Rachel Laudan

Using NPD’s National Eating Trends®(NET®) research, which has continually tracked the eating and drinking habits of U.S. consumers for over 30 years, MyPlate days were calculated based on consumers who, on the same day, achieved at least 70 percent of the daily recommended intake for dairy, fruit, grains, proteins and vegetables. For the average consumer, two percent of their days (about 7 days a year) come close to the USDA dietary guidelines; and when a MyPlate day is achieved, consumers are very likely to consume more than three meals a day.

I’ve often wondered about the actual effects of the USDA dietary guidelines on eating habits.  Today I came across this.  NPD is a company that provides consumer and retail information to 1,800 companies in many different branches of business, not just food, around the globe.  I don’t see that they have a particular ax to grind.

I think most people want to eat well. It’s also clear that most people eat well enough to live active lives, avoid deficiency diseases, and survive longer than their ancestors.

Is it really bright policy in these circumstances to set up goals for eating that are so utopian that most well-intentioned people can’t achieve them?

An aside.  The press release from NPD is just about as irritatingly vague as the USDA guidelines themeselves. When it says average, is this the median or the mean?  What is the distribution of eating patterns?  Hard to find out because you have to pay to get more info.

Primitive tools do not need to imply primitive results.  exquisitely carved objects and elegant painting by societies tens of thousands of years before the invention of grain agriculture attest to the essentially unlimited possibilities for bread making in the context of the earliest gatherers of grains.

This from William Rubel’s new little book, Bread: A Global History.  Hear, hear.  From an aficionado of the simple grindstone, I can attest that nothing surpasses tortillas from that simple tool.  I wouldn’t want to prepare the dough that way except as an experiment, nor would I wish it on anyone else.  That doesn’t mean I can’t recognize the quality.  And the same quality, I suspect, could be achieved grinding wheat and other bread grains.

Bread has yet to have a general historian, excellent as certain histories of French or British baking are.  William knows his stuff and this short book is a trial run for a much bigger book that I am eagerly awaiting.  Both books deal with raised breads, not flat breads, and global is a bit of an overstatement on the publisher’s part.  Don’t let that deter you.  This is well worth reading.

It covers the early history of bread to the end of the Roman Empire, bread as a marker of status, bread and fashion, a tour of the contemporary breads of six countries, and a limited but eye-opening selection of historical bread recipes. One of these is the bread fed to privileged horses in seventeenth-century England.  As he says

Even in a society more used than ours to the idea of a fixed social hierarchy, it must have felt terrible to be able to see by the bread on one’s table that one’s food wasn’t worth the trouble the master put into that of his horse.

You might also look up William’s earlier book, The Magic of Fire. It’s a lyrical and practical introduction to the variety and sophistication of hearth cookery.

Edit. Here’s a favorable review of William’s book by Steven Kaplan of Cornell, one of the the experts on both contemporary bread and on the history of bread.   Thanks to Dan Strehl for the link.

In my earlier post I suggested that traditionally farming was men’s work and post-harvest processing women’s work.

That may be the general pattern.  There are lots of exceptions though. Women do a whole lot of farming, including the staples in many societies.  Men do a lot of post-harvest processing, threshing of grains, for example.  In Hawaii men traditionally cooked the sacred staple, taro.  Preparing was forbidden to women, though in fact they apparently did so when there were no men about.

In Mexico, though, although women helped farm, men did not grind.  Absolutely not.  The women who taught me to grind progressed from amazement to nervous titters to outright hilarity when men friends of mine tried their hand at it.