It was my first in-person event since the start of Covid, and I was delighted to be with my mom and my dear friend Davia Nelson of Kitchen Sisters. If you catch me smiling at folks in the audience it might be my husband, my daughter, my brother, my 4th grade English teacher, my kids’ school principal… it truly was a family affair. My mother and I got to talk about the anniversary edition and all the fun we had pulling it together. You can learn more about Diet for a Small Planet at 50 and get yourself a copy at our website here.

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Fifty years ago, while experts published scary tomes about imminent world famine, my mother was a 26-year-old researcher curious about exactly why there was so much hunger around the globe. She buried herself in the stacks at the Giannini Library on UC Berkeley’s campus. What she discovered was so shocking, she felt she had to share the news with the world: There was actually enough food (there is still today). We humans were actually creating scarcity through then-just-emergent grain-fed, industrial livestock production systems. 

She turned her insight into a pamphlet, which became a longer essay, which became the book, Diet for a Small Planet.   

Last year, as Covid-19 kept our family thousands of miles from each other, I set out to help my mom celebrate the 50th anniversary of this seminal book with a new, special edition.  

This edition includes a new opening chapter by my mom—trying to distill her life’s work into just 15,000 words! And, with the expert hand of the wonderful and talented recipe developer, Wendy Lopez—and loads of Zoom calls and dirty dishes—we also refreshed the recipe section. No more soy grits and margarine! The 85+ recipes include more than a dozen from some of our very favorite cookbook authors and chefs, including several beloved Real Food Reads authors!  

You can pre-order your book today at www.dietforasmallplanet.org and please join us with friends and family for one or both of our book launches: 

• Monday, September 20th Frances Moore Lappé in conversation with Bryant Terry at 5:30pm PST / 8:30pm EST
• Thursday, September 30th Frances Moore Lappé in conversation with Raj Patel at 4:00pm PST / 7:00pm EST

The post Diet for a Small Planet — 50 Years Later appeared first on Real Food Media.

It was the early 1970s. With books like Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb captivating readers across the country, fears were growing that the world faced imminent, widespread famine. My mother, Frances (at the time a 26-year-old grad school dropout), wanted to understand why. As she sought out the answer in the stacks of UC Berkeley’s Giannini Agricultural Library, she realized she was asking the wrong question: there was more than enough food to feed the world. Yet she was also alarmed to discover the vast resources going to raise livestock in industrial operations—and creating such waste at the same time.

As she dug deeper, her animating question became: Why does hunger persist in a world of plenty? That question would lead her on her life’s path and the answer she uncovered would become one of her most-quoted mantras: Hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food, but a scarcity of democracy.

She shared her insights in what would evolve from a one-page handout into her 1971 book, Diet for a Small Planet. In its pages, she would help readers connect the dots between the then-emergent industrial animal agriculture system and injustice in the food system. It also gave people a tasty way to buck that system with more than 100 plant-based recipes.

Fifty years later, my mother’s book still feels so relevant. Today, a whopping 80 percent of global agricultural land is used to feed livestock while providing less than 20 percent of our calories. Compared with 1970, we’ve increased our meat intake—with the average American now eating twice as much protein as their bodies can even use. And our food system, including environmentally destructive factory farming, has an enormous climate toll as well: as much as 37 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions come from the sector.

With a new opening chapter that shares lessons my mother has learned over these past five decades, the 50th Anniversary Edition of Diet for a Small Planet includes a fully revamped recipe section showcasing some of our favorite plant- and planet-centered chefs, including Real Food Reads stars like Yasmin Khan, Chef Sean Sherman, Bryant Terry, Mark Bittman, and Luz Calvo and Catriona Esquibel (made possible thanks to the careful curation of recipe developer Wendy Lopez).

We at Real Food Media are thrilled to share this book with all of you as the work is a reminder of the power of going deep on big questions about the world around us. We love it when those questions bring us to the delightful tastes and textures of the abundant, delicious, and diverse world of plant-centered eating.

In community and solidarity,

Anna on behalf of the Real Food Media hive

P.S. Join us at one of the book’s launch events. And don’t forget to pre-order the book and dive into the website to learn more!

