Arabella Weir talking rubbish about food and poverty

"If you're hungry, and your last 30p will buy you a whole packet of biscuits or one single apple, what would you choose? I believe it is IMPOSSIBLE to eat well if you're poor."

This is what the comedian Arabella Weir stated on the Food & Drink programme on BBC 2 earlier this week. You can see it here. I think she is completely wrong on this issue. Why does she think that biscuits or apples are the only two alternatives? You can buy 3/4 of a kilo of rice for 30p or half a kilo of pasta.

I was in ASDA on Monday and because I knew she was going to say this I looked at the price of biscuits. I couldn't find any packets of biscuits for 30p. I'm sure if someone had the time to shop around they could find biscuits for 30p but the nearest to that in ASDA - which is not one of the more expensive supermarkets - is ASDA smart price Rich Tea biscuits for 31p. The packet weighs 400g and the information on the back says that there are 455 calories in every 100g.

This means that there are 1,820 calories in a pack. Divide that by 31 and you find that the biscuits provide just under 59 calories per penny. Rice provides nearly 88 calories per penny and pasta provides just over 59 calories per penny. There are some supermarkets that sell pasta for less that 30p per half kilo. So rice and pasta are always a better bet because they are cheaper and because they are low GI sources of calories.

One of the people she was debating with said you can buy pulses, rice and lentils cheaply. Lentils are one type of pulse. The quality of this debate is extremely poor - nobody seemed to know what they are talking about. Arabella's smug reply to that is "Have you ever fed children lentils?". What does she think that millions of parents in India feed themselves and their children on? She chose not to mention rice. Pasta is a favourite food for most children, and it doesn't cost much to make pasta palatable.

Her argument doesn't make sense. If the argument is about affordability, then it doesn't make sense to contradict someone who says that lentils (and other pulses and rice) are affordable by saying that children won't eat them. Then it becomes an argument about British children refusing to eat healthy food and how parents respond to that. In most parts of the world children eat what they are given, they're not offered alternatives. If your children refuse to eat healthy food then it doesn't matter how much money you have. If you are poor and you can offer your children healthy food such as rice, pasta and pulses but your children don't like them then the problem is not affordability.

Many people on benefits - pensioners for example - don't have dependent children. People with children receive more in benefits than people who are childless; it's people on Job Seekers Allowance and without children who are the poorest. People who go to food banks are usually people who have had delays in receiving their benefits.

So I don't see why people can't eat lentils. Lentils aren't that cheap though, it's yellow split peas that are the cheap pulses. Both lentils and yellow split peas can be used for soup, for the Indian dish dal, and also for felafels although more often chickpeas are used for that.

The family size frozen lasagna she mentions provides under 10 calories per penny. Iceland sell a 1.6 kg family size frozen lasagna. There's a bit of confusion on their site about how many calories there are in the pack because they state that there are 172 calories (kcals) per 100g but 635 calories per 1/4 pack. 172 x 16 is 2752 but 635 x 4 is 2540. So somewhere Iceland have put incorrect information of their site.

Let's assume the higher figure of 2752. The pack cost £3. 2752/300 gives us the figure of just over 9 calories per penny. So to advise poor people to eat lasagna is extremely poor advice based on an ignorance of the facts. I'm aware that lasagna provides protein as well as calories but most poor people in Britain eat far more protein than they need.

She's wrong in assuming that lasagna is an unhealthy food. The Iceland lasagna isn't particularly unhealthy. It has more pasta in it than the meat and cheese combined, so it doesn't contain that much saturated fat. It does contain some sugar, and it would have been better if it didn't, but it isn't the 50/50 combination of fat and sugar that is the real problem with much processed food.

The recent BBC 2 programme Sugar v Fat was mostly boring but towards the end they showed the results of experiments with rats. Professor Paul Kenny fed rats either fat but no sugar or sugar but no fat. Both these groups restricted the number of calories they ate and didn't put on weight. When he fed rats a 50/50 combination of fat and sugar, however, they overate and became obese. There are two ways to interpret this. Either a 50/50 combination of fat and sugar is particularly alluring. Or when foods are combined we often can't taste all of the different ingredients.

