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Op-ed: An open letter to the Food and Drug Administration Commissioner

News Feed
Tuesday, May 28, 2024

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is going through a major reorganization to improve efficiency and protect public health. A recent hearing in front of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability concluded that the agency stumbles from crisis to crisis, including drug shortages, tainted food and illicit tobacco scandals in recent years.Although crises such as the contamination of baby food with heavy metals like lead and mercury gain public attention, the scientific approach used by FDA to regulate chemical additives in food is much more opaque. While it largely flies under the public radar, the agency’s neglect to update its testing to reflect modern science and modern food chemical hazards is a decades-long crisis that impacts all of our health. The agency has fallen behind other nations’ testing and regulations and is not even following laws put in place nearly 70 years ago to keep us safe. We are calling on FDA Commissioner, Dr. Robert M Califf, to use the agency reorganization as an opportunity to overhaul its approach to chemicals in our food and put public health at the center of its work. How does the FDA evaluate the safety of food additives and contaminants?Recently, the FDA published a consumer update entitled, “Is food safe if it has chemicals?” In it, the agency says that it’s the amount of a chemical in food that determines its risk to our health. They use sodium as an example. While it largely flies under the public radar, the agency’s neglect to update its testing to reflect modern science and modern food chemical hazards is a decades-long crisis that impacts all of our health.We need sodium to live, but too much sodium can be bad, so they publish guidance on the safe level of sodium to be consumed each day. But many of the chemicals that wind up in our food are not required for us to live, such as bisphenols like BPA, phthalates or the group of chemicals known as PFAS or “forever chemicals”. In fact, many of these are not required for food production, but leach into food from packaging and equipment. FDA noncompliance The FDA discusses how they intentionally determine an “acceptable daily intake” for a chemical that includes a safety margin. The idea is that this safety margin is so conservative that it will always protect public health.However, we know chemicals in the diet can come from a variety of food sources and that different chemicals can have the same adverse effect. This is so well-known that the 1958 amendment to the Food, Drugs and Cosmetic Act of 1938 required that FDA evaluate the “cumulative effect of the substance in the diet, taking into account any chemically or pharmacologically related substance or substances in such diet.”Sixty-six years later and the FDA has never complied with this part of the law. A good example: its guidance for lead in baby food, in which they set the suggested (not required) limit to be 20 parts per billion. However, there is no safe blood level of lead, which hurts children’s brains, resulting in lower IQ and behavioral problems among other harmful effects.It’s not just lead: recently, the Dutch risk assessment agency reported that the combined exposure to lead, methyl-mercury, arsenic, polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs, polybrominated diphenyl ethers or PBDEs and fluoride were much more potent at reducing children’s IQ than any one of these chemicals alone.Similarly, the FDA continues to defend its ruling that current levels of BPA in food are safe despite the decision by the European Food Safety Authority, the EFSA, to reduce the “safe level” of BPA by 20,000 fold. The FDA defends its position by focusing on BPA as if it is the only chemical in foods that act like the female hormone estrogen. In contrast, it is well known that plastic food packaging contains a number of estrogen-like chemicals, like other bisphenols and phthalates, that can leach into foods.The failure of the FDA to comply with the 1958 amendment to food safety law is not just a violation of the law but presents a significant risk to American consumers. A citizen’s petition was filed with the agency in 2020 to attempt to cajole it into compliance. The FDA has never responded.Considering