Hello

We had a brief respite from the heat last week, but things are ramping up again. Does that make me want to be back in the Middle Ages? Not really. And am I fearlessly eating lettuce (admittedly unbagged)? I am! How about you?

“When all else fails, sue”

Lighthouse is on fire. Last week I pointed to the report in Le Monde about their investigation into uncompetitive concentration in French slaughterhouses. This week The Guardian (and others) joined forces with Lighthouse Reports to promote a detailed investigation into Big Food’s further embrace of Big Tobacco’s playbook: Abuse the law.

It makes for sobering reading. In five countries, 239 lawsuits against healthy eating initiatives. Almost 40% of them were lodged by eight industrial food companies, six household names in this household. (One that isn’t is “a global leader in making … liquid water enhancers” while the other claims modestly to be “leaders in energy and food”.)

The plaintiffs are not winning. The report says that they have lost three-quarters of the suits that have been decided, although “dozens of cases are ongoing”. And while they may ultimately have lost, the lawsuits swallowed almost 600 years in court, tying up government and public health specialists and delaying the adoption of policies that could save billions in healthcare, not to mention improve billions of peoples’ health.

The Guardian quotes Marion Nestle, who wrote the book(s) on food politics, to explain the obvious truth.

“The lawsuits tell us that public health measures reduce sales of unhealthful products.…The tactics mirrored those used by the tobacco industry for decades, Nestle said, adding: “Food companies are well trained. They follow the tobacco industry playbook to the letter. When all else fails, sue.”

Can we take it, then, that all else is failing?

“Under control”

RFK Jr finally addressed explosive diarrhoea in the USA but, as Helena Bottemiller Evich explained, “To be clear, the outbreak (or rather outbreaks) are not under control”.

[W]e are nearing 12,000 cases of parasitic illnesses. This is not under control. This is a disaster.

It has become clear that the current outbreak is actually at least six outbreaks, some of which are not tied to Taylor Farms. For example, North Carolina is having an outbreak of its own that seems to be linked to parsley and cilantro as well as lettuce.

While I am going to keep an eye on developments in the US, I thought it would be worth taking a look at Europe. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control has a handy explainer on cryptosporidiosis, which links to the most recent Annual Epidemiological Report, for 2020. That reveals a drop in overall cases, the result of Covid and the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, and also that the rate of reports for children aged 0–4 years had fallen to one third of the average for the previous five years. Five countries accounted for 65% of all confirmed cases, and Germany alone accounted for 28%.

There’s a handy dashboard that breaks down numbers by country. The map is slightly misleading, because the number of cases is related to the population. Expand the table on the left and you see that tiny Luxembourg is the cyclosporiasis hotspot for Europe, though Belgium, Ireland, and Iceland get an honourable mention. Despite the high number of cases in Germany, the population rate is not that high.

I guess we are doing reasonably well with cryptospora over here. It maybe even under control.

“We have done nothing for pulses and beans”

Last week, the FAO published its latest annual report on The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World. Globally, the cost of a healthy diet increased by about 25% from 2021 to 2025. Europe’s increase, however, was 33%, from $2.97 to $3.97.

Politico chose to focus on how EU farm support makes healthy food more expensive. As they point out, fruit, vegetables, and legumes consume 60% of the cost of a healthy diet, but 80% of EU support goes to starchy staples and livestock, including feed. The FAO would like the EU to support food for people, rather than livestock feed.

To some extent that is addressed in the EU’s Plant Protein Plan. Of course, the Plan has yet to affect the actual Common Agricultural Policy, but it seems hopeful.

It notes that the EU produces 67 million tonnes a year of crude protein from crops, while the livestock sector alone consumes 74 million tonnes a year. The Plan outlines lots of measures to address the shortfall, among them “implementing demand-side measures”. That involves “origin labelling, public procurement prioritising local sustainable proteins and awareness raising campaigns”. I wonder whether the awareness-raising campaigns will go so far as to recommend people eat less meat?

“Nutrition has never been a narrow technical issue”

Jess Fanzo has used the publication of the UN’s report to take a deep look at how policymakers regard nutrition. The perceived importance of nutrition has moved in waves, she points out, from the early days of straight hunger and famine, through scaling up nutrition and nutrition-sensitive agriculture, to today’s mantra of food systems. And while the focus on food systems brings benefits, it risks pushing nutrition into the background.

The danger today is not that nutrition has disappeared from the agenda. It is that it is being folded into other priorities without enough explicit attention of its own. Food systems are important, but food systems do not automatically produce healthy diets. A system can be efficient, resilient, and climate-smart and still fail to improve nutrition. Unless nutrition is named, measured, financed, and held accountable, it can easily be assumed rather than delivered.
That is the lesson from nutrition’s history.

Professor Fanzo recognises the strides that have been made. Globally, undernutrition in children under five has improved marginally, but “child stunting has declined substantially in Africa” while Asia is on track to meet the 2030 targets. She is also clear-eyed on the problems that remain or have worsened. “Anemia among women is getting much worse. … Obesity among adults continues to increase.”

What to do is less obvious. The whole article is well worth your time.

“Intolerable heat and drought”

Lots of people probably have a passing familiarity with the Little Ice Age. Not so many, I guess, for the Medieval Warm Period that came before. An article in The Conversation offers some contemporary observations and explanations that are fascinating and informative. But …

The headline asks “how does the medieval warm period compare with today?”. The answer seems to be, not well. For one, there are the causes. For another, the scale. For a third, we have technology, for example to fight fires. But that’s not going too well at the moment.

Overall, then, clickbait. Then again, we all need clicks.

Take care