My pal Ben over at The Nation just sent me over their new monster food issue — it’s in-depth and fantastic, and a must-read for anyone interested in where food intersects with politics and the future of both. I’ll let him round up who and what’s in it:

• A forum on food democracy with Alice Waters (Chez Panisse), Dan Barber (Blue Hill), Grace Lee Boggs, Dave Murphy and LaDonna Redmond.
  • Alice Waters: School lunch reform is the best way to teach democratic values.
  • Dan Barber: The campaign for food democracy needs to start with boning knives and cast iron skillets.
  • Grace Lee Boggs: How Detroit came to see vacant lots not as blight but as opportunities to grow our own food.
  • Dave Murphy: People are beginning to understand the connection between our stomachs and our common destiny.
  • LaDonna Redmond: To engage a broader audience, food-justice activists need to change their language.
• Raj Patel and Eric Holtz-Gimenez on the Gates Foundation’s flawed approach to ending hunger in Africa.
• Dayo Olopade on DIY urban gardens in New Orleans.
• Anna Lappe on emerging “dining hall” activism.
• Habiba Alcindor on a community farming revival in one of America’s poorest counties. (With slideshow.)
• Michael Pollan on the lasting impact of food and farming visionary Wendell Berry.
• John Nichols on crucial food safety legislation pending in Congress.
• Brent Cunningham reviews several current books about famines and food shortages, challenging the good-food revolution to move beyond its evangelical phase.
• Plus, Katha Pollitt on Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia, and Ten Things You Can Do to Start a Community Garden, a primer from Walter Mosely and the Editors of The Nation.

It’s fascinating, smart, and well-written. Have at it.

Rupa Bhattacharya, Culinary Writer

As noted by the sharp media critics over at EatMeDaily, the real star of the culture storm that is Julie & Julia turns out to be a book. Check the numbers: Since the film’s opening, Julia Child’s seminal Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 1 has been Amazon’s overall number 1 (now 2) bestseller. Which leads one to wonder whether, in addition to rekindling America’s love affair with Julia, Julie & Julia will also mark a resurgence of interest in French cuisine. Is the movie likely to alter in a significant way the place of French cuisine in American culture? Does Julie & Julia shut the door on the era of the freedom fry?

The latter, a bit, perhaps. Maybe the film will make a tiny dent in our national Francophobia. But as for restoring French hegemony to matters of cooking and dining: very unlikely. While there have been anecdotal reports of cooking classes selling out (a trend the recession started) and bistros filling-up, the social forces behind the declining status of French cuisine — the globalization of taste, the democratization of fine dining and international travel — are just too broad and well-established. Today’s center of culinary gravity lies solidly in the Mediterranean, somewhere between Rome and Barcelona, perhaps inching in the direction of Athens, and for all their butter-drenched magnetism, neither Julia nor Julie nor Julie & Julia are likely to move it.

Jonathan Milder, Research Librarian

Fat, the kind we carry around, is big news of late. A study of the astronomical price of obesity-related chronic illnesses just published in the journal Health Affairs has been focusing attention on the public costs of personal decisions and injecting obesity into the debate over healthcare reform.

The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein frames the urgency of the issue thusly:

“If trends continue, health-care costs will chew up 100 percent of the gross domestic product by the end of the century. And estimates suggest that half to two-thirds of that growth is coming from chronic diseases related to diet. We’re eating our way through the national budget.“

In other words, inaction is something we as a nation can no longer afford. But what is to be done? What will it take for us to eat less? That is the subject of another report making rounds. That study, from Urban Institute, suggests that obesity poses a public health crisis of such severity that it’s now time for some tough love:

“America’s state and federal policy makers may need to consider interventions every bit as forceful as those that succeeded in cutting adult tobacco use by more than 50%”

Such ‘interventions’ would include tough labeling laws, tax subsidies to encourage fruit and vegetable consumption, and stiff excise or sales taxes on fattening foods. All of which would generate hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue, enough to pay for a whole lot of healthcare. And all of which, unfortunately, sounds more than a little pie-in-the-sky (if you will), considering the enormous political obstacles to enacting such measures.

Furthermore, if Slate’s Daniel Engber is right, the tough love prescribed by the Urban Institute is crippled by a false premise: that the fat are more of a drain on the public coffers than the rest of us. If anything, Engber argues, they save us money by sparing us the cost of all the expensive illnesses we suffer in our golden years:

“While it’s true that someone who’s grossly overweight might rack up bills for obesity-related ailments like diabetes and hypertension, those added costs would be more than offset by his shorter lifespan.”

