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  • E258: Do 'market driven epidemics' drive your food choices?

    E258: Do 'market driven epidemics' drive your food choices?
    2024/12/19
    For much of history, the word 'epidemic' applied to infectious diseases. Large numbers of cases of disease caused by organisms such as bacteria and viruses that spread through water, air, or other means, sometimes transmitted from person to person, or back and forth between people and animals. Then came epidemics of chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease - diseases occurring in very large numbers and created not by infectious agents, but by drivers in our day to day lives, such as a bad food environment. A new paper was just published in the PLOS global health literature that I found fascinating. It focuses on another use of the concept of epidemics: market driven epidemics. Let's find out what these are and find out a little bit more about their implications for our health and wellbeing. Our guests today are two of the authors of that paper. Dr. Jonathan Quick is a physician and expert on global health and epidemics. He is an adjunct professor at Duke University's Global Health Institute. Eszter Rimanyi joins us as well. She works on chronic disease and addiction epidemiology at Duke university. Interview Summary Access the PLOS article “Dynamics of combatting market-driven epidemics: Insights from U.S. reduction of cigarette, sugar, and prescription opioid consumption.” So, Jono, let's start with you. Tell us what you mean by market driven epidemics. The pattern is familiar to people. There is a product that that humans like and the business community says we can make a lot of money on this unmet need. And so they do that and they start selling a lot of it. And then people start noticing that this thing that the humans like is killing some of them. And so, the scientists do the public health. And then the business community says these scientists are going to kill the golden goose. They buy up other scientists and try to defend themselves. And then it goes on and on before we really bend the epidemic curves. This pattern of consumer products that have harmful effects, those products are major contributors to the root causes of at least a million deaths a year in the US, and over 20 million deaths worldwide. So, to try to look at this from an epidemic point of view, we first established a case definition. Our definition of market driven epidemic is a significant increase in death, disability and other harmful effects on humans and human health and wellbeing. It's arising from a consumer product whose use has been accelerated by aggressive marketing. Whose harmful effects have been denied or otherwise minimized by producers. And for which effective mitigation is possible but actively opposed by producers. So, we looked at the natural history of this, and we found five phases through which these epidemics pass. There's market development, either inventing a new product, developing a product like prescription opioids, or transforming an existing product like tobacco. Phase two is evidence of harm. First, there's suspicion, astute clinicians, whistleblowers, and then eventually proof of harm. Phase three is corporate resistance. Companies deny harm, seek to discredit accusers, commission counter science, manufacture doubt, mount legal challenges. All the while deaths and social upheaval and economic costs are mounting. And finally, our next phase four is mitigation. We get some regulatory efforts going, and there's a tipping point for the consumption and resulting deaths. And then finally, phase five of this is market adaptation. In a response to decreasing or threatened consumption, companies and consumers typically seek alternatives. Adaptations can be positive or negative. Some are healthier, some are equally or more harmful. Thanks very much for that description. It really helps explain what the concept is all about. You chose three areas of focus. You could have chosen others, but you chose cigarettes, sugar, and prescription opioid use. Why those in particular? We wanted to identify differences in these market driven epidemics in a few product categories. We wanted to look at distinctly different consumer experiences so we could see what worked and what didn't in terms of bending the epidemic curve. We picked nicotine delivery, food, and prescription medicine. And to choose within those categories we established five inclusion criteria. So, number one, the product had to have proven adverse health effects. Number two, there needed to be well documented histories of product development, marketing, mitigation efforts, and so forth. Number three, the product needed to meet the overall case definition. That is, companies knew they were doing harm, continued to do harm, and fought that harm. Number four, there needed to be long term data available for product consumption and associated impact. And number five, most important, we chose products for which mitigation efforts had already resulted in significant sustained reduction in product consumption. Based on these three criteria, ...
