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The Leading Voices in Food
Hosted by Duke World Food Policy Center · EN
The Leading Voices in Food podcast series features real people, scientists, farmers, policy experts and world leaders all working to improve our food system and food policy. You'll learn about issues across the food system spectrum such as food insecurity, obesity, agriculture, access and equity, food safety, food defense, and food policy. Produced by the Duke World Food Policy Center at wfpc.sanford.duke.edu.
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E300: Tackling Food and Nutrition Systems Change at the Kellogg Foundation
Yesterday00:27:38Tap to summarizeKelly Brownell interviews Jon-Paul Bianchi, Director of Systems Change at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, about the foundation's systems-change approach linking food, health, early childhood, and family economic security to address inequities affecting children and families. Bianchi describes his path from PhD research to policy work and then to Kellogg, and explains how integrated grantmaking focuses upstream on policies, practices, resource flows, narratives, and long-term investment in people and relationships rather than isolated programs. He highlights Vermont's inclusion of food quality in childcare ratings and the foundation's Farm to Early Childhood efforts connecting procurement, regional food systems, and state policy, with examples from states like North Carolina, Iowa, and Wisconsin, and notes Brazil's national local purchasing policy as a model for success. Transcript As I was mentioning before we got started, I've long admired the work of the Kellogg Foundation. Working with the concept of food systems or connecting agriculture with nutrition and thinking about regenerative agricultures. There are a lot of places where your foundation was out front. So, I salute you and your colleagues for that. And it'll be interesting to find out what's happening right now. Tell us a little bit about yourself, and how did you get into the philanthropic work and your work with Kellogg in particular? I'm Jon-Paul Bianchi. I'm the director of the Systems Change team at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. And what that essentially means is I'm the director of national programs at the foundation. But we call it systems change because we really do see in the different areas of work that we focus on- health, family economic security, food, and early childhood- that these things are all interconnected by some distinct systems. But also, common systems that overlap across them. And so, that's the approach that we take. And I'll spend some time sort of diving into that today. You know, to answer the question of how I got here... you know, a master stroke of luck. I was set to be an academic researcher. I was working on my PhD at the University of Wisconsin. I was ABD and decided that I didn't want to be a researcher and I wanted to work in policy. And I moved to Colorado to take a job sort of sight unseen, being the policy director of an organization that worked in K-12 and children's health, and food and early childhood education. And did that for a few years and learned to translate research into practice; into policy. And was giving a presentation and got a tap on a shoulder from somebody that worked at the Kellogg Foundation who was interested in what I was saying. And we had one conversation, and six months later, I wound up having a new job and leaving Colorado and moving to Michigan. That was 15 years ago. Well, you went into this with a great background having done the science as a graduate student and then into the policy world. And you're right, the intersection of those two is really where the magic can occur. You began talking about this, but let's talk about it a little bit more. So, when you say that there are systems that cut across different problems like food and health and economic security, etc., and I know you structured your team to reflect that cross-cutting kind of view of things. But tell us a little bit more about that. And how is this different than what's usually done, and how does it affect the way your work gets carried out? So, big picture at the Kellogg Foundation, we envision a society where every child can thrive. But we know that there's too many kids and families that still can't access good food or quality childcare, or their parents can't find quality jobs because of inequities that are embedded in the policies and the practices and narratives that shape our systems. And so, having a multi-issue integrated grant making team, it's made us more effective by better understanding the points of intersection and collaboration across those bodies of work. So, our food systems program officers are in the same team, and they work closely with our program officers in early childhood and family economic security and health. And those collaborations strengthen the work in a variety of ways. We have experts in each of those areas, but because they're spending time with each other and working in the same team, they're exposed to, and they learn about each other's work and each other's worlds. And that creates powerful collaborations in the foundation, but more importantly, out in the field. And it helps us to see that we can't fix any of these systems, including food systems, with surface level or patch kinds of solutions. We really have to work together to get upstream and focus on policies, focus on practices, focus on resource flows and narratives that really sustain the inequities that we see. And so, the foundation partners with organizations to dismantle barriers in food systems in the other areas so that children and families can access quality food. But I think we also recognize that's about investing in people. And it's about investing in people over time to drive transformational change in any of these systems, including food. For people listening to this who aren't in the world of philanthropy or academics or science or policy they might be saying, "Well, this kind of makes common sense. Isn't this the way it's usually done?" And in fact, it's not usually done to have this cross-cutting work accomplished the way you're doing it. It's actually a pretty impressive thing. Yes, thank you. And I have a lot of respect for our philanthropic partners and peers, and we work very closely with a lot of large and small foundations. And I think the adage in philanthropy is you know one foundation you know one foundation. So, we do it this way and somebody else will do it differently. And I think there's a lot of connection for us back to our founder. You mentioned Will Keith Kellogg at the top of the call. He was ahead of his time in terms of understanding the interconnectedness between food and the land and opportunity and people's education. And a lot of that came out of his tradition as a Seventh Day Adventist. But also, I think just as a person coming up in the Depression and seeing what happened afterwards and really beginning to understand in his own community of how these things were sort of connected to one another. And so, for us, both inside and outside the foundation, systems change really means betting on people long term to reshape those systems from the outside in. But also, from the inside out. And that's really what we're striving for. You mentioned the history of Dr. Kellogg. The history of that family is so interesting, and what went on in, you know, the sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, and how the concept of breakfast cereals came about. And how the focus on natural foods was so important. It's worth spending a little time even on just Wikipedia to try to find out what that history is, because I find it fascinating. So, let's go back to food and go a little bit deeper and talk about what this systems approach looks like in practice. You're a philanthropic organization. You exist in the context of a capitalist society where businesses are out to do as well as they can. How is the foundation's work different from, say, funding a food pantry, launching a single nutrition program somewhere, which is what typically might be done? Yes, I think what we intend to do and how I think our systems approach is a little different from, say, you know, funding a single nutrition program, is that we mean to design and redesign practice and policy based on how kids and families actually live their lives. Right? So, where food and health and early childhood and family economic security show up together in a community, right? Families experience these things simultaneously in their everyday lives. They don't experience these things in silos. And so, we try to have our team and our work reflect that. So, instead of treating food as a narrow problem to fix with one program, we try to think about how the entire system around a child and their caregivers works or doesn't work and find those opportunities and levers to move that whole system. I'll give you a concrete example that will bring in our colleague Linda Jo Doctor, who you mentioned at the top of the conversation. Early in my time at the foundation, I was a reviewer for the Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge Grant. This was an Obama era competitive grant process for building early childhood systems in states. And the state of Vermont did something really interesting that I had the good fortune to review as part of that team. They included the quality of food and access to fresh, healthy food in childcare centers as part of their quality rating and improvement system for childcare. They didn't just talk about teacher quality or curriculum or reflective practice. They actually said, "If we care about child development, then what children are eating every day in those childcare centers is part of what quality means." That's a systems approach. They connected food policy and procurement directly into early childhood policy and practice so that nutrition and education and child wellbeing were all being advanced simultaneously. I brought that back to the foundation and brought it back to Linda. And we had a really great conversation about it, and then another, and then another, and then another. And that experience helped shape how I think and how many people think about our work at the foundation. And it led to things like the expansion of our Farm to Early Childhood work, which again, leans heavily on procurement as the strategy to ...