Morbid stuff. You can follow this argument a little further here.

Policy aside, one can’t help but wonder how we got here in the first place. How, in a mere 30 years, has the average weight of an American male has grown by 17 lbs and an American female by 19 lbs? What’s changed? A spate of recent books surveyed in a must-read New Yorker article tackle just this question. Explanations range from the economic–fattening foods have become a lot cheaper–to the evolutionary-biological–we’re hard-wired to pursue the maximum calories with the minimum of effort–to the neuroscientific-corporate conspiratorial–companies have reformulated processed foods to exploit this hard-wiring.

Interestingly, as fat is demonized in Washington policy circles, ‘fat acceptance’–bolstered by recent medical studies suggesting that overweight is (contra Engber) actually ‘a protective against mortality’–may be making inroads into popular culture, according to a recent NYTimes article. Who knows, perhaps Lifetime’s plus-size heroine in “Drop Dead Diva” and Fox’s new reality show “More to Love” represent the shape of things to come. If so, it’s unlikely to faze Food Network viewers, who’ve known all along that beauty comes in all sizes.

Jonathan Milder, Research Librarian

The first in an occasional ‘from the Library’ series wherein statistics caught in our weekly troll of the food media are offered up in highly digestible, if occasionally provocative, bits.

Number of national chain grocery stores in Detroit: 0

Percentage of total antibiotics used in the United States that is fed to healthy chickens, pigs and cattle: 70

Approximate annual weight of these antibiotics: 24 million lbs

Estimated total Americans spend on weight-loss products per year: $35 billion

Percent increase in American obesity rates between 1998 and 2006: 37

Percent by which the medical expenses of an obese American exceeds that of normal-weight Americans: 42

Estimated medical spending on obesity-related conditions in the U.S. in 2008: $147 billion

Percent of all medical spending that figure represents: 10

Estimated increase in the number of Americans suffering from gout in the last 30 years: 100%

Estimated increase in the number of calories the average American consumes per day over the last 20 years: 250

Estimated weight loss if the average American substituted water for sweetened beverages: 15 lbs

Estimated 10-year revenue from a 10% sales tax on fattening foods as defined by a national standard recently adopted by Great Britain: $522 billion

Estimated 10-year cost of healthcare reform: $1 trillion

Jonathan Milder, Research Librarian

Media-wise, it’s been a rough couple of weeks for the organics industry. Earlier this month a prominent LA Times food journalist confessed, “I don’t believe in organic,” arguing that flavor–most reliably found in farmers’ markets–should trump all other considerations for conscientious food shoppers. Fair enough perhaps. And in and of itself, the article is of limited significance. But its timing is telling and, to my mind, reflective of the declining status of organics in general and of the federal organic label in particular. My sense of this was solidified a few days later when the Washington Post ran a front page report raising questions about the integrity of the federal organics program, which oversees the federal organic labels.

The report depicts the program as a mire of lobbyist-friendly administrators, eroding standards, and lax oversight. Specifically, it details friction between the National Organic Standards Board, which controls decisions on which synthetics are permitted under the organic label, and the National Organic Program, which administers the standards. In recent years, according to the WaPo, the Program has taken it upon itself do some standard-setting of its own and to selectively enforce standards established by the Board.

Critics charge that the Program has been all too easily swayed by industry lobbyists who’ve pushed to loosen regulations by expanding the list of allowable synthetics in processed organics. Federal administrators counter they’re removing obstacles to the growth of the organics industry.

Is any of this really news? Certainly, as Samuel Fromartz, author of ‘Organics, Inc.,’ points out in a thought-provoking blog post, a fundamental tension ‘between those who have always sought to expand the industry and those who seek a more purist vision’ has underlain the entire history of efforts to standardize and enshrine organics into law.

But there is a definite sense that, under the pressure of explosive growth, this tension is building, perhaps toward a breaking point–something recognized by the standards board’s chairman, Jeff Moyer, who observes, “As the organic industry matures, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to find a balance between the integrity of the word ‘organic’ and the desire for the industry to grow.”

