Part the First: Ultra-Processed Foods and Addiction. Big Ag and Big Food may finally have a problem with their big moneymaking products. We have discussed UPFs here several times before. They fill the center aisles of grocery stores in much of the Anglophone world. This article in Scientific American adds to wave of information coming out: Can Ultraprocessed Foods Be Addictive? A Neuroscientist Weighs In.
The recent surge in the use of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs has propelled addiction-adjacent terms such as “food noise” and “food cravings” into common vernacular. But can food actually be addictive? Now some neuroscientists and food behavior researchers are trying to understand if food—particularly ultraprocessed foods—can be addictive in the same way as other known substances, such as cigarettes, alcohol and cocaine.
Whether UPFs meet all formal criteria of being addictive, including tolerance, does not matter in a very real sense. UPFs are food-like substances engineered by the Great American Food System (and its international subsidiaries everywhere) to be both habit forming and the default choice for many due to convenience, calorie density, mouth feel (why does that term give me the creeps?), apparent price, and advertising. Regarding price, it is true that cooking real food – animal and vegetable – from scratch is less expensive and healthier than a diet consisting largely of UPFs. But that doesn’t matter to the vast numbers of the precariat who live in food deserts where cooking at home has become a lost skill and employment often is sporadic and purposively unscheduled. I know why zero-hour employment requirements give me the creeps. They are a signal evil of the Neoliberal Dispensation, just one more violation of the categorical imperative.
This article is in the form of an interview with Alex DiFeliceantonio, who is an appetitive neuroscientist at Virginia Tech (emphasis added):
When we’re thinking about food addiction and looking qualitatively at what people are eating when they are saying that they can’t stop eating, we have to put it in the framework of a substance use disorder. These disorders affect life in an untenable way. Food addiction isn’t in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) like substance use disorder is, but there is a proposal to have it put in the DSM.
We typically look to the Yale Food Addiction Scale for clinical evaluation. The scale was designed to assess the same criteria as the substance use disorder criteria in the DSM. The scale also contains what we call clinical indicators that a person is experiencing symptoms of an addiction and those symptoms are poorly affecting life—such as the ability to engage in social situations or engage in aspects of work or life. If we accept that food addiction exists—if you give the Yale Food Addiction Scale to large population-level studies and do it across multiple countries internationally—we generally find that around 12 percent of people [experience] it.
A combination of factors can lead to an addictive behavior. And the most common is the addictive potential of the substance combined with the vulnerability of the person. We think about both of those things with food, too: ingredients that could have addictive potential and the people who could be most vulnerable. We also look at food attributes, such as high refined carbohydrate content, which is known to trigger reward pathways in the brain.
Excessive UPF “use” can certainly be considered a substance use disorder (bordering on substance abuse). The vulnerability of the “user” is certainly an aggravating factor. There are few people more vulnerable than the “left behind” who make up such a large percentage of the population in much of the Global North. And while Big Food prattles on about “making good personal choices,” that is unserious except about making money where UPFs are virtually the only choices in a food desert and the major products sold in supermarkets. Going back one hundred years to Andrew Nelson Lytle, we should remember: “A farm is not a place to grow rich, a farm is a place to grow corn.” And he was not talking about corn the GMO commodity crop that is now used primarily to make ethanol as a superfluous additive to gasoline, feedlot feedstock used to “finish” industrial beef, and high-fructose corn syrup to sweeten UPFs.
Other aspects of substance-use-disorder criteria include loss of control over intake and highly patterned intake. That’s what we see in binge-eating disorder. Binge-eating disorder and food addiction are not the same thing, but they share similarities. If we look at the foods people report consuming when they binge eat, they tend to be things that would be classified as ultraprocessed – things like pizza, ice cream, candy, chips. They’re very rarely things like fruit, nuts, beans.
This is where “food science” enters the picture. These men and women with a PhD design UPFs to hit our bliss point for Salt, Sugar, Fat. As the tagline put it about Lay’s potato chips. This must be the earliest version of “Nobody can eat just one!” starring the great Bert Lahr. And no, nobody can eat just one potato chip. This is no accident:
The current scientific thinking is we have one reward system and lots of different things that can be rewarding. All addictive drugs increase dopamine in the striatum [a brain region beneath the cerebral cortex that is involved in motor and reward processing]. This has been the dogma since 1988 with [a paper by pharmacologists Gaetano Di Chiara and Assunta Imperato]. It’s the same thing [with certain foods]. If you infuse sugar and fat into the oral cavity of an animal, you see an increase in dopamine. If you infuse these things directly into the gut [of animals], you also see increases in dopamine. There is no agreed-upon threshold in which we say a substance that is addictive must increase dopamine in the striatum by x amount.
