Episodes

  • E260: Food Recovery Network Urges Food Date Labeling Reform

    E260: Food Recovery Network Urges Food Date Labeling Reform
    Jan 14 2025
    I don't know about you and your household, but in my home, we have a long history of opening the refrigerator and discovering pasta sauce or mayonnaise that we don't remember when it was put in the refrigerator, when we last opened it, and we're confused. We open the container; we smell it; we check out the date label. And if we're confused, we have a mantra: when in doubt, throw it out. But aren't those date labels supposed to help us make good decisions about whether or not a food product is safe? Currently, there is no federal regulation on what those labels should say. Best Buy, Use Buy, Sell Buy, or what have you. However, there is legislation in the Congress called the Food Date Labeling Act to help us address this issue. And today's guest, Regina Harmon, will help us explore this particular issue. She is the executive director of the Food Recovery Network, the largest student led movement fighting food waste and hunger in the United States. Interview Summary First, some of our listeners may not be familiar with the Food Recovery Network. Could you tell us more about the organization and what it hopes to accomplish? Absolutely. Thank you so much. Food Recovery Network was started in 2011 by college students at the University of Maryland who saw a couple of things happening. They saw a lot of food waste on their college campus, and they also saw a lot of people who were experiencing hunger in their communities. And so, they thought, hey, instead of throwing this perfectly good food away, what we could do is package this food up and give it to those in our neighborhood that we know need some help. And that's how Food Recovery Network was started. They started at the University of Maryland, one dining hall, one carload of food. They started calling other friends that went to different colleges and universities across the United States. And over the last decade and some change, we've grown into, as you said, the largest movement of students who are fighting food waste and hunger. We have about 200 college campuses that have food recovery network chapters. We've recovered over 16 million pounds of food through the power of young people. And today we also help other sectors that would like to also do the right thing with their surplus food. We help farms, we help corporate events, large scale events, we help conferences. You name it, wherever there's surplus food, Food Recovery Network can help make sure that food doesn't go into landfill and helps feed those in need. I would love to hear a little bit about who you are able to serve through the Recovered Food. Are you working with food banks? Are you working with the pantries directly? Tell me a little more about that connection. It's a beautiful connection. We have about 400 nonprofits all over the United States. That directly receive the surplus food that we donate. We go to the sites where the food is. So again, in college dining halls, large scale events, you name it, and that food is packaged up safely. And then it's brought to what we call hunger fighting nonprofits. These are nonprofits on the front lines in all of our communities that are in some way feeding our neighbors in need. These are homeless shelters, soup kitchens, food banks. These are domestic violence shelters. These are afterschool programs, churches, anywhere that can also handle the food safely and then distribute it to our neighbors directly. So through that, we've been able to meet so many incredible people, and a lot of times volunteers themselves who work at these incredible locations that again, are just helping those who need support to make their ends meet. Great. This is really important work. Thank you so much for the work that you all are doing. So, how does the Food Recovery Network activate to end food waste and make a positive impact on the environment? There's a lot of things that are happening here. You know, millions of tons of food is wasted every single year. And I know we'll get into the Food Date Limiting Act in just a moment, but every part of our food system, there's food waste. On farm fields, during transportation, at supermarkets, in our own homes. And so, a lot of times, most of the time, the majority of the time, all of the food that is wasted is actually thrown into landfills. You know, we see those images of whole entire tractor trailer trucks of food being dumped into landfill. And that is the problem. The majority of food, much of which is still perfectly good to eat, perfectly good to consume, is being driven into landfill, where it then is covered up, it begins to rot, and this is where the environmental harm starts. The food rots, and it creates additional CO2 into our environment and other greenhouse gases that is really difficult for our environment to reabsorb because it's happening at such an increased rate. And that is directly causing what we now know as global warming. Food all across the United States, all across the globe, is the third ...