this, we wrote to Commissioner Califf to address this serious shortcoming of FDA’s Human Food Program. The Commissioner has not responded. The letter is re-printed below.March 11, 2024Robert M Califf, M.D., CommissionerUnited States Food and Drug AdministrationCc: James Jones, Ph.D., Deputy CommissionerFDA Human Foods Program Dear Commissioner Califf, We read with great interest your OpEd with Dr. Warraigh entitled, “Four steps toward meeting the challenge of chronic disease” (The Hill, 02/15/24). This is a particularly important issue considering that the United States is below average compared to peer economies in 9 health domains, including adverse birth outcomes, obesity and diabetes, heart disease and chronic lung disease. And this, as you point out, is despite US taxpayers spending nearly 18% of our GDP on healthcare.However, we are concerned that there was no mention of food-borne chemicals that are either added to food intentionally or that migrate into food from packaging or processing. The recent analysis by the New York Times of the failure of the food safety system that resulted in hundreds of children being poisoned by lead in applesauce illustrates in part how our system of food safety needs to be improved.More important to the issue of chronic disease is that of chemicals in the food supply that are being evaluated for safety in a one-by-one approach, rather than considering the “cumulative effect of the substance in the diet, taking into account any chemically or pharmacologically related substance or substances in such diet” as required by the 1958 amendment to the Food, Drugs, and Cosmetic Act of 1938. Recent studies demonstrate that the cumulative effect of Americans’ exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals in the food supply contributes to harmful health impacts including chronic disease, increasing healthcare costs in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually, as well as affecting quality of life. Importantly, the scientific evidence is sufficient to conclude that the cumulative effects of biologically related substances in the food supply contributes to chronic diseases such as obesity or diabetes. We urge you to consider it as a critical “fifth step” in meeting the challenge of chronic disease in the United States, one that the agency is already mandated to conduct.For example, a recent study contributed by the Dutch risk assessment agency (RIVM) in collaboration with Professor Andreas Kortenkamp, a world-leader in the analysis of cumulative risk, demonstrated that in 9 countries in the EU, their populations exceeded combined tolerable levels of exposure to a mixture of chemicals at median exposure levels. Thus, the traditional way of identifying a “Tolerable Daily Intake” using a chemical-by-chemical basis is clearly underestimating the cumulative risk of chemicals with similar structure or observable effects.Despite the 1958 amendment requiring the FDA to evaluate cumulative effects of chemically related and biologically related substances in the diet, the agency has never performed this analysis for any chemical additives. Moreover, the FDA has not responded to citizen petitions or Congressional queries asking for the FDA to comply with the spirit and letter of this law. It simply is past time that the Agency stop ignoring the law and incorporate cumulative risk assessments in their regulatory approaches.We ask that FDA form a committee of its Science Board including external experts to guide the agency as it addresses this shortcoming in its current safety assessment methods. When it passed the 1958 law, Congress recognized that chemicals, even ones that are not chemically related, may impact organs such as the thyroid and systems such as the cardiovascular with different mechanisms of action but cumulatively have a greater negative effect on the health of the American people.Finally, we are happy to meet with you to provide further information and insight or to contribute to the changes that need to be made in any way that we can.Sincerely,Linda S. Birnbaum, Ph.D., D.A.B.T., A.T.S.Scientist Emeritus and Former DirectorNational Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and National Toxicology ProgramScholar in Residence, Nicholas School of Environment, Duke UniversityR. Thomas Zoeller, Ph.D.Professor EmeritusUniversity of Massachusetts Amherst