Modern ultraprocessed foods started to become widespread in the U.S. around the 1950s. Those foods are acting on a reward system that evolved to deal with natural rewards from the environment.
When we’re thinking about food addiction, we know that there are certain levers or ways to highly activate the reward system, and ultraprocessed foods seem to access the most levers. They elevate levels of sodium, fat and refined carbohydrates in the body (Salt, Sugar, Fat again). And this is aided in various ways—with emulsifiers, with texture changes, with flavor changes – ultraprocessed foods are made to be the most palatable, the most delicious. We don’t think about broccoli as an addictive substance; we think about foods that contain enough of these potentially addictive nutrients in combination to be addictive substances.
So, are UPFs really addictive? The data certainly indicate they are. Whether the science and politics of food (which are intertwined, here and here, for example) will allow us as citizens (instead of consumers) to eat properly is the question. California has filed a lawsuit against UPF manufacturers (and these are manufactured products), but this is not a fight for lawyers. Nevertheless, one argument from Big Food resonates these days. In certain circles, we do overpathologize everything:
One pushback I hear is we don’t want to overpathologize everything. But I think that if about 12 percent of a population is telling you that they have a problem, maybe we should look at it, or we should at least give it some concerted study and determine what it is. People also say it’s a behavioral addiction—you are not addicted to food as a substance; you are addicted to the act of eating. But that argument falls down pretty quickly when you look at what people are eating. If you were addicted to the act of consuming, you would be eating things that were hard or crunchy or that required a lot of work to consume. And that’s not really what we see. We see people losing control over intake for items that are high in fat and sugar—refined carbohydrates.
One place the battle is being fought is in the medical curriculum in American medical schools, but not very well so far. Nutrition is generally taught as a subdiscipline of Biochemistry, with politics and economics left out of the curriculum. Given that UPFs and food politics have been an issue since the 1950s it is past time for emphasis to change. The Farm Bill has become what Earl Butz wanted when he told American farmers to “get big or get out.” The change we need seems too difficult to manage, but it is not. As we have discussed here before, this is a political problem with a political solution.
The Farm Bill could subsidize the production of actual food instead of industrial commodities such as corn (maize) and soybeans, which are primary inputs in UPF production. And “farmers” could be farmers again instead of cogs in the machine that grinds them down, while making it possible for all the people, not just those with the wherewithal to shop at whatever version of Zabar’s they use, to eat well as members of a local community. Again, this is a political problem with only a political solution. For those who want to read about how to do it at the local level, Barbara Kingsolver has an answer in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Not all of us can grow our own food, but we can support those who do grow our food for us!
Part the Second: The American Chestnut Returns. Speaking of food, most of us heard this song at least once over the past month. Through the early twentieth century the American chestnut was the tree in American forests. Travelers including William Bartram marveled at forests of chestnut trees. The nuts were delicious and the wood was useful for all things. Alas, chestnut blight put an end to this. Until now.
I have followed this story at a distance because a friend has been involved in the chestnut recovery project, but I did not know that For the First Time in Decades, Hikers Can Walk in Forests of Mature, Wild American Chestnuts:
Hundreds of years ago, American chestnut trees dominated the Appalachian Mountain forest-scape. They stood an imposing 100 feet tall and eight feet wide at maturity, lived for up to 600 years, and covered an estimated 200 million acres of land from Mississippi to Maine. Carpenters prized their lumber. Farmers regaled their ability to produce cheap and nutritious feed for livestock. Gourmands crowned their nuts the world’s finest.
Then an invasive blight from East Asia arrived around 1904 (as a natural consequence of international trade, along with the fire ant and the Formosan termite). The fungus attacked tree trunks and felled the giants by the tens of thousands. While lone trees survived here and there, their nuts were infertile without others to cross-pollinate them, and by 1950 American chestnuts became functionally extinct.
“The devastation represents one of the greatest recorded changes in natural plant population caused by an introduced organism in history,” says West Virginia University emeritus professor of plant pathology and former American Chestnut Foundation president William MacDonald. Had the tragedy been avoided, hikers on the iconic Appalachian Trail would not only experience a “radically different landscape” but enjoy “some very tasty treats around their fall campfires,” he says.