So I don't agree that people become obese because our ancestors on the savanna were always short of food and needed to eat everything they could. People don't actually crave a fatty food or a sugary food that much. They quickly become repulsive, tasting too fatty or too sweet. We do have an 'off' switch for them. The fat/sugar combination is not found in nature and we don't have an 'off' switch for it. This is the biggest problem with processed foods.

Arabella finishes off her piece by saying "So come on, you pretentious foodies, stop lecturing people with less cash than you about what they should be eating!" I'm not a foodie and I live on benefits. Telling poor people - incorrectly - that their best options are biscuits and frozen lasagna is doing exactly what she accuses others of doing, lecturing people with less cash than her about what they should be eating.

a children's favourite

Institute for Fiscal Studies report on food and poverty

"Struggling households are turning to cheaper, fattier food in the wake of the recession." So it says in this newspaper article. This comes from research on food and poverty done by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. However, if you look at the report (Food purchases and nutrition over the recession), the facts don't seem so alarming.

The report says there has been an increase in the calorie density of food eaten by 2.6%, less for poorer people. Fat density has increased by 2.4%, less for the poorer people. Sugar density has increased by 2.1%. So we have increases of between 2% and 3%, which doesn't seem to be a big change. What's more salt density has decreased by 7.5% and fibre density has increased by 4.1%, which is quite a good thing. So the food we eat has become slightly fattier and slightly more sugary, but at the same time less salty and with a higher fibre content.

At the same time people have been spending less on food and eating fewer calories. The amount of fat, sugar and salt eaten have been decreasing. One way you can interpret the statistics is to say that people are eating slightly less food overall, eating the same proportion of processed food, but eating cheaper processed food. Cheap processed food does seem to have more fat and sugar than the more expensive processed food.

What people don't seem to be doing is turning to the cheaper less processed foods such as rice and pasta. The assumption that the Institute of Fiscal Studies are making is that calorie dense foods are cheaper. It might well be that a macaroni cheese from Iceland is more calorific and cheaper than the equivalent from Marks and Spencer. However, less processed foods such as rice and pasta are much cheaper than the cheapest processed foods. So to say that the poor have had no option but to turn to more calorie dense foods is wrong.

continent of the pigs

I've been looking for accurate statistics for the number of farm animals for a while, and this page seems to have them. I didn't know that for every one of the 7 billion people on the planet there are almost 3 chickens, 19 billion in total. Chickens are better converters of animal feed (maize and soya) than other farm animals, perhaps especially when they are used for egg production.

There are 1.4 billion cattle. Cattle can eat grass that we can't eat, and some areas can't be used to grow crops but produce grass. Many cattle, perhaps the majority these days, are kept in feed lots and fed animal feed. There are 1 billion sheep. As far as I know sheep only eat grass although they might get a supplement of feed.

There are 1 billion pigs on the planet. They are not efficient converters of animal feed like chickens, neither can they eat grass like cattle and sheep can. Traditionally, pigs were fed on food that we can't eat, waste food or stale food. Nearly all pigs today are fed on a high-calorie high-protein diet consisting mostly of maize and soya. Pigs are about the same size as us, and I think they are the best example of how crops are being wasted by being fed to farm animals.

A billion is a big number. If you think about the entire population of North America, Central America, the Caribbean and South America combined, that doesn't come to a billion. If you think about the 6 giant cities in the Americas, each of which is bigger than any city in Europe, it makes you think. The global population of pigs is bigger than the entire human population of the Americas.

Of course we do end up eating the pigs, and they do sometimes eat what we would not want to. Nobody would want to eat pig food, but people have been eating maize and soya for thousands of years and enjoying it, along with wheat, barley and fish. Fish, especially anchovies, form part of animal feed. This is no way to feed the world.

According to the Economist site, in China there are 0.35 pigs per person. So for every 3 people there's a pig. No wonder they have to import grain. That's 451,000,000 pigs. In Denmark there are 2.24 pigs for every person, the only country where there are more pigs than people. There is no geographical reason why this should be so. Denmark is nowhere near where maize and soya are produced. You could understand it if countries like America, Brazil or Argentina had that ratio of pigs to people. I imagine vast fleets of ships carrying animal feed from the eastern coasts of North and South America to northern Europe. It seems a strange way of doing things, but then the global agricultural system has never made much sense.

