Eat This Newsletter: Taken on Trust
ETN 257: Taken on Trust
Hello
Sometimes I just can't pursue the stories I link to in the kind of depth I would like. This is one of those times. I hope that won't spoil them for you.
Gillian Riley
Sad news. Gillian Riley, the food historian’s food historian, has died. She was, as I said elsewhere, one of a kind and wonderfully generous. The pear tart in A Feast for the Eyes, her book of “evocative recipes & surprising tales inspired by paintings in the National Gallery,” is a staple on our dinner table. Perhaps you have already seen the obituary by Tom Jaines. You may not have known that she regularly wrote for the Hackney Citizen, her local paper in London, which also published a lovely obituary. I will miss her warm presence.
Epic Failure
I zipped merrily through Slate magazine’s attempt to decide on “The 25 Most Important Recipes of the Past 100 Years” in America, noting a few that had influenced me, one that had inspired me, and a whole lot of meh. Dan Kois cooked each and every one of the 25, and the very best of his accounts, of course, is the epic failure to make Tunnel of Fudge cake. I have neither nostalgia for nor experience of tunnel of fudge cake, though I have had a chocolate volcano once or twice. it was too much even for me.
Kois’ account of trying to work out why it didn’t work and the disappearance of the one ingredient that enabled it to work speaks volumes about the food industry.
Future Failure?
Science magazine offers a remarkable article about the planetary impacts of global food trade. I won’t attempt to summarise because it seems already to be a summary of a new book called Feed the Planet, subtitled A photographic journey to the world’s food. In many respects, there’s nothing new here if you’ve been paying attention over the past decade or so, although it is useful to have so many threads woven together in one place. The images are indeed amazing, and you may recognise some, but it is the text that carries the argument.
Come for the pictures, stay for the words.
Nuts
Is it possible that all those peanut allergies — and fatalities — are the result of a failure to understand a single paper published in 1996? It might just be, according to a book by Marty Makary, excerpted in the Harvard Gazette.
The way Makary tells it, the American Association of Pediatrics copied the UK’s advice that pregnant mothers and infants under three years old should not eat peanuts. There followed a surge in peanut allergies, but of course correlation is not causation. Or is it? Makary went back to the original paper cited by the UK government and discovered that it did not say what the guidance to avoid peanuts thought it did. And then, even in the face of the rise in peanut allergies, the medical establishment, according to Makary, “close[d] ranks around inaccurate dogma”.
Current advice in the UK, based on a meta-analysis of two big trials is that babies should be given their first taste of peanut butter starting at around four months of age.
Makary, by the way, has just been nominated by the US President-elect to head the Food and Drug Administration. No way I am going to get into the weeds on that, except to note one weirdness. The nomination includes this gem from the P-e:
“I am confident that Dr. Makary, having dedicated his career to High-Quality, Lower-Cost Care, will restore FDA to the Gold Standard of Scientific Research, and cut the bureaucratic red tape at the Agency to make sure Americans get the Medical Cures and Treatments they deserve.”
Makary’s book, and the extract, is marked “Copyright © Ladner Drysdale LLC, 2024”.
Ladner Drysdale’s business, as far as I could gather online, is “Educational services, namely, providing educational conferences pertaining to improving quality and lowering costs in healthcare”.
I have no clue how all this ties together, except for a feeling that it does.
Nice Slavery
That the treatment of slaves was determined to a large extent by the work the enslaved were required to do is not that new an idea. At base, of course, were profits, but the ways in which slaves contributed to profits was crucial. If they supplied brute strength, they were worked liked brutes and replaced at the end of their short lives. If some skill were needed, they were treated more as investments than depreciating assets. These arguments are summarised in a recent piece by Lipton Matthews, Were all slave societies brutal? in Aporia magazine.
What’s good about the article is that it does link to original sources for many of the claims it makes. More obscure is the point it is trying to make. That slavery is OK if you treat slaves well? And why bring in a factoid about national IQs and preceding slave regimes? Reading about Aporia made me more suspicious, not less.
Take care
