Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 068

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11 December 2017

  1. Oooh, Mark Bittman triggers a spat in the young farmer good food movement.
  2. Bittman doesn’t seem too savvy about the history of American farm policy, unlike you (if you heard Rethinking the folk history of American agriculture). He could catch up with the latest article from that show’s guests, Nathan Rosenberg and Bryce Wilson Stucki.
  3. Are you ready for another myth buster? The Farm Bill is not the reason junk food is cheap. Because the whole point of junk food is to add “value” to the cheapest possible ingredients.
  4. Growing commodities that aren’t quite so cheap is beginning to gain traction in the heartland.
  5. While adding value to commodities that aren’t quite so cheap is the next step in community restoration.
  6. After which, I need to reiterate my wish to be able to find non-American stories more easily, like this one: I swallowed the hype about the earliest wine makers in Georgia. Luckily there are people who know enough about the subject to pour a little cold water on it.


Extra Matter

Antibiotics in US agriculture going down

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The Salt, at NPR, asks: Is The Tide Of Antibiotic Use On Farms Now Turning? and gives the lie to my standard view that the answer to any question in a headline is always “No!

The Food And Drug Administration released its annual accounting of antibiotics sold in America for use in poultry, pigs and cattle, and for the very first time, it reported that fewer of the drugs were sold. Sales of medically important antibiotics in 2016 declined by 14 percent, compared to 2015.

So the answer instead is a cautious “Maybe”.

Podcasts

Feeding people is easy A conversation with Colin Tudge

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:33 — 22.1MB)

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“Plenty of plants, not much meat and maximum variety.”

The best advice for a good diet I’ve ever heard. It’s a maxim devised by Colin Tudge, long before anything similar you may have heard from more recent writers. Tudge, more than anyone else I know, has consistently championed the idea that meat ought to be seen in a supporting role, rather than as the main attraction, a garnish, if you will.

Tudge has been thinking and writing about agriculture and food systems for a long time, and we’ve been friends for a long time too. In fact, it’s fair to say that knowing Colin has influenced my own thoughts about food and farming quite a bit. As far as Colin is concerned, we’ve been going about farming in completely the wrong way for the past 100 years or so. Instead of asking how can we grow more food, more cheaply, he thinks we should focus on what we need – good, wholesome food that doesn’t destroy the earth – and then ask how we can provide that for everybody.

He’s expanded and built on those ideas in many books since Future Cook (Future Food in the US), which contained that pithy dietary advice and which was published in 1980. And rather than reform or revolution, neither of which will do the job he thinks needs to be done, he advocates for a renaissance in real farming.

Notes

  1. The Campaign for Real Farming and The College for Enlightened Agriculture share a website.
  2. More details on the Oxford Real Farming Conference.
  3. The two books we mentioned are Feeding People is Easy and Good Food for Everyone Forever.

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Extra Matter

Evidence on agriculture and antibiotics

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Ampicillin was introduced to the British market in 1961. By 1962, there were outbreaks of disease caused by strains of Salmonella typhimurium resistant to the antibiotic. A new study shows that the use of penicillin on farms from the 1950s gave the bacteria a head start. A team at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France, looked at samples of S. typhimurium collected from people, livestock, food and feed between 1911 and 1969. From the announcement:

“Our findings suggest that antibiotic residues in farming environments such as soil, waste water, and manure may have a much greater impact on the spread of resistance than previously thought”, says Dr Francois-Xavier Weill, who led the study.

When are we going to see real action on this?