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"The Food Movement Takes a Beating," by Mark Bittman in the New York Times


dcs

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Mark Bittman with a food-centric appraisal of the election results in California: The Food Movement Takes a Beating

I'm Don Rockwell, and I endorse this message.

Thank you for posting this, dcs. It needs to be said, and it needs to be read.

Okay, look, it's a somewhat boring read, but it takes two minutes and it's very important if you care anything at all about this stuff. Please take two minutes out of your day and focus on this.

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I have not seen this posted on this site elsewhere, so I will drop it in here:  Mark Bittman's farewell column in Sunday's New York Times.  He is leaving the Gray Lady "to take a central role in a year-old food company, to do what I've been writing about these many years: to make it easier for people to eat more plants."

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I really, really like Bittman, especially because his Minimalist recipes got me into cooking, and his "How To Cook Everything" is a lifesaver, but seems a bit misguided...

From a public health stand point, he's absolutely right, that sugar is the tobacco of the 21st century. There isn't very much to debate. But taxing soda? Ugh, that's tough. Because like he says in the article, we need a smoking gun. We need that strong research. We need causation proved, not some wishy-washy correlation. We need that lawsuit that he mentions, with someone drinking multiple sodas a day, getting type 2 diabetes, and then having the evidence that shows that it is causative. The damn problem is the gal or guy drinking 5 sodas is also eating triple size portions of entrees and fast food all the time. They took the soda out of the schools, and the kids started pounding Snapple, which had just as much sugar in it. It's not that easy to tax something that we truly haven't proven causes an illness (trust me, it's not there!) - we know sugar does, but we don't know if it's any worse or better than any other sugar product. What about white pasta? That has a ton of carbs in it. Plates and plates of that are going to lead you down the road to metformin and insulin, so will too much naan and biryani (as has happened to both my parents), and so will jambalaya.

The labeling thing is even more thorny. We need labels for specific reasons.

1) Is it unhealthy and labeling will allow people to choose healthier foods?

2) Is it harmful to the environment and labeling will allow people to treat the environment better?

3) Will public health be improved because of labeling?

If the answer is yes to even any one of these, then label away. If not, we really should think about what the goals are. This is Bittman's argument, directly from the column:

"G.M.O. labeling is by far the thornier issue. Labeling is important not so much because G.M.O.'s are "bad" "” they have not introduced harmful ingredients into the food chain, and those who argue that they have are taking a position that is difficult to defend "” but because once we know what's in food we can better influence how it is produced."

I'm not sure the federal government is responsible in "better influencing how (food) is produced". I think safety is important. I think the environment is extremely important (it has led to me become primarily a single issue voter). I think public health improvement is important. And he says it twice in his column, GMOs are not evil, they are not bad. If not, then why are we pushing this? Shouldn't we focus on things that are evil and bad? If it truly is to better influence how food is produced, we need to have a reason that this "influence" is doing a public good. Right now, if you put a label on a GMO food, you've not 1) Made consumers safer 2) Made the environment better 3) Improved health. You can say knowledge is power, but, really is it? We don't have to label much else right now ... What about what specific pesticide or herbicide is used, whether the meat was packaged by a mistreated, underpaid and overworked undocumented worker, how much the CEO of that Big-Ag company pays in taxes, or whether or not the chicken had friends (Portlandia reference)? If we are going to mandate something, we have to have a rationale for it.

The reason we labeled cigarettes is because the scientific community provided strong, irrefutable evidence that cigarette smoking causes cancer. This labeling ... I'm just not sure we have a strong causal link of GMO foods to ... anything ... yet. Maybe we will soon, but maybe we won't, and it will be completely safe. The heaping evidence (quoted by one side, sounds mysteriously like the climate change folks, "95% of the evidence indicates that GMO foods are safe").

The labeling of GMO foods .. well, gosh, there is a lot of emotion about this, and it reminds of climate change debates and vaccination debates. One side says "if you don't believe this, you are anti-science" and the other side says "we just don't know enough yet, so we should take caution". It's very much ruled by passion and fervor, and the more data and evidence one side provides, the more entrenched the other side becomes. And you can't really talk about it with people, b/c it's turned into religion.

Chipotle really shat the bed, too, with their whole dropping GMO bit. Their animals are fed with GMO corn, and all the soda has HFCS which is clearly a GMO food. It was a marketing stunt, not an effort to improve public safety. And that's what I think the labeling effort is (right now). Why not keep doing the research, keep trying to figure out if there is link to bad health?

A few years ago, I was very much for labeling. And after more research, and thinking a lot about it, i don't know if this should be priority number one with food health and safety, or even as a public health measure, until we have some reasonable data (we don't). This is a good long form article that looks at history and evidence. I know it's really hard to escape our epistemic closure, but take a read this weekend (it's long!) and see if maybe even if you aren't swayed, or even further entrenched, it can help you ask some better questions and dig a bit deeper.

"Unhealthy Fixation" by William Saletan on slate.com

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Simul, I hate to pick such a tiny part of this wonderful post of yours (which I encourage *everyone* to scroll up and read, several times), but you gave so much to pick from!

From a public health stand point, he's absolutely right, that sugar is the tobacco of the 21st century. There isn't very much to debate. But taxing soda? Ugh, that's tough. Because like he says in the article, we need a smoking gun. We need that strong research. We need causation proved, not some wishy-washy correlation. 

Quoting you here:

1) "... sugar is the tobacco of the 21st century. There isn't very much to debate ...."

2) "... But taxing soda? Ugh, that's tough ...."

I'm not arguing so much as I am seeking clarification of what seems to be something written in the form "A = B, but B ^= A" which is a contradiction (unless you feel that we shouldn't tax tobacco - then it's at least consistent).

