Eat This Podcast

When you’re on holiday, or just away from home, do you seek out the “authentic” local food, or look for a reassuringly familar logo? Backpackers, keen to distinguish themselves from the vulgar hordes who are merely on holiday, seek out the authentic, at least to begin with. Dr Emily Falconer has been studying women backpackers. That’s her in the photo, doing a little field research over a bowl of something exotic in Thailand. And she says that while they start out seeking the grottiest places to eat, after they’ve been on the road for a while, their thoughts stray guiltily to familiar, comforting foods. I know the feeling

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Emily Falconer didn’t set out to study backpackers and food, but soon discovered that no matter what the subject, the people she was talking to sooner or later brought up food. I’m no exception, and although I’ve never been a great backpacker myself, I do prefer to seek out reasonably local eating places where I can, and I’ve had some memorable meals as a result. The most memorable of those was in Kunming, China, where I detached myself from the group I was with and went in search of something to eat. I didn’t find it at the food fair that was on at the same time, but in the end I fetched up in a place so authentic it didn’t even have photographs of the food. I indicated to the waiter that I was hungry and he brought me food. I had no idea what any of it was, and aside from one soupy dish that was almost too hot even for me, it was all delicious. Next time I might take with me a book, this book.

Notes

1. Emily Falconer is a senior research assistant at the Weeks Centre for Social and Policy Research at London South Bank University.
2. Her paper is Transformations of the backpacking food tourist: Emotions and conflicts.
3. She also mentioned Food in tourism: Attraction and Impediment, by Erik Cohen and Nir Avieli.
4. Intro music, as ever, by Dan-O at DanoSongs.com.
5. While Jimmy Buffet – and how appropriate is that? – provided the outro music.

The Guadalupe River that flows through Texas used to be known as The River of Nuts, a fact that Wikipedia does not confirm. The nut in question is the pecan, Carya illinoinensis, and the pecan tree is the state tree of Texas. The groves of wild pecans that lined the rivers of Texas are, however, threatened by the very popularity of the nuts they bear, and in particular by the fickle global nut market. The Chinese, you see, have gone nuts for pecans, increasing their purchase of American pecans from 3–4% in 2006 to 30–40% today. And if they abandon the pecan as quickly as they took it up, the wild pecan groves might be abandoned too. All this, and much more, I learned from James McWilliams, professor of history at Texas State University. His new book is one of those delights that looks at the global sweep of human endeavour through a little lens, in this case the pecan.

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Why it was the Chinese, rather than the French, the English or some other country, that chose to absorb the pecan surplus, I guess we’ll never know. McWilliams told me that Chinese people he spoke to believe the nuts prolong life; irrational as that may seem, no American grower is going to say they don’t. And while the high prices are good news for growers, they’re not so good for people who want pecan-containing industrial food.

Notes

1. James McWilliams’ book is The Pecan: a history of America’s native nut. There’s an extract in Texas Monthly online.
2. iTunes artwork photo by Melanie McDermott
3. Outro music Pecan Pie by Golden Smog.

Say you wanted to bake bread in a microwave – I can’t think why, but say you did – you could go online and search the internets for a recipe. And you would come up with a few. Just reading them over, they didn’t seem all that appetising. One, for example, warned that you had to serve the bread toasted. What’s the point of that? Anyway, that didn’t deter Ken Albala, a professor at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, but rather than search the internet, he turned to ancient Egypt for inspiration. In thinking about ways in which the material culture of food might change in the future, for the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, he came up with not only the plate that keeps crispy things crunchy, but also a way to bake bread in a microwave. Not great bread, but acceptable bread.

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Why? Well, partly because it is hot where Ken lives, and he doesn’t like putting the oven on just to bake bread. And partly because he foresees a future in which space is at a premium, cooking, maybe, is deskilled, and ovens, where they exist, are used for storing stuff, not baking.

Turns out, though, that there’s method to Ken’s madness. I’d always thought that microwaves heat water molecules and that’s that. Apparently not, as I learned from Len Fisher at Bristol University. Apparently some ceramics absorb microwaves and others don’t, and if you have a ceramic that absorbs microwaves, watch out. It can get very hot. Hot enough to turn bread dough to toast in less than 7 minutes.

Len admitted that he didn’t fully understand the physics of different ceramics in the microwave, which means there’s no chance for me and you. But he did think he’d invented something along the lines of Ken’s bread mould. Turns out someone had already patented it, although as far as I can tell the patent has lapsed and nobody ever did anything with it. Or did they? If you’re aware of a container designed to bake bread in the microwave, please leave a comment.

Notes

1. Ken Albala blogs and has an interesting Facebook page.
2. Len Fisher also has a website, and it is well worth exploring.
3. Intro music by Dan-O at DanoSongs.com.

I am reliably informed that the taste of a soggy potato crisp – or chip, if you prefer – is identical to that of a crispy one. But the experience falls far short of enjoyable. A crisp needs to be, well, crisp. If it isn’t, it actually tastes bad. That’s not quite so true of things like fried or oven-roasted potato chips; they still taste pretty good when they’re not quite so crispy, but they’re even better when they are crispy, and that goes for a whole lot of other cooked crispy things too. Which is why it is such a shame that by the time you get to the bottom of a plateful of fries or nachos, they’re soggy. Not to mention thin-crust pizza in a box. Ken Albala, a food historian at the University of the Pacific in Stockton California, happens to be an accomplished ceramicist, so he invented a plate that helps keep foods crispy. And that prompted an episode on crispy crunchiness.

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The argument that the appeal of crispiness is innate – that is was selected for by evolution – is not that far-fetched. John S. Allen, a research scientist at the Dornsife Cognitive Neuroscience Imaging Center and the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, writes that “[c]rispy foods are certainly not the only type of food that humans find appealing, and of course some people do not even like them. But the pervasive appeal of crispy is clearly something that emerges out of our multiple, interacting histories”.

There’s more to it than just the texture or the sound of the food breaking in our heads, but there does seem to be something to Allen’s ideas. What, though, is the difference between crisp and crispy? My sister says that, for her, carrots are crisp, while fried noodles are crispy, and that’s an importance distinction, for her. I’m not so sure. I think one could possibly separate out the texture from the flavour, at least experimentally, and see whether there really is a difference. Of course all sorts of sensations affect the experience of eating something, but whatever the truth of the matter, I’d just as soon not have to eat soggy crisps.

Notes

1. Ken Albala blogs and has an interesting Facebook page.
2. Why Humans Are Crazy for Crispy is an essay by John S. Allen, adapted from his book The Omnivorous Mind.
3. Intro music by Dan-O at DanoSongs.com.