The ACF has spent the past seventy-five years working with various conservation agencies to crossbreed blight-resistant American chestnut trees using clippings from anomalous survivors and Chinese or Japanese varieties.
Large stands of publicly accessible American chestnut forests are now found in more than a dozen locations spread across the Virginia mountains. Other smaller experimental plots exist in Kentucky, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, and Maine, but the largest and oldest sit within ten miles of the Blue Ridge Parkway at Lesesne and Matthews State Forest in Galax. Sky Meadows State Park in Delaplane and the Mountain Lake Wilderness near Blacksburg also hold destination-worthy groves.
This is tale of scientists not giving up, doing work that is by its nature slow and painstaking. They recovered a giant of the forest. This science as it should be done and an object lesson that problems can be solved. Next on my list is the recovery of more than a miniscule remnant of the longleaf pine forest that covered much of Southeast North America when William Bartram was traveling, but not in the Farm Bill way that pays tree farmers to plant longleaf pines in rows like industrial corn. We already do that with pine trees intended for paper production in these parts and a forest they do not make. If we are going to survive the coming inconvenient apocalypse (and it is coming), this can be done only by going back to the land while producing everything we need, animal, vegetable, and mineral, for use instead of only for profit. Our choice and it is really very simple.
I thank WHS for the chestnut link. Apologies for the abbreviated Coffee Break today as we begin the new year. Make this into an open thread if you desire. I don’t think we have had one of those in a long while.
Happy New Year! May 2026 be a good year for all! Thank you for reading. See you next week.
KLG, you and the other “newish” members of the Naked Capitalism team comprise one of the many gifts of 2025. So very many things in the world got markedly, even disastrously, worse last year that I, for one, tended to overlook the gifts bestowed upon us. You, Nick, Conor and Nat, plus of course Yves and her steadfast devotion, were definitely among them. Many thanks to all !
Thank you, Carla!
Insert blushing emoji here.
I’ll join you in that, Carla. I learn so much from KLG, Nick and Conor. And with Nat, I get a cup of tea and maybe enjoy a bowlful before Nat entertains me with all the latest craziness from social media land. He’s always a fun and informative read.
Yves did a great job of maintainng NC’s excellence even in the face of losing the irreplaceable Lambert.
I first saw a stand of chestnut trees in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Magnificent!
As for food, I notice that some states are starting to eliminate junk food from food stamps.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/nutrition/snap-benefit-map-shows-states-with-junk-food-bans-in-2026/ar-AA1TkUCB?ocid=BingNewsSerp
an aside, opening verse from The Village Blacksmith:
Under a spreading chestnut-tree
The village smithy stands;
The smith, a mighty man is he,
With large and sinewy hands,
And the muscles of his brawny arms
Are strong as iron bands.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
My senior year apartment was on a chestnut-lined street. Nice memories of the leaves changing color.
Your comment: “some states are starting to eliminate junk food from food stamps” notes a seemingly beneficial action by some states. However, I believe this from the post:
“Regarding price, it is true that cooking real food – animal and vegetable – from scratch is less expensive and healthier than a diet consisting largely of UPFs. But that doesn’t matter to the vast numbers of the precariat who live in food deserts where cooking at home has become a lost skill and employment often is sporadic and purposely unscheduled.” places that action in a different light. A partial ‘solution’ that creates more problems without attacking the root problems will serve to increase the suffering and difficulties of those who rely on food stamps. I notice a of red from the states involved in eliminating junk food from food stamps which leaves me suspicious of the supposed good intentions of their action.
>>>I notice a of red from the states involved in eliminating junk food from food stamps which leaves me suspicious of the supposed good intentions of their action.
SNAP is not intended to buy sandwiches from delis, or meals from restaurants, and now junk foods are being banned. Since many of the poor lack access to a kitchen, this might create a problem.
The work around I have seen is that a food stand will sell raw food under SNAP but will cook it on premises for a nominal fee (I think about a dollar in cash).Usually fish or chicken.
This is good to know.
Ohio is one of those states, and Mr. Peepers is so proud of himself. No, the motives are nothing good.
I’d add one “skill” that is essential to complement cooking, and that’s preparing and eating leftovers. My spouse and I were both raised in homes where food was pretty plentiful (because we grew up on farms), but where it was a venial sin to waste food. The memories of dust storms and Depression were too fresh. There were no food disposals in the sink.
