Eat This Newsletter 277: Empty calories
Hello
What chance does an emaciated weakling regulatory agency have against the mighty, maggot-free muscle of Big Food?
A Definitive Definition?
Once upon a time, those of us of a certain age, probably with parents of a certain leaning, knew all about empty calories. That’s not good enough for the modern era and so we have, among other things, ultra-processed foods. The problem of course is that like empty calories, nobody can quite agree on just which foods are in fact ultra-processed, which are merely processed, and which are processed but in ancient ways that actually improve their nutritional quality. A quandary, for sure.
Into which fraught contest has finally been drawn the US Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration. Helena Bottemiller Evich, who was the first to flag that this might happen, has the details in her Food Fix newsletter. As Helena notes, while many people would agree that specific foods — brightly coloured breakfast cereals and ready meals, for example — are definitely ultra-processed, “it gets murky quickly.” That is why some kind of definition is both very difficult and very necessary. She goes into the whole story in a lot more detail.
Bottemiller Evich also says “I feel like a broken record here, but we’re still very much waiting to see what the MAHA policy agenda is going to be at the federal level”.
So is Marion Nestle, who notes “an astonishing investigative report” about the collapse of the FDA. “Everyone should read this piece,” Nestle says, “to realize what is at stake in the current destruction of the FDA—a lot. We need the FDA, and we need it to be much, much stronger, not weaker.”
I haven’t, because it is paywalled, but I know many of you subscribe to the New York Times.
Food Poisoning in Ireland
A countrywide outbreak of food poisoning in Ireland, including one death to date, has been traced to a single manufacturer of ready-made meals. Ballymaguire Foods has recalled all its products, called a halt to production, and called in a public health expert to fix the problem.
What is particularly disconcerting (though not actually surprising) is that in the weeks leading up to the recall the company was served with two prohibition orders about the presence of Listeria in its Bacon and Cabbage meals and Turkey and Ham Dinners.
Listeria is particularly dangerous both because it can continue to grow even in a refrigerator and because it forms a biofilm on surfaces that is very hard to clean off. When those biofilms form on food manufacturing equipment they can contaminate everything that comes into contact with them, which could be everything leaving the factory, and the cold chain will not protect the final customer. That makes Listeria a pain to get rid of.
Of course Ballymaguire’s travails prompt memories of last year’s “historically large lunch meat recall” of Boar’s Head Deli meats, which had to shut the entire plant involved. I took a quick look, and it seems Boar’s Head is still in the recall business, this time for its “Pasteurized Process Gouda and Cheddar Cheese”. The problem isn’t yet clear, and the recall applies only to the state of Florida.
The recall notices from the Food Safety Authority of Ireland also reveal just how many supermarkets were having their ready meals made by Ballymaguire Foods. I expect someone, somewhere is collating these data.
Pass the Maggots
Yet another eye-opener of a paper on Neanderthal Diets this week, but eye-opening for all the wrong reasons. “The only reason this is surprising is that it contradicts what we westerners think of as food,” Karen Hardy, professor of prehistoric archaeology at the University of Glasgow, told The Guardian.
The unsurprising discovery is that maggots formed quite a large part of Eurasian Neanderthal diets. And that puts another stake through the heart of the hypercarnivore zombie factoid, which came to life partly to explain high levels of nitrogen-15 in Neanderthal bones.
Nitrogen comes in two forms. Nitrogen-14 is slightly lighter and much, much more abundant; around 99.6% of the nitrogen on earth is N-14. The other 0.4% is N-15, which is both heavier and excreted more slowly by the kidneys. As a result, the meat of carnivores contains more N-15 than the meat of herbivores, while the meat of hypercarnivores — lions, wolves, other top predators — contains the most N-15 of all, because they concentrate N-15 by eating little apart from meat. Neanderthals too have high levels of N-15, therefore …
Except that this new research offers a more palatable explanation. The scientists studied nitrogen isotopes in samples taken from putrefying corpses at the Anthropology Research Facility (ARF) of the Forensic Anthropology Center (FAC) at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Better known as the Body Farm (one of several), the ARF is where human corpses are studied as they age and decompose to give forensic scientists better tools for investigating deaths. The researchers found that while heavy nitrogen increases slightly in corpse meat as it decomposes, it is very much higher in the maggots of different fly species that colonise the muscle. If Neanderthals ate the maggots, which, indeed, modern people around the world do with relish, that would account for their high levels of N-15 as well as supplying them with a rich source of good, nutritious food.
The research paper is not that difficult a read and is a rewarding insight into other cultures’ food choices. I suppose my next task is to create the transcript and subtitles for another John Speth episode: It’s putrid, it’s paleo, and it’s good for you.
Sage Aloo
A personal quirk: whenever I read an article about potatoes, I can’t really focus until I’ve found the obligatory description of the spud as “humble”. It drives me nuts. Extra marks, therefore, to Priti Gupta writing for BBC about How India became a french fry superpower. No humility at all.
It’s an interesting story with a lot of moving parts. Miserable farmers because their traditional cotton crop needed too much water. Potatoes for fresh eating weren’t much more profitable than cotton. Potato processors arrived in Gujarat. Demand for potatoes suitable for turning into frozen french-fries soared. Happy farmers. And India is now the number two potato producer in the world, with exports of frozen french fries leading the way.
I’d love to know what first attracted the likes of McCain Foods to Gujarat. And how they plan to deal with somewhat flaky cold chains. And how regional cuisines will adapt.
Take care
p.s. This week’s Other Food Podcast was a muddled disappointment to which I will not draw further attention.