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Culinary Medicine and connecting med students with patients
Apr 3000:19:42Tap to summarizeI'm delighted today to be joined by Dr. Joseph Skelton, professor of Pediatrics, founder and director of Brenner Fit, a program at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. FIT stands for Families in Training, which is a family-based pediatric obesity program. He's the author of a new book on children and their weight, a topic we discussed in a separate podcast. But in this podcast, we're talking about something he teaches at Wake Forest, a course in culinary medicine. This is a fascinating, pioneering area of focus, so let's dig in. Interview Transcript There's a lot of language about medicine and nutrition now, so people talk about food as medicine. There's a move afoot to get more training and nutrition and medical education, and here you are doing culinary medicine. Tell me how all these things differ from one another. Our interest in this here at Wake Forest School Medicine started a little organically with our program. A lot of what we do is focus on family meals. There are decades of research showing the benefits of family meals, not only for the nutrition and obesity risk, but the quality of nutrition, time spent together, parent child communication. Kids are less likely to get pregnant or do drugs and alcohol. All these things from just spending that time together over the meal. And I inherited a small teaching kitchen that was at a local organization that someone before me had gotten funding for. And we, sort of, took it over and used this opportunity to teach families how to cook. And a lot of families know how to cook but trying foods in different ways and to get kids involved and things like that. Then a couple years after that, the local YMCA approached us. They had some space and wanted to do this as a partnership. So I became a fundraising machine for a year or two and took a lot of dinners to raise the funds. And we built this gorgeous teaching kitchen, and we were mainly doing it in the efforts of sort childhood obesity treatment or prevention, getting families, teaching them new recipes, which then kind of extended to that whole key thing of getting families just to be comfortable in the kitchen and spending that time together. And we just started seeing these amazing things. We always say we've converted more kids to Brussels sprouts than I think any other effort of just getting them cooking it a different way. You and I were both probably raised with steamed Brussels sprouts, which I think is an abomination. If you really want to highlight the sulfur smell of a food, then you're going to steam it. And so, we really started to do that. And then students started volunteering. Actually, it was a student, Josh Patman, he's an emergency medicine physician now at East Carolina University, and he was a cook in a professional kitchen college. And he said, hey, could I help volunteer with that? And then more student medical students wanted to do it. And then we all found that you, much like I did, I'm a self-taught cook myself, and the more time you spend in that, the more you learn, the more comfortable you are. And the more you start to know, you know, I can teach med students nutrition all day, but that doesn't teach them how to get nutrition on their patients' plates, into their mouth. And so it really grew from there. And then I, kind of, stumbled upon what other people were doing. It started in New York, but the biggest program started was really Tulane School of Medicine that had it as a very focused way about teaching nutrition through cooking. Not just on a blackboard through PowerPoint slides and stuff like that of like hey, let's teach it in a different way. And the old-fashioned analogy, and actually the medical educators hate this, it used to be see one, do one, teach one. That was sort of the old surgical thing. And so, it's really you got to see how to make a recipe and you got to do it yourself. And what we found that when students start then teaching each other, or teaching patients or teaching community members, it really drives home and gives them a much deeper understanding of what nutrition in the real world is. Let's talk about the need for this. If we go back in time and we think about your parents or my parents, you know, the likelihood is that meals were being prepared from the real foods rather than from a package, let's say, or in a micro. How are things different now for the modern parent that has kept people distanced from their food and where it comes from, and that's led families to be distant because they're not having meals together as much? What does that look like now? Yeah, pulling from our own history, you know, Home Ec is not really a thing anymore. We did this study in our own med students. You know, most of their cooking, nutrition, the nutrition education they're getting tends to be the popular media. They're learning it from social media. Very few students have a degree in nutrition or took a nutrition class. And as much as we have to cram into medical student's education, there's not much room for it. They mainly learn to cook from their families. And what we know is families are cooking less and less for multiple reasons. They're much busier. Especially parents, actually parents of kids of all ages with that. And again, the marketing of food, you know, it's much easier to get ready made meals. And I'm not badmouthing those, you know. We're in talks right now of actually writing a cookbook for families, and one of the things that we promise is we're going to have a chapter on assembled meals. You know, having a pre-made salad with a rotisserie chicken, that's still going to be a better thing to do if you bring that home, sit at a table or at a bar or around a coffee table and eat that meal together. It's still going to be better for your family in multiple ways on multiple levels than eating out. And what I see, it really with families right now when it comes to actually raising "healthy eaters" or raising good eaters is when we... and again, I love a good restaurant, I'm not trying to badmouth that... but when you're going out to eat a lot of kids have endless choices and there's two issues. One is a paradox of choice. Whatever they get, they're always going to think that other thing might have been better. And it doesn't allow them to spread their palate and try different foods and get exposed to different things. And we always laugh... whenever in this field we want to play a drinking game where every time you say complex or complexity, you take a drink because, but it is such a complex issue with parents. You know, with kids and getting meals on the table. And hopefully finding some time, whether it's a breakfast or it's a dinner, but finding that time to come together around a meal. You mentioned the paradox of choice. I was reminded at one point I downloaded this cute app called You Choose or something like that. And it would help you make a decision if you were undecided. It would flip a coin, it would roll a dice. It would do, yes, no, it would do rock, paper, scissors, it would do all these things. And I was at a restaurant once. I couldn't decide between two entrees, so I used it. I did rock, paper, scissors, or something, and I then it said, okay you should choose X. So I ordered X and the second I ordered it, I immediately thought I should have ordered Y. Alright, so tell us about culinary medicine. What does this course look like that you teach? Yeah, the best way to think about it is applied nutrition. Because again, you can understand a ton about nutrition, but if that doesn't change into you getting the foods that you want in front of you, to me it's almost theoretical or scientific. It's applied nutrition. It's this idea of teaching some very basic cooking skills, and then including within that very core elements of nutrition. And for us, we tend to do it by the balanced plate. We think that works really well for families. But having it be very real world. You know, so again, we have recipes... in two weeks, I'm doing one... we're doing a rotisserie chicken and you're breaking it apart and making a chicken salad out of it. We were always teaching using microwavable rice and a couple of the students cornered me and said, this is very offensive to my culture. You need to teach people how to make real rice. But what it looks like for us is about a quarter, almost a third of med students will rotate through these classes. So, it's voluntary. Next year we're actually hopefully going to surpass half of the first-year med school class. That's unbelievable. That's very impressive. Well, especially up until last year I was doing this in my free time and paying for it with fundraising money. But yeah, Wake Forest is really behind this now. But about a quarter to a third of med students. They do five classes. And it's set up and again, that sort of theme of that family meal. They come in and we get stuff cooking. We get stuff in the oven; we get stuff on the stove top. We usually take some time out for a very short lecture. Again, tends to be very practical stuff. We include a lot about social determinants of health and food insecurity. Given what I do, we talk about picky eating. Very little do we go into details about Mediterranean diet and Dash diet and some of the really core things with that. We really just try to keep it about getting that balanced plate of a protein, a starch and a fruit or vegetable on the plate in front of you. They come back and usually finish what they're cooking, and then they sit down to eat together. And unlike when I was in med school and you were in grad school, or when you were teaching, a lot of students don't go to class anymore. A lot of students, they record the lectures so they can listen to th...
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Your child is not their weight - a parent's guide
Apr 2700:30:47Tap to summarizeSo going back more than 30 years, I was involved in work on childhood obesity. It was a prevalent problem at the time, but little attention was being devoted to children and weight issues. And it was fair to say that the field, as it were, was an academic backwater. Little was known about short and long-term effects of childhood obesity. The social and emotional lives experienced by the children hadn't really been documented or studied much. There was very little known about treatment or strategies for parents, but thankfully, things are different now. Thanks in part to the work of a number of really innovative people in the field, and one of the most innovative is our guest today, Dr. Joseph Skelton. He's a professor of pediatrics and founder and director of Brenner Fit. FIT stands for Families in Training, which is the family-based pediatric obesity program at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. He's also editor of the Journal of Childhood Obesity is involved in clinical care, research, education, and community outreach. Dr. Skelton has just published what I think is a really important book through the American Academy of Pediatrics, entitled Your Child Is Not Their Weight: Parenting in a Size Obsessed World. I was asked to review the book and was delighted to see it before it was published and just was so happy to see that such a book existed at all, but such a good quality book at entering the picture. Really a very important advance in our field. Interview Transcript There have been some books about pediatric weight issues in the past. Who is this book for and how is it different than what's been out there? I feel overall the big audience for this book is any parent, especially of my generation, that were raised during some really toxic diet culture in the '70s, '80s, and '90s. And so, I think the main folks that that's for is that parent: I want my kids to eat healthy, to be active, to lead healthy lives. But I don't want them to become concerned about their weight to feed into our culture's focus on the ideal body image. I don't want to feed into that. But you know I do want to pay attention to the health habits. How can I do this in a healthy way? How can I focus on health habits with my kid that's not a focus on weight and do it in a way that's backed up by science. You know, that's what parents always want to know. Am I doing this right? Am I causing harm? And it is actually who the book is dedicated to, you know, all those parents that were raised in a toxic diet culture and want to do things differently with their children. So, in modern day America, what is life like for a child whose weight exceeds the standards that we know might be healthy, and for the parents who are raising those children? From personal experience and 20 years of running a program, as well as what the research shows, it can be kind of rough. Despite a lot of the advances that we've made around weight bias we're still in a place that kids are trying to live up to this idealized body image. And then they have all these toxic messages when it comes to nutrition and body image. I think it's rough. We know that kids in bigger bodies tend to have a lower quality life. They tend to have more symptoms of depression, anxiety; and it's because of this world that we live in. You mentioned messages that they might be getting from places like the media, but what are interactions like with peers and teachers and doctors and others in their lives that are affecting how they feel? Yes. So, the adults in their life were raised in that toxic culture. They're my generation and the generation behind me that was raised in that. You know, there's the myth that a smaller body is healthier than a bigger body. And I think we can't break away from that. And I think that still sort of comes through. We still see this as a lifestyle issue, and everyone has an opinion. Everyone has a thought of, you know, well, I did this... and I lowered my cholesterol... I did this and I lost weight, you need to do it too. And I think in the medical profession, because of a lack of understanding, a lack of training - I think that still occurs. I don't do a ton of medical education. I'm getting more and more into it, especially when it comes to areas around nutrition. But that's what I'm trying to avoid in the next generation of healthcare providers and even actually a lot of our community collaborators, teachers, and stuff like that. To get away from that. This is not a simple issue, so don't share advice because sometimes that advice can be damaging or could be wrong. You know, good lord how much I hear about carbs on a weekly basis. And not the carbs I like to talk about, which is around dessert and Carolina Gold rice and all these other