Eat This Newsletter 095
Hello
With any luck, if these emails were going to your spam folder, they aren’t any more.
So, let’s get to it.
If you’re the kind of person who really enjoys guided food tours when you travel, you maybe need to bookmark Culinary Backstreets. It seems to be a mixture of articles from travellers and locals along with tours in selected cities. I’m sure the list of cities will expand in due course.
To satisfy my inner policy wonk (and yours?) this time, I’m linking to Historians rethink the Green Revolution, a piece by Glenn Davis Stone based on a paper he wrote for The Geographical Journal.
There have been many critiques of the Green Revolution before now, but this is the first one I’ve seen that makes two things plain. First, that India was not importing wheat because it had too many mouths to feed on its own. It was importing wheat because the US was offering wheat cheap, while India was going gung-ho for heavy manufacturing. And secondly, that the drought of 1967, the, er, watershed year for the Green Revolution, ended almost as soon as it began. Or, as Stone puts it:
I]f there was no real famine during the rare 2-year drought before the Green Revolution, just who is supposed to have starved after the rains returned? The new histories lead us to revise the number of lives saved from a billion to a lower number.
Like zero.
In my opinion, The Surprising Benefits of Serving Prisoners Better Food fails actually to offer any evidence of the surprising benefits to be had, other than, perhaps, fewer riots. Nevertheless, it is also my opinion that there would be benefits; there’s just no good evidence yet.
Shameless plug: the episode last summer about Food in prison.
Even if you don’t want to eat meat, you may want to acknowledge that there’s a role for dairy cows in agricultural systems. Maybe not the milk machines of the industrial operations, but the cattle munching contentedly on grass, hay and even sileage and turning into something we humans could enjoy, were we so minded. A nice roundup by Suzanne Wynn takes stock of UK Dairy Farming in 2019.
BTW, I looked at the Twitter tag, so you don’t have to.
Do you read ingredient lists on prepared “foods”? Ever wondered what maltodextrin is doing there? Wonder no more. The ever interesting Tom Nealon is here to tell you about this ubiquitous and wonderful stuff. Not easy to find some of the things Tom has concerns about, but I did eventually land on someone who seems to have been fooling around with maltodextrin and molecular gastronomy almost 10 years ago, although she’s been quiet on that site since January 2014.
As ever, comments, criticism and suggestions are truly welcome.
All the best,
Jeremy