Adam Omary: I’m Adam Omary. I’m a research fellow at Human Progress. I’m pleased to be joined today by Jan Dutkiewicz. He’s assistant professor of Political Science at the Pratt Institute and co-author together with Gabriel Rosenberg of Feed the People: Why Industrial Food Is Good and How We Can Make It Even Better. Jan, welcome to the Human Progress podcast.
Jan Dutkiewicz: Thanks so much for having me.
Adam Omary: You open the book with this food paradox. What is the paradox?
Jan Dutkiewicz: The paradox of the modern food system, especially the modern American food system, is basically that it’s never been better and it’s never been worse. So what I mean by that is that the American food system is just incredibly abundant. It produces a wealth of foods that are produced at scale to set standards within a relatively strong, actually, regulatory state. So Americans get cheap access to a huge abundance of a wide variety of delicious and potentially very nutritious foods. Whatever we do to improve the food system, we need to keep that. But then there’s a problem, which is the way that we produce food also has quite large environmental externalities, and I’m sure we’ll get into that later. It is not always great for labor, and it’s not always optimally distributed. So we have this problem where, on the one hand, we’re the richest country on earth with this truly actually incredible food system, and yet, we still have quite high food insecurity. So the point of the book is to basically see how we can address those externalities and sort of dial down the things that don’t work while leaning into the things that do work.
Adam Omary: I’m excited to get into it. Now, you got on our radar at Human Progress from your recent article in the Free Press, In Defense of Processed Foods. And processed foods have been a subject of major controversy recently, particularly with our health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and the broader Make America Healthy Again movement. But processed foods, you argue, aren’t the evil that they’re made out to be.
Jan Dutkiewicz: I think where I’d start with answering this question is that saying that foods are processed doesn’t actually, or ultra-processed, for that matter, doesn’t actually tell us anything about them. It doesn’t tell us what’s been processed. It doesn’t tell us how it’s been processed. It tells us nothing about the nutrition of individual foods. So the fact that processing has become something of a synonym for unhealthfulness, I think just absolutely does not help the discussion either about individual health or public health in this country. Now, I think what a lot of people fixate on is this idea of ultra-processed foods or UPFs. And one thing that we really tried to make clear in the article in the FP and that I really want people to take away from the book is that the idea of UPFs is super new. It comes from a public health schema that comes out of Brazil in the late 2000s called NOVA. NOVA is often capitalized as if it were an acronym to sort of lend it more scientific gravitas, but it’s not an acronym. It’s just the Portuguese word for new, as in new schema. And basically these public health researchers wanted to create an epidemiological tool that they could map the general quality of a diet in a given population, in a given area, to see if they could correlate negative health outcomes with the general dietary patterns of a population.
Jan Dutkiewicz: So far, so good. But the way they decided to do that is to create these four categories of food. Unprocessed foods, NOVA 1; basic household ingredients like salt, sugar, honey, oil, NOVA 2; NOVA 3, which are foods that you could basically create in your kitchen or that just combine ingredients from 1 and 2, which is pasta, tinned marinara sauce, what have you. And then you get this category called NOVA 4, ultra-processed foods. And it’s this general catch-all category to basically describe anything that you can’t produce, make in your kitchen or make with ingredients you usually have in your kitchen, or that uses industrial processes to do things like extract or isolate parts of food, so sort of like whey protein isolate or soy protein isolate. And they decided that ultra-processed foods were a primary driver of morbidity, which is true if you conflate all ultra-processed foods with Oreos and sugary drinks and Doritos. But that’s quite simply not what it is. We’ve known that too much salt, too much fat, too much sugar in our diet is bad for a long time. I mean, the McGovern Committee report in 1977 told us this.
Jan Dutkiewicz: But what this category of UPF does is it then gets all, if you imagine it as a net sort of being pulled behind a fishing trawler, it gets all this bycatch. And that bycatch includes things like, for instance, plant-based burgers, Impossible Burgers, Beyond Burgers, baby formula, healthy ultra-processed vegetables and fruits, protein shakes. So basically it’s a category that’s way too broad to adjudicate the nutrition of individual foods. And so therefore I think that it’s really not fit for purpose. I think we should be focused much more on the sort of nutrient quality of individual particular foods, so something like what they do in Europe with Nutri-Score. Otherwise the schema is just far too broad and I think it does a huge disservice to nutrition and to how the public thinks about nutrition.
Adam Omary: When and why do you think the narrative around processing food shifted from “this is new and innovative and saving people time” into now it almost seems like a dirty word?
