Author: Jeremy Cherfas

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You are what you eat: junk food edition

An article in last weekend’s New York Times Sunday Review has been getting a lot of traction. Breeding the Nutrition Out of Our Food by one Jo Robinson complains that nutrition has been going downhill ever since farming began. Not, she says, merely with the advent of modern varieties.

Wow! I mean, that’s quite a claim. So I took a serious look.

I guess my main beef with the piece is that it still presents a thoroughly medical view of nutrition and diet. I guess the de rigeur hat-tip to Hippocrates should have tipped me off. “Let food be thy medicine” is not in fact a prescription for specific active ingredients to combat specific ailments. And to switch, as Robinson does, between active ingredients and some vague notion of phytonutrients, confuses me at least. There’s also the vaguely disquieting idea that if a phytonutrient is good, more is better. It ain’t necessarily so. ((Of course, a carrot overdose might not be a problem for Jo Robinson, as she advocates a return to wild-type plants, which I guess would mean a weedy, woody, pale white unimproved carrot root.))

Actually, there’s a lot more in the piece that made my blood boil. Most trivially, having said that our nutritional downfall is the result of preferring more sugar and less bitter, how can this be good advice:

Make a stack of blue cornmeal pancakes for Sunday breakfast and top with maple syrup.

Because blue corn contains anthocyanins, obviously.

More worrying is Ms Robinson’s deep misunderstanding of the nature of selection, at least as she describes the domestication of teosinte. To imagine that “nature had been the primary change agent in remaking corn” from the first cultivation of maize until the 19th century, when “farmers began to play a more active role” is nothing short of scandalous. Not unlike people who think Columbus discovered America.

Better yet, in hammering on about modern maize and how sweet it is, we are treated to a description of the discovery and commercialisation of supersweet corn. The first release of a commercial supersweet corn took place in 1961, of which Robinson says:

This appears to be the first genetically modified food to enter the United States food supply, an event that has received scant attention.

If you think supersweet corn is genetically modified, I’d love to know what you think of the changes that turned teosinte into maize.

I was also intrigued by a little “correction” the NYT yesterday slipped in at the bottom of the piece.

An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to the origins of supersweet corn. The corn was the result of a natural, spontaneous mutation, not one artificially induced through radiation.

I’m sure the whole thing was equally well researched. Because …

Jo Robinson is a bestselling, investigative journalist who has spent the past 15 years scouring research journals for information on how we can restore vital nutrients to our fruits, vegetables, meat, eggs, and dairy products.

The book will probably be a runaway success.

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Nibbles: Kenyan water, Peruvian diets, Kazakh horse meat, Orchard diversity, Rubus ID, Baltimore

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Seeds for Needs in India

Seeds for Needs is a series of projects aimed at getting diverse material into farmer’s hands so they can assess it for themselves and decide whether and how they want to make use of it. An interesting twist on the idea is to harvest the results from hundreds of farmers and make greater sense (and use) of all that information. Now here’s a little video from Bioversity International about how things are going in India.

The growth of the farmer network, from 50 to 500 in a year, is fantastic, although I can’t help thinking that Jacob van Etten is still dreaming of hundreds of thousands of participants in his grand experiment in crowdsourcing.

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Does the new EU seed law have anything to offer?

Today is the International Day for Biological Diversity. The theme this year is Water and Biodiversity, which may be why I am in Bonn, at a conference on Water in the Anthropocene. Bravely ignoring the vast swathes of biodiversity that call fresh water home, I’d rather focus on agricultural biodiversity, and the recent proposals for revising the dreaded EU seed laws. Tl;dr? They’re pretty good. ((In fact my greatest disappointment is that in the long list of people and organizations that did take the time to share their views on this important matter with the EU, some that say they’re concerned about the diversity available to and used by farmers in their fields are prominent by their absence.))

A couple of weeks ago the European Commission adopted new proposals for the marketing of plant reproductive material. People with an interest in agricultural biodiversity have been waiting a long time, and have put a lot of effort into telling the European Commissioners what they would like to see. They didn’t get everything they wanted – more of that later – but they did get quite a lot. So what was the response? ((No links; I don’t want to feed the trolls.))

  • BREAKING: European Commission to criminalize nearly all seeds and plants not registered with government.
  • We don’t accept this. Let us keep our seeds EU!
  • EU Targets Seeds and Gardeners; Critics Lash Out
  • New European Law To Illegalize Unregistered Government Vegetation

Etc. etc.

All of which is just plain wrong. The new proposals actually decriminalize some activities that were outlawed by previous versions of the seed laws. They also set gardeners free to exchange and grow any varieties they like. And there are other provisions that give micro-enterprises and seed banks licence to do things that larger concerns cannot. In my view (and I hate to pull the I’ve-been-at-this-a-while card, but I have) the new proposals permit officially throughout the EU things that previously were ignored to a greater or lesser extent in different member states.

Of course the devil is in the details – he always is – and we will have to see how the various gaps and derogations in the proposal pan out in the different countries of the EU. And the fundamental premise of the proposal remains all wrong.

Everything not permitted is still forbidden, and things that may soon be permitted could be forbidden (again) in future. Like many others, I’d like a system that the rest of the world enjoys, where breeders and growers can choose to avail themselves of the qualities that seed certification and registration offers. I’d also like world peace and harmony and for everyone to just get along.

But let’s be realistic. The EU was never going to admit that the original 1966 seed laws were a complete mistake. They have listened to some of what they were told in their efforts to find out what people wanted, and the final regime contains elements from the two most popular options. If I were still in the business of selling seeds or produce, I’d be wondering how to make the most of my new-found freedoms, while perhaps at the same time continuing to plot final escape and redemption.

BTW, theres some very interesting reading – for and against – in the Impact Assessment on the Proposal undertaken by Commission staff. I hope to find the time (and the raw data) to analyse some of the very interesting differences among member states.

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Nibbles: Coffee, Farming origins, Trees and gender, Peach award