Eat This Podcast

In the past year or so there has been a slew of high-level meetings pointing to antibiotic resistance as a growing threat to human well-being. But then, resistance was always an inevitable, Darwinian consequence of antibiotic use. Well before penicillin was widely available, Ernst Chain, who went on to win a Nobel Prize for his work on penicillin, noted that some bacteria were capable of neutralising the antibiotic. What is new about the recent pronouncements and decisions is that the use of antibiotics in agriculture is being recognised, somewhat belatedly, as a major source of resistance. Antibiotic manufacturers and the animal health industry have, since the start, done everything they can to deny that. Indeed, the history of efforts to regulate the use of antibiotics in agriculture reveals a pretty sordid approach to public health. But while it can be hard to prove the connection between agriculture and a specific case of antibiotic resistance, a look at hundreds of recent academic studies showed that almost three quarters of them did demonstrate a conclusive link. Antibiotic resistance – whether it originates with agriculture or inappropriate medical use – takes us back almost 100 years, when infectious diseases we now consider trivial could, and did, kill. It reduces the effectiveness of other procedures too, such as surgery and chemotherapy, by making it more likely that a subsequent infection will wreck the patient’s prospects. So it imposes huge costs on society as a whole. Maybe society as a whole needs to tackle the problem. The Oxford Martin School, which supports a portfolio of highly interdisciplinary research groups at Oxford University, has a Programme on Collective Responsibility for Infectious Disease. They recently published a paper proposing a tax on animal products produced with antibiotics. Could that possibly work? Notes * The paper by Alberto Giubilini and his colleagues is Taxing Meat: Taking Responsibility for One’s Contribution to Antibiotic Resistance. He also wrote an article explaining why we should tax meat that contains antibiotics. * Claas Kirchhelle’s paper on the history of antibiotic regulation in Britain will be published in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine. His prize-winning D.Phil thesis Pyrrhic Progress - Antibiotics and Western Food Production (1949–2013) will be published by Rutgers University Press. * Reducing antimicrobial use in food animals, published in Science after I had talked to Alberto and Claas, has some interesting things to say about a tax on antibiotics and other ways to tackle antibiotic resistance. * The UK government’s Review on Antimicrobial Resistance is a valuable source of information. * Pig pill image from the National Academy of Medicine. Banner image of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus from the Wellcome Trust.    Huffduff it

In 2014, food historian and professor Ken Albala found himself stuck in a kitchen with no utensils. He headed for an Asian grocery store and bought a little saucepan and some noodles, to make something for breakfast. Thus started almost three years of home-made noodle soup for breakfast, practically every day. Out of that came some spectacular successes, some abysmal failures and a book. Of course, I had to put pulled noodles to the test. Ken says to use a high-gluten flour. I checked scads of sources online, and many of them say the exact opposite. Some insist that in your kneading you have to go beyond building up a strong gluten net and actually break that network down. But none of them suggest allowing the dough six hours of rest and relaxation, as Ken does. Ken’s method, at least in his video, is a little too vague to follow exactly, as he insisted I must. When to start kneading? How often to dip your hands in water while kneading? Nevertheless, I did the best I could and was somewhat amazed that it worked. It really did. And the noodles were delicious. Being the kind of person I am, I made some measurements too: 275 gm of flour weighed 395 gm when I started to knead, for a hydration of 44%. That’s stiff. And it weighed more or less the same after kneading, but maybe the water added equalled the starch removed. I do wonder whether you would reach the same end point by adding the water all in one go at the outset. Notes * The book – Noodle Soup: Recipes, Techniques, Obsession – is available for pre-order from Amazon. * In the meantime, you can always search Ken’s website for “noodles”. * Pocket soup, which Wikipedia calls Portable soup, was an early convenience food. I was surprised to find a recipe for a modern version. I haven’t tried it, but I do like instant miso soup. * Cover picture is of Ken’s Hand Made Hybrid Noodles for Newbies. * Banner picture is a video grab of me, amazed that I pulled a noodle. * And those Lucky Peach links? Here you go. * Homemade Ramen Noodles, but beware: as I discovered while hunting, there’s an error: “Apologies to Harold McGee and to all of you who tried to make alkaline noodles with 4 tablespoons of baked soda. Please only use 4 teaspoons. Damnit.” SI units FTW, dahling. * Momofuku Ando and the Invention of Instant Ramen * A Timeline of Ramen Development * On Alkalinity * The State of Ramen: Peter Meehan * A Guide to the Regional Ramen of Japan The Internet Archive is a truly valuable a...

