Hello

Happy to share a small part of my own origin story today, besides a bit of wonky stuff and some explosive news.

Help Save Wakelyns

This one is personal. The fight to save a farming pioneer in The Guardian gives a brief history of the foundation and development of Wakelyns, a remarkable farm in Suffolk, England.

Standing out like a green oasis in the straw desert that surrounds it, Wakelyns was one of the very first modern agroforestry farms in Europe. Martin Wolfe and his wife Ann bought the place in 1992 and “ruined a perfectly good wheat field” by planting rows of fruit and timber trees and growing crops in the arable alleys between the trees. The farm has been a beacon of rural resilience and sustainability ever since, becoming even more productive as it attracted new partners, each of which works with others on the farm to create food and other products of real value.

Now, Wakelyns needs to raise £1.2 million to buy out one of the Wolfes’ sons and turn it into a Charitable Community Benefit Society.

Wakelyns is personal for me because Martin Wolfe and John Barrett opened my eyes to the value of agricultural biodiversity with their earliest work on using mixtures of different barley varieties to protect the crop against powdery mildew, a disease that can wreck the harvest if not treated with fungicides. Theirs was no mere theoretical argument. The German Democratic Republic had no hard currency with which to buy fungicides, and it needed barley to brew beer. Wolfe and Barrett planted mixtures, first experimentally and eventually across almost the entire country. Yields were maintained and, indeed, stabilised, without any fungicides. British maltsters said it would be too difficult to process the mixed harvest, but East German brewers had no problems, a skill conveniently ignored after unification.

Mixtures graced almost all of the GDR’s barley fields, leaving only those needed to produce the purebred lines that made up the mixtures. More recently, Martin Wolfe was instrumental (along with Salvatore Ceccarelli) in promoting the idea of evolutionary populations, which are essentially genetic rather than physical mixtures. These deliver the same benefits of resilience and sustainability with the added benefit that they adapt over time to the place and conditions where they are growing. I did an episode about these wheats nine years ago, and sad to say the full commercialisation of evolutionary cereal populations is still mired in bureaucracy.

Anyway, that’s why I’m supporting the Wakelyns appeal, and you could too.

Food Not Feed

A report from Project Drawdown (“an independent nonprofit organization driving bold, science-based climate action”) summarises an investigation by project staff and the University of Minnesota at where the calories produced on farms ends up.

Looking at the top 50 crops from 2010 to 2020, the headline news is that a smidgen over half the calories produced in 2020 (50.1%) were available to people to eat. The rest went to animal feed and non-food uses, mostly biofuel. Moreover, although total calories produced increased by almost 24% from 2010 to 2020, calories for people went up by only 17%.

Looking in more detail, the most inefficient sector is (natch) beef, which used more than a third of the feed calories for less than a tenth of animal-source calories. Pork was a close second. Also unsurprising, the feed inefficiencies are concentrated in just a few countries; the US, Brazil, the EU, and China. Indonesia replaces China when you consider only biofuel.

The paper goes on to estimate the number of people that could be fed if the calories “lost” to feed and biofuel were redirected, and while the number is large, it ignores the other nutritional needs of a healthy diet. More aptly, the study also points out that if beef consumption were reduced to “healthy levels” in the top 48 beef-eating countries by replacing the beef with lentils or chicken, that would free up calories for 1.2 billion or .85 billion people respectively. Again, the gains are geographically constrained: “More than half of that 850 million could come from substituting excess beef for chicken in just the United States (37%) and Brazil (21%).”

Dream on.

Two to Chew On

Ultra-processed foods are in the news again, after an article in Science set out to interpret the evidence of five random controlled trials. The study points out that “UPFs are often characterized by soft texture, high calorie density, high amounts of saturated fat and salt, and low fiber and protein content—properties that affect health regardless of the degree of food processing”. So far, so true. It then goes on to ask “Are the adverse effects of UPFs caused by ultraprocessing itself or are they a consequence of their nutritional properties?”

An article in Vox takes up the challenge to explain that the best evidence on ultra-processed foods has a problem and in my view ties itself somewhat in knots to do so. It is hard to deny that the hyperpalatability and energy density of UPFs makes it more than likely that people will eat more than they “need” and that over-eating is a factor in obesity. In addition, by now it has been made abundantly clear that the NOVA classification of foods is not all encompassing or foolproof, delivering occasional false positives as well as false negatives. What I was left with was a vague idea that some people blame specific aspects of ultra-processing, such as ingredients like emulsifiers or processes like extrusion, for any purported ill effects. Those may indeed exist, and they are going to be a great deal harder to support with evidence than the effects of energy density and hyperpalatability on overeating.

To add to the desirability of UPFs one must add their ubiquity. Thin Lei Win addresses that in a recent newsletter (on Substack). It looks at Commercial Determinants of Health, defined, according to The Lancet, as “strategies and approaches used by the private sector to promote products and choices that are detrimental to health”. That goes way beyond food and drink to encompass purveyors of tobacco, alcohol, other drugs, arms, and maybe even social networks.

Thin focuses on food and drink, her usual beat, and points out:

For a long time, the industry has framed ill health as a result of “personal choice” to prevent regulatory accountability, and labelled governments that attempt regulate as “nanny state” to sow fear among policymakers.
But how much choice do we actually have if all that we can find and afford is food that could give us hypertension, diabetes, or cardiovascular disease?

Thin also points out that policies and regulation can work, as they have done in the case of tobacco and a few food taxes. But given all the problems even identifying UPFs, what kind of policies could there be? My own view is that even if some kind of label identifies some product as a UPF, that should be taken mostly as a sign that you are liable to eat too much of it, remembering too that it is also very possible to overeat less-processed foods.

As to that question in the Science paper, about the causes (if any) of the adverse effects of UPFs (if any), the somewhat wishy-washy answer is that “the current evidence base suggests that policy guidance should distinguish nutritionally poor, calorie-dense, and rapidly consumed foods regardless of their degree of processing”. In other words, nutrition labelling.

It is also be worth noting that the researchers have all enjoyed support from some of the biggest names in industrial food in the past, although “[n]one of the authors have received personal financial awards, honoraria, or consultancy fees from the food industry in the past 10 years.”

About That Latest Round of Food Poisoning in the US

Helena Bottemiller Evich has got you covered in her latest missive, What we know so far about the growing cyclospora outbreak.

One thing she doesn’t mention is that the disease was first noted in humans as recently as the late 1970s. And while the source has not yet been identified, I’m intrigued by Sarah Taber’s speculation that the source knows full well its procedures are dodgy. She notes that there have been no cases in Minnesota, points out that Minnesota’s public health system “does not miss cases,” and surmises that the source is deliberately not shipping to Minnesota. We shall see, maybe.

Take care