Eat This Newsletter-248: Slow
Hello
Not a great haul this week. I expect everything is just slowing down during our northern summer. As a result, I’m quite looking forward to starting up the new season, possibly on 2 September. No promises, mind.
An enormous amount of online news consists of one place referring to (or blatantly copying) something published at another place. I like to track those things down to the original source mostly because I want them to receive any readers I may send their way and also to see whether there is actually anything worth pointing to. This week, we’re better served by the secondary sources because they do a better job of putting things in context.
New Chocolates?
First up is a piece from Mongabay, a great site for news about the natural world. Liz Kimbrough writes about three close relatives of Theobroma cacao — the tree that gives us chocolate — discovered during an ongoing survey of herbarium specimens. The original paper describing these three new species is very detailed and probably of direct interest mostly to plant taxonomists, though it does also point up the continuing value of herbaria. Kimbrough uses these newly described species to look at their potential value in breeding new varieties of Cacao and more generally at conservation in the western Amazon, where two of the species are probably already at risk of extinction.
One idea that fascinates me is that new products might be developed from the pulp that surrounds the seeds of these new species. There’s an idea that cacao was first cultivated and domesticated for the pulp, rather than the seeds, and the pulp of other relatives of cacao does find its way into foods. If the new species produce interesting pulp worth cultivating them for, that might help to secure their future.
Moral Dimensions of Cultured Meat
Fans of cultured meat like to point out that it is better for the environment and does not rely on industrial farming. Do concerns about those factors underpin the readiness of people to buy (into) and eat the stuff? You might think the companies that have sunk millions into the technology would know, but if they do they haven’t published it. A paper in Appetite addressed meat and morality; Anthropocene magazine reports on the results.
The study surveyed almost 1900 people in Germany and the USA — meat-eaters, vegetarians, pescatarians, and vegans — to determine what makes them “want to buy cultured meat, and what makes them shy away” and related that to their moral values.
[P]articipants who said they believed strongly in the importance of purity as a moral guiding star, were simultaneously less willing to eat cultured meat, and ranked low on questions relating to its perceived goodness and naturalness, and also had higher outright opposition to the unconventional protein.
That effect was much stronger in the USA than in Germany, and it is relatively easy to see how “purity” might colour the production of cultured meat as unnatural. The big surprise was that there was no link between how much people were guided by moral notions of care and reduced harm and their attitude to cultivated meat.
Will these findings influence either the marketing or the acceptance of cultured meat? Maybe. The dominant narrative around cultured meat has long been about harm reduction, for livestock and the environment, but that has not driven widespread acceptance. “Perhaps then,” the researchers conclude, “these interventions have been limited in their success because they are not necessarily addressing the values that underpin consumer attitudes.”
UPFs Engorged
It can be fun to read the adventures of people willing to expose themselves to experiences one might not, personally, relish. Who am I kidding? I’d love to be paid to go to “the world’s leading food technology event” and report back. Nicholas Florko is the lucky man who stuffed his face to learn about ultra-processed foods.
Florko’s report is indeed a fun read, and also delivers some expected but nevertheless disquieting news. Like the fact that manufacturers can see slightly healthier versions of UPFs as “opportunities for growth”. There are many more delicious nuggets to savour in the story, though perhaps not as many as the Jetpuffed White Cylinder Marbit marshmallows and Kraft Caramel Bits that characterised what Florko called “a perfect cookie bar”.
Take care
