Eat This Newsletter 153: Not a prime (but divisible by 17)
Hello
This week’s haul has prompted me to mull over how hard it is fully to understand other discourses. It’s good to be reminded how little I know.
The cost of food poisoning
Marion Nestle has picked over a long list of documents on the cost of foodborne illness, compiled by the USDA.
The [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] estimates that these 15 pathogens cause about 8.9 million cases of illness, 54,000 hospitalizations, and 1,480 deaths each year.
In 2018, these cost about $17.6 billion in health care, hospitalization, lost wages, and other economic burdens, an increase of $2 billion over estimates in 2013.
Nestle’s bottom line is that “we need to do a much better job of preventing foodborne illness for reasons of cost as well as human suffering”. Hard to disagree, but I found it interesting to read that alongside a piece from The Counter: Multidrug-resistant bacteria is significantly less common in organic meat, new study finds.
The headline finding is that organic meat is half as likely to contain antibiotic-resistant bacteria as conventional meat. I would hope so, seeing as “organic” livestock is not supposed to receive any antibiotics. In fact, I’m slightly surprised that there were any multi-drug resistant bacteria in certified organic meat. But the article points to a more interesting finding.
Meat from processors who handle only conventional meat is three times more likely to carry bacterial contaminants (antibiotic resistant and not) as meat from so-called “split” processors, which are required by law to prevent conventional meat “commingling” with organic. Thorough cleaning between runs of conventional and organic meat probably helps to prevent cross contamination.
The Counter’s article says that “2.8 million people contract infections that are resistant to antibiotics every year in the U.S., and 35,000 people die from them”. Deaths due to antibiotic resistance are thus more than 20 times deaths from foodborne illness. Marion Nestle’s article says that economists calculate the value of preventing a death due to food borne illness as $9.7 million. Of course not all antibiotic resistance can be laid at agriculture’s door, but would it be too naive to estimate the cost of antibiotic resistance at somewhere around $340 billion a year?
Caste and fat and cross-cultural incomprehension
I’m always happy to ready anything Naomi Duguid thinks I should, and a recent link was no exception. Caste, Fat & Indian Culture: Who We Are Is What We Eat is an article by Farah Yameen in Goya Journal.
The article is indeed fascinating and gave me a glimpse into the multiple layers that envelope questions of food and cultures in India. But only a glimpse because, as someone not a member of any of those cultures, much of the narrative is invisible to me. The allusions and references, which I imagine are immediate and transparent to any Indian, are almost all opaque to me.
Some, of course, the more botanical, I can disentangle. Niger (Guizotia abyssinica) seed, I know about. And a little online searching enabled me to make more sense of this passage
Nanna only knows mahua as a source of perpetual debauchery and inebriation. She surmises that tharra, from the mahua, has been the undoing of the tribes of Jharkhand, not the pillage of their lands. That something as innocuous as oil should come from the same tree, is incomprehensible.
Mahua is Madhuca longifolia, although Wikipedia doesn’t have much to say about its oil. Nor does The Economist, though it is more informative about the mahua wine that is the foundation of Nanna’s visions of “perpetual debauchery and inebriation”.
Note that I’m not asking for a complete “translation” of Farah Yameen’s article for an ignorant outsider like me. I am saying that there’s only so much that an outsider can glean from the piece, and that, even so, it is a joy to read an insider’s account of the foodways they know.
p.s. The photo will make sense only if you read the piece; perhaps it will encourage you to do so.
A different kind of incomprehension
I don’t know much about wine, but I know what I like, and while I’ve never knowingly drunk the stuff, I enjoyed reading Trink magazine about Completer: The Answer to a Prayer. Why is this all-but-forgotten-and-now-remembered variety called Completer? You’ll have to read the article. Perhaps then you can tell me what this means:
Modern examples, when not oxidative in style, tend to involve a minerally core with tropical notes like passion fruit, mango, and pineapple. Many of the better examples are harmonized with aromas of fresh cream, fresh pastry from lees contact, and wood vanillins.
But no. I should finally admit to myself that just because I don’t understand a language – which sounds a lot like the language I know, but clearly isn’t – is no reason to mock it.
The story of Completer is worth more than that, even to a Philistine.
Worth a thousand words, easily
Without a doubt, the best part of this article about a pair of Canadian saffron growers, is the photo.
The rest of it is fun … very expensive, labour-intensive, reproductive organs, prone to disaster … but matching blue suits, green wellies and brown compost: priceless.
Nutritionist eats her words
Last week, Jess Fanzo talked on the podcast about her new book on food systems and how to fix them. She was busy elsewhere too, telling NPR “I think we need to start considering other alternative sources of protein”. That would be brood X of the periodical cicadas, currently making their long-awaited appearance in Washington DC and elsewhere.
I well remember my own first encounter with the mass emergence in 1987, until then something I knew about only in a theoretical sense. The noise and crunchiness underfoot turned the leafy streets off Connecticut Avenue into a tropical reverie, a nightmare to some. But we didn’t know enough then to sample the cicadas.
Unlike Jess today.
The article on NPR gives some advice and a couple of recipes (although I suspect you could put 1/4 cup of anything into banana bread and still have it taste good). For the straight dope, I would point you to the website of Professor Fanzo’s other half, Derek White: Brood X 2—collecting + cooking cicadas 101. Almost everything you need to know is there although, as he says, “this advice won’t be useful to anyone for another 17 years (for brood X anyway)”. Maybe there’s still time where you are. If not, cut out and keep until 2024 and some alternative broods.
Take care and stay safe.
Jeremy
p.s. Cicada photo by James St. John on flickr