Harold McGee.  Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World’s Smells.  Penguin Press, 2020.

Harold McGee, author of the astonishing On Food and Cooking, sent me a copy of his equally astonishing new book, this one an encyclopedia of the smells of everything—the “osmocosm.”

I am happy to have it.  He’s produced a life-changing book.  I will never think of smells in the same way again.

For starters, the book is brilliantly designed with elegant charts, key terms in bold, and chemical structures (yes!) right next to the terms in miniature on a light grey background, set off from the text but right there where they are needed.  Here’s an example from the pages that Amazon.com makes available.  This excerpt comes from a section on the smells of chemical compounds found in interstellar space (p. 19—and see my comment on the page number at the end of this post).

Interstellar space?  Well, yes.  Also animals, pets, and human armpits, along with flowers, spices, weeds, fungi, stones (they have bacteria and fungi on them), asphalt, perfumes, and everything else that smells or stinks—as well as foods, of course.

McGee must have had fun writing this.

It’s exactly becasue CAFOs [Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations] are offensive and harmful that the volatiles of animal excrement have been so well studied.  Crazily but appropriately, chemists borrow the terminology of top, middle, and base notes from the perfume worls (see page 477) to describe the smells of CAFOs.  The top notes, very volatile and quickly dispersed, are ammonia and hydrogen sulfide.  The more persistent middle notes include amines, thiols and sulfides, aldehydes and alcohols and ketones.  The constantly present base notes are the short-chain straight and branched acids, cfresol and other pehnolics, and skatole.  In a 2006 study of swine and beef cattle operations, barnyard cresol was identified as the primary offensive odor, and could be detected as far as ten miles (sixteen kilometers) downwind.  It’s probably the first long-distance hint I get of that I-5 Eau de Coalinga (p. 71).

But let me be clear: this is an encyclopedia, demanding close attention to the chemistry.  Sentences like this one come frequently: “The branched four-carbon chain (3-sulfanyl-2-methyl butanol) has its branch just one carbon atom over from the otherwise identical molecule in cat pee” (p.121).

But this blog is about food.  McGee’s discussion of food smells are riveting.  For example:

• The standard basil varieties in the West today mainly produce varying proportions of a coupld of terpenoids, flowery linalook and fresh eucalyptol, and the clove- and anise-smelling benzenoids eugenol and estragole.  But when it comes to a dish in which basil stars—peto alla genovese, the Ligurian pasta sauce of pounded basil, garlic, nuts, and cheese—Italians are more particular (p. 255).
• In 2014, I made a pilgrimage to a celebrated durian stall in the outskirts of Singapore and found that most of the half-dozen varieties I tried tasted of strawberries and a mix of fried onions and garlic.  I enjoyed them enough to smuggl one into my hotel room…After just an hour or two its royal presence filled the room and became unbearable.  I had no choice but regicide, and disposed of the body like coCanned sntraband drugs, flushing it in pieces down the toilet (p. 333).
• The dominant note [in beef stews], described as “gravy-like,” came not from the meats, but from the onions and leeks!  The volatile responsible turned out to be a five-carbon, one-sulfur chain with a methyl decoration, a mercaptomethyl pentanol, MMP for short.  It is formed by a sequene of reactions, the first causaed by heat-sensitive onion enzymes, then ordinary chemical reactions that are accelerated by heat.  So its production is encouraged by chopping or pureeing these alliums (but not garlic) well before cooking them to let the enzymes do their work, the cooking slowly for several hours  (p. 513).
• Canned sweet corn is dominated by seaside-vegetal dimethyl sulfide, acetyl pyrroline, and a corny thiazole (p. 519).
• Swiss Appenzeller is notably strong in sweaty-foot branched acids (p. 567).

It should be clear from these excerpts that this is a reference work—a field guide—just as advertised.  If you read it, you will learn more than you ever dreamed possible about the volatile molecules that we can and do smell.

Nose Dive will go right next to On Food and Cooking on my reference shelf.

