How have plant-based foods been re-branded and positioned for mainstream grocery stores?

Big Food’s weird war over the meaning of mayonnaise, America’s top condiment

Mayonnaise’s identity crisis goes to court. Courtesy of Hampton Creek.
A big-money war is brewing over the meaning of America’s best-selling condiment: mayonnaise.
The maker of Hellmann’s mayo, food giant Unilever, has sued the San Francisco start-up behind Just Mayo, an egg-less, mayonnaise-like sandwich spread giving Big Mayo a run for its money.
The global food giant argues that Hampton Creek’s Just Mayo is not, as Unilever lawyers wrote, “exactly, precisely, only and simply mayonnaise,” as defined by the dictionary and the Food and Drug Administration, which says mayo must include “egg yolk-containing ingredients.”
The Just Mayo identity crisis, Unilever lawyers said, has hurt Hellmann’s market share, “caused consumer deception and serious, irreparable harm to Unilever” and the mayo industry as a whole. The firm wants Hampton Creek to stop calling it Just Mayo, yank the product off store shelves and pay Unilever damages worth three times the startup’s profits.
It is a strangely defensive stance for Unilever, a Big Food titan that made more than $64 billion last year selling foodstuffs in nearly 200 countries (including “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!”, a spread that is not butter). Hellmann’s, which is branded Best Foods west of the Rocky Mountains, dominates 45 percent of the mayo market, data from industry researcher Euromonitor shows.
But market watchers say it highlights the fears from traditional food conglomerates facing unexpected competition from crafty start-ups. It’s perhaps no coincidence that the biggest battleground is mayonnaise: Americans buy $2 billion of the stuff every year — more even than ketchup, salsa or soy sauce.
“It’s not about using the (mayo) word,” said Michele Simon, a public health attorney who wrote about the suit. “It’s about the fact that this company is taking market share away. And now it’s like they’ve awakened the giant.”

That the plant-based Just Mayo is a new type of food will lend an interesting dimension to the legal proceedings: Brand disputes typically quibble over words, not the definition of the product itself.
But the very modern legal battle will be fought on regulatory territory that is decades old. The FDA’s definition of mayonnaise was set in 1957, decades before the phrase “vegan mayo” ever made sense. (Maintaining that “standard of identity” is important: Kraft Foods’ Miracle Whip, which doesn’t meet the FDA’s standard, is technically a salad dressing.)
Unilever doesn’t just call out Just Mayo for what it calls confusing branding — advertisements have called the stuff “mayo,” and its logo resembles an egg — it also says the company has no proof in its claims of beating Hellmann’s in a taste test.
So what’s spooking Big Food? Hampton Creek has some big backers, including Bill Gates, and in a matter of months has spread rapidly to more than 20,000 Walmarts, Costcos and other stores across the country.
While other organic spreads like Vegenaise play up their place in the vegan niche, Hampton Creek has widely promoted Just Mayo as a mainstream brand: healthy, cheap and good for everybody. (Company ads rarely call it “vegan.”)
“We don’t market our product to tree-hugging liberals in San Francisco, even though I’m in the middle of nine of them right now,” said Josh Tetrick, Hampton Creek’s founder and chief executive. “We built the company to try to really penetrate the places where better-for-you food hasn’t gone before, and that means right in the condiment aisle of Walmart.”
The fate of Just Mayo, which swapped out eggs for Canadian yellow peas, will be watched closely by other food conglomerates. Hampton Creek also sells Just Cookies, a line of egg- and milk-free cookie dough, and is working on a gooey egg-free mix, Just Scramble.
The suit comes at a touchy time for Unilever, which just launched an ad campaign promoting itself as devoted to sustainability, and which backed its own soy-based egg alternative, Alleggra Foods, nearly ten years ago.
“Our concern here is not about innovation, it is about misleading labelling,” a Unilever spokesperson said in a statement Tuesday. “We simply wish to protect both consumers from being misled and also our brand.”
Just Mayo has fought back with the help of celebrity chefs including Andrew Zimmern, who launched a petition, “Stop Bullying Sustainable Food Companies,” that has more than 11,000 signers. The firm tweeted Unilever’s chief executive’s own words against him (he called for “transformational innovation”) and was less than subtle on its Facebook about its David-vs.-Goliath status (though the illustration has since been deleted):

Tetrick, the start-up’s chief executive, said his firm is looking at the lawsuit as a chance to not just expand their corporate profile, but to lift up their egg-free sandwich spread as the touchpoint for a larger food-based cultural movement.
“A lawsuit gives us the opportunity to talk about the things that matter,” he said. “So we’ll take it.”


Several factors have contributed to the current plant-based trend, formerly vegan. Among them are the rise in wellness culture, scientific findings of increased cancers from eating too much red and processed meats, environmental concerns, and marketing tools used by the vegan community. Concern for the future of world's food supply and the impact of climate change are other factors which have contributed to the plant-based trend. Only documents related to plant-based products are relevant.

Research the reasons behind a specific dietary trend for this question.

Eat less meat, a government panel says. Is science on their side?

A recommendation to eat more calories from fruits and vegetables resulted in a suggestion to eat less meat. Some researchers suggest eating no meat at all. (Gene J. Puskar/AP)
A modest suggestion that American diets should be lower in meat has galvanized the debate about carnivorousness. In February, the federal Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee issued its recommendations on improving the government’s official nutritional advice. Although the report is 571 pages, the executive summary distills it to one pithy sentence: A “healthy dietary pattern is higher in vegetables, fruits, whole grains, low- or non-fat dairy, seafood, legumes, and nuts; moderate in alcohol (among adults); lower in red and processed meat, and low in sugar-sweetened foods and drinks and refined grains.” A footnote about meat says, “Lean meats can be part of a healthy dietary pattern.”
It wasn’t a hard line against meat, but it was enough to make the industry come out swinging. The North American Meat Institute launched a Change.org petition, Hands Off My Hot Dog, that called the recommendations “extreme and ill-considered” and rallied supporters to stand with the industry in asking the Department of Agriculture to reject them. At last count, the petition had 2,472 signers.
(In other parts of the report, the committee discussed the important issue of meat’s environmental impact, but the “less meat” recommendation was based solely on nutrition considerations, and that’s what I’ll tackle here.)
Beyond the idea that a dietary recommendation to eat less meat is an assault on liberty is the position, expressed to me by Meat Institute chief executive Barry Carpenter both on Twitter and in a Washington Post Live forum I moderated , that a pro-meat stand is evidence-based: Meat is a nutrient-dense, healthful food, and we reduce intake at our peril. The institute has science on its side.
But wait! The Physician’s Committee for Responsible Medicine, advocate of a plant-based diet, recommends reducing our meat intake all the way to none. “Multitudes of studies have demonstrated the remarkable health benefits of a vegetarian diet,” the committee says. Science “is on the side of vegetarianism.”
Science, she’s a fickle mistress.
A recommendation to eat less meat was met with an immediate campaign by the meat industry. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
You don’t have to spend much time on PubMed, the repository of journal articles, to figure out that, when it comes to the question of meat-eating and health, there’s something for everyone. If you’re looking for evidence that meat eaters die earlier, you can find that. If you’re looking for evidence that they don’t, you can find that, too. Just to make it harder, the debate on meat incorporates two other nutrition debates: those surrounding sodium (high in processed meats) and saturated fat (high in fatty meats).
So, is meat good or bad? Nutrient-rich essential or dietary enemy? It’s neither, and that’s why the “less meat” recommendation makes sense.
Dariush Mozaffarian, dean of Tufts University’s Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, points out that, although different studies of meat show different results, the range of those results is actually quite narrow. “If you look at every possible study with every population around the world, you see that meat-eating is neutral or is associated with slight harm,” he says. “I’ve never seen a benefit.”
Mozaffarian says that two of the main arguments — one for, one against — are flawed because we shouldn’t be talking about individual nutrients, whether they’re theorized to be healthful (like the minerals in meat) or dangerous (like the saturated fat). We should be talking about food.
“What the meat industry is doing is a major mistake,” he says. Basing dietary guidelines on nutrients is completely invalid, and we’ve learned that again and again.” As for saturated fats, “the sources of saturated fat are so diverse, and the health effects are so diverse, that it doesn’t make sense to combine them. Butter, cheese, milk, meat, nuts — they all have different health effects.”
Mozaffarian says he supports the dietary guidelines because they talk about food rather than nutrients, but he would have preferred the committee to have tackled meat differently. The meat to reduce, he says, is processed meat: bacon, sausage, deli meats. A review of the evidence that Mozaffarian co-authored in 2012 links processed meat to higher risk of heart disease and diabetes (the primary — although not the only — culprit appears to be sodium), and other  studies have also found a stronger link between mortality and processed meats than between mortality and unprocessed ones.
Processed meats, such as bacon, have the strongest link to heart disease and mortality. (Sarah A. Miller/AP)
Not everyone agrees with that assessment. Walter Willett, chairman of the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health, isn’t ready to exonerate saturated fat and says that one serving of red meat a week is low-risk, but none or almost none is even lower. He also makes the case that what’s important is what you replace the meat with. Replace it with sugar or refined grains, and it’s a health loser. Replace it with polyunsaturated fat, and it’s a win.
Which goes back to the idea that it’s your diet in total that matters, and parsing it food by food isn’t terribly helpful.
Alice H. Lichtenstein, vice chairwoman of the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee and professor of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, says she is frustrated by the debate over the meat recommendation. “People are making more of this than they should,” she says. “When we talk about individual foods within a dietary pattern, we frequently cause problems. We forget what else happens to the diet. If you increase or decrease meat intake, something else is going to change.”
There’s no magic number of optimal servings. And looking for very specific recommendations on diet is likely to be the wrong approach, because there’s a great deal about nutrition that we don’t know, and there are limits on how effectively we can find it out. Trying to tease out links between diet and disease from population data is tough, because people who eat meat (or almost anything else) are likely to be different from people who don’t in all kinds of ways. And controlled trials, where we feed some people Diet X and some other people Diet Y, can go on for only so long. We can’t hold subjects hostage until they begin to die (or not) of heart disease. Nor can we kill them and autopsy their livers.
Which means that all the research on meat, or on just about any other aspect of human nutrition, is necessarily limited. What are public health professionals supposed to do in the face of imperfect information? “The best we can,” says Lichtenstein. “You have an entire panel of scientists with no vested interest trying to look at all the evidence.”
And so the answer to the question “how much meat should I eat?” is maddeningly elusive. Mozaffarian says two servings a week. Willett says one, or maybe none. The dietary guidelines committee recommends an overall pattern that includes 3.3 ounces per day of meat and poultry. But there is no optimal level. “And it’s not just meat,” says Lichtenstein. “We can’t know optimal levels of anything.”
Customers shop for produce at a Whole Foods market in San Francisco. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
We need to reconcile ourselves to the idea that we simply can’t expect dietary recommendations that are both science-based and very specific. Although the committee looked at all the evidence and concluded that we would be better off if we ate less meat, Lichtenstein emphasizes that that isn’t the top dietary priority (as does Mozaffarian). Two things we do know, from decades of research all pointing in the same direction, is that if you really want to improve your diet, keep your calories in balance and eat lots of fruits and vegetables.
Beyond that, cut your sugar intake. Substitute whole grains for refined. Get some exercise.
The evidence on meat isn’t iron-clad, but “less meat” seems reasonable given that people need to eat more vegetables and fruits, and less overall. The calories need to come from somewhere, and we’re pretty sure meat — especially processed and fatty meat — isn’t doing us any good, so it makes sense to cut back.
That’s the upshot. The reason the dietary guideline committee’s “less meat” recommendation makes sense is not that meat’s so very bad for you. It probably isn’t. But you need to make room in your diet for the things that are actively good for you, and something’s gotta give.
Haspel, a freelance writer, farms oysters on Cape Cod and writes about food and science. On Twitter: @TamarHaspel. She’ll join Wednesday’s Free Range chat at noon: live.washingtonpost.com.
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The problem with processed foods isn’t what’s in them.