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is going through a major reorganization to improve efficiency and protect public health. A recent hearing in front of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability concluded that the agency stumbles from crisis to crisis, including drug shortages, tainted food and illicit tobacco scandals in recent years.Although crises such as the contamination of baby food with heavy metals like lead and mercury gain public attention, the scientific approach used by FDA to regulate chemical additives in food is much more opaque. While it largely flies under the public radar, the agency’s neglect to update its testing to reflect modern science and modern food chemical hazards is a decades-long crisis that impacts all of our health. The agency has fallen behind other nations’ testing and regulations and is not even following laws put in place nearly 70 years ago to keep us safe. We are calling on FDA Commissioner, Dr. Robert M Califf, to use the agency reorganization as an opportunity to overhaul its approach to chemicals in our food and put public health at the center of its work. How does the FDA evaluate the safety of food additives and contaminants?Recently, the FDA published a consumer update entitled, “Is food safe if it has chemicals?” In it, the agency says that it’s the amount of a chemical in food that determines its risk to our health. They use sodium as an example. While it largely flies under the public radar, the agency’s neglect to update its testing to reflect modern science and modern food chemical hazards is a decades-long crisis that impacts all of our health.We need sodium to live, but too much sodium can be bad, so they publish guidance on the safe level of sodium to be consumed each day. But many of the chemicals that wind up in our food are not required for us to live, such as bisphenols like BPA, phthalates or the group of chemicals known as PFAS or “forever chemicals”. In fact, many of these are not required for food production, but leach into food from packaging and equipment. FDA noncompliance The FDA discusses how they intentionally determine an “acceptable daily intake” for a chemical that includes a safety margin. The idea is that this safety margin is so conservative that it will always protect public health.However, we know chemicals in the diet can come from a variety of food sources and that different chemicals can have the same adverse effect. This is so well-known that the 1958 amendment to the Food, Drugs and Cosmetic Act of 1938 required that FDA evaluate the “cumulative effect of the substance in the diet, taking into account any chemically or pharmacologically related substance or substances in such diet.”Sixty-six years later and the FDA has never complied with this part of the law. A good example: its guidance for lead in baby food, in which they set the suggested (not required) limit to be 20 parts per billion. However, there is no safe blood level of lead, which hurts children’s brains, resulting in lower IQ and behavioral problems among other harmful effects.It’s not just lead: recently, the Dutch risk assessment agency reported that the combined exposure to lead, methyl-mercury, arsenic, polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs, polybrominated diphenyl ethers or PBDEs and fluoride were much more potent at reducing children’s IQ than any one of these chemicals alone.Similarly, the FDA continues to defend its ruling that current levels of BPA in food are safe despite the decision by the European Food Safety Authority, the EFSA, to reduce the “safe level” of BPA by 20,000 fold. The FDA defends its position by focusing on BPA as if it is the only chemical in foods that act like the female hormone estrogen. In contrast, it is well known that plastic food packaging contains a number of estrogen-like chemicals, like other bisphenols and phthalates, that can leach into foods.The failure of the FDA to comply with the 1958 amendment to food safety law is not just a violation of the law but presents a significant risk to American consumers. A citizen’s petition was filed with the agency in 2020 to attempt to cajole it into compliance. The FDA has never responded.Considering this, we wrote to Commissioner Califf to address this serious shortcoming of FDA’s Human Food Program. The Commissioner has not responded. The letter is re-printed below.March 11, 2024Robert M Califf, M.D., CommissionerUnited States Food and Drug AdministrationCc: James Jones, Ph.D., Deputy CommissionerFDA Human Foods Program Dear Commissioner Califf, We read with great interest your OpEd with Dr. Warraigh entitled, “Four steps toward meeting the challenge of chronic disease” (The Hill, 02/15/24). This is a particularly important issue considering that the United States is below average compared to peer economies in 9 health domains, including adverse birth outcomes, obesity and diabetes, heart disease and chronic lung disease. And this, as you point out, is despite US taxpayers spending nearly 18% of our GDP on healthcare.However, we are concerned that there was no mention of food-borne chemicals that are either added to food intentionally or that migrate into food from packaging or processing. The recent analysis by the New York Times of the failure of the food safety system that resulted in hundreds of children being poisoned by lead in applesauce illustrates in part how our system of food safety needs to be improved.More important to the issue of chronic disease is that of chemicals in the food supply that are being evaluated for safety in a one-by-one approach, rather than considering the “cumulative effect of the substance in the diet, taking into account any chemically or pharmacologically related substance or substances in such diet” as required by the 1958 amendment to the Food, Drugs, and Cosmetic Act of 1938. Recent studies demonstrate that the cumulative effect of Americans’ exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals in the food supply contributes to harmful health impacts including chronic disease, increasing healthcare costs in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually, as well as affecting quality of life. Importantly, the scientific evidence is sufficient to conclude that the cumulative effects of biologically related substances in the food supply contributes to chronic diseases such as obesity or diabetes. We urge you to consider it as a critical “fifth step” in meeting the challenge of chronic disease in the United States, one that the agency is already mandated to conduct.For example, a recent study contributed by the Dutch risk assessment agency (RIVM) in collaboration with Professor Andreas Kortenkamp, a world-leader in the analysis of cumulative risk, demonstrated that in 9 countries in the EU, their populations exceeded combined tolerable levels of exposure to a mixture of chemicals at median exposure levels. Thus, the traditional way of identifying a “Tolerable Daily Intake” using a chemical-by-chemical basis is clearly underestimating the cumulative risk of chemicals with similar structure or observable effects.Despite the 1958 amendment requiring the FDA to evaluate cumulative effects of chemically related and biologically related substances in the diet, the agency has never performed this analysis for any chemical additives. Moreover, the FDA has not responded to citizen petitions or Congressional queries asking for the FDA to comply with the spirit and letter of this law. It simply is past time that the Agency stop ignoring the law and incorporate cumulative risk assessments in their regulatory approaches.We ask that FDA form a committee of its Science Board including external experts to guide the agency as it addresses this shortcoming in its current safety assessment methods. When it passed the 1958 law, Congress recognized that chemicals, even ones that are not chemically related, may impact organs such as the thyroid and systems such as the cardiovascular with different mechanisms of action but cumulatively have a greater negative effect on the health of the American people.Finally, we are happy to meet with you to provide further information and insight or to contribute to the changes that need to be made in any way that we can.Sincerely,Linda S. Birnbaum, Ph.D., D.A.B.T., A.T.S.Scientist Emeritus and Former DirectorNational Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and National Toxicology ProgramScholar in Residence, Nicholas School of Environment, Duke UniversityR. Thomas Zoeller, Ph.D.Professor EmeritusUniversity of Massachusetts Amherst



