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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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In the previous episode, Carl Ipsen explained how the EU regulations for extra-virgin olive oil include tasting notes, and that if an oil has any of the forbidden flavours, it cannot be classified as extra virgin. So I was very surprised to read (in an issue of Edward Behr’s Art of Eating newsletter) about oils being produced in Provence that go out of their way to develop some — but not all — of the EU’s “defects”. Just as with modern extra virgin, these old-fashioned oils rely on up-to-date equipment and the skill of the miller.

In this episode, the paradox of old-fashioned modern oil.

Notes

1. Old-Fashioned Olive Oil from Provence is the piece that prompted this episode. A few months back, Ed Behr had written about modern olive oil. Both contain fascinating tasting notes and more besides.
2. Here is the transcript.
3. I lifted some images from the Moulin Cornille website.

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Extra virgin olive oil, as a formal classification, owes its existence to the disastrous state of Italian olive oil in the 1950s. At that time, esterification, a chemical process designed to extract the last drop of oil from the crushed olives, was permitted. It could also be used to extract oils from all manner of unlikely sources, and those too found their way into “olive” oil.

When extra-virgin was first codified, only around 20% of oil qualified. Today, you would be hard pressed to find any oil on sale that does not claim to be extra virgin. Is that any guarantee of quality? Not really, says Professor Carl Ipsen, author of a forthcoming new book tentatively entitled A True History of Olive Oil. In it, he traces the evolution of olive oil from its early role as a lubricant of industrial development, when less than 1% was considered edible, to today, when it is almost exclusively used for food.

Notes

1. Carl Ipsen’s website contains links to some of his publications, including From Cloth Oil to Extra Virgin: Italian Olive Oil Before the Invention of the Mediterranean Diet, the essay that won the Sophie Coe Prize in 2021.
2. Here is a transcript. Thank supporters of the podcast.

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A lot of people who care about these things will tell you that the food system is broken. Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel Rosenberg insist that it is not. Bits of it may not work as well as we might like, but overall it delivers greater abundance, diversity, and nutrition at a lower cost than at any time in history.

They argue the point at length in their new book Feed the People! Why industrial food is good and how to make it even better. Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg write engagingly and the book is a good read. And for those bits of the food system that are not working so well, they offer plenty of evidence-based recommendations that could help fix them.

Notes

1. Feed the People! is published by Basic Books.
2. How the New Food Pyramid Fits Into the Broader Conservative Project is their nuanced look at the vexed topic of food guidelines in the United States.
3. Gabriel Rosenberg has a newsletter, The Strong Paw of Reason, and there’s more of Jan Dutkiewicz’s work at The New Republic.
4. Here is the transcript.
5. Banner photos of the authors by Tim Atakora and Harris Solomon.

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