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.
Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 016

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2 November 2015

Staple fare

  1. Two helpings from the New York Times Magazine’s recent Food Issue, either one of which is a meal in itself:
    1. Bread is broken. Inside the Washington State University Bread Lab.
    2. The archive of eating. A portrait of the wonderful Barbara Ketcham Wheaton.
  2. What happened as the price of pu’er tea rose and rose and rose – more than 1500-fold since 2003.
  3. My friend Jess Fanzo has some sane things to say about changing diets and changing climate.
  4. When the Western world ran on guano. Wonderful stuff.
  5. Self-promotion: I wrote about how some new toys should improve my fermented pickles.

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Extra Matter

Agriculture and nutrition

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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.

nutrition-over-timeThe 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.

Podcasts

Going further than food miles Tim Lang, father of food miles, talks about food systems

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 24:56 — 17.4MB)

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food-systemsWendell 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.

For a start, take the label on the apple in the image on the left. In case you cannot read it, it says: “Forget organic. Eat local.” Nice, simple advice. But more or less pointless. There’s so much more to food systems than just the distance the food travels.

Tim Lang – who coined the phrase food miles – agrees. When he visited Rome recently for a conference on sustainable food I took the opportunity to get together to chat about the complexities of food systems. Our conversation ranged from high-level government policy to what you do with the skin of a mango you’ve just eaten, the point being that once you start to look at food systems as a whole, those two aspects of how we eat become closely intertwined.

Notes

  1. Gareth Edward-Jones’ paper Does eating local food reduce the environmental impact of food production and enhance consumer health? is a good introduction to some of the difficulties with a simple view of food miles.
  2. Tim mentioned the work of Carlos Monteiro, of the University of Sao Paolo, on ultra-processed food, and Barry Popkin, of the University of North Carolina, on the nutrition transition.
  3. That quote of Wendell Berry’s is a pithy soundbite, but the whole essay The pleasures of eating is well worth your time.
  4. And if you fancy a really deep dive into recent thinking on some aspects of food systems, how about this report from the European Commission: Energy use in the EU food sector: State of play and opportunities for improvement.
  5. Banner photo by Duncan Brown.
Extra Matter

Hummus: for better or worse

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The owner of a hummus cafe in Kfar Vitkin, a tiny settlement north of Netanya in Israel, is offering a 50 percent discount to mixed tables of Arabs and Jews. Some people have taken up the offer, others refused and said that they wanted to “support the initiative”. Heart-warming stuff. (There are various versions of the story around, but I read it on Al Jazeera, which has the most “context”.)

Meanwhile … Over at Boston University, Ari Ariel, head of the Gastronomy program, delivered a lecture on “Hummus Wars: Buying and Boycotting Middle Eastern Foods”. Citing a long-standing rivalry between Israel and Lebanon for bragging rights to the world record for largest hummus dish — currently held by Lebanon with around ten tonnes of hummus — Ariel “views the hummus record as an extension of the political climate”. Lebanon has been seeking a protected designation of origin for hummus since 2008. Israel, and probably much of the rest of the Near East, objects.

Sounds to me like a recipe for disaster, although I have been unable to discover what has become of Lebanon’s idea.

And finally, there is The Hummus Blog. Dig deep!