Midaq Alley by Joseph Massad

Th           The first work of modern Arabic fiction to deal with the question of same-sex desire seriously is Naguib Mahfouz’s Zuqaq al Midaq (Midaq Alley). Published in1947, Midaq Alley is one of the Egyptian novelist’s earlier novels. Set in the early 1940s, while Egypt remained under British colonial rule and the confrontation between the Axis and the Allied powers was approaching at El-Alamein, the novel, a tragicomedy of sorts written in a realist style, opens with a romantic rendition of the history of Midaq Alley:


It is a wonder of epochs past. It soared one day in the history of Cairo like a flashing star. Which Cairo, do I mean? That of the Fatimids, the Mamluks, or the Sultans? Only God and the archeologists know the answer to that, but at any rate, it is a relic, and a precious one at that. How could it be otherwise when its cobblestone road leads directly into Sanadiqiyyah Street? That historic cul-de-sac, and its famous café, known as Kirshah’s Café . . . Although this alley lives in virtual isolation from what surrounds it, it still clamors with its own distinctive life, one that is connected in its depths to the roots of life as a whole while still preserving a good amount of the secrets of the world gone by.

            The novel tells of the transformation that the alley would undergo with the encroachment of colonial modernity, which had already enveloped much of Cairo over the previous century, but to which the alley had somehow remained immune.

               As we will see, the change will not only be felt at the technological, economic and political level but also at a deep social and ultimately epistemological level. The entry of Western epistemology is signaled in the novel by the appearance of certain words and concepts in English.  It is in this realm that the opening scene in which a folk poet, who for the previous twenty years had worked in Kirshah’s Café, playing the Rababah (a one-stringed instrument played with a bow) and reciting folktales of olden days, was dismissed from his job by a popular demand among customers to be replaced by the radio.

               The Sufi ascetic Shaykh Darwish explains the transformation: “ Yes, everything has changed . . . the poet has gone and the radio has come. This is the way of God in his Creation. It was mentioned in the ancient days in tarikh [history], which the call in English ‘History’ and is spelled ‘H-i-s-t-o-r-y.’” Presumably, the invocation of “History” as an “ancient” European concept is ironical in this context, given Mahfouz’s enumeration of different historical periods through which Cairo passed long before Europe or the English language itself existed.

               Shaykh Darwish had been an English teacher at one of the religiously endowed schools. He, like other employees, was let go when this traditional school system was placed under the control of the modern Ministry of Education, which required higher qualifications. He took up a job as a clerk in the Ministry of Religious Endowments with a lower salary, which made him so unhappy that he became notorious as the most stubborn complainer in the Ministry. News of his bad disposition reached his superiors who, though sympathetic, docked his pay a day or two.  “ One day he decided to write all his official correspondence in English, and would say that he was a technical employee, unlike other clerks.”  About to be fired, he requested to meet with the deputy minister and informed him that “God had chosen his man,” referring to himself. He deserted his family and friends and began to roam the streets, wondering into “the world of God, as he calls it.” He lost all his money, and his house but seemed completely at peace. Everybody became his family. “If his gown wore out, someone would get him another; if his necktie got torn, he would receive a new one too.” Shaykh Darwish, as he came to be known following the Sufi tradition, was loved and considered blessed. “People feel that he brings them good luck and they say of him that he is a holy man of God who received Godly revelations in both Arabic and English.”


     It is noteworthy that while the march of the colonial modern state had already has its imprint of Dawish’s life, wherein he taught English, a language not taught previously, the further entrenchment of the colonial state transformed Darwish’s life at a deep institutional level, dismantling the school system of which he was a part and erected a new one. Unable to accept this modern transformation, which for him signaled not progress but regression in both his pay and his rank as an employee (he was reduced from grade six to grade eight), he opted out of the whole affair and chose an alternative that was familiar to him,  namely, that of Sufi asceticism. The alley and Kirshah’s Café became his makeshift home.

               Unlike Sheykh Darwish, Kirshah, the café owner, is of a different ilk altogether. A hashish dealer and user, he spent much money on his habit and on chasing after “his desires”. Kishah lived “in the embrace of the deviant life for so long that it seemed to him to be a normal life. As a narcotics dealer, he was used to working in the dark, a fugitive from normal life and a prey to deviance.” Kirshah resented the modern colonial government of the British Mandate and its local cronies, “which allows alcohol, which God has forbidden, and prohibits hashish, which God has permitted!  It protects bars, which spread poison, but cracks down on hashish dens, which are therapy to souls and minds . . . As for his other desire, he says with his traditional cough: ‘you have your religion, I have mine!’”  Here Kishah invokes the traditional tolerant impulse of folk Islam where each will be judged according to his/her religion or to his/her interpretation of religion.  This metaphorical posting of sexual practice as tantamount to professing a religion is important in that it signals Kirshah’s refusal of one uniform religious judgment of his sexual practice, and his refusal of one religious authority’s right to pass such judgment.


    While he had initially been private about his sexual practices with young men and would not invite them to frequent his café, “once his situation became known, and the scandal spread, he took the mask off his face and pursued his misdeeds openly. Tragic scenes would take place between him and his wife that became fodder for scandalous gossip.”


    When Kirshah’s wife mobilizes his son Husayn against him, Husayn was “not concerned with the misdeed [ithm] unto itself, but rather with the scandal that it engendered around them as well as the volley of curses and fighting it unleashed inside their home. The misdeed itself was utterly unimportant to him. Indeed, the first time he was informed of it, he shook his shoulders and said indifferently: “he is a man and nothing shames a man!’ Then he condemned his father along with the others when he found his family’s reputation in shreds by gossip.”  Clearly for Husayn, his father’s sexual practices are not the cause of shame or embarrassment at all if they remain within the realm of the private and are not advertised publically. People knowing about what his father’s practices are is one thing, while his father becoming open about them is another. The issue is not that people in the neighborhood know that Kirshah fancies young men (which in itself causes no embarrassment), rather it is that Kirshah thinks he can openly court such young men before the eyes of the community without censure. It is the latter that the community rejects and that Husayn condemns. It is this kind of stark publicity of such private intimate practices that society condemns, not the practices themselves.

              The novel is rich with characters derived from Cairene quotidian life. Take for example the character of Radwan al-Husayni. His biography is borrowed from the story of Job, as like the latter, he lost all his children but maintained his belief in God and His mercy and appeared always content.  He is the one to whom Kirshah’s wife, Umm Husayn turned in order to pressure her husband to end his affair with an unnamed young boutique salesman whom she described as a “profligate [fajir]”.  When she sent for her husband to have a word with him, Radwan thought to himself that this would be the first time he would allow a ‘dissolute” (fasiq) person to enter his room. Then, “he went on wondering about the devil’s seduction of man, and how he makes him deviate from the proper nature that God gave him [fitrat Allah].”Attempting to bring Kirshah back to the righteous path, Radwan asked him to let go of this “disreputable and profligate young man.”  He then instructed him to “leave this man, for he is an abomination of Satan’s handiwork.”

