Eat This Podcast

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I’m fascinated by Japanese food, but from a position of profound ignorance. I’ve never been there and I’ve never having eaten anything I could definitely say was “genuine,” aside from a wasabi chocolate cake baked by a Japanese friend. So the opportunity to talk to a Westerner living in Japan was one I leaped at. Jason Irwin is a Canadian who has been helping people in Japan learn English for the past seven years. He’s not in a big city, and he is part of a Japanese family, so he probably has a better understanding than many. He’s also leaving Japan soon. Time, obviously, to talk.

As I mention in the podcast outro, I still find it rather remarkable that I can be online friends with a Canadian living in Japan and record us having a conversation. The recording bit is nothing special these days, I suppose, but the online friendship is the result of this thing called app dot net, aka ADN. It’s a special kind of social platform, one where the people who use it are the customers, as opposed to the others, where users are just a bulk commodity to be sold to the highest bidder. ADN celebrated its second birthday two days ago, and I’ve been there two years today. I’ve I get a lot out of ADN, not least my conversations with Jason, although I have never done anything to evangelize about it. Consider this a plug.

Notes

1. Cover photo is Ise-ebi: Crawfish or Spiny Lobster and Ebi: shrimp by Utagawa Hiroshige.
2. Jason’s website is well worth a read.

On food, I thought I would single out two posts about some of the Canadian foods he missed in Japan: Food I miss the most and I am not a chef … but you’ll have to ask him yourself for the details of how to prepare ham cooked in Canada Dry Ginger ale.

3. Aside from everything else that people say it could be, I find ADN to be just a very fine micro-blogging platform. You might too.
4. Banner photograph modified from an original by Linh Nguyen.

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The history of pasta, ancient and modern, is littered with myths about the origins of manufacturing techniques, of cooking, of recipes, of names, of antecedents. Supporting most of these is a sort of truthiness whereby what matters most is not evidence or facts but – appropriately for us – gut feeling. Combine that with the echo chamber of the internet, and an idea can become true by virtue of repetition. So it is, by and large, for the idea that Arabs were responsible for inventing dried pasta and for introducing it to Sicily, from where it spread to the rest of the peninsula and beyond. You can find versions of this story almost everywhere you look for the history of dried pasta.

Anthony Buccini’s gut feeling, however, was that this story was not true. His expertise in historical linguistics and sociolinguistics tells him that the linguistic evidence for an Arab origin gets the whole story backwards; rather, one of the principal elements in the spread of dried pasta through Italy and beyond was the commercial expansion of Genoa. The stuff itself was being made in southern Italy, the Genoese took the word and the stuff to the north and to Catalonia, and it was the Catalonians who took them to the Maghreb and the Arabs.

So what did the Arabs do? They wrote it down in their cookbooks. And a bit more besides.

Notes

1. The 2nd Perugia Food Conference Of Places and Tastes: Terroir, Locality, and the Negotiation of Gastro-cultural Boundaries took place from 5–8 June 2014. It was organized by the Food Studies Program of the Umbra Institute.
2. World Pasta Day falls on 25th October. Enough time to prepare something special?
3. Banner photograph taken by Su-Lin in Vancouver. Used with permission.

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What do artisanal cheese and maple syrup have in common? In North America, and elsewhere too, they’re likely to bring to mind the state of Vermont, which produces more of both than anywhere else. They’re also the research focus of Amy Trubek at the University of Vermont, a trained chef and cultural anthropologist. Trubek gave one of the keynote speeches at the recent Perugia Food Conference, saying that terroir – which she translates as the taste of place – combines two elements. There is the taste itself, which when people talk about it with one another becomes a social experience that, she said, lends meaning to eating and drinking. And it is “a story we tell to assure that our food and drink emerges from natural environments and conditions.” Vermont cheese, at least the lovingly crafted artisanal kind, as much as maple syrup, reflects those concerns with natural environments and conditions.

In our interview, we didn’t dwell too much on the scientific research underpinning Amy Trubek’s ideas. I found the idea that simply knowing the personal story of a cheese – who makes it, where, why – can influence how you respond to it fascinating. Taste, surely, is physiological. How would the story affect that? But it does. In one study of four different cheeses, people heard either a generic story about that cheese category, taken “from dairy science manuals,” or “socially and contextually relevant production information”. No matter how much they actually liked the cheese, or their “foodiness” on an established scale, people who had been told personal stories about the cheesemakers liked the cheese more than those told about the cheese alone. (See Note 3 below.) What’s more, according to Rachel DiStefano, who did a Master’s thesis with Amy Trubek, cheesemongers are vital allies in telling the stories and thus helping consumers to value artisanal cheeses.

By contrast, terroir for maple syrup does seem to be less about personal stories and more about the soils the trees are in and the details of turning sap into syrup. Trubek has worked with a large, multidisciplinary team to create new standards and vocabulary that take discussions well beyond “sweet”. And yes, there is some evidence that soil does affect taste:

[S]yrup produced from trees on limestone bedrock had the highest quantities of copper, magnesium, calcium and silica, which scientists hypothesized had a role in the taste. Shale syrups came in second in all of these substances, followed by schist.

