for science for the public and i welcome you to contemporary science issues and innovations our topic tonight is big agriculture's effect on food and health and environment and our expert is top cultural producers in the u s and it has an international influence dr kaufman's research is unique in scope she looks at agriculture in terms of multiple effects especially socio economic health and environmental effects she's received multiple book award and tonight we'll talk about her book on obesity from a while back and also her current research on the strawberry industry this past year dr gotham and has been awarded both a guggenheim fellowship and a francis b cashen fellowship at the radcliffe institute for advanced research at harvard while she's here at harvard she's writing her next book on the soil pathogen that has affected the strawberry industry rather profoundly we're very honored to welcome julie death then thank you and come welcome and welcome to cambridge to thank you and thank you for having me on the show and i'm very much enjoying being in cambridge  good ok then i would like to talk to focus especially on these two books your current research mainly ok but to go back to a book that had i think was very significant in that it was more multi dimensional approach to the issue of obesity you made some very interesting points starting with the issue of obesity right well that was a very controversial book and i understand that people love to teach it in the classroom there's always a vigorous debate but i thought really the book came out of my observations about how the discourse o epidemic was being used in the alternative food movement and a lot of my research has been focused on the politics of the alternative food movement which is supposed to be in opposition to big ag or industrial food and i was quite concerned about the way that obesity had crept into that conversation so the book was really just a kind of an examination of all the assumptions about the obesity epidemic and i challenge about seven of them yes which you mentioned a couple i challenge i mean the first one that's important is as i challenge the idea that obesity is necessarily a health problem i'm not saying it's not a health problem but the way we understand the relationship between obesity and health is much more complicated then you get from the regular public conversation and just to give you an example of that a lot of when we even look at what is a measure of obesity we look at the body mass  five point or twenty four point nine twenty five to twenty nine point nine is concerted overweight and over thirty is considered obese well there's a bunch of stuff like that i mean when we even hear of about a rising epidemic what that means isn't it could mean is on a population basis that at one group you know on a population wide basis there might be an overall gain of let's say five to ten pounds which is not significant but that means huge groups of people move to one category to the next which doesn't mean that everybody's were really huge it just means they've gotten a little chunkier or whatever i mean like using that term than they were maybe a generation ago but in turn in terms of the health effects turns out the epidemiological studies show that people in the in the overweight category actually have longer lifespans than those in the in the normal category that is a surprise that is a surprise but  it's like the source of this is somebody who works for the center for disease control on it and she's published a lot more on it right so there's just so many assumptions like that so that's one of the relationship between food and health the idea that our our agricultural subsidies are making people fat habit junk food that junk poop junk junk food the idea and the idea that it's calories alone that are making people bigger than it is people's eating habits and i think that's probably one of the most interesting things i came across and i think that and what i'm getting at because already your listeners are always saying of course it's calories of course it's what we eat oh first i mean just on the calorie business i mean now there's a lot of new evidence that it's not only calories and how rees that you know the carbohydrates can be causing big mess and there's a lot i mean we don't even really understand the mechanisms by which people are getting bigger but the big the big one was this idea that we that people are getting bigger regardless of what they eat and that was one of the best i've assumed if you're talking about like talking about the chapter now i know more than i did even when i write a book but this is you know when i was writing the book i you know i'm just kind of a contrarian and so who is looking for i was kind of curious and i wondered if there was some role relationship between environmental toxins and obesity and i looked it up and i found this article written by this british woman dr paula bailey hamilton and she had you know she added an article that was all about other possible explanations for obesity there were outside of eating and and all sorts of studies this is just the obesity could be related to talks in the environment since she wrote that there's more and more who've written about this and i mean the one of the main focuses is has been about ended current disrupting chemicals and there are studies that show that when when lab animals are exposed to chemical in utero when they will those that are exposed will become much bigger in adulthood than those who are not even if they have the same thought the same diet and have the same amount of physical activity so there's that in there and now there's a lot of study on that and there you know and for the focus has been on chemicals like bisphenol a in plastic and these and these chemicals kind of came on well first of all it's gets agenor or it takes a generation for these things to manifest so these kind of chemicals came on line right when the folks it gave birth to people who are no bigger point right and so there are some i mean that's a correlation like everything else there's a lot of correlations in the book i take but i think it's worth considering and now you know there's more evidence about the relationship between stress hormones at home he said he likes circulating also in right we do so yet but you know i'm not going