The Leading Voices in Food Duke World Food Policy Center

Is it possible to decarbonize agriculture and make the food system more resilient to climate change? Today, I'm speaking with agricultural policy expert Peter Lehner about his climate neutral agriculture ideas and the science, law and policy needed to achieve these ambitious goals. Lehner is an environmental lawyer at Earthjustice and directs the organization's Sustainable Food and Farming Program.
Transcript
How does agriculture impact the climate? And I guess as important as that question is why don't more people know about this?
It's unfortunate that more people don't know about it because Congress and other policy makers only really respond to public pressure. And there isn't enough public pressure now to address agriculture's contribution to climate change. Where does it come from? Most people think about climate change as a result of burning fossil fuels, coal and oil, and the release of carbon dioxide. And there's some of that in agriculture. Think about tractors and ventilation fans and electricity used for pumps for irrigation. But most of agriculture's contribution to climate change comes from other processes that are not in the fossil fuel or the power sector. Where are those? The first is nitrous oxide. Nitrous oxide is a greenhouse gas about 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. And it comes because most farmers around the world and in the U.S. put about twice as much nitrogen fertilizer on their crops, on the land, as the plants can absorb. That extra nitrogen goes somewhere. Some of it goes off into the water. I'm sure your listeners have heard about harmful algae outbreaks or eutrophication of areas like the Chesapeake Bay and other bays where you just get too many nutrients and too much algae and very sick ecosystem. A lot of that nitrogen, though, also goes into the atmosphere as nitrous oxide. About 80% of nitrous oxide emissions in the U.S. come from agriculture. Excess fertilization of our hundreds of millions of acres of crop land.
Quick question. Why would, because the farmers have to pay money for this, why do they apply twice as much as the plants can absorb?
Great question. It's because of several different factors. Partly it is essentially technical or mechanical. A farmer may want to have the fertilizer on the land right at the spring when the crops are growing but the land may be a little muddy then. So they may have put it on in the fall, which is unfortunate because in the United States, in our temperate area, no plants are taking up fertilizers in the fall. Also, a plant is like you or me. They want to eat continually but a farmer may not want to apply fertilizer continuous. Every time you apply it, it takes tractor time and effort and it is more difficult. So they'll put a ton of fertilizer on at one point and then hope it lasts for a while, knowing that some of it will run off, but hopeful that some will remain to satisfy the plant. There's a lot of effort now to try to improve fertilizer application. To make sure it's applied in ways just the right amount at the right time. And perhaps with these what's called extended release fertilizers where you put it on and it will continue to release the nutrients to the plant over the next couple of weeks and not run off. But we have a long way to go.
Okay, thanks. I appreciate that discussion and I'm sorry I diverted you from the track you were on talking about the overall impact of agriculture on the climate.
I think what's so exciting about this area is that everyone cares about our food. We eat it three times a day or more and yet we know very little about where it comes from and its impacts on the world around us. It's wonderful to be talking about this. The second major source of climate change impact in agriculture is methane. Methane is another greenhouse gas much more powerful than carbon dioxide. About 30 times more powerful over a hundred years and about 85 times more powerful than carbon dioxide over 20 years. Which is I thin

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

Traditional clinical weight loss interventions can be costly, time consuming, and inaccessible to low-income populations and people without adequate health insurance. Today's guest, Dr. Gary Bennett, has developed an Interactive Obesity Treatment Approach, or iOTA for short, that represents a real advance in this area. Dr. Bennett is Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, Medicine and Global Health at Duke University, where he is also Dean of Trinity College of Arts and Sciences.
Interview Summary
You know, in this time when people are talking about more expensive, and kind of more intrusive interventions, like the big weight loss drugs, it's nice to know that there may be alternatives that could be accessible to more people. Could we start off with you telling our listeners what the iOTA approach is and how it works?

Sure. This is an approach for weight management. It's useful for weight loss or preventing weight gain or maintaining one's weight after you've lost weight. The idea here is that it's a technology that's designed to be highly accessible, and useful for a range of different types of populations. So, as you described, we have developed and tested this primarily for folks who are medically vulnerable, who are low income, who are racial, ethnic minority, who live in rural communities, and where we have traditionally had real difficulty reaching populations with effective weight loss tools. So, iOTA is a fully digital approach. It uses technologies smartphone apps, but it can also use text messaging, interactive voice response, those are like robocalls, automated telephone calls, websites. We've tested this on a wide range of different types of technology platforms, and we've tested it in a range of different types of populations all over the country and indeed even in other countries.

So, give us some examples of what kind of information people might be receiving through these various forms of media.

