Eat This Newsletter 192: Digested
Sometimes it is fun to pull on a thread and watch the unravelling. Other times, it is more fun to read about someone else doing the same.
Hello
Sometimes it is fun to pull on a thread and watch the unravelling. Other times, it is more fun to read about someone else doing the same. I can take some small credit for someone here spinning a thread of their own, but modesty forbids …
Digestive Anecdata
Preparing for last week’s episode on how hosts and guests should deal with allergies led me to a truly remarkable story. Luck-based medicine: My resentful story of becoming a medical miracle is a fascinating account of how someone who had been struggling with digestive problems her entire life suddenly found that life transformed, miraculously.
It is impossible to distill the story, other than to quote what seems to be the central conclusion:
[S]ometimes knowledge doesn’t work and then you have to optimize for luck.
To be clear, Elizabeth Van Nostrand’s story is unique, in the sense that it is her story and involves a single experimental subject. She doesn’t intend you to copy it, unlike the other “medical miracles” that are her starting point. Rather, it illuminates just how diverse people can be, and that sometimes doctors have absolutely no clue either. If you have a somewhat similar history and are tempted to trust to luck, do be careful, and take heed too of the follow up article.
I Blame Bambi, a Bit
Ecolacy — Garrett Hardin’s important addition to the useful skills of literacy and numeracy — is hard. Its crucial question is “and then what?”, which is intended to show that every action has consequences of some sort, intended or otherwise, and that if you don’t even ask the question, you’re likely to be taken by surprise. For a textbook example, take a look at this article in Grist: Deer are threatening American forests. Is more hunting the solution?.
Marigo Farr’s story starts to trace “then what?” from early decisions to create wildlife preserves that restricted deer hunting to improve deer hunting. Inexorably, that results in rapid population growth, which results in deer leaving the preserves, which results in deer everywhere, which results in many forests being, in the words of ecologist Dan Janzen, “living dead”; underneath the glorious canopy of mature trees, there are no young saplings ready to take over when a tree falls, because the deer have eaten them all.
Only many more predators killing many more deer each year can restore something resembling balance, and humans are effectively the only hunters left. Alas, as the article points out, there really isn’t much incentive to kill more deer.
Federal law currently states that wild game species “cannot be sold, but can be harvested for personal consumption” or given away (with just a few exceptions). And there’s only so much venison one can cram inside a home chest freezer.
Some states allow slaughterhouses to process deer for food banks, but the hunter gets nothing in return.
The solution has to be a market in venison. That, of course, will require driving demand, likely to be a hard sell in the US these days, even though, if you factor in health, climate and environment, venison is superior to beef in so many ways. In the UK, I was cheered to see that two of the finalists in this year’s BBC Food and Farming Awards involved venison.
- Ardgay Game in Scotland processes wild venison from estates across the northern Highlands, and was up for a Best Food Producer award.
- Even more interesting, in its first year a partnership between East Lancashire Hospital Trust and Forestry England put a tonne of venison on the menu for “delicious, nutritious meals for patients and staff”. I doubt that a hook-up with hospitals would work in the US, but how about prisons? Or schools?
Apples in India
To be honest, apples are not a fruit I associate with India. Mango, pineapple, jackfruit and all the other heat-loving delights are what spring to mind. A wonderful article by Priya Mani opened my eyes to The Apple in Indian Cookery. Of course one would have expected The Raj to have imported their fondness for apples, but Mani digs back into their much older history in the sub-continent and recreates several old recipes that make use of apples. There’s a downloadable short book that shares the recipes, should you want to experiment.
If you know about apples, you may know that the trees need to experience a minimum number of chill hours, when the temperature stays below about 7°C. That is why in India apples are grown in the foothills of the Himalayas, where winters are cold enough long enough. Apple growers everywhere face the likelihood of warming winters that could wreck their harvests; in India, they already have the beginnings of an answer.
In 1998, Hariman Sharma, a farmer from Bilaspur in the warmer plains of Himachal Pradesh, threw an eaten apple in his backyard. A few months later, he realized there were apple saplings, and in 2001, they bore fruit. Grafting on a local plum, the yield improved and together with the National Innovation Foundation, Hariman has developed low chilling apples, patented as HRMN-99.
He’s not the only one; breeders around the world are working on low-chill apple varieties. But Hariman Sharma now grows apples alongside mangos in the same field, and I need to update my mental associations.
Perennial Rice
NPR’s Goats & Soda carried a story recently about new varieties of rice that are more or less perennial. Dan Charles did a fine job of making the academic paper accessible for the rest of us, giving a lot of the background and putting the claims of the researchers in context. What interested me was that financial support from the research at Yunnan University came from The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. They’ve been working on perennial crops for decades, most successfully with a type of wheat called Kernza. This press release relates some of this history of the perennial rice project, which I reckon would make a fascinating case study.
News About Old News About Old Eating Habits
The UK has been collecting details of families’ weekly food and drink purchases since the 1940s. Results from 1974 to the present can be downloaded as open data sets, with the earliest surveys available from the UK National Archives.
I mention this for two reasons.
First, the government’s official page about the archived information will not help you find the older archived information. I guess nobody ever tried, because although the page has been updated loads of times, the broken links has never been fixed. So I fixed it for you.
More important, I only found out about the historic data thanks to a tweet from Lucy Dearlove’s Lecker podcast. Twitter has always been a good source of useful information for me, as long as I completely ignore it on a variety of topics. I have not yet abandoned ship myself, though recent news is deinitely pushing hard in that direction. When/if I do, I’ll try and find other ways to follow people who, like me, take pleasure in digging up treasures to share, but in the meantime let me say again that my email is eager to hear from your email.
Take care.
Jeremy