Food: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 2

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WonderEvolution

Most adults in the world make little lactase, the enzyme that digests milk sugar, after childhood. In several peoples with a long history of dairy farming, genetic changes that keep the enzyme working for life spread through natural selection, a trait called lactase persistence.

In Europe the most common variant sits in a stretch of DNA that switches the lactase gene (LCT) on and off; a widely cited estimate puts its first spread at roughly 7,500 years ago. Different mutations with the same effect arose independently among cattle herders in East Africa and pastoralists in the Middle East, so evolution reached one solution several times. Scientists call this gene-culture coevolution: a cultural habit, keeping animals for milk, changed which genes helped people survive. The story is more complicated than it first looked. A 2022 study in Nature found that Europeans used milk for thousands of years while the variant stayed rare, and suggested it spread fastest in famines and epidemics, when milk could make people without it seriously ill.

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WonderEvolution

Maize, sugarcane and sorghum grow well in heat and strong sun partly because they use C4 photosynthesis, a way of concentrating carbon dioxide inside the leaf. This method has evolved independently more than 60 times in different groups of plants.

Most plants use C3 photosynthesis, which relies on an enzyme called RuBisCO to capture carbon dioxide. In heat and drought, plants close the pores in their leaves to save water, carbon dioxide inside runs low, and RuBisCO grabs oxygen instead, wasting energy in a process called photorespiration. C4 plants first trap carbon dioxide in their outer leaf cells as a compound with four carbon atoms, which gives the pathway its name, then carry it to inner cells where RuBisCO works and release it there, so the enzyme is surrounded by carbon dioxide. With more than 60 separate origins, it is one of the most often repeated adaptations in plant evolution. Scientists are now trying to engineer the trait into rice.

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WonderNature

Leafcutter ants do not eat most of the leaves they harvest; they process them into a growing medium for a domesticated fungus that feeds the colony.

Leafcutter ants grow a single fungus, Leucoagaricus gongylophorus, which is not known to live anywhere outside their nests. Ants began farming fungi around 50 to 60 million years ago; leafcutters are a much younger branch of that lineage, and their crop is passed from nest to nest rather than gathered from the wild. A young queen leaving to found a colony carries a small pellet of it in a pouch inside her mouth. Many colonies also have a third partner: bacteria called Pseudonocardia, grown on the ants' bodies, make antibiotics that help keep down Escovopsis, a mould that can wipe out the fungus garden. A mature nest of Atta leafcutters can house several million ants in chambers reaching several metres underground.

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WonderNature

The leaf-eating hoatzin relies on microbes in an enlarged foregut to ferment tough vegetation, an unusual digestive strategy among birds.

The hoatzin lives in swampy forests along rivers in the Amazon and Orinoco basins of South America. It is the only bird known to digest leaves mainly by fermentation at the front of its gut, much as a cow does in its rumen. Bacteria in its huge crop and lower oesophagus break down tough plant fibre before food reaches the stomach. The fermenting crop gives the bird a manure-like smell, which earned it the English nickname 'stinkbird' and means it is seldom hunted for food. The oversized crop also leaves little room for flight muscles, so hoatzins are clumsy fliers. Chicks have two claws on each wing, which help them climb back into the branches after dropping into the water to escape a predator.

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WonderBiology

Cultivated sweet potatoes carry DNA that passed into them naturally, long ago, from a soil bacterium called Agrobacterium, and some of those bacterial genes are still active. No laboratory was involved: the crop is a naturally genetically modified plant.

Agrobacterium is known for inserting part of its own DNA into plants, making them produce nutrients for it; since the 1980s, genetic engineers have used the same trick to add genes to crops. In 2015 a team led by Tina Kyndt and Godelieve Gheysen of Ghent University, working with the International Potato Center, reported bacterial DNA in the sweet potato genome. One insertion, containing four bacterial genes, was present in all 291 cultivated varieties they tested but not in the plant's close wild relatives. That pattern suggests early farmers may have unknowingly favoured plants carrying it, perhaps for a trait it affected, although which trait, if any, is still unknown. The case is often mentioned in debates about genetically modified food.

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WonderFood

Injera is the soft, spongy flatbread of Ethiopia and Eritrea, made from a fermented batter, traditionally of teff flour. It is cooked on one side only, so bubbles rise and burst into a surface of tiny holes known as 'eyes'.

Teff, native to the Ethiopian highlands, is one of the smallest cereal grains in the world; injera is also made with other grains or mixtures. The batter is left to ferment for a few days, often with a little starter kept from the last batch, which makes it slightly sour and full of gas. It is then poured in a spiral onto a large clay griddle called a mitad. At the table, a large injera covers a shared tray and stews are served on top; diners tear off pieces to scoop up the food, and the injera underneath, soaked in sauce, is eaten last. Placing a morsel in a companion's mouth, called gursha, is a sign of affection and respect.

