Philosophy of Food Spring 2018 Class Notes

JAN 18: 1

• First Day Food Survey

• Course Content: A brief look at the major course research questions.

• Course mechanics:

• Websites in this course. alfino.org --> wiki and courses.alfino.org
• Roster information -- fill in google form
• Main Assignments and "Grading Schemes"

• To Do list:

• Send me a brief introduction through the "Tell Me" form on the wiki. (Soon, please.)
• Login to wiki for the first time and make a brief introduction on the practice page. (3 points if both are done by Friday.)
• After rosters are posted, login to courses.alfino and look around. Note "Links" for pdfs. Retrieve reading for Monday (and read it).
• Browse wiki pages, especially some of the old food news.
• Get the book. Pollan, In Defense of Food
• Start printing pdfs. Highly recommended.

• The Prep Cycle -- recommendations for success in the course!

1. Read - Check out Advice on Reading. Look at last year's class notes for the reading, if available. Be ready for quizes.
2. Make sure your in-class notes link class notes and problems and issues to readings. This is how you get a high level of information and detail to work with in your thought and expression.
3. Class -- Our pattern is to consolidate our understanding of the reading and then engage in philosophy on the basis of it. Small group discussion is a training experience. Everything is a training experience.

This is the basic pattern for our coursework. From this cycle we then develop short philosophical writing and position papers using by instructor and peer review.

JAN 23: 2

• show survey results; Spending on Food by country

Food Inc Notes

Fed Up!

JAN 25: 3

Gastrpod, "The End of the Calorie"

• Sanctorio Sanctorius - 30year practice for weighing inputs and outputs.

• Antoine Lavasier — Guinea pig in coffee urn - we “burn” food chemically. Change in temperature of water the pig is in. 1st “calorimeter”. Axed in French Rev.

• Later defined by a german scientists (Favre and Silbermann in 1852 or Mayer in 1848) as: Amount of heat energy to raise 1 gram of water by one degree centigrade from 14.5 to 15.5 at sea level.

• We still use calorimeters......museum of calorimeters also. Visit to contemporary calorimeter. Converted walk in cooler. Implication that the woman with the sewing machine “made a mess”?

• Bomb calorimeter. You burn the food. Segment on how it works.

• Wilbur Atwater. Atwater values. USDA scientist. “Father of nutrition science” (Nestle likes him.). 4,000 food values. Method...omg. Potental energy (bomb cal value) - excretion = value. 4 cal/gram of carb or protein. 9 calories per gram of fat. (7 alcohol).

• Recent evidence about variability of calorie values — researchers repeating Atwater research, but using additional measures. David Baer and Bill Rumpler both work at the Food Components and Health Laboratory at the USDA-ARS headquarters, in Beltsville, Maryland. Check out Baer and his colleagues' papers on the difference between the calories on the label and those our bodies can extract for almonds and walnuts.b. “The food is free, but you have carry ...”. 5-6% off on tree nuts, 30% on almonds, 21% walnuts,

• Richard Wrangham is the author of Catching Fire: How cooking made us human. Harvard medical anthropologist. —
• First to show that cooking changes food to allow earlier digestion (small intestine) and greater calorie recovery. 40% for starch. Also cooked meat, peanuts. All research on mice (and pythons). Still hard to say what the variation will be for us. Maybe 20-40%. What about heat extrusion, also called Food Extrusion? (Used in cereals.). Industrial food might raise calorie levels relative to atwater values. That's a good thing, right? Or is it?

• Digression on Food Extrusion (based on Sp'17 course):

• [1]
• So, if extrusion damages nutrition, what about pasta? Why doesn't it have a high glycemic index like breakfast cereals?
• "In pasta products, gluten forms a viscoelastic network that surrounds the starch granules, which restricts swelling and leaching during boiling. Pasta extrusion is known to result in products where the starch is slowly digested and absorbed (59,60). Available data on spaghetti also suggest that this product group is a comparatively rich source of resistant starch (61). The slow-release features of starch in pasta probably relates to the continuous glutenous phase. This not only restricts swelling, but possibly also results in a more gradual release of the starch substrate for enzymatic digestion. Pasta is now generally acknowledged as a low glycemic index food suitable in the diabetic diet. However, it should be noted that canning of pasta importantly increases the enzymic availability of starch, and hence the glycemic response (62).[2]

• Sarah Haley — scientist claiming counting calories didn’t work.

• CALORIES AND THE GUT MICROBIOME

• Peter Turnbaugh's lab at the University of California, San Francisco, promises "better living through gut microbes." In our conversation with him, we discussed this study on the effects that transplanting gut microbes from lean and obese twins had on the weight of mice. Further examples of the impact of microbes on energy balance can be found in this paper on one woman's weight gain following a fecal transplant, and this paper on how risperidone is associated with altered gut microbiota and weight gain.

• microbiota creates variation in calorie capture.

• 36:45. Sarah Hailey comment.

• CALORIE REPLACEMENTS?

• Susan B. Roberts is the creator of the satiety-based "iDiet." She has also done extensive research into the accuracy of calorie counts on menu labels. David Ludwig's book, Always Hungry?, also proposes measuring foods based on their satiety score. Adam Drenowksi's Nutrient-Rich Food Index is explained here.

• They acknowledge that we don’t have a better standard, but other methods might tell us more.

• DAVID WISHART AND METABOLOMICSDavid Wishart's research group is based at the University of Alberta. You can check out the Human Metabolome Project Database online here. And the Israeli study on personalized nutrition based on individual glycemic responses is available online here.

• WHY THE CALORIE IS BROKEN
• We wrote a feature article for Mosaic, the online publication of the Wellcome Trust, to accompany this episode. You can read it online here.
• THE CHEMICAL DEFINITION OF THE CALORIE
• In the episode, we say that a calorie is the amount of heat energy needed to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree centigrade, from 14.5º to 15.5º, at one unit of atmospheric pressure. This is accurate, but it is misleading, because throughout the rest of the episode, we are discussing a different kind of calorie—the kilocalorie, which is the amount of heat energy needed to raise the temperature of one kilogram of water by one degree centigrade. The kilocalorie is the number we see on our food labels and recommended daily allowances, but no one other than chemists actually calls it the kilocalorie. Instead, it has been shortened to "calorie" on labels and in everyday usage. Throughout our episode, we follow common practice by calling a kilocalorie a calorie, but then we mistakenly gave the definition of a true calorie without noting the difference. We apologize for any confusion!

• The University of Alberta's David Wishart offers us a glimpse of the future, in which truly personalized nutrition advice will evolve from the emerging science of how the chemicals in our bodies interact with all the different chemicals in the food we eat. And Susan Roberts, director of the energy metabolism laboratory at the Tufts USDA nutrition center, suggests an alternative unit as a replacement for the traditional calorie.

-

Groopman, Jerome, "Is Fat Killing You, Or is Sugar?"

• the author, a medical doctor, start with 1960's cholesterol culture in US and his own experience with diet and statins to change his levels.

• Fat is back -- oils and nuts are good again, Atkins and paleo diets (ketosis diets) make health claims. But looking at a study underlying one of these claims for the med diet, one finds the significance of the science overstated.

• The article uses a review of two books to make some points about the connection between nutrition science and dietary advice.

• Sylvia Taylor, Secret Life of Fat
• Gary Taubes, The Case Against Sugar

• Digest of Taylor's case: You need fat in your body to metabolize many vitamins, to signal regulatory mechanisms for appetite (leptin). Every neuron in your brain is sheathed in a lipid. She also espouses an inflammation theory of obesity. Groopman is critical of the quality research here. There is no easy dietary advice that follows from understanding lipids. (But note that it could still be helpful in training our intuitions against simplistic dietary advice!)

