The Leading Voices in Food

The first nutrition labels mandated by the Food and Drug Administration appeared on food packages in 1994. A key update occurred in 2016, informed by new science on the link between diet and chronic disease. Along the way, things like trans fats and added sugars were required, but all along, the labels have been laden with numbers and appear on the back or side of packages. There has long been interest in more succinct and consumer-friendly labeling systems that might appear on the front of packages. Such systems exist outside the US, but for political reasons and lobbying by the food industry, have been blocked in the United States. There's new hope, however, described in a recent opinion piece by Christina Roberto, Alyssa Moran, and Kelly Brownell in the Washington Post. Today, we welcome Dr. Christina Roberto, lead author of that piece. She is the Mitchell J. Blutt and Margot Krody Blutt Presidential Associate Professor of Health Policy in the School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Interview Summary This is a really important topic, and if the nation gets this right, it really could make a difference in the way people make product decisions as they're in the supermarket. So, let's talk first about the importance of labeling on the front of the package. Why is that important when all the information is somewhere else, namely on the side or the back? I think there's a couple of key reasons why it's good to do front of packaging food labeling specifically. So, as you mentioned, it was a huge deal in 1994 to get this information mandated to be on food packaging to begin with, right? All of a sudden, there was much more transparency about what's in our food supply, but that being said, when you think about the nutrition facts label, it's pretty dense. There's a lot of percentages, there's a lot of numbers, there's a lot of information to process. And when people are actually in the supermarket shopping, they're making these split-second decisions, right? So, it's not to say that some consumers are turning it around and inspecting that packaging, but the reality is, for most people, it's a very habitual behavior. And so, we want to be in a place where that information is prominent, it's easily accessible, and it's easy to understand so that when you're making those snap judgements, they can be informed judgments. So, you're not talking about taking what's on the back and just moving it to the front. You're talking about a different set of information and symbols that might be available? That's right. Yeah. What front of package labeling is designed to do is just take some of the key bits of information that we know from science is going to be most important for consumers to base their nutritional decisions on. That's things like saturated fat, sodium, added sugars, right? And moving that to the front of the package and communicating about it in a very simple, clear way. So, no numbers, no percentages, just very straightforward language. And ideally some sort of icon, like an exclamation point, that would draw attention to that symbol and just quickly let consumers know that this product is high in those nutrients that you need to be concerned about and you need to try to limit. Why is it an important time to be thinking about this issue in the US? It's an important and it's an exciting time because the FDA right now is highly interested in actually moving forward on a policy that would require these types of front of package labels. And that hasn't been true, as you noted, for about a decade. But last year, the White House convened a very significant conference that hadn't happened in 50 years about nutrition, health, and hunger. And front of package labeling actually made it into their report in that conference as a key objective for this country in terms of a food policy that, under the Biden administration, they want to achieve. What we're seeing the FDA do now is actually undertake a series of research...

Traditional clinical weight loss interventions can be costly, time consuming, and inaccessible to low-income populations and people without adequate health insurance. Today's guest, Dr. Gary Bennett, has developed an Interactive Obesity Treatment Approach, or iOTA for short, that represents a real advance in this area. Dr. Bennett is Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, Medicine and Global Health at Duke University, where he is also Dean of Trinity College of Arts and Sciences. Interview Summary You know, in this time when people are talking about more expensive, and kind of more intrusive interventions, like the big weight loss drugs, it's nice to know that there may be alternatives that could be accessible to more people. Could we start off with you telling our listeners what the iOTA approach is and how it works? Sure. This is an approach for weight management. It's useful for weight loss or preventing weight gain or maintaining one's weight after you've lost weight. The idea here is that it's a technology that's designed to be highly accessible, and useful for a range of different types of populations. So, as you described, we have developed and tested this primarily for folks who are medically vulnerable, who are low income, who are racial, ethnic minority, who live in rural communities, and where we have traditionally had real difficulty reaching populations with effective weight loss tools. So, iOTA is a fully digital approach. It uses technologies smartphone apps, but it can also use text messaging, interactive voice response, those are like robocalls, automated telephone calls, websites. We've tested this on a wide range of different types of technology platforms, and we've tested it in a range of different types of populations all over the country and indeed even in other countries. So, give us some examples of what kind of information people might be receiving through these various forms of media. The underlying kind of technology, the underlying approach, I should say, for iOTA is actually reasonably simple. It operates from the perspective that creating weight loss is really about making an energy deficit. That is to say, helping people to consume fewer calories than they are expending. The realization we had years ago is that you can get there, you can create that calorie deficit in a whole host of different ways. Some people diet, some people try to get more active, there are limitations around that kind of approach. But fundamentally, you can also just get there by asking people to do some reasonably straightforward behaviors. Like not consuming sugary beverages, or consuming fewer chips, cookies and candies. Or changing the amount of red meat that they put on the plate. And, if you frame those things out as goals, then you can prescribe those goals to people in ways that make sense to them personally. The trick though is actually in the idea of personalizing those goals to the given individual. And that's where technology comes in and gets very helpful. The case is, if you have a large library of these goals, you'd want to try to provide these in a highly personalized way. That really are aligned with what people's needs are and noting that those needs may change over time. So, what we do with iOTA is deliver a very short survey. That survey then helps us to be able to look into our library of goals and pick the ones that are most useful for our users. We prescribe those goals, and then we ask folks to self-monitor those goals. Self-monitoring or tracking is an extraordinarily powerful part of behavior change science. And so, we ask them to track using one of our technologies: the chat bot or the text message or interactive voice response or the smartphone app. Every time that we receive data from one of our users, we give them highly personalized feedback that is designed around principles of behavior change science. And then over time we also give them support. We do support sometimes from a...

Fast food is part of American life. As much a part of our background as the sky and the clouds. But it wasn't always that way, and over the decades, the fast food landscape has changed in quite profound ways. Race is a key part of that picture. A landmark exploration of this has been published by today's guest, Dr. Naa Oyo Kwate. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Africana Studies and the Department of Human Ecology at Rutgers University. Her book, recently published, is entitled White Burgers, Black Cash: Fast Food From Black Exclusion to Exploitation. The book has been received very positively by the field. And was recently named the best book in the field of urban affairs by the Urban Affairs Association. Interview Summary I was so happy to see your book because people have talked about the issue of race off and on in the field, but to see this kind of scholarly treatment of it like you provided has been really a welcome addition. Let me start with a general question. Let's begin with the fast food situation today and then rewind to where it began. Are there patterns to where fast food restaurants are located and who fast food is marketed to? Absolutely. There's quite a bit of research, and you just alluded to the work that's been done in the field. There's a lot of research that shows fast food is most dense in African American communities. Not every study has the same finding, but overall that's what the accumulated evidence shows. On the one hand you have the fact that Black communities are disproportionately saturated with these outlets. Then there's also the case that apart from the physical locations of the restaurants, fast food is strongly racialized as Black in terms of how it's portrayed to the public. It [Fast Food] relies on images of Blackness and Black cultural productions such as Black music for its marketing. These sometimes these veer into racial caricature as well. One of the things I talked about in the book briefly is the TV commercial character Annie who Popeye's introduced in 2009. They basically created this Black woman that Adweek at the time was calling "feisty," but it's really just this stereotypical idea of the sassy Black woman and she's in the kitchen frying up the chicken for Popeye's. And actually, some of the language that was used in those commercials really evokes the copy on late 19th century and Aunt Jemima pancake mix packaging. It's a really strong departure from fast food's early days, the way that fast food is now relying on Blackness as part of its core marketing constructs. I'm assuming that it follows from what you've been saying that the African American community has disproportionately been targeted with the marketing of these foods. Is that true of children within that community? Research shows that in terms of fast food marketing at the point of purchase. There's more - display advertising for example at restaurants that are in Black communities. And then there's also been research to show, not in terms of the outlets themselves, but in terms of TV programming that there tends to be more commercials for fast food and other unhealthy foods during shows that are targeting Black youth. How much of the patterning of the fast food restaurants is due to income or due to the amount of fast food consumption in these areas with many restaurants? Almost none of it really. It's not income and it's not the amount of fast food that people are consuming. In fact, one of the main studies that led me to start researching this book, because I was coming to it from public health where there was a lot of research around the disproportionality of fast food restaurants. We actually did a study in New York City, some colleagues and we published it in 2009, where we looked at how fast food was distributed across New York City's five boroughs. And restaurant density, we found, was due almost entirely to racial demographics. There's very little contribution from income....

