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  • E279: Feed Us With Trees - the surprising importance of nuts

    E279: Feed Us With Trees - the surprising importance of nuts
    2025/07/31
    Every day, with few exceptions, I eat a handful of nuts. Usually a combination of almonds, walnuts, pecans, cashews, and pistachios. And they taste good for sure. But I'm responding mainly to research showing that consumption of nuts is related to less chronic disease. In particular, eating nuts lowers levels of inflammation related to heart disease and diabetes, and may improve cholesterol levels among other benefits. So, I saw it as welcome news that someone has just published a book about nuts, all aspects of nuts, actually. Today we're joined by NPR, food Writer Elspeth Hay author of a new book called Feed Us with Trees- nuts, and The Future of Food. And I had no idea. Nuts were so interesting until I dove in a little bit. Elspeth has gathered stories from dozens of nut growers, scientists, indigenous knowledge keepers, researchers and food professionals. She writes that humans once grew their staple crops in forest gardens of perennial nuts, such as oaks, chestnuts, and hazelnuts in these species. Particularly important to the environment as well as to human wellbeing. Interview Summary Elspeth, thanks so much for joining us and for writing such an amazing book. Thank you so much for having me. And it sounds like you have the same habit as my dad. He makes sure to eat a little bit of mixed nuts every night, ever since I can remember for his health. Let’s start by having you describe your book. Tell us about Feed us with Trees. Why did you write it and what's it about? I wrote it because I've been reporting on food in the environment for a long time, a little more than 15 years. And I had never heard anyone mention anything about eating acorns until a few years ago. And someone sent me a TEDx talk by a woman in Greece named Marcie Mayer, and she said, you can eat acorns. And not only that, but they're a super food nutritionally, and one of humanity's oldest foods. And I live in this giant oak forest that's protected on Cape Cod as part of the Cape Cod National Seashore. And I had always seen this forest as a sort of impediment to local food production, right? There's all this land that can't be farmed. And all that time, it turns out there was food literally raining down on my roof, underfoot in my driveway, and I just wasn't equipped to see it. The stories that I had grown up with hadn't mentioned that. And so that was a real eyeopener for me and I just couldn't stop thinking about it and I kept researching. So, have you started consuming acorns? I have, yes. I've collected them the past probably five falls and, you know, oaks do something called masting. Some years they have a really big production and some years smaller production. Some years I've gotten more than others. But I have started processing them at home and experimenting with different ways of using the flour. And I've also ordered online acorn oil. There are actually three food products that you can make from acorns. You can make starch, which works just like corn starch or potato starch. Thickens things. You can make flour and with some species you can make oil. It's actually a pretty diverse crop. That's so interesting. You know, I have a series of oak trees right outside my window and I never thought that they might be producing food I could consume. It's so interesting to hear your history with that. Yes, I mean I had no idea. And it turns out that actually acorns are very similar to olives in the way that they need to be processed. They're very high in these compounds that are very bitter, called tannins, just like an olive. I had the experience once of going to Italy with my husband, and we saw this olive grove and we thought, oh cool. Olives growing right here. And we picked one off the tree and he put his in his mouth and immediately spat it out and said, oh, that's awful. Tannins are not something that we want to eat. They don't taste good, but obviously they haven't hampered the olives rise to glory in terms of a human food source. And Acorns need the same kind of processing. So, tannins are water soluble. You pull them out with water. You know, you always get olives in brine, right? And so Yes, just started learning more about how to work with them and then also more about our relationship with oak trees. And I started seeing them differently in that light too. Going from sort of the species that I'd always seen as natural and wild and better off without humans, to actually understanding that we have a really long history with oak trees and in some places, they actually really depend on us. So that was total game changer for me. There's more to the story than oaks and acorns. Tell us what you learned about the history of humans eating nuts like acorns, but also things like chestnuts and hazelnut. Yes, I was really surprised. At first, I thought, okay, this is going to be an isolated thing where some people in really hilly areas or areas that aren't good for row crops are eating these nuts as staple foods. But when I ...
