Eat This Newsletter 200: It has been brought to my attention …
Hello
I regard myself as something of a connoisseur of weasel words, and so for this celebratory edition — 200, can you believe it? — a few choice examples.
Formula for Balance
Apparently I did the commercial milk formula and my own responsibilities as a publisher a disservice last week by failing to point out that breast may not be “truly best”. A subscriber (now, alas, an ex-subscriber) pointed me to this 2014 article, for which I am truly grateful.
If you simply compare breastfed with non-breastfed, there is ample evidence for the beneficial effects of breastfeeding. However, mothers who breastfeed are often better educated and of higher socioeconomic status than mothers who do not breastfeed. So, any differences between children who were breastfed and children who were not could be down to those other, confounding factors.
In a nutshell, the researchers re-examined 25 years of data from the National Longitudinal Servey of Youth in the United States. The clever part is that they were able to identify families in which one sibling was breastfed and another was not. After some statistical tests, it turns out that the clear association one sees between breastfeeding and “good” outcomes when comparing children across families all but vanishes when you compare breastfed and not breastfed within families. As the authors say:
[W]e are forced to reconsider the notion that breastfeeding unequivocally results in improved childhood health and wellbeing. In fact, our findings provide preliminary evidence to the contrary.
Is that, then, a green light for commercial formula? The authors certainly do not think so.
A mother’s decision to breastfeed her child as well as how long she is able to do so is based on a complex web of personal, familial, and social factors. It often requires that women dramatically reduce their hours working outside the home, have jobs with maximum flexibility, and/or rely heavily on wages from partners to make up for lost income. This is a sacrifice for all women, regardless of how much they want to do it or how important they think it is. This trade off, however, may be especially untenable for poor and/or minority women who already face reduced access to steady, full-time employment, have few or no benefits, and lower than average salaries often in conjunction with the added pressures of single parenthood.
To me, the message is clear. Mothers need social support that will allow those who want to breastfeed to do so, and those who want to use formula to be able afford it. If the benefits of breastfeeding are confounded by education and wealth, that seems to me like a good argument for increasing education and wealth, with considerable gains as a result, not for allowing formula companies to do more or less as they please to promote sales.
Too Cheap at Any Price
Have you come across the idea that the “true” cost of a Big Mac in the US ought to be $13 rather than $5? Or that the ground beef that goes into a hamburger is sold for one-sixth of its true cost? Those claims are linked to the $38 billion that the US spends to subsidise meat and dairy. A rational chap decided to investigate, tracked the numbers down to a 2013 book, and decided that those claims were “not at all plausible”.
In 2013 a Big Mac cost $4.56, so they’re claiming $8.44/burger. There are about 550M Big Macs sold annually, so the total Big Mac subsidy would be $4.6B. That’s 12% of the entire $38B. And Big Macs are only 0.4% of US beef consumption (25.5B lb of beef, 1/5lb each, 550M/y) let alone all the other subsidized foods.
Follow the numbers, do a bit of digging, and here’s the bottom line: “In short, this statistic is junk.”
How Much Food Should Cost
Almost every question about the true cost of food comes down to "it depends". That nonsense about Big Macs surfaced in an article about how to persuade lapsed v*gans to rejoin the cause, which drew on an extremely neoliberal analysis that stridently announces "In free markets for private goods, consumers should bear the costs of production". In other words, taxes on people who don't eat meat shouldn't subsidise meat production.
I agree, in broad terms. Food production shouldn't get any subsidies, and should shoulder the costs of its externalities too. I also know that's never going to happen. In the meantime, Corinna Hawkes, Professor of Food Policy at City, University of London, found herself sitting by the side of Lake Victoria, one of the largest inland fisheries in the world, eating a tilapia that may well have come from China. The surprise provided a good peg on which to offer an interesting summary of why cheap food is unsustainable.
Chicken and the Sea
Tilapia farming has grown more rapidly than other aquaculture recently, but salmon remains the world’s most farmed fish. Many environmentally conscious people apparently favour farmed salmon over farmed chicken because they reckon that the overall environmental impact of salmon is lower. Not so fast. Their impacts are extremely similar says a report in Anthropocene magazine.
Two points to bear in mind. The main driver of both species’ impacts is their feed. Chicken are fed mostly land crops like soy and wheat, but also consume quite a lot of fish meal and oil. Salmon get mostly fish meal and oil, but also considerable amounts of land crops. Following this discovery, the authors suggest that the area that produces feed, which is relatively small compared to the total area impacted by chicken and farmed salmon, would be a good place to think about reducing environmental impact. Maybe.
Also, according to the report:
[T]he study reconsiders the idea that chicken and salmon are ‘low-impact’ meats, which is why many people choose them as part of a more sustainable diet. As it turns out, that depends on what you measure.
Doesn’t everything?
Ezekiel’s Bread Never Tasted So Good
Search online for Ezekiel bread and you are bowled over by claims for how delicious, nutritious and all-around wonderful it is. The loaf, made from sprouted grains and legumes, is “the healthiest bread you can eat”. None of its proselytisers, alas, seem to have gone back to the original source of the recipe, the visions that cemented Ezekiel’s status as a major prophet.
The indefatigable William Rubel did go back. He points out that in his vision, Ezekiel is served two breads, the first a sweet-tasting bread, the second the one that has captured today’s imagination. His conclusion, taking into account very literally what the vision tells us, is that Ezekiel’s bread is all about “awfulness”.
Rubel says “I have not been able to find any commentary explaining why this bread is so often interpreted as a sprouted grain bread. If you know of one that references sources please put in the comments”.
With a vague recollection that I had once seen such a thing, I had a little look, but I’m not sure that the article I found — How a Transylvanian Mystic Made Sprouted-Grain Bread a Californian Ritual — would find favour as such a commentary. As for the theological meaning of Ezekiel’s vision, I commend The Weird Story Behind Ezekiel 4:9 And The Bread It Inspired, although that does not mention the Transylvanian mystic.
Both entertaining reads, like Rubel’s piece.
Cherished
<rant>
No doubt you have been unable to avoid the unfortunate Thérèse Coffey’s exhortation to Brits that, in the absence of tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers on supermarket shelves, they should cherish their turnips. I’d love to pile on, but I can’t, because I agree with her.
Turnip might have been an unfortunate choice on which to focus, but there are plenty of salad ingredients that can be grown in the UK, as many people have pointed out. Brexit, and the paperwork that involves, has clearly made things worse, even for imports from non-EU countries. But in my view the big problem is the one that Corinna Hawkes identified. Food is just too cheap.
Also, supermarkets have too much power. They refuse to pay farmers enough, so farmers aren’t growing what people want. And because supermarket food has been so cheap for so long, customers have false expectations of the cost of food and no alternative sources of supply.
People everywhere, not just in the UK, really are struggling to get by, and the problem is not food poverty, it is poverty.
I’ve always said that the only possible good that might possibly come out of Brexit would be the opportunity to remake the UK’s food system to serve goals other than low cost. So far, so bad.
<rant>
Take care.
p.s. Banner image by an unknown illuminator, from The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles