Eating to Extinction.

Dan Saladino’s Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them makes its important point – that declining biodiversity will impact our food supply in multiple ways – in unusual fashion: Rather than arguing the point in a straight narrative, Saladino gives the reader a tour of many of the rare foods at risk of extinction from environmental degradation, globalization, even over-regulation in some cases, presenting the scientific case for preserving them but relying more on emotional appeals. We’ll miss these foods if they’re gone, or maybe we’ll want to try them more for knowing they exist and might disappear.

The strongest arguments here come in the various sections on plants, because of the evolutionary case Saladino offers. Take the banana, probably the best-known sustainability problem in our food supply: Most of the bananas sold in the world are Cavendish bananas, every plant of which is genetically identical, because the plants themselves are sterile and must be propagated via clones. This deprives the plants of the opportunity to develop new defenses to pathogens or environmental changes via evolution; mutations are discouraged in monoculture farming. The Cavendish itself is now defenseless against a real threat to its existence: Panama disease, which previously wiped out Gros Michel banana plantations, has mutated and is in the process of wiping out Cavendish plantations as well. The banana you know and love is, to put it bluntly, fucked.

Saladino offers examples from the other side of the evolutionary equation, identifying rare fruits, vegetables, and other plants like wild coffee that offer both the genetic diversity these plants will need to survive – forever, even after our species is gone – and more immediate benefits to us, such as unique flavors or cultural legacies. Coffee is struggling in the face of climate change that is driving it to higher altitudes and pests like the fungus that causes coffee-leaf rust; the wild coffees of Ethiopia may provide genetic solutions, at least until the next crisis comes along. There’s a wild maize plant in Mexico that fixes its own nitrogen through a symbiotic relationship with a bacterium, a crop that could help address the world’s growing need for food. The wheat we’ve selected for easy harvesting and processing is close to a monoculture, and it wouldn’t take much to collapse the annual crop, even though there are hundreds of thousands of known varieties of wild wheat, like the wild emmer wheat of eastern Turkey known as kavilca.

He explores the impact that even so-called ‘sustainable’ solutions often have on wild populations, and how what works for our food supply in the short term leaves it even more vulnerable in the long term. We’ve nearly wiped out wild Atlantic salmon and are well on our way to doing the same in the Pacific, while farmed salmon fill our stores and plates, but when those farmed salmon get loose from their aquaculture pens, they interbreed with wild populations and can reduce genetic diversity, leaving those fish more vulnerable to diseases.

Some of these endangered foods are more closely tied to culture than to global food needs or biodiversity, such as the honey gathered by the native Hadza people in Tanzania, where local bee and bird populations are threatened both by habitat destruction and the loss of symbiotic relationships they’ve developed with humans. Certain birds would identify hives in baobab trees that contained honey, and humans would hear their calls and bring down the nests. The humans would eat the honey and parts of the honeycomb, while the birds would wait nearby to consume what the humans did not. This entire way of life is disappearing as native populations lose their land and become assimilated into urban life and dependent on processed foods.

Along the way, Saladino explains (several times) the presence of various seed banks around the world, including the critical one on the island of Svalbard in the Arctic Ocean, and the two great success stories of the Haber-Bosch process of fixing nitrogen in artificial fertilizer and the Green Revolution – the post-WWII adoption of high-yielding varieties of cereal and grain crops, notably dwarf wheat and rice, along with scientific methods of increasing yields through those artificial fertilizers and massive monocultures. (Not mentioned is how Haber’s research, which has helped accelerate climate change, also led to the development of Zyklon-B.) There’s quite a bit of science in here, which does help move things along in what amounts to a series of mini-essays on dozens of foods.

Saladino’s reference-work approach isn’t entirely successful for that last reason; sometimes, it’s like reading an encyclopedia. It’s often an interesting one, and Saladino went to all of these places to try the endangered foods and eat them with the locals who grow or gather or develop them. But such a broad look at the subject guarantees that some essays will be duds, and by the time we get to the end, Saladino’s epilogue, “think like a Hadza,” is so far removed from the opening essay on those people and their honey-gathering that the throughline connecting all of these foods has started to fray a bit. It works best as a call to action – we need to find and value these products, to keep them alive and protect those habitats or those cultures, and to stop relying on these monocultures to feed ourselves. You can find other wheat flours even at Whole Foods and similar stores, while there might even be local mills or growers near you offering unconventional (and thus genetically distinct) flours and grains and beans. Our diets will be richer for it, and we’ll be taking a small step towards protecting the future of humanity before we scorch the planet growing the same five crops.

