our daily bread (& rice) | wheat, rice, & CO2

Plants need carbon dioxide to live, but its effects on them are complicated.

As the level of carbon dioxide in the air continues to rise because of human activity, scientists are trying to understand how the plants we eat are being affected.

According to recent studies, rice, wheat, and other staple crops lose nutrients when exposed to levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere expected by 2050.

Samuel Myers, principal research scientist at Harvard’s School of Public Health and director of the Harvard-based Planetary Health Alliance and colleagues have conducted studies in which crops are grown bathed in air that simulates the predicted atmospheric conditions expected both by 2050 and by the end of the 21st century. The studies showed declines in protein, iron, and zinc in wheat, and declines in iron and zinc in soybeans and field peas.

The scientists compared nutrient levels in field crops grown in ambient CO2 levels, about 380-390 parts per milliion (ppm) at the time of the work, with those grown in the elevated CO2 levels expected by 2050. The latter level, 545-585ppm, is expected even if substantial curbs on emissions are put in place by the world’s governments. In order to take account of variable growing conditions, the researchers analysed 41 different strains grown in seven locations on three different continents.

Wheat grown in high CO2 levels had 9% less zinc and 5% less iron, as well as 6% less protein, while rice had 3% less iron, 5% less iron and 8% less protein. Maize saw similar falls while soybeans lost similar levels of zinc and iron but, being a legume not a grass, did not see lower protein.

The precise biological and physiological mechanisms that cause nutrient levels to fall when CO2 levels increase are not yet well understood.

See:

“Major crops lose nutrients when grown in elevated carbon dioxide levels,” Harvard School of Public Health, 19 June 2018

“As Carbon Dioxide Levels Rise, Major Crops Are Losing Nutrients,” Merrit Kennedy, NPR, 19 June 2018

“Climate change making food crops less nutritious, research finds,” Damian Carrington, The Guardian, 7 May 2014

“Increasing CO2 threatens human nutrition,” Samuel S. Myers, Antonella Zanobetti, Itai Kloog, Peter Huybers, Andrew D. B. Leakey, Arnold J. Bloom, Eli Carlisle, Lee H. Dietterich, Glenn Fitzgerald, Toshihiro Hasegawa, N. Michele Holbrook, Randall L. Nels, Michael J. Ottman, Victor Raboy, Hidemitsu Sakai, Karla A. Sartor, Joel Schwartz, Saman Seneweera, Michael Tausz & Yasuhiro Usui, Nature, International Journal of Science, 7 May 2014

November 26, 2018

your money, your life, your choice | extra-virgin olive oil

While the olive tree was first domesticated in the Eastern Mediterranean between 8,000 and 6,000 years ago, the earliest written mention of olive oil that we have on record is on cuneiform tablets of the twenty-fourth century BC at Ebla (in today’s Syria, about 55 km southwest of Aleppo).

Olive oil took a central place in Greek sports, performed in the nude. Nigel Kennell, a specialist in ancient history at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, links that centrality to the rise of bronze statuary in the sixth century B.C. “A tanned athlete, shining in the summer sun, covered with oil, would really resemble a statue of the gods.”

Olives were a cash crop in the Roman Empire by the first century AD, olive oil was traded internationally. The family of Septimus Severus, emperor of Rome from 193 to 211 AD, traded olive oil from Leptis Magna, a city in the Tripolitania region of North Africa (now Libya). Emperor Septimus Severus was the first to introduce regular free distribution of olive oil in Rome.

Today, demand for high-quality olive oil is on the rise. As of 2012, the American market, the largest outside Europe, was worth about $1.5 billion and growing at a rate of about 10% per year.

Over a five-year projection period of 2017-2022, the global olive oil market is projected to reach approximately US$11 billion by end-2022.

So, what is olive oil? What is meant by “extra-virgin” olive oil?

The olive is a “dupe.” A dupe is a stone fruit with a pit, like a cherry.

The olives are harvested at the moment of the invaiatura, when they begin to turn from green to black; ideally they are picked by hand and milled within hours, to minimize oxidation and enzymatic reactions, which leave unpleasant tastes and odors in the oil.

