(Press-News.org) A survey of New York state residents found that nearly half of respondents increased the amount of time they spent on wild and backyard food in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, confirming anecdotes about increases in activities such as sourdough baking, fishing and gardening. People also tended to eat the food they produced, researchers found, possibly buffering the generally less healthful eating that was common at the time.
“This was the period of 2020 when you couldn't find tomato cages, seeds were out of stock, and there were reports about record numbers of people hunting and fishing,” said Kathryn Fiorella, assistant professor in the Department of Public and Ecosystem Health at Cornell University and senior author of “Wild and Backyard Food Use During COVID-19 in Upstate New York, United States,” published in the journal Frontiers in Nutrition.
The researchers conducted a survey of more than 500 people across Broome, Cortland, Onondaga, Oswego, Cayuga and Seneca counties. Participants reported on their production and consumption of wild and backyard foods – from gardening, poultry rearing, foraging and hunting and/or fishing – during the pandemic compared with the previous year. Because respondents were recruited in a convenience sample, they likely overrepresented interest in these activities. They also tended to be whiter, more educated and wealthier than average New Yorkers.
Results showed that only a small number of participants were new to wild and backyard food-related pursuits, and across different activities, 40% to 46% of people increased the amount of time they invested. Conversely, a notable minority of respondents reduced their activities.
The researchers were especially interested to see whether people also consumed the food they produced. Indeed, they did. While diets generally worsened during the pandemic, gardening and poultry rearing for meat and eggs may have contributed to buffering those effects in the study region.
“People were actually consuming really meaningful quantities,” Fiorella said, including home-produced eggs and meat, and backyard-grown fruits and vegetables.
“People reported harvesting and eating wild and backyard foods to have more control over food availability, a key dimension of food insecurity, compared to before the pandemic,” said doctoral student Jeanne Coffin-Schmitt. “This was true even though the people we surveyed were almost entirely considered food secure based on their responses. We think this could show how much anxiety about conventional food systems the pandemic inspired.”
For additional information, read this Cornell Chronicle story.
Cornell University has dedicated television and audio studios available for media interviews.
- 30 -
END
Pandemic boosted gardening, hunting in NYS
2023-10-04
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
Study identifies jet-stream pattern that locks in extreme winter cold, wet spells
2023-10-04
Winter is coming—eventually. And while the earth is warming, a new study suggests that the atmosphere is being pushed around in ways that cause long bouts of extreme winter cold or wet in some regions.
The study’s authors say they have identified giant meanders in the global jet stream that bring polar air southward, locking in frigid or wet conditions concurrently over much of North America and Europe, often for weeks at a time. Such weather waves, they say, have doubled in frequency since the 1960s. In just the last few years, they have killed hundreds of people and ...
Department of Defense grant awarded to study metastasis in bladder cancer
2023-10-04
A Weill Cornell Medicine researcher has received a $610,000 grant from the Department of Defense to investigate the mechanisms causing DNA instability that potentially drives metastasis in bladder cancer. The research also aims to identify methods to intercept this spread. The Peer-Reviewed Cancer Research Program (PRCRP) Idea Award funds innovative, high-risk, high-reward basic cancer research. One of the goals of the PRCRP program is to decrease the burden of cancer on service members and their families, veterans, and the American public.
“Approximately 40% of patients with muscle-invasive bladder cancer develop metastases, where ...
Simultaneous large wildfires will increase in Western U.S.
2023-10-04
Contacts:
David Hosansky, UCAR/NCAR Manager of Media Relations
hosansky@ucar.edu
720-470-2073
Audrey Merket, UCAR/NCAR Science Writer and Public Information Officer
amerket@ucar.edu
303-497-8293
Simultaneous outbreaks of large wildfires will become more frequent in the Western United States this century as the climate warms, putting major strains on efforts to fight fires, new research shows.
The new study, led by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), focused on wildfires of 1,000 acres or larger. It found that wildfire seasons in which ...
