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That Antioxidant You’re Taking Is Snake Oil

by DominiqSikora Posted on July 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Plants can’t move. They’re sitting targets for every insect, two- and four-legged creature, and air-borne fungus and bacteria that swirls around them. But they’re not defenseless, we’ve learned. Under pressure from millions of years of attacks, they’ve evolved to produce compounds that repel these predators. Known as phyotochemicals, these substances can be quite toxic to humans. You probably wouldn’t enjoy the jolt of urushiol you’d get from a salad of toxicodendron radicans (poison ivy) leaves.

But other phytochemicals have emerged as crucial elements of a healthful human diet. Indeed, they’re the source of several essential vitamins, including A, C, and E. But according to an eye-opening Nautilus article by the excellent science journalist Moises Velasquez-Manoff (author of a recent Mother Jones piece on the gut microbiome), our view of how these defensive compounds benefit us might be wildly wrong.

The accepted dietary dogma goes like this: The phytochemicals we ingest from plants act as antioxidants—that is, they protect us from the oxidative molecules, known as “free radicals,” that our own cells produce as a waste product, and that have become associated with a range of degenerative diseases including cancer and heart trouble.

It’s true that many phytochemicals and the vitamins they carry have been proven in lab settings to have antioxidant properties—that is, they prevent oxidization. And so, Velasquez-Manoff shows, the idea gained currency that fruits and vegetables are good for us because their high antioxidant load protects us from free radicals. And from there, it was easy to leap to the conclusion that you could slow aging and stave off disease by isolating certain phytochemicals and ingesting them in pill form—everything from multivitamins to trendy antioxidants like resveratrol. “A supplement industry now worth $23 billion yearly in the U.S. took root,” he notes.

And yet, antioxidant pills have proven to be a bust. In February, a group of independent US medical researchers assessed 10 years of supplement research and found that pills loaded with vitamin E and beta-carotene (the stuff that gives color to carrots and other orange vegetables) pills are at best useless and at worst harmful—that is, they may trigger lung cancer in some people. Just this month, a meta-analysis published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that antioxidant supplements “do not prevent cancer and may accelerate it.”

And a 2009 study found that taking antioxidant supplements before exercise actually negates most of the well-documented benefits of physical exertion: That is, taking an antioxidant pill before a run is little better than doing neither and just sitting on the couch.

So what gives? Velasquez-Manoff points to emerging science suggesting that phytochemicals’ antioxidant properties may have thrown us off the trail of what really makes them good for us. He offers two key clues. The first is that plants produce them in response to stress—e.g., pathogenic bacteria, hungry insects. The second is that exercise itself is a form of self-imposed stress: You punish your body by exerting it, and it responds by getting stronger. Leaning on the work of Mark Mattson, Chief of the Laboratory of Neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging, and other researchers, Velasquez-Manoff proposes that phytochemicals help us not by repelling oxidant stresses, but by triggering them.

Consider that exercise actually generates free radicals in our muscles—the very thing, according to current dogma, that makes us vulnerable to cancer and aging. But a while after a bout at the gym or on the running trail, these free radicals disappear, replaced by what Velasquez-Manoff calls “native antioxidants.” That’s because, he writes, “post-exercise, the muscle cells respond to the oxidative stress by boosting production of native antioxidants.” And these home-grown chemicals, “amped up to protect against the oxidant threat of yesterday’s exercise, now also protect against other ambient oxidant dangers” like ones from air pollution and other environmental stressors, he writes. In the exercise study, the supplements may have interrupted the process, the study’s main author, Swiss researcher Michael Ristow, tells Velasquez-Manoff—they prevent the body from producing its antioxidants, but what they deliver doesn’t offset the loss.

Yet phytochemicals found in whole foods—”the hot flavors in spices, the mouth-puckering tannins in wines, or the stink of Brussels sprouts”—may work on our bodies much as exercise does. Velasquez-Manoff writes: “Our bodies recognize them as slightly toxic, and we respond with an ancient detoxification process aimed at breaking them down and flushing them out.”