Plant-based diet? Sure, but first understand what that really means.

a plant-based diet that emphasizes less-healthful plant foods is associated with increased risk of heart disease. Those eating a nutritious plant-based diet while also being more physically active fare even better. In a 2016 study, the researchers found similar results for the risk of developing type 2 diabetes. The study also supports the value of a plant-rich diet even for omnivores. Individuals who ate the least plant foods were eating about five or six servings of animal foods per day, while those with the most plant foods were eating three servings of animal foods. This means that reducing — not eliminating — animal foods even slightly while increasing healthy plant foods has benefits for preventing heart disease and diabetes. This allows a lot of flexibility with eating. The traditional Mediterranean diet follows this pattern, as do other healthful dietary patterns from around the globe. Putting the research on your plate While association does not prove cause and effect, there are various physiological mechanisms that may explain the health benefits of a plant-based diet. Whole and minimally processed plant foods are rich in vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients and antioxidants, along with heart-healthy unsaturated fats and dietary fiber. Together, this can promote healthy blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol levels, while lowering inflammation and nourishing your gut microbiota. To reap these benefits, here’s what to eat more of: •Whole grains and foods made from whole grain flour •Fruits and vegetables •Nuts, beans and lentils •Vegetable oils (olive oil, canola oil, sunflower oil) in dressings and for cooking •Tea and coffee •Healthy animal foods like fish, dairy (other than ice cream) and eggs At the same time, here’s what to eat less of: •Fruit juices and sugar-sweetened beverages •Refined grains and foods made from white flour •French fries, potato or corn chips, and baked or mashed potatoes •Sweets (candy, pastries, desserts) •Less-healthful animal foods (butter, lard, meat, ice cream) Bottom line In this era of “free-from” foods (lactose-free, gluten-free, GMO-free), this study is a reminder that for nutrition and health, what you do eat matters as much as, if not more than, what you don’t eat. More from Lifestyle: 10 ways to save money on organic groceries Pro tennis players’ good habits are prolonging their careers. The average athlete can learn from them. They offered to pay people to go to the gym. Guess what happened? Trying to conceive? Think about what you’re eating.

 (iStock)
The concept of eating a “plant-based” diet is tossed around frequently, but it’s a label that can be confusing. Some people shy away from the notion because they assume that plant-based is code for vegan. On the other hand, it’s easy to think that eating all plants and no animals guarantees that your diet is healthful and nutritious. But does it?
The research in support of plant-based diets is bountiful, which is likely because of what they include — vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients and fiber — as much as what they don’t — excess saturated fat. But one limitation of much of that research is that it defines “plant-based” as vegetarian. Plant-based diets can take many forms, from vegan to vegetarian to flexitarian to omnivore. The common denominator is that they make plant foods the focal point of the plate. If you choose to eat animal foods like meat, poultry, fish, eggs or dairy, they play smaller, supporting roles.
The other limitation is that the research tends to treat all plant-based diets equally, without regard to food quality. The fact is that many people focus on avoiding certain foods but are blind to whether the rest of their diet is nutritionally adequate. This is one of the perils of demonizing specific foods — no one food makes or breaks a diet, and it’s your overall eating pattern that matters most for health and well-being.
That’s not the message you get from many of the recent plant-based diet “documentary” (in other words, propaganda) films. The latest, “What the Health,” blames animal foods for every ill known to man and woman. While excessive amounts of animal protein and fat aren’t good for us, that doesn’t mean that moderate amounts in the context of a plant-rich diet are harmful. An excessive amount of anything isn’t good — even water — and a cupcake is a cupcake, even if it’s vegan.
A recent study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology seems to agree. It found that when it comes to the plants you eat, quality does count — and omnivores have a place at the plant-based table, too.
Dietitian Ellie Krieger, Nourish Schools co-founder Casey Seidenberg and certified health education specialist Elaine Gordon offer picks for meals from breakfast to dessert.
Not all plants are created equal
The study, which came from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, included more than 200,000 women and men from the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, aimed to get a clearer answer on both quantity and quality of plant foods needed to see a benefit for health. This included the role of animal foods. Researchers measured what proportion of each participant’s diet was plant-based, and whether those plant foods were healthful — vegetables, fruits, whole grains — or unhealthful — sweetened beverages, refined grains, sweets.
They found that a diet rich in healthful plant foods is associated with a substantially lower risk of developing heart disease, while a plant-based diet that emphasizes less-healthful plant foods is associated with increased risk of heart disease. Those eating a nutritious plant-based diet while also being more physically active fare even better. In a 2016 study, the researchers found similar results for the risk of developing type 2 diabetes.
The study also supports the value of a plant-rich diet even for omnivores. Individuals who ate the least plant foods were eating about five or six servings of animal foods per day, while those with the most plant foods were eating three servings of animal foods. This means that reducing — not eliminating — animal foods even slightly while increasing healthy plant foods has benefits for preventing heart disease and diabetes. This allows a lot of flexibility with eating. The traditional Mediterranean diet follows this pattern, as do other healthful dietary patterns from around the globe.
Putting the research on your plate
While association does not prove cause and effect, there are various physiological mechanisms that may explain the health benefits of a plant-based diet. Whole and minimally processed plant foods are rich in vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients and antioxidants, along with heart-healthy unsaturated fats and dietary fiber. Together, this can promote healthy blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol levels, while lowering inflammation and nourishing your gut microbiota. To reap these benefits, here’s what to eat more of:
•Whole grains and foods made from whole grain flour
•Fruits and vegetables
•Nuts, beans and lentils
•Vegetable oils (olive oil, canola oil, sunflower oil) in dressings and for cooking
•Tea and coffee
•Healthy animal foods like fish, dairy (other than ice cream) and eggs
At the same time, here’s what to eat less of:
•Fruit juices and sugar-sweetened beverages
•Refined grains and foods made from white flour
•French fries, potato or corn chips, and baked or mashed potatoes
•Sweets (candy, pastries, desserts)
•Less-healthful animal foods (butter, lard, meat, ice cream)
Bottom line
In this era of “free-from” foods (lactose-free, gluten-free, GMO-free), this study is a reminder that for nutrition and health, what you do eat matters as much as, if not more than, what you don’t eat.
Dennett is a registered dietitian-nutritionist and owner of Nutrition by Carrie.
More from Lifestyle:
10 ways to save money on organic groceries
Pro tennis players’ good habits are prolonging their careers. The average athlete can learn from them.
They offered to pay people to go to the gym. Guess what happened?
Trying to conceive? Think about what you’re eating.


