Tag Archives: food and ag

John Oliver Explains How the Chicken Industry Systematically Screws Over Impoverished Farmers

by MiraHarricks Posted on May 18, 2015

Mother Jones

Americans eat a ton of chicken—so much so, chicken farmers produce 160 million chicks a week just to keep up with national consumption, according to the latest “Last Week Tonight.” But despite the industry’s massive output, many contract farmers live near or below the poverty line, all while working under the constant fear of losing their jobs. And that’s because the business model is such that farmers own the equipment used to raise the chickens, and corporations own the chickens.

“That essentially means you own everything that costs money, and we own everything that makes money,” Oliver explains.

Perhaps the most damning part of the segment is a defense from Tom Super of the National Chicken Council, who responded to the question of why farmers live under the poverty line with the following: “Which poverty line are you referring to? Is that a national poverty line? Is that a state poverty line? The poverty line in Mississippi and Alabama is different than it is in New York City.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Oliver shot back. “It doesn’t matter. The poverty line is like the age of consent: if you find yourself parsing exactly where it is, you’ve probably already done something very, very wrong.”

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John Oliver Explains How the Chicken Industry Systematically Screws Over Impoverished Farmers

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You’re Really Going to Hate James Franco’s Offensive Nostalgia Trip to McDonald’s

by HugoCouvreur Posted on May 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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In the midst of plummeting sales, pressure to bump wages, and an apparent gastronomic identity crisis, McDonald’s needs all the help it can get right now to reclaim its status as a global fast-food powerhouse. Today, the company found a friend in actor James Franco.

The aspiring Renaissance man and actor, who once worked as a McDonald’s employee for a total of three months, has penned a bizarre op-ed in the Washington Post to defend the company from its growing chorus of detractors. The piece, titled “McDonald’s Was There for Me When No One Else Was,” describes his decision to quit UCLA as an undergrad in 1996 in order to pursue an acting career. While studying at a “hole-in-the-wall” acting school, Franco worked a part-time job at a Los Angeles McDonald’s:

When I was hungry for work, they fed the need. I still love the simplicity of the McDonald’s hamburger and its salty fries. After reading “Fast Food Nation,” it’s hard for me to trust the grade of the meat. But maybe once a year, while on a road trip or out in the middle of nowhere for a movie, I’ll stop by a McDonald’s and get a simple cheeseburger: light, and airy, and satisfying.

Franco, who seems to forget that being a drop-out from an elite university set him apart from most hourly workers at McDonald’s, goes onto reminisce about his rosy experience: Mixing it up with co-workers and even practicing funny accents. “I refrained from reading on the job, but soon started putting on fake accents with the customers to practice for my scenes in acting class,” he recalls. Franco even encountered a homeless family. “They lived out of their car and did crossword puzzles all day,” Franco writes. “Sometimes they would order McDonald’s food, but other times they would bring in Chinese or groceries.”

Franco also had the thrill of getting hit on by a man who actually cooked those “light, airy, and satisfying” burgers.

He wanted to hook up in the bathroom, but he didn’t speak English, so he had someone translate for him.

To everyone out there fighting for a living wage, this experience could offer some hope. After all, with the right attitude, McDonald’s can be a stepping stone on your path to Hollywood stardom, just as it was for James Franco.

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You’re Really Going to Hate James Franco’s Offensive Nostalgia Trip to McDonald’s

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How to Trick a Child Into Eating a Vegetable

by AshleyAragon Posted on May 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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Michelle Obama has gotten a lot of flak for her efforts to improve the nutritional value of school lunches and reduce the rate of childhood obesity. On Twitter, for instance, kids have been using the hashtag #ThanksMichelleObama to complain that new lunch standards she spearheaded have resulted in less appetizing meals.

By some accounts, the First Lady’s school lunch program seems to be working. A 2014 study from Harvard University’s School of Public Health found that compared to 2011, kids eating school lunches were selecting 23 percent more fruit overall after the guidelines were imposed in 2012. What’s more, vegetable consumption per student rose 16 percent. The problem is that the amount of food left uneaten and thrown away seems to have increased considerably, as well. According to a study from the School Nutrition Association, schools reported an 81 percent increase in the amount of food left on plates, with vegetables making up the majority of the waste.

