mim’s blog

Recently we had a party at our apartment and I wanted to do myself one better than last year’s lychee bubbletinis.

So in addition to making tapioca pearls and this time soaking them in a dilute honey solution to give them flavor, we made some watermelon “juice” to add to the drinks. I had cut up another watermelon a few days earlier for eating and then blended it for drinks, but it took so long to cut the watermelon into slices and then cut the rind off and cube each slice.

Clearly a better method for converting a watermelon to a gallon of watermelon juice was called for. Enter Joanne’s 200 watt hand-held blender. All you have to do is cut the top off of the watermelon, scoop a bit out for splashing room, and blend away. Not only do you avoid all of the extra cutting and cubing, but you have a perfect watermelon juice container that can be used as an all natural vase after finishing the juice. It might be a little unwieldy, but it’s guaranteed to hold all of the juice. In fact, I was surprised that the juice took up exactly as much volume as the pulp that I blended, I figured there’d be a little bit of air in there or something, but no. The total yield was about 1.5 pitchers of juice, good enough for a party’s worth of watermelon-lychee bubbletinis and then some.

I’m quite interested in agriculture and the modern food industry as a result of hanging out with my sister. I wanted to outline some of my reading of late in this area, mostly three articles which I’ve found very informative. What inspired me to write this post was an article in Rolling Stone, of all places, about the pork industry, written by Jeff Tietz. That article reminded me of another one I read a while ago from the New York Times Magazine about the beef industry, which was written by Michael Pollan. In reading Tietz’s article and searching for Pollan’s, I came across a third article, this one from Harper’s by Richard Manning entitled The Oil We Eat.

Pollan’s article was forwarded to an email list to which I subscribe a number of years ago and it really shocked me. I was never a huge beef eater, but it pretty much turned me off of beef entirely. It follows the life of a steer that Pollan has purchased as a calf, going into excruciating detail about the life of a modern steer, the most disturbing parts of which are the lives the cows lead in their feedlots and their slaughter. Pollan puts it much more eloquently that I can, but if you don’t want to read the article, here are some of the highlights.

As with chickens and pigs, feedlot cows are crammed into spaces so small that they literally wallow in their own filth. They are fed corn, which their stomachs are not designed for, creating all sorts of digestive and immunological troubles. These problems can be alleviated only with heavy doses of antibiotics, a quarter of a pound for calves, two and a half pounds for grown ups. This overuse of antibiotics leads to antibiotic resistant bacteria and the unsanitary conditions lead to e. coli covered cows in the feedlot and then e. coli covered meat in the slaughterhouse. When it’s time for Pollan’s steer to be slaughtered, the slaughterhouse won’t allow him to see the heart of their process, so he interviews assistant professor of animal science Temple Grandin, who also happens to be the eponymous Anthropologist on Mars in Oliver Sacks’ book. The conditions of the cows’ lives and deaths are bad enough, but the kicker of the article is that the profit a steer owner can realize has averaged about $3 per head over the past 20 years. Pollan is lucky, his earns him a whopping $27.

Tietz’s article is mainly about the environmental devastation caused by industrial pig farming and by Smithfield pork in particular. The conditions in which the animals live sound quite similar to those of Pollan’s cattle, the concentration of animals leading to a giant waste disposal problem, which the pork industry cannot face while remaining profitable. Thus farms resort to collecting all of the waste in giant open pools, which often spill, leach into the ground water, etc. In addition, since the waste keeps coming, the pools are emptied by aeresolizing the waste, ostensibly to fertilize crops, but it is literally sprayed into the air to drift into someone else’s back yard. When people fall into these cesspools, they die. When they live close to the pools, they pass out from the stench. When they breathe the air within miles of the pools they report all sorts of respiratory ailments. Various spillage disasters have rendered local waterways completely barren, killing fish by the millions. The article ends mentioning that Smithfield is sending the spores of American agriculture overseas to places with more lax environmental laws like Poland.