food stuff. But it tends to be around sort of demonizing certain foods and just really bad messages that still are floating around out there. Let's dive in a little deeper about what you refer to as toxic diet culture that was especially pronounced in previous generations. What does that mean? Does it affect standards for what the ideal body looks like? What about messages about how much control you have over that yourself, and how responsible you are for your weight? How your self-image should be influenced by how you look? But tell us more about what you mean by that. We wanted this to be a book that didn't necessarily dwell on weight so much, but actually one of the first chapters is to say let's cover how complex weight really is. We know that 50% or more of someone's weight is heavily, heavily influenced by their genetics. Where they live, you know. The amount that our lifestyle affects that is much, much smaller. It's the minority of what goes into our body size. And even that, our habits are so influenced by the world around us. But it's, you know, trying to get people to understand that, hey, body sizes are just different. I love this picture from the Olympics and it was a medalist in gymnastics- it was Simone Biles; you know, the huge media personality of Ilona Maher who is a bronze medalist in rugby; and then one of the women's basketball players. You're talking 4'9", 5'10" and pure muscle and six foot seven, all people at the top of their game. And not only different heights, different body types. And, you know, body type is a hard thing to talk about because there's not standard body types. We're all just built differently. And starting that message at a young age that people are just oftentimes built differently. There's very little control that we have over our weight. And even though there are things that we can do about weight, what you can do is you can focus on your habits for health. And that has just gotten lost. We talk about in the book the, we call it veiled weight talk, and it's basically where you're just substituting the word health for the word weight. And kids pick up on that. They know when their parents and others are talking about weight. And so, a really big thing we want to accomplish is like, Hey, you know, eating for health is important. Being active for health is important. In my world, and I did one part of my early research in this, and we always try to have that message as there's so much more to health than weight. In our medical world right now, our primary outcome on these lifestyle changes that people are making is weight. You mentioned genetics as a contributing factor to who is affected by the problem. Tell me how you look at the food environment out there that people are exposed to now, and things like food marketing and the processing of foods. The availability of all these foods that are contributing to obesity and things. And the reason I ask is, you know, there was a time in our country when the prevalence of childhood obesity was probably close to zero. And there are plenty of countries around the world where that's still the case. But now in many countries there's large amounts of childhood obesity. And it's not as if the genetics have changed. When people move from other countries to the United States, their weight tends to go up. Their genes obviously don't change. There's something pretty toxic about the food environment that's driving this. So, thinking about things that way, does that help parents by shifting some of the blame from them and their children to an environment that they might be able to manage in some way? Absolutely. Because parents…they blame themselves oftentimes. You know, how did I let this happen? What did I do to sort of cause it happen and it's not. So, we do try to shift that of looking at ourselves as the reason blame. But you can kind of look at the - and I'm just going to focus on nutrition as the focus - the broader food environment and how that impacts. We tend to get a lot of buy-in or understanding when you talk about how they are trying to market to kids. And so, for any parent, all you have to do is bring up the checkout line at a grocery store, you know? And all the things that are at the kids' level that is just made to make your life as a parent hard when you're trying to feed your kids well-balanced regular meals but you're just kind of constantly walking through this landmine. It's the same thing with electronics and social media. There are so many things that they have a lot more money than you do to market to you than you do to protect yourself against it. And it absolutely influences it. And the way I talk about this is really when it comes down to snack foods, and using the parenting language that snacks get you between long periods of time between meals, but that got co-opted by companies marketing snack foods. And when you see food, smell food or hear ...
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E297: Behind the Scenes of Diners, Drive-ins and Dives
Apr 1400:25:09Tap to summarizeIt's the story of a guy on a road trip across the country, checking out America's classic greasy spoons. And the adventure is all about finding the restaurant owners and creative cooks serving up the very best of down-home style food. That's the premise of the hit series Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives starring everyman chef Guy Fieri. Today we're going to talk with the show's creator, two-time Emmy Award winning food journalist and executive producer David Page. Interview Transcript David, I can't wait to talk to you about the show. But before we dive in and talk about the specifics, how long did the show run and how many episodes were done? My impression it's still on and it's always been there. Yes. I created it in 2006, 2007. I did the first 11 seasons and moved on. And funny story, in the first month of the show we had a couple of strong initial outings. And everyone was all excited thinking maybe this will be a hit. A food network executive called me up to tamp down my expectations and said, look, this is all fine and dandy, but this thing isn't gonna go more than a season or two. There's just not that many restaurants. And you know, to quote the great screenwriter William Goldman whose rule of Hollywood is 'no one knows anything.' I did 11 seasons. It's now in season 40 or something, I think. Holy cow. I could just think of enough restaurants around me to do a couple of seasons worth. So, tell us the origin story. How did Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives come about? Well, I had left a career in network news and moved to the Twin Cities because I thought I wanted to be in business for a public corporation. And I took a job as the Senior Vice president at a home shopping channel, and I was all excited, and I hated it. It was just horrible. I did not want to sell second rate gold jewelry to shut ins. So, I quit, and I opened a production company and began to starve because I wasn't selling anything. Then I called Al Roker, who has a production company and who had technically worked for me, although stars don't work for executive producers in the real world. When I was the co-producer of the Weekend Editions of the Today Show. Al was on the weekend show at the time. He hadn't yet moved up to the big show. And I said, hey, Al, I'm starving. You got any work you could throw me? And he said, yeah, I'm doing a lot of stuff for the Food Network. I'll subcontract some of it to you. Which was good for both of us. I got to work, and Al got to take a cut without doing anything. So, that hooked me up with the Food Network. I started working for them and Al and I both knew I wasn't gonna get rich doing a pass-through deal, so I started pitching them directly. And I was getting nowhere. There was this very nice development exec who would talk to me on the phone. And everything I proposed she would shoot down. And one day I'm on the phone with her and we're going through a pitch call and I'm proposing this and proposing that, and she's saying, no, no, no. Finally, the Food Network had asked Al to do a documentary on diners and the history of diners and such. And Al had subcontracted it to me. So, this development exec had a frustration and I think pity for me and finally said to me on this call, don't you have another thing on diners? And I immediately, I said, oh, absolutely. I'm developing a show called Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. And I told her all about it. And this was like late on a Thursday or Friday afternoon. And she said, 'you know, that sounds good. We have a development meeting Tuesday. Get me a writeup on Monday.' And I got off the phone elated because it was the first time she'd expressed interest in anything. But also, I'd kind of put myself in a jam because I was not developing a show called that. I had literally pulled the title out of thin air. Or a body part, depending upon how scatological you want to get. And that gave me the weekend to try to put a pitch together. So, this was in the old days when you didn't email people, you called them. I did as much research as I could, and I started calling restaurants around the country. And on Monday I sent her a pitch for a one-hour special with, I think, it had seven restaurants in it. And, they had their meeting on Tuesday and here here's, you know, you get lucky. Guy Fieri had just won their second Food Network Star competition. Back then they naively believed that that contest was gonna generate them a new star every year. Someone who would be a big deal for it. In fact, Guy is the only one who ever made it and, when I'm drunk and immodest, I take a lot of credit for having taught him how to make it. But he has immense natural talent. Anyway, they wanted to make Guy a star. And they were trying to get a primetime show for him. And big deal, major league production companies had been asked to come up with proposals, which had not come back yet. They figured, what the hell, let's do a special with Guy just to keep on the air so people wouldn't forget about him. So, they picked up this special from me. It was gonna be a one-shot deal. We did it. I think they were kind of stunned by how well it did. And then something really great happened for me. They looked at the proposals from the big boys and didn't like them. And they were kind of stuck. They were desperate to get Guy on the air in prime time. So, they figured, well, you know, let's pick up a very short season of this thing. And they bought, I don't know if it was eight or 10 episodes, but they committed to that. And very quickly, we became a hit and off we went. It's an amazing story. So many people have seen so many episodes of that show. But nobody would have any idea that's how it got started. It's wonderful to hear about that. Once you got going and got your feet on the ground with this, what were you hoping to accomplish through this show? Well, look, TV's about storytelling. I've been a storyteller, hell, for 50 some odd years now as a mostly broadcast journalist. You learn, if you're any good, that the best stories come from and are about people. I conceive this not as a food show, but as an opportunity for the viewer to meet really cool, passionate people doing something they cared about. You know, independent restaurant owners make a buck 3.80 at best. They're passionate about making good food. If they're any good. They're often trying to keep family legacies alive. And more than anything else to succeed in the food biz you gotta wanna serve people. You gotta wanna make people happy. So, I went out to document the stories of some of the coolest people in America. Now, it was in the food world, which is a world of shared experience. We all eat. Most of us have favorite foods. Most of our favorite foods are the kinds of foods that I featured on Diners. TV is about one thing: hanging out with someone you want to hang out with. That's why Tom Selleck remains a star; whatever crappy TV show you put him in. That's why for your older audience, Tyne Daly kept getting series after series, or James Garner. There are just people you want to hang out with and that's all television is. Guy is someone people want to hang out with. His personality comes through the screen in a particular way. And you know, I said earlier, frankly or implied, that I taught him a lot about how to make TV. I did, but that's because at heart, he is the most naturally talented performer I've ever worked with in 50 years in the business. And was brilliantly able to soak up anything he learned along the way. I mean, it's like a chef. If you're a good chef, a better chef can make you better. But if you're not a good chef, you'll never be a good chef. To be good on TV, you have to have it. I can't define IT, but to quote the Supreme Court justice about pornography, I know it when I see it. And Guy has IT. So basically, this show put together people you wanted to hang out with and brought them into your living room or your bedroom or whatever room you watch in. The show is very compelling and you're right, you get to know the chefs, the restaurant owners in these little places, and there's something wonderfully wholesome about it. It's so good that you came up with this idea. You know, I was reminded as you were talking about a conversation you and I had when we first got to know each other by Zoom a few weeks ago. And I was mentioning I was going to do a self-guided drive called the Blues Triangle Tour. Starting in Memphis going down to Tupelo, over to Mussell Shoals, ending up in Nashville. And immediately you started telling me about places I needed to go. You said, oh, there's this wonderful place in Memphis. It's down an alley and down these stairs. Yeah, the rendezvous. Yes. They have the best Memphis dry rub ribs. I thought, oh my God, I'm, I can't tell you how grateful I am for that recommendation. Well, did you go? I'm going plan my trip around that. And then as I was reading your book, Food Americana, which we've discussed in a separate podcast, you mentioned the hot wings in Nashville. You mentioned former Mayor of Nashville, Bill Purcell, who was an inspiration for the hot wing festival they have there. Well, I happen to know him. And because our professional paths intersected around some health and wellness things, and he's a wonderful guy. So, you inspire me to get back in touch with him. You know, I wrote to him, I said, I'm going to be in Nashville. Let's go out for some hot wings. You know, at the place where they were invented. How wonderful is all this? Well, the story behind them is phenomenal. Apparently, the guy, Prince I guess was his last name... he was not a real faithful husband or boyfriend. I'm not sure if he ...