Next up: I just finished Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom.

Stick to baseball, 1/8/22.

My latest game review for Paste covers the great, easy-to-learn Super Mega Lucky Box, from the designer of Silver & Gold and Sushi Go! It has elements of both games, and will remind non-gamers of bingo enough to get them started. We played this over the holidays with my family, and everyone liked it, from my 9-year-old niece to my mother, who generally does not like games.

My prospect rankings are still on track to start running on The Athletic on January 31st, leading off with the top 100, with team-by-team rankings following afterwards. My podcast will also return this upcoming week.

And now, the links…

  • The Guardian hasan excerpt of Michael Pollan’s most recent book, This is Your Mind on Plants, asking whether we should be giving up caffeine. (The answer is “no,” whether Pollan knows it or not.)
  • This Hidden Brain episode titled “Both Things Can Be True,” about dealing with the apparent contradictions we find in other people, is a remarkable and compelling story in its own right, and also feels especially apposite in the wake of the recent Hall of Fame vote. You can also find it on iTunes.
  • Is there really enough taste difference among different varieties of rice to justify an annual rice-tasting competition? The mere question would be heretical in Japan.
  • Climate change is coming for everyone and every industry, including pro sports. Hannah Keyser asks if MLB is ready for it.
  • “America’s Frontline Doctors” are a giant fraud, as its members haven’t worked on the front lines against COVID-19 and profit off quack treatments like hydroxychloroquine.
  • A Deputy DA in California who was expected to run for the state Assembly this year has died of COVID-19 at age 46, just weeks after speaking an anti-vax/anti-mandate rally.
  • I don’t especially care that an Australian writer doesn’t like board game nights, but what possible aim is there to writing a piece that does nothing but shit on something thousands of people enjoy?
  • The New York Times‘ David Streitfeld has a post mortem of sorts on the Theranos trial, with an eye on the people who failed to ask Elizabeth Holmes the obvious questions about her technology that didn’t work. John Carreyrou’s book Bad Blood has quite a bit more on this in its history of the con.
  • Alec Karakatsanis, founder of the Civil Rights Corps, has been critical of mainstream media outlets’ slanted coverage of police shootings. He had a Twitter thread this week calling out the New York Times for its framing and for use of biased sources when covering a recent shooting in LA, pointing out that police unions and departments spend a lot of money to try to get this kind of positive coverage.
  • Asmodee’s Unexpected Games division announced a new title, Voices in My Head, where players try to play aspects of a suspected thief’s persona against the one player who plays the prosecutor.

Stick to baseball, 12/17/21.

My big item this week was my annual ranking of the top board games of the year for Paste, which runs 15 titles deep (plus a bonus for the best reissue). My music rankings will go up here next week, and I’ll have a PAX Unplugged recap at Paste next week too.

Nothing new at the Athletic from me, as I work on prospect rankings and there are no transactions to cover. I’ll do a chat next week, though, even if it’s mostly non-baseball stuff.

On The Keith Law Show, I spoke with Nik Sharma, author of the great cookbooks Season and The Flavor Equation, about those books, underused ingredients, and his unusual career arc. You can subscribe and listen on iTunes and Spotify.

I will also send out another edition of my free email newsletter this week, although I have a feeling with baking plans and the kids home I am already setting myself up for failure. And one last time, here’s another reminder that I have two books out, The Inside Game and Smart Baseball, that would make great gifts for the readers (especially baseball fans) on your lists.

And now, the links…

The Mushroom Hunters.

I love mushrooms – the edible kind, that is. (Never tried the other kind, sorry.) I’m not sure when I first realized they’re among my favorite foods; I do remember seeing the Good Eats episode “The Fungal Gourmet” and deciding to try the various recipes Alton Brown gave on that show, and discovering I liked them all. It was probably the first time I’d cooked mushrooms, and it inspired me to try a recipe in The Joy of Cooking for a white mushroom pizza with goat cheese, a pizza I still make often and have refined over the last 20 years. That may have been the starting point, but it just scratched the surface of what the kingdom of edible fungi has to offer.

