Eat This Newsletter 282: Myths Busted
Hello
The Black Death, the Shetland Black, the smoking wok, the misleading image, the pomegranate; all slightly mythical, all somewhat busted.
Oppressing the Workers: an ancient history
The standard narrative of European agricultural history would have us believe that in the wake of the Black Death, as labour became scarcer in England, the wages and living conditions of workers improved markedly. I’m no historian, and I believed it, so I was fascinated by a long post from Anton Howes, an historian of innovation, which turns that narrative on its head. Far from ushering in a good life for labourers, one consequence of the Black Death was a century-long depression.
The argument is long and full of detail and I have no idea what experts on the period think of it, but Howes makes a very good case that the upper reaches of society did everything they could to make it impossible for workers to be paid more. It became a crime not only for workers to look for better-paid jobs, but also for employers to meet their demands, including removing many loopholes such as being paid in kind of a higher quality. The law even outlawed nascent collective bargaining.
Howes says that most historians today believe that these laws simply weren’t enforced; I found his counterargument convincing although, as I said, I’m no historian.
Old Potatoes Show No Humility
Of course a publication that offers “No-nonsense, no-frills potato news stories from around the world” is not going to have any truck with the tired trope of the humble potato, and so it is with Potato News Today’s article on how to revive old potato varieties. Lukie Pieterse has distilled the essence of how some old heirloom and landrace potatoes have been dug out of their graves to once again grace plates around the world.
Pieterse’s six-step “practical playbook for reviving an old variety” could usefully be adapted for almost any crop, while the detailed tips on storage and handling offer an insight into the kind of work and technology that goes into marketing potatoes, even old and heirloom varieties, in modern times.
On a personal note, as someone who grew Shetland Black (and many other old varieties) in the early 1990s, I resent the suggestion that it was safeguarded by Slow Food. The Henry Doubleday Research Association as was deserves far more credit.
Now We’re Cooking — Without Gas
From Bloomberg, Why Electric Stoves Are Preferable to Gas for Some of the World’s Best Chefs. Not just electric, but induction, which is why I read it with great interest.
The benefits enjoyed by the world’s best chefs in their kitchens — cleaner, cooler, more efficient — can also be enjoyed by humble home cooks in their’s, except possibly for the bit about recreating a dish perfectly night after night. Having looked into retro-fitting our kitchen, and being stymied by the lack of a simple replacement for our current gas cooker, I’m now inspired to look again, not least as a result of the praise heaped on convex induction plates specifically designed for an old-fashioned wok.
May Contain Vegetables
Preying on parents, with their insecurities and lack of time, is standard operating procedure for manufacturers of foods aimed at young children. In an effort to prevent that, the WHO “recommends that commercial infant and toddler foods do not carry compositional, nutrition, health, or marketing claims,” a recommendation that, it turns out, is almost completely ignored in New Zealand and Australia and so, presumably, everywhere else as well.
Sally Mackay at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and colleagues analysed the packaging of 210 different products for infants and toddlers, and have written a commentary to accompany their published paper. The results are no surprise, but it is always good to have the data. To whit:
- Packaging carried an average of seven to eight claims, with the worst offenders carrying up to 15 claims.
- Most claims boasted about what was not in the food, such as additives and colours, which, the authors say “can distract parents from what is actually in the food, … a high sugar content or highly processed ingredients”.
- Pictures of fruit featured on 60% of packages, and vegetables on 40%, but “foods featuring vegetables often only contain tiny amounts of vegetable juice or powder, and foods featuring fruit images typically contain processed fruit sugars such as pastes and concentrates”
- “[O]ne in five contained less than 5% fruit”.
There’s more, of course, but the bottom line is that only a quarter to a third of infant and toddler foods in Australia and New Zealand meet the WHO’s recommendations.
Seeds of Seduction
Plant of the Month at The Plant Humanities Lab and JSTOR is the pomegranate. It’s a fun roundup of the pomegranate’s place in myth and medicine, art and religion, that tries to resolve some of the inherent contradictions. Is it warming or cooling? Yes. Did Persephone choose to eat the seeds, or was she compelled, or maybe even tricked? Yes. Is it a symbol of love or carnal pleasure, of chastity or the resurrection? Yes.
If you know me, you’ll know why I almost decided not to link to this piece at all, based on an egregious error in the very first sentence, but sometimes you just have to let these things go.
Light on Sweetness
This week’s other food podcast® suggestion is from Slow News, the Observer newspaper’s podcast. It’s a detailed report on The great British honey scandal which, you may recall, is something I covered in November 2023. Reporter Jon Ungoed-Thomas did a good job presenting the problem of fake honey and the difficulties of deciding when honey is unmistakeably fraudulent. The “weight of evidence” approach, however, didn’t get much in the way of explanation, because it is hard. I know, I had a go myself.
Take care
