The Bullshit Hypocrisy of "All-Natural" Foods

 

Here’s the thing about nature: It will fuck up your shit. A few weeks ago, the website The Naked Label published a picture of a vibrant, colorful mushroom. It was captioned with a quotation from author and paleo diet advocate Diane Sanfilippo: “We cannot make food better than nature.” The problem? The mushroom pictured was the Amanita muscaria, which is highly poisonous. The Naked Label probably wasn’t recommending poisonous mushrooms as a part of your balanced cannabis-induced munchies on purpose. However, this tiny meme is symptomatic of a bigger problem on the internet: self-declared “natural health” gurus who say everything natural is automatically better. It’s not. Are chemical additives safe or should you eat an “all-natural” diet? Is there a reason for the chemical paranoia brought on by Dr. Oz-endorsed mommy-bloggers, or is this just fear mongering from people who need to go back to chemistry class? Is the vision of “nature” propagated by Whole Foods and the like just another marketing term? Recently, several large companies have made decisions to alter their products based on chemical phobia. Is this a good thing? If you follow any “natural” food blogs, you might say yes. But the science says otherwise. And stuck in the middle trying to make sense of it all is the consumer. What the hell does “natural” mean anyway when it’s on a food label? Let’s examine a few recent food kerfuffles to figure out what Nature, Inc. offers the consumer. Kraft Macaroni and Cheese: Still Awful Last month I wrote about Vani Hari, AKA the Food Babe. I decreed that her tactics and statements about food were devoid of science (fine, she’s full of shit). One of her attention-grabbing schemes was petitioning Kraft to remove artificial dyes from their macaroni and cheese. Shortly after my article made her cry tears of blood about her life decisions, Kraft announced that they would be removing the artificial dyes, although they claimed that they started reformulating the recipe a year before she launched her campaign. Whether or not this was a response to her petition, did the change make the product healthier? To start with, let’s remember that we’re talking about a product with powdered cheese. If you were looking for health food, you took a wrong turn three aisles ago after the spinach. We’re also not removing something that causes foodborne illness and replacing it with hummingbird whispers. We’re switching food dyes synthesized in the laboratory to food dyes that are… well, still going to be produced in the laboratory. We now have the safest class of food dyes ever on the market (here’s some reading on the short history of food dye regulation in America). Laboratories have helped that process because they can check final products for safety and purity, whether synthetic or derived from natural sources. And no matter what the source of the dye, a chemical solvent is used to extract the target color molecule. A common tactic of the Food Babe is to tell you these solvents are toxic only in products she’s deemed evil. Paprika is one of the sources for Kraft’s new and improved mac and cheese, and just like in the processes used for some synthetic dyes, hexane is used in processing (when consumed in large quantities, hexane is metabolized into a neurotoxic chemical). Note, with both classes of dyes, you are not consuming hexane, but then again, the Food Babe isn’t known for facts. As for the safety of the synthetic dyes, any substance has drawbacks and they’re about equal in synthetic and natural dyes. Some parents who previously bought the product for their fussy eaters are complaining about the new paprika-based dye. Even though it’s all natural, you can have allergies to paprika. This isn’t the only natural dye with this issue; carmine dye derived from the cochineal insect, sometimes used to punch up the red color in strawberry milkshakes, can induce anaphylactic shock. But it is natural. Raw Milk Will Make You Sick One sacred cow of the natural food movement is raw milk. And why not, all the natural hipsters know that organic kool aid is so five minutes ago and they’ve switched to suckling the raw teet. All my favorite bullshit peddlers—Mercola, Modern Alternative Mama, and Weston Price—endorse raw milk. Even the Food Babe buys into it, saying that “raw dairy is the best choice,” and that “raw dairy products are “alive.” Scary. They say that raw milk maintains milk’s natural enzymes and vitamins, that it even has components to fight off bacteria itself because of the goodness of its wonderful “naturaliness” (my version of truthiness). But when natural advocates endorse going back to a time before we introduced a technological advancement, they often fail to remind the consumer why we made those advancements in the first place. Pasteurization, the process of heating milk to a high temperature for a very small amount of time, kills a vast majority of the bacteria in it and keeps it safe for a longer period of time. Before the process became widespread in the early 20th century, milk was safe for maybe the day after you purchased it, and old milk was a source of festering disease. There are a lot of myths about what pasteurization does to milk that have been floated by the natural health movement. But let’s lay those rumors to rest: It does not induce allergies or lactose