A friend of mine from middle school asked me last month on Facebook if I’d read Langdon Cook’s The Mushroom Hunters: On the Trail of an Underground America, a non-fiction narrative work about several people who forage for the wild mushrooms that end up on restaurant plates and occasionally in markets across the country. Not only is the book an extraordinarily interesting study of a gray market industry and two of the eccentrics who live within, but Cook imparts a lot of useful information on various mushroom species – including a few fungi we call mushrooms but that belong to a different phylum, Ascomycota, than true mushrooms – that I’d eaten but never cooked, or seen but never eaten, or just flat-out had never encountered before.

Mushrooms are different from other foods that are foraged in the wild in that their removal does not diminish future supply, and when done responsibly the foraging doesn’t damage the environment. (If the foragers leave trash or are careless with surrounding plants, of course, that’s another story.) Wild mushrooms have extensive root structures below the ground, and humans typically harvest the edible shoots that appear above the surface and allow the mushroom to spread spores. Removing those tips doesn’t kill the mushroom itself, which continues to live in the ground, usually feeding off rotting wood, and will produce new shoots the following year. Different mushrooms live in different climates, with different food sources – sometimes favoring specific species of trees with which they’ve co-evolved over long periods of time – and varying ‘crops’ from year to year. Morels, among the most valuable culinary mushrooms, tend to pop up in abundance after forest fires, although they, like the famous truffles of western Europe and now the Pacific Northwest, are not technically mushrooms but are sac fungi classified in Ascomycota. (They’re also the subject of a great two-player game.)

Cook runs through the main mushrooms you’ll find in restaurants, only skipping the derided and flavorless white button mushrooms, dedicating long chapters to those morels, the meaty porcini (also called king boletes), the prized matsutakes, and the autumnal chanterelles, while giving shorter but still useful descriptions to species as diverse as candy caps, black trumpets, lobsters, yellowfoots, and more. He describes many mushrooms that chefs prize but that aren’t cultivated and would only appear if you went to the right restaurant or perhaps farmers’ market, and with just about every mushroom he describes, he gives a handful of ways he likes to prepare or consume them, or just straight-out tips on what you should or shouldn’t do. For example, just about every mushroom pairs well with cream, butter, and other dairy products, but matsutakes areone exception and are best served without those staples of French and Italian cuisines.

Cook himself is a character in the book, but the two stars are Doug, an iconoclastic forager with some interesting if not entirely consistent life philosophies; and Jeremy Faber, a mushroom buyer who runs a wholesale service to chefs on the west coast and in New York, and who also forages himself and takes Cook on several of his trips, including the morel hunt in the Yukon that fills the last long chapter in the book. Faber has extensive relationships with chefs in Seattle, including James Beard winner Matt Dillon and Faber’s former business partner Christina Choi, who was a rising star in the Seattle scene before dying far too young during surgery to address a brain aneurysm. Cook follows the mushroom supply chain to the tables of restaurants like those, and to special events like a multi-course dinner at the Oregon Truffle Festival, describing dish after dish with mushrooms used in typical and atypical fashions. If this book doesn’t make you want to cook with mushrooms, you probably just don’t like the things in the first place.

Doug is the perfect eccentric for a book like The Mushroom Hunters, with his mix of humanist views and self-serving wisdom, as well as a rather healthy disregard for property rights and the boundaries of national parks. He and Faber rail against federal and state government regulations that treat mushrooms as finite resources and restrict or simply ban foragers from gathering them, even though such activities might be good for the forest and, if done right, do no harm. Their self-interest is obvious here, and Cook acknowledges that not every forager is as responsible about cleaning up their own mess or respecting the other flora and fauna that grow in these environments. It’s also hard to feel much sympathy for Doug when he describes foraging on privately owned land without permission and finds himself threatened or unable to escape with his haul.

The Mushroom Hunters would be a great read if it offered nothing more than its education on mushrooms themselves – how they grow, where they thrive, how they’re gathered, and how to prepare and cook them – within some broader story, but Cook also wraps up the story of each species in some larger trip or escapade starring one of the two men at the heart of the book. It is a book about the foodstuffs themselves, with appearances from a handful of other wild plants the foragers often target, while also giving a window on to this shadow economy that also includes numerous immigrants from Mexico and southeast Asia, and thus serves as a bit of a microcosm of our society as a whole, with stories of racism, economic inequality, and labor exploitation sprinkled throughout the book. If you enjoy the fungus and want to know your chanterelles from your shiitakes, it’s a wonderful, educational read.

