Statistics

‘How conventional soy farming starves honey bees’ ∞

December 1, 2019

Jessica Fu writing for the New Food Economy:

A significant, multi-year study […] provides new evidence that commodity crop production can be detrimental to honey bees, putting colonies at risk by depleting their access to food. […]

Now, by examining the health of honey bees in Iowa soy fields, scientists have showed precisely how damaging that lack of variation can be. Soy is one of the U.S.’s most highly produced and exported foods.

In 2018, farmers harvested 4.54 billion bushels of the crop (for reference, a bushel of soy weighs 60 pounds), with the Midwest contributing to the vast majority of this output. The industry’s rise, however, has come at the cost of traditional habitat: In Iowa, the second-largest soy producing state, the expansion of farmland has driven a steep decline in native tallgrass prairie. That, in turn, has depleted both the quantity and variety of food sources available to honey bees, according to the new research[.] […]

Typically, bees are supposed to produce honey for their colony from spring through fall in order to have enough food to survive the winter. What the researchers found, however, was that colonies adjacent to soy farms were turning to food stores for sustenance as early as August, and that by mid-October, all of them had wiped out the gains that they had made in the spring and summer. That’s like clearing out your fridge and pantry right before a power outage—and it means those hives would be far less likely to survive.

Ninety-eight percent of soy that is grown in the US is used for animal feed. One percent is grown for human consumption.

‘Almost 90 percent of the people eating non-meat burgers are not vegetarian or vegan’ ∞

November 18, 2019

NPD found that plant-based hamburgers are largely responsible for the increase in Americans’ consumption of plant-based proteins at restaurants, with nearly 80 percent of that growth coming from Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat. Aside from burgers, sales of plant-based versions of wings, sausage and meatballs have risen by double digits over the past year — and sales of plant-based Italian sausage have skyrocketed by 416 percent in that time.

NPD found that 16 percent of Americans say they “regularly” use plant-based alternatives to meat and dairy products, such as almond milk and meat substitutes. More unexpected, though, is that 89 percent of the people eating all of these tell NPD that they’re not vegetarian or vegan — they just like variety in their diets.

I can’t find out how large this study was, but I’m delighted that 89 percent of those sales aren’t vegan or vegetarian. When Ethan Brown called the vegan section the “penalty box” he was right. I think their placement next to actual beef has been important, simply because it makes it easier to pick-up. Otherwise, that’s one more thing to remember and one more section of the grocery store to walk to.

And I’m glad it’s mostly Impossible and Beyond. Those are two of the best vegan products out there, and are definitely some of the first products I hope non-vegans try when they’re taking baby bites in this new realm.

‘Dean Foods, America’s biggest milk producer, files for bankruptcy’ ∞

November 12, 2019

Dean Foods’ business has struggled as more consumers turn to nondairy milk or buy private-label products. Americans’ per capita consumption of fluid milk has fallen 26% in the last two decades, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Great news. I can’t believe alternative milks have taken a 1/4 of the market. Now, one of the nutmilk companies just needs to make a campaign as fun and ridiculous as this.

‘Why are people malnourished in the richest country on earth?’ ∞

November 6, 2019

Tracie McMillan writes a thoughtful and difficult piece for National Geographic:

Chances are good that if you picture what hunger looks like, you don’t summon an image of someone like Christina Dreier: white, married, clothed, and housed, even a bit overweight. The image of hunger in America today differs markedly from Depression-era images of the gaunt-faced unemployed scavenging for food on urban streets. […]

In the United States more than half of hungry households are white, and two-thirds of those with children have at least one working adult—typically in a full-time job. With this new image comes a new lexicon: In 2006 the U.S. government replaced “hunger” with the term “food insecure” to describe any household where, sometime during the previous year, people didn’t have enough food to eat. By whatever name, the number of people going hungry has grown dramatically in the U.S., increasing to 48 million by 2012—a fivefold jump since the late 1960s, including an increase of 57 percent since the late 1990s.

And these numbers will keep growing as the divide between the poor and the wealthy grows wider.

It can be tempting to ask families receiving food assistance, If you’re really hungry, then how can you be—as many of them are—overweight? The answer is “this paradox that hunger and obesity are two sides of the same coin,” says Melissa Boteach, vice president of the Poverty and Prosperity Program of the Center for American Progress, “people making trade-offs between food that’s filling but not nutritious and may actually contribute to obesity.”

