The Cost of a Healthy Diet One in three people can’t afford to eat even the cheapest nutritious diet

Four people on a terrace with trees and buildings in the background.
Anna Herforth, Imran Chiosa Will Masters, and Olutayo Adeyemi

Cover artwork, A plate of money with a green smoothie in a glass at top left.Let’s assume that people understand what they ought to eat to keep themselves healthy over the course of their lives and that the nutritious food to deliver good health is available in the market. More than one in three of the world’s people simply cannot afford a healthy diet. We know because the Food Prices for Nutrition team at Tufts University has developed tools that allow countries to use data that most of them are already collecting (to compile their Consumer Price Index) and from them calculate the cost of a healthy diet. The results have been alarming for some policy-makers, with encouraging results in at least one country.

Anna Herforth, who first told me about the cost of a healthy diet in 2021, was in Rome recently for a workshop on diet cost metrics with her colleagues Will Masters, who leads the Food Prices for Nutrition team, Olutayo Adeyemi, from Nigeria, and Imran Chiosa from Malawi. A chance too good to miss, despite the roar of the traffic beneath us.

Notes

  1. The website of Food Prices for Nutrition offers more detailed explanations and links to other places where the data are being used. This one lets you see the numbers for each country; the surprise is that even in high-income countries, large numbers of people cannot afford a healthy diet.
  2. The first episode on this topic was The cost is too damn high.
  3. Want a transcript? We’ve got you covered, thanks to the show’s supporters.
  4. Cover photo by DALL-E.

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Anchovies Part 2 How the Spanish learned to love anchovies

A blur of fresh silvery anchovies on ice being unloaded

Author Chris Beckman holding an anchovy on a toothpick in one hand and a bowl in the other. He is wearing a blue button-down shirt and looking into the camera.The Spanish are the world’s greatest anchovy eaters. They get through about 2.69 kilograms each a year, more than a tin a week. So you might be forgiven for thinking that anchovies have always been a part of Spanish cuisine. Not so, with the exception of the good people of Malaga, who developed a thing for deep-fried fresh anchovies. The rest of Spain resolutely ignored anchovies as food, spreading them instead on their fields as fertiliser. All that started to change in the late 19th century, when Italians, expert in the ways of salting fish, fetched up on the Basque coast to buy up all the fish that nobody else wanted. Among them, Giovanni Vella, who invented the modern tin of anchovy fillets in olive oil.

It was, according to Chris Beckman, author of A Twist in the Tail: how the humble anchovy flavoured Western cuisine, a win for everyone.

Notes

  1. Christopher Beckman’s A Twist in the Tail: How the Humble Anchovy Flavoured Western Cuisine is published by Hurst & Co.
  2. If you haven’t already heard it, the previous episode celebrates the anchovy in modern Spain.
  3. Here’s the transcript. Also, from this episode, I am trying to make transcripts available in podcast players that offer this service. Let me know if you experience any difficulties.

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Insects will not make pet food more sustainable either

Somewhat sad to see Marion Nestle, with whom I almost always agree, linking, without question or comment, to an article in a pet-food trade journal which suggests that insect protein is a key solution to a sustainable pet food industry. The article contains some eye-opening numbers for the pet food business in the US and globally, as well as some dubious claims about pet health; they are not properly sourced, so I’m not going to bother to address them.

I do, however, take issue with this:

“In terms of sustainability, the key point is that this isn’t just greenwashing,” said Hobbs. “Insect protein in pet food truly has a significant positive impact.”

It is just greenwashing.

Hobbs is Aaron Hobbs, executive director of the North American Coalition for Insect Agriculture (NACIA), so Mandy Rice-Davies applies. The key point, which neither he nor Marion Nestle seem to have appreciated, but which you will because you listened to the recent episode on insects as food (for people and their pets), is that the “waste” that insects are reducing is usually a feed product that could be given direct to livestock and, in some cases, people and their pets.

Premium-priced insect-based pet food might assuage the consciences of some pet owners, but it is unlikely to do anything at all for food waste.

Anchovies Part I A work of art in a can

An open tin of anchovies with a label showing the name of the woman who packed them.

A woman with short, dark hair and dark eyes looking directly at the camera.
Marcela Garcés

Anchovies can be very divisive; some people absolutely cannot stand them. I can’t get enough of the little blighters. What’s the difference? It might be as simple as the way they’re stored.

At the Dublin Gastronomy Symposium this past summer, I was delighted to learn one crucial way to improve any tin of anchovies: keep it in the fridge until you’re ready to use it.

Marcela Garcés is a professor at Siena College in New York, and as a side hustle she and her husband Yuri Morejón run La Centralita, a culinary studio that aims, among other things, “to teach guests about anchovies as a gourmet food in context”. As a result of our conversation, I now hold anchovies in even higher regard.

Notes

  1. Marcela Garcés’ paper is In Defense of the Anchovy: Creating New Culinary Memories through Applied Cultural Context.
  2. La Centralita is in Albany, New York.
  3. Here is the transcript, thanks to the generosity of supporters
  4. Banner photograph from Marcela Garcés.

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Crunch Time: Insects Are Not Going to Save Us Recent bankruptcies suggest the edible insect bubble could soon burst

Adult black soldier flies mating on a green leaf. The insects are tail to tail and joined by the male's penis.

Cover artwork; a bowl of reddish rice, possibly with tomato, scatterd with a few darker black soldier fly larvae and a green parley or coriander leaf.If only we could get over our squeamishness, insects can save the planet, banish hunger, protect the rainforests and reduce the climate catastrophe. At least, that’s what article after article tell us as they sing the praises of feeding our food waste to insects like the larvae of the black soldier fly. Insects can grow 5000-fold in 12 days, producing prodigious quantities of protein in less than 100th the space of soya beans.

There’s just one fly in the ointment, so to speak. Most of the food that insects are fed isn’t waste at all, and after absorbing large amounts of investor cash, some of the biggest companies have gone bust. Dustin Crummett, executive director of the Insect Institute, shared his many reasons for saying that eating insects will not save the planet.

Notes

  1. Dustin Crummett is executive director of The Insect Institute. His paper: Is turning food waste into insect feed an uphill climb? A review of persistent challenges.
  2. If not food or feed, how about “valuable raw materials for various industries”?
  3. Here’s the transcript. You can thank the donors, and become one yourself.
  4. Cover photograph from designer Katharina Unger’s Farm 432 concept, “a fly-breeding device for home use that continually collects fly larva as a protein source for less squeamish diners”
  5. Banner photo by Muhammad Mahdi Karim from Wikimedia shows black soldier flies making more black soldier flies.

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