Eat This Newsletter 263: Connectivity
Hello
I’m struck, once again, by the connections it is possible to make with very little effort. Sugar craving, cheap ultraprocessed calories, cheap food for enslaved sugar workers, the hidden horrors behind plenty, information deficits. Maybe I really do need a pinboard and lots of red string.
Sweet Release
There are topics other than food, honest, and I follow lots of people for reasons other than food. Occasionally though, I get a twofer, and someone who I do not follow for food produces something that engages my interest in food. So it was with Maya (of maya.land), who linked to How My Trip to Quit Sugar Became a Journey Into Hell while also urging us to “think about it a bit with me”. I did both, I’m glad I did, and I think you should too.
First things first. Maya puts the article into the context of what she calls the Nutritional Just-World Fallacy. Summarising her own summary, this boils down to if you eat bad stuff it is because you lack will-power or are somehow broken, or both. And her point is that despite all the mocking self-deprecation (which I perceive as getting your retaliation in early), the would-be sugar quitter is kind of indulging in the belief that she could, actually, cure herself of her craving if she tried harder, and maybe she should. I agree with that characterisation.
But, to business. The sugar quitter’s article is an account of a trip to a wellness spa in Austria that will cure her of an addiction to sugar that seems to have no adverse effects on her body or metabolism but that she (perhaps?) thinks of as A Bad Thing. (Or maybe it was just an all-expenses jolly more or less guaranteed to deliver good copy in the right hands.) Either way, it is a classic of the genre, almost, but not quite, a match for the ne plus ultra, Ian Belcher’s account of his colonic irrigation holiday, The enema within.
(The Guardian tells me the article is more than 22 years old. That I remember it today is testimony to its classic quality.)
Banqueting to Excess
In a fallaciously just world, people get what they deserve. What does that say about the world illustrated in the sumptuous still lifes of late 17th century Dutch feasts.
[T]he heaps of delicacies and baubles simply appear in great quantity, as if by magic rather than toil. The abundance is beguiling. Pluck one grape, slurp one oyster, and there are still plenty more on the table. Their replenishment is all but assured. “There’s more where this came from”, the paintings seem to say.
The truth, of course, was a lot less palatable and so best kept out of sight, in the paintings as in life.
The Public Domain Review interprets the genre and serves up a sumptuous banquet of examples.
Somebody Should Do Something About UPFs
And they are, but maybe not what they should be. Researchers in Australia published a recent paper in Nature Food that looked at regulatory responses to ultra-processed foods. I have not read it in detail, but the overall picture is that most existing regulations do not actually address UPFs directly, and about 85% of the interventions intend only to “change the food environment”; that is, they mostly address food labelling. That might help shoppers to make better-informed choices if, in fact, information is what they lack. Is it, though? Later this week I’ll be talking to someone who asks that question directly, for a future episode.
What’s in your food
Labels are where the truth about nutrition and processing goes to die, as special interests of all views fight for a place to nudge purchases.
That’s from an entertaining article from the American Council on Science and Health that takes a look at another scientific paper in Nature Foods in which researchers “applied a machine learning algorithm (what else?) to over 50,000 real-world grocery items from Walmart, Target, and Whole Foods”. The author interprets the results in the light of Michael Pollan’s 2011 food rules, which in my opinion were always more of a challenge to manufacturers to evade than sound prescriptions to live by.
The article brings out some fascinating insights. Ultra-processed food really is a lot cheaper per calorie, except for plant-based milk substitutes. Much of that may be a consequence of subsidies to additives such as sugars, which add calories — and palatability — at lower cost. There is also some judicious sleight of hand going on. Whole Foods is much more likely to tell you that its cereals contain virtuous sea salt and cane sugar than nasty old sugar and salt.
The whole thing is a fun read that will save you having to find the research paper itself. My feeling though, is that this research will do about as much to change eating habits as Pollan’s rules.
Hold the front page!
People are bad at reporting what they eat. That’s a problem for dietary research.
Can you remember everything you ate during the past 24 hours? I know I can’t. So why should we trust research that is often based on what people recall about what they ate? Another paper in Nature Food estimates a correction factor for diet surveys. Because it is behind a paywall I am linking instead to a piece in Science magazine which not only explains how the correction works but also adds context to survey-based research on diet and nutrition. Bottom line: “The results call into question the thousands of studies that have used these data sets to link particular diets to human health, the authors claim.”
Breadfruit’s Bounty
Dumbarton Oaks is a beautiful building, museum, library and garden in Washington DC and I have often linked to its Plant of the Month features. This month’s is breadfruit, and well worth exploring. I’ve never knowingly eaten breadfruit, though I have tasted its close relative jackfruit, and yet one thing I know about it is that it was at the heart of the Mutiny on the Bounty. The British government tasked Captain William Bligh with transporting breadfruit seedlings from their home in the Pacific to the Caribbean, where it was hoped the trees would provide cheap food for enslaved people on the sugar plantations. Then it gets complicated.
There’s a lot to savour in the story of breadfruit’s enforced migration from its origins in the Pacific to the plantations of the Caribbean and the lasting impacts there. The article brings all these facets out with (occasionally clunky) links to images, maps and cooking videos.
Take care
p.s. Pronkstilleven by Carstian Luyckx