Eat This Podcast
Talking about anything around food

Eat This Newsletter 074 The robots are coming

27 March 2018 Filed under: Tags:

What does country music tell us about agriculture in America today? Not much. Plus some nutritional goodness, and follow-ups to previous podcasts.

Bayer's Prospero robot

Three chords and the truth

There’s a bit of a roundabout chain to this one. Agricultural Law published Down on the Farm: Nostalgic Ideological Hegemony in the Service of Agribusiness, Big Data, and AI, or, Capitalist Agriculture and Country Music. It’s a fascinating look at several cultural tropes in modern America, most notably two antagonisms; rural vs urban and capital vs labour, triggered by Bayer’s robot farm hands, current code name Prospero, and the company’s imminent takeover of Monsanto. In Bayer’s future:

‘The farmer acts like a shepherd, giving his swarm instructions … Then his robots carry out these orders by communicating with each other through infrared signals.’ [R]obots like Prospero will ‘change the role of a farmer from being a driver to an instructor … [They will] alleviate the physical work of farmers, which gives them more time to focus on the economic part of their business.’

Then follows an unpicking of some iconic country songs that proclaim, loudly and repeatedly, how independent the true American farmer is of all that capitalism.

And, of course, it ain’t necessarily so.

I don’t follow country music religiously, so I had been unaware of Blake Shelton’s Boys ’Round Here, which is a centrepiece of the article, but the Official Music Video is a mini-masterpiece that hinges on that other useful trope, black vs white, for good measure. The song itself is complete tosh, the lyrics banal beyond belief (and don’t just take my word for it) but that’s not the point. The point is the images that it serves up. And the point of the AgLaw article is to question both the images of country music more generally and the deeply suspicious nature of Bayer’s Here’s To The Farmer! campaign. They claim to be fighting hunger across the country. To what extent are Bayer and the other behemoths of industrial agriculture complicit in creating that hunger?

Anyway, that’s what I got out of the AgLaw piece. Then I discovered it was extracted from a much longer piece – Agriculture Wars – by Nick Murray, a former editor at Rolling Stone. And, although I’d never have found it without AgLaw, that’s what I’d suggest you read.

Truth? What’s that?

It’s a common enough complaint that you can’t trust any dietary advice from nutritionists because the science is based on small samples and short-term interventions, and in any case, the advice flip flops every few years. Dariush Mozaffarian (at Tufts University) and Nita Forouhi (at the UK’s Medical Research Centre) try to refute that with an article in the British Medical Journal that looks at the history of nutrition science and how the evidence it produces stacks up against other disciplines. Not surprisingly, they decide nutrition science is up to the task, although they also warn that “Management of vested interests is needed to avoid potential bias in research findings and public messaging of dietary advice”. Right. ((Professor Mozaffarian tweeted that the BMJ brought the article out from behind its paywall “due to strong interest”. Fair enough. I wonder how they plan to put that that genie back in the bottle?))

Now, let’s make this a theme. Are you getting enough iron? Is it the right kind of iron? What can you do about that? NPR’s The Salt has the answers. You may want to take that with a sip of orange juice. But not a cup of tea. Or a glass of red wine.

Maybe none of that matters. What if The great nutrient collapse has actually happened? I’m truly not competent to judge.

And the follow-ups

Crafty beer marketing

23 March 2018 Filed under: Tags:

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, they say. But it can also debase a good thing, and it is definitely happening to craft beer.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, they say. But it can also debase a good thing, and it is definitely happening to craft beer.

(more…)

How great Canadian wheat ruined industrial bread The cheaper the flour, the more profitable the bread

20 March 2018 Filed under: Tags:

George Weston created Garfield Weston, who created Allied Bakeries to improve British bread by selling more Canadian wheat. Then came the Chorleywood Bread Process.

The Food Programme’s recent episode on bread pivoted, quite rightly, around the year 1961, when the new Chorleywood Bread Process thrust tasteless pap on an all-too-willing public shopping for convenience. And for this year’s Real Bread Week, Chris Young at the Sustainable Food Trust dug into the devious lengths to which at least one supermarket is now going to suggest that their bread is anything other than industrial. What was Tesco’s own-brand “everyday value” white sliced loaf is now marketed under the brand name H.W. Nevill. That name, Tesco tells us dates back to 1872, when “Henry William Nevill founded his first bakery and started a proud baking tradition. Almost 150 years later, our hero bakers take their craft just as seriously as Henry did”. Leaving aside all the tosh about hero bakers and craft, Chris Young looked at the history of H.W. Nevill and discovered that it hasn’t baked a loaf of bread since the 1960s, when it was swallowed by Sunblest. Sunblest is currently owned by Associated British Foods plc, and ABF became the name of Allied Bakeries Ltd in 1960, just before the introduction of the Chorleywood process.

Still with me, I hope.

