Seriously Curious

by Tom Standage

  Small-scale brewing owes its success to several factors. Richer consumers are increasingly turning to more distinctive, local products rather than mass-market brands. Microbreweries are relatively cheap and easy to establish: they can be housed in industrial estates, old factories, farm sheds and even campsites. Many small brewers are keen to open their workplaces to help educate the more discerning drinker. This trend is particularly prevalent in Britain, which is home to 2,200 microbreweries all by itself. Tours range from the two small units occupied by the Padstow Brewery, located in a fashionable Cornish resort, to Meantime, a larger establishment in Greenwich now owned by Japan’s Asahi. Festivals and the stocking by pubs of locally brewed beers have further spread the word.

  Wort is going on?

  Sources: Brewers of Europe; UN

  The shift towards smaller brewers shows no sign of abating. Forecasts for the craft industry look stout, with Technavio, a market-research firm, projecting that revenues will grow by around 10% a year until 2021. To keep pace with demand and stand out from the growing crowd, microbrewers will need to continue devising ever more inventive names, and striking packing designs, for their artisanal ales. Stand still, and the likes of Born Hoppy, Yeastie Boys and the 4 Hopmen of the Apocalypse will no longer be the Cream of the Crop.

  Why some American cities don’t like food trucks

  When gourmet food trucks first appeared on America’s streets in 2008, many dismissed them as a fad. A decade later it is clear that the trendy trucks – known for offbeat dishes, low prices and clever use of social media – are here to stay. That does not mean they are always welcome. In recent years many cities have passed laws restricting where and when food trucks can operate. But regulating the mobile-food industry has proved difficult. How do cities keep food trucks off their streets?

  The food-truck revolution is often credited to Roy Choi, who began selling $2 Korean barbecue tacos on the streets of Los Angeles in 2008. By 2015 America could boast more than 4,000 food trucks, which together were bringing in some $1.2bn per year. Not everyone finds them an appetising prospect, however. Critics say food trucks block streets, take up valuable parking spaces and disrupt pavements with crowds, waste and noise. Restaurant owners complain that because mobile vendors do not have to pay rent or property taxes, they enjoy an unfair advantage. Lawmakers have responded to these complaints with stricter regulation. In 2011 Boston set aside public sites where food trucks could do business – and barred them from operating elsewhere in the city.

  In 2013, Washington DC passed a similar law, delimiting “zones” where food trucks could operate legally. In cities that do allow food trucks to ply the public streets, truck owners typically face limits on how long they are allowed to park in a single place. In Denver vendors are given four hours per spot. In other cities, limits can be as short as 30 minutes. Some cities have gone further, imposing minimum distances between food trucks and existing bricks-and-mortar businesses. In Baltimore trucks may not set up shop within 300 feet of a restaurant. In some cities, these “buffer zones” can have a radius as large as 500 feet.

  Such regulation has stifled the food-truck industry in some of America’s biggest cities. In New York, where vendors have to shell out as much as $25,000 to rent a permit on the black market (the city has not increased the number of licences in three decades), and may not park in any of the city’s 85,000 metered parking spaces, launching a new food truck has become nearly impossible. In Chicago, where truck owners cannot operate within 200 feet of bricks-and-mortar restaurants and must carry GPS devices to verify their whereabouts, the food-truck market has stalled. Despite being home to more than 7,300 restaurants and 144 craft breweries, Chicago has just 70 licensed food trucks. But some are fighting the regulations: in 2011 the Institute for Justice, a libertarian law firm, successfully challenged an El Paso law that prohibited food trucks from operating within 1,000 feet of any existing restaurant. In 2015 the group won a similar case against San Antonio, which had a longstanding 300-foot rule. Where there is a wheel (or four), there is a way.