intolerance. If you can’t tolerate pasteurized milk, you’re not going to be able to tolerate raw milk either. And as for all those “enzymes” that allegedly die off when Big Dairy is reaching around into your wallet, relax. Your stomach acid will destroy them anyway. All the macronutrients and micronutrients in your pasteurized milk are exactly the same as raw milk. But is raw milk safe? You might think so, but you’d be misled. According to the CDC, less than 1% of milk consumed in the United States is raw milk. From 1993-2006, 121 outbreaks (causing 4,413 illnesses and three deaths) were caused that could be linked back to dairy. Seventy-three of the outbreaks were from raw milk and 48 were from pasteurized milk. Given that less than 1% of the dairy in the country is raw, if it’s safe, why is it causing a majority of the illnesses? The simple answer? It’s not safe, and the people promoting it are not promoting healthy food. They’re promoting the natural epidemic at any cost. Aspartame Won’t Kill You or Make You Fat Recently, Pepsi announced that they were going to remove aspartame from from Diet Pepsi and replace it with sucralose and acesulfame potassium, AKA Ace K. Sucralose is derived from sugar, and Ace K is the sweetener used in Coke Zero that gives it that “real sugar” flavor. Internet-based fears about aspartame are sweeping. Quacks and conspiracy theorists say it’s the most dangerous substance in food, that it causes MS like symptoms and, my personal favorite, that it killed Heath Ledger. So with all these fears, was removing aspartame from Diet Pepsi necessary for safety or health? Science says no. Aspartame is one of the most-studied food additives ever. It’s been shown, time after time, to be safe. No links to cancer, MS, ADHD, the NY Yankees, premature ejaculation, your dog sniffing the litter box, or any other random thing you want to blame on this. It just tastes sweet. It’s not even making you fat. I’m sure you’ve heard that diet soda with aspartame can cause weight gain. I drank Diet Coke when I was overweight, I drank Diet Coke all through my 90lb-weight loss, and I still drink Diet Coke. The difference is that I eat a lot more fruits and vegetables now and fewer french fries. An excess of calories will make you gain weight, not carbonated water with caffeine. Studies linking diet soda to weight gain are, at best, corollary, and haven’t closely enough examined the other behaviors of the people in the study. And speaking of my favorite soda, Coca-Cola offers multiple sugar-free varieties of cola for their customers with different types of sweeteners, and they all taste a little different. Pepsi’s decision to change the sweetener due to a small decline in sales will change the flavor that 95% of their loyal customers enjoyed. It only serves the people with overblown fears of a safe product. Given that aspartame is safe, why not just offer a second option like their competition did? That doesn’t make as good of a press release from Nature, Inc. Paleo: Not Good for Babies Pete Evans is a former pizza chef from Australia. Now he’s trying to harm your children. Evans became a celebrity chef due to his popular and flavorful pizza offerings. But then he discovered the Paleo lifestyle, or the annoying-everyone-you-know diet. The Paleo diet alleges to be a natural diet, one that closely mimics what our primal ancestors ate. Paleo devotees say that many diseases in society came along with the “unnatural” introduction of modern agriculture. Under this line of reasoning, Paleoites believe all foods that came with agriculture should be removed from your diet for optimal health. So when Evans, the man who made a fortune as a celebrity pizza chef, found Paleo, he began advocating the removal of grains, dairy, and other whole food groups from your life in order to find health. So if it’s so healthy, why was Evans’ new cookbook, Bubba Yum Yum: The Paleo Way, pulled before publishing over concerns that the recommendations would harm a baby? In attempt to be more natural than store-bought formulas, Evans’ bone-broth based baby formula recipe could have potentially starved a baby. Despite the recipe’s overwhelming naturaliness, it lacked calories, something tiny humans very much need to thrive. Furthermore, the liver pate recipe for infants contained such high levels of vitamin A that it could have caused toxic side effects. The unfortunate part of this is that well-meaning parents with every intention of feeding their children healthy foods easily would have bought this thinking they were doing the right thing for their kids. Parents, whether you choose breast milk or formula, please consult your pediatrician or a registered dietitian. Just like you wouldn’t consult your local Dominos pizza guy on what to feed your baby, Pete Evans the pizza chef is also not an expert. Non-GMO Chipotle Will Still Make You Need to Use Chipotlaway Burrito giant Chipotle announced last week that they ditched the GMOs from their menu. Amid random pictures on the internet of fish being spliced into tomatoes, reports from people who have never worked in food regulation about no-GMO regulation, and questions from mommy-bloggers-cum-doctors about GMOs causing health problems, did Chipotle act in the best interest of the public? Not. Even. Close. Chipotle claims that GMOs increase pesticide use and that the long-term health impact of their consumption are unknown. However, the claims just don’t stack up. We also have decades of data showing that GMOs are safe for consumption and the environment. In a large-scale analysis of all the studies done of GMOs, data showed that they reduced chemical pesticide use by 37% and increased crop production by 22%. Farmers can spend less and use a lower amount of safer types of pesticides. In fact, by switching to non-GMO ingredients, Chipotle is knowingly endorsing the use of more toxic pesticides and a fairly hazardous production method in the name of avoiding the GMO title. As Stephan Neidenbach wrote at We Love GMOs and Vaccines: BASF used a process known as mutagenesis to breed their sunflowers. Their seeds were doused with ethyl methanesulfonate and sodium azide to alter their DNA.