Communication to Bridge the Gap Between Food Production and Nutrition and Health: Proceedings of a Workshop (2024)
Chapter: 2 Challenges and Successes in Communicating about Food Sources and Food Production
2
Challenges and Successes in Communicating about Food Sources and Food Production
The speakers in the first session, moderated by Payam Vahmani, University of California, Davis (UC Davis), explored ways to communicate to the public about the influence of agriculture and farming practices on nutrition and health. The session also addressed the topic of communication between farmers and researchers about their research needs. In their opening remarks and proceeding panel discussion, speakers examined some of the challenges of translating the science of food production and food sources into consumer-friendly messages. They covered a variety of topics, including genetic engineering of food, gender bias in agricultural research and technology development, new agricultural technologies, food safety, and consumer perceptions.
FOOD PRODUCTION
Alison Van Eenennaam, Distinguished Professor of Cooperative Extension in the Department of Animal Science at UC Davis, said when she was a graduate student, she had no idea that animal agriculture and breeding methods, particularly those involving genetic engineering, would be such a controversial topic or how difficult it would be to correct the narrative around them. Today, searching the internet for information about genetically modified organisms (GMO) returns alarming images that accompany narratives based on fear, disgust, or outrage. “These narratives are difficult to counter with reassuring academic messages,” said Van Eenennaam. Although many scientists make decisions based on academic messages, she added, this is not how much of the public makes their decisions.
A 2014 Pew Research Center survey of attitudes towards various scientific topics found that 88 percent of scientists believed it is safe to eat genetically modified foods, while only 37 percent of U.S. adults believed that to be true (Funk and Rainie, 2015). Of the topics the survey addressed, the largest agreement gap between scientists and the public was their beliefs about genetically modified foods (Figure 2-1). Addressing this misperception has been a difficult problem to solve, said Van Eenennaam. She pointed to a 2016 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine consensus study report that agreed with global scientific societies that there are no unique food safety concerns about commercialized genetically engineered crops. The committee authoring the report noted that a careful examination of all the available research studies found no persuasive evidence of adverse health effects directly attributable to the consumption of food derived from genetically engineered crops (NASEM, 2016). Van Eenennaam said that despite these conclusions, the public narrative has not substantially changed.
NOTES: The numbers refer to the percentage agreeing with the statement. The agreement gap represents the difference in percentage points between the percent agreement of U.S. adults compared to scientists. MMR = measles, mumps, and rubella.
SOURCES: Presented by Alison Van Eenennaam on May 30, 2024, at the workshop on Communication to Bridge the Gap Between Food Production and Nutrition and Health; Data from Funk and Rainie, 2015.
A 2020 survey of people in 20 countries found widespread skepticism about the safety of genetically modified foods, with the median percentage of 48 percent who think genetically modified foods are unsafe compared to 13 percent who believe they are safe (Kennedy and Thigpen, 2020). This study also found that in the United States only 27 percent of the general public reported believing these products are safe. “A lot of this skepticism is being sown by media that is intentionally putting out false information around this topic,” said Van Eenennaam. She cited a 2018 study from researchers at Iowa State University who found that among seven news sites the majority of articles portrayed GMOs negatively (Dorius and Lawrence-Dill, 2018).
Van Eenennaam said the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences has published papers on the science of science communication. This research shows that trust, emotion, social identity, and how an issue is framed are more important than scientific literacy in determining whether the public will agree with the research community on matters of policy (Nisbet and Scheufele, 2012). The challenge is that scientists are not well trained to engender trust and positive feelings, said Van Eenennaam. One study, for example, found that scientists are ambivalently perceived as high-competence, low-warmth people (Fiske and Dupree, 2014). The message here, she said, is that the scientific community needs to be more empathetic, show more concern for humanity and the environment, and try to be more personable and connect better with audiences.
Providing compelling narratives is one approach to correcting misinformation. Van Eenennaam, for example, collaborated with Academy Award-nominated director Scott Hamilton Kennedy to make a documentary titled Food Evolution, which Neil DeGrasse Tyson narrated.1 Van Eenennaam stated that it is important for agricultural scientists to get involved in efforts such as this because alternative facts not based on validated data about food and nutrition can result in bad policy outcomes. This happened recently in the Philippines, where an activist group used false information to prohibit growing genetically modified, vitamin A-enriched rice, which would have been a potential solution to the vitamin A deficiency in that country.