Jan Dutkiewicz: Look, I think people who live in a world of great abundance of readily available, cheap, healthy food start, once they’re benefiting from all of that, fixating on the possible negatives of that system. Look, we have to understand that food science and food processing are an incredible innovation if looked at across the history of human progress. In the United States before 1906, there are no food safety regulations. You get some canned meat, you’re basically rolling the dice whether or not you get botulism. Before the 1920s, scientists haven’t actually isolated vitamins. As soon as vitamins start getting isolated and start getting put into foods, we address many of the tremendous malnutrition effects that affected huge populations of the United States. So just to give you a few statistics, which we also mentioned in the FP piece, in the early 1900s, something like 70% of all children in public schools in New York City suffered to some degree from rickets, which is a vitamin D deficiency. When the United States does the draft for World War I in 1916, there are about, in different constituencies, there are as many as 30% of all drafted men who are rejected from service because of physical unfitness, in part due to malnutrition.
Jan Dutkiewicz: We’ve got pellagra running wild in the South, killing hundreds of thousands of people. Basic early food science, so adding iodine to salt, enriching bread, pasteurizing and enriching milk, these things save countless lives. They massively improve nutrition, they reduce child mortality. So food processing actually brings us into the modern world. And food processing is actually celebrated. This is a government policy. This is something that business gets behind. This is something people celebrate because finally we’ve got really healthy food that’s abundant. And then modern food processing technologies equally, I think, are celebrated until it’s forgotten what a huge leap forward they are in human history. And then people start, in a sense, once you’re in the present and you’re benefiting from all these things, then you can start looking with rose-tinted glasses into the past and saying, “Well, I don’t necessarily want the packaged product. I want things that come from a real farm, from the soil.” And so it’s this very sort of romanticized and aestheticized notion of what food production was like and should be like. But in fact, when food production was like that, sort of scattered, small-scale, poorly regulated, before modern science, before modern transportation technology, before modern processing technology, food was actually on balance worse and nutrition outcomes for the average American were worse.
Jan Dutkiewicz: So I think there’s that and I also think that there’s just, as with most things, there’s a certain degree of technophobia. People, if they don’t understand or aren’t brought along with what new technologies do, tend to develop a sort of knee-jerk aversion to it. We saw this, of course, with genetically modified organisms. People are still so scared to this day of the idea of GMOs, while there is no proof, there’s not one single study that links GMO consumption to negative health outcomes. And I think it’s a similar thing with ultra-processing, right?
Adam Omary: Right. This is a common theme in our work at Human Progress. You have these nostalgia biases, negativity biases, but it’s absolutely remarkable when you take a historical standpoint, whether it’s even a hundred years ago or from an evolutionary perspective, thinking that most humans who have lived had to work for their food in a very direct sense, whether farming or hunting and gathering. And now, this has freed up so much time for everyday people to respecialize in different fields and enable the other innovation that we’ve seen in technology and other areas.
Jan Dutkiewicz: Absolutely. I mean, modern society as it is cannot be inherently an agrarian society. We have a complex division of labor. We have people doing all sorts of different tasks to make modern society run. You can’t feed that society in the same way that we fed an agrarian society 150 or 200 years ago. So quite simply, you need a food system that works for the society which it feeds. And that food system has to be inherently industrial and it has to do things at scale. And it can’t rely on any idea of most people going back to agricultural labor or to farm labor.
Adam Omary: Across the 20th century in particular, there were all of these massive developments. You mentioned improvements in food safety. There’s also improvements in just raw agricultural output, in large part due to developing better fertilizers. There’s industrialization and factories as a whole taking off. What’s the rough timeline as to the order that each of these developments came on and what led to the next one?
Jan Dutkiewicz: Well, agriculture, it’s hard to say historically that agriculture has gone from small to big. So if you look at many ancient civilizations, right, for instance, ancient Egyptian civilization operated at scale. They harnessed scale and they harnessed things like irrigation at large scale, understanding that creating food availability, making sure there was enough food was the basis for a prosperous society. And of course you’ve had societies with far smaller, far more disaggregated, what we’d now call family farms. But broadly speaking, it’s as we enter the 20th century, you’ve got the birth of the industrialization of food processing and food transport with the introduction of long-distance rail and then refrigerated rail, the centralization of the storage and the creation of grades for things like grain in places like Chicago. So as we all know, the birthplace of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Chicago Board of Trade was based in large part on developing futures contracts for farmers that were producing and then selling to aggregators who would then sell on to East Coast processors and merchants. And following that, you’ve got the rise of the application of modern science through, as you noted, superior fertilizer, which is often petrochemical-based, superior pesticides and herbicides, and better and often electrified or petrochemical-based irrigation technologies that ensure long-term irrigation.
