106 | Food Systems Emissions Are Single-Handedly Destroying Earth (Not)

Plus: should you wash rice; a weird new food allergy and how the mafia profits from tinned tomatoes

This is The Rotten Apple, an inside view of food integrity for professionals, policy-makers and purveyors. Subscribe for weekly insights, latest news and emerging trends in food safety, food authenticity and sustainable supply chains.

• Food systems emissions and the end of life on earth

• The food safety aspects of washing rice

• Food safety news and resources from around the globe

• That’s interesting: red meat allergies are becoming more common

• How the mafia profit from tinned tomatoes

• Food fraud news and incidents

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Hi,  

"I really enjoy seeing what you do. As a food safety professional you inspire me :)" said Karilliz last week. Awww, thanks! Also thank you Jennifer and Chance for signing up for paid subscriptions. Chance also purchased a second subscription for their colleague – saving 35%.

Huge congratulations to long-time subscriber Stephen Trowell who heads a group whose high-tech sensor won a top Australian Design Award last week.  I got to try Stephen’s sensor system last month and was really impressed by its speed, compact size and ease of use.  If you are in dairy products and want to measure Pseudomonas protease (AprX) or lactose hydrolysis in real time, definitely check it out.

This week I’m ranting about the environmental impacts of food systems; debating whether to wash rice before cooking; exploring a weird new food allergy and discovering how the mafia profits from tinned tomatoes. And, as always there’s food safety news for everyone and food fraud news for paying subscribers.

Hope you find this issue as interesting and stimulating as I did while putting it together for you.

Karen

P.S. If you haven’t become a paid subscriber yet, now’s the time. Your subscription supports independent ad-free goodness (and it’s probably tax deductible for you!)

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Food Systems are Destroying Our Planet (Not)

I spent Saturday morning helping residents of Sydney prepare for catastrophic-level bushfire conditions, which are predicted to arrive as soon as tomorrow. It’s freakin’ September! (that’s equivalent to March for Northern Hemisphere-ites).

In 2015 it would have been unthinkable to experience conditions like this, just 18 days into spring, when the weather here is typically cool and moist. We are already sweltering like the worst days of the hottest summers of my childhood.

After seeing the fire season predictions, I bought myself a second very long garden hose, so when the small patch of bush near my suburban house explodes in a ball of superheated flame and shoots burning debris into the sky, I can douse the embers that will inevitably land on my roof.

Global warming is keeping me awake at night (literally).

I’m not alone. The number of people who report being “Alarmed” about climate change has tripled in the United States in the past six years and climate anxiety, which manifests with physiological symptoms like shortness of breath, affects around ten percent of Americans. Half of young people globally think the human race is doomed due to climate change.

Why am I talking about this in The Rotten Apple? Because food systems account for around one quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions and we all have a role to play in reversing global warming. But not by wringing our hands about the environmental impacts of food systems.

Food systems do produce significant emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. But most food emissions discussions completely disregard the fact that growing food also captures a significant amount of atmospheric carbon with photosynthesis. In fact, small-scale food production, performed without clearing land or using artificial fertiliser, is carbon neutral.

Food systems only make a net contribution to global warming when they use fossil fuels to make fertiliser, fossil fuels in manufacturing, storage and transport, and when forests are cleared for agriculture... oh, and there’s cows farting methane too. (Find my sources about net carbon from food systems here).

It’s complicated (not)

‘Solving’ food emissions is complicated because people need to eat.

Solving the climate catastrophe does not depend on solving food emissions. Putting the brakes on global warming is NOT COMPLICATED, because there is one simple thing we can do as humans today to prevent catastrophe.

We can stop extracting carbon and methane from the ground and burning them for (fossil) fuel. This is the single biggest contributor to global warming, by a million miles. Not food systems, not microplastics, not loss of biodiversity, not soil degradation, not water pollution. Fossil fuels.

Fossil fuels account for 75% of all greenhouse gas emissions and 90% of all carbon emissions (source).

Total food emissions account for one-quarter of greenhouse gasses and fossil fuels account for three quarters.

There is one big, uncomplicated thing we can do, right now to halt global warming: stop digging up fossil fuels. That’s why charts like the one below absolutely do my head in.

Maddening infographics

The chart below was all over the interwebs on the weekend. While my colleagues in the bushfire service were bracing for the worst season on record, a full month earlier than ever before, food system pundits were sharing this monstrosity of an infographic.

If you can figure out what it means (apart from ‘things are bad’) in less than 5 minutes, you’re a genius.

Current status of control variables for all nine planetary boundaries, with six of nine boundaries transgressed, reflecting unprecedented human disruption of Earth systems. Source: Richardson, et al (2023)

I’ll explain the terminology in a moment. But for now, I want to draw your attention to the ninth sector on the chart, the one at 11 o’clock marked climate change.

Climate change makes up just one-ninth of this infographic. And yet, climate change caused by CO2 is negatively impacting at least four other sectors: ocean acidification, water systems, biosphere integrity and biogeochemical flows. It’s the only sector that can render our entire planet incapable of supporting any complex lifeform in a matter of centuries.

This infographic creates an intense feeling of alarm about the health of our planet, without showing which element most urgently needs our attention. Giving ‘climate change’ equal status with less urgent environmental problems muddies the waters and encourages ‘analysis paralysis’.