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    29 分
  • E257: Embracing convergence in the RECIPES Network

    E257: Embracing convergence in the RECIPES Network
    2024/12/04
    In 2021, American University and 15 partner institutions across the U. S. launched the Multiscale RECIPES Research Network with the goal of transforming our wasted food system into a sustainable and resilient one. Food loss and waste is a complex problem spanning societal issues such as food insecurity and food recovery, sustainable farming, food packaging and transportation, food marketing, sales and consumer preferences, family dynamics, and corporate profits, among others. A fascinating part of the RECIPES Network vision is a purposeful focus on convergence, making the research process more effective and creative in designing solutions to big problems such as these. In a recent article in the journal Ecology and Society, team members evaluated how well the network's intentional convergence efforts have worked thus far. Interview Summary Norbert Wilson - It is my great pleasure to welcome my colleague, Amanda Wood, who is a research scientist at the World Food Policy Center. Amanda Wood - Thank you, Norbert. I'm looking forward to this discussion today. Our guests come from the University of Illinois Institute of Technology Food Systems Action Lab. Weslynne Ashton is a professor of environmental management and sustainability at Illinois Tech and co directs the Food Systems Action Lab. Azra Sungu is a design researcher and strategist at the Food Systems Action Lab, who just defended her doctoral dissertation. So, our biggest congratulations to Dr. Sungu. Thank you so much for being here today. So first, I want to start by saying the RECIPES Network has gone about their work a little bit differently than most traditional academic projects by taking a convergence approach. Weslynne, would you talk about what convergence is in research, and why is this approach useful for tackling complex societal challenges like food waste? Weslynne Ashton - Convergence is an approach that really tries to integrate the best of many different disciplines. The way that they see, approach, and tackle problems. And tries to integrate them in a really holistic way, right? Like, we often operate in silos and universities and this is a way of trying to get out of that. But more than working side by side on the same topics, it really tries to pull ways of working and ways of knowing across these different disciplines. For the topic of food waste, which as Norbert described is incredibly complex, right? There are so many different dimensions. They're scientific, natural science, social science, anthropological, political science. So, there are these technical aspects, economic aspects, social aspects, as well as cultural and spiritual aspects that we really don't talk about that often. And so, a convergence approach tries to say, how can we bring together the way all of these different disciplines approach understanding and developing solutions so that the solutions we develop can be more holistic. And more likely to take hold because they are considering these different perspectives. Amanda - A lot of individuals might not see food waste as this complex challenge. They throw their leftovers in the bin and that's food waste to them. But as you say, challenges of food waste and food loss extend all the way across the food system. So, we definitely need that more holistic approach. Thanks for that bigger picture. Norbert, over to you. Norbert - Azra, I'd like to turn it over to you and ask you a question about design. And I've got to say, this is the first project that I've ever worked on where I've worked with design scholars. And so, I'm excited for you to share with our audience what actually is design. And how do you see design fitting in the context of the work that we've been doing? Azra Sungu - Thank you. Yes, it's been very exciting for me to part of such a transdisciplinary group as well. And probably in over 12 years of design education that I got, that was the most frequent question. Like my family and everyone that's asking, like, what is it that you do actually? So, I think it's really important that we clarify that because design in this context is a little bit different than the design of products and services. In a way, we could say that it carries similar principles, but in recent years, design has been gaining visibility as a creative and collaborative problem-solving approach. So, some of the key mindsets, methods, and processes of design have been distilled into more accessible toolkits that allow more people from various backgrounds and expertise to get together and collaboratively explore problems of different kinds and approach them in more creative ways. So, we can say that, yeah, this adaptation of design found applications in different fields, such as entrepreneurship. We see that picking up in education or even apply to issues related to social justice. And I would say that what makes it different from other problem-solving approaches is that it centers a deep understanding of humans, their needs, their ...