The fact that kids (and many adults) generally don’t like vegetables isn’t exactly an earth-shattering discovery. Parents and policy makers have long struggled over the question of how to get children to eat their broccoli. But Traci Mann, a health psychologist who has spent much of her career studying our eating habits, has come up with a simple solution. “Just put the vegetable in a competition it can actually win,” said Mann on a recent episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast.

Of course, in a contest between vegetables and, say, mac and cheese, the veggies don’t stand much of a chance. But Mann has an elegant strategy for improving the odds. “As far as I can tell,” she says, “the only competition a vegetable can routinely win is the competition between a vegetable and nothing.” Mann first discovered this kernel of wisdom by observing the behavior of her own children. In a Los Angeles deli, when her kids were 3 and 6, she watched them happily consume sauerkraut while waiting for their meals to arrive. “After much scholarly effort,” writes Mann in her newly released book Secrets from the Eating Lab, “I developed a highly technical theory about why they ate the sauerkraut: They ate it because it was there.”

And, being a scientist, Mann decided to put this theory to the test. Using schoolchildren as subjects, Mann and her colleagues conducted two field studies in an elementary school where most of the students were eligible for free or reduced-cost lunches. In one study, the scientists first figured out what the baseline consumption rate was for a reasonably well tolerated vegetable—in this case, carrots. Then, the scientists waited three months for the exact same menu to be served again. This time, as the children waited at their class tables before receiving their full meals, they had access to small paper cups filled with baby carrots. Once the meal was over, the scientists painstakingly weighed all the leftover carrots in cups, on the floor, on trays, and anywhere else they could be found. Sure enough, kids ate more carrots when they were left alone with them at their tables than they did on a normal day. The result, wrote the researchers, was an “increase in carrot consumption of over 430% that was almost entirely driven by many students eating carrots from the cups before entering the line.”

Encouraged by these findings, the scientists then conducted a follow-up field study in which broccoli was the prized vegetable. On a regular day, broccoli was among the foods that the children could select as they went through the cafeteria line. But on the study days, the students were handed cups of broccoli while they waited for the rest of their meal. Once again, the experiment worked. The students as a whole consumed far more broccoli when that was the first food they had access to.

Mann and her colleagues even tested the “veggies first” theory on college students, comparing their consumption of baby carrots and M&Ms while manipulating which snack was offered first. Undergraduates not only ate more carrots when that was the first option, but they also then ate fewer M&Ms.

“For most of us, the main obstacle to eating a vegetable is that we don’t like them as much as the other stuff,” says Mann. And most of us are also pretty lazy. Since vegetables in general require more preparation than many other foods, and are not as tasty, we tend to eat less of them than is good for us.

But there’s an upside to our laziness: If the goal is to limit consumption of an unhealthy food, even a minor obstacle can make a difference. On Inquiring Minds, Mann describes a Dutch study of M&M consumption. “They showed that if you have a bowl of M&Ms on the table right by you, you’ll eat a lot,” says Mann. That’s not surprising. But if you place that bowl farther away, requiring you to get up from your desk to grab a handful, consumption decreases significantly. “Here’s the even more amazing thing,” adds Mann. “Take that same bowl of M&Ms, put it on the same table that you’re sitting at—except instead of right by your hand, put it two feet across the table.” Within-reach, but requiring a bit of stretching. It turns out that you’ll consume just as few M&Ms as if they were across the room.

Adding obstacles, even tiny ones, is so effective at reducing unhealthy food intake that even a simple manipulation in Google’s New York offices made headlines recently. When M&Ms were put in opaque rather than glass containers, and healthier alternatives such as figs and nuts were made more visible, Google employees consumed 3.1 million fewer calories from M&Ms over seven weeks, according to the Washington Post.

One of Mann’s experiments shows just how much of an impact the visibility of food can have. In another effort to get school kids to eat more veggies, her team placed photographs of green beans and carrots into two of the compartments on the children’s lunch trays. With this simple manipulation, they found that twice as many kids served themselves green beans and nearly three times as many took carrots, compared with what happened on a typical day.

Mann attributes the success of the photos to the social forces that impact our eating habits. It’s not effective to simply tell a kid to eat his vegetables. But putting photos on the trays, according to Mann, sends the message that other kids are choosing those veggies and placing them in those two compartments. And, as any parent knows, fitting in can be a powerful motivator.