We’ve maintained that tradition through three kids, and it’s absolutely critical now that we’re down to two. We currently have leftover homemade chicken soup, homemade chicken casserole and some chunky-style sausage gravy (the sausage was commercial) in the refrigerator, and that’s a couple of meals tomorrow. Now with microwaves and air fryers, heating them up can be done individually regardless of anyone’s schedule. Leftovers didn’t last long when we had teenagers.
When we have big family dinners, the leftovers are split up and taken home in (now glass, better late than never) containers. One child had to break a spouse into the habit. Her parents are far from wealthy, but they seem to consider wasting food as a sign they’re middle class.
And leftovers can age very well if done right. A microwave doesn’t do for the kind of pizza Karen describes below. It needs to be placed in a toaster oven and heated on broil until the cheese is bubbling again. The homemade posole we had at Thanksgiving was simpler. A microwave was just fine. It just kept getting better and better until it was gone.
My Internet’s been out for roughly 24 hours. First text had it completed 18 hours ago. Three texts later, it’s finally working. Spectrum sucks. This had nothing to do with the storm that blew through. It happened after the weather had settled.
Talk about an addiction!
I keep telling my friends that Cape Cod Kettle Fried Potato Chips should be a Schedule 1 drug. They agree. We keep eating them anyway.
Chestnuts.
I started the year with a heavy lunch, ordering a very traditional main dish.
For a celebratory dessert, I had chestnut pudding topped with a candied chestnut and chopped pistachios (not traditional but tasty).
In the U S of A, those recipes have been lost. Let’s hope for a return. Chestnuts are a good, basic, humble food.
Humble? If humility costs 10 dollars a pound.
I love chestnut stuffing and marrons glacé. And I can buy roasted chestnuts here in a not-tiny package for less than $1. I keep them in the house for the hot times of year when I can consume more as a munchy (everyone should come to Thailand and stay at 85-90 degrees with only a fan, you lost a LOT of weight, more than just water weight!)
Nutrition: Wife was in the hospital a week for myocarditis, and the food. OMFG. It was the “Let’s give you diabetes” diet. Low fat, high sugar everything. It was like no nutritional knowledge from the last 30 years had penetrated.
I began my journey into this wilderness about six years ago with a seminar presented to my basic science department in the medical school on “The Diet-Heart Hypothesis.” Short version: Dietary fat and cholesterol get demonized due to the sketchy research of Ancel Keys beginning in the 1950s. This leads to the substitution of dietary cholesterol and fat by processed carbohydrates (refined sugars and starch) and vegetable oils. The result is the obesity epidemic and more heart disease. Cholesterol makes it to the cover of Time magazine as a villain, in the 1980s IIRC. In 2015 the American Heart Association recants, without much in the way of publicity, by recommending no dietary restriction on cholesterol. The basic scientists pushed back a little but the talk was well received.
An internist was at my talk and asked me to do a Grand Rounds in the Department of Internal Medicine. Same talk. I expected a lot of push back. None really, except for this: “Very interesting and convincing. But we will still discharge our heart patients with a mandatory statin prescription and recommendation they eat a high-carb, low-fat/cholesterol diet. And exercise more, of course.”
The travesty is how Ancel Keys and his funders conspired to bury what had already been known by John Yudkin (Pure, White and Deadly — published in 1972!) and his predecessors for decades. They are of a piece with the mendacious defenders of Big Tobacco.
It’s not like hospitals have gardens. Sysco/GFS for the ill.
The hospital where I’d been spending a lot of time the past couple of years has a Wolfgang Puck Express in the lobby. The food for the patients was pretty good too, though I don’t think there was any connection. Plus the all-singles rooms were huge with all glass walls giving a view of the city modulated by remote-controlled mini-blinds. The bathrooms were as almost as big as an old hospital double, and were luxurious in a “hospital” kind of way with fold-down wooden seats and a multi-setting shower head. Aside from the occasional Code Blue coming over the intercom and the nurse waking you up in the middle of the night to take your blood pressure, it was like being in a nice hotel.
The last time I was in the oncology ward for several days, I was given no nutrition at all. It wasn’t because of necessary fasting or other medical procedures. It was because I am unable to swallow solid foods or purée due to neurological damage and the large teaching hospital doesn’t make liquid meals available. I wasn’t offered a feeding tube (I would have declined it anyway) nor was it ever discussed. A nice hotel, it was not. More like a prison run by sociopaths. Medical trauma, it’s a real thing.