A final thought: Amy Trubek’s throwaway remark about fake maple flavour sent me down an internet rabbit hole that in the end proved surprisingly productive.

Notes

1. The 2nd Perugia Food Conference Of Places and Tastes: Terroir, Locality, and the Negotiation of Gastro-cultural Boundaries took place from 5–8 June 2014. It was organized by the Food Studies Program of the Umbra Institute.
2. Sign photograph by Katherine Martinelli.
3. Consumer sensory perception of cheese depends on context: A study using comment analysis and linear mixed models.
4. Rachel DiStefano has written about her field work, behind the counter of a specialist cheese shop in Cambridge, Ma.
5. If you’re entertaining thoughts of maple syrup expertise, you’ll need to study the new sensory maps and be able to talk knowledgeably about the history of sugaring.
6. Other images by Rachel DiStefano.

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Great wheels of parmesan cheese, stamped all about with codes and official-looking markings, loudly shout that they are the real thing: Parmigiano-Reggiano DOP. They’re backed by a long list of rules and regulations that the producers must obey in order to qualify for the seal of approval, rules that were drawn up by the producers themselves to protect their product from cheaper interlopers. For parmesan, the rules specify how the milk is turned into cheese and how the cheese is matured. They specify geographic boundaries that enclose not only where the cows must live but also where most of their feed must originate. But they say nothing about the breed of cow, which you might think could affect the final product, one of many anomalies that Zachary Nowak, a food historian, raised during his presentation at the recent Perugia Food Conference on Terroir, which he helped to organise.

In the end the whole question of certification is about marketing, prompted originally by increasingly lengthy supply chains that distanced consumers from producers. One problem, as Zach pointed out, is that in coming up with the rules to protect their product, the producers necessarily take a snapshot of the product as it is then, ignoring both its history and future evolution. They seek to give the impression that this is how it has always been done, since time immemorial, while at the same time conveniently forgetting aspects of the past, like the black wax or soot that once enclosed parmesan cheese, or the saffron that coloured it, or the diverse diet that sustained the local breed of cattle. One aspect of those forgettings that brought me up short was the mezzadria, a system of sharecropping that survived well into the 1960s. Zach has written about it on his website; some of the memories of a celebrated Perugian greengrocer offer a good starting point.

Will some enterprising cheesemaker take up the challenge of producing a cheese as good as Parmigiano-Reggiano DOP somewhere else? No idea, but if anyone does, it’ll probably be a cheesemaker in Vermont, subject of the next show.

Notes

1. The 2nd Perugia Food Conference Of Places and Tastes: Terroir, Locality, and the Negotiation of Gastro-cultural Boundaries took place from 5–8 June 2014. It was organized by the Food Studies Program of the Umbra Institute.
2. Wikipedia has masses of information about Geographical indications and traditional specialities in the European Union and, of course, Parmigiano-Reggiano which may, or may not, be parmesan.
3. Official site of the Consorzio del Parmigiano-Reggiano.
4. Thanks to Zachary Nowak for his map of the soils of the Parmigiano-Reggiano DOP.
5. 2019-05-05 Updated with link to Internet Archive.

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The growing popularity of “Mongolian” restaurants owes less to Mongolian food and more to, er, how shall we say, marketing. To whit:

“It’s actually not a cuisine, but an INTERACTIVE style of exhibition cooking modeled after a centuries-old legend. According to this legend, 12th century Mongol warriors, led by the mighty warrior, GENGHIS KHAN heated their shields over open fires to grill food in the fields of battle!”

The question of what the Mongols under Genghis Khan actually ate, however, is really rather interesting. In particular, did conquering that vast empire change their diet in any way? Jack Fenner and his Mongolian colleagues Dashtseveg Tumen and Dorjpurev Khatanbaatar analysed bones from three different cemeteries, representing Mongol elites, Mongol commoners and Bronze-age people from the same area, looking for differences in what they ate. They found some, but interpretation remains difficult.

I didn’t think to ask Jack about using a shield as a wok.

Notes

1. Read Food fit for a Khan: stable isotope analysis of the elite Mongol Empire cemetery at Tavan Tolgoi, Mongolia if you have access to the Journal of Archaeological Science.
2. There is also an accessible write-up at the Bones don’t lie website.
3. I don’t plan to visit the Genghis Grill, although I’m happy enough to plunder their advertising copy. And to point out that the mighty warrior didn’t become Genghis Khan until the 13th century.
4. Images from Michael Chu, Dave Gray and Wikimedia.
5. Music by Chad Crouch, aka Podington Bear.
6. This show is a week late; apologies. There’s a sort of explanation at my other website, which also provides hints of shows to come.
7. Plus, an explanation of what Flattr is all about, and why I think you should flattr me and other content creators.