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E296: The Story of Food Americana
Apr 800:26:29Tap to summarizeIf someone asked you about French, Korean, or Thai food, you could probably name some signature flavors and dishes. I certainly can. Well, what about American food? What stands out for you there and what IS it, really? Today we're going to dig into the roots of American cuisine with food journalist David Page, who initially was an investigative journalist but turned his attention to food. And he's author of a book called Food Americana: The Remarkable People and Incredible Stories Behind America's Favorite Dishes. But you might also know David's work from television. He was executive producer on the hit series Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives for 11 years. He has two Emmy awards and has his own podcast series, which is excellent, called Culinary Characters Unlocked. Interview Transcript So, here's the book: Food Americana. It's really a wonderful read and, you know, every case study you go through in the book, like pizza, Chinese food, Mexican food, every one is completely fascinating. I'd love to dive in and hear more about your thoughts about how all this unfolded. So, is there such a thing as American cuisine and how did you come to write this book, Food Americana? Well, the short answer is yes, there's American Cuisine. I came to write it out of personal experience. I became really deeply interested in food when I was posted overseas for NBC News as a producer and traveling from country to country, pre-Internet. And not ever having expected to leave America. I mean, they called me up one day and said, Hey, you wanna move to England? And from there I moved to Germany and then Budapest, Hungary. I was remarkably unprepared for all of the places I was being sent. And I kind of had a study pretty quickly. And I found that one of the best ways to understand a country or culture was through its food. You know, why do they eat so much wild boar in Tuscany? Well, because it was historically a poor region. And if you wanted to eat, you had to kill something. And what you were most likely to find that you could kill was a wild boar. When you go to Strasburg in France, why are you eating Germanic choucroute, which is, you know, pork on top of sauerkraut. Well, that reveals to you that that area went back and forth in terms of which country owned it forever. And that really awakened in me a deep interest in food. When I got back to the States, I eventually ended up creating Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. And that got me deep into American food, if you will. And, more and more over time, I stockpiled stories and interests and decided as all TV producers do eventually, whether they actually act on it or not. Everyone thinks it's easy to write TV and it's hard to write a book. Those of us who are TV producers carry a chip on our shoulder because frankly, it's harder to write for television. You can't just sit down and type out whatever you want to type out. You've got to figure out the words that integrate with the pictures and that can move the pictures forward. But, you know, we all think we have a book in us, and I said, what interests me? And it was this. And I dived in; thoroughly enjoyed the process. To answer the other half of the question, I came to the conclusion looking at everything that I had put on Diners, looking at every place that I liked eating in various towns, there was a cuisine. It was something we constructed, much like we constructed American democracy out of other countries and cultures. And you know, when you go to a Chinese restaurant in America, all of us have gone with that real bore who looks up and says, this isn't authentic Chinese food. Well, no, it's not authentic Chinese food. It is authentic Chinese American food. Just as, with the exception of something called polpette, which are very small round meatballs, there are no meatballs as we know them in Italy. When the poorest of the poor left Southern Italy to come to the United States in the 1800s, to their shock when they got here, they found out that being poor here was different than being poor there, where even pasta was considered a luxury item and only enjoyed on a Sunday, if ever. Here, poor people could afford meat. And that is what created Italian American cuisine, which is to a great extent based on abbondanza, you know, a whole lot of everything. I live in New Jersey where red sauce cooking means open your belt and, you know, strap in for a few hours of absolute gluttony. And we've done that with bagels from Poland. In Poland, they weren't quite what they are here. But they were similar, and they were sold by Jewish peddlers in the streets on long sticks. Because they had holes in the middle, you could, you could stack 'em on the sticks and young kids would walk around the town square shouting in polish. I don't know the actual words but shouting something that translated as bagels and lemonade. When Jewish immigrants arrived in the United States, packed into the Lower East side into tenements, they did what they knew how to do. And bakers started making bagels which then became far more than a Jewish food. They became a New York food. And then in horribly awful incarnations, they became an American food. I would argue it's still hard to get a decent bagel outside of New York for any number of reasons, but bagels are American cuisine now. They're not the bagels per se that were eaten in Poland. But there's something from another country that we took and made into our own. And by the way, the cuisine continues to evolve. It now includes Vietnamese banh mi. As more and more cuisines are sampled here, they're modified by the lack of availability of original ingredients for the immigrants who are here who have to look for alternatives. And they're modified to suit broader tastes. You know, the original spices of much of Mexican cuisine... and when I say Mexican cuisine, it was basically the food of the Nortenos, Northern Mexico, because as with all countries, Mexico is a combination of cuisines based on regionality. But, when Americans started sampling, quote, Mexican cuisine, unquote, much of it was too hot for us. For the most part, those people who had lived in what was Mexico who were now living in America after the Mexican American war, when America seized half of Mexico. Those who opened restaurants realize that, you know, if you want a broader clientele, you better tone things down. That's the Americanization of another culture's food, and that is American cuisine. I'm hoping you wouldn't mind taking a little detour and talk about how magical it is to connect with a culture through food and through the people you meet in that context. You and I were talking before we started recording and you mentioned a trip you made to Spain and how wonderful this particular connection was. And I was thinking about some things I've done recently that have connected me with people and their history through their food. And there's something very magical about that. But tell us about your trip to Spain because I thought it was very interesting. My wife and I went to Spain a few years ago, and I had worked in Spain a fair amount when I was overseas as a journalist. But I'd never really had the opportunity to do much vacation in Spain. And I can't remember if it was Madrid or Valencia, it may have been Valencia. But we signed up for a half day cooking course. And we showed up and it was taught by somebody's grandmother. I made the mistake of trying to be polite and use my leftover high school Spanish, and I was the only one who in the class who did. So, she decided I was fluent, which I'm not. But she and I had a lengthy conversation during the class, which consisted of her saying things I did not understand in me nodding my head and saying, si. But it was just a remarkably wonderful experience to have my hands on and in and be learning about another culture. You know, one of the things I realized when I first started traveling much of the world for NBC and again, I had never expected to be sent overseas, was that there are a million ways to do things. You know, this is going to sound kind of gross, but until you go overseas and you realize there are different shapes to toilets, you know, people look at the same problem and figure it out in slightly different ways. You learn that there are multiple ways to approach things, to address things, to do things. And first of all, the cooking in Spain is extraordinary. And it's an underappreciated cuisine here in the United States. But, you know, we're in cooking class making a Spanish tortilla, which is not a Mexican tortilla. Mexican tortilla obviously is a disc of dough, either corn or wheat, depending upon the region. A tortilla in Spain is an omelet, but more than an omelet, it's kinda like a frittata. It's a very thick, almost spongy, egg-based product with potatoes in it. And making that and learning how to make that and the way that this teacher had clearly been making it, that she had learned from her mother, who had learned from her mother. You know, you turn it upside down to get it out of the dish. It was just a wonderful experience. And look, I've been fortunate enough to have that experience in any number of countries. This one, wasn't terribly culinary, but I was in Moscow in a bar frequented by locals. And this was under the Soviet Union; it was a long time ago. But they had the bars for Westerners where they took dollars and served the good vodka, which Russians could not get by the way. I mean, there was no Stoli for Russians. But we were in this real low rent bar and a guy sat down next to me with Asian features. And through, kind of, hand signals and some assistance from I guess one of the NBC translators or something, we exchanged life stories. It turned out he was visiting from Siberia to do som...
