Eat This Newsletter 102: ne plus ultra
Medieval fisherperson
Hello
As promised, I have finally returned to the topic of ultra-processed food.
My jumping off point is a heartfelt comment from Robert Shewfelt: “This past month has been a difficult one for defenders of processed food.” Rather than just telling Robert to stop bothering, I have looked at four papers about the health effects of ultra-processed food. In Ultra-processed food: a round-up I try, as ever, to keep processed and ultra-processed separate.
Couch potatoes
Not everything I read made it into my magnum opus. One of the more entertaining bits of nutritional buzz I picked up from a guest post by Anna Kathryn Colbert on Robert Shewfelt’s site is the acronym SoFAs, for “solid fats and added sugars”. She also differentiates sensibly between processed and ultra-processed. So does another guest post by Bailey Houghtaling and Lily Yang, which acknowledges the cost and time of avoiding processed foods.
Bananas travelling backwards
Do not adjust your set; that banana really is pink
The standard story of the banana’s domestication and spread is that it started in southeast Asia, popped across to Africa and then went to the Caribbean and the tropical zones of the Americas. Peru’s best kept banana secret looks into a very special group of bananas called Iholena cultivars. That’s their Hawaiian name, and a clue to the reverse journey they made, east across the Pacific. The taste of these varieties reflects “a rich and lingering semi-sweetness piqued with a lemony tang”. That may be one reason people in Peru like them. Another is that they are very nutritious; the pink-orange pulp is high in vitamin A precursors. ProMusa advises waiting until the skin is black before eating one of these bananas, should you be so lucky, because the peel turns yellow before the fruit is ripe.
Beef Rules, by Jonathan Foley, looks closely at beef in the context of climate change.
He offers American beefeaters three rules: eat much less beef, waste none of it, and source it from soil-building grasslands. Very good. Simple, and easy to follow. But why is his post only on Medium? I just can’t stand their nagging. Sure, he has his own domain name, but it truly beats me why anyone who is as good a communicator as @GlobalEcoGuy has apparently no interest in owning his own content.
And of course, I have additional content of my own. Grass-fed beef and What’s the beef with frozen meat? are two podcast episodes that discuss better ways of continuing to eat beef.
Cookbooks of the mind
One of the stories that profoundly moved me when I visited Yad Vashem, the holocaust museum in Israel, was about sharing bread, possibly in one of the ghettoes.
I can’t remember exactly how it went, but the essence was that each person received a slice of bread. One person was in hiding, and so received no bread. How to give that person some bread? Obviously everyone could eat all their slice save for a small piece, and then all would give their crumbs to the one in hiding. What a mess. Instead, the first person ate all their slice save a small piece, and handed that small piece to the second person. The second person ate the small portion and somewhat less of their slice than the first person. This left a bigger piece to give to the third person, who did the same, passing an even bigger small piece to the fourth person. So it went, down the line, until the last person ate almost an entire slice, passing their slice to the person in hiding.
Does that make sense? If not, does anyone have a more accurate description? (I did search, and found this, which is also pretty remarkable, but not the story I remember.)
Anyway, I bring it up in light of a fascinating article in Gastro Obscura on The Extraordinary ‘Cookbooks’ Left Behind by Prisoners of War and Concentration Camp Victims. As the title implies, it explores far and wide, and although it doesn’t contain the story I remember (why would it?), it too is plenty moving.
Boom and bust, medieval style
There’s absolutely nothing new about us overexploiting the natural world. The Atlantic has a fascinating article about how Medieval Overfishing Transformed Europe’s Fisheries, based largely on the work of Richard C. Hoffman of York University in Canada.
Yup, medieval! “A Scottish statute from 1214 required all dams to include an opening for fish and barrier nets to be lifted every Saturday.” And in 1289, Philip IV of France enacted perhaps the world’s first conservation law, privatising the assets so that he could control them.
And that’s it for another newsletter. I’ll get back to planning the next lot of podcasts.
All the best,
Jeremy