Hello

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?

Hello

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 …

Hello

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.

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A wet nurse (for that is what Hera was in all tellings of the story) created the Milky Way when her divine milk sprayed across the heavens.

Today’s nursing mothers are not so blessed. Although women have a legal right to breastfeed in public across the United States and the UK (and many other countries), there are plenty of individuals who seem to think that they have the right to tell them to stop, and plenty of new mothers who are intimidated enough not to try. Why? How can this most essential of food chains possibly be considered shameful? And then there are the women who would dearly love to breastfeed their infants, but cannot.

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Things seem to be picking up again after the (northern) summer lull. A bumper crop these past couple of weeks, even after some judicious weeding, so I’m going to go light on the interpretation.

Roman Herb Resurrected

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Eat This Podcast is back with new episodes. And they really are new, unlike most fad diets, which are usually just an old fad diet with a new wrinkle.

Banting, Atkins. South Beach. Whole30. Keto.

In Anxious Eaters: Why We Fall for Fad Diets, Janet Chrzan and Kima Cargill examine fad diets and the people who follow them as anthropologists might examine foreign cultures. Janet Chrzan helped me understand why people are drawn to fad diets and how they help to soothe, at least temporarily, some of the anxieties that surround food.

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I’ve just listened to a very interesting podcast episode about the growth of the dairy industry in the US, and I’m pretty sure I will have more to say on that in a day or two. In the meantime, though, I’m reminded of an episode of my own from 2018.

Gillian Hopkinson, of Lancaster University in the UK, explained the remarkable turnaround in the market for British veal.

Hello

I’ve been hard at work on the next series. ETA: 19 September. But that hasn’t stopped me scouring the internets in search of additional sustenance.

Killjoy Preaching in the Desert

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There’s no use pretending otherwise. Today’s foray into the back catalogue is inspired by National Salami Day, which is not until next week and which is, frankly, deeply underwhelming. It does, however, remind me of one of the very first episodes of Eat This Podcast, recorded a little more than 10 years ago at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery.

Jan Davison talked about The Authentic Air-Cured Sausages of Europe at the symposium on Wrapped & Stuffed Foods. She then sat down to talk to me for what became the second ever episode.

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A quick confession; I have finally uploaded transcripts for the four episodes on wheat and human history. Sorry it took so long. Supporters of Eat This Podcast, who make transcripts possible, deserve better than that. If you have been considering joining them, and I hope you have, I pray my slackitude won’t put you off.

Beyond Food Miles; Way Beyond.

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By a happy coincidence, today I can point you to a short episode that first saw the light of day exactly four years ago, as part of my lunatic attempt to podcast something about bread and wheat on every day of August 2018.

The episode is about Ferragosto, today’s big holiday in Italy. These days, it celebrates the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, but a couple of thousand years ago it was the peak of Emperor Augustus’ Feriae Augusti. How are they connected, and why is the constellation Virgo carrying a wheatsheaf?

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Little did I know last week, when I resurrected the episode in which Harry Paris explained watermelon names, that 3 August was National Watermelon Day. Mind you, every day is national something day. Today (8 August) is apparently National Zucchini Day, which is also appropriate. National Palm Oil Day? Not likely

The problem isn’t palm oil

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The only thing keeping me from a complete meltdown these days is watermelon. Two slices from the ripe, crimson quarter-slice, replete with spittable seeds, that lives on the bottom shelf of the fridge and is replenished as necessary. The greengrocer knows me and knows what I want, but it wasn’t always so.

When I arrived in Italy, I already knew that the scientific, Latin name for watermelon was Citrullus. That was no help. Depending on where you are, the Italian for watermelon is either anguria or cocomero which, to me, sounds way too much like cucumber. But the Italian for cucumber is cetriolo, and that sounds like citrullus, for watermelon. As for anguria, you better just listen to this brief episode from 2016, when Harry Paris tried to straighten me out.

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Was I happy that Russia and Ukraine appeared last week to have agreed a deal to allow some grain exports to leave the Black Sea ports? Of course I was. Was I surprised that Russia bombed Odessa less than 24 hours later? Not really. Recent bleats that “Russia has weaponized food” ignore the fact that food has always been a weapon, in peace and in war. I’m still hopeful that grain shipments from Ukraine will resume soon, but I’m also not impressed by meetings between Russia and Egypt (and other African countries).

