Eating in America Podcast

Ric Bayly
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Eating in America is about the food on our table and who's in charge of keeping it healthy. www.eatinginamerica.co

  1. 1d ago

    “Your morale on board is directly tied to food.”

    There’s a big food story from the Trump administration this week. It goes right back to the Eating on Board story from a few weeks ago here on Eating In America. I did a podcast and post in conjunction with the Tall Ships that sailed the East Coast in honor of America’s 250th birthday. We talked then about the role of food in keeping up the morale of sailors, and that very topic has exploded with the retreat of the USS Lincoln from the Iran War theater due to the political cost of further deployment while the ship is struggling to feed its troops. Today, the exposure of our sailors and Marines at sea in the Middle East to inadequate food and deteriorating morale is risky for them and the forces they support in an ill-conceived, unauthorized, unpopular war that is bleeding our resources and endangering our troops, nation, the world, and innocent civilians in many countries without a clear, believable goal. Trump’s war in the Middle East is a disaster. There are tens of thousands of sailors and Marines at sea who are, or could be, in harm’s way. Several sailors on the Lincoln have attempted suicide. The Navy knows how to feed them in the best possible manner for deployment at sea, but the system is failing these troops. Weight-loss is not meant as an enticement to enlist Diet profiteers are everywhere in our society, but weight-loss is not meant to be a benefit of enlistment. It’s a cruel joke, but I wouldn’t put it past Trump to say it in public, given his complete public dismissal of the problems brought to light on the USS Abraham Lincoln and the USS Tripoli. There are multiple reports of severe weight loss and consequent reduction of physical and mental fitness among sailors and Marines aboard vessels deployed to the Middle East. These troops are not being served enough food, and the food they are being served is often not appetizing, but they are expected to do their jobs and be ready for attack in an ongoing war. Seven tons of food a day I visited the USS Intrepid, a huge floating museum, in New York City two weeks ago. The aircraft carrier, which saw action in World War II and the Vietnam War, was crewed by up to 3,400 troops. The men on the Intrepid required seven tons of food each day. That’s 14,000 pounds of food. Navies have known for millennia the importance of food for morale and to keep up health, both physical and mental. Food planning has always been fundamental. Even on voyages of Greek mythology, food shortages were deadly, as we’re reminded in several scenes of the new movie re-telling of the Odyssey. Napoleon Bonaparte invented the processing of canning fruits and vegetables for his sailors. Similarly, his nephew, Napoleon III invented margarine to replace butter, which could only last one week at sea. The armed services know exactly what they are doing with food The U.S. military devotes significant resources to optimizing the food and nutrition provided to its troops. The Food Utilization and Energy Laboratory (FUEL) provides the Navy with hard science on warfighter nutrition for high-stress environments, energy utilization, and performance optimization. During World War II the Natick Soldier Systems Center outside Boston developed many ultra-processed foods with the goal of keeping troops fed in heat, cold, and stressful conditions. I visited the Natick Soldier Systems Center a few years back to investigate research being done there to optimize the gut microbiome for combat performance. It is a little ironic that the very lab that invented foods that could disrupt the gut microbiome was now inventing foods to optimize that biome. But it was all being done with the goal of helping our fighting forces survive combat .So the Navy knows exactly what and how much food stuffs to put on board every vessel from an aircraft carrier to a submarine and how that food can best be prepared for purposes of morale, physical health, strength, and energy. They know how much fresh food they can leave port with and how much must be canned, frozen, dehydrated, or dry. What a military food scientist cannot know is the exact nature of the bad conditions that will occur in a war, and conditions have gotten bad in the war on Iran. Persian Gulf Navy supply hub was a predictable Iranian target The Iranians destroyed the functionality of the U.S. supply hub on the island of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, directly across from Iran. Trump should have taken into account, and maybe he did, that this was a vulnerable and likely target for Iran’s missiles. After the depot’s destruction early in the war, the logistics and supply hub had to be moved 2,200 miles away to Diego Garcia in the Pacific. Replenishment of food, weapons, and other supplies became a massive problem, which likely played a large part in the morale crises on board the Lincoln and the Tripoli. Morale on board reflective of events and attitudes at home? Also, I suspect – there is little hard data, although some investigators like NPR have made a good case – that decisions in the White House and Pentagon, an upheaval of culture in the military with a downgrading of minorities and women in promotions, political firings, dissatisfaction of the American public, uncertainty about the Iranian war goals, and constant shifting in strategy have been factors in the downward direction of morale. Remember, the Commander in Chief of our armed forces has called troops who gave their lives fighting for America in World War II “suckers” and “losers.” What is certain is that the chef in charge on a navy vessel is likely to be highly experienced, extremely well-organized, very creative, and absolutely dedicated to his or her role in boosting the morale of the troops eating his or her food. A sailor testifies to the importance of food on board ship Here is a former enlisted seaman, who said his name is “Joe,” describing the role of a sailor’s meals at sea. I recorded him as he was about to board the USS Intrepid aircraft carrier: Your morale is directly tied to food. I was on a small ship, a destroyer, DDG-64 [the USS Carney], so we had usually a bit of a better quality of life for food ‘cause our cooks weren’t making meals for 5,000 people. They had to do 300. So our food was a little bit better quality. We knew our cooks. We talked to them every day, gave them hell when they messed something up. When the food was good, it was great. It made us a lot happier. It was also a great way of telling what day of the week it was. Tuesday is tacos, burger Wednesdays, pizza Fridays, Sunday was brunch. And if you forget everything else out there, as soon as you get burgers for lunch, you know, okay it’s Wednesday. That’s what’s going on now. Last week Retired Chief Petty Officer Thomas Nutzmann described being at sea in the Navy Times: “There’s no Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, it’s just a day…You can only do so much to keep morale up before you hit a stalemate … and that’s where the deterioration is.” Four million meals in nine months at sea Since the USS Abraham Lincoln was deployed in November, the seven galleys on board have served about 4 million meals. That’s a small miracle in itself, but with troops going so hungry they are losing 20 to 30 pounds on a deployment that is not yet over, that’s a major system failure. Let them eat steak and lobsters, like they deserve It seems unprecedented and an indicator of how arbitrary and unpopular the Iran War is, but the Lincoln is now sailing home from the Middle East, on the strong winds of public outrage and media attention. I hope at some point before they get to port, the Lincoln will be able to get a few thousand ribeyes on board and just as many lobsters to give the sailors and Marines the Navy’s traditional steak and lobster dinner to thank them for their extended service. Thank you for reading. Sharing this post with your friends and subscribing or upgrading your subscription will help Eating in America continue to grow and is appreciated. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.eatinginamerica.co/subscribe