Jan Dutkiewicz: And so that happens and then after that we’ve got the birth of what we’d call modern plant science. So of course this is at first, this is very much very meticulous crossbreeding to achieve particular effects. Of course this is most closely tied to the work of Norman Borlaug and the development of dwarf wheat. He’s sort of normally thought of as the father of modern agriculture. So Borlaug basically creates a more robust, higher-yielding variety of wheat, but one that inherently already depends on these industrial systems I just described. So this is a wheat that depends on fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, and high levels of irrigation. And from there, we basically just have the takeoff of the ability to crossbreed plants and then slowly genetically modify plants in order to achieve particular ends, right? Such as resistance to particular forms of herbicide or pesticide, resistance to particular natural diseases, or whatever other application. And so that’s the rough, that’s a very, very rough. I mean there are entire books written about all of this, right? So I mean if you want that old history, you can read William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis. If you want the more recent history, you can read some of Vaclav Smil’s books.
Jan Dutkiewicz: But I’ve just basically run through the timeline as best I could. But the long and short is that at the end of all of this, what we have is tremendous increases in yields per acre for staple crops. So 200, 300, 400-fold increases in yields. And actually simultaneously, after chemical use basically peaks in the 1970s, we’ve actually seen a decline of pesticide use and herbicide use since the ’70s as technology has improved. So we can actually use less of these chemicals or we can apply them more specifically and more judiciously.
Adam Omary: I’m also thinking about the massive population growth that coincided with this timeline that you just outlined, both in the United States and worldwide. Much of it is directly driven by increased food availability, but there’s also a tension, especially around the 1970s with The Population Bomb, people being worried about overpopulation, worried about we’re not gonna be able to feed a billion or 10 billion people. And then there was a lot of pressure and incentive to develop an agriculture. So I’m wondering throughout this timeline, how much was just raw technological progress that then enabled population growth and how much was directly driven by already a strong struggle to feed a growing population?
Jan Dutkiewicz: I think that’s a little bit of a chicken and egg question because I think it’s hard to disambiguate causal factors [0:16:34.0] ____ is driven by a true belief in the need to sustainably feed the world. Right? But so on the one hand, you’re producing food to feed an existing population, but on the other hand, broadly speaking, all of these developments, so how we grow crops, how we store them, how we transport them, how we sell them to the public, coupled with other trends that are pushing towards urbanization, all create the conditions under which basically a well-fed, highly diversified population can grow.
Jan Dutkiewicz: So the answer is yes and yes. A larger population obviously incentivizes the development of technologies to feed them, but the technologies existing and providing an abundance of food also gets rid of the “Will there be food on the table tomorrow?” question, which facilitates demographic growth. And one thing I’ll say is that, and I really can’t overstate this case, this recent historical development has led to the first time in human history that we produce more calories and protein than the average person needs. We now produce actually an excess, globally speaking, in the aggregate, of calories and protein, which is just an incredible achievement. So many other civilizations before ours have risen and fallen just off the basic question of is there enough food or is there not enough food?
Jan Dutkiewicz: Entire civilizations could be brought down by a few bad harvests, a few droughts. And now, we have a food system globally that actually produces a tremendous amount of food and, all things considered, is relatively robust. So there can be shocks, but the shocks don’t short-circuit the entire system or the food that is the basis for our civilization.
Adam Omary: The COVID pandemic was a good example of that, testing the resilience in our supply chains, which were certainly disrupted but rebounded rather quickly.
Jan Dutkiewicz: Exactly. And a lot of those shocks, a lot of those supply chain shocks and price shocks had to do with markets not knowing how to react in real time to what was happening, so sending odd price signals. But ultimately speaking, production in the aggregate, other than in a few key industries, so for instance, meat production, because of meat processing being so labor-intensive and meat processing sites being such super-spreader hubs for COVID, but broadly speaking, global food production was not that disrupted. People pointed to empty shelves here and there, but ultimately, we never had a food availability crisis during COVID. In fact, I wrote an article during COVID with Liz Specht about this for Wired, which was that, contrary to popular opinion, the food system actually proved itself remarkably robust.
Adam Omary: Absolutely. I want to return to this point about being the first population in history to produce an excess of the caloric needs for all humans. Of course, there are still areas in the world that face food insecurity. So there’s also the problem of efficient distribution and not being wasteful. So how resilient is the system there? How much of the excess calories is concentrated, say, in wealthy countries like the United States, where we might see a lot of food waste? Or is the food waste narrative actually overblown?
Jan Dutkiewicz: So those are two different questions. And the first one I’ll say is that the total production of calories and protein, of course, is not fairly distributed. And by fairly, I mean that there are people globally who are food insecure. I think if we think just from a basic baseline of justice, human justice, I think that we should be able to at the very least distribute the bounty of food we have to hungry populations. And of course, the big things that get in the way of that are political questions and economic questions. So that’s number one. Number two, as far as the question of food waste, food waste is very tricky. And I’m reticent to give you a bite-size answer, if you will. But one thing I will say is that a tremendous amount of food waste is household food waste. So we think about waste throughout the value chain, but a lot of food waste is at the household level. So people throwing out food that’s going bad or that they no longer want, or they don’t want to eat their leftovers or whatnot.