Fromartz seems to believe that the real story is the question of what happens to organics after this breaking point is reached. As he sees it two outcomes are likely, both dead-ends of a sort:

“If synthetics are taken out, even over a sunset period…organic processed foods would fade off the shelves. Maybe that’s not a bad thing, but the organic industry would be a lot smaller. If, on the other hand, too many synthetics are let in, and we start getting more organic junk food with a long list of  unpronounceable ingredients, that will spell the end of organics too.”

The odds of the latter strike me as vastly more likely. The organic industry has been so thoroughly integrated into (some argue co-opted by) the larger food industry that it now has tremendous weight to throw around in Washington. If the industry wants to loosen definitions of ‘organic,’ chances are definitions will loosen. If, on the other hand, the industry fails to get its desired changes, chances are it will find a work-around by creating cheaper alternatives that siphon off organic’s cache without being constrained by organic regulations–Horizon Organics’ recent introduction of a ‘Natural’ line suggests this process is now under way. Both courses of action carry tremendous risks for the industry in terms of diminishing the value of the organic label in the eyes of consumers. The LATimes article, among other things, seems symptomatic of this spreading sense of diminished value. If Fromartz is right, organics may well be approaching a tipping point.

Jonathan Milder, Research Librarian

How an extremely misanthropic resident of the bovine digestive system such as E. coli travels through four stomachs, 150 feet of intestines large and small, across thousands of miles, from farm to processor(s) to retailers to — at the end of a journey that makes a Yukon river salmon run look like a 5-minute commute — ultimately find new accommodations in some unlucky human gut is one of the most pressing mysteries investigators of food contamination have attempted to solve since the first major E. coli scare back in 1992.

This week that mystery got a new twist with the emergence of a new and wholly unlikely disease vector: chocolate chip cookie dough. Now, a rare hamburger (or even spinach grown downstream from a feedlot) is one thing. But how E. coli 0157 found its way into a package of Nestlé Toll House Cookie Dough, let alone enough packages to sicken at least 65 people in 29 states, is the kind of mystery that adds a whole new layer of fear and distrust to an already worrisome situation. Nothing in Nestlé’s product would seem to pose an E. coli risk. The risk usually associated with cookie dough is salmonella from raw eggs-even Nestlé’s eggs are pasteurized.

One can only hope that the food safety reform bill just passed by a House panel, while far from perfect, will make such mysteries easier to solve in the future. In the meantime 300,000 cases of recalled cookie dough should have landfills nationwide smelling a little sweeter for the next few weeks.

Jonathan Milder, Research Librarian

We’re hearing a whole lot less about a global food crisis these days than we were a year ago. No longer do we read week-in-week-out of food riots in the developing world or grain shortages or skyrocketing inflation. Publishers are printing fewer books with apocalyptic titles like ‘The End of Food,’ ‘Stuffed and Starved,’ and ‘The End of the Line.’ The spectre of Malthusian collapse looms a little less large.

But lest you thought the global food crisis was over, several recent films and articles have come along to remind us that we’re not out of the woods yet. Far, very far, from it. The world is still hot, crowded, and hungry, and getting more so. Demand is growing faster than supply; agricultural productivity is flattening; and ‘the world is in desperate need of a green revolution, a greener revolution.’ A must-read National Geographic article does a nice job of walking through the debates taking place over just what shape this ‘greener revolution’ will take.

Jonathan Milder, Research Librarian

Canning, kitchen gardening, gourmet comfort food: There’s hardly a food trend these days that doesn’t owe something to the recession. This month’s most attention-grabbing trend, street eats, is no exception.

From Austin to San Francisco to NYC to Portland to D.C. to Seattle, across the country a new generation of food trucks and carts is emerging and expanding notions of what street eating can be in the process. The trend is drawing strength from a number of factors: cheap prices, of course; but also low start-up costs; and, not least of all, a large and growing pool of the newly jobless (many of them chefs) looking for entrepreneurial opportunity.

For these and other would-be street vendors, street food presents itself as a tradition-bound corner of the food service industry ripe for experimentation and ideally-suited to thriving in an economic downturn.

As a result, the new wave sets many of today’s prevailing food world trends-e.g. ethical eating, gourmet sophistication, cupcakes (enough already!)-on four wheels. Increasingly taco and kebab trucks find themselves competing for curbside real estate with crème brulee carts, cupcake trucks, mobile purveyors of escargot-on-a-stick and the like.

For their part, chefs and restaurateurs have seized on trucks and carts as a marketing tool for their restaurants.

