Hello

Sometimes a big story seems to have been everywhere I look, and I wonder whether it is worth including here. So I ask people not quite as nerdy as me, and they say “what big story?”, which is why I do include it.

Lets Start With a Laugh

In her latest book English Food: A People’s History, Diane Purkiss offers just that, an entrancing survey of what and how the English ate, with due recognition that “‘the English’ are not a single entity” and that the past necessarily illuminates the present. Impossible to cover all that in a single episode, or even several, we set out to explore what happens when the vast bulk of the English do not have enough to eat.

Take a listen.

All the best,

Hello

Back on the usual timetable, alternating podcast episodes with newsletters, and finding that being more selective produces what I hope is a more interesting newsletter for you too.

Still Fishy

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Apologies for cluttering your inbox twice in as many days.

Apologies too for being an idiot. In yesterday’s email I said that fresh milk was always a seller’s market. This is categorically wrong. It is, of course, a buyer’s market, as Anne Mendelson explained. My fault entirely.

While I’m here, though, let me share something I cut from the interview because it didn’t really fit. I wondered about the origin of the phrase “cash cow,” seeing as it didn’t obviously apply to the dairy farmer. Anne Mendelson said that it was coined by a business consultant, and I went digging further.

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Anne Mendelson's new book Spoiled is subtitled The Myth of Milk as Superfood, and at its core argues that while there's nothing wrong with fresh milk, at least for those who can digest it as adults, the belief that you cannot have enough of a good thing has created a monstrous industry. Dairy farmers have always had the short end of the stick, because fresh milk is inevitably a sellers' market. Cows have been manipulated to divorce them from any kind of natural life. And milk drinkers are being fobbed off with a tasteless white liquid reconstituted from its constituent parts and with no hedonic value.

And for what?

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A few stories here that demonstrate how illuminating it can be to pull on a thread until it has little more left to give.

Not Sweet, Bitter

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We are in the middle of another very hot spell here, but I’ve been keeping cool reading long reports in a darkened room … so you don’t have to.

Far-sighted Grape Growers

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Sat up late last night looking for inspiration from the Perseid meteor showers, but local light pollution thwarted that plan. Nothing daunted, here are some enlightened gleanings.

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Is the world ready to pay the true cost of food? Probably not.

Too Costly?

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Delayed delivery today to be able to bring you real science.

The Mything Microbiome

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No let-up in sight as we continue to swelter. I hope you are doing better.

Black Sea Exports Blocked Again

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Of course it is just a coincidence that today’s issue number is equal to the boiling point of water in degrees Fahrenheit, but it’s a coincidence that has particular resonance as we fry in the jaws of Cerberus.

What Price Externalities?

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A couple of weeks ago I was blessed with a couple of nutty stories. Now here I am again with pistachios, baklava and hazelnuts, among other treats. Life is good.

Blue Food Blues

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For some reason, food from Italy features in this issue. Go figure?

Ancient Italian Flat Round Thing

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A full banquet for you this week, with thanks to my sister for the soup and reader Tom Robinson for the nuts.

Soup

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We are on the weekly schedule now, with probably fewer items but, I hope, my customary high standards for entertainment and information. In that connection, I’m grateful to Naomi Duguid for sharing the link to the first item..

A monocular look at a cheese

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As the podcast goes briefly dormant for its summer rest, I plan to publish the newsletter every week. That may mean some issues are slimmer than others, so I would appreciate any items you may care to share with me. Replying to this newsletter is an easy way to do so. Thanks.

A taste of history

At my grammar school it was obvious that nobody could possibly want to study geography and history; on the basis of the teachers’ personalities, I gave up history for geography, a decision I have been making amends for ever since. I’m quite certain, though, that neither Mr Jackson nor Mr Davies would ever have taught a lesson like Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, who writes about Potato Latkes and Pedagogy.

Saghar Setareh left Iran in 2007 at 22 years old. She came to Rome to study graphic design and photography. The way she tells it, when she arrived she “certainly didn’t have a particular passion for food”. Slowly, though, that passion developed, first for Italian food and then by extension for the food of her homeland. Her book, which emerged from her passion, shares stories and recipes from Iran, from Italy, and from all the countries in between, and it is simply gorgeous, showcasing her multiple talents: writer, cook, photographer.

Take a listen.

Take care.

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It’s all down to supply and demand, although that says nothing about value.

The Cost of Brexit

“This is not about chickens. This is about humanity” Jill Silverman van Coenegrachts, Curator.