Walking down the supermarket aisle in search of coffee, I have this warm inner glow. If I choose a pack that boasts the Fair Trade logo, or that of any other third-party certifying agency, I’ll be doing good just by paying a little more for something that I am going to buy anyway. The extra I pay will find its way to the poor farmers who grow the coffee, and together enlightened coffee drinkers can make their lives better. But it seems I’m at least somewhat mistaken. Certified coffee is certainly better than nothing, but it isn’t doing as much good as I fondly imagine. And the price premium I pay could be doing a lot more. In this episode I hear about coffee that’s more ethical than fair, and about some of the ways in which Fair Trade falls short. Notes * The Acteal massacre that prompted Chris Treter to get into coffee is a horrific story that continues to reverberate. Matt Earley, a friend and colleague of Chris, wrote about the struggle for peaceful existence through coffee. * Chris and Matt also feature in a documentary film, Connected by Coffee. * More about Higher Grounds coffee, including the latest news from Congo. * Cooperative Coffees also shares some interesting stories on its website. * A couple of cool additional listens: Episode 4 of Alexis Madrigal’s series on Containers is all about The Hidden Side of Coffee. And the podcast Start-Up recently told the story of probably the world’s most expensive coffee, at $16 a cup. * It’s easy to fall into despair faced with details of how the foods we enjoy are produced, which almost inevitably involve the kind of power imbalance that makes exploitation and maltreatment not only possible but, apparently, inevitable, not only far away in former colonies but much closer to home. In Europe and in America, producers and consumers are thinking about third-party certification for local growers. What more could be done? * Banner and cover photos of coffee cherries in Colombia by Neil Palmer (CIAT).    Huffduff it

As our ancestors moved north out of Africa, and especially as they found themselves in climates that supported less gathering and more hunting, they were faced with an acute nutritional problem: scurvy. Humans are one of the few mammals that cannot manufacture this vital little chemical compound (others being the guinea pig and fruit bats). If there are no fruit and veg around, where will that vitamin C come from? That’s a question that puzzled John Speth, an archaeologist and Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He found clues in the accounts of sailors and explorers shipwrecked in the Arctic. Those who, often literally, turned their noses up at the “disgusting” diet of the locals sometimes paid with their lives. Those who ate what the locals ate lived to tell the tale. John Speth told me the tale of how he came to propose the idea that putrid meat and fish may have been a key part of Neanderthal and modern human diet during the Palaeolithic. Notes * Read Putrid Meat and Fish in the Eurasian Middle and Upper Paleolithic: Are We Missing a Key Part of Neanderthal and Modern Human Diet? for John Speth’s full chain of reasoning – and all the wonderful first-hand accounts. * Two articles, one from the University of Pennsylvania and one from the University of Chicago, give a flavour of Paul Rozin’s research. * The Centers for Disease Control in the US has an interesting page on botulism in Alaska. * Discover Magazine did a story on Alaskan food. * But you know, I am just so sick of the whole 73-disgusting-foods-you-won’t-believe-people-not-like-us-eat trope, I could throw up. Get over it, people. * I cobbled together the banner image from two images at Wikimedia, a ball and stick model of viatmin C and an illustration from The Arctic whaleman; or, Winter in the Arctic Ocean: being a narrative of the wreck of the whale ship Citizen. I know the whalers were taken care of by local people, but not whether any succumbed to scurvy. Nobody seems to know where the fish stink-head photo comes from -- unless you do.    Huffduff it

