Eat This Newsletter 125: Bad apples
Hello
It has been a difficult couple of weeks, even sitting on the sidelines, trying to listen rather than to speak. However, speak I must, if only to acknowledge the many people who saved me the trouble of having to point out that a bad apple is not in and of itself a bad thing. It is a bad thing only in close proximity to many other apples, for example in a barrel. You don’t identify a bad apple merely to give it a name or excuse its badness. You identify it so that you can remove it from the barrel, lest its badness spread to all the other apples, ruining the whole barrel of them.
A bad orchard? That’s an entirely different level of difficulty.
Ok, having got that off my chest …
Where the action is
People are sharing many different things about the intersection of race and food. I’ve read many of them with interest, and choose to amplify only two here, as they are close to my own interests.
First, Bryan Ford’s book New World Sourdough, out next week. I really enjoyed an interview with Ford on the Taste website. I like that he expands the remit of sourdough to include anything leavened with a starter rather than pure yeast, although I dispute Taste’s description of “natural leaven” — and would fully expect Ford and any experienced baker to do the same. If this book encourages some of the people who have taken up quarantine baking to keep at it, I’ll be well pleased.
And then there’s a lovely long piece by Navneet Alang in Eater, detailing the derailing of Alison Roman, billed as “the prom queen of the pandemic”. I’m subtly pleased to admit that I had never heard of her.
If it felt as though people had been sitting around waiting for her to mess up, it was probably because many of them had.
After a long, long list of gussied up global fusion foods (which the USA does seem particularly prone to), Alang gets to the crunch:
Who gets to use the global pantry or introduce “new” international ingredients to a Western audience? And behind that is an even more uncomfortable query: Can the aspiration that has become central to the culinary arts ever not be white?
But this is about much more than cultural appropriation, whatever that is. In his thoughtful piece, Alang explores so many of the questions that bedevil race and food. That’s not to say there are answers to all of them. But right now, asking what you must and answering what you can seems very appropriate indeed.
Chicken not cheap enough?
The US Department of Justice has indicted executives from some of the biggest chicken processing companies in the country on charges of price fixing. This is a long-running saga, which goes back to accusations that big chicken colluded to create a shortage of laying hens. The resulting shortage of chicks then pushed up the price of broiler chickens even at a time when production costs were falling. I don’t understand the case in its entirety and would welcome expert input.
If found guilty, the executives (or the businesses?) could face a fine of $1 million “which may be raised if ill-gotten gains or losses to victims [shoppers in the aggregate? Who?] are found to be higher than $1 million”. Maybe it was the potential fine that prompted Pilgrim’s Pride CEO Jayson Pell just this morning to sell off some of his stock to the tune of $1,449,070.38
Pilgrim’s Pride, one of the two companies involved, earned $3.07 billion last quarter. A fine of $1 million is obviously chicken feed. There is also a maximum prison term of 10 years, but I’m sure it won’t come to that. Big chicken can rest easy.
Mulberries for the taking
The ways of the world are mysterious. In the course of a week not one but two items on urban mulberries.
First, Morus londinium, an entire website devoted to the history of mulberries in London, from Roman times on. There’s even a map to show you where to find this most delectable of fruits.
Much, much cagier, Dave M. Cook, the powerhouse behind Eating in Translation, showed off his harvest of Wild mulberries in New York City with no hint of where to find the fabled trees.
No matter; there’s an app for that
Processed food news
Look, I know that some people have a bee in their bonnet about the names of things. I’m not going to get into that. I’m just going to copy and paste the highlights of a paper showing that Ultra-Processed Diets Cause Excess Calorie Intake and Weight Gain: An Inpatient Randomized Controlled Trial of Ad Libitum Food Intake, published in the journal Cell Metabolism.
- 20 inpatient adults received ultra-processed and unprocessed diets for 14 days each
- Diets were matched for presented calories, sugar, fat, fiber, and macronutrients
- Ad libitum intake was ∼500 kcal/day more on the ultra-processed versus unprocessed diet
- Body weight changes were highly correlated with diet differences in energy intake
If you have a problem with any of that, take it up with the authors of the paper.
All the best, and take care,
Jeremy
p.s. And don’t get me started on Lone Wolves.
p.p.s. Rotten apple by Per Oleson on Flickr