• cites historical models for "moral diets" like Brillat-Savarin, Graham, Fletcher....(We will read more about these characters.)

• Wibur Atwater -- still a census: Calories matter.

• Post WW2 AMA declares obsesity a major health problem. Ancel Keys -- Promoted low fat, low unsaturated fat diet, such as Med. Diet.

• traces Taubes early food journalism, "What is Its all a Big Fat Lie?" 2007: Good Calories, Bad Calories. Taubs 1. makes strong claims for sugar as the "culprit" in the Western Diet and 2. tells the Big Sugar political story, e.g. "the food industry has systematically tried to obstruct scientific research that exposes the dangers of sugar, just as tobacco companies tried to hide the risks of smoking." (note that Groopman agrees with the latter claim.)

• traces history of sugar industry effort to refute the claim that is is an "empty calorie" (makes a food calorie dense)
• research funding history, research funding wars.

• Groopman claims that Taubes overstates the evidence for sugar as a single cause. Follows his somewhat unscientific reasoning. He lumps lots of very different diseases together. The analogy between tobacco and sugar doesn't carry over to the molecular level. (Note: This does not mean that glycemic response is not an important area of recent research, just that it can't be recruited in this fashion.)

• Note his closing critique of diet books: oversimplification, overreliance on macronutrient theories, or behavioral tricks. Meta-research on diets undermines their efficacy.
• (To the extent that diet books are effective, it's because their advice overlaps to some degree with mainstream advice. The "trick" in the diet isn't what's effective.)

JAN 30: 4

Microbiome Movie Notes

• Medical Revolution The Gut Microbiome
• Medical Revolution The Gut Microbiome Notes
• The Gut -- Our Second Brain Notes

Montgomery, David and anne Bilke, "What Your Microbiome Wants for Dinner"

• Digestion Basics

• good introduction to digestion.
• inverse relation between complexity of the food molecule and how far it continues to contribute to digestion as it moves through the tube.
• note distinct environments of the tract and their respective "ecologies" - 7 quarts of fluids through small intestine.
• genomic "division of labor" -- our genes code for 20 enzymes to break down complex carbs but our bacterial guests code for 260 enzymes for that purpose.
• Microbiota (M) like a pharmacy.

• Grain Wreck

• Chemistry of Typical cereal crop seed --
• Note that you lose the fats in the grain to stabilize it for production purposes. Fats go rancid. Also, white bread is sweet to the taste. Because it's already breaking down into sugars (simpler carbs) even in your mouth.
• historical point: total carb consumption stable over 20th c US, but types of carbs changed. Whole grains and rate of sugar absorbtion (tracked by "glycemic index")

• Meat

• Protein Putrefication (Does this happen alot?) - compounds produced by undigested meat in large intestine interferes with butyrate production -- important for general colonic health. Thinning of bacterial density leaves openning for pathogens and physical damage.
• High fat diets can lead to higher rates of bile in the large intestine, which it doesn't handle well. secondary bile acids.
• Needn't be a general health argument against meat, but he acknowledges some legitimate health advantages to a vegetarian diet. Point is that cereal fermentation might be part of the process that helps us tolerate the protein putrefication and excess bile of meat and fat.

• espouses what I'm calling the "consensus healthy diet" - movement away from industrial processed food.

Sonnenbergs, C 1, "What is the Microbiota and Why Should I Care?"

• How the world looks to a microbiologist! "Without microbes humans wouldn't exist, but if we all disappeared, few of them would notice." 10
• Introduction to the Tube and digestion
• Microbiota Case against the Western Diet

• Sets the history of human diet in context. Agriculture already a big change, but then industrial ag / industrial foods
• Adaptability of M remarkable. Makes us omnivores.
• Baseline M - cant' be health Western Diet eaters. studies of groups like Hadza -- far more diverse.
• 19 - Evolved Symbiotic relationship between us and bacteria --

• types of symbiotic relationship - parasitic, commensal (one party benefits, little or no effect on the other), mutualism.
• The heart warming story of Tremblaya princeps and Moranella endobia. (21) -- why we should be happy mutualists. Delegation and division of labor might create resiliance.

• 22-30 - Cultural History and History of Science on Bacteria

• The Great Stink 1858 London, Miasma theory disproved, Cholera bacterium, not isolated until near end of century. Dr. Robert Koch.
• 60-70's: Abaigail Salyers: early pioneer, 2008: Human Microbiome Project
• Contemporary research: gnotobiotic mice. early fecal transplant studies of [Dr. Jeffrey Gordon].

Philosophical Implications of the Microbiome

• The Microbiome research we are reading seems to have implications for the following course research questions:

• 1. What is food?
• 5. What are the challenges of nutrition science as a field of knowledge and what is the state of knowledge about nutrition, broadly?
• 6. What is a nutritious diet?
• 10. How should I critically assess my own food practices in light of my understanding of the nature of food and food culture?

Here are some possible theoretical claims for you to evaluate in terms of their plausibility and their own implications:

• Your food doesn't just feed you.
• Your food doesn't just nourish you, it also supplies a pharmacy in your gut. These effects cut across the health spectrum and life span.
• You exist as a distinct organism, but you cannot survive outside of the symbiotic relationships you have with bacteria and other organisms that call you home.
• Mental health is influenced by the health of our M.
• We have co-evolved with our Microbiome.
• The interic nervous system is an ecology.
• Some of the requirements of industrial food production are at odds with the requirements of a health Microbiome.

• In small group discussion, consider how information about the Microbiome might change your approach to questions like "What is Food?" Then look over the proposed philosophical implications above. Are they too strong? Warranted? Do you have sceptical doubts about using this research to alter your view of these research questions?

FEB 1: 5

• Data on glycemic index and a puzzle....
• Isolated Fiber in industrial food

Sonnenbergs, C 5, "Trillions of Mouths to Feed"

• Microbiota extinction -- not just from change in foods, less fermented foods, more sterile food and sterile environments. pets help with our microbiota.

• Microbiota mechanisms:

• direct response to diet, "recyclers",
• life is hard for our M germs: no oxygen down there and transit time is fast. So they make SCFAs that can metabolize in the blood stream where there is oxygen.
• Why feed the gut? Isn't that just more calories? (116) - No. people with high scfa diets lose weight, decrease inflammation, Western diet diseases.

• History of research -- field doctors: Thomas Cleave, 70s "The Saccharine Disease" "Bran Man"; Denis Burkitt studies comparing Western and Africans on fiber, stool quality, and health.

• Carb chemistry/metabolism basics -- 120: also in our nutrition textbook chapters. Note unique types of saccharides in particular foods: read 121 and 126; insulin resistance.

• Measuring MACs - the authors acronym for Macrobiotically Available Carbohydrates. - no standard measure of dietary fiber (note discrepancies from above.)

• RDAs: 29/38 grams. Actual 15 grams/day.

• research discovering enzyme in nori, a seaweed based sushi wrapper: found in Japanese guts. Helps digest fish. Note: Terrior. Local adaptation of the M.
• research on rich and poor. richness of M better predictor of disease than obesity.
• Gordon's famous FMT mouse research: need M and M-supporting diet.
• what's wrong with refined cereal seeds (130) (like Montgomery's account). Wheat bread vs. Wheat berries. The form of the food matters to the fiber count.
• What about the Inuit?
• What about excess gas?

Sonnenbergs, C 7, "Eat Sh*t and Live"

• This chapter is more focused on diseases that have been treatable with new knowledge about the M, and the limits of that research currently.

• Gastroenteritis, infectious diarrhea, -- culprits like Giardia, Salmonella, and norovirus.
• Immunological effects of the M: "colonization resistance" - mechanisms (165) - crowding out, bacteriocidal chemicals. Problematic nature of antibiotics in the M.