[8] Ethyl mathanesulfonate is a possibly carcinogenic compound that produces random mutations in DNA.[9] Sodim azide is an extremely toxic compound used as a biocide and in airbag systems. It is lethal to humans at only 0.7 grams.[10] (...)The one conclusion that we can draw is that Chipotle is not doing this for any reason other than to profit off of the current GMO paranoia. Additionally, it’s incredibly disingenuous for Chipotle to claim that they’re only using non-GMO ingredients. The meat they serve still comes from animals that eat GMO feed. To switch to non-GMO feed would make their prices skyrocket and drastically hurt their business. As was demonstrated by this marketing stunt, their commitment to “food with integrity” comes right after their commitment to shareholders. Promoting fresh, natural thousand-calorie burritos with integrity gets harder if the price goes up to $16. Panera’s Publicity Ploy On the heels of the Chipotle decision, not to be outdone, Panera announced that they were tired of serving poison to their customers and would be removing approximately ⅓ of their ingredients from their recipes. This list of ingredients they’re removing includes caffeine, components of vanilla, and artificial sweeteners. According to Nature, Inc., this means their menu, from their 1,110-calorie sandwich to their 700-calorie caffeinated milkshakes, is suddenly a beacon of health. Unless they’re getting rid of the coffee and soda, claiming they’re removing caffeine from the menu is total bullshit. Remember, everything is made of chemicals, even your cup of “make-me-not-hate-life” in the morning. And if they do get rid of the option to add Splenda to the coffee, I’m heading back to Starbucks for a “toxic” PSL, thanks. The reasoning behind the retooling is publicity. Ron Shaich, Panera’s CEO, claims his “kids are eating Panera 10 to 11 times a week,” and he doesn’t want them to eat “junk.” Whenever a decision like this comes out, you should take an enormous pause to consider what it says about the ingredients the establishment was serving before. How much did Shaich care about his company’s food previously if he’s calling it junk now? Is this just a new way of greenwashing a thousand-calorie sandwich? Was Shaich not aware of the incredibly strict regulations involved in getting food additives to market? Didn’t anyone tell him that chefs and food scientists, who his company chose to hire, worked to make those exact flavors for their company that he’s now publicly deemed “junk?” (Those latter two questions are rhetorical.) And as for Shaich’s kids eating Panera ten times a week, I offer this suggestion: locate a grocery store. Maybe buy some goddamn apples. The Difference Between Nature, Inc. and Nature What is natural, anyway? And what’s the difference between slapping “natural” on a label versus… getting food from nature? We drive hybrid cars, own designer dogs that have been inbred from the grey wolf down to the chihuahua, and live in temperature-controlled, eco-friendly environments. We load the hybrid dog into the hybrid car, stretch on a pair of green-friendly $100 lululemons while hiking in the artificially designed nature trails of L.A. while drinking artificially sanitized water and tweeting selfies on our technological marvel iPhones with the hashtag #nature. That’s Nature Inc™. Nature, on the other hand, is generations ravaged by smallpox because vaccines weren’t invented yet. It’s having a home birth not because it’s been romanticized, but because it’s your only option. It’s dying of malnutrition because, even though you have soil, sunlight and water, you don’t have the technology to fight off bugs, weeds, or droughts. Nature is one too many sunburns leading to melanoma. Nature is when shows like Naked and Afraid and Born In The Wild are just life, and not documentary-worthy expenditures of bored and privileged twenty-somethings who can call the hospital when something goes horribly wrong. Because as much as nature makes delicious fruits and vegetables, if you’re not paying attention, it also makes poisonous mushrooms. Yvette d’Entremont holds bachelor’s degrees in theatre and chemistry and a master’s degree in forensic science. With a background working as an analytical chemist, she now runs SciBabe.com full time. She’s currently working on her first novel, SciBabe’s Ten Rules To BS Detection, due out in winter 2016. Her site debunks pseudoscience with humor and science. She lives in southern California with her dog, Buddy, and cat, Lexi. Follow her at fb.com/sciencebabe and scibabe.com. Image by Jim Cooke

