Month: January 2024

Give us this day our daily Weetos

Like every child of the 90s, I grew up eating cereal for breakfast every morning. My favourites were Coco Pops, Weetos, and controversially, Apricot Wheats. My most hated adversary was the Honey Monster. His puffed wheat cereal was disgusting in both taste and texture. A truly vile invention from the writhing depths of hell.

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I don’t eat cereal now. As much as I love extremely expensive muesli—the more Brazil nuts in it the better—my morning cravings are generally savoury. I love eggs and toast, shakshuka is a gift, and sausages are much better than bacon, in my opinion. I believe the sausage and egg McMuffin is a truly angelic creation, fit to cure all ills and revive a person from near-death. The nearest I get to cereal these days are the amazing apple and cinnamon porridge bars you can get from Lidl. They are essential camping and walking snacks.

I’m sure you’re all aware of the legends that claim to explain the true motives behind the invention of cereal. If not, here’s Snopes’ concise and helpful guide to the creation of Kellogg’s Cornflakes.

What’s True

The creation of corn flakes was part of John H. Kellogg’s broader advocacy for a plain, bland diet. Without referring to corn flakes in particular, Kellogg elsewhere recommended a plain, bland diet as one of several methods to discourage masturbation.

What’s False

According to the available evidence, corn flakes were primarily created as an easy-to-digest, pre-prepared and healthy breakfast food, in particular for patients at the Kellogg sanatorium in Michigan. The product was never advertised as an “anti-masturbatory morning meal.”

Corn flakes were originally recommended as an easily-digested food for people with digestive problems and other illnesses that caused nausea and sickness such as dyspepsia. Later, Kellogg fought with his brother about additional ingredients to increase the popularity of their corn flakes and rice krispies—John stuck to his principles of plain food, and Will wanted to add sugar. John saw sugar as an evil to be eliminated from our diets, along with spices, alcohol, condiments, pickles, and basically everything in the world that makes food worth eating. The point of cereal, for John Kellogg, was its “pure” and “unstimulating” nourishment.

I’m sure that he’d find Cinnamon Grahams an affront to all that is good. Imagine presenting him with a bowl of Jolly Rancher-coloured Froot Loops, made by his own corporation. And that’s what’s interesting about breakfast cereals—they quickly moved away from being promoted as a healthy, lighter alternative to starchy and friend breakfast foods, appealing to children and the young at heart with sweetshop flavours and bright packaging. The turning point happened after World War II, in part because women were entering the workforce and quicker alternatives to cooked breakfasts were needed to feed the whole family. Onwards into the 1950s, cereal became one of the advertising industry’s most lucrative and successful project. Characters were invented and printed on the box, later taking part in TV shows about their exploits. Cereals began to be enriched with additional vitamins lost during the processing of the grains—many cereals are still made using refining techniques to remove fibre, because at the time they were invented, it was thought to inhibit the digestive system’s ability to absorb nutrients.

This addition of vitamins (remember, they largely just replace vitamins lost during processing) was a huge marketing drive, not just to get families to eat more cereal, but to encourage the idea that breakfast was the most important meal of the day. To this day, there is a lingering feeling that to miss breakfast is to ruin your day before you’ve even begun it. According to a recent study, it’s not true. Eating food, whatever time of day, is what keeps you going and strengthens your body. Your gut has no idea what time of day it is.

“We found that breakfast is not the most important time of the day to eat, even though that belief is really entrenched in our society and around the world…if you eat breakfast and it suits you, then you shouldn’t change. But what we tend to see is that there’s a strong push towards eating breakfast because ‘you should’. The evidence now says that’s not the case.