Jan Dutkiewicz: And addressing household food waste is, from a structural or policy perspective, very difficult, if not impossible, other than maybe running information campaigns for people to waste less food. And then if you go to different points in the food value chain, there are definitely efforts that could be made to capture, for instance, food waste from supermarkets and redistribute it, for instance, to people in need, to homeless shelters, et cetera, et cetera. But these are really piecemeal and local-level efforts. So food waste is… I’m not saying it’s not a problem, but it’s a very difficult problem to tackle. And the largest part of food waste of produced food happens in the household. One thing I will say, though, is that if you’re thinking about food waste in the sense of poor use of calories and protein within the food system, a sort of elephant in the room is meat production, especially industrial meat production. The average animal that we eat will consume far more calories and protein over its lifetime than it actually yields, because it has to live, it has to grow, and so on and so forth. So there are studies that basically measure the ultimate yield of meat in terms of protein and calories as a percentage of the total consumption of protein and calories by animals.
Jan Dutkiewicz: And it’s just shockingly low. So if we’re thinking about using resources a bit better, we have to, whether we want to or not, talk about the meat question.
Adam Omary: There’s an interesting tension between two concepts that you introduce in the book, the meat austerity view that you just articulated and what you call democratic hedonism, or pursuing food not just because it meets our nutritional needs, but because it’s pleasurable. And many people might be willing to pay more and tolerate the waste because meat is tasty.
Jan Dutkiewicz: I mean, I think this is a fundamental question in general in addressing food system issues. I think that what we want to convey in the book is that so much food writing and so much food discourse shies away from the basic pleasures people get from eating. Whether it’s the sort of Michael Pollans and Wendell Berrys of the world, these super influential food writers who basically say if you enjoy an industrial diet, if you’re enjoying your burger or your Doritos, that’s not real pleasure, you’re basically suffering from food false consciousness and you just need to eat heirloom tomatoes from the farmer’s market and you’ll actually be far happier. Well, that’s an empirical question, and I don’t think that’s right. Lots of people like burgers, lots of people like Doritos. And then people who talk about the harms of the food system similarly often say, well, pleasure is secondary.
Jan Dutkiewicz: So, for instance, people who make arguments for veganism from an ethical standpoint will say, well, the pleasure you get from meat should not outweigh the suffering of animals. This is sort of how the standard argument goes. And even if you buy that argument, I personally buy that argument—that hasn’t done a lot to veganize society or minimize meat consumption. And so what we think is that a central principle of making a better food system is still providing people with food that’s good and also understanding how people enjoy foods, or from where does their food pleasure come from, and thinking about food systems reforms in, to the extent possible, maintaining their access to that pleasure even as we address negative externalities. And so in the case of meat, and we spend basically a chapter, we spend the whole chapter that has to do with food sustainability bouncing off or directly focusing on the meat question. Look, we think that all peer-reviewed research points to the fact that Americans or people in high-consuming countries like the United States need to eat less meat if we’re to have a more sustainable food system.
Jan Dutkiewicz: How do you do that? Well, you can tell people to eat less meat, but we think that things like alternative proteins are, maybe not the versions we have now, but potentially better versions down the line are one promising avenue. Because what they do ideally is the theory of change is that it actually meets people where they are. If you want a burger, it’s gonna give you a burger. Beyond Burger is pretty damn good. Or if you want a chicken nugget, it’ll get you a chicken nugget, but produced in a way that is just far less resource-intensive. Whether or not this theory of change will work, we don’t know. As we were writing the book, there was, of course, this huge boom in plant-based alternatives. There was a lot of investment in cellular agriculture. Now, at least in the United States, so not globally. Globally, plant-based is actually doing quite good, but in the US, there’s been this about-shift, in part because of this idea that these products are ultra-processed, in part because of just a cultural swing back towards meat consumption. But cultural trends notwithstanding, the science says we need to eat less meat. How we do that, I think that giving alternative proteins another chance or really thinking about long-term investment in cellular agriculture is one of the ways we could achieve these goals.
Adam Omary: Throughout your book and as a psychologist, I kept coming back to these interesting psychological issues at play with how we approach food, both personally and societally. There’s been a lot of discussion about evolutionary mismatch, particularly for the obesity crisis, this innate taste that we have for high-fat, high-sugar foods that were rare in our ancestral environments. And now in an era of processed foods and industrialization where they’re hyper-plentiful, it’s easy to go overboard. It’s also interesting reflecting on that with meat because you don’t usually see the same evolutionary logic applied there. It makes sense that ancestrally, even for hunter-gatherers, meat would be relatively rarer and account for, in most societies, only a minority of total calories. So again, we have this scarce good that when you present it cheap and plentiful, even meat being more expensive than most other calorie sources now, if you look at it from a time-price perspective, how many hours of labor it takes to get a pound of meat, way lower than any time in human history, including hunting. Especially when you consider you don’t have to skin the animal, pluck feathers, and so forth, or cook it. You can even just buy a whole cooked rotisserie chicken for $5 at Costco.