To listen to our full interview with Mann, click below.

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and Kishore Hari, the director of the Bay Area Science Festival. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook.

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How to Trick a Child Into Eating a Vegetable

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Your Winter Vegetables: Brought to You by California’s Very Last Drops of Water

by Serena8909 Posted on May 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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California’s drought-plagued Central Valley hogs the headlines, but two-thirds of your winter vegetables come from a different part of the state. Occupying a land mass a mere eighth the size of metro Los Angeles, the Imperial Valley churns out about two-thirds of the vegetables eaten by Americans during the winter. Major crops include broccoli, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, and, most famously, lettuce and salad mix.

And those aren’t even the region’s biggest moneymakers. Nestled in the state’s southeastern corner, the Imperial Valley also produces massive amounts of alfalfa, a cattle feed, and its teeming feedlots finish some 350,000 beef cows per year.

In terms of native aquatic resources, the Imperial makes the Central Valley look like Waterworld. At least the Central Valley is bound by mountain ranges to the east that, in good years (not the last several), deliver abundant snowmelt for irrigation. The Imperial sits in the middle of the blazing-hot Sonoran Dessert, with no water-trapping mountains anywhere nearby. It receives a whopping 3 inches of precipitation per year on average; even the more arid half of the Central Valley gets 15 inches.

The sole source of water in the Imperial Valley is the Colorado River, which originates hundreds of miles northeast, in the snowy peaks of the Rocky Mountains. As it winds down from its source in the snow-capped peaks of northern Colorado down to Mexico, it delivers a total of 16.5 million acre-feet of water to the farmers and 40 million consumers in seven US states and northern Mexico who rely on it. (An acre-foot is the amount it takes to flood an acre of land with 12 inches of water—about 326,000 gallons.)

Of that total, the Imperial Valley’s farms gets 3.1 million acre-feet annually—more than half of California’s total allotment and more than any other state draws from the river besides Colorado. It’s an amount of water equivalent to more than four times what Los Angeles uses in a year, according to figures from the Pacific Institute.

The Colorado Rivers waters are so in demand that they rarely reach their endpoint in Mexico’s Sea of Cortez. Map: Shannon/Wikimedia Commons

Because it owns senior water rights based on a 1931 pact, the Imperial gets its allotments during low-flow years even when other regions see reductions. Currently, the Rocky Mountain snowpack that feeds the Colorado stands at about 44 percent of its average for this time of year, triggering fears of an impending shortfall—but not for the Imperial. “Nevada, southern Arizona and Mexico will be cut back before the Imperial district loses a drop,” The Los Angeles Times recently reported. Whereas Central Valley farmers, reliant on vanishing snowmelt from the Sierras, have seen their irrigation allotments curtailed the last two years, growers in the Imperial Valley haven’t lost any water (though the Imperial Valley District did agree to sell as much as 0.2 million acre-feet of water by 2021, of its 3.1 million acre-foot allotment, to fast-growing San Diego in a 2003 deal).

Already, decades of intensive desert farming have had severe ecological effects, epitomized by that beleaguered inland body of water known as the Salton Sea, which sits uneasily at the Imperial’s northern edge. Before the big irrigation projects that made the valley bloom, what’s now the Salton periodically captured flood waters from the then-mighty Colorado River. Now it’s fed solely from Imperial Valley farm runoff, and as Dana Goodyear shows in a superb recent New Yorker piece, it’s slowly decaying into a toxic mess—one that could “emit as much as a hundred tons of fine, caustic dust a day, leading to respiratory illness in the healthy and representing an acute hazard for people with compromised immune systems.”

Meanwhile, the Colorado’s flow has proven inadequate to supply the broader region’s needs. In a paper last year (my account of it here), University of California-Irvine and NASA researchers found that farmers, landowners, and municipalities are supplementing their river allocations by drawing water from underground aquifers at a much faster rate than had been known. Between December 2004 and November 2013, the Colorado Basin lost almost 53 million acre-feet of underground water, an enormous fossil resource siphoned away in less than a decade.

A desert in bloom: the Imperial Valley as seen from space, from a photo taken by NASA astronauts in 2002. Photo: NASA

Consider also that the Southwest’s population is on pace to expand by a third by 2030—and that the river’s annual average flow is expected to decrease by anywhere from 5 percent to 18 percent by 2050, compared to 20th century averages, according to the National Climate Assessment, throttled by rising temperatures and declining precipitation.

