- Good news everyone! New test could guarantee the perfect avocado.
- The Counter says small chicken farmers are doing OK, while smaller slaughterhouses are still being butchered by the big guys.
- Ancient grains? We got ‘em. The revival of the grains that the ancient Greeks called zea and Bruce Pascoe’s first modern harvest of “dancing grass” down under.
- Canadian hop growers crying politely into their beer.
- If the “the Canadian Native Haute Cuisine Team” can take gold at the Culinary Olympics, what’s stopping those lacklustre Canadian craft brewers?
- Anyone doing home-schooling on the Egyptians? This one’s for you.
Eat This Newsletter 124 Indigenous winners
On being the right size, and other news, ancient and modern, food and drink. Subscribe to the newsletter for a fuller “analysis”.
You are what you drink Or maybe you drink what you are
Robert Walpole — like all great politicians — understood how to use his tipple to send a signal
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 21:10 — 19.4MB)
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Taste has never really been purely subjective, good taste has always come with the baggage of social status and moral superiority. Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in politics, where the extended meanings of taste — refinement, discernment, judgement — brought with them an assumption that these were also the qualities associated with the ability to govern well. If you could choose a superior wine, of course you could choose a superior policy for the nation.
Chad Ludington, Professor of History at North Carolina State University, has studied the politics of wine in Britain extensively. He told me how changes in the production of wine, against the background of changes in political relationships between England and France and in the social structure of England, combined to make one’s choice of wine an important statement about one’s self-image.
In America, beer plays the part of wine in Britain, but the story is practically identical.
Notes
- Would you like a transcript?
- Professor Ludington’s book is The Politics of Wine in Britain: A New Cultural History.
- A few years ago we talked about How the Irish created the great wines of Bordeaux (and elsewhere).
- Food Fights, the book that prompted this episode, is published by University of North Carolina Press.
- Ale to the Chief (which is pretty clever) provides the background to Barack’s brews.
- Official White House photo by Pete Souza. Bottles of port by F. Tronchin on Flickr. Portrait of Robert Walpole, 1st Earl of Orford, by Jean-Baptiste van Loo.
Eat This Newsletter 123 Meat matters
No meat shortage, no vegetable left behind, not enough figs, tasty maize, bulky barley, old bottles.
- Jayson Lusk explains Changes in Meat Supply and Demand and what that actually means, at least in the US …
- … where lack of meat is not part of greater food insecurity.
- Another topinambour, monsieur?
- The University of Pisa gets to promote the natural variability of the fig.
- Faster, breeder! More! More!
- Why should you care that Scottish Archaeologists Discover Ruins of Massive Lost Wine-Bottle Glass Factory? Because bottle technology changed tastes, as will be explained in nest week’s episode.