Eat This Newsletter 112: Depressing
Hello
Here’s a strange little research result. A group of young people in Indonesia were offered tastes of nine different samples of tempeh. (Tempeh is a very nutritious, and delicious, food made by fermenting soybeans.) Four of the samples were produced using modern methods and five using traditional methods. The youths liked the modern ones well enough when they didn’t know which was which. However, when they were informed about the source of the beans and the way the tempeh was produced, they far preferred the traditional varieties.
So, does this meaning transparency (or, cynically, marketing) is an important aspect of preference? Of course it does.
A niche activity, like gardening or sewing
It’s a treat to read a longish essay in which the writer has obviously thought deeply. So it was with Alex Danco’s article Cooking As A Service. Alex uses the trends in “Daily energy intake in US adults by food source” as a springboard to explore Cooking as a Service. The survey conclusions are inescapable. Since the mid-1960s, the amount of food eaten outside the home – i.e. cooked by someone else – has climbed from less than 10% to more than 30%, across all incomes. That’s for the US, but where the US leads, others follow, and it is probably an underestimate given both ready meals et cetera eaten in homes and private chefs cooking in other kinds of homes.
Alex considers several aspects of this trend, one of which I found particularly interesting. When you cook for yourself, you can at least try to produce a healthy meal. You may choose not to, but in practice, you could. When you buy into cooking as a service, that service does not have the same incentive to cook healthily. As Alex puts it:
When you outsource food preparation … you turn all aspects of food into something that’s being sold to you. And that includes healthiness. … [H]ealthy eating turns into a luxury good: something that’s an upcharge, rather than the base model.
He then points out that the people who are willing to pay a little more for a healthier option are probably willing to pay a little bit more still.
Fully monetizing your best customers can mean pricing these premium healthy options out of reach for those with less disposable income.
The motivation of the food provider also works against healthy options.
You want people to keep coming back for your food. And if you can’t do this through premium features like tasty healthiness (which can be expensive), the other cheaper way to do it is to make your food less healthy: add more fat; add more salt; make your food easier to enjoy.
Bottom line; if you don’t want to hand responsibility for the healthiness of your diet to someone else, the best thing to do is to keep cooking.
There’s a lot more to chew over in the piece (hey, at least I avoided the food-for-thought thing, this time) but that was what most struck me. And you?
Regulation: less is more
I very occasionally make my own cheese, but by and large I am happy to pay for cheese as a service, and there are industrial giants who would be happy to take my money. Their products are cheaper too, a definite consideration. If I have the money, though, and am willing to pay more, shouldn’t I be allowed to do so? Apparently not, but for my own good, you understand, to protect me from my ignorance and stupidity.
Modern Farmer carries an extract from a new book by Catherine Donelly, Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford Companion to Cheese and, more importantly, an expert on Listeria, in which she makes a strong case that in the US and the EU, it is increasingly impossible for cheesemakers to use unpasteurised milk, thanks to misguided regulations on food safety.
Many, many regulations claim to promote food safety. Large food producers can easily afford to follow those regulations. Indeed, they often promote regulations that permit them to do things that smaller food producers have no desire to do. Smaller producers would rather do things their way, which may be more expensive but which produces a product that some customers find more desirable. Of course, they cannot afford to compete directly with the large, nor do they want to, but that isn’t enough for the large producers, who use food safety and over-bearing regulation to do their dirty work for them.
Regulation: more is not enough
Long investigative piece from The Guardian about how Ghana is failing to protect its fish against invading Chinese pirates. The World Bank paid to put Ghanaian observers onto foreign boats fishing in Ghana’s exclusive economic zone. Unfortunately, at least one observer has vanished without trace, and without Ghana doing much about it. Rather like the fish.
Can it
Dave Cook’s amazing Eating in Translation served up a treat a little while ago, a report from the Canstruction exhibit in Brooklyn (which is open till 21 November).
More than 100 cities worldwide participate in this annual event, for which teams of architects, designers, and contractors compete to design and build sculptures from unopened cans of food. Afterward, the sculptures are disassembled and their component parts donated to local food banks.
Some of the entries are immensely creative – check them out on Dave’s Flickr album.
Canstruction was new to me. That Wikipedia page could use a little love, and I’d have linked to the organisation that runs the thing, but there’s no way I’m agreeing to the silliness of their “Link Agreement”.
Depressing
In case you’re feeling at all upbeat, here’s the most depressing piece I’ve read in a long, long time. Down the Hunger Spiral: Pathways to the Disintegration of the Global Food System It’s a long, long piece. It’s very, very depressing. You have been warned.
That’s all for now.
Jeremy
P.s. Tempeh photo by Jesica. Uber eats photograph by shopblocks. Drain photo by Henry Burrows