Fresh voices of food: The rise of Vani Hari the ‘Food Babe’

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Fresh voices of food: The rise of Vani Hari the ‘Food Babe’

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It’s been a big month for menu changes at the nation’s largest food companies, including:

  • Dunkin’ Donuts will remove the whitening agent titanium dioxide from its powdered donuts.
  • McDonald’s and Costco will sell only antibiotic-free chicken by 2017 (the home of the Big Mac also announced it will start selling kale).
  • Nestle will remove artificial flavoring from its 250 chocolate products by the end of this year.

But these changes and others weren’t just to tweak the recipes. Increasingly, nonprofits and bloggers are pressuring Big Food to remove chemicals and preservatives from their products — or face the wrath of social media.

The person most identified with the movement is not a politician, policymaker, or even a trained scientist. She’s a 34-year-old who left a career as a managerial consultant to start her own nutrition blog in 2011.

Her name is Vani Hari, best known as “Food Babe.”

Though she wasn’t involved the above examples, she’s gotten Subway to say it will stop using a plastic-based additive she dubbed “the yoga mat chemical” in its bread.

Chipotle announced it would not use genetically modified crops. And she takes credit for Kraft’s pledge to stop using yellow dyes in three mac-and-cheeses.

Time magazine named her one of its “30 Most Influential People on the Internet,” and she released a book last month and announced plans for a TV show.

But her crusade is not without controversy. Hari’s lionized by her legions of followers, dubbed the “Food Babe Army,” but vilified by a vocal group of research scientists, some of whom argue she’s doing more to hurt the field than help it.

Critics deride her as a dilettante who mucks the science (sometimes purposefully), a “fearmongerer” who preys upon the ignorance of a science-illiterate public for her own profit.

Her most ardent critic is Yale neurologist Steve Novella who called her “the Jenny McCarthy of food activism.”

But love her or hate her, one thing is clear: Hari’s changing what we eat.

The whole foods movement, which rejects processed foods, additives and genetically modified crops, has been around since at least 1971, when organic-food pioneer Alice Waters opened her California restaurant Chez Panisse.

But Vani Hari’s vigilante-style food finds its roots at the turn of this century.

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Books like Eric Schlosser’s 2001 “Fast Food Nation” revealed the horrors of our food system, inspired by the work of Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novelistic exposé “The Jungle” of the meatpacking industry.

Morgan Spurlock’s 2004 documentary “Super Size Me,” which took on the health risks of consuming McDonald’s food, followed, then Michael Pollan’s 2006 book“Omnivore’s Dilemma.”

The three works pushed the whole-foods movement to the forefront, though mostly among wealthy and middle-class families.

Organizations like The Center for Science in the Public Interest and Environmental Working Group lobbied for curbs on marketing junk food to children, for bans on trans-fats, and for greater transparency about food ingredients, especially about the growing list of added chemicals, which activists say are not properly researched by the FDA.

The Internet fueled the movement, says Andy Behar, CEO of the nonprofit group As You Sow.

“I think the whole Instagraming pictures of their grilled cheese is part of the meme today of ‘Yeah I am aware of what I eat,’” he says. “Food is not just fuel; it has a deeper meaning. People are celebrating every meal.”

No wonder then that global sales of “healthy food products” are expected to reach $1 trillion by 2017. Labels like “organic” and “all-natural” increasingly spur sales, even if they are often misleading.

In 2010, organic food captured $57.3 billion in sales; this year this number is expected to nearly double to $104.5 billion.

A recent Nielsen study of 30,000 people found that 88% of consumers are willing to pay more for “healthier” foods — and the biggest slice of this premium-paying pie are millennials.

Health-food stores and farmers markets have grown in tandem with the increasing demand.

In 1994, for example, there were only 1,755 farmers markets in the US. In 2013, there were 8,144.

What was once the purview of hippies and vegans has now become serious academic business.

Dr. Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University says that there were only two food studies degree-granting institutions when she started at NYU in 1996. Now there are more than 20.

Out of this growing awareness came a greater unease, epitomized by the “pink slime” campaign.

After a series of investigative reports into “lean finely textured beef” products by The New York Times, British chef Jamie Oliver produced a series called “Food Revolution.”

Its Season 2 premier, in 2011, focused on the same product, calling it “pink slime.” At the end of the episode, Oliver poured ammonium hydroxide on a batch of meat — the process by which the beef filler was made — in front of a disgusted live audience.

Freelancer Bettina Elias Siegel took note and started her own online petition to get pink slime out of school lunches, amassing more than 250,000 signatures in two weeks.

Supermarkets across the country started to ban products with pink slime. Schools followed suit, starting with New York City.

The “pink slime campaign,” which Slate columnist Daniel Engber called a brilliant framing campaign, “all because of a shift from four matter-of-fact words to two visceral ones,” was a resounding success.

A similar coup spearheaded by 16-year-old Mississippian Sarah Kavanagh targeted Gatorade’s use of brominated vegetable oil — a chemical banned in Europe for possible health concerns in animal studies.

She, too, started a petition, acquired nearly a quarter of a million supporters, and caught the eye of PepsiCo, who then announced that they would rid their sports drink of this chemical.

Though Hari had already launched her blog, pink slime and Gatorade wins showed her the limitlessness of her opportunities.

“I thought, ‘Wow, an everyday person like myself can inspire change. Why don’t I try it?’ ” Hari tells The Post.

Hari was invited to Chick-fil-A’s corporate headquarters, after which the company announced plans to phase out chickens raised on antibiotics.