Or maybe you're saying, "If we tax soda, let's go ahead and tax Twinkies too."

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I guess I'm saying that, yes, overdoing sugar is extremely dangerous and probably leading to much in the way of illness in our country, but their are many vehicles to sugar consumption, and to choose one over another, and to try to reduce that consumption via taxation doesn't really fix the overall problem. People will get their fix, it's more important to change habits overall than to pick one target. I explain metastatic cancer in the same way- if you have a bathtub with several holes in it, and then choose to plug one, the water will just flow into the other holes. Problem not solved unless we figure out a way to plug them all. Until we can, plugging one hole is futile (i.e. Why if you have tumors all over your body and through your blood. I don't think radiating just one lesion is going to fix anything, despite your feeling that if I just zap the one in the lung, maybe problem could get solved).

Does that make more sense?

With cigarettes, there are no other tobacco delivery systems that we were leaving alone and not taxing. Oral tobacco may or may not lead to tongue cancer, and the evidence is very weak that it causes lung cancer, coronary artery disease, and COPD. So, when we cracked down on smoking, lung cancer rates fell precipitously. It was a huge win for public health. That's what we need is big wins - not "feel good" policy that doesn't change health outcomes.

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One side says "if you don't believe this, you are anti-science"

Let me first say that I *love* your post.

And also let me say that I *love* Bill Nye's stance in this debate.

But just as you have the "If you can't explain dark matter, there must be a God" crowd, you have the "If you can't prove something scientific is wrong, you must be anti-science" crowd. They're both misguided.

The development of the hydrogen bomb was very much pro-science. And look where it got us.

Fracking. Pro-science.

Fossil fuels and their resultant climate change. Pro-science.

In 100-200 years, Joe Everyman may well have the power to destroy mankind. All because of science. Lovely.

Science must be kept in check, or it's going to kill us all. Climate change is happening *right now*, and you don't see people doing jack-crap about it, because people are so damned short-sighted and selfish that they'll wait until it's beyond too late - all because they don't want to moderate their precious little science-supplied lifestyles of convenience.

Of course I guess this is similar to the "guns don't kill people; *people* kill people" stance. It isn't *science* that's killing people; it's the people who misuse science who are killing people. Laws are already on the books; why don't we enforce them?

Well guess what? There will *always* be people (not mentally ill people; *selfish* people) who misuse things when they're made available to them. All you have to do is look at the preponderance of porn on the internet - all for a buck, and if a seven-year-old stumbles across it, it's the *parents'* fault, right?

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Let me first say that I *love* your post.

And also let me say that I *love* Bill Nye's stance in this debate.

But just as you have the "If you can't explain dark matter, there must be a God" crowd, you have the "If you can't prove something scientific is wrong, you must be anti-science" crowd. They're both misguided.

The development of the hydrogen bomb was very much pro-science. And look where it got us.

Fracking. Pro-science.

Fossil fuels and their resultant climate change. Pro-science.

In 100-200 years, Joe Everyman may well have the power to destroy mankind. All because of science. Lovely.

Science must be kept in check, or it's going to kill us all. Climate change is happening *right now*, and you don't see people doing jack-crap about it, because people are so damned short-sighted and selfish that they'll wait until it's beyond too late - all because they don't want to moderate their precious little science-supplied lifestyles of convenience.

Of course I guess this is similar to the "guns don't kill people; *people* kill people" stance. It isn't *science* that's killing people; it's the people who misuse science who are killing people. Laws are already on the books; why don't we enforce them?

Well guess what? There will *always* be people (not mentally ill people; *selfish* people) who misuse things when they're made available to them. All you have to do is look at the preponderance of porn on the internet - all for a buck, and if a seven-year-old stumbles across it, it's the *parents'* fault, right?

That's a tough road to go down. Because, then it's like "People are good?? What do you mean? What about Hitler? What about Stalin? What about David Spade?"

Science is just a tool, what is done with it is left up to humanity. Fracking is a utilization of science (EDITED, good call JNE), and one day we will know if it is bad or good, but say it's good ... It already is helping is geopolitically, lettings us not rely on OPEC as much. If it's bad for the world, yeah, water will be on fire and North Dakota will look like Beyond Thunderdome. Time will tell...

I just have found it very interesting that people on "my side" (I am unabashedly liberal, save for a few misgivings about tax policy and entitlement spending) that scream and shout that the other side is "anti-science" is unwilling to be objective when it comes to food/GMOs/organics/etc. But, it's not really that confusing. People are tribal more than they are consistent. People go with their gut, even when their brain is running in the other direction.

Goes to tell you that there really is two Americas. One of the most important policy issues of our time - how do we reduce carbon? - doesn't get mentioned in last night's debate, but we have the moderator asking a former CEO of  a major American tech company being asked what she thinks about a reality TV star insulting her looks.

-S

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The development of the hydrogen bomb was very much pro-science. And look where it got us.

Fracking. Pro-science.

Fossil fuels and their resultant climate change. Pro-science.

The bomb and fracking are not "pro" science.  They are applications of scientific theories/principles used to solve a problem.

Openly and honestly studying the downstream effects of their application in as un-biased a way as possible, and then accepting the conclusions supported by the evidence (regardless of the political or commercial implications) would be "pro-science."

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The bomb and fracking are not "pro" science.  They are applications of scientific theories/principles used to solve a problem.

Openly and honestly studying the downstream effects of their application in as un-biased a way as possible, and then accepting the conclusions supported by the evidence (regardless of the political or commercial implications) would be "pro-science."

:P <---------------------------------------

(In case it isn't obvious, I picked "The Terminator" for a reason.) :)

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