Jan Dutkiewicz: Yeah. I think that’s absolutely right. And I think that, unfortunately, part of our abundant food system is that there’s an abundance of things that we probably should eat less of, right? Be it meat, be it sodium, be it sugar. And that then becomes a policy question, a question of what we do about it, how we address this through policy. And I think there are some pretty tried, tested, and true policies, such as, for instance, taxes, sugar taxes, soda taxes that could marginally increase the cost of things we know are bad, like soda, potentially to dissuade consumers. We could remove soda machines from institutions that have populations that probably shouldn’t have them, like schools. But ultimately, I think ultimately a big problem here is that, well, it’s a problem if you see it as a problem, but consumers have a tremendous amount of freedom in the market for food, and they should have freedom in the market of food. So there’s no reality in which any government can micromanage diet. And so what we can do is we can try to steer diets to be more healthful or more resource-efficient.
Jan Dutkiewicz: But I don’t see a world in which we ban sugary drinks.
Adam Omary: Right. That reminds me of what you said earlier about price signals and these real-time changes, both making our food system and our supply chains quite resilient as well as strongly incentivizing, at least at a production level, absolute minimization of waste. It makes sense also at the individual consumer level that price signals will serve as strong incentives that if the most unhealthy foods also happen to be the most expensive, there’s a disincentive. But there’s another elephant in the room, which is that now often these high-sugar, most unhealthy foods are also the ones that are most subsidized via corn subsidies. And indirectly, you could make the same case even before having any discussion about, say, a sugar tax. Should it be indirectly supported, again, through corn subsidies? Or you talk about SNAP benefits, food stamps benefits in your book as well.
Jan Dutkiewicz: Right. So the subsidy question is tricky. It’s tricky in the United States because in the United States, unlike, for instance, in Europe under the CAP, farmers don’t get direct cash handouts. They don’t get direct cash payments in the form of subsidies. So subsidies are mostly indirect in the forms of things like crop insurance. But what crop insurance, of course… Crop insurance, as the name suggests, the government supports cheaper crop insurance, which for particular crops, especially crops that can be produced at large scale, staples like wheat, corn, soy, which in turn incentivizes farmers to produce those products, especially if there’s already a market for them. So if you take corn, the reason we produce so much corn in this country is because, (A) corn grows everywhere, (B) there are these government supports, but there are also all kinds of uses for corn, be it through ethanol, be it through high-fructose corn syrup, that give farmers a steady market for this good. And so that’s really hard to untangle. So what could be done? I mean, I absolutely think that subsidy regimes for these crops, especially for crops not used for human consumption… I’m not saying this is an easy political lift, right?
Jan Dutkiewicz: It’s in fact one of the hardest political lifts given the strength of the farming lobby. But I think getting rid of subsidies for any food that doesn’t go for human consumption, so if something gets burned for ethanol or it gets ground down for animal feed, I think none of those crops should be subsidized because it doesn’t actually advance the needs for nutrition and it doesn’t lead to things like more efficient land use. I also think that to the extent there are farm-level subsidies, crop insurance subsidies should apply to any crop, any crop for human consumption, including crops grown in smaller quantities. That’s step one. Step two is where do subsidies that send signals to producers come from, which, when it comes to government spending, those come from major programs that the USDA pays for, which is SNAP and which is school lunches. Before we get into the SNAP question, I just want to say that school lunches, which are a much-maligned part of the sort of American foodscape, people have these images of sort of limp hot dogs that are kind of greenish and just these awful school lunches, actually, in the wake of the Obama administration, now that reimbursement for school lunches has to…
Jan Dutkiewicz: Each lunch has to meet at least three of the five food groups on MyPlate, which was based in the old nutritional guidelines. School lunches are actually relatively healthy, right? And if we spent more money on them, as other countries do, they could be even healthier. But of course, what gets reimbursed by school lunches is an incentive to producers. But under the new guidelines, a lot of that is actually fruits and veggies, which is great. The flip side of this is SNAP. And of course, SNAP has been attacked because it doesn’t restrict what you can spend money on. And so depending on which statistics you look at, somewhere between 9 or slightly over 10 into the teens percent of SNAP money gets used for soda and some other percentage gets used for ultra-processed foods, which we now know is a dubious category. But then the question becomes, what can you do about it, right? So the arguments in favor of doing away with soda from SNAP, of course, are that the government is basically subsidizing the Coca-Cola Corporation, right, and leading to poor nutritional outcomes. And so it should be done away with.
