Podcasts

Anchovies Part I A work of art in a can

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An open tin of anchovies with a label showing the name of the woman who packed them.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:20 — 21.4MB)

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A woman with short, dark hair and dark eyes looking directly at the camera.
Marcela Garcés

Anchovies can be very divisive; some people absolutely cannot stand them. I can’t get enough of the little blighters. What’s the difference? It might be as simple as the way they’re stored.

At the Dublin Gastronomy Symposium this past summer, I was delighted to learn one crucial way to improve any tin of anchovies: keep it in the fridge until you’re ready to use it.

Marcela Garcés is a professor at Siena College in New York, and as a side hustle she and her husband Yuri Morejón run La Centralita, a culinary studio that aims, among other things, “to teach guests about anchovies as a gourmet food in context”. As a result of our conversation, I now hold anchovies in even higher regard.

Notes

  1. Marcela Garcés’ paper is In Defense of the Anchovy: Creating New Culinary Memories through Applied Cultural Context.
  2. La Centralita is in Albany, New York.
  3. Here is the transcript, thanks to the generosity of supporters
  4. Banner photograph from Marcela Garcés.

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Extra Matter

Insects will not make pet food more sustainable either

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Somewhat sad to see Marion Nestle, with whom I almost always agree, linking, without question or comment, to an article in a pet-food trade journal which suggests that insect protein is a key solution to a sustainable pet food industry. The article contains some eye-opening numbers for the pet food business in the US and globally, as well as some dubious claims about pet health; they are not properly sourced, so I’m not going to bother to address them.

I do, however, take issue with this:

“In terms of sustainability, the key point is that this isn’t just greenwashing,” said Hobbs. “Insect protein in pet food truly has a significant positive impact.”

It is just greenwashing.

Hobbs is Aaron Hobbs, executive director of the North American Coalition for Insect Agriculture (NACIA), so Mandy Rice-Davies applies. The key point, which neither he nor Marion Nestle seem to have appreciated, but which you will because you listened to the recent episode on insects as food (for people and their pets), is that the “waste” that insects are reducing is usually a feed product that could be given direct to livestock and, in some cases, people and their pets.

Premium-priced insect-based pet food might assuage the consciences of some pet owners, but it is unlikely to do anything at all for food waste.

Podcasts

Crunch Time: Insects Are Not Going to Save Us Recent bankruptcies suggest the edible insect bubble could soon burst

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Adult black soldier flies mating on a green leaf. The insects are tail to tail and joined by the male's penis.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:24 — 21.5MB)

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Cover artwork; a bowl of reddish rice, possibly with tomato, scatterd with a few darker black soldier fly larvae and a green parley or coriander leaf.If only we could get over our squeamishness, insects can save the planet, banish hunger, protect the rainforests and reduce the climate catastrophe. At least, that’s what article after article tell us as they sing the praises of feeding our food waste to insects like the larvae of the black soldier fly. Insects can grow 5000-fold in 12 days, producing prodigious quantities of protein in less than 100th the space of soya beans.

There’s just one fly in the ointment, so to speak. Most of the food that insects are fed isn’t waste at all, and after absorbing large amounts of investor cash, some of the biggest companies have gone bust. Dustin Crummett, executive director of the Insect Institute, shared his many reasons for saying that eating insects will not save the planet.

Notes

  1. Dustin Crummett is executive director of The Insect Institute. His paper: Is turning food waste into insect feed an uphill climb? A review of persistent challenges.
  2. If not food or feed, how about “valuable raw materials for various industries”?
  3. Here’s the transcript. You can thank the donors, and become one yourself.
  4. Cover photograph from designer Katharina Unger’s Farm 432 concept, “a fly-breeding device for home use that continually collects fly larva as a protein source for less squeamish diners”
  5. Banner photo by Muhammad Mahdi Karim from Wikimedia shows black soldier flies making more black soldier flies.

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Podcasts

Olives Reborn in the Salento The Xylella disaster points the way for a new optimism

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Ripe green olives of th variety FS17 hanging on a branch

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 24:32 — 22.6MB)

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A man standing in front of a glass-fronted cupboard in which are cans of single variety olive oils.
Silvestro Silvestori stands in front of some of the metal cans of his varietal olive oils.

Xylella fastidiosa is a bacterium that attacks all manner of plants. It prevents water getting to the leaves, so the plant essentially dies of drought. It probably arrived in Italy in 2008 but wasn’t really noticed until 2013, attacking a few trees around the town of Gallipoli in the Salento, the heel of the boot of Italy. Thanks to badly botched responses it spread, carried by spittlebug insects that live in the plants under the olives. By 2019, efforts to control the spread of Xylella were more or less abandoned, and the disease had killed 10 million olive trees in the Salento.

People – including me – thought it might be the death of olive oil production in the Salento and the rest of Puglia. In the past couple of years, however, literal green shoots of resistant olive varieties have taken hold, and with them the opportunity for a new industry focused on high-quality, profitable olive oil. To learn more, I went to visit Silvestro Silvestori, who runs The Awaiting Table cookery school in Lecce.

Notes

  1. The Awaiting Table Cookery School runs lots of different courses, including an opportunity to plant new olive trees.
  2. Here is the transcript.
  3. Cover photo of a fiscolo, the jute mat used in older mills to contain the crushed olives in the press. Banner photo of FS17® La Favolosa from iocolivivai

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Podcasts

Avocado Anxiety: how to choose what to eat They’re “not so bad”. Compared to what?

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Three photographs of avocados on toast.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 24:42 — 22.8MB)

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Portrait of Louise Gray, a young woman with shoulder length brown hair and dark eyes wearing a white blouse.
Louise Gray
Winner of the Guild of Food Writers award for investigative work in 2024, Avocado Anxiety is about more than avocados. It offers a deep look at the implications of the choices we are faced with when deciding what to buy. Local may not always be best for the planet, but perhaps it avoids the worst abuses of labour. And air-freighted is usually terrible for greenhouse gas emissions, but may be good for communities far away.

Some universal truths did emerge from our conversation. Fruit and veg is almost always better for the planet than meat, and homegrown is generally preferable to imported. Exceptions, however, are not uncommon, and in the end questions outnumber simple answers.

Notes

  1. Avocado Anxiety: and Other Stories About Where Your Food Comes From is available from Bookshop.org and elsewhere.
  2. We didn’t discuss the meaning of the word avocado, thank heavens, because the greatest service I can offer is to point out that nobody believes that words like nut or ball actually mean testicle. Let the Nawatl Scholar explain: the word guacamole does not come from the Nahuatl word for “ground testicles or avocados”..
  3. The book Louise Gray mentioned at the end is The Avocado Debate by Honor May Eldridge.
  4. Here is the transcript.
  5. Photo of Louise Gray by Nancy MacDonald. Others scraped by me from Instagram.

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