It is so disorienting that when I first saw this infographic I actually thought it had been created by fossil fuel industry lobbyists, for the purpose of diverting attention from CO2 emissions, to other environmental issues, a tactic straight from the lobbyists playbook.

What does the infographic mean?

It means our planet’s health is in bad shape. The further a sector extends outwards from the centre, the ‘worse’ things are.

Radiative forcing is what happens when the amount of energy that enters the Earth’s atmosphere is different from the amount of energy that leaves it. (Source) Novel entities are “novel chemical compounds created by humans, such as microplastics, pesticides and nuclear waste” (Source). Biogeochemical flows are natural pathways by which the chemical elements of living matter (think nitrogen, phosphorous, carbon) are circulated (Source).

What we can do as food professionals and consumers

• Don’t share infographics that conflate less urgent environmental problems with global warming from fossil fuels.

• Don’t be diverted. By all means work on sustainability initiatives for food systems, but remember any initiative that reduces fossil fuel use has three times more impact on global warming than any other food system initiative.

• Stay up to date. Ten years ago, fossil fuels were the cheapest energy source, but things have changed and since 2020, renewables are cheaper. Solar and wind-generated electricity is now cheaper than natural gas, the cheapest fossil fuel.

• Focus on the big picture. Sure, biodiversity, recycling initiatives and seaweed supplements for cows are nice, but if we don’t stop digging up fossil fuels we won’t have seaweed. Or biodiversity. Or cows.

In short: 🍏 Fossil fuels create ninety percent of the world’s carbon emissions and three times more greenhouse gas emissions than food systems 🍏 Any food system initiative that reduces fossil fuel use has three times more impact on global warming than any other food system initiative 🍏

Infographic source: Richardson, K., Steffen, W., Lucht, W., Bendtsen, J., Cornell, S., Donges, J.F., Drüke, M., Fetzer, I., Bala, G., Werner von Bloh, Feulner, G., Fiedler, S., Gerten, D., Gleeson, T., Hofmann, M., Willem Huiskamp, Matti Kummu, Mohan, C., Bravo, D. and Petri, S. (2023). Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries. Science Advances, 9(37). doi: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458.

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The Food Safety Aspects of Washing Rice

To wash or not to wash rice before you cook it? I’m in the ‘don’t wash’ camp. People who wash rice before cooking claim it reduces free starch and therefore decreases stickiness, but new research has found that washing does not affect either the texture or the stickiness of cooked rice.

As well as not reducing ‘stickiness’, washing does not make any contribution to the microbiological safety of rice.

However, washing before cooking can remove dust and stones and it significantly reduces the amount of microplastics present in uncooked rice. It also reduces heavy metals including cadmium, arsenic and lead.

Maybe I will start washing rice!

Sources:

• Dessì, C., Okoffo, E.D., O’Brien, J.W., Gallen, M., Samanipour, S., Kaserzon, S., Rauert, C., Wang, X. and Thomas, K.V. (2021). Plastics contamination of store-bought rice. Journal of Hazardous Materials, 416, p.125778. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhazmat.2021.125778.

• Li, H., Yang, J., Gao, M., Wang, J. and Sun, B. (2019). Washing rice before cooking has no large effect on the texture of cooked rice. Food Chemistry, 271, pp.388–392. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodchem.2018.07.172.

• Liu, K., Zheng, J. and Chen, F. (2018). Effects of washing, soaking and domestic cooking on cadmium, arsenic and lead bioaccessibilities in rice. Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, 98(10), pp.3829–3835. doi:https://doi.org/10.1002/jsfa.8897.‌

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That’s interesting: Allergies to red meat are on the rise

Did you know you can develop an allergy to red meat after being bitten by a tick?

It’s estimated that up to 450,000 people in the US might have alpha-gal syndrome, which is an allergy to red meat caused by tick bites.  Unfortunately, many medical professionals have either not heard of the syndrome or report they are “not too confident” in their ability to diagnose or help people with alpha-gal symptoms.

The syndrome appears to be increasingly prevalent, says the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who noted that positive diagnoses increased by 29% from 2017 to 2021. 

The allergy is different to most common food allergies because:

• it can recede over months or years, with some sufferers making a complete recovery

• the allergen is not a protein, but an oligosaccharide,  galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose (alpha-gal), found in most mammalian meat and meat products.

Read more: https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2023/p0727-emerging-tick-bites.html

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Organised Crime in Tinned Tomatoes

In 2021, the United Nations estimated that between 400,000 and 430,000 workers in Italy are employed under an exploitative (and illegal) labour system called caporalato (source).

The makers of this 4.5 minute video, The Guardian, assert that the labour systems used in tomato picking for tinned (canned) tomatoes in Southern Italy amount to modern slavery.

Read more: Are your tinned tomatoes picked by slave labour?

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What you missed in last week’s email

• Did cultivated meat’s big problem just get solved?

• Is it safe to eat banana peels (the science of edible)

• Uh oh, plastic recycling and microplastics

• Plant-based milks: good for the planet but bad for humans?

• Food fraud: The financial impacts of the melamine milk scandal revealed

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Below for paying subscribers: Food fraud news and incident reports (audio 🎧 is now at the top of the page)

📌 Food Fraud News 📌

Food prices easing

The Food and Agriculture Organization Food Price Index decreased between July and August, for all globally traded food commodities tracked by the index, except