Last week Jonathan Robins enlightened me on the history of fats. I did not know there was so much politics behind fats and foods. For example, tropical fruit fats were attacked as being unhealthy because the US produced more traditional fats such as corn and soybean. In turned, we turned to the usage of trans fat which are the most unhealthy of any fat.

This had made me question the politics that into our foods. For example, we spend billions of dollars every year on subsidies for crops like corn and soybeans in order to feed our livestocks and flood grocery store shelves with these products. This has also encouraged the proliferation of GMO foods because they provide a better yield and are cheaper to produce. Because it’s in the agriculture industry’s best industry, there is very little regulation on these foods. In California, a referendum to label GMO ingredients on food labels was defeated after interests groups spent a large amount of money to campaign against the measure.

We should all pay attention to the politics behind our foods and be wary not to be swayed into making unhealthy food choices in the interest of larger profit motives.

When considering what food products are the best to buy (disregarding price or taste), the first thing I think to ask is, “Well, which is the healthiest?”  From vitamin supplements to artificial sweeteners to crazy fad diets, health benefits and drawbacks of foods are constantly present in the consumer psyche (obesity epidemic notwithstanding).  However, with regard to fats, the answer to this question is apparently none of them.  There are, of course, the chemical categories of fats that we all know so well (saturated, unsaturated, trans), but within those categories there is no clear, well-supported health difference.  To your body, palm oil is no different from canola oil is no different from soybean oil.  Many of the issues that Jonathan Robins brought up in his talk stem from the fact that fats are somewhat a somewhat unique class of food products in that they are infinitely substitutable.

This has the interesting effect that all fats, especially similar fats like oils, compete in one market.  This opens doors to all kinds of fascinating intrigue around smear campaigns, government lobbying, subsidizations, etc.  Much of the world uses palm oil heavily, as the oil palm produces oil extremely efficiently and relatively cheaply.  Soybean oil maintains a strong hold in the US because it can be grown here, so our government subsidizes it.  The soybean industry also ran enormous decades-long campaigns a few decades ago claiming palm and coconut oil were hazardous to health.  The more well-defined differences between different oil products, however, are found in the places they are grown and their environmental impact.

After health, I might consider whether a product is locally produced or fair trade.  Before this talk though, it would have never occurred to me to consider the efficiency and habitat of the plants that the products come from.  Of course I’m aware that deforestation is a problem, but I’ve never tried to specifically weigh one crop against another in the grocery store.

Oil palms are 2 times more efficient at producing fat than coconuts, and 8 times more than soybeans, so that’s less total area of land required.  However, the land used is mostly in sensitive tropical forests in southeast Asia that have high biodiversity.  The first google search result for “palm oil” is a site entitled “Say no to Palm Oil”, which lambasts the industry particularly for deforestation of ecologically unique and sensitive habitats in Indonesia and Malaysia.  Soybeans though, are grown in large quantities in the Amazon.  Can you choose between 8 acres of the Amazon vs. 1 acre of Borneo?  Before the global shift to vegetable fats around World War II, we used animal fats — should we start hunting whales again?  What about cows and pigs?  Livestock farming takes even more crops and water than plant farming to produce the same amount of food, and its responsible for huge quantities of greenhouse gas emissions.  Soybeans produce animal feed as a byproduct — does that reduce the amount of land we need to feed the animals of the growing livestock industry, or does that actively contribute to the growth of said environmentally harmful industry?

There are seemingly infinite facets of the issue to take into account, and no clear way to weigh them against one another.  Nor is there any obvious way to just reduce fat usage overall.  The world population that needs to be fed is only ever growing.  Fats aren’t even only used in foods, they’re also used in production of plastics, detergents, fuels, adhesives, and any number of products used in everyday life.  Apparently we do have artificial fat substitutes, but I can only seem to find information about compounds that are designed to mimic fat without the health detriments, as opposed to exactly replacing natural fats (much less replacing fats with the intention or potential for large scale implementation).  Could the future lie in synthetic fats, just as enthusiasm is growing for lab-grown meat?  I’m sure someone out there with more knowledge than me is either working on it, or could say why not.

I really enjoyed Dr. Robins’ talk last week and all the fascinating anecdotes and facts he brought into the room with him. We live in an age where we’re often told “sugar is the new fat”, and that fats, after all, might be good for you, despite what we’ve been preached since elementary school. Robins is extremely skeptical of any attempt to label anything as “the new fat”, and he criticizes the capriciousness of trends in health discourse.

