Eat This Newsletter 225: The World Turns
Hello
I cannot tell you how happy I am that we are rapidly approaching the turn of the year. Only a week or so to wait. There’s something soul-crushing about the short days here even though skies are often blue and it isn’t cold. I’ve one more podcast lined up this year, and a special celebratory newsletter in a couple of weeks time. Other than those, see you in the new year.
Whatever you will be doing, I hope it is all you expect.
Get the Lead Out
Helena Bottemiller Evich continues to cover the astonishing case of lead poisoning in America.
At least 64 children across 28 states are now reported to have high blood-lead levels tied to recalled cinnamon applesauce pouches
At base, this is all about global supply chains. The applesauce pouches on sale in the US are made in Ecuador, but the cinnamon is not from Ecuador, and nobody yet knows where it originated. And the amount of lead is mind-boggling. The purée in the pouch has between 200 and 500 times the FDA’s limit for lead in baby food. And cinnamon — the probable source of the contamination — is present in minuscule amounts.
We’re talking lead levels hundreds of times higher than anything we’ve ever seen in cinnamon and thousands of times higher than typical environmental contamination. … Something has gone very wrong and it very well could have been intentional.
Intentional? Yikes! And also, with what intent?
Nutrition and Staple Crops
Are modern crop varieties less nutritious than older ones? You can find articles and research that claim as much, and others that say the rose-tinted lenses of nostalgia are responsible for any perceived decline in nutrition. To the rescue comes Chemistry World, with a readable article that surveys some of the results and explains some of the pitfalls involved.
The story is surprisingly complex, although the best evidence does seem to favour the idea that nutrients are declining and that this is a direct result of breeding efforts to increase yield. Staple cereals, for example, now put far more carbohydrates into their seeds, and that dilutes the amount of other important nutrients. The effect may even increase as carbon dioxide increases, because that could make it even easier for plants to make and store carbohydrates.
Should we be worried? Bárbara Pinto, the author of the article, says no. “[I]t seems that the best approach is still to follow the usual dietary guidelines, especially at a time when fruit and vegetable consumption in European countries is still far from ideal.”
And outside the rich world? On that the article is almost silent.
A Long Shot
Speaking of nutrition, another topic on which there is little agreement is whether the processing that makes food ultra-processed is somehow bad in and of itself. My feeling is that it is, once you get rid of people who want to say that olive oil, for example, is ultra-processed. And maybe that’s right, at least according to a report in the Washington Post that I picked up on Ars Technica.
A Nutrition Evidence Systematic Review is looking specifically at “Ultra-Processed Dietary Patterns and Growth, Body Composition, and Risk of Obesity” with a view to having some say in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2025–2030.
The review could conceivably recommend limiting the amount of ultra-processed foods in the diet. Ars Tecnica points out that this “would mark the first time that Americans would be advised to consider not just the basic nutritional components of foods, but also how their foods are processed.”
Maybe I’m too cynical, but that seems very unlikely. And even if it does come to pass, is likely to be ignored — like dietary guidance everywhere.
Repairing is Right
There is much to love in Adam Nicolson’s ruminative essay To Mend a Farm in Plough magazine. He does not go into the details of how his farm is to be repaired, offering only hints. “[F]ull of thickness, every hedge allowed to balloon and roughen; little woods on steep slopes; no field bigger than three or four acres; trees growing in the middle of pastures.” He knows, of course, that if the land is to remain a farm and productive of the things people want and need, then those repairs will require constant maintenance. The hedges will balloon to uselessness if humans do not lay them every so often. The little fields will need to be cultivated if they are not to join the steep woods. This is the work that will need to take place to bring continuing life to his his vision:
Such a landscape is not a view or a work of art. It is an intricate layering of past lives in which human and natural have long been interfolded. To remake it is not to abandon it or to rewild it but in some ways the opposite: to reculture it, to allow the ancient connections between human use and animal and plant life to re-establish themselves in a way that persisted here for at least half a millennium before the locust years of the late twentieth century descended.
Bean There, Done That
Further to my rant about the International Years of Waste, two items to set your pulses racing.
USDA breeders are speeding to produce dry beans that cook in a fraction of the time, with a focus on yellow beans from around the world because, apparently, the time it takes to cook beans is why people don’t eat them, and yellow beans cook quickly.
As promised, I asked the lead researcher of Colorado State University’s Bean Cuisine project whether they had been inspired by the International Year of Pulses. “No, my research was not directly inspired by the IYP.”
And finally
A late entry, but a very strong contender, for tosh tech-fix of the year: Zero Acre’s pitch for bio-engineered cooking oil.
Take care