  How wine glasses have got bigger over the years

  In 1674 George Ravenscroft, an English glass merchant, was granted a patent for the discovery, made at his factory in London, that adding lead oxide to molten glass resulted in a clearer, more durable product. Thus was born lead crystal, and with it the fashion, in England, of drinking wine from glass vessels rather than, say, pewter ones. Wine glasses have evolved since then, of course, and one aspect of this evolution is of particular interest to Theresa Marteau and her colleagues from the Behaviour and Health Research Unit at Cambridge University. Dr Marteau suspected that glasses have got bigger over the years, and that this may have contributed to the increased drinking of wine in Britain – an increase that has been particularly marked in recent decades.

  She and her team obtained data on glass volumes going back to about 1700, from sources including the Royal Household (which buys a new set for each monarch) and the Ashmolean, the university museum of Cambridge’s arch-rival, Oxford. Altogether, they recorded the capacity of 411 glasses and, as the chart shows, there has indeed been a near-continuous tendency for that capacity to increase since Ravenscroft’s day (he died in 1683). There was also a notable acceleration of the process starting in about 1990. In all, the average capacity of a wine glass increased from 66ml in the 1700s to almost 450ml in 2017.

  That this volumetric inflation has stimulated wine consumption – Dr Marteau’s second hypothesis – is hard to prove. But it may have done. The amount of wine drunk in Britain has risen more than sevenfold since 1960, while the population has grown by only 25%. Data collected between 1978 and 2005 by Britain’s Office of National Statistics (ONS) suggest the proportion of adults drinking wine fell from 60% to 50% over that period, while the average weekly consumption of wine drinkers tripled, when measured as units of alcohol. Another data set, collected by the Institute of Alcohol Studies, a temperance charity, suggests that the amount of alcohol from all sources (measured as pure ethanol) consumed per head in Britain is about the same as it was in 1980, though it has fluctuated quite a bit in the intervening years, peaking in 2004.

  Bottoms up

  Capacity of wine glasses in England, ml; 1700–2016

  Source: BMJ

  Meanwhile, work designed to test directly the idea that glass size matters, which Dr Marteau published in 2016, produced mixed results. She looked at the consequences for wine sales at a bar in Cambridge of serving its wares in both bigger and smaller glasses than normal, while keeping the serving sizes on offer (125ml or 175ml, according to customer choice) the same. In weeks when the bigger glasses were used, wine sales went up by 9% on average. The larger vessels, it seemed, were indeed encouraging customers to order refills more often. On the other hand, in weeks when the size of the glasses was below normal, sales did not go down. Reducing glass sizes, then, does not keep people sober.

  Why food packaging is good for the environment

  Supermarkets encourage shoppers to buy products using clever layouts and cunning promotions. Alluring packaging helps too, while also keeping food clean and safe to eat. Green types balk at plastic-encased bananas. But some forms of packaging, especially for meat, can be an environmental boon. A third of food is wasted between field and plate, according to the UN, costing billions of dollars every year. Global greenhouse-gas emissions associated with food waste are higher than those of India, because chucking out items means the water, fuel, fertiliser and other inputs that went into them are wasted too. Such harm to the planet can be reduced if the length of time that food lingers on shelves or in fridges can be extended. This is especially true for meat.

  Meat provides 17% of mankind’s global calorific intake, but it is costly in terms of both cash and resources, requiring a disproportionate amount of water and feed. More land is given over to grazing animals than for any other single purpose. Overall, the livestock sector accounts for as much pollution as is spewed out by all the world’s
vehicles. Ruminant livestock, such as cattle and sheep, have stomachs containing bacteria able to digest tough, cellulose-rich plants. But along the way, huge volumes of methane are belched too – a greenhouse gas more than 20 times as powerful as carbon dioxide over the span of a century.

  Wrapping meat in vacuum packaging prevents oxidation, extending its lifespan. It allows meat to stay on shelves for between five and eight days, rather than two to four when simply wrapped on a polystyrene tray or draped behind a counter. This pleases big grocery chains, which stand to save thousands of dollars a week if less meat has to be either marked down or thrown out. It also delights consumers, as vacuum-packed meat is more tender.

