The Leading Voices in Food

By: Duke World Food Policy Center
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  • Summary

  • The Leading Voices in Food podcast series features real people, scientists, farmers, policy experts and world leaders all working to improve our food system and food policy. You'll learn about issues across the food system spectrum such as food insecurity, obesity, agriculture, access and equity, food safety, food defense, and food policy. Produced by the Duke World Food Policy Center at wfpc.sanford.duke.edu.
    Duke World Food Policy Center
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Hygiene & Healthy Living Science Social Sciences
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Episodes
  • E254: Why is food so expensive?

    E254: Why is food so expensive?
    Oct 31 2024
    If you feel like your grocery budget just doesn't buy you as much as it once did, you're not alone. According to U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, food prices rose 11. 4 percent last year alone - the highest annual increase in 23 years. The ongoing pinch at the grocery store has been in the news of a lot of media outlets, such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Times Magazine, Forbes, and so many others. Our guest today, food economics and policy professor David Ortega from Michigan State, is going to walk us through the food price inflation phenomenon. Interview Summary We've been hearing a lot about food price inflation. Can you tell us how food prices have changed over the last four to five years, and how that compares to the recent past? Definitely. So, I think it's always really important to define what food inflation is so that we're all on the same page. We hear this word a lot and we've been hearing it for a number of years now. Inflation is the rate of increase in prices over a period of time - so how fast prices are changing or increasing in a given period. The time frame here is very, very important. Now, compared to last year, food prices are only up 2.1%. And this is for all food, which includes food at home and food away from home. Now groceries, food at home, are up 0.9% compared to last year. And menu prices at restaurants, or food away from home, are only 4.0% higher. Now if you're listening to this, you're probably thinking, ‘well, how can this be given how expensive things are at the grocery store?’ And that's because you are likely thinking about how food prices have changed since the start of the pandemic, right? So, over the past five years, food prices have increased around 26%. And so that's the cumulative effect of inflation that we're all very familiar with at the grocery store. Wow. You talked about the recent past, and in particular, about the time since COVID. How has this looked historically if you take a longer time frame? Yes, so if we look at a few years before COVID, food prices generally increase around 2% or so, year over year. Now in the summer of 2022, we experienced double digit increases in food prices. More than 11%, year over year. And that was the highest rate of increase in around 40 years, since the late 1970s and early '80s. So now that's a significant spike and departure from what we would consider to be normal. But the rate of increase has come down to almost pre pandemic levels, which is really great news. But remember the rate of inflation is the rate of increase, so because that rate has come down, it doesn't mean that prices are decreasing necessarily. They're just not growing as fast as they were before. Correct. I have some ideas, but I really want to hear you talk about it. What has led to this significant increase in the last four and a half years or so? It's really been a convergence of factors. It's not just one particular thing, but really all these factors coming together and sort of compounding on each other. We saw increases in labor costs, and then as we go through the timeline, we had Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022. And that really sent commodity prices surging for things like wheat, other grains, as well as vegetable oils. And it wasn't just the invasion alone, but we had countries responding with export restrictions on things like palm oil that really just exacerbated the situation. We also have the impacts of climate change. The summer of 2022, and for a few years leading up to then, there was this mega drought in the West and the plain states that affected anything from lettuce prices to the price of meat. Something that we're experiencing to this day. We also have the bird flu outbreak, now the largest outbreak in U. S. history. Egg prices have been through a bit of a roller coaster ride, and we've been hearing a lot about increases in egg prices. That's primarily due to the high path avian influenza outbreak, or the bird flu outbreak. Now, those are all what I would consider, for the most part, to be supply side factors. But we also have demand factors at play. And that is, that when we look at consumer spending on food, especially over the past two to three years, it's been much higher compared to before the pandemic. Even when you adjust for inflation. Now, this is likely attributed to households. Some of them accumulated savings. We had the fiscal stimulus payments from the government that injected cash into the economy. For a period of time, some households, we could splurge at the grocery store. We've seen, and the data from USDA shows, that consumer spending on food both at home and away from home is much higher in recent years than prior to COVID. So again, it's a combination of both supply side and demand side factors that have contributed to the significant rise in food prices. This is a really important point that it's not a single factor, but it's this mix of things, which also makes it ...
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    15 mins
  • E253: Learnings from No Kid Hungry in New York