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    14 mins
  • E259: Your state of the science on weight loss drugs

    E259: Your state of the science on weight loss drugs
    Jan 9 2025
    About two years ago, we released a podcast with Dr. Thomas Wadden of the University of Pennsylvania describing work on a new generation of medications to treat diabetes and obesity. They were really taking the field by storm. Since then, much more is known since many additional studies have been published and so many people have been using the drugs. So many, in fact, the market value of the Danish company, Novo Nordisk, one of the two major companies selling the drugs, has gone up. It is now greater than the entire budget of the country of Denmark. This single company is responsible for about half of Denmark's economic expansion this year. So, a lot of people are now taking the drugs and this is a great time for an update on the drugs. And we're fortunate to have two of the world's leading experts join us: Dr. Wadden, Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and the inaugural Albert J. Stunkard Professor of Psychiatry at Penn. Joining us as well as Dr. Robert Kushner, a physician and professor of medicine at Northwestern University and a pioneer in testing treatments for obesity. Interview Summary Tom, you and I were colleagues at Penn decades ago. And I got frustrated the treatments for obesity didn't work very well. People tended to regain the weight. And I turned my attention to prevention and policy. But you hung in there and I admired you for that patience and persistence. And Bob, the same for you. You worked on this tenacious problem for many years. But for both of you, your patience has been rewarded with what seems to me to be a seismic shift in the way obesity and diabetes can be treated. Tom, I'll begin with you. Is this as big of a deal as it seems to me? Well, I think it is as big of a deal as it seems to you. These medications have had a huge impact on improving the treatment of type 2 diabetes, but particularly the management of obesity. With older medications, patients lost about 7 percent of their starting weight. If you weighed 200 pounds, you'd lose about 15 pounds. That was also true of our best diet and exercise programs. You would lose about 7 percent on those programs with rigorous effort. But with the new medications, patients are now losing about 15 to 20 percent of their starting body weight at approximately one year. And that's a 30-to-40-pound loss for a person who started at 200 pounds. And with these larger weight losses, we get larger improvements in health in terms of complications of obesity. So, to quote a good friend of mine, Bob Kushner, these medications have been a real game changer. Thanks for putting that in perspective. I mean, we're talking about not just little incremental changes in what treatments can produce, which is what we've seen for years. But just orders of magnitude of change, which is really nice to see. So, Bob what are these medications that we're talking about? What are the names of the drugs and how do they work? Well, Kelly, this transformation of obesity really came about by finding the target that is really highly effective for obesity. It's called the gut brain axis. And when it comes to the gut it's starting off with a naturally occurring gut hormone called GLP 1. I think everyone in the country's heard of GLP 1. It's released after we eat, and it helps the pancreas produce insulin, slows the stomach release of food, and reduces appetite. And that's where the obesity story comes in. So pharmaceutical companies have taken this hormone and synthesized it, something similar to GLP 1. It mimics the action of GLP 1. So, you could actually take it and give it back and have it injected so it augments or highlights this hormonal effect. Now, that same process of mimicking a hormone is used for another gut hormone called GIP that also reduces appetite. These two hormones are the backbone of the currently available medication. There's two on the market. One is called Semaglutide. That's a GLP 1 analog. Trade name is Wegovy. Now, it's also marketed for diabetes. Tom talked about how it is used for diabetes and increases insulin. That trade name is Ozempic. That's also familiar with everyone around the country. The other one that combined GLP 1 and GIP, these two gut hormones, so it's a dual agonist, the trade name for obesity is called Zep Bound, and the same compound for diabetes is called Mounjaro. These are terms that are becoming familiar, I think, to everyone in the country. Tom mentioned some about the, how much weight people lose on these drugs, but what sort of medical changes occur? Just to reiterate what Tom said, I'll say it in another way. For Semaglutide one third of individuals are losing 20 percent of their body weight in these trials. For Tirzepatide, it even outpaces that. And I got a third of individuals losing a quarter of their body weight. These are unheard of weight losses. And with these weight losses and these independent effects from weight, what we're seeing in the trials ...
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    42 mins
  • E258: Do 'market driven epidemics' drive your food choices?

    E258: Do 'market driven epidemics' drive your food choices?