My podcast with Di Murrell about how grain moved by barge around the Thames basin should have contained a chapter that ties these apparently disparate threads together, but there wasn’t room. For a couple of years, Di and her husband Tam carried weekly loads of grain by barge to Coxes Mill at Weybridge in Surrey. Coxes has a long history, and in her book Di shows how it can be thought of as a symbol of the history of bread in England. Coxes was an independent miller until, like H.W. Nevill, it was bought by Allied Mills, part of ABF. It is the history of Allied Mills that Di Murrell tells in Barges & Bread.

Allied Mills sprang from the loins of George Weston, a Canadian apprenticed to a Toronto baker at the age of 12. Six years later, in 1882, he bought a bread route from his employer and went into business for himself. He prospered, bought out his former master and developed his loaf of Real Home-Made Bread, using the finest Manitoba wheat and local Ontario wheat in about equal proportions. On he went, investing in automation and expanding his range until by the start of the 20th century he was Canada’s biggest baker. George’s son Garfield served in World War I and returned to Canada with the bright idea of manufacturing the best-selling biscuits that he had seen in England.

Weston’s English Quality Biscuits launched in 1922 and Garfield took over Weston in 1924 after the death of his father. The company went from strength to strength, buying up small bakeries, consolidating and modernising right through the Depression. During the depression, Garfield Weston could see that Canadian wheat farmers were suffering and came up with a cracking idea. Maybe he could increase demand for Canadian wheat by opening a chain of bakeries in the UK. He did, and they did well too, but even though his bakeries were able to make a better loaf with Canadian wheat, other bakers weren’t convinced. Garfield Weston’s solution was to import the wheat himself, mill it, and make his flour available to British bakers. He created Food Investments Ltd in 1935, almost immediately changed its name to Allied Bakeries and began to buy up small independent millers.

Generally Weston left these small family mills alone, managed by the families that had previously owned them, but now supplying them with Canadian wheat. The resulting high-protein flour went to Allied’s bakeries, and others, where it made good, profitable loaves, and by the start of World War II Allied was Britain’s biggest baker. Garfield went into politics, helped to feed Londoners during the war, and in 1945 returned to Canada.

In 1960 Allied Bakeries became Associated British Foods. In 1961, bakeries fell with glee upon the Chorleywood bread process, perfected by the British Baking Industries Research Association. It’s actually very hard to find anything about the BBIRA ((Now amalgamated with the Research Association of British Flour Millers to form the Flour Milling and Baking Research Association, which is effectively invisible on the internet)) but if it was an industry supported association, I find it hard to believe that Britain’s biggest baker was not also the BBIRA’s biggest supporter. In 2018 ABF still produces much of the bread in Britain, including the stuff that pretends it was crafted by the hero bakers of H.W. Nevill.

The really strange part in all this is that Garfield Weston came to Britain with two stated ambitions:

“I want to give the public the best quality bread that can be produced … I hope at the same time to increase the demand for Canadian wheat, which is the best in the world, as you know, and which makes a better bread than any other.”

Instead, through Allied and ABF, he gave us bread made from weaker, cheaper flour at lower cost. And we ate it up.

Safer smoke through chemistry

20 March 2018 Filed under:

I’m tickled by the news that big industrial food-smoking concerns are worried enough about the carcinogens in smoke to do something about it. That something is a filter based on zeolites, present in car exhaust systems to reduce harmful pollutants. It’s early days yet, but preliminary results are in: “To the tasters, the chicken made […]

I’m tickled by the news that big industrial food-smoking concerns are worried enough about the carcinogens in smoke to do something about it. That something is a filter based on zeolites, present in car exhaust systems to reduce harmful pollutants. It’s early days yet, but preliminary results are in:

“To the tasters, the chicken made with filtered smoke had a bit of a ‘Christmas ham’ aroma and a more rounded balanced flavor,” Parker says. Foods made with the unfiltered smoke, by contrast, tended to score higher in the categories of “ash tray” and “acrid smoke.”

A visit to Hummustown Doing good by eating well

19 March 2018 Filed under: Tags:

Eating is a political act, as Wendell Berry reminded us. Which is why I was very happy to sample the food on offer by Syrian refugees in Hummustown.

Refugees selling the food of their homeland to get a start in a new life is, by now, a cliché. Khaled (in the photo) joined their ranks a year ago. But cliché or not, selling food is an important way to give people work to do, wages, and hope. If it’s happening on your doorstep, which it is, and the food is good, which it is, what’s a hungry podcaster to do? Go there, obviously, and report back. Which is why, a couple of weeks ago, I found myself, microphone in hand, waiting patiently in line for a falafel wrap.

Truth be told, there aren’t that many Syrian refugees in Italy. The most recent official statistics put the total at around 5000 with a little over 600 in Rome. Hummustown is helping a few of them.

Notes

  1. The Hummustown website tells more of the story and has a link to the GoFundMe campaign.

huffduffer icon   Huffduff it