Eat This Newsletter: Happy Rapa Nui
Hello
I’m quite pleased with myself for running down better sources for two items this week, doing the work so you don’t have to.
Chile: falling obesity is not the (only) outcome
Chile introduced its famous Food Act, designed to combat growing obesity, in 2012, though it took a while for measures such as front-of-package warning labels, sugar taxes and advertising bans to come into effect. Does it matter, then, that far from falling, obesity rates in the country are continuing to climb? That depends very much on who you ask, according to a very thorough report by Carlyn Kolker for The Examination.
Kolker’s investigation (also published, behind a paywall, in the BMJ) looks at how the tools Chile brought in to tackle its obesity problems are working. On the one hand, people are buying products containing less sugar, fat and salt. On the other, the obesity rate for people over 15 years old actually increased from about 25% to more than 33% and even more among children.
Not surprisingly, food industry says this just proves that the changes brought about by the Food Act have been futile. Equally unsurprising, public health experts say that it is early days yet and that the country may not see large benefits for 30 or 40 years, when today’s 10-year olds will be facing diabetes, heart disease and all the other problems associated with obesity.
Will the government hold its nerve? The article makes no predictions, but the fact that people seem to have embraced the warning labels and other measures, at least to some extent, coupled with predictable opposition from vested interests, gives me hope.
Turmeric is not (only) yellow
When I first saw the illustration at Ambrook Research’s article on turmeric I thought, oh ho, someone’s been playing with Photoshop. I was wrong. In turmeric, as in many crops, we mostly have no idea of the diversity that exists. That article reports on the Utopian Seed Project’s current library of five different varieties of turmeric.
[S]liced open, a mesmerizing, geode-like interior is revealed. The flesh of the red and yellow varieties bear a squash-like hue, while the more exotic black and blues evoke a watercolor of the night sky. And the green turmeric appears downright radioactive.
There’s a bit more about the taste and smell of the different types, but what fascinated me most was the fact that people have been growing turmeric in North Carolina for at least a decade. High value, sure. But who is buying it and what are they using it for? I know someone who may know answers.
Pepper is not (only) black
Another spice whose diversity we seldom appreciate is pepper. My preferred spice shop stocks black peppercorns from six or seven different places, and I have tried to taste the differences among them. But I don’t think even they have long pepper (Piper longum, as opposed to P. nigrum, black pepper.) Atlas Obscura has a fascinating piece by Sarah Laskow on the history of long pepper, asking why it was eventually pushed aside by black pepper. Expanding trade routes made black pepper coming by sea from Kerala cheaper and more plentiful than long pepper coming overland from northern India. But was that all there was to it, or might long pepper have been more expensive because ancient Romans who could afford it actually preferred the taste of it?
Sarah Laskow cooked two versions of pasta cacio e pepe side by side.
I’d call long pepper the better pepper, but the two tastes were similar enough that it was hard to imagine anyone besides a very picky and discerning guest noticing that their pasta was spiced with black pepper rather than long.
Leaving aside the question of ancient Roman cacio e pepe, I’ve added long pepper and cubeb, another locally-forgotten species of pepper, to my shopping list.
Plant-based is not (only) ultra-processed
Here’s a turn-up for the books. According to The Week, “More people who eat a plant-based diet are avoiding meat substitutes and choosing to cook from scratch”. Whatever next?
The logic is impeccable. Vegan alternatives allowed people to wean themselves off meat “without resorting to eating only vegetables,” according to one commenter. Eventually, though, some converts come to recognise the price they’ve paid, metaphorical and real. Plant-based meat substitutes fall squarely into the ultra-processed category, with all that that entails. And meat substitutes remain more expensive at the checkout. According to various trend-spotters, then, we are seeing a resurgence of “protein-forward products”. Or food, as it is also known.
Easter Islanders ate (not only) South American plants
There are some great mysteries in the prehistory of crop and livestock movements around the world. A couple focus on chickens and the west coast of South America. Did the chickens of Chile arrive overland, with European colonisers, or by boat with Polynesian seafarers? The trans-Pacific route seemed to have been debunked by DNA studies published in 2014, notwithstanding claims that chicken bones found in Chile date to before the year 1400.
Part of the evidence in favour of Polynesia had always been the spread of South American foods — notably sweet potato — west across the Pacific. A tad more support for east-west flow comes from a new paper in PLOS One, Identification of breadfruit (Artocarpus altilis) and South American crops introduced during early settlement of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), as revealed through starch analysis. That title, and the article itself, is a bit of a mouthful. In essence, the researchers looked at old obsidian blades and found starch granules that were definitely from crops native to South America: achira (canna lily roots), sweet potato and taro. Kristina Killgrove’s account puts it all in context. As she says, “The finding suggests that the early Polynesians had regular contact with the people of South America as far back as a millennium ago”.
Take care