Read the full issue of the Real Food Scoop
 

Photo credit: Paige Green for Diet for a Small Planet

The post Real Food Scoop | No. 47 appeared first on Real Food Media.

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A new study published in Science offers a stark warning about the climate crisis: Even if we completely halted fossil fuel use in the near term, we would still blow through the carbon budget needed to avoid catastrophic climate change unless we change the trajectory of emissions from the global food sector. Although many have warned about the climate impact of modern food production and land use, this new science is soberingly clear, and it has garnered attention around the world.

Without radically reducing emissions from agriculture, the research shows we won’t meet the Paris Agreement’s goal to limit average warming to 1.5°C – 2°C degrees. And yet, even those targets still position us to face some pretty extreme climate impacts.

Civil Eats talked with Michael Clark, a researcher at the Nuffield Department of Population Health at the University of Oxford and one of the lead authors on the study, about the findings, what they teach us about collective action to move the needle on climate, and how we might build the political will to do so.

Why does the food system have such a big climate toll?

One of the main sources of greenhouse gas emissions from food systems is meat, and within that red meat from ruminants: beef, sheep, goats, and—to a lesser extent—other livestock like pork. The reason why ruminants have a relatively large impact is two-fold: They’re particularly inefficient at converting grass into things we can eat; or, if they’re not being fed grass, converting soy or other feed into food for humans. This matters because you have to include the climate impacts of producing the feed we then give to cows and other ruminants. Another reason why ruminants are particularly high emitters is because during their digestive process, they convert their food into methane, a potent greenhouse gas that they then burp.

The other large source of emissions within food systems is from fertilizer use—from how it is processed to emissions from application. Nitrogen naturally converts into nitrous oxide, which is one of the other very potent greenhouse gases.

This I think has been a blind spot. We’ve disrupted the carbon cycle, but we’ve disrupted the nitrogen cycle, too.

Exactly. Estimates are that humans have doubled the amount of reactive nitrogen in the world—that is human sources of reactive nitrogen are at least as large as the amount of reactive nitrogen that is naturally available. Not ideal.

Your findings paint a picture based on current trends. What trends did you track?

Very broadly speaking, emissions from the food system are a function of what we eat, how it’s produced, and the size of the population. We looked at these three factors and trends to date and projected out if these patterns continue over the next several decades.

What we found at a global scale is that the most important driver is changes in dietary habits; populations eating more food and eating a larger proportion of that food from animal sources, either meat, dairy, or eggs. Population growth is an important driver, but it’s not as important as dietary habit change. And while changes in food production—like having better management techniques and reducing emissions per unit of food—could counter those shifts, it would not be by a huge amount.

Now, all this is at a global scale; for any single country, that global pattern may not match up. Diets are changing, but not uniformly. For instance, diets are not changing by a huge amount in the United States, but if you go to a place like China or Brazil, countries experiencing large economic transitions, there are massive dietary shifts happening and with them those emissions are going to be driven up.

Do you feel the story of food systems emissions has been late to the game in climate change?

Rightfully, a lot of the effort, focus, and political will has targeted emissions abatement through fossil fuels. That makes a huge amount of sense. But we’re getting better knowledge about the impact food has had on the environment—and the trajectory of emissions—and starting to see, thankfully, food becoming a bigger part of the conversation.

Talk about some of the main levers for change. First, plant-rich diets: Let’s get into what you mean by that and why this diet shift makes a difference.

We mean a reduction in meat, dairy, and eggs and an increase in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, legumes, and so on. What’s critical here is that while the endpoint is similar for everyone in the world, the direction you might need to go to get there will be really different. In the United States, for instance, this shift in diets might mean a typical person eating much less meat and much more fruits and vegetables. The second thing I really want to stress is that these plant-rich diets are associated with pretty large increases in health outcomes. While for this paper we focused on climate, plant-rich diets have enormous co-benefits.

Let’s talk about another lever for reducing food system emissions; what you and your co-authors call “healthy calories.”