In addition, Robins informed the crowd that whale oil had been commonly used as late as the 1960s, a stunning observation when one considers who anachronistic we view that practice. He also noted how the rise in vegetable oils has not hurt demand for animal fats, but actually increased them. For example, when soybeans are harvested for oil, that still leaves their solid content largely intact. This then becomes an easy, cheap source of feed for livestock, increasing production of meat. Therefore, you have a situation where this acts as a positive feedback loop.

Considering the gross amount of resources fats cost us and how much land (due to livestock and crop production) they use up, I wonder what role government regulation could play in managing them. Perhaps there should be a tax for fat production, instead of subsidies for this industry (as is done excessively for ethanol, for example)? I am no fan of the nanny state, but this may be needed to make us reconsider the role fats play in our lives.

This week’s Rose Cafe was a really interesting and insightful talk about the history and science of fats. Fats and nutrition have become such a popular topic of interest and controversy, with the “facts” changing all the time, confusing over “good” fats and “bad” fats, and a rising obesity epidemic. Therefore, this was a really interesting and relevant talk.

One topic discussed which I found really interesting was the topic of palm oil plantations and deforestation in certain places in South East Asia for the production of palm trees. I was particularly interested in this because I grew up in Singapore which is in South east Asia and is next to countries like Malaysia and Indonesia which produce a lot of palm oil. An aspect that wasn’t discussed regarding this issue of palm oil production is the health effects of the deforestation process. In Singapore, there would be a huge amounts of haze caused by the burning of forests in Indonesia for palm oil which can be a huge health risk- to the point where the government actually gave out free face masks to protect from pollution!

In conclusion, the topic of fats and nutrition is very complex and interesting and there are are many aspects to the issue.

Before this talk, I did not know anything about the history of fats. I knew from a class that I had taken that everyone uses nutrients differently and that depending on genetics, some people digest fats better than others. I was surprised to hear that there had been a large backlash against plant fats when they were first introduced. Now, it is rare that people use anything except plant oils and fats. It was interesting to hear about how the sale of different products was also affected by this.

Overall, this talk was interesting as it allowed me to understand the controversy behind different kinds of fats and the implications that this can have. For example, some people believe that just because one fat may be healthier than another fat, that they should consume mass quantities of it. However, scientists frequently disagree about what fats are good, bad or simply mediocre.

Last week, I attended the Rose Cafe where Jonathan Robin discussed fats. He described a long history of the different perspectives and cultural angles of fat. For something that is such a common thing, it was interesting to hear about the different perspectives, not only from cultural angles, but from a historical perspective and the trends in fat consumption that were assumed to occur, and in some case did not. An example of this from the talk was that chemists thought animal fats would be replaced by other sources of fat, yet that did not occur. We discussed many types of fats, like trans fat and the environmental impacts of these fats, which I think is often overlooked. When discussing fats in daily life, I typically only think of the percentages on the back of a food product on a nutrition fact label, rather than where these fats are actually coming from, and I think I need to be more cognizant of this, as it is important to realize the impact of the food industry. It can be hard, since some of the environmental destruction is not occurring in our own country, but it is an important thing to keep in mind.

The talk also discussed the role of the FDA in regulating these fats. While I do think some regulation may be beneficial, it can be somewhat misleading. For instance, he discussed the fact that although trans fat has been pretty much eliminated, less than a gram of trans fat is equated to zero in the FDA’s mind, even though there may actually be a minuscule amount of trans fat in that product. This surprised me, and made me want to find out more about nutrition and think about my food more often before I eat it. In high school and freshman year of college, I essentially ate whatever I wanted and thought nothing of it. I have come to realize that eating ice cream every day and eating fried food may taste good, but I need to start eating healthy as my metabolism slows down and before my eating habits catch up to me. While this took me a while to realize, I am glad that I have, and this talk really illuminated the importance of my lifestyle change.