Dear Colleague Letter: SEES: Interactions of Food Systems with Water and Energy Systems (nsf15040)

 

NSF 15-040 Dear Colleague Letter: SEES: Interactions of Food Systems with Water and Energy Systems February 2, 2015 Dear Colleagues: NSF established the Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability (SEES) investment area in 2010 to lay the research foundation for decision capabilities and technologies aimed at mitigating and adapting to environmental changes that threaten sustainability. SEES investments advance a systems-based approach to understanding, predicting, and reacting to stress upon and changes in the linked natural, social, and built environments. In this context, the importance of understanding the interconnected and interdependent systems involving food, energy, and water (FEW) has emerged. Through this Dear Colleague Letter (DCL), the NSF aims to accelerate fundamental understanding and stimulate basic research on systems that extend beyond the interests of the SEES Water Sustainability and Climate (WSC) program to include couplings to energy and food systems where the NSF already has established presence. Water and energy are critical for agriculture and food production. In addition, many factors - including changing land-use practices; increased urbanization; population growth and distribution; changing demand and consumer preferences; water contamination; and climate variability - create stresses on water, energy, and agriculture resources and systems in multiple and sometimes unexpected ways. These multifaceted interactions among food, energy, and water systems function according to fundamental scientific principles that govern the coupling of various physical, chemical, biological and social processes. There is a critical need to enhance understanding of the couplings within these complex systems and how they determine the systems-level response of the FEW system. a need for basic research to enable foundational technologies critical to the safety, security, productivity, and resilience of the FEW system and to pursue sustained cyberinfrastructure (data, software, and computational resources) that will support these activities and advances. The NSF supports basic research in nearly all key scientific and engineering disciplines which can further the understanding of these physical, chemical, biological, and social interactions, as well as the integration of heterogeneous data and uncertainties. In addition, the NSF supports the building of knowledge and educational advances to foster a broad and diverse next generation workforce. The NSF defines the FEW system very broadly, incorporating physical processes (such as new technologies for more efficient resource utilization), natural processes (such as biogeochemical and hydrologic cycles), biological processes (such as agroecosystem structure and productivity), social/behavioral processes (such as decision making and governance), and cyber elements. Understanding these complex, dynamic coupled systems will require new or enhanced partnerships across many disciplinary research communities. The NSF requests innovative proposals in the form of (1) supplements, to build upon existing NSF-funded research activities; or (2) conferences of typically 30-80 attendees that stimulate debate, discussion, visioning and collaboration across research communities, and enable a higher appreciation, visualization and understanding of food systems and their couplings to energy and water systems. Such conferences are typically identified as "workshops" and will hereafter be referred to as simply "workshops". All NSF Directorates/Office listed below are interested in receiving inquiries. These proposals should address the coupled nature of the food, energy, and water system and the interdisciplinary dimensions of physical, natural, biological, cyber, and social/behavioral processes of relevance. Workshop proposals should facilitate and enable interdisciplinary partnerships among natural science, physical science, social science, computing and engineering researchers and develop innovative, interdisciplinary