Thus the Imperial’s 2.6 million acre-foot allotment of water is looking increasingly vulnerable to challenge. Just as we probably need to get used to sourcing more of our summer fruits and vegetables from places beyond California’s Central and Salinas valleys, the Colorado River situation makes me wonder if we shouldn’t rethink those bountiful supermarket produce aisles in February, as well.

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Your Winter Vegetables: Brought to You by California’s Very Last Drops of Water

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Pepsi Is Ditching One Fake Sweetener, But What About The Rest?

by LouellaNewcomer Posted on April 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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Alexei Vella

Junk-food giant PepsiCo is preparing to make the biggest change to its Diet Pepsi brand in three decades, Bloomberg News reports: it’s nixing the controversial low-calorie sweetener aspartame. In its place, Diet Pepsi will get its sweet jolt from a mix of sucralose and acesulfame potassium. The apparent reason for the shake-up: Diet Pepsi sales plunged 5.2 percent last year, Bloomberg noted. Rival Diet Coke fared even worse, enduring 6.6 percent drop in sales (though Coke is clinging fast to aspartame). What gives?

Even with the recent consumer turn away from these once-formidable products, the lure of sweet-but-virtuous soda is still going strong—and goes back decades. Recently, I came across one from a 1966 glossy magazine featuring a close-up shot of a supple-lipped woman filling a glass with Tab, Coca-Cola’s original diet soda. “One crazy calorie in every six ounces,” the copy purrs, with a Don Draper-ish flourish: “Like everything now, a little crazy, but wow.”

Today, diet drinks make up 27.5 percent of the $76.3 billion US soft-drink market, according to Beverage Digest. And artificial sweeteners don’t just work their magic on sodas. They also appear in stuff like Minute Maid Light Orange Juice, Quaker “25% less sugar” granola bars, and Thomas’ 100% Whole Wheat English Muffins. A 2012 study by Emory University researchers found that nearly a quarter of adults and 12.5 percent of children regularly consumed artificially sweetened beverages. Globally, the market for low-calorie foods and drinks will hit $10.4 billion by 2019, up from today’s $7.4 billion, predicts the firm Transparency Market Research. Prominent medical groups approve: The American Diabetes Association, for example, recommends diet soda as an alternative to the real stuff.

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Pepsi Is Ditching One Fake Sweetener, But What About The Rest?

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There’s a Place That’s Nearly Perfect for Growing Food. It’s Not California.

by ShaunLadprsnu Posted on April 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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California is by far the dominant US produce-growing state—source of (large PDF) 81 percent of US-grown carrots, 95 percent of broccoli, 86 percent of cauliflower, 74 percent of raspberries, 91 percent of strawberries, etc.

But all three of its main veggie growing regions—the Imperial Valley, the Central Valley, and the Salinas Valley—face serious short- and long-term water challenges. As I recently argued in a New York Times debate, it’s time to “de-Californify” the nation’s supply of fruits and vegetable supply, to make it more diversified, resilient, and ready for a changing climate.

Here are maps of US fruit and vegetable production:

USDA

USDA

Now check out this map depicting average annual precipitation. The data are old—1961 to 1990—and weather patterns have changed since then as the climate has warmed over the decades. But the overall trends depicted still hold sway: The West tends to be arid, the East tends to get plenty of rain and snow, and the Midwest lands, well, somewhere in the middle. So the map remains a good proxy for understanding where water tends to fall and where it doesn’t, though the precipitation levels depicted for California look downright Londonesque compared to the state’s current parched condition.

Not only is California gripped in its worst drought in at least 1,200 years, but climate models and the fossil record suggest that its 21st-century precipitation levels could be significantly lower than the 20th-century norm, when California emerged as a fruit-and-vegetable behemoth.

So here’s an idea that could take pressure off California. In my Times piece, I looked to the Corn Belt states of the Midwest as a prime candidate for a veggie revival: Just about a quarter million acres (a veritable rounding error in that region’s base of farmland) from corn and soy to veggies could have a huge impact on regional supply, a 2010 Iowa State University study found.

