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Tag: people’s attention

  • ‘Plant-Based’ Peanut Butter … And Shampoo … And Booze

    ‘Plant-Based’ Peanut Butter … And Shampoo … And Booze

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    Several years ago, I made a New Year’s resolution to eat more plants. Doing so, I assumed, would be better for my health, for animals, and for the planet. Besides, it would be easy: The rise of plant-based meat alternatives, offered by companies such as Impossible Meat and Beyond Meat, made it a breeze to eat less meat but still satisfy the occasional carnivorous urge. I could have my burger and eat it too.

    Or so I thought. Meat alternatives, I found, cost more than their conventional counterparts and are made with complicated ingredients that raise doubts about their healthiness—and even then, taste just okay. Other people have had similar concerns, part of the reason the popularity of those products has declined in recent years to such a degree that Beyond Meat is reportedly now in “survival mode.” But beyond the meat aisle, the “plant-based” label lives on in virtually every food product imaginable: instant ramen, boxed mac and cheese, Kraft singles, KitKat bars, even queso. You can now buy plant-based peanut butter. You can also wash your hair with plant-based shampoo and puff on a plant-based vape.

    Queso made from cauliflower instead of milk is correctly described as plant-based. But if peanut butter is vegan to begin with, then what is the point of the label? And who asked for plant-based liquor? On packaging and ad copy, plant-based has been applied to so many items—including foods that are highly processed, or those that have never contained animal ingredients—that it has gotten “diluted to nothing,” Mark Lang, a marketing professor at the University of Tampa who studies food, told me.

    Technically, plant-based does have a clear definition. The Cornell University biochemist Thomas Colin Campbell is often credited for coining the term in the 1980s as a neutral, less fraught descriptor for diets considered “vegan” or “vegetarian.” That is what made plant-based a popular term for companies eager to sell their meat replacements to a wide range of eaters. The Plant Based Foods Association uses essentially the same criteria—foods made from plants that do not contain animal products—to determine which products can bear its “Certified Plant Based Seal.”

    Some companies describe products as “plant-based,” however, even if they don’t meet these criteria. Items sold as such include foods that have always been vegan, such as prepackaged jackfruit, and those mixed in with some animal products, such as Wahlburgers’ “Flex Blend” patties. But even a product that is properly described as “plant-based” might mean different things to different people, because there is no one reason to try and avoid the consequences of animal rearing and consumption. Health is the leading one, followed by environmental and ethical concerns, Emma Ignaszewski, the associate director of industry intelligence and initiatives at the Good Food Institute, told me.

    The label’s vagueness has been a marketer’s dream, creating an enormous opportunity to capitalize on the perceived virtuousness and healthiness of eating plant-based. Brands use the “plant-based” label to “draw people’s attention to the aggregate goodness of a particular product” and simultaneously “deflect attention” from any less appealing attributes, Joe Árvai, a professor of psychology and biological sciences at the University of Southern California, told me. Some, like coconut water, are relatively good for you; others, like booze, are probably not. And their environmental benefits remain murky: Using fewer animal ingredients generally decreases emissions, but the climate impacts are not always straightforward.

    In this way, the evolution of plant-based mirrors that of organic or gluten-free. These terms have specific meanings that are legitimately useful for helping people make choices about their food, but they have been overused into oblivion. You can now buy organic marijuana and gluten-free water along with your plant-based energy drinks. With multiple labels, including gluten-free, plant-based, GMO-free, Earth-friendly, and Fair Trade, “some products look like a NASCAR” vehicle, Lang said. “You’re just putting buttons all over the place, trying to get my attention.”

    We may have already hit peak “plant-based.” According to a recent survey from the Food Industry Association, there is substantial confusion about what the label means—and that could be discouraging people from buying plant-based products. Some are now outright skeptical of the label. A 2023 study co-authored by Árvai suggested that people are less likely to go for foods described as “plant-based” (or “vegan”) compared with those called “healthy” or “sustainable.” One reason may be negative associations with plant-based meat alternatives, which are seen as “artificial” because of their ultra-processed nature, co-author Patrycja Sleboda, an assistant professor of psychology at Baruch College, City University of New York, told me.