               It is interesting that Mahfouz has Radwan use this description, which is a direct Qur’anic quotation from a well-known verse.. Ironically the Qur’anic verse has nothing to do with homosexuality, but rather with alcohol and gambling, among other things.  In the Qur’an, other abominations include eating pork, blood, or dead meat but not same-sex practices among men.  Undeterred, Kirshah answered back, “ Man commits many bad deeds, of which this is only one; don’t be angry with me, instead ask God to  guide me, and accept my apology and my excuse. For what power does man possess over his soul?” Kirshah’s clever response to Radwan’s  Qur’anic reference marshals a modified Qur’anic verse about man’s limited power to do good or harm himself “except as God willeth,” therefore exonerating Kirshah’s own actions as predestined by God.

              Radwan al-Husayni’s failure in his mission on behalf of Kirshash’s wife left her with no recourse but to confront both her husband and his boy lover. She marched one evening to the café and began to insult and beat up the young man, calling him a “son of a whore,” and “a woman is man’s clothing.”  When the shocked young man asked her what he had done to her, as he did not even know who she was, she answered him with ridicule that she was his “co-wife.”  The bloodied young man slipped away in the mayhem of Umm Husayn’s confrontation with Kirshah, who in turn was appalled at her audacity. Once the pious Radwan calmed her down and asked her to return home, despite her threats of walking out on her husband, Kirshah began to swear up and down that he “will not submit to a woman’s will, for I am a man, free, I do as I like, let her leave the house if she wants.”

               Mistaking Kirshah’s desire for the young man as a substitute for, rather than a supplement to, desiring women, the, evidently non-essentialist, Sufi Shaykh Darwish lifted his head and addressed Kirshah: ‘Your wife is strong, and has within her such manliness that is missing in many men. She is indeed a male, not a female, so why don’t you like her?” Furious, Kirshah lashed back at Darwish to shut up and walked away. Shaykh Darwish proceeded to explain: “This is an old evil, which in English is called homosexuality and is spelled h-o-m-o-s-e-x-u-a-l-i-t-y, but it is not love. True love is only for the family and descendants of the Prophet.” For Darwish, the Sufi ascetic for whom love is always love of God and the Prophet, the opposite of homosexual love is not heterosexual love, but a much nobler kind.

              What is being introduced by Mafouz is not only a word but also a new epistemology that seems to define such acts outside Midaq Alley, among the literati and those with an English education, where the encroachment of colonial concepts was being felt more strongly. In the alley, the problem was not with Kirshah’s desires for young men but his open sexual practice, which caused a minor scandal, one that ultimately had little social repercussions for him and affected his wife more, but no more and no less than had he taken a woman as his mistress and flaunted her in public. Mafouz does not explore the situation from the vantage point of the young salesman whom Kirshah courted. The young man remains unnamed, an encroaching character that come from outside Midaq Alley, who seems to have a small role to play and then disappears upon being beaten up by Umm Husayn. As the young man is unknown in Midaq Alley, there is no scandal for him. He simply disappears from the novel. The next time Kirshah’s desires are expressed in the novel is when his own son moves back in accompanied by his young bride and her brother, whom Kirshah fancies.

               It is important to note that although Mafouz used the term shudhudh (deviance) to refer to Kirshah’s sexual practices with men, the term is not limited to homosexual sex, but to all non-normative sex, desires, excess, and general public conduct. Indeed, when Salim ‘Alwan, the owner of the sales company in Midaq Alley, expressed his dissatisfaction with his wife’s lack of responsiveness to his insistent sexual advances (he indulge in eating green toasted wheat with pigeons and much nutmeg baked and served in a pan, which he deemed an aphrodisiac and to which he attributed his virility), this is what the narrator tells us:

               His wife did not welcome the baking pan at first, even when she was a young woman in the prime of her life. She had a healthy instinct [fitrah] but was repelled by deviance from nature; still she bore what she considered to be exhausting out of respect for her insatiable husband, and out of pity that she might unsettle his mind.

               Deviance in fact seems to be the operative judgment not only of the sexual desires of Kirshah, Salim ‘Alwan, and Hamidah, but also of all socially unpleasant behavior. When Salim ‘Alwan returned to work weakened by his heart attack and deeply depressed, his hostility to his employees and the constant irritability that he now exhibited led them to conclude that he had become an “accursed deviant.”

               The novel however does naturalize heterosexual desire as that which is normative, insofar as the institution of marriage is linked to it definitionally.  The declaration is made by Umm Hamidah, the alley’s matchmaker, not only as a truism but also as an expression of economic necessity, for her livelihood depended on it.  She stated that “men love marriage in their depths” and that “a man wants a woman even if paralysis had crippled him, for this is Our Lord’s wisdom,” and “this is why God created the world. He could have filled it with men only, but God created the male and the female, and he graced us with reason so that we understand his aim; there is no deviation [mahid] from marriage.

     .   .   .  .  .

                Midaq Alley received critical acclaim by book reviewers of the period. Sayyid Qutb expressed his dissatisfaction with the novel on account of the abundance of “deviance” and “deviants” in it (understood as general social deviance). He proposed that Mafouz reduce the number of deviant characters from five to two. Nabil Matar, half a century later, misunderstood Qutb’s reference to deviance and perversion as a reference to same-sex contact and attributed Qutb’s dissatisfaction to those elements, which is a gross misinterpretation of Qutb and of the uses of the term “deviance” in the novel and by critics. Indeed, Matar strangely declares that the critics, Qutb included, received Midaq Alley with an “outcry against the novel’s homosexual characters.”  Besides Qutb’s review, Matar cites Lebanese critic Adib Muruwwah’s review of the novel as another example of a critic objecting to homosexuality in the novel, merely because Muruwwah stated that “no one among writers has been able to depict these [popular] classes as they are, as Mr. Mahfuz has done. He was utterly realist and faithful, even though this reality might have contained that which would on occasion offend proper decorum (such as the sodomy of Kirshah, for example).” Matar also cites Muhammad Fahmi’s review as another example, when all Fahmi stated was the he found “Kirshah’s deviance . . . somewhat strange for [someone] like him; perhaps had Kamil, the sweets seller, been afflicted with it . . . it would have added an atmosphere of joy to the story.: This is hardly an “outcry” against homosexual characters or anything remotely connected to it.

               Contrast this with the reception that Gore Vidal’s 1948 novel The City and the Pillar received in New York. The critical response was so violent that the New York Times refused to advertise the novel and, along with all the major magazines and newspapers, had a standing policy not to review any Vidal novels for the next six years merely because the novel depicted a homosexual encounter between two young, all-American athletic types, wherein one had an unrequited love for the other. In contrast to Vidal, Mahfouz continued to be celebrated by the Arabic press for the rest of is career despite continuing inclusion of characters who desire same-sex contact.