  2. Aug 9

    Energy drinks + 30 foot cliffs and motorcycles

    “It’s scientifically proven to function!” Rose Byrne and Seth Rogen scream repeatedly and absurdly about the energy drink to which their characters have become addicted in an episode of the series Platonic. But is that energy drink scientifically proven to function, and, if so, to do what? Today I look at the place of energy drinks in our food environment, their health risks, and how the Big Tobacco playbook has been used to stop efforts to protect our youth from those risks. Red Bull, Monster Energy, and Celsius are the top three energy drinks in America. Coca-Cola owns about 20% of Monster Energy and Pepsi-Cola is in a partnership with Celsius. There are plenty of other brands, some of which highlight their drink’s health benefits, but the inclusion of caffeine is universal, usually anywhere from a cup of coffee’s worth or up to double that amount. The sugar fix is in Red Bull, Monster, and Rockstar Energy (another leading brand) feature over 50 grams of sugar (200+ calories) in their sugar-sweetened products, which is the bulk of what they offer. That amount of sugar is double the American Heart Association recommended daily limit for women and 50% more than the daily limit for men. The appeal These three brands seem to target young males with extreme sports as the centerpiece of their marketing, often along with images of women in poses meant to appeal to men and boys. The energy drink demographic ranges from adolescents to young adults. The Gorilla Mind brand’s flavor lineup is typical:16 flavors all in the genre of Blue Raspberry, Rocket Frost, and Candy Apple Like Gorilla Mind, a number of other energy drinks market their ability to sharpen your brain. FOCUSAID claims it provides “brain boost” with nootropics, also called “smart drugs” or “cognitive enhancers.” These are unfamiliar ingredients like GABA, alpha-GPC, and acetyl-L-carnitine. Are these products safe? There are a lot of concerns. The high sugar content; the heightened caffeine consumption that may be accelerated by drinking a cold, sweetened beverage; the ultraprocessed mix of ingredients; and perhaps, most of all, the glorification of these drinks in association with dangerous sports, including race car driving, stunt bikes, and ultimate fighting. For example, Monster Energy and the motorcycle jump: from the top of a thirty-foot high cliff straight down to land on a pile of dirt. This is not what most parents would want to watch their 17 year old do, no matter how prepared with caffeine, sugar, and vitamins. Energy drinks + alcohol: the wide-awake drunk Add to this the rising concern about the frequent use of energy drinks in conjunction with alcohol: it’s called the wide-awake drunk. Stunts like going off a thirty-foot high cliff on a motorcycle somehow seem more likely if alcohol were to be involved along with an energy drink. Red Bull bought the research it needed Red Bull, in yet another example of the Tobacco Playbook being employed to create biased, bad, and misleading research, funded at least five studies examining the health and behavioral effects of combining energy drinks and alcohol. Those research projects found no harm. Unfortunately, the results of those studies were the foundation of the European Union’s Food Safety Authority’s report on energy drinks that provided a stamp of approval subsequently accepted by many countries. Eating in America is supported by you. To receive new posts, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. A new investigation by The Examination, published by STAT and done in collaboration with other media outlets including Der Spiegel and The Toronto Star, identified over 100 studies of the risks of combining energy drinks with alcohol. Almost all of the studies funded by Red Bull or in which the researchers had a financial conflict of interest with Red Bull, found no increase in risk from mixing energy drinks with alcohol. Yet, about 80% of the studies where there were no Red Bull financial ties or funding found that risks did increase when energy drinks were consumed along with alcohol. However, Red Bull was able to parlay the research it had funded into widespread governmental acceptance of energy drinks and, with vigorous lobbying, has effectively stopped most efforts to impose regulations on energy drinks, such as banning sale of them to minors. The soda tax SWAT-team approach with energy drinks Sugar-sweetened beverage taxes, aimed at reducing the negative health effects of sodas, have been shown effective in reducing sales. Forty countries have them at the national level. Whenever a sugar-sweetened beverage tax has been proposed in the U.S., the soda manufacturers have taken a SWAT-team like approach, sending in lobbyists to squash the idea. Of dozens of proposals, none have passed at the state level and many on the local level have failed as well. Around ten cities have a sugar-sweetened beverage tax. This SWAT model seems to have been adopted by market leader Red Bull, who has taken a vigorous approach to monitoring threatening proposals and, when they arise, sending in academic researchers or company representatives to, usually, successfully dissuade legislators from imposing any restrictions on energy drinks. Strong public health leadership can prevail While the energy drink manufacturers are trying to deflect regulation in the U.S. using tricks we have seen employed by Big Tobacco, it is worth noting that, led by strong public health leadership from the federal government, tobacco use among youths has dropped from a high of 36% in 1997 to 4% in 2021. It seems the right leadership can create change when it comes to harmful substances in our environment. There have been documented deaths associated with energy drinks, including due to cardiac events. Emergency department visits because of energy drink consumption numbered 20,000 way back in 2011. The CDC reports that up to 50% of adolescents consume energy drinks and that they can be harmful. The CDC endorses the American Academy of Pediatrics recommendation that adolescents do not drink energy drinks. RFK, Jr. is strongly opposed to energy drinks, but they are ultraprocessed foods and part of the Big Food and Coca-Cola protectorate, and Kennedy has, so far, made little progress against that political force. Will Delaware by the first state to do anything? Members of the Delaware legislature wanted to ban energy drink sales to under-18s, but that proposed law was killed. Maybe if Delaware is successful with its current, feather-light attempt to suggest to retail locations that they voluntarily post energy drink warnings and, a little more significantly, to ban energy drink sales at public schools, other states will take up the fight again and eventually the federal government will gather the political capital to act. In the words of Delaware State Representative DeShanna Neal, “One caffeine-related death is one too many.” Thank you for reading and for your support of the research and work of Eating in America by becoming a patron with a paid membership, liking this post if you like it, and sharing it with your friends, especially those with teenagers. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.eatinginamerica.co/subscribe

