Eat This Podcast

A thorough trawl in 2020 brought to light more than 40 different kinds of policies around the world designed to improve diets to deliver better nutrition and health. And yet, the vast majority of people do not eat within dietary guidelines. If anything, diets — and with them health — are getting worse in many places. What’s the problem? Maybe, it is that the people who devise the policies are too far away from the lives of the people they’re trying to help.

That’s the gist of a new paper from a group of researchers in the UK. They argue that “a fresh approach is needed, one that considers the full picture of people’s realities”. Corinna Hawkes, lead author on the paper, took me through some of those realities.

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For a long time people have suspected that there is a kind of logic to what people buy as they have a bit more to spend on food. First, they change from coarse grains — things like sorghum or millet — to fine grains, wheat and rice, maybe corn. Then they switch up to protein from animal-sourced foods. This logic was even considered something of a law, Bennett’s Law, after Merrill Bennett, the agricultural economist who formulated the idea in the early 1940s. But it wasn’t really a law, because no-one had actually studied income and food purchases under controlled conditions.

Now someone has, with the first empirical test of Bennett’s Law. For Marc Bellemare, the lead author, the research, “changes your view of how the world works”.

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Let’s assume that people understand what they ought to eat to keep themselves healthy over the course of their lives and that the nutritious food to deliver good health is available in the market. More than one in three of the world’s people simply cannot afford a healthy diet. We know because the Food Prices for Nutrition team at Tufts University has developed tools that allow countries to use data that most of them are already collecting (to compile their Consumer Price Index) and from them calculate the cost of a healthy diet. The results have been alarming for some policy-makers, with encouraging results in at least one country.

Anna Herforth, who first told me about the cost of a healthy diet in 2021, was in Rome recently for a workshop on diet cost metrics with her colleagues Will Masters, who leads the Food Prices for Nutrition team, Olutayo Adeyemi, from Nigeria, and Imran Chiosa from Malawi. A chance too good to miss, despite the roar of the traffic beneath us.

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The Spanish are the world’s greatest anchovy eaters. They get through about 2.69 kilograms each a year, more than a tin a week. So you might be forgiven for thinking that anchovies have always been a part of Spanish cuisine. Not so, with the exception of the good people of Malaga, who developed a thing for deep-fried fresh anchovies. The rest of Spain resolutely ignored anchovies as food, spreading them instead on their fields as fertiliser. All that started to change in the late 19th century, when Italians, expert in the ways of salting fish, fetched up on the Basque coast to buy up all the fish that nobody else wanted. Among them, Giovanni Vella, who invented the modern tin of anchovy fillets in olive oil.

It was, according to Chris Beckman, author of A Twist in the Tail: how the humble anchovy flavoured Western cuisine, a win for everyone.

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Anchovies can be very divisive; some people absolutely cannot stand them. I can’t get enough of the little blighters. What’s the difference? It might be as simple as the way they’re stored.

At the Dublin Gastronomy Symposium this past summer, I was delighted to learn one crucial way to improve any tin of anchovies: keep it in the fridge until you’re ready to use it.

Marcela Garcés is a professor at Siena College in New York, and as a side hustle she and her husband Yuri Morejón run La Centralita, a culinary studio that aims, among other things, “to teach guests about anchovies as a gourmet food in context”. As a result of our conversation, I now hold anchovies in even higher regard.

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