In 1999, Koen Vanmechelen, a Belgian artist, embarked on a project to bring together chicken breeds from around the world into a gloriously diverse cosmopolitan chicken population. He talked to me about the history of the project and the philosophy behind it at his studio in Genk. With us was Olivier Hanotte, a livestock specialist who is helping to use Vanmechelen’s cosmopolitan chickens to boost the resilience and productivity of village chickens in Africa.

Take a listen

All the best,

Hello

Today’s issue once again waited hours at the bus stop for a Number 75, when suddenly a whole flotilla of them arrived. Let’s jump aboard.

A Bumper Harvest of Alt-Food

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Coupons and ration books during war was a way for the British government to try and ensure that restricted items were distributed as fairly as possible, and while it wasn’t perfect, it worked pretty well most of the time. At the same time, during both World War One and World War Two, there were concerted efforts to feed people. It started with centrally cooked meals that people took home to eat, but soon blossomed into a far-reaching network of government-run restaurants. A new book — Feeding the People in Wartime Britain — from historian Bryce Evans uncovers the past and offers some ideas for the present.

Take a listen

Hello,

On a gray and dismal May Morning, with more rain forecast for the next couple of days, it gives me some pleasure to think about solar panels and food, in addition to other sunny subjects.

Throwing Shade

Hidden hunger — a lack of vitamins and minerals in the diet — afflicts two billion people around the world, with lasting effects on health and well being.

Biofortification — engineering or selecting varieties of staple crops so that they produce higher levels of micronutrients — makes perfect sense to tackle hidden hunger, which is strongly correlated with the amount of energy people get from staples, at least on the surface. Putting more micronutrients in those staples ought to be a good thing. Except that there’s little evidence that it works, and yields of biofortified staples are generally lower than those of unfortified varieties. That’s a waste of land that could be used to grow the fruits and vegetables that contribute to a more diverse diet, which offers a better approach to micronutrient deficiencies.

All this and more is brought out in a recent paper in the journal Global Food Security. I interviewed one of the authors.

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Some stories are too good to be true; these are not, I hope, those.

Gelato Blues

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Digging into old Chinese texts, Professor Miranda Brown discovered recipes and advice on butter, milk and cheese. She even managed to successfully recreate some cheeses.

So what about the story, which I’ve long believed, that the reason there is no milk or cheese in Chinese food culture today is because ethnic Chinese people are likely to be lactose intolerant?

Yes, a study in 1984 concluded that 92% of Han Chinese exhibit “primary adult lactose malabsorption”. Nevertheless, milk consumption is growing rapidly in China and the genetic basis of intolerance may be more complicated than a simple, single gene.

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I know the price of everything and the value of nothing, as the great man said.

Well, I don’t, but I’m trying.

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A chicken has two wings, two legs, two breasts; how does the market cope when all people want is wings?

Chickens were bred to deliver big breasts; wings were an afterthought until the advent of Buffalo wings in the 1960s. Now, and especially in the run-up to the Superbowl and March Madness, wings are in much greater demand than breasts, which is reflected in much higher prices for wings.

I wanted to understand how the market copes with changing demand for the different parts of the whole bird, so I turned to Professor Wally Thurman, an agricultural economist.

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I’ve been digging into databases, with some little success.

Never Mind Apples and Oranges, Let’s Compare Chickens and Chickpeas

Ten years ago, the first episode of Eat This Podcast featured Ben Reade talking about some butter that he had buried in a Swedish bog, the better to understand the bog butter occasionally unearthed in Ireland (and elsewhere). The butter for that experiment was made by Patrik Johansson, using methods taught him by his grandmother, lightly churned with some modern food science. The result is a product that can be found only at a few fine restaurants. That is unlikely ever to change, as Patrik says he couldn’t possibly scale up production.

We talked about that, and much else besides.

Take a listen, and while you’re about it, wish ETP a happy birthday.

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I regard myself as something of a connoisseur of weasel words, and so for this celebratory edition — 200, can you believe it? — a few choice examples.

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One overarching topic this week; the other couple of things I saved will keep.

The Commercial Milk Formula Industry

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Re-evaluating coffee, Jamaican jerk and industrial food waste.

Decolonising Coffee

“Twenty loaves of bread for the cost of a cigarette”

Wheat yields in Egypt are among the highest in Africa, but they are no match for the population, which is why Egypt is the biggest buyer of wheat on the global market.

Even when government raises the price it will pay for local wheat, the farmers who grow it prefer to keep their harvest — for their own family food security — rather than sell it to promote the government’s security.