At the Rose Cafe, Professor Jonathan Robins led a pretty interesting discussion on the many aspects of fats. Prior to coming to the talk, I was not particularly knowledgeable about the subject of fats. I was aware of the fact that small amount of fat should be consumed, and did not really know much about the healthiness of the various fat sources. And since the professor is a nutrition historian, he was able to share information regarding the narratives and discussions surrounding fats in both today’s world and in the past. One interesting thing he shared was the fact that consensus about what types of fat sources are most healthy has changed pretty significantly over the years. In fact, just a few decades ago, there was a remarkably negative connotation surrounding fats, and consensus then was that fat intake should be extremely minimal. There has certainly been a shift away from this belief in today’s world, and perhaps there will another shift in the future. For example, coconut oil seems to be a highly popular source of fat these days, but perhaps another fat source will be lauded and consumed more heavily in the future.

I also found the “political economy” of fats to be quite fascinating. The professor discussed how oil palm trees are actually remarkably efficient at producing palm oil, and thus is a remarkably large part of the economy of several nations, such as Malaysia. However, there are significant concerns about the impact that aggressive production of palm in these countries has on the environment, and as a result, there has been significant debate on the subject. Thus, something that we almost consume for granted on a daily basis possesses complexities that affect the environment and economy of several countries heavily. All in all, I realized after the discussion that the subject of fats actually possesses numerous complicated layers, including areas like nutritional health, production efficiency, etc. I’ll definitely try to take a closer look at all the various oil types and brands the next time I visit the supermarket!

Last week, Dr. Jonathan Robins spoke to the Rose Scholars about the change in fat and oil productions occurring in the various prepackaged foods. He focuses a great deal on the many affects plant based oils have on the human body and the production that goes into each type. It was interesting to hear that many years ago, trans fats were considered to be an abomination in foods, so it was replaced with saturated fats. Now saturated fats are seen as the devil and have been replaced with trans fats. In reality, both of these altered forms of fats do more harm than good in the body in how they break down and are processed. It brings me comfort to know that in the near future, it will be illegal to have either trans or saturated fats in foods, especially since prepackaged foods are nearly unavoidable to have in one’s life.

As a college student, I must admit that my intake of packaged foods has increased a fair amount. Though I am blessed enough to live on West Campus and attend Cornell University which offers the number one dining hall food experience in the country, I still indulge and need a quick protein bar, bag of popcorn, or ice cream every now and again. It would be a perfect world if eating healthy food was both readily accessible and economically friendly, but the truth is that neither are true. In order to eat a fresh salad, one must be willing to walk to a cafe and pay ten dollars, which on a part-time job’s salary can be seen as too expensive in comparison to a two dollar protein bar. Also, it is faster to consume a bag of chips versus sitting down and eating a good plate of chicken, grains, and vegetables.

As a dancer, I understand the importance of having a good balance of protein and nutrients in daily meals, but it is so easy to get carried away with how how congested a schedule can become. By finding better fat and oil replacements and enforcing their use when making prepackaged foods, society will benefit greatly from the healthy options that are available to them. Also, I really appreciated Dr. Robins’s comment that fats are good for you. It is very easy to think that by eliminating fats from one’s diet completely they will feel and look healthier. Quite the opposite, without at least 30% of fats in one’s daily food intake, one can feel week, delirious, and be in a bad mood. I learned a lot by having Dr. Robin’s come and speak with us on Wednesday and more importantly it allowed me to look at my diet in a whole new way.

I went to a Rose Cafe where I learned about fats. One thing that I found really interested is that one of the reasons that some fats are preferred over others is because governments promote different kinds of fats. For example, the Malaysian government promotes the consumption of palm oil both domestically and abroad because they are one of the world’s largest producers of palm oil. Countries like Malaysia spend a lot of time and money to get us to consume, for example, palm oil over canola. Due to these different viewpoints, there is a lot of conflicting research about which types of fats are good, and just because something is considered to be healthy now, does not mean that it will remain that way in the future.

Before going to this talk I really didn’t think about the different kinds of fats. I tried to avoid saturated and trans fat, but besides that I really didn’t consider where I was getting my fat from. I think that because there is a lot of conflicting information out there, it’s hard to determine conclusively whether one kind of fat is better than another. I believe that the best thing to do might be to eat the different kinds of fats in moderation.

Wednesday night at Rose Cafe, Professor Robins lead a discussion about fats. I half-expected a nutrition talk on good fats versus bad fats, but was pleasantly surprised that our discussion centered on something completely different, that is, the history of fats and the ecological implications of their use. What stood out to me was how various types of fats gained and lost popularity over time as a function of evolving popular opinion surrounding nutrition standards, largely driven by company politics and profit. For example, saturated fats were invalidated in the past as companies switched to using trans fats, and now the standard is that trans fats are “bad” and, coconut oil, a saturated fat, is even touted as a “health” food. Palm oil, due to its versatility, is making a comeback as well.