    Dec 19 2024
    For much of history, the word 'epidemic' applied to infectious diseases. Large numbers of cases of disease caused by organisms such as bacteria and viruses that spread through water, air, or other means, sometimes transmitted from person to person, or back and forth between people and animals. Then came epidemics of chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease - diseases occurring in very large numbers and created not by infectious agents, but by drivers in our day to day lives, such as a bad food environment. A new paper was just published in the PLOS global health literature that I found fascinating. It focuses on another use of the concept of epidemics: market driven epidemics. Let's find out what these are and find out a little bit more about their implications for our health and wellbeing. Our guests today are two of the authors of that paper. Dr. Jonathan Quick is a physician and expert on global health and epidemics. He is an adjunct professor at Duke University's Global Health Institute. Eszter Rimanyi joins us as well. She works on chronic disease and addiction epidemiology at Duke university. Interview Summary Access the PLOS article “Dynamics of combatting market-driven epidemics: Insights from U.S. reduction of cigarette, sugar, and prescription opioid consumption.” So, Jono, let's start with you. Tell us what you mean by market driven epidemics. The pattern is familiar to people. There is a product that that humans like and the business community says we can make a lot of money on this unmet need. And so they do that and they start selling a lot of it. And then people start noticing that this thing that the humans like is killing some of them. And so, the scientists do the public health. And then the business community says these scientists are going to kill the golden goose. They buy up other scientists and try to defend themselves. And then it goes on and on before we really bend the epidemic curves. This pattern of consumer products that have harmful effects, those products are major contributors to the root causes of at least a million deaths a year in the US, and over 20 million deaths worldwide. So, to try to look at this from an epidemic point of view, we first established a case definition. Our definition of market driven epidemic is a significant increase in death, disability and other harmful effects on humans and human health and wellbeing. It's arising from a consumer product whose use has been accelerated by aggressive marketing. Whose harmful effects have been denied or otherwise minimized by producers. And for which effective mitigation is possible but actively opposed by producers. So, we looked at the natural history of this, and we found five phases through which these epidemics pass. There's market development, either inventing a new product, developing a product like prescription opioids, or transforming an existing product like tobacco. Phase two is evidence of harm. First, there's suspicion, astute clinicians, whistleblowers, and then eventually proof of harm. Phase three is corporate resistance. Companies deny harm, seek to discredit accusers, commission counter science, manufacture doubt, mount legal challenges. All the while deaths and social upheaval and economic costs are mounting. And finally, our next phase four is mitigation. We get some regulatory efforts going, and there's a tipping point for the consumption and resulting deaths. And then finally, phase five of this is market adaptation. In a response to decreasing or threatened consumption, companies and consumers typically seek alternatives. Adaptations can be positive or negative. Some are healthier, some are equally or more harmful. Thanks very much for that description. It really helps explain what the concept is all about. You chose three areas of focus. You could have chosen others, but you chose cigarettes, sugar, and prescription opioid use. Why those in particular? We wanted to identify differences in these market driven epidemics in a few product categories. We wanted to look at distinctly different consumer experiences so we could see what worked and what didn't in terms of bending the epidemic curve. We picked nicotine delivery, food, and prescription medicine. And to choose within those categories we established five inclusion criteria. So, number one, the product had to have proven adverse health effects. Number two, there needed to be well documented histories of product development, marketing, mitigation efforts, and so forth. Number three, the product needed to meet the overall case definition. That is, companies knew they were doing harm, continued to do harm, and fought that harm. Number four, there needed to be long term data available for product consumption and associated impact. And number five, most important, we chose products for which mitigation efforts had already resulted in significant sustained reduction in product consumption. Based on these three criteria, ...
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    29 mins
  • E257: Embracing convergence in the RECIPES Network

    E257: Embracing convergence in the RECIPES Network
    Dec 4 2024
    In 2021, American University and 15 partner institutions across the U. S. launched the Multiscale RECIPES Research Network with the goal of transforming our wasted food system into a sustainable and resilient one. Food loss and waste is a complex problem spanning societal issues such as food insecurity and food recovery, sustainable farming, food packaging and transportation, food marketing, sales and consumer preferences, family dynamics, and corporate profits, among others. A fascinating part of the RECIPES Network vision is a purposeful focus on convergence, making the research process more effective and creative in designing solutions to big problems such as these. In a recent article in the journal Ecology and Society, team members evaluated how well the network's intentional convergence efforts have worked thus far. Interview Summary Norbert Wilson - It is my great pleasure to welcome my colleague, Amanda Wood, who is a research scientist at the World Food Policy Center. Amanda Wood - Thank you, Norbert. I'm looking forward to this discussion today. Our guests come from the University of Illinois Institute of Technology Food Systems Action Lab. Weslynne Ashton is a professor of environmental management and sustainability