“This was a huge win. Not only because it helped the whole issue, but because it inspired other companies, like McDonald’s, to change,” she says.

Then there was the “yoga mat chemical” campaign — by far Hari’s most publicized food advocacy win. The chemical, azodicarbonamide, is used to bleach and condition flour in more than 500 foods, but is also found in plastics and, of course, in yoga mats.

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It’s considered by the FDA to be “GRAS,” or generally recognized as safe.

By distilling this complex story down to a tweetable statement: “Yoga mat chemicals are in your Subway bread,” Hari was able to reach, gross out, and galvanize groups of consumers and hit Subway where it hurt most: its brand.

“Subway had to respond to the media blitz. It went worldwide. I was interviewed everywhere,” Hari tells The Post. “Before my campaign no one in the world knew about azodicarbonamide.”

When Subway announced that it would be removing azodicarbonamide from its breads, the company refused to give credit to Hari, instead insisting that it was planning on doing so anyway.

But the result was clear: Hari and her army are powerful.

Subway has suffered from an onslaught of bad publicity since the Food Babe petitioned the chain to remove the ‘yoga mat chemical’ ingredient from its bread.Photo: AP

Most recently she shepherded a campaign against the antioxidant butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT) used in many cereals to keep it the vegetable oils from going bad.

Though generally recognized as safe by the FDA, the chemical is banned in Europe and has been linked in some animal studies to certain types of cancer.

Respected food-advocacy organizations have taken note of Hari’s powers of persuasion. As You Sow was behind the successful Dunkin’ Donuts campaign, which focused on removing nanoparticle titanium dioxide from powdered donuts.

They took a cue or two from Hari’s. Their current work on lead found in chocolate also focuses on highly tweetable nuggets of information, easily understood by the masses.

“Internally we’re trying to tailor messages to be more digestible,” says As You Sow president Danielle Fugere. “It’s something we struggle with because we want to give the full information, the full background. But it’s also important to make it easy to understand.”

This ability is the source of both Hari’s success and her critics’ ire.

Researchers take issue with Hari’s simplistic explanation of the science. Many of these chemicals she has focused on, experts argue, have shown no proof to be harmful in the small amounts present in our food.

Take her statement that “There is no acceptable level of any chemical to ingest ever” (really, critics responded, even H20?). She’s confused ingredients — mixing up, for example, propylene gycol and another called propylene glycol alginate.

Two very different chemicals, the former used in antifreeze and the other derived from kelp and used in beer.

Then there’s the issue of genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. A number of food vigilantes object to crops being altered on the genetic level, saying that it’s unnatural.

But scientists counter that humanity has been “altering” crops for centuries — through selective farming — and that tinkering with grains to make them more abundant can help alleviate world hunger.

Hari also makes money by linking to “healthy” alternatives, which has led to conflict-of-interest accusations, while her posts sometimes drift into tinfoil-hat territory.

Items about the oxygen levels on planes and on harmful effect of microwaves on food have been removed — and she admits that she’s made some “mistakes” along the way but that her heart is in the right place.

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In the end, if she’s getting eyeballs on labels, does it matter if she’s right?

“If she gets the science a little bit wrong, ultimately the bigger point is that this stuff shouldn’t be in our food,” Fugere says. “That she’s implying that you need a science degree to comment on food makes her point.”

Not everyone agrees. NYU professor Nestle says that Hari “gives the movement a bad name” and that “getting the science right is extremely important.”

“She’s making scientific judgments of these chemicals that may or may not be valid or may or may not be meaningful,” Nestle says.

“I’d love to see someone like her work on issues like protecting the quality of school lunches, keeping agriculture in line with our health policies, how to figure out how to stop companies from marketing junk foods to kids. Issues like those.”

Regional future – Know your food: Mexico farm hardship, bounty for US tables

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Regional future – Know your food: Mexico farm hardship, bounty for US tables

An LA Times reporter and photographer find that thousands of laborers at Mexico’s mega-farms endure harsh conditions and exploitation while supplying produce for American consumers.

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The tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers arrive year-round by the ton, with peel-off stickers proclaiming “Product of Mexico.”

Farm exports to the U.S. from Mexico have tripled to $7.6 billion in the last decade, enriching agribusinesses, distributors and retailers.

American consumers get all the salsa, squash and melons they can eat at affordable prices. And top U.S. brands — Wal-Mart, Whole Foods, Subway and Safeway, among many others — profit from produce they have come to depend on.

These corporations say their Mexican suppliers have committed to decent treatment and living conditions for workers.

But a Los Angeles Times investigation found that for thousands of farm laborers south of the border, the export boom is a story of exploitation and extreme hardship.

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Many farm laborers are essentially trapped for months at a time in rat-infested camps, often without beds and sometimes without functioning toilets or a reliable water supply.  Some camp bosses illegally withhold wages to prevent workers from leaving during peak harvest periods.

Laborers often go deep in debt paying inflated prices for necessities at company stores. Some are reduced to scavenging for food when their credit is cut off. It’s common for laborers to head home penniless at the end of a harvest.

Those who seek to escape their debts and miserable living conditions have to contend with guards, barbed-wire fences and sometimes threats of violence from camp supervisors.

Major U.S. companies have done little to enforce social responsibility guidelines that call for basic worker protections such as clean housing and fair pay practices.

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The farm laborers are mostly indigenous people from Mexico’s poorest regions. Bused hundreds of miles to vast agricultural complexes, they work six days a week for the equivalent of $8 to $12 a day.