The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is going through a major reorganization to improve efficiency and protect public health.

A recent hearing in front of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability concluded that the agency stumbles from crisis to crisis, including drug shortages, tainted food and illicit tobacco scandals in recent years.

Although crises such as the contamination of baby food with heavy metals like lead and mercury gain public attention, the scientific approach used by FDA to regulate chemical additives in food is much more opaque.

While it largely flies under the public radar, the agency’s neglect to update its testing to reflect modern science and modern food chemical hazards is a decades-long crisis that impacts all of our health. The agency has fallen behind other nations’ testing and regulations and is not even following laws put in place nearly 70 years ago to keep us safe.

We are calling on FDA Commissioner, Dr. Robert M Califf, to use the agency reorganization as an opportunity to overhaul its approach to chemicals in our food and put public health at the center of its work.

How does the FDA evaluate the safety of food additives and contaminants?


Recently, the FDA published a consumer update entitled, “Is food safe if it has chemicals?” In it, the agency says that it’s the amount of a chemical in food that determines its risk to our health. They use sodium as an example.

While it largely flies under the public radar, the agency’s neglect to update its testing to reflect modern science and modern food chemical hazards is a decades-long crisis that impacts all of our health.

We need sodium to live, but too much sodium can be bad, so they publish guidance on the safe level of sodium to be consumed each day.

But many of the chemicals that wind up in our food are not required for us to live, such as bisphenols like BPA, phthalates or the group of chemicals known as PFAS or “forever chemicals”. In fact, many of these are not required for food production, but leach into food from packaging and equipment.

FDA noncompliance 


The FDA discusses how they intentionally determine an “acceptable daily intake” for a chemical that includes a safety margin. The idea is that this safety margin is so conservative that it will always protect public health.

However, we know chemicals in the diet can come from a variety of food sources and that different chemicals can have the same adverse effect. This is so well-known that the 1958 amendment to the Food, Drugs and Cosmetic Act of 1938 required that FDA evaluate the “cumulative effect of the substance in the diet, taking into account any chemically or pharmacologically related substance or substances in such diet.”

Sixty-six years later and the FDA has never complied with this part of the law. A good example: its guidance for lead in baby food, in which they set the suggested (not required) limit to be 20 parts per billion.

However, there is no safe blood level of lead, which hurts children’s brains, resulting in lower IQ and behavioral problems among other harmful effects.

It’s not just lead: recently, the Dutch risk assessment agency reported that the combined exposure to lead, methyl-mercury, arsenic, polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs, polybrominated diphenyl ethers or PBDEs and fluoride were much more potent at reducing children’s IQ than any one of these chemicals alone.

Similarly, the FDA continues to defend its ruling that current levels of BPA in food are safe despite the decision by the European Food Safety Authority, the EFSA, to reduce the “safe level” of BPA by 20,000 fold. The FDA defends its position by focusing on BPA as if it is the only chemical in foods that act like the female hormone estrogen. In contrast, it is well known that plastic food packaging contains a number of estrogen-like chemicals, like other bisphenols and phthalates, that can leach into foods.

The failure of the FDA to comply with the 1958 amendment to food safety law is not just a violation of the law but presents a significant risk to American consumers. A citizen’s petition was filed with the agency in 2020 to attempt to cajole it into compliance. The FDA has never responded.

Considering this, we wrote to Commissioner Califf to address this serious shortcoming of FDA’s Human Food Program. The Commissioner has not responded. The letter is re-printed below.


March 11, 2024
Robert M Califf, M.D., Commissioner
United States Food and Drug Administration
Cc: James Jones, Ph.D., Deputy Commissioner
FDA Human Foods Program

Dear Commissioner Califf,

We read with great interest your OpEd with Dr. Warraigh entitled, “Four steps toward meeting the challenge of chronic disease” (The Hill, 02/15/24). This is a particularly important issue considering that the United States is below average compared to peer economies in 9 health domains, including adverse birth outcomes, obesity and diabetes, heart disease and chronic lung disease. And this, as you point out, is despite US taxpayers spending nearly 18% of our GDP on healthcare.