To bolster his case, Velasquez-Manoff cites the example of sulforaphane, the compound that gives broccoli and other members of the brassica family of vegetables—such as Brussels sprouts—their sulfurous smell when they cook. It’s what’s known as an “antifeedant”—i.e., it’s pungency discourages grazing (and makes many people hate Brussels sprouts, etc). Unlike many phytochemicals, sulforaphane isn’t an antioxidant at all, but rather a mild oxidant—that is, it mimics free radicals and thus under the old dietary dogma, we should avoid it. And yet…

When sulforaphane enters your blood stream, it triggers release in your cells of a protein called Nrf2. This protein, called by some the “master regulator” of aging, then activates over 200 genes. They include genes that produce antioxidants, enzymes to metabolize toxins, proteins to flush out heavy metals, and factors that enhance tumor suppression, among other important health-promoting functions. In theory, after encountering this humble antifeedant in your dinner, your body ends up better prepared for encounters with toxins, pro-oxidants from both outside and within your body, immune insults, and other challenges that might otherwise cause harm.

In this theory, what causes cancer and general aging isn’t oxidative stress itself, but rather a poor response to oxidative stress—”a creeping inability to produce native antioxidants when needed, and a lack of cellular conditioning generally.” And that’s where the modern Western lifestyle, marked by highly processed food and a lack of physical exertion, comes in.

The National Institute on Aging’s Mattson calls this the “couch potato” problem. Absent regular hormetic stresses, including exercise and stimulation by plant antifeedants, “cells become complacent,” he says. “Their intrinsic defenses are down-regulated.” Metabolism works less efficiently. Insulin resistance sets in. We become less able to manage pro-oxidant threats. Nothing works as well as it could. And this mounting dysfunction increases the risk for a degenerative disease.

While this emerging view of phytochemcials is compelling, Velasquez-Manoff acknowledges that it isn’t fully settled. For one thing, it’s unclear why isolated phytochemicals in pills don’t seem to work the same magic as they do in the form of whole foods. Here’s Velasquez-Manoff:

Proper dosage may be one problem, and interaction between the isolates used and particular gene variants in test subjects another. Interventions usually test one molecule, but fresh fruits and vegetables present numerous compounds at once. We may benefit most from these simultaneous exposures. The science on the intestinal microbiota promises to further complicate the picture; our native microbes ferment phytonutrients, perhaps supplying some of the benefit of their consumption. All of which highlights the truism that Nature is hard to get in a pill.

But human nutrition is a deeply interesting topic precisely because it resists being settled. As Michael Pollan showed in his 2008 book In Defense of Food, humans have adapted to a wide variety of diets—from the Mediterranean and Mesoamerican ones based mostly on plants, to the Inuit ones focusing heavily on fish. The one diet that hasn’t worked very well is the most calibrated, supplemented, and “fortified” of all: the Western one.

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That Antioxidant You’re Taking Is Snake Oil

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The EPA Dithers While a Popular Pesticide Threatens Ecosystems

by TWTKamwbbsdhe Posted on July 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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Ah, summer—the season when trillions of corn and soybean plants tower horizon-to-horizon in the Midwest. All told, US farmers planted more than 170 million acres in these two crops this year—a combined landmass roughly equal in size to the state of Texas. That’s great news for the companies that turn corn and soy into livestock feed, sweeteners, and food additives; but not so great for honeybees, wild pollinating insects like bumblebees, and birds.

That’s because these crops—along with other major ones like alfalfa and sunflower—are widely treated with pesticides called neonicotinoids. Made by European chemical giants Bayer and Syngenta, these chemicals generate a staggering $2.6 billion in annual revenue worldwide—and have come under heavy suspicion as a trigger of colony collapse disorder and other, less visible, ecological calamities.