A growing number of research studies show that the cognitive and brain development of low-income children differs from that of children in higher income families. For any family, that is a concerning statement. Today's podcast features a project called Baby's First Years, a multi-year effort to test the connections between poverty reduction and brain development among very young children. Here to talk about what the study has revealed so far is Dr. Lisa Gennetian from Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy, and Dr. Sarah Halpern-Meekin from the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Transcript Sarah, let's start with you. What is the Baby's First Years study? Sarah - So the Baby's First Years study is a study of how having additional income matters for children's development and for family life in families that had incomes around the federal poverty line when they had a child. And so, it includes two main components. The first is a randomized control trial that tests the effects of families receiving either a large or a small monthly cash gift each month, families get either $333 or $20 each month on a debit card from the time their child was born until just after the child's sixth birthday. Lisa and our colleagues, Katherine Magnuson, Kimberly Noble, Greg Duncan, Hiro Yoshikawa, and Nathan Fox lead this part of the study. They've been following mothers and children from a thousand families over the past six years. The other part of the study is a qualitative study in which we do in-depth interviews with a subset of those families because we want to learn more about how they think, about making financial decisions, the values and dreams for their children that guide their parenting and how they think about their money they're getting from Baby's First Years each month. This study is complex and would require time to observe change. Can you tell me about the length of time your team has been doing this intervention? Sarah - So the first families started the study in 2018. Lisa - One thing that's unique about this intervention is its length. As Sarah mentioned, it's starts at the time of birth and it's monthly. And families will be receiving this cash for 76 months. So, they'll be receiving it through the first six years of their child's life. Thank you for that detail. Lisa, what is the landscape for food programs and assistance in the United States, particularly for families with infants and young children? Lisa - There are two major programs that are federally funded in the US that are particularly targeted for families with infants and children. One of them is called the Women, Infant, and Children's Program, or WIC for short. The WIC program, let's see, in 2022, served about 6.3 million participants, but it provides a mix of core nutritional needs, breastfeeding support, information and referrals. And the second big safety net program in the US around food is called SNAP, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. This one's broader and has served over 40 million people in 2022. And together both these programs have been pretty core to providing food and nutritional support to families, including those with young children. Thanks for that context. So now, how does the cash gift intervention differ from, or fit with other food assistance programs that these families may participate in? Lisa - The thing that cash can add above and beyond that, so thinking about how this Baby's First Year study might help supplement resources is in two ways. One is thinking about how money that might have been spent on the foods that are provided by these programs are now being taken care of through these food subsidies. One direct way that the BFY cash money can help is by increasing those net resources available for other types of food or for other things in the household. It's a real compliment to these what we call in kind or conditioned kind of food subsidy programs....

Today's podcast is a story of one man's personal journey to making a difference by building communities. Zach Wyatt grew up caretaking an old 300-acre farm in Virginia. He went to college and ended up working in mortgage lending. And then something changed for Zack, and that's where the story gets interesting. He now leads the Carolina Farm Trust, working to strengthen local food systems in the Carolinas. The trust cultivates urban farm networks, farm apprenticeships, supports local farmers in purchasing equipment or land, making informed-decisions, and more. Interview Summary I'd like to understand a little bit more, why did you want to start the Carolina Farm Trust? Well, with a lot of things, it was just kind of by accident and circumstance. And I would say subconsciously I had agriculture in my bones, ever since I was a kid growing up in agriculture in Northern Virginia. It just kind of seeps in. We [The Family] still have that little arm reached out to being a part the DC metro area. Growing up in an urban-rural environment kind of planted, I think, a lot of the seeds in the work that was going to transpire so many decades later. But it really just kind of came down to a life event. I had a partnership that just ended in one day, which was a huge blow to us financially. We had to get on EBT and Snap and went through that process. And I was really soul searching and figuring out what were the next steps for me. Looking back on it, I think I was really grasping on to how do I do anything, to kind of just do something. I got back into reading about our food system and farms and started meeting some farmers. And once you start talking to farmers in a real way and understanding what our food system truly is, it's horrifying. It kind of came down to seeing this visual metaphor of a meteorite heading toward us every day, and either sticking your head in the sand or doing something. Circumstance just led to this next event and next event, and the next event. And eight years later, here we are. What I hear from you is this story of resiliency and it seems like that's something you also see in the food system or a need for that is that a fair assessment? Absolutely. We just take food in agriculture for granted. And over the last 80 to 90 years, we've really given our entire means of survival pretty much away. Most people don't really look at food and agriculture and how it spins every major decision on Earth. Every social problem we typically have, every health issue we have, if you follow it all the way down to where that problem started, you go all the way back to the dirt. So, to kind of look at resilience and what do we mean by that and more importantly, building regional resilience in a global economy: I think getting supply chains a whole lot shorter, focusing on soil health and nutrition density and our farming community, is where we really have to start. I'm starting to get a sense of the big picture of the farm trust. What is the driving mission of your work? I think you're hitting on some of that, but I'd like to hear more. I'd say the vision is very clearly about building regional resilience and then using food and agriculture as a primary driver. The four main pillars we have are health and nutrition, upward mobility and equity, sustainability, and climate change. Our four action-on-the-ground pillars are first, building an urban farm network and to get people to understand where our food comes from. Why is that important? We do really need to push urban centers to be more responsible for where our food comes from and playing a role in that. Second, our farm apprentice program, workforce development. You know, the average age of our farming community right now is a little over 60. Where is this next generation of farmers coming from? Where is the land coming from? So, it is not only kind of a labor force for us, you know, but how do we make sure every community garden, every school garden is thriving? How...