The squalid camps where they live, sometimes sleeping on scraps of cardboard on concrete floors, are operated by the same agribusinesses that employ advanced growing techniques and sanitary measures in their fields and greenhouses.

The contrast between the treatment of produce and of people is stark.

In immaculate greenhouses, laborers are ordered to use hand sanitizers and schooled in how to pamper the produce. They’re required to keep their fingernails carefully trimmed so the fruit will arrive unblemished in U.S. supermarkets.

“They want us to take such great care of the tomatoes, but they don’t take care of us,” said Japolina Jaimez, a field hand at Rene Produce, a grower of tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers in the northwestern state of Sinaloa. “Look at how we live.”

He pointed to co-workers and their children, bathing in an irrigation canal because the camp’s showers had no water that day.

At the mega-farms that supply major American retailers, child labor has been largely eradicated. But on many small and mid-sized farms, children still work the fields, picking chiles, tomatillos and other produce, some of which makes its way to the U.S. through middlemen. About 100,000 children younger than 14 pick crops for pay, according to the Mexican government’s most recent estimate.

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Pedro Vasquez, working the chile pepper fields near Leon, Guanajuato, is one of the estimated 100,000 Mexican children younger than 14 who pick crops for pay, according to the government’s most recent estimate. He is 9 years old.

During The Times’ 18-month investigation, a reporter and a photographer traveled across nine Mexican states, observing conditions at farm labor camps and interviewing hundreds of workers.

At half the 30 camps they visited, laborers were in effect prevented from leaving because their wages were being withheld or they owed money to the company store, or both.

Some of the worst camps were linked to companies that have been lauded by government and industry groups. Mexico’s President Enrique Peña Nieto presented at least two of them with “exporter of the year” honors.

The Times traced produce from fields to U.S. supermarket shelves using Mexican government export data, food safety reports from independent auditors, California pesticide surveys that identify the origin of imported produce, and numerous interviews with company officials and industry experts.

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The practice of withholding wages, although barred by Mexican law, persists, especially for workers recruited from indigenous areas, according to government officials and a2010 report by the federal Secretariat of Social Development. These laborers typically work under three-month contracts and are not paid until the end. The law says they must be paid weekly.

The Times visited five big export farms where wages were being withheld. Each employed hundreds of workers.

Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, bought produce directly or through middlemen from at least three of those farms, The Times found.

Bosses at one of Mexico’s biggest growers, Bioparques de Occidente in the state of Jalisco, not only withheld wages but kept hundreds of workers in a labor camp against their will and beat some who tried to escape, according to laborers and Mexican authorities.

Asked about its ties to Bioparques and other farms where workers were exploited, Wal-Mart released this statement:

“We care about the men and women in our supply chain, and recognize that challenges remain in this industry. We know the world is a big place. While our standards and audits make things better around the world, we won’t catch every instance when people do things that are wrong.”

The real truth is that we’re work animals for the fields

Supermarket Chains Show More Interest In Local (VT) Food

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Supermarket Chains Show More Interest In Local (VT) Food

It wasn’t exactly a romantic event, but it was billed as a matchmaking opportunity, complete with a “speed dating” session.

For the dozens of Vermont food producers and buyers in attendance, though, the gathering at Vermont Technical College this week was strictly business.

“I was very excited to come down and expand my reach beyond Chittenden and Washington County and get some of our products down south or even regionally,” said farmer-producer Beth Whiting.

She and her husband own Maple Wind Farm in Huntington and Richmond, which specializes in pasture and grass fed meats.

On the buyers’ side were many familiar co-ops along with wholesale and institutional food suppliers. But there were also some relatively new faces to the local foods scene: the big chain supermarkets.

“We see an emerging trend that’s really growing and we have to get better at that,” said Scott Evans, vice president of grocery and merchandising at Price Chopper.

Evans said that trend is increasing customer demand for local products and an expectation that even a large supermarket chain with 135 stores should carry them.

“As we start to work with the local areas like Vermont and the towns that we’re in it’s really important for us to find those products and partner with those different suppliers.” – Scott Evans, vice president of grocery and merchandising at Price Chopper

“There’s this loyalty that customers have with those products and it makes absolute sense because it strengthens their communities,” he explained. “As we start to work with the local areas like Vermont and the towns that we’re in it’s really important for us to find those products and partner with those different suppliers.”

For a company used to working with large food distributors, one challenge is adapting the company’s supply chain to deal with small producers.  

“Obviously when we work through distributors it makes life a bit easier for us, but sometimes it doesn’t make sense.“

“Obviously when we work through distributors it makes life a bit easier for us, but sometimes it doesn’t make sense,” said Evans. "We’re trying to find the flexibility and the ability to work with partners to get their products to our stores in whatever fashion works best for both of us.”

Representatives from Shaw’s and Hannaford supermarkets were also at this week’s event.

From the producer’s perspective, the challenges of supplying a large chain store include the time it takes to increase production. Producing a premium product also costs more, so there’s the question of meeting the price point for both the store and the producer.

Demand for local food is also happening on an institutional level.

This week the food service giant Sodexo filled a full-time position dedicated to increasing the share of Vermont products the company provides to schools and hospitals.

Climate change: why the Guardian is using a new storyline to detail the threat

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Climate change: why the Guardian is using a new storyline to detail the threat

Alan Rusbridger – the guardian

As global warming argument moves on to politics and business, Alan Rusbridger of the Guardian explains the thinking behind our major series on the climate crisis.

