Podcasts

What is the value of functional foods? Always the next big thing

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A string of açai berries on a person's outstretched hand

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 24:55 — 22.9MB)

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Açai, goji, chia. Pepino, mangosteen, rambutan. Quinoa, teff, fonio. Names to conjure with, especially if you’re in the business of selling food dreams. All of them have been touted at one time or another as being the next big thing. Superfoods that can cure all the ills that ail you. Many more mundane foods — chocolate, coffee, red wine — have mutated into functional foods, imbued with power to promote good health and fight disease.

“[B]etween 2011 and 2015 there was a phenomenal 202% increase globally in the number of new food and drink products launched containing the terms ‘superfood’, ‘superfruit’ or ‘supergrain’,” according to Mintel research.

Whether you believe the claims — I remain dubious — there’s one group of people that these foods could definitely help: the farmers who grow them. There are, however, reasons to be cautious.

A recent issue of the journal Choices brought together a set of case studies from Central and South America. I chatted to Trent Blare, one of the two editors of that issue, about some of the success stories and some of the difficulties.

Notes

  1. Choices Magazine Online: Functional Foods: Fad or Path to Prosperity?
  2. Chocolate really does “contribute to normal blood flow”.
  3. But here’s what Harvard School of Public Health thinks about superfoods.
  4. And that enlightened Swiss chocolate company Trent Blare mentioned? That would be Choba Choba.
  5. A transcript? Sure, as soon as it is ready.
  6. Cover photo by Neil Palmer/CIAT shows a lulo farmer in Darién, Colombia. Banner image of açai fruits in Brazil by Kate Evans/CIFOR.

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Podcasts

Naomi Duguid: Exploring the World through Food “We write to travel … It was never the other way around.”

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covers of cookbooks by Naomi Duguid

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:51 — 30.2MB)

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Portrait of Naomi Duguid sitting in front of bookshelvesPhotographer, writer, traveller, cook, geographer, culinary anthropologist: Naomi Duguid is all this, and more. True, her books contain approachable recipes that have won awards and accolades from food-first organisations, like the James Beard Foundation and the International Association of Culinary Professionals. But they also offer sensitive insights into the lives of people far from her native Canada. Why do they prepare, cook and eat the foods they do? How does the way they live influence the way they eat, and vice versa? And all illustrated with her photographs, at once both informative and atmospheric.

Though the people and food she chronicles are from far away, she has a knack of preserving their distinctness while making us all neighbours.

A woman cheesemaker in front of a fire with a bowl of curds on her hip
A cheesemaker farmer in rural southern Georgia, not far from the Turkish and Armenian borders.

Notes

  1. Naomi Duguid’s website is at naomiduguid.com, but you’re much more likely to find her on Instagram or Twitter.
  2. You can find Burma: River of Flavors and Taste of Persia at bookshop.org and getting them there gives independent bookshops (and me) a hand.
  3. The transcript is here.
  4. Cover photo by Randy Risling/Toronto Star

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Podcasts

The cost is too damn high The first global survey of the price of healthy eating

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One dollar and ninety cents

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:32 — 19.0MB)

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Anna Herforth

Anna Herforth is the lead author of Cost and affordability of healthy diets across and within countries, a background paper prepared for The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2020. In the paper, Herforth and her colleagues calculate the cost of getting enough energy, getting adequate nutrition, and getting a diet that meets healthy eating guidelines. The results are sobering.

All this is possible because the World Bank collects a massive amount of data in its International Comparison Program, including the market price of hundreds of food items. Governments and other bodies issue healthy eating guidelines that offer their considered opinion on what a healthy diet should look like. And at Tufts University in Boston, where Herforth has been working, they’ve been building models that can take the full range of what’s available in the market and calculate the cheapest way to meet the requirements of any specified diet. Put all that together and you discover that, globally, roughly three billion people cannot afford a healthy diet.