We shall see.

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In the final part of my conversation with Scott Reynolds Nelson, author of Oceans of Grain, we move on to empire.

The earliest city states in Mesopotamia built their fortunes on their position astride grain transport routes. Still today, the ability to tax grain as it moves and to control that movement is a source of political and commercial power around the world.

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Having moved your wheat from where it grew to where it was needed, there was a matching need to transfer the money to pay for it. Bills of exchange, invented in Venice and Genoa, created a piece of paper that increased in value as the time for delivery of the wheat drew near, but it was the need to avoid rank profiteering in times of war that created the futures market. Standard amounts of standard quality grain made buying and selling the crop even more efficient – and saved the Union army during the Civil War in the US.

Scott Reynolds Nelson traces the ways in which the wheat trade affected financial matters in his book Oceans of Grain. The story goes far beyond merely paying for the grain, extending to huge infrastructure projects and the consequences of their failure.

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Cereals provide their offspring with a long-lived supply of energy to power the first growth spurt of the seed. Thousands of years ago, people discovered that they could steal some of the seeds to power their own growth, taking advantage of the storability of seeds to move the food from where it grew to where it might be eaten. Wheat, the pre-eminent cereal, moved along routes that were ancient before the Greek empire, carried, probably, by ox-drawn carts and guided along these black paths by people remembered in Ukraine today as chumaki.

In this episode, Scott Nelson, author of Oceans of Grain, tells me about the various ways in which the ability to move wheat more efficiently changed world history, geography and economics, for starters. All the best

Hello

Many people take the myth of Demeter and her daughter Persephone to be just a metaphor for the annual cycle of planting and harvesting. But maybe there is much more to it than that. Maybe the story hides a secret so valuable that it was worth protecting with threats of divine retribution.

Elucidating the Eleusinian Mysteries is one small element in Scott Reynolds Nelson’s new book, Oceans of Grain. It looks at the many, many ways in which wheat and human history intertwine, which he’s been working on for years. It was finally published on 22 February this year.

Hello

I had a very enjoyable time during the Oxford Food Symposium’s Kitchen Table talk on how can we find reliable sources of information about food. I’d send you to a recording if there were one, but one reason we all found it enjoyable is that it was not recorded, so we were free to speak our minds.

I don’t think I am revealing any state secrets when I say that there was a lot of discussion about authenticity, especially about recipes. If you’re not interested in the first printed version, how do you know what is authentic? There were some interesting suggestions, but I had a different question. Why do some people care so much about authenticity? I still don’t know. Is that because I’ve never had my culture or cuisine or recipes appropriated? I’ve listened to diatribes about the awfulness of British food. Does that mean only awful British food is authentic? Of course not.

So, why do some people care so much about authenticity?

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A quck reminder of the Oxford Food Symposium’s Kitchen Table on Wednesday of this week. Join Elizabeth Yorke, Anusha Murthy, Ken Albala and me for an open discussion about how can we find reliable sources of information about food. Details and link to tickets

Onwards!

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Senegal, on the western edge of Africa, was an ideal base for the transatlantic slave trade, although the European powers that established themselves in the region found other goods to trade too. One of the most important was the peanut, brought by Portuguese explorers to Africa, where it grew well, tended mostly by enslaved African labourers.

Jori Lewis’ book Slaves For Peanuts: A Story of Conquest, Liberation, and a Crop That Changed History tells the tangled story of how colonial expansion and Christian missionaries simultaneously encouraged and opposed slavery, and how the history of peanuts and slavery still reverberates in Senegal.

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There is a kind of thread tying most of today’s newsletter items together. More on that in the final piece.

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You cannot avoid the past in Rome, but if you’re interested in the history of food there’s been nothing to see since the pasta museum shut its doors. A new museum, at the bottom of the Palatine Hill and facing the chariot-racing stadium, has put food history back on the tourist map. I was very fortunate to get a guided tour from the director, Matteo Ghirighini, a few days before Garum, as it is called, opened its doors to the public.

I learned so much, including the French origins of a Roman street food and the most convincing origin story yet for perhaps the most contentious pasta dish.