research approaches to understanding the FEW system. Workshop projects should culminate in deliverable white papers that define scientific, engineering and data challenges in understanding the FEW system. In addition to academic researchers, workshop participants may include scientists, engineers, educators, and practitioners from industry, local, state, and federal agencies (e.g. EPA, DOE, USDA, USGS, NOAA). For any potential NSF follow-on effort in the FEW system, NSF anticipates some Federal agency partner participation. Workshop proposals may be submitted to any appropriate program, with prior approval of the program's manager, and may be additionally discussed by other relevant programs. Prior to submitting a proposal the PI must contact one of the individuals listed below to ensure that the proposal fits the goals of this DCL. PIs will then be directed to appropriate Program Directors for submission through the normal submission process outlined in the NSF Grants Proposal Guide. Workshop proposal budgets must be less than a total of $100,000. The title of workshop proposals submitted under this DCL should begin with "FEW." Supplements to existing NSF active grants may be proposed with prior permission of the appropriate managing Program Officer. These requests must enhance existing projects by incorporating or exploring the concepts described in this DCL. For example, a project focusing on energy and water might propose to add a component related to food production. In addition, proposed supplements may provide an opportunity to broaden the project's interdisciplinary dimensions to incorporate physical, natural, biological, cyber, and social/behavioral processes of relevance. All supplement requests must include costs associated with use of facilities or other infrastructure. Supplements whose focus is to foster and strengthen interaction among scientists, engineers, and educators, to advance research or education in the FEW system, across disciplinary, organization, geographic, and international boundaries, will also be considered. Workshop proposals and supplement requests must be submitted by March 30, 2015, for consideration. Workshop proposals should focus their activities and deliverables in the September to December 2015 timeframe. For supplements that foster new collaborations and partnerships to address interdisciplinary topics, it is strongly encouraged to have initial activities during 2015. Proposals or requests where PIs have not contacted the relevant program officers, as described in this DCL, will be returned without consideration. MPS will also consider EAGERs following specific discussion with the MPS point of contact below. Investigators are encouraged to review the six "bottleneck" areas of research identified in the July of 2014 report of the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Advisory Committee - Subcommittee on Food Systems "Food, Energy and Water: Transformative Research Opportunities in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences." This report can be found at: http://www.nsf.gov/mps/advisory/mpsac_other_reports/nsf_food_security_report_review_final_rev2.pdf Points of contact for participating Directorates: ENG: JoAnn Lighty, FEW Working Group co-Chair Division Director Division of Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental, & Transport Systems GEO: Thomas Torgersen, FEW Working Group co-Chair Program Officer, Division of Earth Sciences BIO: Alan Tessier Deputy Division Director (Acting), Division of Environmental Biology SBE: Leah Nichols Program Officer, Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences OIIA: Audrey Levine Program Officer, Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research MPS: Colby Foss Program Officer, Division of Chemistry CISE: David Corman Program Officer, Division of Computer and Network Systems EHR: Amy Chan Hilton Program Officer, Division of Undergraduate Education

Two Foods You Should Stop Eating Yesterday

 

 

What if I told you that most people could cut out a huge chunk of health problems just by eliminating two groups of food? Well, you can.