The plant breeding behind the green revolution has delivered amazing results, way more than two ears of corn where one would grow before. Those gains, however, depend on tailoring the environment in which the seeds are planted to suit those modern varieties. If a farmer can’t afford to do that, or isn’t willing to use the herbicides and fertilisers modern varieties require, they’re kind of stuck. The market isn’t really interested in providing the kinds of varieties you need. Before the explosion of scientific breeding, however, farmers did their own plant breeding, by selecting the best plants and saving their seeds to sow the following year. The plants were genetically diverse, so there were always some that would do better and others that would do worse. Modern varieties are entirely uniform, so if conditions aren’t perfect, the whole field does poorly. While some farmers are rediscovering the benefits of the old varieties created in just such a way, a few are looking to create the future. They won’t adapt the environment to suit their crop; instead, they’re adapting the crop to suit their environment. The process is based on hugely diverse evolutionary populations of wheat, and it is giving the farmers wheat that performs better now and that will be able to track whatever climate change brings. Italy has been suffering a drought this year, but the farmers who are working with these evolutionary populations are much less bothered by it than those who depend on modern wheats. The work with evolutionary populations is part of an experiment organized by Rete Semi Rurale, to help farmers get the kinds of varieties they need, an important part of which is to show local farmers what the experiment is about. I joined them on one such open day in the southern Italian region of Molise. Notes * Matteo Petitti is sharing the results of the research at his website. * Molise is a bit of an undiscovered gem (to me at any rate). The Pettaciato’s farm is not an agriturismo, but there are lots of lovely places to stay in the region    Huffduff it

In the town hall of Siena is a series of glorious frescoes that depict The Allegory of Good and Bad Government. In one of them is a pig, long snouted and thin legged, black with a white band around its back and down its front legs, being quietly chivied along by a swineherd. It is absolutely recognisable as a cinta senese, a Belted Sienese pig, today one the most favoured heritage breeds in Italy. But it wasn’t always so. Numbers dropped precipitously in the 1950s and 1960s, to the point that the herd studbook, recording the ancestry of all the animals, was abandoned. And then began the renaissance. One place that contributed to the revival of the cinta senese is Spannocchia, a large and ancient estate not far from Siena. I was lucky enough to visit earlier this summer, to see the pigs first hand and to learn about them from Sara Silvestri. Perhaps the biggest surprise, to me, was that not all cinta senese are blessed with the white belt that is deemed a characteristic of the breed. Some have white spots or stripes but not the full band, and some don’t seem to have any white at all. This could be flaky genetics – odd for a breed with a supposedly ancient lineage – or it could be the result of marauding male cinghiale, which are a problem in Spannocchia and elsewhere. Right now, all these visually defective animals (and most of the perfect specimens too) end up on a plate. I wonder how long before every piglet born is properly belted. Notes * La Tenuta di Spannocchia has a couple of websites, one mostly for the Foundation that’s behind the place (alas, mostly broken) and one that’s more commercial, which is where you’ll be sent actually to book a stay, should you wish. * Be careful searching Wikipedia for information on the pigs. There’s a bit in English and much more in Italian, if you can find the correct page. * Photograph by Lucy Clink.    Huffduff it

The island of Corfu was part of the Venetian republic for hundreds of years. So when I went there on holiday I expected to see some Italian influences, and there were plenty; Venetian lions, eroded by time; elegant buildings; Italian restaurants everywhere; and dishes with Italian-sounding names, like sofrito and pastitsada. Also, a curiously neon version of limoncello, made in this case from kumquats rather than lemons. I was fortunate to have an introduction to Cali Doxiadis, an expert cook who has made her home on Corfu, and over an excellent lunch on her terrace I plied her with questions. Cali wasn’t too keen on kumquat liqueur or its history. You’ll find all sorts of tangled accounts of how kumquats got to Corfu. Many of them mention Sidney Merlin, a Greek-born British marksman and amateur botanist, and most of the stories say he introduced kumquats to the family’s estate in northern Corfu in 1860, which would have been quite a feat as Merlin would have been only four years old. One even gives the date of introduction as 1846, ten years before Merlin’s birth, which was actually the year that plant hunter Robert Fortune brought them from China to Europe. As best as I can tell, Merlin’s kumquat’s arrived in 1924, a few years after he had successfully introduced Washington navel oranges. Wikipedia tells me that “to this day,” the Washington navel “is known in Greece as ‘Merlin’,” a fact I did not know at the time and so could not confirm with Cali or anyone else. Who knows, maybe it was introduced twice, once by Merlin and once, much earlier, by an unknown British colonial officer. Notes * Huge thanks to Aglaia Kremezi for intrdoucing me to Cali Doxiadis and of course to Cali for her hospitality and patience. * The old town of Corfu really is a delight, and a World Heritage Site to boot. * Pastissada de caval can still be found in the Veneto. And here’s a once-over-lightly guide to Corfiote foods. * I snatched a bit of music from John Skolarikis. * Banner photo by Lucy Clink. Those two little blobs are me and Cali talking. Cover photo borrowed from Mavromatis, purveyors of kumquat products.    Huffduff it

