Food

Lowering the price of fruits and vegetables by 30 percent can save nearly 200,000 lives over 15 years — roughly the population of Des Moines, Iowa. That’s the message being touted by researchers this week at the American Heart Association’s Epidemiology meeting in Phoenix.

We know eating more fruits and vegetables is good for your heart. Now computer models suggest that making that produce more affordable may actually translate into lower death rates from heart disease and stroke. And, the researchers add, lower prices are more effective at saving lives than traditional campaigns designed to encourage consumption of fruits and vegetables, like “5 A Day.”

Lower prices for fruits and vegetables meant better health across the population, regardless of age, gender, race and ethnicity, lead researcher Jonathan Pearson-Stuttard, an academic clinical fellow at Imperial College in London, tells us.

Researchers from the U.K. and Tufts University created a tool called the U.S. IMPACT Food Policy Model that included projections of U.S. demographics and cardiovascular death rates to 2030. They then combined the data with current and projected fruit and vegetable intake figures. The model allowed the team to simulate the effects of different policies on eating habits.

“We were able to take a given change of price, and [determine] what that change in price does to consumption levels,” says Stuttard.

It’s the ability to model outcomes that’s new here, says American Heart Association president Dr. Mark Creager, a cardiovascular disease expert.

“They’re doing the modeling that will demonstrate how pricing affects health. The best example is what’s happened to tobacco. The increase in the cost of the price of cigarettes” deterred some smokers from lighting up, which meant fewer people exposed to the health risks associated with that habit, he says.

“Another example is the price of food like sugar-sweetened beverages,” Creager says. Mexico’s soda tax has pushed consumption rates down. “It’s too early to see outcomes yet, but we can anticipate as they consume less sugar, it will have downstream effects for weight reduction.” And therefore, better health.

So far, no national studies have been done looking at how financial incentives drive healthy eating, the researchers say. But a smaller study conducted in Massachusetts between 2011-2012 mirrored the findings of the modeling done at Tufts and Imperial College.

That previous study — the Healthy Incentives Pilot — tested financial incentives for SNAP recipients that were designed to encourage more consumption of fruits and vegetables. Under the program, some SNAP participants received an extra 30 cents for every dollar of SNAP benefits — but could spend the extra money only on targeted fruits and vegetables.

“We did indeed find the incentive worked: Participants purchased more and consumed more fruits and vegetables than SNAP participants that were not receiving the incentive,” says Susan Bartlett, principal associate at Abt Associates, a public policy consulting firm that worked on the study.

The findings presented this week don’t identify which specific policies should be tweaked to bring the price of produce down. But Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist, epidemiologist and dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, has some suggestions.

“At state or national levels, general subsidies could be implemented at the farm or wholesaler level,” Mozaffarian tells us via email. “Grocery store bonus cards could also be a mechanism for providing lower prices.”

Elizabeth Pivonka, president of Produce for Better Health Foundation, a nonprofit working to increase fruit and vegetable consumption, says it isn’t necessarily about moving crop subsidies from corn and soybean to broccoli and oranges. It may be more about the USDA simply putting its money where its mouth is.

Produce for Better Health’s 2015 GAP Analysis report looked at USDA spending on subsidy programs, promotional programs, research education and more and found that it didn’t match with its own dietary guideline recommendations — which encourage Americans to eat more fruits and vegetables and less meat and dairy.

“The government doesn’t put as much funding into fruits and vegetables,” says Pivonka. Instead, it spends “six times more on the protein group,” she says, citing findings from her group’s 2015 report.

Bartlett says a better strategy would be a policy that directly relates to the people who are making the purchases.

“Reducing prices for the people at the market is a promising strategy, and making it available to the population you’re trying to encourage,” says Bartlett.

The end goal, says the American Heart Association’s Creager, is to encourage policymakers to have “these conversations about what can be done in communities that will make healthy foods more accessible and more affordable for people, so they’ll be encouraged to consume a healthy diet.”

Clare Leschin-Hoar is a journalist based in San Diego who covers food policy and sustainability issues.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Here’s an exercise in deductive logic, with implications for our food supply.

