Eat This Newsletter 260: Consolidated
Hello, and Happy New Year
Two pieces about food and place, two pieces about the perils of industrial food, and one blast about why the food system is as rotten state as it is and, maybe, what we might do about that.
Gastronationalism, Ukrainian Style
Food as a marker of national identity is nothing new. Ukraine had applied to the UN to list its borsch soup as endangered cultural heritage in 2020, but the application was fast tracked after Russia invaded in 2022. Now comes a somewhat breathless report from the Christian Science Monitor on how Chefs are rediscovering Ukraine’s cuisine – and identity.
Chefs are searching for old recipe books and rediscovering ingredients that were once carried by merchants through the Black Sea. They are celebrating Ukrainian gastronomy, which some originally dismissed as a joke. All this is couched in terms of reversing decades of Soviet oppression, which is fair enough. The USSR did not make it easy for ordinary people to eat well. But it does kind of ignore pre-Soviet reality, when most of these dishes were widely cooked, with regional differences, across eastern Europe.
If cementing an independent identity through food helps in the pursuit of self-determination, then it cannot really be a bad thing, but there is a danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The Cristian Science Monitor, for example, parenthetically adds some helpful advice about cabbage and beetroot soup: “And in Ukraine, just don’t write it or pronounce it as “borscht” with a T, the Moscow spelling.” And yet, the UN’s own inscription of the soup on its List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding spells it “borscht”.
Bergamot Nation
I was happy to read about Bergamot’s fragile revival in southern Italy.
The value of Bergamot goes way beyond the heady notes it add to Earl Gray tea, but the oil extracted from this fragrant citrus was eclipsed in the 1960s by a cheaper synthetic substitute. The usual story: landowners abandoned cultivation, trees were uprooted, the local industry in Calabria contracted and almost died. Then, just in time, demand for the real thing sparked a renaissance in the fortunes of one family that had not destroyed its orchards.
Calabria now produces 80% of the world’s bergamot oil, which is extracted from the skin of unripe, green bergamots. “Yet,” the article relates “until just over a decade ago, the flesh of the fruit was cast aside — mostly fed to animals.”
This is an intriguing example of human exceptionalism, that they were willing to feed animals with something that was widely believed to be lethal to humans.
“If someone died? They’d eaten a bergamot. If a woman miscarried? She’d eaten a bergamot. Any ailment was blamed on bergamot.”
That’s Vittorio Caminiti, a local historian, who learned to love bergamot juice and won prizes with his bergamot cake. And he has a good explanation for bergamot’s evil reputation. The oil was so valuable that the peasants, who worked the trees owned by the rich, might be tempted to steal some fruit, so wealthy landowners demonised the fruit’s juice. “There were too many trees to patrol, so instead of arresting or beating people for eating them, they created a myth.”
It’s a tussle that is being repeated, as upstart bergamot producers and the revived old guard fight it out over protected status for their products. Both of them, however, now face climate change and extensive drought, which could threaten the reborn industry just like synthetic oil in the 1960s.
Feed the Counterculture
Jess Fanzo, quite apart from being a friend and sometime guest on the podcast, is Professor of Climate and Director of the Food for Humanity Initiative at Columbia University and a force in the study of food systems. The New Year’s Day article on her website is a rallying cry, reminding readers of beginnings of the counterculture in the US in the late 1960s. What’s that got to do with food?
The counterculture movement explicitly used food to ignite a social revolution. They returned to the land and started communes to grow their food in organic, wholesome ways. They opened neighborhood co-operatives to sell and provide these foods to their communities. They (the Black Panthers) started safety net programs to feed children living in impoverished neighborhoods.
And what has that got to do with us, 60 years on? Jess lays it out with passion and insight, and I urge you to read her piece in full.
Chips Join Chicken in the Dock
Last issue, I reported on the huge settlement that poultry processors had paid to settle a case against them of price fixing. This time, it’s the turn of the four companies that “control at least 97% of the $68 billion frozen potato market” in the US.
That is a staggering level of consolidation. Philip Howard, who talked to me about who owns whom in the food industry, notes that “It’s interesting that even in a very permissive environment of mergers and acquisitions, this industry was allowed to get to the level that it has”.
Once again, according to an article in The Lever, a third-party data analytics company is the mechanism that enables them all to raise their prices by the same amount at the same time. The article goes into the details of the price-fixing claim and points out that consolidation is happening even in products that might be considered niche, like almond milk and microwaveable popcorn.
There are now more than 12 class action suits pending against the four who, in my opinion, should not be called big potato, but rather Big French Fry, or Big Tater Tot, because what they really do is transform potatoes into profits.
You do have to sign up to read the article, which I thought worth it because it gives a lot of good background information on consolidation and the data-sharing companies that make cartels so much simpler than having to sit in a smoke-filled room.
Listeria Threatens Plant Milk Maker
Another follow-up: In ETN-245 I noted an outbreak of Listeria contamination tied to plant-based “milks,” sold as Danone’s Silk and Walmart’s Great Value but manufactured by a third party. That third company, Joriki Inc., has now filed for creditor protection while they attempt to restructure their business.
The company made no mention of the outbreak in its request, and has said it is not bankrupt, but it owes more than $200 million to more than 100 companies. Joriki is said to be considering its strategic alternatives.
Take care
