Future Timeline

(Futurity) Five peer-reviewed papers in the journal Nature (see link provided below this quote box) highlight the opportunities to leverage the vast diversity of blue foods in the coming decades to address malnutrition, lower the environmental footprint of the food system, and provide livelihoods.

People around the world eat more than 2,500 species or species groups of fish, shellfish, aquatic plants, and algae. Together, these foods provide livelihoods and incomes for more than 100 million and sustenance for one billion.

“People are trying to make more informed choices about the food they eat, in particular the environmental footprint of their food,” says Ben Halpern, a marine ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, who with colleagues reports findings in three papers on the environmental sustainability of aquatic foods, the potential for the growth of small-scale producers, and the climate risks that face aquatic food systems.

“For the first time we pulled together data from hundreds of studies on a wide range of seafood species to help answer that question. Blue foods stack up really well overall and provide a great option for sustainable food.”

The research projects that global demand for blue foods will roughly double by 2050 and will be met primarily through increased aquaculture production rather than by capture fisheries.

(Nature) Aquatic foods are an important component of many food systems, yet have received little attention in food policy discourse. This collection (see link above this quote box) - the result of a collaboration between The Blue Food* Assessment and the Nature journals - shines a light on the contribution that aquatic foods can make to future food systems and the challenges that need to be tackled if these contributions are to be realized.

The Blue Food Assessment, a collaboration between the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University and Stanford University in partnership with EAT, brings together over 100 researchers to explore the role that aquatic foods can play in building healthy, sustainable and equitable food systems. Here, Nature and the Nature journals present some of the findings along with comment and opinion pieces on the project.

(Nature) Despite contributing to healthy diets for billions of people, aquatic foods are often undervalued as a nutritional solution because their diversity is often reduced to the protein and energy value of a single food type (‘seafood’ or ‘fish’)1,2,3,4. Here we create a cohesive model that unites terrestrial foods with nearly 3,000 taxa of aquatic foods to understand the future impact of aquatic foods on human nutrition. We project two plausible futures to 2030: a baseline scenario with moderate growth in aquatic animal-source food (AASF) production, and a high-production scenario with a 15-million-tonne increased supply of AASFs over the business-as-usual scenario in 2030, driven largely by investment and innovation in aquaculture production. By comparing changes in AASF consumption between the scenarios, we elucidate geographic and demographic vulnerabilities and estimate health impacts from diet-related causes. Globally, we find that a high-production scenario will decrease AASF prices by 26% and increase their consumption, thereby reducing the consumption of red and processed meats that can lead to diet-related non-communicable diseases5,6 while also preventing approximately 166 million cases of inadequate micronutrient intake. This finding provides a broad evidentiary basis for policy makers and development stakeholders to capitalize on the potential of aquatic foods to reduce food and nutrition insecurity and tackle malnutrition in all its forms.

(Other Words) Is “corporate ethics” an oxymoron? Do you have to be a jerk to be a successful CEO? Is exploitation the only path to profit?

The good news is that many companies, big and small, in the food economy are blazing a different path through Wall Street’s jungle of greed, demonstrating that money and morality can be compatible.

Texas supermarket chain HEB, for example, has drawn an intensely loyal customer base by investing in good wages and benefits for employees, showing up in such emergencies as pandemics, hurricanes, freezes, etc. to give essential supplies and hands-on help, and being an involved and supportive neighbor to the hundreds of unique communities it serves.

Elsewhere, Maine Grains is “relocalizing” the business of milling grain by working with local farmers who’d been abandoned by global grain marketers like Ardent and Gold Medal. They’re producing nutrient-rich flours from heritage grains, boosting the local economy in the process.

Then there’s Bob’s Red Mill, which also artfully mills its products from diverse, natural grains — and it’s 100 percent employee-owned.

(Baptist News Global) A $1.5 million gift will place a Baptist university among a select set of U.S. schools conducting scholarly research and engaging students on the topic of food security.

Baylor University in Waco, Texas, announced the gift from Jim and Tammy Snee of Austin, Minn., which will establish an endowed faculty chair to lead research efforts addressing food security through the Baylor Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty. That major gift will be matched by funds available through the Baylor Academic Challenge, creating a total initial endowment of $3 million.

This is the 14th new academic chair established through the Baylor Academic Challenge, and it is likely the most unique. While other academics study quantum physics and ancient languages, this position will work toward an extremely practical goal: Ending hunger.

“We are truly grateful for Jim and Tammy Snee and for their family’s commitment to ending hunger in the world,” said Baylor President Linda A. Livingstone. “We are grateful that they are entrusting Baylor and the Baylor Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty to lead this incredibly important and urgent effort to find solutions and best practices to address hunger at home and abroad.”

