Bananas might be healthier than oil sands for Albertans (although they’re high in fructose), but they’re very unethical.

Getting ripe bananas to market in North America requires burning lots of oil, which is why Chiquita cares so much about where it’s coming from. Consumers demand cheap bananas, so people working in the banana industry are paid very little and the whole industry has been shut down in higher wage countries like Jamaica. Finally, bananas have been bred into a sweeter and fleshier disease-prone monoculture.

Bananas represent everything that’s wrong with globalized, industrial agriculture – we should all consider boycotting them.

Modernist Cuisine writes down a lot of the techniques of molecular gastronomy, which I predict will shortly become known as “modernist cuisine” because “chefs have come to dislike the term ‘molecular gastronomy,’ on the ground that it is alienating and makes what they do sound like scientific party tricks”. However, maybe because I know the cocktail world rejected molecular mixology almost as soon as it appeared (because it really is just scientific party tricks), I feel like molecular gastronomy has already jumped the shark and this project is documenting a passing fad.

So although I’ve read a few glowing preliminary reviews of Modernist Cuisine, the first good review I’ve read is in the New Yorker, pointed out by Ingrid. The analysis shows that the other way in which cuisine is becoming increasingly modernist is the widening “gap between ordinary and professional cooking”:

That is why the term “modernist cuisine” is so handy. When modernism arrived in the arts, it marked a dual break: a rupture within the history of the art form and a splitting off between advanced practitioners and the general public — between the popular and the serious.

The theme that runs through this discussion of traditional cooking techniques is their underrated complexity and the resultant variability of their outcomes. Hence the team’s affection for sous vide…We’re back with the question of control and precision, which is one of the things deeply loved by modernist chefs.

The review goes on to contrast modernist cuisine with current trends toward minimalism, comfort food and local ingredients, which I suppose should be labelled postmodernist cuisine.

Vegans often disregard the quality of meat compared to other food. At the very least, it needs to be calculated as mass of carbon per calorie:

I don’t know about you, but my diet is calculated, so I would eat the same amount of protein if I became a vegan, not just brown gack. So ideally we’d calculate mass of carbon per essential amino acid. Measured that way, chicken meat and eggs come very close to vegetables, and are a pleasure to eat.

But not all meat is created equal. Shrimp, beef and lamb (grass-fed is worse) are significantly worse than their brethren. I never eat these three meats when alternatives are available and try to get most of my protein from eggs, milk and sustainable fish. If the environmental externalities were added to the price of beef, ground beef would be a luxury rather than the filler it currently is in North American diets.

Since Pollan’s explicit goal in writing this book was to offer more recommendations than The Omnivore’s Dilemma, he runs into a problem. He cites scientists that are against the lipid hypothesis, the theory that fats are the main dietary cause of ill health. But the lipid hypothesis is a “theory” the same way that evolution and climate change are theories: there is scientific consensus that it is correct. You can’t argue from within a scientific frame that renegade scientists are right.

Pollan ends the book with a series of recommendations that are only vaguely supported by the arguments earlier in the book. These are not as heavy on the authenticity as I feared when I picked up the book and I think most of them sound pretty reasonable. Some recommendations that I particularly like:

• eat weeds and bitter greens because breeders haven’t replaced the nutrients with sweetness
• try not to eat alone
• pay more, eat less
• do all your eating at a dining table
• be the kind of person who is statistically likely to take multivitamins, then don’t bother taking them
• drink 1-2 servings of alcohol every day
• eat a big breakfast and a small dinner

• Liquid corn syrup is much easier to use in industrial production than granulated sugar.
• The US has production quotas on sugar beets/cane and subsidies on corn: these slightly increase the price of sucrose and slightly decrease the price of corn syrup.

High-fructose corn syrup is made from natural, high-glucose corn syrup by using enzymes to digest the glucose into fructose. Two kinds are made: HFCS-42, which is 42% fructose and less sweet than sucrose, and HFCS-90, which is 90% fructose and sweeter than sucrose. In food production, the two are mixed to get the right effect of sweetening, moistening and browning.

Because HFCS-90 is sweeter than sucrose, less of it has to be used. Mexican Coke, made with sucrose, has double the carbohydrates of American Coke, made with HFCS mixed to 55% fructose. Producing a product with less material that looks healthier on the label is another reason industry prefers HFCS.

Many people use honey, agave syrup or apple sauce instead of high-fructose corn syrup. But check out the sugar composition of various sweeteners and foods:

Honey is almost identical to HFCS-42 and agave syrup is close to HFCS-90. In fact, to check that honey hasn’t been adulterated with HFCS requires examining the carbon isotopes. Applesauce is mostly water and fibre, but it’s sweetness comes from unpolymerized fructose.

Just because products are less processed, doesn’t mean they’re any healthier for you: the reason we crave sugar is because it’s so hard to find in the wild. The problem isn’t high-fructose corn syrup, it’s that people eat too much sugar:

If you’re looking for a sweetener that’s more pretentious than table sugar and includes trace micronutrients, I think maple syrup is the way to go.

The two most common simple sugars (monosaccharides) are glucose and fructose. Glucose is what cells input for energy. Fructose is metabolized in the liver into either glucose or fatty tissue. Transport of fructose to the liver appears to be sped up by the presence of some glucose. So it’s best to eat fructose without glucose.