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    26 分
  • E278: Here's how screen time affects our kids' eating, activity, and mental health

    E278: Here's how screen time affects our kids' eating, activity, and mental health
    2025/07/15
    Interview Summary So, you two, along with a number of other people in the field, wrote a chapter for a recently published book called The Handbook of Children and Screens. We discussed that book in an earlier podcast with its editors, Dmitri Christakis and Kris Perry, the executive director of the Children and Screens organization. And I'd like to emphasize to our listeners that the book can be downloaded at no cost. I'd like to read a quote if I may, from the chapter that the two of you wrote. 'Screen time continues to evolve with the advent of continuous and immersive video reels, voice activated assistance, social media influencers, augmented and virtual reality targeted advertising. Immersive worlds where children can virtually shop for food and beverages, cook or work in a fast-food outlet from a smartphone, a tablet, a computer, or an internet connected tv and more.' So as much as I follow the field, I still read that and I say, holy you know what. I mean that's just an absolutely alarming set of things that are coming at our children. And it really sounds like a tidal wave of digital sophistication that one could have never imagined even a short time ago. Amanda, let's start with you. Can you tell us a little bit more about these methods and how quickly they evolve and how much exposure children have? I think you're right, Kelly, that the world is changing fast. I've been looking at screen media for about 20 years now as a researcher. And in the earlier years, and Tom can attest to this as well, it was all about TV viewing. And you could ask parents how much time does your child spend watching TV? And they could say, well, they watch a couple shows every night and maybe a movie or two on the weekend, and they could come up with a pretty good estimate, 1, 2, 3 hours a day. Now, when we ask parents how much time their children spend with media, they have to stop and think, 'well, they're watching YouTube clips throughout the day. They're on their smartphone, their tablet, they're on social media, texting and playing all these different games.' It really becomes challenging to even get a grasp of the quantity of screen time let alone what kids are doing when they're using those screens. I will say for this book chapter, we found a really great review that summarized over 130 studies and found that kids are spending about three and a half or four hours a day using screens. Yet some of these studies are showing as high as seven or eight hours. I think it's probably under-reported because parents have a hard time really grasping how much time kids spend on screens. I've got a one-year-old and a five-year-old, and I've got some nieces and nephews and I'm constantly looking over their shoulder trying to figure out what games are they playing and where are they going online and what are they doing. Because this is changing really rapidly and we're trying to keep up with it and trying to make sure that screen time is a safe and perhaps healthy place to be. And that's really where a lot of our research is focused. I can only imagine how challenging it must be to work through that landscape. And because the technology advances way more quickly than the policies and legal landscape to control it, it really is pretty much whatever anybody wants to do, they do it and very little can be done about it. It's a really interesting picture, I know. We'll come back later and talk about what might be done about it. Tom, if you will help us understand the impact of all this. What are the effects on the diets of children and adolescents? I'm thinking particularly when Amanda was mentioning how many hours a day children are on it that three to four hours could be an underestimate of how much time they're spending. What did kids used to do with that time? I mean, if I think about when you and I were growing up, we did a lot of different things with that time. But what's it look like now? Well, that's one of the important questions that we don't really know a lot about because even experimental studies that I can talk about that look at reducing screen time have not been very good at being able to measure what else is going on or what substitutes for it. And so, a lot of the day we don't really know exactly what it's displacing and what happens when you reduce screen time. What replaces it? The assumption is that it's something that's more active than screen time. But, you know, it could be reading or homework or other sedentary behaviors that are more productive. But we really don't know. However, we do know that really the general consensus across all these studies that look at the relationship between screen time and nutrition is that the more time children spend using screens in general, the more calories they consume, the lower the nutritional quality of their diets and the greater their risk for obesity. A lot of these studies, as Amanda mentioned, were dominated by studies of television viewing, or looking at ...