  3. Jul 31

    John Snow, the great disease detective, and how, even in its infancy, public health science struggled with the false beliefs of those in charge

    Every day, unless we are in very bad circumstances, we drink water. In today’s America we are lucky to have wide accessibility to what we almost always consider safe drinking water, while for much of the world obtaining clean water is often a struggle. Contaminated water is the transmission pathway for many bacterial, viral, and parasitic diseases including cholera, typhoid fever, hepatitis A, norovirus, polio, and more. Vaccines, like the polio vaccine, and public water and sewer systems have eliminated or greatly reduced most water-borne risks for most people, and cholera has not been epidemic in the U.S. since 1866 due to our government’s delivery of public health measures. However, in parts of the world the seventh cholera pandemic, which started in 1961, still infects about a half-million people annually and is the seventh largest pandemic ever in terms of lives lost, which may be over 9 million and growing, 65 years into the pandemic. We’re generally lucky in America, but not everyone has access to the best public health here, and our systems are vulnerable. For example, at last count, we are experiencing an outbreak of over 11,500 reported cases of cyclosporiasis in the U.S. The story of Snow, cholera, oysters, pandemics, and miasma Today I’m telling the tale of how a great disease detective, John Snow, put the clues together to save perhaps thousands of lives in the 1854 cholera outbreak in London. Snow became the father of epidemiology, the science of disease source detection that has saved millions of lives. And I’ll talk about water-borne disease in America today; oysters, yum or yuck, however you feel; how measles got to be as rare as cholera in America; and that we need to acknowledge, as we face the corruption of our public health systems, funding, and status in the U.S., that we remain susceptible to very bad pandemics. Plus, I’ll reflect on how the rejection of the evidence by the authorities after Snow’s discovery of the source of the 1854 cholera outbreak is similar to today’s rejection in America of science and proven public health measures. It all ties together, believe it or not. Welcome to new subscriber, Ming Yang, Senior Editor for Nature Medicine, and author of the excellent Health Checks on History Substack. Check it out. Londoner Yang knows well the history of the important site we will visit in the podcast today. The first epidemiologist John Snow was born in poverty in a neighborhood close to the river in York, England, the son of a coal yard worker and eldest of nine children. Drinking water in the neighborhood was from wells or the polluted river. The unsanitary conditions he experienced growing up likely informed Snow’s later cholera investigations. Snow’s aptitude for learning won him an apprenticeship with a surgeon-apothecary, giving him five years of clinical training leading to education and certification as a surgeon able to practice medicine. In 1836, Snow entered the University of London to be become an actual doctor. It was there he made his first important epidemiological discovery, although epidemiology had not yet been named as a science. Snow’s first epidemiological discovery (about arsenic, not cholera) While performing post-mortems on dead patients with fellow students, Snow noticed that some of his colleagues were becoming sick. Snow deduced that the arsenic used to preserve many of the bodies was causing the illness and published a paper to that effect. The University discontinued the use of arsenic to preserve corpses for dissection and the medical students stopped getting sick. Snow’s article also caused arsenic to be removed as an ingredient of candles, which burned brighter with some arsenic in the wax but put off toxic fumes. Snow finished his medical degree in 1843 and would thereafter be titled Doctor. A pioneering anesthesiologist Snow is known for his epidemiology, but anesthesiologists know Snow because of his pioneering research to safely administer ether and, later, chloroform. His reputation as London’s top anesthesiologist was solidified when Queen Victoria insisted Snow administer chloroform to her for the birth of the last two of her nine children. But it was Snow’s work on understanding, mapping, and eliminating the source of the cholera outbreak in the Soho section of London in 1854 that is most acclaimed. Cholera came to England from the Ganges delta in India in 1831, starting the first of four English epidemics. In 1848, the second and most fatal cholera epidemic, with over 40,000 deaths, was manifesting itself in London. The prevailing view of scientists at the time was that transmission of cholera was in something called miasma, essentially the bad smell that accompanied unsanitary conditions. Snow understood how respiration worked from his experience with anesthesia and realized that if it cholera was carried in the air, people who worked in the worst smelling places like slaughterhouses and emptying cesspits, would be the most prone to get sick. That wasn’t happening. Snow and others formed the London Epidemiological Society, meeting first in 1850 at the end of the second cholera epidemic. The new Society was committed to understanding not only cholera, its primary motivation, but to working on other diseases, including smallpox and smallpox vaccination, a topic on which it was very influential with the government. For my fellow epidemiologists, it’s worth noting that some members of this new group also belonged to the Statistical Society of London, which had been formed in 1832. So the drive to solve the mystery of cholera gave birth to a whole new science, just in time to address the third epidemic, where its methods would result in the saving of many lives. Epidemiology today employs sophisticated mapping and statistics and toxicological testing. All three of these fundamental techniques were integrated by Snow in two groundbreaking investigations of the third cholera epidemic. Around September 1st, 1854, at word of a sudden outbreak of cholera deaths in the Soho neighborhood where he had his office, Snow leapt into action, quickly obtaining the addresses of the first 83 fatalities, which he went to visit. Snow noticed they were all within a short distance of a communal water pump on what was then called Broad Street. Snow immediately suspected the pump as the source of infection. Porter beer was the Gatorade of 19th century London, except probably better for you The doctor interviewed many of the families of the deceased, finding 61 that had definitely or likely drunk water from the pump. Snow noticed that there were only a few deaths of workers from the brewery near the pump. The brewery owner told Snow that the workers received a daily allotment of porter beer to take home, the low-alcohol dark beer being a popular and safe hydration alternative to the available water. Also, the brewery had its own water well the workers could use. Wait a minute, beer used for hydration? Doesn’t alcohol cause dehydration? Yes, generally, but with the low 2% to 3% alcohol content of the working-class’s porter, the body retains more water than it loses from the diuretic effect of the alcohol. Plus, the hard-working porter drinkers got significant calories from the beer as well as important B-complex vitamins. Adding to Snow’s growing evidence, just around the corner from the pump was a workhouse, a horrible, jail-like, last resort for people who were poor or disabled. Snow found a water well within the workhouse grounds and only five cholera deaths among the 535 workhouse inmates. His Broad Street pump theory was further supported. Snow sought toxicological evidence and had the pump water examined under a microscopic. Flaky organic matter was found, but otherwise the results were inconclusive. Microscopy at the time could not easily see some transparent microbes like the cholera bacterium, Vibrio Cholerae. As it happened, an Italian professor, Filippo Pacini, identified the rod-like bacterium, called a bacillus because of its stick shape, in the 1854 Italian epidemic. But Pacini’s findings were not widely read, including not by the famous German bacteriologist Robert Koch, who went to Egypt during its cholera epidemic in 1883 and identified the Vibrio Cholerae bacillus in corpses. Koch’s widely disseminated findings convinced the scientific world that a bacterium was the agent of cholera and put nails in the coffin, as it were, of the miasma theory. By Snow’s account, three-fourths of the residents quickly fled the neighborhood of the Broad Street pump soon after the onset of the outbreak with its hundreds of deaths. But many remained, and when Snow took his evidence to the local authorities, he managed to convince them to remove the pump handle With no more water flowing, there were no more infections and the worst of the deaths ended within ten days, as those already sick at the time of the handle removal had either died or were destined to survive. Following the Broad Street pump investigation, Snow continued that same year with his second and larger epidemiological study of cholera, which he called the “Grand Experiment.” Snow tallied the cholera deaths in 32 districts of London. The Lambeth Company supplied neighborhoods with water from the Thames above London, and the Southwark and Vauxhall Company supplied water from the Thames below where sewage was discharged in London Snow’s statistics and map showed that the homes and community pumps supplied with water from the upper Thames had a low risk of cholera and few cases, and those supplied with heavily polluted water from the Thames within London had a high risk of cholera and many cases. Unfortunately, even with the additional hard evidence of the second study, the higher authorities and most scientists were still not persuaded to give up their miasma theory. It was not until the fourth and final English epidemic in 1866 that polluted water w