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WonderFood

Chinampas, the so-called floating gardens of Xochimilco in Mexico City, are fixed fields raised from lake mud and plant matter. Canals run between them, and rows of ahuejote willows along their edges hold the banks in place.

Farmers built chinampas by staking out a plot in a shallow lake, piling up layers of mud and rotting vegetation, and planting willows whose roots anchor the sides. Mud dredged from the canals keeps the beds fertile, and the canals double as waterways for canoes. The technique is older than the Aztec Empire, but the Aztecs expanded it greatly around their capital, Tenochtitlan, helping to feed a city of perhaps 200,000 people or more. Xochimilco's canals and chinampas became part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987; today urban growth, pollution and falling water levels threaten the farmers who still work them.

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WonderFood

Breadfruit, a tree with large starchy fruit, was carried from island to island by Pacific voyagers over thousands of years. Many varieties have no seeds, so they travelled as living shoots, and islanders developed hundreds of locally named varieties.

Breadfruit was domesticated in the western Pacific, probably around New Guinea, and spread east with the ancestors of the Polynesians. Seedless varieties can only be grown from root shoots or cuttings, so voyagers had to keep young plants alive at sea, shielded from salt spray. A single tree can bear fruit for decades, and the fruit can be roasted, baked, or fermented and stored, which made it a staple food. In 1787 Britain sent HMS Bounty to Tahiti to collect breadfruit plants for plantations in the Caribbean; the voyage ended in the famous mutiny of 1789. Today the Breadfruit Institute in Hawaiʻi, founded in 2003, keeps a large collection of varieties and helps spread them to tropical countries.

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StillnessFood

Couscous is made by rolling moistened semolina by hand into tiny grains and steaming them. Algeria, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia share it, and each region, even each family, keeps its own way of making it.

Rolling the grains is a skill learned by watching and doing, traditionally passed from mother to daughter. The couscous is then steamed, usually two or three times, in the top half of a two-part pot, known in French as a couscoussier, while a stew of vegetables, meat or fish simmers below, so the grains take on its aroma without touching the liquid. Broths, spices and occasions vary from region to region, and in many families couscous is the Friday meal. It is usually made from wheat semolina, but also from barley or millet. UNESCO inscribed the knowledge and practices of couscous on its intangible heritage list in 2020, after a joint nomination by Algeria, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia.

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WonderFood

Garum, a fish sauce traded across the Roman Empire, was one of the Romans' favourite seasonings. Fish were layered with salt and left for weeks or months while their own enzymes broke the flesh down into a savoury liquid.

Garum was a family of products rather than one recipe. Romans also used names such as liquamen and muria for fish sauces, and allec for the paste left at the bottom of the salting tank; quality ranged from cheap everyday seasoning to prized luxury. Heavy salting kept harmful bacteria at bay while the fish's own digestive enzymes turned the flesh to liquid, releasing glutamates, the compounds behind the savoury taste now called umami. Large salting works stood along the coasts of Spain, Portugal and North Africa. In Pompeii, painted labels on jars name the contents and the maker, and the house of the producer Aulus Umbricius Scaurus has a floor mosaic showing his own sauce jars.

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DriveFood

Cassava contains natural compounds that release cyanide when the root is cut or crushed. Traditional steps such as peeling, grating, soaking, fermenting, pressing and drying let the poison escape and make this staple safe to eat.

Cassava was domesticated in South America, probably in the southern Amazon basin, and Portuguese traders took it to Africa in the sixteenth century; today it is a staple for hundreds of millions of people in the tropics. The trouble comes mainly from a compound called linamarin: once the root's cells are damaged, an enzyme in the root breaks it down and hydrogen cyanide gas is released. 'Bitter' varieties contain far more than 'sweet' ones, which is why methods differ. Grating and soaking bring the enzyme and the compound together; fermenting, pressing and sun-drying let the cyanide escape. When food is short and processing is rushed, people can fall ill: konzo, a disease that causes lasting weakness in the legs, has been linked to poorly processed bitter cassava.

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StillnessFood

Maple syrup was first made by Indigenous peoples of northeastern North America. Each spring they collected the sap of maple trees and concentrated it into syrup and sugar, long before Europeans arrived; settlers later learned the craft from them.

