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What I talk about when I talk about our microbiome, pollution pencils, and Got (soy) Milk!

Today’s newsletter begins with the most interesting thing I read this week:

“I would like to focus on a special way of predicting the future. As we are living at a time of unusual uncertainty and anxiety about what will happen next, this topic is on many people’s minds, prompting us to ask: ‘What is our future going to be like?’”

So goes an essay in Harper’s Magazine titled “The Holy Multiplicity” by Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk. She writes: “When I say ‘our future,’ I’m not thinking about the next few years, but rather the gradual processes whose effects will be visible several centuries from now.”

That line made me think about the food we eat, which won’t change overnight. It won’t take centuries to change, but it will take time. Unlike goofy pasta recipes on TikTok, a fleeting bit of fiddle faddle, the meat industry is a behemoth because its had decades to grow. Plant-based meat may be feeling the punches now, but things will change.

I was drawn in by Tokarczuk’s philosophical talk of the future. Mostly because I’ve been thinking and writing deeply on the topic for the past two years. ‘What will we be eating in the future?’ Everyone wants to know. Same junk, better junk, wholly new junk? Dilemma’s abound.

Tokarczuk’s essay continues by exploring various methods of future seeking including ololygmancy (new word!), which divined according to the way dogs barked or howled. It’s not dogs but literature, she writes, that has proven to be a better fortune-teller. Just look at the goo-like foods written about in science fiction novels that are now coming true; or appearing in the latest episode of “The Last Of Us.”

Fortune telling in the essay shifted to an “unimportant, innocent discovery” by scientists into how many organisms are living inside us. “Scientists,” she writes, propose that “we treat the human organism and the symbiotic microbes that inhabit it as a holobiont (another new word!)—a single living being composed of many living beings.”

We’re multispecies. Not one unique thing—me, Larissa, one human body. We, me, are many.

Flashback to a dinner recently: the conversation turned to our gut flora (also called microbiome) and what Tokarczuk was referring to––the trillions of bacterial cells living inside our bodies that sustain us. They help with digestion, destroy harmful bacteria and assist in moderating our immune system. Maybe they’re even mood regulators. (Yes, my dears, it is mental.)

It’s quite possible I’m the one that brought this topic up. We got onto it because the person I was dining with complained that he was eating yogurt and not ice cream. (IKR?) I said that his body was thanking him because fermented foods are good. I may have then enacted a mini play of pretend microbe cheers: “Oooh yummm yummm we looooove this so much! Thank youuuuu!!!!” 

He accused me of overacting. Perhaps. 

When his doc suggested he include more fermented foods he turned to kefir, but the one he was drinking was full of sugar. (“NoooooOOOooooOo,” say the flora in his gut!) Natural sugars found in fruits and vegetables are good. They come alongside fiber—a staple of our gut flora. But white sugar, and sugar from highly processed foods, throws off the balance of our microbiome. 

Unsweetened is the way to go if you want to try kefir.

What does it do? It lowers the number of beneficial strains of bacteria in our gut and increases the ones that science has found to be over represented in several intestinal and extraintestinal diseases as well as basic inflammation distress—you know that bloated feeling you may get? That.

The essay turned from symbiotic microbes to the notion of individual identity because maybe we think we’re completely in charge of this effort. And maybe we’re not? Our body is an ecosystem. It’s a delicate, strong, ingenous bit of living machinery comprised of more than blood and bones.

We eat with our eyes and our minds, but its all for our gut, an ambiguous place that goes far beyond the singular “I.” To keep this in mind means we’re eating for the possibly 1,000-plus species shacking up in our gut intestine, and this dear reader means we’re never alone.

Other tidbits:

1. These pencils are made from air pollution in India and then given out to kids in schools. Wow. Did you know? Poorly ventilated classrooms in low-income neighborhoods can have air pollution levels three or four times higher than limits set by the WHO?

2. A new ad campaign from Silk uses the “famous” kids of parents that posed in the original Got Milk? campaign. (Milk mustache and all.) Why they didn’t riff on the Got Milk line is anyone’s guess. 

3. Ultra-processed foods (and some processed foods) are getting all the haters right now. (Good!) This piece by Jerry Mande at Harvard brings up a few solutions for our public health crisis. Mande says that the FDA and USDA need to use their “authority under federal law to protect us from these highly processed foods” paying as much attention to acute illness (like e. coli from romaine lettuce) as chronic illness (such as diabetes, obesity, hypertension, and heart failure). These four are also linked to two-thirds of severe Covid cases.

Where you can find me:

1. I’m interviewed in this nice little primer on what shoppers might want to know about lab-grown meat by Ali Francis at BonAppetit.com. 

2. My Consumer Reports piece on healthy plant-based swaps was re-published in the Washington Post. (Wish I also got paid twice for it!)

3. I’ll be the closing keynote at a Novel Foods conference in Rome on March 10th. You can attend virtually (like me) for only €45. (€95 for in person)

4. I’ll be hosting food demos on stage with Demolish Foods, Novameat and Current Foods at Future Food Tech in SF on March 16-17. Who’s gonna be there?

P.S. No newsletter on March 17th because I’ll be running around San Francisco tasting everything and saying hello to the food-tech founders of the world. You’ll see me in your in-box again on March 24th.