Jan Dutkiewicz: And this has been the argument for a long time of people who champion changes in SNAP, such as former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, right, who was this sort of fierce anti-sugar and anti-soda activist. The flip side of that is that hunger food security activists will say that not only should we not restrict what people using SNAP can use just out of concern for things like human dignity, but that if the point of SNAP is to actually address food insecurity by stretching household budgets, by putting more money into the household budgets, what we know is that if you remove soda from SNAP, people receiving SNAP will probably still buy soda and they’ll use scarce funds that SNAP is meant to address. So that’s the tension that’s at play. And so you’ve got these odd bedfellows where the Coca-Cola Corporation and poverty advocates or food insecurity advocates are on the same side against people who are perhaps more fiscally conservative or people who care more about nutrition. And so ultimately, and this is sort of where the debate comes down.
Jan Dutkiewicz: So it’s an empirical question. If you cut soda eligibility from SNAP, would people buy less soda? And that’s an empirical question. It’s an empirical question that I think should be tested and could be tested, but it hasn’t been because every time people like Bloomberg tried to run pilots where they actually cut soda from SNAP, those efforts have been shut down by the USDA, which runs SNAP.
Adam Omary: Michael Pollan recently argued in a 60 Minutes interview that we’re essentially paying double because you have both subsidies on the food end and then you have the later healthcare costs that are also largely taxpayer-paid.
Jan Dutkiewicz: Yeah, but look, to the extent that you can make an economic argument for shifting subsidies or increasing taxes to disincentivize certain forms of food consumption, I’m all for it. But I think you start running into the quite hard problem of consumer choice and food culture and eating habits. So the USDA has this thing called the Healthy Eating Index, or the HEI. And what it does is it’s a longitudinal study that compares how people actually eat to the requirements of the National Dietary Guidelines, and you get a score out of 100 and over 80, obviously, is a healthy diet. And Americans do really poorly, which is not surprising, on the HEI. But what is surprising is that even people who are quite affluent and who have access to, or potential access to, the healthiest possible diet also often don’t eat very well. So I think that there’s something there about changing food, and we know what’s wrong with American diets. It’s the same thing it’s been since the McGovern Committee 50 years ago. It’s too few veggies, too few fruit, too few whole grains. So how do you get Americans to eat more veggies and fruit?
Jan Dutkiewicz: And I think that’s an open question, but are you gonna massively change that by changing subsidy regimes? I’m not sure. I’m not against it, and I buy this Pollan argument, but I think that there’s a hard limit to how much the government can actually intervene in diets. Just speaking objectively, we can ban particular things that we know are harmful. So for instance, we’ve banned trans fats. That’s a huge public health win. We’ve banned a few other food additives, a few other food dyes that are clearly noxious, and that’s a big win. But at what point, where’s the limit for micromanaging diets? You can make sugar a little bit more expensive, but you can’t ban sugar. Could you even make salt more expensive? Well, it’s unclear. So you’d have to think of a pretty smart mechanism that sends enough price signals to push Americans to what we know they’re not eating, but it’s not an easy task.
Adam Omary: How would you say the USDA is currently performing and in the direction that RFK is taking public health, is it closer to living in the time where trans fats are in everything and we’re incurring the costs and even if we’re either unaware of the risks or we’re aware, but again, still have action? So when he’s talking about ban certain food dyes, or is it at this point like fearmongering and a sort of purity sense that might stray away from the data?
Jan Dutkiewicz: I am so reticent to talk about what’s happening because it’s in such flux. Like a week ago, we would have said, well, surely they’re gonna, if they’re gonna crack down on food dyes, they’re gonna crack down on glyphosate. But instead, they’re leaning into supporting glyphosate production. So it’s really, it’s so mercurial. But one thing I will say is that a big part of public health related to the food system isn’t just the content of what people eat, but it’s the regulatory frameworks within which it happens. So oversight over food production, oversight over food safety, sort of the basic nuts and bolts of the regulatory state. We know that a lot of that is being hacked away. And in fact, there are deregulatory pushes for things. Like most recently, there was a really good piece in Vox by Kenny Torella about the push to simultaneously increase line speeds at chicken slaughterhouses and also reduce oversight for things like products tainted with salmonella.
Jan Dutkiewicz: So all of this, of course, benefits the big meat companies, but it doesn’t benefit laborers and it doesn’t benefit consumers because consumers are ultimately protected by the guardrails of the regulatory state. And we know that the regulatory state is not being supported. And so that’s just a fact. And when it comes to things like the new nutritional guidelines, I think again that there it’s more show than substantive difference other than the foregrounding of red meat and increasing protein. But if you look at the rest of those guidelines and compare to older guidelines, they’re still saying Americans should eat more fruit, Americans should eat more veggies, Americans should eat whole grains. And that’s not a deviation from what past guidelines have said. It’s just that past guidelines also haven’t convinced Americans to eat those things.