If people knew how much food they threw away each week, would they change their food-wasting ways? That's a question scientists explore in the 2023 State of Food Waste in America report. The research goal was to understand why and how households waste food, and what would motivate them to prevent food waste. In today's podcast, we'll talk with MITRE scientists Laura Leets and Grace Mika, members of a team who developed and launched the MITRE Food Waste Tracker app. This is a first of its kind app for households to log information about discarded food and learn ways to save money by reducing food waste. The Food Waste in America study team includes the Gallup Survey Company, researchers from the Ohio State University, the Harvard Law and Policy Clinic, ReFED, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the World Wildlife Fund. Interview Summary Laura, let's begin with you. Can you give us a quick overview of why MITRE focused on measuring food waste at the household level and the behaviors? Laura - In a general sense, Norbert, we know the United States waste 30 to 40% of our food, yet we do not know how much is wasted at the household level. We know that waste occurs along the entire farm to table supply chain, like approximately 15% with farms, 15% at manufacturing, about 20% at stores and restaurants and about 50% in the household. So, given that half the waste happens at the household level, it's important to measure it. If you can measure it, you can do something about it. Up to this point, people have not had an easy way to estimate their amount of food waste. So, to address this gap, not only did we develop a new way to measure household food waste and Grace will share more about that, but we also provided a baseline measurement of American household food waste. I would like to really dig in a little bit more. How much food do American households waste, and do you have a sense of what kinds of foods people are wasting? Laura - Let me start with the amount first. We found that the average American household wastes somewhere from 3 to 4.5 pounds per week. And there's two ways to measure household food waste. The first is you can focus on the edible or uneaten food. And with this measure, American households waste about on average three pounds per week. Second, you can add inedible food. So, that's your food scraps, your eggshells. And if you take edible plus inedible food together, then the American households wastes on average about 4.5 pounds per week. Let me give your listeners a couple analogies to understand that impact of that 3 to 4.5 pounds of household food waste. So, let's say we combine our own household food waste with everyone else's. The crop waste is large enough to cover the states of California and New York. From a personal perspective, imagine before every meal you scrape off 40% of the food on your plate. If you imagine that in each meal, you're going to start to understand that the current food waste is massive, and we're all contributing to it. So that's the measurement piece. I'm going to pass it over to Grace to discuss the types of food we're wasting. Grace - Americans are wasting a wide variety of foods in their homes, but the number one wasted food type is your fresh produce. So, that would be your fruits and your vegetables. I think this is really important to keep in mind, not only because, of course, fruits and vegetables are perishable, but when we think about healthy diets, many people in the nutrition space are encouraging fresh fruits and vegetables or fruits and vegetables in general. Ao this is a really important finding, and I'm excited to know this. But it's also important for our listeners to think a little bit more about this. Grace, I would like to learn a little bit more from you. Can you tell us more about the MITRE Food Waste Tracker, the app itself? Grace - I would be happy to. The MITRE Food Waste Tracker app is meant to be a tool for households who want to...

Dollar stores are the fastest growing food retailer in the United States, both by sheer number of stores and consumer food purchases. Just two corporations, Dollar General and Dollar Tree, which also owns Family Dollar, operate more than 35,000 stores across the country. However, a growing body of research reveals that dollar stores offer limited healthy food options. Dollar stores shape the food environments of communities, especially in the South and Midwest regions and communities in rural areas with substantial shares of Black and Latin people and households with limited financial resources. What do we know about the impact dollar stores have on these communities and the overall wellbeing of community members? The Center for Science in the Public Interest conducted a national survey to understand how people perceive and actually use dollar stores. Today we will talk with lead author of this study, Senior Policy Scientist Sara John. Interview Summary My first question is what do we know about dollar stores and healthy food access? There are more than 35,000-dollar stores across the country. So, to put that large number into context for people like me who have trouble processing them, that's more dollar stores than McDonald's, Starbucks and Walmarts combined. As you also mentioned, just two companies, Dollar General and Dollar Tree, control nearly all of them. Dollar stores really play a large role in food acquisitions for households. They can be especially important for households with limited incomes and those living in rural communities. These smaller store formats are much smaller than your typical grocery store or supermarket and tend to stock fewer fresh and healthy items. So, the body of evidence is still growing and we're still trying to figure out really how dollar stores interact with the food environment, whether or not they're driving out existing or potential new grocery stores or whether they're filling important food gaps in communities that otherwise lack food access. I am really blown away by the number. I must admit I did not appreciate that they have 35,000 stores across the US. I know that there is a growing body of literature, as you suggested. One of our colleagues, Sean Cash at Tufts has been working in this space along with others in various disciplines have been thinking about the role of dollar stores. I'm interested to understand why CSPI conducted a national survey of those or perceptions, and what were some of the key findings? As I mentioned, there's a lot of outstanding questions we still don't know. There have been more than 50 communities across the country that have already passed policies at the local level to ban or improve new dollar stores in their communities. But we don't understand community perceptions, usage and just I guess more plainly what people want from dollar stores. So, CSPI really wanted to take a stance to make policy, corporate, and research recommendations on this very quickly and growing retail format. But before doing so, we wanted to really make sure that we're centering our recommendations around what community members really want from dollar stores. We decided to conduct a national survey. We ended up having over 750 respondents from across the country of people with limited financial resources that lived near a dollar store. I have to say we were pretty surprised by our findings, especially given this popular sentiment that we have seen in the news media and with a lot of the local policy action. I would say that we found overall positive dollar store perceptions that people really are relying on dollar stores for food. But I would say just as many people want them to make healthy foods more available, affordable, and accessible. Could you help me understand how did people find them beneficial? What were some of the things that you discovered, in terms of the benefits? But I'd like to also hear what were the points of contention? Where did they want some...

How did the Nutrition Facts label come to appear on millions of food products in the U.S.? As Auburn University historian, Xaq Frohlich, reveals in his new book, "From Label to Table: Regulating Food in America in the Information Age," these seemingly innocuous strips of information reveal the high stakes politics that can help determine what we eat and why. In today's podcast, Frohlich will explore popular ideas about food, diet, and responsibility for health that have influenced what goes on the Nutrition Facts panel and who gets to decide that. Interview Summary I'm really happy to have you on today's podcast. So, why don't we just jump right in. What would you say are the key historical moves in the food policy arena with respect to labeling? One of the things I talk about in this book is an informational turn in food politics. And what I'm specifically referring to there is a shift since the 1970s from an older way that the Food and Drug Administration approached regulating the market to its current focus on informative labeling. So, at the beginning of my book and at the beginning of the story, in the 1930s, 1940s, the FDA was trying to handle this big market full of lots of different products, especially packaged and processed foods. And under the legislation in the 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, authorized food standards. And the idea was that for any mass-produced food, they would hold hearings. People would say, "This is what we think the food should look like." They would then publish the standards, which would look kind of like a list of ingredients and ranges of the ingredients they could use, and then say, "Okay, all foods have to be the standard form of food. If not, we will either remove them from the market or call them imitation." And this was a system they used for decades, and it created a lot of problems. Then, late 1960s people started to get unhappy about this. There was this big turning point connected to the White House Conference on Food, Nutrition and Health where Nixon administration brought together lots of nutrition scientists. And one of the conclusions that came out of that is we need to change the FDA's system. And so, in the early 70s, the Food and Drug Administration says, "We're going to pivot away from these food standards and start focusing on informative labels." This is when you get the requirement of ingredient labeling on all foods, including standard foods, and you also get the first voluntary nutrition information label. My book looks at this change in strategies away from standardizing foods towards standardizing information about foods and creating these kinds of consumer-oriented information labels. I love the fact that you helped us understand this idea of the information age, because once you read that and think, "Oh, well you're talking about something about the internet," but it's even more foundational about how we communicate what is a product. I found it really fascinating to read in your book where you talked about what I perceive to be really laborious conversations around what exactly is peanut butter or some other product. I mean, it seems like that took up a lot of space. Do you think that was ultimately productive? Is that the reason why we see this information change? Or was there something important about that effort on its own? So, there were advantages and disadvantages of the old food standards approach. One of the advantages is that everybody who wanted to raise an issue was invited to attend those hearings. This meant that you could have really colorful exchanges. There is one woman who ran a homemaker's association who would show up and she would get a lot of attention because she was very colorful in her criticisms of proposed standards. It could be a very democratic space in that sense. On the other hand, they could run on for years. And there were contentious hearings where you would have dozens of lawyers from different food companies. It...