Approximately half the global adult population is eating too much or not enough. In certain countries the figures are even more extreme. For my co-authors and me, the healthy diet lever means—independent of a plant-rich diet—what proportion of calories are coming from fruit, vegetables, and other healthy sources of calories. We know that so many people are not getting the right amounts of food for a healthy diet. Similar to the plant-rich lever, this means in some places, eating a lot less, in other places, it will mean people eating more [healthy foods].

Food waste has gotten a lot more attention in the past few years—in part, I think, because the percent of food that is wasted is so high and because addressing food waste feels so doable.

Yes, it’s pretty shocking: About one-third of all food that is produced remains uneaten, ether because it’s thrown away, rots, or otherwise doesn’t get to the people who want to eat it. The sources differ widely by country, sometimes it’s a lack of refrigeration, lack of storage, grain silos, and so on. In the United States, a family of four wastes on average $1,600 worth of produce a year. That’s a pretty big incentive to act.

It always surprises people that if the emissions associated with food loss were a country, it would be the third largest emitter in the world.

Let’s talk about what you are seeing in terms of policy responses.

One of the joys and complications of working on a global study is that the policy responses are going to look very different wherever you are. We talked earlier about the climate impacts of nitrogen fertilizer use. One policy that has really been effective has been the 1991 European Union Nitrates Directive. Now, when it was passed, it was designed to reduce nitrogen runoff because agricultural sources of runoff were one of the main causes of water pollution in Europe. Since then, fertilizer applications per hectare have decreased by about half, yet crop yields have continued to increase as they were before. It’s just one example of a relatively large geographically scaled policy that is working. While it wasn’t specifically designed to address emissions, it most certainly has had emissions benefits.

We can look at farmers choosing different production pathways. Like in some cases adding more crop rotations into their planning or using agroecological approaches, such as planting hedgerows, agroforestry, and more. Honestly, there really is a huge amount that can be done. But it’s important to stress that no single action is going to solve the problem.

One of the big food-climate debates is about soil carbon sequestration and livestock. What do you think about those who argue for livestock’s ability to rehabilitate soils?

We know for sure we can be doing a lot better in terms of soil carbon storage. And we are seeing incredible results from a range of strategies, like some I mentioned: planting cover crops, intercropping, and silvopasture, planting hedges between fields that can prevent soil loss—and more. All of these can help sequester more carbon in the soil, but I think the key message should be: Soil carbon sequestration is part of the solution, but it isn’t the only solution.

Now, for the debate about cows! The instances where I’ve seen cows or other ruminants’ potential to be net negative in terms of greenhouse gas emissions—after accounting for methane emissions—is over short timescales, in certain conditions, on previously degraded land. So, yes, it may be possible for cows to play a helpful role, but in a limited way. How the cows are raised matters; but how many cows you’re raising matters more.

Do you feel like any parts of your paper have been misunderstood as this complex story gets translated for the general public?

I actually think the coverage has been good. There are basically three main points and I think the media has been capturing them well: One, food matters to climate and if we continue eating the way we are, it will result in catastrophic climate change; two, there is a lot we can do; third, everyone has a role to play—consumers, businesses, food processors, everyone.

I know one question those who work on climate often gets asked is, “Are you optimistic or pessimistic?”—but, I feel I should ask the same of you.

I’m laughing because it’s an uncomfortable question to answer. We are starting to move in the right direction, but honestly, we’re not moving anywhere close to as fast as we need to. We need to start acting now. It would have been great to have made these changes years ago, but we didn’t.

Right. As they say, the best time to plant a tree was 10 years ago. The second best time is today.

Exactly.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post New Research Confirms What We Eat Is Central to the Climate Crisis appeared first on Real Food Media.

I was pleased to get to weigh in on Burger King’s announcement—via a (literally) moldy ad—to go preservative-free. As I said in this ABC News segment, the fast food chain’s decision was just one more signal that companies are responding to the tectonic shift in the marketplace, as eaters across all demographics are seeking out foods without preservatives and other additives, food grown without pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, and meat raised with routine antibiotics. I did note that we would all do good to remember that, preservatives or not, fast food is still not healthy food. I also stressed that the biggest health and environmental impact of Burger King’s supply chain isn’t its preservatives, it’s the beef. Last year, the company bowed to public pressure and agreed to root out deforestation in its supply chain, but gave itself a 2030 deadline for doing so. That’s not nearly soon enough—and we should keep the pressure on to make the company do more, sooner.