Most other U.S. universities with academic programs related to food security are public schools, often schools with historic ties to agriculture. Baylor approaches the subject not from an agriculture background — it was founded as a liberal arts school — but as a matter of social and economic justice.

(Investigate Midwest) Off-farm income contributed an average of 82% of total income for family farms in 2019, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture analysis.

Almost all farm households in 2019 derived some income from off-farm sources, such as pensions, investment income, or wages and salary from an off-farm job. But small family farms — defined in this instance as having income less than $350,000 — depended on it the most.

About half of U.S. farms, according to the USDA, are considered very small, with annual farm sales under $10,000. Small-scale operators of these farms tend to rely on off-farm sources for most of their household income.

In small “off-farm occupation” farms, where the operator reports a main occupation that’s not farming, off-farm sources of income in 2019 made up 84% of all earnings.

In contrast, “very large” farms, with an annual gross cash farm income of $5 million or more, earned only 7% of their total income from off-farm sources in 2019.

searching the web: I only want one part of this commercially made combine and eat food product for something I'm doing, I can use the other parts in something else. what's the nutritional data for the individual packets?
web results: the combined food is a processed food with higher levels of sodium than steamed broccoli.
me: no shit, it's a ready to eat food item largely made from processed wheat. what's the data for just this third of it?
web result: It doesn't have any b12 or vitamin c.
me: it's processed wheat, of course it doesn't. What I need to know is...
Web: too much sodium could result in heart disease.
Me: I'm trying to figure out if this is a viable ingrediant for a meat and vegetable dish that needs a little something else to tie it togeth...
web: refined carbohydrates are linked to metabolyc syndrome in women ages ...
Me: you know what, f*ck it, I don't care anymore. 110 or so calories of carbs, 30 of fat and some salt to a meal seems about right and brings some texture, carries the sauce, adds a bit of volume, seems like it'll work.
the web: it'll kill you gradually over years.
Me: shut up internet, you're being moronic.

(Courthouse News) — Food processing giant Conagra will return to federal court after the Ninth Circuit ruled Tuesday that class action claims of false advertising against the company are not preempted.

Consumer Robert Cohen sued Conagra claiming that the labels advertising “100% natural white meat chicken” mislead purchasers about three synthetic ingredients in the chicken products. A federal judge in the Central District of California dismissed the claims finding the label regulations set by the Poultry Products Inspection Act preempted the suit.

Cohen claims the labels were not properly reviewed and approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), contending that Conagra bypassed the FSIS approval by utilizing a more generic review regime. The Ninth Circuit agreed there is insufficient evidence that the label received the green light from federal regulators.

“The only evidence before us is the label itself — there are no affidavits or other documentary evidence showing that the label was submitted to and approved by FSIS,” U.S. Circuit Judge Mark Bennett, a Donald Trump appointee, wrote for the panel.

"On behalf of poultry product purchasers, we’re thrilled that this class action is returning to district court," Gretchen Elsner, the lawyer representing Cohen and other class action members, said in an interview. "The Ninth Circuit correctly recognized that a company cannot just assert that its label was approved and then argue that it is entitled to preemption. Instead, trial courts need to evaluate the evidence."

(Futurity) Using artificial intelligence, researchers have developed a genetic model for the “ultimate” chickpea, with the potential to lift crop yields by up to 12%

Researchers genetically mapped thousands of chickpea varieties, and then used this information to identify the most valuable gene combinations using artificial intelligence (AI).

Researchers wanted to to develop a “haplotype” genomic prediction crop breeding strategy, for enhanced performance for seed weight.

“Most crop species only have a few varieties sequenced, so it was a massive undertaking by the international team to analyze more than 3,000 cultivated and wild varieties,” says Ben Hayes, professor at the University of Queensland
.…
“We identified 1,582 novel genes and established the pan-genome of chickpea, which will serve as a foundation for breeding superior chickpea varieties with enhanced yield, higher resistance to drought, heat, and diseases,” says Rajeev Varshney from the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics in Hyderabad, India. Varshney is lead author of the paper in Nature.

(TechCrunch) U.S. fast-casual salad chain Sweetgreen priced its IPO at $28 per share yesterday. Selling 13 million shares in its IPO, the company’s early gross proceeds from the transaction total $364 million, before taking shares reserved for its underwriting banks into account.

For Sweetgreen, the pricing is a win. The company initially expected to price between $23 and $25 per share, meaning that it sold shares at a higher price than it had anticipated. And Sweetgreen sold 500,000 more shares in its IPO than its final S-1/A filing indicated.

Given that investors made a larger, more expensive bet on Sweetgreen than we might have anticipated, there’s work to do.

Let’s calculate the company’s IPO valuation, using both simple and fully diluted share counts. Then we’ll dig into Sweetgreen’s final IPO revenue multiple to understand how investors are truly valuing the company. From there, we’ll see if the company’s valuation squares up with what we’ve seen from other recent technology-enabled IPOs.

