23 January 2017

Authentic food news

The previous newsletter was back on 19 December, when I suggested that if there were interesting stuff over the festive season, I’d share it. Well, there was, but I didn’t, so you’ve got your work cut out. All of it, I have to say, wonderfully opinionated, not that I necessarily agree with all the opinions expressed. But they are entertaining.

So, let’s get cracking.

1. In Cato Unbound, Gary Taubes has been defending his sugar hypothesis against all comers. Read the response essays too, if you have time. And energy.
2. If you worry about sugary sodas, I hope you weren’t tut-tutting when you read that poor people spend money on sodas because, as Marc Bellemare explains, so does everyone else.
3. Mark Bittman, meanwhile, offers a recipe for a healthy food system. Right.
4. Darra Goldstein recalls her years in Soviet Russia and how they prepared her for her dedication to food preservation, in an extended conversation for Harvard Design Magazine.
5. Are you ready for pasta with terroir?
6. How about mutiny in the mess tent?
7. Saving best for last: Bee Wilson on the slow death of the great British curry house and — irony fully intended — Harry Sword conjures Keith Floyd of blessed memory to pour scorn on the modern incarnation of the great British everything.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 8:46 — 7.3MB)

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This is the last of the short episodes of the holiday season. It is also something of a meta-episode because it is mostly about this podcast and another podcast.

I’ve hinted before that I’d like to do more constructed shows here, where I speak to a few different people about a topic to try and get a broader sense of the subject. They’re harder to do, but more rewarding, and they consistently get more listeners. The problem is that as a one-man band, I don’t have the time I need to do that kind of show very often. As an experiment, I’m going to try chunking episodes into seasons, with a break between seasons when I’ll be working on those more complex shows. I’m not sure yet how long either the seasons or the breaks will be.

In anticipation, I encourage you to subscribe to the podcast, if you aren’t already doing so, via iTunes or by email, which gives you the added advantage of getting Eat This Newsletter between episodes and during the breaks. (You can also, of course, do both.) I’m also on Twitter and Instagram.

Aside from finding time and resources, one of the other things that is really hard for a completely independent production like this is to find new listeners. Reviews and ratings on iTunes probably help, but a word-of-mouth recommendation is even better.

I know that’s true for me, and so I want to share a podcast that was recommended to me. Bee Wilson (@kitchenbee) recommended “this wonderful podcast series by Vikram Doctor, The Real Food Podcast … It is superb and worth listening to in its entirety.”

On the strength of that, I jumped through a few hoops to ensure I had an episode to listen to on my walk in the park, and I agree. Thoroughly enjoyable and informative. In addition to making podcasts, Vikram Doctor is also the editor of special features for the Economic Times of India.

I’ll be subscribing, and if you have any interest in food from an Indian perspective (and not just Indian food) I recommend you take a listen.

   Huffduff this episode

Notes

1. I’m currently working on two idea for shows suggested by listeners, and I’d love to hear about anything you think I should consider.
2. Vikram Doctor’s Real Food podcast is at audiomatic.in.
3. I’m using that banner photograph knowingly, having shamelessly stolen it from Julia Barton, who started the whole stock mic thing.
4. And I admit I flipped the cover photograph, which I took from Douglas Self’s strange catalogue of Acoustic Location and Sound Mirrors.
5. Seriously, though, why is it so difficult both to find new podcasts and to put my own podcast in front of people. I still don’t know.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 7:10 — 6.1MB)

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Maybe you’ve seen the stories about a peanut, prosaically named Carolina Runner No. 4? In 2017 it will be ready to be grown in commercial quantities, having faded gently away from being the primary peanut before the 1840s to a reasonable contender into the 1910s to presumed extinct by the 1950s. Professor David Shields, an historian at the University of South Carolina, found it in a genebank as part of a project by the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, which he chairs, to restore the crucial varieties of the American South. It’s a fine story, but a couple of things bothered me.

One, how do they know it is “the first peanut cultivated in North America” or “the South’s original peanut” as all the articles claim.

Two, although everyone acknowledges that the peanut came to the USA not from South America, it’s ancestral home, but from West Africa with enslaved people, nobody seems to be much interested in what on earth it was doing in West Africa, or the consequences of its introduction there by the Portuguese.

The podcast looks a bit at the question of whether Carolina Runner No. 4 – henceforth Carolina African Runner – is indeed the “ur-peanut”; I conclude that it doesn’t really matter. My article sketching the peanut’s influence in West Africa is here.

   Huffduff it

Notes

1. My thanks to Professor David Shields and Dr David Williams for their help. Errors, of course, my own.
2. The Carolina Gold Rice Foundation is doing good work.
3. Music is The Peanut Vendor, played by Louis Armstrong, natch. It too had quite an influence, if Wikipedia is to be believed.