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    43 分
  • E277: Food Fight - from plunder and profit to people and planet

    E277: Food Fight - from plunder and profit to people and planet
    2025/06/27
    Today we're talking with health and nutrition expert Dr. Stuart Gillespie, author of a new book entitled Food Fight: from Plunder and Profit to People and Planet. Using decades of research and insight gathered from around the world, Dr. Gillespie wants to reimagine our global food system and plot a way forward to a sustainable, equitable, and healthy food future - one where our food system isn't making us sick. Certainly not the case now. Over the course of his career, Dr. Gillespie has worked with the UN Standing Committee on Nutrition in Geneva with UNICEF in India and with the International Food Policy Research Institute, known as IFPRI, where he's led initiatives tackling the double burden of malnutrition and agriculture and health research. He holds a PhD in human nutrition from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Interview Summary So, you've really had a global view of the agriculture system, and this is captured in your book. And to give some context to our listeners, in your book, you describe the history of the global food system, how it's evolved into this system, sort of warped, if you will, into a mechanism that creates harm and it destroys more than it produces. That's a pretty bold statement. That it destroys more than it produces, given how much the agriculture around the world does produce. Tell us a bit more if you would. Yes, that statement actually emerged from recent work by the Food Systems Economic Commission. And they costed out the damage or the downstream harms generated by the global food system at around $15 trillion per year, which is 12% of GDP. And that manifests in various ways. Health harms or chronic disease. It also manifests in terms of climate crisis and risks and environmental harms, but also. Poverty of food system workers at the front line, if you like. And it's largely because we have a system that's anachronistic. It's a system that was built in a different time, in a different century for a different purpose. It was really started to come together after the second World War. To mass produce cheap calories to prevent famine, but also through the Green Revolution, as that was picking up with the overproduction of staples to use that strategically through food aid to buffer the West to certain extent from the spread of communism. And over time and over the last 50 years of neoliberal policies we've got a situation where food is less and less viewed as a human right, or a basic need. It's seen as a commodity and the system has become increasingly financialized. And there's a lot of evidence captured by a handful of transnationals, different ones at different points in the system from production to consumption. But in each case, they wield huge amounts of power. And that manifests in various ways. We have, I think a system that's anachronistic The point about it, and the problem we have, is that it's a system revolves around maximizing profit and the most profitable foods and products of those, which are actually the least healthy for us as individuals. And it's not a system that's designed to nourish us. It's a system designed to maximize profit. And we don't have a system that really aims to produce whole foods for people. We have a system that produces raw ingredients for industrial formulations to end up as ultra processed foods. We have a system that produces cattle feed and, and biofuels, and some whole foods. But it, you know, that it's so skewed now, and we see the evidence all around us that it manifests in all sorts of different ways. One in three people on the planet in some way malnourished. We have around 12 million adult deaths a year due to diet related chronic disease. And I followed that from colonial times that, that evolution and the way it operates and the way it moves across the world. And what is especially frightening, I think, is the speed at which this so-called nutrition transition or dietary transition is happening in lower income or middle income countries. We saw this happening over in the US and we saw it happening in the UK where I am. And then in Latin America, and then more Southeast Asia, then South Asia. Now, very much so in Sub-Saharan Africa where there is no regulation really, apart from perhaps South Africa. So that's long answer to your intro question. Let's dive into a couple of things that you brought up. First, the Green Revolution. So that's a term that many of our listeners will know and they'll understand what the Green Revolution is, but not everybody. Would you explain what that was and how it's had these effects throughout the food systems around the world? Yes, I mean around the, let's see, about 1950s, Norman Borlag, who was a crop breeder and his colleagues in Mexico discovered through crop breeding trials, a high yielding dwarf variety. But over time and working with different partners, including well in India as well, with the Swaminathan Foundation. And Swaminathan, for example, managed to ...
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    25 分
  • E276: Climate Change - A little less beef is part of the solution

    E276: Climate Change - A little less beef is part of the solution
    2025/06/20
    Interest and grave concern have been mounting over the impact of agriculture and the food choices we all make on the environment, particularly on climate change. With natural weather disasters occurring much more frequently and serious threats from warming of the atmosphere in general, it's natural to look for places to make change. One person who has thought a lot about this is our guest today, Dr. William Dietz of George Washington University. He's been a prominent voice in this space. Bill, you're one of the people in the field I respect most because our relationship goes back many years. Bill is professor and director of research and policy at the Global Food Institute at George Washington University. But especially pertinent to our discussion today is that Dr. Dietz was co-chair of the Lancet Commission on the global syndemic of obesity, under nutrition and climate change. Today, we'll focus on part of that discussion on beef in particular. Interview Summary Bill, let's start out with a basic question. What in the heck is a syndemic? A syndemic is a word