How should we respond? The paper concludes: “To make healthy diets cheaper, agricultural policies, research, and development need to shift toward a diversity of nutritious foods.”

Notes

  1. Cost and affordability of healthy diets across and within countries is published by FAO.
  2. The paper is part of the work of the Food Prices for Nutrition program at Tufts University. There is loads more information there.
  3. Here’s the transcript.
  4. Interstitial music by mmleys.

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Podcasts

Still ticking The population bomb has not been defused

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A plant and its shadow seen against dry soil

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 22:50 — 21.0MB)

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cover artwork

As a young biology student, one of the things I and my classmates worried about was population. You didn’t need to be a mathematical whizz to understand the force of Thomas Malthus’ argument in An Essay on the Principle of Population, even if you didn’t agree with the methods he proposed for dealing with it. Firebrands like Paul Ehrlich whipped us up, and Limits to Growth from the Club of Rome provided food for thought as we contemplated future famines. And then, just like that, population vanished as a suitable subject for conversation.

A textual analysis of loads of published works on how to feed the world confirms this impression. The number dealing with population becomes vanishingly small, even while those about increasing production just keep going up. A conversation with one of the paper’s authors, Giangiacomo Bravo of Linnaeus University in Sweden, prompted me to look back at some of the history.

Notes

  1. The trigger paper for this episode was From population to production: 50 years of scientific literature on how to feed the world. It is, alas, behind a paywall.
  2. The Population Bomb is online, as is a 2009 appraisal of their work by Paul and Anne Ehrlich
  3. I’m grateful to The Internet Archive for all the work they do. That’s where I found archive tape of Paul Ehrlich, Newsweek and Joseph van Arendonk. Jørgen Randers was from YouTube.
  4. Just ignore this nonsense 5qikwjcph1aiCyoAte7sdel2P2iot2puh21lcz
  5. Banner photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash.

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Podcasts

The quest to conserve rare breeds The importance of yesterday’s heritage breeds for tomorrow

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A White Park cow maintaining a Site of Special Scientific Interest on Salisbury plain in England

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:07 — 24.0MB)

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Cover artwork

Modern livestock breeds are incredibly efficient, gaining weight at a prodigious rate and supplying astonishing quantities of milk and eggs. That efficiency, however, comes at a cost: the food needed to support such a metabolism. Much of that food could be eaten directly by people, and certainly the lush pastures that support modern dairy cows, for example, might be put to better use growing food for people. But then, where will our meat, milk and eggs come from?

Lawrence Alderson founded the Rare Breeds Survival Trust in the UK in 1973. Those breeds, he contends, are the key to future food security. It is thanks to the foresight of Alderson and other visionaries around the world that rare and heritage breeds are still here to convert stuff we can’t eat into stuff we can eat.

Notes

  1. Lawrence Alderson’s has a website. His new book is The quest to conserve rare breeds: setting the record straight. If you follow that link (which is an affiliate link), you’ll do better by clicking on the flag at top right and switching to the UK front for bookshop.org.
  2. Here’s where to find out more about the Rare Breeds Survival Trust.
  3. I remain dubious about the whole Sir Loin story, although I wasn’t going to press the point any harder than I did. Wikipedia seems to agree: “There is no reliable evidence for this explanation and scholars generally hold it to be a myth.” I don’t doubt that James I of England dined on some fine beef at Hoghton Tower in 1617, and the beef could well have come from White Park cattle. Did he knight it? Convince me.
  4. In case you were wondering about the new herds of Northern Shorthorn Dairy cattle, I think this is one of the places Lawrence Alderson was talking about: Stonebeck Raw Wensleydale Cheese.
  5. Rules 4 and 10 of Ten golden rules for reforestation to optimize carbon sequestration, biodiversity recovery and livelihood benefits are why you should not plant trees on uplands.
  6. Here is the transcript.
  7. Banner photo of a White Park cow maintaining a Site of Special Scientific Interest on Salisbury Plain by Natural England/Paul Glendell used with permission

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