There are approximately seven hundred olive varieties, or cultivars, whose distinctive tastes and aromas are evident in oils that are made properly, just as different grape varietals are expressed in fine wines.

“Slippery Business, The Trade in Adulterated Olive Oil,” Tom Mueller, The New Yorker, 13 August 2007

The best olive oils are unlike most vegetable oils that are extracted in a refinery from seeds or nuts, using solvents, heat, and intense pressure.

More like fresh-squeezed fruit juice, the best olive oils are made using a simple hydraulic press or centrifuge.

Extra-virgin olive oil, that must be totally unprocessed, is the highest-quality olive oil. During the physical extraction process, extra-virgin olive oil must be kept below 75 degrees Fahrenheit at all times. Extra-virgin olive oil must, further, meet strict chemical criteria as defined by the International Olive Oil Council and adopted by the European Union and USDA, and have flavor and aroma as determined by a certified tasting panel.

According to E.U. law, extra-virgin oil must be made exclusively by physical means (by a press or a centrifuge) and meet thirty-two chemical requirements, including having “free acidity” of no more than 0.8 per cent. (In olive oil, free acidity is an indicator of decomposition.)

According to the E.U. regulations, extra-virgin oil must have appreciable levels of pepperiness, bitterness, and fruitiness, and must be free of sixteen official taste flaws such as “musty,” “fusty,” “cucumber,” and “grubby.”

The next lower grade of olive oil is virgin oil. Virgin oil must have no more than two percent of free acidity. Oil that has a greater percentage of free acidity is classified as lampante.

New milling technologies—stainless steel mills, high-speed centrifuges, temperature- and oxygen-controlled storage tanks—are making it possible to produce the best extra-virgin olive oils in history: fresh, complex, and every bit as varied as wine varietals. (There are about seven hundred different kinds of olives.)

“Olive Oil’s Dark Side,” Sally Errico, The New Yorker, 7 February 2012

There’s also massive output of low-grade olive oils. Some producers are selling these as extra-virgin olive oil even though these low-grade oils do not meet the requirements of the extra-virgin grade. (E.U. and U.S. trade standards require extra-virgin olive oil to be free of sensory defects, and these oils are deeply flawed.) This is creating a downward pressure on olive oil quality.

Given that so many “extra-virgin” oils are actually inferior oils cut with other products, where should the average shopper buy his oil?

Ideally, at a mill, where you can see the fresh olives turned into oil, and get to know the miller—in an industry where the label means so little, personal trust in the people who have made and sold it is important. Barring this, try to visit a store where you can taste before you buy; an increasing number of olive-oil specialty stores exists throughout America, even in small towns and unexpected corners of the country. In a conventional retail store, certain characteristics of labelling and bottling suggest (though they don’t guarantee) high quality: a harvest date (as opposed to a meaningless “best by” date), a specific place of production and producer, mention of the cultivar of olives used, dark glass bottles (light degrades olive oil), a D.O.P. seal on European oils, and a California Olive Oil Council seal on oil made in the U.S.

“Olive Oil’s Dark Side,” Sally Errico, The New Yorker, 7 February 2012

Here are some helpful guides to selecting olive oil:

“How to Buy Great Olive Oil,” Tom Mueller

“About Olive Oil,” Olive Oil Lovers

See:

“How to Buy Great Olive Oil,” Tom Mueller

“About Olive Oil,” Olive Oil Lovers

“Olive Oil Market Revenue to Approach US$ 11 Bn by 2022 despite Dire Supply-Demand-Pricing Setback, Unleashes the New Intelligence Study by Fact.MR,” Globe News Wire, 18 October 2018

“Olive Oil’s Dark Side,” Sally Errico, The New Yorker, 7 February 2012

“Slippery Business, The Trade in Adulterated Olive Oil,” Tom Mueller, The New Yorker, 13 August 2007

