Eat This Newsletter 241: Periodic
Hello
I’m very grateful to a reader who pointed out that something wasn’t working properly on the website and that made several past episodes invisible. Or do I mean unlistenable? Anyway, alerted, it was a quick fix. So, please, if you see anything that isn’t as it should be, please let me know.
Onwards!
Hilarious Hummus
After last issue’s items on gastronationalism, hummus and originalism, I was primed to notice Wikipedia’s judgement about Hummus and friends on its very aptly named page about the lamest edit wars.
Tasty snacks in the Middle East are hilariously politicized.
If the very idea of edit wars is foreign to you, my advice is to keep it that way. If, on the other hand, you are passingly familiar with how Wikipedia works, the entire page is a delight.
Olive Branches
Lest you think I am making light of gastronationalism, let me share a couple of articles about olives in Palestine. JSTOR uncovers a 2009 article that details the ways in which, after the 2000 intifada, the Israel Defence Forces systematically destroyed the links between many Palestinians and the olive trees they depend on. The article brings to light the vast gulf between how a Palestinian farmer and an Israeli officer view the olive.
For the Palestinian, “my olives are like my children”.
For the officer, “like children, their trees look so naive, as if they can’t hurt anyone. But like [their] children, several years later they turn into a ticking bomb.”
I don’t understand that last point at all, but let it pass. That some children do turn into ticking bombs is attested in a new book — My Brother, My Land — by Sami Hermez, an anthropologist, with Sireen Sawalha, a Palestinian. Sawalha’s younger brother did become involved in the Palestinian resistance but in this extract, in Sapiens, she “recalls the rituals of the olive harvest season, which shaped much of her life growing up in the West Bank in the 1960s and ’70s”. It started with being sent immediately after school to guard the family’s olive trees against the depredations of village children who would steal olives and sell them for pocket money.
PYO PoV
It’s hard to imagine anyone attempting to operate a pick-your-own operation for olives. The work can be hard, and it takes a lot more work to end up with something edible, as opposed to just gorging on strawberries, cherries or peaches warm in the sun. If you thought PYO was plain sailing — fruit picked and cash earned without having to pay for labour — have a read of The Curious Economics of Pick-Your-Own Farms from Ambrook Research. Bottom line: it is complicated, with additional costs that more orthodox operations don’t have to deal with and perhaps even more susceptibility to factors beyond the farmer’s control, such as the weather.
Fascism and Fish Fingers
This one takes a bit of believing but — hey! — if the New England Historical Society says it happened, who am I to argue? The story runs roughly as follows. In 1923, Benito Mussolini ordered $1 million of salt cod from Gorton’s, the largest fishing company in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Mussolini refused to pay. Gorton’s nearly went bankrupt, and asked Clarence Birdseye, recently arrived in Gloucester to experiment on techniques for freezing fish, to help. Thus was born fish fingers and much more besides. Thanks, Benito.
Well Hidden Value
The ultimate expression of food as medicine is the search for active ingredients. Why go to the bother of eating broccoli or Brussels sprouts if you can swallow a pill of glucosinolates and get all that cancer-fighting power directly? I’ve even seen arguments that beneficial phytochemicals be purified from wild plants and somehow incorporated into the batter for chicken nuggets. So I’ve long been skeptical of an effort launched a while ago to compile a periodic table of food, described as an initiative “for generating biomolecular knowledge of edible diversity”. I didn’t link to the original paper because it was behind a paywall but now that two of the 56 authors have written a kind of press release I’m happier to do so.
Superfood - Unveiling the “Dark Matter” of Food, Diets and Biodiversity explains how little we know about the molecular composition of the vast majority of edible plants, and that to learn more will take “a united scientific movement, larger than the human genome project”. Such a movement, in turn, calls for standardised tools, data and training to ensure that results are comparable.
What have we learned from the tools, data and training, so far? As an example, the authors offer
Broccoli, which achieved “superfood” status several years ago for its antioxidants and its connections to gut health, has over 900 biomolecules not found in other green vegetables.
And? Does that mean the broccoli pill will need more than glucosinolates, which are also present in many other brassicas? What does it mean, other than that we need more research?
There are larger goals. One, I think, is to somehow reverse the current trend for people in the West to fall upon the latest superfood with a cry of glee until the next one comes along, without giving anything back to the indigenous cultures that discovered and preserved the superfood. Calling for capacity-strengthening, the authors say “it is time to start opening the black box of food and create more nourishing food systems for everyone”. M’kay.
Another goal, I think, is to ensure that government dietary guidelines are based on more complete knowledge, despite the fact that even now it is more or less impossible to get people to follow those guidelines. Will having more molecular data help?
Full disclosure: I used to work for one of the organisations behind the Periodic Table of Food Initiative and I count many of the researchers as friends. I still don’t see the point, but please check out the gorgeous PTFI website for yourself and let me know why I am wrong.
Standard Recipe History
Another group worrying about standardised tools and data is culinary historians. They have masses of digital resources now to dig through but each resource is often an island floating in its own sea. James Edward Malin and Gary Thompson make the case that each of these highly disconnected culinary historical research tools is trying to reinvent the wheel of metadata alone when it could be drawing on the combined experience embodied in standard bibiographic tools.
Yes, it is an arcane set of arguments of direct relevance to a relatively small group of people, and this is the first of two articles, but I read it with interest as an insight into problems that beset many fields of research.
Take care
