Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 056

 

29 May 2017

  1. Wendell Berry takes the coastal elites to task, with style and grace.
  2. I like what the American Anthropological Association had to say on the matter: “Maybe the colonial narrative is as guilty of reductionism as the nostalgia narrative – but at least it moves the conversation away from a weakness of rural character to the demonstrable effects of economic policies and practices.”
  3. Then there’s the whole question of who is actually doing the work in agriculture. Longreads has an extract from a new book that gives a voice to migrant workers in California.
  4. From Berkeley, mind, a little bit of history on innovations in food processing. “Today, there are more than 400 types of mixed salads.” And that was just the start of it.
  5. Do people perceive those bagged salads as “healthy”? Probably not, according to one graphic Marion Nestle lifted from the 12th annual Food and Health Survey produced by the International Food Information Council. She also reminds us that the IFIC is “industry-funded” and that “the data come from an online survey taking 22 minutes to complete”.
  6. A Feast for the Eyes is celebrated in The British Journal of Photography. You may never look at food photographs in the same way again. Well, you probably will, but you may also think a bit more about them.

Let me take a brief moment here to moan again about how hard it is to find interesting food news that originates outside the USA. Help me out, if you can.

You might also like:

  1. Ireland’s apple collection A visit to the Irish Seedsavers Association yields history and modern science Apples picked to perfume a room. Undocumented apples and apples with false papers. Foundlings that could give a supermarket apple a run for its money. Others that don't taste too good but are catnip to blackbirds. A heritage orchard in...
  2. A computer learns about ingredients and recipes What else would you put on a peanut butter sandwich? Perhaps you’ve heard about IBM’s giant Watson computer, which dispenses ingredient advice and novel recipes. Jaan Altosaar, a PhD candidate at Princeton University, is working on a recipe recommendation engine that anyone can use....
  3. Antibiotics and agriculture Tackling the problem of antibiotic resistance at (one) source Antibiotic resistance is one consequence of feeding animals large amounts of antibiotics -- about three times the amount given to people in the US. Why is it so hard to regulate the use of antibiotics in agriculture, and how else...
  4. Milk is not a Superfood The mania for fresh white stuff has a lot to answer for The first celebrity doctor's fad diet is still going strong today, 300 years later, and it has a lot to answer for....

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