Eating meat, with a side order of conflicting emotions

Last month, McDonald’s devised a plan to wedge itself into the dense flow of self-promotion and micro-conversations that constitute Twitter. The fast-food giant had hoped to introduce some of the real-life farmers and producers who supply McDonald’s with potatoes, beef and other products under the organizing hashtags of #MeetTheFarmers and #McDStories.
But within the hour, the company had a social-media disaster on its hands. Tweeters quickly hijacked the #McDStories hashtag to offer their own anecdotes and propaganda, some of it attacking McDonald’s long history of selling cheap meat to Americans, millions of patties and nuggets a day.
One person, under the Twitter handle @MichelleVegan, wrote, “McDonalds scalds baby chicks alive for nuggets.” The Twitter feed for Vegan.com chimed in: “My memories of walking into a McDonald’s: the sensory experience of inhaling deeply from a freshly-opened can of dog food.” Then, of course, PETA entered the fray with a photo of a coil of pink goop, implying that McNuggets were made from “mechanically separated chicken,” an allegation that McDonald’s immediately denied.
Regardless of the veracity of those claims, the episode underscored a new truth: Meat eating is not the simple pleasure it was in previous generations, and not just for those frequenting fast-food joints.
Even as millions of Americans continue to gobble down gourmet burgers, dry-aged steaks, chef-driven charcuterie and bacon-wrapped everything, they’re regularly forced to consider the potential consequences of their actions. Environmentalists want us to think about the greenhouse gases that meat production creates. Humane advocates want us to consider the suffering of animals. Doctors want us to ponder the health implications. And the medical community would like us to understand the potential fallout — otherwise known as antibiotic resistance — of pumping farm animals full of drugs.
(Dan Page for The Washington Post)
It’s as if America has become schizophrenic about meat: As the reasons to reduce or eliminate meat consumption increase, so do the sources of particularly tasty morsels of animal flesh.
Washington is the prime example. In recent years, the Expense-Account Steakhouse Capital of America has practically become the center of the burger universe. We can secure a premium patty in countless outlets, including Shake Shack, Elevation Burger, Good Stuff Eatery,  Ray’s Hell-Burger, Big Buns Gourmet Grill, Thunder Burger & Bar and BGR: The Burger Joint. Shall we count the number of barbecue outlets that have opened in the past few years, too? Does this sound like a sign that Washington, home to some of the most well-educated people in the country, has absorbed the message on meat eating?
“We’re schizoid, as a culture, on meat eating,” notes writer Michael Pollan, who has grappled with this own internal conflicts on the consumption of animal flesh. “We love the taste and what having lots of meat has always signified — status, wealth — but at the same time it’s hard to overlook the high cost of meat-eating: to the environment, to the workers, to the animals and to our own health. It’s no wonder we’d be conflicted.”
It’s perhaps not surprising that we’ve reached this point at which meat eating has become almost as polarizing as religion. Groups such as PETA, Compassion Over Killing and Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine have been promoting vegetarian or vegan diets for years, if not decades. An entire generation of eaters, many of them Twitter-savvy, has grown up with the idea that not eating meat is better for them and the world they live in.
What’s more, some of those groups have been targeting kids almost from the moment they started to make decisions about their diets. People such as Neal Barnard, a physician and president of the PCRM, make no apologies for it. He compares current anti-meat campaigns to those that discourage underage smoking: It’s important to hit ’em while they’re young.
“If a kid, like me, found a pack of cigarettes when he was 11,” Barnard says, “that kid is more likely to grow up as a smoker as opposed to a kid who never encountered them at all.”
Hitting the youth market
PETA, in particular, has actively targeted young eaters with its Peta2.com Web site, which launched in 2002 and has more than 500,000 e-news subscribers. The site has little interest in promoting the health-care savings or potential long-term health benefits of a vegetarian diet. Instead, it adopts a pop-culture approach to make meat-free eating seem cool and “cruelty-free” to animals — or, at the very least, contrarian to the adult world, which in itself might appeal to the more rebellious.
The idea, says Dan Mathews, senior vice president of campaigns for PETA, is not to take an elevated intellectual approach in trying to appeal to youth, but to play up factors important to young eaters. Like looking good, or sex, or celebrities. PETA even works with television producers to insert anti-meat messages into various programs, such as an episode of last season’s “Real Housewives of Miami” in which Lea Black annoys her fellow South Beach sun-bunnies by pooh-poohing a pig roast.
“Being realistic, we realized we had to go to a lower common denominator” to hit the youth market, says Mathews. “They want to look good. They don’t care about something that will take decades to affect them,” like heart disease.
But the anti-meat and reduced-meat messages are not coming just from animal-rights organizations with an agenda. Cookbook authors, activists and even the federal government have embraced an idea that might have seemed radical a generation or two ago: We don’t need to eat as much meat as we used to.
Pollan, in his “In Defense of Food” (Penguin, 2008), famously wrote that we should “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” The following year, author Mark Bittman espoused essentially the same idea in “Food Matters” (Simon & Schuster, 2009) by noting that we should “eat less meat and junk food, eat more vegetables and whole grains.”
More than two years later, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which recommended that we “reduce the intake of calories from solid fats.” Translation: Eat less meat.
It’s not easy to quantify how those messages have influenced meat eating in the United States. According to a poll conducted last year by Harris Interactive for the Vegetarian Resource Group, about 5 percent of Americans identified themselves as vegetarian, and another 33 percent are “eating vegetarian meals a significant amount of the time.” In 1994, a poll conducted for the Vegetarian Resource Group led the organization to estimate that “0.3 to 1 percent of the population is vegetarian.”
Perhaps more telling are numbers culled by the America Meat Institute from Agriculture Department data. They show that consumption of red meat is down across the board. Americans, for example, ate 56.9 pounds of beef per capita in 2010, compared with 62.4 pounds in 2005. Our pork consumption per person also dropped, from 46.5 pounds in 2005 to 44.8 in 2010. Even our taste for chicken has dulled: We ate 55.5 pounds of chicken per person in 2010, off from 60.5 pounds five years earlier.
The numbers might trend toward a vegetarian lifestyle, but the fact is, Americans still down an estimated one-sixth of the meat eaten in the world. Where does this drive come from? (Aside from the intoxicating scent of those burgers sizzling on the grill at Ray’s?)
Barnard of the PCRM suggests in his book “Breaking the Food Seduction” (St. Martin’s, 2003) that meat eating has an addictive quality. “Scientific tests suggest that meat has subtle drug-like qualities, just as sugar, chocolate, and cheese do,” Barnard writes. “When researchers use the drug naloxone to block opiate receptors in volunteers, meat loses much of its appeal.”
New York University professor and noted nutritionist Marion Nestle says the addiction theory is bunk.
“Humans are omnivores and lots of animals eat meat,” she wrote via e-mail. “People eat because they have to (a drive). Taste drives food choices. We get nutrients (Vitamin B12, among others) from meat and dairy foods that we can’t get enough of from vegetable sources. Our ancestors had no choice. Survival depended on eating meat. We do have a choice, and people and the planet would be healthier if we ate less meat, but I wouldn’t call meat-eating an addiction.”
Whether its product is addictive or not, the meat industry is not sitting back idly and watching America transform into Veg Nation. The American Meat Institute, a trade association that represents red meat and turkey processors, launched a Web site about a year ago called Meat MythCrushers with the idea that it would counter many of the arguments against meat eating. Via studies and video interviews with industry experts, the site tackles what it says are “myths,” such as the belief that antibiotic use in livestock production contributes to antibiotic resistance in humans, or that there’s a concrete connection between meat eating and heart disease.
Janet M. Riley, senior vice president of public affairs for the AMI, acknowledges that lower consumption rates and increased attacks on meat eating led the organization to create the site. But she also says the statistics showing declining meat-eating are deceptive: Between higher meat prices and the poor economy, Americans have naturally started to eat less meat.
On the defense
The videos on the site were particularly important to Riley, who serves as the interviewer in each. She says she wanted to humanize an industry that has become increasingly viewed as cold and mechanical via films such as “Food, Inc.” and books such as Eric Schlosser’s “Fast Food Nation.” When people visit processing plants these days, she says, they’re surprised by the improvements in animal welfare and safety.
That statement might come as a surprise to PETA’s Mathews, who notes that the agriculture industry continues to try to push bills through state legislatures to prevent undercover videos and photographs at slaughterhouses and other facilities, which could potentially turn off more meat eaters. “They’re very threatened,” Mathews says. “This is why they got these bills sponsored.”
It would seem clear, whether it’s McDonald’s on Twitter or slaughterhouses in Iowa, that meat producers, retailers and eaters have assumed a defensive position. Will some of those defenses eventually crumble under more pressure to decrease meat consumption? One former hard-core meat eater found she could no longer justify her habits after doing pro-bono legal work for the Humane Society of the United States and its anti-puppy-mill campaign.
One day, more than three years ago, antitrust lawyer Amber McDonald of the District “made the connection that industrialized agriculture is run a lot like a puppy mill.” She gradually weaned herself from meat and dairy products, a move that came as a shock to her friends, colleagues and family. McDonald grew up in Wisconsin, eating brats and cheese. She used to judge people who ate fish in a steakhouse as not aggressive enough for employment in the legal profession. She laughs at the memory of it now.
Four years ago, McDonald might have been a happy participant in the eight-day barbecue orgy known as Meat Week. But this year, for the third consecutive year, she was organizing her own little counterproposal: Meat-Free Week, which ended Monday. She’s the founder of the event. Is she also a harbinger of things to come in America?


