Eat This Podcast – Page 29 – Talking about anything around food

Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 107

2 September 2019 25 August 2024 5

To mark Sourdough September here’s The Biology of … Sourdough, a little something Bread Magazine dredged up from 2003, when the world of artisanal bread was new and fresh.
What Would It Take to Feed the Entire Human Population with Nothing but Mycoprotein?.
Tom Nealon has a great piece constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing the Sloppy Joe.
The recent Daily Chart from The Economist perplexed me.
Xylella update:
- On Thursday, the European Court of Justice may decide on the amount of Italy’s bill.
- A gushing press release announced “a hope for the future with the first oil from olives infected with Xylella”.
- An editorial rebuttal followed rapidly.
- (Translations at 2019 Olive Harvest in Puglia Begins for First Crop of Xylella-Resistant Cultivars and Correction to the Preceding.)

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Podcasts

A sweet sour story Immersed in apple cider vinegar

26 August 2019 9 September 2019 16

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 16:06 — 13.1MB)

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I went to Kilfinane, in Ireland, for the Hearsay Audio Festival. I stayed because Maurice Gilbert offered to show me round his apple empire at Ballyhoura Artisan Food Park.

cover artwork with photo of Maurice Gilbert sniffing vinegar I was sitting in O’Seachnasaíth’s public house, having just finished an excellent take-out that I’d brought in from Tasty Bites, because that’s how things work there, and enjoying a final Guinness. A chap I recognised, because I’d seen him grilling hamburgers at the Ballyhoura Artisan Food Park, introduced himself, and I learned that he was in fact part owner of Ballyhoura. What followed was an excellent conversation about the various apple juices he’d concocted, which I had been enjoying all weekend, and, which really piqued my interest, a brief account of how they made their apple cider vinegar.

It being late at night, in a somewhat noisy pub, recording was out of the question. Maurice was kind enough to offer to do the whole thing again for me in the morning, so I changed my departure plans and showed up, armed this time with my recorder.

Notes

Ballyhoura has a website.

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Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 106

19 August 2019 25 August 2024 0

Jay Rayner, a restaurant critic, blasts both barrels at the Bourne & Hollingsworth Garden Room in London.
Samuel Ashworth on the gastro-military complex that is the traditional French restaurant and how, just possibly, the decline of the system is reinvigorating French food.
Champions of breakfast. Very clever title for a new report from the Union of Concerned Scientists, calling on the companies that manufacture breakfast cereal to change their ways.
The relative cost of more and less nutritious calories, from the World Bank.
How does China feeds its people? On Quora, an incredibly detailed answer by Janus Dongye Qimeng, to be consumed, possibly, with a grain of salt.
Is Grass-Fed Beef Really Better For The Planet? Here’s The Science. It all depends.

Extra Matter

A fastidious follow-up

14 August 2019 14 August 2019 0

Karima Moyer, a once and future guest on the podcast, took me gently to task for something I said in the most recent episode. “Fastidioso in Italian means annoying, and is all too appropriate!” Having pointed out that scientific names are all Latin, albeit some very strange Latin when converted from another language, rather than Italian, I thought I had best investigate further.

Xylella – the genus – is obvious enough, from the Greek for wood, along with the diminutive ending -ella because it is a tiny thing.

What about fastidiosa, the species? An online Latin dictionary gives four meanings:

1. disdainful  
2. exacting  
3. nauseating  
4. squeamish

All along, I had “exacting” in mind, and thought that perhaps the species name was a subtle little bit of taxonomic sarcasm, as I suggested in the podcast. But, as ever, worth checking, so off I went to the original description of Xylella fastidiosa. There I learned that fastidious is an adjective applied to a few genera of bacteria, where it means “nutritional fastidiousness” in the sense that these bacteria are picky eaters in the laboratory. They need a specialized growth medium, especially when they are first being isolated. And that’s why the discoverers called it Xylella fastidiosa.

(fas. tid. i. o’sa. N. L. m. adj. fastidiosus, highly critical; referring to the nutritional fastidiousness of the organism, particularly on primary isolation).

Obviously not as picky when it comes to the wild, with more than 350 plant species on its menu.

Podcasts

Chronicle of a Death Foretold, or What I did on my holidays

12 August 2019 26 August 2019 11

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 24:26 — 19.7MB)

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Map of Xylella containment zones in Puglia — The most recent extension of the containment zone now covers the whole of the Salento peninsula

In 2013, a few olive trees near Gallipoli, in Lecce province in the heel of Italy’s boot, seemed to be dying of drought even though there was water. Turned out they had a disease caused by a nasty bacterium, Xylella fastidiosa, and it was the first time this particular disease had been identified in Europe. In California, where Xylella causes Pierce’s Disease in grapevines, it costs about a million dollars a year to try and control it. Plans were quickly drawn up in an attempt to control the disease, and equally quickly disrupted.

Olive seedling possibly resistant to xylella — One of the 10 potentially resistant olive seedlings discovered in a dead olive grove

Instead of killing maybe 3000 trees, more than four million have died in the past six years, and the disease is completely out of hand. When I was in Puglia in 2015, having just got interested in the story, it was quite exciting to see the occasional dead tree, marked for removal. This year, I was sickened to find whole landscapes, once covered with the glittering silver of olive leaves, brown and lifeless.

How did that happen?

Notes

Many, many sources provided the information that underpins this episode, notably Diffusion of xylella in Italian olive trees, a website that acts as a kind of clearing house, and the pages it linked to.
An earlier episode on Xylella clearly wasn’t pessimistic enough.
Music by Dasgoat and PSOVOD on Freesound and Podington Bear.
Photos by me, except for the seedling, which I found here.

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