Adam Omary: Occasionally you see some high-profile case of contaminated ingredient in a large production chain, there’s a massive recall, stock price of the company involved drops. And whether it’s because I’m more optimistic or more contrarian when I see that, I’m actually always remarkably pleasantly surprised because it causes me to reflect on how every single day we’re feeding millions of people billions of pounds of produce across the whole country or the whole world, and only rarely, maybe once a year or less, you’ll see some high-profile incidents of something going wrong like this.
Jan Dutkiewicz: No, absolutely. I mean, this is core to our argument. I don’t think that’s contrarian at all. I think the fact that a tainted food scandal like an E. coli scandal or a salmonella scandal makes the news shows you how rare it is. And again, it’s because the industrial principles we have in our food system create food that is remarkably safe. And it does this again within the guardrails of the regulatory state and also because there are lawsuits and companies are scared of lawsuits, right? Companies don’t want to be sued in a class action lawsuit because there was some E. coli in baby spinach. And so those forces push companies towards better behavior. But that doesn’t mean that companies, like for instance, chicken companies, wouldn’t prefer less regulatory oversight. Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive. But yeah, absolutely, we live in an amazing. It shocks me sometimes the extent to which people critique the modern food system when you can go to the average supermarket and just get a bounty of food for a relatively low price and not worry about whether or not the food’s gonna be there, whether the food’s gonna make you sick. Right. And only then, only if you forget about that can you start worrying about things like, oh, am I eating too many Doritos or too many Oreos? Right. Or did I read a story on my phone at the checkout aisle while buying all this food about an E. coli recall somewhere in Kansas? Right. So I think we need to keep in perspective the benefits, which I think far outweigh the downsides.
Adam Omary: It’s amazing. And again, I find myself wondering why have we lost that? Is it just this innate pessimistic bias, this hedonic treadmill, like we’ll price in what’s good and focus on what’s wrong and it just says something about human psychology.
Jan Dutkiewicz: I mean, I think that’s a question for you maybe. I mean, I think there are a number of factors. Yeah, I mean, I think, look, there are downsides to the system that I think are valid. Like it’s valid to critique the environmental impact of food production and to seek to reduce it. It’s valid to seek to address food insecurity which remains unaddressed. And so I think that there are very valid problems that are identified. I just think that once we identify those problems, we have to think about ways to address them at scale. And what happens, I think, is that especially in the case of food, and especially in the case of American food writing, even people who identify the problem more or less correctly point towards these sort of antiquated, anachronistic, non-scalable solutions. So rather than saying, for instance, that addressing food insecurity just means more SNAP benefits or better school lunches, they’ll start talking about how every school lunch needs to be regeneratively fed or whatever beef, and it’s just, that’s just not gonna happen. And that’s just not the solution to the problem.
Jan Dutkiewicz: And similarly with individual diets, this obsession with sort of bodily purity and people wanting to, there are diets that say you can’t eat X or people who are so obsessed with supplements. Like we just know what a healthy diet looks like. We’ve known what a more or less healthy diet looks like for ages. Just download the MyPlate app, make some MyPlate compliant meals. You can do it in any supermarket and you’ll be fine. And I just think there are so many neuroses around food. And I think the more we address those neuroses and just walk it back, the more we’ll be able to have rational conversations about actual food system solutions.
Adam Omary: It’s interesting seeing these psychological dimensions play out in advertising. There’s a lot of focus on how food companies themselves are hiring scientists and artists and doing everything they can to make the thing look as appealing as possible, whether it’s airbrushing the burger for the advertisement photo or just engineering the food itself so that it’s maximally pleasurable. But I think less appreciated is how in anti-food industrial activism, you see a lot of the same play on emotion, like trying to trigger this disgust sensitivity or purity. I remember seeing as a kid, there was this viral video of the chicken paste that becomes chicken nuggets being used in this campaign against McDonald’s. And again, all of this, it’s basically the same type of technique, except instead of airbrushing it to highlight its more appealing aspects, they’re highlighting the nastier aspects of industrial processing and slaughter, but neglecting these benefits that you just mentioned of how efficient and clean it is and how it enables population growth and limits food insecurity that we’ve faced really throughout pretty much all of human history until the last century.