It’s terrible that obesity would be an indicator of hunger or malnourishment. It could be a different picture if the government would subsidize the right things. This part, with emphasis mine, speaks to that:

These are the very crops that end up on Christina Dreier’s kitchen table in the form of hot dogs made of corn-raised beef, Mountain Dew sweetened with corn syrup, and chicken nuggets fried in soybean oil. They’re also the foods that the U.S. government supports the most. In 2012 it spent roughly $11 billion to subsidize and insure commodity crops like corn and soy, with Iowa among the states receiving the highest subsidies. The government spends much less to bolster the production of the fruits and vegetables its own nutrition guidelines say should make up half the food on our plates. In 2011 it spent only $1.6 billion to subsidize and insure “specialty crops”—the bureaucratic term for fruits and vegetables.

The USA needs to subsidize produce with a focus on health. Every dollar that goes against that is a dollar squandered, and it’s easy to see this in our population. The government is the reason fast food is cheaper than vegetables. The general health of the people should be considered our government’s problem, because it starts with what crops they subsidize.

‘Czech Lab Grows Mustard Plants for Mars’ ∞

November 6, 2019

Reuters via the NYTimes:

Czech scientists have opened a lab to experiment growing food for environments with extreme conditions and lack of water, such as Mars.

The “Marsonaut” experiment by scientist Jan Lukacevic, 29, and his team at the Prague University of Life Sciences is based on aeroponics – growing plants in the air, without soil, and limiting water use to a minimum.

[…]

The team has already succeeded in growing mustard plants, salad leaves, radishes and herbs like basil and mint.

That’s interesting, but the last sentence of the article is what astounded me:

The main benefit of the growing method is that it uses 95 percent less water than normal plant cultivation and also saves space, which could boost agricultural yields in areas hit by urbanisation and climate change.

95 percent less. How is that possible? Can most produce be reduced like this? I want to know more.

‘Are Burgers Really That Bad for the Climate?’ ∞

October 2, 2019

After Tad Friend’s New Yorker piece, a few folks on the internet contested this line:

 “Every four pounds of beef you eat contributes to as much global warming as flying from New York to London—and the average American eats that much each month.”

Justin Fox writing for Bloomberg helps clear up the confusion:

That last bit is actually an understatement: per-capita beef consumption in the U.S. was 4.7 pounds per month in 2017, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. 

[…]

With help from an explanation by the article’s author, Tad Friend, I have since been able to get to four, although only by using a flight-emissions calculator that delivers much lower numbers than the others I consulted. The source of Friend’s estimate for beef’s climate impact was one I had already come across: a December 2018 article in the journal Nature 1 that put it at 188 kilograms of carbon-dioxide-equivalent emissions per kilogram of beef. That’s based on the weight of the carcass, about 70% of which actually makes it onto people’s plates, so 269 kilograms of emissions per kilogram of beef was the number Friend used.

At either 188 or 269, this is a lot higher than other estimates of beef’s per-kilogram impact that have been making the rounds. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (whose estimates are discussed in more detail below) says it’s 48.7 kilograms, carcass weight. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture recently put it at 21.3 kilograms for U.S. cattle operations. A 2012 survey of past studies by Dutch government researchers found a range of 9 to 122 kilograms. Nine kilograms carcass weight is about 13 at the grocery store. Compare that to the flight-related emissions calculated by the Swiss nonprofit myclimate and it would take 70 kilograms, or 154 pounds, of such beef to equal the climate impact of an economy flight from New York to London. 

Why do the estimates vary so widely? A lot depends on how the cattle are raised. Modern intensive agricultural methods are usually judged to be more climate-friendly than traditional or organic ones — a finding that deserves a separate exploration. But in the case of  “Assessing the efficiency of changes in land use for mitigating climate change,” the title of the 2018 Nature article, the really big differences have to do with, you guessed it, assessing the efficiency of changes in land use. Which is worth diving into, because it so nicely illustrates the complications of any such calculation.

Calling it now: calculating the efficiency of beef and its relationship to our environment is going to be America’s new favorite wedge issue. I look forward to it dividing yours and my Thanksgiving tables annually.

