Mark Bittman’s history of why we eat bad food.

We are all guilty of this. Powerful forces are at work.

As Bittman notes, the calories have to go somewhere, and—thanks in no small part to the advertising industry, which attached itself to the food industry like a remora to a shark—they went inside us; we look the way we do because of the need for the Krafts and Heinzes of the world to keep their profit margins growing by finding new ways to get us to consume their limited line of basic commodities. “Global sugar consumption has nearly tripled in the past half-century,” he writes, and so has obesity; the number of people worldwide living with diabetes has quadrupled since 1980. “Two thirds of the world’s population,” Bittman tells us, “lives in countries where more people die from diseases linked to being overweight than ones linked to being underweight.”

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Bill McKibben — The Nation

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How Chinese cuisine became India’s comfort food

Chinese cuisine served in India is markedly different from that in China. I have witnessed how the dishes are evolving on the streets of small towns in India.

The evolution of Chinese food in India was accelerated by several such innovations, among them the invention of chicken manchurian. A man named Nelson Wang, the son of Chinese immigrants in Kolkata, is most often credited with its creation. The story goes that Wang ended up in Bombay in the 1970s, working as an assistant cook at another Taj restaurant, Frederick’s. One day, he happened to experiment with mixing garlic, ginger, and green chillies—quintessentially Indian ingredients—with soy sauce and cornstarch to thicken the gravy. The result was the now ubiquitous chicken manchurian.

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Maria Thomas — QZ

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The History of Poop Is Really the History of Technology

Highly unpleasant and negative are the raw, uncomposted, intense smells that emanate from concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, which confine and raise large numbers of animals—hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands—in a small area, and have come to dominate modern meat and dairy production over the last few decades. They accumulate huge quantities of excrement that can be smelled from miles away. I live in central California and pass by the Harris cattle ranch on Interstate 5 near Coalinga whenever I drive between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Even with the car windows closed, I can smell it long before I see it. Tens of thousands of beef cattle are confined there, each animal generating some 65 pounds of urine and excrement a day. Today’s formulated feeds usually supply more nitrogen than the animals would obtain from their natural diet of plants, so their excrement is especially rich in the most offensive volatiles, the branched acids, cresol, skatole, ammonia, and amines.

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Harold McGee — Backchannel

HOW MUCH CAN DIETARY CHANGES AND FOOD PRODUCTION PRACTICES HELP MITIGATE CLIMATE CHANGE?

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“Balanced diets featuring plant-based foods, such as coarse grains, legumes, fruits and vegetables, and animal-sourced food produced sustainably in low greenhouse gas emission systems, present major opportunities for adaptation to and limiting climate change,” Debra Roberts, co-chair of IPCC Working Group II, said in a press release. (In the summary of the report, the IPCC acknowledges that factors like financial barriers and cultural habits may influence the adoption of such diets.)

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Kelley Czajka — Pacific Standard

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The new potato

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Diversity holds the key.

Many countries continue to plant popular potato varieties that have remained essentially unchanged for decades. But new approaches, including genetic engineering, promise to add more options. Potato breeders are particularly excited about a radical new way of creating better varieties. This system, called hybrid diploid breeding, could cut the time required by more than half, make it easier to combine traits in one variety, and allow farmers to plant seeds instead of bulky chunks of tuber. “It will change the world tremendously,” says Paul Struik, an agronomist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.

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Erik Stokstad — Science

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The Right Way to Complain at a Restaurant

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Good restaurateurs want to know when something goes wrong as soon as possible — while the diner is still in the restaurant, ideally — so they can fix it, and avoid a complaint in the future (or in the age of social media, a complaint that goes directly onto Yelp). For people who are used to communicating via email and text, speaking up about a cold plate of risotto can be somewhat anxiety-inducing. According to a recent survey by restaurant consulting group Technomic, 52 percent of millennials are uncomfortable sending food backat a restaurant (by comparison, 61 percent of people over 55 are comfortable doing so). They shouldn’t be! Restaurants want you to have a good experience! Hospitality is their business, and they want you to leave happy — and hopefully, come back again.

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Whitney Filloon — Eater

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How a Georgian Princess’s Cookbook Helped Build a Celebrated Restaurant

This is for friends who fantasize about food all day long.

The book, entitled Georgian Cuisine and Tried Housekeeping Notes, was published in 1874 by a Georgian princess named Barbare Jorjadze. Today, Princess Jorjadze is a national hero: She is considered the first feminist of the country, and is famous for her advocacy of women’s rights in Georgia. In her decree, she wrote about the damning expectations placed on women: “From a very young age, we are told, ‘since god made you a woman, you must sit silently, look at nobody, go nowhere, shut your ears and your eyes, and just sit there. Education and learning of languages is none of your concern.” Now, the Georgian National Library has dedicated a full room to her, in honor of her advocacy efforts. A copy of Georgian Cuisine and Tried Housekeeping Notes is on display at the Georgian Literature Museum and the Georgian National Library, too.

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Will McGough — Atlas Obscura

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The Truth About the “Vegan Lobby”

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The idea that there’s a powerful vegan lobby has caught on with vegans and non-vegans alike. In a Telegraph essay last year, titled “I would sign up to veganism if it weren’t for all the damned vegans,” a photo caption uses the term to refer to PETA protestors, thus equating the vegan lobby with animal rights groups as King does. But others use the term even more loosely. A writer for The Guardian seems to believe that the vegan lobby is people who love soy. And in a recent essay, vegan writer Janey Stevenson wrote, “I’ve deliberately disconnected myself from the vegan lobby because frankly, it’s embarrassing,” without explaining what, exactly, she’d disconnected herself from. A PETA membership? A vegan Meetup?

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Emily Atkin — The New Republic

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The Surprisingly Intolerant History of Milk

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But even with these deep cultural connections, milk held a peculiar status among early civilizations. The Greeks castigated barbarians for their gluttonous desire for dairy, and in Rome, milk was widely regarded as low-status food because it was something only farmers drank. Northern Europeans would earn similar ridicule for their love of reindeer milk, and Japanese Buddhists later rebuked Europeans as “butter stinkers.”

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Daniel Fernandez — Smithsonian

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Beyond ‘litti chokha’

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Sunday special on Bihari cuisine.

“Bihar is very rich (in food), but it has been looked down upon due to multiple political reasons. Therefore, its cuisine got left behind as well. Look at Bengal, for example, whose food has really travelled,” says chef and food consultant Ajay Chopra, who has made some Bihari dishes on his show Northern Flavours on the Living Foodz channel. He calls the thekua, made during the annual festival of Chhath, no less scrumptious than a Scottish shortbread. In modern kitchens, fans of the fennel-flavoured thekua often bake it instead of frying it. Chopra went a step further to fashion a bold thekua millefeuille, putting a French spin on it, for a food event recently. Another favourite of his is the Bihari murmura mutton—cooked with a lot of mustard oil and turmeric, spooned over puffed rice and topped with chopped onion, green chillies and lemon.

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Neha Bhatt — Mint

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