6 March 2017

1. My main reason to recommend Rachel Laudan’s A kipper for breakfast is not to disagree with her preferences (although I certainly do), but to use it to recommend Alan Davison’s throughly delightful book A kipper with my tea: selected food essays. If you don’t know it, you should. And if you do, you should reacquaint yourself with it, just as I wish I could reacquaint myself with the delights of a kipper.
2. How did the elite East coast urbanites respond to An English Sheep Farmer’s View of Rural America? And rural America?
3. Does it always take a foreigner to interpret what the locals take for granted? A blog post Following persimmon around the world confirms my prejudice.
4. I enjoyed this open letter from Emely Vargas, asking why her mother doesn’t teach her brother to cook. Would it be too much to expect a reply? Or to hear her brother’s point of view?
5. And let me toot my own horn, again. In the wake of last week’s podcast on the cost of a nutritious diet, I took a look at a couple of studies of fat taxes and thin subsidies to ask “What if the differences in how people buy food depend more on whether they are obese or normal weight than whether they are poor or rich?”