Hello

Here I am again, bringing you fearless reporting from the frontiers of food and agriculture. Or something.

Meat, Soda, And Beyond

What do you do when year-on-year sales slide 20% and each $1 of product you sell costs you $1.95 to make. You pivot to create a “‘Beyond Immerse’ protein- and fiber-packed lightly carbonated beverage platform”.

Yup, Beyond Meat is still in the game. I’m not sure what the rules are, but perhaps there’s a way to win back $1.2 billion in losses accumulated since it launched.

As ever, I am indebted to Marion Nestle for linking to the report. She points out, too, that the availability of red meat in the United States has increased by almost 5 kg since 2014 and now stands at “105 pounds per capita per year or roughly a third of a pound a day for every man, woman, and baby in the country—and that’s for boneless”. A shade under 48kg! Alt-meat doesn’t seem to be having much of an impact.

Return of the Set Menu

An interesting guest essay in a newsletter I like has identified a hot new trend. Where once people like the author delighted in their power to construct exactly the bowl they personally desired at that instant, the inevitable downward slide in the quality of investor-led food soured the experience. As a result, set menus are back, based on the impeccable execution of a limited choice of ingredients.

That, she writes, harks back to the first restaurants in Paris, catering to the exquisite needs of intellectuals (and the rich). After several almost identical cycles, the hyper-focussed pop-up is now the darling of the restaurant scene.

A Fortune Flushed

Speaking of enshittification, there’s an inescapable fact about farming. It takes nutrients in the soil to grow food. Those nutrients then leave the farm and move to the city and other places where they are eaten by people and other animals, who use what they can to grow their bodies, but leave a lot behind. Which is why in almost all agriculture, the farmer has to add nutrients to grow enough food.

It has been a long-term dream to close the circle, to get “wasted” nutrients back to the farm, from the ancient Chinese entrepreneurs who set up free facilities in order to collect valuable “night-soil” to modern composting toilets. The dream, however, remains just that. Maybe, however, things will change now that some scientists have run the numbers.

[M]ining these nutrients from waste could meet all the nitrogen needs and half the phosphorus needs on US farms, amounting to billions in value and reducing the need for synthetic fertilizers.

The research is in Nature Sustainability, but thankfully Emma Bryce has an excellent article about the paper in Anthropocene Magazine. Of course, running the numbers is not going to make it happen, not even for the $7 billion apparently going down the tubes each year.

I hope you will not be surprised to learn that I covered this topic in some detail in 2020 in the episode Oh, poop with Professor Donald Worster and his memorable tag line “If you eat, you’re gonna excrete”.

Restaurant Reporting

So these two super typical like dudes in like New York had this idea to like randomly try the food from every single country in the world only in New York City. Which may be, you know, an idea you could only have had there. And they make short things for their YouTube channel, which is called TasteBuds NYC and that’s a clever name because, like, they’re buddies and they’re tasting things in NYC, but personally, I find them unwatchable. You may enjoy them. I’m not judging.

The Measured Life

Here’s a claim-and-a-half:

Brillat-Savarin might be able to tell you about yourself based on the food you eat, but I bet I can tell you even more by how you abbreviate the word “teaspoon” when writing out a recipe.

I’m a tsp or t person, myself, but probably only for vanilla essence. Does that tell you much?

K.C Hysmith does a good round-up of how some abbreviations are presented in different contexts and different recipes as part of The Recipes Project. In the end, I remain unconvinced by the primary claim, but I will concede that it got me to read on. One warning; many of the images were missing, for me. I’ve tried to notify the project so maybe they will reappear.

Hyper-optimised for Me

À propos of the Set Menu story above, this past week I had an extraordinary eating experience at a chain called Zhangliang Malatang. You grab a big plastic bowl. You walk, bedazzled, past endless containers of ingredients; five kinds of mushroom, at least as many variations of tofu, seafood, meat, vegetables, four (minimum) kinds of noodles, daikon slices, lotus root. Unimaginable plenty and diversity.You put what you want in your bowl, hand it to the person at the register, choose one of five soup bases or two dry stir fries, get given a buzzer, and wait until it goes off to receive an absolutely delicious bowl of whatever you selected.

They charge by weight, and there’s a handy scale near the ingredients so you can keep an eye on things. I’m sure the price is calibrated to get a profit from the vast majority of customers.

I thought the whole thing was terrific, well worth the minor hassle and buyer’s remorse over choices made and not made. One of my companions hated it, saying he didn’t know enough to choose wisely and far prefers an expert at what goes with what to make decisions for him. Alas, he was stuck with the tyrannical original choice made by the majority of the party.

I like the idea of a hyper-focussed pop-up, and I like the idea of personal optimisation run wild. There are, I’m told, 6000 branches of Zhangliang Malatang worldwide though none (yet?) in Italy. Bring it on.

Take care