But uh oh.  How I wish it had a better index. 

For a book like this, the index needs to be meticulously complete—list every bold face term every time it appears—so readers can find what we are looking for.  This one is surprisingly unhelpful.

I found this out because I forgot to write down the page number for the fatty acid excerpt shown above.  I searched the index for most of the key words that appear in the clip: fatty acids, short and branched; butyric; methylbutyric; hexanoic; cheesy; intersteller space. No luck.  I had to check through all of the fatty acid listings and finally found it under “fatty acids, and molecules in asteroids, 19.”   Oh.  Asteroids.  Silly me.

I also forgot to note the page for the CAFO quote.  CAFO is not indexed at all, even though it appears in bold on the previous page, and neither does its definition, Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation.

McGee refers frequently to “Hero Carbon,” the atom basic to odiferous molecules.  I couldn’t remember where he first used “Hero” and tried to look it up.  Not a chance.

This book deserves better, alas.

Penguin Press:  this needs a fix, big time.

Life is always full of stresses but on top of the usual sources we now have the pandemic and what went on—and continues—about the election.

Fortunately, food remains one source of comfort we can always rely on.

The trick is making sure that stress eating doesn’t interfere with long-term health.

Here is a sample of recent reports:

• From Eater: Butter sales are up “thanks to everyone who is channeling their anxiety into baking.”
• From CNN: it was junk food and booze on election night.
• From the Wall Street Journal:  Hershey’s sales are up.  “Hershey said it also benefited from using Covid-19 case counts to predict where demand would spike as more people stayed home, and sent more chocolate bars there.”

What are we to make of these reports?

We are all looking for comfort and solace, and foods help.

But watch out for food marketers: they will do all they can to encourage you to buy what they are selling.

I am all for making sure that farmers make a decent living but most agricultural subsidies go to Big Ag—the producers of corn and soybeans fed mainly to animals or, in the case of corn, as ethanol for car fuel.

These taxpayer-funded payments are enormous and represent increasing percentages of the income of Big Ag.

For example, see this chart from the Wall Street Journal.

As part of the Trump administration’s effort to get votes from farmers and ranchers, it pledged $37.2 billion to them in the spring and summer with an addition $14 billion in September.

Why is this about the election?  The Washington Post says “Trump’s farmer bailout gave $21 billion to red counties and $2.1 billion to blue ones.”

At a campaign rally in Wisconsin last week, President Trump didn’t mince words about how much his administration had done to bolster the economic fortunes of farmers…I gave $28 billion to the farmers, many of them right here, $28 billion, $12 billion and $16 billion, two years”… That redistribution was facilitated through the Agriculture Department’s Market Facilitation Program. According to data obtained by the Environmental Working Group through a Freedom of Information Act request, that program disbursed more than $23 billion in the 2018 and 2019 program years.

From a report from Agricultural Economic Insights:  USDA’s direct payments to Big Ag will equal 36% of net farm income, up from 22% in 2018=2019.  These payments used to account for around 10% of net farm income.

Check out its map:

Finally, it’s good to review the big picture of what happened to food and farming under Trump.  Civil Eats has an excellent review by Lisa Held.

To offset the effects of the tariffs, in 2018, USDA began distributing cash payments through the Commodity Credit Corporation at unprecedented levels, with no appropriations or oversight from Congress. In 2020, as the pandemic hit the farm economy, it added another source of government payments via the Coronavirus Food Assistance Program (CFAP). Overall, Trump’s USDA has handed out more government dollars to farmers than any administration prior. In both 2019 and 2020, more than 40 percent of farm incomes came from federal assistance—the only thing keeping farm incomes afloat.

Those payments have been controversial because they have almost exclusively benefited the largest farms and agriculture companies. Two-thirds of the trade aid payments went to agriculture producers in the top 10 percent, including corporations, such as the $67 million paid to JBS USA, a subsidiary of the Brazilian-owned meatpacking giant. Small farms, especially diversified operations and those run by socially disadvantaged Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) farmers, have largely been unable to access CFAP assistance.

