Eat This Newsletter 286: Cravings
Hello
The people who need a healthy diet most can’t afford one, while the people who can easily afford it don’t seem to want it. That plus a travel tip, forest gardens, and a not guilty verdict on gluten -- at least some of the time.
Healthy Diets Revisited
The Food Prices for Nutrition team at Tufts University has been collecting worldwide data on the costs of diets for more than five years, and I spoke to them about the work when the first summary was published and, almost a year ago, after five more years of data. It is hugely pleasing now to see that Our World in Data recently updated its page on the cost of a healthy diet to reflect the latest set of numbers.
One of the most important measures, to which Our World in Data draws attention, is the number of people worldwide who cannot afford even the bare minimum diet that will supply enough energy to live, at least in the short term. The cost of that, around the world, averages 95¢ a day. Almost 900 million people around the world cannot afford it.
Today we might think of this calorie-sufficient threshold as the nutritional equivalent to the international poverty line. It is the absolute bare minimum. It is a very low threshold that allows us to identify those living in the most dire of circumstances.
The map of those numbers in the article I found confusing, as it gives the absolute number of people unable to afford the bare minimum of calories, rather than the percentage of the population. Luckily, there is another map that shows the share of the population.
When it comes to a diet that is actually healthy, supplying not merely calories but also local government or public health recommendations, the cost is more than four times higher, at $4.46 a day. Around 2.6 billion people around the world cannot afford that healthy diet. The map this time does show the share of the population that cannot afford a healthy diet, and it is staggering to realise that there are countries — mostly in sub-Saharan Africa — where four out of five people cannot afford to eat a healthy diet.
A final chart relates the cost of a healthy diet to the median income in each country. For the vast bulk of the world’s population, a healthy diet is almost unaffordable, either leaving nothing for anything else or being a third to a fifth of the median income. For the rest, the chart says that a healthy diet is “easily affordable on median income”. I’d love to know the share of the population in those richer countries that are actually spending their money on a healthy diet. As far as I know, there are no data on that.
Craving Planetary Sustainability
All this is quite timely, given the recent publication of the new EAT-Lancet Commission’s report. Those 2.6 billion people are not going to be paying its recommended Planetary Health Diet much attention but nor, going on past form, are most of the rest of us. Maybe, just maybe, Mike Lee has identified the problem: People Don’t Eat Research Papers.
Lee describes himself as a “food futurist and innovation strategy consultant,” and his polemic pushes the idea that the Planetary Health Diet will fail because it is “competing against Big Food companies, fast food chains, and junk food manufacturers that have spent decades engineering their products to be as craveable as possible”.
He’s got a point. And he offers alternative visions of menu items at three different price points that would appeal because they taste good rather than because they do good. I do wonder, though, who is going to make these delights. Well, the fine dining menu will be made by chefs who have “spent twenty years learning how to make a single radish unforgettable.” But the crispy garlic patty melt? Can Big Food really save the planet from Big Food?
Truck-stop Delights
The Amazing Race is a reality TV show on CBS. What’s it doing here? Well, someone I follow for other reasons is an expert on travelling the world and on the show, and he comments on each episode after it airs. A couple of weeks ago, he used the hostility faced by a pair of Sikh brothers to talk about a fascinating development in North American food service, “an archipelago of Punjabi ‘dhabas’ along major U.S. and Canadian highways”. No idea when I might need this information, but maybe you can use it now.
No mention of dhabas would be complete without reference to the dabbawalas of Mumbai. These are the thousands of people who every day deliver hundreds of thousands of homemade hot lunches to office workers. If you know about them, you know. If not, maybe this BBC article and this little film will give you a taste of the service that the Mumbai Tiffin Service Provider Association provides.
Growing Social Cohesion
Across towns and cities in Sweden, there are urban forest gardens, planted on permaculture principles to provide a bit of food and some green space for local people. A new study looked at 30 of these gardens and discovered that their benefits go far beyond food.
“Researchers found that interviewees valued the educational, cultural and aesthetics more than any other benefit of these gardens, including the cultivation of plants for food, energy and materials,” according to an article on the study in Botany One.
Town authorities are taking notice too. The first forest gardens were planted by local enthusiasts, but municipalities have taken notice and are using public funds to plant forest gardens. My worry would be that local authorities come and go, and with them, their enthusiasms. Local enthusiasts are much more likely to put down roots, like their forest gardens.
A Verdict on Gluten: Not Proven
A big study has looked at a large number of previously published papers on non-coeliac gluten sensitivity and concludes that factors other than gluten “contribute considerably to symptom generation in many cases”. The paper is paywalled, but Jessica Biesiekierski, the lead author, has written about their research in The Conversation. The crucial point is that the symptoms suffered by people who believe they are gluten sensitive but who do not have coeliac disease are absolutely real, but often they are not triggered by gluten itself.
Why should that matter? The paper points out that “[t]he substantial size of the gluten-free market raises questions about commercial and media influences on how NCGS is portrayed, and on the direction of related research”. The article goes further, and points out that gluten-free foods generally cost more than the standard formulations. In Italy, for example, gluten-free pasta costs 2.5 times more, while in the USA, GF versions of mass-market cereals, pasta and snacks average 1.4 times more expensive.
One problem is that there’s no simple test for non-coeliac gluten sensitivity. The authors of the paper recommend a four-step process that, they say, deals with the symptoms people experience while “avoiding unnecessary long-term exclusion of gluten”.
Take care
