The USDA’s Economic Research Service was damaged serriously when the Trump Administration moved its offices out of Washington DC to Kansas, and it is taking some time to recover.

It’s still publishing what it calls Charts of Note.

These are on all kinds of topics dealing with farm production and food consumption.  Here are a couple of examples I found particularly interesting.

Here’s the first:

This one shows that small and medium size farms make money selling direct to consumers at farmers’ markets and via Community Supported Agriculture, but the largest farms benefit most from these opportunities.  Restaurants and grocery stores don’t source much from smaller farms and neither do regional distributors.

The challenge for small and medium size farms is to find more and better distribution channels.\

And here’s the second:

I picked this one because I like the design and because this watermelon has seeds.  You can hardly buy a watermelon with seeds anymore.

I’ve been convinced that seedless watermelons don’t taste as good as the ones with seeds.  This year, I bought some seeds from old-fashioned watermelon and planted them in my place in Ithaca, New York.   They are now ripe, and edible.  But alas: I don’t think they taste any better than the ones without seeds.

Next year, we plant seedless.

One big question: how do you get create seeds for seedless watermelons?   This, I had to look up.

Seedless melons are referred to as triploid melons while ordinary seeded watermelons are called diploid melons, meaning, that a typical watermelon has 22 chromosomes (diploid) while a seedless watermelon has 33 chromosomes (triploid). To produce a seedless watermelon, a chemical process is used to double the number of chromosomes. So, 22 chromosomes are doubled to 44, called a tetraploid. Then, the pollen from a diploid is placed on the female flower of the plant with 44 chromosomes. The resulting seed has 33 chromosomes, a triploid or seedless watermelon. The seedless watermelon is sterile. The plant will bear fruit with translucent, nonviable seeds or “eggs.”

Aren’t you glad I asked?

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Coming soon!  My memoir coming out in October.

For 30% off, go to www.ucpress.edu/9780520384156.  Use code 21W2240 at checkout.

Here’s what I do not know about this conference:

• The agenda
• Who is speaking
• Who is invited
• What will be announced

Everything I do know about it is in this message sent from the White House last week.

White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health Stakeholder Update

The Biden-Harris Administration is hosting the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health on Wednesday, September 28, 2022 and we need your leadership.

For the first time in over 50 years, the White House will convene public and private sectors, catalyzing our nation’s leaders around a coordinated strategy to accelerate progress and drive significant change to end hunger, improve nutrition and physical activity, and reduce disparities.
It’s time to take back our nation’s health. We need your help bringing people together to deliver on bold action and to make meaningful change in every community.

It will take everyone working together to be the change needed to finally end hunger and reduce diet-related diseases and disparities. Thank you for being a leader as we build a healthier and more equitable future for America.
Here are some ways to be a leader for change in your community:

• • • Sign up to receive email updates about the Conference and learn more.
    • Host an event or watch party to bring people together to take bold actions in your community. An event toolkit has been developed to assist you in planning for these.
    • Share your ideas and stories about how to end hunger and reduce diet-related diseases and disparities.
    • Watch the livestream of the Conference on Wednesday, September 28, 2022
    • Help spread the word about the Conference on social media by using #WHConfHungerHealth and tagging @WhiteHouse

  White House Conference Website

  • Please share the

  White House Conference website

  • with your networks! Interested stakeholders can sign up here for updates:

  https://wh.gov/OPE-hungerhealthconference-signup

  .

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Coming soon!  My memoir coming out in October.

For 30% off, go to www.ucpress.edu/9780520384156.  Use code 21W2240 at checkout.

I very much appreciate the weekly newsletter, ObesityandEnergetics.org (If you want to subscribe, do so here).

I particularly enjoy its section, Headline vs Study.  Here’s the most recent, with my additions.

Headline: “Astonishing” Effects of Grape Consumption and “Remarkable” Impacts on Health and Lifespans.

Study: Grape Powder (Not Grapes) Modulates Gene Expression, Reduces Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease, and Extends Longevity… In Female Mice.

I took a look at the study.

• Conclusion: “These results suggest the potential of dietary grapes to modulate hepatic gene expression, prevent oxidative damage, induce fatty acid metabolism, ameliorate NAFLD (non-alcohol fatty liver disease), and increase longevity when co-administered with a high-fat diet.”
• Funding: This work was supported in part by the California Table Grape Commission. The sponsor was not involved: in the preparation of the article; in study design; in the collection, analysis and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; and in the decision to submit the article for publication.

Here is another study:

Study: Behavioral and Genetic Changes of Grape Powder (Not Grapes)… In Female Mice.

Its funding?  “This research was supported in part by the California Table Grape Commission.”

And one more:

Study: Grape Powder (Not Grapes) Modifies Hepatic and Urinary Metabolite Profiles… In Female Mice.

This study is also enlightening.

• Conflicts of interest: [onE of the authors] “serves on the scientific advisory board of the California Table Grape Commission. There are no other conflicts to declare.”
• Acknowledgements:  [two of the authors] “acknowledge grant support from the California Table Grape Commission and seed grant funding from Long Island University. The California Table Grape Commission was not involved: in the preparation of the article; in study design; in the collection, analysis and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; and in the decision to submit the article for publication.”

