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For much of the world, food has never been as abundant or as inexpensive as it is now, but at what cost? The Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that the cost of diet-related ill health is somewhere around $7 trillion, which is far more than the “profits” of food and agriculture. Those profits, like the cheaper, more plentiful food they stem from, take no account of the external costs of climate change, pollution, biodiversity loss and, ultimately, human health.

Professor Tim Benton has spent his career working at the interface between agricultural and food politics and environment.

“If we don’t get to grips with these challenges,” he told me “then ultimately the only thing to happen is some big calamity at some point in the future, where the planet bites back and says, I’ve had enough.”

Notes

1. Tim Benton’s paper with Rob Bailey — The paradox of productivity: agricultural productivity promotes food system inefficiency — is a very readable summary.
2. Here is the transcript.
3. This is not the first time the podcast has looked at prices and externalities – search for prices – and it will not be the last.

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The top four companies globally control more than 60% of the inputs modern farmers need: machinery, fertilisers, seeds, and pesticides. That kind of concentration, coupled with their size, gives these companies unprecedented power to set prices, often in collusion with their “competitors,” to block real competition, to stifle innovation, and to manipulate governments and policies. And while that may seem a problem of modern times, it’s actually a story that goes back to the beginning of industrial agriculture. Jennifer Clapp, Canada Research Chair in Global Food Security and Sustainability at the University of Waterloo in Ontario undertook a deep investigation of the history and behaviour of these companies for her new book Titans of Industrial Agriculture: how a few giant corporations came to dominate the farm sector and why it matters.

Notes

1. Jennifer Clapp’s book Titans of Industrial Agriculture: how a few giant corporations came to dominate the farm sector and why it matters is published by The MIT Press.
2. This recent article by Jennifer Clapp sets out some of her views on how to address global hunger, including ideas on reining in corporate concentration.
3. Here is the transcript.

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:38 — 27.3MB)

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For most of the 2000s, farmers in Peru earned a little more than one sol per kilogram of unprocessed quinoa they sold. Starting around 2007, the price began to climb as quinoa exports became a thing, averaging 9 soles per kg in 2014. The following year, the price halved, and it dropped again in 2016. It’s still around 4 soles per kg, so a lot better than it was, and quinoa production is double what it was. Nevertheless, the early promise of a sustained quinoa boom proved to be an illusion.

Emma McDonnell was in Peru for the early years of the boom and for the subsequent bust, a story she recounts in her book The Quinoa Bust.

Notes

1. Emma McDonnell has a website. Her book The Quinoa Bust: The Making and Unmaking of an Andean Miracle Crop is published by California University Press.
2. A previous episode — It is OK to eat quinoa — looked at the impact of the boom in purely economic terms.
3. An issue of the USDA’s Choices magazine looked at several so-called functional foods, including quinoa, asking whether they were a Fad or Path to Prosperity?. Both, maybe.
4. Here is the transcript
5. The banner photo uses a picture of quinoa growing in Ollantaytambo, Peru by Hector Montero. The quinoa close up on the cover is by Flickered!

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:50 — 28.4MB)

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Perhaps the only thing most people know about Jewish dietary laws is that pork is forbidden. A new book asks why the pig — rather than any of the other animals banned by the Hebrew bible — should have become so inextricably bound up with Jewish identity. Author Jordan Rosenblum points out that at the time of the Roman occupation, the pig was “simply the most commonly encountered nonkosher quadruped.” The imagined qualities of the pig and those of the Jews aligned, a link that still survives in anti-semitic propaganda.

I didn’t want to rehash the history of anti-semitism but I did want to know more about the relationship between pork and Jewish identity. I hope you will too.

Notes

1. Forbidden: A 3,000-Year History of Jews and the Pig is published by New York University Press.
2. Jordan D. Rosenblum is the Belzer Professor of Classical Judaism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
3. Cover art is a reproduction from a 19th century book about customs of the Middle Ages. The banner image is from a campaign by the Debby Agency for Burger King. I am told (by ChatGPT) that the Hebrew says “And may the house be filled with the smell of turkey bacon”.
4. Here is the transcript.

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:15 — 26.9MB)

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A new book takes a close look at people’s concerns about processed foods and how the processed food industry has failed to respond to them. The author, Charlotte Biltekoff, says she wanted to try and understand what was happening around her, as people in her milieu came more and more to demand real food rather than processed foods, while the makers of processed foods failed to understand the deeper reasons underpinning those demands. Industry wants consumers who, reassured on questions of safety and risk, will buy and eat its products. People want answers to questions beyond safety and risk. And never the twain shall meet.

Notes

1. Real Food, Real Facts: processed food and the politics of knowledge is available from the University of California Press.
2. Other effects notwithstanding, a primary reason to avoid UPFs is that they encourage you to eat more.
3. Here is the transcript.
4. Thanks ChatGPT for sharing your stereotypical vision of a Mom and a Female Scientist.

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