Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 018

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30 November 2015

Domesticated bliss

  1. Rachel Laudan writes about the origins of rice, maize and chickens.
  2. Not forgetting the sweet potatoes.
  3. Maybe the awful headline did attract some readers, but I’m here to help you get past it and find out about Clementine Paddleford.
  4. “Ninety minutes into the meeting, we were still trying to agree what the hell a vegetable was.” Was that meeting of nutritionists worthwhile? You be the judge.
  5. A history of modern Irish cheesemaking.

I was in Ireland last week, and managed not to do Irish cheese. But I did lots of other good things that will show up in the podcast in due course.

Podcasts

How to measure what farms produce Going beyond yield and calories to the true value of production

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defriesHow should we measure what farms produce? The answer drives some pretty important trends. For the past 60 years and more, the key metric has been yield – tonnes per hectare or equivalent. And it has resulted in extraordinary improvements in productivity, at least as measured by yield, and at least for some crops. Over the past 60 years, the productivity of the three major cereals – wheat, rice and maize – has gone up 3.2 times, more than keeping up with the 2.3-times increase in population. And the total production of those three has gone up from 66 per cent of all cereals to 79 percent over the same period. Largely as a result, we no longer see the same large-scale famines that we used to.

Yield, however, isn’t everything. Nor are calories, which some people have embraced as a better measure than yield. The world produces enough calories for everyone (ignoring for now the fact that there are problems with distribution) but calories are not enough.

As Ruth DeFreis says in the podcast, “If calories were everything, why would we have a billion iron-deficient people?”

Ruth and her co-authors have come up with an alternative measure, nutritional yield: “The number of adults who would be able to obtain 100% of their recommended DRI [dietary reference intake] of different nutrients for 1 year from a food item produced annually on one hectare”.

To me, this makes intuitive sense. Food – as opposed to, say, biofuel – is for nourishing people, not powering machines. So of course there’s more to it than calories. I’ve tried saying as much to pundits gung-ho for yield or calories, even before I read the paper, but with no great success. So when the topic came up again I jumped at the opportunity to speak to the lead author.

Notes

  1. Ruth DeFries recently published The Big Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural Crisis.
  2. Metrics for land-scarce agriculture is in the 17 July 2015 issue of Science.
  3. My side of the little rant is at the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog. The calorie-fans can put their own side up if they’re so minded.
  4. A couple of weeks later, my compadre Luigi wrote about the Science paper and added his own views.
Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 017

  0

16 November 2015

Eating information

  1. You’ll never look at that green blob next to your sushi the same again.
  2. A technocrat speaks: “Local and organic is a romantic myth – the future of sustainable agriculture is all about smart technology and scaling up”.
  3. How does agriculture use land?
  4. Which crops make money?
  5. Who will eat most meat?

The last three are intended to whet your appetite for next week’s podcast on nutritional yield.

Extra Matter

More on emulsifiers

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When I spoke to Peter Hertzmann about Just Mayo, we talked a bit about the nature of mayonnaise. Now, here’s more, prompted by an article by Ari LeVaux (who told me a while ago why frozen beef is best).

Mayo

Take a quick look at the picture above. Do the two sets of packaging look similar? I think they do. Certainly more similar than either of them is to Just Mayo’s jar.

Just mayoSo here’s the question: if you were in a hurry, and looking for “real” mayonnaise, which would you pick up? Brown Just Mayo, or one of the blue-branded jars above?

I thought so.

The jars above left are from a company called Follow Your Heart, which produces a range of vegan foods, including one called Vegenaise. To me, the package looks like Hellman’s mayonnaise. Even though it doesn’t claim to be mayonnaise, I’d assume it was. And yet, as far as I can tell, Vegenaise has had no trouble from the American Egg Board, the USDA, the FDA or Unilever, which own Best Foods, maker of Hellman’s mayonnaise. That may be because, unlike Just Mayo, it is targeting vegans, and nobody much cares what they buy.

But it makes a much more important point: there’s no big deal about the egg in mayonnaise, no matter what the FDA and its rules may say. The egg yolk is there purely to stabilise the emulsion of oil and water. In fact, there’s so little of it that all three — Hellman’s, Vegenaise and Just Mayo — record 0% protein on their nutrition labels.

The emulsifier is important, no doubt about that, but the exact chemical nature or source of that emulsifier is, to all intents and purposes, irrelevant. So, why the fuss?

Because of that definition of mayonnaise, I suppose. But the definition is completely past its sell-by date. It needs to change. And then maybe Vegenaise could change its name too and appeal to everyone who would rather not depend on the cheapest products of the chicken industry.

Meanwhile, Hampton Creek, maker of Just Mayo, is playing word games:

“The term ‘mayo’ should not now be held to the regulatory standard for ‘mayonnaise,’” wrote the company’s lawyer, Josh Schiller.

So yes, they’re guilty, bang to rights, of making a product that isn’t mayonnaise. But the fuddy-duddy old FDA is guilty of confusing “mayo” with “mayonnaise”.

“While there is a food standard of identity for ‘mayonnaise,’ there is no current standard for ‘mayo’. … Hampton Creek does not use the term ‘mayonnaise’ on any of its products or any of its marketing materials … If FDA had intended to cover products that use the term ‘mayo’ in its standard for mayonnaise, it could have done so, yet it did not.”

To which, I think, Vegenaise has countered with a neat little tag-line “It’s Better than Mayo”. I can’t swear to it, but I don’t think that was there when I first started looking at the stuff.

It’s fun watching this play out. I’ll stick to my whizzed concoction of tahini, yoghurt and lemon juice.

Podcasts

The Dark Ages were a time of prosperity Latest evidence points to productive and sustainable agriculture

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book-coverThe Dark Ages ran for about 400 years, from around the fall of the Roman Empire, in the middle of the 6th century, to around the 10th or 11th centuries. It was dark because the light of Rome had been extinguished, while that of the Renaissance had not yet burst into flame. And it was supposed to be a time when the culture and economy of Europe slumped. Peasants in scattered rural settlements scratched out a living in ignorance and obscurity. Recent archaeological excavations, however, have changed the way people look at the Dark Ages.

Richard Hodges, President of the American University in Rome, wrote a book back in the 1980s called Dark Age Economics, and it subscribed, more or less, to the prevailing wisdom. Recently, though, he has completely written the story, and Dark Ace Economics: A New Audit reinterprets this fascinating period in Europe’s development. He presented a very brief introduction at the recent sustainability conference organised by the American University of Rome and the American Academy in Rome, where he said that farming in the Dark Ages was much more productive and sustainable than people previously thought. Luckily, the American University in Rome is close at hand.

There is a lot more I would have liked to go into; the spread of the plough, animal breeding, the wool economy. I confess I find this sort of thing very beguiling, and I hope you do too. Maybe another time.

Notes

  1. Dark Ace Economics: A New Audit is published by Bloomsbury.
  2. I remember reading Marshall Sahlins’ The Original Affluent Society when it first came out, and it made a huge impression. (As did Marv Harris, but that’s a story for another day.)
  3. The extreme weather events of 535–536 were news to me; they shouldn’t have been.