She suggested that the communication challenges around genetically engineered food can serve as an informative case study for other scientific issues. The insights gained from this example could potentially inform and enhance communication strategies for other complex scientific topics.
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1 Available at https://www.foodevolutionmovie.com (accessed July 22, 2024).
GENDER IN AGRICULTURAL TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT, DELIVERY, AND COMMUNICATION
Hale Ann Tufan, associate professor in Cornell University’s School of Integrative Plant Science, has dedicated her research on gender and agricultural technology development with a focus on plant breeding. She aims to understand how to intentionally design gender-equitable, just, and socially inclusive crop improvement research projects, programs, and institutions. Accomplishing this, Tufan stated, begins with the two sustainable development goals of no poverty and zero hunger, which are important for agricultural productivity, and how the effects of hunger and poverty are felt differently by men and women. She noted that globally, women have fewer years of formal education, including agricultural education, and receive less input from agricultural extension services. Women, said Tufan, own a fraction of the arable land that is agriculturally productive and have less access to financials related to agriculture and agricultural technologies, such as improved seeds and fertilizers. As a result, the yield gap between men and women farmers averages 20 to 30 percent (National Geographic, 2014).
What this means, said Tufan, is that women around the world face systematic barriers to addressing malnutrition, hunger, and productivity goals. She noted that the food system does not exist in a vacuum, so social and gender inequalities and social norms play a role in shaping the food system (Figure 2-2).
Tufan addressed how farmers communicate about their needs concerning plant breeding and plant varieties. She cited a 1994 study that reported the presumptions of agricultural researchers of the time believing that men have more information than women and know more than women about bean production (Ferguson, 2009). That assumption and bias carries into how researchers collect data and what they understand about the communities for whom they are breeding new varieties. “What happens at the end of the day,” said Tufan, “is that decisions made around varietal development are informed more by the opinions of men than those of women.” However, while research has shown that accounting for sex and gender differences leads to better science, Tufan found in a recent scoping review of the trait preference studies conducted over the past 40 years that researchers rarely asked the sex of the respondent (Occelli et al., 2024). “This means we are violating this basic tenet of good scientific practice of accounting for sex and gender in agriculture research, especially around trait preferences for varieties,” she said. That means communication from farmers, which helps inform research and breeding programs, is missing an important component: the voice of women.
SOURCES: Presented by Hale Ann Tufan on May 30, 2024, at the workshop on Communication to Bridge the Gap Between Food Production and Nutrition and Health; Njuki et al., 2022; adapted from Brouwer et al., 2020, CC BY.
COMMUNICATING ABOUT EMERGING AGRICULTURAL TECHNOLOGIES AND DISCOVERIES
Paul Kononoff, professor and extension dairy specialist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Dairy Science, provided examples of challenges and successes in communicating science at the Journal. While the journal he leads is peer-reviewed and intended for dairy scientists, he sees a growing need and interest in sharing this information with the public as well as other scientists. One step the journal took in 2022 was to become a Gold Open Access journal, which meant scientists all over the world and the public could access the published information. He even recalled how a dairy producer he visited in Utah thanked him for sharing this science publicly through open access. The downside of this move, Kononoff said, was that authors had to bear increased article charges, and thus shouldered more of the burden of making this information public.
Social media has become an important avenue for the Journal to get the information in its pages out to the public. Kononoff noted that LinkedIn has proven to be valuable for connecting dairy scientists to this information, while X (formerly known as Twitter) and a few other social media sites have generated better engagement with the public. As an example, Kononoff discussed a 2024 Journal of Dairy Science paper that presented a detailed analysis of whole milk powder left over from Ernest Shackelton’s voyage to Antarctica (Bendall et al., 2024). The Journal highlighted the paper on all its social media platforms, and the story generated a lot of interest and uptake, including coverage on a popular science website.2
Several years ago, Dr. Matt Lucy, a former editor-in-chief of the Journal, launched a podcast for which he interviewed authors from the dairy science community who contributed to the Journal. These podcasts, which discuss the science and scientist, have been an excellent avenue for engaging with the public and dairy scientists.
