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It’s putrid, it’s paleo, and it’s good for you How do you get your vitamin C where no fruit and veg will grow?

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As our ancestors moved north out of Africa, and especially as they found themselves in climates that supported less gathering and more hunting, they were faced with an acute nutritional problem: scurvy. Humans are one of the few mammals that cannot manufacture this vital little chemical compound (others being the guinea pig and fruit bats). If there are no fruit and veg around, where will that vitamin C come from?

That’s a question that puzzled John Speth, an archaeologist and Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He found clues in the accounts of sailors and explorers shipwrecked in the Arctic. Those who, often literally, turned their noses up at the “disgusting” diet of the locals sometimes paid with their lives. Those who ate what the locals ate lived to tell the tale. John Speth told me the tale of how he came to propose the idea that putrid meat and fish may have been a key part of Neanderthal and modern human diet during the Palaeolithic.

Notes

  1. Read Putrid Meat and Fish in the Eurasian Middle and Upper Paleolithic: Are We Missing a Key Part of Neanderthal and Modern Human Diet? for John Speth’s full chain of reasoning – and all the wonderful first-hand accounts.
  2. Two articles, one from the University of Pennsylvania and one from the University of Chicago, give a flavour of Paul Rozin’s research.
  3. The Centers for Disease Control in the US has an interesting page on botulism in Alaska.
  4. Discover Magazine did a story on Alaskan food.
  5. But you know, I am just so sick of the whole 73-disgusting-foods-you-won’t-believe-people-not-like-us-eat trope, I could throw up. Get over it, people.
  6. I cobbled together the banner image from two images at Wikimedia, a ball and stick model of viatmin C and an illustration from The Arctic whaleman; or, Winter in the Arctic Ocean: being a narrative of the wreck of the whale ship Citizen. I know the whalers were taken care of by local people, but not whether any succumbed to scurvy. Nobody seems to know where the fish stink-head photo comes from — unless you do.

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Extra Matter

Fact checking the Dead Zone

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You maybe saw headlines blaming meat producers for the bigger-than-ever dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. You maybe even saw them in reputable newspapers. But Katherine McDonald at Big Picture Agriculture has pointed out that pinning the blame on the meat industry is based on what she calls a “ludicrous statistical error”.

That’s not to say that the dead zone isn’t a problem. It is. But blaming it on the meat industry — because animals eat soybeans and corn, and soybeans and and corn get most of the nitrogen fertiliser that runs off down the Mississippi into the Gulf — is just plain wrong.

The report that prompted the headlines claimed that

The domestic meat market consumes 70 percent of the soybeans grown in the U.S. and 40 percent of the corn, and is the biggest single market for both of these crops.

But as Katherine points out:

Since 50 percent of our soybeans are exported, more than 11 percent are used to produce biodiesel, and yet more to produce oil and other products, obviously their claim that 70 percent of our U.S. grown soybeans are consumed by our domestic meat market is off base by a very, very wide margin.

The outfit that produced the report says it has amended that figure, but when I looked 2 minutes ago, it was still there. And while animal feed alone is not the only reason to blame industrial meat for the dead zone, it clearly makes for a much less interesting story if you can’t beat evil food corporations over the head.

Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 059

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7 August 2017

  1. I hadn’t been planning to see the new film Okja – “the story of a big corporation’s effort to develop and market a genetically modified pig in a way that will make it appealing to the masses” is how David Berriss describes it in his review – but on the strength of that review, I just might give it a shot.
  2. Berriss talks about that stock trope, “the evil corporation that controls our food supply”. Perdue Farms is dipping its toes into the “Don’t Be Evil” water, and I for one welcome this move from our chicken overlords. I’m not even going to question their motives.
  3. Step aside, Antoine-Augustin Parmentier; there’s a new European potato hero in town. Eva Ekeblad, celebrated in a Google Doodle did much to change the agricultural economy of Sweden by making alcohol from potatoes, freeing grain for more nutritious uses. (I missed the Doodle because I don’t use Google.)
  4. This is frankly weird. The health benefits of the Mediterranean diet in Italy are restricted to higher socioeconomic groups. The original paper suggests that even in groups scoring the same for their adherence to the Mediterranean diet, there were differences in what they ate: “These nutritional gaps may reasonably explain at least in part the socioeconomic pattern of CVD protection from the MD.”
  5. An article on strawberries claims it can “teach us a great deal about politics and colonialism,” and that’s true.
  6. How much more exciting, through, is what strawberries teach us about money, power and intellectual property. My compadre Luigi has been following the Strawberry Wars assiduously, from the opening skirmishes, through a broken ceasefire and a fresh offensive to a recent declaration of victory though not, as yet, news of the peace treaty and reparations, which had been due to be formalised on 6 July.