to say yes it fast junk food is i'm certainly not going to say it's good for you because i don't think it is but i think it's the problem with that kind of food is are problematic regardless of whether makes people bigger or not are many really very interesting points before we leave that book yeah i do urge people to read this again very readable for one thing for a general public but it is one of the very few sources where you would see this complexity of the problem itself and how being addressed you mention of course the capitalist aspect of this and i wonder if you go into this and the socio economics of this problem right well sure i mean a lot of my work has looked at how the dynamics of capitalism create some of the problems that we see is  that we see is troubling in that book i think i think one of the main things i say is that the you know so much of our political economy is based on yes you know we create a great deal a waste i do not think that waste is what's making people big i want to be really clear about that but there is this sense in which consumption is supposed to help get rid of all your stuff exactly right but it was a i think a brilliant point there you have out of this particular economic system that you must be materialistic or the system that is the divide because it's often brought up that poor people tend to be disproportionately heavy right and you had a point about yeah and that's interesting because some of the  again i was combing through evidence and it's an even evidence and i and i can't tell you that my evidence is better yet i have against it without it i was looking for things that just to give us pause about our like are like you know like what's the word i'm looking for this kind of power through the only way we want to know when to measure things and so one of the things i found is a study that show that people in the lower income brackets did not eat more calories than people in higher income that was interesting and it didn't differ by race either right and so there but there are other possible possible answers to why poor people are bigger and one of them is you know like  stress hormones but it's also we have to look at the inverse issue which is while being thin doesn't guarantee that you will be wealthy being fat guarantees that you will modern research think it's not just our culture but the interesting thing about modern scientific research is it tends to be hyper narrow right so that people don't look at other i spend forty from the the social background of the social aspect right should say orientation right of your particular bacteria that's very welcome in any case now this year you are at radcliffe having a wonderful time and your project is a book of all things on strawberries right i think this is a favorite fruit everywhere of course major crop  lot of bad press some of it deserved some of it maybe not but so strawberries are you know it's kind of a in some ways it typical high value crop in california which is tends to depend on t how poor labor conditions but strawberries are kind of the pinnacle of that but what motivated this research was actually it came from the obesity book which is that there was this fight this this and die but i'm getting ahead that i kind of want to say what motivated this so there was this big fight over mental iodide and because it's more toxic than methyl bromide muscle bromide was being phased out because it's an ozone depleting worker activists and pest side activists and public health people got together to fight this thing and i was really interested in that and i was also interested to know whether the possibility exposed to it i was wondering if that was entering the regulatory debate well it turns out it wasn't but but it did get it was a great question and it got national science foundation funding to pursue a project and and the project got two different grants actually and one was looking at so what happened is methyl i doubt it was taken off the market because of this regulatory battle now that was the first and really bad that was a really bad that was a bad bromide been around a lot longer ok so i got a i got a grant to look at how that happened looking at the regulatory debate and then i also got a grant to look at what farmers were going to do without now without  medical iodide ok and so i wrote a bunch of articles on that but really this book volved out of things that i just wasn't expecting and what i saw was just how  interlocked the whole strawberry system was that so many things had co evolved including fumigation including plant breeding including the use of plastic tarp all these kind of technologies ahead of volved to control soil pathogens have now made it near impossible to farm without a few meghan's and so the book is really about how these advantages advantages a strawberry growing in california and there were many advantages night turned into a set of threats because all of these techniques are co evolved it and now the industry is very locked into a particular way of doing things yes is that a you with the scale of the production for one thing the destruction of the soil goes in there but is that like in your locked in the sense that if you get a problem then you get a solution then you get a problem as a result of that is that all life started i don't have to let me get messy or let me give you a really specific because it's not it's let me give you more specific not a chain it's not necessarily a chain and i've been thinking about that very question start growing strawberries for the market in california the there strawberries all over the country starting about nine hundred twenty s one nine hundred thirty s they started seeing blight in their fields and there was a bunch of there was a lot of different kind of diseases  they went to the university of california which is a land grant university help them figure out what was going on and they identified one of these pathogens as being bird psyllium dolly in which is a fungus so the university gotten and they were so kind of spokes post the breed for disease resistance but they started breeding for productivity they started bringing breeding for productivity and they also sort of breeding much as we are so so reading starts taking off anyway then they try but they still have to deal with these pathogens they try a bunch of