Eat This Newsletter 116: Eat well
Eat well to do good
Hello
Veganuary is almost over, for those partaking, and my offerings this week briefly reflect the hot water carnivory has got itself into. It’s a strange story of special pleading and, dare I say it, outright bullying. At stake, how bad for your health is meat, really.
The American Medical Association published a very lengthy account of the pressures that had been brought to bear on the journal Annals of Internal Medicine even before publication of a research review into the links between eating red meat and heart disease and cancer. The study concluded that the evidence was “too weak to recommend that adults eat less of it”. The JAMA article exposes corporate ties between the complaining scientists and industry.
Nothing to see here, right. Move along. Except that the accusation went both ways. Those saying meat is no threat to health had ties to the meat industry. And those saying the study was no good had ties to the meat alternatives industry. (By the what are we to call that? “The plant-based industry” leaves out a whole lot of other plant-based industries.) Anyway, as Marion Nestle wrote, this was “definitely up my alley”. She offers an interpretation of conflicts in research, which links to many other pieces.
For my part, I think effects on health are the weakest possible reason for avoiding red meat. Cut down, yes please, and convert quantity into quality and you’ll do good beyond, just possibly, your health. You’ll definitely improve the planet’s health.
Not boiling, but maybe hot enough
Way back when Eat This Podcast was young, I talked to Professor John Speth about his idea that Neaderthals could boil water without hot rocks or ceramics. And now comes sort of kind of experimental proof. The Atlantic reports on student experiments designed to discover How Did Humans Boil Water Before the Invention of Pots?.
The reason we need an answer is that Neanderthal teeth from a site called Shanidar had evidence of boiled starch trapped in their teeth, but there was no evidence of either heated rocks or ceramics at the site. Speth thought you might be able to boil water in something like an animal hide suspended over a fire. And while there’s evidence that you can boil water in all sorts of other flammable containers, apparently nobody had tried an animal hide until now. A group of students hoisted a water-filled deer hide over a fire.
Four hours later, the hide was still intact. It did get very hard, but neither sprung a leak nor burned. The water reached 60 degrees Celsius, or 140 degrees Fahrenheit, but it did not come to a boil.
Too bad. But then, wheat, barley and rye all start to gelatinize at 51°C. So maybe that’s all that was needed.
“An unsweetened doughnut with rigor mortis”
Something else that has almost died in London is the traditional bagel shop. Last time I went back, the bagel bakery at the end of my street was flying under Jamaican colours. In some respects, the demise of the proper London bagel, like the demise of proper bagels globally, was probably the result of the bagel-making machine, and for that we probably have the strength of Local 338 of the Bakery and Confectionery Workers International to thank.
It’s a complicated story told by the great grandson of one of the founders of Local 338, and you’ll almost certainly need a paper and pencil to keep track of who is strong-arming whom.
Börek has an even longer history than bagels
Faced with the task of consolidating their diverse realms, the Ottoman sultans embraced a similar approach to that of the Mongols. Though profoundly Persian in their outlook, they eagerly adopted and modified the cultures – and cuisines – of those they had conquered.
Just as, later, the cultures they conquered adopted and modified dishes that they probably thought belonged to their oppressors.
Cultural appropriation? Cultural enslavement? Maybe it doesn’t matter if it happened hundreds of years ago. In any case, History Today has a cracking article on Börek, which saw the Ottoman empire rise and watched as it fell.
The Nature of Food
The academic journal Nature has launched another offshoot: Nature Food. Will they be able to fill it? I suppose they must have looked before leaping. Two items in the inaugural issue caught my eye.
- A national approach for transformation of the UK food system outlines many of the things that will need to be taken into consideration, but is short on how actually to achieve change.
- The Londoner’s meal chronicles, lightly, the death of the traditional East London pie and mash shop. I’ve never been one for jellied eels, I confess, although I’ve also never heard of pie and mash called “The Londoner’s meal,” so what do I know?
Short orders
- When I was little we called them Chinese Gooseberries. That the whole world now knows them as Kiwis is down to one woman: Frieda Kaplan. She died a couple of weeks ago, and The LA Times has a good obituary.
- “I didn’t know he was that kind of corrupt.“ What kind? Terrific story on the background of the biggest “organic” scam in American history.
- Obama, source of salted raw mackerel and other delicacies.
- Just as the New York Times stopped explaining what a bagel was, so too it has stopped telling us that kimchee is “Korean spicy fermented cabbage”. Now that you’ve appropriated kimchee, maybe it is time to do the same for kimjang?
Jeremy
Kimjang photo by USAG-Humpphrey on Flickr. Others by me.