Manning’s article was what I had hoped Harvey Levenstein’s books would be. Paradox of Plenty and Revolution at the Table described the evolution of American’s ideas about nutrition, whereas I’d hoped they would discuss the evolution of the food industry. This article addresses the evolution of agriculture in general and our current use of energy in food, which I find interesting enough to put Manning’s book, Against the Grain, on my list.

According to the article, the environmental destruction endemic to our cultivation of cereal grains goes back millennia, including a quote from Plato lamenting the devastation of ancient Greece’s hillsides by farming. But the most interesting fact is that the processing of one calorie of food currently requires ten calories of fossil fuel energy, a fact that also comes from David Pimentel at Cornell. I haven’t done the math myself, but Manning claims that one pound of breakfast cereal requires the energy in a liter of gasoline to fertilize, water, harvest, mill, and bake. That apparently does not even account for all of the energy spent shipping the food to the store or driving it home. Another interesting figure he quotes is that 80% of the grain grown in the US goes to feeding livestock. The article also describes the overuse of petroleum-derived fertilizers and the destruction caused by their runoff into bodies of water, for example, the dead zone the size of New Jersey at the mouth of the Mississippi river. While it is long on history and facts, the article is rather short on solutions aside from eating local and seasonal foods, including wild game you shoot yourself.

The result of all of this article reading is a new desire to read more about these issues (what an academic response). While I had thought that no one was writing about the angles I find interesting on this topic, I’ve found some books that sound interesting through links from Richard Manning’s book. I read Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire and found it quite interesting, but I skipped his most recent book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which was panned for neither providing much new information nor any solutions to the problems he’s written about before. He does have a large body of essays to read on his website, though, which I will read instead. I think between all these articles and books I’ll have enough reading material to keep me busy for a while.

One of the greatest culinary accomplishments of the illustrious xi chapter of tau epsilon phi, at least while I resided there, was the creation of the platonic meal, the food ball. Its inventors, Dylan Stiles, Jason Rolfe, and Ian Collier, were able to fit an entire dinner into a single, breaded sphere. The food ball consists of a core of meat, surrounded optionally by a shell of sauteed vegetables, a mantle of rice, and finally a thin crust of breading. The entire orb was then deep fried to a crispy brown yumminess (at the cost of nearly two gallons of peanut oil per meal!).

Upon relaying this story to Joanne, she informed me that such a food had already been invented and was, in fact in widespread consumption in Italy, known as rice balls or arangini. I was at first skeptical, but upon the presentation of a number of world wide web pages, I found the evidence to be overwhelming. What are the chances that two cultures, so different from one another, the Italians and the teps, would arrive at the same gustatory conclusion, that one should have to carefully balance one’s meal on one’s plate for fear of its rolling across the table.

As a much belated addendum to the above (below) “bubbletini” post, I would like to present the pictures of the final product. It also turns out that I wasn’t the first to have come up with such a beverage, who knew?

More recently I finished Harvey Levenstein’s Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America, which picks up where Revolution at the Table leaves off and continues up to the present day. This book was written first, but revised after the other was written.

Of course I did learn some history from these books, a large part of both was devoted to how ideas of nutrition evolved over time. The first nutritionists around the 1890s tried to get the poor to eat cheaper food so that they would have more money for other things, since Malthusian theory prohibited wage increases. Then around the turn of the century, the “new” nutritionists tried to spread the theory of food as being made up of fat, protein, and carbohydrates and the interchangeability of e.g. one carbohydrate for another. The “newer” nutritionists around the 1920s became concerned with people’s eating enough of the newly discovered vitamins. And finally the “negative nutrition” starting in the 1960s told people not to eat certain foods deemed to be unhealthy. I was surprised by how recently most of what I consider current nutritional knowledge was acquired, much of it within the last 20 years.

Taken together, both books disappointed me. While this one covered many aspects I felt were lacking from the first volume, Levenstein’s books seem more concerned describing the “what” than the “why” of American’s eating habits. Events seem to just have happened, without much justification or cause. Government agencies and corporations leap into existence. The masses start to feel a certain way for some inexplicable reason. Good history should explain the logical flow of ideas, technologies, movements, businesses, fads, and so forth, many of which were lacking in these books.