Climate change is the biggest threat to humanity. Yet journalism has struggled for two decades to tell a story that doesn’t leave the public feeling disheartened and disengaged.

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Journalism tends to be a rear-view mirror. We prefer to deal with what has happened, not what lies ahead. We favour what is exceptional and in full view over what is ordinary and hidden.

Famously, as a tribe, we are more interested in the man who bites a dog than the other way round. But even when a dog does plant its teeth in a man, there is at least something new to report, even if it is not very remarkable or important.

There may be other extraordinary and significant things happening – but they may be occurring too slowly or invisibly for the impatient tick-tock of the newsroom or to snatch the attention of a harassed reader on the way to work.

What is even more complex: there may be things that have yet to happen – stuff that cannot even be described as news on the grounds that news is stuff that has already happened. If it is not yet news – if it is in the realm of prediction, speculation and uncertainty – it is difficult for a news editor to cope with. Not her job.

For these, and other, reasons changes to the Earth’s climate rarely make it to the top of the news list. The changes may be happening too fast for human comfort, but they happen too slowly for the newsmakers – and, to be fair, for most readers.

These events that have yet to materialise may dwarf anything journalists have had to cover over the past troubled century. There may be untold catastrophes, famines, floods, droughts, wars, migrations and sufferings just around the corner. But that is futurology, not news, so it is not going to force itself on any front page any time soon.

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Even when the overwhelming majority of scientists wave abig red flag in the air, they tend to be ignored. Is this new warning too similar to the last? Is it all too frightening to contemplate? Is a collective shrug of fatalism the only rational response?

The climate threat features very prominently on the home page of the Guardian on Friday even though nothing exceptional happened on this day. It will be there again next week and the week after. You will, I hope, be reading a lot about our climate over the coming weeks.

One reason for this is personal. This summer I am stepping down after 20 years of editing the Guardian. Over Christmas I tried to anticipate whether I would have any regrets once I no longer had the leadership of this extraordinary agent of reporting, argument, investigation, questioning and advocacy.

Very few regrets, I thought, except this one: that we had not done justice to this huge, overshadowing, overwhelming issue of how climate change will probably, within the lifetime of our children, cause untold havoc and stress to our species.

So, in the time left to me as editor, I thought I would try to harness the Guardian’s best resources to describe what is happening and what – if we do nothing – is almost certain to occur, a future that one distinguished scientist has termed as “incompatible with any reasonable characterisation of an organised, equitable and civilised global community”.

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It is not that the Guardian has not ploughed considerable time, effort, knowledge, talent and money into reporting this story over many years. Four million unique visitors a month now come to the Guardian for our environmental coverage – provided, at its peak, by a team including seven environmental correspondents and editors as well as a team of 28 external specialists.

They, along with our science team, have done a wonderful job of writing about the changes to our atmosphere, oceans, ice caps, forests, food, coral reefs and species.

For the purposes of our coming coverage, we will assume that the scientific consensus about man-made climate change and its likely effects is overwhelming. We will leave the sceptics and deniers to waste their time challenging the science. The mainstream argument has moved on to the politics and economics.

The coming debate is about two things: what governments can do to attempt to regulate, or otherwise stave off, the now predictably terrifying consequences of global warming beyond 2C by the end of the century. And how we can prevent the states and corporations which own the planet’s remaining reserves of coal, gas and oil from ever being allowed to dig most of it up. We need to keep them in the ground.

There are three really simple numbers which explain this (and if you have even more appetite for the subject, read the excellent July 2012 Rolling Stone piece by the author and campaigner Bill McKibben, which – building on the work of the Carbon Tracker Initiative – first spelled them out).

2C: There is overwhelming agreement – from governments, corporations, NGOs, banks, scientists, you name it – that a rise in temperatures of more than 2C by the end of the century would lead to disastrous consequences for any kind of recognised global order.

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565 gigatons: “Scientists estimate that humans can pour roughly 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by mid-century and still have some reasonable hope of staying below 2C,” is how McKibben crisply puts it. Few dispute that this idea of a global “carbon budget” is broadly right.

2,795 gigatons: This is the amount of carbon dioxide that if they were burned would be released from the proven reserves of fossil fuel – ie the fuel we are planning to extract and use.

You do not need much of a grasp of maths to work out the implications. There are trillions of dollars worth of fossil fuels currently underground which, for our safety, simply cannot be extracted and burned. All else is up for debate: that much is not.

We need to keep it in the ground. This was the starting point for the group of journalists who met early in January to start considering how we would cover the issue.

Some will make the case for governmental action. Within nine months, the nations of the world will assemble in Paris, as they did previously in Copenhagen and Kyoto and numerous other summits now forgotten. Can they find the right actions and words, where they have failed before? It is certainly important that they feel the pressure to achieve real change.

Others will make the case for reducing the fossil fuel exposure of investment portfolios by decarbonisation. Or going further to full divestment from the most polluting fossil fuel extraction companies. Next week, McKibben will describe how the cause of divestment is moving rapidly from a fringe campaign to a mainstream concern for banks and fund managers.

It is now very much on the radar of the financial director rather than the social responsibility department. If most of these reserves are unburnable, they are asking, then what does that say about the true value of carbon-dependent companies? It is a question of fiduciary responsibility as much as a moral imperative.

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We will look at who is getting the subsidies and who is doing the lobbying. We will name the worst polluters and find out who still funds them. We will urge enlightened trusts, investment specialists, universities, pension funds and businesses to take their money away from the companies posing the biggest risk to us. And, because people are rightly bound to ask, we will report on how the Guardian Media Group itself is getting to grips with the issues.

