SUMMARY: As attitudes toward meat-eating shift and climate-conscious consumers experiment with alternatives, investors are throwing their money at mock meat startups that are replicating the smell and texture of a meaty burger. Economics correspondent Paul Solman explores the emerging technology that might help Americans wean off of their meat habit.
SUMMARY: The biggest challenge for these college students may not be exams or papers, but finding the means to survive. While the University of California system has worked to bring in more first-generation and “non-traditional” students, helping them stay, succeed and meet basic needs like getting enough food requires greater investment. Jeffrey Brown reports from Berkeley, California.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): You will probably be surprised to hear that hunger and homelessness is a growing problem for thousands of college students across the country, particularly among those who are the first in their families to pursue a degree.
This is forcing some universities to figure out new ways of keeping low-income students in school.
Jeffrey Brown has the story from the University of California, Berkeley, as part of our weekly education series 'Making the Grade.'
ANTHONY CARRASCO, Student, University of California, Berkeley: Oh, darn. These tortillas are not very good.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): Every Sunday night, Anthony Carrasco prepares the food he will eat for the week ahead, setting himself a quota of one meal a day.
ANTHONY CARRASCO: I can skip breakfast, skip lunch, and even skip dinner. And I have just saved myself close to $30 or $40. I, like many folks, come to college to get out of poverty. I really thought that was the end of the line when we got the admission letter. Unfortunately, it wasn't.
JEFFREY BROWN: Anthony is a junior at the University of California, Berkeley, one of the nation's leading public universities. And he's the first in his family to attend college. It was hard to get in, and now hard to stay in, but maybe not for a reason many people have considered.
ANTHONY CARRASCO: We were expecting long nights in the libraries and tough exams; but what we're really facing is, you know, just, you know, sleepless nights worried about rent, and really distracting lecture halls when you just cannot stop thinking about food.
JEFFREY BROWN: Today, almost a third of all students entering two- and four-year colleges are first-generation. They're more likely to be minorities and come from low-income families. And by the estimate of one advocacy group, more than half of them lack reliable access to food. And that contributes to their lower graduation rates.
Many years ago, I myself was a student here at Berkeley. I was fortunate enough to have the means so I could concentrate on my studies, my grades, and, yes, the fun side of college life. But more and more these days, many students find they have to worry about more basic needs, including food and shelter.
A beautiful campus, world-class academics and now a new reality.
WOMAN: Is there any stock on Friday?
MAN: We're going to restock on Friday, so everything is going to be here on Friday.
JEFFREY BROWN: A campus food pantry, where twice a month students can stock up on staples. The University of California system has worked hard to bring in first-generation, low-income and what are called nontraditional students, such as veterans and those with families. But more work is required to help these students survive and graduate.
RUBEN CANEDO, University of California Global Food Initiative: Twenty-five bags today.
JEFFREY BROWN: Ruben Canedo is a first-generation graduate from Berkeley. He's now a leading advocate for student food security, and oversees the campus food pantry.
RUBEN CANEDO: What we're doing on our campus is making sure that campus becomes basic need secure. You have the recession, you have the increasing cost of living, and students are caught in the middle of that.
SUMMARY: South Sudan, the world’s newest country, is again on the brink of a civil war. Photographer Sebastian Rich has covered the conflict in the country for more than four decades, and he is there now on a mission with UNICEF, documenting the turmoil and the toll it has taken on civilians. The area is plagued by malnutrition and the lowest education levels in the world. John Yang speaks with Rich.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): The world’s newest country, South Sudan, established in 2011, again stands on the brink of civil war. A peace deal signed last year between rival governing factions is in tatters. More than one-sixth of the country’s 12 million citizens have been displaced, and the humanitarian crisis there is worsening by the day.
John Yang has the story.
JOHN YANG (NewsHour): For that view, we turn to photographer Sebastian Rich, who has covered conflict zones for more than four decades. He has been to South Sudan many times. He is there now on assignment for UNICEF, the United Nations children’s agency.
