Avocado Anxiety: how to choose what to eat They’re “not so bad”. Compared to what?

Three photographs of avocados on toast.

Portrait of Louise Gray, a young woman with shoulder length brown hair and dark eyes wearing a white blouse.
Louise Gray
Winner of the Guild of Food Writers award for investigative work in 2024, Avocado Anxiety is about more than avocados. It offers a deep look at the implications of the choices we are faced with when deciding what to buy. Local may not always be best for the planet, but perhaps it avoids the worst abuses of labour. And air-freighted is usually terrible for greenhouse gas emissions, but may be good for communities far away.

Some universal truths did emerge from our conversation. Fruit and veg is almost always better for the planet than meat, and homegrown is generally preferable to imported. Exceptions, however, are not uncommon, and in the end questions outnumber simple answers.

Notes

  1. Avocado Anxiety: and Other Stories About Where Your Food Comes From is available from Bookshop.org and elsewhere.
  2. We didn’t discuss the meaning of the word avocado, thank heavens, because the greatest service I can offer is to point out that nobody believes that words like nut or ball actually mean testicle. Let the Nawatl Scholar explain: the word guacamole does not come from the Nahuatl word for “ground testicles or avocados”..
  3. The book Louise Gray mentioned at the end is The Avocado Debate by Honor May Eldridge.
  4. Here is the transcript.
  5. Photo of Louise Gray by Nancy MacDonald. Others scraped by me from Instagram.

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Palatable is not Potable The Taste of Water

Water fountain with carved stone message "acqua non potabile" the water is not drinkable.

Book cover artworkWater is tricky stuff. It can be limpid and clear but dangerous, home to harmful bacteria and parasites. It can be murky, but perfectly safe to drink. It may smell of chlorine, which puts people off, but perversely that is a sign that no bacteria are present.

So how do we judge the quality of water? That’s the subject of a new book — The Taste of Water — by Christy Spackman at Arizona State University. She looks at the history of water purification and efforts to understand the complex interplay between the quality of water from a public health standpoint and the sensory perceptions that people use (or don’t use) to decide whether they trust it.

Notes

  1. The Taste of Water: Sensory Perception and the Making of an Industrialized Beverage is published by University of California Press. Christy Spackman’s website offers insights into her work.
  2. Wichita Falls, the town in Texas that used recycled water to cope with drought, is proud of its water purification. Scientific American had an article about the project.
  3. Lithium in spa waters? Yes! See Lithium with your tonic, Sir? in the magazine of the Geological Society of London.
  4. Here is the transcript.
  5. Banner photo by me in our local park. Cover photo by gcardinal from Norway, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

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Women Butchers Why shouldn't women become butchers?

Portraits of the three women in the podcast: Martina Bartolozzi, Sophie Minchilli and Olivia Potts.

Cover artworkCheap supermarket meat has been making life difficult for independent butchers for quite some time now. England has lost 60 per cent of its butcher shops in the past few decades, Australia 80 per cent. I couldn’t find figures for the United States. Against that background, there has been an uptick of interest from young people wanting to learn the skills needed to deconstruct an animal carcass. What surprised me – and of course it shouldn’t have – is that women are learning butchery. I chatted with three of them.

Notes

  1. Olivia Potts’ article, which triggered my interest, is The Women at the Cutting Edge of Butchery. She has a website too.
  2. Instagram is the best place to find Martina Bartolozzi and while Sophie Minchilli is also on Instagram, she has a website. Both offer great food tours.
  3. Here is the transcript.

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Leftovers Through History Refuse food waste

The tops of green, red and yellow waste bins labelled Compost, and RecycleWaste,

Portrait of Eleanor Barnett
Eleanor Barnett

We all know we’re supposed to reduce our food waste, but what exactly is the difference between waste and leftovers? For me, leftovers become waste when they turn green and furry, forgotten at the back of the fridge, but that’s a very narrow view. Eleanor Barnett is a historian whose book Leftovers: a history of food waste and preservation takes a much broader look at food scarcity, food surpluses and the byproducts of food production that people don’t or won’t eat. Our conversation reflected on the complex relationships among food waste, human behaviour, and systemic factors throughout history, advocating for a renewed appreciation of the value of food.

Notes

  1. Follow Eleanor Barnett as historyeats on Instagram. She also has a website.
  2. Leftovers: a history of food waste and preservation is available from UK booksellers and will be published in the US in September.
  3. Here’s the transcript.
  4. Banner photo from Nareeta Martin on Unsplash. Cover photo by Kathleen Franklin on Flickr.

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What is Chametz? Neither science nor scholarship can really answer the question

Medieval illustration of passover

A sign in Jerusalem in Hebrew, Arabic and English. The English text reads: Please refrain from eating "Chametz" (bread and other leavened foods)in the Jewish quarter during Passover. Thank you!One of the key activities in an observant Jewish household’s preparation for Passover is the hunt for and destruction of chametz, anything that involves leavened grain. At one level, the search means that the house gets an extremely thorough cleaning at least once a year. At another, there are associations that equate ridding the house of chametz with ridding the mind of ego and other spiritual concerns. But what exactly is chametz? In trying to get to some sort of “truth” I discovered that there can be no right or wrong answer, only opinions, more or less persuasive, more or less accepted. In the end, the meaning of chametz rests on history and tradition, and new traditions are possible.

Notes

  1. I do have a list of all the sources I consulted, which I can share if needed.
  2. Here is a copy of the script.
  3. Banner image from the National Library of Israel. Cover image via Wikimedia Commons

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