Imagine a maize and soya farm in Brazil. Imagine if most of the maize and soya was exported to feed people, but some of it kept on the farm to feed a relatively small number of free-range pigs. Pig slurry was put back onto the land. The pigs could be slaughtered on site. Livers could be frozen and exported. Ham and bacon could be made on site providing employment and exported. Seems sensible to me, so sensible that you kind of know that nothing like this happens or will ever happen.

Instead we have pigs, one of the most intelligent animals, kept in horrible conditions. Slurry that can't be disposed of. New viruses and antibiotic resistant bacteria breeding away. One eighth of the world's population starving while an equal number grow fat. It's crazy, and no amount of GM technology or badger killing is going to make it better.

instant noodles

I listened to the recent episode of Thinking Allowed on Radio 4. Laurie Taylor was talking to Deborah Gewertz about her book on instant noodles.

She had this to say.

"... they will allow poor people to be sustained in contexts of extreme poverty. I would very much like a world in which extreme poverty did not exist but it does and it looks like it's going to get worse as the population of the world increases to 9 to 10 billion by 2050 and the question that we contemplate in our book is how are these people going to be fed. Of course we would love it if people had healthy food to eat but since it's not likely that poverty will decrease instant noodles will remain a proletarian hunger killer."

The problem with this is that if you do the calculation and work out how many calories per penny instant noodles provide then it isn't much compared to other foods.

Tesco Everyday Value chicken flavour instant noodles cost 15p for a 65g pack that has 260 calories.
Lidl long-grain white rice costs 40p for 1kg and has 3,510 calories.
Lidl organic whole-grain farfalle costs 99p for 500g and has 1,685 calories.

instant noodles: about 17 kcals/p
rice: about 88 kcals/p
organic whole-grain pasta: about 17 kcals/p

This means that rice provides more than 5 times the number of calories per penny as instant noodles, whereas the very much healthier organic whole-grain pasta is slightly cheaper. So it is wrong for Deborah Gewertz to state that poor people can't afford to eat healthier food than instant noodles. It is not only wrong but it is misleading people into making poor choices about how to feed their families and keep them healthy.

It is possible that instant noodles may be cheaper in some parts of the world than in Britain, but I wouldn't expect the relative price of instant noodles and rice to be much different. I think since writing this the cost of Tesco noodles is now 20p which makes them even less value for money. Looking at the information on the back of packets of noodles, it does seem that there is some confusion over how many calories they have. I'm going on the information provided on the Tesco site. It may turn out that instant noodles may be a bit cheaper than organic whole-grain pasta, but there is no doubt they are more expensive than rice.

instant noodles

Deborah Gewertz is one of many people who believe that unhealthy food is cheapest, and that's why poor people eat it. They all seem to disagree on what it is that poor people are condemned to eat. She believes that it is instant noodles. Danish food writer Katrine Klinken believes that is it cheese and butter. Zoe Williams and some of her fellow Guardian journalists believe it is burgers and crisps. They have all got it wrong, and it is easy to show that this is true. Just by looking at the facts. If anyone deserves to be likened to Marie Antoinette it is these three women, not people like me.

They seem to believe that poverty in Britain today is the same as poverty in Britain decades ago or poverty in countries like India today. It isn't. Nobody today is in the same situation as mining families in the 1920s. The problem with all these people is that they have to believe in one extreme or the other. There are some people who believe that poor people are totally responsible for the situation they find themselves in. They tend to be on the right of the Conservative Party. Then there are others who believe in the exact opposite, that poor people have absolutely no control over what happens to them whatsoever. They tend to be on the left of the Labour Party. They think poor people are victims, and that to suggest there are ways to eat more healthily and spend less money is blaming the victim.

The truth lies somewhere between these two extremes. We can all learn more about nutrition. We can all learn what we need to eat and what we can cut back on.

tuberculosis and the importance of meat

This weekend I listened to the BBC Radio 4 programme Any Questions?. Benjamin Zephaniah was one of the guests. He is a vegan and had some interesting things to say on the question of diet. This was prompted by a question about lab-cultured burgers.

Benjamin seemed very up to date on the subject of how much protein people need and the importance of meat. The other contributors continue to believe the old-fashioned idea that people need large amounts of protein and that the only easy way to get that is through eating meat.

I was especially perturbed by what was said by Hugh Pennington, Emeritus Professor of Microbiology at Aberdeen University.