• C. difficile (Cdiff) -- associated disease CDAD. why antibiotics don't always help. spores.
• 2013 Dutch FMT therapy for CDAD - 94% cure rate (note earlier researcher in 50s who tried this.)

• Antibiotics -- Interesting that Americans not only eat the Western Diet, but take high levels of antibiotics. Effects of Cipro on M. -- decrease in volume (-10-100x) and diversity of bacteria (25-50% of species). Test subject had diverse responses. Some recovered M in several weeks. Some sustained damage. 2nd round of Cipro hurt everyone's M.

• IBS and IBD - 177:

• Difficulties with FMT as a therapy: dangers in introducing new bacteria into someone's gut. Might be hard to remove. (Like issue of releasing GMOs in environment.)
• Limited results from FMT in humans for obesity treatment. or inflammatory bowel disease.

Some implications of Microbiome research

• The form of the food you eat partly determines the kinds of nutrition you can get from it.
• Nutritional information about the food is incomplete for assessing potential nutrition from the food.
• Which part of you eats the food affects what kind of nutrition (and other benefits) you receive from it.

FEB 6: 6

Pollan, In Defense of Food, first 4 chapters of Part 1

• background on previous work and personal food history.
• 5: example of failure of advice on fat and cancer, coronary heart disease. Failure of claims about fiber not reducing cancer risk., also on value of fish.
• best to understand confusion on nutrition as result of interaction of food industry, gov't and journalism.
• claim for Part One: most of the nutritional advice of the last 50 years has made us less healthy.
• surprising claim: It's a dangerous idea to think that food is just about health. orthorexics.
• 10: Western Diet defined. Four of the top ten causes of death today are chronic diseases with well-established links to diet: coronary heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and cancer. Even after adjusting for longevity. Note: You could define it epidemiologically or in terms of principle traits.
• goal: advice for enjoying food.

• Chapter 1 - From Foods to Nutrients

• food disappearing in favor of "nutrients" - a kind of reductionism.
• William Prout, early 19th division of macronutrients into Protein, Carb, and Fat. Justus von Leibig, also studied soil, imp. or minerals.
• 1912: Casimir Funk, "vitamines" - goes back to "vitalism", also "amines" because nitrogen based.
• McGovern Committee: important ideological moment: part of the story starts in 1977, with the first Fed comm on nutrition. blow back on recommendations 23. This led to a strategy of not referring to foods directly in terms of "more or less" but nutrients. Also, good foods reduced to nutrients.
• also from 1950's "lipid hypothesis" - that fats from meat and dairy were responsible for much dietary disease.

• Chapter 2 - Nutritionism Defined

• Gyorgy Scrinis -- 2002 claim.
• Nutritionism puts the food scientists in charge. leads to thinking about foods as "good" or "bad" based on their nutrients. you find this in the history of nutrition. 29ff. Liebig made "protein" a master nutrient. Others, like Kellog and Fletcher, would promote carbs. Good place to see limits of nutritionism is in baby formula. Still no match for the real thing.

• Chapter 3 - Nutritionism comes to Market

• nutritionism works well with marketing of food. margarine, for example. starts as cheap fat, but then marketed as healthier. industrial foods can be redesigned as nutrition fads change.
• early history of food adulteration. Sinclair's The Jungle, 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. Objections to "imitation" rule. (note other controversies: milk, real). Thrown out in 1973. If an imitation food is nutritionally similar to the food it imitates, it doesn't need to be called imitation. Opened the door to lots of chemical substitutes.

• Chapter 4 - Food Science's Golden Age

• diet fads tend to favor foods that can be re-engineered. Some of that can be done with animals by feeding them differently, but mostly this favors industrial food over whole foods. Note on taste of leaner corn-fed beef. Arguably a decrease in satisfaction.

Group Writing Exercise

• What is nutritionism? Does it makes sense to say that it contributes to an ideology about food? Express both majority and minority views from your group. 300 words.

Montanari, "Food is Culture"

• Creating One's Own Food

• q. 3: roughly, now that we're in a postindustrial age, we look at agriculture as "natural" and traditional, but from the perspective of those adopting, it wasn't. - but they experienced ag as a break from nature. against nature, but also a breakthrough and innovation. ...gave us power to rule nature (later ideas about space and time).

• demography of agriculture is amazing.dates for ag in diff regions (5), "invention of agriculture...matter of necessity tied to population growth"

• cites Franz Braudel, who made a version of this thesis. Agriculture organized everything (roughly). see list. economy, religion (make side point about warrior / ag gods). Civitas and civilitas depend upon agriculutre!

• Bread, breadeaters, marks break from nature. Bread is an invention from nature (sidepoint: can sustain life, man can live on bread alone, it just isn't pretty.). Interesting reference to mythology of bread and woman in Epic of Gilgamesh (short term research oppportunity).

• Fermented drinks - like bread, break from nature.

• germ idea about culture: culture is produced where tradition and innovation intersect

• Even Nature is Culture -

• two oppositions: 1. ag and hunt/gather goes through plant and animal kingdom. but 2. sedentary/nomad favors plant over animal (in fields vs. forest opposition, plants are identified with culture, hunting with nature)

• gods/myths of agricultural societies: stories of Persephone, rice in asian narratives, corn in Mayan legend. hunting practices treating bones of animal as sacred, basis for rebirth. Germans have their grand Miale!

• thesis: opposition between nature and culture somewhat fictitious. something like: civilized man uses nature (food structured) in the primary myths to separate him/herself from nature.

• p. 11: difference btween Greco-Roman and German food systems. Germ of European food system in the clash between these cultures (note that Romans saw German meat culture as barbaric. Romans would have eaten meat, but not as primary food (note, later, Christian calendars with meatless and fasting days). Christianity coming from Med culture, has bread and wine as liturgical symbols. Unification of these cultures produces European food culture, balancing bread and meat. Implications for gastronomy.

• Playing with Time

• no seasons in Eden or Land of Cockainge.
• Food culture developed by prolonging and stopping time, through species variation and food storage. examples 14-15. "man made putrefaction a means to a useful end" cheese, cured meats.

• Playing with Space

• goal of transcending spatial limits to food, transpo. Nice story from the Mantuan court of Gonzaga. "good horse and a full purse". involves concept of "terroir".

• Conflicts

• food systems are not nec. harmonious (esp. given what is at stake in a food insecure world). Medieval system was a class based system of control of food production. Peasant rebellions over restricing forest access. Robin Hood. famine image: scene of farmers at the city gate starving. conflicts between lords also about food, cities taxed area villages in food. Irish food famine of 1846 due to English control of food. (can't live on potatoes).

• examples of movements of food in global trades cultures. For Columbus ( int. term "Columbian exchange") and age of conquest, exploitation was avowed purpose.
• Original text in "bio-history".

Diamond, Ch. 10, "Agriculture's Mixed Blessings"

• Old "progressivist" view
• Ants practice agriculture and something like animal husbandry
• Details about the spread of agriculture
• Advantages of hunter gatherer lifestyle

• short work week, more leisure
• better nutrition (in some comparisons)
• no impact from crop failures

• paleopathology: what you tell from old bones and cookware

• health evidence from early adoption of agriculture
• height, nutrition, cavities, anemia, tb, syphillis, mortality
• low carb, varied nutrients
• class structures emerge after agriculture: diff outcomes dep. on class
• sexual inequality

• other differences that sustained agriculture

• increased population density made hunt/gather politically vulnerable
• hunt/gather requires lots of room
• agriculture created society that could produce sophisticated art (churches).
• grants that agriculture led to lots of great things, but also to large populations, which affects the equation about quality of life.