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    33 分
  • E256: ATNI - driving market change towards nutrition

    E256: ATNI - driving market change towards nutrition
    2024/11/21
    Now more than ever, it's important to challenge the world's food and beverage manufacturers to address nutrition issues like obesity and undernutrition. Today, we're going to discuss the 2024 Global Access to Nutrition Index, a very important ranking system that evaluates companies on their nutrition related policies, product portfolios, marketing practices, and engagement with stakeholders. The index is an accountability strategy produced by ATNI, the Access to Nutrition Initiative, a global nonprofit foundation seeking to drive market change for nutrition. Our guest today is Greg Garrett, Executive Director of ATNI. Interview Summary You know, I very much admire the work you and your colleagues have done on this index. It fills such an important need in the field and I'm eager to dive in and talk a little bit more about it. So, let's start with this. You know, we've all heard of the concept of social determinants of health and more recently, people have begun talking about corporate determinants of health. And your organization really is focused on corporate determinants of nutrition. Let's start with a question that kind of frames all this. What's the role of industry in nutrition, according to the way you're looking at things? And how does the Global Index shine a light on this topic? Thanks for the question. We're working primarily quite downstream with large manufacturers and retailers. But we hope to affect change across the value chain by working with that group. Of course, when we talk about private sector in food, that's a very, very broad terminology that we're using. It could include farmers on the one hand, looking all the way upstream, all the way through to SMEs, aggregators, processors, manufacturers. SMEs are what? Small and medium enterprises, small and medium enterprises, local ones. All the way through to the multinational food and beverage manufacturers. But also catering organizations and restaurants. When we talk about business what we're trying to do is ensure that business cares about portability, and access to safe and nutritious food. And I think we can say pretty safely, based on the data which we'll talk about, that the health aspects of food are still not as, they're not at the forefront like they should be. Yet. We'll dive in and talk a little bit more about what the index is and what it shows in a minute. But let's start with a kind of broader question. What is the role of diet and consumption of processed foods in influencing health? Yes, so they say now one in five deaths are related to poor diet. It's arguably now the biggest risk factor related to global morbidity and mortality. We've seen in the last 20 years a slight slowing down of our efforts to combat malnutrition and undernutrition. Whereas we've seen over nutrition, obesity, really taking off. And that's not just in high income countries, but also low- and middle-income countries. So, you know, it might be too little good food and that can lead to at the extreme end of things wasting. It might be too little micronutrients, which can lead to all kinds of micronutrient deficiencies or hidden hunger that leads to many adverse outcomes. Including, for example, cognitive decline or reduced immune system. And then, in terms of diabetes and obesity, we're seeing that really skyrocket. Not only in countries where we have excessive food intake, but also in low- and middle-income countries where they have too much food with a lot of, say, empty calories. Not enough nutrients that are needed. In fact, the recent numbers that we've been working with, it looks like in the last 20 years, obesity rates have gone from about 7.9 percent to 15.9 percent. And by 2030, it might be that 20 percent of global population is considered obese if we don't mitigate that. Right, and of course that number is many, many times higher in the developed countries. So, you've got a tough job. You talked about the complexity of the food industry going all the way to the farmers, to the big companies, and caterers even, and things. And a lot of different health outcomes are involved. How in the world do you construct an index from all that? Why don't you tell us what the Global Index is, and then some of what you found in the most recent report. Yes, so the Global Index, we've been running it for 11 years since ATNI was founded. And it has gone through multiple iterations. This latest one was the biggest we've done and we tried to capture about a quarter of the world's market. So, what we did is we took the 30 largest food and beverage manufacturers by revenue. We looked at 52,000 of their products, and that's where we know the market share was about 23 percent global market share. We profiled the foods. We tried to understand their governance structures and how much nutrition features in the way they run their business. We tried to understand, for example, how they market the foods. Are they marketing them responsibly, according to the World ...
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    27 分
  • E255: Reducing food waste - less seafood wasted than thought in US

    E255: Reducing food waste - less seafood wasted than thought in US
    2024/11/18
    The U. S. is the largest importer of aquatic foods, which includes fresh and saltwater fish, crustaceans, mollusks, and aquatic plants served in restaurants and homes. A critical piece of this global market is the cold chain, keeping these foods chilled or frozen during storage and transport to market. With 44 percent of aquatic foods sold live or fresh globally, the percentage of fresh over frozen aquatic foods creates an extra logistical cold chain challenge. What's more, most aquatic foods become, well, fishy from cold chain disruptions, which can cause perceived food safety concerns, potentially resulting in food getting tossed into the bin. Until recently, research to understand just how much aquatic food gets wasted or lost has been spotty. However, in a recent Nature Food article, researchers argue that aquatic food loss and waste in the United States is actually half of earlier estimates. And that's good news that we'll explore today. This interview is part of an ongoing exploration of food loss and waste. This episode is co-hosted by environmental economist, Martin Smith at Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment. Interview Summary Martin Smith - So I'm really pleased to introduce our guests for today. First up from University of Florida, a natural resource economist, Frank Asche. Frank is a long-time collaborator of mine and a good friend. And he's also one of the world's leading experts in seafood markets and trade. And honestly, Frank has taught me just about