…

      In his discussion of Sa’dallah Wannus’s Orientalist play  Tuqus al- Isharat wa al- Tahawwulat (The Rites and Signs of Transformation), published in 1994, Massad  writes:

   The character of Mu’minah seems to conflate the body and its desires. She seems to posit that the truth of the body is that of desire. Her insistence on becoming a prostitute (though she is not compelled by poverty to do so), as she tells the Mufti, is unrelated to anger at her husband’s infidelity, the latter having provided her the opportunity to make the latent manifest. In undertaking her project of manumitting her body as part of the liberation of her repressed desire, a contradiction arises in Mu’minah’s logic (and in the logic of Wanna.)  If the play stresses the quest for individuality and individualism in a society that represses both, then desire cannot be the foundation of such a quest. As desire is always already social and not part of the individual economy, how is Mu’minah’s quest to release her desires from the shackles of traditional repression, and even oppression, to enter the social economy of carnal pleasure, a quest for modern individualism?  Wannus seems to posit Mu’minah’s quest as a Hegelian one, of transforming the being-in-itself into the being-for-itself and the being-for-another. But the Hegelian story is not only about the journey of self-consciousness into individualist self -realization but also that of a journey of self-consciousness into sociality, of being “in the world,” as Edward Said, echoing Heidegger, put it. When the response to her father’s horror at her sullying the family name and its honor by her action she responds that “what I do is no concern to anyone but me,” she is insisting on deploying the individualist project and exiting from society. Indeed, no less an authority than the Qur’an is marshaled to the cause of individualism by Mu’minah: “In the last instance, we do not know that no one carries the burden of others, and that each soul receives every good that it earns, and suffers every ill that it earns.” How is desire, which presupposes sociality, liberated in an asocial individualist world? The play provides inadequate answers at best to the very question it raises. . .

              While Arab intellectuals, following Orientalism and the colonial encounter, came to perceive the existence of the Arabs principally in terms of civilization and culture, there emerges in the literature they produced an elaboration and an occasional contestation of the place of sexual desires in wider discourses and practices of modernity. It is at these rarer moments when the impositions and seduction of Western norms fail that the possibility of different conceptions of desire, politics, and subjectivities emerge. My hope is that the critique that Desiring Arabs offers marks an instance of that possibility.

End of the Ottomans by Tamin Ansary

Historians looking back can see quite clearly that Suleiman’s failure to take Vienna in 1529 marked a watershed. At that moment the empire had reached its greatest extent, it was no longer expanding.  This was less than obvious at the time because the empire was still fighting someone somewhere all the time, and the news from the battlefield was often good. The Ottomans were losing battles here and there but they were also winning here and there. Were they losing the big ones and winning only the little ones? The answer was yes but that was hard to gauge for people swimming through the historical moment.  How does one weigh the significance of a battle? Some people were alarmed, but some people always are. After all, the empire was not shrinking.

Unfortunately, however, not shrinking was not good enough for the Ottoman Empire. In truth, this empire was built on the premise of permanent expansion. It needed a constant and generally successful war on its borders for all of its complicated internal mechanisms to work.

First of all, expansion was a source of revenue, which the emperor could ill afford to lose. Second, war served as a safety valve. For example, peasants who were forced off the land for one reason or another didn’t hang out hungry and hopeless, turning into a surely rabble. They could always go join the arm, go on a campaign, score some booty, and then come home a start a little business. Once expansion stopped this pressure of agrarian displacement and surplus population drifted into the cities. Even if they had a skill, they might not be able to ply it. The guilds controlled all the manufacturing and they could only absorb so many new members. A good many drifters ended up unemployed and disgruntled.

Third, the classic devshirme depended on a constant conquest of new territories out of which “slaves” could be drafted for the institutes that produced the empire’s elites.  The janissary had originally labored under one important restriction: they were not allowed to marry and produce heirs, a device designed to keep new blood flowing into the administration.  Once the expansion stopped the devshirme began to stagnate. Then janissaries began to marry and swing their clout to get their kids the best possible educational and employment opportunities. This meant the janissary encrusted into a permanent, hereditary elite, which reduced the vigor of the empire because it meant that experts and specialists who ran the empire were no longer drawn exclusively from those who showed early promise but also included dullards with rich and important parents.

Then came the follow-up to Sulieman’s failure. In 1683, the Ottoman’s tried against to take Vienna, just as they had 154 years earlier and were routed by a coalition of European forces. Whereas in 1529 failure to score a victory resulted in, at worse, a sort of general, indefinable social malaise that was hard to explain or caused religious conservatives to rail about the moral fabric of society and the importance of restoring old-fashioned values, this time the Ottoman elite knew they had been trounced and something had gone very wrong.

It made them doggedly determined to pump up their military strength. Against the formless forces eroding the empire, they thought to fling up a military bulwark. Pouring resources into their military, however, only imposed more expenses on a government that was already overburdened.

It was overburdened in part because European traders entering the economy had upset the delicate checks and balances in the Ottoman system. Forget the battle of Lepanto, the failed siege of Vienna. Ultimately, it was traders, not soldiers, who took down the Ottoman Empire.

In the Ottoman Empire, guilds (intertwined with Sufi orders) controlled all manufacturing and they protected their members by locking out competition. One guild had a monopoly on producing soap, for example, while another had a monopoly on making shoes.  The guilds couldn’t exploit their monopoly positions to jack up prices, because the state imposed limits on how much they could charge. The state protected the public and the guilds protected their members; everything balanced, everything worked.

Then the Westerners came into the system. They didn’t compete with the guilds by trying to sell soap or shoes – the state wouldn’t let them. No, they came looking for stuff to buy, raw materials mainly, such as wool, meat, leather, wood, oils, metals and the like – whatever they could get their hands on. Suppliers were happy to sell to them, and even the state smiled on this trade, because it brought gold into the empire. Unfortunately, the Europeans were after the same materials the guilds needed to make their products. And the Europeans could outbid the guilds because they had the gold of the America in their satchels, while the guilds only had their profits, which were limited by government price controls. They couldn’t make up the difference with volume – by producing and selling more goods, that is – because they just couldn’t get enough raw materials to increase production. With foreigners sucking those out of Ottoman territory, artisans in the Ottoman world felt the pinch: domestic production began to fall.

Ottoman officials saw the problem and dealt with it by banning the export of strategic raw materials needed by domestic industries. But laws of this type only opened up contraband opportunities: when exporting wool is a crime, only criminals will export wool. The black market economy began to thrive: a whole class of nouveau riche black-market entrepreneurs emerged: and since they were breaking the law to make money, they had to bribe various officials to look the other way, which opened up opportunities for corruption, which spawned another class of nouveau riche “entrepreneurs”: bribe-battened bureaucrats.

So now a lot of folks had illegal cash to spend that didn’t come out of increased productivity. But what could the newly rich Ottoman citizens spend their money on? Investing in aboveboard industries was out: it would attract unwelcome attention from the state. So they did what drug dealers do in modern American society. They spent freely on extravagant luxury items, including consumer goods from the West, which could be had for cash paid under the table. The very trends undermining Ottoman ability to manufacture goods were providing a market for European industry and incidentally draining the gold back to Europe.

Outside cash coming into the system just as production was falling generated inflation: that’s what happens when you have more money chasing fewer goods.  Whom does inflation hurt? It hurts people on fixed incomes, and not only the poor.  In Ottoman society people on “fixed incomes” included salaried government bureaucrats and more particularly the salaried officials at court- that bloated, wholly nonproductive upper class. These officials were rich beyond the dreams of Croesus. But even the richest of the rich somehow feel threatened when their buying power goes down. How much they had didn’t matter: it was how much less they had that got to them. Inflation made rich courtiers living on fixed salaries feel like they had to tighten their belts and this they didn’t like.  They began to supplement their incomes by controlling access to the administrative and legal workings of the state.  When people have no role except to provide access, they have no power except to deny access. Courtiers and bureaucrats began to prevent instead of facilitate – unless they were given bribes. The Ottoman Empire became a paperwork nightmare. To negotiate one’s way through it, a person needed to bribe people who knew people who could bribe people who could bribe other people, and so on, creating an expensive maize of delays and bottlenecks.