Plant proteins, healthy fats and more 2017 food trends

food trends will we be seeing in 2017? If I had to summarize the overall theme for food trends next year, I would say: plant proteins, healthy fats and whole foods made convenient. Here are my predictions: The new quinoa Why it will be a trend: With demand for fiber-rich gluten-free options and local food continuing to grow into 2017, this whole grain is one to watch. Where you’ll see it: This gluten-free grain will also be popping up in protein bars, crackers and gluten-free bread. Sorghum may even make its way into your bar as it’s also used to make spirits. Sprouting everything The ’70s are back! Another trend for 2017 is sprouting just about everything: seeds, nuts, beans and grains. Do-it-yourself sprouting is an option if you have patience and aren’t worried about food safety, but sprouted foods will also be available in a variety of packaged foods this year. Why it will be a trend: Where you’ll see it: Plant-based protein sources reinvented What is a fresh take for 2017 is the movement to go beyond hummus and lentil soup to find creative new ways to incorporate legumes throughout your day. Nuts and seeds will continue to be featured as healthy go-to snacks. Why it will be a trend: Plant-based proteins are sustainable, affordable and nutritious. They’re also incredibly versatile, and healthy food companies are taking advantage of that aspect to bring vegetarian proteins to every meal and snack. Where you’ll see it: Beans and lentils are now being used to make pasta that’s higher in protein and fiber than wheat-based varieties. Good fats Low-fat, carbohydrate and sugar-rich foods are the food villains of 2016. It follows that 2017 will be all about embracing the health benefits of a nutrient we once feared, fat. Why it will be a trend: We need fat to feel satisfied and for palatability, and as an energy source and to absorb fat-soluble vitamins. We know that healthy fats such as omega-3s and monounsaturated fats promote brain and heart health. Where you’ll see it: Dairy companies will increasingly offer milk products that are organic or from grass-fed cows to meet consumer demand for healthier fat profiles and better treatment of animals. More from Lifestyle: How to eat for an energy boost The best reason to eat beans and grains together: They’re delicious Rice that cauliflower and spiralize that zucchini all you want

Sorghum is an excellent source of fiber and rich in protein. (iStockphoto)
If the food trends of 2016 could be summed up in three words, they would be: protein, paleo and local. What food trends will we be seeing in 2017?
At the Food and Nutrition Conference and Expo in Boston in October, I was among more than 10,000 nutrition professionals who got an inside scoop on the latest nutrition information and products from 416 exhibitors and more than 130 research and educational presentations, lectures, panel discussions and culinary demonstrations.
If I had to summarize the overall theme for food trends next year, I would say: plant proteins, healthy fats and whole foods made convenient.
Here are my predictions:
The new quinoa
Step aside, quinoa. There’s a new gluten-free whole grain gaining traction among the health-savvy. It’s called sorghum and it’s homegrown: The “sorghum belt” runs between South Dakota and southern Texas.
Why it will be a trend:
With demand for fiber-rich gluten-free options and local food continuing to grow into 2017, this whole grain is one to watch.
Where you’ll see it:
This gluten-free grain will also be popping up in protein bars, crackers and gluten-free bread. Sorghum may even make its way into your bar as it’s also used to make spirits.
Sprouting everything
The ’70s are back! Another trend for 2017 is sprouting just about everything: seeds, nuts, beans and grains.
Do-it-yourself sprouting is an option if you have patience and aren’t worried about food safety, but sprouted foods will also be available in a variety of packaged foods this year.
Why it will be a trend:
Another bonus: Sprouting helps deactivate “anti-nutrients” such as phytic acid, making the protein and minerals easier to absorb. For example, sprouting rye can increase its folate content almost four times.
Do the nutritional benefits remain once sprouts are heated? No, but they do offer benefits vs. un-sprouted versions when in comes to grains. Compared with whole-grain bread, eating sprouted-grain bread increases satiety-promoting hormones and lowers the blood sugar response.
Where you’ll see it:
Plant-based protein sources reinvented
With the United Nations declaring 2016 the International Year of Pulses (another word for legumes), cooking with beans, lentils and peas is nothing new.
What is a fresh take for 2017 is the movement to go beyond hummus and lentil soup to find creative new ways to incorporate legumes throughout your day. Nuts and seeds will continue to be featured as healthy go-to snacks.
Why it will be a trend:
Plant-based proteins are sustainable, affordable and nutritious. They’re also incredibly versatile, and healthy food companies are taking advantage of that aspect to bring vegetarian proteins to every meal and snack.
Where you’ll see it:
Beans and lentils are now being used to make pasta that’s higher in protein and fiber than wheat-based varieties.
Legumes are going to dominate the snacking market in the new year with more roasted chickpea companies expanding nationwide and offering enticing flavors from mesquite barbecue to Thai coconut. New on the scene are roasted broad beans from companies such as Enlightened that are high in fiber and offer seven grams of protein for only 100 calories.
Good fats
Low-fat, carbohydrate and sugar-rich foods are the food villains of 2016. It follows that 2017 will be all about embracing the health benefits of a nutrient we once feared, fat.
Why it will be a trend:
Why now? KIND Snacks filed a Citizen Petition in December 2015 requesting that the FDA update what it allows to be called “healthy.” This change will mean that whole foods such as vegetables, seafood, nuts and seeds won’t be penalized for their natural, healthy fat content.
We need fat to feel satisfied and for palatability, and as an energy source and to absorb fat-soluble vitamins. We know that healthy fats such as omega-3s and monounsaturated fats promote brain and heart health.
Even fats we once viewed as unhealthy, such as saturated fats in dairy, will be reframed in 2017. Dairy fat contains naturally occurring trans-fatty acids such as conjugated linoleic acid (CLA). Research suggests that CLA in milk could lower the risk of coronary heart disease and prevent cancer cells from growing.
Where you’ll see it:
Dairy companies will increasingly offer milk products that are organic or from grass-fed cows to meet consumer demand for healthier fat profiles and better treatment of animals.
Christy Brissette is a dietitian, foodie and president of 80TwentyNutrition.com. Follow her on Twitter @80twentyrule.
More from Lifestyle:
How to eat for an energy boost
The best reason to eat beans and grains together: They’re delicious
Rice that cauliflower and spiralize that zucchini all you want


Tell me about the situation pertaining to the lock out of musicians of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.

Musicians of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra have been officially locked out. I'm looking for details about the possible causes of the orchestra's financial troubles. What specifically led to the lock out, negotiation efforts, and state funding issues are all relevant. Actions and reactions of the musicians, donors and community also are relevant. I am also interested in any plans or actions to rescue the ailing orchestra. I am not interested in any document discussing the name of the director or concert master of the orchestra.

Research the reasons behind a specific organization's financial crisis to answer this question.