However, we are concerned that there was no mention of food-borne chemicals that are either added to food intentionally or that migrate into food from packaging or processing. The recent analysis by the New York Times of the failure of the food safety system that resulted in hundreds of children being poisoned by lead in applesauce illustrates in part how our system of food safety needs to be improved.

More important to the issue of chronic disease is that of chemicals in the food supply that are being evaluated for safety in a one-by-one approach, rather than considering the “cumulative effect of the substance in the diet, taking into account any chemically or pharmacologically related substance or substances in such diet” as required by the 1958 amendment to the Food, Drugs, and Cosmetic Act of 1938.

Recent studies demonstrate that the cumulative effect of Americans’ exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals in the food supply contributes to harmful health impacts including chronic disease, increasing healthcare costs in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually, as well as affecting quality of life.

Importantly, the scientific evidence is sufficient to conclude that the cumulative effects of biologically related substances in the food supply contributes to chronic diseases such as obesity or diabetes. We urge you to consider it as a critical “fifth step” in meeting the challenge of chronic disease in the United States, one that the agency is already mandated to conduct.

For example, a recent study contributed by the Dutch risk assessment agency (RIVM) in collaboration with Professor Andreas Kortenkamp, a world-leader in the analysis of cumulative risk, demonstrated that in 9 countries in the EU, their populations exceeded combined tolerable levels of exposure to a mixture of chemicals at median exposure levels. Thus, the traditional way of identifying a “Tolerable Daily Intake” using a chemical-by-chemical basis is clearly underestimating the cumulative risk of chemicals with similar structure or observable effects.

Despite the 1958 amendment requiring the FDA to evaluate cumulative effects of chemically related and biologically related substances in the diet, the agency has never performed this analysis for any chemical additives. Moreover, the FDA has not responded to citizen petitions or Congressional queries asking for the FDA to comply with the spirit and letter of this law. It simply is past time that the Agency stop ignoring the law and incorporate cumulative risk assessments in their regulatory approaches.

We ask that FDA form a committee of its Science Board including external experts to guide the agency as it addresses this shortcoming in its current safety assessment methods. When it passed the 1958 law, Congress recognized that chemicals, even ones that are not chemically related, may impact organs such as the thyroid and systems such as the cardiovascular with different mechanisms of action but cumulatively have a greater negative effect on the health of the American people.

Finally, we are happy to meet with you to provide further information and insight or to contribute to the changes that need to be made in any way that we can.

Sincerely,

Linda S. Birnbaum, Ph.D., D.A.B.T., A.T.S.
Scientist Emeritus and Former Director
National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and National Toxicology Program
Scholar in Residence, Nicholas School of Environment, Duke University

R. Thomas Zoeller, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
University of Massachusetts Amherst

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

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Culture

How food banks prevented 1.8 million metric tons of carbon emissions last year

Redistributing food before it’s tossed or wasted doesn’t just fight hunger — it also fights climate change.