In 2022, Congress established Summer EBT, the first new permanent federal food assistance program in almost 50 years. The authorization of Summer EBT represents a historic investment in the nutrition and wellbeing of almost 30 million children who will qualify for the program. But states that piloted Summer EBT, or operated Pandemic EBT programs in the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic know that getting these benefits into the hands of families will involve overcoming complex challenges related to data and technology. That's why Code for America and No Kid Hungry, a campaign of Share Our Strength joined forces to create the Summer EBT Playbook, a comprehensive free resource designed to help state agencies plan for and implement a human-centered Summer EBT program. Today we will talk with Eleanor Davis, director of Government Innovation on the Safety Net team at Code for America. In her role, she helps government agencies adopt best practices for human-centered digital benefit delivery. Interview Summary Why is Summer EBT significant? Well, I think you gave us a good intro. Summer EBT is a brand-new benefit program and it's designed to reduce childhood hunger during the summer months by providing families with a monthly grocery benefit to feed their kids when they're not receiving meals at school. So, almost 30 million kids in the US receive free or reduced-price meals at school, but during the summer many of them struggle to access nutritious food because they're not receiving those meals at school. School is out of session. Summer EBT is designed to give families $120 per child in the summer to help them buy groceries and it really has the potential to dramatically reduce childhood hunger. It's a tremendous moment because Summer EBT is the first new permanent federal food assistance program in almost 50 years. For those of us in government or in the food access space, this is really I would say, a once in a generation opportunity to shape the implementation of the program to make sure it really meets the needs of families and children. So, why did Code for America and Share Our Strength develop the Summer EBT Playbook? What was the challenge? Code for America is a 501 C3 nonprofit organization. We partner with government at all levels to make the delivery of public services more equitable, more effective, and more accessible using technology and data. And we've spent the last decade helping states deliver safety net benefit programs in more human-centered ways. The Summer EBT program, as we mentioned, has immense potential, but we also know that states are going to encounter many challenges in implementing this program in 2024 and beyond. I think standing up a brand-new benefits program is a huge undertaking generally, but Summer EBT will present some really specific challenges to states and we learned a lot about this back in 2020. So, at the start of the pandemic, Congress authorized an emergency response program called Pandemic EBT, that was very similar to Summer EBT in many ways. It was the same idea, really sort of providing families with a grocery benefit while schools are closed because of COVID-19. And so, in 2020 and 2021, Code for America worked directly with about a dozen states to help them deliver Pandemic EBT benefits. And through that process we saw very up close what made that program so hard to implement. Delivery of the program really relies on effective data and technology systems. So, really being able to find the right data in state systems and use that data to deliver benefits. And a lot of these challenges will also be true for Summer EBT, right? It's a very similar delivery process. So, states really needed help planning for Summer EBT and really designing systems and processes that will help them operationalize this brand-new program so that it can really live up to the promise spelled out in the policy. So, that's why we partnered with the No Kid Hungry Campaign. We really wanted to...

In 2022, more than 6 million people visited farmers markets across North Carolina. Today, we're talking with a team of people who are the driving force behind the North Carolina Farmers Market Network: Maggie Funkhouser, Catherine Elkins, and Nora Rodli. The goal of the North Carolina Farmers Market is to create and support a thriving network of marketplaces for the state's local food and farm products. The nonprofit network, which was recently awarded a USDA Farmers Market Promotion Capacity-building grant, will provide education, programming, and partnership development assistance to farmers market managers, including resources to support historically underserved populations. Interview Summary I would like to take a moment to actually get to know you all a little bit better. Tell us a little bit about how you got involved in farmers markets. Catherine, let's start with you. Catherine - Sure. I've been doing this for the longest, I suppose. I went with my mom many times to Amish markets in Pennsylvania where I grew up. She was not a very good gardener. But we could buy everything that she liked at the market. I also worked a bit at the Carrboro Farmers Market, and I then got an opportunity to work with the Morehead City Saturday Market, a one-year lifespan. And the Old Beaufort Farmers Market we started up the next year, that's now in its 10th year. That makes me proud. I liked that market a lot. Managed it for two years, and I'm still one of those devotees that go on vacation and have to look up the closest farmers market just to check out new stuff. Maggie - Like most managers, I did not go to school to be a farmers market manager. It kind of found me, I guess you could say. I went to graduate school directly after undergrad for classical languages. Then when I moved back to the Triangle, I just sort of started getting involved more and more with local food. I worked in restaurants, I worked in coffee shops, and one time I worked in an artisan bakery; I managed a culinary garden, and I just kind of kept getting drawn into different parts of the community in our local food system in the Triangle. In 2019, I applied for and was offered a job at the Carrboro Farmers Market as the assistant manager. I worked there for about a year. Then in 2020, I took over as the manager, and I've been here ever since. Nora - So, I actually come to farmers markets as a farmer. For the past 25 years, I've farmed in various places around the country, mostly New Mexico and Hawaii and now North Carolina. That has given me the ability to see and experience farmers markets in a lot of different manners, whether it be a small market or a large market, and urban versus rural settings. I feel like I am uniquely on board as a cheering squad for farmers markets. Thank you. We all need a cheerleader on our side, so it's good to hear that. I really would love to ask each of you more questions about your past because there are some interesting connections that I hear. Catherine, the Marine Lab is in Beaufort, and I'm intrigued to know more about how those relationships develop. Maggie, I would love to talk more about your training as someone in the classics has influenced the way you think about this. I mean, this idea of food and agriculture is deeply within that literature, and so that's really fascinating. And, Nora, I just can't wait to learn more about Hawaii. But I can't do that right now. We have other things to focus on. However, if those answers come up in your other responses, please feel free. I'm intrigued to talk to you all a little bit more about the North Carolina Farmers Market Network. What is it and who does it serve? Maggie - I'll kind of kick us off talking about the network a little bit, and maybe my colleagues can chime in. So, we incorporated this year as a 501 nonprofit under the name North Carolina Farmers Market Network. NCFMN, for short. That's our kind of alphabet-soup title that I might say really, really...

