29 May 2017

1. Wendell Berry takes the coastal elites to task, with style and grace.
2. I like what the American Anthropological Association had to say on the matter: “Maybe the colonial narrative is as guilty of reductionism as the nostalgia narrative – but at least it moves the conversation away from a weakness of rural character to the demonstrable effects of economic policies and practices.”
3. Then there’s the whole question of who is actually doing the work in agriculture. Longreads has an extract from a new book that gives a voice to migrant workers in California.
4. From Berkeley, mind, a little bit of history on innovations in food processing. “Today, there are more than 400 types of mixed salads.” And that was just the start of it.
5. Do people perceive those bagged salads as “healthy”? Probably not, according to one graphic Marion Nestle lifted from the 12th annual Food and Health Survey produced by the International Food Information Council. She also reminds us that the IFIC is “industry-funded” and that “the data come from an online survey taking 22 minutes to complete”.
6. A Feast for the Eyes is celebrated in The British Journal of Photography. You may never look at food photographs in the same way again. Well, you probably will, but you may also think a bit more about them.

Let me take a brief moment here to moan again about how hard it is to find interesting food news that originates outside the USA. Help me out, if you can.

15 May 2017

1. You’ve seen the photographs of “Eating Spaghetti by the Fistful” now learn how they came about.
2. Sharanya Deepak takes us Inside the Birthplace of Indian-Chinese Cuisine.
3. If you eat cheap chicken, you do not want to read Exploitation and Abuse at the Chicken Plant in The New Yorker.
4. The Rituals of Dinner by Margaret Visser was one of the first books to really open my eyes to the meanings of food and eating. Now it has been reissued.
5. Civil Eats writes about Seed Rebels. In the past, I’ve interviewed many of the principles: Carol Deppe, Jack Kloppenburg of the Open Source Seeds Initiative and Lane Selman of the Culinary Breeding Network.

My compadre Luigi I have been going back and forth on a recent research paper that delved deep into the breeding history of lemons and limes. It is utterly mind-boggling stuff, which neither of us feels able to understand, let alone summarise in any meaningful way. Luigi shared this picture from the paper:

I’ll just fondly remember my conversation with Helena Attlee, who explained that citrus are just really promiscuous.

[G]olf ball materials … may have been inadvertently harvested with potatoes.

And that’s all you really need to know, about why McCains is recalling frozen hash browns they made for Roundy’s, Harris Teeter and Wegman’s.

How many golf balls might have been harvested? Why don’t they know?

It was a happy constellation. I’d heard The Food Programme on potatoes a couple of days before, and the lemon roasted potatoes sounded good. I’d just bought some salmon steaks for dinner. And there in the greengrocer was a pile of beautiful red-skinned new, but large, potatoes. No need to search out unwaxed lemons either, because all their lemons are unwaxed. Fiddly to put together, but easy to eat.

Also, a chance to do a reminder link to Carol Deppe talking about how really nutritious potatoes are.

P.s. Pity publicity-hungry Chris Voigt couldn’t be bothered to maintain the website for his 60-day, 20 potatoes-a-day marathon.