Eat This Newsletter 133: Entirely whole
Hello
I’ve enjoyed doing the newsletter every week, and I’m also enjoying arranging and editing forthcoming episodes of the podcast, which will resume next week. From now till I next take a break, it’s back to podcast and newsletter alternating week by week.
In praise of actual, whole wheat
Normally the phrase “boost your immune system” in a headline would have me releasing the safety catch, but I’m giving Mark Bittman and Melissa McCart a pass for two reasons. Maybe they did actually come up with the headline These California Grain Geeks Want to Boost Your Immune System With True Whole Wheat, given that the outlet is not an an actual publication with sub-editors and the like. More to the point, the article explains the problem with things that are labelled “whole wheat,” at least in the United States and EU, and does a good job of explaining the benefits of actual whole wheat.
Each country in Europe has its own specifications for the different types of flour (which causes no end of anguish to internationally-minded home bakers). In Italy, I believe, whole wheat flour is “the product obtained directly from the milling of wheat free from foreign substances and impurities”. That’ll do.
Nevertheless, I had not been aware of the recently published test for whole grain content in wheat flour and pasta developed by Dr David Killilea, the peg for Bittman and McCart’s article. Here’s hoping some labs here in Europe and elsewhere take it up and publish their results.
Kenyan coffee’s colonial history
Once upon a time, most of the British Empire’s coffee came from Sri Lanka, then Ceylon. These days Ceylon is known for tea, but that was because leaf rust wiped out the coffee bushes in the 1860s. Attention turned to Kenya, and by the 1920s coffee was the country’s number one export.
All this, and much more, I learned from a fascinating piece from the Scottish Centre for Global History: Kenyan Coffee: Enticing and Quenching an Imperial Thirst for Quality. One of the important points it makes is that Kenyan coffee was one of the first to trade on “low-quantity, high-quality and high-price” coffee. The Coffee Board of Kenya tried some interesting approaches that might be seen as a foretaste of today’s social media influencers and their, er, influence.
It’s a fascinating story of how Kenyan coffee penetrated the hearts and minds of Empire subjects through a web of reciprocal arrangements:
In exchange for coffee farmers purchasing tyres from ‘Gilfillan and Company’, the company had ‘sent a copy of the East African Standard … to every vessel in the British Navy … enclosing Kenya coffee publicity matter supplied by the [Coffee] Board [of Kenya] … The Navy buys more Kenya coffee and thus planters can buy more tyres.’
Of course coffee was important in post-colonial Kenya too, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.
Markets and food safety
The Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research has supported research into the food safety risks associated with more traditional markets, as compared to modern supermarkets. They recently published a summary: Wet markets – not so cut and dry. Bottom line: there’s a huge difference between perceived risk and actual, quantified risk.
You heard it first here, if you did. And if you didn’t, that episode is a good entry point, as is the ACIAR article.
Pick on someone else
It is no secret that agricultural labour in richer countries is provided by people from poorer countries, and despite the appalling conditions migrant workers have to cope with, it isn’t that hard to understand why they do it.
[P]icking peppers at home earns only the national minimum wage: €1.87 ($2.21) per hour. The hourly wage for harvesting asparagus in Germany is €9.35.
That’s from an interesting little article in The Economist, informing us that Bulgarians have been Europe’s gardeners longer than you think. Today’s fruit and vegetable labourers are the rump of a long tradition.
Farm news from Isabella Rossellini
Yes, really. Vanity Fair brings us up to date with the actor’s lockdown life, including some of the goings on at her farm.
She is so smart, wise and sincere. I wonder how I would go about getting her as a guest on the podcast?
Also, if you have never seen them, I urge you to seek out her Green Porno series on YouTube and some of the other short films she has made, exploring animal behaviour and evolution.
Before you go, here’s everything you might ever have wanted to know about asafoetida. And, after the history and natural history of this spice, so enigmatic to the average westerner, a very thoughtful discussion of its place in the cultures that know it far better and use it more often.
Take care, and stay safe.
Jeremy