All of this leaves plenty of room for improvement.

President-elect Biden: get to work!

I have a few suggestions.  Maybe you can think of others?

• Appoint committed experts to head federal agencies dealing with food issues (especially USDA, FDA, FTC, EPA, CDC).
• Rehire the experts who quit or were fired during the Trump administration.
• Bring the Economic Research Service back to Washington DC.
• Rescind the public charge and work rules that have led to SNAP de-enrollment; restore SNAP outreach.
• Refocus agricultural supports on food for people (rather than feed for animals or fuel for cars).
• Promote small- and mid-size agricultural production.
• Provide incentives for agricultural production that conserves and regenerates natural resources.
• Insist on fair pay for farm, packing house, restaurant, and grocery workers, and on safe working conditions.
• Use every means possible to promote diets that reduce the risk of overweight and the diseases for which it increases risk.
• Create a food agency to coordinate existing policies to develop a food system healthier for people and the planet.

Hey, I can dream.

Anything in this direction will be a big step forward.

If you are a marketer of fruit juice, you have a problem.  Fruit juice has a lot of sugar and retains little of the fiber of whole fruit.  Dietary recommendations increasingly suggest limits on the amounts consumed, especially for children.

But according to the trade group, the Juice Products Association, “The 2015 Dietary Guidelines for Americans and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) concur that 4 to 6 ounces of 100% fruit juice per day is appropriate for young children. For children age 7 and older, the AAP recommends a daily serving of 8 to 12 ounces per day.”

No it does not!  The American Academy of Pediatrics suggests a limit to that amount.  Big difference.

Juice should not be introduced into the diet of infants before 12 months of age unless clinically indicated. The intake of juice should be limited to, at most, 4 ounces/day in toddlers 1 through 3 years of age, and 4 to 6  ounces/day for children 4 through 6 years of age. For children 7 to 18 years of age, juice intake should be limited to 8 ounces or 1 cup of the recommended 2 to 2.5 cups of fruit servings per day.

What about adults?  Adults do not need more sugars or the calories they provide.   They too would be better off eating fruit.

Juice trade associations to the rescue.

The study:  100% Fruit juice intake and cardiovascular risk: a systematic review and meta-analysis of prospective and randomised controlled studies. Lanfranco D’Elia, et al.  European Journal of Nutrition (2020)

Methods: This is a meta-analysis of prospective studies and randomized controlled trials (RCTs) examining the relationship between consumption of 100% fruit juice (FJ) and the risk of cardiovascular disease (CV).

Conclusions: “The results of these analyses indicate that 100%FJ consumption is not associated with higher CV risk. A non-linear inverse dose–response relationship occurs between 100%FJ consumption and CV disease, in particular for risk of stroke, probably mediated by the decrease in blood pressure.”

Funding: “Open access funding provided by Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II within the CRUI-CARE Agreement. This project was funded by the European Fruit Juice Association (AIJN) via an unrestricted grant. AIJN was not involved in the design, conduction, analysis and interpretation of the results.”

Comment: Why would anyone think that fruit juice, of all things, would be associated with heart disease risk?  You would have to be drinking a lot of it —at the exclusion of healthier foods—for it to make  a significant difference.  The only point of this study is to try to convince adults to drink more juice.  When I was a kid, fruit juice was expensive and we drank it in 4-ounce glasses.  If you drink fruit juice at all, that’s still a good idea.

Rebecca Earle.  Feeding the People: The Politics of the Potato.  Cambridge University Press, 2020.

The historian Rebecca Earle uses the potato as an entry point into investigations of some of the most important political issues of our time: immigration, free-market capitalism, and globalization.  As she puts it, her book

offers a deep history of the concept of food security and fresh account of how eating became part of modern politics.  It also helps to explain our own fraught relationship with dietary guidelines by showing how healthy eating became embedded within a neoliberal framework valorising personal responsibility and choice rather than state-led intervention” (p. 3).