Cutting out these two food groups can help regulate your hormone levels, make it easier to lose weight, improve gut health, normalize blood sugar levels & even improve allergies. If you take a look at food groups through the lens of the 80/20 Principle, these two foods would be the 20% of foods that cause 80% of the problems in most people’s diets.

So what are they? Well here are the two foods you should stop eating – yesterday preferably. Here we go.

Dairy

What Standard Nutrition Advice Would Have You Believe:

“It’s great for you! It’s got calcium! But be careful of that fatty, whole milk. Better drink either skim or 1%, just to be safe – and try to forget that 1% tastes like water. I mean it has to be good for you right? Besides thousands of terrible milk mustaches & “got milk” campaigns can’t be wrong – can they?”

Well…actually…

Why Dairy Is Actually Terrible For You

Dairy has different levels of bad, but particularly low-fat, 1% and skim milk are highly insullogenic – that means they cause your insulin levels to spike and causes your body to stop burning fat.  And don’t get me started on the fact that it’s nearly impossible to find chocolate milk without HFCS and corn starch in it. Really, corn starch in your milk? When’s the last time you said “yum” to corn starch? Toss in the fact that a huge portion of the population is lactose intolerant and the links to cancer that milk is known for and the picture isn’t looking too pretty.

If you’re going to have dairy, make it either fermented (cheese, whey protein, grassfed butter, or yogurt – without a ton of a sugar). Sure, ice cream is delicious  but there’s really no need for a daily shellacking of dairy in your diet.

Grains

Standard Nutrition Advice:

You need grains more than you need oxygen – they’re that important! Why else would we need 6-11 servings a day? I mean, just look at this chart!

“They help with digestion & give you fiber! Not to mention, it’s completely UNREALISTIC to actually cut out ALL grains from your diet. I’m Italian, I can’t live without grains – we’re not animals, you know?”

Well…actually…

Why Grains Are Terrible For You

Grains are actually pretty unnecessary. They contain gluten, lectins and phytates that make minerals unavailable to your body & create situations prime for obesity.

Oh, and that’s just the start. It can lead to leaky gut, weight gain and even cause type 2 diabetes. That’s before we get into how these simple carbohydrates affect your blood sugar & insulin levels and cause you to store fat instead of burning it and using it for fuel. Whether you’re into paleo or not, when you look at grains (and wheat especially), there’s a ton of really, really good reasons not to eat them.

Despite all of this, 6-11 servings of grains was common nutritional advice from the government up until 2011!

The truth is, for most people, there’s really very little reason to include many (or any) grains in their diet on a regular basis and once you try it, they’re not so “impossible” to cut out of your diet either. If you need a substantial amounts of carbohydrates (endurance athletes or power lifters come to mind), you can get them from vegetables & squashes that give you the energy sources you need without the added side effects of feces in your blood stream & type 2 diabetes (sounds like a good tradeoff to me).

Note: It’s funny that somehow both of these have made it into a standard american breakfast of cereal with milk – which is the absolute worst time to do this as the morning is your body’s prime time to burn fat and both of these “foods” bring that process to a screeching halt. Do yourself a favor & choose eggs & bacon for your morning breakfast instead.

80/20 your diet and take out these two foods from your diet. You might be surprised at the results.

Want to clean up your diet? Start with these two foods & cut out dairy & grains. Notice how you feel and see what happens.

photo credit: Dustin Diaz

5 Ways to Feed the World

 

by Mary Beth Albright

How will we feed 9 billion people? Glad you asked. Tomorrow National Geographic will host Food: A Forum from 2 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. followed by a weekend hackathon on feeding a planet groaning under the weight of 7 billion—and quickly growing to 9 billion—people. My top five ways to ease the way:

Update and Rethink Food Law

Focusing on food law as a singular study of the modern food system would examine the multiple levels on which food—the growing, procuring, transporting, distributing, cooking, serving, and cleaning of it—affect our planet. Far beyond traditional regulatory work that falls under “food and drug law,” negotiating the best body of law to ensure good food for 9 billion is currently the most interdisciplinary legal work around. Let’s examine all laws relating to food as one body of work (and take it one step further to examine how many nations’ food laws work with one another to feed the planet).