In addition to words, images and films, we will be podcasting the series as we go along, to give some insight and transparency about our reporting and how we are framing and developing it.

We begin on Friday and on Monday with two extracts from the introduction to Naomi Klein’s recent book, This Changes Everything. This has been chosen because it combines sweep, science, politics, economics, urgency and humanity. Antony Gormley, who has taken a deep interest in the climate threat, has contributed two artworks from his collection that have not been exhibited before – the first of many artists with whom we hope to collaborate over coming weeks.

Where does this leave you? I hope not feeling impotent and fearful.

Some of you may be marching in London on Saturday 7 March. As McKibben will argue next week, the fight for change is also full of opportunity and optimism. And we hope that many readers will find inspiration in our series to make their own contribution by applying pressure on their workplace, or pension fund, to move.

But, most of all, please read what we write. Real change can only follow from citizens informing themselves and applying pressure. To quote McKibben: “This fight, as it took me too long to figure out, was never going to be settled on the grounds of justice or reason. We won the argument, but that didn’t matter: like most fights it was, and is, about power.”

Big food consolidates under Organic & commodity squeeze

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Big food consolidates under Organic & commodity squeeze

A deal to merge Kraft Foods with Heinz and create the third-largest food and beverage company in North America will likely lead to top products in the control of fewer companies, as rival businesses are expected to compete by purchasing more brands.

But with firms eyeing deals and acquisitions as a way to cut their costs, the consumer is unlikely to see changes in the prices of packaged foods.

The merger announced Wednesday, overseen by 3G Capital and Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc., aims to save $1.5 billion annually by the end of 2017 by making the combined Kraft Heinz Company more efficient. It would be the fifth-largest food and beverage firm in the world, with an expected annual revenue of $28 billion. The other top ranking global firms in that sector according to their annual revenue history are Nestle, Unilever Group, Pepsi and Mondelez International.

Rival U.S. food companies including General Mills, Con Agra, Campbell’s Soup Company and Kellogg’s will likely seek the same cost saving by partnering with or acquiring food industry brands to share warehouses, shipping routes and to gain leverage with retailers, says Virginia Lee, food market analyst for research group Euromonitor International.

Food companies like Kraft and Heinz want to become more efficient to help counter greater expenses for commodities they depend on, like milk and coffee. Those higher prices are created in part by the growth of middle class consumers in developing markets, she says.

“As China and other developing countries have grown their middle class, that has grown the demand for protein products like dairy and meat,” she says. “Supply has been unable to grow as swiftly as demand.”

Food companies have been working harder to appeal to retailers, which have been trimming underperforming brands from their shelves as they try to build a niche consumer base among bargain shoppers or higher income organic food connoisseurs. Heinz and Kraft may try to lower costs for retailers, but their ability to do so will depend on the prices of food ingredients and oil, Lee says.

“In nations like Japan and the U.S., supermarket firms have consolidated with their regional competitors to keep pace with supermarket corporations like Wal-Mart,” she says.

Food companies diversifying their brands to appeal to retailers like Whole Foods include General Mills, which will launch new organic soups this summer through the upscale Annie’s brand it purchased last year for approximately $900 million.

“The easy way to venture into the upmarket, organic space is to acquire those brands,” says Raphael Moreau, food analyst for Euromonitor.

Changing diets in the U.S. are also expected to spur brands to consolidate through new deals. Kellogg’s may seek new partnerships as U.S. breakfast cereal sales are projected to decline by 8 percent to $10.3 billion by 2018, according to Euromonitor. The research group also says soup sales in the U.S. are expected to fall 2 percent by 2018, damaging business for Campbell’s.

If some businesses fail to adapt, it will not mean the end of the road for classic snacks, however. Hostess went bankrupt in 2012, which ended production of its trademark Twinkies until 2013 when the firm was purchased out of bankruptcy.

“There is always a market for classic, established brands,” Moreau says. “Businesses may sell an underperforming brand to allow another firm to purchase it and to position it in a niche market.”

Drought-stricken California has only one year of water left!

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Drought-stricken California has only one year of water left!

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As California experiences the fourth year of one of the most severe droughts in its history, a senior NASA scientist has warned that the state has about one year of water left.

In an LA Times editorial published last week, Nasa Jet Propulsion Laboratory senior water cycle scientist Jay Famiglietti called for a more “forward-looking process” to deal with the state’s dwindling water supply.

Famiglietti, who is also a professor at University of California at Irvine, said the state had about one year of water in reservoir storage and the backup supply, groundwater, was low.

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“California has no contingency plan for a persistent drought like this one (let alone a 20-plus-year mega-drought), except, apparently, staying in emergency mode and praying for rain,” Famiglietti wrote. “In short, we have no paddle to navigate this crisis.”

Nasa data shows that water storage has been in steady decline in California since at least 2002, before the drought began.

Famiglietti called for specific measures to combat the crisis, including accelerated implementation of a law that requires groundwater sustainability, a state taskforce focused on long-term solutions and immediate, mandatory rationing. He also said there was a need for the public to be more involved in the issue.

2015 California Snowpack – record low

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A Field poll released in February showed that 34% of California voters supported a mandatory rationing policy, though 94% agreed that the drought is “serious”. The majority of respondents – 61% – favored the voluntary reductions the state currently encourages.

On Tuesday, the State Water Resources Control Board isscheduled to vote on a conservation measure that would limit landscape watering, the strictest mandate directed at such water use the state has considered.

