Eat This Newsletter 195 – New Year
Hello
Happy New Year? Sad New Year? New Year, for sure.
Crisis? What Crisis?
I’m taking the opportunity to link to Aaron Smith’s post from early March last year: We’re Not Facing a Global Food Crisis. It was written just a couple of weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, when nobody had any idea how things would play out, and it helped to shape my own thinking, this quote in particular:
This will have a big effect on world agricultural markets, but not that big.
This was where I first learned that exports from Ukraine and Russia together account for only 7.3% of global wheat production and 2.6% of global corn production. So, while a lack of exports from those countries would affect some buyers (poor countries) a lot, the rest of the world ought to have been less troubled. The article didn’t really consider prices for fertiliser or energy, but market traders (who presumably do consider those factors) were betting that prices would be back to “normal” by the middle of 2023.
The Black Sea Grain Initiative, after a shaky start in July 2022, remains operational (for another couple of months) and has allowed almost 5 million tonnes of wheat and more than 7 million tonnes of maize through the Bosporus. Wheat and maize prices have dropped. Of course there is still famine and hunger in places. Russia is still hammering Ukraine criminally. I’m not saying everything is OK, not by a long stretch. But the global food catastrophe that many people were so worried about in the weeks and months following Russia’s invasion has not come to pass.
Equally, that does not mean that a crisis-free future is assured, even if the fighting stops. Energy and fertiliser prices remain high, and as it is currently constructed the global commodity market depends absolutely on synthetic fertilisers. So, if you want some really bad news, USDA reports that agricultural productivity growth has slowed to the lowest rate since calculations started in 1961, which “suggests that producers will need to use more land and apply other agricultural inputs more intensively to maintain growth in agricultural output”. Worse, it has slowed most in developing countries.
Another depressing article about pork
Here’s some weird Brexit-tinged news. The British pig industry has had an absolutely disastrous year. Ah, but, a Danish company is investing £100 million in “a state-of-the-art bacon plant” in Yorkshire. Ah, but, it will mainly process Danish pigs. In fact, as John Lewis-Stempel explains, “about 60% of the pork consumed in the UK already comes from other countries, principally in the EU bloc”. And that’s despite Brexit. In fact, pig imports were up 20% in 2021.
The story is an old one: Brits say they want better animal welfare, and have done since sow stalls were outlawed in the UK more than 20 years ago. But they buy whatever is cheapest, which in practice means pork produced under the very conditions thay say they dislike and legislate against.
Lewis-Stempel further dissects the difference between the animal welfare statutes that are nominally on the books and what actually happens on intensive pig farms. It isn’t easy going, and it isn’t obvious that things are any better for UK pigs than they are for those in the EU.
Lewis-Stempel’s solution — which ought to apply everywhere, not just in Britain — is simple in the extreme:
“If the British pig industry does not want to end up in a slaughterhouse of its own making, it needs to end factory farming, improve welfare to organic levels, and put pigs on a main diet of natural forage and crop waste, rather than soy and cereals that contribute to deforestation and loss of wildlife habitats. The result is happy pigs, and a happier farm balance sheet. (Our pigs, by rootling in woodland, orchards, and crop fields following harvest, have found as much as 50% of their food for free.)”
Oh look, there there they go, freewheeling through the blue.
Laughing stock?
I read Gastro Obscura’s article on ’Perpetual broths’ en route to the USA, and wondered how Magdalena Perrotte would fare today. In the article, she boasts that she “became an expert at hiding food from customs officials” after she first arrived in 1982. On that first trip she brought a jar of her mother’s broth “carefully wrapped in a scarf, as well as some raw milk cheeses and cured saucisson — French ingredients you couldn’t buy in Florida”. After pondering for a while the ethics of deliberately smuggling potentially damaging forms of life, I moved to the meat of the article, and all I really wanted, nerd that I am, was a double blind test.
The article strongly suggests that there’s something magical about a broth or stock that has been simmering for decades, having diverse ingredients added over the years. Is there? Faced with a series of choices between two stocks — one ‘perpetual’ the other not — can tasters reliably identify which is which? Until that evidence is available, for me any benefits people ascribe to such potions is evidence only of magical thinking.
Take care.
p.s. Flying pig by Ricky Leong