With a new year comes a fresh start, and I find myself reflecting on how long I’ve been writing this blog and what it means for me and for readers.

For starters, this is post #4174 since I started doing this on May 29, 2007.

On the blog’s tenth anniversary, I posted a self-interview on what it is about.  Here is an update.

What do you do on foodpolitics.com?

Usually, I post only once a day, Monday through Friday, with occasional lapses.  As a general rule (but there are lots of exceptions), the week goes like this:

• Mondays: food company sponsorship of research or advertising
• Tuesdays and Wednesdays: current news
• Thursdays: collections of links to articles on a single topic
• Fridays: Weekend Reading—a book or report of interest

I also post current information about my books (under the Books tab), upcoming talks (Appearances), and links to interviews on radio, TV, or in print (Media).  The About tab has information about my biography , c.v., and conflict-of-interest policy.

I’m not keeping up with the other tabs very well, alas.

How did you get started?

As I discussed in a previous post, the publisher of my book, What to Eat, asked me to be a guinea pig for use of social media to publicize books.  It set up the site with the understanding that I would try it for six months.  It’s gone through some iterations, but I’m still at it.

What does it do for you?

I’m still doing it because I find it useful and well worth the time.  It is:

• An online file cabinet:  It ‘s quicker and less cumbersome than downloading paper and filing things in file cabinets.
• A way to link to original documents: I can find them right away.  Sometimes the site is the only place to find certain documents online.
• Tracing back history: WordPress has a superb search engine, so it is easy to find posts on specific topics right away.
• Informative for reporters: They can see what I’ve written and don’t have to call me.
• An incentive to keep up: It forces me to keep up with current topics in food and nutrition.
• A gift to students: If students are writing papers about food politics topics and need help getting started, I can refer them to the site.
• My private platform: I can say what I think.  I don’t have advertisers or sponsors to worry about.

You must have to spend a lot of time on it?

Not nearly as much as I thought it would take.  Once I figured out how to schedule posts, I tend to do them in odd minutes and set them up over the weekend for the entire week.

How do you know what to write about?

Food politics is a full-employment act.  There is always something.  I subscribe to a dozen or so daily newsfeeds.  Choice is a bigger problem.  Because I only post once a day, I pick the topic I find most interesting, outrageous, or funny.

Why don’t you allow comments?

I wish I could.  I would love to engage with readers—and used to—until the trolling got out of hand.  Readers insisted I stop the nasty personal comments about my age, looks, ethnicity, and opinions posted by anonymous writers who used false email addresses from IP addresses traced to a spam site.  I couldn’t think of a way to stop the incivility without stopping comments altogether.

Who pays for it?

Before I retired from NYU, the blog was part of faculty community service and I paid for it out of the fund that came with my Paulette Goddard professorship.  Now I pay for it myself out of retirement funds.

How do you handle the design and technological aspects?

As long-standing readers know, technology is not my long suit.  My site was designed and is managed by Rachel Cunliffe and Stephen Merriman of Cre8d-Design.com.   Their company is located in Auckland, New Zealand (of course!), but the time/date difference has never been a problem.   They are a pleasure to work with.

Is the blog useful to anyone else besides you?

This is for someone else to decide.  I certainly hope so.  I try hard to make it a worthy resource for everyone, but especially students.

Who reads it?

I don’t really know.  the statistics say it has a small readership of just a couple of thousand a day, but the posts go out over Twitter (@marionnestle) where I have 144,000 followers.  Readers tell me when I make mistakes, so I know someone must be reading it.

How long will you keep doing this?

I like doing it.  It’s become a habit, and an easy one to follow.  When it stops being fun to do, I’ll end it.

Tomorrow: back to food politics.

So much for my plan to take the week off.

The new 2020-2025 Dietary Guidelines came out today.  See them at DietaryGuidelines.gov.  The new guidelines are much the same as the ones in 2015.

The big news: They paid no attention to the recommendations of the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (I covered this in a previous post).

USDA and HHS overrode the scientific decisions of the DGAC.  So much for “science-based” dietary guidelines.

I would love to know what the members of the DGAC think of this.

More later.  These come from the USDA’s press release.

• Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2020-2025 along with companion pieces:
• Executive Summary of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2020-2025
• The Top 10 Things You Need to Know About the Dietary Guidelines
• Make Every Bite Count with the Dietary Guidelines video
• The Dietary Guidelines Consumer Brochure: Small Changes Matter. Start Simple with MyPlate Today
• Dietary Guidelines infographic series on topics like:
  • Making Every Bite Count with the Dietary Guidelines
  • The Dietary Guidelines Can Help You Eat Healthy to Be Healthy
  • Public Engagement Strengthens the Process
  • USDA-HHS Process to Develop the Dietary Guidelines
  • What’s the Difference between the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee Report & the Dietary Guidelines for Americans
• Video of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2020-2025 virtual event
• Press release announcing the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2020-2025

And here’s the USDA’s explanation, such as it is, of why it overrode the decisions of the DGAC on sugar and alcohol

 

Let’ keep doing what we can to get through this year and hope that we can all be together in the next one.  Happy holidays!