Now my gaze is heading south and east, to acres now occupied by cotton—a crop burdened by a brutal past in the South (slavery, sharecropping) and a troubled present (a plague of herbicide-tolerant weeds):

Let’s leave aside all of the cotton growing on the arid side of the map. (The drought is already squeezing out production of the fluffy fiber in California; as for the Texas panhandle, cotton production there relies heavily on water from the fast-depleting Ogallala Aquifer—not a great long-term strategy.)

What I’m eyeing are those cotton acres on the water-rich right side of the map—the Mississippi Delta states Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee, and Louisiana, along with the Carolinas, Alabama, and Georgia to the east. According to the USDA, mid-Southern and Southeastern states planted more than 4 million acres of cotton in 2014. This is what’s left of the old—and let’s face it, infamous—Cotton Belt that stocked the globe’s textile factories during the 19th-century boom that delivered the Industrial Revolution (a story told in Sven Beckert’s fantastic 2014 book Empire of Cotton).

Decades of low prices have already put a squeeze on Southern cotton acres, and the fiber has recently slumped anew in global trading. Why not transition at least some acres into crops with a robust domestic market? I bounced my idea of a Cotton Belt fruit-and-vegetable renaissance off a few experts to see if it was nuts. Ferd Hoefner, policy director of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, called it “noncrazy.” He pointed out that, as in most other parts of the United States, small-scale farms that sell directly to consumers are “already gearing up down there,” and added that the region “seems ripe for entrepreneurial companies to come in, buy land, grow farmers, introduce a whole new vegetable supply chain on a bigger scale, especially with California’s woes.”

I’m not talking about a fantasy in which everyone eats from within 20 miles (although such locavore networks, which have thrived nationwide over the last two decades, certainly add diversification and resilience to the overall food system). I’m simply pushing a more regionalized, widely distributed scheme for filling our salad and fruit bowls, one less dependent on California and its overtaxed water resources.

Scott Marlow, executive director of North Carolina-based RAFI USA, a farmer advocacy organization, also said the idea make sense—with caveats. One is credit. Marlow says that most farmers who still plant cotton are large enough that they rely on loans to start the growing season—and bankers understand and are used to cotton, but may find vegetables too exotic and risky. For such farmers, “if the banker won’t lend for it, they are not doing it,” he said. Reforms in the latest farm bill made it easier for “specialty crop” (i.e., fruit and vegetable) farmers to get good crop insurance, and that, in turn, made it easier to get loans, he said. But those changes take time to sink in.

He added that the South’s high levels of precipitation can actually be a liability compared to California’s aridity, because “rain spreads diseases through splash erosion, ruins product, screws up harvest, reduces product quality.” California farmers, who meet their watering needs through controlled irrigation, don’t have those problems.

But rain troubles can be addressed through low-tech means like high tunnels, which are already being adapted by Southern produce farmers to extend the growing season, but also to protect sensitive crops from rain, Marlow said. Black plastic mulch, another widely adapted practice, also helps keep crops healthy in rainy periods, he added. The South’s farmers have demonstrated the ability to innovate, he said, but “there have to be markets, there has to be risk management, and there has to be access to credit.”

Converting swaths of Dixie country to vegetables won’t be a fast or easy process. But if California’s water troubles drag on, as it appears they will, broccoli may yet emerge as the heir apparent to doddering King Cotton.

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There’s a Place That’s Nearly Perfect for Growing Food. It’s Not California.

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How a Massive Environmental Crisis Led to the Invention of Cheese

by HassanNoriega Posted on April 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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A version of this article was originally published on Gastropod.

This is the story you’ll often hear about how humans discovered cheese: One hot day 9,000 years ago, a nomad was on his travels and brought along some milk in an animal stomach—a sort of proto-thermos—to have something to drink at the end of the day. But when he arrived, he discovered that the rennet in the stomach lining had curdled the milk, creating the first cheese.

But there’s a major problem with that story, as University of Vermont cheese scientist and historian Paul Kindstedt explained on the latest episode of Gastropod—a podcast that explores food through the lens of science and history. The nomads living in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East in 7000 B.C. would have been lactose-intolerant. A nomad on the road wouldn’t have wanted to drink milk; it would have left him in severe gastro-intestinal distress.