FEB 8: 7

Two famous restaurants started by Chef/food activits.

• Blue Hills at Stone Barns Dan Barber
• Chez Panisse Alice Waters

Barber, "Intro and Ch 12"

• Story of Eight Row flint corn at Blue Hills. sig. "varietal restoration" "heritage cultivation"

• Story of the summer of corn at Blue Hills Farm when Barber was a kid. Note diffs.
• planted in "Three Sisters"
• polenta not typically thought of as high flavor experience, but in this case it was.
• some background on "farm to table" "artisanal eaters" "locavores" -- (another side of industrial food, esp. for a chef, is the effect of varieties and production methods on flavor).
• chef as activist (p. 10 reference to Paul Bocuse) -- Wolfgang Puck -- eventually industrial food system produces a version of the chef's innovation.
• p. 11ff: Barber's critique of farm to table and the 1st and 2nd plates. Criticizing the way we eat: protein-centric plate, small side of veg Protein consumption per capita by country
• Some detail on Blue Hills.

• lamb chop story-- Problem: farm serving table. Table is still in charge of the plate. "cherry picking ingredients that are often ecologically demanding and expensive to grow" So, eliminate the menu! p.14 top of 15. Note characterization of American cuisine vs. French and Italian. No peasant heritage to base it on. Am: immoderation, big slabs of meat.
• 1st, 2nd, 3rd plates 17. Claim: "The future of cuisine will represent a paradigm shift, a new way of thinking about cooking and eating that defies Americans' ingrained expectations." 18

• The food "supply chain" is an ecology. The implication is that we can assess it in terms of sustainability, flavor, quality, diversity...etc.

Montanari, "Food is Culture" "Fire > Cooking > Kitchen > Cusine > Civilization

Fire > Cooking > Kitchen > Cuisine > Civilization

• cooking essential to human being. (note other resources) . Western story of Prometheus (30), the hearth identifies human being (abode).

• Not true that cuisine is only about cooking. raw food methods. Chinese critic of western gastronomy as based too much on cooking. meanings of "Cucina". transition from womens' domain to men's.

FEB 13: 8

Short Writing Assignment: 400 words

• Please write a 400 word maximum answer to the following question by midnight Friday, February 16, 2018:

• In light of our course readings to date, how do you approach the problem of defining "food"? What is food, in your opinion, and what do we need to consider in offering a definition? Please review the Assignment Rubric as you think about how to construct your answer.

• Prepare your answer and submit it in the following way:

1. Do not put your name in the file or filename. You may put your student id number in the file. If possible put your word count in the file.
2. Format your answer in double spaced text in a 12 point font.
3. Save the file in the ".docx" file format using the file name "SW1".
4. Log in to courses.alfino.org. Upload your file to the Q&W dropbox.

Pollan, Part II of In Defense of Food

• Part II : Western Diet and diseases of civilization

• Chapters 1 and 2

• Summer 1982 - W. Australia aborigines study -- "metabolic syndrome" -- defined, theorized as signiture disease of western diet.
• O'Dea's results p. 87. Note that she didn't look for a silver bullet, a single factor. Just the diet change.

• Major premise: Compare us to many traditional diet populations and the difference in diseases profile is stark. It might be the "whole diet pattern" rather than a single imbalance. (The imbalances are symptoms.)

• Group of early 20th c intellectuals (bot 90) noticed absence of chronic disease in populations they travelled to. Pollan chooses the story of Weston Price from this group.

• Two objections to hyp that Western diet is to blame: disease/race theory, demographic theory (live longer). In both cases, the evidence refutes the claim.

• Weston Price -- b. 1870. diseases of teeth are effects of Western diet. 1939 major work after global travels looking at teeth. Lots and lots of teeth. kind of an amateur scientists, but collected important data (and seen right by later dental research). hard to find control groups. Price found big differences in Vit A and D. (Note comment about Masai -- . Multiple successful diets for omnivores.) pl 98: note comparison of groups with wild animal flesh and agriculturalists. made comparisons of grass fed / winter forage fed animals to find vitamin differences.

• Albert Howard -- similar time period, making argument against synthetic nitrogen (more later). both pioneers in what would later be seen as an ecological approach to food production.

• Chapter 3

• thesis: Calling for a more ecological way of thinking about food. think of food as mutual adaptation of plants and animals to humans. propagation/place in ecology of food chain. example of fruit: ripeness, transportation, high nutrient state. Corn vs. corn syrup. (Note point about possible future humans who could use HFCS. also true of milk in history of agriculture. Pollan doesn't quite give the details on milk. not like a light switching on. Textbook example of gene-culture co-evolution. Selective advantage for those who keep lactase expression going past breast feeding. You can always leave it to natural selection to favor those who can get on with the new diet.)

• Types of Changes that mark the Western Industrial Diet

• 1. From Whole Foods to Refined

• prestige of refined products: prior to roller technology, white rice and flour would be labor added, story of grain rollers 107, Refined flour is the first industrial fast food. Fresh flour lasts days. 108: specific details germ/endosperm, but also local mills, water power, (again, conquering space and time, as Montanari would say). Fortified bread.
• Jacobs and Stefffen study: epidemiological study showing effects of whole grains, but also that groups not eating whole grains, but getting equivalent nutrients did not enjoy benefits. alludes to possible wholism in effects. Sugar intake since 1870's.

• 2. From Complexity to Simplicity

• The flip side of food degradation is soil degradation. nitrogen fertilizers. simplification through chemical processing. control. Documented nutrient decline in foods. (Think about this in terms of diet. You get a larger variety of X fruit or veg with less nutrition, but it's cheaper. Problem is that you have a limited volume of food intake, so you lose value in the end and possibly compromise nutrition.) Simplification of species diversity and monoculture of ag. corn and soy are very efficient producers of carb calories. but then we draw less food diversity by focusing on these two.

• conclusion: there may be a false economy in industrial food production. varietals, soil, diversity of food have values that are lost in assessing costs at the retail level and without this knowledge.

• 3. Quality to Quantity

• decline in nutrient content (118-119: review), "nutritional inflation," interest in "phytochemicals" -- seem related to anti-oxidant and anti-inflammatory effects.

• decline in food nutrient content from food grown in impoverished soil. Calls the result "nutritional inflation" because you have to get greater volumes of food to get your nutrition. some details on how soils matter: growing time affects mineral and vitamin levels (bio-accumulation). some evidence that organic plants have chemicals related to immune responses.

• "overfed and undernurished"

• cites Bruce Ames, serious researcher interest in micronutrition and cancer. Interesting theory (unproven) that "satiety" mechanisms are tied to nutrition such that a malnurished body always feels hungry.

• 4. Leaves to Seeds

• shift from leaves to seeds decreases anti-oxidants and phytonutrients in our diet. seeds tilt in their fat profile toward O6. less healthy fat. O3 fats spoil faster, so tend to be removed from industrial food. nutritional advice to move toward seed oils didn't originally distinguish O3 from O6. Claims that lipidphobia led us to shift to seed oils (give up butter --which has some 03 fats and move to corn -- which is high in 06 fats) and that led to a change in ratio of O6/O3 from 3:1 to 10:1. note the connection p. 129 between fat profile and sense of "food security" -- interesting digression here. Could we have a deep fear of hunger that still leads us to choose overeating, especially of caloric foods?

• O3 decline also related to mental health. 130

• 5. From Food Culture to Food Science

• shift from reliance on national / ethnic food cultures to science. (digress on how national food cultures are often defined by major cookbooks).

FEB 15: 9

Nestle, "Introduction: The Food Industry and 'Eat More,' from Food Politics"

Intro: "This book exposes the ways in which food companies use political ernment and professional support for the sale of their products."

