- 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.
A fastidious follow-up
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.
Chronicle of a Death Foretold, or What I did on my holidays
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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.
Nutrition news
On Twitter, Parke Wilde asks:
How is it possible that a federal checkoff program, from a semi-public board whose marketing is approved by the federal government, advertises a bacon ice cream sandwich during a time of rising health care costs and high rates of chronic disease?
I have a different question:
How could anyone eat a bacon ice cream sandwich?
Parke offered more background on his website.