Kindstedt, author of the book Cheese and Culture, explained that about a thousand years before traces of cheese-making show up in the archaeological record, humans began growing crops. Those early fields of wheat and other grains attracted local wild sheep and goats, which provide milk for their young. Human babies are also perfectly adapted for milk. Early humans quickly made the connection and began dairying—but for the first thousand years, toddlers and babies were the only ones consuming the milk. Human adults were uniformly lactose-intolerant, says Kindstedt. What’s more, he told us that “we know from some exciting archaeo-genetic and genomic modeling that the capacity to tolerate lactose into adulthood didn’t develop until about 5500 B.C.”—which is at least a thousand years after the development of cheese.

It took another recent advance to figure out the origins of cheese: Kindstedt says that only recently have scientists been able to analyze the chemical traces on pottery from thousands of years ago in order to find milk fat in the higher concentrations that indicate it was used to hold cheese or butter, rather than plain milk.

Using this new research, Kinstead explains, we now know that the real dawn of cheese came about 8,500 years ago, with two simultaneous developments in human history. First, by then, over-intensive agricultural practices had depleted the soil, leading to the first human-created environmental disaster. As a result, Neolithic humans began herding goats and sheep more intensely, as those animals could survive on marginal lands unfit for crops. And secondly, humans invented pottery: the original practical milk-collection containers.

In the warm environment of the Fertile Crescent region, Kinstedt explained, any milk not used immediately and instead left to stand in those newly invented containers “would have very quickly, in a matter of hours, coagulated due to the heat and the natural lactic acid bacteria in the milk. And at some point, probably some adventurous adult tried some of the solid material and found that they could tolerate it a lot more of it than they could milk.” That’s because about 80 percent of the lactose drains off with the whey, leaving a digestible and, likely, rather delicious fresh cheese.

With the discovery of cheese, suddenly those early humans could add dairy to their diets. Cheese made an entirely new source of nutrients and calories available for adults, and, as a result, dairying took off in a major way. What this meant, says Kindstedt, is that “children and newborns would be exposed to milk frequently, which ultimately through random mutations selected for children who could tolerate lactose later into adulthood.”

In a very short time, at least in terms of human evolution—perhaps only a few thousand years—that mutation spread throughout the population of the Fertile Crescent. As those herders migrated to Europe and beyond, they carried this genetic mutation with them. According to Kindstedt, “It’s an absolutely stunning example of a genetic selection occurring in an unbelievably short period of time in human development. It’s really a wonder of the world, and it changed Western civilization forever.”

To learn more about what those first cheeses tasted like—and how we got from there to Velveeta—listen to Gastropod’s “Say Cheese!” episode:

Gastropod is a podcast about the science and history of food. Each episode looks at the hidden history and surprising science behind a different food and/or farming-related topic—from aquaculture to ancient feasts, from cutlery to chili peppers, and from microbes to Malbec. It’s hosted by Cynthia Graber, an award-winning science reporter, and Nicola Twilley, author of the popular blog Edible Geography. You can subscribe via iTunes, email, Stitcher, or RSS for a new episode every two weeks.

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How a Massive Environmental Crisis Led to the Invention of Cheese

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7 Key Facts About the Drought

by GrazynaGuffey Posted on April 6, 2015

Mother Jones

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the drought in California, especially since this past week, when Gov. Jerry Brown introduced mandatory water cuts for the first time in the state’s history. So what exactly makes this drought so bad? And what are people doing about it? Here are a few important points to keep in mind:

Drought is the norm in California. How bad is this one? There are always wet years and dry years, but the past three years have been among the driest on record—and state officials worry that 2015 will be even drier. Last week, for the first time in the state’s history, Brown imposed mandatory water restrictions, requiring all cities and towns to cut their water usage by 25 percent. Though agriculture uses more than 80 percent of the state’s water, the regulations merely require farmers to submit “water management plans.”

California’s reservoirs have about a year’s worth of water left. Groundwater levels, seen as a “savings account” that the state can draw from in dry times, are at an all-time low. The US Drought Monitor comes out with weekly drought maps based on satellite imagery, precipitation, and water flow data; the Central Valley—America’s bread basket—is covered in dark red, “exceptional drought.”