everything I know about aquaculture. Also today, we have Dave Love from the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. Dave is someone whose work I'm also very familiar with and is a leading expert in food systems and sustainability. And recently in my classes, I have often said out loud to some student questions that I don't know the answers to. I'll bet Dave Love knows the answer to that question. Norbert Wilson - So Dave, let's begin with you. Why was it important to develop better estimates and methods of aquatic food waste in the US? Why did your team pursue this research question? Dave Love - Great question. So, the US government has a goal of cutting food waste in half by 2030. And if you want to know how much you need to cut, you really need to go out and measure. And that's one of the areas of food waste that we really don't know a lot about for many different types of foods. We know the production data. We know how much is produced. We have a pretty good sense of what's consumed, whether that's in an economic sense of being consumed or actually eaten. But we really don't know how much is wasted. And groups come to the table with different numbers, different estimates, and they, they make their way into reports, into national guidelines. But for seafood in particular, the estimates haven't been refreshed in a while. So, it was about time to do that. And this study aimed to tackle that issue from all the stages of the supply chain, from production to consumption, looked at different forms of seafood and among the top 10 species. So, we rolled those species estimates and stage estimates into a national number. So yeah, that that's, that's why we did it. And we were really surprised at what we found. Norbert - Well, what surprised you? Dave - Well, earlier estimates were that about half of seafood was lost or wasted in the US and that came from UN Food and Agriculture Organization data. And when we actually crunched the numbers for the US supply, we thought it was more like 22.7 percent is wasted. So, a lot less than the FAO estimate. Which means we're doing a good job in some areas, but there's also room for improvement in others. Martin - So, Frank, maybe you could tell us a little bit more about the key takeaways from this Nature food paper are? Frank Asche - It's really that it's important to recognize that we are consuming a lot of different species and they have very, very different characteristics. For instance, the filler yield of a salmon is about 65 percent while for a cod it is about 40%. That makes your starting point really important. Moreover, this thing of looking at the whole supply chain is important because there are different ways to organize it, and there are a lot of potential uses for what food is sometimes wasted. And to look into what different types of producers are actually doing. What different companies that are operating these cold chains that Norbert spoke about are doing. And what they are doing when these things break apart. Kind of, there's all these people in the supply chain that may help us, and some of them do. Some of them aren't very good at it. But it's really nice to find that there are best practices that can really help us a lot of people take the trouble to figure that out and follow that up. Martin - That's really interesting. And it makes me wonder with all this heterogeneity that you're describing, are large producers better positioned to manage or, or reduce food waste ...
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    30 分
  • E254: Why is food so expensive?

    E254: Why is food so expensive?
    2024/10/31
    If you feel like your grocery budget just doesn't buy you as much as it once did, you're not alone. According to U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, food prices rose 11. 4 percent last year alone - the highest annual increase in 23 years. The ongoing pinch at the grocery store has been in the news of a lot of media outlets, such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Times Magazine, Forbes, and so many others. Our guest today, food economics and policy professor David Ortega from Michigan State, is going to walk us through the food price inflation phenomenon. Interview Summary We've been hearing a lot about food price inflation. Can you tell us how food prices have changed over the last four to five years, and how that compares to the recent past? Definitely. So, I think it's always really important to define what food inflation is so that we're all on the same page. We hear this word a lot and we've been hearing it for a number of years now. Inflation is the rate of increase in prices over a period of time - so how fast prices are changing or increasing in a given period. The time frame here is very, very important. Now, compared to last year, food prices are only up 2.1%. And this is for all food, which includes food at home and food away from home. Now groceries, food at home, are up 0.9% compared to last year. And menu prices at restaurants, or food away from home, are only 4.0% higher. Now if you're listening to this, you're probably thinking, ‘well, how can this be given how expensive things are at the grocery store?’ And that's because you are likely thinking about how food prices have changed since the start of the pandemic, right? So, over the past five years, food prices have increased around 26%. And so that's the cumulative effect of inflation that we're all very familiar with at the grocery store. Wow. You talked about the recent past, and in particular, about the time since COVID. How has this looked historically if you take a longer time frame? Yes, so if we look at a few years before COVID, food prices generally increase around 2% or so, year over year. Now in the summer of 2022, we experienced double digit increases in food prices. More than 11%, year over year. And that was the highest rate of increase in around 40 years, since the late 1970s and early '80s. So now that's a significant spike and departure from what we would consider to be normal. But the rate of increase has come down to almost pre pandemic levels, which is really great news. But remember the rate of inflation is the rate of increase, so because that rate has come down, it doesn't mean that prices are decreasing necessarily. They're just not growing as fast as they were before. Correct. I have some ideas, but I really want to hear you talk about it. What has led to this significant increase in the last four and a half years or so? It's really been a convergence of factors. It's not just one particular thing, but really all these factors coming together and sort of compounding on each other. We saw increases in labor costs, and then as we go through the timeline, we had Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022. And that really sent commodity prices surging for things like wheat, other