Month: May 2014

Daniel Gross notes that Whole Foods is losing its edge, pointing to how “in places where it has been established for a decade or more, [it] seems to be losing market share”:

We are becoming the United States of Ameri-kale. Local food cultures are rising up everywhere, not just in yuppified suburbs and chi-chi cities. And Whole Foods’ success is inviting others into the increasingly crowded aisles. Small chains are gaining scale and resources. Sprouts Farmers Markets, which went public last summer. It has 150 stores, concentrated in Arizona, California, and Colorado. Fresh Market, had 151 stores in January and opened 25 in the last fiscal year. While Fresh Market doesn’t rival Whole Foods across the board, it is a reasonable alternative—especially for bulk items like nuts, and its fruits and vegetables are much more reasonable. Trader Joe’s, a quirky competitor, opened its 400th store last year.

Meanwhile, the higher standards being set by Whole Foods, restaurants, locavores, food blogs, farm stands, and CSAs, are causing mass retailers to up their collective game.

In response, Whole Foods is lowering prices. Alison Griswold wonders whether that will work:

Pricey, high-end brands that were once available only on the shelves of Whole Foods and other boutique stores can now be found in many mainstream supermarkets. Even Walmart announced last month that it would begin offering organic food products from Wild Oats at a fraction of competitors’ costs.

In short, Whole Foods’ grip on the organic market is slipping. The company cut its 2014 same-store sales and earnings outlook for the third consecutive time when it reported second-quarter results on Tuesday. Executives said the growing popularity of organic foods represented a huge opportunity for Whole Foods and that some of the recent gap in sales could be chalked up to the harsh winter. But those hedges didn’t reassure investors. Shares of Whole Foods plunged 18.8 percent to $38.93 when trading reopened on Wednesday and several analysts lowered their ratings on the stock.

Jill Neimark considers the barriers to widespread PrEP use:

The stigma around anal sex plays out in the doctor’s office, where acceptance and compassionate care are necessary to stem the epidemic. An anonymous college student told his story on a site called My PrEP Experience. After two boyfriends had cheated on him, and one had snuck a condom off during sex, the student wanted a pharmaceutical brand of protection. He wanted PrEP. ‘We don’t prescribe this to people like you,’ he was told by a physician. ‘I felt like she [the doctor] had already labelled me as whore and, as far as she was concerned, the appointment was over.’ Eventually, the prescription was written by the doctor’s boss and, after jumping through some administrative and insurance hoops for a few weeks, the student went to receive his pills. He was the first in his town of 130,000 to be given PrEP. It takes a confident young man to persist in spite of that kind of humiliation. …

There aren’t many primary care doctors who feel confident opening up a conversation with a gay man about barebacking, online apps, anal chlamydia, and a treatment plan for protection. And how many gay men walk into their primary physician’s office comfortably prepared to discuss all those concerns?

And so, in 2014, in the developed world, HIV infections continue unabated at crushing expense to society because of HIV of the mind. I do not mean to imply the existence of a scarlet H unique to gay male psychology. No, I mean the incredible complexity around being gay in 2014 – when HIV is treatable and preventable, but profound vulnerability to infection remains. I refer to the whole welter of confusing feelings and polarised messages that gay men still shoulder, often invisibly, and that the straight world still struggles with, too. Silence equals death. That was the brilliant mantra coined by the original AIDS activists, the ones who mobilised all of us to action. But there is still a penumbra of silence around gay life, even in the most ‘out’ gay man’s heart.

The recent Dish thread on Truvada is here.

Rebecca Burns examines Atlanta’s Cobb County:

Long considered the epitome of red-state suburban comfort, a quintessentially middle-class kind of place where the median income is $65,000 and people pride themselves on owning their own homes, Cobb County now has other superlatives attached to its name. Between 2000 and 2010, the county’s poverty rate doubled to 12 percent. Just last month, the Urban Institute reported that of all counties in the United States, Cobb is where low-income people have the least chance of finding affordable places to live.

This is not an indictment of Cobb County in particular.