The latest annual impact report from the Global Foodbanking Network — a nonprofit that works with regional food banks in more than 50 countries to fight hunger — found that its member organizations provided 1.7 billion meals to more than 40 million people in 2023. According to the nonprofit, this redistribution of food, much of which was recovered from farms or wholesale produce markets, mitigated an estimated 1.8 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. These numbers reflect an ongoing, high demand for food banks. Last year, the Global Foodbanking Network, or GFN, served almost as many people as it did in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic sent food insecurity soaring. In order to respond to this pressing need in their communities, many of GFN’s member organizations have invested in agricultural recovery, working to rescue food from farmers before it gets thrown out.  Their efforts show how food banks can serve the dual purpose of addressing hunger and protecting the environment. By intercepting perfectly good, edible food before it winds up in the landfill, food banks help mitigate harmful greenhouse gas emissions created by food loss and waste. “There is always food that is unnecessarily wasted,” said Emily Broad Leib, the founding director of the Food Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School, who has worked with GFN before but was not involved in the recent study. All that unnecessary waste means “there is ongoing need for scaling up food banks and food recovery operations,” Broad Leib added. Read Next One in 11 people went hungry last year. Climate change is a big reason why. Ayurella Horn-Muller A recent analysis from the United Nations Environment Programme estimated that 13 percent of food was lost while it was making its way from producers to retailers in 2022. Subsequently, 19 percent was wasted by retailers, restaurants, and households. The world’s households alone let 1 billion meals go to waste each day. The scope of food wasted around the world has been shockingly high for years: In 2011, the Food and Agricultural Organization, or FAO, of the United Nations released a study that suggested roughly one-third of food produced globally is never eaten.  Food waste at this scale comes with massive planetary impacts. When food goes uneaten, all of the emissions associated with growing, transporting, and processing it are rendered unnecessary. Furthermore, when food rots in landfills, it emits methane, a greenhouse gas that is roughly 80 times more potent than CO2 over a 20-year period. Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency reported that 58 percent of methane emissions from U.S. landfills come from food waste. Globally, food loss and waste have been estimated to be responsible for 8 to 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, and reducing them is essential for achieving climate targets.  Food banks can play a special role in that reduction by rescuing more food before it’s lost and redirecting it to people in need.  10 February 2024, Berlin: Vegetables at the Berliner Tafel food bank on the Berlin wholesale market site, which were collected at the Fruit Logistica trade fair. The food bank distributes the food to people affected by poverty. Photo: Christoph Soeder/dpa (Photo by Christoph Soeder/picture alliance via Getty Images) Christoph Soeder / picture alliance via Getty Images “Our members have been building out their redistribution capacity,” said Lisa Moon, the president and CEO of GFN. “I think that was our first challenge in the face of this rising need: How do we as an organization capture more supply?” In order to do this, food banks within GFN member organizations have been coordinating more closely with farmers to redirect surplus food from landfills. GFN defines surplus food as food from commercial streams that was grown for human consumption but that, for some reason or another, cannot be sold. So-called “ugly” produce — misshapen food that never makes it to the grocery store because of its looks — falls into this category. Some of this redirection actually looks like cutting out food banks as the middleman. Moon gives the example of a food bank that receives a call from a farmer with excess green beans. Instead of traveling to the farm to pick them up, traveling back to the food bank’s distribution hub, storing the green beans, and having folks wait for the next distribution day to collect them, the food bank in question might simply reach out to beneficiaries in the area (think: soup kitchens) to inform them of how many green beans are available and where so they can pick them up. GFN refers to this as “virtual food banking” because of how members are using tech platforms to match farmers with beneficiaries, rather than physically moving the produce themselves. Read Next The people who feed America are going hungry Ayurella Horn-Muller The result of this emphasis on agricultural recovery is that fruit and vegetables now make up the largest portion — 40 percent — of food redistributed by GFN members by volume. Moon says the organization is “just only scratching the surface” of possibilities for recovering fresh produce.  In order to calculate that 1.8 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent was mitigated by these efforts, GFN utilized the Food Loss and Waste Protocol developed by the World Resources Institute. This framework takes a number of things into account, including where recovered food would have ended up had it not been intercepted from the waste stream. These waste destinations can be landfills but also include animal feed, compost, and anaerobic digesters (a waste management technology that converts organic waste into biogas — but that can come with its own emissions problems). Moon acknowledged that GFN does not know in every case what would happen to the surplus food if it were not rescued by a food bank — but pointed out that most of the places where the network operates do not have a robust circular economy for food. Broad Leib, the Harvard Law food policy expert, described GFN’s estimate of carbon dioxide equivalent mitigated as “a good proxy for impact.” While other waste destinations are possible, “we also know that the large majority of wasted food globally goes to landfill,” she said. “I think their estimate is likely not far off from actual emissions avoided.” This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How food banks prevented 1.8 million metric tons of carbon emissions last year on Aug 14, 2024.

Food
Climate
Waste

Wild genes in domestic species: how we can supercharge our crops using their distant relatives

For millennia, we’ve selectively bred our crop species to make the plants stronger and better yielding. But we’ll need a different approach to help our food plants weather the changes to come.

