Eat This Newsletter 253: Conflict
This edition explores UK nutrition conflicts, the tomato's rise in India, and lead in turmeric.
Hello
New news, old news, non news; as long as it is interesting, I’m happy to share it here.
I’m shocked, shocked to find that there are conflicts of interest here
The UK government relies on its Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition (SCAN) to provide, er, scientific advice on nutrition. Imagine the agitation I underwent on learning that at least 11 of its 17 members “have conflicts of interest with the likes of Nestlé, sugar manufacturer Tate and Lyle, and the world’s largest ice cream producer, Unilever”.
Never mind the editorialising. That’s from an investigative report in the BMJ. Of course, there are two sides to the story.
Campaigners say that these conflicts of interests at the heart of policy making are detrimental to public health. Others say that they reflect the lack of funding for nutrition research and that removing experts with industry links from SACN would “diminish” its expertise.
I’ll make just one observation. If it really is the case that removing experts with industry links would diminish the committee’s expertise, doesn’t that rather suggest that the UK government isn’t actually funding enough research in nutrition?
For others, allow me to point you to Marion Nestle.
What have the British ever done for us?
They popularised the tomato in India.
OK, that alone does not make up for the depredations of the Raj, but in remarkably little time the tomato went from suspicious interloper to a staple in many different Indian cuisines.
Although the Portuguese had brought tomatoes to the sub-continent in the 1600s it wasn’t until a couple of hundred years later that they were grown widely across the country, mostly to feed the British and other Europeans. Sohel Sarkar charts the rise of the tomato for Goya magazine, noting that it wasn’t until after independence that Indians really went for tomatoes in a big way.
If that sounds familiar, it may be because you remember the episode with Sucharita Kanjilal, in which she told me about the invention of butter chicken, with tomatoes an essential ingredient in the sauce. I was glad to see that the Goya article quotes Sucharita Kanjilal’s paper extensively, explaining how new varieties of tomato made growing them profitable for small farmers, in turn keeping tomatoes affordable most of the time for most Indian families.
We’re so familiar with how foods from the New World became accepted in Europe, it is salutary to see some of the same strands running through their adoption elsewhere. It also piqued my interest to be sent from that Goya article to a recipe for a spicy tomato peanut chutney, combining two colonisers from the New World. There’s only one problem; the recipe calls for two teaspoons of urad dal. I’d love to have a big pot of urad dal from which to scoop the needful, but black “lentils” aren’t easy to find here. Maybe I could just use some other pulse. Or leave it out altogether. Any other suggestions?
Clove hitch
JSTOR’s plant of the month in September was the clove tree. The story gives us the usual once-over-lightly history of the spice which, in case you didn’t know, consists of the dried, unopened flower buds of Syzygium aromaticum, the clove tree. The Dutch, who really opened up the trade in cloves and other southeast Asian spices, were desperate to maintain their monopoly (don’t even ask about nutmeg, not yet a Plant of the Month). While they could control the indigenous people in a variety of ghastly ways, they could do nothing about the birds that ate the fruits that cloves become if unpicked and spread the seeds.
So far so good, but I wish they had explored the history of clove’s names. In one 17th century print, the plant is labelled Cariophillum, Tsjenke off Nagel in Dutch. JSTOR translates that as Caryophyllum, Cengke, or Clove. But nagel also means nail, the thing used to hold wood together, and dried cloves do indeed resemble nails. What about Cariophyllum? That derives from the Ancient Greek karyophyllon, literally nut-leaf, their word for clove, the spice. In Latin, clavus means nail, from which, apparently, come the Old French clou de girofle, the Anglo-French clowes de gilofre, and ultimately the English clove; but also gillyflower and, indeed, clove pink. Those flowers are both members of the large botanical family Caryophyllaceae, which has absolutely nothing to do with cloves the spice except that an obsolete name for the clove pink was Caryophillus, a direct reference to its perfume.
Phew. Now to find my way out of this rabbit hole.
Tainted turmeric revisited
NPR recently offered a long story headlined You'll never guess the culprit in a global lead poisoning mystery. Of course, if you’re a subscriber here and I told you some of the people poisoned were Bangladeshi children in New York, you might have correctly guessed turmeric. A little more than a year ago I linked to the story of how Jenna Forsyth tracked down high levels of blood lead among women and children in Bangladesh.
NPR covers the Bangladeshi end of the story and also brings it up to date. Jenna Forsyth now heads a global lead program at Stanford School of Medicine and has her work cut out. While Bangladesh cleaned up its act quickly and effectively for turmeric, lead is still present in other household items and cosmetics. In other countries, lead is still being used to “improve” turmeric and other spices have also been adulterated. Furthermore, the length of the supply chain is so long that it can be impossible to be certain that any spice is lead-free.
The NPR piece mentions a device that gives an instant readout of the lead content of, say, paint on a wall. Does it work on spices? And how soon before importers or retailers offer a lead-free guarantee?
Is the story of 陈麻婆豆腐 true?
Today I saw someone state categorically that Mapo Tofu was invented in 1862 by Ms Chen, whose nickname was Mapo — “pockmarked old lady” — on account of the scars she bore from having survived smallpox. I didn’t know the story, so I had a quick look and many sources agree on the outline. Maybe, then, the history is true, but it reminded me of something that surfaced a couple of weeks ago, a remnant from when the internet was young.
In 2001 Heather Rose Jones wrote Charlemagne’s Cheese: a study in the un/reliability of sources. In it, she dissects a claim that the Emperor, quite the turophile, was particularly fond of a blue sheep’s milk cheese and a Brie. The claim itself is in Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat's very entertaining History of Food, translated by Anthea Bell. I really don’t want to spoil the fun, so I urge you to have a read and see why Heather Rose Jones concludes that “one should be extremely wary of sources that don’t tell you where they got their information. The information may be wrong, and you have no way to know it”.
In the spirit of which, I confess that I lifted 陈麻婆豆腐 from here. He says it means Chen mapo tofu. Deepl, my go-to translator, renders it as stir-fried beancurd in chili sauce. No conflict there.
Take care