Besnard G, Khadari B, Navascues M, Fernandez-Mazuecos M, El Bakkali A, Arrigo N, Baali-Cherif D, Brunini-Bronzini de Caraffa V, Santoni S, Vargas P, Savolainen V. 2013, “The complex history of the olive tree: from Late Quaternary diversification of Mediterranean lineages to primary domestication in the Northern Levant,” Proc R Soc B 280: 20122833. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2012.2833

November 24, 2018November 23, 2018

your money, your health, your life | the olive

The olive (botanical name “Olea europaea”, meaning “European olive”) is a species of evergreen tree or shrub in the family of Oleaceae in the order of Lamiales. The tree is typically short and squat, seldom taller than 26 – 49 feet (8 – 15 meters). The trunk is gnarled and twisted.

With a sturdy and extensive root system, the olive tree can tolerate drought well, live for centuries, and remain productive for long periods if pruned correctly and regularly.

Hundreds of cultivars (assemblage of plants selected for desirable characters that are maintained during plant propagation) of the olive tree are known.

Many olive cultivars are self-sterile (self-incompatible; when a pollen grain produced in a plant reaches a stigma of the same plant or another plant with a similar genotype, the process of pollen germination, pollen-tube growth, ovule fertilization and embryo development is halted at one of its stages and consequently no seeds are produced). Olive trees are generally planted in pairs with a single primary cultivar and a secondary cultivar selected for its ability to fertilize the primary one.

Only a few olive varieties can be used to cross-pollinate. Olive trees are, then, propagated by various other methods, including grafting (in Greece grafting the cultivated tree on the wild tree is a common practice) and budding (asexual reproduction; in Italy, for instance, embryonic buds, which form small swellings on the stems, are excised and planted under the soil surface).

With common ancestors that go way (way) back, long before written history (“the most recent common ancestor of each Mediterranean lineage dates back to the Middle or Upper Pleistocene: 139 100 BP for E1 (95% CI: 49 200–482 100), 284 300 BP for E2 (95% CI: 84 400–948 100) and 143 700 BP for E3 (95% CI: 37 100–542 700″), the olive tree was first domesticated in the Eastern Mediterranean between 8,000 and 6,000 years ago, according to research published in February 2013 in the “Proceedings of the Royal Society B (Biological Sciences): “The complex history of the olive tree: from Late Quaternary diversification of Mediterranean lineages to primary domestication in the northern Levant.”

We can say there were probably several steps, and it probably starts in the Levant,” or the area that today includes Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, said study co-author Gillaume Besnard, an archaeobotanist at the National Center for Scientific Research in France. “People selected new cultivars everywhere, but that was a secondary diversification later.”

The findings, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, are based on the genetic analysis of nearly 1,900 samples from around the Mediterranean Sea. The study reveals that domesticated olives, which are larger and juicier than wild varieties, were probably first cultivated from wild olive trees at the frontier between Turkey and Syria.

Tia Ghose, “The Origins of the Olive Tree Revealed,” LiveScience, 5 February 2013

The cradle of primary domestication of the olive tree is located in the northeastern Levant, where populations currently contain substantial genetic diversity, although not the highest in the Mediterranean basin (i.e. the Strait of Gibraltar [13,43]). This paradox can be explained by the fact that advanced civilizations emerged in the north Levant, such as the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B [51,52], and that they had enough genetic resources to succeed in domesticating a self-incompatible tree. The domestication of the olive tree appears to have been a long and continuous process that involved numerous genetic exchanges between the cultivated trees and wild gene pools, as already reported for other crops [53]. The first domesticated gene pool of olive was more likely to have spread with agriculture, first to the whole Levant and Cyprus [54] before being progressively disseminated to the western Mediterranean. Genetic evidence for multi-local origins of cultivars previously reported by several authors [6–12,55] may be explained by secondary domestication events involving crosses between newly introduced cultivars and local oleasters across the entire Mediterranean.

