Podcasts

Ireland’s apple collection A visit to the Irish Seedsavers Association yields history and modern science

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Nobody knows when the first apples were specifically selected in Ireland. The earliest written record dates to 1598, “when a writer discusses the fruitful nature of Irish orchards and the merits of the fine old Irish varieties contained in them”. (A brief history | Cider Ireland) The next couple of centuries saw a blossoming of native Irish apples, as farmers and landowners selected varieties that suited their conditions. In the middle of the 20th century, however, those myriad varieties began to be lost as consolidation and uniformity took hold.

JGD Lamb (“informally known as Keith”) was one of the few people who worried about this loss. Lamb obtained his PhD in 1949 with a thesis entitled The Apple in Ireland: Its History and Varieties. In the process, he collected 53 old varieties, creating vigorous new trees by grafting them onto suitable rootstocks. These new trees formed the basis of the national collection at University College Dublin. Lamb also sent duplicates of many to the main apple breeding centre in the UK at Brogdale and it was just as well that he did, because some time later the UCD collection was grubbed up and destroyed. Whether by accident or design, nobody knows, but if it hadn’t been for the safety duplicates much of Lamb’s work would have been in vain.

In the early 1990s, Anita Hayes, founder of the Irish Seedsavers Association, launched a public hunt to recover the varieties Keith Lamb had collected and any that he missed. The end result was a restored national collection, the Lamb-Clarke collection at University College, Dublin, and the start of the Seedsavers own apple collection, which now numbers about 180 varieties. That includes 70 of Irish origin and the rest collected in Ireland but originally brought from elsewhere. And the hunt goes on. Roughly 50 Irish varieties that were documented in the past have so far not shown up.

photographic apples
Eoin Keane adding to the apple documentation

Documentation is probably the hardest part of keeping a collection of apples (or any long-lived food) alive. Names change with time and place, memories fade, identities are appropriated and forgotten. DNA testing can tell you whether two samples are in fact one and the same, but not, as yet, any more than that. Meticulous, ongoing record-keeping gradually adds to the sum of knowledge but – as Eoin Keane explained in the podcast – sometimes it is a chance encouter that provides a vital bit of information that fleshes out an apple’s story. Unknown J, the apple I tasted and found so delicious, is no less delicious because we know nothing about it. But how much more would I like it if it had a romantic history to relate?

Notes

  1. I highly recommend a visit to the Irish Seedsavers Association in Scariff, County Clare.
  2. Tommy Hayes’ Apples in winter is “a celebration of the Irish apple in music, song, dance and film”. If I had my way I’d be enjoying it with a good russet and a sharp Cheddar, but that’s just me.
  3. Photos by me. The small one is Anita Hayes’ mystery medicinal apple.

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Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 64

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16 October 2017

  1. Everyone else seems to have gone to town on Richard Thaler’s Nobel Prize and how his research can help people choose healthier diets. So I’ll point to The Economist’s very thoughtful analysis of the link between land reform and prosperity.
  2. A lovely listen, as Laurie Taylor hears about the history of restaurants and restaurant critics on Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed.
  3. Nebraska gives New York a licking in the great Reuben sandwich origin war. For reasons I can’t quite articulate, this piece made me very happy, although I have yet to try Ken Albala’s deconstructed Reuben noodle soup.
  4. How do you deal with modern food marketing if you eschew modern technology? A cracking story about Amish workarounds.
  5. And another one on a farmer in western Georgia who “has now reverted to ways that his grandfather might recognise,” not least by giving up on sub-therapeutic antibiotics.
  6. Shameless self-promotion: I went to town on one defender of antibiotics in agriculture.

By the way, I hope those Economist links are available. Please let me know if they’re behind a paywall for you.

Extra Matter

Resistance is fudgeable

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Editing the recent podcast on Antibiotics in agriculture was far harder than I expected it to be, mostly because I had to cut away stuff that is important, but just didn’t fit. Much of that was about how, in time honoured tradition, antibiotic manufacturers and veterinarians sowed doubts about who was to blame for what. Here’s a bit of that. Claas Kirchhelle’s paper uncovers a lot more.

The Animal Health Institute is an organisation in the US that represents many manufacturers of veterinary products. If you go to the Animal Antibiotics section of the AHI’s website, you’ll find, among other things, a page on The Antibiotic Ban in Denmark: A Case Study on Politically Driven Bans. Given that everyone I’ve spoken to seems to regard Denmark as a shining example of how to regulate antibiotics in agriculture, I wanted to see what the AHI made of it.

Their conclusion:

Bottom line: A ban on AGPs in Denmark has not had the intended benefit of reducing antibiotic resistance patterns in humans; it has had the unintended consequence of increasing animal suffering, pain and death.

To back that up, the AHI helpfully publishes this graph.

This does show an increase in the therapeutic use of antibiotics, which exceeds the amount used before Denmark’s ban on antibiotic growth promotors came into force. Claas Kirchhelle said as much when we spoke. In fact, just a cursory look at the graph suggests that antibiotic use is much higher in 2009 than it was in the peak year of 1994. Which, of course, is exactly what the AHI would like you to think. There are, however, a couple of worrying things about that graph. First, why are the years across the bottom evenly spaced, when there are years missing? That’s always fishy. Much more importantly, why does the graph end in 2009, when here we are in 2017?

Bravely, the AHI provides a link to Denmark’s official report for 2009, so I didn’t have to hunt for it myself. And there, of course, is the official version of the same graph.

A couple of things to note.

  • The Danes do not skip years for which they don’t show data, so the slopes, which indicate how quickly things are changing, are more accurate.
  • For the years up until 1999, the Danes stack AGPs and therapeutic antibiotics on top of one another, showing total use of antibiotics in animals. So you can see that although therapeutic use has gone up, total use is quite a bit lower in 2009 than it was in 1994.
  • The Danish graph shows figures for the human use of antibiotics from 1997 onwards; it may be increasing slightly, and is about one-third the use in animals. AHI does not show these data at all.