He joins us now via Skype from Juba, the capital.
Sebastian, thanks for joining thus evening.
First of all, tell us how it feels now, what the situation is like on the ground now.
SEBASTIAN RICH, Photojournalist: Well, the situation is a little more tense than it was, obviously, before the recent fighting.
The recent fighting has put the people, the ordinary people in the street. They’re much more tense than they were. There’s not so many friendly faces. If you walk in the streets of Juba now, you’re not greeted the same way you were a couple of months ago or even a year ago, when I came last year.
JOHN YANG: And how is this affecting the children that you’re covering, that you’re there watching, looking at behalf on UNICEF, particularly the issues of malnutrition?
SEBASTIAN RICH: Well, it’s affecting the children very badly.
And there’s 250,000, a quarter-of-a-million children suffering from severe acute malnutrition. And that’s not including the children who just got malnutrition, the first stages of.
So, what’s happened is that the children who were actually starting to recover from severe acute malnutrition before this recent fighting, when the fighting happened, those children couldn’t come back to the hospitals to get their follow-up treatment and children that had started to get malnutrition couldn’t get to the hospitals either.
So now we have this huge increase in malnutrition and severe cases of malnutrition. And UNICEF is trying its very, very best to keep on top of this disaster.
SUMMARY: Sam Polk was making millions on Wall Street when he had a life-changing revelation: he wanted to help those in need. His focus became so-called "food deserts," regions with limited access to healthy food. Polk founded Everytable to serve nutritious meals at minimal prices for low-income populations, but higher prices for customers who can afford them. Economics correspondent Paul Solman reports.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Now, economics correspondent Paul Solman spends a little time with a former hedge fund trader turned social entrepreneur, someone who wants to turn the table on food shortages in inner cities by launching an array of eateries in both high-end and lower-income neighborhoods.
It's part of our series “Making Sen$e”, which airs Thursdays on the “NewsHour”.
PAUL SOLMAN (NewsHour): Sam Polk was formerly a top dog at one of the world's top hedge funds.
SAM POLK, Former Hedge Fund Trader: My dad was this sort of Willy Loman character, this sort of out-of-work salesman that could never make ends meet. So when I was on Wall Street, my entire life's goal was to make more money than the next guy.
DORCIA WHITE-BRAKE, Groceryships Graduate: Just going to pour a little bit of salsa inside. It's like your own little bowl.
MAN: Wow, nice.
PAUL SOLMAN: Dorcia White-Brake is a teacher's aide in Los Angeles. Three kids, no car, the nearest supermarket miles away.
DORCIA WHITE-BRAKE: So I can have, you know, good healthy food that tastes good. I have to take a bus and a train.
SAM POLK: When I was 27, I had been on Wall Street for five or six years and I was at this club in Las Vegas, and it was this super-exclusive club and there was $1,000 bottles of champagne, and beautiful women all around. My life finally looked like I'd always wanted it to look. But I basically felt empty.
DORCIA WHITE-BRAKE: So, basically, I waited six months for this application.
PAUL SOLMAN: Really.
DORCIA WHITE-BRAKE: Yes, and I got it and I turned it in and then it seemed like an eternity. I was waiting and waiting and finally I got a call.
PAUL SOLMAN: Got a call to join the Los Angeles non-profit Groceryships Program, started by Sam Polk.
SAM POLK: I started Groceryships when I came to understand that people are living in food deserts, where there's very little produce for sale and tons and tons of fast food.
THIS summer the tiny town of Furnace Creek, Calif., may once again grace the nation’s front pages. Situated in Death Valley, it last made news in 1913, when it set the record for the world’s hottest recorded temperature, at 134 degrees. With the heat wave currently blanketing the Western states, and given that the mercury there has already reached 130 degrees, the news media is awash in speculation that Furnace Creek could soon break its own mark.
