Hello

Being back in the two-week cycle means that more stuff accumulates. As it does so it reveals, as I have often pointed out, that what I have been working on sharpens my detection of related things.

Cheesy Witchcraft

Seducers — male and female — were among the more prominent users of the magic of cheese, but an older article on The spellbinding history of cheese and witchcraft examines a whole lot of other ways in which cheese and magic were intertwined. Of course there’s tyromancy, cheese-based fortune telling, though details in the article are scant. Apparently young women could write the name of potential suitors on a piece of paper and attach each slip to a piece of cheese. The name on the one that went mouldy first was The One, though rapidly going off is not my idea of a good portent for a relationship.

The article sensibly points out that the very process of milk turning into cheese is magical, and that may be what gave cheese its power. Witches could curdle milk, or prevent it curdling, and stole milk directly from the source. Enchanted cheese could turn people into beasts of burden. Cheese also had power in the realm of procreation. All in all, excellent conversation fodder.

Alternative Food Systems

Thessaloniki, the second-largest city in Greece, has long been at the forefront of grassroots responsee to the severe austerity imposed as a condition of bailing out the Greek government. A recent article reprinted in resilience summarises the ways that has played out in the food system.

There are grocery and food service cooperatives, processing initiatives, direct markets, gardens, and solidarity kitchens. They all have in common that they are driven by more than shareholder value, and that in their different ways they contribute to community, labour relations, and democracy. The article recognises that it takes real work to move from a middle class fancy to real relevance for all, and that the work can be slow and difficult. There are sensible policy suggestions that would help other places to learn from and emulate Thessaloniki’s successes, which are modest in their ambitions:

The point is not to replace every supermarket tomorrow. It is to expand the ecosystem of food systems that already work differently.

Beans Blow Up

Some truly heartening news from the UK. According to The Guardian, sales of “beans, pulses and soya bean derivatives” in the first 6 months of 2026 are 7.3% up on the same period in 2025. Champion performer was cheap dried lentils, up 23%.

Baked beans, once the titans of the supermarket tinned section, initially appeared to have become has-beens in the frenzy, with 1.2% fewer cans sold – but the decline is actually down to a drop in cans also containing sausages.

Not just sausages, either; fake meats in general are down 4.3%. This is just so sensible. Why pay a factory to turn pulses into something vaguely meat-like when you can eat them directly? The experts quoted in The Guardian generally point to price as one factor in the shift, along with nutrition and environmental concerns. I wonder whether it isn’t all down to price. We may find out, if food inflation slows and living standards improve, but that’s a big if.

Salads in Freefall

I am indebted to Marion Nestle for keeping a close eye on the Cyclospora outbreak, especially in two recent articles. The first pointed to a report showing conclusively that industry consolidation was a root cause of the problem. Taylor Farms supplies fully 40% of all the bagged salad sold in the United States. She followed that up by asking Should we be eating lettuce?, prompted by an article in the Washington Post saying that indeed, we should not.

That article is paywalled, so it is great that Marion Nestle summarises the arguments, which culminate with the observation that lettuce is “basically, an excuse to kid yourself into eating blue cheese dressing”. And before they had even read the article, shoppers in the USA had abandoned salads in droves, with more than one in four households giving up salads and fresh greens entirely. That can’t be good for them, though I don’t blame them one bit. Nestle’s own advice is straightforward.

I’m not opposed to eating lettuce.  …  I like it in salads and sandwiches and just about anything else. I grow it, buy it at farmers markets, and buy whole heads at grocery stores. I just avoid bagged salads.

To War, Add Water

A couple of issues ago I linked to an article about the impact of war in Iran and Ukraine on wheat prices. Turns out, drought also plays a major role in wheat prices.

A large group of scientists looked at how a measure they developed, called Severe Water Scarcity, interacts with the price of wheat, maize, and rice. For rice, not at all, for maize, a bit, and for wheat, a lot. I’ve only read one university press release, and it makes a compelling case that globally, drought can account for 74% of the variation in bulk wheat prices. This is especially worrying because almost all models of climate change predict increasing water shortages in the places where wheat grows.

Orchard Ordered Destroyed

Remember the farmer who gave away tonnes of white nectarines rather than sell them to the wrong company? Well, a court found Cesar Mora guilty, although it declined to award any damages to Guimarra Brothers Fruit company, who sued Mora for breach of contract. It turns out that the judge ordered Mora to destroy his orchard even before the jury’s decision, but that probably will not be the end of the story.

Bouillon Confusion

In last week’s podcast on The World of Fermentation, Ken Albala told me a bit about iru, a Nigerian ferment of locust beans that was once a staple flavour base for many soups and stews. Bouillon cubes, introduced by Nestlé, quickly replaced iru because they are much cheaper and much easier to prepare. Now I learn that there is talk in Nigeria of mandatory bouillon cube fortification with iron, zinc and folic acid to fight malnutrition and neural tube defects.

The article points out that to deliver meaningful amounts of those minerals and vitamins via cubes will mean a massive increase in salt intake for most women, and that high blood pressure associated with salt is one of the primary causes of maternal deaths in the country. As far as I can tell, fortification with iron has been voluntary for about 20 years, but during this time, the article says, the prevalence of anaemia among women has more than doubled, from 24% to 55%. It also suggests other ways in which government policies could address nutrition more effectively and without creating additional public health dangers. Surprisingly, to me at least, it makes no mention of iru.

Buried by Inconvenient Facts

This one is very tricky, and I don’t know how I feel about it. Works in Progress magazine says just bury your trash in an evidence-based summary of all the problems behind well-meaning efforts to avoid landfill.

Thankfully it doesn’t even address food waste, except as a contaminant of plastics, but for all other forms of waste it argues that, especially in countries where landfill is well-organised and well-managed, every other form of waste reduction or recycling is worse. The one exception is metals, where recycling is a huge advance on fresh extraction in all respects.

It would have been good if the writers had paid a bit more attention to the global implications of continuing to use fossil fuels as a feedstock for packaging, but I couldn’t find fault with the basic facts as they present them. Still, I’ll continue to use my cotton bags for groceries, not least because they are so much easier to carry, even though I know I’ll probably never break even on the deal.

Take care