25 May 2015

1. The cost of ingredients has never been that big a factor in the price we pay for food. Latest evidence: in the US the price of bacon plummets – fattening restaurant margins. And waistlines? I actually think the hypocrite burger – a veggie burger with a couple of strips of bacon – is a great idea, a dish for the thoughtful consumer.
2. I tried to ask Willy Staley, who wrote the eye-opening A Conspiracy of Hogs: The McRib as Arbitrage from 2011, for a comment on the bacon thing, or even a prediction as to when the McRib might reappear, but he’s a hard man to find. Can you help?
3. Enough of the US-centric stuff: here’s Paul Levy’s fine piece from last October, on The exotic history of British fish and chips.
4. And where do chips come from? Some people would have you believe only from a potato called Russet Burbank. Not Morrice and Ann Innes. Their exhibit of 140 different potato varieties has just won gold at the Chelsea Flower Show. Mature tubers in May; that takes some doing.
5. Something to wash your fish and chips down with? The University of Vermont seems to be making an awfully big deal about the rise in hard cider, or what I, a Somersetian at heart, prefer to call cider. Or zider. I suggest that the Vermonters pay God’s own county a visit.

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This episode of Eat This Podcast is only tangentially about what people eat. At its heart, though, it is about how what people leave behind affects the other animals that eat it.

Hunters routinely clean up the animals they’ve shot out in the field. That leaves a gut pile, consisting not only of the guts but also, usually, the heart and lungs and any meat damaged by the bullet. The hunter takes home the meat and scavenger animals get to snack on the gut pile. It’s been that way for a long time.

Unfortunately, recent research has shown that much of the gut pile, and some of the meat the hunters take home, is contaminated with microscopic pieces of lead. That could be damaging the people who eat the meat, and it has been accused of hampering the recovery of the Californian condor. I heard the story from Matt Podolsky, a wildlife biologist and film maker who worked with the condor recovery programme. That’s him (in the hat) with one of the condors; even the size of that tag doesn’t give a very good impression of the size of the bird.

Notes

1. Matt Podolsky’s film Scavenger Hunt tells the story of the efforts to persuade hunters in Arizona to adopt non-lead ammunition.
2. Not everyone agrees that lead in deer carcasses is the main source of lead in condor blood. Start here.
3. Banner photograph of the Vermillion Cliffs, site of the Arizona condor releases, by Jerry and Pat Donaho.
4. Chef and hunter talk on Nordic Food Lab Radio. Beware, it auto-plays.
5. It is a good thing I don’t have a loaded weapon any time I visit SoundCloud.
6. And if you want to know more about my close encounters with Californian condors, you’ll have to find a copy of my book Zoo 2000 or persuade me to scan and share the relevant pages. I no longer have any copies of the TV shows on which it was based, although there is one on YouTube.

May 11, 2015

1. “Tsukushi, what I had thought was a regional wild vegetable foraged only in the countryside of Japan, was in fact horsetail, an unbridled New England weed. Years living in Japan had allowed me to see my own backyard anew. It was a revelation.” Eat weeds.
2. “How can the wisdom around such a simple food get so universally bungled?” Cook polenta.
3. “After the policies were enacted, trends in the prevalence of overweight-obesity leveled off among students attending schools in more disadvantaged neighborhoods but declined among students attending schools in neighborhoods with the highest income and educational levels, according to the study.” Regulate competitive food and beverages
4. “Pigs have … been beset by snobbery, given that pork has regularly provided calories to the poorest members of society. After the Black Death carried off a third of Europe, demand for meat plummeted and so did prices. Peasants started eating pork; uppity nobles chewed on birds and beef instead.” Respect pork.
5. “‘We try to adhere to a ranger dress code,’ he told me as we wended our way through the backroads of Williamson County, in Central Texas. ‘No mustaches, no beards. You can’t wear a black hat. Bad guys wear black hats. It’s an old Western thing.’” Catch rustlers.

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A Culinary History of Spam landed in my Other Podcasts feed the other day. Interesting stuff, in the two-geezers-talk-to-one-another-about-stuff-they’ve-learned genre. Of course I wasted no time in pointing the two geezers, who happen to be women, to my own offering on Spam. You might like it too.

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By great good fortune, there is nothing I cannot eat. There are a couple of things I’d prefer not to eat, but nothing, at least as far as I know, that would make me ill. As a result, I am fascinated by people who have to forego certain foods to stay well. I used to follow someone on the web who swore that something called the Specific Carbohydrate Diet™– which, I learn, apparently requires initial caps and a TM symbol — was the only thing that kept her alive. I never really investigated further, because that was before I had a podcast to feed and she more or less stopped writing about it. So when the chance arose to talk to someone who is living with the disease and the diet, I leaped at it.

Victoria Young is a journalist who has been following the SCD™ for about seven years. She says that it has actually renewed her relationship with food, partly by making her think hard about what she eats. Far from being a dull diet that is all about avoiding things, it forces her to be inventive with the things she can eat. And she says she’s never felt better. The medical establishment may not be too keen on the SCD™ but the proof of the pudding — assuming you can in fact make a pudding that complies — does seem to be in the eating.

Notes

1. Victoria Young’s website links to her blog How to eat (when you can’t eat anything at all). She tweets @tory21.
2. The mother lode on the SCD™ is Elaine Gottschall’s book Breaking the Vicious Cycle: Intestinal Health Through Diet.
3. Once again, I’m plaintively asking you to rate and review the show on iTunes. I know that’s pathetic, but it honestly does help.
4. The banner photo of a stained section of inflamed bowel is from Wikimedia, and doesn’t it take me back …