    E253: Learnings from No Kid Hungry in New York
    Oct 30 2024
    When we talk about problems with food insecurity and the food system, we tend to reference challenges at the national or international level. And of course, work at that level really needs to be done. But increasingly, there is a unique focus on regional food system strategies and right sizing solutions to best fit those unique characteristics of a particular locale. In today's podcast, we will talk with Rachel Sabella, director of No Kid Hungry New York. She leads the planning, implementation, and evaluation of the No Kid Hungry campaigns across the state of New York. Interview Summary Rachel, it is such a pleasure to have you with us on the show today. We've done several podcasts with No Kid Hungry staff in the past and discussed topics like your Summer EBT Playbook for state governments. I'm really interested to learn more about your work in the state of New York. Thank you so much for having me, Norbert. We have been so lucky to have No Kid Hungry on here to share the stories. And I'm excited to give you some updates about what we've learned with Summer EBT, and to talk about how things look in New York these days. So, can you help our listeners understand more about No Kid Hungry New York as an organization? What is your approach to addressing childhood hunger? No Kid Hungry is a campaign of Share Our Strength. And I have the honor and privilege of representing the organization across the state of New York as we work to create solutions, to draw more attention and awareness, and to help connect more kids and families with meals. We believe that every kid needs three meals a day to grow up healthy, happy, and strong. But too many children, and I know we'll talk more about this, are missing those meals. We really take an approach of working directly with communities. I don't know the right answer for each community. But my job and really my privilege is to work with school districts, with elected officials, with community organizations to look for challenges and work together to overcome them and really change systems. I can appreciate that local communities look very different and appreciate if you're talking about New York City versus upstate New York. Can you tell us a little bit about how you all think differently about the cities versus the more rural areas of New York State? I appreciate that question. I think all of my colleagues can hear me say, we almost run two different campaigns in New York. Because the approach in New York City, where there is one school district in five boroughs, but a large concentration of students, the largest school district in the nation, versus the rest of the state, is different. But ultimately, the challenges are the same. How are we communicating with families? What solutions are out there that we can implement? We really focus on listening, sharing tools, sharing toolkits, thinking about, in some communities, what they need are materials translated in different languages, so families understand that SNAP benefits are available, or summer EBT benefits. Or as in other communities, it's how can families get to a centrally located place to pick up meals? We really spend our time learning and listening and sharing these programs so that they can find the solutions that work best. This is wonderful. I grew up in Georgia, I should just note. And I grew up in rural Georgia versus Atlanta. And we always talked about two Georgias, the Atlanta region versus the rural areas. And I can appreciate just how different some of those challenges are. But you're right, the central issue of access to food is similar and how you address those issues will look different in those regions. I want to span out and talk about some national data that just has come out. USDA has reported food insecurity rates in the U.S. and we saw that hunger actually increased. And we see that for childhood hunger, food insecurity in general, it has risen since the 2019 pandemic. Why is this happening for children? It's a challenging time. I think something that came out of the pandemic was right away, people said, families are struggling with hunger. What can we do? The stories on the news. We saw it no matter where you were in the country, with the lines to pick up food. And we saw government responded very quickly. There were expanded SNAP benefits. There were no cost school meals provided to every child across the country. We saw pandemic EBT implemented. We also saw the expanded child tax credit. At a time when families were facing tremendous challenges, there was that support from the government. But many of those programs have now ended. And in these economically challenged times, incomes haven't changed. Some people are still dealing with an unemployment crisis. We hear a lot from families as well that they're underemployed. There may be a job, but it's not that same income. And without these expanded government programs, families are facing challenges. How is this looking specifically in New ...
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    15 mins
  • E252: Is farm-level environmental impact reporting needed or even possible?