that reflects the interaction of these three pandemics that we're facing. And those are obesity, under nutrition, and we've also called climate change a syndemic insofar as it affects human health. These three pandemics interact at both the biologic and social levels and have a synergistic adverse impact on each other. And they're driven by large scale social forces, which foster clustering and have a disparate impact on marginalized populations. Both in the developed and equally important, in the developing world. Here are a couple of examples of syndemics. So, increased greenhouse gases from high income countries reduce crop yields in the micronutrient content of crops, which in turn contribute to food insecurity and undernutrition in low and middle income countries. And eventually the reduction in crop yields and the micronutrient content of crops is going to affect high income countries. Beef production is a really important driver of the climate change, and we're a major contributor in terms of the US' contribution. And beef production drives both methane and nitrous oxide emissions, and in turn, the consumption of red and processed meat causes obesity, diabetes, colon cancer, and cardiovascular disease. And finally, obesity, stunting and nutrition insecurity occur in the same children and in the same population in low- and middle-income countries. Okay, so we'll come back to beef in a moment, but first, help us understand the importance of agriculture overall and our food choices in changing climate. Well, so I think we have to go back to where this, the increase in mean global surface temperatures began, in about 1950. Those temperatures have climbed in a linear fashion since then. And we're now approaching a key level of increase of 1.5 degrees centigrade. The increase in mean surface temperature is driven by increased greenhouse gases, and the US is particularly culpable in this respect. We're it's second only to China in terms of our greenhouse gas emissions. And on a per capita basis, we're in the top four with China, India, and Brazil and now the US. And in the US, agriculture contributes about 10% of greenhouse gas emissions, and about 30% of fossil fuels are responsible for greenhouse gas emissions. But when you look at the actual contribution of car use among the fossil fuel use, it's pretty close to the contribution of greenhouse gases from agriculture. The important point here is each one degree increase centigrade in air temperatures associated with a 7% increase in water vapor. And this is responsible for the major adverse weather events that we're seeing today in terms of increased frequency and severity of hurricanes, the droughts. And I learned a new term from the New York Times a couple of days ago from the science section, which is atmospheric thirst. I had trouble understanding how climate change would contribute to drought, but that same effect in terms of absorbing moisture that occurs and drives the adverse weather events also dries out the land. So increasingly there's increased need for water use, which is driven by atmospheric thirst. But that increase in air temperature and the increase in water vapor, is what really drives these storms. Because in the Pacific and in the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, this increase in air temperature is associated with an increase in water temperature, which further drives the increase in the severity of these storms. Thanks for that background. Now let's get to beef. You and I were not long ago at the Healthy Eating Research conference. And you gave what I thought was a very compelling talk on beef. We'll talk in a minute about how much beef figures into this overall picture, but first, tell us how beef production affects both climate and health. And you mentioned nitrous oxide and methane, but how does this all work? Cattle production is a big driver of the release of methane. ...
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    24 分
  • E275: Against the Grain - A Plea for Regenerative Ag

    E275: Against the Grain - A Plea for Regenerative Ag
    2025/06/16
    I was at a professional meeting recently and I heard an inspiring and insightful and forward-looking talk by journalist and author Roger Thurow. Roger was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal for 30 years, 20 of them as a foreign correspondent based in Europe and Africa. Roger has written a number of books including one on world hunger and another what I thought was a particularly important book entitled The First 1000 Days, A Crucial Time for Mothers and Children and the World. Now comes a new book on farmers around the world and how they are coping with the unprecedented changes they face. It was hearing about his book that inspired me to invite Mr. Thurow to this podcast and thankfully he accepted. His new book is entitled Against the Grain: How Farmers Around the Globe are transforming Agriculture to Nourish the World and Heal the Planet. Interview Summary I really admire your work and have loved the new book and what I've read before. So, let's talk about something that you speak about: the wisdom of farmers. And you talk about their wisdom in the context of modern agriculture. What do you mean by that? Farmers of the world, particularly the small holder farmers, indigenous farmers, family farmers as we know them in this country, they're really bold and pioneering in what they're doing. And these farmers, kind of around the world as we go on this journey around the world in the book, they've seen their efforts to earn a living and feed nourish their families and communities turn against. So, while conforming to the orthodoxies of modern industrial agriculture practices: the monocropping, the increased use of fertilizers and pesticides and insecticide chemicals, the land expansion, at the expense of savannas, forest wetlands, biodiverse environments. In the face of this, they've really witnessed their lands degrading. Their soils depleting. Their waters dwindling. Their pollinators fleeing. Their biodiversity shrinking and becoming less diverse. Their rains becoming ever more mercurial., Their temperatures ever hotter. And their children and families and their communities becoming ever more hungry and malnourished. So, they've really seen the future of their own impacts on the environment, and then the impacts of changing climates, of more extreme weather conditions. They've really seen this future. They've