I believe that the biggest factor in getting rid of tuberculosis in this country ... has been that people can buy cheap chicken. And chicken is the big big protein source. Herbert Hoover ran an election campaign ... on 'a chicken in every pot' but it was successful. Now you may not like the way the chickens are grown but it is very cheap very good protein, and that has saved lots and lots of lives. And white meat from chicken is good for you. Beef is a bit of a luxury. So that's where I stand. Chicken, eggs, milk and that sort of stuff.

It is true that when people are trying to recover from tuberculosis, or many diseases, that they should eat good quality protein. But, as it says on this site under the heading High quality proteins to repair the damaged tissue

• The best and easily digestible proteins are from egg whites and milk. About 2 eggs and 3 glasses of milk are required in a day.
• Other good sources of protein are chicken, fish, meat, cheese, nuts and seeds, pulses.

So it looks like vegetarians can very easily get the protein that they need to recover from tuberculosis. They can have egg whites and milk. Or cheese, nuts, seeds and pulses. It also looks as if vegans can easily get the protein they need too. They can have nuts, seeds and pulses. So I really don't know why Professor Pennington is going on about chicken.

Another guest on the programme, Matthew Sinclair said It's hard to get the full mixed proteins you need without meat. This is simply not true. This belief stems from the time when scientists overestimated the amount of protein that people need. Now the scientific recommendations for the amount of protein that people need is much lower. I know that plant proteins tend to be slightly deficient in one or more of the amino acids, but when you have protein from different plants - such as grains and pulses - they make up for each other's deficiencies. That's not so important anyway now that we know people's protein requirements are more modest.

The other thing that Matthew Sinclair said I didn't like is what the audience member who asked the question also said. They said that scientists have done wonders in breeding crops to benefit mankind, so isn't it wonderful that now they are turning their attention to proteins. As if proteins only come from animals. Farm animals do not create proteins, they can only take protein from plants and very inefficiently re-organize them into their tissues. Soya and other pulses are the cheap proteins. It's about time people realized that, because if they don't we're never going to be able to feed the world.

People should not worry about whether they are getting enough protein. In Britain people, even poor people, get about one and a half times as much protein as they need. Even if they are recovering from an illness, such as TB, they wouldn't need to have more. Although, if they want to be on the safe side, they could have eggs and milk. If they want to worry about getting enough of any nutrients, it would make more sense if they worried about getting more vitamin D.

Vitamin D has been linked to TB, among other things, and it seems if you take more vitamin D then you are less likely to get TB or more likely to recover from it. It's difficult to get enough vitamin D from food sources or from sunlight, so I would take a vitamin D tablet. Not chicken. Eggs have got some vitamin D. Oily fish do too. So if you eat oily fish you get protein, omega-3 (another nutrient we could do with more of) and some vitamin D. Cod liver oil has omega-3 and some vitamin D.

The irony is that chickens are fed on animal feed that often contains anchovies. Anchovies are being overfished. This Guardian article is very interesting.

Betrand noted that despite accounting for the biggest stock in the world, anchovies are seldom used for human food, crushed instead into a fine flour to make animal feed for fowl, pigs and farm-raised fish.

If people fed less anchovies to animals like chickens and ate them themselves they would have cheaper protein, they would have more long-chain omega-3 and they would have more vitamin D. There would be less TB in the world. When anchovies are fed to chickens about half of the protein is lost, and nearly all of the omega-3 and vitamin D. It's not so bad if it is egg production and not meat.

Anchovies in the supermarket are expensive, but there should be a way of getting anchovies to people all over the world cheaply. You might say that people don't want to eat anchovies, but if instead of 'a chicken in every pot' for Americans we tried to get cheap protein in the form of soya and sustainably fished anchovies to everyone that would be a much better way of feeding the world.

Soya in the form of tofu and tempeh has a bland flavour but miso is delicious. Anchovies could combine quite well with miso, even in the form of anchovy flour, to make a tasty soup or stock. There may be other ways to use anchovies.

anchovies

kidney stones and diet

On the BBC Radio 4 programme Inside Health on 16/07/13 Dr Mark Porter was talking about kidney stones. He said that they affect one in ten of the population and the pain can be worse than childbirth. Surgeon Bhaskar Somani said that to avoid kidney stones we should drink lots of water and have a diet low in salt and low in red meat. He also said that it can be a good idea to avoid plants high in oxalate such as spinach, beetroot and rhubarb.