Baltimore Symphony musicians rally for state funding to save the orchestra

ovetta.wiggins@washpost.com

Wearing tuxedos with tails and lugging brass horns and metal music stands, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra musicians rallied in Annapolis on Thursday to urge Gov. Larry Hogan (R) to release funding to help save the orchestra — and their jobs.
The orchestra is one of about three dozen programs and projects waiting for the governor to make available money that the General Assembly “fenced off” in the state’s $46.6 billion budget — meaning Hogan could not reroute it to other priorities. The orchestra announced last month that it was canceling its summer programming to reduce costs, cutting the season from 52 to 40 weeks per year.
“Governor Hogan, we are the Baltimore Symphony musicians,” Michael Lisicky, a second-chair oboist, yelled into a white megaphone while a half-dozen musicians played “That’s a Plenty” across the street from the statehouse. “We urge you to release the funds.”
In addition to $1.6 million specifically to help keep the orchestra afloat, the General Assembly set aside $127 million for school construction, $3.5 million to launch a grant fund to pay for testing a backlog of rape kits and $1 million for a summer youth jobs program in Baltimore, among other things.
“These are not frivolous items,” said Del. Maggie McIntosh (D-Baltimore City), the chairwoman of the House Appropriations Committee, adding that the legislative priorities are a “small, tiny, fraction” of the state budget. “They are of major importance to our constituents.”
The back-and-forth is part of an annual budget battle between the Democratic majority legislature and Hogan that essentially pits the governor’s budget priorities against the General Assembly’s. In past years, Hogan has at times refused to release money for the General Assembly’s priorities, instead placing the money in the state’s rainy day fund.
House Democrats this week began waging a social media campaign against that practice, using the hashtag #FreeTheFunds and urging followers to contact the governor’s office to ask him to do so.
Hogan on Thursday accused the legislature of playing “political games” by fencing off money for its priorities instead of requesting supplemental funding for them. “We’ve said repeatedly that we’re not going to let them play those kinds of games,” he said.
The General Assembly cannot add money to the spending plan that the governor introduces during the budget process but can shift money from one fund to another to pay for programs it prioritizes. Setting aside the money restricts it from being used elsewhere. The state constitution also gives the governor the authority to decide whether he wants to comply with the changes.
Hogan hinted during a Thursday morning news conference that he does
not plan to provide the additional funds to the orchestra.
“We put $8 million into the BSO,” Hogan said. “They received the most money of any arts group in the state, 74 percent higher than any other arts group. . . . We continue to pour millions and millions of dollars into the BSO, but they’ve got real serious issues and problems with the management, with losing the support of their donor base.”
Hogan spokesman Michael Ricci said the legislature chose to “fence off” the money for the BSO instead of working with the governor and the administration to provide supplemental funding for the orchestra.
“It’s a classic example of how this tactic puts important projects in the middle of the back-and-forth,” he said.
The state is facing a structural budget shortfall of $961 million, Ricci said, and the governor “has to make these decisions with that budget picture in mind.”
Ricci said he expects the governor to make a budget announcement in coming weeks. He would not say whether the governor will release any of the funds.
State Sen. Nancy J. King (D-Montgomery), chairwoman of the Senate Budget and Taxation Committee, said the governor should release the funds to help the orchestra “get on its feet.” She said she hopes Hogan also considers the funding of the other programs.
“We were careful about what we fenced off,” King said. “None of this was looked at lightly.”
ovetta.wiggins@washpost.com


BSO bids a reluctant farewell with Mahler’s Ninth Symphony at Strathmore

Marin Alsop led an expansive, complicated rendition of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony under difficult conditions Saturday night in the Music Center at Strathmore. The last time she conducted the work, in 2009, she made the mistake of pairing it with an inferior work by Leonard Bernstein. This time around it stood alone, suffused with regret and nostalgia. Anxiety about the future has hovered over the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra all season. Management has insisted the orchestra become a part-time ensemble by cutting back the season from 52 weeks to 40 weeks. At the end of May, after an extended contract dispute, management abruptly canceled the orchestra’s summer season, suspending musicians’ pay as of June 16. Mahler’s Ninth Symphony is a leave-taking, composed after the death of the composer’s young daughter. Much of the first movement obsesses over the three-note motif “Lebewohl” (Farewell), taken from Beethoven’s piano sonata “Les Adieux.” After an ethereal opening in cello and harp, Alsop wrung as much pathos and urgency as she could from this music — and those emotions seemed to resonate with the orchestra’s situation. The rough-hewed second movement plodded along somewhat rudely, the second violins hacking away unceremoniously at the first statement of the Ländler. The third movement darted and bit even more bitterly, the viciously maintained counterpoint interrupted by a crystalline, mournful trumpet solo around the midpoint. The entire violin section, one of the BSO’s greatest assets, sang their hearts out in the opening of the concluding Adagio, marked “grosser Ton” (with big tone) in the score. The plush string section, including heart-melting solos from concertmaster Jonathan Carney, sustained the time-stopping tempo set by Alsop, complemented by gorgeous horn solos. One early flute entrance aside, quickly righted, it was a moment to glory in the sound of the BSO, just before its likely dismantlement at the hands of its own management. At the start of the concert, the entire orchestra took the stage together, in a gesture of solidarity. The devoted Strathmore audience responded with standing ovations both at the beginning and end of the concert. The affection in the hall was palpable, but it may not be enough to save this esteemed ensemble from diminishment. style@washpost.com

style@washpost.com


BSO, after choppy summer, embraces fate and voodoo in exuberant opener

anne.midgette@washpost.com

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra opened its season at Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, its home house, on Friday night.
This sounds like a routine statement, yet it contains a world of news: As recently as last week — after the musicians had been locked out by management all summer, and in the midst of negotiations that didn’t seem to be bringing the two sides any closer together — it seemed highly likely that the performance, if not, indeed, the season, would be postponed.
So when conductor Marin Alsop and the musicians took the stage in this warm and homey auditorium, they were greeted with a long ovation.
“I’m not sure I can talk,” said a visibly moved Alsop, after leading the national anthem that orchestras around the country play at the start of their seasons.
The issue has been whether the orchestra can afford to continue in its current form. The management avers that a 52-week season is no longer viable, and that the orchestra needs to reduce to a 40-week season to survive. Musicians argue that cutting back the season would lower prestige and drive away players. This put management in the odd position of trying to prove to the world just how badly it had managed its money so far,
canceling its summer season only weeks after announcing the program, and then locking out its musicians for the 10-week duration.
The new agreement is a one-year contract extension that simply kicks the problems down the road. The contract is for 50 weeks (the lockout accounts for the two missed weeks), but provides pay for a 40-week season; the other 10 weeks are being covered by a $1.6 million donation from “special friends of the BSO.” There is no guarantee that those special friends are going to come forward next year. The contract stipulates that management will hire new musicians to fill existing vacancies; the board will create a Vision Committee with musicians to plan for the orchestra’s future; and there will be no strike and no lockout through next September. Negotiations, one presumes, will continue.
All of this background puts any concert under a kind of existential filter. What is the purpose of the orchestra? How necessary is it to the city? How glad are people that it’s back? The answer to the last seemed to be “very”: The Baltimore audience, which always seems to me more relaxed and familial than the Kennedy Center’s, filled the hall, while members of the players’ committee greeted them in the lobby.
To add another existential touch, fate was the theme of the program, with numbers such as the overture to Verdi’s “Forza del Destino;” Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony (which winds around a “fate” theme from the start); and the Voodoo Violin Concerto written in 2002 by the dynamic Daniel Bernard Roumain, a piece shot through with otherworldly implications, from the spiritlike voices of high flutes to an admixture of vernaculars from other genres, as if the orchestra were speaking in tongues.
After the initial outburst of love, the night started on a sober note with a short piece by Christopher Rouse, the Baltimore-based composer and Pulitzer Prize winner who was BSO composer-in-residence in the 1980s and who died this month at the age of 70. Alsop offered a few reminiscences of him and the time she spent with him in his final days as he was dying of cancer (his only two regrets, she said, were his concern that the BSO might not play opening night, and that he might not see the Baltimore Orioles win). “Processional: Death of Poe” was one of the works the orchestra commissioned for its centenary in 2016, a big dark piece growing to a powerful growl and then dying away — passing, as it were, before our ears and eyes.
The other contemporary composer on the program was bursting with life: Roumain, also known as DBR, was engaging both as composer and performer. His concerto marshals familiar tropes from jazz, blues and folk music in an exuberant synthesis that is neither forced nor hackneyed, as such quotes too often are. Fiddling on his amplified instrument, or taking his bow in his teeth to pluck the strings like a guitar, and even singing into the mic at one point, he drew the orchestra after him in call-and-response episodes, and the audience into enthusiastic applause, a response to this welcome jolt of musical reality in a normally rarefied world.
Alsop’s Verdi was overcharged and not altogether idiomatic, lacking Verdian flow in the interest of trying to land points at big moments. And the evening overall had a slightly raucous quality, the sound of energy funneling itself into a small space. This wasn’t a bad thing, though it gave the Tchaikovsky the sense of a jigsaw puzzle, with the joins apparent between the pieces of the picture. But the piece also crested to a great crashing wave of a finale, and the evening overall gave several perspectives to the issue of why an orchestra is, after all, worth it.
anne.midgette@washpost.com