When a student asked Professor Robbins which fats were “good” and “bad”, he was hesitant to apply this label on any one fat, as opposed to what the media would like to ingrain in your mind, “saturated, unsaturated, trans, monounsaturated, omega-3s..” To Professor Robbins, there are only ecologically good fats and ecologically bad fats. Plant-based fats are probably a more sustainable replacement for animal-based fats, yet large-scale production requires large amounts of land, therefore contributing to deforestation. However, some plant-based fats are much more efficient to produce: palm tree oil yields much more oil per acre, meaning a lower cost of labor and land, compared to coconut oil.

When I think about fats, the production and global supply chain that brought the fat to be in my food, and the implications of their use on the environment is not the first thing to come to mind. Although my consumption habits will probably not change by much, I do appreciate how now I am more conscious about the role fats I consume on a daily basis play in the global market.

I participated in this week’s Rose Cafe in a discussion about fats with Professor Robins. Before this talk, I would not think about fat in ways other than weight gains and how I struggle to reduce fat consumption every day. However, Professor Robins not only informs us about the nutritional effects of fat but also makes us think about the politics that go beyond the fat production chains.

While I learned a lot about the health benefits of different chemicals in different types of fats (e.g. unsaturated fats are typically in liquid forms and saturated fats are in solid forms in low temperature), what interests me the most is how interdependent fat is as a commodity. On the one hand, the production of fat concerns with environmental issues, such as soil degradation. Professor Robins mentioned that there is no ecologically good or bad fat: while plant-based fat decreases the use of animal produced fat, vegetable oils increase deforestation. Specifically, there is a debate about substituting soybean oil produced in Brazil, which decreases the diversity of plantation in the Amazons, with palm tree oil produced in Malaysia, which supposedly leads to less deforestation. On the other hand, government plays a big role in the international fat market so as to regulate the price of different types of fat, rather than using economic approaches to regulate the health issues related to fat consumption. Professor Robins talked about that the U.S. government encourages domestically produced fats while disincentivizes imported fats. The intention of this policy is to help domestic fats producers. Professor Robins might not discuss too much about this, but from what I learned in my International Trade and Finance class, the consequences of such policy is complicated and far-reaching. For one, decreasing fat import undermines the competitiveness of the international fat market and reduces consumer choices through increasing the price of foreign fat products, thereby decreasing consumer welfares. Secondly, while fat producers at home are protected, the net welfare of the country as a whole might decrease as a result of retaliation by other countries that export fat to the U.S.–by decreasing U.S. imports in other industries. Moreover, increasing production of plant-based fat at home might speed up the process of deforestation, decreasing social welfare of the whole country. In short, there is no clear right or wrong in such trade policy but demonstrates the dynamics of politics behind various price tags and brands of fats.

This talk has really made me think about fat beyond the realm of body weight and see how much ecological and political debates have taken place before consuming the fat on my plate.

Professor Jonathan Robins provided a very insightful and knowledgeable study of the role of fat in the food industry with some rather comprehensive examples regarding how specific fats are made in certain parts of the world and comparing the different environmental conditions and social-political pressures that control the type of fat in the marketplace, expanding on the role of federal regulations as well. It was very interesting to learn the historical perspective on nutritional science through which Professor Robins was able to clarify and expand on certain key issues, such as the politics of fat substitutability, with concise examples (one of which was that whale oil was claimed extinct in 1920s but then revived in the 40s-50s and before it left the industry in the 60s due to the vegetable fat industry ambitiously attempting to put the animal fat industry out of business). The rather free-form Q&A session catered to a discussion on the types of fats we eat and whether they can be identified as good or bad. Of course, take everything in moderation was the final word on that matter. However, what intrigued me most was rather the economic depth to these choices and that the misconceptions that we have about fats where we so easily categorize them as good or bad are influenced by the government’s fluctuating role in which fats are made available on the market and which are not. Professor Robins really opened a new platform for discussion about food and our ways of consumption.