  But doesn’t packaging itself require resources to produce? Yes, but the emissions from creating it are less than those associated with food waste. According to estimates, for every tonne of packaging, the equivalent of between one and two tonnes of carbon dioxide is released. For every tonne of food wasted, the equivalent of more than three tonnes of carbon dioxide is emitted. So although supermarkets have been focusing on curbing the amount of packaging they use, many now consider extending shelf life the most important environmental consideration. Given that meat consumption is expected to grow by 75% by the middle of the century, vacuum packaging offers an important way to boost resource efficiency and access to an important protein source.

  Peak booze? Alcohol consumption is falling around the world

  The world appears to have passed peak booze. The volume of alcoholic drinks consumed globally fell by 1.4% in 2016, to 250bn litres, according to IWSR, a research firm. It was the second consecutive year of decline, and only the third since data started to be collected in 1994. The main cause of the drop-off is that people are drinking less beer, which accounts for three-quarters of all alcohol drunk by volume. Worldwide beer consumption shrank by 1.8% to 185bn litres in 2016. Yet because the drinking-age population of the world grew by 1% in that time, beer consumption per drinking-age adult declined even more, by 3.2%. The overall drop is almost entirely because of declines in three of the five biggest markets. China, Brazil and Russia accounted for 99.6% of the global reduction in the volume of beer drunk in 2016.

  Both economics and changing tastes play a part. China overtook America to become the world’s biggest market for beer (by volume, not value) in 2001. It now quaffs a quarter of all beer. But consumption per person peaked in 2013 and dropped further in 2016. Beer’s appeal is waning among older drinkers, with over-30s moving to wine and over-40s favouring baijiu, the national spirit. Elsewhere, recessions have hit beer-drinkers’ pockets. In both Brazil and Russia, consumption by the average adult fell by 7%.

  Drying up

  Global alcohol consumption

  Source: IWSR

  Beer-drinking patterns also change as countries grow richer. In a study published in 2016, Liesbeth Colen and Johan Swinnen of the University of Leuven examined the effects of income growth and globalisation on beer consumption in 80 countries between 1961 and 2009. They found that as GDP per person increased in poorer countries, beer became more popular. But when it reached around $27,000 per person, consumption began to fall: consumers may opt for more expensive drinks, such as wine, once they can afford them. And beer consumption rose as countries became more globalised, the authors found. As international drinks companies move in, punters may find a new favourite tipple. For all these reasons, consumers in emerging markets have driven beer sales ever upwards for decades. But now the IWSR’s figures suggest that the froth is coming off the booze market.

  Why wheat has a more complex genome than humans

  The domestication of wheat and other staple crops in the Middle East some 10,000 years ago allowed for persistent settlement above a level of mere subsistence – and thus kicked off the rise of civilisation. Early farmers grew naturally occurring hybrids of wheat, and over time tamed them into a robust, easy-to-harvest and high-yielding species, the history of which is revealed in the genome of modern bread wheat. It is an enormously dense, complicated genome. And unlike the genetic codes of staples like rice, soya and maize, scientists struggled until 2017 to crack it. Why was it so hard to decipher – and was it worth the effort?

  The genomes of ancient wheats, such as wild emmer, contain more DNA base pairs than human genomes do. Domesticated hybrids, like bread wheat, are even larger. The genome of bread wheat has nearly six times as many DNA base pairs as the human genome (about 17bn compared with humans’ 3bn). That is in part because humans are diploid, with two sets of chromosomes, whereas the chromosomes of bread wheat come in sets of six (corresponding to the three ancient wheats of which bread wheat is a hybrid). Furthermore, the DNA of ancient wheat contained a huge amount of duplication. This means that bread wheat not only contains an enormous amount of genetic information, but that much of it is repeated. That makes decoding its genome complex. With fewer unique pieces, it is harder to fit the jigsaw together.

  Other staple food crops had their genomes sequenced long before bread wheat. But they are much simpler: popular strains of maize, soya and rice have 2.3bn, 1.1bn and 420m DNA base pairs respectively. The breakthrough with bread wheat came in 2016, when several different academic and industry projects matured. Both the International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium (IWGSC), which includes wheat farmers, breeders and scientists, and an independent group led by Johns Hopkins University, managed to sequence it. Others decoded wild emmer, an ancestor of both bread and durum wheat, and Aegilops tauschii, another of bread wheat’s ancestors.

