Who thinks better ingredients are bad?

Giveaway: Free copy of "We Are Eating the World" by Michael Grunwald.

Hello friends! Welcome back to Technically Food, my bi-weekly newsletter on food and how it’s changing. I’ve got a copy of We Are Eating the World to send out to one lucky reader. Elizabeth Kolbert recently reviewed the book in The New Yorker. Grunwald’s book includes the food-tech people I met with for my book, and he tastes the same foods, and like me he has questions. Grunwald’s book focuses on trying to answer the question of which solutions might actually solve the problem of feeding the world in a rapidly changing climate.

Hah! This comic is more of a spoof on politicians and ranchers being up in arms about the sale of lab grown meat versus what anyone might actually think about the stuff when and if it ever makes it to market. Cartoon from Marin IJ. Thank you MW.

There’s a lot going on in the news right now. I almost don’t know what to share. Kellogg’s is selling its cereal biz to Italian mega brand and Nutella-maker Ferrero for $3.1 billion. Twitter and Square co-founder Jack Dorsey created a new spin on his ex-messaging platform. It’s called Bitchat and its hitched solely to your phone's Bluetooth. A woman was arrested in Germany for sneaking 90 kg (almost 200 lbs!) of a hard-to-get candy bar with an outer layer of milk chocolate and stuffed inside are layers of kataifi, pistachio and tahini paste. (Yes, I want one.) The woman packed the decadent bars into three suitcases and oops, failed to report them on her customs declarations. Why? To avoid hefty taxes. She wasn’t arrested but will be investigated for tax fraud. Why this bar? Tik Tok of course.

French researchers found microplastics in drinks sold in glass bottles. In looking at commonly sold brands of tea, water, lemonade, soda, beer and wine they found microplastics in every kind of beverage. Researchers pointed to the paint used on the caps and the labels on bottles as the culprit. The only positive here was that fewer microplastics were found in wine and water. Another problem? The more you cap and uncap a drink could raise the percentage found.

My tip? Use your own water bottle. Make sure it’s metal without a plastic lip or straw. Clean it often. If you have to: buy drinks sold in aluminum cans. (This used to be far easier.)

About that book GIVEAWAY: I will pick one name at random from my paid subscribers and anyone new that upgrades to paid this week. (It’s very affordable — $35 a year.) I’ll announce the winner in my next newsletter. Yippee.

And here’s the one that helps me land my subject line. Hamdi Ulukaya, the founder of Chobani, believes that efforts to improve ingredients will disappoint consumers. Huh the what? Ulukaya says products like his famous Greek yogurt will become more expensive (yes, that might be bad) and the new formulations won’t taste as good. Customers, he says, will complain.

His assumption is that we prefer foods that have been engineered for a long-shelf life, that last days in the back of a refrigerated truck and look perfect when we drop our spoon into it. He said to Business Insider: "Everybody wants to eat good,” but no one “wants to pay $3 for yogurt." Let’s call it the cost conundrum.

Make it cheap, make it good for us, make it delicious. Can it be everything? Maybe, maybe not.

The CEO recounted the company’s efforts to reformulate oat milk without dipotassium phosphate, a sodium-adjacent compound that helps products foam and last longer. The problem is that it’s commonly found in highly processed foods. Here’s a study about the problems. It may extend the product but it’s not going to extend our lives. A diet high in UPF (ultra processed food), aka convenience foods, are often eaten by those with fewer resources and less time. (Time is money.) This junk adds up in our bodies.

I get that we don’t want our yogurt to separate or taste different from what we might be used to but it’s not a proven edict that because things have been one way for a long time that it can’t change or we can’t adjust our taste preferences. Big Food likes to tell us that they’re making what we want, what we ask for, but that’s a big fat lie. Our preferences have been engineered by the very group telling us we don’t want to change.

Carrots and kale don’t worry about their formulation. In fact the better tasting the vegetable the more we’ll buy. I joke but it’s not far from the truth. Let’s all dream about better tasting carrots and in the same breath hope for better staples like oat milk and yogurt that aren’t formulated with highly processed ingredients.

Where you can find me:

1. I recently appeared on Dana Cowin’s podcast Progressive Hedonist. She was nominated for a James Beard award for the podcast, which is a big deal. I met Dana when I was in my second year of graduate school in New York. We became fast friends and I had the good fortune to work with her to promote her first cookbook. Dana helped me launch into my writing career. Another big deal!

2. Next week, I’ll be at FoodXClimate in San Francisco.

3. In October, I’m moderating a panel on cultured meat at the Reducetarian Summit in Atlanta. Come say hi.

What I’m reading:

1. I recently read the memoir Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams. The book is about Wynn-Williams time as the global policy director at Facebook. It’s astonishing to be there for the beginnings of the company, and gives such pause to consider if it were handled differently. The stories in it are just wow. Did you read it? Did it make you regret ever using the social network? Yep.