If you had asked me before tonight if anyone spends their career researching the history of fat I would have probably said no. I would have been wrong because today’s Rose Café speaker does in fact study the history of fats as a career. While the speaker talked eloquently about the history of fat my biggest take away from the talk was that some people make a living studying the history of fat. This got me thinking about all the other interesting a niche career paths that people take. Most of my neighbors, family members, and friends have more typical careers such a lawyer, doctor, teacher, psychologic, engineer, accountant, and more. I rarely run across a person whose job is so out of the ordinary that it makes me rethink the breadth of possible career choices; historian of fats happens to be one of the careers that made me rethink the breadth of possible career choices.

I have met a few people with out-of-the-ordinary career choices. For example, one of my neighbors was worked for a TV channel and his job involved a large amount of watching TV. When I was in middle school, this sounded like a pretty cool job to me. I have also met people whose job is to test a popular video game. When I heard, this I imagined them playing the game in big reclining chairs for eight hours a day. However, they actually test the game programmatically without playing it too much.

Perhaps I rarely meet people with unique jobs because people explain their jobs in relatively plain terms even if their work is quite distinctive. For example, I wonder if tonight’s speaker would introduce himself as a historian rather than as a historian focusing on fats.

What I found most interesting about Jonathan Robins’ talk was his emphasis on the interrelationship between political motive, economic gain, and public perceptions about the nutritional value of a given product or ingredient. While I realized that new scientific findings continually change what we believe to be the cure-all superfood, the healthy but delicious substitute, or the deadly downfall, I did not realize that fats and other ingredients that were previously discredited or found to be harmful have actually made a comeback and become widely accepted yet again. What is more, I really had no idea how deeply public perceptions about healthy eating and go-to ingredients were the product of political and economic agendas. On the contrary, it seems as though society often takes the newest claims about which foods are healthy and which ones are not as the most recent and thus most accurate empirically supported knowledge. I think that especially when it comes to health, people assume that the knowledge reported or the newest ingredient being advocated is disseminated with altruistic intentions to improve society’s health. At times, altruistic intentions could certainly be present, but after listening to Robins explain how surges or resurgences of advocacy for a certain type of fat or oil often depend on which is cheapest or easiest to produce, I will definitely be taking Robins’ advice to be skeptical about the latest claims I encounter.

In fact, Robins’ advice to be skeptical about the sources of our knowledge is useful guidance not just when choosing which fat or oil to use but in all aspects of life. This advice illuminates the larger reality that knowledge is put forth by a particular person or group for a particular purpose. Thinking about from where a particular piece of information is coming, considering who is advancing this information, and untangling what interests this source has in spreading this information can help us evaluate the validity of a certain claim. In a world where a multitude of new scientific reports are coming out everyday and “alternative facts” are fronting as truth, the ability to the dissect the continuous stream of knowledge with which we meet is a super useful skill.

Tonight at the Rose Cafe, Jonathan Robins, a historian who  specializes in the history of fats, talked about the technology of fat production, environmental concerns related to its production, and health concerns that have changed the types of fat we consume over the past 150 years.

In the late 1980s, palm oil was labelled as a bad fat because it is saturated and was associated with heart disease, and many companies switched to using trans fats in their products. However, not long after, in the 1990s, the recommendations changed. It was discovered that trans fats, which are artificially produced by hydrogenating liquid unsaturated fats to get the consistency desired for many baked goods, were actually more harmful than the palm oil they replaced.  There has been a transition back to palm oil in recent years. This is just one example of how opinions on nutrition have changed over time. New discoveries are made that invalidate previous findings and shift nutritional recommendations.

I asked Dr. Robins to talk about the best fat from an ecological standpoint, since, given the changing views on the nutrition of fats, he was not able to recommend the healthiest fat. This question also has no clear answer. For example, palm oil is made in Malaysia and one acre of oil palms can produce the equivalent amount of oil to 10 acres of coconut palm trees in South America. Oil palm growers argue that because oil palms are so efficient at making oil, they are better for the environment because less land has to be clear cut. But the question arises –  is all land equal? Is clearcutting one acre of Malaysian land really better than clearcutting 10 acres of South American land?  Many Malaysian rainforest sit on top of peat bogs, known to store large amounts of carbon, which complicates the comparison.

Fat is much more complicated than a number on a nutrition label and governments, health researchers, and environmentalists all have competing opinions on which fats we should be consuming.