  4. Jul 19

    Eating on Board: A seafaring celebration of the 250th anniversary of our freedom and food stories tied to Tall Ships

    Tall ships in Boston and a world of the past A collection of tall ships have sailed from New Orleans to Boston, the last stop on their US tour celebrating the birth of our nation, 250 years ago. Sixty ships from the U.S., Europe, Asia, Oceania, and South America are part of the gathering. The oldest is likely the U.S.S. Constitution, built in 1797 and permanently docked in Boston. Most of the ships involved were built in the 1900s, some as naval training vessels and others for pride and beauty. These boats evoke a world very different from what we see, use, and experience today: extraordinary bravery in exploration of the world, Leif Erikson, Columbus, Magellan, and nature, Darwin and the HMS Beagle, empire building and naval domination, the shipping of African people who had been enslaved as cargo for trade, the theft of gold from the Americas, pirates, cannon battles, the retreat 250 years ago of the British fleet from Boston Harbor under the surprise threat of George Washington’s cannons, the Star-Spangled Banner withstanding the bombardment of the British fleet in Baltimore in the War of 1812, and an explosion of trade spanning the globe. In the hold: food, opium, tobacco More than half of that trade was in food and substances for consumption, like opium and coffee. Tobacco was the most valuable export of England’s American colonies, and a tax on the tea which kept Americans going resulted in the Boston Tea Party and stoked the fires of the American Revolution. Sugar, rum, and the Great Boston Molasses Flood Sugar was another substance that crossed the Atlantic with a massive amount of it going to Boston in the form of molasses to be distilled into rum for the heavily drinking American colonists and their British countrymen. To be fair, contaminated water was a big issue, so consumption of beer, hard cider, and rum was a common way to quench thirst. At the time of the Revolution, men were drinking three pints of rum a week on average. Rum distilling in Boston continued to be huge right up to 1919 when a 2.3 million gallon tank of molasses ruptured in the North End, very near Revolutionary hero Paul Revere’s historic home, releasing a tidal wave that killed 21 as it poured through the streets. I’ll give you a horse for that pineapple? America was a big grain exporter from its early colonial days, sending barrels of flour and unmilled wheat from the Chesapeake and mid-Atlantic, along with salted beef and pork, dried and pickled cod, and rice. But sailing ships also brought the imperialists back a wealth of new food. Columbus brought back the first pineapple, which started a 150 year craze. Pineapples could cost thousands of dollars and were rented out to the middle class for display at dinner parties. They were valuable mainly because so few specimens could survive the Atlantic crossing without refrigeration. Many other new fruits arrived in Europe, but perhaps most transformative was one of the plainest of produce products: potatoes from the Andes. The success of potato farming fed massive population booms in Ireland, Germany, and Russia. Corn was also a big introduction to the European diet along with tomatoes and chili peppers. Of course, many people today would be happiest that the New World yielded its invaders chocolate. Or is it a toss-up between chocolate and coffee? Naval food: a source of enduring innovation But apart from what was in the holds of the sailing ships, what happened in the ship galleys was a source of important nutrition innovation and discovery. During the 1700s scurvy killed thousands of British sailors, more than died in sea battles. In 1747, a naval surgeon, Dr. George Lind, ran the first medical clinical trial to determine the best treatment for scurvy. Although the vitamin C deficiency disease had been diagnosed and treated since the ancient Egyptians, Lind’s comparisons of the effectiveness of citrus vs. hard cider vs. vinegar vs. vitriol, which was likely a copper or iron sulfate liquid, vs. seawater concluded what many sailing cultures already knew, namely lemons and limes were the best treatment and prophylactic for scurvy because of their high concentration of vitamin C. The Napoleons better the lives of their sailors (or at least try to) Then there were the Napoleons and the prizes they offered to improve their navies’ food by improving its lifespan. Napoleon Bonaparte was immensely successful with the invention of canning, a massive boon for food preservation, but Napoleon III’s effort was a miss. The third Napoleon offered a prize for the invention of a butter replacement, the unrefrigerated dairy product spoiling after a week on board ship. After some years margarine was produced from beef fat in 1869, but it was so disgusting that neither the French sailors nor France’s poorest people would eat it. Margarine from plant oil was finally invented in 1901 and eventually became a huge hit due to its low cost and great health advantage over butter. Only the health advantage was merely imagined and marketed, and, in fact, plant oil margarine, which is essentially transfat, is quite toxic to human health. See https://www.eatinginamerica.co/p/a-horror-story-from-long-ago-about for the story of the 1945 health testing of margarine vs. butter using orphans as subjects: completely unethical research commissioned by the margarine manufacturers. More evidence for World War II as the crucible of the era of ultraprocessed food As the industrial technology of highly- and ultra-processed food advanced (I classify canning as moderately processed and margarine as highly-processed), the better served were the short term health, nutrition, and morale needs of the seafaring and the worst served were the long term health needs of the land-based population. In World War II, which was the engine that propelled us into the highly-and ultra-processed food era we live in now, the needs of transporting hundreds of thousands of soldiers aboard ships sparked the U.S. to invent dehydrated foods like powdered milk, instant coffee, and instant mashed potatoes. The amazing rowing journey of Kelsey Pfendler and the 4th of July cup of Joe! Interestingly, descendants of these same dehydrated meals were on board Kelsey Pfendler’s 24 foot row boat when she embarked from California in May to row to Hawaii, landing in Honolulu on July 4th. Powdered milk and dehydrated camping meals were staples of Pfendler’s 4,500 calorie a day diet. She told NPR, that it was, for sure, not a good diet for long term health. Her addictive but completely essential substances on board included lots and lots of chocolate and sugar. Pfendler had a supply of caffeine pills for emergencies, but had gotten herself off coffee before she left. However, the first thing in her hands when she landed in Oahu: fresh hot coffee! The everyday shipboard hero was in the galley So the seagoing life is never going to provide a nutritional model for the rest of us. But the ship does provide a model for the role of the chef, the cook, as a person who can deliver hope, love, warm memories, sustenance, community, and family. On a naval boat the chef is the cruise’s biggest hero three times a day, meticulously planning meals and packing every inch of available space with food for the voyage. The chef is the creative innovator, especially when things go wrong, and brings joy and a sense of pace to the voyage with a traditional, homey, fried chicken Sunday dinner, along with dependable birthday cakes and surprise treats. When the depth charges start exploding 100 meters down in battle, it’s the submarine’s chef who makes sure to hand pass sandwiches down the line to the far ends of the boat. Sort of a super-mom or super-dad. The highlight of the week? A can of pre-made coffee in the middle of the Pacific. And those mid-voyage treats? Even Kelsey Pfendler, who rowed a tiny but heavy boat 55 miles a day through ocean waves (I’m a rower and that is incredibly amazing) where every gram of weight counted, brought a can of coffee to celebrate reaching the mid-point of her 43 day journey. Congratulations to Kelsey Pfendler and all the sailors, and especially their galley cooks, who sailed the oceans to help celebrate the founding of one of the world’s most profoundly important and often beautiful democracies, a nation where all men are certainly created equal and, someday, we hope all children will be well fed. Let freedom, and the mess bell, ring. Thank you for reading. Your help in subscribing or upgrading your subscription, sharing this podcast with your besties, clicking a heart, or making known your thoughts, will get a warm like from me. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.eatinginamerica.co/subscribe