experienced, lived it, and it's ugly what they see and what they've experienced on their farms. So, that's their wisdom, and they'll really tell us that it doesn't have to be that way if we listen. That such a future isn't inevitable. Because out of their desperation, you know, these farmers have begun farming against the grain. So, there's the title of the book Against the Grain of this modern agriculture orthodoxy to reconcile their roles as both food producers and nourishers of us all, and stewards in the land. They're pushing forward with practices like agroforestry, agroecology, regenerative agriculture, kind of whatever one calls it. Farming with nature instead of bending nature to their will, which is what we too often done and with kind of the larger modern industrial agriculture techniques. So, farming with nature as opposed to against it as they strive to both nourish us all and heal our planet. Give us a sense, if you will, about how important these small farmers are to the world's food supply? So how important are these? They're really important. Extremely vital for the global food chain, certainly for their own families and communities, and their countries. In a lot of places, say in Africa, in many of the countries, on the continent, it's the small holder farmers that are producing the majority of the food. In their communities and in their countries and across the continent. Still not enough. Africa then must become a substantial importer of food. But these small holder farmers are so key and the more success that they have in feeding their communities and families, the more success we all have then in this great goal of ending hunger and malnutrition. Equally important, these farmers are the stewards of the land. And they're on the front lines of these environmental challenges. The threats from the changing climate and more extreme weather conditions. They're the first impacted by it, but they also increasingly see, and that's what stories in the book are about, how they see that their own actions are then impacting their environment and their climates. And this is why they're so important for all of us is that they find themselves at the center of what I think is this great collision of humanities two supreme imperatives. One, nourish the world, so nourish us all. That's the one imperative. And then the other imperative, kind of colliding with that, is to preserve, protect, and heal our planet from the very actions of nourishing us. So, these are these two colliding forces. You know as I think we already know agriculture and land use activities are responsible for about a ...
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    31 分
  • E274: Sweet and Deadly - Coca-Cola in the spotlight

    E274: Sweet and Deadly - Coca-Cola in the spotlight
    2025/06/05
    Recently I was asked to review a forthcoming book for American Scientist magazine. The book was entitled, Sweet and Deadly: How Coca-Cola Spreads Disinformation and Makes us Sick. I did the review, and now that the book has been published, I'm delighted that its author, Murray Carpenter, has agreed to join us. Mr. Carpenter is a journalist and author whose work has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and has been featured in places like NPR's All Things Considered and Morning Edition. Interview Summary So, let's start with your career overall. Your journalism has covered a wide range of topics. But a major focus has been on what people consume. First, with your book Caffeinated and now with Sweet and Deadly. What brought you to this interest? My interest in caffeine is longstanding. Like many of us, I consume caffeine daily in the form of coffee. And I just felt like with caffeine, many of us don't really discuss the fact that it is a drug, and it is at least a mildly addictive drug. And so, I became fascinated with that enough to write a book. And that really led me directly in an organic fashion to this project. Because when I would discuss caffeine with people, mostly they just kind of wanted the cliff notes. Is my habit healthy? You know, how much caffeine should I take? And, and in short, I would tell them, you know, if you don't suffer from anxiety or insomnia and you're consuming your caffeine in a healthy beverage, well, that's fine. But, what I realized, of course, is that by volume, the caffeinated beverage people consume most of is sodas. And so that led me to thinking more about sodas because I got a lot of questions about the caffeine in sodas. And that led me to realize just the degree to which they are unhealthful. We've all known sodas not to be a health food, but I think that the degree to which they are not healthy surprised me. And that's what led me to this book. Yes, there's some very interesting themes aren't there with addiction and manipulation of ingredients in order to get people hooked on things. So let's talk about Coca-Cola a bit. Your book focuses on Coca-Cola. It's right there in the title. And certainly, they're giants in the beverage field. But are there other reasons that led you to focus on them? Other than that, the fact that they're the biggest? They're the biggest and really almost synonymous with sodas worldwide. I mean, many people don't say ‘I want a pop, I want a soda.’ They say, ‘I want a Coke.’ I quote a source as saying that. You know, what that means is you want a sugar sweetened beverage. And it's not just that they're the most successful at this game, and the biggest. But as I started doing this research, I realized that they have also been the most aggressive and the most successful at this sort of disinformation that's the focus of the book. At generating these health campaigns, these science disinformation campaigns, we should say. This is not to say Pepsi and Dr. Pepper have not been at this game as well, and often through the American Beverage Association. But it is to say that I think Coca-Cola has been the most sophisticated. The most invested in these campaigns. And I would argue the most successful. And so, I really think it's a league apart and that's why I wanted to focus on Coca-Cola. That makes good sense. So, in reading your book, I was struck by the sheer number of ways Coca-Cola protected their business interest at the expense of public health and also the degree to which it was coordinated and calculated. Let's take several examples of such activities and discuss exactly what the company has done. And I'd love your opinion