It has been said many times that a picture is worth a thousand words. Our guest today is documentary photographer Sally Thomson, the creative genius behind the book "Homeground." She hopes her photos of 24 ranchers and land managers can broaden people's understanding of the impact conservation ranching has on the health of the land, the animals, and the people who live, work, and recreate in Southwestern and Rocky Mountain rangelands. Her book also includes rancher quotes and essays from land managers working to address challenges of climate change and diminishing resources and to find sustainable land management solutions. Interview Summary I was especially interested in doing this podcast because we've had a lot of people on to talk about regenerative agriculture and there have been farmers and ranchers, some of whom we both know in common. There have been scientists who work on this, people who work with NGOs trying to promote this work, and even some policy makers, but never a photographer. It's going to be really interesting to hear from you and I look forward to what you have to say. So, we have spoken to chefs and filmmakers before who've used their arts to shape and change the food system. But as I say, you're the first photographer we've spoken to. Let's go back to the beginning. What got you interested in photography in the first place, and how can photography be used as a social or political statement? Well, I didn't start out to become a photographer. I took a art class in college and that is really what first introduced me to photography. I was gifted a used cannon camera and a couple of lenses and I started experimenting with the camera. And I was immediately drawn to the medium. Especially watching the images kind of emerge in the dark room was just fascinating and kind of magical. But it never really occurred to me to consider photography as a career. I eventually went on to graduate school and I studied landscape architecture following my interest in environmental design and planning. I figured this would also give me the opportunity to incorporate photography into my creative process. I practiced landscape architecture for many years. But it wasn't until much later that I realized the power photography can have in storytelling, and raising awareness, and connecting me with people in places that, you know, I wouldn't have otherwise thought possible. So, up until about this point, I had used photography more for documenting my work. I had worked for a conservation organization in the Amazon Rainforest, and in order to communicate their message, I felt that photography was extremely useful in doing that. That's really what caused that shift in my thinking of turning to photography. In 2008, I created On Focus Photography, which was an effort to highlight the work of various underrepresented environmental cultural NGOs. I set about trying to learn everything I could about documentary photography at that point. That sort of led me to where I am today. What I do today is primarily divide my time between freelance assignment work, fine art and documentary photography. Thanks for that background. It's really helpful to understand how you got to where you are now. So, let's turn to your book, "Homeground" brand new. Can you provide an overview of the book and what are some of the key things that you're hoping to convey? Well, Homeground, of course, is a visual narrative. It explores the endangered rangelands of the American Southwest and the Rocky Mountains, and the people and the practices that are involved in restoring and sustaining these landscapes. I think one of the things that was kind of startling to me was the account of our rangelands, and I just wanted to talk about that briefly. Rangelands account for the largest share of the nation's land base. They cover more than one third of the land service in the continental US and that's according to USDA data. Unlike pastureland, rangelands consist of...

Our guest today is Jasmine Crowe-Houston, social entrepreneur, and founder of Goodr.co. Jasmine started her journey cooking soul food for hungry unhoused people in her kitchen in her one-bedroom apartment in Atlanta. She fed upwards of 500 people a week for years with pop-up kitchens and parks and parking lots. Then in 2017, she founded Goodr, a technology-based food waste management company that connects firms with food surpluses to nonprofit organizations that can use the food. She has worked with organizations that have food waste issues, such as the Atlanta International Airport, Hormel Foods, and Turner Broadcasting. Today, Goodr has expanded nationwide and sponsors free grocery stores and schools. She has combined charity, innovation, and market-based solutions into a for-profit waste management company that Inc. Magazine called a rare triple win. This episode is in collaboration with Policy360, a podcast of the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. Interview Summary Would you describe what Goodr is today? Goodr is a blessing. We are a sustainable food waste management company that leverages technology to connect businesses that have excess food to non-profit organizations that can use that food. And at the same time, we have a line of business, which is Hunger Solutions, and we're helping brands and government and other municipalities rethink how hunger is solved in their communities. We believe that hunger is not an issue of scarcity. It's really a matter of logistics. And so, we are using technology and logistics to drive out hunger and food waste. We've built technology that includes our mobile app and portal. Imagine you are using an Uber Eats or DoorDash app. You go onto your favorite restaurant; you click the item that you want. Similar experience for our users. So, for example, a restaurant in the airport. Their menu is in our system. They click chicken sandwich; they tell us 50. Our platform is going to calculate the tax value of those sandwiches, the approximate weight of those sandwiches, and our algorithm is automatically matching those sandwiches with the non-profit that is serving 50 or more people that can take those items and then get it distributed to people in need. Another big thing that our technology is capturing is the poundage that we're keeping out a landfill. So, it's really important because we're able to tell our clients we have kept 2 million pounds of food from landfills. This is equal to this much CO2 emissions that you've helped to prevent. We do a lot of fun gamifications as well, but we're data-driven and we believe that you can't manage what you don't measure. And for too long, people have thrown everything away. They've never measured it. And now we're giving them real insights and they're seeing things like, wow, my number one wasted thing is pork. Why am I making pork so much? Maybe people here at our offices don't eat pork. Start to make changes. So, we really work on the source reduction, but the number two on the EPA is the food hierarchy chart is feeding hungry people. And so that's really where we are. Wow, that's amazing. I want to ask because I've seen this in the food waste and food donation world, that sometimes food that's donated isn't appropriate or fit for human consumption. What happens to those food products? Traditionally, they end up in landfills. One of the big things that we have to do at Goodr, and I'll tell you too, that change is by county. So, think of not by city, not by state. Wake County and Durham County probably have different rules because it's based off the health department in each city. So, a good example is when we were working in Florida, what we do in Miami is absolutely illegal in Fort Lauderdale. They're 10 minutes away from each other. Broward County and Dade County have different rules. So, we spend a lot of time, our R&D team, creating quality assurance checklists. And we know this food is going to live for three...

Stories from the past help us understand who we are and who we can be. In today's podcast, we will explore a gripping new book titled "Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement," written by African American Studies Assistant Professor Bobby J. Smith II at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The book tells how food was used as a political weapon against African Americans and describes how black people fought against oppressive regimes by creating their own food systems, Bobby sets the stage for understanding how black youth today in Mississippi and beyond are building food justice movements and grappling with inequalities that attempt to contort their lives. Interview Summary So, Bobby, what inspired you to write "Food Power Politics?" So many different ways to answer the question. I have a family background in agriculture. I did food justice activism while I was in graduate school. I also worked on food policy councils. So, I was inspired to write it because I was already interested in understanding the ways in which food was produced, consumed, and distributed. But what inspired me to write "Food Power Politics" was actually a class I took while I was in graduate school at Cornell University in the Department of Developmental Sociology. I'm taking a course around community development and organizing and we read a book by sociologist Charles Payne entitled "I've Got the Light of Freedom." It's about the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi, particularly the area called Greenwood, Mississippi in the Yazoo Mississippi Delta Region of the state of Mississippi, which is the northwest quadrant of the state. And in the book, Payne talks about the organizing tradition of the Civil Rights Movement. And during that class, I'd already been interested in understanding, again, issues of food justice and food security. So, as I was reading that book, I learned about the ways in which food became a weapon used against the Civil Rights Movement and civil rights activists responded by organizing their own food programs. And essentially, I wrote "Food Power Politics" because I wanted to raise awareness about how food can be used in different ways. But I also wanted people to rethink the idea of food. Many times, people think about food as something that's on your plate or something you get at the grocery store. But what inspired me to write "Food Power Politics" was to show a different story about food and how it impacts the lives of African American people. Thank you for that. And I have got to tell you, I'm intrigued by the phrasing of "Food Power Politics." Could you please unpack its meaning and explain how you map it across the landscape of Black life? "Food Power Politics" is the title of my book, but it's also the theoretical framework that I created to begin to understand, or for scholars and other people to interpret, how food can be used as a weapon. The book started as ideas for my dissertation. When I first learned about the ways in which food had been used as a weapon against African American communities, I started looking to the literature to find out how have people talked about food as a weapon. I remember talking to a number of my colleagues about the book itself and they were telling me stories about how the idea of food as a weapon is just what we call wartime tactics. So, food has been weaponized for many, many years, and centuries. So, I went to the literature, and I found out that scholars, typically legal scholars, historians, and political scientists, when they talk about how food when used as a weapon, they use the term food power. I had never heard of food power before or this framework of food power. So I, of course, as a diligent graduate student, delved into the literature and learned more about food power. And it's a concept that is usually understood in the context of international conflict whereby one nation withholds food from another nation in times...