To combat this gumming up of the works, the state raised salaries, so official wouldn’t feel the need to take bribes. But the state didn’t have any source of extra funds based on real productivity, especially since the empire was no longer expanding and flush with the revenue that came from conquest. In order to raise salaries, pensions and soldiers’ wages, therefore, the empire had to simply print money.

Printing money spurs inflation –which puts us back where we started! Everything the Ottoman government did to stem corruption and promote efficiency only aggravated the problem it was trying to solve. Eventually, government officials gave up and decided to hire some consultants to come in and help them set things in order. Western business forces thus began to operate freely in the Ottoman Empire.  Their interaction with the Ottomans can be summed up in one word: capitulations.

These capitulations began when the empire was still at is height, and the term simply referred to permissions granted by the mighty sultans to petty petitioners from Europe pleading to do business in the Empire. Capitulations were lists of permitted business activities for Europeans, organized by category. There was no single moment when capitulations stopped meaning “permissions doled out haughtily by mighty Ottoman lords” -in exchange for a fee or percentage of gross sales (rarely a percentage of profits) –and started meaning “humiliating concessions wrung out triumphantly from Ottoman officials (by haughty European bosses backed by the military might of their governments).” But that’s certainly what they meant by 1838, when the Ottoman’s signed the treaty of Balta Liman which, for example, which placed low tariffs on European goods coming into the Empire but imposed high tariffs on products flowing out. It forbade Ottoman subjects to establish monopolies but permitted and eased the way for Europeans to do just that, ensuring that Ottomans would be unable to compete with European businessmen on their own soil.


These capitulations were soon followed by ‘reorganization measures”  - The Noble Edict of the Rose Chamber” (1839), “The Imperial Edict” (1956) and a third in 1860- designed to construct a modern secular state on democratic principles- written out by the British Ambassador Stratford Canning and handed to Ottoman officials with instructions to translate it and proclaim it publically.

A growing movement of reformists throughout the empire and the Muslim world embraced and promoted the reforms. They thought that the only way to defeat the Europeans was to beat them at their own game which would necessitate, first of all, adopting whatever European ideas accounted for European strength. But to many Ottoman Muslims, the tanzimat  smelled less like reform and more like fresh evidence of alien power over their lives.

The Ulama was still around. The Tanzimat worked directly against their interests by taking education out of clerical hands, replacing Shari’ah courts with secular courts and substituting French laws for Islamic laws. Of course they were going to resist; and the ulama still had a lot of moral authority among ordinary people and clout at the court too.

 The sultan and his advisors soon found themselves caught between the clamor of the secular modernists and the yammer of both the Islamic old guard and various ‘schools of reform’ whether of the fundamentalist Wahhabism, the Aligarh Movement or those associated with Sayyid Jamaluddin-i-Afghan.

It was a see-saw battle.  It wasn’t like one group of agitators were nationalist, another group secular modernists, some other one liberal constitutionalists. Many ideologies and movements were intertwined and interacting. Any single person might espouse a bit of this and a bit of that.  Eventually a group, held together for a brief time by their youth- The Young Turks- overwhelmed the last Ottoman sultan, a weak and silly man named Abdul Hamid II. In 1908 they forced him to reinstate the constitution (briefly suspended in the turmoil) and reduce himself to a figurehead.  On January 23, 1913, the ultranationalist Committee for Union and Progress staged a coup d’etat, assassinated the incumbent vizier, deposed the last Sultan, ousted all other leaders from the government, declared all other parties illegal and turned Ottoman Turkey into a one-party state. A triumverate of men emerged- the Three Pashas- and they were ruling the truncated remains of the Ottoman Empire in 1914, when the long-anticipated European civil war broke out.

.  .  .  .  .

From the Western side, it seems plausible (to some) to assert that funding and arming rulers amenable to Western ways in places like Pakistan, Jordan, Iraq, Afghanistan and Egypt helps bring democracy to those societies, as well as the blessings of the ‘free market.’ It also seems plausible (to some) to assert that Islamic social values are backward and need correction by more progressive people, even if force must needs be applied to get it done.

From the other side, however, the moral and military campaigns of recent times look like the long familiar program to enfeeble Muslims in their own countries. Western customs, legal systems, and democracy look like a project to atomize society down to the level of individual economic units making autonomous decisions based on rational self-interest. Ultimately, it seems, this would pit every man, woman and child against every other, in a competition of all against all for material goods.


What looks, from one side, like a campaign to secure greater rights for citizens irrespective of gender,looks from the other side, like powerful strangers inserting themselves into the private affairs of families and undercutting people’s ability to maintain their communal selves as familial and tribal networks. In sort, what looks from one side like empowering each individual looks, from the other side, like disempowering whole communities.

The conflict presently wracking the world is not, I think, best understood as a “clash of civilizations”. It’s better understood as the friction generated by two mismatched world histories intersecting. Muslims were a crowd of people going somewhere. Europeans and their offshoots were a crowd of people going somewhere. When the two crowds crossed paths, much bumping and crashing resulted and is still going on. Unraveling the vectors of those two crowds is a minimum precondition for sorting out the ideas and feelings of the present time. The unraveling will not itself produce sweetness and light, because there are actual contradictions within each vector and incompatibilities between them, not just ‘misunderstandings’.

Law Without Justice by Paul Robinson and Michael Cahill.

“In Law as in life, we want people to get what they deserve. Indeed, many (probably most) people, both legal experts and ordinary citizens think this is a fundamental reason (and perhaps the reason) that we have a legal system at all: to help give people what they deserve when life has not. If one person wrongs another, the law makes the wrong-doer pay. On the other hand, if someone has done nothing wrong, we expect the law to leave that person alone, as she does not deserve to be sanctioned or punished.

This basic notion holds particularly true for criminal law, in part because the stakes are higher on all sides. When a person gets away with murder, we are outraged. Why?  Because we are concerned about the message this sends to other would-be murderers, who now think they can kill without fear? Perhaps in part, but surely our outrage is more deeply related to the particulars: this murderer has committed an evil act and deserves to be punished, yet has evaded punishment. Similarly, when we hear that an innocent person  has been incarcerated, we are outraged. Why? Because we fear that this indicates a general corruption in the system and that the government may come for us next? A little, perhaps, but surely the main reason is that we sympathize with the individual, who has not received the treatment she deserves. In both cases, we feel that justice has not been done, and this offends and angers us. Isn’t justice supposed to be the system’s goal?

Surprisingly often, it isn’t. To take just one brief example, the case of Leandro Andrade who, in November 1995 went to two K-Mart stores and stole none video-tapes worth a total of about $154 . Because he had earlier convictions for burglary, minor thefts, and drug offenses involving marijuana – though he had already served time for those offenses – Andre was sentenced under California’s ‘three strikes’ law to two consecutive sentences of twenty-five years to life, meaning he will serve a minimum of fifty years in prison for his video tape theft.  Currently, California is spending about $26,000 per year for the incarceration of Andrade and each of its other prisoners. But it is also paying another price: the price of sacrificing justice by treating minor offenses as if they were far more serious than significant, violent felonies  .  .  .”

