- Two posts about technological fixes in the food industry. Wouldn’t it be cool to eavesdrop on a discussion between David Zilberman and Rachel Laudan?
- Germany is helping India’s spice growers to undo some recent technological fixes.
- A peer-reviewed study of the Mediterranean diet is retracted on 13 June and republished a week later with essentially the same conclusion. Marion Nestle asks: What are we to make of all this?
- Hard to believe I somehow had not mentioned the first of One Angry Chef’s two carefully considered pieces about Jordan Peterson, but here they are: Thermidor Part 1 and Part 2.
- The London Review of Books often releases articles from a while back. Here’s a joy, Angela Carter reviewing Redcliffe Salaman’s classic book on the potato.
- CDC retracts finding that farmers have the highest suicide rate in the country. Solid detective work by Nathan Rosenberg and Bryce Wilson Stucki busts another agricultural myth.
- Farm Aid is awfully sorry about the high suicide rate among farm workers, but “will continue to prioritize farmer stress despite [the] retraction”.
- Maybe they should just go back and listen to Nathan and Bryce butzing the myths of American agricultural history.
Eat This Newsletter 080 Is the living easy yet?
- Have you ever wondered how all those different specialty sauces get to supermarket shelves? Wonder no more.
- By now we all know that chocolate is a fermented food, right? But there’s still so much we don’t know about The Microbial Ecology of Chocolate.
- You know what else is fermented? Coffee. Take a deep draught from the annals of coffee vessels.
- Date of Italy’s earliest olive oil pushed back a few hundred years. Probably a bit fermented by now.
- The author of Big Chicken scratches in the dirt to locate figures on the use of antibiotics in American agriculture.
- Which is a perfect opportunity to plug my podcast on antibiotics and agriculture, in case you haven’t heard it.
Eight Degrees of assimilation Buying a brewer for the barrels not the beer
Irish Distillers, itself owned by Pernod Ricard, recently bought Eight Degrees Brewing, a craft brewer in Ireland. That’s interesting for lots of reasons.
For a start, I’ve had a lot of enjoyment from the beers produced by Eight Degrees, which are delicious no matter what you’re listening to. They’re good beers, not fussy, and excellent drinking.
On the other hand, consolidation in the beer industry is proceeding apace, with big players swallowing craft brewers and putting out their own “craftwashed” beers at a premium, at least in the US. In many cases, the product has suffered, so there could be some cause for concern among Eight Degrees’ fans. To be honest, though, there isn’t much evidence of any concern.)
But … the reason given for the “multimillion-euro deal” is more interesting than a mere takeover.
The primary objective of the purchase of the brewer is to ensure a long-term beer supply to sustain the continued growth of Jameson Caskmates, a product introduced by Irish Distillers on a trial basis in 2014.
Caskmates, as I did not know, is a Jameson mark that ages whiskey in barrels first used by craft brewers. (I’m partial myself to a single malt aged in sherry barrels, but that’s by the by.) Caskmates is, apparently, very popular. And its previous supplier of used craft beer barrels, despite being owned by giant Molson-Coors, risked running out. By buying a much bigger but still craft brewer, the deal secures a supply of barrels in which Jameson can age their whiskey, which with luck means that Eight Degrees will have every incentive to produce tasty beer and plenty of used barrels.
I remain cautiously optimistic.
Stores promote soda on SNAP days
New Food Economy recently revealed that grocery stores push soda sales on the days that people receive their SNAP benefits, especially in low-income neighbourhoods. The news is based on an academic paper currently in press, and would be shocking indeed if it were not for a few things. ((Increases in Sugary Drink Marketing During Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Benefit Issuance in New York. I can’t afford to pay for access, nor do I feel I need to as New Food Economy has quite a detailed account, and I’m assuming that is accurate.)) In essence the study, by Alyssa Moran and her colleagues, shows that in three towns in New York state, stores were almost twice as likely to promote sugar-sweetened beverages on the days SNAP benefits were issued (the first 9 days of the month) compared to other days, and that the effect was greater (4 times more likely) in areas that had more SNAP recipients.
What’s wrong with that? Nothing, as far as it goes. But a couple of aspects of the study and the reporting worry me. For one, the data are from 2011; maybe things have already changed. I also wondered how common it was for states to distribute SNAP benefits in a big chunk at the beginning of the month. I already knew that each state has its own rules, and that when people get their benefits has an influence on crime. So I turned to the USDA’s Monthly Issuance Schedule for All States and Territories.
Skimming that, Alaska, Guam, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont and the Virgin Islands all distribute benefits on a single day each month. Is the effect is even more pronounced in those places? A few places dole out benefits on a few days, but more spread out over the month. Is the effect weaker there?
And quite a few places disburse benefits across several days. ((Alabama (20), Delaware (22), Florida (29), Georgia (10 spread over 18 days), Illinois (12 over 20 days), Indiana (10 over 18 days), Kentucky (10 over 19 days), Maryland (20), Massachusetts (10 over 14 days), Michigan (10 over 18 days), Mississippi (18), Missouri (22), New Mexico (20), North Carolina (10 over 18 days), Ohio (10 over 18 days), Tennessee (20), Texas (10 over 15 days), Wisconsin (10 over 13 days). New York City spreads benefits over 13 days at the beginning of the month.)) Is it worthwhile for shopkeepers to give sugary drinks extra marketing attention over a longer period of time, or should they just do it all the time?
What I’m saying, I suppose, is that the study could be so much richer than it currently is, which might then add some illumination to the paper’s conclusion:
Increases in sugar-sweetened beverage marketing during issuance may exacerbate disparities in diet quality of households participating in SNAP. Policy changes, like extending SNAP benefit issuance, may mitigate these effects.
Maybe. Maybe.
And then there’s New Food Economy’s conclusion:
People using food stamps are encouraged to buy soda as soon as they’ve got money in their pockets.
I suspect they need no encouragement to do so. Why shouldn’t people treat themselves to a soda when they have a bit more to spend? The bigger issue is whether grocery stores should be promoting their profits at the expense of the government.
Eat This Newsletter 079 More is more
- OK, this is very worthwhile: Science magazine has a really good round-up of the latest research on What’s really behind ‘gluten sensitivity’?. (I’d have removed that final question mark, but what do I know.)
- So is this: Diet and cancer risk: the latest research evidence. Marion Nestle offers her very brief summary and, better yet, links to all the underlying evidence.
- It says here that it will take you almost 18 years to make Eggs Benedict from scratch. Recursive Recipes is a bit of fun and takes a bit of exploring to see what’s going on. You need to play with the slider under Time limit to see how things change.
- I haven’t quite worked out why you need apples for Eggs Benedict, and I was going to link to an article about apple breeding on Popular Science, but the GDPR-overkill has made me very wary. There has to be a better way. Maybe if you’re not in Europe the link will work for you. Please, let me know.
- In any case, if you plan to do things from scratch, you might want to study What Does a Seed Farmer Do?.
- That article tells me that “most modern-day farmers don’t have time for it, nor the know-how”. Very true, alas, and thankfully not a problem for the African farmers enslaved and sent to Suriname. My compadre Luigi found a super video showing how they transported their rice seeds with them.
- Claims to contain truffles are often bogus, and being expensive is often no guarantee that you’re getting what you’re paying for. Welcome, then, to research that can “clearly discriminate foods that contained synthetic truffle aroma or a mixture of synthetic and natural aromas, and … distinguish among products containing white truffle and those containing other species of the fungus.” Or, you know, just buy truffles, if you can.