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E295: Food engineering is fueling preventable disease
Apr 200:47:41Tap to summarizeTranscript Paper: Gearhardt AN, Brownell KD, Brandt AM. From Tobacco to Ultraprocessed Food: How Industry Engineering Fuels the Epidemic of Preventable Disease. Milbank Q. 2026;104(1):0202.https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0009.70066 https://www.milbank.org/quarterly/articles/from-tobacco-to-ultraprocessed-food-how-industry-engineering-fuels-the-epidemic-of-preventable-disease/ Ashley, let's talk a little bit about, just set the stage for what this paper was all about, and since it was your brainchild, you approached Allan and me about being involved. Tell us what you set out to do and why you thought these issues were worth digging into. Ashley - You know, I've just been so struck that when we think of cigarettes, they were something that's so common, so normal that we kind of think, oh, they've always just sort of been there. But truly, they're just taking a natural plant from the ground and through advancements and corporate engineering and technology and knowhow, they took a poisonous plant and made it into the most deadly and addictive drug in human history. And yet that was, you know, just accompanied by tons of debate. It didn't look like other addictive substances. And I just really felt like, man, we're reliving this history right now when it comes to how we've altered our food supply. I wanted to really bring you all together and see if we could really lay that story out of the, the parallels of these two public health crises. We'll get in a minute into the issue of what you discovered, but tell us what you covered, what the paper was meant to do. Ashley - The paper really goes back from how you take the tobacco plant in the field, or the corn in the field, and walks essentially through all the kind of levers that are being pulled to transform it in very specific ways. And through specific technologies and corporate practices that are being shared by modern cigarettes and ultra processed foods. These products maybe look harmless on their face initially, or don't look like they're just maybe pleasurable or craveable. But truly, I would argue that they've crossed thresholds into things that are addictive and clearly damaging many people's lives. Okay, so several decades ago, I don't know who came up with a term, but there was a lot of discussion about similarities between tobacco industry behavior and food industry behavior. And the press started publishing cover pieces that would say food is the next tobacco. And it was a term that the food industry really didn't like, and they don't want that comparison at all. It'll be interesting to see whether they deserve it. You clearly made that connection in this paper. Allan, let's turn to you. Oh my God. I mean, we could do a 15-hour podcast and not cover the history of the tobacco industry. There's so much to say, enough that you wrote a massive book about it. But give an overall sense, if you will, of the kind of tactics and morality of that industry. Allan - Well, as Ashley already mentioned, early in the 20th Century we wouldn't really be thinking much of cigarettes, and they were just a very peripheral sales consumer item. And over the course of the 20th Century, we came to a point in the middle of the century of the 1970s, and '80s where about half of all American adults were smoking cigarettes regularly. I wanted to understand that. How do you take something that's at the very margin of the economy and culture and make it a dominant consumer force? And I think in that way, we have certain parallels to ultra processed foods. But then there were the questions, how do you make it so popular? Is it dangerous to use? Is it addictive? Does it cause disease? And how do you resist regulation and other public health approaches to try to keep people smoking? And I found a lot of evidence in each of those areas, both of how the industry acted. And when you say, you know, it's ultra processed food like cigarettes, we're learning a lot about ultra processed foods. But we know a ton about what the industry did to make the 20th Century what I call the Cigarette Century. And we have seen really important declines in smoking in the last 30-40 years. It's a remarkable public health effort. But at the same time, the industry worked incredibly hard and, in some ways brilliantly, to maintain the popularity of their product. And underlying all this is the idea that nicotine is highly addictive. And the industry came to understand that certainly before consumers did. And as a result, they could engineer, manage, manipulate the addictive character of a product that kills. I think looking for parallels, both in terms of how the industry did it and how perhaps public health law regulation can undo it, is the critical aspect of what we've been working on together. Okay. So, the tobacco industry did more than just take a plant, dry it out, chop it up, and roll it up in some paper. Then people might be driving whatever natural pleasure there would be from that product. But they did more, didn't they? Allan - Yes. And you talked about nicotine in particular. So how manipulated was this industrial process and was it designed to create such high levels of addiction? Allan - Well, for a long time we couldn't be sure about that. And we have learned that the industry had learned sophisticated techniques of industrial production of cigarettes. So, it wasn't like just chopping up tobacco and putting it in paper. You know, they added many additives. They added liquids. They dried it out, they put it in long strips of tobacco for cutting and packaging. And they had innovated the technologies, instead of human beings rolling cigarettes, they were able through machinery and technology to produce hundreds of thousands of cigarettes a day. And then they had to figure out how do we sell this tremendous volume of cigarettes in order to make our industry truly lucrative. So, there were those aspects. And certainly by the middle of the 20th Century, many people realize that - I smoke regularly and I crave my next cigarette and I'm smoking a pack a day, sometimes two packs a day. And people would ask, well, is it a habit? Is it habituating? Is it addictive? And as the science of addiction really grew in the middle of the 20th Century, we began to realize it had all the characteristics of addiction. But we really didn't know exactly what the companies were doing. And what we did learn in the '80s and '90s is that the companies had a precise ability to manage the nicotine in their product. And they did, so that even as they put filters on and they claimed they had safer cigarettes, they were also producing increasingly addictive cigarettes where we have craving, we have withdrawal, we have tolerance. The basic categories, that structure, how we understand addiction. Okay. We'll dive into some of those in a little more detail, but thanks for that background. Ashley, people kind of get it that drugs can be addictive and they know that alcohol can be addictive. They know that cigarettes can. But what about food? Ashley - Yes, so I think one of the things that when I take a step back, is that the reward and motivation system that alcoholic beverages, cigarettes can start to hijack and drive towards compulsive problematic use, that was laid down in the brain to make sure we were getting enough food. It's really sensitive to food reward, energy density. But the thing is you actually consume nicotine probably most days. Nicotine is actually in a lot of plants like tomato and eggplant, but nobody's getting addicted to the chemical in that delivery vehicle. I would argue the same thing's happening. When we look at our research nobody's getting addicted to minimally processed foods like bananas and broccoli, and salmon filets. It's when you're able to process and titrate and hedonically engineer food reward in a way that mimics the intensity and the sensory appeal and the spikes and crashes and the craveability of something like cigarettes, that you start to see people losing control. And when I read Allan's book, my husband was watching over my shoulder. And he's like, you know, if you highlight every single sentence, it's not gonna help you because you've highlighted the whole book. And reading what Allan laid out about how each wave of cigarette addiction, it wasn't because we suddenly discovered what nicotine was, it's because the industry got better at manipulating engineering, designing, flooding the market with it. And then health washing it, so people didn't really understand what they were getting into. And to me, that is what we've done to our food supply. And the result of that has been the astronomical increases in diet related disease and health concerns. Tell us about the concept of ultra processed food and how that fits in. Ashley - Yes. Yeah, that's a great question. So, ultra processed food is a concept that actually came out at about the same time as the Yale Food Addiction Scale, that Kelly and I published together, about how to operationalize who might be showing signs of addiction and certain foods. Carlos Monteiro from Brazil was noticing that his grocery store was starting to be flooded by foods that you could not make in your home kitchen. I have exactly no idea how to make a double stuffed Oreo or a flaming hot Cheeto, or a Cherry Coca-Cola. And as these products that were industrially created with additives and flavor enhancers that are kind of biologically novel, that's when the disease risk started to go up. And so, these foods are so fundamentally changed in they're kind of most archetypa...