Besnard G, Khadari B, Navascues M, Fernandez-Mazuecos M, El Bakkali A, Arrigo N, Baali-Cherif D, Brunini-Bronzini de Caraffa V, Santoni S, Vargas P, Savolainen V. 2013 “The complex history of the olive tree: from Late Quaternary diversification of Mediterranean lineages to primary domestication in the northern Levant“. Proc R Soc B 280: 20122833. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2012.2833

To unravel the history of the olive tree, the team took 1,263 wild and 534 cultivated olive tree samples from throughout the Mediterranean and analyzed genetic material from the trees’ chloroplasts, the green plant structures where photosynthesis takes place. Because chloroplast DNA is passed from one tree to the descendant trees that spring up around it, the DNA can reveal local changes in plant lineages, study co-author Gillaume Besnard, an archaeobotanist at the National Center for Scientific Research, said.

The researchers then reconstructed a genetic tree to show how the plant dispersed. The team found that the thin, small and bitter wild fruit first gave way to oil-rich, larger olives on the border between Turkey and Syria.

After that first cultivation, modern-day domesticated olives came mostly from three hotspots: the Near East (including Cyprus), the Aegean Sea and the Strait of Gibraltar. They were then gradually spread throughout the Mediterranean with the rise of civilization.

Tia Ghose, “The Origins of the Olive Tree Revealed,” LiveScience, 5 February 2013

See:

Author for correspondence:

G. Besnard
e-mail: guillaume.besnard@univ-tlse3.fr

Electronic supplementary material is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2012.2833 or via http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org.

Tia Ghose, “The Origins of the Olive Tree Revealed,” LiveScience, 5 February 2013

“Olive,” Wikipedia

“Budding,” Wikipedia

“Plant Propagation,” Wikipedia

“Self-incompatibility,” Wikipedia

November 19, 2018November 19, 2018

it’s your money, your life, your health | olive oil

For years I’ve cooked with olive oil, dipped bread in olive oil, “drizzled” olive oil onto asparagus, and enjoyed olive oil infused with garlic or rosemary. More recently I’ve begun to use (what is labeled as organic, extra virgin) olive oil as a moisturizer. For use on my face I’ll even squeeze a few drops of juice from an organic lime into the olive oil.

So, what is olive oil and what is its story? Why is olive oil said to be so conducive to good health? This, I am learning, is a long, robust, multi-faceted, and global story with many players, a story that we will examine in small steps.

It is helpful to remember why, in the first place, we “eat.”

We are all sophisticated systems of systems and systems of players, finely evolved, precisely calibrated to the relationships between ourselves and our environments.

Through eating we bring chemical compounds of biological origin (and increasingly, in some cases, of synthetic origin) into our systems and ultimately into our blood (a finely tuned transport system) and from our blood into our cells (of which we each have billions and billions, chugging away and doing their work, each cell precisely calibrated to its particular environment and task) so that they can do their work.

Through breathing we bring atmospheric chemical elements and compounds, such as oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen, into our lungs, and from our lungs into our blood and from our blood into our cells.

Some of the compounds ingested through our food and breathed in through our air interact to better effect with our cells, some less so, towards the optimal performance of the systems of systems and systems of players that we all are, each individually.

Fortunately, nature’s wizardry has evolved a sense of “taste.” Much of the food that contains the chemical compounds that are beneficial to our cells tastes good. We enjoy eating it. Some of the food, however, that tastes good does not lead to optimal performance. In today’s world it is important to consult our taste buds and the label and do our due diligence.

An observation published in an earlier post, about risk and the system of systems that is the built environment, is pertinent:

“You owe it to yourself to call on every dispassionate expert you can find and grab all available data on any risk you are taking on.”

“You’re Buying a Home? Have You Considered Climate Change?”, Ron Lieber, The New York Times, 2 December 2016

Determine your goals, identify pathways towards them, identify risks, “grab” data, proceed with your due diligence, and eat (and breathe, another story) well.

As we proceed along our journey of exploration and learning we’ll investigate and discuss olives and olive oil. Come future posts we’ll examine a variety of foods including peanuts, peanut butter, coffee (a bean), blueberries, and grapes.

See:

“You’re Buying a Home? Have You Considered Climate Change?”, Ron Lieber, The New York Times, 2 December 2016