Eat This Newsletter 274: Pushmi-pullyu
Hello
The administration giveth, and the administration taketh away. Of course consistency and logic is too much to ask for, although it is good to have a record of the insanity.
Make Agriculture Happy Again
Errol Schweizer, aka Grocery Nerd, actually read Make Our Children Healthy Again Assessment, the report from the MAHA Commission. His newsletter issue on the subject is a long and detailed report that contains something for everyone to disagree with. Final conclusion:
Poverty and inequality are at the heart of America’s chronic disease epidemic, and are the results of imbalances in wealth and power.
MAHA can’t solve for one without addressing the others.
Anything else is misdirection.
Along the way we get damning indictments of how the revealed preferences of the current administration directly undermine what the MAHA Commission says it would like to see, as well as a detailed reflection of public attitudes to policy changes.
The issue concludes with Grocery Nerd’s Ten Point Program To Make America Healthier Than Ever, to which the optimist in me can say only “Right On!”.
The cynic (realist?) fires back “Dream On!”
Ancient Avocados
The often humid climate of the tropics means that ancient plant remains are few and far between, making it difficult to trace the long-term history of crops there. Thanks to a dry rock shelter in western Honduras, which preserved “an unparalleled sequence of radiocarbon-dated avocado remains,” researchers have now rewritten its ancient history. The paper is paywalled; I found out about it because one of the universities involved has just published a popular account, which in turn led me to an earlier popular report from another of the universities.
Two key milestones emerged. First, people were tending wild avocado trees as far back as 11,000 years ago. And by 7500 years ago, they had begun to select for larger fruits with tougher skins. Those ages reveal a bigger surprise; they predate the arrival of maize. The standard view is that as maize spread to new locations, it transformed foragers into farmers. The new results show that people were “fully engaged in tree cultivation upon maize’s arrival”.
The research also has a message for the modern avocado industry, 90% of whose fruits are of the single Hass variety. Because they are multiplied as clonal offsets, those trees are all genetically identical and thus all equally vulnerable to any pest, disease or climate change that affects them. The researchers point out that farmers grew avocados from seedlings for millennia, and that much of that genetic diversity lingers in remaining relict populations. As Amber VanDerwarker, lead researcher on the study, points out:
“Developing new varieties through seed selection of modern domesticates and wild relict populations growing throughout Central America may provide more success in adapting trees to these changing landscapes than clonal propagation alone.”
Sourdough vs Yeast: an ancient battle
When I trip over a source new to me I tend to look around and see what else might be of interest. So it was last week, with the article about butter in Dutch history. Turned out that the author of that piece, Mouhamadoul Khaly Wélé, also wrote about bread. Back in 2024, he brought to life a 17th century debate that inflamed Parisian passions: is bread raised with yeast, as opposed to sourdough, bad for you?.
The answers will not surprise you.
Where There’s a Huile …
The sheer evil of some food fraudsters is astonishing. In Vietnam, local police recently busted a criminal organisation that had raked in the equivalent of $3.14 million by disguising animal feed oil as cooking oil and selling it widely, “from industrial kitchens and restaurants to street food vendors and traditional village snack and sweet shops”.
The article explains that because animal feed-grade oils are not refined, they “can cause poisoning, organ damage, toxin build-up and increased risk of chronic diseases if taken over a long period”. It does not, however, offer any evidence that anybody was actually harmed.
The criminals obviously spotted an opportunity in the market, with feed-grade oil cheaper to buy and subject to lower taxes too. Were the customers paying full price for the oil, I wonder, or were they happy to pay less?
Other recent food frauds mentioned in the article suggest that fake food is a huge problem in Vietnam.
Take care