Kononoff presented some examples of how the Journal has translated agricultural research into farming practices. The Journal has issued publications on the nutrient requirements for dairy cattle and on the use of data to power value-driven dairy farming. These communication pieces have proven valuable to people working in the field who are trying to understand what to feed their animals.
The American Dairy Science Association, the Journal’s sponsor, holds Discover Conferences to spark scientific discussion and sharing of ideas that can include sharing of unpublished data with the dairy science community. These conferences also serve as forums for discussing today’s issues and
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2 Available at https://www.popsci.com/science/antarctic-milk-time-capsule/ (accessed June 18, 2024).
what the future of dairy science might hold. The dairy science community, said Kononoff, is also engaged in delivering information to nutritionists, particularly by presenting publications from the Journal at technical meetings such as the Four-State Dairy Nutrition and Management Conference. This conference is a collaborative effort of Iowa State University Extension and Outreach, University of Illinois Extension, University of Minnesota Extension, and University of Wisconsin-Extension. He noted that the American Dairy Science Association’s annual meeting is a place where people interested in applying the science, whether they work for a milk processing company, a feed company, or a pharmaceutical company, can learn about cutting-edge science from journal authors.
On a final note, he listed the Journal’s 10 most highly cited papers from 2020 and 2021, and pointed out that many of them are related to human health and welfare. He said that they are not only highly cited in other publications but are frequently read by the general public. It seems that there is great interest and thirst for “anything that helps people understand a dairy product as it relates to human health,” said Kononoff.
CONVEYING INFORMATION ABOUT FOOD SAFETY TO PROTECT CONSUMERS IN THE FACE OF MISTRUST OF SCIENCE
Mary Ellen Camire, professor of food science and human nutrition at the University of Maine School of Food and Agriculture and editor-in-chief of Comprehensive Reviews in Food Science and Food Safety, discussed milk pasteurization to illustrate how food technologists can convey information about food safety and regulations to the public. When milk pasteurization was introduced in the early 1900s to reduce the number of bacteria that cause milk to spoil, there was a drop in infant mortality among those children who were drinking cow’s milk when their mothers could not nurse them. There was also a large drop in tuberculosis, which at the time was spread by unpasteurized milk. The disadvantage of pasteurization is that it destroys some of the heat-sensitive vitamins, including thiamine and vitamin B6 as well as immunoglobulins and other substances that protect the immune system. It also changes the taste of milk. Despite the public health benefits of pasteurization, raw milk has become popular again and its sale is permitted in some states. Consuming food is an individual activity, explained Camire, and there are people who will only drink unpasteurized milk even after a century of evidence that pasteurization reduces illness and death.
Recently, there have been reports that dairy farm workers were exposed to highly pathogenic avian influenza. It was a shock, said Camire, that avian influenza was transmitted to cows, but fortunately, pasteurization inactivates this influenza virus. In fact, when the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration recently tested nearly 300 types of dairy foods made from pasteurized milk, there was no evidence that active virus was present. That, however, raises the question of how people who drink unpasteurized milk will know whether the milk is contaminated with the influenza virus. “That is something consumers need to be concerned about,” said Camire, who added that salmonella, listeria, and pathogenic variants of E. coli can also be spread by unpasteurized milk. “We do see raw milk or unpasteurized milk available in retail stores in many states and, unfortunately, the number of states is growing,” she said.
Since 2018, the number of food recalls in the United States has been growing. Part of this results from the Food Safety Modernization Act, which created a better way to follow food from the farm to the grocery store and be able to recall it. While the most common reasons for a recall are the unintentional presence of an allergen that was not listed on the food label or contamination with heavy metals, pathogenic organisms in food are a growing concern and something consumers need to know about so as to not consume a contaminated item. The Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) has a global food traceability center that serves as a great resource for information on tracing technologies. Camire noted that IFT makes several advocacy toolkits available free to the public. Topics covered include traceability, blockchain, food ingredients, food processing, and health.
Comprehensive Reviews in Food Science and Food Safety, the journal Camire edits, publishes reviews, issues press releases, and posts on social media that reach food scientists, media personnel, and consumers. The journal is indexed in the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed database to provide information on food science to physicians and other healthcare professionals. “It is important they understand about food safety, the benefits of food for health, and other issues about which their patient may ask questions,” said Camire.
