Eat This Newsletter 265: Past and Future
Hello
Some items look back, some look forward, but isn’t that always the way?
Food and Energy
Gunnar Rundgren’s essay Eating Oil will probably not be to everyone’s taste, and that’s a pity. In it, he tries to answer a seemingly simple question: how many calories does it take to produce one calorie of food? The answer depends on a whole host of factors, which Rundgren explains and which enable him to point out how different studies come up with rather different estimates.
One thing is glaringly obvous. The actual energy used by plants to construct themselves, the energy captured from sunlight, is infinitesimal. The energy in harvested products represents less than 0.5% of the sunlight falling on the fields, so Rundgren simply ignores it.
Most of the energy needed to feed us comes in the form of fertilisers, then fuel used in farm machinery and transportation, refrigeration, processing and handling, etc etc. Taking all those into account, a USDA report finds that “delivering the average American’s 2,000 calorie diet requires nearly 32,000 calories of energy inputs” and that farm operations “consume only 14% of the total energy used in the food chain”. That’s not very efficient.
There are lots more facts, figures and interpretations in the essay, culminating in some predictions for the future. I only wish the article had looked at the cost of meat produced in mechanical bioreactors, as opposed to the living bioreactors of livestock, which I know Rundgren knows about.
Coming — Maybe — to a Plate Near You
From Wageningen University, a new vegetable that the European Food Safety Authority has just approved as “safe for human consumption”.
The vegetable in question is a duckweed, one of those very small, bright green plants you may find floating on the surface of still water. Two species seem to be involved, Lemna gibba and L. minor, both now being promoted as “water lentils”. They have lots of points in their favour; they grow very rapidly, doubling in a couple of days, are suitable for greenhouses and urban, indoor farms, require no pesticides and very little fertiliser, are very high-yielding, and contain up to 40% protein when dry. And, to the satisfaction of the EFSA, water lentils are safe for human consumption and may now be placed on the market.
Which of course raises the question: what do they taste like?
[P]articipants ate dishes with water lentils, like soup, stew, quiche and risotto. For the first two days, the participants had to get used to the taste, but after that, their response was positive. Comparisons with the same dishes containing spinach showed that the participants liked water lentils just as much. In fact, they liked the water lentil soup better than the spinach equivalent.
I’m not entirely convinced, but never say never.
Marmalade Is Tasty, if It’s Very Thickly Spread
History, etymology, poetry, literature, espionage; Rachel Mosses joyfully started out of “an almost absolute stop” in her writing with a no-holds-barred encomium to marmalade. Bits of it you, like me, might already know. But unless, like one of her sources, you wrote The Book of Marmalade, I guarantee you a nugget or two of thick cut, aromatically bitter peel to chew on.
Thrilling
When I’m not reading about food for “work” I often relax with with Alan Furst’s spy stories of inter-war Europe. Not surprisingly, perhaps, I fell on Schmankerl Time Machine as the kind of resource that would be essential to give an authentic taste of the period.
Click on the winsome serving woman and you’re taken to facsimiles of Munich menus collected over the past 150 years, complete with prices and, sometimes, exact dates. There’s an interactive map too, that tells you which establishments no longer exist. So my man could alight from his train, turn right in front of the station and walk to Bayerstrasse 14, where he would find the Holzkirchner Bahnhof restuarant, and know that the sausages were from that establishment’s own slaughterhouse.
That’s about as far as I go with my very limited German, but I did discover that the project is part of an ongoing series of challenges in open data, and that it won the “most technical” section of the competition when it was first held in the south of Germany in 2019. DeepL helped me understand more:
Do you always have the same thing on the table at home? Are you looking for culinary variety in your everyday life? Not all is lost yet! The ‘Schmankerl Time Machine’ invites you on an epicurean journey through Munich’s traditional pub history of the past 150 years. Get an overview of the legends in Munich’s restaurant scene, of stars that have burnt out and evergreens that have never faded. Put together your unforgettable menu of tomorrow from a portfolio of over 380 menus and the recipes linked to them. How about a lobster cocktail, followed by hare in a terrine and venison mousse, topped off with Prince Pückler? Take inspiration for your menu creation from the suggestions of other users. Upload the menu of your favourite Munich gourmet restaurant to expand the range even further. Let’s savour!
I hope some of you will get more out of this than I could.
Jay Rayner
The Observer’s restaurant critic Jay Rayner quit when The Guardian announced it was selling The Observer. This may be a little parochial, or maybe not given The Guardian’s global online presence, but I’m sharing his final column because I think every single sentence, beyond the first explanatory paragraph, would make a fine cross-stitched conversation piece.
Bechamel sauce is easy to make; just follow the damn recipe.
Just one downside; they brook no conversation.
Rayner has moved to the Financial Times, which, as you might expect, has a far less open attitude to online publishing. Unlike The Guardian, they’re not content to let me pay what I can afford from time to time; it’s all or (almost) nothing. A glimmer of hope does exist. Jay Rayner’s website contains links to his reviews, though not the actual reviews. So far (and I realise it is early days) there’s nothing from the FT. However, Tim Harford, the FT’s Undercover Economist, republishes his columns four weeks after they appear in the newspaper. I hope Jay Rayner can do the same.
Take care