— Professor Flavia Cicuttini1

So why are cereals so popular in a world where we seem to want more “real” foods than ever before? Is it because granola, the good-natured hippy of the cereal world has created a sort-of halo effect? Do we buy into the idea of added vitamins? I think, more likely, it’s a combination of convenience and comfort, just like most of our everyday purchases at the supermarket. Packaged cereals were invented to solve the problem of needing something easy and nutrition to eat for breakfast. They still serve that purpose, over 100 years later. It’s been 70 years since sugary cereals invented for kids flooded the market, which means your grandparents might still enjoy a bowl for nostalgia’s sake. They’ve been touted as diet tools to keep slim, and now, in 2024, there are cereals manufactured to bump up protein content rather than B12 and riboflavin, promoted as a fun and delicious way to at healthily. Cereals are not going anywhere. They are part of our diets because we want them to be, not because they need to be. And that’s the processed food industry’s biggest achievement.

What exactly am I looking for?

My favourite thing in the world is going to an old pub for a pint. I love sitting in the peace of a bar room softly buzzing with the chit chat of locals and fellow drinkers, basking in the atmosphere of a place that’s been a second living room for generations of people.

I spend a lot of time researching places to visit. I live in a part of England that’s seemingly blessed with quaint old pubs, and yet there are so few of them that really fit my elusive parameters—so few of them boast every aspect I need to call them perfect. I thought it was about time I tried to consolidate these requirements of mine, to try and put into words what it is I’m looking for, to see if what I’m after isn’t just me wishing for the Moon Under Water. I travel quite far for a good pub, so I try and make sure I’m not wasting diesel. Imagine driving two hours around the winding roads of North Yorkshire to find you’ve arrived at a total dud.

When I’m searching for pubs to visit, the first thing that puts me off are renovations. So many beautiful country pubs in the Ribble Valley have had their character stripped in favour of light oak tables and pastel tartan. What keeps me interested are original beams, wonky floors, and horse brasses—or big, clichéd bunches of dried hops and age-tinted maps on the walls. Keep talking.

If reviews talk about “decent pub grub” I am likely to wonder about the price, quality, and selection of the beer. My next step is to check photos of their bar to see what they sell. Nine times out of ten, my suspicions about Pedigree and/or Doom Bar are confirmed.

Conversely, if a country pub has stunning reviews for its food, that pub is going to be hellishly busy, it will require a reservation, and it is not what I’m looking for. I will probably book to go for my tea sometime. I don’t want to have a pint there, because it’s a restaurant. I’ll feel like I’m taking up space, and I’ll overhear someone talking about struggling to fill their holiday lets.

When I get there, I want to feel comfortable and welcome, but left alone. I want a delicious pint of beer and plenty of fun trinkets to look at on the walls and shelves. I want to feel like I’m sat reading or playing cards just like a patron 150 years ago might have done in my spot.

I want to be chatted to when I go to the bar to choose from good selection of beer, and feel like the people who work here are looked after and enjoy being there. I love a real fire, but controversially, it’s not a dealbreaker. I do, however, award huge bonus points for hauntings, witch marks, and fascinating or gory local history that can be linked to the pub—however tentatively. Points are deducted for tourism-baiting, although I’m not too harsh on this right now. It’s a difficult industry out there. Beautiful views from the windows are a tick. Funny or interesting regulars are a tick. Classic bar snacks are a massive tick—pickled eggs, butties wrapped in clingfilm, or pies from a local butchers’ shop all tot the points right up.

I want a pint that’s so good I get two more of the same. I want to feel my shoulders relax and my cheeks ache with smiling—I want to feel happy. I want to be slightly sad when it’s time to leave.

Other Stuff

• This week on Pelllicle Will Hawkes writes about northern Germany’s Störtebeker Braumanufaktur. I have always wanted to go to Germany’s Balkan coast.

• I re-read Will Hawkes’ story about Bundobust this week as a result of the above and it really is super interesting to learn about Bradford and the owners of everyone’s favourite curry pub/tap room

• Polyester Zine are just coming out with some of the most interesting and insightful features right now. Try this on Shanzhai design and fashion for size, or read this about the enduring popularity of smoking in all its forms (including vaping) — particularly interesting to me since I said I was giving up two weeks ago and it’s all I can think about. Critically and in a hot, aloof way, of course.

• “Saltburn is an anti-Scouse film” by Ella Fradgley for STAT magazine. Wow there is just SO MUCH great culture critique out there right now.

• Golden Hive Mead made wine out of Mountain Dew and I want to drink it.