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Liberatory Agriculture in Afterlives of the Plantation
Mar 2600:27:34Tap to summarizeIn 1881, African American educator and political leader Booker T. Washington founded Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama. The school's mission was to provide practical education and vocational training in fields such as agriculture and mechanics to African Americans in the post-Reconstruction South. Tuskegee ultimately became a world-renowned agricultural and industrial school for African Americans – and actually for all people. Today, we're speaking with Duke University's Jarvis McInnis about his award-winning book Afterlives of the Plantation: Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South. Interview Transcript Jarvis, I cannot tell you how much I appreciate this book. And hopefully we'll make a link to the Franklin Humanities gathering (https://youtu.be/rfSy1lWWOwA?si=dVcWH3xDBuBStEEc) that we had for your book launch. As I said at that time, and I'll say it right now, this book resonated with me so deeply because of my rural upbringing. My experience as a son, a grandson of farmers and agricultural workers. And someone who grew up in the 4-H Club down South. Hopefully we will get to some of those topics as we go through. So, let's start off with a real basic idea. Could you give our readers an overview of what the book is? And also, about what you mean by the Afterlives of the Plantation. Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much for that question, Norbert. The book is an effort to think about the cultural and intellectual and political ties between Southern African Americans and Afro-Caribbean people in the late 19th to early 20th Century as they were responding to the legacies of slavery, right? This is the period after emancipation, and across the hemisphere. And so, I'm really interested in the way that they are sharing ideas as they are confronting the new modes of racial oppression that emerged in slavery's aftermath. In the United States, you have Jim Crow, right? Segregation, and other forms of violence and dispossession like lynching and land dispossession and so forth and so on. And then in the Caribbean, in Latin America, you have institutions like the European colonialism, and US imperialism, right? And so that is the afterlife of slavery. They're emancipated, but it's not a period of full citizenship, right? Of full access to the rights and privileges of citizenship. And so in telling that story, I center Booker T. Washington's school, the Tuskegee Institute, which was founded on the site of an abandoned and burned cotton plantation in Alabama in 1881. And this is getting at the second part of your question. I became really fascinated by what it meant to establish a school, to establish a future-oriented institution, that's committed to uplifting Black people. To establish that on the site, on the ruins of a burned plantation. And, in some ways, I became curious about that as an undergraduate student because I'm a graduate of Tougaloo College, in Tougaloo, Mississippi, which is a historically black college much like Tuskegee. And much like Tuskegee, Tougaloo was also founded on the site of a former cotton plantation. And I saw that this idea, or this practice, this logic of transforming these sites of violence into something that is more liberatory and more emancipatory was really a strategy that Black people used throughout the US South and throughout the Caribbean. Throughout much of the Americas where slavery and the plantation had existed. I placed Tuskegee, and particularly its approach to agriculture, at the center of that story to demonstrate how an institution rooted in the US South is not backward. It's not pre-modern. That's firmly rural, but that rurality... they're taking the knowledge that's cultivated there and disseminating it to other Black people in other parts of the world to aid in their struggles toward freedom and citizenship. I think this is an important point to make. And I know we've had conversations about this as you were developing the book. And I'll just say again, out of my rural Southern agricultural background, I often found a sense that people thought, oh, well you must be backward. Oh, you must come from this... and that's not a good thing. I can only imagine that people of this time must have thought, well, shouldn't people want to move away from agriculture? Why would you want to be invested in this thing that was a part of former enslavement? How do you think about this in light of this notion of agrarian futures? You would think people would want to move away from that. What is your understanding of sort of this move towards agriculture and seeing this as something for the future and even modern. That's such a great question. And I, you know, I have to say that I came to agriculture relatively late in the project. I was initially most interested in what Tuskegee was doing with Black aesthetics: with photography and with music and with literature. I'm a literary scholar after all. But as I sat with Tuskegee's aesthetic output, I realized the significance of agriculture within that. And as I began to explore the ways that Tuskegee was being disseminated to other parts of the Black world, to places like Haiti, to places like Puerto Rico. And as they were admitting students from those particular colonies at that time. Now some of them are countries; Puerto Rico is still a territory. But I realized that what other Black people, both in the US South and abroad, were interested in was its agrarian vision. Was the work, the research that someone like George Washington Carver was doing at Tuskegee and as a mode of self-help. And so I really had to wrestle with that because it was outside of how I had conceived of agriculture. And in many ways, writing this book transformed my own understanding of what the modern was. And, you know, forced me to, or perhaps invited me, to think about agriculture to understand it as intellectual. To understand it certainly as a skill, in all of these ways that I had not really given much thought to it previously. But as I sat with George Washington Carver's bulletins. As I sat with Tuskegee's extension initiatives. As I sat with the knowledge that they were producing, the various print cultural artifacts, the newspapers. And again, the agricultural bulletins and so forth and so on. I realized, wait a minute. This is a site of knowledge production, and its modern up-to-date knowledge production that actually still has a lot of sound basis that can be used in contemporary agriculture to this very day. And so, it radically transformed my understanding of Tuskegee, of a figure like Booker T. Washington. who as we know, is a much-maligned figure in Black studies and American studies because of his conservative politics. But agriculture gave me another way into that institution and to think about, again, the significance of the cultural and intellectual contributions of the US South at this particular period. Thank you for that. I want to talk about a particular section of the text that has to do with both the agricultural philosophy, but also this idea of sharing information, and you've made some reference to it. So, I grew up, as I mentioned, going and being a part of the 4-H program, which was a part of the Cooperative Extension System. And Tuskegee, in many ways, helped form and helped inform what extension would look like. Which ultimately became a thing, federally, in 1914. But I want to read this one passage from your text, and you say: "In 1897, the state of Alabama passed legislation allocating $1,500 to establish an agricultural experiment station on campus. The station also known as the Experiment Plot." And plot is something you come back to. And I would love to hear your thoughts about this garden plot and the Experiment Plot and just the metaphor of plot throughout your text. "But the station also known as the Experiment Plot, was managed by George Washington Carver. Washington insisted that the experiment station ' should not be used for scientific experiments of interest only to experts. Should deal with the fundamental problems with which the Negro Farmers of Alabama were daily confronted.' The results of Carver's experiments were thus published in bulletins that were then distributed among farmers throughout Alabama and the broader US South." And then you go on and talking about the different courses that were made available. But I wanna get this one quote from the Tuskegee student. And you said the Tuskegee student observed: 'Tuskegee Institute is primarily a school for the masses of our people. Both old and young and in all degrees of development.' I mean, Tuskegee was doing something that other land grant institutions would eventually take on, is this idea of sharing knowledge and using this. As a means of uplift and I would say even citizen building. What are your thoughts about that sort of perspective? Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to try to wrap all of those questions up into one response. We'll see how successful I am. I know I gave you a lot. Well, one of the things that I wanted to say, that I did not get a chance to say in my response to your previous question is that, you know, the majority of African Americans lived in the South in this particular period. And many of them viewed agriculture as a viable future. And that was one of the aspects of, you know, doing research on this book that was transformative for me. Was understanding that they did not hold this same necessarily, sort of, denigrating attitudes toward agriculture. In part because the United States was largely agricultural writ large, right? ...
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E293: From Truffles to Trash - Lessons on Food Waste Prevention
Mar 1900:23:19Tap to summarizeOver the last several years, I have been thinking about food waste and food loss a lot. It's been a topic that we've seen in many spaces in the US and around the world. And it's interesting to compare how the US handles food waste with other countries. To that end, we will learn more about how Belgium addresses food waste in a conversation with an anthropologist and journalist, Dr. Kelly Alexander from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her book, Truffles and Trash: Recirculating Food in a Social Welfare State, explores community driven solutions and policy around food waste. And Belgium's capital city of Brussells. Interview Transcript Let's start with your research in Brussels at a high end truffle restaurant... but you ended up in food banks and social restaurants and community kitchens. Tell us a little bit about the evolution. How did this project evolve to finding yourself in these new places? Yeah, it's a, a strange trajectory. I did not start out to be a food waste researcher. But how it started and how it's going, you know, that meme from 2018? This is like what I love to talk about when I talk to my food study students, because I started out, as a researcher, very interested in the development of haut cuisine. I had worked in a lot of restaurants. I had worked as a journalist for several food magazines. And the question that really animated me was how a truffle, this little spore on a fungus, has become one of the world's most expensive ingredients. And so I was doing ethnographic research in the kitchen of a Michelin starred truffle restaurant. And there is not that many of those, and one of them happens to be in Brussels, Belgium. And I'm in the kitchen there and I'm working on the line. And I usually have to specify to my students like it wasn't a stunt. Like you can't write to a Michelin star restaurant and say, 'Hey, can I come on in and work in your kitchen?' I had a lot of credentials as a journalist and as a chef first. What I did have going for me is that I was in a funded doctoral dissertation program, actually the anthropology program at Duke. So, I had funding to go and do that research in this kitchen. And there's probably no restaurant in the world, no matter how high end, that is not willing to accept some free labor. So, I'm working in that kitchen. I'm working with fantastic chefs. And what happens when you work at a super high-end restaurant is that is aesthetics are valued above all else. The food has to be really, really beautiful. And this restaurant charges extraordinarily. It's called La Truffe Noire. It's still in Brussels now. It's a truffle restaurant. The black truffle. Super high prices for very, very refined food. And in order to do that, a large part of my job was brushing priceless truffles, throwing away an unbelievable amount of very beautiful produce that would otherwise have been exceptionally valued in other contexts. And I come from a background - my grandmother was a Russian Jewish woman. She grew up in Brooklyn. She moved to Atlanta, Georgia after World War II. She taught me to cook, and she never threw anything away. And when I say that to people, I think they're like, oh yeah, I have a grandmother like that. But she really never threw anything away, like can of grease under the sink. The whole thing. Every little butt of a vegetable was saved for stock for later. And I was throwing away so much good food working in La Truffe Noire just making beautiful garnishes and vegetable carvings and things like that, that I started following the food waste around the city. I was wondering where all of this went. And I actually asked the chef in the restaurant, you know, we throw away so much food, would it be possible to give some of it to people who could really use it? And his response really interested me and changed the whole course of my research because he said, I am really willing to do that. However, I pay chefs to cook food and not to give it away. So, if somebody was willing to come here and pick it up, I'd happily give it to him. But I'm not going to pay people to go and do that. And I thought, well, I wonder what else is going on in this city in terms of this. Like where does all this food go? And I discovered I was doing this research at a fortuitous moment in the EU when the EU had just made this compulsory policy aimed at supermarkets. So, all large scale supermarkets across the EU were suddenly required to donate all edible but unsellable food. And the EU didn't give a lot of direction about how they could do that, and also didn't give the supermarkets any money. So, what happened as a result of that? Well, there were lots of local grassroots efforts communicating directly with supermarkets who were like, 'Hey, we're over here. We'll come pick up the food that you don't