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Many vegetables don’t taste of anything much these days, but whose fault is that, really? Plant breeders produce what growers want, and growers want what people will buy. So why aren’t people buying flavour? Mostly because they aren’t being offered a real choice. Lane Selman, who works on organic projects at Oregon State University, discovered that although organic growers say they want disease resistance, for example, they don’t actually grow existing disease-resistant varieties “because they taste terrible”. Lane enlisted a handful of chefs to taste some peppers that a local breeder was working with. From that quiet beginning has blossomed the Culinary Breeding Network, which aims to “bridge the gap between breeders and eaters to improve agricultural and culinary quality”.

For the past three years, Lane has organised a variety showcase that pairs chefs with breeders and growers to display their combined talents, creating interesting vegetable varieties and interesting dishes from those varieties. We talked about how the Culinary Breeding Network began and about the latest variety showcase.

Notes

1. The Culinary Breeding Network has a website and the home page currently features a video of this year’s variety showcase. It’s fun.
2. Lane’s video explaining the overall project is here.
3. The breeders Lane Selman works with include Frank Morton, of Wild Garden Seed, Bill Tracy at the University of Wisconsin and Michael Mazourek at Cornell University.
4. The Organic Seed Alliance is also a partner.
5. All photographs (c) Shawn Linehan.
6. It would be remiss of me not to take this opportunity to point you to an earlier episode about backyard vegetable breeding with Carol Deppe.

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Here's a little gift for Thanksgiving. It is at Patreon, and you can listen directly there.

Of course, I'm also going to shamelessly promote two turkey episodes from 2014 that you might have missed.

Talking turkey about how they came by that name, and A partial history of the turkey, which asks when and where were turkeys domesticated.

21 November 2016

Authentic food news

No apologies this week for focusing on North America. There are still plenty of things to give thanks for.

1. Revisiting authenticity, this time in the context of mezcal. It’s only the abstract of a student anthro paper, but it looks really interesting, examining the differences between local authenticity and global authenticity.
2. 538 unravels a weird fact about farms in the USA: The number of farms has stayed about the same, and yet there has been huge consolidation among farms. Part of the answer: “These aren’t the farms of the poor; they’re the yards of the upper-middle-class.”
3. The official estimated price of Thanksgiving dinner has dropped. Again
   • Rachel Laudan uses that to celebrate the “affordability” of this most democratic of feasts.
   • I use it to talk about price-fixing in chicken and ride my own hobbyhorse: food is too cheap.

   What’s nice, to me, is that we both have questions about what the headline price of that feast leaves out.

4. Back to 538 for the last word on Thanksgiving, and a self-selecting, undoubtedly biassed but nevertheless fascinating attempt to define “the best possible Thanksgiving dinner”. I expect the results to be really scary.

Over at the other place, I wrote about some of the things that just wouldn’t fit here. Mostly, that was about the anatomy and physiology of the digestive system of ducks and geese, and the question of how essential is the process of gavage to the production of foie gras. In French law, it is required. No gavage, no foie gras.

So what do you call the fatty liver that some people seem able to persuade ducks and geese to make?

Also, some links to things other people have written, and truly the most horrifying discovery of the past couple of weeks: foie’camole.

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Any way you slice it, foie gras — the fatty liver of a duck or goose — is a fighting matter. To animal rights activists it is quite obviously cruel and depraved. To many chefs and eaters, it is a delicious extravagance. To many other chefs and eaters, it is something they would rather not countenance. To the vast majority of French people, it is a symbol of their nation and an essential part of their identity, the rare product of smiling rustic grandmothers, making a bit of pin money on the side. And for the industrial producers responsible for 90% of French foie gras, those rustic grandmothers are icons of perfect marketing.

The whole foie gras story — which is by no means over yet — offers a fascinating insight into the role of politics in food — which happens to be the subtitle of a new book by Michaela DeSoucey, a sociologist who got caught up in foie gras just before the topic exploded all over the food scene in Chicago.

In this episode, we talked about just a few of the things that make foie gras such a special topic.

Notes

1. Michaela DeSoucey’s book is Contested Tastes: foie gras and the politics of food, published by Princeton University Press.
2. There has been an awful lot written about foie gras in America, more than I care to link to here. But the Chicago Tribune did publish a look back at what they called Chicago’s foie gras fiasco. I took the cover photo from there.
3. If you want some straight talk on foie gras, and how to prepare it from scratch, you could do worse than visit Peter Hertzmann’s website.
4. Banner photo of Chef Doug Richey (c) Heather Irwin.
5. And the music? Sonata IV in C Major for Trumpet and Strings by Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber.

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