• Note opening picture of food industry: overproduction, connection to publicly traded companies creates need to sell more. [What is relationship between ownership type and production, capitalization, industrialization? Digress to woofing. More traditional farm structure might focus on sustaining real income rather than meeting investor expectations.]
• On the other hand, this model worked well to meet nutritional deficits that continued well into the 20th century for many americans.
• historic note: early 20th century still battled nutritional disease from inadequate calorie intake. Then shift to overconsumption.
• her professional experience (3) with editing Surgeon General's report: no "eat less meat" - Government gave up producing the report in 2000. Authoritative advice would have required some "eat less" messaging. Could say "eat less sat. fat". (Note nutritionism.)

• Side note: "New Dietary Guidelines Crack down on Sugar but red meat gets a pass," NPR Jan 7, 2016 [3]

• her thesis: "that many of the nutritional problems of Americans—not least of them obesity—can be traced to the food industry's imperative to encourage people to eat more in order to generate sales and increase income in a highly competitive marketplace."

• note her concise nutrition advice on p. 5ff.

• 7ff: stats on diet and mortality, childhood obesity. Note that she does endorse "energy balance" as legitimate (more so than in Fed Up, but she would agree with their point)

• 8ff: food production and consumption trends. more total daily calories (3200 in '70 to 3900 in the 90's), increased consumption of low fat foods, more restaurant food, where we are in relation to USDA advice. see p. 10. low variety of food in actual diets. (Note: Not just more protein. More of everything! Revise our protein hyp.)

• 11: dimensions and trends in food industry and international - European diets are approximating US diet in calories from fat. "nutrition transition" idea that as cultures move from primary healthy diets to industrial diets they ironically seek more calories and want cheap calories. US less than 10% of income on food (see wiki links for more)

• Some food economics: percent of food value from farming across food types. Advertising spending on industrial food, using philanthropy for branding, new food products (25)

• Follow data: size of industry, timeline of tobacco company purchases of industry. Farm value vs. Marketing of industrial food. p. 18. Stop to consider explanations.

• Social trends: female labor market participation, changes in perception of "cooking". Scratch cooking associated more with sub-cultures.

Nestle, Chapter 1, "From Eat More to Eat Less"

• this reading gives more detail to the argument as summarized in the Intro. You could say that we are the victims of an industry that succeeded too well!

• early history of USDA survey of food supply and consumption, 1909. (interesting to note that early studies in the 1890s predate knowledge of vitamins and dietary causes of onditions like beriberi, pellagra, and scurvy.

• "food groups" approach since early 20th century. War food policy, post-war "food for freedom" promotes sugar and candy. "eat more". Even in 1950's people weren't hitting RDAs in some areas. response of US gov't "eat more". 1960s war on poverty also reinforced "eat more" (recall %33 poverty rate).

• McGovern committe is the pivot point on "eat more" "eat less". Ancel Keys, explaining increase in heart disease since war, uses comparative data on food cultures with plant based diets. Hits on lipid hypothesis. reduce calories from fat. go low fat. (connect this discussion to Pollan, 40-50)

• details from the infamous 1977 hearings, p. 40-41. replaced "reduce consumption of meat" with "choose meats, ....which will reduce saturate fat intake."

• 43: Surgeon General's contribution -- 1979 first attention to processed foods nutritional value, publication Healthy Peoplerecommended less red meat (last time Fed Gov't would do that). Instead, switch to lean meats.

• back to USDA guidelines: 1985, first mention of maintaining ideal weight. "avoid too much" instead of "eat less". 49: consensus among nutrtitionists in late 1980s. Series of authoritative reports against high fat meat. consensus on limits of calories from fats, salt. consensus on need to restrict overall calorie intake as well.

• note last page summary: transition in 1980s of not resisting the consensus from the nutritional community, but using it to market nutrients. This coincides with the thesis of "nutritionism".

• Some inferences from Nestle's narrative: We have had the food politics that you would expect from the historical and social conditions of our culture. The historical conditions of malnurishment and insecure food supplies, along with economic organizations that are motivated to increase profit and production gave us a kind of momentum that produced food in abundance. But it was hard for the political system, having developed political and institutional systems of support for increasing production of food products to transition to a world in which the best nutritional advice was to tell people to eat less of many kinds of foods.

FEB 20: 10

Nestle, "Chapter 2: Politics Versus Science -- opposing the food pyramind, 1991-1992"

• Tells the story of the blocked printing of the 1991 Eating Right Pyramid. Meat and Dairy did not appreciate being "narrowed" in the pyramid. She highlights the USDA mandate (over HEW) after 1977 to produce nutrition information, the tension between that agency and then "HEW" (health education and welfare), (now DHHS) where the Surgeon General was.

• p. 55. Specific design process for the pyramid. Compare other countries approaches. [4]. Compare to current US Dietary Guidelines for 2015-2020. [5] [6]

• the controversy over the pyramid was mostly about the diminished size of the meat group and it's proximity to the sugar, fats, and oils. If you look at the previous chapter's image of the "Basic Four" design, meat and dairy were "in front" and "on top" of the image. The ensuing controversy had partly to do with gov't officials dodging responsibility for the nutritionists work.

Small Group Discussion

• Considering this political history, what part of government should have responsibility for informing the public about diet and health?
• Review the various ways of picturing a healthy diet including some of the other governments' approaches and "My Plate" (see Guidelines or [7])

• Should we try to represent a healthy diet in a picture, heuristics (Pollan, for example), or just text? Come up with your own food heuristics or image-ideas.

Moss, Ch. 4, "Is It Cereal or Candy?"

• John Harvey Kellog vs. Will Kellog. Drama at Battle Creek Michigan.
• note early ad claims by Post for Grape-Nuts and Postum -- shows something about food psychology and tendency to fad diets.

• $660 million to $4.4 billion 1970 to mid 80s.
• breakfast cereal growth coincided with increased labor participation by women. Easy meal to eliminate cooking for, especially with cheap milk.
• Ira Shannon, Dental activist!, measures sugar content on breakfast cereals after Feds refuse. 74
• Jean Mayer, Harvard nutritionist, big deal, early obesity research. title for chapter from an essay of his. urged moving cereals over 50% sugar to the candy aisle.
• note nomenclature issue in the public policy discussion: breakfast cereals v. breakfast foods. who cares?

• 76: Key theoretical claim: The breakfast cereal industry responded to concern over sugar in part by developing market campaign to children and by putting marketing in charge of product development (85)

• 76ff: political story of sugar in 1977 -- FTC over responds to concern about marketing of cereals to kids by banning all advertising to kids. battle between advertising lobby and FTC. advertising ban failed. Washington Post labels it "the National Nanny". role of gov't issue. "social engineering". still, FTC report was credible and damning on the topic of advertising sugar to kids. note the industry documents showing the industry's effort to "engineer" their consumer.
• 2/3 price of the cereal is in the advertising (!).

• 1990's competition from store brands -- 82ff: note value of minute market share movements. "product news" - continual change in marketing. Kellog is losing out at one point, Moss finishes chapter with their strategic response: concept of "permission" (when a taste is close enough for the consumer to say that had an experience of a real thing through the taste, example: the taste of rice crispy treats in a cereal. "We didn't have to be literal. We just had to have the flavor spot on." (87)

• Key theme from Kellog's market share loss: This is a real crisis for a food company. 87ff. CinnaMon/Bad appple campaign
• odd twist - the "Cinnamon" and "bad apple" commercials. [[8]]
• Frosted Mini-Wheats became "brain food". fraudulent research. 91-92 Commercial in this NPR story Also, check out these oldies. [9]
• Kellogg even tried comparing kids who ate Mini-Wheats to kids who skipped breakfast!