“Our state’s water management is complex, but the technology and expertise exist to handle this harrowing future,” Famiglietti said. “It will require major changes in policy and infrastructure that could take decades to identify and act upon. Today, not tomorrow, is the time to begin.”

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Scientists are working to determine what role climate change has played in California’s drought. Earlier this month, a study by Stanford researchers showed that high temperatures increase the risk of drought conditions. Last year, two research teams said in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society that they could not definitively pin the drought on climate change.

A third team, which includes a Stanford researcher from the previous study, said that rare atmospheric conditions are exacerbating the drought.

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Ogallala Aquifer’s dramatic drying sows deep concerns for agriculture

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The Ogallala Aquifer across the region has dropped about 325 billion gallons every year for at least the past four decades. To put that number into perspective, the roughly 1-foot annual drop in the aquifer is more than enough to supply all of Lubbock’s municipal water needs for 25 years.

And it has dropped about that amount every year since 1969, according to High Plains Underground Water District data analyzed by the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, which is owned by Morris Communications, the parent company for The Topeka Capital-Journal.

In all, across the district’s 16 counties, the aquifer has fallen about 40 feet, a decline of roughly 44.9 million acre-feet since 1969.

Primarily used for irrigation, the aquifer is critical to the region where agriculture represents about 30 percent of the economy. Agriculture’s direct economic impact for the High Plains is upward of $3 billion annually.

As vast as the High Plains aquifer is — it spans eight states and holds nearly 3 billion acre-feet of water — it could still run dry. A Kansas study last year estimated it could in less than 50 years. It likely will be sooner here.

OGALLALA STORAGE

■ The Ogallala Aquifer holds nearly 3 billion acre-feet of water.
■ That water isn’t distributed evenly, and the aquifer doesn’t recharge the same everywhere. The stretches in Nebraska, for example, recharge with rainfall the most quickly.
■ Overall, the Ogallala has had about an 8 percent decline over the past six decades. In Texas, the Ogallala has dropped 150 million acre-feet during that time, accounting for roughly 60 percent of the overall decline.
■ From 2009 to 2011, the water table in Texas alone dropped 4.5 million acre-feet while it dropped 2.8 million over eight states.
What the U.S. Geological Survey estimates the Ogallala has in storage
■ Predevelopment in the 1950s — 3.20 billion acre-feet
   1980 – 3.25 billion acre-feet
   2000 – 2.98 billion acre-feet
   2010 – 2.96 billion acre-feet

“When anybody tells me it’s going to last for 50 years, I just laugh,” said Lucia Barbato, associate director at the Center for Geospatial Technology at Texas Tech. “How long the aquifer lasts depends on where you are.”

Across the district, the aquifer already has dropped below the minimum depth for large-scale irrigation in portions of six counties, including Lubbock. Four other counties have fewer than 15 years before running out of groundwater, according to the center’s projections.

“Certainly, the magnitude of the decline is greatest in Texas,” said Virginia “Ginny” McGuire, a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Nebraska. “You’re still using water at a much faster rate than it’s being recharged.”

Rapidly declining

That nearly 45 million-acre-foot decline in the Ogallala Aquifer equates to about 14.6 trillion gallons of water over 45 years.

That is enough — if the average American uses, conservatively, about 69 gallons a day — to meet the Lone Star State’s entire municipal water needs for roughly 20 years.

An acre-foot of water is used to describe large water resources such as river flows and reservoirs. It is the equivalent of 1 acre of surface area covered by water 1 foot deep — 325,853 gallons. The aquifer decline is larger than Lake Mead, which filled to capacity is roughly 28.9 million acre-feet. Lake Mead is the man-made reservoir in Nevada that supplies Las Vegas.

As staggering as the decline is, what is actually used to irrigate roughly 1.7 million acres of farmland throughout the district is likely much more.

No one knows with certainty how much water has been mined from the Ogallala. Most agree, though, that groundwater irrigation has been extensive, particularly in the Texas High Plains.

The reason for the ambiguity is complicated. Part of the answer is in what is actually being measured — how much is in irrigation wells. The High Plains district isn’t yet measuring how much water is taken out of the Ogallala.

This distinction is important because of the second reason for the uncertainty. The Ogallala Aquifer moves — albeit slowly — about a foot a day from west to east, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

That means the district’s annual measurements could be the Ogallala settling and not a true level change but rather a redistribution of the water in the aquifer to areas that are being pumped.

In short, more water is used than is being measured, experts say.

“We just think there’s been more water pumped than they show as a decline,” said Bob Stewart, director of Dryland Agriculture Institute at West Texas A&M University in Canyon. “I actually think that there’s more water in the aquifer remaining than a lot of people say there is. The bad news is, we’re using it faster than we say we are.”

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‘Not sustainable’

The Ogallala Aquifer is among the largest aquifers.  It extends 174,000 square miles beneath portions of eight states from South Dakota to Texas in one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world. Growing concern over extensive irrigation has led to, among other things, a state-mandated regional approach to conservation that requires planners to craft strategies that include a desired future condition.

The goal for Lubbock and the region is 50 percent left in 50 years.  The board recently drafted rules that would require producers to track and limit their use to help meet the district’s 50-50 goal and stave off possible further regulation from Austin, if nothing were done.

The district held public hearings July 29 in Levelland and Aug. 5 in Canyon. A vote on the proposed rule change could come as early as this week. No one can say how much of a difference this will make.