Julio Marrero, a guard in a federal prison who had received numerous threats to his life, purchased and carried a gun under the impression that  his exemption for obtaining a special permit as a officer of the federal government was equally applicable under the laws of the State of New York, was arrested, convicted of felony possession of a firearm, fined, given a 3 year suspended sentence and thus barred from work in law enforcement or corrections.




Deviations from the norms of just desert occur frequently in respect to bright-line determinations of the immaturity ‘defense. All actors below a specific cutoff age are  conclusively presumed to be immature and are tried in juvenile court in which the normative expectations  for offenders, and the punishments handed out are lowered. Above a certain age defendants are tried as adults and not allowed  an immaturity defense. The problem is only exacerbated by the increasing trend towards lowering the age at which juveniles can be tried and punished as adults. Here, as elsewhere, flexible standards rather than bright-line rules would better serve the goal of just deserts.  Undertaking complex judgments of blameworthiness – assessing mental capacities and functioning in specific situations should not normally be abandoned simply because they are sometimes difficult.

“Strict liability’ rules in criminal courts also lead to many deviations from the principle of just deserts as in the case of a mentally retarded individual who impregnated a girl who he thought and had been told by the girl herself and several friends was sixteen years old but was actually fourteen. He received a twenty year sentence for statutory rape. Felony-murder offenses are also the subject of deviations. A teenager in Chicago fled from an officer who stopped him for ‘erratic driving”. The officer pursued the kid on foot .Running between two cars into the street during the chase the officer was struck and killed by another officer responding to his call for assistance. The suspect was apprehended, convicted of felony murder and given a life sentence.

The author gives many other examples of distortions of the just desert principle in American law enforcement and jurisprudence. A serial killer is set free because his initial arrest lack sufficient  ‘probable cause’ and evidence gathered at the time of that arrest ruled inadmissible. He goes on to kill and dismember three more victims before finally being apprehended. Clear evidence of culpability in the murder of his girlfriend shows up after a man is acquitted and is thus only convicted of perjury and serves three years in jail. A woman is brutally raped but is only able to face what happened to her, identify her attacker- who in the meantime had raped several other women, after the statue  of limitations had run out.

The author also discusses the disparities of punishments and deviations from the principle in several areas of the law, including ‘the war on drugs’, increasing criminalization of administrative rules and the prosecution of corporate misconduct. He examines the empirical evidence that is sometimes used to justify such deviations in terms of deterrence, crime prevention, ‘law and order’ or simply ‘keeping the lid’ on things in high crime areas as embodied in the rationale behind ‘broken windows’ policing. He finds this evidence to be largely inconclusive.

 Although the author recognizes that no legal system can hope to entirely eliminate deviations from the rule of just deserts, the closer a system gets to it, the greater the authority the law achieves in the eyes of the people and therefore, the more incentive it provides to obey it. Without substantive just desert, no other measures of prevention, deterrence or public safety can hope to be successful. The provision of just deserts, he argues, undertaken with a greater flexibility and painstaking adjudication than is currently allowed in the law in many States, especially in present ‘good faith’ and and broad, abstract expectations of ‘reasonable conduct’ by officers and prosecutors, would not seriously injure their capacity to investigate, apprehend and convict dangerous criminals or maintain law and order, irrespective of the inchoate fears and unfounded claims and fallacies of widespread public perceptions of the extent of crime in America today. Harsh and unfair regimes of punishment and their attendant costs could be reduced significantly. Constitutional  protections of life and liberty under the Bill of Rights need not be relaxed. They could, in fact, be  greatly enhanced.

Formal and Substantive Human and Civil Rights by Joseph Massad

The Soviet/US struggle over defining human rights is now the stuff of  history given the US victory in the Cold War but a brief review is necessary. While the US insisted that having the right to work, to free or universally affordable health care, free education, daycare, and housing (which the Soviet system granted in the USSR and across Eastern Europe as substantive and not merely as formal rights) are not human rights at all, the Soviets, in the tradition of socialism, insisted they were essential for human life and dignity and that the Western enumeration of the rights to free speech, free association, free movements, freedom to form political parties, etc., were “political” and “civil” and not “human rights, and that in reality in the West, they were at any rate only formal and not substantive rights except for the upper echelons of society and those who owned the media and could access it and could fund election campaigns, etc.

Moreover the Soviets argued that it was essential for humans to have human rights in order to be able to access civil and political rights in a substantive manner and that granting formal civil and human rights while denying substantive human rights amounted to granting no rights at all. Perhaps most important in this regard is that the post-World War II US definition of human rights did not encompass in the 1950s and 60s the rights of African Americans to vote, to receive the same social services as whites, and not to face official institutionalized racial discrimination – all of which were referred to in the US lingo as mere “civil rights.”. Malcolm X’s insistence that US violations of the human rights of African Americans should be taken up by the United Nations, which had the power to impose sanctions on the United States as a racist state, earned him much opprobrium and a much lesser status in latter official commemorations that Martin Luther King, who was satisfied principally with limiting the Black struggle in the US to the arena of “civil rights.”

While the Soviet form of “popular democracy” was anchored in the hegemony of this system of (human) rights and its resultant substantive and massive benefits and massive limits and (civil) restrictions applied universally to all Soviet citizens, the US system of liberal “democracy” was anchored in its own system of rights that granted substantive and massive benefits to smaller portions of the citizenry while applying massive restrictions to the larger portions. The post-World War II Soviet system did not need to resort to major coercive means when its hegemonic system did not seem all-encompassing; indeed in a country of some 260 million people, at the height of the 1960s and 1970s  Brezhnevite repression, there were no more than 500 political prisoners in the country. Amnesty International’s count in 1980 was that the Soviets had no more than 400 people imprisoned for political dissidence between 1976 and 1980. The postwar United States, in contrast, had to rely, especially in the late 1940s, on more massive means when the hegemony of its system was weakened, as evidenced by the McCarthyist repression and the repression of the antiwar and civil rights protests of the 1950s-1975, and had hundreds of political prisoners (under varying legal pretext used to prosecute activists), who are harder to count due to the use of criminal charges to imprison them. The reassertion of the US coercive system would be strengthened through its new racialized and repressive criminal justice system since the 1980s and more after September 2011 with legislation of the Patriot Act and related repressive measures.

While in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the hegemony of Soviet-style “popular democracy” eroded under the increasing US Cold War assaults on the USSR, most Soviet and East European citizens hoped to end the “popular democratic” systems of their ruling Communist Parties and gain Western style political and civil rights. They wanted that latter not instead  of but in addition to retaining those human rights that the Soviet system guaranteed them. In the end, they lost their existing human rights and gained very little Western political and civil rights, and even the modicum of rights they did gain were more formal than substantive and subjected to the vagaries of financial and class power. It was in this context of an all-persuasive imposition of neoliberalism on a global scale that the U.S. discourse of human rights and the meaning the US gives to “human rights” reigned supreme.

[This carefully drawn distinction between human and civil rights, formal and substantive, as illustrated in the contrast between the Soviet and US ideology and systems during the Cold War, plays an important role in Professor Massad’s analysis of the UN, private philanthropy the United States government, and domestic political action groups ‘crusades’ to save, for instance, women and ‘gays’  from the oppressive impositions of ‘Islam’ , that is, to reform Islamic societies in line with Western notions of civil rights to the utter neglect and even direct destruction of human rights in both the formal and substantive sense. A few examples will suffice.]