FILLING THE GAPS OF INFORMATION IN AGRICULTURE COMMUNICATIONS
Joe Proudman, associate director for communications at UC Davis Clarity and Leadership for Environmental Awareness and Research (CLEAR) Center, explained that the CLEAR Center focuses on improving sustainability in animal agriculture. “I believe that if we are going to have sustainable solutions adopted throughout animal agriculture, communication is going to have to go hand in hand with research,” said Proudman.
Consumers, said Proudman, are pressuring farmers to implement more sustainable solutions on the farm. They want to know how their food affects the environment. And when it comes to communication about agriculture and sustainability, he stated that it is instructive to know where
people are getting their information from as we set out to develop plans to reach our various audiences.
One of the first things he examined when he came to the CLEAR Center was whether people could get information directly from the farm. While there was a time when people would get firsthand or even secondhand information, today far fewer Americans have relatives who farm and so they are getting third- or fourth-hand information. In addition, because of the demise of U.S. daily newspapers, Americans have lost another core source of credible information. When Proudman searched for newspapers that still have reporters covering agriculture, he found a few newspapers that did, but even those reported on-farm issues infrequently. Some major newspapers had their food writers covering agriculture.
The approach that the CLEAR Center takes, said Proudman, is based on the premise that science and agricultural communicators can fill the existing knowledge gap and discredit inaccurate information. The CLEAR Center uses its website, Google searches, social media, peer-reviewed publications, white papers, and in-person and virtual presentations to dispense information to different audiences. Presentations, he said, are critical to building trust. “It is hard work, but it is the foundation for us establishing trust,” he said. One recent event was a 2023 state-of-the science summit at UC Davis, co-sponsored by the California Department of Food and Agriculture, featuring a collection of experts and decision makers from across the globe discussing enteric methane emissions in livestock. Legislators and regulators used a report the CLEAR Center produced from the summit. This year’s summit had double the attendance of the 2023 gathering.
Google searches—what is carbon sequestration or what is a dairy digester, for example—drive half the traffic to the CLEAR Center’s website, and half of those coming to the website are first-time visitors, Proudman explained. Visitors spend a great deal of time reading topical explainers, which he said are tailored to leverage search engine optimization algorithms. These explainers are long, often over 1,000 words, and yet people are spending as long as six minutes—an eternity on the internet—reading them. The CLEAR Center website has a blog that offers perspective and context to animal agriculture topics, much like opinion pieces and editorials, that tend to be more provocative to catch the online reader’s eye. The website also has news-style articles highlighting research and CLEAR Center news and videos to appeal to younger audiences and take advantage of YouTube, the internet’s second largest search engine. “If you are not producing and replicating your content in video format, you are missing out on a whole other area of audiences,” said Proudman, who added that graduate students are a “huge driver of engagement for us on our videos.”
The CLEAR Center’s social media specialist helps disseminate the Center’s content, in part by teaming with social media influencers, such as
Natalie Kovarik, a beef producer with a large beef production audience. Another influencer, Jess Pryles, is a meat scientist known as the Hardcore Carnivore and owner of her own barbeque brand. Although the CLEAR Center does not currently have paid partnerships with influencers, they do promote posts on social media. “We are not afraid to do some paid promotions when necessary because that is how the [search engine] algorithm works these days,” said Proudman.
UNDERSTANDING THE CONSUMER PERSPECTIVE
Milton Stokes, senior director at the International Food Information Council, said there has never been so much interest in how food happens and where it comes from, but there has also never been a time when so few people are involved in farming. “This big disconnect presents a lot of challenges, and it fuels inaccurate information,” said Stokes. “This creates a significant opportunity to practice better communication and provide consumers with credible information to help them make informed food decisions.”
Stokes’ nonprofit consumer research and science communication organization focuses on understanding the consumer perspective and preferences about food, food production, nutrition, and health. He noted that his organization recently released their 2024 Food and Health Survey report on the perceptions, beliefs, and behaviors that influence the decisions that consumers make about food and beverages (IFIC, 2024).
He noted that during his time working on communication at the intersection of food, agriculture, and nutrition, he connected dietitians and other healthcare professionals to farmers and agriculture scientists to help them understand the challenges farmers face and the tools farmers need to meet those challenges. He and his colleagues worked with farmers to create on-farm experiences as opportunities for people from various disciplines to learn from one another. “This work taught us that no single profession or no single discipline is truly an expert on everything in the supply chain,” said Stokes.
