Eat This Newsletter 224: Life Happens
Hello
This should have been a podcast episode week, and yet here we are with another newsletter. Life got in the way, as it will occasionally. I do beat myself up a bit when that happens, because I feel I am letting you, the listeners, down. But I am also grateful that because this is both a one-person-plus-guests operation and a labour of love, it doesn’t really matter in the greater scheme of things.
Of course, if I were more organised I would always have an episode up my sleeve for times like these. The next best thing, given a back catalogue of more than 250 episodes now, is to resurrect something suitable. This time, in honour of the first couple of items, It is OK to eat quinoa. Perhaps soon there’ll be more to say on the subject.
Quinoa Revelations
JSTOR’s plant of the month (a collaboration with Dumbarton Oaks) is an Andean superfood — quinoa to you and me. Why now? Ostensibly because it has been ten years since the International Year of Quinoa (IYQ) in 2013. More prosaically, it is always time to talk about superfoods. The article draws attention both to the reasons quinoa got its very own year — nutritious, sustainable, culturally interesting — and the potential downsides of all that publicity. It also takes a peek at some of the historical interest in quinoa, including its transformation into a superfood.
JSTOR does mention doubts about the economic benefits of the IYQ for the plant’s original stewards in the Altiplano of Peru. It points to the work of Emma McDonell, an anthropologist who has studied the quinoa boom and bust and superfoods more widely. She concludes:
Before promoting traditional food commercialization as an economic development tool, sufficient institutional mechanisms must be put in place to protect small farmers in these situations and ensure that they retain some control over the product, after the initial boom.
Formal protection for geographical origins or fairtrade-like certification may offer some help, although I feel that, as ever, the root problem is perceptions about the value of food and the work that goes into it. Are we willing to pay five or six times more for quinoa from the Altiplano than for locally-grown or intensively produced alternatives?
Another Quinoa Revelation
Among quinoa’s attractive qualities are its adaptability and resilience, including its tolerance for drought and salinity. Like many other tough species, the plant‘s leaves, flowers and stems are covered with tiny, fluid-filled bladder cells that for more than 120 years were thought to be the basis of their resilience, a combination of salt dump and water store. Recent research from the University of Copenhagen discovered that bladder cells are important for the plants’ survival, but not in the way imagined.
The researchers looked at mutant varieties of quinoa that have far fewer bladder cells than normal. To their surprise, the mutants were just as salt-tolerant as normal plants, and they were even more drought resistant than the non-mutants, because the bladder cells keep vital water from the rest of the plant. So what are bladder cells for?
Mutant plants, it turned out, were quickly overcome by insect pests called thrips, while normal plants generally survived even a deliberate thrips infestation. There are two lines of defence. For a start, the bladder cells are tightly packed together on the growing tips and young leaves of normal plants (the number of bladder cells is constant, so as the leaf expands, they are less dense) and that forms a physical barrier against the insects. In addition, the barrier cells contain oxalic acid and saponins, both chemicals harmful to pests, and the plant can double the concentration of oxalic acid in the cells when it senses damage. The barrier cells also seem to block infection by pathogenic bacteria sprayed onto the leaves.
When tiny insects and mites trudge around on a plant covered with bladder cells, they are simply unable to get to the juicy green shoots that they’re most interested in. And as soon as they try to gnaw their way through the bladder cells, they find that the contents are toxic to them,” says Michael Palmgren, supervisor of the research.
What I really enjoyed about this study is that in a way it would never have happened had quinoa not taken off as a global crop. The researchers found the mutant plants by combing through a field of more than a million quinoa plants on the Danish island of Lolland. And the value of the discovery is that it will help breeders to develop new varieties better suited to new growing conditions. Max Moog, the student who led the research, said:
Due to efforts to expand quinoa cultivation around the world, the new knowledge can be used to adapt the crop to various regional conditions. For example, southern Europe has very dry conditions, while pests are a bigger problem than drought in northern Europe. Here in northern Europe, it would make sense to focus on quinoa varieties that are densely covered with bladder cells.
Seeing Red Apples
Thanks to the research above, we now know why some plant leaves carry a dense carpet of bladder cells. An article entitled Why Are Some Apples Red Inside? baited me with the prospect of a similar kind of answer, a functional reason why it is good for the apple to be red. No such luck. Even switching to the original paper (which dates back to 2012, for heaven’s sake) left me no wiser. The researchers genetically engineered Royal Gala apples to make more of the anthocyanin pigments that colour the flesh of some naturally-red apple varieties.
There’s nothing terribly exciting about the engineered apples compared to naturally occurring red apples or unengineered Royal Gala, and that goes for consumer preferences too, the one characteristic that might be good for the apple breeder even if it is irrelevant to the apple. The best the researchers can offer is that red-fleshed apples, engineered or conventionally bred, “are likely to retain all the current consumer expectations of flavour, with the added appeal of elevated colour and potential health enhancement”. That, it seems, is the reason for the article that disappointed me so, because there are now more red-fleshed apples on the market.
And so we get to the point of it all: The Curious Case of the Hidden Rose, which digs back into the history of a naturally red-fleshed apple of the Pacific Northwest.
Many Thanks
If you celebrated Thanksgiving, I hope yours was as good as mine. If you didn’t, I’m sure you, like me, still have plenty to be thankful for. Among which, two articles and a plug.
Marion Nestle offers An update on sugar (just in time for Thanksgiving) with news of New York City’s Sweet Truth Act and of the US government’s increasingly odd sugar support system.
Rachel Laudan looks back (and revises) an article she wrote explaining her view of American Thanksgiving as a republican meal, a repudiation of the high cuisine of monarchies
And that gives me yet another chance to point to my own turkey gobbles.
Take care