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The EPA Dithers While a Popular Pesticide Threatens Ecosystems

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Tom’s Kitchen: Farmhouse-Style Roasted Potato and Egg Scramble

by JoleenRayner Posted on May 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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In the years I spent working on a small organic farm in North Carolina, we’d often spend the wee hours of the morning harvesting a variety of vegetables. One of my favorite crops to pick was potatoes, which required a kind of subterranean treasure hunt. One of us would plunge a pitchfork into the earth and upturn a potato plant, and another, on hands and knees, would quickly snatch the dirt-caked orbs dangling from the roots and place them in a bucket.

Occasionally, a potato would get “speared”—unintentionally stabbed by the fork—making it unmarketable. We’d separate them out, and march them into the kitchen for a post-harvest “second breakfast” of potatoes, just-laid eggs, and any other vegetables on hand. Early-morning harvests generated a fierce hunger, and nothing satisfied it quite like these just-dug treasures roasted in a hot oven—sweet, creamy, and sumptuous, justifying their name in French: pomme de terre, or apple of the earth.

Now when I go the the farmers market, I can never resist “new” potatoes, which are just potatoes that haven’t been stored long. Recently, at the stand of an excellent Austin farm called Green Gate, I spied some purple potatoes—which are not only rich in health-giving phytochemicals, but also deliver an extra dose of earthy flavor. I grabbed a couple handfuls, came home, and tried to recapture that farmhouse magic.

Note: You can omit the eggs and just use the below recipe as a guide for roasting potatoes.

Farmhouse-Style Roasted Potato and Egg Scramble
Serves two

Ingredients
About .75 pounds new potatoes, preferably blue or purple, chopped into bite-sized pieces
Olive oil
Sea salt
1-2 shallots, minced
3-4 eggs from pastured chickens
A few slices of decent cheese—I used Organic Valley “Grassmilk” raw cheddar
Some coarsely chopped herbs, for garnish. (I used cilantro, but parsley, chives, and even arugula would all work great.)

Adjust your oven’s top rack to between 6-8 inches below the broiler (you’ll be finishing the potatoes under the broiler). Turn the oven to 400 degrees F and insert a large cast-iron or other heavy-bottomed, over-proof skillet. Your going to want to cover it, so find an oven-proof cover that will work with the pan before proceeding.

Dab the chopped potatoes dry with a towel. When the oven comes to temperature, remove the skillet. Proceed with caution: It will be blisteringly hot. Add enough oil to cover the bottom, and drop in the potatoes along with a good pinch of salt. Using a spatula, toss the potatoes around in the pan until they are well-coated in oil. Cover the skillet and return it to the oven. The cover will help the potatoes cook faster by essentially steaming them in their own moisture.

While the potatoes are cooking, crack the eggs into a bowl, along with a pinch of salt and a grind of pepper, and whisk them together with a fork until the yolks and whites are just combined.

Check the potatoes every ten minutes or so by plunging a fork into one of the larger pieces. When the fork penetrates easily, it’s time to remove the skillet’s cover, turn off the oven’s bake function, and turn the broiler on to its highest setting. Place the skillet under the broiler and cooking, checking often, until they’re brown and crisp on one side. Flip them with a spatula, and brown/crisp them on the other. Remove the skillet, placing it on the stove top. Turn off the broiler and shut the oven door.

Add the chopped shallots to the pan along with a small glug of oil, tossing it all with a spatula. The pan will still be sizzling hot, and will cook the shallots. When the sizzling has calmed down, turn the heat to low and carefully pour the mixed eggs over the potatoes, covering the skillet bottom with the eggs. When the edges have set, flip the eggs with a spatula. Lay the cheese slices onto the eggs, and return the skillet to the still-hot oven until the cheese has just melted—a couple of minutes.

Serve with a green salad, toast, and white wine for dinner, or tortillas and coffee for breakfast.