I had a difficult time even getting a glass of water. On the third day, I begged for some chicken broth. I was brought a small packet of powdered bouillon and a cup of cold water that I was supposed to mix it in (heads up: powdered bouillon doesn’t dissolve in cold water). I looked at the packet. The label showed it contained 0 calories and had no nutritional value but did have high sodium. This bouillon had never met a chicken and was unusable.
My “medical team” ignored my repeated requests for nutrition of some kind, please. Finally, I had a friend bring me some Ensure (she had to sneak it in). Eventually, I was able to get out of the hospital against the advice of my doctors. I figured if it meant I was going to die at home at least I had a blender there to liquify my meals and wouldn’t starve. I’m very good at blending my food into liquid consistency. I’ve had a lot of practice.
My hospital care plan: “You mean less than nothing to us. Just die, okay? Dibs on your organs.”
I’m so sorry to hear about such an awful experience. It does sound more like a torture chamber than a hospital.
I was being a little sarcastic about the cushy accommodations where I’ve been. My spouse spent a couple of nights in the same hospital, but in a wing for eye, ear nose and throat problems. It was a small double, no view, over worked nurses, etc. The cancer wing is a flagship operation of that teaching hospital. Things could have done in a more efficient and less showy fashion. The doctors were good, if highly stressed, and the nurses were mostly amazing. I can’t complain. But I know it’s not typical of most hospitals. I was just “lucky.”
It would be nice of the successes for recovering chestnut trees could be repeated for the Dutch elm and longleaf pine.
One thing greatly troubles me regarding the organisms that brought about the the demise of chestnut trees, Dutch elms, and threaten tomatoes, and soybeans, and kill hops and their relatives where I live now. If the many climate driven die-offs of trees and plants continue the amounts of dead vegetable matter seem like they will become a banquet to fungi. Increasing temperatures may temper strains of fungi that can thrive at mammalian body temperatures. The large availability of food will foster the proliferation of fungi. I believe fungi could become a threat to animal and plant health greater than that of bacteria and viruses.
I love the lacey Hemlocks which are also threatened in my area.
How many new critters do we introduce each month bringing new diseases with them? We have the quite showy spotted lanternfly, imported from Asia, sucking the life out of our wine grapes. I haven’t seen the damage on the hops yet, but those bugs were everywhere last summer. You’d have to brush them out of your hair and clothes before you came in the house. They arrived here three years ago, reportedly by train from Philly after passing through ever vigilant customs.
I know someone who is a member of Overeaters Anonymous. I learned that there are 12 step groups for things other than drugs and other chemicals, and there is a wiki List of Twelve-Step Groups that includes “Food Addicts Anonymous” (est. 1987), “Overeaters Anonymous” (est. 1960) and “Food Addicts in Recovery Anonymous” (est. 1998). They treat food issues as addictions, and in those programs I guess the addictive nature of some foods seems pretty obvious. Overeaters Anonymous was founded in 1960, so I am kinda wondering why this would still be a question.
Looking at the website for FA, the first symptom is:
“Physical Symptoms of Food Addiction – Do you think you cannot control your intake of food, especially junk food or high sugar foods?”
Full disclosure: I went cross-country skiing today and when I got home I wolfed down a pile of pastries…definitely a binge. I am pretty sure that no one could have successfully ripped those pastries out of my hands. If I didn’t have easy access to those pastries I would have been forced to prepare something more nutritious LOL.
Side note: as a caregiver for someone in a long term care home, I am constantly amazed at the poor quality of food the residents are served. It took prolonged and extended pressure from me to get the dietary staff to switch the sugary cookie/muffin snack to a fresh apple. I am guessing cost is the main issue in that case.
re: Chestnuts
You can still buy American Chestnut lumber but almost all of it is reclaimed old stock, re-milled from old beams. It is expensive, about $20 per BF, but if you are repairing a period project you have no other choice. In comparison mahogany costs at most $15 per board foot. Good to hear that it is coming back. Maybe there will be cabinetmakers around when it becomes commercially available again.
