FERN’s Friday Feed: Gut check
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
Does our stomach define who we are?
Atlas Obscura
“A lecturer in history at the University of Strathclyde, Scotland, [Elsa] Richardson describes herself as ‘a historian of the body and the self,’ researching how our understanding of who we are changes across time. In Rumbles, she traces the gut’s history in Western culture, and the various ways the organ has been conceptualized: from the medieval scholars who sought to balance the four humors of the body (and thus the mood) through eating, to the 19th-century doctors who thought of constipation as the root cause of illness, to modern wellness culture centered around a garden of gut flora … When you look at historical medical texts, says Richardson, ‘it becomes clear that we have long, long recognized a link between the gut and the mind, or the gut and the emotional life.’ The gut’s influence was even believed to extend to the subconscious, with nightmares blamed on indigestion well into the modern era.”
From state prison to a revered San Francisco restaurant
SFGATE
“On a recent morning in the kitchen of Flour + Water, Michael Thomas picks the stems off sungold tomatoes from Mariquita Farms. One by one, he discards the bramble of green that held the tomato to its vine and places the poppy orange-colored miniature orbs on a tray before he cuts each of them in half. This is just one of his duties as a new prep cook at the iconic San Francisco restaurant,” writes Nico Madrigal-Yankowski. “Thomas, 45, is keen on memorizing every single new ingredient that he’s working with, many of which have Italian names, like teleme and crescenza cheeses and Taggiasca olives. That’s largely because Thomas didn’t have those ingredients at the chow hall in Corcoran State Prison. An inmate in the California prison system for nearly 30 years of his life, he was used to cooking with hamburger meat and white rice as part of the chow hall crew. But 17 years into his sentence, he realized his newfound passion for baking and made it his goal to pursue that aspiration upon his release.”
‘Chaos wheat’ and the future of bread
The Washington Post
“[Stephen] Jones spent years breeding commercial wheat strains for the grain industry,” writes Michael J. Coren. “Disillusioned with commodity agriculture, he started the Breadlab at Washington State University in 2009 to focus on smaller farmers. He calls his approach chaos wheat, a genetic gamble deploying diversity against a volatile world. The lab’s varieties — developed by painstakingly crossing one wheat plant with another — balance yield, flavor and resilience. The results don’t yield as much white flour as conventional varieties, but field tests show the plants offer a mix of resistance to drought, pests and volatile weather, while requiring less water, fertilizer and agrochemicals. ‘We present genetic chaos in a field,’ says Jones, ‘so [the plants] can deal with chaotic events.’”
Making food ‘out of thin air’
Noēma
“Solar Foods’ Factory 01 is located on a modern industrial estate in Vantaa, a satellite town about a 10-minute train ride from Helsinki Airport. Inside the building’s jet-black exterior,” writes Philip Maughan, “bundles of polished steel pipes twist and weave … feeding a noxious mix of hydrogen, ammonium, oxygen and carbon dioxide into a series of bioreactors and the silent creatures who dwell inside. It is in these roughly 53-, 530- and 5,300-gallon tanks that the Finnish food-tech company’s first product is being cultivated: an all-natural ingredient called Solein — a portmanteau of ‘solar’ and ‘protein’ — which I’d been promised would be served to me in a variety of formulations before the day was up. Technically speaking, Solein is the powdery remains of a hydrogenotroph: an organism that metabolizes molecular hydrogen. Hydrogenotrophs can be found in the soil, in the sea and even in the human gut. Finding a specimen that would work as food, however, was a unique challenge.”
$27 a pound for ground beef? Factoring in food’s environmental costs.
The New York Times
“As pricey as a run to the grocery store has become, our grocery bills would be considerably more expensive if environmental costs were included,” write Lydia DePillis, Manuela Andreoni, and Catrin Einhorn. “For years, economists have been developing a system of ‘true cost accounting’ based on … evidence about the environmental damage caused by different types of agriculture. Now, emerging research aims to translate this damage to the planet into dollar figures. By displaying these so-called true prices, sometimes next to retail prices, researchers hope to nudge consumers, businesses, farmers and regulators to factor in the environmental toll of food … [S]ome governments are using this research to design policies that account for food’s environmental effects. New York State, for example, is working with Cornell University researchers to develop a tool to factor them into procurement decisions, rather than just picking the cheapest bid. And Denmark is introducing the world’s first tax on methane emitted by cows, pigs and sheep.”