on this. One thing you noted that Coke acted partly through other organizations, one of which you just mentioned, the American Beverage Association. There were others where there was sort of a false sense of scientific credibility. Can you explain more about what Coke did in this area? Yes, and one of the organizations that I think is perhaps the exemplar of this behavior is the International Life Sciences Institute. It's a very successful, very well-funded group that purports to you know, improve the health of people, worldwide. It was founded by a Coca-Cola staffer and has, you know, essentially carried water for Coke for years through a variety of direct and indirect ways. But so front groups, the successful use of front groups: and this is to say groups that don't immediately appear to be associated, say with Coca-Cola. If you hear the International Life Sciences Institute, no one immediately thinks Coca-Cola, except for people who study this a lot. The International Food Information Council, another very closely related front group. This is one of the ways that Coke has done its work is through the use of front groups. And some of them are sort of these more temporary front groups that they'll establish for specific campaigns. For example, to fight soda taxes in ...
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    25 分
  • E273: Feeding innovation by taste testing alternative proteins

    E273: Feeding innovation by taste testing alternative proteins
    2025/05/29
    As someone who's been mostly vegetarian for a number of years, I have tried a lot of plant-based foods and there's a variety of them. And so how do they really taste, not just from my perspective? Well, it's really important to do really careful analysis, and this is going to be the subject of our conversation today. Plant-based foods are becoming increasingly healthier and cheaper. But one large question really remains for consumers. How do they taste. NECTAR, a nonprofit initiative on a mission to accelerate the alternative protein transition sets out to answer this question. Through large scale blind taste tests with thousands of consumers. NECTAR is amassing the largest publicly available sensory database on alternative protein products. In its latest report, Taste of the Industry 2025, NECTAR conducted blind sensory panels of 122 products across 14 categories and uncovered which products have achieved the taste that's on par with their animal-based counterparts. Today we talk with NECTAR's Director, Caroline Cotto, about which products are meeting and exceeding consumer taste expectations and what the alternative protein industry needs to do to get more products to this level. And how NECTAR's novel dataset can be used to get there faster. Interview Summary I understand you've conducted the world's largest clinical sensory test for plant-based and alternative meats compared to real animal meat. Tell me about how you conducted this study and why NECTAR is focused on this research. Absolutely. So, for us, we're really focused on this research because we know that taste is a major purchase driver for consumers and it's often the key reason people cite for not repurchasing plant-based meats once they've purchased them. We really want people to come back to the category and so in order for that to happen, we need taste to be where consumers expect it to be. As you mentioned, we set out to conduct a large study and sort of understand where the products on the market taste today. So, we tested 122 products across 14 categories. And we chose those categories by looking at the highest volume selling categories of animal meat, and then mapping the plant-based products to those categories. And then 43 of those products were from Europe as well. So, we were trying to get a real landscape analysis. Different than traditional sensory testing, we conducted all of our studies in restaurant settings to give a more natural experience for the participants. And all of our testing is done with omnivore consumers. So, we love vegans and vegetarians, but we're really trying to go after that hardcore meat eater and see if we can get them to switch because they love the taste of these products. And then the other difference is that we serve everything in what we call a full build. We serve burger patties and buns, hot dogs and buns. We really allow consumers to apply condiments as long as they do it equally across all of the products that they're testing, um, to give that authentic experience as they would experience the product in their own kitchen. And we ended up having 2,684 participants in this city. Each product was tried by a minimum of 100 consumers. Wow, that's pretty extensive. What were some of the surprising results of this? Yeah, I think we found that the average plant-based product was not quite ready for mainstream adoption. The average plant-based product was generally disliked more frequently than the animal product was, with 35% of tasters rating the product. Some form of dislike. And only 9% of tasters rating animal products as some form of dislike. That said, we did find 20 products out of the 122 that were worth celebrating. We created the Tasty Awards based on this data. And we set a threshold for top performance. And that threshold was that of the people that tried the product, if at least 50% of them said that it, that plant-based meat was the same or better than the animal meat that it was considered a winner product in this study. I'm super exciting to see that we saw 20 products meet that threshold. However, these products were not distributed equally across categories. Some categories had up to five products that met the winner threshold and other categories had none. And we also found that no products in this year's study actually achieved parody with animal meat. So, four products came very close, and we're expecting that in next year's study, that there will be some products that achieve that milestone. But we're not there quite yet. And then lastly, we found that there really is a correlation between great taste and financial return. So, we found that the plant-based products that perform best in our sensory tests are actually capturing 50% more market share than the average products in that category. And the categories that taste better are capturing more market share than the lower performing categories. Wow. That's really fascinating and there are lots of ways of sort of thinking through...