grains, as well as vegetable oils. And it wasn't just the invasion alone, but we had countries responding with export restrictions on things like palm oil that really just exacerbated the situation. We also have the impacts of climate change. The summer of 2022, and for a few years leading up to then, there was this mega drought in the West and the plain states that affected anything from lettuce prices to the price of meat. Something that we're experiencing to this day. We also have the bird flu outbreak, now the largest outbreak in U. S. history. Egg prices have been through a bit of a roller coaster ride, and we've been hearing a lot about increases in egg prices. That's primarily due to the high path avian influenza outbreak, or the bird flu outbreak. Now, those are all what I would consider, for the most part, to be supply side factors. But we also have demand factors at play. And that is, that when we look at consumer spending on food, especially over the past two to three years, it's been much higher compared to before the pandemic. Even when you adjust for inflation. Now, this is likely attributed to households. Some of them accumulated savings. We had the fiscal stimulus payments from the government that injected cash into the economy. For a period of time, some households, we could splurge at the grocery store. We've seen, and the data from USDA shows, that consumer spending on food both at home and away from home is much higher in recent years than prior to COVID. So again, it's a combination of both supply side and demand side factors that have contributed to the significant rise in food prices. This is a really important point that it's not a single factor, but it's this mix of things, which also makes it ...
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    15 分
  • E253: Learnings from No Kid Hungry in New York

    E253: Learnings from No Kid Hungry in New York
    2024/10/30
    When we talk about problems with food insecurity and the food system, we tend to reference challenges at the national or international level. And of course, work at that level really needs to be done. But increasingly, there is a unique focus on regional food system strategies and right sizing solutions to best fit those unique characteristics of a particular locale. In today's podcast, we will talk with Rachel Sabella, director of No Kid Hungry New York. She leads the planning, implementation, and evaluation of the No Kid Hungry campaigns across the state of New York. Interview Summary Rachel, it is such a pleasure to have you with us on the show today. We've done several podcasts with No Kid Hungry staff in the past and discussed topics like your Summer EBT Playbook for state governments. I'm really interested to learn more about your work in the state of New York. Thank you so much for having me, Norbert. We have been so lucky to have No Kid Hungry on here to share the stories. And I'm excited to give you some updates about what we've learned with Summer EBT, and to talk about how things look in New York these days. So, can you help our listeners understand more about No Kid Hungry New York as an organization? What is your approach to addressing childhood hunger? No Kid Hungry is a campaign of Share Our Strength. And I have the honor and privilege of representing the organization across the state of New York as we work to create solutions, to draw more attention and awareness, and to help connect more kids and families with meals. We believe that every kid needs three meals a day to grow up healthy, happy, and strong. But too many children, and I know we'll talk more about this, are missing those meals. We really take an approach of working directly with communities. I don't know the right answer for each community. But my job and really my privilege is to work with school districts, with elected officials, with community organizations to look for challenges and work together to overcome them and really change systems. I can appreciate that local communities look very different and appreciate if you're talking about New York City versus upstate New York. Can you tell us a little bit about how you all think differently about the cities versus the more rural areas of New York State? I appreciate that question. I think all of my colleagues can hear me say, we almost run two different campaigns in New York. Because the approach in New York City, where there is one school district in five boroughs, but a large concentration of students, the largest school district in the nation, versus the rest of the state, is different. But ultimately, the challenges are the same. How are we communicating with families? What solutions are out there that we can implement? We really focus on listening, sharing tools, sharing toolkits, thinking about, in some communities, what they need are materials translated in different languages, so families understand that SNAP benefits are available, or summer EBT benefits. Or as in other communities, it's how can families get to a centrally located place to pick up meals? We really spend our time learning and listening and sharing these programs so that they can find the solutions that work best. This is wonderful. I grew up in Georgia, I should just note. And I grew up in rural Georgia versus Atlanta. And we always talked about two Georgias, the Atlanta region versus the rural areas. And I can appreciate just how different some of those challenges are. But you're right, the central issue of access to food is similar and how you address those issues will look different in those regions. I want to span out and talk about some national data that just has come out. USDA has reported food insecurity rates in the U.S. and we saw that hunger actually increased. And we see that for childhood hunger, food insecurity in general, it has risen since the 2019 pandemic. Why is this happening for children? It's a challenging time. I think something that came out of the pandemic was right away, people said, families are struggling with hunger. What can we do? The stories on the news. We saw it no matter where you were in the country, with the lines to pick up food. And we saw government responded very quickly. There were expanded SNAP benefits. There were no cost school meals provided to every child across the country. We saw pandemic EBT implemented. We also saw the expanded child tax credit. At a time when families were facing tremendous challenges, there was that support from the government. But many of those programs have now ended. And in these economically challenged times, incomes haven't changed. Some people are still dealing with an unemployment crisis. We hear a lot from families as well that they're underemployed. There may be a job, but it's not that same income. And without these expanded government programs, families are facing challenges. How is this looking specifically in New ...