My Stuff

• I’m writing a lot more for Ferment these days, so if you get Glug or Ferment magazines, you’ll see more of me in both.

• My series of newsletters about processed food, PROCESS is coming into its penultimate week. Upgrade to a paid subscription to read the whole series so far and to be among the first to see what’s coming next.

• I’m working on a lot more of my own work, which doesn’t bring me in any money. This is not ideal. If you have writing work you’d love to send my way, please get in touch!

  

  Katie Mather’s The Gulp is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Why do we drink milk anyway?

I was 20 when I discovered Alpro. I was a fiend for milkshakes in my early 20s, especially those which tasted nothing like banana but were marketed as such, and Alpro’s perfectly fit the bill. Soon after that, I moved in with a bunch of vegetarians, one of whom often drank soy or rice milk instead of the semi-skimmed I was so used to seeing in the fridge.

My first thought was how exciting it was to have something unusual in the kitchen. Milk is unthought about. It is a thoughtless purchase. It is always needed. Milk, bread, toilet roll. I never stopped to think about how much of it I drank on a weekly basis, and only vaguely considered it strange that every single person I knew went though litres of it at a time whenever their recycling really needed taking out to the wheelie bin.

The content below was originally paywalled.

Milk is, of course, a useful and renewable way to consume calories and nutrients, and we as a race have been drinking the milk of cows, goats, sheep, yak, buffalo, reindeer, and donkeys since 9000 BCE, and cultivating dairy farms for around 6,000 years—about the same length of time that we’ve been making and drinking beer. Drinking your nutrition is super efficient, and since human breast milk is quite hard to come by (and not that fatty, really) and cows produce a lot and happen to be docile when domesticated, it supposedly makes sense that early humans decided to give their milk a go. If you had meagre supplies and you didn’t want to kill your animal for a week’s worth of food, milk might have been the difference between starvation and survival.

In the 21st century, we don’t need to rely on animals for nutrition. It’s entirely possible to live healthily without any animal products whatsoever. In terms of animal liberation, the commercial dairy industry is as detrimental to animal welfare as farming for meat—the animals are still kept, farmed, and taken from their mothers, they are slaughtered when they are no use as dairy cattle, and they live entirely at the mercy of human consumption. They exist in their current breeds for their utility to mankind. If you consume dairy in any form, as I do, I believe it’s important not to be blind to these facts. Just because there is no blood, doesn’t mean it is guilt-free. We are removed from the suffering only in as much as the products—cheese, cream, yoghurt, protein powders—are unrecognisable as animal in nature. In reality, they are as brutal as a carcass.

In the 20th century, milk drinking reached wild levels of obsessive consumption. In the 1950s, it was a vessel on which newly-developed breakfast cereals could sail towards total breakfast table domination (don’t worry, I’m coming for them soon.) It was seen as a cure-all for strong bones and healthy muscles, and became a marketing campaign all its own—a product that wasn’t branded, being promoted as if it was. I never cared about whether the milk I had at home was from Arla or Müller, just that it was there in a massive 6 pint carton and that I should drink more of it if I wanted to be a healthy, smiling child, or as beautiful as Phoebe and Rachel from Friends.

I always wondered why my tummy hurt when I drank a glass of milk. Turns out, most of us aren’t that good at digesting it. And that’s where the non-animal liberation-centric arguments in favour of Plant M*lk begin.

Approximately 65% of the population can’t properly digest dairy without some form of reaction. Until I started using plant milk in my brews I had no idea I was one of them. I’m only slightly intolerant, I can maybe have a cappuccino and forget to ask for oat milk, but I can’t eat normal yoghurt (for some reason I can eat Fage, someone tell me why) and I definitely can’t drink a glass of it. I don’t know why anyone would. Ming.

I started drinking soy milk because it lasted longer and nobody stole it out of the fridge at work, and now I have oat milk delivered to my door by my local milkwoman. I never need to drink dairy milk again. As I happily shake my glass bottles each morning to re-combine the totally separated oat milk solution and the slightly yellow rapeseed oil suspension before I make my breakfast, it occurs to me that I believe my beloved Oato is healthier for me than cow’s milk, but I can actually see the component parts of it. It is totally processed.