    E252: Is farm-level environmental impact reporting needed or even possible?
    Oct 22 2024
    In today's podcast, we're discussing Fast and Furious. But it's not the movie series starring Vin Diesel. Instead, the catchphrase describes rapidly increasing and somewhat confusing food system environmental impact reporting. Food firms, farmers, and governments all have a clear need for more quantitative environmental impact data in order to measure and understand factors such as carbon footprint, sustainable agricultural practices, and food supply chain processes. But there is no single standard for such reporting and different measurement methodologies make it difficult to assess progress. What's more, greater transparency regarding environmental impacts and food systems will affect trade and supply chains. Our guest today is Koen Deconinck from the Trade and Agricultural Directorate of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD for short. Interview Summary You and your colleagues at the OECD recently published a paper called Fast and Furious: The Rise of Environmental Impact Reporting in Food Systems. Can you tell me a little bit about the paper? Sure. A while ago we were talking to one of the world's experts on sustainability in food systems. He alerted us that there was a major change happening in how people think about sustainability in food systems. He told us in the past, it was thought of almost as a checklist, right? People would say, here's a list of practices that you should or shouldn't use. And then we'll come and confirm whether that's the case on your farm. Then you either get certified or you don't. And he said, you should pay attention because there's a big change underway. We're more and more moving towards actually quantifying things like what is your carbon footprint? What is your water footprint? And so on. He convinced us that this was actually a major change that was happening. Oddly enough, outside of the role of the practitioners, not that many people have been paying attention to it. That is why we wrote this paper. This is a really important shift because just thinking about this in terms of economics, evaluating outputs versus the methods that you get to those outputs can have really significant implications for the various actors involved. So, this seems like a good move, but it seems also kind of complicated. I would love to hear your thoughts about that particular move. Why did you think, or why did you all realize this was a challenge and opportunity at the same? That's a great question. It actually gets to the heart of what we're describing in the paper. Starting with the good news, we do think that this has an enormous potential to improve sustainability in food systems. Because we know from the scientific evidence that there are big differences between different kinds of food products in terms of their average environmental impact. For example, beef tends to have more greenhouse gas emissions per kilogram of products relative to poultry and then definitely relative to plant based alternatives and so on. You can see these kinds of average differences. But then the data also shows that within each kind of product category, there's huge differences between different farmers. And what you can do if you start quantifying those footprints is it actually unlocks different kinds of levers. The first lever, if you think about carbon footprints, which is maybe the most intuitive example. The first lever is people know the carbon footprint of different kinds of food products. They could shift their diets away from the products that have a higher footprint towards products that have a lower footprint. For example, less beef and more towards poultry or towards plant-based alternatives. That's one lever. A second lever is that if you can also start to get even more precise and use data that is specific to each producer, not just an average, then also within each product category, people can start shifting towards the producers that have a lower environmental footprint. So, for example, people will still be drinking milk, but then they can shift towards milk producers that have a lower carbon footprint. And the third interesting lever that you can unlock is if you have that data at a supplier level. Suppliers could then say, well, I changed my practices. I changed my inputs. I've done things differently to reduce my impact. You actually can stimulate innovation by each individual farmer, each individual company in the supply chain to lower that impact. And that is something that you can do if you're quantifying those impacts, and that is very difficult or even impossible to do with this previous checklist-based approach. So that's one of the reasons why we're, we think that this has tremendous potential if we get it right. That's right. Just saying that you're doing sustainable practices isn't sufficient. It's really critical to evaluate what kinds of greenhouse gas emissions or other environmentally problematic outcomes of that producer or firm is what ...
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    24 mins

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