‘We Asked 10 Experts What the Phrase ‘Plant-Based Diet’ Means and No One Could Agree’ ∞

October 1, 2019

Paul Kita for Men’s Health rounds up some interesting info from the latest International Food Information Council Foundations’s Food and Health Survey:

Seventy-three people said they’ve heard of a “plant-based diet,” according to a survey by the International Food Information Council Foundation. Fifty-one percent of those polled said that they would be interested in learning more about a plant-based diet.

But here’s the thing: Even though consumers are familiar and interested in plant-based diets, they aren’t quite sure exactly what that means.

From the same survey…

• People who defined a “plant-based diet” as a vegan diet that avoids all animal products, including dairy and eggs: 32 percent.
• People who defined a “plant-based diet” as a diet that emphasizes minimally processed foods derived from plants and limits the consumption of animal products: 30 percent.
• People who defined a “plant-based diet” as a vegetarian diet: 20 percent.
• People who defined a “plant-based diet” as a diet that limits animal products and encourages eating as many fruits and vegetables as possible: 8 percent.

Neither the USDA nor the FDA currently have a definition for the term “plant-based.” Same goes for the medical and research community.

I’ve always felt that the term “plant-based” was a tabula rasa for historically hurricaned “vegan” term.

Veganism has zealots, while plant-based does not. Vegans are strict, while plant-based is ostensibly flexible. Vegans have a cultural history, PETA memories, and fairly set public perception. Plant-based appears new, different, and filled with opportunity.

This small switch let a lot of new people who hate vegans to try vegan food and not feel like they’re breaking their own moral code. “Plant-based” as a term is the best thing to happen to vegans since vegetables.

‘How much is a whale worth?’ ∞

September 25, 2019

Protecting large, charismatic animals like whales is often seen as a sort of charity work individuals and governments do on behalf of nature. A team of economists led by Ralph Chami, an assistant director of the IMF’s Institute for Capacity Development, wanted to change the way we think about whales by quantifying the benefit they provide us in dollars and cents. 

This sort of thinking offers a new opportunity to reconsider the value of an animal. As the world has larger discussions about climate change, animals around the world can help or harm our planet depending on what we do or don’t do with them.

The analysis hasn’t yet been published in a peer-reviewed scientific paper, and there are still important scientific knowledge gaps in terms of how much carbon whales can capture. But based on the research that’s been done so far, it’s clear to the economists that if we protect great whales, it will reap major dividends for the planet.

Chami hopes this finding will “start a conversation with the policymakers who don’t buy into saving animals for the sake of animals.”

At this point, any angle that introduces people to veganism is good. And even saving one animal could have a large net effect, like when wolves were brought back into Yellowstone.

Great whales, including the filter feeding baleen and sperm whales, help sequester carbon in a few ways. They hoard it in their fat and protein-rich bodies, stockpiling tons of carbon apiece like giant, swimming trees. When a whale dies and its carcass descends to the bottom of the sea, that stored carbon is taken out of the atmospheric cycle for hundreds to thousands of years, a literal carbon sink.

A study published in 2010 estimated that eight types of baleen whales, including blue, humpback, and minke whales, collectively shuttle nearly 30,000 tons of carbon into the deep sea each year as their carcasses sink. If great whale populations rebounded to their pre-commercial whaling size, the authors estimate this carbon sink would increase by 160,000 tons a year.

[…]

Using the current market price of carbon dioxide, the economists then worked out the total monetary value of this marine mammalian carbon capture, and added it to other economic benefits great whales provide through things like ecotourism.

Altogether, Chami and his colleagues estimated that each of these gentle giants is worth about $2 million over its lifetime. The entire global population of great whales? Possibly a one trillion dollar asset to humanity.

Interesting.

“We don’t want to oversell the concept,” said Steven Lutz, the Blue Carbon Program Leader at GRID-Arendal, a Norweigan foundation that works with the United Nations Environment Program. “It’s not like we save the whales and we save the climate.”

That’s true, but any step in the right direction is a good step.

‘Malnutrition Case Stirs Debate About Vegan Diets for Babies ‘ ∞

September 2, 2019

It happens every once in a while: A child being raised vegan develops serious health problems, setting off an emotional debate over whether such diets are suitable for the very young.

Experts say it is possible to raise healthy infants and children on a totally plant-based diet.

Like any diet for a child, all it takes is planning — and these parents didn’t plan. A reminder that the American Dietetic Association says: that appropriately planned vegan diets are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. Well-planned vegan diets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes. 

✏️ by C. W. Moss