Fact: Insects such as bees and butterflies are helpful, and sometimes essential, for producing much of our food, including a majority of our fruits, vegetables and nuts.

Fact: Many of these pollinators, especially wild ones such as bumblebees, are in trouble. In Europe, where the phenomenon has been studied most carefully, about a third of all bee and butterfly species are declining, and 9 percent are threatened with extinction.

The seemingly logical conclusion? Food production will decline along with the pollinators.

This is the basis of a headline-generating summary of a new and massive scientific report prepared by 80 scientists around the world, and sponsored by the United Nations. Only a summary of the report has been released at this point.

According to the summary, fewer pollinators could lead to food shortages, “impacting health and nutritional security.”

This simple, logical deduction, however, is bedeviled by many complicating factors.

First, the world’s biggest crops, the ones that billions of people still depend on for most of their calories, don’t rely on insects or other pollinators. These crops include corn, wheat, soybeans and rice.

That still leaves a lot of other crops, though, and many of them are growing in popularity. Berries, vegetables, fruits and nuts tend to benefit most from pollinators. Marcelo Aizen, a researcher at Universidad Nacional del Comahue in Argentina and co-author of the U.N. report, has reported that the amount of land devoted to these “pollinator-dependent” crops has been increasing at a much faster rate, globally, than pollinator-indifferent grains.

According to Aizen, the surging popularity of these nutritious crops could run headlong into the roadblock of vanishing pollinators. With fewer bees or butterflies available, yields could fall, making these valuable foods even more expensive.

The degree of probable damage, however, is largely a matter of speculation. According to Jaboury Ghazoul, an ecologist at ETH Zurich, a leading university in Switzerland, “in most farming systems, production is limited by other, far more important factors” — such as pests and diseases, weather, and access to fertilizer.

Some crops, meanwhile, like almonds and greenhouse-grown tomatoes, rely on pollination by highly managed colonies of bees that are multiplied in captivity and hauled by the truckload to farms where they are needed. This can be expensive, but those pollinators — unlike wild species — are not likely to disappear.

And yet another wrinkle: The places where pollinators have declined most precipitously are the places where crops don’t actually need them — like the Midwestern corn and soybean belt. In much of the rest of the world, there’s scant evidence that pollinators are even in trouble, which has led Ghazoul to question whether there really is a “pollination crisis” for agriculture. In an email to The Salt, Ghazoul wrote that “there is an urgent need for conservation, for many reasons, but I do not believe that a clear scientific case has been made for pollinators on the basis of their contribution to food production.”

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Denmark is once again distinguishing itself in the race against food waste — this time, with a supermarket hawking items once destined for the trash bin.

Those items might include treats for a holiday that happened last week, a ripped box of cornflakes, plain white rice mislabeled as basmati, or anything nearing its expiration date. In other words, perfectly edible items that are nonetheless considered unfit for sale by the retailers and manufacturers who donate them.

WeFood is not the first grocer in Europe to sell surplus food. But unlike so-called “social supermarkets” – stores which serve almost exclusively low-income people — WeFood’s offerings are very intentionally aimed at the general public.

“If you call it a ‘social supermarket,’ it’s difficult to get customers to go there. Who wants to be poor?” explains Per Bjerre with DanChurchAid, the charity behind this initiative. “If you want to stop [the] waste of food, everybody has to be into it.”

And, apparently, everybody is. Or at least, everybody who has been lining the sidewalks each day since WeFood opened its doors on Feb. 22. Bjerre says some of these surplus food die-hards are low-income people looking for a deal. But mostly, he says, they’re here for more political reasons.

Food waste has become a Danish cause célèbre of late (a Danish princess graced WeFood’s grand opening). Over a recent five-year period, Danes managed to reduce the amount of food landing in the garbage by 25 percent (a reduction of roughly 35 pounds per person per year).

WeFood’s open-to-everyone policy is similar to that of Daily Table, another surplus food retailer, which launched last year in Boston. Both are nonprofits, but while Daily Table’s sales cover operational costs, WeFood is run by volunteers with profits used to support anti-poverty initiatives in other parts of the world.