Such speculation, though, misses the real concern posed by the heat wave, which covers an area larger than New England. The problem isn’t spiking temperatures, but a new reality in which long stretches of triple-digit days are common — threatening not only the lives of the millions of people who live there, but also a cornerstone of the American food supply.
People living outside the region seldom recognize its immense contribution to American agriculture: roughly 40 percent of the net farm income for the country normally comes from the 17 Western states; cattle and sheep production make up a significant part of that, as do salad greens, dry beans, onions, melons, hops, barley, wheat and citrus fruits. The current heat wave will undeniably diminish both the quality and quantity of these foods.
The most vulnerable crops are those that were already in flower and fruit when temperatures surged, from apricots and barley to wheat and zucchini. Idaho farmers have documented how their potato yields have been knocked back because their heat-stressed plants are not developing their normal number of tubers. Across much of the region, temperatures on the surface of food and forage crops hit 105 degrees, at least 10 degrees higher than the threshold for most temperate-zone crops.
What’s more, when food and forage crops, as well as livestock, have had to endure temperatures 10 to 20 degrees higher than the long-term averages, they require far more water than usual. The Western drought, which has persisted for the last few years, has already diminished both surface water and groundwater supplies and increased energy costs, because of all the water that has to be pumped in from elsewhere.
If these costs are passed on to consumers, we can again expect food prices, especially for beef and lamb, to rise, just as they did in 2012, the hottest year in American history. So extensive was last year’s drought that more than 1,500 counties — about half of all the counties in the country — were declared national drought disaster areas, and 90 percent of those were hit by heat waves as well.
The answer so far has been to help affected farmers with payouts from crop insurance plans. But while we can all sympathize with affected farmers, such assistance is merely a temporary response to a long-term problem.
Fortunately, there are dozens of time-tested strategies that our best farmers and ranchers have begun to use. The problem is that several agribusiness advocacy organizations have done their best to block any federal effort to promote them, including leaving them out of the current farm bill, or of climate change legislation at all.
Energy drinks are the fastest-growing part of the beverage industry, with sales in the United States reaching more than $10 billion in 2012 — more than Americans spent on iced tea or sports beverages like Gatorade.
Their rising popularity represents a generational shift in what people drink, and reflects a successful campaign to convince consumers, particularly teenagers, that the drinks provide a mental and physical edge.
The drinks are now under scrutiny by the Food and Drug Administration after reports of deaths and serious injuries that may be linked to their high caffeine levels. But however that review ends, one thing is clear, interviews with researchers and a review of scientific studies show: the energy drink industry is based on a brew of ingredients that, apart from caffeine, have little, if any benefit for consumers.
“If you had a cup of coffee you are going to affect metabolism in the same way,” said Dr. Robert W. Pettitt, an associate professor at Minnesota State University in Mankato, who has studied the drinks.
Energy drink companies have promoted their products not as caffeine-fueled concoctions but as specially engineered blends that provide something more. For example, producers claim that “Red Bull gives you wings,” that Rockstar Energy is “scientifically formulated” and Monster Energy is a “killer energy brew.” Representative Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, a Democrat, has asked the government to investigate the industry’s marketing claims.
Promoting a message beyond caffeine has enabled the beverage makers to charge premium prices. A 16-ounce energy drink that sells for $2.99 a can contains about the same amount of caffeine as a tablet of NoDoz that costs 30 cents. Even Starbucks coffee is cheap by comparison; a 12-ounce cup that costs $1.85 has even more caffeine.
As with earlier elixirs, a dearth of evidence underlies such claims. Only a few human studies of energy drinks or the ingredients in them have been performed and they point to a similar conclusion, researchers say — that the beverages are mainly about caffeine.
Caffeine is called the world’s most widely used drug. A stimulant, it increases alertness, awareness and, if taken at the right time, improves athletic performance, studies show. Energy drink users feel its kick faster because the beverages are typically swallowed quickly or are sold as concentrates.
“These are caffeine delivery systems,” said Dr. Roland Griffiths, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University who has studied energy drinks. “They don’t want to say this is equivalent to a NoDoz because that is not a very sexy sales message.”