Most laws on the books today that discriminate against women in formerly colonized Muslim-majority countries, including nationality laws, are derived from Western liberal and secular colonial and national laws, yet no slogans that oppose secularism and liberalism,, seen as European par excellence, have identified these ideologies as essentially sexists and gender-discriminatory; yet somehow all Islamists are often condemned for allegedly being essentially sexist and that this is the main characteristic of their social programs. The point here is that if the concern with Islamists taking power is because some Islamists’ gender policies or views ( and many Islamist parties in fact have a far better record on gender equality and women’s representation than secular parties in the region), then why is opposition not articulated as strongly against non-Islamist parties (e.g. Mubarak and Sisi in Egypt) whose record on women is often far worse?

Some would say that in the U.S. and West European countries, at least since the mid 1980s, laws ( masquerading under the rubrics ‘crimes of passion’ and ‘domestic abuse’ rather than what is called ‘honor killings’ in Islamic society) that protected men who commit crimes against women have been removed but in Jordon they remain on the books. But if this is so, research has not turned to a condemnation of the Jordanian government and the regime which uphold this law, and which is derived from the Napoleonic code, but Arab culture and “Islam” tout court,  when all Islamic jurisprudential schools are condemnatory of “honor crimes” as murder and refuse to offer mitigating circumstances to men whom commit them. These crimes also occur at far lower rates in Muslim countries than in the U.S., whatever the laws on the books are.

In dealing with the question of the hijab and other dress codes, Mossad quotes Wendy Brown (commenting on an article in The New York Times in her paper “Civilizational Delusions”):

Decades after Euro-Atlantic women rose up against sexual codes that bound them to the roles of subservience, unpaid and unrecognized labor, sexual availability and decorative objectification, what is to be made of these New York women teetering on the balls of their feet in stilts? Imagine walking for an hour in such shoes, let alone running for a bus, chasing after children, navigating inclement weather, standing all day at work or even just for two hours at a cocktail party? In Islamic religious female dress, one would surely be more comfortable, far less likely to sprain an ankle, slip on ice, trip on an uneven sidewalk, permanently damage one’s feet, or succumb to chronic sciatica or other back injuries. One might have a better concentration, a wider subjective imaginary, and more versatility in greeting the various episodes and possibilities of a day.. In short, if shoes nearly impossible to stand let alone walk in are freely chosen, that does not make them shoes of freedom, something that of course that can be said of the hijab or niqab as well. Yet to my knowledge, no one, anywhere in the Western world, has ever seriously considered passing legislation to outlaw such shoes, their making or their wearing, including in schools or state offices.

The anthropologist Lila Abui-Lughod's Egyptian native informants authorized her to make this plea to western feminists :"I have done fieldwork in Egypt over more than twenty years and I cannot think of a single woman I know, from the poorest rural to the most educated cosmopolitan, who has ever expressed envy of US women, women they perceive as bereft of community, vulnerable to sexual violence and social anomie, driven by individual success rather than morality, or strangely disrespectful of God.”

Many, even the vast majority of poorer Muslim women  reject the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women’s premise of total gender equality with regard to housing provision, economic maintanence of the marital home and children, and child support in the case of divorce, given that Islamic jurisprudence has historically placed great emphasis on male responsibility in these arenas. Indeed this ‘traditional logic may explain why poverty and economic well-being  in Arabic countries cannot be easily identified as a gender issue, unlike the U.S. which, at any rate, is one of the few nations that has continuously refused to ratify the CEDAW.

[Most of Joseph Assad’s book consists of a Critical analysis of the historical roots and contemporary elaborations of Orientalism (he is the  the disciple of Edward Said), Semitism and the Abrahamic conceptions of cultural in our current “Clash of Civilizations” and “War on Terror”. It makes for difficult  reading, confounds pre-conceptions and embroils the reader in controversy especially in regards the the issues surrounding the use of terms such as ‘Queer’, “Gay” or even ‘Sexuality” which have no functional equivalence in the Arabic language and which he has suggested the use of which by government agencies and NGO’s in protecting ‘rights’ is more provocative of repression in Islamic contexts then understanding.

But the careful distinction he makes between ‘human’ and ‘civil rights, and the role these conceptions play in neo-liberal agenda ( expanding ‘global finance’, opening international trade, invoking ‘austerity’ on foreign and our own governments and supporting repressive secular regimes)- which de-emphasizes the former in favor of the latter in the context of phantasmagoric representations and essentializations of the Islamic Other and no lack of self-deception with regard to the substantive character of its own society- holds the treatise together.]

Islam in Liberalism by Joseph A. Massad; University of Chicago Press, 2015

Starch by Joanna Blythman

Joanna Bythman is an investigative food journalist and influential commentator on the British food chain. This book (Fourth Estate, London, 2015) is an examination of the food processing industry in the U.K., Europe and America; how it works and the character of its products. Here  I present her chapter on starches, followed by her brief remarks on recent advances in nanotechnology as applied to packaging.

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In food manufacturing starch is essential kit, by far the most commonly used item, in the food manufacturer’s box of tricks, as one authority explains: ‘Since their development in the 1940s, modified food starches have become a vital part of the food industry. Practically every category of food utilizes the functional properties of starch to impart some important aspect of the final product.’

It’s no exaggeration to say that the modern processed food industry is predicated on the stuff. This is why, when you turn to the ingredients listings on the massed ranks of manufactured foods, the word starch turns up with regularity, sometimes prefixed by a source, say, potato starch, or more often by the enigmatic word ‘modified.’

Starch acts as a muse for the modern food industry, a biddable, versatile, obliging substance that inspires a never-ending flow of creativity. Although it is utterly lacking in any food personality of its own, the very neutrality of nondescript starch makes everything feasible. Think of it as a facilitator, an ingredient that generates a boundless range of technical possibilities.

Added starch makes puffed potato snacks and breakfast cereals crisp and expansive, it makes your tortilla chip crunchier, and your crisps crispier. It lends smoothness and creaminess to processed cheese. It extends the shelf life of yogurt, gels fruit and cream fillings, adds fiber to bread, replaces eggs, makes batter more clingy, adds porosity to crackers, and airiness to cakes. In tumbled, injected and emulsified meats, such as sausages and ham, it can mimic fat, so acting as a ‘meat extender’. Starch seals in moist glazes and marinades and acts as a carrier for flavorings and colorings. It stops your orange juice from separating and makes it cloudy. Starch binds the water in mayonnaise, margarine, ketchup and salad dressings, toughens up dough for the onslaught of factory baking, and adds viscous heft to bouillons and gravies. It stiffens canned foods – soups, pulses, vegetables – and makes ready meals more resilient to the temperature changes posed by chilling, freezing, transportation, reheating, and the general stress and elevated temperatures of factory production. Starch providers ‘freeze/thaw stability’, prevents freezer ‘burn’ and gives food more ‘microwave tolerance.’ Last but not least, it can create texture. Whatever consistency is needed – crisp, crunchy, smooth, shreddable, jellied, stringy, cuttable, short, smooth, cohesive or chewy – multi-tasking starch can deliver it.