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    15 分
  • E252: Is farm-level environmental impact reporting needed or even possible?

    E252: Is farm-level environmental impact reporting needed or even possible?
    2024/10/22
    In today's podcast, we're discussing Fast and Furious. But it's not the movie series starring Vin Diesel. Instead, the catchphrase describes rapidly increasing and somewhat confusing food system environmental impact reporting. Food firms, farmers, and governments all have a clear need for more quantitative environmental impact data in order to measure and understand factors such as carbon footprint, sustainable agricultural practices, and food supply chain processes. But there is no single standard for such reporting and different measurement methodologies make it difficult to assess progress. What's more, greater transparency regarding environmental impacts and food systems will affect trade and supply chains. Our guest today is Koen Deconinck from the Trade and Agricultural Directorate of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD for short. Interview Summary You and your colleagues at the OECD recently published a paper called Fast and Furious: The Rise of Environmental Impact Reporting in Food Systems. Can you tell me a little bit about the paper? Sure. A while ago we were talking to one of the world's experts on sustainability in food systems. He alerted us that there was a major change happening in how people think about sustainability in food systems. He told us in the past, it was thought of almost as a checklist, right? People would say, here's a list of practices that you should or shouldn't use. And then we'll come and confirm whether that's the case on your farm. Then you either get certified or you don't. And he said, you should pay attention because there's a big change underway. We're more and more moving towards actually quantifying things like what is your carbon footprint? What is your water footprint? And so on. He convinced us that this was actually a major change that was happening. Oddly enough, outside of the role of the practitioners, not that many people have been paying attention to it. That is why we wrote this paper. This is a really important shift because just thinking about this in terms of economics, evaluating outputs versus the methods that you get to those outputs can have really significant implications for the various actors involved. So, this seems like a good move, but it seems also kind of complicated. I would love to hear your thoughts about that particular move. Why did you think, or why did you all realize this was a challenge and opportunity at the same? That's a great question. It actually gets to the heart of what we're describing in the paper. Starting with the good news, we do think that this has an enormous potential to improve sustainability in food systems. Because we know from the scientific evidence that there are big differences between different kinds of food products in terms of their average environmental impact. For example, beef tends to have more greenhouse gas emissions per kilogram of products relative to poultry and then definitely relative to plant based alternatives and so on. You can see these kinds of average differences. But then the data also shows that within each kind of product category, there's huge differences between different farmers. And what you can do if you start quantifying those footprints is it actually unlocks different kinds of levers. The first lever, if you think about carbon footprints, which is maybe the most intuitive example. The first lever is people know the carbon footprint of different kinds of food products. They could shift their diets away from the products that have a higher footprint towards products that have a lower footprint. For example, less beef and more towards poultry or towards plant-based alternatives. That's one lever. A second lever is that if you can also start to get even more precise and use data that is specific to each producer, not just an average, then also within each product category, people can start shifting towards the producers that have a lower environmental footprint. So, for example, people will still be drinking milk, but then they can shift towards milk producers that have a lower carbon footprint. And the third interesting lever that you can unlock is if you have that data at a supplier level. Suppliers could then say, well, I changed my practices. I changed my inputs. I've done things differently to reduce my impact. You actually can stimulate innovation by each individual farmer, each individual company in the supply chain to lower that impact. And that is something that you can do if you're quantifying those impacts, and that is very difficult or even impossible to do with this previous checklist-based approach. So that's one of the reasons why we're, we think that this has tremendous potential if we get it right. That's right. Just saying that you're doing sustainable practices isn't sufficient. It's really critical to evaluate what kinds of greenhouse gas emissions or other environmentally problematic outcomes of that producer or firm is what ...