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Tom’s Kitchen: Farmhouse-Style Roasted Potato and Egg Scramble

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Our Alarming Food Future, Explained in 7 Charts

by RicardoCorbould Posted on May 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Earlier this year, President Obama signed a bill into law that will essentially preserve the status quo of US agriculture for the next half-decade. Known as the farm bill, the once-every-five-years legislation (among other things it does) shapes the basic incentive structure for the farmers who specialize in the big commodity crops: corn, soybeans, wheat, and rice. This year’s model, like the several before it, provides generous subsidies (mostly through cut-rate insurance) for all-out production of these crops (especially corn and soy); while also slashing already-under-funded program that encourage farmers to protect soil and water.

Read about 7 more scary facts from the National Climate Assessment.

As I put it in a post at the time, the legislation was simply not ready for climate change. How not ready? A just-released, wide-ranging new federal report called the National Climate Assessment has answers. A collaborative project led by 13 federal agencies and five years in the making, the Assessment is available for browsing on a very user-friendly website. Here’s what I gleaned on the challenges to agriculture posed by climate change:

Iowa is hemorrhaging soil. A while back, I wrote about Iowa’s quiet soil crisis. When heavy rains strike bare corn and soy fields in the spring, huge amounts of topsoil wash away. Known as “gully erosion,” this kind of soil loss currently isn’t counted in the US Department of Agriculture’s rosy erosion numbers, which hold that Iowa’s soils are holding steady. But Richard Cruse, an agronomist and the director of Iowa State University’s Iowa Water Center, has found Iowa’s soils are currently disappearing at a rate as much as 16 times faster than the natural regeneration. According to the National Assessment, days of heavy rain have increased steadily in Iowa over the past two decades, and will continue doing so.

National Climate Assessment

But dry spells are on the rise, too. In spring 2013, Iowa experienced its wettest spring ever, with storms that washed away titanic amounts of topsoil. The previous summer, it underwent its most severe drought in generations. Such extremes can be expected to continue. This map shows the predicted increase in the maximum number of consecutive dry days, comparing the 1971-2000 period to projections for 2070-2090. The worst-hit regions will be in the west—more on that below—but key corn-growing states like Illinois and Indiana take their lumps, too.

National Climate Assessment

Crop yields will decline. All the carbon we’ve been spewing into the atmosphere over the past century and a half has so far probably helped crop yields—plants need freely available carbon dioxide, after all. But as the climate warms, that effect gets increasingly drowned out by heat stress, drought, and flood. And now, the Midwest is expected to see sharply higher average temperatures as well as days above 95 degrees Fahrenheit. This chart compares the region’s average temps in the 1971-2000 period to those expected between 2041 and 2070.

And higher temperatures correlate to reduced crop yields—as this chart, comparing yields and maximum temperature data in Illinois and Indiana between 1980 to 2007, shows.

National Climate Assessment

California, our vegetable basket, will be strapped for irrigation water. California is locked in a severe drought. I recently noted that farmers in the state’s main growing region, the Central Valley, are responding by rapidly drawing down underground water stores to keep their crops irrigated. The main driver: Farmers count on snow melt from the Sierra Nevada mountains to supplies the state’s vast irrigation networks—and this year, the snows barely came. According to the report, as the weather warms up, they—and other farms in the Southwest—can expect much less snow going forward.

National Climate Assessment

And even if they can get enough water, heat stress and other climate effects will likely knock down yields of some crops. Different crops respond to higher temperatures in different ways. This chart projects yields for Central Valley crops under two scenarios—one in which greenhouse gas emissions continue rising, the other if we manage to reduce emissions. Crucially, these projections are based on the assumption that “adequate water supplies (soil moisture)” will be maintained—a precarious assumption.