In August of 2023, the Food and Drug Administration issued something known as a direct final rule, disregarded trans fats in the food supply. Consumers won't notice changes as the rule just finalizes FDA's 2015 ruling that partially hydrogenated oils - trans fats - no longer had "GRAS status." GRAS stands for generally regarded as safe. We cover this issue today because this trans fat ban was the product of lots of work by a key group of scientists, the advocacy community, and others. The anatomy of this process can teach us a lot about harnessing scientific discovery for social and policy change. At the center of all this is today's guest, Dr. Walter Willett. Willett is one of the world's leading nutrition researchers. He is professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and for many years served as chair of its Department of Nutrition. He's published extensively, been elected to the National Academy of Medicine, and it turns out, is the world's most cited nutrition researcher. Interview Summary There are so many things I could talk to you about because you do work in such an array of really important areas and have just made contribution after contribution for years. But let's talk about the trans fat because you were there at the very beginning, and it ended up with a profound public policy ruling that has major implications for the health of the country. I'd like to talk about how this all occurred. So, tell us, if you would, what are trans fats, how present were they in the food supply over the years, and what early discoveries did you and others make that led you to be concerned? Yes, this is a story from which I've learned a lot, and hopefully others might as well. Trans fats are produced by the process called partial hydrogenation. This takes liquid vegetable oils, like soybean oils, corn oil, canola oil, and subjects them to a process with high heat and bubbling hydrogen through the oil. What this is doing is taking essential molecules, essential fatty acids like the omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids and twisting their shapes just subtly, and this turns them into a solid fat instead of a liquid fat. And, of course, the food industry likes this because our culture, the Northern European eating culture, emphasizes solid fats like butter and lard. Industry really didn't know what to do with all the liquid oil that they were able to produce by another process that was discovered back in the late 1800s. The partial hydrogenation process was actually developed in about 1908, and someone actually got a Nobel Prize for that. It wasn't used widely in the food industry till the 1930s and 1940s when it was upscaled because it was cheaper, for multiple reasons, to partially hydrogenate oils and turn them into solid fats like Cricso and margarines. I got worried about this, actually, back in the 1970s, when other scientists were discovering that these essential fatty acids are important for many biological processes, clotting, arrhythmias, inflammation, and counteracting inflammation. I realized while studying food science at that time that there was nobody really keeping an eye on this. That there were these synthetic fatty acids in massive amounts in our food supplies. Margarines, vegetable shortenings were up to 30% and 40% made of trans fatty acids. And that may me concerned that this could have a big downside. So, back in 1980, with the help of some people at the Department of Agriculture developing a database for trans fats in foods, we began collecting data on trans fat intake in our large cohort studies. And about 20 years later, we saw that trans fat intake was related to risk of heart disease. We published that in 1993. That got us started on the pathway to getting them out of our food supply. Let's talk about how present they were in the food supply. You mentioned some things like margarine and Crisco, but these fats were in a lot of different products, weren't...

White Oak Pastures is a sixth generation, 156-year-old family farm in Bluffton, Georgia. It's also the home of Rancher Will Harris who runs an expansive, zero waste production system with the animals he pasture raises and butchers on the farm. White Oak Pastures produces grass fed beef, lamb, goat, and Heritage pork, and pastured turkeys, chicken, duck, geese, and more. Will is a vocal and passionate champion of radically traditional farming as the path to regenerative land management, humane animal husbandry, and revitalizing rural communities. This is the second time we've spoken with Will Harris. The first time came right on the heels of a really interesting national meeting held in Tennessee on regenerative farming, where I became very impressed with Will and the work he's doing. He was kind enough to join us for a podcast at that time. Our discussion today happens to coincide with the release of a book that Will has written entitled, "A Bold Return to Giving a Damn: One Farm, Six Generations, and the Future of Food.” Interview Summary I really would love to dive into the meaning behind the title of your book, and what you wrote about. But let me ask you a few lead-in questions. Many years ago, you made a profound change in the way you approached ranching and farming. What convinced you back then that this kind of change was necessary? And tell us what you did if you would. My dad ran the farm before me. He was born in 1920, took over the farm post World War II, 1945. He was the generation that really industrialized, commoditized, and centralized the farm. It went from being the really typical 19th century farm under my great-grandfather and grandfather, to being a monocultural cattle operation. My dad was very, very good at it, a great cattleman. He ran the farm profitably. And all I ever wanted to do was come back and run the farm as a monocultural industrial cattle operation. I just loved it. I went to University of Georgia in 1972 and majored in animal science with the intention of coming back, and I did. And I loved it. You know, we weren't wealthy people, but we made money every year. We paid taxes every single year. And I was happy for a long time. But, in the mid-nineties, the excesses of that industrial monocultural model, became displeasing to me. When it started, it happened fairly quickly, and I decided to change. I did not have a goal to move towards, I just knew what I wanted to move away from. I started moving away from it almost 30 years ago, and I've been moving away from it ever since. I'd love to follow up on one thing that you mentioned, and it's the generational nature of kind of farming overall, and your farm. Several years ago, I did a tour of farms in Eastern North Carolina, and I was really impressed with how important the family aspect of that was. Could you just tell us a little bit about that? What does that mean to you and six generations? That's really impressive. The family aspect of it is a blessing and a curse, but it's been a blessing for us. This is just the way it is. My dad was an only child, and I am an only child. So, the passing down of the asset, the farm, farmland was very easy for us. I'm reminded that the old European way of all the assets going to the eldest son was certainly not fair, but I think that went a long way towards ensuring that the asset was passed down and kept intact, as opposed to dividing it up equally among the two, three, four, six, seven siblings. I have three daughters, two of which have come back to the farm. And I will leave the farm to those two daughters. So, our farm is unusual. And it's five, maybe six generations old, but it too will cease to be at some point. That's the way it is. There are other people that want to start farming, that need the opportunity. So this, it's just a good healthy, natural business system. You referred to the farm as an asset, but I have a feeling it's more than that. I mean you could be passing down to subsequent...

