Eat This Newsletter 243: Follow-up
Hello
The weekly schedule does sometimes mean that there is less to share, and two of today’s items hark back to previous weeks. I hope that’s OK.
PTOV beats PTFI
Two weeks ago I was somewhat sniffy about the Periodic Table of Food Initiative, which is calling for an effort larger than the human genome project to generate “biomolecular knowledge of edible diversity”. I don’t see the point, but it prompted a reader to tell me about the Periodic Table of Veg, which predates the PTFI by a year or two. I think I see the point of the PTOV, which is right there in the mission statement:
My mission is to help you make delicious veg - tasty, healthy, and planet positive. May we know the veg, may we cook the veg, and may we love the veg!
So what is the PTOV? A beautifully illustrated selection of 90 vegetables arranged quasi-alphabetically from alfalfa sprouts to watercress. There is some general nutritional information and a bit about carbon footprints, although nothing that ties the veg to any kind of periodicity. Individual vegetables reveal their important micronutrients and season as well as some tips about choosing and preparing. And then, the bonanza! A section headed Time to Cook! that invites you to “Click on the photos to explore delicious plant-based recipes from chefs and cooks all over the world”.
Those photos certainly are mouth watering, which is hardly surprising because each of them takes you to a commercial recipe website, each of the ones I visited driven by the kind of tawdry adverts that suggest I am smarter than Steve Jobs, need a better hearing aid and could have washboard abs by sitting in a chair while working out. PTOV thus seems at heart to be a sort of aggregation site, gathering together wonderful recipes from all over. There’s nothing wrong with that, although I find it odd that there is no easy way to find the vegetable you are interested in, short of paging through them, a drag if you’re facing down a mound of winter squash. How hard is it to add a search facility?
I’m sure Livia Solustri, whose idea the PTOV was and who credits her mom with developing her vegetable love, is sincere in her desire to help people eat more sustainable, plant-based food. I’m slightly surprised her site hasn’t crossed my path before now, although it also does not seem to have attracted many comments from readers. Maybe it is just not that well known, which is odd because Livia Solustri bills herself as a strategy and marketing consultant.
What keeps her going? I mentioned that every recipe I clicked through to was on a site that is harvesting personal data (for onward resale?) and burdened with innumerable adverts. Is PTOV getting a share of the earnings? Might be, given that each link to a recipe tells the recipe exactly who sent the visitor. I’m not here to quibble (Oh yes you are! Ed.) and if PTOV helps people eat more nourishing food more sustainably, which is more than PTFI does, then more power to it.
Popeye Triumphant
Time for a confession. One of my fondly-held facts is no such thing, and hasn’t been since around 2009. The primary “fact” is that spinach is the superfood that powered Popeye because it was so rich in iron. The secondary “fact” — the one I believed that’s wrong — is that the first fact is indeed a myth, based on an erroneous decimal point introduced by the German scientists who measured the iron content of spinach, meaning that spinach is not 10 times richer in iron than other veg. The “truth” is that Popeye never claimed he ate spinach for the iron. He ate it for the vitamin A.
I failed to note who linked to one of Mike Sutton’s investigations into the Popeye sponge supermyth but it was fun chasing down the various rabbit holes that led me to. Could the whole thing have been a Christmas joke? And by way of vindication, PTOV on spinach does not mention iron.
Summer Apples, Some Are Identified
As my friend Luigi pointed out, “the canonical lost-British-apple story appears on the BBC in the autumn usually.” And yet, there it was in flaming June. The apple detectives hunting for lost varieties is, in a sense, entitled to be unseasonal because it focusses on apple DNA rather than on the visual and sensory qualities of the fruit itself, usually in autumn. It is a modern wonder that ordinary apple enthusiasts can take advantage of DNA sequencing to help them in their search to find old varieties and identify unknown apples. What I don’t really understand is how they positively tie a DNA sample to a name.
Take the source of all the excitement, Unknown Founder 8, an apple that clearly contributed to the family tree of several known varieties. The article explains how DNA can rule out a putative identification, by showing that a sample is a good match for a different, known variety. But how do they go from a DNA sequence inferred from the ancestry of several modern apples to the confident statement that Unknown Founder 8 is in fact Lemon Roy? Could there be another, as yet unidentified apple, that is an even closer match?
Growing Greenhouses
Last week I poked fun at the notion that global cooling was a hidden upside of a countryside covered in glass and plastic, under which are growing valuable horticultural crops. Trust the USDA to release a report on Growth in Greenhouses a couyple of days later. The number of “controlled environment agriculture” operations in the US more than doubled from 2009 to 2019, while production went up by more than 50%. No word on local cooling.
Take care
Popeye's explanation of his spinach mania from First Versions: Popeye