Jan Dutkiewicz: Yeah, absolutely. And these things change as the sort of cultural tides change. A few years ago, it was gluten. Now there’s the question of protein and processing. And these things shift with the tides. But absolutely. And what I actually find unfortunate about it is that it pushes people away from, or it can push people away from what are ultimately fantastic technological innovations. We see this in the complete reticence to eat genetically modified organisms, even though many genetically modified organisms, like rainbow papaya in Hawaii, it was genetically modified to protect it from the ringspot virus, which threatened the state’s entire crop of papayas. All the genetic modification does is makes it possible to grow papaya in Hawaii. That papaya is delicious and healthy. Arctic apples from Washington state, they’ve been genetically modified to not oxidize as quickly, right, which reduces food waste, keeps them crunchy and looking good if they’re sliced up. These are not scary technologies, but you could see these very sort of benevolent technologies being cast as papaya made in a lab or apple that doesn’t brown, which is unnatural.
Jan Dutkiewicz: You see this with critiques of plant-based meats like Impossible Burgers, people listing out ingredient lists, completely missing the fact that all of this processing is pretty benign and that actually peer-reviewed research shows that a soy-based Impossible Burger is actually heart healthier than a red meat burger. And so I think a lot of this has to do with scaremongering, which takes advantage of both relatively low levels of scientific literacy and this idea that food should be sort of pure and come from the land, if you will.
Adam Omary: So there’s a related trade-off to keep in mind of yield versus quality. There’s some arguments that in these efforts to make produce bigger, whether that’s animals and giving them lower quality feed so that they can grow bigger and faster, or if it’s vegetables and fruit, like again, physically larger, but perhaps the nutrient density goes down. How do we think about those trade-offs?
Jan Dutkiewicz: Well, I think we should talk about these things on a product-by-product basis. I don’t think we see this in staple crops, right? We don’t see the wheat we get, if we eat it as whole wheat, of course, not milled white wheat, is super nutritious. I think we do see some variation, but only very minor, in the quality of nutrients between small-scale and large-scale production of produce. Taste, I mean, taste is a personal thing. Many people will say they prefer the farmer’s market tomato to the hothouse tomato that you get at the Trader Joe’s. But there’s only one way, only one of those two production methods scales such that everyone can eat tomatoes, right? And it’s the latter. So I have nothing against people going to the farmer’s market, and I have nothing against farm-to-table restaurants, and I have nothing against people getting food pleasure where they get food pleasure. And if someone appreciates a farmer’s market radish or tomato more, then that’s great. But we can’t pretend that these perceived losses of a little bit of flavor or potentially a tiny bit of nutrients outweigh the fact that it’s only large-scale industrial production that makes produce or meat or staple crops or whatever widely available and actually increases aggregate nutrition, aggregate options for food pleasure.
Jan Dutkiewicz: Simultaneously, you try to get a tomato that’s in season in New York City, February. What’s actually in season? Nothing. Beets, right? Beets and tubers. If I want a tomato in New York City, I’m gonna go to the supermarket. If I go to the Whole Foods in February in New York City, I have access to seven or eight different types of tomatoes of different sizes and flavors, and a whole bunch of them are absolutely delicious. And I think that that’s how we should approach this question, right, rather than comparing the most sort of basic beef, tomato to the best tomato at the farmer’s market, right? ‘Cause that’s not an apples-to-oranges comparison.
Adam Omary: Right. The seasonal availability is something so easy to take for granted.
Jan Dutkiewicz: Yes. Yes, we have. Look, if you’re trying to eat healthier and if you’re trying to hit that, improve your HEI score or what have you, and you live somewhere that you don’t have year-round access to produce, you can only do this because of the industrial food system and long-distance transportation. It’s a small miracle that I can go into the Key Food on the corner and have an entire sort of verdant, multicolored produce aisle in the middle of February. And that’s a huge nutrition win, right? Like again, what’s in season in February in New York? And it is not a sort of verdant, multicolored variety of fruits and vegetables. It’s a bunch of tubers and some beets.
Adam Omary: Right. And to your point about the farmer’s market experience, there’s great placebo psychology studies that show that in a blindfold taste test, you might not see a difference. So much of eating is experiential. That’s not to say anything’s wrong with it if it is a placebo effect, but it’s nice to keep in mind.
Jan Dutkiewicz: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, no, absolutely. And look, people enjoy going. They talk to the farmer and it does something for how they see themselves as consumers of food as perhaps more active rather than more passive participants in the food system. And I recognize all these values. But yeah, ultimately, is that farmers market tomato all that much better than the Whole Foods tomato? You know, I’m not convinced.
Adam Omary: Even the criticism that people say about, you know, is organic produce or the very best being limited to only small segments of the population, it’s still remarkable from a human progress angle to reflect on if that’s our problem, that’s a pretty good problem to have. All these problems that we laid out and that you lay out in the book, as well as proposed solutions to them, it’s still remarkable and I think much preferred that we’re dealing with that instead of a problem of starvation or food insecurity.
Jan Dutkiewicz: Yeah, absolutely. 100%.
Adam Omary: All very optimistic and inspiring to reflect on. Thank you very much for your time, Jan.
Jan Dutkiewicz: No, thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed the conversation.