1. Coffee, culture and class
2. A new analysis of seven decades worth of tomato varieties shows that genetic diversity is increasing, at least since the 1950s
3. Modern wheat is not a cause of gluten sensitivity say researchers funded by the Oklahoma Wheat Commission. Oh, and in mice
4. Marion Nestle rounds up information about the state of the United Kingdom’s food system after Brexit. She “had to dig to find anyone hopeful of a silver lining”.
5. Everyone Loves Crispy and Crunchy, But What About Chewy?. What about it, indeed.

Quite by coincidence, I listened to two podcasts about coffee back to back. Well, it wasn’t truly a coincidence; I saw that there were two in my queue and so I interfered with the ordering to listen to them one after the other. Anyway, Benjamen Walker’s Wake up and smell the coffee was the kind of podcast I wish I could do more often.[1] Benjamen took his growing love for coffee on a global tour of discovery that took in Paris, Copenhagen and Nairobi. I don’t know whether he planned it that way, or simply took advantage of various opportunities (there was something in the credits about having received a grant to do it, so maybe it was planned as a whole.) The result was an entertaining, complex episode that exposed parts of the coffee chain that even coffee fans might not know about.

Perhaps the most telling point was made by one of the founders of Coffee Collective, in Denmark, who explained that because in the past most coffee had been produced by enslaved labour, the cost of coffee barely reflected the cost of production. That cheapness created a culture that happily tips down the drain coffee that has sat neglected too long. You wouldn’t do that with a glass or two of wine left in a bottle (although you might feed it to your vinegar mother). The historically low price of coffee is probably what also causes right-thinking people to blanch at the thought of a $15 shot.

Slave-grown coffee also came up towards the end of Lord Bragg’s sleepwalk through an episode of In Our Time on coffee. In fact, it may even have come up only during the podcast listeners’ special treat of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. It wasn’t the only interesting thing to arise late and, in my view, much too briefly. There was also the foundations of Italian coffee culture, which mandated a top price for a coffee but only if it came without service. Standing at the bar and gulping a tiny espresso was thus cheaper than paying a lot more to linger at a table. In Italy, and in France too, the sale of coffee went to the guilds that also sold distilled spirits, which explains a lot.[2] The stove-top Moka coffee maker, launched in the 1930s and still a classic icon of Italian coffee at home, became popular partly because it made a reasonable facsimile of an espresso at home, and also because it was it was futuristic, modern, and made of aluminium.

Then there are the huge differences between Italian coffee culture and the “Italian” coffee bars in London in the 50s and 60s, where patrons did linger and where the coffee was mostly milk, as it remains in so many places today. Class and coffee is a ripe area for discussion. Starbucks, apparently, was popular in blue states 20 years before it began to make inroads in red states. In that context, and the cappuccino-sipping Guardian reader, another guest raised the milkiness of caffé latte and its kin as infantilising, people walking down the street and “sucking on their sippy cups”.

Coffee producers don’t drink coffee, just as cacao farmers don’t eat chocolate. Preparation is too much of a fuss, for one thing, and for another some countries outright banned coffee roasting; beans had to go for export. (Benjamen Walker’s interview with the first coffee roasters in Kenya was eye-opening.) Now farmers are leaving the land, in part because they cannot earn enough growing coffee, and moving to the city, where they encounter, and drink, instant coffee. Coffee remains a mostly urban drink, and as urbanisation increases in the developing world, so does coffee consumption.

What I’m saying, I guess, is that the guests on In Our Time seemed to have much more interesting information to offer than the same old stories of frisky goats, the growth of Lloyds List and invention of The Tatler and The Spectator. Perhaps I know too much, but I do think I have learned a lesson listening to those two podcasts together.

What that is, I’m not yet ready to say.

Syndicated from the mothership
Photo by Rodrigo Flores on Unsplash

• I’m older than an “old” wheat. You really need to read my full explanation.
• A drowning fruit fly gave us cheese and yoghurt.
• Farrell Monaco’s Etruscan Banquet.
• My holiday gifts to you:
  • Paintings of breakfast and Paintings of lunch.
  • Toto’s Africa played on sweetpotato and squash.
• If you would like to give me a little something, you can do so easily. Alternatively, persuade a friend to sign up to the podcast and this newsletter.

1. Pizza Hut and perestroika
2. Resurrecting the tea Soviet Russia ruined
3. Dutch farmers take to the beaches and defer the day of nitrogen reckoning
4. Lamb-a-bam-a-ding-dong about what exactly “Spring” means to the average American
5. On the one hand, “totalitarianism is bread in exchange for freedom”. On the other, democracy says “give up bread for freedom”. The plot against brown bread
6. Can Babies Learn to Love Vegetables? from The New Yorker’s Food Issue

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I am extremely grateful to Tom Nealon for giving me a reason this year not to republish my previous podcasts about turkey and Thanksgiving. He has written a choice round-up of many things turkey that is bound to lift the gloom that sometimes hangs over leftovers.

Who hasn’t spent Thanksgiving deep in self-recrimination for ruining the turkey that they spent all day lovingly basting? Cursing its very existence, making pale lumpy gravy, doubling down on the horror and shame? How many doomed holiday seasons have been kicked off with a dry turkey, bad stuffing, shitty mashed potatoes? Who among us hasn’t been rendered impotent by too much dry turkey — rendered incapable by tryptophan, bourbon and self-loathing. But the Aztecs knew something that we don’t — they had a turkey secret…

That secret, and many more, in Tom’s piece.

I know, too, as a solo podcaster, that I must not ignore this opportunity for self-promotion (or marketing) so:

1. Tom Nealon’s podcast here: Mistaken about mayonnaise — and many other foods
2. My first crack at the topic: A partial history of the turkey
3. Further and better particulars: Another helping of turkey
4. The icing on the cake (a metaphor too far): What a bunch of turkeys

As for our celebrations, for the second year in a row we went with beef cheeks stracotto, and all present agreed: All Hail a new Thanksgiving tradition.

Photograph by Don DeBold.