at Illinois Tech and co directs the Food Systems Action Lab. Azra Sungu is a design researcher and strategist at the Food Systems Action Lab, who just defended her doctoral dissertation. So, our biggest congratulations to Dr. Sungu. Thank you so much for being here today. So first, I want to start by saying the RECIPES Network has gone about their work a little bit differently than most traditional academic projects by taking a convergence approach. Weslynne, would you talk about what convergence is in research, and why is this approach useful for tackling complex societal challenges like food waste? Weslynne Ashton - Convergence is an approach that really tries to integrate the best of many different disciplines. The way that they see, approach, and tackle problems. And tries to integrate them in a really holistic way, right? Like, we often operate in silos and universities and this is a way of trying to get out of that. But more than working side by side on the same topics, it really tries to pull ways of working and ways of knowing across these different disciplines. For the topic of food waste, which as Norbert described is incredibly complex, right? There are so many different dimensions. They're scientific, natural science, social science, anthropological, political science. So, there are these technical aspects, economic aspects, social aspects, as well as cultural and spiritual aspects that we really don't talk about that often. And so, a convergence approach tries to say, how can we bring together the way all of these different disciplines approach understanding and developing solutions so that the solutions we develop can be more holistic. And more likely to take hold because they are considering these different perspectives. Amanda - A lot of individuals might not see food waste as this complex challenge. They throw their leftovers in the bin and that's food waste to them. But as you say, challenges of food waste and food loss extend all the way across the food system. So, we definitely need that more holistic approach. Thanks for that bigger picture. Norbert, over to you. Norbert - Azra, I'd like to turn it over to you and ask you a question about design. And I've got to say, this is the first project that I've ever worked on where I've worked with design scholars. And so, I'm excited for you to share with our audience what actually is design. And how do you see design fitting in the context of the work that we've been doing? Azra Sungu - Thank you. Yes, it's been very exciting for me to part of such a transdisciplinary group as well. And probably in over 12 years of design education that I got, that was the most frequent question. Like my family and everyone that's asking, like, what is it that you do actually? So, I think it's really important that we clarify that because design in this context is a little bit different than the design of products and services. In a way, we could say that it carries similar principles, but in recent years, design has been gaining visibility as a creative and collaborative problem-solving approach. So, some of the key mindsets, methods, and processes of design have been distilled into more accessible toolkits that allow more people from various backgrounds and expertise to get together and collaboratively explore problems of different kinds and approach them in more creative ways. So, we can say that, yeah, this adaptation of design found applications in different fields, such as entrepreneurship. We see that picking up in education or even apply to issues related to social justice. And I would say that what makes it different from other problem-solving approaches is that it centers a deep understanding of humans, their needs, their ...
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    33 mins
  • E256: ATNI - driving market change towards nutrition

    E256: ATNI - driving market change towards nutrition
    Nov 21 2024
    Now more than ever, it's important to challenge the world's food and beverage manufacturers to address nutrition issues like obesity and undernutrition. Today, we're going to discuss the 2024 Global Access to Nutrition Index, a very important ranking system that evaluates companies on their nutrition related policies, product portfolios, marketing practices, and engagement with stakeholders. The index is an accountability strategy produced by ATNI, the Access to Nutrition Initiative, a global nonprofit foundation seeking to drive market change for nutrition. Our guest today is Greg Garrett, Executive Director of ATNI. Interview Summary You know, I very much admire the work you and your colleagues have done on this index. It fills such an important need in the field and I'm eager to dive in and talk a little bit more about it. So, let's start with this. You know, we've all heard of the concept of social determinants of health and more recently, people have begun talking about corporate determinants of health. And your organization really is focused on corporate determinants of nutrition. Let's start with a question that kind of frames all this. What's the role of industry in nutrition, according to the way you're looking at things? And how does the Global Index shine a light on this topic? Thanks for the question. We're working primarily quite downstream with large manufacturers and retailers. But we hope to affect change across the value chain by working with that group. Of course, when we talk about private sector in food, that's a very, very broad terminology that we're using. It could include farmers on the one hand, looking all the way upstream, all the way through to SMEs, aggregators, processors, manufacturers. SMEs are what? Small and medium enterprises, small and medium enterprises, local ones. All the way through to the multinational food and beverage manufacturers. But also catering organizations and restaurants. When we talk about business what we're trying to do is ensure that business cares about portability, and access to safe and nutritious food. And I think we can say pretty safely, based on the data which we'll talk about, that the health aspects of food are still not as, they're not at the forefront like they should be. Yet. We'll dive in and talk a little bit more about what the index is and what it shows in a minute. But let's start with a kind of broader question. What is the role of diet and consumption of processed foods in influencing