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    Mr Justice Linden: “If it contains excess fat, sugar or salt, that product is adverse to a child's health"

    Kellogg’s loses court case over sugary cereal

    Farmer Andy Pimbley examining ripening strawberries inside a polytunnel at Claremont Farm in Bebington on the Wirral © Colin McPherson/FT

    Labour shortfall leading to ‘catastrophic’ food waste

    The Longview Power Plant, a coal-fired plant, stands on August 21, 2018 in Maidsville, West Virginia. The plant’s single unit generates 700 net megawatts of electricity from run-of-mine coal and natural gas. Spencer Platt | Getty Images

    US Supreme Court limits EPA authority

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    “Understanding the emergence of CC398 in European livestock is vitally important for managing the risk it poses to public health”

    Super bug that arose in pigs can jump to humans

    Martin Lines, UK chair for the Nature Friendly Farming Network, says farmers will continue moving away from fertilisers and pesticides

    Fertilisers: going cold turkey in a time of crisis

    European Commission Vice-President Frans Timmermans, European Commissioner for Health and Food Safety Stella Kyriakides, and European Commissioner for the Environment Virginijus Sinkevicius

    EU to halve use of pesticides, heal nature

    Executive director of Nourish Scotland, Pete Ritchie: “If the UK could just get over itself, alignment on sustainable food with the EU would be helpful”

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    Mr Justice Linden: “If it contains excess fat, sugar or salt, that product is adverse to a child's health"

    Kellogg’s loses court case over sugary cereal

    Farmer Andy Pimbley examining ripening strawberries inside a polytunnel at Claremont Farm in Bebington on the Wirral © Colin McPherson/FT

    Labour shortfall leading to ‘catastrophic’ food waste

    The Longview Power Plant, a coal-fired plant, stands on August 21, 2018 in Maidsville, West Virginia. The plant’s single unit generates 700 net megawatts of electricity from run-of-mine coal and natural gas. Spencer Platt | Getty Images

    US Supreme Court limits EPA authority

    “Understanding the emergence of CC398 in European livestock is vitally important for managing the risk it poses to public health”

    Super bug that arose in pigs can jump to humans

    Martin Lines, UK chair for the Nature Friendly Farming Network, says farmers will continue moving away from fertilisers and pesticides

    Fertilisers: going cold turkey in a time of crisis

    European Commission Vice-President Frans Timmermans, European Commissioner for Health and Food Safety Stella Kyriakides, and European Commissioner for the Environment Virginijus Sinkevicius

    EU to halve use of pesticides, heal nature

    trade deals

    WTO strikes global trade deals after ‘roller coaster’ talks

    inflation

    Food inflation is swallowing Latin America’s dietary staples

    Protestors outside UK Parliament with a placard reading, "Keep the protocol, keep the peace."

    New EU legal action over post-Brexit deal changes

    Buyers at Risk Countries in Africa and Asia are among the most reliant on Ukraine grain

    US quietly urges Russia fertiliser deals

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    Mr Justice Linden: “If it contains excess fat, sugar or salt, that product is adverse to a child's health"

    Kellogg’s loses court case over sugary cereal

    Farmer Andy Pimbley examining ripening strawberries inside a polytunnel at Claremont Farm in Bebington on the Wirral © Colin McPherson/FT

    Labour shortfall leading to ‘catastrophic’ food waste

    The Longview Power Plant, a coal-fired plant, stands on August 21, 2018 in Maidsville, West Virginia. The plant’s single unit generates 700 net megawatts of electricity from run-of-mine coal and natural gas. Spencer Platt | Getty Images

    US Supreme Court limits EPA authority

    “If we lose territory we lose everything. It’s that simple.” Pic: Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador

    Ecuador’s Indigenous peoples: we are protecting our territories

    “Understanding the emergence of CC398 in European livestock is vitally important for managing the risk it poses to public health”

    Super bug that arose in pigs can jump to humans

    Martin Lines, UK chair for the Nature Friendly Farming Network, says farmers will continue moving away from fertilisers and pesticides

    Fertilisers: going cold turkey in a time of crisis

    European Commission Vice-President Frans Timmermans, European Commissioner for Health and Food Safety Stella Kyriakides, and European Commissioner for the Environment Virginijus Sinkevicius

    EU to halve use of pesticides, heal nature

    Executive director of Nourish Scotland, Pete Ritchie: “If the UK could just get over itself, alignment on sustainable food with the EU would be helpful”

    Scottish food bill: a dram to celebrate the end of the beginning

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Diets are becoming less diverse, a new book warns

Dan Saladino tells delicious tales of rare foods and the people trying to save them

October 24, 2021
in Data, In the news, Environment, Research, Health
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The Economist says the range of human foods is a reflection of ecological and anthropological variety—the consequence of tens of thousands of years of parallel yet independent cultural evolution.

And yet, as choice has proliferated in other ways, diets have been squeezed and standardised. Dan Saladino, a food journalist at the BBC reminds readers of what stands to be lost.

In “Eating to Extinction” he travels far and wide to find “the world’s rarest foods”. These include the murnong, “a radish-like root with a crisp bite and the taste of sweet coconut”; for millennia it was a primary food for Australia’s Aboriginals, before almost vanishing. The unpasteurised version of English Stilton, meanwhile, was salvaged from hygiene rules by an American enthusiast who renamed it Stichelton.

The book’s overarching theme is the rapid decline in the diversity of human foods over the past century.

Inside the stomach of a man who died 2,500 years ago, and whose body was preserved when it sank into a Danish peat bog, researchers found the remains of his last meal: “a porridge made with barley, flax and the seeds of 40 different plants”. In east Africa, the Hadza, one of the last remaining hunter-gatherer tribes, “eat from a potential wild menu that consists of more than 800 plant and animal species”.

By contrast, most humans now get 75 per cent of their calorie intake from just eight foods: rice, wheat, maize, potatoes, barley, palm oil, soya and sugar.

Even within each of those food groups there is homogenisation. Decades of selective breeding and the pressures of global food markets mean that farms everywhere grow the same varieties of cereals and raise the same breeds of livestock.

In an ever-changing world, diversity is an insurance policy. The pressures of climate change and rapidly spreading diseases make that insurance all the more important.

The unhappy fate of the Large White pig, the quintessential farmed swine, is a case in point. But in the past few years African swine fever has swept through. By summer 2020 it had reached Europe—and may have killed nearly half of China’s pigs and a quarter of the world’s. Homogeneity made the planet’s piggy population a pathogen’s playground.

Nikolai Vavilov, for example, founded the world’s first seed bank, in Leningrad (now St Petersburg). He and his disciples gathered more than 150,000 seed samples before he was sent to a prison camp under Stalin. In 1943 Vavilov “was claimed by the very thing he had spent his life working to prevent: starvation”.

His seed collection, however, lives on thanks to the immense sacrifice of the conservationists he inspired. Under siege by the Nazis, and with Vavilov stuck in prison, they moved hundreds of boxes to a freezing basement and took turns standing guard over their trove of genetic diversity. “By the end of the 900-day siege”, writes Mr Saladino, “nine of them had died of starvation.” Among them was the curator of the rice collection, found dead “at his desk, surrounded by bags of rice”.

More here…

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