  5. Jul 15

    Coffee and the Ngäbe indigenous people in the mountains of Panama

    The most special person I have met recently is Marilyn Monroe. That’s her name as she said it, and she didn’t explain why. She was pretty much the opposite in every way of the Marilyn Monroe of the silver screen. Marilyn was a five-year old Latina niña when she started picking coffee on the finca where her mother worked and lived in the volcanic mountains near Boquete, Panama. As she grew, her employer, the farmer, saw her potential and paid for her school, including university. Marilyn went on to get a law degree, married another lawyer, moved to Panama City, and had a little girl. When her husband died at a young age, Señora Monroe and her daughter, Lorraine, discovered he had purchased a coffee finca near where she had grown up. Leaving her law practice, Marilyn followed Lorraine and her son-in-law back to the mountains. Marilyn and Lorraine were passionate about growing organic coffee, more to be a model for other farmers than as a commercial producer. And Marilyn was even more passionate about giving opportunities to the thousands of indigenous Ngäbe people whose labor made coffee farming possible in the region. Marilyn was very excited that it was the role of the Ngäbe in coffee production that I was most interested in hearing about. I thought she was going to hug me. Panama has the second highest per capita income in Latin America but severe income inequality, with skyscrapers in Panama City looming over slums. In the mountains and along the remote Caribbean coast, over 90% of the Ngäbe live in extreme poverty, and 1/3 are illiterate. Very close to the beautiful two-night rental my wife and I had found above Boquete was a large coffee finca. Below this farm was a dingy, shabby migrant camp of shacks surrounded by a high, plastic-shrouded fence topped with barbed wire. Outside the gate to the camp, unsupervised boys crawled through a dirty drainage pipe as their playground. A barefoot girl in a traditional Ngäbe dress passed by inside. It was February and still the middle of coffee picking season. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.eatinginamerica.co/subscribe

    Coffee and the Ngäbe indigenous people in the mountains of Panama

  6. Jul 12

    Pesticide makers are having a field day: Trump delivers 3 wins in 3 weeks.

    The Trump administration is supporting the financial interests of Big Agriculture and pesticide manufacturers like Bayer-Monsanto instead of the health concerns of its Make America Healthy Again constituency. MAHA is mad and sees it as a betrayal of their support for Trump. But all of America should be mad. The big win for Roundup: Trump helps Bayer-Monsanto win at the Supreme Court Trump fully backed Bayer-Monsanto at the Supreme Court, which ruled a few weeks ago that the Roundup manufacturer was immune from lawsuits from thousands of people claiming their cancer was caused by the glyphosate in Roundup. This ruling is expected to be extended to other pesticides that have been approved by the EPA and negates the ability of those claiming glyphosate harms to challenge the manufacturers for damages in state courts. But what is the big picture with pesticides, which include herbicides like glyphosate, and health? Glyphosate is by far the most widely used pesticide in America with 300 million pounds used annually in the United States on crops including corn, soybeans, wheat, oats, spinach, and almonds. In urine testing, the CDC found 81% of Americans had glyphosate in their system. According to the CDC, fruits, vegetables, and cereal grains are possible sources of glyphosate in people. Glyphosate has also been found in baby formula. Glyphosate/Roundup health effects So it’s in us every day. What about the health effects? The International Agency for Research on Cancer long ago declared glyphosate a probable carcinogen. But the EPA, relying heavily on a 2000 paper that reviewed the evidence, has said consistently that glyphosate is not a health risk. However, according to the Washington Post, that very widely cited 2000 paper was withdrawn last year because authors on the paper may have been Monsanto employees, other authors may have been paid by Monsanto, and the studies cited in the review were unpublished and written by Monsanto. The credibility of the paper which was the basis of wide belief in the safety of glyphosate has crumbled, but still the EPA clings to its stance of glyphosate safety. Cancers aside, research published in 2023 found when children were exposed to glyphosate there was the chance of an increased risk of liver disease, high blood pressure, prediabetes, obesity, and high cholesterol. This research studied children in an agricultural area in California, with some in homes close to a lot of glyphosate spraying. Exposure levels for some of the children were higher than normally found just through eating contaminated food. This allowed differences in exposure levels to be used to evaluate differences in disease outcomes. It is unclear to me how the exposures in that setting, the Salinas Valley in California, translate to the experience of the majority of