24 September 2021. Food | Coffee
The storm swirling around the UN Food Systems Summit; drinking 50 cups of coffee a day
Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to publish daily, five days a week. Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story.
#1: The storm swirling around the UN Food Systems Summit
The UN’s Food Systems Summit was held yesterday in New York. This sounds like it ought to be a good thing, given the sense of impending crisis around the food sector. But a lot of people aren’t happy about it. There have been protests by people who say they have been excluded from the process, critical op-ed articles, and pre-summit withdrawals by some invited stakeholders.
At The Counter Lela Nargi wrote a good explainer of what’s going on.
At the pre-summit, global leaders declared intentions to forge an international road map for the future of agriculture on a rapidly changing planet. They were “expected to step up and launch bold new actions, solutions, partnerships, and strategies” to vastly improve food and ag systems. “That’s where the decisions (were) made,” explained professor Molly Anderson about the decision to protest the pre-summit. “The cake (was) baked at the pre-summit and the summit will be the celebration where they eat the cake.”
Anderson has some skin in this game. She is a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food), which has withdrawn its participation in the Summit, criticising ‘opaque methods of decision-making and a favoring of tech-heavy, corporate-centric private sector voices.’
At heart, this dispute is about competing values and visions of a food future. Anderson’s perspective is that the UN Summit is over-interested in tech food futures such as digitisation, gene editing, and precision agriculture, which “won’t help the poorest and hungriest people in the world very much, and will make the gap between the very poor and hungry and the wealthy even wider than it is now.” In contrast:
(T)he Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism (CSM), which organized the pre-summit protest, favors “solutions that are resilient, community driven, and that impact the most vulnerable,” said Qiana Mickie, a member of the CSM coordination committee and former director of New York City nonprofit Just Food.
The CSM is actually part of the UN’s sprawling mechanisms, an ‘autonomous space” which has 500 global grassroots organisations representing 380 million affiliated members, and which was created 12 years ago to give more voice in the policy process to smallholders, women, young people and agricultural workers.
The types of solutions that are being overlooked were summarised in an elegant tweet by one of the CSM’s members:
Although the Food Summit’s website now has stuff on it about civil society, the civil society critics say that this is lip service, added late in the day.
The critical issue, as always with such international meetings, is how the agenda was set:
IPES-Food’s statement alleges that organizations representing the private sector, such as the World Economic Forum, a.k.a. Davos—widely seen as a mechanism that benefits the wealthy global elite—were allowed to frame the agenda from the outset. Mickie said their goal was to focus on “investment-friendly” solutions, and that civil society was “invited to come to a table that had already been set.” CSM and a long list of supporters, including UN special rapporteurs, have claimed that the way various invitees were picked was dubious.
There’s also criticism of the Summit’s Scientific Group which is heavily freighted with economists. The World Bank’s participation is also a source of criticism, as
an actor in what Anderson and her co-authors called in a working paper the “coalescing of a market-based vision of food governance…holding the line against the food sovereignty movement.”
It’s pretty clear that this fight represents wider faultlines in the battle over the future of food. But it’s not clear that the United Nations has anything to gain by promoting an agri-food friendly view of the future. Of course, it’s also possible that this is just a ‘used future’, borrowing Sohail Inayatullah’s idea, and defined by Jose Ramos as a set of ideas “created in some other context, but to which we are unconsciously holding on to, blinding us to other more authentic and empowering ideas of the future.”
It’s also worth comparing these competing food ideas to the pre-Summit paper published by a group of scientists in Nature.
h/t Marion Nestle
#2: Drinking 50 cups of coffee a day
A guest post by Peter Curry
What would happen if you drank fifty cups of coffee a day? This is the amount that Balzac supposedly imbibed, although some have converted 50 of his flimsy French cups to about 13 American cups, or just 1 Brobdingnagian cup.
The amount of liquid consumed obviously varies with other important scientific factors such as: size of coffee cup, shape of coffee cup, how full coffee cup is, how much coffee spilled per sip, and amount of liquid consumed.
(Image via Piqsels)
Nonetheless, Balzac drank enough of it to write a blisteringly bonkers essay about coffee, the kind that ricochets around, a bullet in a metal canister, with made-up science and pseudo-assertion in lieu of gunpowder. But it’s really fun. I’ve collated a selection of the juicy bits:
Coffee roasts your insides. Many people claim coffee inspires them; but as everybody likewise knows, coffee only makes boring people even more boring.
“Coffee,” Rossini told me, “is an affair of fifteen or twenty days; just the right amount of time, fortunately, to write an opera.”
We get a series of lessons on actually how to actually prepare and consume coffee. I don’t drink coffee, and Balzac’s methods are all beyond my tea-stained mind. But they include things like getting rid of tannin, which is:
An evil substance which chemists have not yet studied sufficiently.
When the stomach membranes have been ‘tanned,’ or when the action of the tannin particular to coffee has numbed them by overuse, the membranes become incapable of contracting properly. This becomes the source of the serious disorders affecting the coffee connoisseur.
There is a man in London, for example, whose immoderate use of coffee has left him with a stomach twisted in knots.
Poor guy, but at least he later found work as a ship-hand. Are tannins actually good or bad for you? As many a great scientist has remarked on many a complex issue: "It depends." A tannin can have anti-carcinogenic properties, or it can cause liver necrosis.
Finally, I have discovered a horrible, rather brutal method that I recommend only to men of excessive vigor, men with thick black hair and skin covered with liver spots, men with big square hands and with legs shaped like bowling pins.
Unless that applies to you, please stop reading. For all my fellow liver-spotted square-handers, let us dive in:
It is a question of using finely pulverized, dense coffee, cold and anhydrous (a chemical term meaning without water), consumed on an empty stomach. This coffee falls into your stomach, which is a sack whose velvety interior is lined with tapestries of suckers and papillae.
The coffee finds nothing else in the sack, and so it attacks these delicate and voluptuous linings; it acts like a food and demands digestive juices; it wrings and twists the stomach for these juices, appealing as a pythoness appeals to her god; it brutalizes these beautiful stomach linings as a wagon master abuses ponies; the plexus becomes inflamed; sparks shoot all the way up to the brain.
From that moment on, everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination’s orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink-for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder.
If that was all a bit too much for you, and you’re thinking at this point, well, we’d rather have a cup of tea, Balzac has bad news:
If the experience of the English is typical, heavy tea-drinking will produce English moral philosophy, a tendency toward a pale complexion, hypocrisy and backbiting. This much is certain: tea-drinking will not spoil a woman any less morally than physically. Where women drink tea, romance is depraved on its principle; the women are pale, sickly, talkative, boring, and preachy.
So what’s it like to drink fifty cups of coffee a day? The New Yorker and Futurama both have answers.
j2t#174
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