The material histories of food quality and composition.

This article argues for material histories of food. In recent decades food historians have tended to emphasize the cultural factors in consumption, in addition to the already well-established social, political and economic perspectives, but what is still missing is the stuff in foodstuffs. With reference in particular to milk and wine, the suggestion here is that physical and chemical composition is a major influence in what we might call the biographies of particular items of food and drink. Product characteristics are rarely static for long and today's mass-produced bread is different from that of the past, but then so are the flour, the yeast, and the even the butter that is spread on it. Adulteration was a particularly interesting aspect of composition in the nineteenth century and was the key to the emergence of two different traditions of understanding and valuing food quality.

Application of geostatistics with Indicator Kriging for analyzing spatial variability of groundwater arsenic concentrations in Southwest Bangladesh.

This article seeks to explore the spatial variability of groundwater arsenic (As) concentrations in Southwestern Bangladesh. Facts about spatial pattern of As are important to understand the complex processes of As concentrations and its spatial predictions in the unsampled areas of the study site. The relevant As data for this study were collected from Southwest Bangladesh and were analyzed with Flow Injection Hydride Generation Atomic Absorption Spectrometry (FI-HG-AAS). A geostatistical analysis with Indicator Kriging (IK) was employed to investigate the regionalized variation of As concentration. The IK prediction map shows a highly uneven spatial pattern of arsenic concentrations. The safe zones are mainly concentrated in the north, central and south part of the study area in a scattered manner, while the contamination zones are found to be concentrated in the west and northeast parts of the study area. The southwest part of the study area is contaminated with a highly irregular pattern. A Generalized Linear Model (GLM) was also used to investigate the relationship between As concentrations and aquifer depths. A negligible negative correlation between aquifer depth and arsenic concentrations was found in the study area. The fitted value with 95 % confidence interval shows a decreasing tendency of arsenic concentrations with the increase of aquifer depth. The adjusted mean smoothed lowess curve with a bandwidth of 0.8 shows an increasing trend of arsenic concentration up to a depth of 75 m, with some erratic fluctuations and regional variations at the depth between 30 m and 60 m. The borehole lithology was considered to analyze and map the pattern of As variability with aquifer depths. The study has performed an investigation of spatial pattern and variation of As concentrations.

Fear of animal foods: a century of zoonotics.

Animal diseases can be spread to humans through the food supply. The article investigates this zoonotic hazard in an historical context and reflects on the nature of public reactions to such risk. It concludes that food scares have been with us for at least 150 years and that consumer responses in terms of changes in demand have been complex.

Arsenic risk mapping in Bangladesh: a simulation technique of cokriging estimation from regional count data.

Risk analysis with spatial interpolation methods from a regional database on to a continuous surface is of contemporary interest. Groundwater arsenic poisoning in Bangladesh and its impact on human health has been one of the "biggest environmental health disasters" in current years. It is ironic that so many tubewells have been installed in recent times for pathogen-free drinking water but the water pumped is often contaminated with toxic levels of arsenic. This paper seeks to analyse the spatial pattern of arsenic risk by mapping composite "problem regions" in southwest Bangladesh. It also examines the cokriging interpolation method in analysing the suitability of isopleth maps for different risk areas. GIS-based data processing and spatial analysis were used for this research, along with state-of-the-art decision-making techniques. Apart from the GIS-based buffering and overlay mapping operations, a cokriging interpolation method was adopted because of its exact interpolation capacity. The paper presents an interpolation of regional estimates of arsenic data for spatial risk mapping that overcomes the areal bias problem for administrative boundaries. Moreover, the functionality of the cokriging method demonstrates the suitability of isopleth maps that are easy to read.

Social implications of arsenic poisoning in Bangladesh.

Besides its toxicity, groundwater arsenic contamination creates widespread social problems for its victims and their families in Bangladesh. There is, for instance, a tendency to ostracise arsenic-affected people, arsenicosis being thought of as a contagious disease. Within the community, arsenic-affected people are barred from social activities and often face rejection, even by their immediate family members. Women with visible arsenicosis symptoms are unable to get married and some affected housewives are divorced by their husbands. Children with symptoms are not sent to school in an effort to hide the problem. This paper employs mainly qualitative methods to interpret people's understandings about the toxic impact of groundwater arsenic poisoning on their social lives. Arsenic-affected patients in southwest Bangladesh were asked to determine their 'own priorities' in measuring arsenic toxicity on their social activities and to explore their perceptions about their own survival strategies. We found that patients' experiences reveal severe negative social impacts, and a sharp difference of perceptions about arsenic and social issues between arsenicosis patients and unaffected people.

The spatial pattern of risk from arsenic poisoning: a Bangladesh case study.

Arsenic poisoning in Bangladesh has been one of the biggest environmental health and social disasters of recent times. About seventy million people in Bangladesh are exposed to toxic levels of arsenic (0.05 mg/L) in drinking water. It is ironic that so many tubewells have been installed in recent times to provide drinking water that is safe from water-borne diseases but that the water pumped is contaminated with toxic levels of arsenic. Along with the clinical manifestations, some social problems have also emerged due to arsenic toxicity. Analysing the spatial risk pattern of arsenic in groundwater is the main objective of this paper. Establishing the extent of arsenic exposure to the people will facilitate an understanding of the health effects and estimating the population risk over the area. This paper seeks to explore the spatial pattern of arsenic concentrations in groundwater for analyzing and mapping 'problem regions' or 'risk zones' for composite arsenic hazard information by using GIS-based data processing and spatial analysis along with state-of-the-art decision-making techniques. Quantitative data along with spatial information were employed and analyzed for this paper.