    Another may be that consumers are not sure whether “plant-based” foods are healthy. Americans may respond better when the actual benefits of the food are highlighted, she said. Similarly, market research conducted by Meati, a company that sells meat alternatives made of mushrooms, found that the “plant-based” label, applied to food, signaled “bad eating experience, bad flavor, bad texture, poor nutrition, too many ingredients, and overprocessing,” Christina Ra, Meati’s vice president of marketing and communications, told me.

    Some good may still come out of the messiness of “plant-based” everything. Meati deliberately avoids the label altogether, opting instead to highlight the contents of its products (“95 percent mushroom root”). A recent Whole Foods report predicted that in 2024, consumers will want to “put the ‘plant’ back in ‘plant-based’” by replacing “complex meat alternatives” with recognizable ingredients such as walnuts and legumes. In a particular literal interpretation of this prediction, the company Actual Veggies sells a greens-and-grains patty called “The Actual Green Burger.” And some milk alternatives are also now skipping “plant-based” and simplifying their ingredient lists to just two items (nuts and water).

    Shoppers just want to know what’s in their food without having to think too hard about it. Plant-based hasn’t helped with that. Even Campbell, after he coined the term, acknowledged that it was a limiting, potentially misleading phrase that left too much room for unhealthy ingredients, such as sugar and flour. Perhaps shoppers’ exasperation with the vagueness of “plant-based” eating may eventually lead brands to promote more plant-based eating: that is, just eating plants.

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    Yasmin Tayag

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  • The Coronavirus-Naming Free-for-All

    The Coronavirus-Naming Free-for-All

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    These days, it’s a real headache to keep tabs on the coronavirus’s ever-shifting subvariants. BA.2, BA.4, and BA.5, three Omicron permutations that rose to prominence last year, were confusing enough. Now, in addition to those, we have to deal with BQ.1.1, BF.7, B.5.2.6, and XBB.1.5, the version of Omicron currently featuring in concerned headlines. Recently, things have also gotten considerably stranger. Alongside the strings of letters and numbers, several nicknames for these subvariants have started to gain traction online. Where once we had Alpha and Delta and Omicron, we now have Basilisk, Minotaur, and Hippogryph. Some people have been referring to XBB.1.5 simply as “the Kraken.” A list compiled on Twitter reads less like an inventory of variants than like the directory of a mythological zoo.

    The nicknames are not official. They were coined not by the World Health Organization but by an informal group of scientists on Twitter who believe Omicron’s many rotating varieties deserve more widespread conversation. The names have, to an extent, caught on: Kraken has already made its way from Twitter to a number of major news sites, including Bloomberg and The New York Times. Unofficial epithets have come and gone throughout the pandemic—remember “stealth Omicron” and the “Frankenstein variant”?—but these new ones are on another level of weirdness. And not everyone’s a fan.

    The names associated with the coronavirus have been a fraught conversation since the pandemic’s earliest days, as scientists and public-health figures have tried to use terms that are comprehensible and hold people’s attention but that also avoid pitfalls of inaccuracy, fear-mongering, or xenophobia and racism (see: Donald Trump referring to the coronavirus as “the Chinese virus” and “kung flu”). The official names for variants and subvariants—names such as SARS-CoV-2 B.1.1.7—come from the Pango naming system, which was fashioned by evolutionary biologists in the early months of the pandemic to standardize variant-naming practices. As baffling as they can seem, they follow a clear logic: Under the system, B refers to a particular COVID lineage, B.1 refers to the sublineage of B lineage, B.1.1 refers to the first sublineage of the B.1 sublineage, and so on. When the names get too long, a letter replaces a string of numbers—B.1.1.529.1, for example, becomes BA.1.

    These official names do not exactly roll off the tongue or stick in the memory, which became a problem when new variants of concern started to arise and the world began groping for ways to talk about them. In May 2021, the WHO instituted its now-familiar Greek-letter naming system to stamp out the geographic associations that were gaining prominence at the time. B.1.1.7, B.1.351, and B.1.617—which were being referred to respectively as the U.K. variant, the South African variant, and the Indian variant—became Alpha, Beta, and Delta. But then, alas, came Omicron. Rather than giving way to yet another new Greek-letter variant, Omicron has spent more than a year branching into sublineages, and sublineages of sublineages. As a result, the nomenclature has devolved back into alphanumeric incomprehensibility. Seven different Omicron sublineages now account for at least 2 percent of all infections, and none accounts for more than about 40 percent (though XBB.1.5 is threatening to overwhelm its competitors).

