By Carina Magyar in Nuts — Aug 5, 2023

VIII: Almond

The steady consolidation of almond farming.

These almonds look unsalted. Photo by Avinash Kumar / Unsplash

Good morning. Today is octidi, the 18th of Thermidor, Year CCXXXI. We celebrate l'amande, a nut that's actually a fruit that's actually a drupe.

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There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of almonds: the kind that are delicious to eat, and the kind that will kill you. These are otherwise known as sweet almonds and bitter almonds. While breeding programs have virtually eliminated bitter almonds from food-producing orchards, they are still grown in the wild and for some industrial purposes, as bitter almonds yield more oil. They also are bitter because they contain a pretty high dose of cyanide. While it would take an entire bag of bitter almonds to make an adult sick, just five to ten is enough to kill a small child.

Power over food supplies was once controlled by the sword. In medieval feudalism, the vast majority of the European population was employed in growing food, but ownership of that food (and the land it grew on) was elusive. The legal claims here weren't enforced so much by courts and paper (though those were components of enforcement in disagreement among nobles) but by knights on horses, spending far more time collecting taxes (in the form of directly taking a high percentage of the harvest) and punishing poachers than the romantic tales would have you believe. The story of the last few hundred years is as much about liberating control of the food supply as any other philosophical argument.

Which is why it's important to sound the alarm about a new type of food feudalism that's gradually emerging, in which certain regulations and control over the seed supply are consolidating into the hands of a few powerful interests, making it difficult for small and less prosperous localities to farm. And almonds are a good example.

VIII: Almond

VII: Flax

IX: Gentian

VII: Flax

IX: Gentian

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