New UCF technology could reduce lag, improve reliability of online gaming, meetings
2023-10-04
Whether you’re battling foes in a virtual arena or collaborating with colleagues across the globe, lag-induced disruptions can be a major hindrance to seamless communication and immersive experiences.
That’s why researchers with the University of Central Florida’s College of Optics and Photonics (CREOL) and the University of California, Los Angeles, have developed new technology to make data transfer over optical fiber communication faster and more efficient.
Their new development, a novel class of optical modulators, is detailed in a new study published recently in the journal Nature Communications. Modulators can be thought of as like a light switch that controls certain ...
Rice alum Louis Brus awarded Nobel Prize in Chemistry
2023-10-04
Rice University alumnus Louis Brus (’65) has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the “discovery and development of quantum dots,” nanosized particles with unique properties “that now spread their light from television screens and LED lamps,” according to a Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announcement today.
Brus, who started his undergraduate education at Rice in 1961, shares the distinction with Moungi Bawendi and Alexei Ekimov. Their work has been crucial to the development of nanotechnology, which has helped drive major computing ...
UGDH in clinical oncology and cancer biology
2023-10-04
“Given the potential challenges of directly inhibiting UGDH, therapeutic strategies may extend to targeting downstream pathways and upstream substrates.”
A new review paper was published in Oncotarget's Volume 14 on September 28, 2023, entitled, “UDP-glucose dehydrogenase (UGDH) in clinical oncology and cancer biology.”
UDP-glucose-6-dehydrogenase (UGDH) is a cytosolic, hexameric enzyme that converts UDP-glucose to UDP-glucuronic acid (UDP-GlcUA), a key reaction in hormone and xenobiotic metabolism and in the production of extracellular matrix precursors.
In this review, researchers Meghan J. Price, Annee D. Nguyen, Jovita K. Byemerwa, ...
Prehistoric people occupied upland regions of inland Spain in even the coldest periods of the last Ice Age
2023-10-04
Paleolithic human populations survived even in the coldest and driest upland parts of Spain, according to a study published October 4, 2023 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Manuel Alcaraz-Castaño of the University of Alcalá, Spain, Javier Aragoncillo-del Rió of the Molina-Alto Tajo UNESCO Global Geopark, Spain and colleagues.
Research into ancient hunter-gatherer populations of the Iberian Peninsula has mainly focused on coastal regions, with relatively little investigation into the inland. A classic hypothesis has been that the cold and dry conditions of inland Iberia ...
Antimicrobials don't appear to help pet dogs with uncomplicated diarrhea - so should likely be prescribed less often by vets - according to new causal inference study
2023-10-04
Antimicrobials don't appear to help pet dogs with uncomplicated diarrhea - so should likely be prescribed less often by vets - according to new causal inference study
###
Article URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0291057
Article Title: Target trial emulation: Do antimicrobials or gastrointestinal nutraceuticals prescribed at first presentation for acute diarrhoea cause a better clinical outcome in dogs under primary veterinary care in the UK?
Author Countries: UK
Funding: CP is supported at the RVC ...
Adoption of vegan dog and cat diets could have environmental benefits
2023-10-04
A new analysis estimates a variety of potential benefits for environmental sustainability—for instance, reduced freshwater consumption and greenhouse gas emissions—that could result from switching all pet dogs and cats in the US or around the world to nutritionally sound, vegan diets. Andrew Knight of Griffith University, Australia, presents these calculations in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on October 4, 2023.
The livestock industry has environmental impacts, such as land and freshwater ...
Being a vegetarian may be partly in your genes
2023-10-04
First fully peer-reviewed, indexed study to look at link between strict vegetarianism and genetics
More people would like to be vegetarian than actually are. ‘We think it’s because there is something hard-wired here that people may be missing’
Findings open the door to further studies that could have important implications regarding dietary recommendations and the production of meat substitutes
CHICAGO --- From Impossible Burger to “Meatless Mondays,” going meat-free is certainly in vogue. But a person’s genetic makeup plays ...