April | 2014 | Eat This Podcast

Rambling on my mind

28 April 2014 Filed under:

Podcasts

rye bread

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This episode of Eat This Podcast is something of a departure. With nothing in the pantry, so to speak, I had to make something with what I had: myself. So I hooked myself up to the audio recorder and went about some of my customary weekend cooking, muttering out loud about what I was doing and offering some reflections on my attitude to food and cooking. I hope the result sheds some light on where I’m coming from. Normal service will be resumed next episode.

I started this exercise determined not to apologise either for having indulged myself so or for the audio quality. And I almost made it. But not quite. So, please accept my apologies, mostly for the quality of the audio at time. This stuff is not easy single handed.

Also, no instructions from me on how to make your own yoghurt. If you want to learn the secrets of yoghurt as made by Turkish grannies, try The Food Programme.

Notes

The first recipe for my version of a light rye bread is here, though it doesn’t look very pretty. Pictures here. I need to transfer that recipe to the baking site, or better yet update it, because the current version is much better.
A couple of earlier podcasts dealt with integrity vs “authenticity” and good industrialisation.

Food prices and social unrest

14 April 2014 Filed under:

Podcasts

“If you can tell your story with a graph or picture, do so,” says Marc Bellemare, my first guest in this episode. The picture on the left is one of his: “a graph that essentially tells you the whole story in one simple, self-explanatory picture.” Yes indeed, social unrest is caused by higher food prices. […]

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 17:59 — 17.0MB)

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FAO index “If you can tell your story with a graph or picture, do so,” says Marc Bellemare, my first guest in this episode. The picture on the left is one of his: “a graph that essentially tells you the whole story in one simple, self-explanatory picture.” Yes indeed, social unrest is caused by higher food prices. ((Yes, caused; this is no mere correlation.)) I could leave it at that, along with a link to the paper from which I lifted the picture. But this is a podcast. I have to talk to people, and that includes Marc Bellemare.

Bellemare’s paper is a global investigation that doesn’t even attempt to ask whether the relationship between food prices and social unrest holds for countries or smaller areas. My sense, though, is that the relationship is strongest in more authoritarian regimes. At least, that’s where we’ve seen most food riots of late. In this, however, it seems I am mistaken. Marc pointed me to Cullen Hendrix, who has studied the links between social unrest and political regimes. Placating the urban masses who eat food at the expense of rural people who produce it has always been a fraught proposition, perhaps even more so for democracies.

All of which raises the question that, I hope, keeps food policy wallahs and agricultural development experts awake at night. What’s so wrong with high prices anyway?

Notes

Marc Bellemare’s blog post on his paper Rising Food Prices,
Food Price Volatility, and Social Unrest. He also examined some of the reactions to the paper.
“Even when presenting to the smartest people in the world, a picture is really worth a thousand words.” Find this and Marc’s other tips for conference and seminar presentations here.
Cullen Hendrix’s website contains a copy of his paper International Food Prices, Regime Type, and Protest in the Developing World
The sound montage at the beginning draws on various reports on Haiti, Egypt and Tunisia, all glued together by a splendid recording of a protest march.
The banner photograph is adapted from an original by Martin Bureau/AFP/Getty Images.