Thanks

This little girl, eating a piece of cooked orange sweet potato, needs pro-vitamin A, among other nutrients, to grow up healthy. Image from HarvestPlus, used with permission.

It’s Thanksgiving today in the US, a holiday that for many is a day to consider what you are thankful for and who you wish to thank. Nicholas D. Kristof, a columnist for the NY Times, suggests that we should be thankful for orange sweet potatoes and give thanks to those hardworking people developing and distributing these and other biofortified crops in his article Bless the Orange Sweet Potato.

We’re so lucky in the US to have a diverse diet that provides all the micronutrients we need. We can be thankful for our climates and soils that are able to produce great amounts of food, easy access to technology that helps farmers grow more, fortified foods that ensure we all get more than enough nutrients, and so many more elements of the system that brings us the bounty on our Thanksgiving tables.

For people in much of Africa, these elements aren’t available for a variety of reasons. We all look forward to a future when every person has access to a diverse diet that will meet their nutritional needs, but it will be a long time coming. Until then, so many people will suffer due to a lack of pro-vitamin A, iron, and other essential nutrients.

Like Mr. Kristof, I am thankful for the people at HarvestPlus and other organizations who are working so hard to help everyone get the micronutrients they need. The orange sweet potato is just one of many life-saving projects that will be coming out in the next few years.

I can’t think of anything better to give #foodthanks for. Now, time to go enjoy some orange sweet potatoes.

Goals for nutrition

A diverse diet, made up of a variety of grains, beans, vegetables, fruits, and animal products is the best way to get all the essential macro and micro nutrients.

Over at Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog, Jeremy has been critical of information coming out of the First Global Conference on Biofortification. He wonders if the organizers and attendees were/are too focused on a techno-fix rather than on diverse diets as a solution. This being a conference on biofortification, we talked about biofortification a lot, and it could be argued that biofortification is a techno-fix, whether by breeding or biotechnology.

However, we talked about a lot more at the conference, including supplementation and fortification, diverse diets and education, cooking and farming methods. To say that diverse diets were ignored would be incorrect. That obviously isn’t getting through in the materials coming out of the conference through the organizers or media, which is a problem.

If we polled each conference attendee, I think most if not all would say that a diverse diet for every human on the planet is the ultimate goal. Many of the sessions addressed this specifically, getting into the details of how diet and nutrition are intertwined. Here are just three examples:

Nutrition is key to everything

Looking at all of the notes I’ve taken at the First Global Conference on Biofortification hosted by Harvest Plus, I’m a little overwhelmed. There were so many important ideas, from specific details on the ground in Uganda to broad discussions that affect everything we do in communicating risk.

The take home message, for me, is that there are people in dire need that deserve better, and improved nutrition is the key to solving many problems. As Mark Whalqvist said in a symposium about “Weaving biofortification into the global development agenda”, good nutrition is not really about rights. It’s about equity, fairness. A child growing up in rural India or Uganda deserves a chance for healthy brain and body development just as much as a child growing up in Washington, DC or Ames, Iowa. It’s only fair.

First Global Conference on Biofortification

In a few moments, talks at the First Global Conference on Biofortification will begin. Up first: the keynote address The Future of Food by William J. Garvelink, the US Government Deputy Coordinator for Development Feed the Future: Global Hunger and Food Security Initiative. Then, a panel discussion on the Importance of agriculture for addressing malnutrition. If you have any questions regarding biofortification, let me know in the comments and I’ll try to find the answer and address it in a later post. Follow the conference on Twitter #biofortconf.

Even before the talks get started, the posters here display some exciting research. For example, B.B. Singh, an agronomist who splits his time between Texas A&M and an Indian university, has developed 60 day cowpea.

Purple tomatoes!

As I write this, I munch on organic blue corn chips and homemade pico de gallo, made with purple peppers from Small Potatoes Farm (along with heirloom tomatoes and flat leaf Italian parsley and with a glass of local wine from Summerset Winery, yum!). Why choose blue and purple? Anthocyanins, of course. These natural plant compounds are nice to look at, and there is a lot of evidence that they have protecting health qualities for those who eat them, protecting us from diseases like cancer, diabetes, and obesity. So, what do we do to make sure that people can get recommended amounts of anthocyanins?

Anthocyanin-rich berries are delicious but expensive and only available during certain times of year. Most people do not seek out red cabbage or brightly colored heirloom varieties of veggies like carrots and cauliflower. In the US, the most frequently eaten vegetables are potatoes, lettuce, and tomatoes. Purple tomatoes exist, but heirloom tomatoes have issues like splitting and little time till spoilage. This is fine if you buy them at the farmer’s market and eat them the next day, but is not suitable for things like pasta sauce production (cans and bottles are where most people get their RDA of tomatoes, but it turns out they are healthier that way!). Varieties like Cherokee purple, while awesome, don’t produce anthocyanins throughout the fruit.