8 October 2018
- 60 tonnes a couple of weeks ago, 3130 tonnes the next, pretty soon you’re talking about a genuine whopper. The world’s largest meatpacker, a company called JBS, just recalled potentially contaminated beef that amounts to “more than double the amount of beef recalled in 2015, 2016, and 2017 combined”. What happens to the recalled meat? You may not want to know.
- Bracing for the Vanilla Boom is an absolutely fascinating account of how farmers in Madagascar respond to the crop that gives us a lot of pleasure and them a lot of problems. I’m still not surely I fully understand.
- Maybe you saw the news about the world’s oldest cheese. It offers an opportunity to get up to date on the story of why most human adults cannot drink milk.
- New to me, a history of bitters. I’m not a huge one for cocktails at home, but I do like a drop of Angostura in fizzy water on a hot day.
- Last week was full of bread news, good, bad and informative.
- Good: The big food chain Pret a Manger is considering labelling the ingredients in its bread, after a young woman died of anaphylactic shock. Shame that’s what it may take. Will that include sourdough?
- Bad: The Consumers Association in the UK discovered that only four of 19 “sourdough” loaves they looked at should be considered genuine sourdough. (Worse, the BBC’s piece on that report, which I refuse to link to.) Do better by reading …
- Informative: Modernist Cuisine’s round-up of Sourdough science. Also, for Vancouverites, a round-up of some of that fine city’s breads and bakers. He linked to the podcast, or I sure I would not have found the piece, but this sort of thing, from a local, is so much more useful than the reviews on the mega-sites.