Oato is a British Oat milk company (from Lancashire, actually 💅) that uses British oats, water, British rapeseed oil, British salt, and various nutrients like B-vitamins and calcium to make a milk-like drink suitable for someone like me—someone who likes creamy coffees but who can’t stand the taste of dairy milk now they’ve not had it in years (isn’t that odd?) It’s creamy because of the rapeseed oil, which mimics the saturated fatty acids in dairy milk. Neither are great for you. My oat milk, just like all other plant milk, needs to have vitamins added to it, which is why I don’t make my own. Dairy milk has naturally-occurring D and A vitamins as well as calcium, but when the milk is processed to reduce the fat content, there is fewer nutrition. If you drink skimmed milk, I don’t know why you bother. There is nothing in it of value. Stop living in the 90s. Fat is not going to kill you on the spot. You are free.

The reason I prefer oat milk over every other option now available to me is down to how it impacts the environment. I can have a locally-made product delivered directly to my door. At this point, that’s even more environmentally sound than super-local independent dairy milk. I don’t choose soy milk because unless it’s organic and grown in the US or Canada, it might be contributing to rainforest deforestation, and I don’t choose almond milk because of immense water consumption in dry areas of the world. Coconut milk has a reputation for exploitation, although there are many sustainable enterprises growing in South East Asia hoping to curb this. Hazelnut milk is a pretty sustainable option, actually, but it’s also on the expensive side. There’s no getting around it though, whichever you choose, it’s all highly processed. So we come back around to that difficult question—is processed food inherently worse for you than natural food? And, if the natural food in question has been heat-treated, homogenised, filtered, and had vitamins added to it, at what stage does it stop being all-natural?

Perhaps that’s why there are farms near me making a killing selling unpasteurised raw milk. People are so scared of processed food they’ll run the gauntlet with literal E. Coli. Which, I suppose, is a truly natural pathogen.

Peanut butter for winners.

At school, I was shocked and amazed to learn that French children regularly had chocolate for breakfast. Not the vague approximation of chocolate that coated my Cocopops or that whispered on the breeze alongside my Weetos, but actual, factual squares of chocolate, often in a folded piece of bread like a forbidden sandwich. Needless to say I was immediately enamoured with the strange and exotic country over the channel—a world of class and taste quite outside my range of comprehension. I went home and told my family of my findings. It was agreed that I could, occasionally, have Nutella on toast for breakfast (or whatever the supermarket equivalent might have been at that time.) Hypercool!

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Now I’m older and I realise that France is indeed a country of sophistication, culture and intrigue for many other reasons, but the idea of chocolate for breakfast still excites me. These chic French people were all once petit children, scoffing Nutella butties and squares of Ritter Sport as they run out to get to school on time. Lady with a Marlborough Gold and a messy bob hairdo—I know you love Nutella. It makes me think you’re even cooler.

Nutella is occasionally in the news, and by that I mean the same old posts return to Instagram’s trending page, because of its negligible nutritional content. My favourite sorts of posts are those which “reveal!” an “unknown!” scandal about a product—usually a food in my case, probably because the algorithm knows I love to eat. The best one IMO is the picture of Nutella’s ingredients. Thank you, online investigative journalist! We thought instead it was full of chia seeds and IBS green juice!! I guess we could have looked at the label and learned exactly the same information, but where’s the fun in that?

As you can see, Nutella is not a health food. It is a highly-processed snack food product made from palm oil, lots of white sugar, and powdered milk, all three of which are ultra-processed ingredients themselves. It’s not a great option if you’re trying to eat food that’s actually food. This is, arguably, what makes it delicious. Bear in mind, I also like that macaroni cheese that comes in boxes and cook with corn oil even though I know it’s worse for me than drinking diesel. Probably. What I wasn’t happy about is the use of palm oil, which contributes to deforestation and loss of habitats for hundreds of species. I’m happy to eat processed foods. I’m not happy about buying products that destroy the environment. This sentiment was shared by thousands upon thousands of commenters, who were disgusted to realise they’d been consuming a product they believed to be damaging to the planet and to their bodies. I especially liked the posts where calorific content was shared, as though that wasn’t already on a sticker on the very top of the lid of every jar.

