Eat This Newsletter 213: Hot News
Hello.
No let-up in sight as we continue to swelter. I hope you are doing better.
Black Sea Exports Blocked Again
The big news this week has been Russia’s failure to renew the deal that allowed grain (and fertiliser) exports from Ukraine’s ports. Worse, it immediately shelled the port of Odessa, apparently destroying 60,000 tonnes of grain. It isn’t exactly clear what Russia’s reasons might be. Mother Jones says that the Russians claim that their own exports were being held back, and yet it has apparently already offered Russian grain to countries in Africa. How are they planning to get it out? The Guardian says that Russians have been going slow on ship inspections since October 2022, effectively reducing exports. The Economist points out that this go-slow prompted markets to anticipate that Russia might end the agreement, which is why the withdrawal and bombing of Odessa barely affected the price of wheat.
[T]he global impact is likely to be muted. World wheat supplies are strong following exceptionally high exports from Australia and Russia and a rebound in Canadian shipments after droughts disrupted last year’s season. After falling for years, global stocks may finally rise in 2023.
The Economist concludes that the main effects will be felt in Ukraine which, in the absence of any action from Turkey or the UN, will probably slash prices and reduce plantings. The Black Sea Grain Initative allowed the export of 33 tonnes over the past year, more than half of it to developing countries.
Last year a major food catastrophe was narrowly averted, thanks to the resumption of Ukraine’s exports and bumper harvests across the planet. But a year may soon come when neither comes to the rescue.
p.s. In other market-moving news, India banned the export of non-basmati white rice in an effort to reduce domestic inflation. History suggests this will not end well.
Sowing Doubts on Ultra-processed Foods
Marion Nestle devoted her website this past week to what she called “the pushback against advice to reduce consumption of ultra-processed foods”. As she noted in the first of four articles:
I can think of only one reason for doing a study like this: to cast doubt on the concept of ultra-processed foods (UPF) and all the research showing that UPF diets induce people to eat more calories ... and are strongly associated in hundreds of studies with poor health, evidence that by this time is overwhelming and incontrovertible. ...
The first rule of the “Playbook” is to cast doubt on the research, which is what we are seeing here. The message to reduce consumption of ultra-processed foods makes good sense for health reasons. But such advice is very bad for the profits of food companies making junk foods.
The whole brief series is well worth your time.
Golda Hens: Cruel to be Kind to Boy Chicks
As long as the world insists on the cheapest possible eggs, those eggs are going to emerge from hens bred for that purpose alone, produced by mating highly selected hens with highly selected roosters to produce the eggs that grow up into layer hens. Alas, the breeders are thus saddled with an equal number of male offspring, which are effectively useless within that limited worldview. So I was pleased to read of a genetic breakthrough by Israeli scientists that solves the problem at source. Reuters’ report is sketchy on details and does not point to a published paper or an official preprint, but as I searched around I came across an article on BBC News from six months ago, which offers a much more lucid account (and an explanation of why the work has not been published). Pity I missed it then.
The technique depends on the genetics of sex determination in birds: females are the ones with two different sex chromosomes, called W and Z, while males have two copies of Z. (In mammals, females have two X chromosomes while males have one X and one Y.) The researchers engineered the Z chromosome of only the female parent to contain a so-called kill switch. Bathing the egg in blue light “for several hours” activates the kill switch, but here’s the neat bit: eggs destined to become females get an unedited copy of the Z chromosome from their male parent, while those destined to become male get the edited Z chromosome from their female parent, so only the males (with the edited Z chromosome) are killed. Eggs laid by the hens -- which the researchers call Golda hens for reason -- are genetically completely normal.
It does seem inordinately clever, and is not being published because the researchers hope to commercialise their discovery. Will it take off? They must think so.
Regrowth of Degrowth
“One barrel of oil has the same amount of energy of up to 25,000 hours of hard human labor, which is 12.5 years of work. At $20 per hour, this is $500,000 of labor per barrel.” A barrel of oil costs about seventy dollars at this week’s market price.
That is from an article by Bill McKibben in The New Yorker, marking the political rebirth of the ideas put forward by the Club of Rome 50 years ago. The article is relevant to all of life, not just food and agriculture, and the reason I singled out that quote is because it makes the invisible visible in a way that I, for one, have never seen before. One can quibble about the length of a working day, or the number of them in a year, the point remains: fossil fuels set most people free.
I’m taken with the comparison also because it joins one of my other favourites: a million seconds is just over 11½ days, while a billion seconds is almost 32 years. Just one little letter difference.
Take care