want to sell that's still good to eat. And we'll use it in our food banks and in our zero food waste popup restaurants.' And all the supermarkets had to do was get the food waste off their books. So, while I was there working in this truffle restaurant, all this other food waste activity was going on. And I discovered that's really what I wanted to be doing. I loved working as a chef, but I wanted to see what the possibilities were for recuperating food around the city. So, I changed. I changed everything I was doing pretty quickly. Oh, this is really fascinating. Thank you for sharing that. I know that the field of anthropology and other fields, you can start off on one project and discover that there's this whole new world that you didn't even realize until you started down the path. This is fascinating and I'm sure your advisor was thrilled to know that you wanted to change topic midstream. But it worked out. It worked out beautifully, it seems. It is true. I couldn't look away from the food waste to the point where I was taking pictures of the garbage can in the restaurant every day. And this big industrial garbage can filled with like priceless wild mushrooms. And a big part of my job is the restaurant made this dish. This is what changed my life. There's like a series of food journalists who talk about the dish that changed my life and what they're talking about is when you eat something super delicious and you have some kind of awakening, this is like the opposite of what happened to me. I am making this dish called Salad Stephanie. It's like a 40-euro salad that has a lobster tail in it and all these beautiful wild mushrooms, and it has eight spinach leaves. So, a big part of my job when I worked at La Truffe Noire was to hold up individual spinach leaves up to the light, and if they had any blemish or like a broken vein in them to throw it away. So, this is beautiful, this is like the best spinach that you could get. The best produce in all of Europe was coming to this restaurant and I was throwing it away. And I started taking photographs just to document all the food I was throwing away. And I couldn't look away. And actually my advisor, Dr. Anne Allison, in cultural anthropology at Duke, was really excited because I had been doing a project on aesthetics and now I was proposing a total change to do this much more political project about where food waste goes. So, she was like, yes, let us follow the food waste. This is so much more interesting. So that was kind of a nice nod that I was thinking in the right anthropological direction about food and value. Thank you. This is such an important uncovering that, you know, research isn't static. It's not linear. It takes deviations and it's in those deviations that you find the real truths. The real exciting things. Let's continue the conversation because I think there's so much more to uncover. In your book, Truffles and Trash, you describe a particular day of field work at a Brussels food pantry. It was a really powerful moment. And I will say, having worked at food pantries in different parts of the US, I recognize this story in a serious way. You mentioned that this moment turned into a tense moment around fish and pork. Can you describe this to our listeners and why did this experience stick with you? What did it teach you about the hidden social politics of food waste and redistribution? Yeah. I often frame, you know, I did this work back and forth to Brussels for about six years and certain moments just absolutely have stayed with me and haunted me in a lot of ways. And one of them was working at this food bank in a former hospital. So, there's a former hospital that had shut down. It was still like a hospital with rooms for sick people in a giant sick bay. And it had been turned into a kind of community residential center where people could rent rooms, they could use the kitchen to prepare their food. That had been the hospital's kitchen. And the bottom floor of it, which had been the whole emergency triage center, was turned into a thrice weekly food bank. So, I'm volunteering at this food bank and there's tons of food coming in from grocery stores. And this is Brussels in the summer. It's pretty hot outside. A lot of people go on vacation. There's a lot of expensive food coming in, including fish and pork, fresh fish and fresh pork. I am assigned to work on this station. The person who usually runs the station, who is my boss, is an older Vietnamese woman who's an immigrant herself to Brussels. And she is kind of giving me the ropes. And she has figured something out where she says, you know, we have to give equal things to equal people, right? And she's telling me this before anybody comes in the food bank. Yes, sure. We will give one to one to each person as the people are coming through the food bank. Brussels has a very high population of Moroccan immigrants, and this is d...
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The downstream effects of disasters on food supply chains
Mar 600:14:13Tap to summarizeIt seems like the frequency of weather-related disasters is increasing. Across the US we're seeing wildfires, tropical storms and hurricanes, extreme heat, extreme cold with snow or ice. And torrential rain leading to a loss of property, life, and livelihoods. What's more, similar extreme events are happening across the globe. These disasters all can have an impact on our food supply and the ability of people to access food. Today, we're speaking with environmental sustainability management expert, Betsy Albright, who is an associate professor of the practice at Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment. Betsy's research centers on how policies and decisions are made in response to weather related disasters. Interview Summary Betsy, I've been wanting to have you on the podcast for a while, so I'm excited to get you now. So, let's begin with the first broad question. I'd be really interested to learn a little bit more about your research to make sure that our listeners are up to date on it. And I know you really study disasters, but could you explain or expand on what that really means for our listeners? I'm an environmental social scientist who studies the human and social side of disasters. And I ask questions about how climate related disasters or climate driven disasters, or weather disasters affect communities and households. And how individuals perceive risks from disasters, how they're affected by disasters, how they learn from make changes and adapt after disasters. My work started with my dissertation in central Europe. I had a Fulbright in Hungary. But from then I've expanded and moved most of my work to the US context. And our research team and I have done work on flooding and wildfires in Colorado, hurricanes in North Carolina. And I'm also working on a study of the flows of disaster assistance funds from FEMA to communities. And all of this is with or through a lens of equity or inequities and thinking about that across the disaster cycle. This is really important, and I remember being at a conference with you and learning about your work. And I was struck by what happens after the disaster. And in particular what happens to availability of food. And I work with the food bank here in North Carolina. And one of the things I know is when there is a disaster, like when Helene hit Asheville, there are real challenges in getting food out to people. Does your work touch on those topics as well? Yes. I would not say that our work centers on food, but food definitely intersects across all phases of the disaster cycle from preparing for disaster, experiencing disaster, the immediate response- that food bank getting food out- to long term recovery and thinking about risk mitigation. And we can think about that, you know, through a number of different lenses. Both on the food access side, but also on the food systems agriculture side as well. As I mentioned earlier, I take an equity lens on much of the work that we do. It's really important to recognize that disasters hit unevenly across society, across the landscape. Disproportionately they magnify social and environmental stressors that are already there. Communities with limited access to wealth, limited access to food, who are underserved, rural communities, racialized communities, often experience greater impacts from disasters. Disasters occur on top of histories of disenfranchisement. For example, centuries of marginalization of the minoritized Romani peoples of Central Europe they've seen great impacts from flooding. And in North Carolina, Black and African American communities whose ancestors were enslaved and suffered land loss through racist systems of who gets access to loans, access to land ownership. And because of these systems and processes, communities, families, individuals may live on marginal lands, may not own their lands. Their lands may be more prone to flood risk. May be underserved. Their housing may be more at risk. They may rent and not own. May have less agency and resources to repair their homes. And may have less trust in government and government systems. So really thinking about all of that, and then piling on disasters over these centuries of marginalization, disenfranchisement, underinvestment is really critical when trying to disentangle all these processes and develop policy solutions. This is really fascinating work and so thank you for laying out the sort of reality of the experience of disasters where people who have been marginalized may have difficulty accessing resources or there may be some concerns about trust. Broadly, we're interested also in the food system, and I'd be interested to understand how, when disasters strike, do you see effects upon the food system or the food system responding to these disasters? Recognizing that some individuals have higher food stress, even without a disaster, they may have higher pollutant burden because they live next to a concentrated animal feed lot operation. They may have weaker infrastructure systems: electricity, transportation, because of disinvestment. And so, when a disaster strikes, pollution loads may increase, access to food becomes even more of a challenge. Food stress increases. For example, in North Carolina, across the Southeast and further in the United States, Latino migrant farm workers face higher risks during hurricanes and floodings because of barriers, like limited access to emergency information and Spanish language barriers, fears about government intervention, fears tied to immigration status, housing conditions, lack of transportation. And these factors can delay access to food, evacuation, reduce preparedness, slow recovery. And yes, it's a challenge to really think then hard about what policy solutions make sense. That does make me also appreciate when we think about some of the folks involved in the food system, that the disruption that a disaster can bring will also mean a loss of employment or opportunities to continue earning income. And that seems to be a sort of a knock-on effect of these disasters. It's not just the immediate weather event. It's all of the other things that follow afterwards. Yes. And so when thinking about policy solutions, I really think it's critical to address these inequities even outside of the disaster cycle, or outside of the framing of disasters. And can we think about and develop ways, for example, to do reduce the risks of concentrated animal feedlot operations in North Carolina. Other ways for more resilient and sustainable and local ways of farming that minimize environmental risks, increase wealth, increase jobs, access to jobs. That then, when disaster strikes, are going to be more resilient because they're more resilient even before disasters. You know, I'd like to see greater investment in areas of food access, strengthening support for farm workers, encouraging development of local food hubs. Also thinking about making food access hubs more resilient to extreme weather events. Maybe elevating them, getting them all generators or solar microgrids. So that when disaster does happen, they're more resilient and then they can serve as community hubs with less reliance on supply chains at the national level. Really, coming back local, mutual aid, supporting each other, community supporting communities, non-governmental organizations, government, faith-based organizations strengthening local food systems. Also, everything that I just said for food I also think for health. You know, access to healthcare goes along with access to food in terms of critical infrastructure for community to flourish. And so, making sure there are local hospitals, not just in time of disaster, but in time of not disaster. So, expedite funding for small businesses, for neighborhood organizations, neighbors getting to know neighbors in disasters. Neighbors relying on neighbors. And that's critical. Anything we can do to build up networks. And that doesn't necessarily have to be government intervention. That could be faith-based organizations, churches, working with communities. It could be Little Leagues. There's lots of different ways to help build that social infrastructure that's so critical during disasters. Betsy, thank you for that. And as I hear you talk about these issues, what I am grateful for is we normally talk about food and the food system, but it's a parallel reality of what happens with the healthcare system when the disaster strikes. I can only imagine if someone is in need of a certain medicine when the disaster hits access to that medicine may be called into question as happens with food. But one of the big things I get out of what you're saying is we need to build resilient communities. Not when the disaster happens but do that work now. How do we create mutual aid? How do we create actual neighborhoods that know what's going on and to care for one another. Because it's that THAT helps us through these difficult times. Is that a fair assessment? Yes. That's more well said than I said it. So yes. Thank you. I am so grateful for this. Betsy, is there anything else we should think about when it comes to disasters and the food system or how we should prepare for disasters in the future? One thing that I didn't emphasize that my early work really looked at is how we grow food. And in Central Europe and Hungary in the area that I studied, this large-scale infrastructure on land that had previously, centuries ago, been wetlands. And then was drained for large scale agricultural systems, not unlike what we see in much of the Midwest of the United States. But as climate change worsens, we're seeing more extreme rain e...