“They will have no trouble meeting the 50-50 because as wells go off line the aquifer will rise, but that’s not because the aquifer is recharging,” said Robert DeOtte Jr., civil and environmental engineering professor at West Texas A&M University. “It won’t be a real 50-50. It’ll be an apparent 50-50.”

Maps projecting depletion rates in the district by the Center for Geospatial Technology at Texas Tech estimate large swaths of Parmer, Castro, Lamb and Hale counties have fewer than 15 years of usable life left.

The region was built on agriculture. Irrigation made it more profitable. “What most people in this city don’t understand is their livelihood is connected to agriculture,” said Darren Hudson, director of Cotton Economics Research Institute at Tech.

Economic researchers at the institute estimate a third of the ag revenue would be lost with a return to dryland farming, which typically has lower yields.

“We should care that it’s dropping,” Hudson said. “It’s an important resource that we need to figure out how to hang on to it as long as we can. We want to get the most that we can out of it and make it last as long as we can because the regional economy is so dependent on this resource and what we produce from it.”

Less than 30 percent of the cropland overlying the aquifer is irrigated. But more than half of the counties where depletion is a threat to irrigated agriculture are in Texas, according to a 2012 Texas Tech report on the future of the Great Plains.

And of those 19 Texas counties, nine are within the High Plains Underground Water District. The counties where depletion could mean the end of irrigated agriculture have also had some of the greatest water-level declines in the past four decades.

Curtis Griffith, a third-generation farmer who leases farmland in Cochran and Terry counties that has been in his family since his grandfather migrated here in the 1920s, has seen the pumping capacity decline by 90 percent.

Wells that once produced 500 gallons per minute now give up 50 gallons per minute. The way Griffith sees it, the land and the water beneath it aren’t just his.

“I just feel like I’ve still got some responsibility to future generations to pass the land on in as good a shape as I can,” Griffith said.

The counties where irrigated agriculture is threatened are Bailey, Castro, Cochran, Hale, Hockley, Lamb, Lubbock, Lynn and Parmer.

“We know it’s a limited supply and we just have to manage it as best we possibly can,” said Steve Verett, executive vice president of Plains Cotton Growers. “Farming is not going to go away. It’s just going to be different.”

Urgent Need to Calculate Costs of Soil Erosion

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Urgent Need to Calculate Costs of Soil Erosion

Over the years, farmers are losing their reverence for the soil. The soil on the snow in a roadside ditch this winter is a stark reminder of the losing proposition confronting U.S. agriculture.  Water quality and nutrient management grab headlines. However, the crucial role of soil conservation in protecting our water is overlooked.

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“There’s a high correlation between water quality and soil erosion, especially phosphorus,” says Rick Cruse, Iowa State University agronomy professor and director of the Iowa Water Center and the Iowa Daily Erosion Project.

Cruse says sediment is Iowa’s number one water-quality problem. “Ephemeral [tillable] gullies are the greatest conductor of sediment from fields,” he says. “As much as 57% of phosphorus in rivers is from ephemeral gullies.”

USDA estimates for 17 states indicate that ephemeral gully erosion accounts for 18% to 73% of the total erosion. What is the true cost of erosion and its impact on yields?

USDA pegs average soil erosion (soil movement on slopes) at 5.4 tons per year.

In 2011, the Environmental Working Group conducted a study using Daily Erosion Project data that revealed some Iowa farms were losing topsoil up to 12 times faster than government estimates. “An average is a good barometer, but it isn’t a very precise indicator,” Cruse says.

Tom Buman, a former NRCS conservationist who launched Agren, Inc., in 1996 to help farmers with conservation, agrees. “Until we start using economic drivers instead of environmental drivers to sell conservation, we’ll make very little progress,” he says. He envisions a day when farmers can calculate the actual return on investment for each conservation practice.

The complexity of the challenge is enormous. Cruse’s team is using a new satellite system to track, by farm, the type of soil, a field’s slope, crop rotation, type of tillage, and conservation efforts. This will be merged with a Nexrad radar system that includes precipitation data.

Finally, soil depth measurements, as well as multiple years of crop yield data at about a dozen farms, will be added.

Aggressive tillage breaks up soil structure, promoting erosion and preventing water infiltration. Manure application also disturbs soil (knife injection reduces the risks). For more, see “Ways to Boost Soil Health.“

Weather extremes increase the urgency of stemming soil losses. “High-intensity, high-volume rainstorms have been smacking us,” Cruse says.

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Landowners also need to take the long view. I’m looking forward to the day when tenants can aggressively compete to market their conservation practices.

“If you own land for decades and plan to pass it on, you can realize the long-term profit of maintaining topsoil,” Cruse says.

Yet, it’s not hard to see the waste of filling ephemeral gullies with topsoil each year, only to watch Mother Nature auger it, along with the lime, herbicides, and fertilizer, out of fields and into the water.

I grew up in Iowa’s Loess hills. Loess soil is very vulnerable to erosion. The panoramic landscape once featured acres of steep pasture hillsides. Today, row crops are plastered across many hilltops. The area has one of the highest erosion rates in the U.S. (about 40 tons per acre per year).

Other marginal land has been pulled out of conservation programs in response to record prices.

However, federal funding cuts in EQIP and Conservation Stewardship, and state cuts in cover crop funds are detrimental. Landowners and farmers have signed up for soil conservation programs, only to be turned away due to a lack of funding.

No one argues that the status quo hasn’t improved since the 1975 Super Bowl Blizzard (also known as The Black Blizzard) in North Dakota.