What exactly is groundwater, and why are people in California freaking out about it? Groundwater is the water that seeps through the ground when it rains. Over the centuries, it accumulates in vast underground aquifers, with older water found deeper in the earth’s crust. Accessed through wells, groundwater is often compared to a savings account in California—good to have in dry times but difficult to refill. The issue now is that with reservoirs (above ground) so depleted, groundwater use is spiking. Farmers are drilling deeper and deeper for water—using water that fell 20,000 years ago. Usually, groundwater makes up about 40 percent of the state’s freshwater usage, but with the recent drought, that number has leapt to 65 percent. This year, it may rise to 75 percent.

What are the state’s biggest water users? Farming in general, and alfalfa (used to feed cows) and almonds in particular. California grows half of the fruits and veggies produced in the States, including more than 90 percent of the country’s grapes, broccoli, almonds, and walnuts. Here are some of the state’s most thirsty crops:

Alfalfa is a superfood of sorts for cows, and it’s in high demand in the Golden State, which leads the country in dairy production and is also a major beef producer. (Fun fact: It takes nearly 700 gallons of water to grow the alfalfa necessary to produce one gallon of milk, and 425 gallons of water to produce 4 ounces of beef.) Almonds are second from the top, both because it takes a lot of water to produce nuts (a single almond takes a gallon of water) but also because the crunchy snack is in vogue in the United States and abroad. The water that’s used to grow the California almonds that are exported overseas in one year would be enough to fuel Los Angeles for nearly three years.

What about fracking? Fracking uses a lot of water, since the process involves injecting water and chemicals into the earth to release oil and gas. According to a recent Reuters article, California oil producers used about 70 million gallons of water in 2014—about the amount that San Francisco homes use collectively in two days. But that’s just the water from fracking. The amount of water that was produced by California’s oil and gas production in 2014—which is to say, the groundwater that bubbled up during production and wasn’t returned to the original aquifers—was about 42 billion gallons. That’s enough to fuel San Francisco homes for 3 years.

Will we get back the water we lose? Your elementary school teachers didn’t lie to you—the water cycle is really a thing. But as Peter Gleick, the president of the Pacific Institute, explained, the water that California is losing “is still falling—it’s just falling somewhere else.” It’s impossible to know exactly where the water that would normally fall in California is going, but there are plenty of places, especially in the North and Northeast, that have been having abnormally wet years. Scientists are also concerned that climate change is both increasing the likelihood of drought and accelerating its effects: As the earth warms, water evaporates more easily from reservoirs, rivers, and soil.

California is on the coast. Can’t we desalinize the ocean? Because desalinization technology is so expensive and energy-intensive, most water officials—and taxpayers—don’t see it as a viable option. The latest attempt is the Carlsbad desalinization plant, just outside of San Diego, which will be complete in 2016. The project will cost taxpayers $1 billion and produce 50 million gallons of water per day—the largest desalinization plant in the Western Hemisphere—and it will provide just 7 percent of the county’s total water needs.

Well, this is depressing. What are viable solutions? There’s no silver bullet, but the good news is that there are some good solutions. This chart, part of a report by the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Pacific Institute, sums up some of the options. California could reduce its water use by 17 to 22 percent with more efficient agricultural water use, including fixes like scheduling irrigation when plants need it and expanding drip and sprinkler irrigation. Urban water use could be reduced by 40 to 60 percent if residents replaced lawns with drought-tolerant plants, fixed water leaks, and replaced old toilets and showerheads with more water-efficient technology. And instead of channeling used water into the ocean, the state could treat it and reuse it—a practice that tends to gross some people out (because of the “drinking pee” factor) but has long been used in Orange County and is becoming more popular as the drought continues.

This article has been updated.

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7 Key Facts About the Drought

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7 Normal Snacks With a Crazy Amount of Sugar

by RodrigoMota Posted on March 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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Call us greedy, self-centered, or overly idealistic, but no one should ever accuse Americans of being bitter: We devour more added sugar than people in any other country—30 teaspoons a day by some estimates. (Indians, on the other end of the spectrum, consume just one.)

The reasons go back to the 1960s, when supermarkets proliferated in US cities and readily available corn-syrupy sodas and juice drinks supplanted milk on the dinner table. By 1996, the daily calories we got from added sweeteners had increased by more than 35 percent.