Why are we paying attention to Sweetgreen? Because it started raising external capital in the mid-aughts and kept at it through a Series I in 2019. More simply, a host of private investors, including venture capitalists, bet on Sweetgreen. So, we care.

(Investigate Midwest) A major donor to the University of Illinois wondered what the heck was up.

Robb Fraley, a top Monsanto executive at the time, emailed the dean of the agriculture college in 2018 complaining about a professor saying publicly that one of his company’s flagship products was causing widespread damage to crops. Monsanto was also a major donor.

Fraley accused the professor of being “biased” and “prone to exaggeration.”

U of I officials had spent years courting Fraley, and they had listened to him before when he'd complained about a lack of progress on an endowed chair he’d funded.

But the 2018 episode highlights potentially thorny situations for public universities, which have cultivated powerful agricultural corporations as donors while public funding has stagnated.

(CleanTechnica) Renew. Repair. Reinvigorate. Restore. Revive. Each of these verbs helps us to understand what regenerative agriculture practices mean. By building organic matter into soils, regenerative agriculture produces stronger yields and nutrient-rich crops. It leads to resiliency — diminishing erosion and runoff, improving water quality on and off the farm, and helping to better withstand climate change impacts like flooding and drought.

Regenerative agriculture is a system of farming principles and practices that seeks to rehabilitate and enhance the entire ecosystem of the farm by placing a heavy premium on soil health, with attention also paid to water management and fertilizer use. Importantly, regenerative agriculture practices help us fight the climate crisis by pulling carbon from the atmosphere and sequestering it in the ground.

In regenerative agriculture, a great deal of emphasis is placed on looking holistically at the agro-ecosystem. Key techniques as outlined at the Climate Reality Project include:

• Conservation tillage: Because plowing and tillage erode soil and release large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, it’s vital for farmers to adopt low- or no-till practices. Farmers minimize physical disturbance of the soil. Over time, soil organic matter increases, creating healthier, more resilient environments for plants to thrive, as well as keeping more and more carbon where it belongs.

• Diversity: Different plants release different carbohydrates, or sugars, through their roots. Various microbes feed on these carbs, returning nutrients back to the plant and the soil. By increasing the plant diversity of their fields, farmers help create the rich, varied, and nutrient-dense soils that lead to more productive yields.

(Inverse) RICH IN OMEGA-3 FATTY ACIDS, vitamin D, calcium, protein, and “good fats,” fish can boost our brains and bodies. Still, tuna and other beloved fish are often maligned for the supposed mercury hazard they pose — the idea here is that too much fish could mean ingesting too much mercury, which is in turn linked to potentially fatal heart issues. But a new study calls this widely-accepted public health wisdom into question.

WHAT’S NEW — In a recent study published Monday in JAMA Network Open, scientists find little correlation between a person’s seafood consumption and blood mercury levels. Further, they find no correlation between high blood mercury levels and cardiovascular disease-related mortality. The study is based on a trove of biobank data involving 17,294 participants in total.

The authors claim this is the first study that estimates the risk of mortality associated with mercury exposure in the general U.S. population.

The study is based on data from a survey begun in the 1960s called the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. It is a large-scale, ongoing health study run by the Centers for Disease Control. Participants periodically answer questions about habits and health and medical outcomes. A nationally representative study group, it gives researchers in the U.S. countless health data points to examine.

(Common Dreams) A global coalition of food justice advocates on Friday urged the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization to sever ties with CropLife International, a trade association representing agrochemical corporations.

In a letter addressed to FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu and attached to a petition signed by more than 187,300 people from 107 countries, nearly a dozen groups wrote that "CropLife's sole purpose is to advocate for use of its members' products."

We are writing to express our deep concern over your plans to strengthen official ties with CropLife International. We strongly urge you to reconsider this alliance. This collaboration with CropLife, an association of corporations which produce and promote dangerous pesticides, directly undermines FAO’s priority of minimizing the harms of chemical pesticide use worldwide. Reliance on hazardous pesticides undermines the rights to adequate food and to health for present and future generations. More than one third of CropLife member company sales are Highly Hazardous Pesticides that pose the highest levels of risk to health or the environment.

Recent estimates show that there are 385 million cases of acute pesticide poisonings each year, up from an estimated 25 million cases in 1990. This means that about 44% of farmers and agricultural workers around the world are poisoned each year by an industry dominated by CropLife members. Pesticide products produced by CropLife member companies decimate pollinator populations and are wreaking havoc on biodiversity and already fragile ecosystems.