health? Yes, so they say now one in five deaths are related to poor diet. It's arguably now the biggest risk factor related to global morbidity and mortality. We've seen in the last 20 years a slight slowing down of our efforts to combat malnutrition and undernutrition. Whereas we've seen over nutrition, obesity, really taking off. And that's not just in high income countries, but also low- and middle-income countries. So, you know, it might be too little good food and that can lead to at the extreme end of things wasting. It might be too little micronutrients, which can lead to all kinds of micronutrient deficiencies or hidden hunger that leads to many adverse outcomes. Including, for example, cognitive decline or reduced immune system. And then, in terms of diabetes and obesity, we're seeing that really skyrocket. Not only in countries where we have excessive food intake, but also in low- and middle-income countries where they have too much food with a lot of, say, empty calories. Not enough nutrients that are needed. In fact, the recent numbers that we've been working with, it looks like in the last 20 years, obesity rates have gone from about 7.9 percent to 15.9 percent. And by 2030, it might be that 20 percent of global population is considered obese if we don't mitigate that. Right, and of course that number is many, many times higher in the developed countries. So, you've got a tough job. You talked about the complexity of the food industry going all the way to the farmers, to the big companies, and caterers even, and things. And a lot of different health outcomes are involved. How in the world do you construct an index from all that? Why don't you tell us what the Global Index is, and then some of what you found in the most recent report. Yes, so the Global Index, we've been running it for 11 years since ATNI was founded. And it has gone through multiple iterations. This latest one was the biggest we've done and we tried to capture about a quarter of the world's market. So, what we did is we took the 30 largest food and beverage manufacturers by revenue. We looked at 52,000 of their products, and that's where we know the market share was about 23 percent global market share. We profiled the foods. We tried to understand their governance structures and how much nutrition features in the way they run their business. We tried to understand, for example, how they market the foods. Are they marketing them responsibly, according to the World ...
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    27 mins
  • E255: Reducing food waste - less seafood wasted than thought in US

    E255: Reducing food waste - less seafood wasted than thought in US
    Nov 18 2024
    The U. S. is the largest importer of aquatic foods, which includes fresh and saltwater fish, crustaceans, mollusks, and aquatic plants served in restaurants and homes. A critical piece of this global market is the cold chain, keeping these foods chilled or frozen during storage and transport to market. With 44 percent of aquatic foods sold live or fresh globally, the percentage of fresh over frozen aquatic foods creates an extra logistical cold chain challenge. What's more, most aquatic foods become, well, fishy from cold chain disruptions, which can cause perceived food safety concerns, potentially resulting in food getting tossed into the bin. Until recently, research to understand just how much aquatic food gets wasted or lost has been spotty. However, in a recent Nature Food article, researchers argue that aquatic food loss and waste in the United States is actually half of earlier estimates. And that's good news that we'll explore today. This interview is part of an ongoing exploration of food loss and waste. This episode is co-hosted by environmental economist, Martin Smith at Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment. Interview Summary Martin Smith - So I'm really pleased to introduce our guests for today. First up from University of Florida, a natural resource economist, Frank Asche. Frank is a long-time collaborator of mine and a good friend. And he's also one of the world's leading experts in seafood markets and trade. And honestly, Frank has taught me just about everything I know about aquaculture. Also today, we have Dave Love from the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. Dave is someone whose work I'm also very familiar with and is a leading expert in food systems and sustainability. And recently in my classes, I have often said out loud to some student questions that I don't know the answers to. I'll bet Dave Love knows the answer to that question. Norbert Wilson - So Dave, let's begin with you. Why was it important to develop better estimates and methods of aquatic food waste in the US? Why did your team pursue this research question? Dave Love - Great question. So, the US government has a goal of cutting food waste in half by 2030. And if you want to know how much you need to cut, you really need to go out and measure. And that's one of the areas of food waste that we really don't know a lot about for many different types of foods. We know the production data. We know how much is produced. We have a pretty good sense of what's consumed, whether that's in an economic sense of being consumed or actually eaten. But we really don't know how much is wasted. And groups come to the table with different numbers, different estimates, and they, they make their way into reports, into national guidelines. But for seafood in particular, the estimates haven't been refreshed in a while. So, it was about time to do that. And this study aimed to tackle that issue from all the stages of the supply chain, from production to consumption, looked at different forms of seafood and among the top 10 species. So, we rolled those species estimates and stage estimates into a national number. So yeah, that that's, that's why we did it. And we were really surprised at what we found. Norbert - Well, what surprised you? Dave - Well, earlier estimates were that about half of seafood was lost or wasted in the US and that came from UN Food and Agriculture Organization data. And when we actually crunched the numbers for the US supply, we thought it was more like 22.7 percent is wasted. So, a lot less than the FAO estimate. Which means we're doing a good job in some areas, but there's also room for improvement in others. Martin - So, Frank, maybe you could tell