Ferrero have a whole section of their website dedicated to discussing the problems with the palm oil in Nutella and their efforts to improve how it’s harvested and treated. They claim that “100% of our palm oil can be traced back to the mills, guaranteeing that it does not come from plantations subject to deforestation” However, their cocoa is Rainforest Alliance accredited—a programme that is notoriously under-enforced.

I am extremely pro-eating whatever food takes your fancy, but sometimes it’s important to look at its provenance. Maybe the problem isn’t where you thought it might be. Avoiding palm oil was something I did until I realised there were other issues to concern myself with—things like child slavery in the cocoa industry, still a problem today despite programmes such as the Rainforest Alliance. I had no idea there were initiatives like the Earthworm Foundation for companies like Ferrero to work with, to promote and support environmental regeneration in agriculture across the world until I looked at Nutella’s Hazelnut Charter (yes, there is one, and it’s incredibly thorough.) There are endless projects aimed at human welfare, animal welfare, nature preservation, regeneration, healthier living, and sustainability. Often they are used as a plaster to market unfavourable products. It’s up to us as consumers to choose what we believe, and what we support.

I guess what I’m saying is, maybe it’s not about the calorie content of the processed palm oil you’re putting into your body. Maybe there are bigger problems in the food industry than that.

— from Da Capo by Jane Hirshfield

If 2023 brought me destruction, grief, pain, and exhaustion, the first four days of 2024 have set about trying to make up for it. I’ve felt more excitement, restfulness, peace, wonder, joy, and inspiration in these weeks since Christmas than I have in a long time. I, for once, am ready to start a new year on both feet with my face defiantly turned up into the rain. I am here to be myself. I am here.

I ran for the first time in a long time today, in a normal t-shirt that got soaked through by passing showers, determined to normalise what, in my mind, had become a competitive sport I could no longer take part in. I listened to George Michael and Aretha Franklin and Sugababes as I ran. I saw blue sky in the dark clouds. I felt energy, long dormant, lighting up my chest.

One of the most important things for me this year will be my writing. Over the past three years it’s taken something of a back seat to running Corto and, latterly, dealing with various health issues (both physical and mental.) I have no split between my interests now. I am all-in for writing. My keyboard will crack in half from the hammering of its keys. My notebook collection will teeter out of control. My projects will become more adventurous, more challenging. I want to level up.

What this means, I’m not yet sure, but I know that I can feel myself reaching for more. I hope you stick around with me so we can find out together.

My Stuff

• My first published story of 2024 is “Anon, A Giant Monster Roams — Torrside Brewery in New Mills, Derbyshire”. I’m very proud of it and if you’ve not read it yet, I’d love it if you could spare a few minutes to learn about one of my favourite breweries of all time.

• For Hwaet! zine, I wrote a piece on witchcraft, brewsters, alewives, beer, and women’s work. You can buy the beautifully illustrated zine here.

• A story about the terroir and the mountains of Abruzzo, for Glug. I love having a monthly column about terroir and the geology of winemaking, there is always something to learn.

Other Stuff

• Eoghan Walsh’s eulogy for The Old Hack, a bar in the EU quarter of Brussels packed with vintage political gossip, predictions for the future of Brussels’ beer scene, and anecdotes about what it was like to drink in a pub full of EU politicians, journos, and civil servants. As always, he manages to pull at the merest hint of a story and drag endless colourful moments from it.

• There’s never a bad time to look at collections of Ladybird book illustrations.

• MAH played a track from Grand Theft Auto: Vice City — The Definitive Edition this morning on Radio 6 and honestly, I can’t think of a better playlist.

• A stunning mini documentary about local (to me) fell runner Ellis Bland’s obsession with Bowland fell Shooters’ Hill

  Katie Mather’s The Gulp is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

  

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