Nutrition – here’s a link again NC provided to the San Francisco v. Kraft Heinz complaint. Double thanks to NC. https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/san-francisco-v-kraft-heinz-complaint.pdf
I disagree with categorizing pizza as a HPF. Not in my house. We make our pizza crust from bread flour, 00 flour and semolina flour. The sauce is tomato puree from home grown tomatoes. We add onions and sweet peppers from our garden, mushrooms from a can (sorry). Sausage is from locally raised pork. Mozarella cheese is from a local cheese factory. Spices are from Penzey’s, for what that is worth.
A 10 inch pizza is about 900 calories. IMO that is diet food.
Karen, your pizza sounds heavenly, although I would substitute canned, sliced ripe olives for the canned mushrooms. IMO, the latter are no substitute for fresh. The occasional canned anchovy can be a great addition, too.
In Appalachian forests, Eastern hemlocks, ash (baseball bats!), and beech trees are being hit hard. There are efforts for those species, similar to chestnuts, to locate specimens with resistance.
There are promising examples for ash trees that resist Emerald Ash Borer. Eastern hemlocks are become more vulnerable due to global warming. Beech leaf disease is so new, that very little is known about the nematode that causes it.
The East Asian hemlock wooly adelgid has devastated eastern hemlocks.
There are sizable “accidental” American chestnuts here and there in eastern forests. Here is a little video about a very sizable chestnut found somewhere in Pennsylvania.
” American Chestnut, Clear Creek State Forest, PA, USA ”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aerP2psdFUQ
Here is another from a videomaker calling his series ” Learn your land”. It is also in Pennsylvania and features several dozen “accidental” chestnut trees just found rather than planted on purpose.
” Finding Dozens Of American Chestnut Trees ”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNPxaLmrkU4
How many, if any, of these trees are blight-resistant or blight-immune, as against just not being found by the blight because such trees are now so few and far between? I don’t know. Many millions of chestnut trees were cut down during the blight spread in the mistaken belief that if enough chestnut trees were killed over a vast enough area in front of the spreading blight, it would be a blight-break equivalent of a fire-break. How many of these cut-down trees would have been naturally resistant or immune to blight?
We will never know.
20 years ago or so I was offered a lead on some “accidental” big-tree-sized chestnuts. When I was visiting my brother in Saratoga Springs I had gone to a local culture-spot called Lena’s Cafe’ . While there I met someone who described himself as a “story-teller” ( which other people confirmed later). He said he had an 80-acre place south of Saratoga Springs and he said there were several 80 foot tall chestnut trees growing on it and bearing nuts. He said he strongly felt that to have reached that size and stayed unblighted could mean that they were naturally resistant or immune. Lena’s Cafe’ still exists.
https://www.caffelena.org/ ( I guess its officially called ” Caffe’ Lena so my memory was a little wrong on that point.) Anyway, someone there or connected to it might know if this person still exists as a “storyteller” and if so, perhaps that person could be contacted about those trees. (He claimed to have Abenaki ancestry and sometimes conducted American-Indian-related cultural events on his land, in case that is also a useful clue). And if that storyteller is just a historical memory now, perhaps someone might know where that 80 acre place was and could tell the chestnut seeker just where to go hunt for those chestnut trees. If some high-powered feco-cephalic investors haven’t cut them down to build luxury condos in the meantime.
And here is just a thought. Maybe people could plant pure-chestnut seeds in their yard to grow some new little American chestnut trees. Foster their super-fast growth so as to foster deepest strongest possible root systems. And when the trees get blight stricken, as soon as the blight has effectively girdled the tree and before the above-the-blight portion looks dead, cut it down below the blight right away. The stump-and-roots should regrow new mini-trunks as any coppice would. Let the coppice trunklets grow and as/if each one gets individually blighted, cut it right down below the blight so the roots don’t waste energy sening water and nutrients up into a crown which can no longer sen finished “food” back down to the roots. That way the roots and below-blight stump keep getting stronger and stronger, fostering ever-stronger growth of the coppice trunklets. Just a thought . . .
Oh the grand Chestnut tree, so close to me. I often lie in the grass, looking towards the sky…thankful for the shade on a hot Summer day. The blossoms are what lured me to this lone tree, standing at the University; and then… the buzz of many, many bees🐝 I feel abundant when I have two selections of nourishing scratch made meals in my abode. Truly. While I am a decade at best? Visitor to this site, I do not comment, much. I do very much enjoy learning from the contributors and…the commentary. Welcome Year of the Fire Horse, best to all🔥🐴🧲