I stayed overnight in Sheffield on Wednesday as my inaugural lecture (which went well) finished too late to allow for a comfortable return home.
On the way back yesterday I listened to an edition of the Desert Island Dishes (you read that right) podcast, featuring Stanley Tucci. I like Tucci, his work and his approach to food. The podcast did not disappoint.
One thing stood out rather strongly. Tucci highlighted his enthusiasm for Italian cuisine. This, he stressed, was nothing like American Italian cuisine, which it would have been so very easy for him to have embraced instead.
As he put it, when Italian cuisine got to America, portions increased in size, the amount of meat increased considerably and sauces got laid on thick.
This is not how Italians do things. They eat human sized portions, designed to meet need and not greed. Meat is used, but never to excess, largely because that could not be afforded. And sauces were for flavouring, not bulk. I agree with all that, although I appear to be heading way from meat these days.
Why mention this? Because as the Guardian notes this morning in its daily newsletter:
In the last year, a little known drug originally prescribed to people with type 2 diabetes has shot into the headlines. Semaglutide, sold by Novo Nordisk as Ozempic, has taken social media and Hollywood by storm. Elon Musk credited his new body to Wegovy, another brand of the drug, and celebrities like the Kardashians are widely rumoured to be using it to shed the curvy figures that propelled them to fame in the early 2010s.
Fat was in. Fat is now, apparently, out again. Let the market profit from the change which, no doubt, it promoted in the first place. And never let it be mentioned that if only people ate sensible amounts of largely unprocessed food whilst taking enough exercise (largely in the form of low impact walking) diet would not be an issue for vast numbers of people.
But where would GDP be if we did something so sensible? It would fall, of course. Our well-being is inversely proportional to that which economics records in that case. And so what wins? As a result of the power of markets the wrong foodstuffs do, for which they must then supply antidotes, of course.
I am not decrying all markets. I think markets are of use. However, markets that exploit and generally demean those with whom they engage are serving no good purpose. Much of our food market appears dangerously close to this. Why can't we better regulate it?
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Tai Chi was developed (not invented) into quite a big thing under the Communists as a way of ensuring people who had few Calories could still take part in exercise.
Like you I think we need to look at ways to adopt low impact exercise like this, and be poor enough again that we eat what we need and not what our greed desires.
I don’t think we need to be poor to eat well
Indeed, it seems like the opposite – although most of favourite meals neither take a lot of time or many complicated, let alone expensive, ingredients
In my rural market town we’ve had an influx of rich southerners, selling up to move here.
So house prices have gone through the roof, there are more cars on the road – SUVs – and estuary English is all around innit?
And now we have the true purveyors of wealth indicators in our times – a local very busy McDonalds and even more so – a Dominoes Pizza outlet – I mean £18.00 for a pizza? Bollocks. The only people who can afford those prices are certainly not local agricultural or shop workers. It’s people who have money to burn.
Dominos is dire
I can do a Big Mac a year to remind me it is only for desperate moments
If you want to see a beautiful film about food watch Tucci in ‘Big Night’ (1996) a film that portrays the culture clash between the Italian Food culture and that of the U.S. It is a wonderful, wonderful film.
You are right to mention fat, but as the food manufacturers have been removing fat, they have been putting in more sugar that gets turned into fat in the human body. I think that this is still misunderstand by consumers. Food manufacturers are literally 3-D printing food that is held together by sugar and very little else (such as fibre).
I have never watched it
But I plan to do so, maybe this weekend
I have seen him talking about it and it is referred to in the podcast
If that is the case Richard, then you are in for a treat. It’s the final scene that gets me blubbing, otherwise the film is part celebration of food, part suspense thriller about revenge, part story of brotherhood.
Truly outstanding ingredients such as Tucci, Ian Holm, Isabella Rosellini and tomatoes and pasta.
Enjoy – you are worth it.
We watched it last night
What a great film
And I loved the open-endedness of it
Very, very good
I think we should bring in a simple regulation for food markets that they can’t exploit or generally demean. Actually that’s two regulations.
The development of our political economy has everything to do with sugar. Once upon a time sugar was a luxury product. It became cheap due to slavery and empire. Our diets have suffered from it ever since.
not exactly on topic but you must see Tucci as Puck in MSDN
“my inaugural lecture (which went well)”
A less pompous, egotistical person would leave that for others to say.
I was told by others, including my heads of department, that it went well, in writing.
Your claim is, like that of all trolls, wholly misplaced.
I’m not surprised it went well. But I’m sorry that I could not be there. I did not feel well.
Shame!
If you had ever lectured, then the lecturer can tell whether a lecture goes well or not. People focussed on what the lecturer is saying give out a quite different atmosphere to lectures where people are shuffling, disengaged, waiting for it to be over.
True
And this one went well
Everyone stayed with me to the end
Have a pizza in Italy, made the traditional way, and it is a healthy and tasty combination of carbohydrate, fat, and protein. An dequate amount of salt is included in the pizza bread, which is not layered thick in high salt and sugar sauce, and is usually meat free or with modest amouts of pepperoni.
Have a pizza from a takeaway here – I won’t name them but you will be familiar enough with their names emblazoning the high street – and you will purchase a wad of salt rich dough overloaded with an ultra processed unhealthy transfat rich sauce swamp and chuncks of meaty muck.