(Thanks to VeggieQuest for the inspiring image)

Food Safety News reports that the European Commission is getting increasingly upset about fraudulent claims that specific food and supplement products will boost immunity and help protect against Covid-19 or even cure it.

Alas, they will not.

The EC is worried about online advertisements.  Food Safety News reported more than 350 cases of such claims in June.  Now there are even more.

In the US, we mostly see this sort of thing—websites from the supplement industry telling you to take supplements.  Here  is what this one claims, with my comments in red.

Supplements can help you address nutrient insufficiencies or deficiencies in your diet—but can they help you fight COVID-19? Not as far as anyone knows.

While there hasn’t been specifically-targeted research to determine which—if any—nutrients should be FDA-approved to ward off the virus, [Indeed] supplements are an ideal way to keep your body and your immune system functioning at optimal levels. No, they are not.  Food works much better.

As a result, many physicians and other health and wellness experts recommend beginning a simple supplement routine to ensure your body has the nutrients it needs to stay healthy.  Many others do not, and neither do I.…The supplements you take during the COVID-19 pandemic may not be specifically developed to ward off the coronavirus. Right.  So don’t expect them to work.

Still, research has shown that they all play an important role in boosting the immune system, preventing respiratory damage, strengthening the body against viral infections, reducing inflammation—or all of the above.  This is true, but largely in experimental studies likely to have been funded by the supplement industry.

Obviously, I am not a fan of supplements.  There just isn’t much evidence that they do anything useful for healthy people, and healthy people are the ones most likely to be taking them.

With respect to Covid-19, the best preventive strategy is avoidance (masks, distancing, etc).

The best immune-boosting strategy is to eat a healthy diet–largely (but not necessarily exclusively) plant-based, balanced in calories, and with minimal amounts of ultra-processed junk foods.

And let’s all hope the vaccination comes soon and works like a charm.

Happy holidays.

I got two notices this week about food lessons for kids.  These tend to be education-y (stuffier and more theoretical than necessary, in my opinion), but easily adapted to doing fun stuff at home.

From the Edible Schoolyard Project: Edible Education for the Home.  This involves the Cooking with Curiosity Curriculum for kids in grades six through nine.  But the website has lots of other ideas, some gathered from collaborators.  In the Resource Library, for example, I found a useful lesson on how to flip food—just the thing to do on a snowbound day.

From Food Corps:  An huge bunch of food lessons for younger kids, kindergarten to fifth grade.  Food Corps says these

Lessons include hands-on experiential activities to engage kids in learning about healthy food. This suite of 96 lessons are for grades K-5, and are organized through this learning progression by grade, season and theme…Each lesson was developed with input from FoodCorps service members, community partners and resource specialists, and have been evaluated and updated to reflect recommendations from our community of food educators. This suite of lessons is intended to guide food and garden educators to spark inquiry and love for healthy food and should be adapted to reflect the needs, identity and culture of the community in which they are taught.

It might be fun to start a worm bin to keep your kids busy under lockdown.

And if your kids ever get to go back to school, get the school to use the Healthy School Toolkit.

I haven’t written anything about the “revolving door” for a while, but it is now time.  This term refers to government officials who leave to work for industry, and vice versa.

Recent example #1: The USDA has just announced that its Chief Economist, Robert Johansson, will be leaving USDA to become Associate Director of Economics and Policy Analysis for the American Sugar Alliance.

Recent example #2: The president-elect’s newly named secretary of the USDA is Tom Vilsack who was was USDA Secretary during the Obama administration.  In 2017, he became executive vice president of Dairy Management, Inc.,and president and CEO of the U.S. Dairy Export Council, a Dairy Management subsidiary, at a salary close to $1 million.    As the Milwaukee Journal Sentinal explains, this organization represents Big Dairy:

As the number of dairy farms nationwide has plummeted by nearly 20,000 over the past decade, there’s one corner of the industry doing just fine:  The top executives at Dairy Management Inc., who are paid from farmers’ milk checks. The Illinois-based nonprofit is charged with promoting milk, cheese and other products — spending nearly $160 million a year collected through federally-mandated payments from dairy farmers.  In 2017, a year in which 503 dairy farms closed in Wisconsin and 1,600 were shuttered nationwide, IRS records show 10 executives at the organization were paid more than $8 million — an average of more than $800,000 each.

The revolving door brings government experts into food trade associations where they can help food companies meet—but also avoid—regulations.

It brings food company executives into government where they can make sure that no government agency does anything inconvenient for the company’s bottom line.

Examples, alas, are legion.  They are signs of government as usual, at a time when agricultural policy needs a huge rethinking.