Baltimore Symphony Orchestra plays on, and with gusto, despite no new contract

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra continues to perform, even though the musicians and management still haven’t agreed to a new contract. At issue is the length of the BSO’s season, which management wants to cut drastically. The musicians have made it clear that they want to play, for a full season, and play they did Sunday afternoon in the Music Center at Strathmore. On the podium was Nicholas Hersh, who joined the BSO as associate conductor in 2014. This regular subscription program was a step up from the normal assignments for the position, such as holiday and kids concerts. It opened with “Rondes de printemps,” a movement from Debussy’s “Images,” which Hersh gave an active, almost breathless propulsion. For much of the time, he uses both arms to give the beat, a style that leaves little room for providing cues or other direction. Cellist Narek Hakhnazaryan, winner of the gold medal at the 2011 International Tchaikovsky Competition, returned to the BSO to play Elgar’s Cello Concerto. He attacked the piece with a beefy, full sound, and luxuriated over rubato slow passages with yearning phrasing. But the playing was not without a few blemishes, including in double-stops and on harmonic notes here and there. Perhaps his finest moment came in a rarefied, heartfelt encore, “El cant dels ocells” as arranged by Pablo Casals. Crisp, raucous low brass introduced Prokofiev’s Sixth Symphony, given a competent reading by Hersh and the orchestra. A few intonation issues unsettled the flute solos in the first movement, but the menacing horn notes, on wailing siren-like crescendos, drove the music to a fever pitch. Both the swooning romantic melody and the military march of the second movement were powerful and full-throated. The gallop-style theme of the finale moved progressively from insipid to threatening, making for a satisfying conclusion. style@washpost.com

style@washpost.com


In classical music it was a year of building, deconstructing and, occasionally, rescuing

Read more: style@washpost.com

Every year has highs and lows. Sometimes they’re even connected. In 2019, classical music wrestled with topical issues and economic concerns that were reflected in some of the year’s most significant triumphs.
It was the year of new flexible, multiuse performance spaces. In New York, the Shed debuted with a goal of bringing a culture of new art to offset the gleaming consumerism of Hudson Yards. In Lenox, Mass., the Linde Center expanded Tanglewood’s offerings to a year-round calendar. And in Washington, the Kennedy Center’s $250 million Reach annex, which opened with a 16-day festival, prompted debate about whether “they will come” is always what follows “if you build it.”
Waking up at last to the lack of people of color both on and behind the stage, classical music is attempting, sometimes clumsily, to tackle the problem. This year saw world premieres of operas about race and injustice (“The Central Park Five,” Long Beach Opera) and white cops shooting black youths (“Blue,” Glimmerglass Festival opera company, coming to Washington National Opera next year), which is good, but there was also more pigeonholing of black artists such as the tenor Russell Thomas, in WNO’s “Otello” this fall. Epitomizing the problem was the Metropolitan Opera’s lavish “Porgy and Bess.” Maybe next year we’ll see more works that truly spotlight and celebrate black culture.
The Baltimore Symphony pump-faked fans by announcing a summer season and then locking out its musicians for nine weeks, citing steep revenue losses. But the two sides managed to find a way forward, and the musicians are now playing under a one-year contract. Meanwhile, the announced demise of the National Philharmonic, based at Strathmore in Bethesda, Md., prompted hand-wringing and an 11th-hour bailout. Will it last? Stay tuned.
The countertenor Iestyn Davies, always a source of dazzling and thoughtful music, offered not one but two programs in Washington this calendar year: the first at the Library of Congress with the ensemble Fretwork and the second at the Kennedy Center with his longtime collaborator, lutenist Thomas Dunford.
The beauty of “Akhnaten,” in Phelim McDermott’s production, marked a moment when the beleaguered and often mediocre Metropolitan Opera had a chance to turn things around. At least the company took a step toward a much-overdue housecleaning by announcing the impending departure of Jonathan Friend, the longtime casting director, who will be succeeded by Michael Heaston, formerly of the Washington National Opera.
The most creative operatic work is still happening at smaller opera companies. In Washington, the In Series, under Tim Nelson, offered some memorable small takes on big works, and Urban Arias and WNO’s festival of 20-minute operas kept going strong. In New York, the Prototype Festival presented Ellen Reid’s “Prism,” an opera about sexual harassment, which premiered in Los Angeles and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. And at year’s end, the Long Beach Opera announced that MacArthur fellow Yuval Sharon — whose company, The Industry, in Los Angeles has brought him international attention — would take over as interim director, showing the appeal small companies hold for creative artists.
Slowly but surely, the field is waking up to the idea that 50 percent of the population deserves better representation on the concert stage. The New York Philharmonic announced its multi-season Project 19, commissioning 19 works by 19 female composers to celebrate the centennial of the 19th Amendment. Washington got a brand-new festival of women’s music, courtesy of the Boulanger Initiative, as well as recitals by mezzo powerhouse Jamie Barton and pianist Lara Downes. Should women’s music be segregated this way? There are a lot of strong feelings on the subject, but advocacy is needed to give more people a chance to recognize the quality of what’s out there.
A three-part series of the complete quartets by Mieczyslaw Weinberg, a composer you might not have heard of, sounds like an obscure attraction. But the Phillips Collection gambled on quality and gave D.C. audiences a chance to hear the quirky Quatour Danel in a rich tapestry of work that deserves to be much better known.
People often ask: Why can’t we update old operas for our time? With “Prisoner of the State,” David Lang has done just that. He remakes Beethoven’s only opera, “Fidelio,” a problem child of the repertory, into a new work that hews to the original in form while underscoring its relevance to today’s society. Watching Lang blossom into one of the heavyweights of the field over the past couple of decades has been a pleasure, and his opera stayed with me and is one I look forward to seeing again.
When I looked back over my concert-going experiences in 2019, I found that Gianandrea Noseda’s concerts with the National Symphony Orchestra were among the ones that remained most vivid in my mind. Noseda has created a narrative at an orchestra that didn’t have one, offering hopes of better things to come.
Read more:
style@washpost.com


Baltimore Symphony Orchestra unexpectedly cancels summer season

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra announced Thursday that it is eliminating this year’s summer programming.
Seven months after putting forth a contract proposal to musicians that would cut the season from 52 to 40 weeks a year, the orchestra said it was advancing aggressively in that direction, first by canceling its promising New Music Festival, a pet project of Music Director Marin Alsop that this year was to celebrate female composers, as well as much of the popular summer programming, including a concert with Leslie Odom Jr., live accompaniment to “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” and the annual Fourth of July concert.
The decision comes just a little over a month after the summer season was announced and only six days after Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) approved a bill providing $3.2 million in state funding for the orchestra, the result of a request by a musician-led consortium for state aid.
In its announcement, the orchestra cited $16 million in losses over the past decade.
“If the BSO is going to survive,” said orchestra president and chief executive Peter Kjome, “our business model needs to change.”
“Legislation passed this session in Annapolis sought to provide some immediate funding to address short-term financial issues,” the statement said. But, it continued, “the legislation did not fully address the long-term, systemic issues or reform the BSO business model.”
The orchestra’s musicians have been playing without a contract since Sept. 9, with the proposed cuts to the season the major issue in the stalled negotiations. The players were blindsided by Thursday’s announcement, said Greg Mulligan, a first violinist and co-chairman of the orchestra committee that represents the players in negotiations.
“We’re very disappointed,” he said. “After the citizens of Maryland and the legislature and governor advocated for us by eventually passing the bill, we cannot understand why they’re taking this action.”
The next bargaining session is scheduled for Tuesday. Mulligan said that at a hastily convened meeting Thursday, the players asked management to put off the announcement until after that session but that management declined.
Players see the threat as existential. “When you change an orchestra from 52 weeks to 40, and cut pay by that much, it’s going to change the kind of players who come here,” Brian Prechtl, a percussionist and the other chairman of the orchestra committee, said in a conversation last fall about the ongoing contract negotiations. “Some great players will leave.”
Baltimore’s situation epitomizes the basic conflict that has marked orchestral labor struggles across the country: musicians’ claims to a fair and regular salary for a highly skilled job against the decrease in demand for concerts. This season, Chicago Symphony Orchestra musicians staged a strike for almost seven weeks, the longest  in the orchestra’s history, over proposed changes to their pension plans, which ultimately went through largely as management had proposed. The Minnesota Orchestra and Detroit Symphony Orchestra have both emerged remarkably rejuvenated after long and bitter labor disputes — in the case of the Minnesota Orchestra, not a strike but a lockout.
The BSO, which is based in a city that is not wealthy and has no great depth of industry to provide corporate funding, has long struggled financially. (The Cleveland Orchestra, faced with a similar predicament, has introduced an annual residency in Florida, enabling it to tap into a second donor base.) In 2009 and 2010, the BSO musicians agreed to voluntary salary reductions, which they had earned back by 2016. For the past two years, they have played on one-year extensions of the previous contract; the second of those expired in September.
“As long as they pay us, we’re going to play,” Mulligan said. “They’ve said they’re going to pay us through concerts on June 16, and after that they’re not going to pay us. It’s not going to be a strike; it’s going to be lockout.”
anne.midgette@washpost.com


