Extra Matter

Formula Recall Boosts Breastfeeding Department of Silver Linings

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Graph showing changes in infant breastfeed over time, including the formula recall of February 2022

Yesterday’s graph from USDA is really interesting. It shows that the February 2022 recall of formula milk in the US, which compounded the supply chain difficulties of Covid, was associated with a striking increase in the number of infants fully and partially breastfed (and a drop in the number fully formula fed).

The survey covers only people enrolled in the USDA’s Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), so it isn’t comprehensive, but it represents a more vulnerable sector of society. It also shows that while formula offers the benefit of convenience, when push comes to shove many women are able to breastfeed more. Of course I would like to see a more detailed breakdown that factors in things like the need to be out working, but I find these results encouraging.

These findings also suggest a way out for mothers faced with what today’s Guardian said are “historically high” prices for formula in the UK.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) found in November that the average price of infant formula had risen by 25% in the past two years and families could save more than £500 over the first year of a baby’s life by switching to cheaper powders.

They could save even more by breastfeeding more and for longer.

Syndicated to the mothership.

Podcasts

Prehistoric cooking pots Early farmers were also fishing

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Early Neolithic farmers in Switzerland, illustration by J. Näf

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 19:40 — 18.1MB)

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Harry Robson on board a boat with the sun near the horizon
Harry Robson
Six thousand years ago in northern Europe, the first Neolithic farmers were bumping up against Mesolithic people, who made a living hunting and fishing and gathering wild plants. Both groups of people made ceramic cooking vessels for their food, and those pots have now revealed that in many respects the diets of the two cultures were more alike than different. The hunter-gatherers were processing dairy foods, while the farmers were cooking fish and other aquatic resources.

That’s the conclusion of a massive study of more than 1000 pot fragments by 30 scientists. Harry Robson, one of the team leaders, explained the results and the light they shed onto the transition to farming.

Notes

  1. Harry K. Robson is in the Department of Archaeology at the University of York. The paper we talked about is The impact of farming on prehistoric culinary practices throughout Northern Europe in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
  2. Here is the transcript.
  3. Banner illustration shows early Neolithic farmers in Switzerland, by J. Näf, from this publication. Cover photograph of a pot from the Funnel Beaker culture in Denmark, made by the earliest farmers across the western Baltic, CC-BY-SA by Arnold Mikkelsen, The National Museum of Denmark.

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Podcasts

The Invention of Baby Food What’s good and when to offer it

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Supermarket shelves showing a bewildering arrays of different types and formats of baby food

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:08 — 26.8MB)

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Amy Bentley portrait

In the 1950s and 1960s, the paediatric establishment in America convinced mothers to start solid foods in the first month of baby’s life, and sometimes even before they had left the hospital. This was considered a good idea even though the average baby wouldn’t have a tooth in its head for another five or six months. Amy Bentley, a professor at New York University, has charted the rise and continuing rise of baby food, from its earliest emergence in upstate New York and Michigan to its proliferation today. Commercial baby foods made sense, she thinks, as a safer and more convenient alternative to home-made options, and still today may form the bedrock of the best-nourished period of a child’s life. But they also reflected an American exceptionalism rooted in the triumph of World War Two.

Early advertisement for Gerber baby food

The adorable infant in Gerber’s advertisements was originally a pencil sketch that the artist said she would finish in colour if selected. Gerber preferred the sketch, and “repeated requests” prompted the company to offer a reproduction, suitable for framing, in exchange for 10¢. Strangest of all, some people seemed to think the baby was Humphrey Bogart, who was 29 qwhen the sketch was made. A little old for baby food.

Notes

  1. Get a copy of Inventing Baby Food: Taste, Health, and the Industrialization of the American Diet from an independent bookshop. And here is Amy Bentley’s website.
  2. I’ve been trying to keep you up-to-date with the lead contamination story in Eat This Newsletter, but just last week Marion Nestle took a look at lead and pesticides in baby food.
  3. Here is the transcript.
  4. I took the photos of baby food.

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Extra Matter

Eat This Podcast Xmas Quiz You can’t win unless you enter

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Mosaic of cover art from the 18 episodes of 2023
Perhaps this will help while away a few minutes as you wait for a new episode to drop. One question for each of this year’s 18 episodes. There will be prizes, but I want to try and ensure that they are things you actually want, so probably tokens or gift cards of some sort. You have until midnight GMT on 1 January 2024 to submit your entry

NB: I need an operational email to ensure I can tell you if you are a winner. That is all I will use it for.

Podcasts

Black Stoneflower: A unique Indian spice A 25-year effort to track down an elusive but ubiquitous source of flavour in Indian cooking

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A branch encrusted with Parmotrema petrolatum, Black Stoneflower, a lichen used as a spice in many Indian dishes

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:11 — 23.2MB)

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Cover artwork

In 1997, Priya Mani fished something strange out of the cauliflower soup she was served at a wedding banquet in India. She didn’t know what it was, she knew only that she was not willing to eat it. Twenty-five years later, her article in Art of Eating shared her discoveries about a spice essentially unknown even in India, one that makes a very elusive contribution to flavour, best described as “you know it when it’s missing”.

Priya Mani eventually identified the strange thing in her soup as a lichen called Parmotrema perfolatum, commonly known in English as black stoneflower. Lichens are an odd group of plants made up of algae or bacteria living within the cells of a fungus. You’ve seen them on rocks and trees, I’m sure. Black stoneflower turns out to be ubiquitous in Indian cooking, though its presence is not often remarked. Its popularity may now be threatening its survival.

Notes

  1. Priya Mani has two Instagram channels, @priya.mani.design and @cookalore, which is a showcase for her Visual Encyclopaedia of Indian Cooking.
  2. Her article Tasting a Tasteless Taste: Stoneflower Lichens as a Spice in Indian Food is in Art of Eating No. 111 and, contrary to what I said in the podast, seems to be available to read.
  3. With apologies for the delay, here is the transcript.
  4. Banner photo by Priya Mani. Cover photo of putative Black Stone Flower by s_bala.
  5. You do know about John Wyndham’s book Trouble with Lichen, I hope.

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