National Climate Assessment

Wine grapes, nuts, and other perennial California crops will be hard-hit. In order to thrive, crops like fruit and nuts need a certain number of chilling hours each winter—that is, periods when temperatures range between 32°F and 50°F. Bad news: A warming climate means fewer cold snaps. The maps below show changes in chilling hours in the Central Valley in 1950, 2000, and a prediction for 2050 if current trends hold (the greener, the more chilling hours):

National Climate Assessment

Overall, the report states, “the number of chilling hours is projected to decline by 30 percent to 60 percent by 2050 and by up to 80% by 2100.” Worse, the “area capable of consistently producing grapes required for the highest-quality wines is projected to decline by more than 50 percent by late this century.” It’s enough to make you want to uncork a bottle, while you still have a chance.

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Our Alarming Food Future, Explained in 7 Charts

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Tom’s Kitchen: Stir-Fried Beef with Celery, Carrots, and Kohlrabi

by ChangHamblen Posted on April 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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This recipe owes its existence to the confluence of three unrelated events:

• At the very end of a busy recent trip to San Francisco, I ate lunch at a restaurant called Mission Chinese, a hipster homage to Americanized Chinese food. I had the “Kung Pao pastrami”—an expertly rendered twist on a venerable strip-mall standard.

• While on the plane home, I read a New York Times style piece on “#normcore,” an internet meme/elaborate joke/contrived fashion trend that involves the “less-ironic (but still pretty ironic) embrace of bland, suburban anti-fashion attire”: stuff like “dad jeans” and Teva sandals.

• The night after I returned from my trip, my mother invited me over for dinner—a simple stir-fried pork dish familiar from my childhood. She brandished a book I hadn’t seen in years: an opulently splattered first edition of Joyce Chen Cookbook, the 1962 opus that taught a generation of Americans (including my mom) how to cook Chinese. Just like in the old days, she served it over white rice—a swerve from her decades-long fixation on brown.

Sitting there, transported by that vintage stir-fry to my ’70s childhood of Toughskins and pre-hipster Chuck Taylors, it hit me: old-school, US-inflected Chinese is a culinary embodiment #normcore. Plus, it’s really good! (When made with decent ingredients.)

It wasn’t long before I was busy in my own kitchen, contriving my own #normcore stir fry. Since I was having a few friends over, I wanted to find the “less-ironic (but still pretty ironic)” sweet spot—and produce something delicious.

From Joyce Chen‘s recipe for beef with green peppers—a childhood staple—I settled on a protein: “Flank steak is fairly inexpensive and easy to slice,” Chen instructs. And she’s as right in 2014 as she was in 1962. I found a beautiful cut of it at Austin’s excellent neo-old-school, whole-animal butcher shop Salt and Time. I also borrowed from Chen the method for flavoring the stir fry: you marinate the meat in soy sauce sweetened with a little sugar and thickened with corn starch—which gives the finished product a lovely glaze—which I goosed up with ginger, green onions, garlic and chili pepper (Chen treats aromatics like ginger and garlic as potent substances to be used in tiny amounts, and her book is devoid of hot peppers.)

For vegetables, green bell peppers felt too on-the-nose #normcore for me. So from that Kung Pao dish I had at Mission Chinese, I lifted the idea of celery, which strikes me as both a pretty #normcore vegetable itself, and also quite delicious and underused. Carrots, too, seemed right. But I only had a little of each, so I filled out the dish in decidedly un-normcore fashion: with a gorgeous bulb of kohlrabi leftover from the previous week’s farmer’s market run. That kohlrabi bulb sported a generous set of leaves—similar to kale, a related vegetable—so I threw those in, too.

A vegetarian was among the guests, so I had to come up with a non-meat alternative protein. Tofu would have been the straight-ahead #normcore move, but all I had in the fridge was a block of tempeh, so I went with it. Here’s what I came up. Enjoy with canned beer—Bud Light if you want to go full-on you-know-what, or a new-wave canned craft brew like Dale’s Pale Ale if you want a twist.

Stir-Fried Beef With Vegetables

(Serves four, with leftovers.)