Twitter has proven a major enabler of the trend. As Serious Eats points out, in mobile vendors, who use the micro-blogging service to relay info to customers, Twitter almost seems to have found its raison d’etre.

Ironically, even as street food gains cachet in some urban settings (and increasingly shows up in the world of fine dining) taco trucks find themselves under assault across the nation, beset by increasingly restrictive ordinances designed to curb their operation. All of which serves as a worthwhile reminder of just how race- and class-specific this street food trend really is.

Fortunately here in New York, the rights and interests of the city’s 10,000+ street vendors are fiercely defended through the heroic work of the Urban Justice Center and its Street Vendor Project. And it’s probably fair to say that here in NYC, the Project, through its efforts to raise public awareness about vendors, and in particular through its wildly successful (and wildly awesome) Vendy Awards (full disclosure: our own Rupa Bhattacharya is a longtime Vendy backer, volunteer, and fiend) has been a major motivating force behind the current trend.

Jonathan Milder, Research Librarian

As a cultural phenomenon, backlash generally surfaces at the point when a movement gathers enough force to actually pose a threat to somebody. So it could be taken as a positive sign that an increasingly vociferous backlash is emerging to the sustainability movement these days. This trend first became apparent last year, as some in the food media began to surfeit on locavorism. Now one can discern it in the avalanche of abuse that’s swirled around the sustainability movement’s proxy, Alice Waters, for the last couple months.

To be fair, much recent criticism of Waters is not backlash. It’s coming from fellow travelers whose patience Waters has exhausted. But there’s also an undercurrent of conservatism coursing through much of these Waters wars, an undercurrent most often betrayed in the tenor of the conversation, the ad hominem attacks, the vituperation. Ultimately, one senses that these attacks aren’t really about Alice at all. Or rather, are only about Alice insofar as she can be deployed as an instrument in an ideological battle whose timing is revealingly coincident with the arrival of a new administration and the possibilities for reform that it has opened up. It seems reasonable to expect that the closer the sustainability movement gets to realizing its goals, the more influence it wields, the cozier it gets with the Obama administration, the more desperate and aggressive the backlash that will emerge. Brace yourself, Alice.

Jonathan Milder, Research Librarian

Why does a chocolate chip cookie—or vanilla milkshake or cheeseburger, etc—have such power over us? Why are they so hard to resist? David Kessler, a Harvard-trained doctor, lawyer, medical school dean, former FDA commissioner and scourge of the tobacco industry, spent years pursuing an answer. The results of his search, ‘The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite,’ hit bookstores last week.

Kessler’s key insight, as he sums it up: “Much of the scientific research around overeating has been physiology — what’s going on in our body. The real question is what’s going on in our brain.”

His theory in its most simplified form is that salt, sugar, and fat work synergistically in foods to stimulate the brain to crave more salt, sugar, and fat. Instead of satisfying hunger, they alter the brain’s chemistry in a way that stimulates hunger. There’s a growing body of research that backs this up.

None of this is really news to the food industry, which Kessler found has long manipulated this neurological response, designing foods to induce people to eat more than they should — or even want. This is the dark side of Kessler’s story, and the one with far-ranging implications for policymakers.

Kessler does not shy away from a challenge. The man’s a formidable muckraker/public health advocate, and one can be sure ‘The End of Overeating’ has caught the food industry’s attention by laying the groundwork for major regulatory action/legislation.

But if overeating is to end, it will require much more than a little re-zoning and nutrition labeling here and there. Kessler envisions nothing short of a wholesale rewiring of the brain’s relation to food. As he puts it: “What’s needed is a perceptual shift…We did this with cigarettes…It used to be sexy and glamorous but now people look at it and say, ‘That’s not my friend, that’s not something I want.’ We need to make a cognitive shift as a country and change the way we look at food.”

This, of course, begs the question: what tools from the tobacco wars are actually transferable to the food industry battle? And just how was this perceptual/cognitive shift achieved with cigarettes? When you start comparing, the former looks like a cakewalk: with tobacco it was so easy (relatively) to finger a culprit, identify conspiracy, connect cause to devastating effect. Not so for fat/sugar/salt. The former is after all a drug (even before a consensus emerged, it was widely understood to be, at the very least, not not a drug); the latter is food, sustenance, albeit a very poor form of it. Cheap too: you’ve got a whole class thing going on that was probably there in the tobacco wars, but certainly not as explicitly-stated.

Jonathan Milder, Research Librarian