Eat This Newsletter 171 is out, with Canadian chickens, proletarian food systems, sweetness and dark, and a tribute to NI Vavilov. All connected, even if somewhat tenuously. Read it at https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas/archive/eat-this-newsletter-171-proletarian/

Huge congratulations to Chris Otter, whose fascinating book Diet for a Large Planet has just won the AHA Bentley Prize in World History. We had a great chat about how the British created global food outsourcing and made it was it is today.

https://www.eatthispodcast.com/large-planet/

Great fun chatting with Amalia Sacchi for @festletteratura about food, agriculture and the climate crisis, although ashamed not to be able to do it in Italian. It will be streamed on 8 September at 14:10 CEST.

In case you thought "organic" meant anything more than another way for industrial food to profit with no regard to any costs other than purely financial, Marion Nestle takes apart Danone's decision to abandon small organic dairies https://www.foodpolitics.com/2021/08/24686/

No favourites from Marion Nestle: Unethical food marketing ad of the week: infant formula, organic no less.

https://www.foodpolitics.com/2021/08/most-egregious-food-ad-of-the-week-infant-formula/

Fun to see @racheleats photo of Bonci Pizza illustrating this article, although that seems to me as far from ordinary pizza al taglio as that is from Mr Go’s pizza vendining machine.

https://www.theguardian.com/food/2021/may/07/dough-to-go-romes-first-pizza-vending-machine-gets-mixe...

USDA says there were about 2,019,000 farms in the US in 2020. But how many were actually farms in the usual sense of the word, growing food for sale as their primary business. I'm sure @rosenblawg said something about this recently, but I can't now find it. Help, please.

Let joy be unconfined: farm share of food dollar up from 14.2 cents in 2018 to 14.3 cents in 2019. Farmers get an even lower share of eating out dollars, and eating out dollars plunged during the pandemic.

https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery/chart-detail/?chartId=100802

I’ve been getting myself in a right old muddle about taste lately. Not music or architecture -- well, not entirely -- but gustatory taste, the taste of food. Of course, we all acknowledge that taste is subjective. 1/6

I do not believe that consumers are the main beneficiaries of recent trends in the centralisation and industrialisation of food production. Convenient, perhaps, but safe and affordable? At what price?