4 spring onions
2 cloves of garlic, crushed and peeled
1 knuckle-sized nob of fresh ginger, peeled with the edge of a spoon
1 tablespoon (organic) corn starch
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon of crushed red chili flakes
Freshly ground black pepper
3 tablespoons of good soy sauce (my favorite is the Japanese brand Ohsawa Nama Shoyu)
1 tablespoon rice vinegar
1 pound of flank steak
2 stalks of celery
2 carrots
1 bulb of kohlrabi
A few kohlrabi leaves (optional; kale will do as well).
Peanut oil, for stir frying
More soy sauce, rice vinegar, and black pepper, to taste

First make the beef marinade. Cut the spring onions to separate the white and green parts. Slice the green parts into two-inch sections, set aside. Coarsely chop the white parts, and place them in the bowl of a mortar-and-pestle (a small food processor will also work here). Chop the ginger and garlic and add it to the mortar. Top with the corn starch, sugar, chili flakes, and a good grind of black pepper. Crush everything vigorously together into a paste. Add the soy sauce and vinegar, and mix it with the pestle. Dump the marinade into a medium-sized bowl. Cut the steak, against the grain, into quarter-inch strips about two inches long. Add the beef to the marinade, along with the green onion tops, and toss to coat well. Set aside.

Now prep the vegetables. Slice the carrots, kohlrabi, and celery into two-inch matchsticks. (Here’s a great Jamie Oliver video that explains how to do that better than I ever could in words). Set the carrots and kohlrabi aside in one bowl, and the celery in another. Slice the kohlrabi or kale leaves, if using, into thin strips, and set aside.

Now the stir fry begins. Set a bowl large enough to incorporate all the ingredients by the stovetop. Put your biggest, heaviest skillet—or wok—over high heat and add enough oil to cover the bottom. When the oil shimmers, add the celery sticks and sauté, using two spatulas to keep them constantly moving. Continue until they’re just cooked—they should retain a little crunch. Place them in the large bowl.

Put a little more oil in the pan—still over high heat—and add the carrot and kohlrabi sticks. Cook them as you did the celery sticks, and then dump them in the same bowl when they’re done. Repeat with the kale leaves, if using.

Again, add a bit of oil to the hot pan. Dump in the meat, onion greens, and the marinade. Spread the meat out across the pan’s bottom, so it forms a single layer. Let it sizzle for a minute—this will allow it to caramelize a bit, and then toss with the two spatulas as with the vegetables, until the meat is cooked through. Add the meat to the big bowl, and toss everything together—the glaze that coats the meat will also coat the veggies. Taste, add a bit more soy, pepper, and vinegar to taste. Serve over brown rice—or white.

The tempeh version: #notsonormcore, but still delicious.

If there’s a vegetarian coming to dinner: Before you start the vegetables for the main dish—in a medium-sized bowl, mix two tablespoons of olive oil, two of soy sauce, and a dash of maple syrup. Take a block of tempeh and cut it lengthwise into quarter-inch strips. Add the tempeh to the bowl and toss. letting it marinate for at least 5 minutes. (This is a twist on the tempeh technique from Heidi Swanson’s great cookbook Super Natural Every Day.) Put a separate skillet over medium heat, add a little peanut or coconut oil. When the oil shimmers, remove the tempeh from its marinade with a slotted spoon and stir fry until it’s cooked through. Place it in a bowl. Then, as each round of veggies come off the main skillet, add a portion to the tempeh. When done, toss together, along with a bit of the marinade.

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Tom’s Kitchen: Stir-Fried Beef with Celery, Carrots, and Kohlrabi

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Study: Fad Diets Work (But Not Why You Think)

by Polly Browder Posted on April 2, 2014

Mother Jones

What’s the best diet to follow to get healthy—should you go Paleo, low glycemic, low-carb, Mediterranean, or low-fat? For a paper released last month in the Annual Review of Public Health, Yale medical researchers David Katz and Samuel Meller surveyed the scientific evidence and decided … all of the above. Specifically, they found that all of these fad diets can be consistent with these basic principles:

The weight of evidence strongly supports a theme of healthful eating while allowing for variations on that theme. A diet of minimally processed foods close to nature, predominantly plants, is decisively associated with health promotion and disease prevention and is consistent with the salient components of seemingly distinct dietary approaches. Emphasis added.