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    18 分
  • E272: Why getting food date labeling right is so darn tough

    E272: Why getting food date labeling right is so darn tough
    2025/05/22
    Do you pay attention to information printed on food labels? From eye-catching designs companies use to entice you to buy a product to nutrition facts panels to the tiny dates printed on packages. There's a lot going on to be sure. For policymakers, they hope that refining date labels on food packaging will help reduce the amount of uneaten food ending up in landfills. Food Waste is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. The Food and Drug Administration and the Food Safety and Inspection Service recently asked for public input on food date labels. So, we decided to gather some experts together to talk about this important policy tool. Roni Neff is a professor in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Senior Advisor at the School's Center for a Livable Future. Her research looks at the intersection of food waste policy, climate change, and food system resilience. Brian Roe is a professor at the Ohio State University Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Developmental Economics. His work focuses on issues including agricultural marketing, information policy, behavioral economics, and product quality. Ruiqing Miao is an associate professor of agricultural economics and rural sociology at Auburn University's College of Agriculture. His research emphasizes sustainability, innovation, and decision making. Interview Summary Brian, let's begin with you and let's make sure everyone's on the same page. Can you talk to us a little bit about what date labels are and where they are on packaging. And what is industry required to include in terms of these date labels? Yes, so date labels, we see them anytime we pick up a food package. Most packages are going to have some type of date label on them. Oddly, federal law doesn't regulate these or really require these other than the exception of infant formula, which is the only federal requirement domain out there. But in the absence of federal regulation, states have kind of done their own thing. About 40 different states require date labels on at least some food products. And about 20 states prohibit or restrict the sale or donation of food past the label date. And even though states that require date labels, manufacturers can still choose the dates. There are no real regulations on them. So, recognizing that confusion over date labels can lead to unnecessary food waste, Government and industry actors have made, you know, some efforts to try to standardize date labeling language. But nothing terribly authoritative. Now, some states have introduced bills that seek to standardize date labels, with the motivation to try to get rid of and reduce food waste. California being perhaps the most recent of these. In 2024, they passed a bill that prohibits the use of any date label other than 'Best if Used By,' the phrase that goes along with foods where the date represents kind of a quality indicator. And then the phrase 'Use By,", if that date has some implications for product safety. The bill doesn't go into effect until July of '26, so we're going to see if this is going to create a domino effect across other states, across the food manufacturing center or even bubble up and be dealt with at the federal legislation level. Now, industries tried to do things before. Back in 2017, the Food Marketing Institute and the Grocers Manufacturers Association had a standardized date labeling suggestion that some firms bought into. FDA has given out some guidance about preferring 'Best if Used By' on certain food products to indicate quality. But again, we're all kind of waiting to see if there might be a federal legislation that kind of brings these state labels into check. Thanks, Brian. And it's really important to know about the policy landscape and the fact that there hasn't been a federal policy across all foods. And it's interesting to see the efforts of, say, in California. I think this begs the question; how do consumers actually process the information of date labels? This fascinated us too. A very clever person at Ohio State that I work with, Dr. Aishwarya Badiger, led a study I was part of. We enlisted consumers to come into the Consumer Evaluation Lab that we have here on campus and evaluate samples of milk. They were presented with the label of each milk. We gave them a little glass with a nose full of the milk that they could sniff. So, they're looking at the date label, they're given the sample they could smell, and then we kind of asked them, Hey, if this were in your fridge, would you keep it or toss it? But the entire time we actually had them fitted with special glasses that precisely track their eye movements so we could understand kind of which information they were looking at while they went through the whole process of evaluating and then making their decision. Consumers overwhelmingly looked at the date itself on the package and largely ignored the phrase or the words that go along with the date. In fact, for more than half of the...
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