From Russia to New Zealand, a sackful of food-related stories
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“Turkey wattle was ground, mixed with chocolate, and fed to the enemies of the Aztecs because it was believed to cause impotence.”
I am extremely grateful to Tom Nealon for giving me a reason this year not to republish my previous podcasts about turkey and Thanksgiving. He has written a choice round-up of many things turkey that is bound to lift the gloom that sometimes hangs over leftovers.
Who hasn’t spent Thanksgiving deep in self-recrimination for ruining the turkey that they spent all day lovingly basting? Cursing its very existence, making pale lumpy gravy, doubling down on the horror and shame? How many doomed holiday seasons have been kicked off with a dry turkey, bad stuffing, shitty mashed potatoes? Who among us hasn’t been rendered impotent by too much dry turkey — rendered incapable by tryptophan, bourbon and self-loathing. But the Aztecs knew something that we don’t — they had a turkey secret…
That secret, and many more, in Tom’s piece.
I know, too, as a solo podcaster, that I must not ignore this opportunity for self-promotion (or marketing) so:
As for our celebrations, for the second year in a row we went with beef cheeks stracotto, and all present agreed: All Hail a new Thanksgiving tradition.
Photograph by Don DeBold.
Mozambique used to be the world’s largest supplier of cashew nuts. Then along came the World Bank, to help.
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In the wake of the previous episode on how capuchin monkeys find their food, I learned that many people were unaware just how difficult and dangerous it is to get cashew nuts. Not for us, of course; you just buy a little bag of them. For the people who process the nuts to fill those bags, however, it is a very different story. Permanently damaged fingers, burned by the acid that protects the cashew, are an occupational hazard for the hundreds of thousands of women who extract the kernels. Mozambique was once the world’s top producer of cashew nuts, and the women who worked there enjoyed better than average conditions. In the aftermath of the civil war there, however, the World Bank stepped in with a rescue package and a cashew nut policy that destroyed the industry.
The history of the cashew in the West is relatively recent. A 1917 report on the Indian Cashew-Nut Industry from the Royal Society of Arts says sniffily that the cashew apple “is eaten only by the lowest classes, and quantities of it are wasted”. At that time, total exports from India amounted to about 680 metric tons. The report explains:
Cashew nuts are prepared for table use in much the same manner as roasted almonds, the flavour of which they are said to resemble slightly. They are not unlike almonds in shape, though thinner and more elongated, and many of them are concavo-convex. The exported nuts are no doubt bought chiefly by East Indians residing in foreign countries, or by persons who have acquired a taste for them by residence in India. They are sometimes made into confectionary with sugar.
It isn’t often that the dangers of badly prepared cashews come to light for those of us who view them as a snack rather than work with them directly. The best example I have found dates to April 1982. A Little League organisation in Southcentral Pennsyvania bought almost 3000 bags of cashews to sell as a fund-raiser. Fifty-four people who ate the cashews developed an itchy dermatitis very like a poison ivy rash. Only three of them suffered blisters in the mouth. Most (97%) had the dermatitis on their extremities, while 66% had the rash on their trunk, 45% in the groin, 34% in the armpits and 21% on the buttocks. An unfortunate “four persons reported perianal itching”. All of which raises, for me, the question of how exactly the cashews provoked the reaction. Aside from the mouth and the extremities, and possibly the perianal itching, where it could clearly be as a result of contact, could the irritant have spread internally? Or was it, as I believe happens with poison ivy, the result of scratching the rash in one place and then touching the skin elsewhere? Unfortunately, the report from the Centers for Disease Control does not say. Investigators did examine 14 unsold bags of cashews. Five of them contained pieces of cashew shell. I’m guessing nobody ate cashew shell by accident, so I can only imagine that the acid from the shell rubbed off onto the nuts and from there onto the skin. The nuts, alas, had been imported from Mozambique.
News from the food front: the future, fish, and more.
Capuchin monkeys are resourceful and smart, which helps them to select a good diet from all the potential food around them.
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When chimpanzees were first seen stripping the leaves off slender branches and inserting them into termite nests to fish for the insects, people marvelled. Our nearest relatives, using tools to get nutritious food. Imagine, then, the surprise among primatologists when capuchin monkeys, not nearly as closely related to us, proved equally adept at tool use. Capuchins select stones that can be half as heavy as they are and carry them long distances to use as nutcrackers.
Elisabetta Visalberghi is a biologist based in Rome, who published the first scientific observations of tool use in capuchins. That is just a part of her far-reaching investigations into how capuchins, which are omnivorous, go about deciding which foods are worth eating and which are best avoided.
The results may surprise you.
Trailer: The Bearded Capuchin Monkeys of Fazenda Boa Vista from Cognitive Primatology_ISTC on Vimeo.