A scientist at the University of Wisconsin became puzzled as he researched an ingredient used in energy drinks like Red Bull, 5-Hour Energy and Monster Energy. The researcher, Dr. Craig A. Goodman, could not find any trials in humans of the additive, a substance with the tongue-twisting name of glucuronolactone that is related to glucose, a sugar. But Dr. Goodman, who had studied other energy drink ingredients, eventually found two 40-year-old studies from Japan that had examined it.
In the experiments, scientists injected large doses of the substance into laboratory rats. Afterward, the rats swam better. “I have no idea what it does in energy drinks,” Dr. Goodman said.
Energy drink manufacturers say it is their proprietary formulas, rather than specific ingredients, that provide users with physical and mental benefits. But that has not prevented them from implying otherwise.
Consider the case of taurine, an additive used in most energy products.
On its Web site, the producer of Red Bull, for example, states that “more than 2,500 reports have been published about taurine and its physiological effects,” including acting as a “detoxifying agent.” In addition, that company, Red Bull of Austria, points to a 2009 safety study by a European regulatory group that gave it a clean bill of health.
But Red Bull’s Web site does not mention reports by that same group, the European Food Safety Authority, which concluded that claims about the benefits in energy drinks lacked scientific support. Based on those findings, the European Commission has refused to approve claims that taurine helps maintain mental function and heart health and reduces muscle fatigue.
By Roni Neff of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
We won't stop climate change through individual action alone, but together, we can make a real difference. Here are four simple things we can do:
1. Eat less meat and dairy, especially beef and lamb. Livestock are by far the biggest producers of greenhouse gases in the global food system. In the U.S., most livestock-related emissions come from the animals' digestive systems and from the fertilizer used to grow their feed.
If an American family of four ate no meat or cheese one day a week, it would be like taking a car off the road for five weeks a year, according to estimates by the Environmental Working Group. If we all did it, it would be like not driving 91 billion miles.
2. Waste less food. Farmers have to grow far more food than we actually need because 40 percent of what they produce gets thrown away, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. That comes at a huge cost in greenhouse gases. Food waste in landfills also produces methane, which is 21 times more powerful than carbon dioxide in trapping heat in the atmosphere, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Try not to buy more than you can eat, and make creative use of your leftovers. Be aware of portion size and of falling into the trap of eating food just because it's there. Buy food that's less than perfect so the store won't toss it out. It also helps if you compost your kitchen scraps.
3. Use less energy. Stores and restaurants generally don't provide information about the energy used to produce, process and bring us our food, but we can make some guesses.
Highly perishable, out-of-season produce often comes by airplane, one of the most fuel-hogging vehicles. Processed foods take a lot of energy to produce. And the energy we use to transport, store and prepare food also contributes a surprisingly large share of food's greenhouse gas emissions.
Make fewer car trips to the store. Can you bike or walk? And consider buying Energy Star appliances. And cover your pots when you cook.
4. Support sustainable food systems. Pound for pound, sustainably and locally produced foods may not always be the lowest emitters of greenhouse gases. But climate-friendly eating also means doing all we can to shore up our food system so it can withstand what climate change has in store for us.
The best way to do that is by shifting toward more sustainable production methods and more efficient local and regional distribution systems. Buying from responsible producers in your area -- and the restaurants and stores to which they sell -- helps strengthen that system.
There's much more we can do, from examining our other food choices beyond meat and dairy to planning ahead, slowing down and appreciating the foods in front of us. And after we're done voting with our forks, we can vote with our ballots, emails, phones and wallets.
Demand that government and businesses step up and take action on greenhouse gases. If they hear from us enough, they'll do it -- and we will have done our part to assure that we can enjoy our meals tomorrow as much as we enjoy them today.
The "Food for 9 Billion" series is a NewsHour collaboration with the Center for Investigative Reporting, American Public Media's Marketplace and Homelands Productions.
