Eat This Newsletter 190: Inundated
Hello
Feast or famine, in this newsletter as in life. Even after judicious culling of the crooked and blemished ones, 13 items jostle for attention.
Russia Is Stealing Ukrainian Grain
A forensic examination of ships’ manifests, bills of lading, satellite images and other minutiae concludes that Russia has to date stolen more than $530 million of Ukranian grain. My favourite factoid in all of this is that many of the vessels that smuggled the stolen grain out of the Black Sea claimed to have loaded at Kavkaz in Russia. Just one snag. Kavkaz is relatively shallow, and “according to Russia’s transport regulator can only accommodate ships with a maximum depth of 5.3 meters”. Most the ships investigated were of far greater draught. What are we to conclude? That the Russians frankly don’t care how easily uncovered their lies are?
Beyond the Great (Milk) Divide
Raw or pasteurised? That’s the conventional choice when it comes to milk and, even more so, cheese. Hang on, says Trevor Warmedahl, who describes himself as a nomadic cheesemaker, in a recent edition of his newsletter. Warmedahl’s point is that globally, there are legal definitions for the exact process that makes milk pasteurised. So many minutes at such-and-such a temperature. But there is a gray area, between no heat treatment whatsoever and the legally established criteria, that is best characterised as unpasteurised, but not raw. Warmedhal explores how different temperature regimes might influences the microbes in the milk and those that colonise the resulting cheese, and offers a much more nuanced way to look at things.
I was, of course, pleased that cheeses like mozzarella confused the issue. They ferment at relatively low temperatures and are then heated to well above pasteurisation to melt them and allow them to be stretched. “These cheeses are considered raw if made from milk that was not legally pasteurized,” Warmedhal points out, but are they, really?
Because of the Droughts
Without thinking too deeply about it, what caused the Syrian uprising? If you said climate change, join the club. I thought so too, mostly because I hadn’t unravelled the thread enough.
Anna Ciezadlo’s essay in adi magazine points to the long history that predates the droughts. She makes a very persuasive case that it wasn’t the drought as such that caused desperate people to rise up, it was years of agricultural and political mismanagement, ruining future water supply for the temporary gain of greater grain harvests. And when the signs became clear that the water supply was failing, the regime made things worse by refusing to examine alternative, less thirsty crops and by setting in motion a train of decisions that destroyed farms and farmers.
Ciezadlo reserves much of her anger for people who promulgate the myth that there isn’t enough food, that we need to produce more, regardless of cost, to prevent climate-fuelled insurrections and, worse, migration:
But these apocalyptic warnings that the world is running out of food ignore an uncomfortable truth: people don’t starve, or rebel, or migrate because there isn’t enough food. They do these things because food is available — but not to them.
I do, of course, take issue with her negative view of Paul Ehrlich and Thomas Malthus, as you know I would. To be honest, the essay loses nothing if you simply omit all references to population, aside from the obvious one that we are all living beyond our means, some more than others.
In that connection, I’d love to link you to Foreign Policy’s latest magazine issue, We Can Feed the World, but unless I am mistaken the whole thing is behind a paywall. So, you know …
Big Vegan Is No Substitute
As I can’t share Foreign Policy’s Plant-Based Proteins Are Too Expensive, here’s a meaty substitute. John Lewis-Stempel lets rip at nu-food and Wageningen University with unconcealed glee. I naively thought big meat was investing in alternative proteins in a vague spirit of diversification and protecting market share, despite the fact that any growth in faux-meat does not seem to be at the expense of the real stuff. Silly me. Lewis-Stempel follows the money and puts the boot into the Netherlands for its misguided agricultural policies. The piece is a jolly, polemical romp with a very serious core.
A Big Vegan world, without reform to waste and food-distribution policies, would require about one-third more cropland. It would therefore also require more artificial fertiliser (likely nitrogen-based), plus pesticides, herbicides and all the other polluting “cides” produced by Bayer, Syngeta and the rest of the agri-chemical giants.
There’s more, a lot more, in this vein. No argument from me.
Another Big Picture
Of course right now the UK government, such as it is, has other things on its mind, such as it is. And having ignored its own independent review of the food system, there’s not much chance it will pay any attention to an offering from Open Democracy, but you can’t blame them for trying.
A call for the Right to Food in the UK lays out a five-point plan. It’s all good stuff, and suitably optimistic.
These are ambitious ideas. But a genuinely internationalist Right to Food, understood as a catalyst for systemic change, could help bring about the policies and institutions that help make them a possibility.
In this moment of global crisis and systemic breakdown, this radical agenda isn’t really all that radical.
True. But truth is seldom enough to change policies.
And Yet … Appeal to History, Always a Crowd Pleaser
Gastronomic History on Twitter served up a link to The curious history of government-funded British Restaurants in World War 2.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, wartime’s “communal feeding centres” find an echo in Open Democracy’s “community restaurants run as public-common partnerships”, though they might need rebranding. Churchill, no less, thought communal feeding centres to be “an odious expression, redolent of Communism and the workhouse” and wrote to the Minister of Food: “I suggest you call them British Restaurants. Everybody associates the word ‘restaurant’ with a good meal.” According to the article, British Restaurants served 180 million meals a week in 1943, about 10 percent of what civilians ate.
Deborah Sugg Ryan’s article contains all the essential details needed should the UK government once again decide to care for its citizens.
And Finally …
We’re getting to the briefly noted section now.
“We have no historical evidence of it, but as the legend goes, when Babur was called to defeat Ibrahim Lodi by an Afghan warlord, he was promised a crate of mangos if he completed this feat.” I’m with Babur, evidence or no. Aramco World sifts the facts.
I was astonished to see Farmers Guardian, a UK magazine aimed squarely at the food-production mainstream (just look at the most-read articles), give air to the topic of livestock genetic diversity. Furthermore, the article hits all the right notes. Bravo.
How long before Uli Westphal produces one of his stunning portraits of diversity featuring a farm animal? Colossal, an art magazine of the internet, pays tribute to Westphal’s amazing portraits of crop agricultural diversity, some of which are on show at the Museum of the City of New York.
And speaking of New York, consider the New Yorker, and three articles.
* From the vaults, shared by Tim Bray and testimony to the internet’s wonderful ability to surface interesting nuggets, The Egg Men from 2005. Ignore the fact that one of the egg men is a woman, a cracking read, well worth your time.
* From the newsletter, The Possibilities of the Peanut, about my favourite nut that isn’t a nut and snack that could be so much more.
* And from the latest issue to reach me, Laila Gohar’s Exquisite Taste. Srsly?
Could the egg piece appear today? Would the New Yorker of 2005 have published the piece on Laila Gohar? And what are you planning to do with peanuts?
Take care.
Jeremy