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    24 分
  • E251: The thoughtful transformation of Southern cooking

    E251: The thoughtful transformation of Southern cooking
    2024/10/14
    Today's podcast is a gastronomic treat. I'm talking with Chef William Dissen, James Beard Award-winning chef and owner of the restaurant, The Marketplace, located in Asheville, North Carolina. William is the founder of four award winning restaurants and draws inspiration from traveling the world, creating dishes that tell a story, surprising guests with inventive food preservation techniques, and bringing classic dishes with explosive flavors to life. He published a debut cookbook in 2024 titled Thoughtful Cooking - Recipes Rooted in the New South. Food and Wine Magazine recognized it as the best spring cookbook and praised how he takes readers on a culinary journey organized by the four seasons of Appalachia's most sought-after ingredients. William also enjoys the fame of being the first and only chef to beat Gordon Ramsay in a cook off on NatGeo TV’s Gordon Ramsay Uncharted Smoky Mountains. Interview Summary Will, you were early to the farm to table local foods concept. Some years ago, when I dined at your restaurant, the Marketplace, I liked the philosophy, not to mention the food, would you please tell us what led you down this road? You know, I'm originally from West Virginia, from the Appalachian Mountains, and my grandparents were, were farmers that lived in very rural parts of the state. I grew up in suburbia in the capital of Charleston, West Virginia, but spent a lot of my weekends on their farm. And they very much lived the Appalachian mentality and culture of farming, of putting things up for the year. You know, they canned and pickled and preserved and fermented and dehydrated, and they foraged and they had honeybees to pollinate their garden. They irrigated with fresh spring water and things that I think now in 2024, hipster DIY trends that people are saying they're doing in bigger cities. But these are things my grandparents were doing to sustain themselves. And I'd say that those ideas and ideals imprinted upon me about not just sustainability and how to treat the earth, but also about how to make food delicious because great food starts fresh. And from this initial exposure to food customs of your youth what led you to being a chef? You know I think in those hot sweaty August days, as they say up in the holler of my grandparents’ farm, we'd sit in the front porch and shuck corn and string beans. I really kind of kindled a love affair with food. One of my first jobs I had, I was a newspaper delivery boy and shortly after that I was, you know, trying to hustle to make some more money. And I ended up washing dishes at a local country club. And I think a very similar story for a lot of chefs, one day the garde manger cook or the salad and sandwich cook called out. And the chef said can you make sandwiches and salads? And I thought, sure, I can do that. And haven't really looked back since. You've been a chef at many fine restaurants in major cities. What led you to Asheville, North Carolina in particular? After I left West Virginia, I lived all over the place. I was in New York and California and South Carolina and ended up back here where I'm now in Asheville where I have my restaurant, The Marketplace. And one of the things that really stood out to me was the really beautiful region. National Geographic has voted it time and time again as one of the most biodiverse places on the planet. It's actually a temperate rainforest. There are species of wild edible greens and medicinal greens. There are species of lizards and snakes and things that you only find here in this region. It's not just beautiful. It's also a really thriving ecosystem. Terms like intentional, mindful, and in your case, thoughtful - it's in the title of your book - can be applied to cooking and eating. What does it mean to you? I'd say in general, it's going back to what I mentioned about my grandparents. And really focusing on being present but also planning ahead. I feel like in this day and age, we're so connected to computers and phones and social media that we've kind of got disconnected from our food system. People say, well, you know, technology is driving the world and we need to be logged in to be able to stay relevant. And I don't disagree with that, but I feel as our society is doing that, we are losing touch with nature. And if you go back one generation, two generations and ask anyone, their grandparents, I'm sure grew a garden. Or were farmers, and they probably went through acts of preservation because there weren't Whole Foods in every corner. It wasn't Amazon delivery. They had to plan ahead, and to be in touch with the time of year enables them to sustain themselves and their families. And certainly, we're fortunate now in 2024 to not have to think that way all the time, but I do think there's a lot of value into being a little more thoughtful about the world around us. And I think that's really what I want to try to show people with my book, Thoughtful Cooking, is that connecting yourself to the ...
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