Stokes said that he got started in agricultural communication when his students asked him questions about GMO labeling. He contacted an agriculture company, received the information he needed, and his questions answered and ended up with a new job. Today, as an agricultural communicator, one of his focuses is on understanding where consumers are getting their incorrect information and how that relates to their values. “Many times, consumers are not asking questions about science. Instead, they are more concerned about values,” said Stokes. For example, GMOs may be one of the most studied innovations in the food supply, but people are not always interested in factual information, particularly if they have heard more negative, fear-oriented information.
His organization has studied how consumers perceive social media. For Americans who say they saw food and nutrition information on social media, the most popular platforms are Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, with LinkedIn being the least popular. However, when asked about where their trust level is regarding the content they have seen on these platforms, Facebook and X conveyed the least trusted content, while LinkedIn’s content was the most trusted. Regarding the information itself, 68 percent of those surveyed agreed there is conflicting information about what to eat and what to avoid in their diet.
Stokes commented that as the field considers communicating online, it might want to approach social media with more curiosity and remember that many social media users are watching the agriculture and food enterprise. “They are watching how we communicate. They are watching how we engage,” he said. “I think that is just as important, if not more important, than what we actually say.” Often, he noted, what consumers hear about agriculture comes from a smaller group of people trying to speak on behalf of all consumers, but his organization tries to learn what consumers really think. He and his colleagues design educational programming that helps dietitians, other healthcare professionals, and communicators more broadly align better with consumers.
DISCUSSION
Session moderator Payam Vahmani, assistant professor at UC Davis and a member of the workshop organizing committee, asked the panelists if consumers view genetic modification of plant-based and animal-based foods equally. Van Eenennaam said one difference is that nobody worries about the welfare of a genetically modified plant, whereas that is not the case for animals. She would argue, though, that the entire debate about GMO plants has mostly precluded the use of the technology in animals.
Vahmani then introduced the topic of the future of open-access journals and preprint servers. Both Kononoff and Camire noted that the main challenge of open access is the cost burden on authors, particularly for researchers who are at universities that are facing shrinking budgets or researchers in other countries with emerging economies. Another issue, Kononoff raised, is the increase in for-profit publishers that are challenging the traditional society-based journals. He further noted that the use of publicly available preprint servers is rising, however, the credibility of these shared findings has not stood the rigor of the peer-review process.
After this discussion, Vahmani asked the panelists if there are enough collaborations between healthcare providers, who are relatively trusted messengers, and agricultural producers and researchers to educate healthcare providers about the benefits of certain agricultural practices or prod-
ucts. Tufan replied with an example of how to merge these communities. In East Africa, a project on vitamin-A enriched, orange-fleshed sweet potatoes coupled prenatal care visits with disseminating these varieties. This project, she said, was successful, both in terms of improving nutrition through biofortified varieties but also in getting women to come in for prenatal care.
Stokes noted that U.S. commodity boards offer opportunities for dietitians and other healthcare professionals to experience agricultural operations in person and talk to farmers and ranchers. Acknowledging that providing this opportunity for everyone is not possible, Stokes recommended two documentaries—Food Evolution and Farmland—and following Jennie Schmidt, a dietitian-farmer, on social media. For credible information about pesticides, he recommended turning to the Alliance for Food and Farming, which provides resources for healthcare professionals to pass along to their patients.
For the final question, Vahmani asked the panelists to talk about approaches that can be used to foster communication among disciplines. Stokes replied that as a nutrition professional and communicator, he believes that neither nutritionists nor agriculturalists should make unilateral decisions about each other’s fields. “We should get together and think it through, debate it, discuss it, and then create our policies and positions together,” said Stokes. “To me, that is what success would look like.” Tufan added that the most important aspect is to respect each other’s opinions and be aware of power asymmetries between disciplines. Proudman said he worries that academics can be reluctant to engage with someone from another discipline because it is outside their expertise, which can create barriers to collaboration. His approach is to simply acknowledge this to the disciplinary expert but continue being an active participant in the conversation. Even without direct expertise, there is still much value from other disciplines that can inform discussions.
