Start: 95.4 Last week: 89.3 This week: 88.7

Drifting, very slowly, down. I think.

Marion Nestle, Colin Tudge, Michael Pollan. Any one of them could have said this.

Let the scientists and their interpreters fight it out over single nutrients. Eat food and enjoy your dinner.

It was, in fact, Marion Nestle.

Start: 95.4 Last week: 87.6 This week: 87.5

A day late, because I wanted to get yesterday’s bread recipe done. But that’s yesterday’s weight up there.

Everyone knows that kids need advertisements to tell them what to nag for. Food is no exception. But food manufacturers, smarting under recent attacks, decided in 2007 to launch a Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative and limit their advertising to children on TV. Responsible, eh?

Children Now, a public policy group, commissioned an independent survey of the Initiative’s impact from researchers at the University of Arizona. The report, available at the Children Now website, makes interesting reading.

Adverts for the nutritionally worst foods have dropped by almost 14%.

From 84% of food ads to 72.5%. C’mon! Credit where credit is due. That can’t have been easy.

I particularly like the categorizations that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has devised to guide food choices for children. The worst, nutritionally, are known as “Whoa” foods; these products should be consumed only on “special occasions, such as your birthday”. Truly healthy foods, such as vegetables and fruits, are known as “Go” products, while the middle ground is occupied by “Slow” foods.

More nice headline numbers: Industry more than doubled advertising of “Slow” foods — which remember the DHSS says are better for children — from 12.9% of food ads to a whopping 26.6%. Alas, the industry let itself down on “Go” foods. Adverts for fruits and vegetables shrank by more than two-thirds, from 3.0% of food ads to 0.9%. As one pusillanimous do-gooding website whined:

If you are looking for ads about fruits and vegetables, be prepared to wait, and wait, and wait: the authors found that you’d need to watch children’s programs for 10 hours before seeing one.

On the bright side, those adverts are no longer interrupting TV viewing and contributing to ADHD.

The US Federal Trade Commission was due to hold a hearing on Sizing Up Food Marketing and Childhood Obesity yesterday.

Start: 95.4 Last week: 87.6 This week: 87.6

Blast. Plateaued again.

The Economist alerted me to a paper in PLOS One by Kevin Hall and his colleagues at the Laboratory of Biological Modeling at the NIH in the US. The Progressive Increase of Food Waste in America and Its Environmental Impact, subtly published the day before Thanksgiving, concluded that America wasted close to 40% of its food supply in 2003. That figure is far higher than the USDA’s own estimate of around 27%.

What is neat about this study is the methodology. Previous estimates of waste have examined small samples of garbage or interviewed people. Hall and his colleague took a different tack. They calculated the difference between food production, as revealed by the FAO’s food balance sheets for the US, and food consumption, based on a model they developed that takes the average weight of people and figures out how much they would need to eat to weigh that much. The difference, they say, is wasted, and most of their assumptions suggest that their estimate will generally be conservative. In 1974, the difference was 900 kcal per person per day. In 2003 it was 1400 kcal per person per day, a total of 150 trillion kcal per year.

I could be wrong but I reckon that’s 174.5 TWh, which as it happens is the annual energy consumption of Scotland and the hydroelectric production of Russia, two countries also not known for their wonderful diet. Not that it matters.

What slightly surprised me about the Hall et al. study was that it took rising weight as a given and used it to estimate waste, without saying much about the consequences of obesity. The main thrust of their conclusion seems to be the environmental impact of throwing all that food away; water to grow it in the first place, fuel used in transport, greenhouse gas emissions in growing it and then as it decomposes, and so on. Of course that’s their privilege. But health barely gets a look in.

The calculated progressive increase of food waste suggests that the US obesity epidemic has been the result of a “push effect” of increased food availability and marketing with Americans being unable to match their food intake with the increased supply of cheap, readily available food. Thus, addressing the oversupply of food energy in the US may help curb the obesity epidemic as well as decrease food waste, which has profound environmental consequences.

That, however is precisely the point of studies by Lisa Young and Marion Nestle. Young has shown a tight correlation between food supply, portion size and obesity, a topic I’ve mentioned before. Nestle has pointed out eloquently that there is almost no lobby in the US that stands to benefit from people eating less, and hence no impetus to change either the amount of food produced or advice on what (and how much) to eat. In that light, maybe the push to turn food into biofuel is not such a sin, if it increases food prices at home and thus helps people to eat (and waste) less.

