Changes in food fads and fashions are endlessly fascinating. Often, they’re related to status, as technological advances make formerly elite foods available to the masses. And then, of course, the elites have to find new foods to set themselves apart, sometimes adopting with glee foods hoi polloi were only too glad to abandon. That certainly seems to be the case for bread. Where once the whitest, lightest loaves were the preserve of nobility, nowadays the nobles flock to wholewheat, artisanal loaves.

Rachel’s Laudan’s book Cuisine and Empire examines many of the links between food and status. In this extract from our chat earlier this year, we talked about white bread’s reversal of fortune.

[Podcast]

Notes

1. The original episode: Food and status.
2. Linked from there too, Rachel Laudan’s post Why did our ancestors prefer white bread to wholegrains?

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UK government reports on antibiotic use in agriculture have resulted in calls for farmers to reduce their non-therapeutic use of antibiotics. To do that, though, it would help to know how much antibiotics farms actually use, a number that is surprisingly hard to uncover. A new survey of 358 dairy farms by the Dairy Herd Health Group at the University of Nottingham’s School of Veterinary Medicine and Science provides some clues. ((The article – Hyde, RM., Remnant, JG., Bradley, AJ., Breen, JE., Hudson, CD., Davies, PL., Clarke, T., Critchell, Y., Hylands, M., Linton, E., Wood, E., Green, MJ. (2017) Quantitative analysis of antimicrobial use on British dairy farms Veterinary Record 181, 683. – is behind a paywall. I relied on a press release.))

The key finding is that farms vary a lot. More than half the antibiotics (per kilogram of cow) are used on just a quarter of the farms. The researchers point out that a good first step to reducing overall use of antibiotics on dairy farms would be to concentrate on the few farms using the most antibiotics.

Pressure may also come from supermarkets. On Wednesday The Guardian reported that first Marks & Spencer and then Waitrose, two of the more upmarket food retailers in the UK, published figures on the use of antibiotics by their suppliers.

And, in (almost) unrelated news, researchers at Arizona State University have discovered that bacteria in honeybee guts can transfer antibiotic resistance from one species to another. According to a press release:

“To our surprise, we found that instead of one gut bacterium acquiring resistance and outcompeting all the other gut bacteria in honey bees, the resistance genes spread in the bacterial community so that all strains of bacteria survived,” said Gro Amdam, a professor with ASU School of Life Sciences and co-author of the paper.

I’m surprised that this was a surprise. Horizontal transmission of antibiotic resistance among gut bacteria has been a concern in livestock and people since at least the 1960s. Why would bacteria in bees be any different.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is supposed to give poor people in America enough help to buy a nutritious diet, and it has been under fire over the past year. Not only do people want to cut back on the benefits, some even want to make SNAP recipients undergo mandatory drug testing. Back in February, I spoke to Parke Wilde, an economist at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University in Boston, about SNAP and what it can deliver in terms of nutrition. Here’s a small second helping of part of our conversation.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:35 — 4.7MB)

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Notes

The full episode: How much does a nutrition diet cost

11 December 2017

1. Oooh, Mark Bittman triggers a spat in the young farmer good food movement.
2. Bittman doesn’t seem too savvy about the history of American farm policy, unlike you (if you heard Rethinking the folk history of American agriculture). He could catch up with the latest article from that show’s guests, Nathan Rosenberg and Bryce Wilson Stucki.
3. Are you ready for another myth buster? The Farm Bill is not the reason junk food is cheap. Because the whole point of junk food is to add “value” to the cheapest possible ingredients.
4. Growing commodities that aren’t quite so cheap is beginning to gain traction in the heartland.
5. While adding value to commodities that aren’t quite so cheap is the next step in community restoration.
6. After which, I need to reiterate my wish to be able to find non-American stories more easily, like this one: I swallowed the hype about the earliest wine makers in Georgia. Luckily there are people who know enough about the subject to pour a little cold water on it.

The Salt, at NPR, asks: Is The Tide Of Antibiotic Use On Farms Now Turning? and gives the lie to my standard view that the answer to any question in a headline is always “No!

The Food And Drug Administration released its annual accounting of antibiotics sold in America for use in poultry, pigs and cattle, and for the very first time, it reported that fewer of the drugs were sold. Sales of medically important antibiotics in 2016 declined by 14 percent, compared to 2015.

So the answer instead is a cautious “Maybe”.