Next up: My friend Joe Posnanski’s upcoming book The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini.

On Spice.

I’m a longtime customer of Penzeys Spices, a massive mail-order operation that consistently delivers some of the highest-quality spices and dried herbs I’ve found anywhere. They offer some hard-to-find options, and sell just about everything in whole or ground form; I prefer to grind my own, so I buy many things (nutmeg, cloves, allspice, black pepper) whole from them, getting enough to last years. They also sell my favorite Dutch-processed cocoa, and the cost per ounce is more than competitive. It doesn’t hurt that the company is unabashedly progressive; their email newsletters have taken on a strident anti-Trump tone, especially when the issue at hand is human rights.

Caitlin PenzeyMoog is part of the family behind the company, and would help bottle or bag spices when she was a kid, although she’s since moved on to a career in writing – she’s an editor for the AV Club. Her first book, however, brings her back to her roots (and rhizomes): On Spice, a breezy, highly informative, yet still entertaining compendium of the best-known spices in your kitchen, as well as some lesser-known ones, and herbs, and alliums, and capsicums, and even salt.

On Spice is loosely organized by the flavoring agent she’s discussing, with each chapter or sub chapter telling you where the spice/herb/whatever comes from, and how it’s used, and perhaps notes on varieties or suggestions on storage or how to buy it. Her approach is evidence-based, even though so much of what she describes appears to come from her personal experience – and that is what makes the book so enjoyable to read. She has stories from three generations of Penzeys; her grandparents, who owned a store called The Spice House that inspired her parents to start the mail-order Penzeys business, appear frequently as side characters.

There’s also some actual, functional kitchen wisdom in the book, including a few things I didn’t know or simply never considered. The book itself came out of a piece PenzeyMoog wrote in April 2017 for The Takeout called “Salt Grinders are Bullshit,” which gets expanded within On Spice‘s chapter on salt. (The short version: We grind many spices to crack open a protective exterior shell and expose volatile, essential oils in the interior that provide flavor and aroma. Salt is a rock. If you grind it, it’s just smaller rocks.) I’ve been putting used vanilla beans in my giant sugar container for probably 15 years now, and I know it’s made all of my baked goods better; she explains the how and why – and also goes into why vanilla is so expensive. Why do we put bay leaves in stocks and soups, and why do we have to take them out before serving? How do you know if the saffron you’re buying is the real thing? You’ve probably never had true cinnamon; the spice we call cinnamon in the United States is nearly always cassia, a more strongly-flavored, and less expensive spice derived from the bark of a related tree. Real Ceylon cinnamon may actually not taste enough like cinnamon for you if you’re used to cassia.

There’s a ton of useful information in here if you’re cowed by the variety of spices available to you, whether it’s the spice aisle at your local supermarket (some of which may be quite stale), the bulk aisle at Whole Foods (better for buying small amounts of spices), or mail-order companies. PenzeyMoog explains the meaning of terms for spice blends, including za’atar, ras-el-hanout, harissa, garam masala, and curry. There are even some unrelated tangents in sidebars and footnotes, my favorite of which informed me that Angostura bitters (a nonpotable bitters that is an essential ingredient in an old fashioned) is named for the village where it was invented, but doesn’t contain any of the bark of the angostura tree.

PenzeyMoog’s writing style is fun and accessible, even when she veers off into slightly nerdier territory, explaining some of the science behind spices/herbs, or going into how to get the scent of garlic off your hands after you’ve handled it. (Those stainless steel things people keep by their sinks? Useless.) The stories from her grandparents’ shop keep the book light and easy to read, and she has the right balance of detail and brevity. I’ve been cooking and buying spices from Penzey’s for a long time, and I still learned quite a bit from it. On Spice even concludes with recipes for spice blends, dishes, and beverages if you’re looking for inspiration, although I got more than enough value from the text proper.

Next up: John Berger’s Booker Prize-winning novel G..

An Economist Gets Lunch.

EDIT: As of March 2020, when Cowen argued that elite universities shouldn’t worry about paying their service workers, I can no longer recommend Cowen’s book for any reason whatsoever.