children, who are exposed to glyphosate mainly from the food on their tables. Another unknown is how much exposure any kid is getting from the Roundup used widely for weed control on lawns and in parks. We’ll get to this question of how much to worry and how to worry about pesticides in a moment. Newly approved pesticides If the backing of Bayer-Monsanto by Trump and the ensuing Supreme Court decision in favor of Roundup weren’t distressing enough, a few days later the EPA ignored substantial evidence of possible risks and approved a number of new pesticides including, based on suggestive evidence from animal studies, two that may have a risk of cancer and another that may have a risk of endocrine-disruption, that’s hormones for metabolism, reproduction, mood, and growth. One of the new EPA approved pesticides is a PFAS, a “forever chemical.” The health risks of PFAS chemicals are multiplied because they are designed to never breakdown and can stay in our bodies and environment, well, forever. This was the fifth PFAS pesticide approved by the Trump Administration. One previous PFAS approval was by Biden’s EPA. PFAS “Forever chemicals,” now appearing in pesticides In the midst of all this, the FDA rejected a petition to set thresholds for seafood and milk for two of the most common and dangerous of the 16,000 PFAS compounds, namely PFOA and PFOS. The FDA is ignoring evidence linking these “forever chemicals” to cancer, bad reproductive and child development outcomes, high cholesterol, liver disease, kidney disease, and decreased immunity. And the EPA has found that most of the PFAS in our body comes from food, and the FDA has found that 60% of the seafood it sampled had PFAS. In limited testing, Consumer Reports found PFOS or PFOA in six out of 50 milk samples in 4 out of 5 milk brands, organic and not organic. There’s a good chance the milk you buy is occasionally positive for a PFAS. Blueberries, kale, and beer are among other foods that can contain PFAS. And, of course, PFAS can be found in nonstick cookware and other kitchen products. With all these concessions from the EPA and FDA, the pesticide manufacturers must be very happy with the Trump administration. Where does this leave us as consumers? Even if we think eating organic makes sense in reducing our pesticide exposure, and I do, most of us cannot afford to eat all organic or are not willing to limit ourselves only to the foods we can find that are organic. Informed choices can be made! The Dirty Dozen The Environmental Working Group (EWG) publishes its famous Dirty Dozen list, created by analyzing USDA data. The Dirty Dozen is a great place to start. Here’s the 2026 list: * Spinach * Kale, collard and mustard greens * Strawberries * Grapes * Nectarines * Peaches * Cherries * Apples * Blackberries * Pears * Potatoes * Blueberries I prioritize my organic dollars on those twelve. The Clean Fifteen EWG also provides a clean fifteen list, which is also very useful for picking produce likely to have the least toxic and lowest amounts of pesticides: * Pineapple * Sweet corn (fresh and frozen) * Avocados * Papaya * Onions * Sweet peas (frozen) * Asparagus * Cabbage * Cauliflower * Watermelon * Mangoes * Bananas * Carrots * Mushrooms * Kiwi I buy non-organic produce freely from this list. No matter where you live or the means you have to apply to healthy eating, my sense is that the health benefits of eating vegetables and fruit generally outweighs the risks linked to pesticides. But starting with the EWG tested rankings of the best and worst is a great way to have the vitamins, minerals, and fiber of produce while minimizing the bad stuff. Also, remember that frozen and canned vegetables and fruit can be just as nutritious as fresh, and frozen organic produce can be more affordable and sometimes more available than fresh. As for meat, EWG points out that pesticides can accumulate in the fat of animals, making another area of the supermarket with choices to think about. Finding the balance With so many choices in what we eat and consume these days, for me reaching an informed balance is the goal. For example, what I spend on organic for berries, apples, and other items on the dirty dozen offsets what I save on non-organic items from the clean fifteen. And there are days when the local non-organic strawberries or peaches are just too beautiful and delicious, and they have to come home with me. My approach suits me, and equally rationale approaches could be much stricter or much more relaxed. We are light years from having health data that can predict our individual health outcomes, and in any event what data we have has to be weighed against our individual circumstances. What we can say with some certainty is that if we greatly limit or eliminate the most toxic pesticides, we will have less pesticide-related disease in our children and the world. I would love to hear in the comments about your choices and thoughts on the chemicals in our food. Thank you for reading. Your support of Eating in America is important and appreciated. Likes, comments, and shares are great! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.eatinginamerica.co/subscribe

