Eat This Newsletter 256: Lengthy
Hello
Bumper fun this week with a selection that includes four long reads. Save them for a rainy day and they should see you through to next week’s podcast episode.
Olive Oil: Modern is Better
Olive oil, as Silvestro Silvestori told me a couple of months ago, is one of those products that is much higher quality these days thanks to superior methods of industrial production. He was at pains to distinguish the historical “black oil” of Puglia — pressed from fermented, fallen olives, almost certainly rancid and good only as lamp oil — from the smooth, low-acidity oils produced today. A long read from Massimo Mazzotti in Aeon magazine goes into considerably more detail and claims that extra virgin olive oil is the flavour of mechanisation.
Mazzotti is a historian of science at UC Berkeley and his article contains a lot of history, not least his personal history of undertaking technical training at the Organizzazione Nazionale Assaggiatori Olio di Oliva. He points out that the training focusses on detecting potential defects in olive oil, which “is one of a handful of foods whose quality is legally determined by its flavour”. Extra virgin olive oil must have no detectable defects.
Much of the article covers the introduction of “modern” oil mills from about 1750 and their impact on local society. One thing that struck me was that these new mills were producing oil of very low acidity, which seems to go against what Silvestro Silvestori was saying, and this at a time when most olive oil was still being consumed not as food but as fuel to illuminate and lubricate industry in northern Europe and its colonies. Common oil, often rancid, was just not as good a product.
Before 1800, no other known material could outperform olive oil as a fuel for illumination or a lubricant for industrial machinery. But common oil would not do, as it would get rancid too easily. A rancid oil would be smelly and smoky when burned, and it would decompose quickly when used as a lubricant.
But in addition to being industrially superior, these low-acidity oils, Mazzotti says, tasted “sweeter and clearer, with a distinctive peppery note” that appealed to elites who were, in any case, the only people who could afford it.
Modern olive oil, Mazzotti concludes, “tastes like the growing network of global shipping routes, and the increasing rotational speed of well-lubricated industrial machinery. It’s a flavour that announced the dawn of a new world, the flavour of mechanisation.”
Grains: Modern is Worse
David S. Shields offers a diametrically different point of view in his latest newsletter, which reflects on wholesomeness versus extreme flavours in the cooking of the Southern USA. It’s a version of a talk he gave at a symposium in 2019, and contrasts the work of reviving the heritage grains of the south with what he calls Xtreme tasting foods.
Grains were once celebrated and judged for their wholesomeness rather than, say, yield or disease resistance.
Several qualities characterize wholesomeness across cultures over time: a modesty of flavor that permits consumption day after day without cloying, a bloom of starch that gives an agreeable mouthfeel when chewed, a relatively quick sense of satiety after being swallowed, a tendency to sweeten in the mouth as saliva breaks down starch, and perhaps a trace of nuttiness.
Xtreme foods are exemplified by the Carolina Reaper, at the time the world’s hottest chilli pepper, “the culmination of an impetus to ramp up the fire in peppers that has been a pathology among male plant breeders in the region since the 19th century”.
Shields’ point is that extreme tasting foods have been battling it out with wholesomeness for a very long time. Any attempt I might make to summarise the article is bound to fail, not least because it contains so many throwaway thoughts (and citations) that would each probably make for an article of similar length and equal interest. Once again, all I can do is urge you to read it.
Descartes, Pascal and My Grandmother
The great thing about some of the more literary X Review of Books publications is that while you might never read the books in question, the reviews themselves are so often enlightening and thought provoking. Take Erin Maglaque’s review of Eating and Being: A History of Ideas about Our Food and Ourselves, by Steven Shapin. I’m unlikely ever to sit down to digest 568 pages on the history of dietetics, but was more than happy that Maglaque had done so and now shared her insights and additional ideas.
As I read, I kept noticing deft sentences and turns of phrase and thought, “I ought to use that as a quote”. By the end, however, I had lost track of all of them and decided instead to just urge you to read the whole thing.