The underlying kind of technology, the underlying approach, I should say, for iOTA is actually reasonably simple. It operates from the perspective that creating weight loss is really about making an energy deficit. That is to say, helping people to consume fewer calories than they are expending. The realization we had years ago is that you can get there, you can create that calorie deficit in a whole host of different ways. Some people diet, some people try to get more active, there are limitations around that kind of approach. But fundamentally, you can also just get there by asking people to do some reasonably straightforward behaviors. Like not consuming sugary beverages, or consuming fewer chips, cookies and candies. Or changing the amount of red meat that they put on the plate. And, if you frame those things out as goals, then you can prescribe those goals to people in ways that make sense to them personally. The trick though is actually in the idea of personalizing those goals to the given individual. And that's where technology comes in and gets very helpful. The case is, if you have a large library of these goals, you'd want to try to provide these in a highly personalized way. That really are aligned with what people's needs are and noting that those needs may change over time. So, what we do with iOTA is deliver a very short survey. That survey then helps us to be able to look into our library of goals and pick the ones that are most useful for our users. We prescribe those goals, and then we ask folks to self-monitor those goals. Self-monitoring or tracking is an extraordinarily powerful part of behavior change science. And so, we ask them to track using one of our technologies: the chat bot or the text message or interactive voice response or the smartphone app. Every time that we receive data from one of our users, we give them highly personalized feedback that is designed around principles of behavior change science. And then over time we also give them support. We do support sometimes from

Fast food is part of American life. As much a part of our background as the sky and the clouds. But it wasn't always that way, and over the decades, the fast food landscape has changed in quite profound ways. Race is a key part of that picture. A landmark exploration of this has been published by today's guest, Dr. Naa Oyo Kwate. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Africana Studies and the Department of Human Ecology at Rutgers University. Her book, recently published, is entitled White Burgers, Black Cash: Fast Food From Black Exclusion to Exploitation. The book has been received very positively by the field. And was recently named the best book in the field of urban affairs by the Urban Affairs Association.
 
Interview Summary
I was so happy to see your book because people have talked about the issue of race off and on in the field, but to see this kind of scholarly treatment of it like you provided has been really a welcome addition. Let me start with a general question. Let's begin with the fast food situation today and then rewind to where it began. Are there patterns to where fast food restaurants are located and who fast food is marketed to?

Absolutely. There's quite a bit of research, and you just alluded to the work that's been done in the field. There's a lot of research that shows fast food is most dense in African American communities. Not every study has the same finding, but overall that's what the accumulated evidence shows. On the one hand you have the fact that Black communities are disproportionately saturated with these outlets. Then there's also the case that apart from the physical locations of the restaurants, fast food is strongly racialized as Black in terms of how it's portrayed to the public. It [Fast Food] relies on images of Blackness and Black cultural productions such as Black music for its marketing. These sometimes these veer into racial caricature as well. One of the things I talked about in the book briefly is the TV commercial character Annie who Popeye's introduced in 2009. They basically created this Black woman that Adweek at the time was calling "feisty," but it's really just this stereotypical idea of the sassy Black woman and she's in the kitchen frying up the chicken for Popeye's. And actually, some of the language that was used in those commercials really evokes the copy on late 19th century and Aunt Jemima pancake mix packaging. It's a really strong departure from fast food's early days, the way that fast food is now relying on Blackness as part of its core marketing constructs.

I'm assuming that it follows from what you've been saying that the African American community has disproportionately been targeted with the marketing of these foods. Is that true of children within that community?

Research shows that in terms of fast food marketing at the point of purchase. There's more - display advertising for example at restaurants that are in Black communities. And then there's also been research to show, not in terms of the outlets themselves, but in terms of TV programming that there tends to be more commercials for fast food and other unhealthy foods during shows that are targeting Black youth.

How much of the patterning of the fast food restaurants is due to income or due to the amount of fast food consumption in these areas with many restaurants?

Almost none of it really. It's not income and it's not the amount of fast food that people are consuming. In fact, one of the main studies that led me to start researching this book, because I was coming to it from public health where there was a lot of research around the disproportionality of fast food restaurants. We actually did a study in New York City, some colleagues and we published it in 2009, where we looked at how fast food was distributed across New York City's five boroughs. And restaurant density, we found, was due almost entirely to racial demographics. There's very little contribution from

A growing number of research studies show that the cognitive and brain development of low-income children differs from that of children in higher income families. For any family, that is a concerning statement. Today's podcast features a project called Baby's First Years, a multi-year effort to test the connections between poverty reduction and brain development among very young children. Here to talk about what the study has revealed so far is Dr. Lisa Gennetian from Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy, and Dr. Sarah Halpern-Meekin from the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Transcript
Sarah, let's start with you. What is the Baby's First Years study?
 