CropLife’s sole purpose is to advocate for use of its members’ products — which are both antiquated chemical solutions and techno-fixes (genetically modified seeds) that lock farmers into ever-escalating use of pesticides, in conjunction with proprietary seeds that have systematically undermined the rights and welfare of the majority of the world’s food producers. A partnership with CropLife represents a perpetuation of this deeply unjust and unsustainable system. It undercuts your agency’s critical — and urgently needed — support for agroecology, which FAO itself notes “can support food production and food security and nutrition while restoring the ecosystem services and biodiversity that are essential for sustainable agriculture.”

We strongly urge you to continue to support the transition to people-led agroecology, and discontinue this deeply inappropriate alliance with an industry that places the interests of profit above that of public welfare and the planet.

(Investigate Midwest) For 28 years, rancher Kyle Hemmert ran cattle auctions out of his sale barn near Oakley, Kansas. He had a front-row seat as the industry changed over the decades, and he didn’t like the direction it was going.

The number of buyers at the auctions dwindled over the years, and sometimes, only a couple placed orders. Cattle prices were dropping, and, with less competition, Hemmert found it harder to sell cattle at market price.

For each head of cattle sold, Hemmert and his staff were required to take $1 out of the seller’s payout and send it to the national beef checkoff program, which funds beef promotion and research.

He estimates that his barn channeled $1.3 million to the checkoff over the years, but he didn’t see the funds solving any of the industry’s problems.
Some ranchers, including Hemmert, say the checkoff isn’t achieving its intended purpose. Instead of benefiting producers, they argue, it’s channeling profits to a handful of powerful meat companies, who are in turn driving down cattle prices and producer revenues.

(Axios) The Europe-based vertical farming startup Infarm has reeled in $200 million to fuel its expansion and entry into new markets.

Driving the news: The Series D round includes investment from Qatar's sovereign wealth fund. The company plans to enter Middle East markets, in addition to expanding in Asia, the U.S., Japan and Europe.

• Plans include a "growing center" in Qatar in 2023 for tomatoes, strawberries, herbs and more.

Why it matters: Indoor, stacked farming holds the promise of more climate-friendly agriculture, avoiding land clearance and enabling food to travel shorter distances.

• "Because crops are grown directly in cities, they ... require 90% fewer food miles to get to consumers’ plates," Infarm said.

(TechCrunch) Food waste is a $2.6 trillion problem globally as some 40% of food is wasted annually. Full Harvest believes this is a distribution problem that can be solved by digitizing the produce supply chain.

The San Francisco-based company’s produce business-to-business marketplace provides a way for produce buyers and sellers to quickly close deals on surplus or imperfect crops in just a few clicks. It also creates an additional revenue stream for farmers.

Founder and CEO Christine Moseley told TechCrunch that a majority of produce companies are still using pen, paper and fax machines to do business.

“This is one of the most important industries, and we wanted to automate and bring the industry online to solve things that haven’t been solved before,” she added. “For example, there is a ton of paperwork involved in buying and selling, but by automating the onboarding process, that process that used to take weeks now take minutes.”

So Full Harvest got busy developing some technology that includes a spot marketplace with a matching algorithm and visibility so that buyers could see what suppliers had available. It also created a third-party audit and verification process to provide consistent specifications to reduce the average amount of rescued produce that is turned away. The industry average stands at 10%, while the company’s rejection average is 1% to 2%, Moseley said.

(Other Words) Some years ago, a young, hippyish couple knocked on my front door. They had noticed that I had fig trees in the yard, laden with summer fruit. If I wasn’t going to pick them all, they asked, could they harvest some figs?

Since I was about to take a trip, I said: Sure, have at ’em.

Upon my return, as I stood at the door fumbling for my keys, I looked down — and there were two jars of delicious fig jam awaiting me.

A little common neighborliness can be deeply enriching, in so many ways.

I remembered my happy fig exchange recently when I read that a fast-growing, underground fruit economy is spreading in cities across America. Well, the movement is underground, but, naturally, the fruit is above ground and — like my figs — in plain sight

(The Logical Indian) In a first, Food Flavours, A Kochi based start-up, has launched India's first box packed wellness diet products, which includes ready to cook chapatis with moringa leaves and ragi.

This has come in as a boon for fitness buffs all set to devour nutrition-packed food. The company is also ready to roll out tortilla wraps and millet-based noodles with the same range of wellness ingredients and will launch frozen variants of its products.

Five Variant Of Ready To Cook Chapatis Food Flavours, promoted by a techie-turned foodpreneur partnered with a homemaker-turned-chef and launched the box-packed wellness diet products that include five variants of whole-wheat ready-to-cook chapatis with moringa leaves, ragi (finger millet), flaxseeds, palak(spinach)and thena ( foxtail millet).

As reported by Deccan Herald, Ranjith George, Managing Director of Food Flavours, had test-marketed these Fresh Start brands of wellness chapatis in northern Kerala for the last one and half years.

He said that the wellness diet received a good response and was catching up fast since the coronavirus pandemic but developing new wellness products was not fluid.