But how can one boring, anodyne ingredient do so much? After all, starch in the form that ordinary people know it, such as cornflower and arrowroot, can only perform a fraction of the tasks mentioned above. As you might have guessed, the starches available to food manufacturers are rather remote relatives of those we might use at home. They have been altered in various ways to endow them with properties they lack in any of their recognized household forms. Natural starches, you see, are badly behaved, dysfunctional starches that can only ever find their true potential through the improving hand of food technology.

Modified starch, the most familiar of these ‘improved’, more ‘functional’ starches, has clocked up decades of steadfast services to industrial food manufacture. This type of starch can be made using various techniques to change its characteristics. These include breaking it down with acids, bleaching it, converting it with enzymes, pre-gelatinizing it by heating and drying it so that it forms a gel in cold water, oxidizing it, cross-linking it with fats, converting it into esters or ethers, and bonding it with phosphates. Starch can also be browned using dry heat (dextrinization) to turn it into ‘starch sugars’, such as maltodextrin. Put it this way, modified starch is definitely not something you could cook up in any home kitchen.

There are many types of modified starch, each with unique properties and functions, a case of horses for courses. The starch in canned soups, for example, is often bonded with phosphates, which allows it to absorb more water yet stop any separation in the liquid. To prevent tomato sauce spilling of the factory pizza during baking, a modified starch treated with chorine solution is often added to the topping.

In Europe, modified starches are considered as food additives, and must carry an E number. These days, because the prefix ‘modified’ tend to ring the wrong bell with consumers, starch companies are developing a new tier of more functional ‘clean label’ starches that can lose the label-polluting M - word and E number, and be replaced with the more consumer-friendly ‘soluble fiber’, ‘starch’ or ‘dextrin’ tags.

These new wave starches are presented as more natural because the have not been chemically altered. Instead, only physical and mechanical techniques such as heat, extrusion, drum drying, compression and atomization can be used to change the particle size and structure. Because these newer functional starches are branded and trademarked, the companies that produce them need only volunteer minimal information about how they are made because the method becomes their intellectual property (trade secret).Marketed as specialty starches targeted for specific uses, they have really caught on with manufacturers. As one academic explains, ‘specialty starches continue to outpace unmodified starches in the processed food industry because of their ruggedness and ability to withstand severe process conditions.’

It’s easy to see why food manufacturers take such a keen interest  in starch, both old-timer and new guard. Whether it comes from corn, wheat, cassava, peas or potato, starch is wonderfully cheap and abundant because it is made from commodity cereals and cash crops that are much less expensive than other categories of foods. Therein lies the appeal of starch. It provides reliable, inexpensive bulk to pad out pricier ingredients, which makes for cost-effective replacement, as this starch company tells food manufacturers:

Like you, we are committed to keeping costs low. Our business is built on successfully replacing expensive ingredients with more cost-effective alternatives, helping you to withstand price fluctuations. Whether replacing expensive texture systems or substituting costly proteins, our starches will meet all your expectations and reduce ingredient costs. So what’s the secret of creating foods that appeal to customers’ concerns about cost and quality? Take a fresh look at your recipes and replace expensive ingredients withy no-compromise alternatives to reduce cost, not consumer appeal. We can provide you with tools to replicate the eating enjoyment and texture consumers look for at a fraction of the cost.

With the aid of starch, manufacturers can use ‘cost optimization’ to ‘value engineer’ their product for the benefit of price-sensitive shoppers. A worthwhile mission, surely?

Yet when you read the sales literature for starch products, a strong sense of self-interest on the part of food manufacturers emerges. Here, for instance, is how one starch company sells its starch-based fat replacer:

[It] cleverly allows food manufacturers to remove some butter content from products and still use the label ‘all butter’, which highlights to consumers that the food is still a decadent product. The finish of the product would retain the same ‘shortness’ and buttery richness and mouth-feel as the full fat equivalent.

Hey, presto. The addition of starch allows opulently labelled ‘all butter’ biscuits or croissants to contain less butter than they did before. Not quite what your average person might deduce from the label. The fat-replacing starch being recommended here goes by the name of Delyte, presumably a play on delight/delicious and lite/light (low fat). Or possibly the person who thought it up was thinking of delete, meaning something taken away; in this case, butter.

In food manufacturing, starch often forms the basis of a product. ‘Your base starch as a viscosifier, which established your food’s structure’, one company explains. An example here might be a Catalan-style flan or French crème caramel, where starch replaces more expensive eggs, milk and crème. ‘Once you’ve created the structure with your base starch, co-texturizers [ another set of starches] fine-tune texture properties. They bring out the more subtle differences in texture that experience in our mouths while eating, such as mouthcoating [creamy] and meltaway [lusciousness].’

As well as offering cheap bulk and texturizing potential, starch has never been in such demand as it currently is to replace other nutrients. As health regulators have breathed ever so lightly down the the neck of the processed food industry to make its products healthier, reduction of fat, sugar and salt has become a regulatory religion, one that opens new doors for starch. Products can be reformulated, bumping up quantities of starch and cutting persona non grata ingredients, thus providing a justification for reduced fat and sugar claims on the label. Using starch, manufacturers can adjust the composition or ‘matrix’ of a whole host of processed foods, to recast them in a flattering nutritional light. Dong so ticks a few boxes with the public health establishment, and the sums also add up very nicely for manufacturers, as this starch company explains:

Our specialty solutions mimic the organoleptic qualities of fat, delivering a creamy, luxurious texture and smooth, glossy appearance in better-for-you applications. We’re also skilled at replacing costly tomato solids. Whether you are looking to replace oil, cream, milk, milk solids, vegetables or egg, we an ensure premium quality and guilt-free indulgence at a competitive price.

And when it comes to starch, ingredient savings are no idle promise. A high-performance starch can replace fat at a ratio of 10:1 in dips, dressings, soups and mayonnaise for a lower calorie, low fat label at lower cost. Starch can stand it for 30% of the cream in a ready made spaghetti carbonara and make redundant at least 35% of the tomato paste  otherwise needed to make a credible pasta sauce. It allows manufacturers to reduce the margarine in puff pastry by a fifth. A starch developed using a ‘cling optimized texture system’ will even have the necessary adhesion, viscosity and suspension to replace ‘up to 40% of the tomato/ vegetable solids in soups and solids’.

On a factory scale, using starch makes for massive savings. To achieve this end, mimicry lies at the heart of food manufacture, a constant itch to make not a faithful version of the real thing, but something that passes for it. For food technologists and new product developers, all the fun with food comes when you take it apart, break it down into components, then reassemble it in a more lucrative. Easy-to-process form.

Greek yogurt is a case in point… which between 2008 and 2012 achieved a spectacular sales curve. Sensing an opportunity, many companies wanted to get in on this dynamic sales sector but they faced a stumbling block.. When produced in the traditional way, Greek yogurt takes a whole lot more more milk to make, different equipment and factory set-ups than standard yogurt.

The starch manufacturer Ingredion first mapped the sensory attributes of Greek yogurts on the market: qualities such as ‘jiggle’, ‘slipperiness, and surface shine. It then devised an innovative starch, which it claimed can give ‘ a similar texture and eating experience to the market leading product’, yet it is much cheaper to produce because it uses less milk and can be made using the standard high temperature/short time non-Greek method, without any investment in new equipment. With this fabulously functional starch, Ingredion promises that yogurt manufacturers ‘can get to market faster, and produce product at lower overall cost’.