us a little bit more about the key takeaways from this Nature food paper are? Frank Asche - It's really that it's important to recognize that we are consuming a lot of different species and they have very, very different characteristics. For instance, the filler yield of a salmon is about 65 percent while for a cod it is about 40%. That makes your starting point really important. Moreover, this thing of looking at the whole supply chain is important because there are different ways to organize it, and there are a lot of potential uses for what food is sometimes wasted. And to look into what different types of producers are actually doing. What different companies that are operating these cold chains that Norbert spoke about are doing. And what they are doing when these things break apart. Kind of, there's all these people in the supply chain that may help us, and some of them do. Some of them aren't very good at it. But it's really nice to find that there are best practices that can really help us a lot of people take the trouble to figure that out and follow that up. Martin - That's really interesting. And it makes me wonder with all this heterogeneity that you're describing, are large producers better positioned to manage or, or reduce food waste ...
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    30 mins
  • E254: Why is food so expensive?

    E254: Why is food so expensive?
    Oct 31 2024
    If you feel like your grocery budget just doesn't buy you as much as it once did, you're not alone. According to U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, food prices rose 11. 4 percent last year alone - the highest annual increase in 23 years. The ongoing pinch at the grocery store has been in the news of a lot of media outlets, such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Times Magazine, Forbes, and so many others. Our guest today, food economics and policy professor David Ortega from Michigan State, is going to walk us through the food price inflation phenomenon. Interview Summary We've been hearing a lot about food price inflation. Can you tell us how food prices have changed over the last four to five years, and how that compares to the recent past? Definitely. So, I think it's always really important to define what food inflation is so that we're all on the same page. We hear this word a lot and we've been hearing it for a number of years now. Inflation is the rate of increase in prices over a period of time - so how fast prices are changing or increasing in a given period. The time frame here is very, very important. Now, compared to last year, food prices are only up 2.1%. And this is for all food, which includes food at home and food away from home. Now groceries, food at home, are up 0.9% compared to last year. And menu prices at restaurants, or food away from home, are only 4.0% higher. Now if you're listening to this, you're probably thinking, ‘well, how can this be given how expensive things are at the grocery store?’ And that's because you are likely thinking about how food prices have changed since the start of the pandemic, right? So, over the past five years, food prices have increased around 26%. And so that's the cumulative effect of inflation that we're all very familiar with at the grocery store. Wow. You talked about the recent past, and in particular, about the time since COVID. How has this looked historically if you take a longer time frame? Yes, so if we look at a few years before COVID, food prices generally increase around 2% or so, year over year. Now in the summer of 2022, we experienced double digit increases in food prices. More than 11%, year over year. And that was the highest rate of increase in around 40 years, since the late 1970s and early '80s. So now that's a significant spike and departure from what we would consider to be normal. But the rate of increase has come down to almost pre pandemic levels, which is really great news. But remember the rate of inflation is the rate of increase, so because that rate has come down, it doesn't mean that prices are decreasing necessarily. They're just not growing as fast as they were before. Correct. I have some ideas, but I really want to hear you talk about it. What has led to this significant increase in the last four and a half years or so? It's really been a convergence of factors. It's not just one particular thing, but really all these factors coming together and sort of compounding on each other. We saw increases in labor costs, and then as we go through the timeline, we had Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022. And that really sent commodity prices surging for things like wheat, other grains, as well as vegetable oils. And it wasn't just the invasion alone, but we had countries responding with export restrictions on things like palm oil that really just exacerbated the situation. We also have the impacts of climate change. The summer of 2022, and for a few years leading up to then, there was this mega drought in the West and the plain states that affected anything from lettuce prices to the price of meat. Something that we're experiencing to this day. We also have the bird flu outbreak, now the largest outbreak in U. S. history. Egg prices have been through a bit of a roller coaster ride, and we've been hearing a lot about increases in egg prices. That's primarily due to the high path avian influenza outbreak, or the bird flu outbreak. Now, those are all what I would consider, for the most part, to be supply side factors. But we also have demand factors at play. And that is, that when we look at consumer spending on food, especially over the past two to three years, it's been much higher compared to before the pandemic. Even when you adjust for inflation. Now, this is likely attributed to households. Some of them accumulated savings. We had the fiscal stimulus payments from the government that injected cash into the economy. For a period of time, some households, we could splurge at the grocery store. We've seen, and the data from USDA shows, that consumer spending on food both at home and away from home is much higher in recent years than prior to COVID. So again, it's a combination of both supply side and demand side factors that have contributed to the significant rise in food prices. This is a really important point that it's not a single factor, but it's this mix of things, which also makes it ...