As the parent of a 12-year-old child, I know that raising a child is one of the most profound and rewarding experiences of a person's life. It is also shockingly expensive. The high cost of child rearing is particularly difficult for families with limited resources. To help us think through this issue, it is my great pleasure to welcome a colleague here at Duke: Dr. Christina Gibson-Davis, Professor of Public Policy. Christina studies economic inequality, and particularly how it affects families with children. Interview Summary So, let's do a bit of level setting. We often hear words like poverty and wellbeing. For our conversation today, what is poverty in the US and what do we mean by wellbeing? In the US we have a definition of poverty that relies on a certain threshold. Every year the US government publishes a set of thresholds for families that say - if you are below this threshold, then you are poor. If you're above this threshold, then you're not poor. The thresholds are actually based on data from 1963, when the federal government decided it really needed a way to count the number of poor people in this country. Prior to 1963, we really didn't have any way to do that. They looked at how much money people spent on food, and from that number, they derived these poverty thresholds. In 2022, the poverty threshold for a family of four, just to give your listeners some idea, was about $22,000. This means that if you earned $21,999, you were considered poor. But if you earned $22,001, you weren't considered poor. That's what I mean about the threshold and about falling either above or below that threshold in order to determine whether or not you're poor. Thank you, Christina, that's really helpful. It is interesting that the measure of poverty really is centering on food, or at least traditionally has. We’ll get back to that in a moment. I want to go back to the question of wellbeing. Could you tell our listeners what you're talking about when you talk about wellbeing? When we talk about wellbeing, we mean things like how healthy kids are, or how they get along with peers, or how they do in school. Basically, it's the way we measure how kids are functioning and whether they're functioning to the best of their ability. It sounds like it's a broad notion that represents all the ways a child is a child, how they move in this world. That's exactly right. It's going to cover a whole bunch of different areas. Everything from health and education to social relationships, to behavior, to delinquency, to how far they get in school. All of that goes into our definition of wellbeing. Great. Thank you for that. I want to now focus a little bit more on children themselves. What does childhood poverty look like in the US? We can have a technical definition of poverty, which is what I alluded to before, but really, that technical definition I don't think paints a very illustrative portrait of what it looks like to be poor in the US. To be poor in the US as a kid means you're growing up in an environment with very low levels of economic resources. You're probably growing up in a household where you're not sure if those economic resources are going to be enough for your family to maintain their home or pay their bills or get enough food. It's a very sort of unstable situation for kids because they may be worried that their parents just don't have enough money. It also sort of affects the kids' outlooks. We know that poor kids tend to have sort of lower aspirations or hopes for the future. Not that they're not hopeful, but they sort of also know that some of the things that they see may be depicted on TV that are open to other kids may not be an option for them; because they simply don't see a path between where they are and how they're going to get there. That is actually pretty sobering. I'd like for you to explain something about households with children, and I noticed that a lot of our conversation is going to not focus on an...

Diet-related disease such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes create a crushing burden on individuals, families, and the healthcare system in the United States. However, Produce Prescription Programs where medical professionals prescribe fruits and vegetables and health insurers pay, promise to improve nutrition and health. Today we will talk with Dr. Kurt Hager from the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School and lead author of the largest assessment of Produce Prescription Programs to date. Interview Summary So, let's get into it. Before we dig into the study itself, can you tell our listeners more about Produce Prescription Programs? So, the programs that we evaluated in our study gave participants electronic cards. So, either a debit card, a gift card, or a loyalty card that they could use at retail grocery stores and some farmer market partners as well to get free fruits and vegetables of their choice. The food could be either fresh or frozen fruits and vegetables. These programs acknowledge that nutrition education alone likely is not sufficient to increase healthier eating for many low-income households, for which just the cost of healthier foods is really the primary barrier in improving their diet. These programs seek to overcome that barrier, and it's really exciting to see that clinics across the country are turning to these. I think physicians, from our conversations with the clinics we partnered with in this study, are really excited to have a tool they can use and provide to patients to offer higher-quality care and help improve their nutrition when they're talking with their patients about managing diet-related illnesses like diabetes, hypertension, or obesity. Thank you, Kurt. Could you tell me a little bit about why you and the team decided to do this particular study? Food insecurity has been consistently associated with poor health outcomes, higher healthcare costs, and lower dietary quality. Many food insecure households tend to have higher rates of diet-related chronic illnesses. We worked with a wonderful organization called Wholesome Wave. They have operated Produce Prescription Programs across the US, and they have been collecting data on these programs for about five years now. Wholesome Wave reached out to our research team at Tufts University's Friedman School. They wanted to see if these programs are working at improving health outcomes. The key thing, I think, to contextualize where this study stands, is prior to this work, there had been a handful of studies that had shown, not surprisingly, that Produce Prescription Programs can improve dietary quality and improve food insecurity. However, very few had gone that extra step to see if Produce Prescription Programs were associated with improvements in really important clinical outcomes. Things like hemoglobin A1C, which is an important measure of average blood sugar levels in the past three months. This is critical for managing diabetes, and outcomes like blood pressure and obesity and overweight. Previous studies had found mixed results on these outcomes, and most had been very small, maybe about 50 participants. We built on this by doing the largest analysis to date. Our study had nearly 4,000 participants from 22 programs across the US, from 12 states. These ranged from cities like Los Angeles to Minneapolis, to Houston, to Miami, Idaho - so all over the US. So, it was the fact that previous studies have had relatively small samples, and some of these other studies did not take all of the sort of important measures of health into consideration. So, you were able to build on that past work in a unique way in this study? Exactly. I think the key thing is that Wholesome Wave had excellent relationships with their partner clinics. This meant that the clinics were willing to share medical record data with us. This is always just very challenging and many other studies weren't able to go that extra step. We were blessed...

Does the term Policy Advocate conjure up the image of a chef? Today we're speaking with Katherine Miller, Founding Executive Director of the Chef Action Network, and author of the book "At The Table, The Chef's Guide to Advocacy". Katherine formerly served as the Vice President of Impact at the James Beard Foundation and serves as an adjunct professor at the Culinary Institute of America. She's worked for 20 years at the intersection of policy, politics, and social impact, and says chefs have an important role to play in this space. Interview Summary Chefs are more and more visible in this advocacy and policy space. I assume that they've been doing this for a long time, but you see more attention to it now, which is nice. Let's talk about sort of its fundamental concept of chefs being involved in the food system at this level. Why do you think chefs and other people in the restaurant industry are equipped to make the food system more just and sustainable? I think that chefs are some of the greatest translators, right? Chefs, as we know them, are the people who cook us delicious meals or host us for events in our lives. But in reality they are taking the ingredients from the farmers and producers and fishermen and translating them to the plate to make them interesting and enjoyable for all of us, right? And the food system is incredibly complicated. It is deeply rooted. The root system overlaps and is incredibly complex. It's off-putting for people to think about how they might get involved in food policy or even understand the different controls on our food. Chefs can really help tell a better story, right? They can take the what's happening in the field and on the boats, and then they can put it on our plate, and they can help explain to us the stories behind all the food, how it's grown, the things that we should be interested in, the decisions that we should make differently. I think they're the ultimate translators and making the world a more delicious place. That makes perfect sense! What inspired you to write your book, "At The Table"? I've been working with the chef community for 10 years, first as a consultant and the founder of the Chef Action Network, and then working with the James Beard Foundation as the first vice president of advocacy and impact for the foundation. Then, after leaving the foundation, continued to work with organizations who are really interested in helping chefs step into policy arenas on things like healthy soils or food waste or medically-tailored meals. All those things are impacted by the policies that our state houses and our federal houses. And it's hard. The restaurant industry is enormous. There are 11 million or so restaurant employees. There are tens of thousands of people who are considered chefs or leaders in the kitchen, and we weren't going to reach them one Chef Bootcamp for Policy and Change at a time. You know, when I left the foundation in 2020 at the sort of tail end of the first year of COVID, we had over 1000 people on the waiting list to get into the Chef's Bootcamp for Policy and Change. We knew we were on to something, but we didn't really have the capacity to expand at scale. So, you know the great thing about a book is it can reach many chefs, culinary students, restaurant workers, farmers. And that's the other thing - I think there's a sort of duality to this idea of chef. It's really anybody who's a food system leader, anybody who is really interested in how the policies control our food system. I'm very excited to have a book out because I wanted this message and the examples and the tips and tools to reach the biggest audience that it could. Boy, it's nice to hear there's so much interest among chefs and work of this type. I'm interested in whether this kind of thing is finding its way into culinary education. You have a position at the Culinary Institute of America, highly visible place. Is this the sort of thing that's showing up in discussions in...

