The hard sell of ultra-processed foods in developing countries as being ‘good for you’ gives children a taste for sugar and salt that could have lasting effects on their health

The bright red bottle of Sting, an energy drink, catches Sunita Devi’s eye when she finds her local shopkeeper has run out of the biscuits she hoped to buy to fuel her son through his homework. She cannot read the English label, but 10-year-old Ajit says it sounds healthy.

“Stimulates mind, energises body” the bottle proclaims. It’s the type of marketing that helps shop owner Vasu Gupta sell energy drinks – mostly to families who have migrated from the countryside to a slum in Govindpuri in the Indian capital, Delhi.

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Prices may be creeping up generally, but there are still some great French wine bargains out there. So long as you know where to look…

I can’t separate summer from memories of road trips through France in years gone by, and if you’re doing that this year, you’ll no doubt pick up some wine along the way at a much cheaper price than you’ll pay back home. Even so, French wine can still offer amazingly good value here in the UK, particularly if you concentrate on lesser known and unfashionable appellations.

Muscadet is a good case in point. Yes, it’s usually eclipsed by the slightly cheaper and jauntier picpoul de pinet, but picpoul doesn’t quite have muscadet’s minerality and finesse. And, yes, if you want a wine to go with seafood, these days many of us will probably opt for albariño, but muscadet does the job just as well, and for less than a tenner, which much albariño struggles to achieve. So, if you haven’t tried muscadet for a while, it’s worth revisiting.

For more by Fiona Beckett, go to fionabeckett.substack.com

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The food is wonderful, but I cannot say that everything else about eating here isn’t rather peculiar, because it absolutely is

Three minutes after walking into Polentina in east London, I messaged the person who had tipped me off about it, asking: “Where the hell am I?” I had muttered several much saltier things while I was wandering around an industrial estate in Tower Hamlets, down dusty tracks and weaving my way through overflowing bins while looking for this restaurant, which isn’t quite a restaurant, but rather a canteen in a factory, where the food is, I’d been told, astonishingly good.

Polentina is the work of Sophia Massarella, a photographer and a forensically passionate fan of Italian food, although it is clearly the cooking side that has taken over of late. Massarella, a Canadian, started a business during lockdown to recreate the polenta, pasta and salad dishes so loved by the Italian side of her family. Her next, entirely illogical step was to take on this small space in the staff canteen of the sustainable fashion factory ApparelTasker , though, in a world where rent, rates and food and staffing costs thwart much creativity in cooking, nothing is remotely logical any more. Anyone with enough investment can serve gold-leafed slop in Mayfair, but it requires genuine guts and passion to take on a few tables in Bow that look out on a load of sewing machines.

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Expert panels recommend that people should keep consumption of popular sweetener below 40mg/kg a day

The sweetener aspartame is a “possible carcinogen” but it remains safe to consume at already agreed levels, two groups linked to the World Health Organization (WHO) have declared.

The rulings are the outcome of two separate WHO expert panels, one of which flags whether there is any evidence that a substance is a potential hazard, and the other which assesses how much of a real-life risk that substance poses.

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Should we care whether we will have less access to artisan sheep’s milk cheese? When it makes the quality of life worse, then yes

They keep telling us to move on; to accept that Brexit is done. The problem is, Brexit isn’t done with us. It isn’t a single disabling event. It’s a degenerative disease, and here comes the next stage. On 31 October, after four postponements to get infrastructure in place, the UK will finally introduce checks on fresh and chilled food imports. The EU has already introduced its checks, which come with a vast amount of paperwork and significant costs. The impact on the export of fruit from the UK to the EU has been dramatic, reducing the value from £248.5m in 2021 to £113.8m by 2023 , a drop of more than 50%.

Now it’s going to work the other way. EU producers of meat products wishing to export to the UK will have to employ a vet to certify their goods, which will cost up to €700 a time . All sectors will have to employ agents for data entry compliance which could add another €200. They will have to train themselves on the paperwork. Then, come January, there’s the border inspection charge of up to £43 for each consignment regardless of whether it’s physically inspected or not. Faced by all of this, thousands of small producers from across Europe who have kept this country supplied with a fabulously diverse range of quality products will simply decide it’s not worth the trouble. They’ll sell elsewhere. The quality of our lives will be diminished.

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Do I want to have lunch with all the ants, flies, wasps, dogs and rodents that will inevitably turn up? No. And then there is the hell of sitting down ...

Picnics? I hate picnics. For a start, it’s always assumed that you’ll be thrilled at the prospect. To be fair, this might be because of the British climate: picnic weather was never the norm, so when picnic weather presented itself, it had to be celebrated … with a picnic. I say let it rain, so we can spare ourselves the trouble.

The faff in the preparation. The baking, making and buying of things. The filling of Tupperware and cool boxes to lug off to whichever patch of grass or – God forbid – sand has been selected. In the excitement, all restraint is abandoned. Somebody will bring something imaginative they have spent a long time cooking, the recipe gleaned from a summer picnic special edition of a Saturday supplement. The ants, the flies, the wasps and passing dogs eagerly await your arrival. As do rodents, already limbering up for the clear-up.

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Licensing for scallop dredging and trawling must comply with National Marine Plan after judicial review by Open Seas charity

The Scottish government should stop approving licences for fishing vessels using methods believed to cause harm to habitats, a charity working to protect marine life has urged, after a court declared a routine licensing decision to be unlawful.

Scotland’s highest court ruled that the Scottish government had failed to act in accordance with Scotland’s National Marine Plan (NMP) when varying fishing licences last December, after a judicial review by the conservation charity Open Seas . It is legally obliged to act in accordance with its environmental duties, as stated in the NMP, when making these decisions.

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From the white bulbs to the tattered green ends, here’s how to make the most of your bundle of joy

Buying a bunch of spring onions (sometimes known as shallots – more on that later) can often feel like a race against time. The bunches are big, yet recipes sometimes only call for a sprig or two.

If you’ve ever wondered why spring onions come in such large bundles, the answer has to do with two things: the ideal size of a spring onion and the size of an adult’s hand.

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Covid pandemic and Ukraine war add to widespread crisis with one in nine people in the world facing severe food insecurity in 2022

The number of people going hungry in the world has risen by 122 million to 735 million since 2019 because of the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, the UN has said.

If current trends continue, almost 600 million people will be chronically undernourished by 2030 – about 119 million more than if neither of these events had happened, a new report has found.

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