But both grocers represent a carrot-based approach to the food waste problem when compared with a new (and potentially more far-reaching) initiative in France, where the stick takes the lead. A law passed in February prohibits French supermarkets from destroying unsold food. It also requires the country’s biggest chains to donate surplus food to charity or give it to farms as animal feed or compost. Scofflaws face hefty fines.

The head of Denmark’s Stop Wasting Food organization, Selina Juul, applauds her French counterpart, municipal councilor Arash Derambarsh, who persuaded French minister to take up the food waste measure. But Juul says that when Derambarsh approached her about introducing a similar measure in Denmark, or on the level of the European Union, she hesitated.

Juul says she’s wary of government mandates like the French one: In her view, such laws could end up simply shifting the Western world’s throw-away habit from one place to another. For example, she says it’s unlikely that Denmark’s 6,000 homeless people could stomach the 163,000 tons of food that Danish supermarkets throw out each year, so welfare organizations would have to deal with the leftovers.

She also wonders who would cover the cost of transportation. As Per Bjerre has quickly learned, basic logistics are one of the biggest barriers between a wilting head of lettuce and a willing mouth; and WeFood’s instant popularity has the store running out of inventory on an almost daily basis.

“We are trying to get some emergency deliveries to the store, but right now, we have empty shelves,” says Per Bjerre.

Bjerre says there is definitely no lack of surplus food to be had: “I’ve been around myself this week, visiting some stores. And even one tiny bakery — it’s throwing so much away every day that it’s kind of unbelievable. So if you add all that up, that’s a lot of food.”

The challenge lies in finding out exactly where that food is, when it’s available and then getting volunteers out to pick it up. Bjerre says he expects that will get easier as WeFood has been open long enough to establish relationships and delivery patterns with local retailers. And if all goes well, he says, Danes can expect to see more WeFood stores opening around the country in the not-so-distant future.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

A Petersburg flavored-salt startup and a Sitka poultry and livestock farm won this year’s Path to Prosperity contest. Sponsors Haa Aaní Community Development Fund and the Nature Conservancy will provide each with $40,000 to build their businesses.

The winners were announced at this year’s Innovation Summit, Feb. 9 in Juneau.

Bobbi Daniels, who owns The Sawmill Farm, went on stage to accept her plaque from the presenter.

“So I’m standing there in front of everybody, in front of this huge Innovation Summit,” she said. “And I said, ‘Thank you. I’ll try really hard not to get manure on it.’ ”

Daniels is the kind of person to leave you rolling with laughter, and with a fresh jug of goat’s milk on your porch. I’m in her car, which has a pink steering wheel and is packed with chicken feed. Since space is so limited in Sitka, Daniels has built the farm across seven different backyards – offered by kindly friends and neighbors.

All told, there are 75 rabbits, 50 quail, 25 ducks, seven geese, seven turkeys and eight goats. She feeds them with cast-off produce from the grocery store. And the number of mouths to feed is only getting larger.

“We’re going to be getting 400 chicks from a hatchery. Both are laying flock and our first round of broilers …our meat chickens,” Daniels explained.

There are also 12 pigs in Washington, that still need to brought over on the ferry. Along with her business partner, Joshua Meabon, the Sawmill Farm has spent the past two years rearing livestock and fowl in Sitka.

Their goal? Daniels said, “When Sawmill Farm labeled meat is on the grocery store shelves in Sitka, that’s huge for us. That’s a huge goal for us. And we think we’re going to get that done by May.”

Daniels was a finalist for the Path to Prosperity Contest in 2014 and 2015, but said that what likely put her business into the winner’s circle this year is her plan to consolidate the farm on one location – at the Gary Paxton Industrial Park, the site of Sitka’s former pulp mill.

The $40,000 prize cash prize is earmarked for business development only, so Daniels will use it for website development, branding and accounting.