Public health is a helpful comparator—when it started as an independent field of study, experts didn’t relegate scholarship to clean drinking water and vaccines. Public health has grown to incorporate seatbelts, bike helmets, emergency preparedness and, of course, obesity and nutrition, among dozens of other issues, and has changed the lives of billions over decades by becoming a cohesive discipline. Food law and food lawyers (as I proudly identify) can have an equally far-reaching impact. A new institution now growing food law’s edges, the Resnick Program for Food Law and Policy at UCLA, is an exciting harbinger.

Photograph courtesy of North Charleston Farmer’s Market

Create and Support Food Hubs

Food hubs are central marketplaces—real or virtual—where farmers and producers can reliably sell their goods directly to consumers. Grocery stores work best for the biggest farmers and producers because grocery stores have a reliability requirement—they cannot ever be out of bananas or apples or yogurt and need to know that the farmers with whom they contract can deliver in whatever quantities the store needs. (Incidentally, when did we decide apples in the grocery store were guaranteed right after death and taxes?)

Food hubs involve local farmers who are more subject to the unreliable vicissitudes of climate and seasonality so there may be no apples—and there will never be a local banana where I live in Washington, D.C. But food hubs create a sustainable local market for agriculture that is not dependent on fossil-fuel, cross-country, refrigerated transportation. Regardless of one’s politics, a system of buying a D.C. family’s food from 3,000 or more miles away is not sustainable 50 years from now (and perhaps much sooner). Food hubs also encourage urban gardening, which has taken hold in Beijing, Paris, and New York alike with revolutionary possibilities. (See “Factory Farming Is Not the Best We Have to Offer“)

Embrace Technology

I am a blueberry picking, heirloom-bean worshipping, real-maple-syrup buying old-school food lover. I value food traditions that make eating more meaningful, fulfilling, and magical. But I know that technology will make food procurement more efficient, which will ease the burden of feeding 9 billion. So my work includes the careful study of ensuring that technology broadens and deepens our food world, not narrows it. Producing a lot of food is unsatisfying if we fear food transparency (knowing how our food got to our plate), whether revealing the treatment of workers or animals or use of chemicals. Our bodies are made up of the food we put in them, and we are only as high-quality as what we eat. (See “High-Tech Tapping: Making Maple Syrup With Vacuums“)

Photograph by Cristian Bortes

Cook at Home

This year Americans will spend an estimated $1.8 billion per day on eating out, according to National Geographic’s May issue. None of those restaurants can resell your quarter-eaten chicken parm. Learn to cook. If you know how to cook, teach someone else, preferably a child so he can look beyond recipes to think about how ingredients go together, use whatever is in the fridge in unconventional ways, and lessen food waste. Your ancestors did it and it’s in your DNA. The smiley lady on TV can do it. Your dumb cousin can do it. You can cook.

Spend as Much Money on Good Food as You Can Possibly Afford

This is the part when people usually chase me with pitchforks and torches. I know, spending money hurts for both individuals and for nations. But investing in good food and the sustainable systems that produce it are every single person’s and nation’s best daily practice to fund a revolution to feed 9 billion. I frequent farmers’ markets and often hear grumblings of “why is this asparagus $2 more per pound than at the grocery store,” or while at the grocery store overhear complaining that organic strawberries are “more expensive but not healthier” than conventional ones—from people carrying Louis Vuitton purses.

I get it—when the stuff looks the same, why should it cost more? (And I’m not even getting into flavor. Of course it tastes better, but you probably already know that.) Spending more on sustainably grown food, particularly grown by people you trust, encourages a healthier planet. The day you purchase food that reflects the cost of a healthy food system and choose to internalize the true cost of good food, is the day you’re closer to sustainably feeding 9 billion (and you’ve likely just purchased a wildly more delicious product). Buy substandard food today, and the good food might not be there tomorrow.

This story is part of National Geographic’s special eight-month “Future of Food” series.