- Isabella dalla Ragione, seeker after old varieties of fruit and corrective of art historians
- Nutmeg is not black gold. It’s Pantone160c gold.
- Cool Beans are having their moment, and not just on “meatless Mondays”.
- Because “Meatless Mondays” are not enough.
Orange-fleshed sweet potato to feed hidden hunger No-one wakes up saying 'I crave vitamin A today'
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:33 — 22.1MB)
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There is more to good nutrition than calories and protein. The realisation that you can be perfectly well fed, maybe even too well fed, and yet still malnourished, is relatively recent. It often goes by the name hidden hunger, and reflects a lack of essential micronutrients in the diet. Tackling the lack of micronutrients is tricky because people do not really feel their hidden hunger. “No-one wakes up saying ‘I crave vitamin A today’,” as a recent paper put it.
That paper looks back over the 25-year history of the most successful effort to feed hidden hunger to date: the introduction of orange-fleshed sweet potatoes to subSaharan Africa. The beta-carotene that makes sweet potatoes orange is the precursor of vitamin A, one of the most important micronutrients. In this episode, I’m talking to Dr Jan Low, who has worked on orange-fleshed sweet potato from the start.
Notes
- The paper by Jan Low and Graham Thiele is Understanding innovation: The development and scaling of orange-fleshed sweetpotato in major African food systems and, oh joy, it is freely available.
- Banner photograph by Benjamin Rakotoarisoa.
- As mentioned in the episode, as an experiment I am going to try and provide a transcript, at least for a little while. Find it here.
- Work on vitamin-A rich sweet potatoes is carried out under the CGIAR Research Program on Roots, Tubers and Bananas (RTB).
Eat This Newsletter 118
- From khat to coffee: revitalising an age-old Yemeni crop, and not for the first time. Or the last.
- As explained in the full ETN 118
- Never mind about food fraud, online-only kitchens threaten food safety too.
- Sweet and fruity, or cardboardy and bready and leathery? We’re talking whiskey and maize varieties.
- Pioneer no-knead baker reveals the secrets of no-gardening harvest.
How does your garden grow?
Squandering antibiotic efficacy
Wait a minute. In 2016 the Environmental Protection Agency in the US authorised citrus farmers emergency permission to spray streptomycin and oxytetracycline on orchards afflicted by huanglongbing, or citrus greening disease. In December 2018, the EPA allowed routine spraying of oxytetracycline.
Seriously? Antibiotics valuable in human medicine just sprayed into the environment?
Now I want to know whether anyone has actually sampled for antibiotic resistance in areas that saw the most spraying. Except that farmers no longer have to report whether they have sprayed.
Another cup of coffee culture Making friends with espresso
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 16:22 — 13.2MB)
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Last episode, Jonathan Morris told me about the rise of coffee culture in Italy and how that changed as it made the move to London. Even long after the first proper espresso machines appeared in Soho, the UK was not a huge coffee drinker. Not so the United States, where coffee became an essential drug for the Union during the Civil War. In this episode, Jonathan Morris tells me how the habit lingered and grew into the bottomless cup of diner coffee. Along the way, we talked about Starbucks and about Friends, and the true history of the flat white.
Notes
- Jonathan Morris’ Coffee: a Global History is available from Reaktion Books. Enter “coffee20” at checkout to get a discount.
- Yes, there really is a Lego set of Friends, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year.
- The flat white remains a bit of a mystery. Microfoam? You can search for yourself, but I found What is a flat white?. How much to trust this or his other pronouncements on flat whites and all the rest of it, I leave up to you.