The liver prioritizes metabolism into glucose, but it makes the decision based on the glucose level in the liver itself. The issue is that when a large amount of fructose is digested, the liver bottlenecks and produces fatty tissue. The liver also prioritizes metabolism of fructose over other activities. So it’s better to eat glucose than fructose. (Excess glucose is also metabolized into fatty tissue by the liver, but without the bottleneck much less dietary glucose should end up as fat.)

Simple sugars combine (polymerize) into complex sugars (polysaccharides). The most common one is sucrose = 1 glucose + 1 fructose. Sucrose is broken down into glucose and fructose in the stomach, which takes time; there’s some evidence that this digestion is regulated by blood sugar levels. So it’s better to eat sucrose than glucose and fructose unpolymerized.

Glucose is 75% as sweet and fructose is 175% as sweet as sucrose. So if you’re cooking with fructose, you don’t need to use as much.

I’ve written the above conclusions from the point of view of someone who doesn’t want to get fat. If you’ve just expended significant energy through exercise, you want to get glucose to your muscles (including your heart) as fast as possible so they can start repairing themselves. Some athletes like to chug maltodextrin = glucose + glucose + glucose + …, which has the emergent property of being not sweet at all.

Say you really like farming but you live in a city, even an apartment building. You note that there is not that much opportunity for you to do farming around you. So you think, “is there any way I can convince policy makers and influential residents to support my hobby?” You decide that farming is the solution and start looking for problems it can fix:

Emergency management

In the event of an apocalyptic disaster, we should be stockpiling oil or grain, not growing plants that could be months away from harvest.

Carbon emissions

If you want to reduce the carbon footprint of food, the most savings are in the transportation chain from boat to grocery store to fridge. Growing ultralight lettuce won’t make any difference.

Feeding the homeless

There’s plentiful free food in Victoria, whether from soup kitchens or dumpsters. I’ll never forget what a homeless guy told me when I offered him half a dozen eggs while cleaning out my fridge: homeless people need homes.

Educating children

Farming on school grounds is a great idea. But since children are not allowed to wander around unsupervised, they’ll never be exposed to any farming that’s off school grounds.

By offering itself up as a solution to all these issues, food security distracts from real solutions.

I think farming is a great hobby. Allotment gardens are a legitimate recreational use of green space. Everyone should have the right to keep bees or raise chickens on their private property. Roofs and boulevards covered by indigenous plants have many benefits. But don’t try to pretend that your hobby is going to save the world and demand the community subsidizes it.

After all, I like climbing things but I don’t think buildering should be in the plan. Although now that you mention it…

500 metres is commonly used in urban planning because it’s the distance the average person walks in 5 minutes (I’ve previously used 400). For groceries, it’s the distance that old people can transport a few days worth of food on foot and young people are willing to “run out” to. Beyond 500 metres people start taking a car.

Alison recently asked me to comment on the viability of a permanent food market in Victoria. I say that’s putting the cart before the horse: many people in Victoria can’t even get to a regular grocery store! Council should figure out how to solve that key environmental, social and security issue before they start worrying about fancy markets.

Here are the 500-metre radii around full-service grocery stores in the municipality of Victoria:

There are food stores that are less than full service. They don’t have butchers, so carnivores who like fresh meat will have to shop somewhere else frequently. They have uneven produce quality and selection. I believe most people who live by these stores will regularly make a trip to a full-service grocery store. You can select the checkbox to display each store on the map:

Famously, creativity comes from constraints. I cook creatively and emphasizing local produce is one of the best inspirations I’ve found. In the winter, the minimal selection forces me to find new uses for mundane ingredients. For example, European recipies used parsnips until potatoes were introduced from Peru in the 1500s. In the summer, a brief flood of local delicacies creates a related problem: most innovations in human food are actually preservation techniques.

I want to know what can be grown locally in each season to be more in touch with my region. I think restaurants should favour local ingredients in order to establish regional cuisines (having close contact with your suppliers also raises quality). I’m not sure I believe in terroir for vegetables, but just in case…

By sometimes selecting specialty food, I am more mindful of where all my food comes from and how it is grown. Mindful consumerism is critical when consumption constructs your identity. (Contemporary class distinction is between those who consume mindfully and those who consume economically.) By consciously choosing when I buy factory food, I elevate all my purchasing.

Buying a restricted set of food symbolizes a willingness to make sacrifices. I will change my lifestyle to save the environment, whether it means eating specific food or doing something else. I do some things to make the world a better place, but not enough.

And just because I preach against our society’s cult of authenticity doesn’t mean I’m immune to it: hopefully the cute check-out girl will notice my 100-mile heritage biodynamic shade-grown fair-trade açaí berries.

Waste

There is a lot of waste at every stage of the food chain from the farm to your house. Fixing this is a big campaign in Britain right now. Start an education campaign or get into some civil-disobedient dumpster diving.

Carbon

Buying local or organic is a lazy proxy for low carbon. European grocery stores have proper carbon labelling, which reveals the two biggest problems in agriculture: beef and air-freight. Nudge argues that mandatory labeling is a reasonable government intervention; mail your MP.

The last mile

Getting food from the grocery store to households is incredibly inefficient. Talk to your city council about zoning and property tax incentives to get a grocery store within 400 metres of every household. You can improve your own consumption by ordering online.

Pesticide and fertilizer

These are serious problems but organic isn’t a sustainable solution, genetic modification is. Lobby your MP for chemical labeling; organic certification is too broad of a brush.

Fair trade

Buying food from the under-developed world only helps them if the money doesn’t end up in the pockets of shareholders in the developed world. Why are so few products Fair Trade certified? Is Fair Trade the best solution? I’m not sure what the political action is in this case.