Eat This Newsletter 146: Unbalanced diet
Hello
I know we should all be eating just a little animal-sourced food for a balanced and sustainable diet, but sometime, overindulgence beckons.
This is one of those times.
I can’t believe it is butter
An innocent enough tweet at the end of December 2020 has unleashed a minor storm in Canada.
The entirely non-scientific observation that Sylvain Charlebois (aka The Food Professor) shared seems to be best explained not by the fact that room temperature is lower in winter, as some commentators suggested, but by the fact that cows are being fed palm oil derivatives, and palm fats have a higher melting point that butterfat.
The story is still unfolding, with the good professor sharing photos of butter melting (or not) on his breakfast toast as I write.
You can read more about it in Canada’s National Post and elsewhere. The Dairy Producers Association of Canada is totally on the ball:
The use of palm oil derived ingredients as a feed supplement on Canadian dairy farms has come to the attention of the Dairy Processors Association of Canada (DPAC). DPAC does not have the necessary data to assess the extent to which this type of feed supplement is used on Canadian dairy farms and thus encourages dairy producer organizations to take steps to better understand its use.
It also reassures the nation that “the way in which butter is produced in Canada has not changed. Ingredients are the same as they have always been. Butter is a very simple product and has a very short list of acceptable ingredients: cream and salt (for salted butter). These are standardized by regulations in Canada, and require butter to contain at least 80% milk fat.”
I’ll be keeping an eye out.
Elsewhere, Indonesia, one of the biggest sources of palm oil globally, is happily feeding processed palm oil waste to its cattle. In the US, according to Progressive Dairy, “Palm-based fat supplements for dairy cattle are becoming increasingly more popular”. I’ve tried to find out whether European cows are allowed to eat palm oil, without any luck. One report from 2017 says that about 2.5 million tonnes of “palm kernel expeller” finds its way into the 250 million tonnes compound feed made in Europe.
Food in the time of Brexit
Have UK dairy farmers already embraced the opportunity to feed their milk cows palm oil? I have no idea (but I hope someone will enlighten us).
There is still a chance that Brexit might in the end result in a UK food policy that actually values human health and welfare. Professor Tim Lang has been hoping the same thing for a while now, and has an article in The Spectator suggesting that policy is currently something of a missing ingredient in the UK food system. He goes through many of the options open to a country that can now choose how to feed itself, but the final conclusion seems to be “must try harder”.
How we feed ourselves is a vitally important question. But it is one today that remains deeply unclear. It’s about time that the government worked out what it really wants from our food system.
Well, yes, but there’s no real rush, is there? They’ve only had four years to try, and no shortage of advice on the matter.
What’s in a name?
Maybe you heard that freedom-loving Cornish fisherfolk have rebranded two of their prize catches. Megrim is henceforth to be known as Cornish sole.
Paul Trebilcock, chief executive of the Cornish Fish Producers Organisation, told The Times: “There’s this negative thing with megrim - it’s a ‘grim’ connotation.”
And the spider crab (who knows?) is to become the Cornish king crab, because “it is not ‘as pretty’ as brown crab, which is more common on UK dining tables.”
Will the Brits, who are mostly not that keen on fish, be fooled? I have no clue, but Cathrine Jansson-Boyd, Reader in Consumer Psychology, Anglia Ruskin University, has taken the opportunity to write a thing about the many factors beyond taste that make a food tastier.
Personally, I’d much rather savour a whiff (an earlier name for megrim that supplies its scientific name Lepidorhombus whiffiagonis) than trust my luck to Cornish sole, what with other food items branded Cornish.
The true cost of some animals
After talking a few weeks ago to Lawrence Alderson, founder of the Rare Breeds Survival Trust, about the ecological value of rare and heritage livestock, of course I noticed a couple of recent articles.
One reports on an EU project to understand the environmental impacts of sheep production in Sardinia. I confess I found it slightly hard going, but I think the essential takeaway is that greenhouse gas emissions of the milk are the same for non-intensive sheep in Sardinia as they are for sheep raised on intensive farms, but the total GHG emissions are far lower when one takes into account the land on which they are fed and other inputs. I may be wrong. The PASTRES project is looking at many other pastoral systems.
The other is about the ins and outs of heritage beef in England.
It starts with a bull and a cow Tim explained …
As good a place to start as any.
“The rise of big peanut”
No, seriously. This is a great piece of reporting from Civil Eats, a seriously long read about concentration in the US peanut industry. It isn’t the growers, who number in their thousands. It’s the processors.
[T]he peanut shelling industry is dominated by two powerful companies that together buy 80 percent of all peanuts grown in the U.S. The two companies, Golden Peanut and Birdsong, operate massive shelling facilities throughout the peanut belt, and together control or outright own nearly 200 buying points, where farmers must go to sell their raw peanuts.
It isn’t all bad news either. Pinko peanut farmers are organising cooperative shelling operations and doing just fine.
Take care, and stay safe.
Jeremy