26 September 2016

Authentic food news

Some cracking long reads this time around, stuffed with history and cultures.

1. Bee Wilson chews over London then and now. From here, mid-Victorian London really does look like a foreign country.
2. From China, Fuchsia Dunlop on the irresistible rise of soy sauce has me wondering whether I have ever had the right stuff.
3. Ashwaq Masoodi on Dalit food. Hard to get my head around the idea that beef is the stuff the lower classes have to make do with.
4. Sort of self-promotion: In Canada, some people would have to spend half their income to eat healthily. Last year’s podcast with someone trying to fix the problem.
5. And – of course – more from the front lines of cultural appropriation, as Disney abandons it’s recipe for princess-approved “healthy gumbo”.
6. A brief moment of schadenfreude as Bloomberg slathers pea-protein stabilised emulsion on the face of Hampton Creek.

I admit, I’m taking pleasure in the continuing exposure of Josh Tetrick and Hampton Creek Foods. Bloomberg Business Week continues its exposé.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:02 — 23.0MB)

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Speculators are responsible for food price spikes? Food price spikes are responsible for riots in the streets? First-world hipsters are responsible for hungry quinoa farmers in Peru?

No, yes, no – at least if you care more about evidence than emotions and opinions.

How do we know? Thanks to the work of agricultural economists like my guest in this episode, Marc Bellemare, director of the Center for International Food and Agricultural Policy at the University of Minnesota. I confess, I’m a little in awe of the analytical skills of ag-economists, their ability to find datasets and then persuade them to offer up reasonable answers. Sometimes it seems emotion and opinion are much easier ways to interpret the world, but I’m glad there are people who disagree. Marc was in Rome recently, and allowed me some time to talk about economics and agriculture.

Notes

1. Marc Bellemare has a blog, and he’s not afraid to use it.
2. Previous episodes: the one about price spikes and the one about quinoa.
3. The graph in the banner photograph is from a rather good article from the USDA: Why Another Food Commodity Price Spike?

As a privileged white male, I am honestly at a loss to respond appropriately to discussion of culinary appropriation and its equally evil twin, culinary imposition, a notion that, I think, only Rachel Laudan seems to have advanced. (more…)

12 September 2016

Authentic food news

1. A fuss over pho. “People were offended, and not all of them were angry Asians. Not all of them were Vietnamese. Rather, they were people wanting greater depth and nuance. … There are plenty of Vietnamese-American chefs and restaurateurs who can give insights on pho, in fluent English to boot! Bon Appetit should have reached out to them as well as Akin to compare and contrast.”
2. Spices, culture and the value of cuisine. Seeking to explain America’s view of “non-European” food in a history of European food itself, and how it weaned itself off the extravagant use of spices and strong flavours. “[C]herry-picking a few flavors is more cultural appropriation than cultural acceptance. The base on which almost all of the food is built is still European, finished with a touch of exoticism, the frisson of something new. The valuation of non-European food remains low: Americans will pay $25 for a dish of Italian pasta, but not for a bowl of Japanese ramen.”
3. As for the Europeans, what did they make of tomatoes? “For Europeans, the key to loving tomatoes seems to have been adapting them into familiar dishes, until they were so intimately incorporated with European cuisine that they were no longer associated with the place where they came from.” Er, that argument sounds extremely familiar. Why is nobody from Central America yelling?
4. Long before it has opened, a new open-fired restaurant is generating heat. Again, the same stories repeat. “[W]hy is it that these mostly white, ‘pedigreed’ chefs attain such incredible fame and success when equally talented immigrant cooks might labor in obscurity for years? And what does it mean that food pundits are so quick to hail these chefs as authorities on their adopted cuisines?”
5. They eat horses, don’t they. Not so much about culinary appropriation as about an unwillingness to confront that fact that different cultures do actually have different foodways. “[T]he student who dropped my class over a discussion of horse meat … understood that deeper issues were at stake. She even wrote about them in her email telling me that she was leaving. But she should have stayed in the class so that others could continue the discussion.”
6. Extra Matter: an interview with Sandor Katz, Mr Fermentation. “The fear that bacteria are bad for us is a gross oversimplification.” ’Deed it is. Now, let’s talk about the appropriation of kimchi.