Rather, what’s happening in Cobb is a microcosm of the dilemma facing suburbs nationwide: a rapid spike in the number of poor people in what once were the sprawling beacons of American prosperity. Think of it as the flip side of the national urban boom: The poverty rate across all U.S. suburbs doubled in the first decade of the millennium—even as America’s cities are transforming in the other direction, toward rising affluence and hipster reinvention.

“As with just about every Atlanta story,” she adds, traffic is a big part of the problem:

That literal lack of mobility contributes to a bigger problem: Atlanta has one of the lowest rates of economic mobility in the country. … [T]oday in greater Atlanta, the odds of a poor kid making it to the top rung of the economic ladder are lower than any other major metropolitan area in the country—in part because residential segregation, which keeps metro Atlantans separated not only by race but also by class, has created widely disparate public school districts, further immobilizing the poor.

Previous Dish on suburban poverty here and here.

Susannah Locke summarizes new research on the question:

The paper concludes that the new cells that are constantly being formed in very young brains may be messing up the circuits that hold memories. The brain makes new cells throughout life — a process called neurogenesis — but young people produce new neurons at a much higher rate. And this process is particularly active in the hippocampus, which deals with memories and learning. Most of the time, neurogenesis leads to better learning and improved memory. But there’s a catch. According to the Science paper, the extremely high rates of neurogenesis seen in very young children can actually increase forgetfulness. These new neurons could be crowding out the old circuits that hold memories.

Clare Wilson explains how the study was conducted:

[Katherine Akers] and her team taught mice of different ages to associate a particular environment with a mild electric shock. They then got some of the adult mice to run on a wheel, because this has been shown to promote the growth of new neurons.

When mice were placed back in the threatening environment, adult mice that had boosted their neuron numbers by running were less likely to freeze to the spot – a sure sign of fear – than a control group with no access to an exercise wheel.

This suggests that forming brain cells caused the mice to forget the electric shocks. Akers’s team then gave a group of mice just a few weeks old a drug that inhibits neurogenesis. These mice were more likely to remember the electric shock than a control group.

Keating is skeptical:

The return of the girls will likely require either a risky military operation or controversial negotiations, neither of which international attention seems likely to hasten. But it’s clear that the Nigerian government, which also happens to be hosting a meeting of the World Economic Forum and is clearly looking to present itself as an emerging economic powerhouse, is already feeling the pressure to prevent this from happening again. An international plan backed by Nigerian business leaders to secure the country’s schools was unveiled at this week’s conference, for instance.

#BringBackOurGirls—either the hashtag itself or the larger campaign behind it—may not end this particular crisis, but if it puts some pressure on the government to address the root causes of the country’s violence and make it safer for girls to attend school, it may yet do some good. Ultimately, however, experience tells us that international attention will fade quickly. The question is whether this crisis will be a turning point within Nigeria, and whether the country’s outraged citizens can keep the pressure on.

Laura Seay outlines what the US is doing to help with the search, and why she thinks it’s right to get involved:

The U.S. team will involve fewer than 10 soldiers and will likely be focused primarily on providing intelligence and negotiation support. This is a small effort, but it points to the United States’ quiet, but growing engagement across dozens of African countries facing a metastasizing terrorist threat. Nigeria is especially important: It’s by far the most populous country in Africa and one of its three biggest economies. Each year, America sends Nigeria $5 billion in private investment and around $700 million in aid, and it’s the 5th largest oil exporter to the United States. A million and a half Nigerians live here, sending millions of dollars in remittances across the Atlantic and maintaining close business and personal ties to home.

U.S. security assistance in the region is not charity; it generally aims to bolster African militaries, and for two main reasons. First, the United States wants African militaries to staff peacekeeping missions on the continent. Second, the United States wants regional governments to suppress militant groups like Boko Haram. Both of these objectives serve the U.S. interest in avoiding putting boots on the ground in Africa (a prospect for which the American public has had no appetite since the failed intervention in Somalia under President George H.W. Bush) while still addressing security threats and humanitarian crises—each of which the continent has in spades.

Canada is sending assistance as well, Ben Makuch reports, in the form of surveillance technology.