One of you was kind enough to give me a copy of Tyler Cowen’s book An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies earlier this year, buying a copy for me at Politics & Prose for me to pick up when I spoke there at a book signing in June. The book was very much up my alley, combining my passion food with my newfound interest in behavioral economics, as Cowen offers a breezy look at why we eat the way we do, and how someone who wants better food can use a little rational thinking to try to identify new places to eat. It’s a quick read, and maybe a little too nonchalant in spots when Cowen talks about foreign food cultures, with more than enough information on our modern food culture and economy to satisfy me (especially since I didn’t pay for it – thanks again, Haris!).

Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University who tends to favor a more libertarian, free-market approach to domestic policy, and that philosophy is very apparent throughout this book, as the focus is very much on taste rather than other modern foodie concerns like sourcing, environmental impact, or fair labor practices. Cowen’s survey of the modern food scene explains why, for example, chain restaurants will nearly always provide inferior food (they have to aim for the largest possible market, which means standardizing flavors and avoiding anything near or at the extremes that might alienate a large share of customers), or why so many highly-rated restaurants lose their edge within the first year after opening. I’d say I probably already knew much of this, just because of my years of exploring the food scenes in American cities and my conversations with so many people working in the industry, but would also guess that most American diners haven’t thought about these questions to the same extent because they don’t eat out as often as I might (due to travel) or Cowen does (because I think he just loves to eat out).

The early parts of the book cover things like the above-mentioned “how American food got bad” or how the typical supermarket has helped ruin our diets. Cowen mentions visiting Asian supermarkets around him that offer better and less typical produce at lower costs – but, more importantly, are organized entirely differently than the U.S. groceries are, with more square footage devoted to produce, meat, or fish, and less on packaged goods … and, I suppose not shockingly, to cheese, since lactose intolerance is higher in Asian populations. To some extent, his suggestions of visiting multiple stores to prepare meals is a manifestation of privilege – I work at home, so it’s nothing for me to split my weekly food shopping between Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, and a local farm stand, but I also recognize I have the flexibility in my schedule to do so where many other people don’t.

One particularly interesting if specific chapter delves into American barbecue, explaining why regional variations in the cuisine arose and how developments like mechanical pits have changed barbecue (I’d argue for the worse). The chapter opens up some gaps in Cowen’s knowledge of culinary history, however, as he gives short shrift to the cooking method’s roots in Africa, something that comes up a few times as the book progresses – his lens on cuisines is very much that of an American, and the concluding chapters on what foods to hunt when traveling in various foreign cities read like the words of a tourist, not a native or an expat who’s lived in those places.

Cowen doesn’t ignore other topics than the search for better food at a cheaper price – there’s a chapter that touches on environmental concerns, called “Eating Your Way to a Greener Planet,” although the complexity of ethical eating is enough to fill a book or two – but that’s very much his core philosophy. It’ll work for a lot of readers: Often that is just what we’re trying to do – cook better food for less. I’ve at least changed my own eating patterns, in part because I have the time and means to do so, to try to make better choices for the planet and the people involved in growing, preparing, and selling me the food I eat. That made Cowen’s book an interesting read for me, but perhaps more of a novelty than a work that changed my outlook on food.

Big Chicken.

Antibiotic resistance doesn’t get a ton of headlines, but it is one of the most critical threats to global health, enough so that the United Nations resolved to address the problem at a summit late in 2016. At the time, they estimated there would be 10 million deaths annually from resistant ‘superbugs’ by the year 2050, which doesn’t include people who would die indirectly from the scourge, such as people who can’t have surgery because the antibiotics that you receive before any operation are no longer effective. In a country where a third of the population rejects the truth of evolution, getting people to understand this issue – itself the product of evolutionary processes among bacteria – has been difficult, and never seems to rise very high on the priority lists for policymakers.

Maryn McKenna’s new book Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats, the journalist and Schuster Institute fellow explains how we got here by way of the humble chicken, which took over our plates and menus thanks to the prodigious and reckless use of antibiotics, in turn leading to widespread antibiotic resistance in our food supply and outside of it as well. Chicken became an industrial product because someone realized that pumping birds full of antibiotics as part of their feed would make them grow faster, regardless of whether they had any need for these medications. While the chicken world consolidated and counted its profits, bacteria did what they do – evolved, through mutations and gene transfer, to become resist to one drug after another, spreading through and beyond our food supply, abetted by antibiotic residues that washed into the water supply from overuse.

