One of the first pieces of news to hit me when I returned from a trip to Germany last week was a report in the Washington Post that the quality of America’s food continues to decline. Nutritional value of various foods in terms of components like protein, iron, and zinc are down 10 per cent and more over the last thirty or forty years.

It’s no surprise to anyone who spends any time in huge American supermarkets or in fast-food type restaurants, and eats the eggs or lettuce or fruit or chicken or bread available in these places.

But what is a surprise is the supposed culprit in sapping nutrients from our food: increased carbon in the atmosphere. What isn’t disclosed is whether the same problem exists in Europe. At least based on appearances, I’d say it doesn’t. I’m just back from ten days in Germany, and the food seems to be as good as always. In even average-quality restaurants, the food appears to be of good quality; you’re less likely to get tough chicken or eggs with pale-yellow yolks. In even smaller convenience-oriented food places, the eggs are unrefrigerated, and the yolks mostly a dark orange. The lettuce is green, and the bread hearty, tasty, and generally fresh. At a huge food outdoor food market in downtown Munich, one stand offered pitchers of maybe 15 different fresh fruit and vegetable drinks for 5 euros or 7 euros a glass, poured from pitchers continually being refreshed on-site. A small casual restaurant nearby offered maybe half a dozen different soups—hearty beef or sausage or vegetable soups. And then there were vegetable stands with huge displays of fresh asparagus—green and white–because the next two months are asparagus season.

So I don’t know if European food has deteriorated as much as American food in nutritional value, but I would guess it hasn’t. There are complaints there that the breads aren’t as diverse as they once were. But overall, there just seems to be much more tradition and pride in production, and less emphasis on churning out ever-more-profitable crops.

But what is a surprise is the supposed culprit in sapping nutrients from our food: increased carbon in the atmosphere. What isn’t disclosed is whether the same problem exists in Europe. At least based on appearances, I’d say it doesn’t. I’m just back from ten days in Germany, and the food seems to be as good as always. In even average-quality restaurants, the food appears to be of good quality; you’re less likely to get tough chicken or eggs with pale-yellow yolks. In even smaller convenience-oriented food places, the eggs are unrefrigerated, and the yolks mostly a dark orange. The lettuce is green, and the bread hearty, tasty, and generally fresh. At a huge food outdoor food market in downtown Munich, one stand offered pitchers of maybe 15 different fresh fruit and vegetable drinks for 5 euros or 7 euros a glass (depending on size), poured from pitchers continually being refreshed on-site. A small casual restaurant nearby offered maybe half a dozen different soups—hearty beef or sausage or vegetable soups. And then there were vegetable stands with huge displays of fresh asparagus—green and white–because the next two months are asparagus season.

So I don’t know if European food has deteriorated as much as American food in nutritional value, but I would guess it hasn’t. There are complaints there that the breads aren’t as diverse as they once were. But overall, there just seems to be much more tradition and pride in production, and less emphasis on churning out ever-more-profitable crops.

***

In my travels to Germany over the last few years, I’ve been carrying out family research to hopefully track down at long last what happened to various members of my family during the 1930s and 1940s. One search has involved trying to track a grandmother who was deported to Poland in 1942, and then fell off all radar screens. She was almost certainly taken to one of the many extermination camps Germany set up in Poland. But I wanted to know more about her end. Here is what I finally came up with, from a post on a Medium magazine, Crow’s Feet.

The large sterile conference room could have been anywhere. For my family, however, this location was deeply significant: I was in Bad Arolsen, Germany, an hour or so from the town where, one day in March 1942, my grandmother Clara Joseph was loaded onto a box car headed east to Poland.

Clara was the main subject of discussion in that room four years ago. Three researchers at Arolsen Archives had just completed a 20-minute presentation to report that Clara’s train was bound for Piaski, a small town in eastern Poland, where the trail went ice cold. There seemed to be no evidence of where and for how long she remained in the small town prior to her likely dispatch to one of two nearby concentration camps.

I had no reason to doubt the researchers were trying their best. The Arolsen Archives is the place to go when you are still searching, decades later, for family members the Nazis had deported to concentration camps around Europe. According to the organization’s web site, “We receive around 20,000 tracing inquiries every year — most of them come from relatives wanting to clarify the fate of family members. After conducting detailed research, we are often able to outline the path a person’s life took, but sometimes we search in vain.”

For many years, the blank slate of my grandmother’s disappearance was a source of such pain that it wasn’t discussed in the family. It wasn’t until 1993, when I was well into my forties, that I first discovered a few details from a partial memoir written by a deceased aunt and uncovered among papers in her home basement.

Here is the rest of the story about what I learned. (Feel free to post reactions on Medium or here.)

View at Medium.com