International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, Author providedFood security is shaping up as one of the biggest challenges we face globally. In some places, access to food has steadily deteriorated in recent years, due to wars, inflation and climate-driven extreme weather. The cost of basic foods such as eggs and vegetables has made news worldwide. Food price inflation is now ahead of overall inflation in over half the world’s nations. The obvious answer is to grow more crops, especially the energy-dense top six – rice, wheat, corn, potatoes, soybeans and sugarcane. Unfortunately, it’s getting harder to produce food due to conflict, more extreme weather such as flash droughts and floods and a surge in plant diseases and pests. For farmers to keep producing in an uncertain future, we need better crops. But much cutting edge agricultural research focuses on improving specific aspects of a plant – better drought resistance, or a better ability to tolerate salt in the soil. This may not be enough to cope with future shocks. Our research suggests a way to accelerate the creation of stronger crops by drawing on the full genetic strength of crop species. Crops that don’t stop Humans have greatly modified the plants which give us the lion’s share of our food, using tools such as selective breeding and genetic manipulation. But much agricultural research is done in isolation. Researchers dive deep into solving specific problems – how to make wheat resilient against a specific fungus, for example. The growing challenges to food security across many fronts means a new approach is needed. The changing climate will throw many different threats at our crops. Parts of the world might endure flash droughts while extreme rain floods others. Some pests and diseases will thrive in a hotter world. That’s why we’re looking to another approach – pangenomics, which attempts to capture every gene a species has access to. You might think a species has a unified set of genes, but this is not true. Yes, all rice plants have a set of shared genetic sequences. But individual plants and strains have distinct genetic differences too. The pangenome covers all of these. The idea of a pangenome only emerged in 2005, when microbiologist Hervé Tettelin and his collaborators were looking for a vaccine against the streptococcus bacteria. As they examined different strains, they realised how much additional genetic information was held in them. It was a breakthrough, and showed how much we missed by focusing closely on a single isolate of a species. Before their discovery, we had assumed an individual of a species carried enough information to accurately represent the genomic content of that species. But this isn’t correct. This realisation has changed how we see our crops. Rather than trying to perfect a single cultivar (cultivated variety) using only its own genetic package, the pangenome offers a way to reinfuse lost vigour from the wider gene pool. In 2019, we took the pangenome approach further by considering the entire gene pool of a crop, including its domestic cultivars – and their wild relatives. Many wild relatives of domesticated crops still exist. These plants have huge genetic diversity, and often harbour superior genes or gene variants (alleles) lost to crop plants through domestication and breeding. We dubbed this approach the “super-pangenome” to recognise the capture of domesticated and wild gene pools. How can this help shore up food supplies? For more than 10,000 years, humans have domesticated and selectively bred crops. But wild relatives have thrived over the same timeframe. There are good reasons these wild relatives have not been domesticated, from poor taste to difficulty of storage to low yields. But what they do have are desirable traits in their genetic code we can identify, isolate and infuse back into the domesticated species. Once we have genetic data from across a species and its wild relatives, we can begin looking for particularly useful genes. What we’re after are the ones responsible for adapting to or surviving environmental stresses likely to get worse in the future, such as drought, saline soils and extreme temperatures. We can identify genes responsible for disease resistance and determine why certain varieties offer other desirable traits such as better taste or higher yields. Around the world, a number of promising research projects use this approach, from American researchers using the genes of wild grapes to boost the yield of domesticated grapes to Chinese researchers doing similar work on tomatoes. How can we make crops more resilient to heat, drought and pests? KPixMining/Shutterstock We and our colleagues are focused on the humble chickpea, a highly nutritious legume of particular importance to India’s 1.4 billion people. Chickpeas, like other legume crops, take nitrogen from the air and fix it in the soil, which improves fertility and helps offset emissions of nitrous oxide, a lesser-known greenhouse gas. But chickpeas lack of genetic diversity due to several evolutionary bottlenecks, domestication and selective breeding. This is already causing problems, because low genetic diversity makes species more vulnerable to pests and disease. Chickpea farmers in Western Australia still remember the outbreak of a fungal blight which almost wiped out production in the late 1990s and left the crop unpopular – even while other states expanded exports. The solution: look to the wild relatives. In the genomes of relatives such as Cicer echinospermum, we found several promising genes which helped resist this fungus. These genes can now be incorporated into domesticated species through modern approaches – such as genomics-assisted breeding and gene editing – to develop disease-resistant and high-yielding chickpea varieties. Once we seek out and capture the full gene stock of our most important crops, both wild and domesticated, it will become easier and faster to supercharge these essential plants – and equip them with the genes they need to survive the uncertainties the future holds. Rajeev Varshney receives funding from the Grains Research & Development Corporation, Australia, for pulses research at Murdoch University. Vanika Garg receives funding from the Grains Research & Development Corporation, Australia for pulses research at Murdoch University.

Food
Climate
Energy

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