• Interesting. You could argue that we entered a "post truth" era in the food industry before politics.

FEB 22: 11

Pollan, In Defense of Food, Part 3

• Chapter 1

• concedes need to use science in spite of some ideology in nutrition science (nutrient fads, for example); big evidence about Western Diet is still epidemiological.

• hard to avoid industrial food if meat is raised on a Western diet (but not impossible. What does a whole food diet cost?)
• "eating algorithms" - interesting concept. rules of thumb for choosing food.

• Chapter 2: Eat Food

• Use grandma's standard; if it can't rot, it's not food. Ingredients; products with health claims; stay on the edges of the supermarket, avoid the commercial supermarket... (easier to just eliminate most processed foods). (Interesting to note how much smaller a food store can be without so much industrial food.)

• Sara Lee's Soft & Smooth Whole Grain White Bread --- Know when you are looking at gibberish.
• (With plausible claims, ask whether there are any rules governing the claim. Not so much with "whole wheat" in industrial context.)
• Qualified health claims. [10] Someone might look into this.

• Chapter 3: Mostly Plants, especially leaves.

• leafy plants especially (current guidelines distinguish types of plants by color and starch). Gives the anti-oxidant theory (which seems to be holding up well)

• try not to isolate the seed from the plant. (Kind of like isolating the juice from the fruit.) Eat the whole thing.

• "You are what you eat eats too" - you can't have healthy animal food if you feed the animals a Western Diet. (disgress on Andrew Smith argument -- can't be vegetarian). Attention to soil.

• Pro: wild food, supplements, traditional cuisines (typically nutrient dense and balanced), scepticism about new foods, don't look for "magic" diets, enjoy food.

• Chapter 4: How to Eat

• European food culture: behaviors -
• Pay More, Eat Less - not just trade offs, but actually asserting control of amounts.
• Is save meal prep time a false convenience? economist study using concept of "time cost" of eating. Microwaves reduce that, for example.
• Eat Meals vs. "continuous eating" (some issues here: family units don't characterize your part of the life span at the moment. Ideas?)

• Some things to add to Pollan's list:

• make ingredient "trade-ups" - fresh bread for factory, 50cent eggs for 11cent eggs, grass fed whole milk and butter.
• potato chips comparison: Lay's vs. Kettle Brand
• some mindful eating concepts: preparing to make food, attending to making food, savoring food. Attend to the eating space, light a candle, use a place mat, allow some ceremony, consider gratitude/food as grace. Make eating sacred. Eat like your life depends on it.

Small Group Discussion

• 1. Using the continuum we developed between "Ultra-industrial and Ultra-Organic/Saporific locate some of your favorite foods. Where are they on the scale? Which ones could you imagine "trading up" in cost and quality? Compare with others in the group?
• 2. Recall a time when you or a group of friends or family last made a "big deal" out of eating a meal together? Was that part also satisfying? Why? How do the satisfactions of a meal with others compare to those of eating alone? What do you or might you do to make a "big deal" out of eating alone? Is treating food as sacred going too far?
• 3. Evaluate Pollan's "Pay more, eat less" advice in the context of our discussions of "food value" and monthly food budgets. Does it make sense?

Zepeda, Lydia, "Carving Values with a Spoon"

• Zepeda gives us a great example of philosophy of food writing that addresses many of the kinds of issues we have identified in the course so far. Note how she moves us off a "binary" of "consumer responsibility" vs. "regulatory state"

• How do you assess responsibility? individual vs. food industry. Her thesis: context affects choice.
• Values of US food context: lots of cheap calories, low % of spending on food, little concern about conditions of production. (note her point that we are using public money to do this. In a way, the opposite of a Nanny state might be one in which corporations maximize profit from food by degrading the quality of food.)

• some stats: food away from home up to 42% of food expenditures. 2004.

• national policy and cultural values influence by pioneer experience (p. 36), which often involved food insecurity and starvation. (Mention 1493- Thanksgiving story). Also might explain bias toward storable foods.

• postwar food culture characterized by industrial versions of pre-war diet. frozen dinners, more desserts, bigger serving sizes tracked increases in wealth.

• industrial deskilling -- "end of cooking"; labor participation from women increases.

• Eating in the New Millenium - focus on palette and how we spend our time.

• 1990s-2000s -- note p. 39. Interesting claim: we don't want real cuisine, but a branded version of it we can trust.
• 30 minutes a day on food prep and clean up. Simple Diet Plan: 70-90 minutes.

• wages in the food and restaurant industry are among the lowest.

FEB 27: 12

Advising Omnivores: Some thoughts on the Dietary Guidelines

• Defer assessment of the Guidelines until after small group work. Just some general comments on the document.

• From our study, we can see the document from a number of angles

• Latest product of a political process started in 70's - Some movement from status quo toward public health, incremental increases in strength of nutritional advice. Limits (discuss later.)
• Ongoing compromise between government agencies -- Status quo.
• Response to epidemiology of dietary disease -- How might this document look different if it were not responding to dietary disease?
• What does it mean to give dietary advice to omnivores that were fed on and partially adapted to traditional diets? Sami, the Faroese (The Islands and the Whales).

some points: traditional diets not always healthy, tacit dietary knowledge (compare hunter gatherers knowledge of edible plants/animals to ours), keytosis.

• Should we use nutritional knowledge to get back to an intuitive understanding of food? Are Dietary Guidelines and My Fitness Pal more research tools for your diet than ongoing necessary guides? What do you need from dietary advice after you have a good diet? Are you still in the audience for dietary guidelines or do you move on!

• analogy to other kinds of advice --- ethical diets

Study Questions for Discussion of Dietary Guidelines

• We will use your answers to some of the following questions in class. Please make notes for each question so that you can efficiently share your impressions in small group and class discussion.

• 1. What are some of the key terms the Dietary Guidelines (DGs) use to introduce their approach the task of giving dietary advice?
• 2. Why are there subcategories of Vegetables? (Dark Green, Red & Orange, Legumes, Starchy)
• 3. Are the DGs successful in conveying serving information in your opinion?
• 4. Pick one text box that provided either information or advice that you were not aware of.
• 5. Were you able to use Chapter 2 to identify places in which you need to make a "healthy shift"?
• 6. Were you able to locate your eating patterns in relation to the normative data (comparing actual average intake and recommended) in Chapter 2? Was that a surprise? Informative?
• 7. What did you think about Chapter 3 and the My Plate approach? Would it stand on its own?

MAR 1: 13

Some initial remarks on ethical diets and animal ethics

• Unfortunate tendency in ethical diet discussions to be very categorical and binary. All or nothing. There are categorical ethical arguments about diet, but we won't start with them.
• The Bike Analogy and levels of moral appraisal. Animal ethics information is a bit like climate change ethics information. There may be choices that are ethically admirable, but not universally obligatory. Joke about vegan at the party. Consider the conversational ethics of these cases.
• Some background. Two famous books: Peter Singer's Animal Liberation (1975) and Tom Regan's The Case for Animal Rights (1983) -- ethical extensionism. Set many of the terms of discourse for discussion of animal ethics.

• Singer's focus is on industrial animal suffering, but many generalize it to a categorical exclusion of eating sentient animals. Some open questions about suffering.
• Regan is focused on a Kantian argument that applies to all animals that are "subjects-of-a life," which includes beliefs, desires, memory, anticipation of future, etc. Such animals have inherent value and hence are candidates for rights. Some open questions about positive vs. negative rights. Look at Zoopolis for contemporary work.

