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Eating habits are formed young and can last a lifetime, which suggests that school meals could be an excellent place to address nutrition and sustainability. Sweden, with universal free school meals for every child, offered a real-life laboratory in which to see the impact of school lunches that are essentially the same but designed to be healthier for the pupils and for the planet.

These were experiments in which the researchers were delighted to be rewarded with negative results. No differences in how much children ate, no difference in food waste, and no difference in satisfaction with the school lunches.

Notes

1. The paper we discussed is Sustainable and acceptable school meals through optimization analysis: an intervention study, prompted by this comment in The Lancet: School meal programmes: improving health and equity in the European Union.
2. Here is the transcript.
3. I took the cover image from Swedish school lunch reform, nutrition, and lifetime income, which has some interesting information on the long-term impact of Sweden’s school meal programme.

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The hipster barista has been around for a while, not quite serving but definitely enabling people to enjoy a wide variety of caffeinated beverages. And he was clearly part of the zeitgeist in 2019, when Mattel launched the Ken Barista doll. It was that ken who inspired Wendy Pojmann to investigate the whole phenomenon of barista cool and how the look of the professional Italian barista went out into the world, mutated in different ways, and returned to establish itself in selected spots in Italy. Pojmann concludes that “Barista Ken truly captures the globalized cool of espresso culture”.

Barista Ken, she also points out “may be … of mixed-race origins”. The bar owners and baristas that Grazia Ting Deng studied for her PhD, which later became the book Chinese Espresso, are by no means mixed race; they are pure Chinese. They are following in the footsteps of the many migrant Italians who took over neighbourhood bars to work for a better life. As they retire, and with children who don’t want to work in a bar, they sold to a new wave of migrants — from China.

As both Wendy Pojmann and Grazia Ting Deng discovered, very little is constant even in the fiercely traditional world of Italian espresso.

Notes

1. Wendy Pojmann’s article is Barista Cool: Espresso Fashion Transformed. She is also the author of Espresso: the art and soul of Italy.
2. Grazia Ting Deng’s book is Chinese Espresso: Contested Race and Convivial Space in Contemporary Italy. Her website contains links to other interviews and articles.
3. For an update on the icon of the hipster barista, take a look at an article from The New Statesman
4. espresso

   Here’s the transcript.

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Collard greens are a kind of cabbage that grows as loose leaves rather than forming a tight head. They’re eaten widely in parts of Europe and in East Africa, but perhaps most strongly associated with the food of Black people in the southern United States. There are many mysteries surrounding collards, like how and why did they become so popular in the US South. To that can be added the recent discovery of collards in oasis gardens in Morocco, where again they are associated with enslaved people trafficked from West Africa. Bronwen Powell and Abderrahim Ouarghidi have done their best to unravel the mystery of collards in Morocco and how that may shine light on their place in Southern foodways.

Notes

1. Collard Greens (Brassica oleracea var. viridis) in the Moroccan Oasis by Bronwen Powell and Abderrahim Ouarghidi is published in Economic Botany. Fortunately, they also wrote about their work in The Conversation, which is where I first saw it.
2. If you want to see how they prepare collards in Morocco, Bronwen made a video.
3. While reading around the topic, I came across this lovely piece about food and belonging: Snow Falling on Collards.
4. Here is the transcript.
5. Banner photo of the Draa valley by Richard Allaway. Cover photo of collards by Jeff Wright.

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“Food has long served as an instrument of statecraft,” write the authors of a new paper, and it isn’t hard to find examples of food weaponised in international relations and between factions in a single country. It can foment strife, through tariffs and blockades, as easily as it can promote peace through food aid. At the same time, conflict has an outsized influence on food and agriculture, from the mythical salting of a vanquished enemy’s fields to the very real genocidal famines today.

While political scientists are well aware of the ways in which food and agriculture can be used to achieve strategic aims, agricultural economists have tended to take a narrower view, worrying more about the perceived inefficiencies of subsidising farmers. Marc Bellemare and Bernhard Dalheimer want them to expand their vision.

Notes

1. Marc Bellemare shared the paper on his website at The Geopolitics of Food and Agriculture.
2. Rather than list the many episodes Marc has helped bring to life, I’ll let you select the ones that interest you.
3. Here is the transcript, for which you can thank (and perhaps join) the podcast’s generous supporters.
4. Apologies for the rather banal cover art; abstract concepts are hard to illustrate, no matter how important.

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Trevor Warmedahl worked in commercial cheese operations large and small in the USA for about 10 years, becoming increasingly disenchanted with the uniformity of the final products and their dependence on purchased starter cultures and rennets. So he set off to learn about “other, older ways to go about the fermentation of milk and the care of dairy livestock and the making of cheese”.

That took him first to Mongolia, and another commercial cheese plant, but it was making the same, uniform, European-style cheeses that he wanted to leave behind. Nevertheless, that was the start of a six-year journey that he shares in his book Cheese Trekking.

Notes

1. You can follow Trevor Warmedahl’s continuing journey on Instagram and via his newsletter.
2. Cheese Trekking is published by Chelsea Green.
3. Here is the transcript.
4. Photos from Trevor Warmedahl.

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