Every summer, thousands flock to the National Cherry Festival in Traverse City, Michigan for all things cherry: pit spitting, pie eating, even the royal crowning of the National Cherry Queen. The region produces roughly 75 percent of the country’s tart cherry crop each year for pies, juice, and preserves.
In 1995, Sara McGuire was reigning royalty of the cherry festival. That same year, she and her high school sweetheart, Pat, got engaged and started growing cherries. For the first few years, business was strong, but then a series of low-yield years set them back. Still nothing could have prepared Royal Farms for 2012.
2012 has been the worst year in recorded history for Michigan fruit. Statewide, more than 90 percent of the tart cherry crop was lost when freezing weather followed an unusually warm spring.
“It’s been a real challenge emotionally and physically,” said Pat McGuire. “We have no crop. We’ve had to lay people off. We’ve had to work extra hours. We did everything we could in the spring to minimize the effects of the freezes that we did have. We felt like we just lost a fight.”
Northwestern Michigan is considered by many an ideal place for growing fruit. Located on the 45th parallel, halfway between the equator and the North Pole, the surrounding Great Lakes and rolling hills help create a temperate climate.
But as Pat walks through his orchards now, they are a haunting green. This year, nature harvested the trees.
Cherry trees remain dormant throughout winter until a spring warming wakes them up. That happened much earlier this year. Temperatures in March shattered records across the country, reaching the mid-80’s in Michigan that month - that’s nearly 14 degrees Fahrenheit above the state average. That pushed the trees to a development stage about 5.5 weeks ahead of normal, Nugent said.
SUMMARY: Washington salmon depend on the cold water from glacial lakes to survive. But as temperatures increase and glaciers shrink, salmon populations are declining, threatening the way of life for the Swinomish Indians, also known as the "salmon people." In collaboration with KCTS-9's Earthfix Project, Hari Sreenivasan reports.
SUMMARY: A once-in-a-generation famine is threatening millions of lives in West Africa, including hundreds of thousands of children in Niger. Rohit Kachroo of Independent Television News reports.
SUMMARY: President Obama outlined Friday a private-public partnership to work on global poverty issues ahead of the Group of Eight summit in Camp David this weekend. Ray Suarez and USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah discuss the initiative to lift millions out of poverty and hunger through farming partnerships.
SUMMARY: Most Americans would squirm when even thinking of eating a grasshopper or locust. But a movement is afoot to encourage insect eating with advocates praising bugs' low fat and high protein. Spencer Michels tasted wax moth larvae tacos and crispy mealworms over ice cream to prepare this report on efforts to put bugs on U.S. menus.
SPENCER MICHELS (Newshour): Martinez (Insect Chef) may be a little early, but she is certainly on to something; 80 percent of the world's population eats insects on a regular basis, though, in the United States and most of the developed world, they are not quite there yet.
GWEN IFILL (Newshour): Next, the last in our special series on the aftermath in Japan, one year after the nuclear accident at Fukushima.
NewsHour science correspondent Miles O'Brien has been reporting on the continuing concerns in the region, including fears of contamination.
Tonight, how Japanese citizens are grappling with very real questions about farming and food safety.
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): Now, a struggle over land in Western Ethiopia that pits village farmers against the government and land investors.
Tonight's story is part of a multimedia project that looks at the challenge of feeding the world in a time of social and environmental change. It's a NewsHour partnership with the Center for Investigative Reporting, Homelands Productions and American Public Media's Marketplace.
The project is called Food for 9 Billion.
Tonight's correspondent is Cassandra Herrman.
JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): And now to the Philippines, a country struggling to cope with its rapidly growing population.
Tonight's story is part of a new project that looks at the challenge of feeding the world in a time of social and environmental change. It's a NewsHour partnership with the Center for Investigative Reporting, Homelands Productions and American Public Media's "Marketplace."
The project is called Food for 9 Billion.
The reporter for tonight's story is Sam Eaton of Homelands Productions.