• Historical vegetarianisms tend to offer categorical reasons for abstaining from meat: ancient vegetarians (Ovid, Plutarch, Pythagora, Porphyry), shame campaigns - Oswald (the original bambi story, diet claims: Sylvester Graham (Christian/Veg fusion), John Harvey Kellogg (7th Day Aventist/health claims), some modern theories. China Study.
• Current research project: Ethical Diets and Animals Ethics -- Beyond Exetensionism. Just under contract with Springer. Call for papers. Open to animal permaculture arguments and frameworks that approach the topics without strict binaries about meat. Problem is more complex that early arguments suggest. Plant sentience (What a Plant Knows) and animal permaculture (Simon Fairlie, Meat: A Benign Extravagance.)

Thought experiment: Report of the Mission to Colony B

• Note on thought experiments: heuristic vs. argumentative (usually reductio). This is meant as heuristic. All of the options at the end are "live" options.
• Thought experiments routinely use fantastic scenarios. In addition to working out your response to the problem, you can object to the thought experiment itself.
• Small group discussion.

• Topic areas for Ethical Diets

• General factors:

• basic animal welfare,
• allowing room and opportunity for "natural behaviors",
• "retiring" non-food animals,
• sustainability,
• breeding against health (chickens and dairy cows)
• industrial animal production often involves environmental externalities (pollution).

• 1. Beef production.
• 2. Dairy cows.
• 3. Poultry production.
• 4. Egg production.
• 5. Fishing - wild and farmed
• 6. Pigs
• 7. Just Food -- justice issues in agriculture and supply chain.

Age of Slaughter vs. Natural Life Span

• Note that the more symmetrically you see animal and human interests, the more likely this information is to be problematic.

• Pigs: Slaughtered at 6 months young; Natural life span: 6 to 10 years
• Chickens: Slaughtered at 6 weeks young; Natural life span: 5 to 8 years for those birds bred as "egg layers" such as Rhode Island Reds; 1 to 4 years for factory layer breeds such as leghorns; and 1 to 3 years for "meat" breeds.
• Turkeys: Slaughtered at 5 to 6 months young; Natural life span: 2 to 6 years
• Ducks/Geese: Slaughtered at 7 to 8 weeks young; Natural life span: domestic ducks: 6 to 8 years; geese from 8 to 15 years.
• Cattle: “Beef” cattle slaughtered at 18 months young; dairy cows slaughtered at 4 to 5 years young; Natural life span: 18 to 25+ years
• Veal Calves: Slaughtered at 16 weeks young; Natural life span: 18 to 25+ years
• Goats: Slaughtered at 3 to 5 months young; Natural life span: 12 to 14 years
• Rabbits: Slaughtered at 10 to 12 weeks young; Natural life span: 8 to 12+ years
• Lambs: Slaughtered at 6 to 8 weeks young for “young lamb” and under 1 year for all other; Natural life span: 12 to 14 years
• Horses/Donkeys: Slaughter age varies; Natural life span: 30 to 40 years

MAR 6: 14

• In connection with our study of Carbohydrates today, we will be analyzing this commercial.

Nix, Chapter 2, "Carbohydrates"

• Nature of

• Carbs are a source of short term energy. All Carbs break down into sugars during metabolism.
• Scale of simple to complex. Simple sugars (monosacharides) don't even require digestion. Starchs are complex and "slow burning".
• Limits to the "energy" metaphor:

• carb levels and types help regulate other processes like insulin response,
• fiber helps with useful bacteria production, appears to reduce colon cancer, helps with bowel function and avoidance of diverticulosis.
• carb types and level signal body to break down protein for energy or not.
• soluble fiber binds bile acids, lowering cholesterol
• per capita HFCS (high fructose corn syrup) up from .12 tsp daily in 1970 to 11.18 tsp in 2008.

Note warning on high fiber low iron-rich diet. Phytic acid in this diet can cause iron deficiency. You can get too much fiber, but most Americans don't.

• Functions of

• reserve fuel supply is stored as glycogen in muscles [[11]] and blood sugar. Roughly 1-2 hours of aerobic exercise.
• carbs keep us from going into ketosis, but as we've noted, you can have a diet based on having your body in a state of ketosis.

• Digestion

• primarily in small intestine, through enzymes such as amalyse from the pancreas, and from the "microvilli" of the intestine which contain specific disaccaridases: sucrase, lactase, and maltase. (digression from p. 26 text box on dairying as textbook case of gene-culture co-evolution.)

• As we learned earlier in the term, you can think of carbs as feeding both you and them. Neither fat nor protein get into the large intestine in significant amounts. We feed our gut bacteria with carbs.

• Recommendations

• decrease added sugar to less than 10% of calorie intake
• increase proportion of complex carbs.

• Two practical take aways:

• Calculating Carb amounts for your diet and noticing carb types and values in your diet.
• Understanding carb related advertising and health claims.

Starchy vs. Non-Starchy Veg

• Corn, peas, parsnips, potatoes, pumpkin, squash, zucchini and yams are all examples of starchy vegetables. Non-starchy vegetables are typically flowering parts of the plant. Lettuce, asparagus, broccoli, cauliflower, cucumber, spinach, mushrooms, onions, peppers and tomatoes are all considered non-starchy vegetables.

Moss, Ch. 11, "No Sugar, No Fat, No Sales"

• This is the story of Kraft's effort to respond to the obesity epidemic by cutting calories from its food line. Initially a "cabal" within Kraft, but then supported by it's tobacco executive owners at Phillip Morris (some of whom had been through the big tobacco litigation era), they proposed "package nutrition" labeling, reductions in calories from products, reducing "indulge" messaging, restaint in marketing to kids. They removed "billions" of calories from products (256). Sales tanked and the Wall street analysts circled. 2003 CEO fired, others connected with the effort leave.

MAR 8: 15

Barber, "The 16.9 Carrot"

• This story connects our work on soil and nutrition with our focus now on gastronomy - practices that promotes taste, satisfaction, and significance or meaningfulness of a diet.

• Blue Hill and Stone Barnes -- as a project [[12]]
• Basic story -- farm/restaurant relationship, farmer Jack with his 16.9 carrots.

• sugar also predicts other things: oils, amino acids, minerals. much of this has flavor dimension to humans.
• 186: story of the soil, example of distilled vs. live vinegar,
• effects of syn nitrogen on microbes -- claim: nitrates saturate water and prevent mineral uptake -- Good research opp: nutrition analysis of differently sourced vegetables. note -- this is beyond "organic"
• "industrial organic" or "shallow organic" carrots from Mexico -- 0 Brax. But also note the point about "terroir" at the end of the essay.

Terroir definied

• Terroir: Terroir (French pronunciation: ​[tɛʁwaʁ] from terre, "land") is the set of all environmental factors that affect a crop's phenotype, unique environment contexts and farming practices, when the crop is grown in a specific habitat. Collectively, these contextual characteristics are said to have a character; terroir also refers to this character.[1]

Barber, Dan. Chapter 30: "Bread" (pp. 382-409)

• Introductory story of the tomato fungus. fungus worse because spread from trucks, but also highlighting varietal system. Mountain Magics resist blight fungus and still taste good. We meet the Cornell breeders of this variety. Theme of the chapter: how does the work of plant breeders affect the food system, especially flavor and yield. Story of Flvr Savr Calgene's gmo industrial tomato. discontinued.

• Background on Land grant breeeding programs. 1862, with USDA, experiment station, extension service added in 1914.

• Terroir for wheat? Aragon 03, kept alive in a corner of Spain, in high demand.

• Steve Jones, formerly of WSU, now Washington State Resaearch and Extention Center, Mt Vernon (and Bread Lab) background story - how land grant seed banks work, fateful meeting with Monsanto, 1880 Bayh-dole Act. by 1990s majority funding from private industry.