Daniels grew up on a family farm in Indiana and wants to bring her locally-grown food philosophy to Sitka. “You look at your plate and what you eat and how you eat differently when you are involved in making it happen. You can’t help it. And I think it’s a really good change,” Daniels said.

The other winner of the Path to Prosperity contest doesn’t have to worry about getting manure on her award, but hummus may be another matter. Mindy Anderson owns the Salty Pantry, a rustic-foods market and deli in Petersburg.

This is Anderson’s first time entering the Path to Prosperity contest and she said the most useful part was the requirement to rewrite her business plan. “In fact the night it was due, I was still adding photos and putting on the finishing touches. Finally I hit the submit button. It was a great feeling. My heart was pumping. ‘Finally, I’m turning in this project after all of this time.’ I think it was a 56-page document,” Anderson said.

Anderson started the Salty Pantry in 2014, bringing gourmet salt blends to the local farmer’s market. She also offers artisanal bread and pickled vegetables. Fans say her oatmeal is to die for.

She’s largely self-taught.

“There was a phase in my life when I ate chicken without skin. It wasn’t until later I learned to cook with spices,” she said.

And now, Anderson wants to expand her business from a home-based, cottage industry …”to a small family-run market and deli with eat-in dining for approximately 20 customers. I’m going to strive to be a business Petersburg can be proud of and be a leader in food and food education.”

Anderson also wants to open up a commercial kitchen to expand into home-cooked meals and retail products, like pastas, salads, flavored butters and cassoulets. While she can’t use the Path to Prosperity money to buy a new mixer, but she can use it for branding or her personal development, like classes in butchery and bread making.

“As a business owner you tend to not spend money on those things. You think, ‘I have to buy the stove, the hood, or I can’t leave my business at this point,’ ” said Anderson. “But right now is the perfect time for me to take advantage of those things and be more educated and be a successful entrepreneur.”

And that is the whole idea of the Path to Prosperity contest. With this money, both Anderson and Daniels will have the means and the permission to make their booming businesses even better.

More than 1 million low-income residents in 21 states could soon lose their government food stamps if they fail to meet work requirements that began kicking in this month.

The rule change in the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program was triggered by the improving economy — specifically, falling unemployment. But it is raising concerns among the poor, social service providers and food pantry workers, who fear an influx of hungry people.

Recent experience in other states indicates that most of those affected will probably not meet the work requirements and will be cut off from food stamps.

For many people, “it means less food, less adequate nutrition. And over the span of time, that can certainly have an impact on health — and the health care system,” said Dave Krepcho, president and chief executive of the Second Harvest Food Bank of Central Florida.

Advocates say some adults trying to find work face a host of obstacles, including criminal records, disabilities or lack of a driver’s license.

The work-for-food requirements were first enacted under the 1996 welfare reform law signed by President Bill Clinton and sponsored by then-Rep. John Kasich, who is now Ohio’s governor and a Republican candidate for president.

The provision applies to able-bodied adults ages 18 through 49 who have no children or other dependents in their home. It requires them to work, volunteer or attend education or job-training courses at least 80 hours a month to receive food aid. If they don’t, their benefits are cut off after three months.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture can waive those work rules, either for entire states or certain counties and communities, when unemployment is high and jobs are scarce. Nearly every state was granted a waiver during the recession that began in 2008. But statewide waivers ended this month in at least 21 states, the largest group since the recession.

An Associated Press analysis of food aid figures shows that nearly 1.1 million adults stand to lose their benefits in those 21 states if they do not get a job or an exemption. That includes about 300,000 in Florida, 150,000 in Tennessee and 110,000 in North Carolina. The three states account for such a big share because they did not seek any further waivers for local communities.

In Tennessee, Terry Work said her 27-year-old deaf son recently was denied disability payments, meaning he is considered able-bodied. And that means he stands to lose his food stamps, even though she said her son has trouble keeping a job because of his deafness.

“I know there’s going to be a lot of people in the county hurt by this,” said Work, founder of Helping Hands of Hickman County, a social service agency in a community about an hour west of Nashville.

Nationwide, some 4.7 million food stamp recipients are deemed able-bodied adults without dependents, according to USDA. Only 1 in 4 has any income from a job. They receive an average of $164 a month from the program.