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SAN FRANCISCO — 27 years ago, Roy Steiner was a fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation, where he now serves as senior vice president of the food initiative.

He had just finished graduate school, and was tasked with cataloging and analyzing 300 agricultural experiments, as part of an effort to create “a more robust definition of sustainable agriculture.”

Now, Steiner is behind the Food System Vision Prize, which asks organizations from around the world to offer their visions for food systems that will deliver sustainable and nourishing diets in their local area.

“We’ve been so focused on yields, and profitable yields, and so we’ve optimized a food system that delivers very inexpensive calories, but we have not optimized it for environmental sustainability, health, and the flourishing of communities,” he told Devex.

“Who is deciding what products are being marketed to mothers and to children? What regulations are in place in our agricultural systems? What kind of food systems are being incentivized?”— Anna Lappé, food and democracy program director, Panta Rhea Foundation

While the prize will distribute $2 million among the winners, the real impact will come from supporting dialogue at a local and global level, Steiner said. He said he hopes to see the ideas that result from the Food System Vision Prize take the stage at the Food Systems Summit that United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said he plans to convene in 2021. The prize is one example of the role philanthropy can play in building the food system of the future, by supporting promising ideas that can scale.

Transforming the current system

In January, the EAT-Lancet report outlined the links between diet, human health, and environmental sustainability. The findings led to further questions about implementation to achieve such an optimal food system, according to Petra Hans, who leads the agricultural livelihoods program at the IKEA Foundation.

“The report gave strategies that described what needs to be done to transform the current system into a healthy and sustainable food system, but the big question is still how to do this,” Hans said.

The EAT-Lancet Diet is unaffordable, but who is to blame? While new criticism of the EAT-Lancet diet focused on its lack of affordability for 1.2 billion of the world’s poorest, researchers say that food and economic systems are to blame, not the diet.

The Food System Vision Prize will engage stakeholders around the world to start thinking about how, she said.

At the Social Capital Markets, or SOCAP, conference in San Francisco in October, Steiner joined Sara Farley, managing director of the Rockefeller Foundation’s food initiative, to announce the prize, with winners to be announced on Sept. 13, 2020.

Farley emphasized the importance of a systems-focused approach: “We look at very isolated parts of the challenge and the solution set and we miss the mess — the interconnections between technology, policy, culture, and environment,” she said.

To build a network between applicants, and inform their own future plans as a funder, the Rockefeller Foundation is partnering with SecondMuse and OpenIDEO, two organizations with experience organizing innovation challenges, on the Food System Vision Prize.

“Everybody talks about participatory development, and too often that’s just rhetoric,” Steiner told Devex. “But it’s hard for groups to say, ‘This is what we really want.’ This is potentially a process by which they’ll be able to communicate their vision in a much more systematic, clear way so that funders can tap into that and say, ‘yep, this aligns with what we’re trying to do.’”

The Rockefeller Foundation also plans to pair winners with storytellers, ranging from visual artists to data scientists to science fiction writers, in order to bring those visions to life and help society to envision a better future.

‘A crisis of democracy’

The most recent U.N. global assessment of childhood nutrition found that 1 in 3 children are undernourished or overweight.

“It’s never been a crisis of productivity,” said Anna Lappé, program director for the food and democracy at the Panta Rhea Foundation, noting that the world produces more than enough calories for everyone each day. “It has been a crisis of democracy.”

Speaking on a panel at SOCAP, she asked: “Who is deciding what products are being marketed to mothers and to children? What regulations are in place in our agricultural systems? What kind of food systems are being incentivized?”

The solution has to do with more people, ranging from indigenous communities to farmers, having a seat at the table to ask questions like these and offer answers, she said.

“When I look at what are some of the most innovative technologies that have the greatest benefits to reducing biodiversity loss, averting the climate crisis, really building healthy food systems, those technological innovations have come out of having all of those people in the room,” Lappé said.

