Eat This Podcast
Talking about anything around food

Sushi From necessity to ubiquity

27 September 2021 Filed under: Tags: , ,

The story of perhaps the greatest transformation in the history of food and how it continues today

Detail from Utagawa Hiroshige’s [Amusements While Waiting for the Moon on the Night of the Twenty-sixth in Takanawa, showing sushi stalls serving tourists

Portrait of Eric Rath
Eric Rath
The California Roll was only the beginning. Or at least, the beginning of global domination. Back in the mid 1980s, when I made a documentary for BBC TV about disgust and learned food habits, we chose sushi as our exemplar of the Westerner’s idea of hard-to-understand foods. Raw fish. Cold rice. Seaweed. What’s to like? If I had known then of the rich history of sushi, I’m sure we could have made even more of its strange 1980s incarnation.

Eric Rath’s history of sushi traces the word back to its origins as a method of preserving fish through many twists and turns to today, when sushi means almost anything you want it to mean.

Notes

  1. Eric Rath’s book Oishii: The History of Sushi is published by Reaktion Books. It contains recipes old and new, in case you want to try making sushi at home.
  2. National Geographic surprised me with this article in early September: These popular tuna species are no longer endangered, surprising scientists.
  3. A popular culture view of modern sushi that I did not mention, precisely because it lives up to all possible stereotypes, is the amazing sequence in Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs. Almost more astonishing is the dedication that went into making it.
  4. Here is the transcript, thanks to the generosity of the show’s supporters.
  5. The banner image is a detail from Utagawa Hiroshige’s Amusements While Waiting for the Moon on the Night of the Twenty-sixth in Takanawa, which dates from the 1820s, with thanks to the British Museum (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). The cover image is a detail from Bowl of Sushi, also by Hiroshige. I have not been able to date it.

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Italian coffee: a temporary triangle Tying together Italy, Brazil and Italian East Africa

13 September 2021 Filed under: Tags: ,

“The cups might break, but the images recycle endlessly.”

Archive photo of an Italian overseer and Ethiopian workers on a coffee plantation

Interior of Tomoca Coffee House in Addis Ababa Tomoca Coffee House in Addis Ababa is a lasting reminder of the Italian occupation of Ethiopia. When I visited, almost 10 years ago, a somewhat ancient machine was producing terrific cups of espresso for a huge crowd, and they were doing a roaring trade in beans too. Tomoca is in some ways a symbol not just of Ethiopian coffee, but also of the Italian connection and, at one remove, of the way that coffee ties Italy and Ethiopia to Brazil.

Diana Garvin, an historian, recently published a paper that examines what she calls the Italian coffee triangle. She explains how Italy’s belated land grab in Africa sought to transform the colonos of Brazil, the 2.7 million immigrant Italian labourers who effectively tripled Brazilian production in a decade, into respectable colonialisti in Ethiopia, Italians who owned and oversaw coffee plantations in Ethiopia. Although their Fascist-inspired duplication of Brazilian methods utterly failed, still, Africa had a powerful hold on the Italian imagination.

Notes

  1. Diana Garvin’s paper The Italian coffee triangle: From Brazilian colonos to Ethiopian colonialisti was published in Modern Italy, doi:10.1017/mit.2021.26. Follow her on Twitter @DianaEGarvin.
  2. Chewing the Fat is one of Karima Moyer-Nocchi’s two published books. She’s on Twitter @MoyerNocchi, but not often. Better go to her website.
  3. Here is the transcript.
  4. Banner photo of Italian plantation overseer and Ethiopian workers, someone else snagged from the Archivio Luce.

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