But what about the Paleo diet, which encourages meat eating? The authors conclude the “aggregation of evidence” supports meat eating, as long as the “animal foods are themselves the products, directly or ultimately, of pure plant foods—the composition of animal flesh and milk is as much influenced by diet as we are.” That’s entirely consistent with the Paleo push for meat from pasture-raised animals, and brought to mind a study I wrote about late last year finding that cows fed on grass deliver milk with healthier fat profile than their industrially raised peers.

The Yale paper essentially cuts through the hype of various fad diets and affirms the koan-like advice put forward by author Michael Pollan in his 2008 book In Defense of Food: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” In fact, the authors reference Pollan directly in the chart that summarizes their findings:

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Study: Fad Diets Work (But Not Why You Think)

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Wall Street Investors Take Aim at Farmland

by sreg2 Posted on March 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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In a couple of posts last fall (here and here), I showed that corporations don’t do much actual farming in the US. True, agrichemical companies like Monsanto and Syngenta mint fortunes by selling seeds and chemicals to farmers, and grain processors like Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill reap billions from buying crops cheap and turning them into pricey stuff like livestock feed, sweetener, cooking oil, and ethanol. But the great bulk of US farms—enterprises that generally have razor-thin profit margins—are run by independent operators.

That may be on the verge of changing. A recent report by the Oakland Institute documents a fledgling, little-studied trend: Corporations are starting to buy up US farmland, especially in areas dominated by industrial-scale agriculture, like Iowa and California’s Central Valley. But the land-grabbing companies aren’t agribusinesses like Monsanto and Cargill. Instead, they’re financial firms: investment arms of insurance companies, banks, pension funds, and the like. In short, Wall Street spies gold in those fields of greens and grains.

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Wall Street Investors Take Aim at Farmland

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Why the EPA Can’t Manage To Block This Gnarly Herbicide

by TammaraMog Posted on February 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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In the February 10 issue of the New Yorker, Rachel Aviv has an outstanding piece on Tyrone Hayes, the University of California-Berkeley biologist whose research found that atrazine, a widely used herbicide, caused extreme sexual-development problems in frogs at very low levels. Aviv’s article follows a superb Hayes profile by Dashka Slater published in Mother Jones in 2012. Aviv’s piece gives some key background on just why it’s so hard for the US Environmental Protection Agency to take action on chemicals like atrazine, which in addition to harming frogs, is also suspected of causing thyroid and ovarian cancers in people at low doses. Here’s the key bit regarding the EPA and its reliance on cost-benefit analyses to determine what chemicals the public can and cannot be exposed to:

In the U.S., lingering scientific questions justify delays in regulatory decisions. Since the mid-seventies, the E.P.A. has issued regulations restricting the use of only five industrial chemicals out of more than eighty thousand in the environment. Industries have a greater role in the American regulatory process—they may sue regulators if there are errors in the scientific record—and cost-benefit analyses are integral to decisions: a monetary value is assigned to disease, impairments, and shortened lives and weighed against the benefits of keeping a chemical in use. Lisa Heinzerling, the senior climate-policy counsel at the E.P.A. in 2009 and the associate administrator of the office of policy in 2009 and 2010, said that cost-benefit models appear “objective and neutral, a way to free ourselves from the chaos of politics.” But the complex algorithms “quietly condone a tremendous amount of risk.” She added that the influence of the Office of Management and Budget, which oversees major regulatory decisions, has deepened in recent years. “A rule will go through years of scientific reviews and cost-benefit analyses, and then at the final stage it doesn’t pass,” she said. “It has a terrible, demoralizing effect on the culture at the E.P.A.”

Hat tip: Kathleen Geier.