Foodwise, what unites Cameroon, Nigeria and Grenada? How about Cape Verde, Colombia and Peru? As of today, you can visit a website to find out. The site is the brainchild of Colin Khoury and his colleagues, and is intended to make it easier to see the trends hidden within 50 years of annual food data from more than 150 countries. If that rings a bell, it may be because you heard the episode around three years ago, in which Khoury and I talked about the massive paper he and his colleagues had published on the global standard diet. Back then, the researchers found it easy enough to explain the overall global trends that emerged from the data, but more detailed questions – about particular crops, or countries, or food groups – were much more difficult to answer. The answer to that one? An interactive website. Notes * The Changing Global Diet website. * The original research paper is Increasing homogeneity in global food supplies and the implications for food security. * Colin and I first talked about the Global Standard Diet in 2014. * And I wrote up the bigger story of food globalisation for NPR. * The hashtag, should you find anything interesting, is #changingglobaldiet, and you can follow Colin Khoury @ColinKhoury. * Images snagged from the website.    Huffduff it

No country has solved the problem of how to ensure that all of its people have enough safe, nutritious food to eat year round, and the variety of approaches is both bewildering and informative. Australia, for example, has a welfare system that doesn’t make any specific provision for food. But it does exempt certain healthier foods – such as fruit and veg, bread, fresh meat, milk and eggs – from the Good and Services Tax. That makes them cheaper than they might otherwise be, a sort of thin subsidy. And yet, Australians prefer to spend more to eat an unhealthy diet. They devote almost 60 cents of every dollar they spend on food to unhealthy stuff. What’s going on? Professor Amanda Lee looked at the cost of what Australians actually eat, based on a large survey, compared to the cost of the country’s national guide to healthy eating. The results were pretty surprising, so surprising that for a while journals refused to publish. Less of a surprise, perhaps, was that people give the answers they think researchers want to hear: among the poorest communities, fully a quarter of the calories actually consumed are missing from reports, and people say they eat eight times more fruit and veg than they actually do. Notes * The research paper that prompted our conversation was Testing the price and affordability of healthy and current (unhealthy) diets and the potential impacts of policy change in Australia. * Another important paper is Are Healthy Foods Really More Expensive? It Depends on How You Measure the Price, from the USDA. * I gave up trying to find a picture of Australian junk food; it looks just the same as more less all junk food, except for the Cherry Ripes. The banner photograph is a detail from Lizard Dreaming 2 by Sue Atkins, a descendant of the Boandik People from Adelaide in South Australia. The image took some tracking down, because the original site had been hacked in various horrible ways, and I have not asked for permission.    Huffduff it

Who invented mayonnaise? Could boiling down tonnes of cattle concentrate beef’s nutritious qualities? Did lemonade put a halt to the plague in Paris? Tom Nealon writes about these and (many) other topics in his book Food Fights and Culture Wars, a title that does the contents no favours at all. The obvious temptation is to talk about the book as a feast of food history, a smörgåsbord of tasty treats, some old, some new, all interesting. It is all that and more, not least because it is lavishly illustrated with fascinating images. All in all, a great read, but a hard topic for an episode, because the only thing that really connects all those dots is Tom Nealon himself. We talked a lot, covered a lot of ground and, inevitably, left a lot of things out. I think I disagree with Tom on at least one thing: cannibalism. I’m just not as persuaded as he is by the evidence, and his argument that if you’re eating “others” from over the mountain, then you’re not really eating people, cuts both ways. What better way to make people seem fundamentally different from "us" than to stress that "they" eat people? But that’s a topic for another episode, I hope. Notes * Food Fights & Culture Wars is currently riding high in Amazon’s New Releases. * Lots more details on mayonnaise in Tom Nealon’s original account of Salsa Mahonesa and the Seven Years War. * To be honest, I had no idea mayonnaise was a topic of such intense interest, but it is. * Hellmann’s Mayonnaise: A History * A Brief History of Mayonnaise and Mayo-phobia: Why do some people hate mayonnaise so much? * On the Etymology of the Word Mayonnaise * For a fine collection of Bovril nonsense, this is the place.    Huffduff it

A computer learns about ingredients and recipes

How much does a nutritious diet cost?

Food and status

In praise of meat, milk and eggs

India’s bread landscape and my plans here