With record-breaking food prices in 2022, it has become more expensive for families to buy the foods that they need. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, helps families purchase foods but families frequently spend their benefits before the next benefit cycle. USDA modifies SNAP benefits every year as a cost-of-living adjustment. But was the change in fiscal year 2023 enough to keep pace with food price inflation? Today, we talk with Elaine Waxman from the Urban Institute to find out. Interview Summary You recently completed an analysis on the gap between SNAP benefits and the real cost of a meal. Can you tell us what you found? Absolutely. I think it helps to start with the fact that for many households, SNAP is a supplement to their budget that they would spend on food. But for about four in 10 households, it is their food budget. In other words, they're deemed to have zero income available to purchase food. What we've done is look at how adequate is the benefit for those households, the ones that receive the maximum benefit. Given overall questions about SNAP adequacy, but because there's such wide variation in geographic food prices, something that I think we all know intuitively based on our everyday lives but don't realize that, in fact in the lower 48 states, SNAP is not adjusted for any of those differences in food prices. It doesn't matter if you live in rural Texas or rural Idaho or on the Coast, your benefit is the same if you're receiving that maximum benefit. What we find is that particularly, based on those experiences in 2022 that we all felt when we showed up at the cash register, 99% of counties in the US had cost for what we would call a moderately priced meal that exceeded the maximum SNAP benefit when we think about that on a per-meal basis. So that was very concerning obviously because people have been relying very heavily on SNAP throughout the pandemic. For a period, there were extra benefits, what is known as emergency allotments, but those have gone away now. As you mentioned at the start, we do get a yearly cost of living adjustment and it was pretty big last year compared to most years and it did help, but the maximum SNAP benefit did not cover the cost of a meal in 78% of count. So that's an improvement from 99% to 78%. But clearly, in the majority of the US, we're still not really able to fully tap the value of SNAP. And since SNAP is a big part of our strategy for reducing food insecurity, that's something we should all be concerned about. I think this is really important for listeners to understand. There aren't regional adjustments in the SNAP benefits and there are huge price differences depending on where you are in the US. I know some work out of the Economic Research Service of USDA found that same finding in some earlier years. And so it's really important to see what happens, especially during an inflationary period. Thank you for sharing that. I want to talk about one way that we understand how SNAP benefits are set. And so, USDA updated the Thrifty Food Plan which is the basis of SNAP benefits or at least the maximum benefit level in 2021, and it was the first time since the mid two-2000s. What did that mean for the adequacy of SNAP benefits? And what do we know about how inflation has further affected SNAP benefits? Yes, great question. It was a very important move on the part of USDA to implement that update to the Thrifty Food Plan, which basically is the market basket of assumptions about food purchasing that USDA relies on to set all SNAP benefits. So it's a critical piece of information. Even though it might sound like inside baseball, to some people, the Thrifty Food Plan really matters. As you noted, it had not been updated since I think 2006. And we all know that not only have prices changed a lot, but the ways in which we acquire food has changed a lot. We buy a lot more prepared foods even to eat at home. A lot more people are working and so the...

A diversity of bacteria and microorganisms making up the gut microbiome supports both our physical and our mental health. Research has shown that stress and trauma can negatively impact the microbiome. But a recent study took that finding to a new level. This was a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Scientists now see inflammation-related microbiomes in babies born to women who experienced mistreatment or adversity during their own childhood. These microbiomes predispose children to physical and mental health problems. We'll talk today with the co-author of that paper, Fran Querdasi, from the University of California, Los Angeles. Interview hosted by Kelly Brownell. Interview Summary This topic is so important, and you just hear time and time again from experts all around the world how profoundly the microbiome was influencing our health and how many factors affect the microbiome. But now to think about this generational matter that you addressed in your research is interesting and scary, in a way. Let's first start off with this question about how you studied these mothers and the children. What were you looking for? The goal of the study was to see how experiences of adversity or hardship across two generations might be related to the composition of the children's gut microbiome, or in other words, which microbes were living in their guts. So, for this paper, I worked with colleagues at the University of California-Los Angeles, as well as a team of scientists in Singapore who are currently conducting a big birth cohort study called Growing Up in Singapore Towards healthy Outcomes, or GUSTO for short. That study has thousands of mothers and families enrolled but, in this paper, we focused on around 450 families who had data on what we were interested in - the mother generation, as well as her child generation. We specifically wanted to study the children when they were around two years old because the gut microbiome develops really rapidly during that period from birth until around two years of age. In this study, we asked mothers to tell us about three different kinds of adversity. First, their history of maltreatment. That would be things like abuse and neglect in their own childhood and then kind of moving forward in time, any symptoms of anxiety during their pregnancies. Then moving forward again into the children's generation, their children's exposure to stressful life events. So, things like their parents' divorce or the death of a family member from birth till two years of age. At two years of age, we collected poop samples to analyze the children’s microbiomes. Then we also asked families to report on their children's social emotional problems. So, things like aggression, sadness, issues with attention on when they were two years old and then again at age four because we really wanted to see also how their microbiomes were related to their early childhood health. I'm eager to hear what you found but first, let me say I'm impressed that you even bothered to ask this question because one wouldn't think that traumatic experiences decades ago in the life of a mother would affect the microbiome of a child today. So, tell us, please, what did you find? We found that each of the adversity experiences that we asked about - so abuse or neglect that the mother experienced in her own childhood, the mothers' symptoms of anxiety during pregnancy, as well as children’s experiences of stressful events in their early life - all of those seem to have an impact on the children’s gut microbiomes. Specifically, we found something interesting, which was that some of the microbes that seem to be related to adversity we think that they might perform similar functions to those that we found were related to the children's social emotional health, both at two years and then at four years of age. We think that those microbes probably play a role in regulating the immune system and inflammation. Our...