different things finally i mean long story short they get fumigat and they still what when soldiers have gas masks on they spray or let's release clore pick ran and the enemy would in the end soldiers would tear their their gas mask once they start fumigating then growers no longer have to rotate ground so they start planning year after year on the same block and when you do that and and the r star berries are grown extra berries love sandy soil and they love coastal temperatures that the temperate temperatures that come off the pacific ocean so they also bred for long jeopardy i mean for strawberries to be harvested for a long period of time because unlike i understand massachusetts has a three week strawberry season the starbury season in california is about ten months oh yes yes yes and that's because they have different varietals of grow in different places and they can and that's why you're getting california strawberries and markets here in in cambridge in boston right now because they're coming from california maybe some from mexico that are that are have been using varietals that rotating the ground they now can concentrate all of their breeding on productivity on extending the late into the season on his ship ability so they don't have to worry about d like for instance in the cost of land so strawberry land is extraordinarily expensive it's based on the presumption that you're going to get starbreeze year after year there are extraordinary high value crop just to give you a sense of what  and even the kind of land value of strawberry and so so the strawberry the lamb prices are going up they're going to continue to go up even if the strawberry business declines and so that puts a but there's a very destructive element first of all in the soil but the other i'm just curious do you are you addressing the issue the health issue for the workers in the fields that are subjected to this write off right well the focus of against and and as they relate to these soil pathogens now it as it happens east fume against again i don't want to mislead your your your viewers they are not they don't affect consumers me because they're planted in the ground i mean they're put in the ground before planting so the people most affected are those who live or work or play nearby these fumigations now the people who apply the few  how are fully they have the masks and everything but there's other people who work on fumigation that are not fully protected i mean i've driven through strawberry land and seeing that you know they put these plastic tarps on there after they  fumigate to control to keep the fumigate in and also somewhat is a public health issue but those those tubs come loose they fly up and you see people without any mouse going in and shoveling dirt on them  so and so there are incidents of pesticide drift the industry likes to say that there are you know minor accidents getting hooked up with with regularity and then there's the issue of the you know the vulnerable the political vulnerability of these workers most many of whom not the fumigation workers many of whom are undocumented events right and they can very vulnerable the land complain they don't complain because they will get in trouble  others are two things we started out by saying strawberries are the number one talks like a product produce so what is in the strawberries if that's not the human against what is now and that was residues but the right against only for ok the other is we have only like a couple minutes left here but would like to go back again to this issue of people working around this environment you had talked to before about you might not you don't look necessarily at the following two weeks you might need to look at the next generation there are pregnant women in those  salinas it's called the child marcos studies this state it's like an acronym but it means children in spanish and they're actually following cohorts and therefore ending guess that they're finding all sorts of reproductive issues with from chemicals as part of my project we did talk to farm workers but the farm workers are i mean again they're they don't necessarily pay attention if you make as they just pay attention to what's making them sick and we did have what i think we talked to i think like seventy or so farm workers and many did complain of either having experience or knowing someone who had some miscarriages or yes problematic menzies and the women in particular were quite nervous about it but it we can't really identify it for what chemicals but yeah yes right and some of that stuff the industry has a way industries have a way of  preventing research funding so maybe it hasn't been researched adequately or addressed yeah i know that the industry certainly doesn't particularly like that  that but i don't think that the strawberry industry perceval is suppressed so science i you know i know it's been a tricky yes project because i wanted to talk to the street people in the strawberry industry and  i have to i mean i have to take seriously what they have this horse to even have the conversation with them i mean i think that the chemical industry i think that they suppress science but i don't think the strawberry industry does oh no prognosis what this it's really hard to know i mean there's several different options are looking at for farming without the megan's because finally the story industry is seeing the writing on the wall they know that they're not going to have long the few millions are long for this world for them so there's different sorts of options ranging from i mean some people love drop and risk placements that just work like the chemical some are looking at growing in soil with substrate and kind of greenhouses which which is a terrible agriculture and then they're also looking at anaerobic soil this infestation which is adding a carbon source in water and plastic covering and they're having mixed results but here's the main thing most of these are going to a lot of the best solutions or capital intensive and or require knowledge patients in to and and so what's happened i think at the very least low resource growers are so some would welcome a shake out but i don't i think that's it that's going to happen regardless whether we move to an a kind of another high tech solution that may or may not work or try more go ecological