No Pitchforks Left
James Rebanks is a justly renowned chronicler of the English agricultural landscape, literal and figurative. In another longish read, he explains why he thinks a farmers’ revolt is coming. His rant is triggered by the new Labour government in the UK changing inheritance tax (which will hit some farmers hard) and withdrawing some subsidies more quickly than promised, but Rebanks is quick to share the blame: “much of the pain inflicted was courtesy of the Tories”.
As he goes through the ups and downs that have beset UK farmers since the 1940s, Rebanks lays out in detail the sorts of decisions that have culminated in his feeling that a revolt is on its way. I’d love to see such a thing, because the one possible benefit of Brexit, that the UK could now determine its own food and farming policy, and could do so with an eye to the long-term, has so far shown no sign of coming to be. But a genuine revolt? Rebanks does not even hint at what that would look like, and I am not convinced.
He does, however, explain why people in the UK ought to show at least a little interest.
You shouldn’t care about this because of the welfare of farmers, that would completely miss the point. It will be you and your family who go hungry if we hit a disaster, not the farmers. No, you should care because we have a highly risky just-in-time food system that isn’t fit for purpose in an increasingly fractured geopolitical world. Donald Trump is preaching “American First”, and he’s not alone in heading in that protectionist direction. The Chinese, Russians, the EU, and others are securing their food supplies for a future of scarcity — our dipshit policy is to “Leave it to Tesco”. That’s wildly unsafe in a world where global supplies can no longer be taken for granted.
Lords of the Diet
Which is as good a segue as any into Recipe for health: a plan to fix our broken food system, from the UK’s House of Lords Food, Diet and Obesity Committee.
The commentariat seems to have been focussed mainly on the cost of diet-related ill health — £268bn a year, from a different report, which squares with the Lords’ estimate of 1–2% of UK GDP — rather than on the report’s recommendations. Many of them should come as no surprise. For example, the report would like to require food businesses to report on the healthiness of their sales and ban those with too many unhealthy sales from any discussions of government policy. It also suggests a ban on advertising of unhealthy foods “across all media”. Not much chance of either, I fear.
What is a surprise is that although the committee recognises the “alarming” evidence of connections between ultra-processed food and ill health, it stops short of calling for any changes to UPF production while at the same time calling for more research. Fine, more evidence is always a good thing. And in the meantime … ?
The report does note the absolute negligence of previous governments to achieve anything meaningful.
There has been an utter failure to tackle this crisis. Between 1992 and 2020, successive governments proposed nearly 700 wide-ranging policies to tackle obesity in England, but obesity rates have continued to rise.
You could of course blame weak-willed people, and several pundits have. But you could also do more to focus attention upstream.
The food industry has strong incentives to produce and sell highly profitable unhealthy products. Voluntary efforts to promote healthier food have failed. Mandatory regulation has to be introduced.
All good stuff with which few people who actually care about the food landscape would disagree. That doesn’t mean I’m actually expecting anything much to change. The House of Lords, for all its worth, doesn’t actually influence policy much.
Baby Steps on Baby Food
One of the more interesting recommendations from the Lords is to “immediately develop an ambitious strategy for maternal and infant nutrition and drive up compliance with the school food standards. This will help break the vicious cycle by which children living with obesity are five times more likely to become adults with obesity.”
In that regard, the Competition and Markets Authority of the UK has suggested that the government “could offer its own low-cost baby formula under a brand such as the NHS to combat the high prices and lack of choice in the market”.
Baby formula in the UK is dominated by Danone, Nestlé and Kendal, which together have more than 90% of the market. They have raised prices by more than 36% over two years and increased their profit margins. Some sort of change seems desirable, but would competition (as opposed to regulation, like a price cap) work?
The article quotes the chief executive of the Competition and Markets Authority as saying that “many parents – who may be choosing infant formula in vulnerable circumstances and without clear information – opt for more expensive products, equating higher costs with better quality for their baby”. Given the level of trust in government (of any stripe), it seems unlikely that an NHS or entirely new brand could compete, especially if priced below those market leaders.
Take care
p.s. ONAOO, if you’re reading this, I’m available to retranslate your website.