  Decoding wheat’s genome is useful for two reasons. First, it makes it easier for researchers to manipulate wheat without recourse to so much trial and error. Second, it allows them to insert attractive traits from ancient wheats into modern ones, rather than introducing genes from other organisms altogether (a process known as transgenics). These ancient wheats may have better resistance to pests or better tolerance of drought, but offer poorer yields and quality, says Catherine Feuillet, head of trait research at Bayer, a German pharmaceuticals firm and an important player in IWGSC’s gene project. Crossing an ancient wheat with a modern one would normally take a decade, but by using the genome as a sort of index of the wheat’s positive traits, iteration and improvement can be done much faster. And with the genome to hand, and in the public domain (the IWGSC is eschewing patents), more researchers can get involved. Help may even come from unexpected corners. Ms Feuillet talks of finding “a high-school student who may finally be able to find a key resistance gene for a fungal disease”.

  Asian countries are eating more wheat

  So central is rice to life in Asia that in many countries, rather than asking “how are you?” people ask, “have you eaten rice yet?” Around 90% of the world’s rice is consumed in Asia – 60% of it in China, India and Indonesia alone. In every large country except Pakistan, Asians eat more rice than the global average. Between the early 1960s and the early 1990s, rice consumption per head rose steadily, from an average of 85kg per year to 103kg. As Asia grew wealthier, people began to consume more food, and rice was available and affordable.

  But rice consumption is now more-or-less flat in Asia as a whole. And in Asia’s better-off countries rice is going out of fashion. Figures from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) suggest that rice consumption per head has fallen since 2000 in China, Indonesia and South Korea, and has crashed in Singapore. Asians are following a rule known as Bennett’s law, which states that as people become wealthier they get more of their calories from vegetables, fruit, meat, fish and dairy products. At the same time, many of them are starting to replace the rice in their diets with wheat.

  Wheat consumption

  Kg per person, 2016–17 forecast

  Sources: USDA; UN; national statistics

  Wheat consumption is rising quickly in countries like Thailand and Vietnam. South-East Asian countries consumed 23.4m tonnes of wheat in 2016–17, estimates the USDA – up from 16.5m tonnes in 2012–13. Almost all of it was imported. I
n South Asia consumption is estimated to have grown from 121m to 139m tonnes over the same period.

  This trend has a long way to run, predicts Rabobank, a bank. South-East Asians still eat only 26kg of wheat a year, much less than the world average of 78kg. They seem unperturbed by price rises: wheat-eating kept growing even as the grain became more expensive between 2009 and 2013. Still, rice will remain central to many Asian cultures. People are unlikely to start greeting each other by asking if they have eaten bagels just yet.

  By the numbers: economical, with the truth

  The easiest way to get rich in America

  Americans are admirably optimistic about their ability to shape their own future. One survey found that nearly three-quarters of Americans thought hard work was a “very important” component of success, while just 62% put it down to a good education and less than a fifth to inherited wealth. But the United States ranks poorly compared with other advanced economies when it comes to income inequality and social mobility. So what must an ambitious young American do to get rich?

  A new study by Raj Chetty of Stanford University and a collective of other economists helps answer this question. By matching data from the Department of Education with 30m tax returns, Mr Chetty and his colleagues have constructed a data set that reveals to researchers both the income distributions of graduates of particular colleges, and how incomes vary depending on how rich the graduates’ parents were. The data show that attending an elite college is a good way of securing an upper-middle-class lifestyle: graduates of Ivy League-calibre universities have roughly the same chance of breaking into the top 20% of the income distribution, regardless of family background. Paths to the upper-middle class exist for those who graduate from lesser-known universities too, because earnings depend even more on what one studies than where. On average, graduates of lesser-known engineering colleges such as Kettering University and the Stevens Institute of Technology do just as well as those from the Ivy League.