These points all make me think that maybe the AHI redrew the graph not merely to inject colourful chart junk but also to hide the facts it represents. Looking at the official Danish graph for 2016, published just a week ago, makes me certain.

Well, would you look at that. Antibiotic use in animals started to decline in 2010 and has continued on a downward path. In humans it has gone up a little.

To me, this manipulation of the data (and a whole lot else on the AHI site, like the utterly ludicrous probabilities here) fully confirm my view that the AHI knows perfectly well that it hasn’t got a leg to stand on. Other organisations fighting tighter regulation of antibiotics and livestock are probably the same.

There’s more, much more, which is why editing the podcast was so hard. Like the evidence that in the UK the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry lobbied hard to have the editor of New Scientist magazine fired. Bernard Dixon, himself a microbiologist, was instrumental in drawing public attention to the very clear evidence collected by E.S. “Andy” Anderson of the Public Health Laboratory Service, connecting antibiotics on the farm with antibiotic resistance in bacteria and – most importantly – demonstrating that resistance could move from harmless bacteria to pathogenic ones.

Part of the industry’s argument against greater regulation of antibiotics is that because antibiotics are also used in human medicine, we can’t be sure how much resistance is the result of medical use and how much the result of use on the farm. In one sense, animals and humans actually receive about the same amount of antibiotics a year, if you measure antibiotics per kilogram per organism. But the total biomass of animals getting antibiotics is far, far greater than the mass of humans; overall something like 70–80% of antibiotics go to agriculture, not human medicine. Worse, in animals almost all antibiotics are given in sub-therapeutic doses, perfect conditions for selecting resistant bacteria.

Of course there are gaps in our knowledge; there always are. But that is not a good reason to block action. The final part of the McNeill report for the British government has this to say (p 10):

Where gaps in the evidence remain, they should be filled But given all that we know already, it does not make sense to delay action further: the burden of proof should be for those who oppose curtailing the use of antimicrobials in food production to explain why, not the other way around.

Podcasts

Antibiotics and agriculture Tackling the problem of antibiotic resistance at (one) source

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In the past year or so there has been a slew of high-level meetings pointing to antibiotic resistance as a growing threat to human well-being. But then, resistance was always an inevitable, Darwinian consequence of antibiotic use. Well before penicillin was widely available, Ernst Chain, who went on to win a Nobel Prize for his work on penicillin, noted that some bacteria were capable of neutralising the antibiotic.

What is new about the recent pronouncements and decisions is that the use of antibiotics in agriculture is being recognised, somewhat belatedly, as a major source of resistance. Antibiotic manufacturers and the animal health industry have, since the start, done everything they can to deny that. Indeed, the history of efforts to regulate the use of antibiotics in agriculture reveals a pretty sordid approach to public health.

But while it can be hard to prove the connection between agriculture and a specific case of antibiotic resistance, a look at hundreds of recent academic studies showed that almost three quarters of them did demonstrate a conclusive link.

Antibiotic resistance – whether it originates with agriculture or inappropriate medical use – takes us back almost 100 years, when infectious diseases we now consider trivial could, and did, kill. It reduces the effectiveness of other procedures too, such as surgery and chemotherapy, by making it more likely that a subsequent infection will wreck the patient’s prospects. So it imposes huge costs on society as a whole.

Maybe society as a whole needs to tackle the problem. The Oxford Martin School, which supports a portfolio of highly interdisciplinary research groups at Oxford University, has a Programme on Collective Responsibility for Infectious Disease. They recently published a paper proposing a tax on animal products produced with antibiotics. Could that possibly work?

Notes

  1. The paper by Alberto Giubilini and his colleagues is Taxing Meat: Taking Responsibility for One’s Contribution to Antibiotic Resistance. He also wrote an article explaining why we should tax meat that contains antibiotics.
  2. Claas Kirchhelle’s paper on the history of antibiotic regulation in Britain will be published in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine. His prize-winning D.Phil thesis Pyrrhic Progress – Antibiotics and Western Food Production (1949–2013) will be published by Rutgers University Press.
  3. Reducing antimicrobial use in food animals, published in Science after I had talked to Alberto and Claas, has some interesting things to say about a tax on antibiotics and other ways to tackle antibiotic resistance.
  4. The UK government’s Review on Antimicrobial Resistance is a valuable source of information.
  5. Pig pill image from the National Academy of Medicine. Banner image of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus from the Wellcome Trust.

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Extra Matter

Mouldy salt

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It’s a scary headline alright:

Mold contamination in sea salts could potentially spoil food

I checked the press release, and yes, sea salts contained spores of some moulds that could conceivably result in food spoilage. A couple of things worried me though. Do other salts, and even the much vaunted kosher salt, also contain mould spores? And, although the spores are there, do they cause spoilage? I mean, if you swabbed my hands right now you might find potentially harmful bacteria, but are they actually going to make me ill? Probably not.

So I looked at the full paper. The first thing that struck me was that the one salt that isn’t made by evaporating sea water now, Himalayan salt — “labeled as a sea salt when in fact it was mined from an ancient sea salt deposit” — had by far the lowest level of fungal spores. So maybe “ordinary” salt would be similarly uncontaminated.

Sea salt may have contributed to food spoilage in cured meats before now, and the paper also identified some fungal species that produce toxins. Overall, through, there’s nothing in the paper to suggest why we should be more worried about sea salt than other kinds of salt.

I’m waiting to see the follow-up, where researchers use different salts to preserve meat or vegetables, taking all the usual precautions, to see whether the fungi survive once fermentation really gets going.