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    15 mins
  • E253: Learnings from No Kid Hungry in New York

    E253: Learnings from No Kid Hungry in New York
    Oct 30 2024
    When we talk about problems with food insecurity and the food system, we tend to reference challenges at the national or international level. And of course, work at that level really needs to be done. But increasingly, there is a unique focus on regional food system strategies and right sizing solutions to best fit those unique characteristics of a particular locale. In today's podcast, we will talk with Rachel Sabella, director of No Kid Hungry New York. She leads the planning, implementation, and evaluation of the No Kid Hungry campaigns across the state of New York. Interview Summary Rachel, it is such a pleasure to have you with us on the show today. We've done several podcasts with No Kid Hungry staff in the past and discussed topics like your Summer EBT Playbook for state governments. I'm really interested to learn more about your work in the state of New York. Thank you so much for having me, Norbert. We have been so lucky to have No Kid Hungry on here to share the stories. And I'm excited to give you some updates about what we've learned with Summer EBT, and to talk about how things look in New York these days. So, can you help our listeners understand more about No Kid Hungry New York as an organization? What is your approach to addressing childhood hunger? No Kid Hungry is a campaign of Share Our Strength. And I have the honor and privilege of representing the organization across the state of New York as we work to create solutions, to draw more attention and awareness, and to help connect more kids and families with meals. We believe that every kid needs three meals a day to grow up healthy, happy, and strong. But too many children, and I know we'll talk more about this, are missing those meals. We really take an approach of working directly with communities. I don't know the right answer for each community. But my job and really my privilege is to work with school districts, with elected officials, with community organizations to look for challenges and work together to overcome them and really change systems. I can appreciate that local communities look very different and appreciate if you're talking about New York City versus upstate New York. Can you tell us a little bit about how you all think differently about the cities versus the more rural areas of New York State? I appreciate that question. I think all of my colleagues can hear me say, we almost run two different campaigns in New York. Because the approach in New York City, where there is one school district in five boroughs, but a large concentration of students, the largest school district in the nation, versus the rest of the state, is different. But ultimately, the challenges are the same. How are we communicating with families? What solutions are out there that we can implement? We really focus on listening, sharing tools, sharing toolkits, thinking about, in some communities, what they need are materials translated in different languages, so families understand that SNAP benefits are available, or summer EBT benefits. Or as in other communities, it's how can families get to a centrally located place to pick up meals? We really spend our time learning and listening and sharing these programs so that they can find the solutions that work best. This is wonderful. I grew up in Georgia, I should just note. And I grew up in rural Georgia versus Atlanta. And we always talked about two Georgias, the Atlanta region versus the rural areas. And I can appreciate just how different some of those challenges are. But you're right, the central issue of access to food is similar and how you address those issues will look different in those regions. I want to span out and talk about some national data that just has come out. USDA has reported food insecurity rates in the U.S. and we saw that hunger actually increased. And we see that for childhood hunger, food insecurity in general, it has risen since the 2019 pandemic. Why is this happening for children? It's a challenging time. I think something that came out of the pandemic was right away, people said, families are struggling with hunger. What can we do? The stories on the news. We saw it no matter where you were in the country, with the lines to pick up food. And we saw government responded very quickly. There were expanded SNAP benefits. There were no cost school meals provided to every child across the country. We saw pandemic EBT implemented. We also saw the expanded child tax credit. At a time when families were facing tremendous challenges, there was that support from the government. But many of those programs have now ended. And in these economically challenged times, incomes haven't changed. Some people are still dealing with an unemployment crisis. We hear a lot from families as well that they're underemployed. There may be a job, but it's not that same income. And without these expanded government programs, families are facing challenges. How is this looking specifically in New ...
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