In states that already have implemented the work requirements, many recipients have ended up losing their benefits.

Wisconsin began phasing in work requirements last spring. Of the 22,500 able-bodied adults who became subject to the change between April and June, two-thirds were dropped from the rolls three months later for failing to meet the requirements.

Some states could have applied for partial waivers but chose not to do so.

North Carolina’s Republican-led government enacted a law last fall accelerating implementation of the work requirements and barring the state from seeking waivers unless there is a natural disaster. State Sen. Ralph Hise said the state was doing a disservice to the unemployed by providing them long-term food aid.

“People are developing gaps on their resumes, and it’s actually making it harder for individuals to ultimately find employment,” said Hise, a Republican who represents a rural part of western North Carolina.

In Missouri, the GOP-led Legislature overrode a veto by Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon to enact a law barring the state from waiving work requirements until at least 2019. The three-month clock started ticking Jan. 1 for 60,000 people in Missouri, where unemployment is down to just 4.4 percent.

“We were seeing a lot of people who were receiving food stamps who weren’t even trying to get a job,” said the law’s sponsor, Sen. David Sater, a Republican whose Missouri district includes the tourist destination of Branson. “I know in my area you can find a temporary job for 20 hours (a week) fairly easily. It just didn’t seem right to me to have somebody doing nothing and receiving food stamps.”

Others say it’s not that simple to find work, even with an improving economy.

Joe Heflin, 33, of Jefferson City, said he has been receiving food stamps for more than five years, since an injury ended his steady job as an iron worker and led to mental illness during his recovery. He said he gets nearly $200 a month in food stamps and has no other income. Heflin was recently notified that his food stamps could end if he doesn’t get a job or a disability exemption.

“I think it’s a crummy deal,” Heflin said while waiting in line at a food pantry. “I think they ought to look into individuals more, or at least hear them out. … I depend on it, you know, to eat.”

Policymakers often “don’t realize a lot of the struggles those individuals are dealing with,” said Mariana Chilton, director of the Center for Hunger-Free Communities at Drexel University in Philadelphia.

Some are dealing with trauma from military service or exposure to violence and abuse, Chilton said. Others have recently gotten out of prison, making employers hesitant to hire them. Some adults who are considered able-bodied nonetheless have physical or mental problems.

A study of 4,145 food stamp recipients in Franklin County, Ohio, who became subject to work requirements between December 2013 and February 2015 found that more than 30 percent said they had physical or mental limitations that affected their ability to work. A similar percentage had no high school diploma or equivalency degree. And 61 percent lacked a driver’s license.

“There should have been more thought on how we look at employment and not thinking that people are sitting there, getting food stamps because they are lazy and don’t want to work,” said Octavia Rainey, a community activist in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Some states have programs to help food stamp recipients improve their job skills. Elsewhere, it’s up to individuals to find programs run by nonprofit groups or by other state agencies. Sometimes, that can be daunting.

Rainey said people who received letters informing them they could lose their food stamps sometimes were placed on hold when they called for more information — a problem for those using prepaid calling cards. And in Florida, food aid recipients received letters directing them to a state website for information.

“A lot of these folks, they don’t have computers, they don’t have broadband access,” said Krepcho, the Central Florida food bank executive. “That’s ripe for people falling off the rolls.”

Associated Press reporters Jonathan Drew in Raleigh, North Carolina, Travis Loller in Nashville, Tennessee, and Greg Moore in Milwaukee contributed to this report.

The Food and Drug Administration issued an alert this Friday stop imports of genetically engineered salmon.

The agency is following a mandate Sen. Lisa Murkowski pushed through Congress in a spending bill at the end of last year. But the import limitation is likely to be just temporary.

The agency, citing bill language, says it can’t allow the fish to be sold as food until it writes consumer labeling guidelines.

There’s no word yet on when the FDA expects to have those guidelines completed.

Meanwhile, the only company approved to produce genetically altered salmon hasn’t yet begun exporting them from its plant in Panama.