• • Specialty wheat in Skagit Valley. (So, if wheat were a fresh crop, we would also be supporting crop rotation over syn fertilizers.)

• Nice narrative moment with the farmers and Jones. Interesting point about how the flavor yield trade off occurs more in plant that have been selected for size and water. Harder to ramp up flavor with all that water. Also, older wheat variety had higher nutrition. Claim of 50% more calcium, iron, and zinc.

• Jones wants to move beyond heirloom varieties. Still ways to improve and diversify strains.

• Steve Jones links: The Bread lab, New York mag article, NYT article, "Bread is Broken".

• Related initiative: The Land Institute, big idea in 3 minute video

MAR 20: 16

Welcome back small group discussion

• Please considering sharing some stories about your families approach to restaurants as you were growing up. Did your grandparents have the same or different attitudes? How do restaurants figure in your celebrations and your personal social life as an adult.

Retronasal Smell

Gopnik, Adam, "Who Made the Restaurant?" (13-57)

• from The Table Comes First

• opening description - follow -- illusion of dining room, relation to romance, difference from previous types: table d'hote, traiteur,

• personal experiences -- HoJo to Paris - Grand Vefour -- restaurants and writers' scenes.

• 19: account of origin of restaurant starts here:

• old story - post french revolution, displaced help from nobles. But restaurant starts 20 years earlier. Restaurant not like home service.

• three factors: intellectual causes (health and simplicity), commercial causes (new site for restaurants in/around Palais Royal), moral/social cause (breakdown of caste/class leading up to Rev)

• Mathrurin Roze de Chantoiseau -- first restauranteur. note root meanings of "restaurant" - associated with bullion and restoratives. Early restaurant served healthy foods that you couldn't source (22), not esoteric or exotic. Chantoiseau introduced more of a pleasure motive to the restaurant. women could go together in public (!). Another early restauranteur, Vacossion, focused on simple foods that individuals could not source themselves. "nouvelle cuisine"

• French Revolution actually problematic for the early restaurant -- communalism of the table d'hote more suited to egalitarianism.

• commercial scene of the Palais Royal -- first mall. 27: 1780-1830 -- period of growth of restaurants - reflected some international ethnic cusine, but points out that the southern provinces of France would seem as exotic to Parisians and North African cuisine might seem to us. "Provencal" --

• adopted Russian services (sequence of courses, dishes chosen by each diner) rather than French banquet service (piles of dishes on a sideboard from which waiters serve) (consider the individualism in this) -- not how this changes the motivations of restauranteurs. (Wealth of Nations, 1776, just saying.)

• Part two of the chapter: The French Cafe: compares the emergence of the restaurant to the newer cafe, which did come into being by post-revolution licensing law changes allowing coffee/alcohol in same place. 33-37, importance of. (Digress to consider how we handle this now and in different places.) note Paris / London comparisons p. 33.

• brings in Bourdieu and Priscilla Park Ferguson -- "social field" , like a "scene" (examples of "gastronomic scenes" -- craft beer, local roasted coffee....) features of a food scene: writing, end of famine, enjoyment of food not seen as a sin, but mark of cultivation.

• Brillat-Savarin, 1825 Physiology of Taste. introduces word "gastronomy" 42ff. defines the "gourmand" in terms of enthusiasm about one's appetite and taste for food. analogy to the pleasure of flirtation, which he also claimed was a french invention (!). "Soft power" (mention slow food, also a political movement).

• rival, Grimod La Reyniere -- real foodie, spent the revolution eating great food, somewhat abstracted. rated restaurants and gave them stickers for their windows. the discussion here suggests how the vocabulary of the French gastronomic moment developed.

• 54: Habermas' theory about "Enlightenment eating" -- creates social capital. Issue at the end: Is the restaurant a bourgeoisie trap or an instrument of enlightenment?

MAR 22: 17

Montgomery, Chapters 2 and 3, "Dirt"

Chapter 2, "Skin of the Earth"

• Darwin's studies of worms. Worms are moving a heck of a lot of dirt.
• Note the recentness of our lack of knowledge of this. Also why antiquities sink.
• isostasy
• also noticing at this time hillside erosion.
• nitrogen fixation
• major point: the processes governing soils determine the possibility of plant and animal life.
• major point: we should be looking for a balance between processes that create soil and the processes (like agriculture) which can erode it.

• you are what you eat. you are what you eat eats.

Chapter 3, "Rivers of Life"

• connection between humanity and soil in language: adama (earth) hava (living). We are living earth. In Latin "homo" from "humus", living soil.

• short digression on "food ontology" -- some candidate answers, but then if we take the linguistic associations literally, how would we define food?

• suggest myth of the garden represents transition to agriculture.

• 20,000 years ago - last major glaciation (though not a single event). Europe freezes, Africa dries.
• 2 million years ago - earliest evidence of migration of homo erectus from Africa. separation from Neanderthal (note some evidence that we ate 'em [13]),
• 300,000 year ago - first modern humans.
• 45,000 years ago - another wave of migration from Africa (movement occurred in both directions).
• 30,000 years ago - sharp stone tools (much later than the handaxe .5 mya) and at 23,000 yrs bows and arrows
• Human Evolution Timeline

• modifications in skin color and other features a response to UV radiation and Vitamin D production, selection effect.

• emergence of agriculture

• oasis and cultural evolution theories. p 30 - problem wit oasis theory - food variety in mid-east expanding at time of agriculture. problem with cultural evolution theory -- not everyone adopted ag (though in other examples, like hand axes, everyone does adopt).
• increasing population density -- agriculture a forced option. Note climate of the Levant 13 - 11,000bc - major food abundance. could have supported population explosion.
• mini-glaciation at 10,000 bc called the Younger Dryas -- recovered pollen samples drop by 3/4 -- decrease precip. forests recede.
• site evidence from Abu Hureyra, on Tigris -- evidence of cultivation of grains, drought tolerant ones, for example.
• more work to produce a calorie at start of agriculture --(digress on Ian Morris). population grew to six thousand. evidence of settlements chose for ag condition.
• note -- using evidence from burnt food remains, we can track the migration of food, independently of human migration.
• the dog -- 20,000 not food. possible self-domestication of cats. times for domesticate livestock. animal labor.

• after agriculture, population doubles every 1,000 years.
• by 5,000 bc, evidence of overcultivation in Tigris valley, hillside erosion. emergence of irrigation.

• very interesting: Mesopotamian religious elite controlled food production and distribution. (Later we'll see that Jewish authorities do the same in the Levant). population growth. Uruk grows to 50,000. agruculture bring property, inequality (vs. hunter gatherers -- Morris), class, gov't administration, (philosophers). Writing 3,000 bc - (mention Field Museum in Chicago).

• back to the environment -- irrigation led to salination of the soil, silting of rivers -- 39-40 evidence of lack of understanding of soil.
• story in Egypt - p. 40 on: short story, the Nile fed civilizations for 7,000 years in rough sustainability, ideal combination of new silt and humus. Harvests increase over time. But, desire to grow grain for export led to year round irriation. 1880's salination extreme. Then Nasser damn.
• story in China - interesting, administration of ag recognized many grades of soil. Yellow River (name from mineral erosion upstream) damned and diverted starting 340 bc. Process of raising levees around the river led to 30 foot levies by 1920s. 19th century flood killed millions.

• story of Walter Lowdermilk -- 1922 - working on famine prevention. First to write about soil management and civilization. Follows major river up stream documenting 400 miles of levies and evidence of ancient mismanagement of early ag sites.

• thesis going forward: Civilizations are defined by their management of soil. And, everyone has messed it up eventually, even the Egyptians.