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Unclean eating, faux craft, China in London, east Germany in the World, NYT reviews, Cured of fermentation

Who knows what evil lurks beneath the wrinkled skin of an “economy” English sausage? And what delights won for the Cumberland and the Newmarket their coveted status of Protected Geographical Indication? Jan Davison, that’s who. She wrote the book on English sausages and is the guest in this latest episode.

If there’s a theme this time — and there may not be — it’s about going beyond easily available information.

Did you know that malt whisky owes its existence in the marketplace to the stock market crash of 1973-74?

Neither did I, so when one of the people I interviewed for the craft distilling episode a few weeks back made that claim, I wanted to know more. Unfortunately, if you just plug “scotch whisky economic history” into an online search engine, you don’t find anything of real interest, at least not in the first few thousand hits.

The past is a a foreign country. And foreign countries are present. London, China, Dalits, First Nations and fake sales figures

I admit, I’m taking pleasure in the continuing exposure of Josh Tetrick and Hampton Creek Foods. Bloomberg Business Week continues its exposé.

Speculators are responsible for food price spikes? Food price spikes are responsible for riots in the streets? First-world hipsters are responsible for hungry quinoa farmers in Peru? Seeking answers to basic questions.

As a privileged white male, I am honestly at a loss to respond appropriately to discussion of culinary appropriation and its equally evil twin, culinary imposition, a notion that, I think, only Rachel Laudan seems to have advanced.

Culinary appropriation up the wazoo.

Hot on the heels of — indeed prompted by — the podcast on zucchini, a quick look at an ill-founded attempt to patent the warts on pumpkins.