How extreme heat makes hunger in America worse

Transcript

NIALA: Good morning! Welcome to Axios Today!

It’s Tuesday, - and it’s the first of August.

I’m Niala Boodhoo.

Today: how fatigue illustrates the challenges with long-covid treatment. Plus, what lab grown meat tastes like.

But first, how extreme heat makes hunger in America worse. That’s our one big thing.

NIALA: On Sunday, Phoenix set a new record, 31 days straight of hitting at least 110 degree temperatures. That means for local food banks like St. Mary's, they're expecting to pass out one million bottles of water this summer, a more than 50% increase from last year. Axios’ Ayurella Horn-Muller has been reporting on how extreme heat is hurting low income residents across the country.

Ayurella, you talked to St. Mary's Food Bank in Phoenix. What else have you learned about how food insecure households are being affected by extreme heat?

AYURELLA: One of the first consequences of this is that when you lack high quality foodstuffs in your diet, you're not eating things that contain a lot of water, that actually creates an exposure to frank dehydration, and it means that it's harder for your body to dissipate heat to the environment and causes body temperatures to increase more rapidly.

There's a lot of studies that have found that food insecure Americans, they have a tendency to make this impossible choice of reducing the quality of their diet and their caloric intake in colder winter seasons to afford those high utility bills to afford a heater. But now with climate change, because we're seeing these, extreme heat waves, we're starting to see a lot of these similar problems emerge to where you have people forced to make this decision of will I eat the food I need to eat today? Or will I make sure I have access to AC.

NIALA: Given everything that you've said, what are you hearing from different communities that are trying to make sure that especially food insecure households have access to enough food and water this summer?

AYURELLA: There is so much strain and demand on organizations like local food banks that are working really hard to supply people in need. But there's another piece of it, Tory Wilson at the United Food Bank talked to me about how during extreme heat periods, people may be less inclined or unable to actually leave their houses to go get food, especially if that involves walking or riding a bike, waiting at a bus stop, being outside.

We know that there are so many food deserts across America and there are solutions being explored across the country. One great example is D.C. Hunger Solutions, they're working really hard to increase the number of hyper local food access points across D.C. And so I think that it's not just about making sure that there are these access points for food, but it's about making sure it doesn't require someone to have to have transportation and mobility being a barrier to whether or not you have the food and the water you need to survive and to be healthy.

NIALA: Ayurella Horn-Muller covers climate justice for Axios. Thanks, Ayurella.

AYURELLA: Thanks, Niala.

NIALA: After the break, understanding more about what fatigue is like for long covid patients.

NIALA: Welcome back to Axios Today. I'm Niala Boodhoo. The National Institutes of Health announced yesterday it would begin enrolling people for four new trials to examine better treatments for the millions of Americans suffering from long COVID.

Ed Yong, a Pulitzer-prize winning science journalist, wrote about one of the issues of long COVID sufferers - fatigue - and joins us now with how that's representative of problems facing treatment and diagnosis for long haulers.

Hi Ed, welcome back to Axios Today.

ED YONG: Hi, thanks for having me.

NIALA: Ed, so these trials have been delayed for some time and one of them had to do with something you just wrote about in your last piece in The Atlantic, a little understood symptom of long COVID fatigue. What struck me about what you wrote was first how fatigue feels different for long COVID sufferers. How so?

ED: Yeah, so all of us have experienced fatigue as part of our everyday lives, but what people with long COVID experience is far more profound than that. Um, one long hauler named Alexis Misko, has been sick since October 2020 and she told me that at the worst of her illness, she couldn't sit upright for more than an hour. Um, people have talked about feeling like their joints are being weighed down by heavy lead. They might feel cognitively tired. it might be hard for them to think or thoughts might be painful. And really notably most everyday fatigue, it is possible to push through and is amenable to rest. That's not the case for the kind of fatigue that most long haulers experience. It's much harder for them to push through and they can suffer severe costs if they do so. And often... Rest doesn't cure what they have, so a lot of them wake up feeling fatigued despite having slept.

NIALA: Ed, there's a lot of stigma around long COVID sufferers and chronic fatigue. Where does that come from?

ED: I think there's several factors that underlie the stigma they experience, um, Capitalism is one of them, right, we in our society have come to view productivity and worth as equal. And there's this push to, push through it, to show grit, to keep at it, to, to work your way out of a problem. Long haulers cannot do so and for subverting that norm, they're often treated with contempt as well as disbelief. It doesn't help that the majority of people with long COVID and similar illnesses like MECFS, myalgic encephalomyelitis, are women. And, women's pain has long been psychologized. It's very easy for medical professionals to tell them that their very real symptoms are the result of depression and anxiety. So this association with idleness and immorality has long been a very specifically feminine one and one that now you know rears its head for all of these people with energy-limiting illnesses.

NIALA: Ed we've specifically been speaking about fatigue. I wonder how much is this representative of a larger problem we have for lots of sufferers of long COVID, whether they're suffering from other symptoms like brain fog or heart problems?

ED: So long COVID is very similar to another illness called chronic fatigue syndrome. Its sufferers existed long before the pandemic and have been facing exactly the same problems for a very long time. There is just this long-standing tendency to dismiss the lived experiences of people with chronic illness and with disabilities that I think the pandemic has exposed and that I think we all need to societally grapple with. Because these problems are not going away, and millions of patients are suffering from them, and just grasping for not just medical support, but even the merest shred of empathy and understanding.

NIALA: Ed Yong is a former science writer at The Atlantic. We'll include a link to his new newsletter in our show notes. Thanks for joining us, Ed.

ED: Thank you for having me.

NIALA: Two California based companies are the first in the U.S. to get approval to sell lab grown chicken. Axios’ San Francisco Reporter Megan Rose Dickey got a taste.

MEGAN ROSE DICKEY: So right now, there are just two companies in the United States that have received approval from the USDA to sell their cultivated chicken or, you know, lab grown chicken, and that's Good Meat and Upside Foods.

So I actually recently got a chance to try the chicken from Good Meat. So they have their research and development center in Alameda, just across the bridge from San Francisco. My big takeaway is that it tastes like chicken and I, I really couldn't tell the difference. That said, the chef did tell me that what they're wanting to do is focus more on the tenderness. Like they feel like there's some room for improvement there, as well as with the juiciness of the chicken. But yeah, it's still going to be a little while before the masses can really experience these products from these companies just because neither of them are making this at scale.

NIALA: Axios San Francisco’s Megan Rose Dickey. Jennifer Kingson also reports for us that while the lab grown meat industry is drawing investors, and there are more than 150 companies in the cell cultivated meat space, it remains to be seen if the technology can be scaled up before this becomes the next big thing.

We’ll include a link to both of their stories in our show notes.

That’s it for us today!

I’m Niala Boodhoo, thanks for listening, stay safe and we’ll see you back here tomorrow morning.