Tomorrow’s newsletter links to a lovely long piece in the New York Times Magazine about the Bread Lab at Washington State University. Behind much of the research is the worry that modern wheats are less nutritious than their parents. There’s good evidence for that, and I recently came across a new study that enlarges the scope of that worry to all the main staples.
The graph may seem a bit complex, but stick with it (and click to enlarge). It shows the percent of the daily recommended intake of four important nutrients provided by 100 gm of a basket of 8 cereals, adjusted so that the amount of each in the basket each year is based on how much the world produced that year, from 1961 to 2011. Energy has stayed the same. Protein, zinc and iron have dropped.
Staple crops are less nutritious than they were.
The graph is from Metrics for land-scarce agriculture, by Ruth DeFries and her colleagues, in the 17 July 2015 issue of Science. It offers a fascinating look at the future of agriculture and food, and I hope to have the authors on the show some time soon.
Wendell Berry, the American farmer, writer and thinker, famously said that “Eating is an agricultural act”. The quote now has a life of its own, but it is worth remembering that Berry used it to introduce a longer version of his advice to the urban consumer who wants to know what they can do. The short version is “eat responsibly”. To do that, though, you have to understand how agriculture and the food we eat are connected, how they form part of an entire system. My guest on this episode understands more than most people about how the various parts of the food system fit together, and it is a lot more complex than many people can imagine.
That sink is where Rachel Roddy, an English woman in Rome, prepares meals to share with her partner Vincenzo, their young son Luca, and a horde of appreciative readers of her website and, now, her first book.