Yet Cruse and his team’s new soil-erosion model could be what it takes to reverse shrinking conservation resources, or to apply a laser focus to damaged areas. The average rate of erosion regarded tolerable by conservation agencies is 20 times the rate at which topsoil regenerates.

Tolerable for how long? Depleted topsoil cripples income potential, requires more fertilizer, and worsens water quality. Unlike reality TV, when it’s about soil, the biggest loser won’t come out on top.

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VIDEO: 5 min of food fun with Jon Stewart – ‘Screw your health study’

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By this point, we all know that most people eat things that are terrible for them on a regular basis.

Americans consume an estimated 500 more calories per day (the equivalent of a McDonald’s Big Mac) than they did in 1970, according to the United States Department of Agriculture.

But it’s not all our fault: Americans get help in their bad eating habits from the companies that rely on those habits for profit, Jon Stewart argued in a segment on Tuesday’s The Daily Show.

Stewart targeted “Big Agra and the food lobby” for feeding us what he called an “addictive, fattening, death menu of artificial chemicals, antibiotics, and cool ranch carcinogens,” and ridiculed the ways companies are responding to Americans’ increased dietary awareness.

“Screw your health study”

Rather than back off in the face of health concerns, some companies are doubling down.  Stewart highlighted a new deep dish pizza wrapped in three and a half feet of bacon from Little Caesar’s, plus advertisements for “endless” buffets and appetizers and Olive Garden’s “buy one, take one” entree special.  

He called this the “I don’t give a f*** approach,” by which fast food companies essentially say “screw your health study.”

Next, Stewart ridiculed “the making-food-slightly-less-bad-for-you craze.”

In this category, we see McDonald’s announcing plans to phase out chicken raised with antibiotics from its menu — “I’ll miss treating my ear infections with the buffalo ranch chicken,” Stewart jokes — and Dunkin’ Donuts planning to eliminate titanium dioxide from its powdered donuts. (The chemical, which makes food and also things like toothpaste appear bright white, is classified as safe by the FDA.)

Needless to say, however, chicken nuggets and donuts still don’t qualify as healthy food. Stewart reaches maximum scorn levels when he addresses companies that don’t actually change their products at all, but pretend to be better through crafty PR.

His case in point is Kraft, which got the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics’ “Kids Eat Right” label on its Kraft Singles after donating to the Academy to support the program. (To be fair, the label says in small type “supporter of” Kids Eat Right — not “approved by.”) Kraft Singles are labeled “pasteurized cheese product,” not even real cheese.

“It turns out the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics is an academy in the same way this [Kraft Singles] is cheese,” Stewart quipped.

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Doctors Fight to Ban Fast Food From Hospitals – Good Reason.

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McDonald’s always seems to have its logo plastered where it doesn’t belong. Every four years, for example, millions watch in disgust as elite athletes smile into a camera, take a bite of a Big Mac, and swear their undying allegiance to the McFlag—all because the multibillion-dollar corporation shelled out a small fraction of its massive profits to become “The Official Restaurant of the Olympic Games.”

But while those high-profile ads are stealing the spotlight, the corporation has a more out-of-place, under-the-radar partnership: McDonald’s currently has contracts to serve food in 18 hospitals across the United States. The quick-serve mega chain doesn’t just serve burgers to guests in cafeterias—it also delivers meals right to sick patients’ beds, hosts birthday parties, and offers a snack menu with nachos and ice cream.

The medical profession is fighting back:

Cardiologist Aseem Malhotra of the Royal Free Hospital in London criticized these controversial marketing tactics in a June 2013 article published in the British Medical Journal. “The junk food industry’s aggressive and irresponsible marketing has even been allowed to hijack the very institutions that are supposed to set an example: our hospitals,” he wrote.

That view is echoed by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C., that promotes preventive medicine and alternatives to animal research, and encourages what it describes as “higher standards of ethics and effectiveness in research.”

The committee has been doing a series of hospital food reports to analyze just how dire the situation is. In their fifth and most recently published installment, experts surveyed more than 200 hospitals around the nation and discovered McDonald’s isn’t the only offender: Chick-Fil-A is in 20 hospitals, and Wendy’s is in five. Most of the hospitals are located in the South, where, according to Centers for Disease Control statistics, obesity rates are disproportionately high.

It’s one thing for the restaurants to be inside the hospitals, but it’s another for their finances to be inextricably linked. The committee analyzed five different contracts and found that the hospitals are actually incentivized to help the fast-food restaurants sell more processed junk food.

In one example, the McDonald’s inside Ben Taub General Hospital in Houston “can terminate its lease if yearly gross sales of Big Macs and other junk foods do not reach $1 million,” the committee’s report states. “Moreover, the monthly rent McDonald’s pays to the hospital increases based on food sales.”

For every Big Mac sold and for every McNugget dunked in corn syrup-y barbecue sauce, the hospital drops another dollar in its theoretical pockets.

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But, as the report states, there is hope, and conditions have been improving. Since the committee started issuing its food reports, two hospitals mentioned have removed the junk food: McDonald’s closed at Riley Hospital for Children at Indiana University Health, and St. Louis Children’s Hospital no longer carries Dairy Queen products. Several other fast-food restaurants have also recently closed in hospitals around the country.

The committee also mentions that more and more hospitals have been adding fresh fruits and vegetables to their cafeterias. But PCRM’s president, Neal Barnard, wants to take it one step further: “Just as cigarettes are banned from hospitals, why not do the same for meat, cheese, and other junk foods?”