How does fast-track Greekish yogurt compare in taste to the genuine article? Because most such products are not sold as natural, plain yogurt, but with added flavors and sweeteners, we rarely have the opportunity to compare like for like. However, it is common knowledge in the processed food industry that starch can import unwelcome flavors. As one authority notes: “cereal-based starches such as corn and wheat starch are sometimes considered to have off-notes described as ‘cardboard’ or ‘cereal-like’. Fortunately for manufacturers, because most processed foods have multiple ingredient formulations., they can make sure that off-tastes are routinely drowned out by other flavors.

Even companies that make starches don’t attempt to sell their organoleptic qualities. To do so would be a waste of time, because they all understand that starches taste, at best, of zilch. Instead they try to make a virtue out of nothingness. ‘The bland taste of potato starch allows whole meat products to maintain their natural palatability’ is how one starch company puts it. A more forthright version of the same message might read ‘the boringness of starch won’t interfere with other ingredients.” They are used as fillers, stabilizers, thickeners, pastes, and glues in dry soup mixes, infant food, sauces, gravy mixes etc.

And if the addition of starch means net loss of flavor, it also translates into a net loss of nutrition also, because when highly refined starches of the type used by food processors replace proteins, fats,  fruits and vegetables, they actually worsen the nutritional profile of the resulting product.

Now this might sound counterintuitive if you’ve paid attention to the standard government nutrition advice: “Rather than avoiding starchy foods, it’s better to try and base your meals on them, so they make up about a third of your diet.’ In recent times, starchy foods, even the most refined types, have been hyped by public health agencies. Starchy foods such as cereals, pasta and bread, we are told, ‘are a good source of energy and the main source of a range of nutrients in our diet. As well as starch, they contain fiber, calcium, iron and B vitamins.’ This presentation of starchy carbohydrate as a hero nutrient is highly debatable. If we are going to champion certain foods on the basis of micronutrients, such as iron and B vitamins, then meat would be a better bet because it contains them in greater abundance. As for fiber, we can get all we need vegetables and fruit.

Of course, starchy carbs in their whole, unprocessed forms do contain some useful micronutrients, but the same cannot be said for the refined sort, which would be more accurately described as stodge, or fodder. Refined starches are rapidly broken down into simple sugars and readily absorbed into the bloodstream. This is why, if you chew a bit of white bread for a few seconds longer than usual, it will begin to taste sweet. Refined carbohydrates cause spikes in blood sugar and insulin levels, which encourages our bodies to produce and store fat. Long term, this predisposes us to chronic disease. Due to their smaller particle size, highly processed, chemically or physically altered starches –precisely the type used in food processing –cause an even faster rise in blood sugar. So when food manufacturers brag about reducing sugar –on the surface, a noble mission –it is worthwhile noting that if starch is the replacement, then this is a case of more of the same. Think of it as a gesture, a tactical, piecemeal reformulation that should not be mistaken for a radical one.

In so many ways, starch is a never-ending source of inspiration to food manufacturers. Classless starch finds a role in every echelon of food processing. It’s facelessness allows to go everywhere and anywhere.

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Controversy over chemicals used in packaging , such as bisphenol A and phthalates, has been aired or decades, but the same cannot be said for nanoparticles, an emerging technology. Nanoparticles, which are far too minute to see with a microscope, are derived from materials such as clay, silver, titanium, silica and zinc oxide, and increasingly used in food and drink packaging. They can improve certain ‘smart’ functions: extending the shelf life of food by decreasing the permeability of plastics, acting as ant-bacterial coatings, or making packaging lighter and stronger. Nanosilver, for example, is used to coat plastic food containers so that anything stored within can be sold for longer. Nanoclays can be incorporated into the fabric of plastic bottles to prevent oxygen from migrating through the walls and shortening the shelf life of the contents.

A boon for the food industry and consumers, surely? Unfortunately, it looks as if nanoparticles can also leach from packaging into food and drink. Researchers recently found, for instance, that aluminium and silicon nanoparticles migrated from plastic bottle into an acidic medium – of the kind you find in fizzy drinks and juices p- and that this migration increased with time, and at higher temperatures.

The potential health problems with nanoparticles is their minuteness. They ate about one ten-thousandth the width of a human hair, which makes them more reactive and more bioactive than larger particles of the same substance. This means they can end up in places that larger particles would not – our cells, tissues and organs, where they can accumulate to ill effect Nanoscale zinc oxide, for example, has been found to cause lesions in the liver, pancreas, heart and stomach of laboratory animals. The European Commission’s Scientific Committee on Consumer Safety has warned that ‘clear positive toxic responses [in some of these tests] clearly indicate a potential risk [of nanoscale zinc oxide] to humans. Other research suggests that nanoparticles of titanium oxide can damage DNA, disrupt cell function, and interfere with the defense activities of the immune system. One emerging scientific theory is that nanoparticles absorbed in the gut may be a factor in the growing prevalence of inflammatory conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome ,and Crohn’s disease.

The European Commission cites evidence from laboratory studies that nanoparticles can promote clumping of protein molecules, a factor in a number of medical condition. It also acknowledges that they can be transported from the upper lining of the nose [by inhalation] into the lungs and brain, a particular hazard for factory workers who have to handle nanomaterials. “Full evaluation of the potential hazards is still to come’, the European Commission reports, in a vaguely promising way,. In the USA, the National Academy of Sciences is far more impatient and warns that ‘critical gaps’ in understanding nanoparticles have been identified but ‘have not been addressed with needed research’. Basically, nanotechnology is out and about, and in contact with our food and drink. Regulators have been caught on the hop. The Institute of Food Science and Technology has expressed concern that

There does not appear to be a requirement for the supplier to specify the inclusion of nanoparticle in packaging materials and neither, due to the lack of end-product labeling requirements, is the consumer likely to be aware of the composition of the packaging material.

About 400-500  nanopackaging products are estimated to be in use now, and nanotechnology is predicted to account for 25% of all food packaging by 2020. In fact, packaging is just the advanced guard for this novel technology; nanotech additives are already out inforce on U.S. shelves. Nanosized titanium dioxide, for example, is now turning up in products such as coffee creamer, cookies, cream cheese, turkey gravy, lemonade and chocolate. Fresh fruit and vegetables can also be coated with a thin, wax-like coating, containing nanoparticles, to extend shelf life.

Could nanotech additives also be in the UK and European food chain? The truth is no-one really knows, and there has been no legal obligation on food manufacturers to inform us of their presence . . .

Who doesn’t know someone with a food allergy, or asthma, or irritable bowel syndrome, or with cancer, for that matter? Closed-minded toxicologists refer back to the philosophical musings of Paracelsus to justify an accommodating attitude to toxic compounds in our food chain and environment as they examine each one in splendid isolation from the safe confines of the laboratory. The rest of us, however, are right to question the comforting pronoucement of the imperturbable Paracelsus, frozen in the 16th century, that small doses of poison  do us no harm. We can be open-minded enough to consider the very real possibility that by activating, blocking, hijacking or otherwise messing with the normal functioning of our bodies, engineered chemicals are contributing to a wide range of human health problems, including obesity, diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease, infertility and other disorders of sexual development. And if we do take this proposition seriously, then reducing our exposure by minimizing the amount of packaged food and drink we consume is one obvious place to start.