21 November 2016
Authentic food news
No apologies this week for focusing on North America. There are still plenty of things to give thanks for.
- Revisiting authenticity, this time in the context of mezcal. It’s only the abstract of a student anthro paper, but it looks really interesting, examining the differences between local authenticity and global authenticity.
- 538 unravels a weird fact about farms in the USA: The number of farms has stayed about the same, and yet there has been huge consolidation among farms. Part of the answer: “These aren’t the farms of the poor; they’re the yards of the upper-middle-class.”
- The official estimated price of Thanksgiving dinner has dropped. Again
- Rachel Laudan uses that to celebrate the “affordability” of this most democratic of feasts.
- I use it to talk about price-fixing in chicken and ride my own hobbyhorse: food is too cheap.
What’s nice, to me, is that we both have questions about what the headline price of that feast leaves out.
- Back to 538 for the last word on Thanksgiving, and a self-selecting, undoubtedly biassed but nevertheless fascinating attempt to define “the best possible Thanksgiving dinner”. I expect the results to be really scary.
