27 November 2017

1. Scandal in the Dutch national herring test. Two things about this please me. First, the defence that “statistical evidence is a red herring”. Something fishy there. Secondly, The Economist never knowingly avoids an opportunity to pun.
2. Native American chefs excoriate “Thanksgiving”. I can empathise.
3. Cynthia D. Bertelson avoids that trap by focussing on the old English contribution to that feast, as an aperitif for a round-up of proper history books on Britain and food history.
4. Which offers a smooth segue into a slightly hard to swallow history of instant mashed potatoes.
5. All about celery; not, as far as I know, a star of any Thanksgiving table, anywhere.
6. I was expecting major insights from A Taxonomy Of Spices Based On Three Million Instacart Orders but I’m afraid the only insight I got was that in some matters I must be an appalling food snob. Also, how on earth can anyone with a smidgen of sense say this: “we don’t mind shelling out the few extra bucks to ensure that the spices haven’t been exposed to irradiation”?

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Durrus is a village at the head of Dunmanus bay, south of the Sheep’s Head peninsula in the southwest of Ireland. Durrus is also the name of an award-winning, semi-soft cheese, while Dunmanus is a harder cheese, aged a lot longer. Both were created by Jeffa Gill and are hand made by Jeffa and her small team up above the village and the bay.

Jeffa is one of the pioneers who turned West Cork into a heaven and a haven for cheese-lovers. One of the special characteristics of Durrus and many West Cork farmhouse cheeses is that they are washed rind cheeses. The young cheese is inoculated with specific bacteria (some cheeses pick their surface moulds up from the atmosphere) and is then frequently washed or moistened with a brine solution, which gives those bacteria a boost and keeps other micro-organisms at bay. The result is what many people call a stinky cheese, although the actual flavour of these cheeses is often mild, sweet and creamy.

The really remarkable thing about West Cork is how an entire food ecosystem has grown up there in the past 50 years or so, each part depending on and encouraging the others. The fact that there are so many outstanding farmhouse cheesemakers is no accident; they all gathered originally and shared their ups and downs, from which each developed their own unique cheeses. They were supported by local shops and restaurants, who created demand not just for fine cheeses but for so many other foods too. Surely someone must have documented it; so where is it?

Notes

1. Durrus Cheese has a website.
2. There’s some cracking stuff on the early history of West Cork cheese on the Milleen’s site
3. And some equally cracking stuff on washed rind cheeses, at microbialfoods and seriouseats.

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13 November 2017

1. The Codfather is Finally In Jail from Modern Farmer, which links to a nice background piece that I don’t think I’ve seen before. Seriously, though, has anyone optioned the film rights?
2. Is organic really better for the environment than conventional agriculture? As always, the correct answer to a question in a headline is usually “No”.
3. This is definitely the year of sticking it to big chicken. I haven’t yet read The Hamlet Fire but I plan to.
4. You’ll never look at another food photo in the same way after reading #EatingfortheInsta: A Semiotic Analysis of Digital Representations of Food on Instagram.
5. And, in case you missed them, Rachel Laudan on why cooking isn’t easy and Martin Lersch’s technique to make it easier.

Rachel Laudan had a thoughtful post on Monday. She was praising an article in The Atlantic, which pointed out that all those recipes for easy, simple to prepare, gourmet meals frequently turn out to be empty promises. I liked this quote from the article:

Real “easy” cooking, if that’s what you’re after, is far too simple to sustain a magazine and cookbook industry.

Rachel added her own reasons, number one of which is supermarket fatigue.

You have to negotiate the modern supermarket. The average supermarket carries nearly 39,000 different items. What other task is so likely to create decision fatigue until you have developed ways of blocking out most of the information screaming at you?

Two days later — probably without there having been any collusion — along comes Martin Lersch with a post about his grocery list and how it eases his passage through the supermarket and through the week’s cooking.

I have a generic list where I can tick of what I need. There’s enough space so I can add specifications and stuff that’s not on the list. In all its simplicity it is a list of what I normally get at the grocery store, organized according to food categories and the layout of my local supermarket. This saves time!

That approach won’t be for everybody. But if, like Martin, you make one big shopping trip a week, I reckon you could do worse than see whether you can adapt and adopt his system.

And another thing, this post is a testimony to the value of subscribing to websites that interest you. Martin hasn’t posted on his site in more than three years, but his latest popped up in my RSS reader and I was very happy to see it there.

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Remember Farm Aid, which launched in 1985? A lot of people do, and they tend to date the farm crisis in America to the 1980s, triggered by Earl Butz and his crazy love for fencerow to fencerow, get big or get out, industrial agriculture. And of course, land consolidation is inevitable, because if you’re going to invest in all that capital equipment to make your farm more efficient, you’re bound to buy up the smaller farmers who weren’t so savvy. Those “facts,” however, are anything but. They’re myths, on which much of the current criticism of American farm policy is built. There are others, too, and they’re all skillfully eviscerated by Nate Rosenberg and Bryce Wilson Stucki in a recent paper.

And here’s another thing. That first Farm Aid concert apparently raised $9 million. You could presumably help a lot of poor old dirt farmers with that kind of cash. But Farm Aid wasn’t actually about poor old dirt farmers, it was about people like Willie Nelson. He lost $800,000 the year before Farm Aid. Nine million dollars doesn’t go too far when individual people are losing that kind of money.

Notes

1. The paper is The Butz Stops Here: Why the Food Movement Needs to Rethink Agricultural History, by Nathan A. Rosenberg and Bryce Wilson Stucki.
2. John Biewen’s wonderful story about the Wise Family Farm in his series Five Farms tells the story of one black farmer in context. The family also featured in Biewen’s series Seeing White, all of which makes for disquieting and valuable listening. Gravy, the podcast from the Southern Foodways Alliance, also did a great episode on black land loss and systematic racism in the USDA.
3. I plundered various online archives for the clips of Jimmy Carter, Earl Butz and Willie Nelson.
4. I owe a real debt of gratitude to Jonathan Kim for helping me to get a good clear recording of Bryce.
5. When you want photographs of rural America in the 1930s, you turn to Dorothea Lange, so I did.
6. Under no circumstances should you visit this page to see the utterly reprehensible use that popular culture made of Butz’s “gross indiscretion in a private conversation” which “in no way reflects [his] real attitude”.

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