Levenstein is definitely not a scientists or “nutritionist” (whatever that means) but he is certainly a thorough historian. While I can excuse the books’ omission of technological and scientific aspects, his history is less compelling for its lack of causal relations. His academic objectivity also got on my nerves. He takes pains to represent both sides of every issue, often dismissing both in the process. One of my main motivations for reading these books was to shed light on the processes that have led to the current state of food in America and its disconformity with my understanding of nutrition. Levenstein’s lack of an angle left my ideas slightly battered, but with nothing to supplant them.

A couple weeks ago, now, I finished Harvey Levenstein’s Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet. It’s about how about how food and eating evolved in America between around 1880 and 1930. It was not what I had hoped it would be, and it was a bit boring to boot.

To be fair, it did contain some interesting material. Apparently, Americans have always taken pride in the amount of food (and specifically beef) that they eat, even dating back to the early ninteenth century. Similarly, America has had a sweet tooth since the mechanization of sugar production at some point in the mid ninteenth century, a point I had hoped would get more attention in this book. I was surprised at how much WWI and specifically Herbert Hoover’s propaganda was able to affect American’s eating habits, especially compared to all of the other failed nutrition campaigns. I also found the invention of home economics and its ability to insinuate American ideals of cooking into immigrant homes interesting.

I was expecting a different book, though. The book that I imagined would have talked more about the industrialization of food in terms of the farming, manufacture, distribution, and retail industries. In opposition to these industries would have been the USDA and the FDA, which were suddenly introduced into the book without much in the way of explanation. It also would have talked more about the evolution of America’s sweet tooth and its penchant for large meals. Other issues not explored in much depth include the evolution of the restaurant, the standardization of American’s eating habits in the 1920s, and the increase in American’s statures during the same decade.

The book did get me thinking a bit about the role of scientists in industry. In the early part of the twentieth century food science was a hot field, but all of the jobs were in the food companies. Scientists were thus paid to find results that show their companies in a positive light, not to find the truth. Of course, every scientist has results she would like to see or hunches she would like to validate, but that can’t get in the way of results. My impression of the food industry, especially of that era, is that it would use ridiculous and blatantly false claims to convince people to eat particular brands of breakfast cereal. There is obviously a difference between looking in a particular direction for experiments to run and burying experiments that don’t turn out the way you had hoped.

It took a bit of digging, but I found stats on what people all over the world eat. These numbers come from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Specifically, I got them from the Food Supply sections of the Agricultural data in the FAOSTATS database. It would be nice to do it by country and put it all into map form using something like DIY Map, but for now I’ll just provide a table listing the data by continent.

This table shows the percentage of average daily calories per capita that come from various foods. The top section shows the breakdown between animal and vegetable foods, while the bottom section breaks it down even further into specific foods. The FAO db will let you break it down even further, but I didn’t want the table to be too big. So, where do people on the various continents get their calories?

This talk of food makes me wonder, as I have for the past few years, how is it that we end up eating the foods we do? Not how do they get on our tables, but why do we eat what we eat. Apparently, I should read two books by Harvey Levenstein, social histories of American eating habits. The first, Revolution at the Table, covers American food history from 1880 to 1930, the second, Paradox of Plenty, coverts 1930 to 1990 or so.

I have a hunch that many foods, like white sugar and white flour, started out as delicacies for the rich, making them all the more desirable to the masses, who gradually gained access to them through technological advances. The question remains, to me at least, what did people eat before that? Is that any more healthy than what we’re eating now or is it just what people had access to then? The existence of populations that subsisted on rice in Asia or beans and rice in Latin America or potatoes in Ireland makes me wonder whether those eating habits are just enough to scrape by or whether they’re healthier (whatever that means) than eating at McDonald’s twice a day.

I recently read here, citing Marion Nestle’s book Food Politics, that the food industry produces 3,800 calories per American per day. This is a very interesting way to measure how much people eat on average. Assuming that we’re not amassing vast stores of ring-dings in wearhouses in New Jersey, it would make sense that people should consume all of those calories, give or take what ends up in the trash or under the sofa. It seems that people are getting fatter because food companies want to sell more food.