  7. Jul 5

    The bite of the Lone Star

    The Lone Star Tick, not named after Texas but for the single white spot on its back, has begun moving in to the Lone Star State along with the alpha-gal syndrome it can cause. This dangerous tick might already be in your state. What’s a tick got to do with eating? Lot’s, because it’s bite can cause a meat allergy, the alpha-gal syndrome. And for many victims, alpha-gal creates a dairy allergy as well. Getting a food allergy from a tick bite is strange but very real. Alpha-gal syndrome can cause rashes, hives, low blood pressure, dizziness, nausea and vomiting, sometimes severe, and even anaphylactic shock. Alpha-gal’s double delay and double avoidance Alpha-gal is tricky. There is a double delay with the symptoms. The allergy itself can take weeks or months to develop after a tick bite, and the symptoms take two to eight hours to appear after consuming mammalian meat or, for some, dairy. Once an allergy has developed double avoidance is required. Mammalian products are out of the diet and out of the medicine closet and the wine rack: some pharmaceuticals contain gelatin and some wines are clarified with gelatin. Avoiding a second tick bite is also important. The allergy can subside in some people, and another Lone Star bite can reinforce or reactivate the meat and dairy sensitivity. 450,000 suspected cases There were over 110,000 suspected alpha-gal cases in the U.S. from 2010 to 2022, but the estimate including unreported cases is 450,000. The Lone Star Tick has been spreading out of the Upper South with high rates of alpha-gal syndrome in parts of Kansas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, the whole of Delaware, and hot spots as far north as Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts and northern Minnesota. The Pacific Coast states have diagnosed cases extending inland to most of Arizona. There are no states that are entirely alpha-gal free. And in Texas, the Lone Star coast up to Oklahoma is encountering more Lone Star ticks. If you have it A lot of care providers are not yet familiar with alpha-gal, so be informed. If you contract symptoms an allergist may be needed to help with the diagnosis. You’ll likely want to get an epi pen to have on hand. An allergist doing food challenge testing on 250 patients who ate pork sausages or a similar meat to see if it provoked a reaction, found 15 to 20% of the patients needed an epi pen rescue. No one in my family has alpha-gal that I know of, but I will be traveling with the antihistamine Benadryl from now on, just in case symptoms appear at a time when getting to a pharmacy or doctor is not convenient. If you have the syndrome, the Pill Clarity website lists animal free pharmaceuticals and the FIG (Food Is Good) app scans product barcodes against its database to provide go/no-go information for your dietary restrictions, including alpha-gal. On Martha’s Vineyard, many restaurants now list their alpha-gal safe dishes and some food products on the store shelves there and in some other hot spots are labeled as alpha-gal friendly. You can buy organic wine to be sure gelatin wasn’t used for clarification. Proposed legislation before Congress The Alpha-gal Allergen Inclusion Act has been introduced in the House of Representatives. The bill would add alpha-gal to the list of major food allergens and require package labeling. An excellent website covering all things alpha-gal is alphagalinformation.org. It’s a Lone Star! Run? Unlike most ticks, including the deer tick plaguing the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and Upper Midwest with Lyme disease, the Lone Star tick does not wait passively to be brushed by a passing animal. The Lone Star detects movement vibrations and carbon dioxide from breathing and moves fast towards its victims, aggressively climbing boots and clothing. What to do if you are a nature lover or work in a vegetated area? Take maximum tick protection measures. Here is an, er, fascinating video from an entomologist. She uses double-stick carpet tape on her boot, DEET, and permethrin-treated clothing to stop an alarming swarm of Lone Star nymphs climbing up her boot. This video was not staged. By the way, the Lone Star tick not only can confer a nasty food allergy on its victim. It is also host at times to a bunch of other pathogens, including those causing tularemia and Rocky Mountain spotted fever. Why the name “alpha-gal”? All mammals except humans and a few primates make a form of galactose sugar which is a little different from the galactose we humans produce when we break down lactose from milk in our small intestine. This mammalian alpha-galactose is also found in the salivary glands of Lone Star and many other ticks around the world, causing an eventual immune reaction to mammal food products in many humans they bite. Thank you for reading. Please support my work by subscribing, if you haven’t, and with your likes, comments, and shares. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.eatinginamerica.co/subscribe