This interested me because I have been reading about low-oxalate diets since reading this article in the Daily Mail. I have tried a low-oxalate diet to see if it has an effect on me. I have suffered from tiredness and poor sleep all my life. It didn't seem to have any effect. Despite having a great interest in nutrition, I had no knowledge of the low-oxalate diet before reading the Daily Mail article, and I thought that not many people believed in it until I heard this episode of Inside Health.

Unfortunately, many healthy foods have considerable amounts of oxalate in them. Whole grains such as brown rice have. Some common vegetables such as cabbage do. Some nuts such as almonds do. I avoided these things for a while, but no longer. However, after listening to Inside Health I shall avoid spinach, beetroot, rhubarb and Swiss chard which are all particularly high in oxalate. I already have a diet low in salt and red meat. I intend to drink lots of water and drink it frequently. If kidney stones affect one in ten of us and the pain is worse than childbirth then it makes a lot of sense to do this.

I shall also take calcium and magnesium citrate in pill form. This helps to remove oxalate from the system.

Most people are not sensitive to oxalate but some people are. Most people don't have to worry about their oxalate intake, but it seems to make sense for all of us to avoid the very high-oxalate foods such as spinach. There's no point in taking any chances when it comes to kidney stones.

eat less meat or face food shortage

The Commons international development committee said farmers should rear more animals on grass because livestock is land and energy intensive and grain should be saved for humans.

This is what it said in this Daily Mail article. This is what I have been saying all along. The farmers seem to be up in arms about this statement. Nobody is saying that we shouldn't use land that can't be used to grow grain or other crops to grow grass for cattle or sheep. We're saying that we shouldn't import vast quantities of maize and soya to feed cattle, pigs and chickens. We should be eating more grain and pulses ourselves.

The article also said:-

The committee raised concerns about the impact of biofuels – derived from plants such as sugar cane and maize – on the environment and on food prices.

Vast swathes of agricultural land are set aside to grow fuel crops, pushing up the price of staple goods. By law, at least 5 per cent of petrol and diesel sold on British forecourts must be biofuel.

The MPs called on ministers to consider using domestic stockpiles of food to protect against price hikes.

As well as claiming grain should be fed to humans instead of animals, vegetarians and green activists tell steak lovers livestock farming is a major source of harmful greenhouse gases.

At the end of the article it mentions the Cranfield University research that seems to show that meat substitutes are not better than meat. I've looked at this research and it doesn't seem to make sense. It seems to be saying that if British people eat more soya, chickpeas and lentils then, because they are grown abroad, more land abroad has to be cultivated. So maybe forests abroad will have to be cut down to grow soya etc.

This seems to me to be complete nonsense. What we are saying is that vast quantitites or maize and soya are grown abroad and used to feed farm animals. If we eat less meat, then most of the maize and soya that is grown abroad will be available for human consumption. We could use that land for other crops too, such as chickpeas and lentils, and also farm less intensively. No extra land would be needed.

I'm annoyed with farmers and Cranfield University with trying to muddy the waters here. This is an issue of the global food supply and personal health. It's as if they want people to believe that when British people go to the supermarket and buy meat it will come from an animal that will have grazed on a Welsh hillside or something. The reality is that most farm animals are fed on maize and soya grown in tropical countries. If we used that soya for tofu instead of feeding animals then we would need LESS cultivated land and not MORE.

Another recent Daily Mail article says that recent research shows that vegetarians are healthier than meat eaters. That doesn't necessarily mean that vegetarianism causes good health because it is a correlation not cause-and-effect, but it makes the vested interests of the farming lobby seem even more immoral in their attempts to make people believe that British meat is all natural and healthy.

In any case, the Cranfield University 'research' is talking about the value of meat substitutes. People don't need to replace meat with a substitute. They don't need as much protein as they think they do. I could agree with the statement below, found here.

Donal Murphy-Bokern, one of the (Cranfield University) study authors and the former farming and food science co-ordinator at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said: “For some people, tofu and other meat substitutes symbolise environmental friendliness but they are not necessarily the badge of merit people claim. Simply eating more bread, pasta and potatoes instead of meat is more environmentally friendly.”