The scandal is that school meals these days are often the cheapest option – Anglo-American pizzas and so forth, filling the stomachs of our young and encouraging the highest rates of obesity in the G20 countries (bar the US of A}.
Agreed
you certainly look bloated..
Wow
I just checked. That’s at least your eighth identity this month
I think you have more problems than me
We have suffered from years of bad food choices starting from WWII. Basically we now eat far too much sugar as well as carbs which effectively has the same effect on our bodies. Meat consumption actually fell as a percentage of the western diet mainly due to bad advice given by so called diet specialists that encouraged a low fat diet. We are slowly coming to realise that was a huge mistake. The food industry thus pushed low fat food. Sadly removing the fat content negatively effects taste and satiency. So they replaced the fat with sugar eg check the sugar content in a low fat yoghurt. Diabetes in the west as a result has soared. We really need to go back to a low sugar/ carb diet.
So get the butter and steaks out. Cut the sugar and carbs and your body will thank you.
Obviously heed moderation like in all things and not forgetting the need for fibre and fresh vegetables.
My wife, who guides me on these things, would agree with you
But not to steak
But you are right on fat
I’m sure from his context Vincent means pastured steak and not meat from some permanently caged unfortunate. We, and the land, need far more of the former and a merciful end entirely to the latter.
Do we need steak at all?
Of course we do. Ruminants are nature’s way of turning stuff we can’t eat into stuff we can. Along the way unusable land gets made usable. Win win. I’ve been trying to suggest locally we do away with the local lawn-mowing companies and get goats in. They’ll clean up the land and afterwards we can eat them. The idea has so far been met with disinterest but in our glorious post-Brexit Nirvana larger areas of local land are left uncut every year due to lack of anyone being available/wanting to do it, so I’m still hopeful.
Read George Monbiot
I side with him on this issue
Eat less, mainly plants.
Though to be honest I don’t follow my own advice..
Ironically the modern plenty of pasta in Italy is directly related to the Italian diaspora who discovered the industrial quantities of wheat available in America.
Much agree with those who suggest that sugar and carbohydrate are basically the same and the first man to suggest that sugar and not fat was a considerable health problem, John Yudkin, lost his career to the sugar lobby.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/07/the-sugar-conspiracy-robert-lustig-john-yudkin
The American sugar lobby actually paid scientists to deflect from its role in heart disease:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/sep/12/sugar-industry-paid-research-heart-disease-jama-report
It was deflected onto saturated fat and sheme fell on fertile soil because people believed the simple idea that consuming fat made you fat. Forgetting of course that humanity has consumed fat for far, far longer than the cultivation of sugar cane which basically didn’t exist before slavery.
Now we have the world’s most widely distributed product, Coca Cola (available, I think, in every country in the world except North Korea) and basically full of nothing but sugar – or when not, then the safety of those sugar substitutes has never been tested – we are the guinea-pigs!
All this shows that the vested interests have no regard for their fellow humanity because it threatens their own route to monetary wealth.
Shades of economics and the monetary system.
It is people in the sugar business that want to silence criticism of sugar.
And people in the money/banking business that want to silence the criticism of household economics.
The sugar industry has managed to silence and or deflect scientific criticism for more than 60 years.
Finance for probably rather longer. But I still can’t work out whether the financiers are cleverer or more stupid because theirs is a human created system and all they have to do is persuade the rest of us that it is a (pseudo) science and works as we are told and that, above all, private finance is essential….
Incidentally the next food scandal is Ultra Processed Foods – even supermarket bread has emulsifiers in it, these days.
A recent fascinating book, Ultra Processed People by Chris van Tulleken which I’ve only just begun to read, shows that another trope of the sugar industry that if only we would exercise enough we’d burn off those excess ‘sugary’ calories is nonsense. We always knew that calories were a largely useless measure because a calorie of chocolate biscuits is obviously not the same as a calorie of cauliflower. Now it turns out that you actually use the same quantity of energy to sit at the office computer as you do in hunter gathering. But if you are a couch potato and don’t use up that energy as brain power the otherwise unused energy will tend to turn against the body itself and we get sick…
Our government now needs not only to take on the bankers, but also most of the large food and drink manufacturers.
Nobody else can.
Trouble is we need capable and concerned government for that.
And we certainly do not have that now – and worryingly, it doesn’t seem to be in prospect.
And don’t get me started on seed oils… especially rapeseed oil which appears to be in just about everything. Luckily some companies are offering alternatives, Hunter & Gather spring to mind https://hunterandgatherfoods.com/
Peter,
I heartily agree.
The further irony on the sugar issue is that the food manufacturers have found an even cheaper, and (you guessesd it) more even more poisonous subsitute…..glucose fructose syrup. It is in EVERYTHING nowadays, from biscuits to cakes and confectionary to sauces and in especially in our fizzy drinks. Sugar is bad enough, but this stuff is even worse for us, just check out your ingredients next time you are in the supermarket and avoid.
It knocks a few percentages off the bottom line of course as well as a few yeard of our lives becuase it is a substance that we cannot digest/excrete. So it builds up in our our arteries over a lifetime with not too good outcomes for our health, acting to increase heart attacks and strokes.
Over all else, fizzy drinks are probably the single worst item we can consume. If we do nothing else shutting down that business should be a primary objective. But we are bombarded with marketing from the likes of Coca Cola, who are more or less the enemy within. And we are so addicted.
You are right
Glucose is the devil’s work
The two referenced articles from the Guardian are excellent and well worth reading.
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