McKenna builds the book around the narrative of one man who nearly died from salmonellosis, an infection caused by bacteria in the Salmonella genus (there are two species, and either can cause this illness), part of a widespread 2013 outbreak caused by unsanitary conditions at the Foster Farms chicken processing plant. The specific Salmonella strain in this outbreak, known as Heidelberg, was resistant to multiple antibiotics, sickened over 600 people, and resulted in at least 200 hospitalizations, although there were no reported deaths. Within the framework of this patient’s ordeal – he survived, but will have lifelong complications, which is common for people who develop these infections – McKenna walks through the history of the chicken as foodstuff, from its advent as an industrial product through changes to the bird to the very recent movement by major chicken producers and consumers to stop antibiotic use.

The very rise of this form of industrialized animal husbandry was an accident, which is one of the book’s most interesting sections (granted, I love history of science stories); there wasn’t any reason to think pumping healthy birds full of antibiotics would make them grow faster, but it did, to a shocking extent. What is infuriating, if not entirely surprising, is how government agencies responsible for ensuring public health rolled over and played dead for Big Chicken and the antibiotic manufacturers themselves even as scientists began to sound alarms about resistant bacteria in the 1950s. The manufacturers played the Big Tobacco game of demanding more proof, aided and abetted by Congressman Jamie Whitten, a Democrat from Mississippi, who abused his power to protect the two industries from proposed restrictions on antibiotic usage until his retirement in 1994. (Whitten wrote a pro-pesticide screed as a rejoinder to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, in case you were unclear on his stance on the matter.) Mckenna parallels this narrative with a walk through the tactics of the bacterial world to outflank our best drugs, most recently with the emergence of bacteria with the mcr-1 gene, conferring resistance to colistin, an antibiotic of ‘last resort’ that has been used for bacteria resistant to all other antibiotics.

Blaming the two industries of chicken and pharma, along with the complicity of useless government agencies (the FDA and the USDA), is easy, but the American consumer is also a major part of the problem here. We eat far more meat than we need to meet our dietary requirements, but we insist on meat being cheap, which encourages us to both eat and waste more of it. We’ve also decided we want lean meat, based on nutritional advice from the Useless Department of Agriculture that turned out to be mostly to entirely wrong, leading to greater demand for breast meat, and in turn for farmers to grow chickens with giant breasts and smaller legs, to the point that the broiler-fryer chickens you might get in an average grocery or warehouse store can’t walk or stand up normally. (I rarely see them in stores, but once did buy a pasture-raised whole chicken; it had less than half the breast meat of even a well-raised conventional bird.) McKenna goes into this in more detail – how the rise of ‘chicken fingers’ and the McNugget exacerbated this trend, how consumers prefer buying chicken parts rather than whole birds – while also pointing out how producers bred birds with these un-natural characteristics to suit the marketplace.

There is hope, at least in this book, on both the antibiotic resistance and the chicken-producing fronts. The UN has, at least, paid lip service to the cause of fighting antibiotic resistance. Several major chicken producers, led by Purdue, have stopped or pledged to stop using antibiotics in full, or to only use them to treat sick birds rather than as growth promoters or for prophylactic purposes. Many large chicken buyers, including Panera, Chipotle, and even McDonald’s, have also pledged to go antibiotic-free, or have done so already. Whole Foods has long been antibiotic-free as well. (One reason I buy organic milk and eggs, even though ‘organic’ itself isn’t that meaningful: It guarantees the cows/birds in question weren’t given antibiotics.) And slowing the use of antibiotics on animals should help in particular if and when researchers discover the next big class of antibiotic compounds. We may have gotten much farther with the drugs we had if we hadn’t given them in such huge quantities to the animals we raised and ate.

McKenna also visits chicken farmers who are operating outside of the main supply chain of industrial birds, raising heirloom varieties in the American heartland or raising certified Label Rouge birds in France, chickens that neither look nor taste like the bland if predictable American hybrids. Educating consumers with the disposable income to buy these birds is a challenge, but one that has plenty of precedent in the market for high-end foods. The bigger conundrum is how to provide enough meat, chicken or otherwise, to feed a world that increasingly demands it and doesn’t want to pay more for it, without the overuse of antibiotics that has led us to the edge of a bottomless pit of resistance.

Next up: Dan Simmons’ The Fall of Hyperion.

Stick to baseball, 7/28/18.

Trade writeups for Insiders:

Jeurys Familia to Oakland
Zach Britton to the Yankees
J.A. Happ to the Yankees
The Eovaldi, Andriese, and Oh trades
Cole Hamels to the Cubs

I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

On the board game front, I reviewed Istanbul: The Dice Game for Paste this week; it’s fun, and quick to learn and play, but not as good as the original Istanbul.

