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An extremely unlikely source (see note 3) tipped me off to the existence of Cooking in Maximum Security. In some respects, it is completely ordinary; a book of recipes — Starters, First Courses et cetera — along with handy tips for making the dishes. In others, it is eye-opening, because all the recipes, and the inventions necessary to make them, were contributed by prisoners in Italian maximum security prisons. Not only that, but cooking is an essential and integral part of the prisoners’ everyday lives. Matteo Guidi, an anthropologist and artist who teaches in Italy and Spain, guided the process of compiling the book.

Notes

1. Matteo Guidi has built a website for Cooking in Maximum Security that gives a lot more information.
2. Matteo’s site has purchase details, but you might do better going directly to Half Letter Press.
3. It was Cory Doctorow’s fabulous Pluralistic that sent me in search of Matteo Guidi.
4. Banner and cover images by Mario Trudu, taken from the book.
5. Here is the transcipt.

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Settled agriculture produced the food surpluses that enabled the development of civilisations. No wonder, then, that scholars have been keen to understand the origins of agriculture, as a way of starting to understand the origin of civilisations. The general view is that humans actively domesticated plants and animals, selecting the traits that made them more reliable producers of food. What if that’s all wrong? What if the traits that mark domestication are not the result of selection but instead an inevitable evolutionary response to changes in the environment? Changes wrought by humans, to be sure, but unconsciously and without any forethought.

That’s the central thesis of a new book, Nature’s Greatest Success: how plants evolved to exploit humanity, by Robert Spengler III.

Notes

1. Nature’s Greatest Success: how plants evolved to exploit humanity is published by University of California Press.
2. If you want more details but less than a book, Seeking consensus on the domestication concept by Spengler and colleagues is part of a journal issue devoted to domestication. There’s also the Spengler Lab website.
3. Here’s the transcript.
4. Image of a Neolithic sickle from the Museum Quintana

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The famine in the Volga Region in the early 1920s was a humanitarian disaster, but it kick started about a decade of agricultural cooperation between the Soviet Union and the United States. Agricultural experts from each country visited the other to teach and to learn, a series of exchanges documented by Maria Fedorova, assistant professor in the Department of Russian Studies at Macalester College in Minnesota, in a new book called Seeds of Exchange: Soviets, Americans, and Cooperation in Agriculture, 1921–1935.

Apart from food aid and medical assistance from the US, the exchanges included material goods, like seeds and tractors, as well as information and experience, and were motivated as much by ideology and politics as by pressing humanitarian concerns.

Notes

1. Maria Fedorova’s book is Seeds of Exchange: Soviets, Americans, and Cooperation in Agriculture, 1921–1935.
2. Seeds as Technology: The Russian Agricultural Bureau in New York and Soviet Agricultural Modernization, 1921–26 gives more information about Vavilov and Borodin’s organisation, while The Untold Story of “Radical Relief” to Soviet Russia has more on the American Tractor Unit.
3. Here is the transcript.
4. Podcast artwork from Бельтюков В. Public Domain.

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In 2008, the legend goes, staff at a Chinese takeaway in Dublin cooked themselves up a special treat after hours. Nothing too fancy, but tasty enough that soon their friends wanted the same. One thing led to another and today you can find something similar not only across Ireland but as far afield as New Zealand.

That after-hours dish became the spice bag, and in many ways the story of the spice bag is the story of assimilation, innovation and widespread adoption that can be told about so many “immigrant” foods. The spice bag emigrated, came back home, and found new modes of expression among communities who took the same basic essentials on which to layer their own particular tastes of home.

Notes

1. I met John Mulcahy at the Food and Drink as Education Conference, which he helped to organise.
2. John Mulcahy’s paper “A is for Aircháelán”: the case for compiling a compendium of food in Ireland offers a taste of the breadth and depth of information he has compiled.
3. Here is the transcript.

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Marieke Hendriksen, in our recent conversation, told me how her new junior researcher had “got an allergic reaction and ended up in A&E” as a result of eating too much fermented food. In the past, Marieke added, “because people ate so many fermented foods, they must have had a higher histamine tolerance.” That rang a distant bell for me, and this is the result.

Histamine is the chemical largely responsible for allergic reactions, which are caused by an allergen triggering a release of histamine from specific cells of the immune system. That process is fairly well understood. Histamine is also common in fermented foods as a result of micro-organisms converting histidine, an amino acid found in many proteins. As a result, histamine concentrations are higher in animal ferments – cheese, meats – than in plant ferments. Histamine intolerance is not an allergic reaction but rather a reaction caused by too much histamine in the diet.

Here’s the problem: if you search for “histamine fermentation” online, you find a slew of sites all echoing more or less the same stuff about the prevalence and symptoms of histamine intolerance, along with sure-fire ways to minimise it, lists of foods to avoid, lifestyle changes to make, etc., etc.

Search for “histamine intolerance” itself on, say, Wikipedia and the picture is somewhat different.

Despite the belief shared by several researchers that consuming histamine can lead to nonspecific health issues, the scientific proof to back this claim is both scarce and inconsistent, the underlying mechanisms are not understood and while several factors have been proposed for explaining the underlying mechanisms of these adverse reactions to histamine intake, no single hypothesis has gained solid scientific confirmation.

That in itself explains why there is so much online advice that is charitably best described as a lot more certain than the topic merits. Although Wikipedia and peer-reviewed publications explain how a deficiency in the enzymes that break down histamine could be overwhelmed by a high enough dose of histamine, or might be deficient in some individuals, the results of double-blind trials on self-identified histamine intolerant people are inconclusive at best, and as far as I am aware no enzyme differences have been detected between those people and others not intolerant of histamine.

Aware of the perils of online research, I turned to Sandor Katz’s magisterial The Art of Fermentation. No time to re-read the entire text, I went, naturally, to the index. Other toxins get a good mention, but histamine is completely absent.

From which I conclude that histamine intolerance is quite possibly not a thing at all. What, then, sent Marieke Hendriksen’s new junior researcher to the hospital? Maybe she really did eat so much fermented food that the histamines overwhelmed her breakdown enzymes. Maybe something else entirely. Marieke did warn us not to try this at home: “Don’t eat all your fermented reconstructions at once”. Still, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say, despite not being a doctor of medicine, it’ll probably be just fine.