  8. Jun 19

    Refining a highly-refined food definition

    This post is in the “totally bonus” category. This short, summarized description of a proposed highly- and ultra-processed food definition is for scientists and policy makers familiar with this important issue as well as anyone with an interest. So if you missed the first version of this piece a couple of days ago, maybe because it was a lot longer, here is a chance to hear the essence of it. And some of the ideas have been revised or clarified since then. If you feel done with HUPF for the moment, a podcast on coffee production in the mountains of Panama is coming in the next few days. I recently had an interesting visit there and got to ask about the role of the indigenous people on the coffee plantations. Back to HUPF: A federal definition of Highly- and Ultra-Processed Food (HUPF) is coming. How HUPF is defined is important to two opposing interests: Big Food with its future profits at stake is certainly lobbying hard on the issue with the Trump administration, and the American people with their health in jeopardy have the voice of RFK, Jr., who has been badly losing on the HUPF fight to date. Using the original definition by Carlos Monteiro from 2009, 55% of the calories Americans eat are HUPF and those HUPF calories have strong links to chronic disease. If a clear, strong definition is achieved, it could provide the basis for policy that grows in effectiveness over time and minimize the opportunities for Big Food to lobby and connive its way out of regulation. A durable, strong definition will be clean and simple, which I suggest is best achieved by identifying the technology that is essential to the creation of HUPF and using the historical timeline a technical framework provides. This timeline is easy to determine. All HUPF is a product of innovations in technology in the last two hundred years. It was the Second Industrial Revolution (mid-19th to mid-20th centuries) and Third Industrial Revolution (the post-World War II Digital Age) that enabled the creation of new food products and additives that humans had not previously encountered or consumed. The great bulk of these have been created in the Third Industrial Revolution since 1945. Of course, we are continuing to create new food substances and additives in the 21st century as we enter what some have termed a Fourth Industrial Revolution, but it may be too early to define the current era. The proposed definition is: Highly- and ultra-processed food is produced from food or chemicals modified or newly created with methods of the Second or Third Industrial Revolution, or moderately processed food that has become a health risk because it is mass produced with new technology and can now be over-consumed. That is a strong, simple, working HUPF definition in 46 words. There are several tenets to this working definition: 1. HUPF is unnatural food. 2. Everything that is natural food predates the Second Industrial Revolution and has been consumed by humans for a long time. (This claim bears checking, but I can’t think of a natural food that was created after the Second Industrial Revolution began.) Intuitively, hundreds of millions of humans have manipulated their available natural foods with any tools and chemical processes at their disposal over the course of human history. Invention of moderate food processing techniques to create new foods and additives – many fermented foods are ancient examples – will have played itself out by the time of the Second Industrial Revolution. 3. Because of our accumulated cultural experience, natural food tends to be healthy, how we tend to eat it. 4. HUPF is not, by this working definition, unhealthy, but for most of the thousands and thousands of HUPF substances, healthiness is not well certified. This definition provides room for nutritionists to weigh as appropriate to each implementation the healthiness of individual substances and categories, some of which may be ambiguous, like bread with reconstituted whole wheat flour and the category of seed oils. Everything that is HUPF is a new industrial invention, or it is a food that is a new risk because of mass production, which is made possible by a high level of processing. Newly over-consumed substances like refined sugar, highly refined flour, salt, and white rice are in this sub-category of HUPF. 5. While the beginning of the Second Industrial Revolution likely marks the point after which any newly created food or additive is HUPF, it seems reasonable to assert that any food substance or additive created after 1945, approximately the beginning of the Third Industrial Revolution, is HUPF. This includes most HUPF, thousands of which have not been identified, catalogued, or certified by our government. We can say no new natural foods have entered human food environments since at least 1945 and any food or additive created after 1945 is HUPF. Some HUPF is older. Hydrogenated vegetable oil, for example, was invented in 1901. It’s possible the watershed date should shift 100 years earlier. 6. Any definition of HUPF, simple or complex, will require exceptions when implemented in law, policy, regulations, or programs. Exceptions will be added based on the circumstances of jurisdiction, institutional setting, nutritional needs, economic and financial dictates, or political influences. In order to have a defensible policy, the exceptions should be added to the language of the implementation and not be part of the main definition. In definitions offered and enacted so far, exceptions have been embedded in the definition – where they invite argument. I cannot think of any exceptions inherent to the simple working definition offered. 7. The proposed HUPF definition is in harmony with the original 2009 definition of Monteiro that has been the foundation of most research on the effects on health of HUPF. This compatibility provides an evidence-base for policy that could be implemented using the simple definition. It was the youthful Hippies in the late 1960s who intuited that during their short lives our food environment had gone bad, with our diets co-opted by lab-created, unnatural products. The Sixties Counterculture’s insight into the dichotomy of natural/unnatural food is fundamental to understanding what HUPF is. Ironically, the Hippies valuable contribution, aimed at restoring the health of our food environment, has been co-opted by the commercial sector, with 557 Whole Foods stores worldwide stocked with aisles of HUPF. The health risks are bad, but the economics favor HUPF. In every implementation of an HUPF definition, policy makers may consider that HUPF can provide convenient, cheap calories, whether it is the increased costs of reduced-HUPF school lunches in California or the cost of calories in vegetables versus the cost of soda calories when sugar-sweetened beverage taxes are formulated. Thank you for reading. Your comments, likes, and shares are always valued. Eating in America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, please become a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.eatinginamerica.co/subscribe

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