At 1 pm today (Saturday) I’ll be at the Silver Unicorn Bookstore in Acton, Massachusetts, talking Smart Baseball and signing books. I hope to see many of you there – and some more of you at Gen Con in Indianapolis next week as well, where I have a signing scheduled on Friday at noon and am happy to sign books any other time during the con.

I’ve been sending out my free email newsletter a bit more often lately; you can sign up through that link and see archives of past editions.

And now, the links…

The Potlikker Papers.

John T. Edge is the director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, an institute at the University of Mississippi that is dedicated to the study and exploration of southern American culinary traditions, a valuable resource that, among other things, works to keep knowledge of the region’s cuisine from dying out in our era of homogenization and processed food. That background gave me a high expectation for his book The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South, but it’s not the book I thought I was getting. It may deliver on the promise of its subtitle, but there’s so much emphasis here on the modern south that the prehistory of it, the hundred-plus years before the civil rights movement that inform so much of southern cuisine even today, gets lost in the shuffle.

Southern cuisine itself is more of a catch-all term than a specific style of cooking – there are multiple regional cuisines from the American south, including two, Creole and Cajun, distinct ones just within the state of Louisiana. White and black southerners bring their own traditions, although many foods associated with white or all southerners likely originated as African-American foods. The culinary appropriations, the origins of what we now consider traditional or classical southern cuisine, the subtitutions out of need that became standard … these are the stories I expected to read and want to hear as someone who likes to eat and cook many dishes that at least have some basis in the rich, vegetable-heavy dishes of the south.

That’s not this book, at least; Edge starts in the 1950s and spends nearly all of the book discussing the evolution of southern cuisine from the 1970s forward, bouncing around celebrity chefs (Emeril gets a lot of page time, as does the late Paul Prudhomme) and artisanal farmers (Glenn Roberts, founder of Anson Mills, is a well-deserved star of that part of the book), but talking less about history and more about modern figures. The best part of The Potlikker Papers by far is the first section, Freedom Struggles (1950s-1970s), which talks about southern food in the context of the civil rights movement – the Montgomery bus boycott, the lunch-counter sit-ins, the importance of individual black chefs like Georgia Gilmore, the way white politicians borrowed or fabricated narratives to suit their policy aims, and more. This is a complete story, probably enough to fill an entire volume – how food enabled African-Americans to fight for equal rights and establish economic independence in a white-dominated society that sought to subjugate them by every available method.

After that section, however, Edge’s narrative falls apart and the book devolves into a series of unconnected profiles and vignettes that were neither engaging nor particularly illustrative of anything about modern southern cooking. A chapter on barbecue, for example, that focuses primarily on North Carolina doesn’t tell me much about Q as a cuisine or the region itself (which has a complicated and recently damaging history with hog farming). The final chapter, on the rising influence of Latin American immigrants and chefs on southern cooking, feels tacked on and cursory. If southern cuisine is one big tradition, Edge doesn’t manage to unify it here, and if it’s merely the phylum for a host of individual orders and families, he doesn’t provide the connective thread beyond mere geography. I had high hopes for The Potlikker Papers, but after the first section on the civil rights era, it told me nothing I didn’t already know.

Next up: I’m about 2/3 through Arthur C. Clarke’s The Fountains of Paradise.

The Gluten Lie.

Alan Levinovitz is, by day, a professor of philosophy and religion at James Madison University, focusing “primarily on the relationship between religion and literature, with particular attention to classical Chinese thought and comparative ethics,” according to his official bio. Yet he stepped way out of his lane in the best possible way with his 2015 book The Gluten Lie: And Other Myths About What We Eat, which dissects the history of fad diets and the misunderstandings or blatant falsehoods behind claims that foods like flour, sugar, and salt are “toxins” or otherwise harmful.