On top of that, during the low-fat frenzy of the 1980s and ’90s, manufacturers replaced the flavorful natural oils in their products with sweeteners. “Now it’s challenging to find a food without added sugar,” says Dr. Andrew Bremer, a pediatric endocrinologist and program director in the diabetes, endocrinology, and metabolic diseases division at the National Institutes of Health. Indeed, today a full three-quarters of the packaged foods that we purchase—including everything from whole-wheat bread and breakfast cereals to salad dressings—contain extra sweeteners.

That’s a problem: Naturally occurring sugars (the kind in fruit, for example) come with fiber, which helps us regulate the absorption of food. Without fiber, sugar can overwhelm your system, eventually leading to obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and other health problems. Given these risks, experts suggest dramatically cutting your intake of extra sweets. In March, the World Health Organization recommended that 5 percent of your daily energy come from added sugars, which for an adult of average weight comes out to roughly six teaspoons—about 25 grams.

The trouble is that it’s hard to tell how much added sugar you’re actually eating. You’ve probably learned to spot cane juice and corn syrup, but what about barley malt, dextrose, and rice syrup—and the 56 other names for added sweeteners?

What’s more, food companies aren’t required to distinguish on labels between added and naturally occurring sugars. The US Department of Agriculture used to list added sugars in an online nutrient database, but it removed this feature in 2012 after companies claimed that the exact proportion of added sugar was a trade secret.

Last year, the Food and Drug Administration proposed changing nutrition labels and requiring companies to display both added and naturally occurring sugars. But industry giants like Hormel and General Mills are objecting—and even if a new label gets approved, it could still be years before packaging changes.

In the graphic above, we crunched the numbers on some everyday snacks and meals to discover just how easy it is to reach six teaspoons.

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7 Normal Snacks With a Crazy Amount of Sugar

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California Nutritionists Just Voted Not To Invite McDonald’s Back as a Sponsor

by LieselotteRinal Posted on March 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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Last year, I attended the annual conference of the California Dietetic Association, the state’s chapter of the country’s largest professional organization for nutritionists and dietitians. Its premier sponsor—and lunch caterer—was McDonald’s. That won’t be the case at this year’s conference in April: The organization just voted not to invite the fast-food chain back.

Today a member of the California Dietetics Association shared the following letter from conference leadership on the Facebook page of Dietitians for Professional Integrity:

We would like to direct your attention to what the California Dietetic Association (CDA) has done to address our own issues surrounding sponsorship. We heard your concerns regarding CDA Annual Conference sponsorship and we have listened. We voted and McDonalds was not invited as a sponsor in 2015. This decision has impacted our finances; however, we believe it was important to respond to our member feedback. In addition, an ad hoc committee approved by the CDA executive board, reevaluated the sponsorship guidelines. The new sponsorship policy will be posted soon on www.dietitian.org. Any questions regarding the new policy can be directed to Kathryn Sucher, CDA President-elect email address redacted
We look forward to seeing you at the CDA Annual Conference.
Your 2014-2015 CDA Executive Board

That’s not to say that the conference organizers have ditched corporate funders entirely. According to the schedule (PDF), Kellogg’s is sponsoring a panel called “The Evolution of Breakfast: Nutrition and Health Concerns in the Future,” while Soy Connection, the communications arm of the United Soybean Board, is hosting a session titled “Busting the Myths Surrounding Genetically Engineered Foods” (and sponsoring a “light breakfast”). A few other sessions sponsored by corporations and trade groups:

“Why We Eat What We Eat in America and What We Can Do About It” (California Beef Council)
“Probiotics and the Microbiome: Key to Health and Disease Prevention” (Dairy Council of California)
“New Research – Understanding Optimal Levels Of Protein And Carb To Prevent Obesity, Sarcopenia, Type 2 Diabetes, And Metabolic Syndrome” (Egg Nutrition Center)
“New evidence of Non-Nutritive Sweeteners: Help or Hindrance for Weight and Diabetes Management” (Johnson & Johnson McNeil, Inc, LLC)
“Plant-based Meals from Around the Globe” (Barilla Pasta)

Still, says Andy Bellatti, a dietitian and leader of the group Dietitians for Professional Integrity, ditching McDonald’s as a sponsor is a step in the right direction. “There’s still a long way to go,” he said. “But the McDonald’s sponsorship was just so egregious. I’m glad they came to their senses and got rid of it.”

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California Nutritionists Just Voted Not To Invite McDonald’s Back as a Sponsor

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