RFK Jr finally addressed explosive diarrhoea in the USA but, as Helena Bottemiller Evich explained, “To be clear, the outbreak (or rather outbreaks) are not under control”.

[W]e are nearing 12,000 cases of parasitic illnesses. This is not under control. This is a disaster.

It has become clear that the current outbreak is actually at least six outbreaks, some of which are not tied to Taylor Farms. For example, North Carolina is having an outbreak of its own that seems to be linked to parsley and cilantro as well as lettuce.

While I am going to keep an eye on developments in the US, I thought it would be worth taking a look at Europe. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control has a handy explainer on cryptosporidiosis, which links to the most recent Annual Epidemiological Report, for 2020. That reveals a drop in overall cases, the result of Covid and the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, and also that the rate of reports for children aged 0–4 years had fallen to one third of the average for the previous five years. Five countries accounted for 65% of all confirmed cases, and Germany alone accounted for 28%.

There’s a handy dashboard that breaks down numbers by country. The map is slightly misleading, because the number of cases is related to the population. Expand the table on the left and you see that tiny Luxembourg is the cyclosporiasis hotspot for Europe, though Belgium, Ireland, and Iceland get an honourable mention. Despite the high number of cases in Germany, the population rate is not that high.

I guess we are doing reasonably well with cryptospora over here. It maybe even under control.

Also relevant to this week’s newsletter, Can Fixing Dinner Fix the Planet? with Jess Fanzo.

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In the previous issue I linked to a piece by Thin Lei Win that shed some light on Commercial Determinants of Health, the idea that food companies (and others) use “strategies and approaches … to promote products and choices that are detrimental to health”. It’s probably just a coincidence, but blow me if The Guardian didn’t recently point out that “[o]besity reflects prices, advertising and access, not simply weak willpower”.

An editorial asks the UK government to put public health before food industry pressure. The piece was prompted by a report from parliament’s health select committee, and most of the arguments and proposed remedies are reasonably familiar. Industry lobbying, however, has effectively defanged every previous attempt to do something. Anything. (Can you see a pattern here?)

On Monday, the country welcomed a new Prime Minister. Will “pro-business” Andy Burnham be up to the task?

Also relevant to this issue, Farming’s Overlords with Jennifer Clapp.

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The first record of tomatoes growing in England dates to the 1590s (though Wales has a slightly earlier claim). It isn’t until the 1720s, however, that recipes for their preparation start to appear. The delay has been blamed on fear of foods from outisde Europe, on the humoral theory, on piety and superstition, and probably lots of other factors too. While all those explanations have obvious attractions, the reality is much more prosaic than that.

Dr Serin Quinn tracked the true history of the tomato in England and found that temperature and technology, along with religious persecution, are much more convincing.

Notes

1. Serin Quinn’s paper on The Tomato-Chili Nexus: Reconstructing the Mesoamerican Influence on Europe through Taste and Method was my introduction to her work.
2. As mentioned, you may also find Rebecca Earle on The true history of the potato in Europe an interesting listen.
3. Here is the transcript.
4. Cover image lifted from The Gardener’s Chronicle, banner from Hortus Eystettensis, 1640, at Wikimedia

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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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