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Pathway to Market is Complicated for Cell-Cultivated Protein
Feb 2400:19:22Tap to summarizeAs global demand for meat grows, this episode of Duke University's Leading Voices in Food podcast examines cell-cultivated protein—real meat grown from animal cells—and the evolving U.S. policy landscape shaping its future. Host Norbert Wilson (Duke World Food Policy Center) speaks with postdoctoral researchers Kate Consavage Stanley (Duke/Bezos Center for Sustainable Proteins) and Katariina Koivusaari (NC State/Bezos Center) about their article in Trends in Food Science and Technology on U.S. regulatory and legislative activity. The conversation explains the joint FDA–USDA regulatory approach for cell-cultivated meat (FDA oversight through cell cultivation; USDA oversight from harvest through processing, packaging, and labeling) and FDA oversight for cell-cultivated seafood (except catfish). They discuss timelines companies report for approval (often two to three years), the lack of federal public guidance on naming and labeling so far, and how USDA label approvals are currently handled case by case (e.g., "cell-cultivated chicken" and "cell-cultivated pork"). The episode also covers state-level labeling laws and the likelihood of federal preemption if state requirements conflict with federal statutes, as well as a growing wave of state restrictions and bans—Florida and Alabama in 2024, followed by Indiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, and Texas in 2025—plus funding restrictions in South Dakota and Iowa. The guests explore implications for consumers, interstate commerce, innovation, investment, and U.S. leadership, noting ongoing lawsuits in Florida and Texas and continued legislative activity such as a proposed ban in Georgia. Interview Transcript Kate, let's begin with you. In the paper, you write about the regulatory frameworks that have been developed for cell-cultivated meat and seafood products in the US. To start, let's talk about what's unique about cell-cultivated products from a regulatory standpoint and how the US Department of Agriculture and US Food and Drug Administration have decided to handle cell-cultivated protein products. Kate - Yes, so as you mentioned in the introduction, Norbert, cell-cultivation is a new technology for use of the food supply. So, the US government had to adapt its existing legal frameworks for food safety regulation. As your listeners may already know seafood is regulated by the FDA, so it was within their scope to also regulate cell-cultivated seafood. The FDA therefore regulates all cell-cultivated seafood products with the exception of catfish. When it came to determining the regulatory approach for cell-cultivated products from livestock, poultry, and catfish, it was a bit more nuanced as the processes and components evolved fell under both USDA and FDA purview. In 2019, the FDA and USDA therefore agreed on a joint regulatory approach where the FDA regulates the early stages of the cell cultivation process, including when those cells are taken from the animal, grown in the bioreactor, and matured into specific cell types such as muscle or fat cells. At the point where those cells are ready to be harvested from the bioreactor to use in a food product, oversight transfers to USDA who oversees that harvesting process as well as food processing, packaging, and labeling. I know this joint regulatory approach may sound complicated, but it's important to note that USDA and FDA already coordinate oversight over other foods in the food supply. I'll give you an example that we all love pizza. A frozen cheese pizza is regulated by the FDA, whereas a frozen pizza with meat toppings like pepperoni is regulated by the USDA. It is therefore not unprecedented that FDA and USDA would agree to jointly regulate cell-cultivated products. And while the process is new, the products go through the same safety checks as other foods in the food supply. In the past few years, we've seen four cell-cultivated meat products go through the joint USDA-FDA regulatory process, meaning they can be sold in the US food supply. And one cell-cultivated seafood product has gone through the FDA regulatory process. Kate, thank you for sharing this. And I've used a pizza example in my class, and it is super complex this regulatory maze that we're talking about. It seems like there has been a lot of collaboration between these two agencies, and so that's important to hear. But it is also the case that it seems challenging for cell-cultivated protein companies to get through this process. Is this a fair assessment and would you elaborate? Kate - Yes, absolutely. We've heard from cell-cultivated companies that it can take two to three years to get through this process. And there certainly is a lot of back and forth between the companies and FDA and USDA. Great, thank you. Katariina, now let's turn to you. How do these regulations extend to labeling and what do we know about the federal government's approach to labeling the sale of cultivated products thus far? Katariina – So, labeling regulations are the most consumer facing part of regulations, really. And they are used to ensure that the product label has information that's truthful, that's not misleading. And that the package has sufficient information and consistent information also across products so that the consumer can make an educated decision on what product they want to purchase. And you'd think that how you label the product or just how you call the product on the label would be simple. But there are certain regulations in place that define how food items can or cannot be called. Now, when it comes to cell-cultivated products, as you and Kate mentioned, they are novel in the food supply. So, there is not a long-established term or nomenclature on how we should call these products. The federal regulators, FDA and USDA, to date have not released any public guidance either on how these products should be called on the label. The USDA did release an advanced notice of proposed rulemaking back in 2021, requesting comments from stakeholders on how these products should be labeled. And the FDA has also requested comments when it comes to labeling cell-cultivated fish and seafood. But to date, no guidance has been published yet. Kate gave an overview of the regulatory process between FDA and UFDA when it comes to labeling this product products. The USDA oversees labeling cell-cultivated meat, and the FDA oversees labeling cell-cultivated fish and seafood. The USDA has a pre-market approval process for labels, similarly to conventional meat industry. So, whenever a company wants to bring to market a new product, they first submit their label to the USDA. And the USDA reviews it and make sure that they agree with the language used in the label. The FDA does not have a similar pre-market approval process for labeling fish or seafood or cell-cultivated fish or seafood. So, currently cell-cultivated meat labels are approved on a case-by-case basis. And we can see from the products that have gone through the regulatory review so far that the USDA seem to approve the use of 'cell-cultivated' as a qualifying term, together with a meaty term such as chicken or pork. So, the products that we've seen approved to date or brought to market to date are called cell-cultivated chicken or cell-cultivated pork. This is really helpful to know what's happened at the federal level. We also know that there are several actions happening at the state level, so several states have proposed their own laws outlining how and what to label these products. Katariina, can you talk us through what this study regarding state labeling? Katariina - To date, about half of the US states have enacted or proposed their own labeling legislation on cell-cultivated products. Missouri became the first state in 2018, so well before any of these products was available on the market. And they specifically prohibited the use of word meat unless the food was from harvested production livestock or poultry. Restricting, therefore, the use of meat not only on cell-cultivated, but also on other alternative protein products such as plant-based meat analogs or fermentation derived proteins. And this is true for many state level labeling laws. That they are applicable not only to cell-cultivated meat, but also other alternative proteins aiming to mimic meat. In addition to Missouri, there are six other states that prohibit the use of meat or meat related terms, such as chicken or pork. Now, the other group of states that have restrictions on cell-cultivated meat labeling do not concentrate on prohibiting the use of word meat, but they require the use of qualifying terms or other additional language that clearly states that the product does not come from livestock or poultry. And this group of states, there are 18 states, have quite a bit of variation in what kind of qualifying terms they require to be used. And I thought I'd give a couple of examples here. For example, Indiana requires the package to include the phrase this is an imitation meat product. Iowa requires the product to be labeled with qualifying terms such as cell-cultivated, cell-cultured, fake, grown in a lab, imitation, lab grown, lab created, meat free, or meatless. What's interesting though is that the federal statutes that regulate the US food supply have actual language that prevents states from establishing laws or regulations that conflict with or are additional to the federal labeling regulations. So, this means that the state level labeling laws are actually likely to be preempted if they conflict with the federal regulations. So, we've only talked about labelin...
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