    It’s great news that the ways in which the coronavirus has been mutating recently haven’t been significant enough to produce a whole new, widespread, and possibly far more worrisome version of itself that the world has to contend with. But it also makes talking about the virus much more annoying. Enter T. Ryan Gregory, an evolutionary biologist at Canada’s University of Guelph who is one of the leaders of a small, informal group of scientists that have taken it upon themselves to name the many subvariants that the WHO does not deem worthy of a new Greek letter. The names—Hydra, Cerberus, Centaurus—originated on Twitter, where Gregory compiled them into a list.

    Their value, Gregory told me, is that they fill the space in between the Greek and Pango systems, allowing people to discuss the many current Omicron variants that do not justify a new Greek letter but are still, perhaps, of interest. You can think of it in the same way we do animal taxonomy, he said. Calling a variant Omicron, like calling an animal a mammal, is not particularly descriptive. Calling a variant by its Pango name, like calling an animal by its Latinate species designation, is highly descriptive but a bit unwieldy in common parlance. When we speak of farm animals that moo and produce milk, we speak not of mammals or of Bos taurus but of cows. And so BA.2.3.20 became Basilisk.

    To decide whether a new lineage deserves its own name, Gregory told me, he and his colleagues consider both evolutionary factors (how different is this lineage from its predecessors, and how concerning are its mutations?) and epidemiological factors (how much havoc is this lineage wreaking in the population?). They’re trying to make the process more formal, but Gregory would prefer that the WHO take over and standardize the process.

    That, however, is unlikely to happen. When I asked about this, Tarik Jasarevic, a WHO spokesperson, told me that the organization is aware of the unofficial names but that, for the moment, they’re not necessary. “Virologists and other scientists are monitoring these variants, but the public doesn’t need to distinguish between these Omicron subvariants in order to better understand their risk or the measures they need to take to protect themselves,” he said. The WHO’s position, in other words, is that the differences between one Omicron subvariant and another simply haven’t mattered much in any practical sense, because they shouldn’t have any effect on our behavior. No matter the sublineage, vaccines and boosters still offer the best protection available. Masks still work. Guidance on testing and isolation, too, is the same across the board. “If there is a new variant that requires public communication and discourse,” Jasarevic told me, “it would be designated a new variant of concern and assigned a new label.”

    The WHO isn’t alone in objecting. For Stephen Goldstein, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Utah, the new names are not just unnecessary but potentially harmful. “It’s absolutely crazy that we’re having random people on Twitter name variants,” he told me. For Goldstein, dressing up each new subvariant with an ominous monster name overplays the differences between the mutations and feeds into the panic that comes every time the coronavirus shifts form. In this view, distinguishing one Omicron sublineage from another is less like distinguishing a wolf from a cow and more like distinguishing a white-footed mouse from a deer mouse: important to a rodentologist but not really to anyone else. To go as far as naming lineages after terrifying mythical beasts, he said, “seems obviously intended to scare the shit out of people … It’s hard to understand what broader goal there is here other than this very self-serving clout chasing.”

    Gregory told me that fear and attention are not his group’s aim. He also said, though, that his group is thinking of switching from mythological creatures to something more neutral, such as constellations, in part to address concerns of whipping up unnecessary panic. When it comes to XBB.1.5, some of that panic certainly already exists, whipped up by less-than-nuanced headlines and Twitter personalities who feast on moments like these. Whether or not the name Kraken has contributed, the fear is that XBB.1.5 might be a variant so immune-evasive that it infects everyone all over again or so virulent that it amps up the risk of any given infection. So far, that does not seem to be the case.

    As my colleague Katherine Wu reported in November, we are likely (though by no means definitely) stuck for the foreseeable future in this Omicron purgatory, with its more gradual, more piecemeal pattern of viral evolution. This is certainly preferable to the sudden and unexpected emergence of a dangerous, drastically different variant. But it does mean that we’re likely going to be arguing about whether and how and with what names to discuss Omicron subvariants for some time to come.

    Whichever side you come down on, the state of variant-naming pretty well encapsulates the state of the pandemic as a whole. Hardly anything about the pandemic has been a matter of universal agreement, but the present nomenclatural free-for-all seems to have taken us somewhere even more splintered, even more anarchic. We’re not just arguing about the pandemic; we’re arguing about how to argue about the pandemic. And there’s no end in sight.

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    Jacob Stern

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