Eat This Newsletter 174: Bitter and dark
Hello
Back in the swing of things now, alternating podcast episodes and newsletters.
STOP PRESS: This just in (see item 3 below): An African immigrant's pizza wins global raves — and overcomes Italian prejudices.
Bitter and dark
Chocolate is one of those products that seems unable to escape its colonial past. Along with tea and coffee, it is produced by "fundamentally, inequitable industries ... set up to be export commodity crops grown by the Global South to supply the Global North with a cheap and stable product". Those words are from the introduction to a piece from the always interesting Vittles newsletter, The perils and promise of bean-to-bar chocolate. Lily Kelting unpacks some of the broken bits of bean to bar, the idea of mindful production that might assuage the consumption guilt of those who can afford it. And she identifies a crucial link in the chain.
Chocolate does not start with beans. Those are already the terminus of an earlier chain that plants and tends the trees, harvests the ripe pods and, most importantly, ferments the beans and pulp to release those elusive flavour notes that make top-notch chocolate. Bean to bar obscures the labour and expertise that produce beans. Kelting shines light on the inequities that still run through even the most enlightened chocolate makers, and offers up a few examples of small manufacturers in India, where she lives, who are doing it all, from tree to bar.
I'm puzzled, then, that she makes no reference to Cocoa Of Excellence, an award programme that has been running since 2009 and that sets out specifically to "recognise the work of cocoa farmers and celebrate quality, flavour diversity and unique origins". Cocoa of Excellence makes limited amounts of actual chocolate from a shortlist of 50 bean producers, for judging, and exists to put manufacturers in touch with bean producers. Alas, it is very difficult to find any evidence of new deals being struck and new bars coming on the market.
Still, the award honours cocoa farmers. Supporters do include some of the players that Kelting identifies as falling short. Nevertheless, it seems to me to be precisely the sort of effort she might like, to reward and encourage the farmers who are responsible for the beans. I didn't see any growers from India among the 2021 winners; maybe none entered. The next competition should be in 2023. Perhaps some of her favourites might triumph then.
Antibiotics round-up
What do you see when you look at this graph, of antibiotics used in livestock? The US Food and Drug Administration sees "a 38 percent decrease since 2015, which was the peak year of sales". It's also 3 percent lower in 2020 than 2019 -- but 8 percent higher than in 2017. Charitably, I'd say things were standing still.
Not coincidentally (at least, not for this newsletter), last week saw the publication in The Lancet of a paper on the Global burden of bacterial antimicrobial resistance in 2019. It estimates that 1.27 million deaths were directly caused by antibiotic resistance gobally in 2019, almost as many as HIV and malaria combined.
The report does not go deep into the causes of antibiotic resistance, although it does say that "[i]ncreased use of antibiotics in farming has been identified as a potential contributor to AMR in humans," while cautiously adding "although the direct causal link remains controversial." About two thirds of all antibiotics used in the world go to animals.
What, then, is likely to happen to antibiotic use on UK livestock?
The question is interesting because on Friday (28 January) a new EU regulation (2019/6) on veterinary medicinal products came into force. It is long and very detailed, as befits the topic, and I certainly have not read it, or even a summary of it. But I did plumb its depths in search of this:
Article 107
1. Antimicrobial medicinal products shall not be applied routinely nor used to compensate for poor hygiene, inadequate animal husbandry or lack of care or to compensate for poor farm management.
2. Antimicrobial medicinal products shall not be used in animals for the purpose of promoting growth nor to increase yield.
3. Antimicrobial medicinal products shall not be used for prophylaxis other than in exceptional cases, for the administration to an individual animal or a restricted number of animals when the risk of an infection or of an infectious disease is very high and the consequences are likely to be severe.
So the provisions are there. However, they no longer exert any direct influence of UK policy. Antibiotic use on UK livestock dropped by about a half from 2014 to 2020 but, campaigners point out, in pigs is still "two-and-a-half times higher per animal than in Denmark and the Netherlands". UK exports of meat, eggs and dairy to the EU have already plunged, so there is little economic incentive to change policy on antibiotics. Still, it would be the proper thing to do.
The "pizza effect" and pizza
Karima Moyer-Nocchi, who has been a guest on Eat This Podcast, has a delicious piece on pizza's history in Italy. Her crucial point is that almost every "truth the whole world knows" about pizza in Italy is not very true. Karima travels far, all the way from Aeneas landing on the shores of Italy to the coveted TSG (Traditional Specialty Guaranteed) status awarded to Neapolitan pizza by the EU in 2010, with a mandatory detour to dismiss the fabulous origin legend of pizza margherita. She shows that the rise of authentic pizza in Italy has little to do with its imagined glorious past. Rather, it is a classic of the emigrant made good; the poor wretch sails off to a foreign land where its qualities are fully appreciated as they never were at home and is feted on its return with little concern for the factors that made it leave in the first place.
It is a fun read. What tickled me most about it was Karima tethering her story to the pizza effect: "the pattern that unfolds when an insignificant cultural item or practice is exported to another country, whereupon it achieves a level of success unheard of in the native country". Why? Because the phrase was coined in a 1970 paper by Agehananda Bharati, the adopted name of an Austrian professor of cultural anthropology. Bharati refers to a process of re-enculturation, with the films of Satyajit Ray an easily-understood example. His films flopped originally in India, but having found fame in foreign lands they "became box office attractions in metropolitan India". He goes further, and ascribes the success of Maharishi Mahesh Yoga among Indians not to his doctrinal thought -- described by Indian critics as "facile, wrong and not in line with the tradition" -- but to his enthusiastic adoption by The Beatles, Mia Farrow et al.
Lots more fun examples in Wikipedia including, it says, chicken tikka masala, invented in the UK and then exported to India. There must be lots of others.
Ur-Tomatoes
Maybe you saw those beautiful illustrations of 16th century tomatoes that were doing the rounds a few days ago. They were prompted by a lovely paper from the Netherlands looking at the earliest tomatoes in Europe. The paper may be a bit heavy going, but the researchers published their own summary for the rest of us.
The paper sheds light on those first tomatoes to arrive, and in particular on the notion that these first fruits "were elongated, segmented, and gold in color. After all, that is how they were depicted, and they were called ‘pomo d’oro’: golden apple." Herbarium specimens and old drawings, many of them newly digitised, revealed many different colours, shapes, and sizes, but not whether tomatoes originated in Peru or Mexico, the two leading candidates. The Dutch researchers sequenced the highly degraded DNA of their specimen and say that it was definitely not a wild plant, and shows strong similarities with three Mexican varieties and two from Peru.
The indigenous Andes population in Peru started domesticating a small wild cherry tomato. They brought this to Mexico, and there they developed the tomato with large fruit that we know today.
No herbarium specimen is ever likely to germinate, so to find out how these first tomatoes in Europe might have tasted the best bet, they suggest, is to go to Mexico and Peru. DNA analysis could probably indicate the closest known relatives for a taste test.
Now, will someone please examine critically the whole "tomatoes didn't catch on because they were considered poisonous" thing, or is there already enough proof of that?
Soup to finish
What is one to make of Glyn Hughes’ epic struggle to authenticate brown Windsor soup, supposed staple of British cuisine and beloved of fair Queen Victoria? It never existed, certainly not in Victorian times, according to a long article in Gastro Obscura. I'm not going to spoil the fun. I am going to say I wonder whether the "truth" Hughes uncovered is any more reliable than all the other culinary myths that are so hard to dispel.
Take care
Jeremy