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Are there any cultures around the world that don’t practice some sort of fermentation? Probably not, judging by Ken Albala’s latest book, The World Atlas of Fermented Foods and Drinks. It goes way beyond the things most of us know are fermented to explore some foods that even fermentation guru Sandor Katz was not aware of. Albala also goes into the history of fermentation and of ideas about fermentation, as well as cultural shifts that might mean the end of the hippie ferments of our recent past. The bulk of the book, though, is an introduction to more than 100 ferments from around the world. Despite the breadth of coverage, though, the book is by no means encyclopaedic.

Notes

1. The World Atlas of Fermented Foods and Drinks by Ken Albala is published in September by California University Press.
2. This isn’t the first time Ken Albala has talked to me about fermentation. We also talked about his noodle soup craze and, as an accomplished ceramicist, about his inventions to bake bread in a microwave oven and a plate that helps food stay crispy.
3. Here’s the transcript.
4. Banner photo by Tamaki Sono.

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In the previous issue I linked to a piece by Thin Lei Win that shed some light on Commercial Determinants of Health, the idea that food companies (and others) use “strategies and approaches … to promote products and choices that are detrimental to health”. It’s probably just a coincidence, but blow me if The Guardian didn’t recently point out that “[o]besity reflects prices, advertising and access, not simply weak willpower”.

An editorial asks the UK government to put public health before food industry pressure. The piece was prompted by a report from parliament’s health select committee, and most of the arguments and proposed remedies are reasonably familiar. Industry lobbying, however, has effectively defanged every previous attempt to do something. Anything. (Can you see a pattern here?)

On Monday, the country welcomed a new Prime Minister. Will “pro-business” Andy Burnham be up to the task?

Also relevant to this issue, Farming’s Overlords with Jennifer Clapp.

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The first record of tomatoes growing in England dates to the 1590s (though Wales has a slightly earlier claim). It isn’t until the 1720s, however, that recipes for their preparation start to appear. The delay has been blamed on fear of foods from outisde Europe, on the humoral theory, on piety and superstition, and probably lots of other factors too. While all those explanations have obvious attractions, the reality is much more prosaic than that.

Dr Serin Quinn tracked the true history of the tomato in England and found that temperature and technology, along with religious persecution, are much more convincing.

Notes

1. Serin Quinn’s paper on The Tomato-Chili Nexus: Reconstructing the Mesoamerican Influence on Europe through Taste and Method was my introduction to her work.
2. As mentioned, you may also find Rebecca Earle on The true history of the potato in Europe an interesting listen.
3. Here is the transcript.
4. Cover image lifted from The Gardener’s Chronicle, banner from Hortus Eystettensis, 1640, at Wikimedia

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Eating habits are formed young and can last a lifetime, which suggests that school meals could be an excellent place to address nutrition and sustainability. Sweden, with universal free school meals for every child, offered a real-life laboratory in which to see the impact of school lunches that are essentially the same but designed to be healthier for the pupils and for the planet.

These were experiments in which the researchers were delighted to be rewarded with negative results. No differences in how much children ate, no difference in food waste, and no difference in satisfaction with the school lunches.

Notes

1. The paper we discussed is Sustainable and acceptable school meals through optimization analysis: an intervention study, prompted by this comment in The Lancet: School meal programmes: improving health and equity in the European Union.
2. Here is the transcript.
3. I took the cover image from Swedish school lunch reform, nutrition, and lifetime income, which has some interesting information on the long-term impact of Sweden’s school meal programme.

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The hipster barista has been around for a while, not quite serving but definitely enabling people to enjoy a wide variety of caffeinated beverages. And he was clearly part of the zeitgeist in 2019, when Mattel launched the Ken Barista doll. It was that ken who inspired Wendy Pojmann to investigate the whole phenomenon of barista cool and how the look of the professional Italian barista went out into the world, mutated in different ways, and returned to establish itself in selected spots in Italy. Pojmann concludes that “Barista Ken truly captures the globalized cool of espresso culture”.

Barista Ken, she also points out “may be … of mixed-race origins”. The bar owners and baristas that Grazia Ting Deng studied for her PhD, which later became the book Chinese Espresso, are by no means mixed race; they are pure Chinese. They are following in the footsteps of the many migrant Italians who took over neighbourhood bars to work for a better life. As they retire, and with children who don’t want to work in a bar, they sold to a new wave of migrants — from China.

As both Wendy Pojmann and Grazia Ting Deng discovered, very little is constant even in the fiercely traditional world of Italian espresso.

Notes

1. Wendy Pojmann’s article is Barista Cool: Espresso Fashion Transformed. She is also the author of Espresso: the art and soul of Italy.
2. Grazia Ting Deng’s book is Chinese Espresso: Contested Race and Convivial Space in Contemporary Italy. Her website contains links to other interviews and articles.
3. For an update on the icon of the hipster barista, take a look at an article from The New Statesman
4. espresso

   Here’s the transcript.

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