Eat This Newsletter 233: Leavened
Hello
Another serving of bits and bobs from around the internet, from the very serious to the very silly. A balanced diet, I hope.
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Lead
The other shoe has finally dropped. On 6 March, the US Food & Drug Administration warned all consumers and all retailers that “the ground cinnamon products listed in the table below contain elevated levels of lead and that prolonged exposure to these products may be unsafe”.
Having found high levels of lead in pouches of apple purée flavoured with cinnamon, it has surely been only a matter of time before cinnamon itself raised an alarm. Still, it is worth noting that the levels of lead found in these samples ranged from 2.03 to 3.40 parts per million, thousands of times lower than the 2270–5110 ppm in the cinnamon used to flavour the apple purée. And while the FDA says it is continuing to monitor cinnamon and other “colored spices,” it also says:
Ultimately, it is the responsibility of the manufacturers and the importers to ensure the safety of the products that enter into the U.S. market.
There is also a 29 February update from FDA, which has determined that the contaminant in the apple pouches is lead chromate, so not just toxic lead but chromium too.
Historically, lead chromate has been illegally added to certain spices increase to their weight and enhance their color, which increases the monetary value of the adulterated spices. FDA’s leading hypothesis remains that this was likely an act of economically motivated adulteration.
Rye
Think of slash-and-burn agriculture, and what comes to mind? For me, a lush tropical rainforest going up in smoke, not Scandinavia. And yet, an article in ReSEED informed me that slash-and-burn in spruce forests was one of two main techniques for cultivating rye in Scandinavia. The other was Larsmässeråg, rye sown into permanent fields on 10th August (St Lawrence, or Lars) and harvested the following year.
Yields were much higher in slash and burn, and the plants very different too, with slash-and-burn rye producing many more stalks and ears of grain per plant. Those differences, however, are not reflected in overall genetic differences between varieties grown as Larsmässeråg and those grown in cleared forest. Rather, there was considerable diversity within each type of landrace, so that “almost any rye population was dynamic enough to grow in any cultivation system and that ascribed traits to the rye populations, more likely were caused by the way of cultivation”.
Rye has declined generally as a cereal crop, but this research shows how adaptable some of the older varieties were, which might make them useful in the increasingly unpredictable weather we face.
Bread
The story of the “world’s oldest bread” has been all over the place this past week. Archaeologists dated the “palm-sized, round, ‘spongy’ residue” found at Çatalhöyük in Turkey to 8600 years ago and said that their analyses identified it as “uncooked, fermented bread”. So then, what about the 14,000 year old flatbread found at Shubayqa 1 in northern Jordan a few years ago? The devil, of course, is in the details.
The Shubayqa 1 evidence consists of “the kind of stuff you might find at the bottom of your toaster” and after analysis was “probably from unleavened bread”. The Çatalhöyük remains had fermented. The honour of a link from here therefore goes to the one headline that managed a crumb of nuance: World’s Oldest Fermented Bread, Dated to 6,600 BC, Found at Çatalhöyük.
Protests
Last issue I let myself rant about Europe’s protesting farmers. This time, let’s hear from a group that represents small, organic growers, many of them moving towards more regenerative agriculture. CrowdFarming is a European box scheme on steroids (an unfortunate metaphor, for sure) that allows people to buy direct and to adopt crops. A recent blogpost explained their position on the proposed new agricultural subsidy regime in the EU.
They make the case that the EU cannot expect farmers to green their practices simply by withdrawing the €9 billion that farmers get each year in subsidies. “We cannot ask them to reduce emissions and improve the long-term resilience of their crops while they battle the consequences of extreme climate events, without giving them any means or support to do this,” they write.
For this, a context-specific and local approach is necessary. Subsidies can no longer be used as regular support for farmers with no specific end or goal in sight, but need to be targeted towards an objective, that when reached will make them redundant: ensuring farms are resilient enough to face climate change as well as being an active part in counteracting its effects, all the while maintaining a financially stable business.
There follows a fair amount of feel-good handwaving about “imbalanced power dynamics” and “consumers, who need to understand the true cost of food and apply pressure from their side,” all very encouraging. But it is that one phrase about targeted subsidies — “that when reached will make them redundant” — that gives me pause.
When has a subsidy, targeted or otherwise, ever rendered itself redundant?
Pies
If the history of the English pie has taught us anything, it’s that you can put pretty much anything into a pie if there’s someone willing to eat it.
Last week was British Pie Week; not for them the silliness of March 14th. So it is only fitting that English Heritage offered a delicious history of pies from food historian Sam Bilton. She raised an interesting philosophical conundrum right at the outset. If a pie is “a filled pastry case with a pastry lid,” she asks, “what about the shepherd’s pie or fish pie, with their mashed-potato topping? Does the absence of a lid make a pie a tart?”
To which I must add, does the absence of a pastry case render the question pointless? Does it, in fact, make the shepherd’s pie or fish pie rather an upside down example of the fundamental unit of sandwichhood (a format as-yet undefined by the cube rule or any other systematisation of which I am aware)?
OK, I’ve had my fun. Go back to Sam Bilton and her sumptuous history of OED-defined pies. No further quibbles from me about lampreys, either.
Take care
p.s. Photograph of lead chromate basic by Keith Lawrence, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.