BSO musicians try to keep summer schedule, without the orchestra

anne.midgette@washpost.com

Fiddling while Rome burns: It’s used as an image of leaders ignoring serious problems for their own amusement. In the case of Baltimore Symphony Orchestra musicians, though, fiddling through a crisis represents an attempt to save their orchestra.
Faced with a lockout that began June 17, weeks after management announced cancellation of the summer season, BSO musicians are trying to figure out how to pay mortgages, afford health insurance and make it through the summer. Some have already departed to substitute with other orchestras — Ivan Stefanovic, the associate principal second violin, left Monday morning for the Atlanta Symphony. But most are staying here and planning to perform at the annual Independence Day event July 3 — one of the events that the BSO announced it was canceling but which Baltimore County is going ahead with anyway.
The orchestra members were going to pitch in free, but a grant from the Music Performance Trust Fund, an independent public service organization, and the Film Funds, will make it possible for them to be paid. The county is arranging the fireworks, food vendors, security and parking — using money that would otherwise have gone to the BSO.
“We were in a position to use existing funding through a grant we provide the BSO,” said T.J. Smith, the press secretary for Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski. “Part of the grant is the Independence Day extravaganza. Considering that’s not happening, we were able to use the funding that already existed to put on a portion of it.”
The concert will go off “essentially as planned,” Smith said, though “there are a few logistical things that will be different.” It will also be on a slightly smaller scale, with an audience of about 5,000.
The Independence Day concert is usually a moneymaker for the orchestra, says Brian Prechtl, a percussionist and member of the orchestra committee. This year, for the first time, it will be free to the public, though it remains a ticketed event. The free tickets were all snapped up last week.
The musicians are trying to maintain continuity in other ways. The popular Academy Week, which allows amateur musicians to play side by side with orchestra players, was among the canceled events, but players are trying to continue it in some modified form, emphasizing mainly chamber music, between July 12 and 21.
What the musicians aren’t trying to replace are some of the summer’s other big events, including a showing of a Harry Potter film with live orchestral accompaniment, and a concert with the popular Broadway star Leslie Odom Jr. Both of these concerts are the kinds of things that orchestras often put on to expand their audience base and make money.
Many of the locked-out musicians are or will be applying for unemployment. “It’s very hard to get a summer festival gig on short notice,” Prechtl said. Most musicians cling to a prized summer festival post, which allows them to work in beautiful surroundings; Prechtl has been playing with the Grand Teton Music Festival in Wyoming for 27 years.
Orchestras do, however, sometimes need a substitute at short notice, and many are eager to help out the Baltimore musicians with work. The Seattle Symphony called Prechtl asking about violists who might be available.
Prechtl, for his part, has had to turn down paying work, because his position as players’ committee
 spokesman is keeping him so busy during the lockout. All members of the committee, he says, feel they have a commitment to the players and shouldn’t leave until things are more settled.
For some musicians, there’s a more immediate logistical problem: Their larger instruments are inside Meyerhoff Hall, which the orchestra is locked out of, and they have no way to get them out for the concert — nor is there a crew available to move them. Musicians will have to use their personal instruments, which in Prechtl’s case include timpani and a bass drum.
“We might have to rent a truck,” he said.
anne.midgette@washpost.com


Under Alsop, BSO offers new look to end the season

anne.midgette@washpost.com

Happy orchestras are all alike; every struggling orchestra is struggling in its own way. These days, most orchestras are struggling, but on Saturday night at Strathmore, at the end of its subscription season, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra certainly looked like a happy and unified family in a well-conceived and well-performed program.
The Baltimore orchestra’s struggles have mainly been financial — this group is Exhibit A in terms of the challenges of maintaining a national-level orchestra in a midsize city without major industry and with plenty of financial problems of its own. The orchestra has responded consistently with pluck and determination. Where Washington’s National Symphony Orchestra has seen four music directors in the past 10 years (one of them, Ivan Fischer, technically a principal conductor), Marin Alsop has been in Baltimore that whole time, developing a distinctive approach, with the flourishing OrchKids program in inner-city schools and energetic programming with a strong American flavor. But the organization had a solid profile even before Alsop got there, after its years under David Zinman and the curiously underrated legend Yuri Temirkanov.
All of this was reflected in the refreshing energy and athleticism of Saturday’s performance, from the first bright, crisp note of Leonard Bernstein’s “Slava! A political overture,” a humorous and amiable burlesque with some lively music. Unlike the NSO, where the struggles have to do with motivation and ensemble playing, this is an orchestra speaking with one voice and having something to say.
The program focused on two tortured titans of the 20th century: Bernstein and Shostakovich. Bernstein was Alsop’s mentor when she was starting out, and I don’t think there’s a conductor in the United States who does a better job with his music. Time and again, Alsop focuses on Bernstein’s large serious scores — on Saturday, it was his second symphony-cum-piano concerto, “The Age of Anxiety” — and each time she makes a persuasive case for music to which not everyone can find the key. Bernstein’s musical language veers from lush, keening Romantic phrases from sad clarinets to manic jazzy syncopations, and Alsop effortlessly found a through line on Saturday that linked them without grandstanding, supported by Jon Kimura Parker, the fluid, mellifluous piano soloist.
The counterweight to this was the Shostakovich Fifth, which at first sounded a little bit too much like the Bernstein: attractive and appealing and polished in a way that took the edges off this rugged music, so that while it was large and powerful, it was never really anguished. It was, however, dramatic and muscular and propulsive, and the slight restraint in the first movement meant that Alsop left herself somewhere to go in the fourth, which after the pathos of the slow third movement was the largest and most dramatic of all. If it wasn’t the most idiomatic Shostakovich, it certainly was a respectable showing, winning a roar from the audience at the close and nicely setting the orchestra up for the BBC Proms, the highlight of the British summer season, where they will play the same program as part of their tour in August.
The orchestra aired its family business with a sincere tribute to five players retiring after a combined 148 years of service, two of whom were on the stage with Alsop and Peter Kjome, the orchestra’s president. It also showed a new face. A four-year collaboration with the Parsons School of Design has yielded prototypes for new concert clothing, elegant modifications of standard tails-and-black-dress concert wear, executed in more breathable and flexible fabrics (donated by Under Armour, the Baltimore athletic-wear titan). A group of musicians came out at the front of the stage at the start of the show to model the new look: a range of asymmetric dresses and modified tails that didn’t trumpet their differences — you might not notice if you didn’t know to look — but whose stylish athleticism proved a perfect fit for this ensemble, in more ways than one.
anne.midgette@washpost.com


Baltimore Symphony Orchestra musicians officially locked out

anne.midgette@washpost.com

It’s official: It’s a lockout. On Sunday night, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra confirmed what it effectively announced on May 30: The musicians of the orchestra are locked out.
On May 30, the orchestra announced that it would be canceling its summer season and ceasing to pay its musicians as of June 16. The musicians have been playing without a contract since September; still, the only way that the orchestra can legally stop paying them is to announce a lockout.
The orchestra’s news release went out late Sunday night, only hours before the end of the last day the musicians were to draw pay, and only a short time after the players themselves had been informed, according to Peter Kjome, the orchestra’s president and CEO.
Players and management are returning to the negotiating table Friday, in the presence of federal mediators, although the negotiations are not yet officially in mediation. Whatever the outcome, Kjome says that the lockout will end on Sept. 9, when the orchestra is scheduled to reconvene for the fall season. Musicians, however, are highly unlikely to resume work unless a contract agreement has been reached.
“To be out for 12 weeks and then come back and take the 20 percent cut they wanted to give us in the first place, would you be willing to do that?” said Brian Prechtl, a percussionist and co-chair of the BSO’s orchestra committee.
The lockout effectively achieves a goal that management announced it was seeking as early as October, when it proposed cutting the BSO’s season from 52 weeks to 40 weeks.
On May 24, House Bill 1404, which included provisions for $3.2 million for the orchestra over two years, and which had passed both houses of Maryland’s state assembly, was not among the bills vetoed by Gov. Larry Hogan (R), and the orchestra breathed a sigh of relief. However, according to Kjome, the money was not immediately forthcoming; he could not get a letter of intent from the legislature to present to the bank for a short-term loan.
The orchestra’s $60 million endowment, Kjome says, is already drawn to capacity, at a rate of 5.75 percent as well as a $5 million loan. “Our endowment trust,” he says, “views that further support without having significant changes to improve our business model is not fiduciarially responsible.”
Kjome asserts that the orchestra has lost $16 million in the past decade, and blames previous administrations for having drawn down the endowment significantly in the past. In 2006, he said, more than $20 million was taken out of the endowment at another critical juncture. “At that time,” he said, “the endowment was restructured to protect assets so that this would not happen again.” He added, “I think about where we would be today if we had those additional funds.”
Others say that Baltimore’s management and board have not done all they could to maximize donations and income, including an entire year during which the orchestra operated without a director of development, the organization’s chief fundraiser. The BSO is rare among American orchestras in having a full-fledged second home at Strathmore, in Montgomery County, one of the richest parts of the state.
“The orchestra management over a number of years has never fully tapped the significant potential that Strathmore represents,” said Greg Tucker, a strategic communications consultant who is a former PR director for the orchestra and was for four years a board member, until 2018.
And players believe the orchestra could still lean more heavily on the endowment. “They could be taking up to 7 percent by law,” Prechtl says.
As it is, Prechtl says, the orchestra will be saving $2.5 million on musicians’ wages and health care if it sticks with its plan of continuing the lockout until September. “That’s all coming out of musicians’ pockets,” he says. “Our line of the budget has remained flat for the last 10 years.” The musicians made several significant concessions over a decade of contract negotiations; their contracts have only recently returned to 2008 levels.
There is much debate about the 52-week season these days. Several orchestras, including Detroit, St. Louis and Atlanta, have cut back their seasons — Detroit, in the wake of a painful six-month strike in 2010 to 2011; Atlanta, after a lockout in 2012. (The orchestra was locked out again in 2014). The 52-week season is, in fact, a relatively recent development, dating from the 1970s and 1980s; before that, many orchestral musicians worked second jobs in the offseason.
According to Prechtl, Detroit’s success is because it  turned to best practices in marketing and development, and showed “a vision for what the orchestra can be.” Detroit, which has balanced its budget for the past six years, is doing well “not because of the 40-week season; it’s in spite of it.”
“The problem,” Prechtl added, “is the people here making these decisions are not showing us their bright vision for the future. They seem to be reacting to the balance sheet. That’s not the way to run an institution. People don’t give you money because you need it; they give you money because you inspire them.”
The musicians will return to the picket lines Tuesday.
anne.midgette@washpost.com


Find information about a new disease that seems to be emerging with polio-like symptoms.

I'm interested in the states that have children who have been diagnosed with the polio like disease (PLD).  I'm not interested with any other country who has identified children with the PLD.  Interested in experimental trials and research on PLD.  What do we know about this disease?

I'm interested in the states that have children who have been diagnosed with the polio like disease (PLD).  I'm not interested with any other country who has identified children with the PLD, nor information solely from any one individual state - it must reference multiple states or the broader USA.  Interested in experimental trials and research on PLD.  What do we know about this disease?

Find research or data on a specific disease's impact within a region to answer this question.

4-year-old’s death in September was caused by Enterovirus 68, which is sweeping U.S.

Eli Waller went to sleep one night late last month and never woke up. My words probably won’t capture him well, but everyone who met Eli knows how he made people feel; imagine a shy little puppy who wants only to make people proud and happy, maybe tripping a bit over his own paws, but truly full of unconditional love. He was a beautiful mix of eagerness and hesitancy, need and striving, caution and surprise, all of which were grounded in a pure, unconditional love. The youngest of a set of triplets, born much smaller and lighter than his sisters, Eli nevertheless persevered through all the difficulties that came his way. Eli was not the type to give up, and even though things never really came easily to him, he would just plug away, day after day, practicing sounds, or movements, or skills, until he would eventually get them. He did this entirely in an effort to make his Mom and Dad proud, and we can unequivocally say that we were, and will continue to be, so very proud of our little Eli. Another child at Eli’s school, Yardville Elementary School in Trenton, N.J., was being tested Monday for a possible Enterovirus 68 infection. But Plunkett said its unlikely for a child to pick up the virus from surfaces. School officials have disinfected all classrooms, water fountains and buses. “We have procedures in place to make sure kids wash their hands before lunch, after lunch,” school superintendent James Parla told the station. Enterovirus 68

Eli Waller went to sleep one night late last month and never woke up.
The 4-year-old from Hamilton, N.J., stayed home from preschool that day, when his parents thought he might have pink eye and didn’t want him to infect his classmates. He had no other symptoms of the respiratory virus sweeping the country — no fever, no coughing or sneezing, no muscle aches and no problems breathing. But sometime after they tucked him into bed Sept. 24 and before they tried to wake him the next morning, he died.
Eli’s death is believed to be the first in the United States directly linked to Enterovirus 68, or EV-D68, health officials ruled Oct. 3. Since August, the virus has hit nearly 600 people, most of them children, across 43 states and District of Columbia, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Four others who died were infected with the disease, but it’s not clear what role it played in their deaths. Eli’s pink eye was unrelated.
“I think Eli’s case is the exception to the other cases around the country,” Hamilton Township health officer Jeff Plunkett told ABC News. “He had no signs of any illness that night, and his passing was sudden and shocking.”
Last month, several children in Colorado, including some who tested positive for the illness, also experienced neurological symptoms such as muscle weakness and paralysis.
Eli, the youngest of triplets, was “smaller and lighter than his sisters,” his father, Andy Waller, said in a statement. Although some children are more susceptible to the virus because of preexisting conditions, the medical examiner said this was not the case with Eli. The medical examiner determined Eli had brain and lymph node swelling that were a result of the disease, according to news reports.
On Sunday, Andy Waller released a tribute to his son. Here’s an excerpt:
My words probably won’t capture him well, but everyone who met Eli knows how he made people feel; imagine a shy little puppy who wants only to make people proud and happy, maybe tripping a bit over his own paws, but truly full of unconditional love. He was a beautiful mix of eagerness and hesitancy, need and striving, caution and surprise, all of which were grounded in a pure, unconditional love.
The youngest of a set of triplets, born much smaller and lighter than his sisters, Eli nevertheless persevered through all the difficulties that came his way. Eli was not the type to give up, and even though things never really came easily to him, he would just plug away, day after day, practicing sounds, or movements, or skills, until he would eventually get them. He did this entirely in an effort to make his Mom and Dad proud, and we can unequivocally say that we were, and will continue to be, so very proud of our little Eli.
Another child at Eli’s school, Yardville Elementary School in Trenton, N.J., was being tested Monday for a possible Enterovirus 68 infection. But Plunkett said its unlikely for a child to pick up the virus from surfaces.
“It’s possible surface contact, but I think that’s remote how the teachers and the custodial staff handle that classroom and that school, but nothing has been eliminated,” he told CBS New York.
School officials have disinfected all classrooms, water fountains and buses.
“We have procedures in place to make sure kids wash their hands before lunch, after lunch,” school superintendent James Parla told the station.
Enterovirus 68
“There is no specific treatment for people with respiratory illness caused by EV-D68,” according to the CDC’s Web site. In addition: “There are no antiviral medications currently available for people who become infected with EV-D68.”


Rhode Island child dies of infection associated with rare respiratory virus

A Rhode Island child died last week of an infection associated with the rare respiratory virus that has been sickening children around the country, health officials said on Wednesday.
The child died of a staph infection associated with an infection of enterovirus 68, or EV-D68, the uncommon viral strain that has been found in hundreds of children in 41 states and the District of Columbia.
“We are all heartbroken to hear about the death of one of Rhode Island’s children,” Michael Fine, director of the the Rhode Island Department of Health, said in a statement. “Many of us will have EV-D68. Most of us will have very mild symptoms and all but very few will recover quickly and completely. The vast majority of children exposed to EV-D68 recover completely.”
Enteroviruses are incredibly common, as more than 100 strains cause between 10 and 15 million infections each year. Many people who are infected with enteroviruses don’t get sick or only develop a cold. This particular strain, which can cause severe breathing problems, has not been seen very often since it was first identified in 1962 in California.
But this year, it has cropped up across the country, sending children as young as six weeks old to the hospital and leading to concerns over how far this virus would ultimately spread. No vaccination is available for this virus, which spreads when an infected person coughs or sneezes.
This rare virus was found in four people who have died so far this year, but it is not known how much of a factor the infection was, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“The role that EV-D68 infection played in these deaths is unclear at this time,” Karen Mason of the CDC’s viral diseases division wrote in an e-mail. She said that state and local health departments are still investigating what happened.
There have been more than 470 cases confirmed across the country so far this year, almost all of them affecting children. The likely number of actual cases is much, much larger, as health officials in many states suspect that there are many cases that have not been formally diagnosed yet. (One hospital in Kansas City, Mo., told us that they believe that up to 450 children with this virus were treated there last month.) Still, the CDC says that since enteroviruses are more common in the summer and fall, the number of infections is expected to drop later in the fall.
The official cause of death in Rhode Island is the staph infection associated with the enterovirus, said Christina Batastini, a spokeswoman for the department. But again, the precise role the enterovirus played in this child’s death is not settled, she said.
“As of now, it’s unclear which one caused the death,” she told The Post on Wednesday.
The child’s age and hometown have not been released yet, Batastini said.
A child in New Jersey died last week of an undetermined respiratory illness, according to the Times of Trenton, but it is not known if the enterovirus strain played a role. The New Jersey Department of Health said Tuesday that it is awaiting test results seeing if this child had the rare EV-D68 strain.
Doctors in Colorado reported last week that several children who tested positive for this strain have experienced paralysis or limb weakness, causing the CDC to ask health officials nationwide to watch for similar symptoms.
A report authored by neurologists earlier this year found that up to 25 children in California may have suffered from a polio-like illness that caused the paralysis of some limbs. Some of these children were found to have had the rare enterovirus 68 strain.
[This post has been updated to note that the virus has been found in four deaths, rather than three; the CDC had said three deaths and increased the number Wednesday.]