Comment:  As usual, these authors deny the problems inherent in industry funded studies that have marketing of health benefits as their primary purpose.  Grapes are fruits.  Fruits are healthy.  Do grapes perform health miracles?  Only if you believe in miracles.  Should you eat grapes?  Sure, if you like them.

You don’t believe this is about marketing?  Here’s one more headline (thanks to Karen Zornow Leiding for sending).  And you know who funded this.

Eating grapes can counteract harmful effects from processed foods, while boosting metabolism too

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Coming soon!  My memoir coming out in October.

For 30% off, go to www.ucpress.edu/9780520384156.  Use code 21W2240 at checkout.

This is what I’ve been working on for the past few years.  It’s coming out early in October!

For 30% off, go to www.ucpress.edu/9780520384156.  Use code 21W2240 at checkout.

Joeva Sean Rock.  We Are Not Starving: The Struggle for Food Sovereignty in Ghana.  Michigan State University Press, 2022.  188 pages

I enjoyed getting to know Joeva Rock when she had a fellowship in my NYU department, and was honored to be asked to blurb her book:

We Are Not Starving is an utterly compelling account of how the failure of international donors to understand and respect the recipients of development aid contributes to the failure of their projects.  Through the industry’s attempts to introduce GMO crops in Ghana, anthropologist Joeva Rock draws lessons essential for anyone who wants international development to work.  If you want to understand the real, on-the-ground politics of GMOs, start here.

A couple of excerpts from the manuscript:

• Ghanaian officials recognized the limitations posed by IPRs [Intellectual Property Rights] as an important way to collect financial benefits from GMO.  Thus, rather than describe GMOs as a humanitarian technology, as donors sought to do, Ghanaian officials and scientists went out of their way to stress that, when coupled with IPRs, GM seeds were “the secret” to obtaining profit, revenue that was sorely needed in the post-structural adjustment era of gutted state infrastructure.
• Ghanaians continually critiqued global discourses and development industry standards wherein philanthropists and professionals in the Global North set boundaries for conversations about hunger, collapse Africa into a homogenized, starving entity, and the prescribe solutions based on these racialized myths.  These critiques are reflective of recipient fatigue and are often held in tension with discourse emanating from the same donors that sponsor the work of GMO advocates, who rely on images and texts that depict Africa as languishing and starving.

If I wore a hat it would be off to the authors of this astonishing paper: “Estimating the environmental impacts of 57,000 food products.”

They used public databases to rank food products by a combination of nutritional and four environmental factors: greenhouse gas emissions, land use, water stress, and eutrophication potential.

Their overall conclusion: more nutritious foods are more environmentally sustainable (whew), but with some caveats.

The paper has interesting illustrations.  Here’s one that correlates the nutritional value of sausages to their environmental impact.  Vegan sausages are the most nutritious and have the least environmental impact; beef sausages are least nutritious by the criteria used here and the greatest environmental impact.

We can argue about the criteria used to establish nutritional quality and environmental impact and the way the algorithm works, but what an ambitious project!

At the very least, it’s a useful starting point.

Lots of people are interested in the environmental implications of food production and consumption.  See the latest paper from the group at Deakin University in Australia: “A conceptual framework for understanding the environmental impacts of ultra-processed foods and implications for sustainable food systems.”

This review found that UPFs are responsible for significant diet-related environmental impacts. Included studies reported that UPFs accounted for between 17 and 39% of total diet-related energy use, 36–45% of total diet-related biodiversity loss, up to one-third of total diet-related greenhouse gas emissions, land use and food waste and up to one-quarter of total diet-related water-use among adults in a range of high-income countries.

What all of this says is that basic dietary advice to eat a largely (not necessarily exclusively) plant-based diet, balanced in calories. and avoiding much in the way of ultra-processed foods is not only best for health, but also for the environment.

It’s hard to know what to make of the new products heading for the market.

Here’s one.

The rapper Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr (aka Snoop Dog) is planning to introduce a new breakfast cereal (When?  Sometime soon).

Just what we need.  Another sugary cereal targeting kids.

If a Nutrition Facts label is available, I couldn’t find it online, but I’m guessing 30-40% sugar, and full of color and flavor additives, and super ultra-processed.

But it’s gluten-free and some of the sales revenues will go to support Door of Hope, which advocates for homeless families.

Despite the do-good aura, it’s not what nutritionists recommend, alas.  Well maybe as an occasional treat.

Will Kellogg complain about copyright infringement?  This is clearly a Froot Loops copycat, only with marshmallows—more marshmallows, no less.

Sigh.

Just got my two—count ’em—copies of the forthcoming memoir, a candid personal account of my professional life.  It comes out October 4.

The publisher, University of California Press, is offering a 30% discount.

• Go to: www.ucpress.edu/9780520384156
• Use code 21W2240 at checkout

Information about the book is here.

Forthcoming appearances are listed here.