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Efforts to undermine industrial agriculture alongside stories hoping to reverse the decline. Diversity is everything.

Eggsorbitent Profits

There is an awful lot of disagreement on the subject of mercury in fish and shellfish and how harmful it might be to people. That’s especially true for tuna, which are top predators that accumulate mercury from all the fish they eat over their long lives.

Many countries, including the USA, offer guidelines about how much tuna it is “safe” to eat, but there are problems with that. First, not all tuna is tested for mercury. And second, some individual fish contain way more mercury than others.

Safe Catch is a relative newcomer to canned tuna, with a unique selling point: it tests every single fish, and to a standard 10 times more stringent than the level at which the FDA might take action.

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Is food more susceptible to invented traditions than other topics? It sometimes seems so.

Hello,

Since 1966, the European Union has had the most restrictive laws in the world on agricultural biodiversity. To be marketed, a variety has to be distinct, uniform and stable, which in principle means the individual plants have to be effectively identical. This has never suited organic farmers or any other smaller scale growers, including home gardeners. Finally, after a few false starts, a new regulation permitted the marketing of “organic heterogeneous material” from January 2022.

One of the organisations that campaigned for the new regulation is Let’s Liberate Diversity. I went along to their 10^th anniversary forum to hear how farmers and food producers were responding to the new regulation.

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Happy New Year? Sad New Year? New Year, for sure.

Crisis? What Crisis?

At the end of the episode on mothers’ milk, Professor Amy Brown mentioned that new mothers become anxious because they cannot easily see how much their baby has eaten. That pushes them to use a see-through bottle and switch from breast to formula.

The Italian Fascist regime came up with a solution 90 years ago. In this episode, Professor Diana Garvin provides some insights into Fascist breastfeeding, and a friend of mine explains how it lingered to traumatise mothers 50 years on, and continues to do so today.

Take a listen

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Not much to share with you at this season, because most of what is being shared with me is reheated leftovers.

Here’s to the future.

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Things have been wild in international wheat markets this year. The price shot up after Russia invaded Ukraine in February, but had started rising well before that. Then prices began to drift down in mid-May, while fighting was still intense and no wheat had yet left the Black Sea. As became clear, there was no great global shortage of wheat, although it had become scarce.

There was a lot of talk about speculators and starvation, which just happens to be the topic of a blog post by David Zetland, an American political economist who teaches at Leiden University in The Netherlands. He, like me, had long dismissed claims that speculators exacerbated price increases. Unlike me, he had changed his mind, at least in some cases. Of course I wanted to understand why, so I asked David to walk me through that and other some fundamental economic ideas as they relate to food and water.

Take a listen

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Taken individually so many things we read about the food system make no sense whatsoever. Perhaps Corinna Hawkes is right, and it really needs to see a doctor.

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There’s a school of thought that says we should judge the art, not the artist. Is the same true for restaurants?

Piggie Park serves barbecue in South Carolina. The man who started it was an out-and-out racist white supremacist, subject to boycotts because he refused to serve Black people long after the Civil Rights Act. His sons have been running the business for 15 years, and removed most of the offensive memorabilia. But the question remains, is it OK to eat at Piggie Park?

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Sometimes it is fun to pull on a thread and watch the unravelling. Other times, it is more fun to read about someone else doing the same. I can take some small credit for someone here spinning a thread of their own, but modesty forbids …

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World Philosophy Day happens later this week, which makes it a good time to be asking what constitutes good behaviour in a host and, equally, in a guest.

How should a host act when faced with a guest whose professed allergies seem a tad suspect? Is it OK to ignore guest requests as snowflake signifiers? What should guests do when faced with intolerable food that they failed to inform their host about?

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A bit of this, a bit of that, from grain exports to bakers, from chicken to chillies, but not for school lunches.

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Can biology and anthropology deepen our understanding of childhood feeding and suggest possible solutions? Tina Moffat certainly thinks so. She has studied how children are nourished in Japan, Nepal, France and her native Canada. Her book – Small Bites – rounds up the evidence and shares several important observations. Like, the difference between neophobia – a sensible evolutionary strategy – and picky eating, which becomes entrenched by being rewarded. School lunches demonstrate what society thinks makes a proper meal and the value it places on good childhood nutrition.

Take a listen

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Feast or famine, in this newsletter as in life. Even after judicious culling of the crooked and blemished ones, 13 items jostle for attention.

Russia Is Stealing Ukrainian Grain

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Authenticity is big again this week. I’m not against that, I just don’t feel like doing it myself.