Perhaps it is just a coincidence, but the latest Economist Debate launched today, on the motion This house believes that governments should play a stronger role in guiding food and nutrition choices. I’ll be keeping an eye on the main contributions, but so far, I’m not impressed by either the food industry spokeswoman or the professor of psychology.

Start: 95.4 Last week: 87.3 This week: 87.6

Two helpings of everything for Thanksgiving cannot have been the only issue. Maybe it was the fresh almonds?

Does anyone need a choice of more than 50 breakfast cereals? Many more.

I’m trying to remember that fancy word from economics, where a single supplier creates several goods that look different, so that the poor befuddled consumer doesn’t realize that no matter what they choose, the company wins. It isn’t a monopsony, is it? Anyway, detergents and breakfast cereals are among the classic examples.

I ask partly because it gives me the opportunity to link to this wondrous flow chart (click it to enlarge) that might help you reach a decision. And also because I can link to Marion Nestle’s posts about Smart Choices. Such fun. Form an industry group. Decide what levels of which ingredients are “good for you”. Slap a label on those products that meet your own standards, like 44% sugar on a breakfast cereal. And then get professional bodies to give your labels their stamp of approval. An appalling instance of marketing hoopla.

Breakfast cereals, however, also offer a truly wondrous instance of marketing hoopla. I refer to Diamond Shreddies, a development I had not been aware of until it was so brilliantly exposed on a Tedtalk by Rory Sutherland. I’m not even going to try and gloss the idea of Diamond Shreddies. You can see some of the TV ads here and here and I strongly advise you to do so. The campaign seems to have worked, and has been dissected in many places. What I love about it is that it is so knowing and also that the focus groups, which I’m assured were “real”, are so bereft of real content. Perfection.

Seriously, though, how many breakfast cereals would be enough?

Start: 95.4 Last week: 88.9 This week: 87.3

My grand scheme to end world hunger using modern technology seems to have fallen on stony ground. Fortunately I can still eat.

When I joined the secret confraternity of home bread bakers back in the summer, the restaurant Necci 1924 fed us a remarkable lunch to tide us over the rising of the bread. Among the items was the most delicious kind of savoury Chelsea bun, a spiral confection of soft bread, prosciutto, tomatoes and, maybe (though I don’t remember) herbs like rosemary. I ate my fill, and lusted after more. But I didn’t know what they were called. So I threw myself on the assembled wisdom of The Fresh Loaf, where Scott Hall emerged from the chaos with some recommendations.

So I did it, based on the recipe in Dan Lepard’s Exceptional Breads but using my starter and only half quantities.

150 gm white starter at 100% hydration
390 ml warm water
500 gm grano tenero 0
10 gm salt
1/2 tsp demerara sugar
25 gm olive oil
100 gm prosciutto
100 gm sun-dried tomatoes

1. In a large bowl, I mixed the water with the starter, then stirred in 250 gm of the flour. I covered the bowl and left that to get going, about 4 1/2 hours.
2. Added 25 gm of olive oil (as per Scott’s suggestion of 5% oil) then tipped in the remaining 250 gm of flour, the salt and the sugar. In the absence of the mixer Dan’s reccipe calls for I did a stretch-and-fold every 10 minutes for an hour.
3. I spread the dough out into a rough rectangle on a silicone mat and placed a layer of prosciutto on top, leaving about the bottom third clear along the long edge to seal it. Then striped the sun-dried tomatoes across the dough.
4. Rolling to dough up wasn’t as hard as I expected, using the silicone scraper carefully. I transferred it onto a floured wooden board and sealed the seam as best as I could. Then sliced it into 12 rounds, which I transferred to an oiled baking tray, leaving space between them to allow for expansion. Next time I might try packing them in a little closer, even at the risk of them joining together.
5. Covered with a cloth and allowed to rise for about an hour, then into an oven at 220 ℃ for 25 minutes.
6. On removing them from the oven I brushed them again with more olive oil, going over them three times in total.

And that’s it. You can see the whole set of photos here. Were they as good as the ones at Necci? I don’t honestly know. May have to go back there soon. Were they good? You bet; gently chewy with the flavour of the ham and some bites intense with salty tomato. Definitely best warm, and they reheat brilliantly in a dry skillet over a low flame with a lid on.

I’m sending this to Yeastspotting, just in case anyone else wants to try it.