A couple more excerpts to give you an idea where she is headed with this.  Malthus, she says, had a “dismal vision of catastrophic population increase.”  With this vision

came pessimism about the potato’s capacity to contribute to national well-being.  Far from increasing trade and boosting economic exchange, the potato bcame an obstacle to modernity, because it helped sustain precisely the sectors of the population that capitalism aimed to eradicate” (p. 141).

Later, she describes the Peruvian International Potato Center (its Spanish acronym is CIP):

Peru is not alone in its gastronational celebration of local potato varieties.  A number of countries, from Denmark to Ecuador, have likewise established national potato days, or sought to protect specific varieties under international legislation…International regulatory structures thus help to nationalise potatoes by according them formal status as part of the national patrimony.  Its long history as an overlooked, localised food resource now enables the potato to toggle between the global food system and notions of culinary heritage, in a way that other major commodities such as sugar or maize have largely failed to do (pp. 197-198).

USDA to launch rulemaking process for labeling of cell-cultured meat; ‘success will turn, in large measure, on the nomenclature used,’ says attorney: How should meat grown from cultured animal cells be labeled? In a joint FDA/USDA webinar, officials said they would work together to come up with joint principles to govern the labeling of products under their respective jurisdictions (FDA: seafood; USDA: livestock & poultry) before launching a rulemaking and comment process, although no firm timetable has yet been established…. Read more.

• You can watch a video about regulation of these products here.
• The joint framework for regulation is here.

FoodNavigator-USA.com has been collecting items on cell-based meats.  I’ve selected a few of interest.  For others, click here.

• Cell-cultured meat startups, NAMI, urge USDA to gather more data before issuing a proposed rule on labeling: Cell cultured meat startups and conventional meat companies have written to USDA’s food safety and inspection service (FSIS) urging officials to gather more data before publishing a proposed rule on how cell-cultured meat and poultry products should be labeled….Read more.  The text of the letter is here.
• What’s in a name? FDA requests info on labeling of cell-cultured seafood:  The FDA has issued a request for information on how best to label cell-cultured seafood as startups in the space edge closer to commercialization…. Read more
• Mission Barns tests cell-cultured pork fat with leading pork producer; gears up for hybrid plant/animal bacon tastingBerkeley-based startup Mission Barns – which is carving a niche in the nascent cell-cultured meat industry by focusing on animal fat – is in talks with leading food companies about incorporating animal fat grown in bioreactors into a range of hybrid meats combining animal- and plant-based components…. Watch now
• SHIFT20: ‘Cell-based’ could be the best way to describe cell-cultured seafood on labels, suggests large consumer study‘  Lab-grown’ seafood is a food marketer’s nightmare. ‘Clean’ seafood carries the tacit implication that the regular stuff is dirty. ‘Cultivated’ seafood – a term that performed well in recent research on meat & poultry – could be confused with farmed fish. However, ‘cell-based’ – while not perfect – may be the best common or usual name to describe seafood grown from animal cells on food labels, suggests new research…. Read more
• TurtleTree Labs in talks with leading dairy, infant formula brands to license cell-cultured human breastmilk technology:  Singapore-based TurtleTree Labs is in talks with leading dairy and infant formula brands to license its technology for the production of cell-cultured human breastmilk, and has articulated a longer-term mission to produce cow’s milk as well…. Read more
• BIOMILQ raises $3.5m to fund mammary cell-cultured human breastmilk platform, disrupt infant nutrition market:  BIOMILQ – a startup producing breastmilk by culturing human mammary cells – has raised $3.5m to meet the needs of the four fifths of women who transition to dairy-based formula before the recommended six-month exclusivity period for breastfeeding, but aren’t always happy about it…. Read more
• UC Davis receives $3.55m grant to investigate long-term viability of cell-cultured meat:  The University of California, Davis, (UC Davis) has received a grant of up to $3.55m from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Growing Convergence program to explore the long-term sustainability and commercial viability of cell-cultured (a.k.a. ‘cultivated’) meat…. Read more