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Why the EPA Can’t Manage To Block This Gnarly Herbicide

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The New Farm Bill: Yet Again, Not Ready for Climate Change

by DeannaColleano Posted on January 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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Imagine you’re a policy maker in a large country in an era of increasing climate instability—more floods and droughts, driven by steadily increasing average temperatures. And say the policy you make largely dictated the way your country’s farmers grow their crops. Wouldn’t you push for a robust, climate change-ready agriculture—one that stores carbon in the soil, helping stabilize the climate while also making farms more resilient to weather extremes?

There’s no real mystery about how to achieve these goals. I profiled a farmer last year named David Brandt who’s doing just that with a few highly imitable techniques (spoiler: crop rotation and cover crops), right in the middle of Big Corn country. This peer-reviewed 2012 Iowa State University study tells a similar tale. The question is, how to turn farmers like Brandt from outliers into to trendsetters—from the exception to the rule. The obvious lever would be the farm bill, that twice-a-decade omnibus legislation that shapes the decisions of millions of farmers nationwide, while also funding our major food-aid program, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which used to be called food stamps.

Well, after more than a year of heated debate, Congress has finally cobbled together a new farm bill, one likely to be signed into law soon by President Obama. Unfortunately, the great bulk of that debate didn’t focus how to steer the country’s agriculture through the trying times ahead. Instead, it concerned how much to cut food aid for poor people. The Democrats wanted relatively minor cuts; the Republicans, animated by the tea party wing, wanted draconian ones. The (relatively) good news: the new bill will cut SNAP by $9 billion over the next decade, vs. the $40 billion demanded by austerity-obsessed GOP backbenchers. My colleague Erika Eichelberger has more on this sad business of pinching food aid at a time of record poverty.

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The New Farm Bill: Yet Again, Not Ready for Climate Change

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The Standard American Diet in 3 Simple Charts

by BrendaMcKinnon Posted on January 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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US obesity and diabetes rates are among the globe’s very highest. Why? On her blog, the NYU nutritionist and food-politics expert Marion Nestle recently pointed (hat-tip, RealFood.org) to this telling chart on how we spend our grocery money, from the USDA’s Amber Waves publication:

So, we do a pretty good job eating enough potatoes. But the healthier, more brightly colored vegetables like kale and carrots, no so much. We spend four times the amount on refined grains the USDA thinks is proper, and about a fifth of the target expenditure in whole grains. We spend nearly 14 percent of our at-home food budgets on sugar and candies, and another 8 percent on premade frozen and fridge entrees. Whole fruit barley accounts for less than 5 percent of our grocery bill. And so on—a pretty dismal picture.

That chart deals with at-home expenditures. What about our food choices out in the world? The USDA article has more. This chart shows that we’re getting more and more of our sustenance outside of our own kitchens:

And while the article doesn’t offer comparable data to the above at-home chart about expenditures outside the home, it does deliver evidence that our eating out habits are pretty dire as well:

Why do we eat such crap food? The USDA throws up its hands: “Despite the benefits to overall diet quality,” the report states, “it can be difficult to convince consumers to change food preferences.”

But it never pauses top consider the food industry’s vast marketing budget. According to Yale’s Rudd Center, the US fast-food chains like McDonalds, Wendy’s, and Burger King spent $4.6 billion on advertising in 2012. “For context,” Rudd reports, “the biggest advertiser, McDonald’s, spent 2.7 times as much to advertise its products ($972 million) as all fruit, vegetable, bottled water, and milk advertisers combined ($367 million).” I can’t find numbers for the marketing budgets for the gigantic food companies that stock the middle shelves of supermarkets; but according to Advertising Age, Kraft alone spent $683 million on US advertising in 2012.

By contrast, Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, the USDA’s sub-agency that “works to improve the health and well-being of Americans by developing and promoting dietary guidance that links scientific research to the nutrition needs of consumers,” had a proposed budget of $8.7 million in 2013.

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The Standard American Diet in 3 Simple Charts

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