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No apologies for devoting a lot of space to protein in one form or another. It is an important topic that we need to understand better.

Insect meal and cultured milk

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The discovery of truly wild tomatoes in Mexico recently allowed researchers to finally tell a story of tomato domestication that fits all the available evidence. The feast of diversity that resulted in traditional tomato varieties, however, is not mirrored in genetic diversity. In fact, modern, scientifically-bred tomatoes are more diverse than traditional varieties, and almost a quarter of so-called traditional varieties are “tainted” by modern genetics.

Jose Blanca, one of the researchers involved in these two recent discoveries, told me more about what they found and what it means. Take a listen.

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I have a problem with podcasts that goes way beyond making my own. It is that I can really only listen when I am walking, flying, boating or training. Any other time, my attention is distracted by something and I lose the thread. That means I don’t have much time to listen. I do make the time for things that ought to be worthwhile, and sometimes I am glad I did. This is one of those times.

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Aaron Vallance’s writing at his website 1dish4theroad has twice been shortlisted by the Guild of Food Writers, not bad for someone who admits to having had great difficulty doing his English homework at school.

I first became aware of Aaron’s food writing through Curry and Kneidlach: A Tale of Two Immigrant Families, a story on his website co-written with Shahnaz Ahsan, and I’ve followed him ever since. A visit to London gave me the chance to meet Aaron in person and get an insight about what food and writing mean to him and how they relate to his practice as a doctor.

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Things have been a bit topsy-turvy lately, so please accept a newsletter instead of a podcast episode this week. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

Organic disasters

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I’m still bleating on about the naming of things, and I suspect nothing will ever stop me.

Cattle denazification

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Jessica Kehinde Ngo recently wrote an impassioned piece bemoaning the fact that “the plantain has long been eclipsed by its banana cousin”. That alarmed me a little, as did the question immediately afterwards: “Where can the curious go to learn about its fascinating transnational history?”

For Jessica, “[e]ach bite of plantain connects me to my roots, though I am many miles from my father’s homeland”.

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This newsletter is half hypothetical and half rooted in reality. Which is which? I couldn’t possibly say.

What price patriotism?

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Discussions about food often “bump up against philosophy,” according to David Kaplan. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of North Texas, and he thinks we could do a better job of thinking about food.

His book Food Philosophy: An Introduction shows us how, and we had a terrific conversation about it.

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In last week’s podcast, I asked whether we should distinguish food poverty from poverty, pure and simple. Following up, this week’s newsletter is largely about the cost of food.

As I write this, dawn is breaking on a day when Americans are predicted to eat 1.42 billion chicken wings, which this year are set to cost somewhere between 14% and 20% more than last year. What does that do to the price of 1.42 billion chicken legs? How about whole chickens with wings and legs intact?

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Give Directly is a charity that was started by students at Harvard and MIT after their research showed that a lot of philanthopy was both very inefficient and not very effective. Unconditional cash has greater impact, at lower cost, than skills training, microcredit, farmer field schools and just about every other form of aid.

But does cash enable people to improve their food security and nutrition? That’s what I wanted to find out from Give Directly staff in Uganda and Malawi.

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Back in the swing of things now, alternating podcast episodes and newsletters.

STOP PRESS: This just in (see item 3 below): An African immigrant’s pizza wins global raves — and overcomes Italian prejudices.

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Way back when, Neolithic people discovered that they could eat milk that had gone sour with impunity, even though ordinary milk upset their digestion. Thus was the culture of yoghurt born, helping those Neolithic farmers to move into northern Europe. Fast forward 10,000 years or thereabouts, and the bacteria that soured milk were held to be responsible for the extreme longevity of Bulgarian peasants. That theory gave birth to a craze for Lactobacillus bulgaricus, as it was known, now increasingly popular in China.

All this and more I learned from Yoghurt: A Global History, a recent book by June Hersh. What I still don’t know is why those Neolithic people were even trying to drink milk, if it upset their stomachs. They were keeping sheep and goats, sure, but why were they milking them? Ideas?

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I had fully intended to release a podcast today, but the honest truth is that I’m not ready. I am still trying to get more guests lined up for the next season and I did not want to launch prematurely. In the meantime, here’s some reading matter.

The vegetarian’s vegetarian