Podcasts

We need to talk about diets And nutrition …

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dietTruth be told, I’m not really big on huge international conferences. I’ve been to enough of them to know the score; lots of talk, lots of platitudes, lots of good intentions, lots of inertia. Despite all my prejudices, however, I dragged myself down to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations recently to witness for myself the International Symposium on Sustainable Food Systems for Healthy Diets and Improved Nutrition.

I did so because the week before, the journal Nature had published two Comments that made a very good case for the need for a drastic change in the discourse about global food supplies and food security. Some of the authors, and many other luminaries, were due to be at FAO, and I wanted to see for myself how the discussions would unfold.

Of the need for change, I am more convinced than ever. As to whether it will happen, that’s another story.

Notes

  1. If you want to investigate the symposium yourself, you can.
  2. The Nature paper with Corinna Hawkes and Patrick Webb among the co-authors is online. It is a very good read.
Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 045

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Eat This Newsletter 45

5 December 2016

Authentic food news

Thin gruel this week, I’m afraid, not least because I spent three days last week in the belly of the beast at FAO in Rome, at the International Symposium on Sustainable Food Systems for Healthy Diets and Improved Nutrition. Sure it’s just another talking shop, but some of the talk was rather interesting and may eventually amount to more than hot air. More on that later, maybe. So, here’s your meagre serving:

  1. “When better food is affordable, people still have to want it. The food movement can’t just fix supply. It has to address demand.” The FAO meeting heard that malnutrition — of the overweight obese kind — goes up as people have more money. Silly people! This has always been a problem, and I only wish I had seen this article before the meeting.

  2. Then there’s the question of people who choose not merely to eat things that may not be good for them, but to do so to excess. Sarah Loman’s “brief history of competitive eating” is a treat.

  3. Cynthia D. Bertelsen continues to make her case that “southern” food in the US owes at least as much to the British as to other immigrants, in the run-up to reviewing a book on The British Table. I’m staying well out of the way.

  4. So, why the hope for change in global food systems? A couple of rather interesting papers in Nature:

Podcasts

The Culinary Breeding Network Breeding vegetables for flavour; now there’s a thought

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 18:32 — 15.2MB)

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lane-selmanMany vegetables don’t taste of anything much these days, but whose fault is that, really? Plant breeders produce what growers want, and growers want what people will buy. So why aren’t people buying flavour? Mostly because they aren’t being offered a real choice. Lane Selman, who works on organic projects at Oregon State University, discovered that although organic growers say they want disease resistance, for example, they don’t actually grow existing disease-resistant varieties “because they taste terrible”. Lane enlisted a handful of chefs to taste some peppers that a local breeder was working with. From that quiet beginning has blossomed the Culinary Breeding Network, which aims to “bridge the gap between breeders and eaters to improve agricultural and culinary quality”.

For the past three years, Lane has organised a variety showcase that pairs chefs with breeders and growers to display their combined talents, creating interesting vegetable varieties and interesting dishes from those varieties. We talked about how the Culinary Breeding Network began and about the latest variety showcase.

Notes

  1. The Culinary Breeding Network has a website and the home page currently features a video of this year’s variety showcase. It’s fun.
  2. Lane’s video explaining the overall project is here.
  3. The breeders Lane Selman works with include Frank Morton, of Wild Garden Seed, Bill Tracy at the University of Wisconsin and Michael Mazourek at Cornell University.
  4. The Organic Seed Alliance is also a partner.
  5. All photographs (c) Shawn Linehan.
  6. It would be remiss of me not to take this opportunity to point you to an earlier episode about backyard vegetable breeding with Carol Deppe.

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Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 044

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21 November 2016

Authentic food news

No apologies this week for focusing on North America. There are still plenty of things to give thanks for.

  1. Revisiting authenticity, this time in the context of mezcal. It’s only the abstract of a student anthro paper, but it looks really interesting, examining the differences between local authenticity and global authenticity.
  2. 538 unravels a weird fact about farms in the USA: The number of farms has stayed about the same, and yet there has been huge consolidation among farms. Part of the answer: “These aren’t the farms of the poor; they’re the yards of the upper-middle-class.”
  3. The official estimated price of Thanksgiving dinner has dropped. Again

    What’s nice, to me, is that we both have questions about what the headline price of that feast leaves out.

  4. Back to 538 for the last word on Thanksgiving, and a self-selecting, undoubtedly biassed but nevertheless fascinating attempt to define “the best possible Thanksgiving dinner”. I expect the results to be really scary.