Sarah - So the Baby's First Years study is a study of how having additional income matters for children's development and for family life in families that had incomes around the federal poverty line when they had a child. And so, it includes two main components. The first is a randomized control trial that tests the effects of families receiving either a large or a small monthly cash gift each month, families get either $333 or $20 each month on a debit card from the time their child was born until just after the child's sixth birthday. Lisa and our colleagues, Katherine Magnuson, Kimberly Noble, Greg Duncan, Hiro Yoshikawa, and Nathan Fox lead this part of the study. They've been following mothers and children from a thousand families over the past six years. The other part of the study is a qualitative study in which we do in-depth interviews with a subset of those families because we want to learn more about how they think, about making financial decisions, the values and dreams for their children that guide their parenting and how they think about their money they're getting from Baby's First Years each month.

This study is complex and would require time to observe change. Can you tell me about the length of time your team has been doing this intervention?

Sarah - So the first families started the study in 2018.

Lisa - One thing that's unique about this intervention is its length. As Sarah mentioned, it's starts at the time of birth and it's monthly. And families will be receiving this cash for 76 months. So, they'll be receiving it through the first six years of their child's life.

Thank you for that detail. Lisa, what is the landscape for food programs and assistance in the United States, particularly for families with infants and young children?

Lisa - There are two major programs that are federally funded in the US that are particularly targeted for families with infants and children. One of them is called the Women, Infant, and Children's Program, or WIC for short. The WIC program, let's see, in 2022, served about 6.3 million participants, but it provides a mix of core nutritional needs, breastfeeding support, information and referrals. And the second big safety net program in the US around food is called SNAP, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. This one's broader and has served over 40 million people in 2022. And together both these programs have been pretty core to providing food and nutritional support to families, including those with young children.

Thanks for that context. So now, how does the cash gift intervention differ from, or fit with other food assistance programs that these families may participate in?

Lisa - The thing that cash can add above and beyond that, so thinking about how this Baby's First Year study might help supplement resources is in two ways. One is thinking about how money that might have been spent on the foods that are provided by these programs are now being taken care of through these food subsidies. One direct way that the BFY cash money can help is by increasing those net resources available for other types of food or for other things in the household. It's a real compliment to these what we call in kind or conditioned kind of food subsidy p

Today's podcast is a story of one man's personal journey to making a difference by building communities. Zach Wyatt grew up caretaking an old 300-acre farm in Virginia. He went to college and ended up working in mortgage lending. And then something changed for Zack, and that's where the story gets interesting. He now leads the Carolina Farm Trust, working to strengthen local food systems in the Carolinas. The trust cultivates urban farm networks, farm apprenticeships, supports local farmers in purchasing equipment or land, making informed-decisions, and more.
Interview Summary

I'd like to understand a little bit more, why did you want to start the Carolina Farm Trust?

Well, with a lot of things, it was just kind of by accident and circumstance. And I would say subconsciously I had agriculture in my bones, ever since I was a kid growing up in agriculture in Northern Virginia. It just kind of seeps in. We [The Family] still have that little arm reached out to being a part the DC metro area. Growing up in an urban-rural environment kind of planted, I think, a lot of the seeds in the work that was going to transpire so many decades later. But it really just kind of came down to a life event. I had a partnership that just ended in one day, which was a huge blow to us financially. We had to get on EBT and Snap and went through that process. And I was really soul searching and figuring out what were the next steps for me. Looking back on it, I think I was really grasping on to how do I do anything, to kind of just do something. I got back into reading about our food system and farms and started meeting some farmers. And once you start talking to farmers in a real way and understanding what our food system truly is, it's horrifying. It kind of came down to seeing this visual metaphor of a meteorite heading toward us every day, and either sticking your head in the sand or doing something. Circumstance just led to this next event and next event, and the next event. And eight years later, here we are.

What I hear from you is this story of resiliency and it seems like that's something you also see in the food system or a need for that is that a fair assessment?
 
Absolutely. We just take food in agriculture for granted. And over the last 80 to 90 years, we've really given our entire means of survival pretty much away. Most people don't really look at food and agriculture and how it spins every major decision on Earth. Every social problem we typically have, every health issue we have, if you follow it all the way down to where that problem started, you go all the way back to the dirt. So, to kind of look at resilience and what do we mean by that and more importantly, building regional resilience in a global economy: I think getting supply chains a whole lot shorter, focusing on soil health and nutrition density and our farming community, is where we really have to start.

I'm starting to get a sense of the big picture of the farm trust. What is the driving mission of your work? I think you're hitting on some of that, but I'd like to hear more.

I'd say the vision is very clearly about building regional resilience and then using food and agriculture as a primary driver. The four main pillars we have are health and nutrition, upward mobility and equity, sustainability, and climate change. Our four action-on-the-ground pillars are first, building an urban farm network and to get people to understand where our food comes from. Why is that important? We do really need to push urban centers to be more responsible for where our food comes from and playing a role in that. Second, our farm apprentice program, workforce development. You know, the average age of our farming community right now is a little over 60. Where is this next generation of farmers coming from? Where is the land coming from? So, it is not only kind of a labor force for us, you know, but how do we make sure every community garden, every school garden is th