Hello

Maybe it is just me, but it seems that there is less interesting food-related stuff around lately. Or maybe I need to spread my net further. Where should I be looking that I might not be?

Small Steps to Tackle Childhood Obesity

Industrial food manufacturers were right to be worried about the impact of legislation to restrict the way foods high in fat, sugar or salt (HFSS) are marketed in English supermarkets. A ban on putting HFSS foods at prominent locations, such as at the ends of aisles, which began in October 2022, depressed sales of these items. The drop doesn’t sound like much — before the ban 20 items out of 100 bought were HFSS, after, only 19 — but that amounts to two million fewer HFSS products sold per day.

Those and many other numbers are in an August press release from the University of Leeds, which coordinated the research. Why mention it now? Because the UK government recently announced a fresh set of measures to tackle childhood obesity, currently at an all-time high: “10.5% of children in reception [4–5 years] and 22.2% of year 6 [10–11 years] children are living with obesity”. Worse, obesity is more than twice as common among children in the most deprived areas compared to the least deprived areas. Would those numbers have been even higher without the 2022 ban? The announcement says only that “The figures cover the period before the government’s current public health interventions have taken effect”.

The government’s response to the new figures on obesity includes plans to restrict junk food advertising, expand free school meals, and create universal free breakfast clubs for primary school children. Strangely, the United Kingdom has never been part of the WHO European Childhood Obesity Surveillance Initiative (COSI), which also recently released its latest survey.

Evidence to Tackle Peanut Allergies

Peanut allergies are falling fast as paediatricians and parents abandon previous advice to keep peanuts away from toddlers. Marion Nestle linked to a New York Times article that is behind a paywall and the research, and summarised some of the data.

In children under 3 years old, the incidence of peanut allergies dropped by 43% from 2015 to 2020. In itself that is something to celebrate, but the research also found that allergies to milk (but not eggs) also declined over the same period. A commentary on the research notes that “clinical research, when coupled with clear guidelines and committed dissemination, can indeed shift the trajectory of childhood food allergy.” That’s important. However, I have not been able to uncover just what evidence supported the advice to avoid peanuts.

Modern Chefs Tackle Sultan’s Delights

Aramco World is always good for an exotic food story, and this article about Ni‘matnāma, the Book of Delights is no exception.

Created for Sultan Ghiyath Shah in around 1500, the Ni‘matnāma contains recipes for food, perfumes, and medicines, including aphrodisiacs, often with detailed directives for their use. It is illustrated with beautiful miniatures, many of which show the Sultan himself inspecting dishes and tables. In that, it differs from European cookbooks of the same time, but in many other respects they are very similar. Most late medieval cookbooks lack detailed instructions and measurements, suggesting that they were intended for professional cooks who already knew what they were doing.

One difference, it seems to me, is that Aramco World uses the Ni‘matnāma to explore foods currently available in the kitchens and food stalls across Bharat. I’m not sure you could do that with, say, A Noble Boke off Cookry or De honesta voluptate et valetudine.

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