The gluten lie of the title is the first major food myth Levinovitz tackles, in part because it is so pervasive right now. While some people suffer from a real autoimmune disease triggered by ingesting gluten, known as celiac or celiac sprue, thousands of others have given up gluten for dubious reasons, including the belief in “gluten sensitivity,” a medical condition for the existence of which there is scant evidence. Gluten is not inherently harmful, but it’s blamed for all sorts of current health evils, from obesity to autism to heart disease to cancer to the quack favorite, “leaky gut syndrome,” which isn’t even real. Numerous books excoriating gluten, including Wheat Belly and Grain Brain, have become bestsellers based on questionable or nonexistent science, taking advantage of a gullible public eager for quick fixes and explanations for their health woes. (Here’s the answer no one wants to hear: obesity, autism, heart disease, and perhaps even cancer are at least partially explained by genetics, and there isn’t much you can do to alter that part of your system.)

Levinovitz starts out by giving the history of glutenphobia and the very real celiac disease, explaining along the way how some doctors refused to accept proof that gluten was the cause of celiacs’ illness, generally because it interfered with their profits. He details the criminal behavior of Walter Kempner, whose name is still easily found on Duke’s campus because his “rice diet” was popular even among celebrities, but who operated a de facto cult, convincing women to be his sex slaves and whipping other patients who didn’t adhere to the diet’s strict limits (around 1200 calories/day). He also covers Dr. Sidney Haas, who believed bananas had some magical cure for celiac disease, so that his patients would get better – until they later ate wheat again. Today’s charlatans may not be so violent or obstinate, but they are profiting off the science ignorance of the public by convincing people that one ingredient is making them sick, offering a quick-fix rather than the more difficult treatment of a healthful, balanced, calorie-limited diet and regular exercise. It’s much easier to just blame the bread.

Gluten isn’t the only enemy Levinovitz exonerates; the new food nemesis is sugar, and he describes the war on sucrose and fructose, along with the past wars on fat and salt, none of which was really based in sound science. (The research on sugar is nascent compared to that on the other fields, for political reasons as much as scientific ones, so I’m not quite ready to give sugar a complete acquittal yet – but he’s right that evidence against it is overstated.) The idea that salt is dangerous still persists across a broad swath of the population, especially those my age and older, because it was everywhere in the 1980s and 1990s, from warnings about salt intake to the prevalence of “salternative” products like NoSalt (which contains potassium chloride, safe in low doses but lethal in moderate ones) or Mrs. Dash (salt-free spice blends). The truth is that sodium is necessary for most people – salt is the only rock we eat, and we eat it because we need it – and only dangerous for a narrow subset of the population, like folks with high blood pressure, Meniere’s disease, or other rare disorders around the body’s homeostasis of sodium. It’s unlikely that you’re eating too much salt, and if you cook most of your food rather than eating out or buying it already prepared, it’s unthinkable.

The low-fat craze, which is also still with us albeit at a lower level of intensity, is based on some outdated science and a history of corporate interference and corruption that led to government condemnation of fat in its dietary recommendations. (Don’t eat what the USDA tells you to eat.) Again, your body needs fat; in fact, you may crave it. Fat contains 9 calories per gram, compared to 4 for proteins or carbohydrates. Humans evolved in environments of scarcity, and fat, typically animal fat, was the most calorie-dense food source available. Such cravings may be ‘hardwired’ in our genes – that is, humans carrying genes that rewarded them for eating fats and sugars fared better in natural selection, and thus craving those foods may now be innate.

The word “natural” in there draws special ire from Levinovitz, as most modern diet fads revolve around some misunderstanding of what a “natural” diet means. Some people simply assume anything artificial is bad, as if your body knows whether a molecule you consume was created in a forest or in a lab. The same applies to the fear of GMO foods. Paleo diets are based on a poor understanding of how early man lived and ate, demonizing foods that can be healthful (whole grains) just because Thag the Caveman no eat them. Others claim you should avoid dairy because it’s not “natural” to consume the milks produced by other species. Levinovitz goes after hucksters like the Food Babe and Joseph Mercola, who demonize harmless ingredients with scary names (and, in Mercola’s case, vaccines and real medicines) to convince you to buy their books and supplements.

Science-ignorance is rampant in our society; I find copious examples every week for my links roundup, and it particularly bothers me when it comes to our governments setting policies that put people’s health and lives at risk. The Gluten Lie aims a little lower; if anything, Levinovitz’s main goal seems to be protecting your wallet, and perhaps your taste buds, from falling prey to groupthink and con artists who’ll peddle what you want to hear in exchange for some of your money. If you want to lose weight, reduce your caloric intake. If you have other health problems, talk to your doctor. But don’t deny yourself the glory of Neapolitan pizza or fresh pasta just because someone on your internet told you that gluten was evil.