Maple sap runs for only a few weeks at the end of winter, when freezing nights alternate with days above freezing; the swings in temperature build pressure inside the tree and push the sap out. Indigenous makers cut V-shaped notches in the trunk and guided the sap along reeds or pieces of bark into birch-bark containers or clay pots. They concentrated it by boiling, and also by leaving it out on frosty nights and throwing away the layer of ice that formed on top, since the ice is almost pure water. It takes about forty litres of sap to make one litre of syrup. Quebec now produces about 70 per cent of the world's supply.

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StillnessFood

Argan oil comes from the nuts of the argan tree, which grows naturally almost only in southwestern Morocco. Making it by hand means drying the fruit, removing the pulp, cracking the hard nuts between stones and grinding the kernels, skills passed down among rural women.

The argan tree is adapted to the dry land between the Atlas Mountains and the Atlantic, and UNESCO declared the area the Arganeraie Biosphere Reserve in 1998. The hardest-looking step is cracking the nut between two stones, but the knowledge covers the whole chain: when to gather the fruit, how long to dry it, and whether to roast the kernels. Roasted kernels give the nutty oil used in cooking and in amlou, a spread made with almonds and honey; unroasted ones give the oil used on skin and hair. Women knead the ground paste by hand with a little water until the oil separates. In 2014 UNESCO listed these practices and know-how as Intangible Cultural Heritage, and many women now work through cooperatives.

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DriveFood

Pemmican was a travel food made by Indigenous peoples of the North American plains: dried bison meat pounded to a powder and mixed with melted fat, sometimes with berries. It packed a lot of energy into little weight and kept for months.

The name comes from the Cree word pimîhkân, built on pimî, 'fat'. Drying removed the water that lets meat spoil, and sealing the powder in fat, often inside rawhide bags, kept out the air. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the fur trade came to depend on it: Métis hunters, people of mixed Indigenous and European descent, ran large bison hunts and supplied pemmican to the canoe brigades of the North West Company and the Hudson's Bay Company. In 1814 Miles Macdonell, governor of the Red River Colony, banned its export from the colony, which set off the conflict known as the Pemmican War. Later, polar explorers such as Amundsen and Shackleton took pemmican on their expeditions.

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WonderBiology

The Indian botanist Janaki Ammal studied plant chromosomes and used that knowledge to help breed sweeter sugarcane suited to India's climate. In 1945 she co-wrote the Chromosome Atlas of Cultivated Plants, a reference to the chromosome counts of crops and garden plants.

Chromosomes are the thread-like structures in a cell that carry its genes, and their number helps explain which plants can be crossed. Janaki Ammal earned her PhD at the University of Michigan in 1931, rare for an Indian woman at the time. India then imported its sweetest sugarcane from Southeast Asia; at the Sugarcane Breeding Station in Coimbatore she crossed cane with related grasses to produce sweet varieties that grew well in India. In England she worked with the geneticist C. D. Darlington at the John Innes Institute, her co-author on the atlas, and then at the Royal Horticultural Society's garden at Wisley, where she treated magnolias with the chemical colchicine. A white-flowered magnolia there is named 'Janaki Ammal'. The Indian government later invited her home to reorganise the Botanical Survey of India, and she received the Padma Shri in 1977.

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DriveHistory

Julia Child could barely cook when she married at 34. She enrolled at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris at 37, and after one publisher rejected her manuscript, 'Mastering the Art of French Cooking' appeared in 1961, when she was 49.

Child wrote the book with two Frenchwomen, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, and the three spent nearly a decade testing and rewriting recipes for an American kitchen, aiming for exact, foolproof instructions rather than a chef's shorthand. Houghton Mifflin turned the manuscript down, judging it too much like an encyclopaedia; Alfred A. Knopf published it in 1961, and it became a bestseller. On 11 February 1963, WGBH in Boston launched The French Chef, built on the same patient, step-by-step teaching; the show ran nationally for a decade and made Child a household name.

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DriveHistory

Momofuku Ando invented instant noodles at 48, after losing nearly everything when a credit union he chaired collapsed in 1957. After months of experiments in a shed behind his house near Osaka, he launched Chicken Ramen in 1958; Cup Noodles followed in 1971, when he was 61.

By Ando's own account, the idea came from watching tempura being fried: flash-frying cooked, seasoned noodles in hot oil drove out the moisture and left tiny holes, so boiling water could soften them again in minutes. Chicken Ramen went on sale on 25 August 1958. Cup Noodles, sold in a waterproof polystyrene cup, followed in 1971 and helped take instant noodles around the world. In a 2000 Japanese poll, instant noodles were voted the country's greatest invention of the twentieth century. The early part of the story comes mainly from Ando and his company, Nissin.

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