Philanthropic dollars play an important role in testing new ideas, which can then be scaled up along with policies that support them, she said.

All hands on deck

At the IKEA Foundation, the goal is to transform linear, extractive, and exploitative agrifood systems to become inclusive, regenerative, and circular, Hans said.

“We need all hands on deck,” she explained, calling the Food Vision Prize an example of an effort that can mobilize people into thinking and action.

While philanthropy can invest in these ideas at the early stage, official development assistance and private sector capital can support their scale.

Bonnie Glick, deputy administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, announced the $35 million Water and Energy for Food Challenge, at SOCAP.

“Part of what this is about is additionality, not replacing where traditional investors will come in, but have us as the ones willing to take that first loss,” she told Devex.

The partnership between USAID, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, and the Netherlands’ Ministry of Foreign Affairs will invest in small enterprises that work at the nexus of food, water, and energy, and aims to mobilize $25 million in private investment capital.

While food systems have posed major problems for people and planet, from burgeoning health care costs to greenhouse gas emissions, they can become part of the solution for climate change and global health, Rockefeller’s Steiner said.

“We can sequester carbon in a way no other sector can, we can dramatically reduce health costs using diet, and the other point I like to make is food brings people together,” he said. “We’re living I such a polarized time: How do we use food systems as a way to connect people with different points of view?”

Steiner said he hopes one of the impacts of the Food System Vision Prize will be to ensure that food systems are a source of community flourishing rather than community disintegration.

Originally published by Devex. Header photo by: Aris Sanjaya/CIFOR/CC BY-NC-ND

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Most of the world, Wise reveals, is fed by hundreds of millions of small-scale farmers, people with few resources and simple tools but a keen understanding of what to grow and how. These same farmers—who already grow more than 70 percent of the food eaten in developing countries—can show the way forward. Wise takes readers to remote villages to see how farmers are rebuilding soils with ecologically sound practices and nourishing a diversity of native crops without chemicals or imported seeds. They are growing more and healthier food; in the process, they are not just victims of the climate crisis, but rather protagonists whose solutions can show us the way forward.

The post Eating Tomorrow: Agribusiness, Family Farmers, and the Battle for the Future of Food appeared first on Real Food Media.

Groundbreaking study on organic food and protecting ourselves from pesticides 

The post Organic For All appeared first on Real Food Media.

by Tiffani Patton

We are bombarded by news of a recently-discovered property of a single food—avocados to improve brain function, pomegranates to fight cancer, beer to ward off Alzheimer’s—and oftentimes these studies have one thing in common: the research was funded by the industry group that is selling the product. Marion Nestle’s latest book, Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat pulls back the veil on industry-funded food research: why it happens, its impact on public health, and what we can do about it. Large players in the food industry have taken pages straight from Big Pharma’s playbook when it comes to funding research: coordinating front groups, designing research studies, and working to limit any regulation that will stifle demand for their product (soda tax opponents, we are looking at you). All of this, and more skews how researchers conduct studies, how government associations pass regulations, and ultimately, how we perceive food.  

This past Saturday, Marion Nestle and Tiffani Patton came together at CUESA’s Ferry Plaza Farmers Market in San Francisco to discuss marketing masquerading as science, the premise of Unsavory Truth. The farmers market was in full swing despite the unhealthy levels of air pollution from the Butte County wildfire. The mostly-masked attendees were a part of the very first live recording (but hopefully not the last) of our monthly book club and podcast, Real Food Reads. Marion was also the very first Real Food Reads guest back in 2016 to discuss her book, Soda Politics. We at Real Food Media love decoding corporate spin and Marion Nestle is a great ally and resource for this type of work. To stay up to date on the world of food politics, make sure to check out her blog Food Politics.

We had a blast doing the live recording, and can’t wait for you to hear it! Special thanks to CUESA for partnering with us, Marion Nestle for joining us, and to all the attendees who braved the air to be a part of this important conversation.

Tune into the podcast here.

Header photo by Brie Mazurek 

The post Unsavory Truth: A Conversation with Marion Nestle at the Center for Urban Education and Sustainable Agriculture appeared first on Real Food Media.