Hello

No respite in sight, so here I sit in a darkened room and with the fan whirring its sweet song, going through the week's finds and trying to keep my cool.

Ube Careful What You Wish For

I cannot improve on my compadre Luigi’s headline for his latest piece, so I borrowed it.

Ube is the Tagalog name for the purple yam, Dioscorea alata and it is enjoying a bit of a moment. Luigi was prompted to write about it by The Economist and took the opportunity to dig deeper into the long-term consequences of the world suddenly discovering opportunities for an orphan crop. I may as well copy his conclusion too.

None of this means we should resist ube’s moment. On the contrary, it presents a rare opportunity to reward farmers, strengthen local value chains, and invest in conservation and breeding. But history suggests that the goal should not be to maximize production for a transient craze. It should be to use today’s demand to build a resilient and diverse ube sector that can survive after the craze fades.

A History of Menus Is a Menu of History

Same goes for a marvellous story from The Pudding; the headline tells you what you need to know.

Go to the starting page and start swiping or clicking to discover what “America’s earliest restaurant menus teach us about America”. For instance, celery is the fourth most common item among the menus, after coffee, tea, and olives. Beyond the informative, brief commentaries, there’s a lot to enjoy in the menus themselves. And beyond dessert, you can explore the entire Buttolph Collection of menus.

Brambling On My Mind

Blackberries can be the sweetest treat on a summer hike and an absolute thug, blocking the way with a dense thicket of fierce thorns. JSTOR is again sharing the latest Plant of the Month from Dumbarton Oaks, and it is a real eye-opener.

For a start, the Himalayan Blackberry that is so ubiquitous is not actually from the Himalayas. It was introduced by noted plant breeder Luther Burbank, who named it for its productivity (and a touch of romance?). He might not have known it came originally from Armenia and northern Iran. Then there is Burbank extending what he had learned breeding plant to human populations. The article does a good job at pointing out how his overarching ideas didn’t always work out for plants or people.

A Grain of Truth

Wrestling last week with a recipe that wanted me to grate 2½ cups of carrots, I was in the mood to think about weights and measures. Then, up popped someone in my feeds (see below) suggesting I read “The crazy history of ‘ounce’”. So I did, and was very disappointed to learn that the someone in question had merely asked a large-language model “What’s the history of ounces, fluid or weight, Troy and Oz?”.

The answer is, I suppose, OK, but for the real lowdown, may I suggest the unfiltered Wikipedia entry Ounce. Then you too will know what links an inch and an ounce and why.

Don’t get me wrong about LLMs. They have their uses. But summarising Wikipedia articles merits a 🪣.

A Different Grain of Truth

Honestly, I do not know what to make of The Whole Truth About Whole Grains, an article from the Boston Consulting Group. It seems to be a facts-and-analysis-heavy look at the benefits of fortified whole grains which, the article says, are better for the health of people and the planet because they improve nutrition with fewer inputs, reduce environmental impacts, especially greenhouse gas emissions, and promote biodiversity while reducing deforestation. I have several problems, the primary one being that nowhere do they explain what they mean by fortified whole grains.

Reading between the lines, joining the dots, etc etc, I believe they mean adding vitamins and minerals to flour that, unlike refined flour, would still contain the fibrous outer layer of the grain as well as the germ. But here’s the thing. Supplementing refined flour, as required by many countries, is much easier for large flour mills than for small; you may remember that producers of wholemeal flour in the UK gained an exemption from the requirement to add folic acid to flour because they were too small. And the main reason that big industrial mills refine their flour is because bran has been deemed undesirable by the masses while the germ contains oils and fats that go rancid, which plain white flour does not. In fact, the vast majority of so-called wholemeal flour is created by mixing the baleful bran back in without the germ and often charging more for it.

Whatever BCG is advocating, it is clearly not aimed at the general good, no matter how they dress it up. And then there are aspects of the analysis that are just plain strange. Increasing the global adoption of whole grains from 20%, their estimate today, to 50% would be equivalent to “removing 26 million cars from the road”. Is that a big number? Should I be impressed? Last in their table of equivalents is “reducing 30% of emissions from production of animal milk”. I don’t see them pushing less dairy as better for people and planet; quite the reverse.

Yes, I know it’s just BCG and I should forgetaboutit, but it rankles me because even with the “key takeaways,” there’s no there there.

My Beef With the Internet

This newsletter exists because I am incorrigibly curious about things. That’s what first diverted me from pure research to science journalism. The internet has made it both much easier and much harder, because it giveth and it taketh away. It giveth articles like this one — The Weird, Disturbing Origins of the Paleo Diet — a fascinating history of beef mania by a previous podcast guest, which also happens to quote lots of other previous guests. It taketh away because The Atlantic — entirely properly — would like me to pay to read it.

How, then, do I know it is a fascinating history etc? Because I am also somewhat geeky (or do I mean nerdy?) and so I subscribe to lots of what are known as feeds. A feed is a special kind of online document that can be read by a thing called a feed reader, which enables me to skim rapidly over headlines, pause if something seems interesting, read it for as long as it actually is interesting, and move on. In truth, I cannot tell you how many feeds I subscribe to because they are scattered over a few different readers and because another joy of feeds is that it costs nothing to stay subscribed, so that when somebody suddenly starts publishing again after a hiatus, it will just pop up. Many of my feeds have not seen any action for years but they may, one day, so I keep them around.

Back to The Atlantic. They publish a feed, for which I am grateful, so I can skim over the articles. Very occasionally — four times in the past six years — I find something I want to share here. Of course I can simply share the link, as I did at the start, and if you’re not a subscriber and haven’t read too many free articles, you might be able to read it. Or you might decide to subscribe, which would be good news for The Atlantic. But it simply is not worth it for me to subscribe just so that I can properly share less than one article a year. I would be happy to pay something to enable me to make a gift of a particular article, but that would probably never be profitable for The Atlantic. So I just do what I can, which includes being geeky enough to save my own reading copy of the article, which would be easy enough to share if anyone were to ask 😉.

Take care