Marion Nestle describes this diagram as “my favourite figure”.
I hope she’s joking, because I can’t make head nor tail of it. ((Well, I can, but only with considerable effort.))
It’s from a USDA publication on U.S. Trends in Food Availability and a Dietary Assessment of Loss-Adjusted Food Availability, 1970-2014
Note, first, that the data are for food availability, which “serve as a proxy for food consumption”. So it’s measuring what’s there and saying all of it was eaten. Fair enough.
Inside the report are tables and graphs that are far more informative than that circular abomination — what are we even supposed to be comparing?
Marion Nestle concludes:
[C]alories from all food groups increased, fats and oils and the meat group most of all, dairy and fruits and vegetables the least.
While the report says:
Americans continue to fall short of the recommended amounts in USDA’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans for fruit, vegetables, whole grains, seafood, and dairy products, and their consumption continues to exceed the recommended amounts for total grains, some protein foods, saturated fat, and added sugars. In order to meet these recommendations, Americans would need to lower their consumption of added fats, refined grains, and added sugars and sweeteners, and to increase their consumption of vegetables, whole grains, dairy products, and fruit.
Go to it.
Excluding animal products from your diet as a vegetarian or vegan is a choice some people have the luxury to make, and if they know what they’re doing, and take care, they can be perfectly healthy. But there are probably far more people who have no choice in the matter. They would eat meat if they could, but they simply can’t afford it. For those people, a little bit of animal source food – milk, meat, eggs – can make a great difference to their health and wellbeing. It can be easy to forget that, in the clamour for meatless Mondays and other efforts to respond to climate change. There’s also the fact that in many parts of the world, animals play a very useful role in transforming things people can’t or won’t eat, like grass, into good food.
I’ve hinted before that I’d like to do more constructed shows here, where I speak to a few different people about a topic to try and get a broader sense of the subject. They’re harder to do, but more rewarding, and they consistently get more listeners. The problem is that as a one-man band, I don’t have the time I need to do that kind of show very often. As an experiment, I’m going to try chunking episodes into seasons, with a break between seasons when I’ll be working on those more complex shows. I’m not sure yet how long either the seasons or the breaks will be.
Maybe you’ve seen the stories about a peanut, prosaically named Carolina Runner No. 4? In 2017 it will be ready to be grown in commercial quantities, having faded gently away from being the primary peanut before the 1840s to a reasonable contender into the 1910s to presumed extinct by the 1950s. Professor David Shields, an historian at the University of South Carolina, found it in a genebank as part of a project by the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, which he chairs, to restore the crucial varieties of the American South. It’s a fine story, but a couple of things bothered me.