Podcasts

A communal oven in Christchurch, New Zealand Baking bread in the aftermath of an earthquake

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 16:14 — 13.1MB)

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In 2010 and then again in 2011, Christchurch, on New Zealand’s South Island, suffered two huge earthquakes. The first destroyed buildings, but few people were hurt. The second brought more buildings crashing down and, because it happened around midday when the buildings were full of people, killed 185.

Simon Gray is an artist, living on the North Island at the time of the disasters. He had come to regard his regular bread-baking as therapy sessions of a sort, and decided to move to Christchurch to offer bread to the people there as a way to cope with what they had experienced and to help rebuild their lives and their community.

I heard about it because Simon sent me information about an event – A Bread Companion – he was organising, one of 55 events at FESTA 2018, which has just ended. FESTA is the Festival of Transitional Architecture, a weekend knees-up to celebrate urban ingenuity and rebirth and tempt people back into the centre of Christchurch.

Of course I wanted to chat to Simon Gray about A Bread Companion.

Notes

  1. Phillipstown Community Hub has a Facebook page.
  2. The pepper tree that Simon mentioned, as a local spice used by Maori people: it must be one of the species of Pseudowintera.
  3. Rewena bread gets a Wikipedia entry too; for me, it needs more solid information.
  4. Simon told me about the Bread Houses Network, which does similar sorts of things, and I’ve since discovered others. I would love to learn about other people using bread and baking to heal.

Photos from Phillipstown Community Hub.

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Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 086 I've got your complexity right here

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  1. Closing the yield gap – the difference between what the best farmers achieve and the rest – has a long history in the annals of how to grow more food. Ethiopia tried it, with a Wheat Initiative that gave farmers subsidised inputs and a guaranteed market. Yields did improve, by 14%, among a group of lead farmers, but the government had expected them to double. Blame those pesky farmers, for not adopting the entire package of improvements wholeheartedly.
  2. As for wheat, so too for fish. Intensification of fish farming in Bangladesh is bad news for some environmental impacts but has no effect on global warming or land use, although it may improve fresh-water consumption. Yields go up, but the overall consequences remain in the balance.
  3. Meanwhile, in the first world: “It was from Starbucks. It was just a latte, with some vanilla flavoring and soy milk. And I spent $6.15 on it.” Drink up, and prepare to dive deep into The Rich History Of Your Overpriced Latte.
  4. Don’t ever accuse me of being unbalanced. I mean, on the one hand, we have yet another deep dive, this time into the burning issue of whether Millennials killed mayonnaise. On the other, what could be more millennial than good ol’ Hampton Creek Foods changing it’s name to Just so that it can continue to push its eggless Just Mayo and its even stranger eggless Just Eggs. Makes me long for the days of a nut cutlet.
  5. Is my enemy’s enemy my friend? I can’t say for sure, at least, not in the case of this particular rant: Vegans, Ranchers and Regenerators Unite: Why Fake Meat and Eliminating Livestock Are Really Bad Idea (sic). I’m definitely there in principle, not so sure about some of the appeals to authority.
  6. Another tiny glimpse into the complex relationships that make up a food system. Marion Nestle on The trade war with China and feeding America’s poor. It’s an ill wind …
  7. And if you’re feeling utterly befuddled by the simple question of what to eat, take heart. You are not alone.
  8. How about noodles?
  9. Are agricultural researchers working on the right crops to enable food and nutrition security under future climates? proves yet again that a question in a title or headline can always best be answered “No!”. This time with data …
Podcasts

Food, power, pubs and politics in Ireland Why it is easier to eat well in a pub than in a restaurant

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 21:01 — 16.9MB)

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Once you get over the idea that there is no good food in Ireland, and a single trip ought to be enough to do that, you might become aware of a paradox. Go into a pub, and if they serve food, rather than just sandwiches, it is likely to be rather acceptable. Go into a restaurant, and you’re more likely to be disappointed. At least, that’s my experience. I have had some fine meals in restaurants, to be sure, but I have also had some stinkers. Pubs are more predictable.

Why should that be? Diarmuid Murphy, of the Dublin Institute of Technology explained in his talk on The Power of Policy and Its Influence On the Restaurant Industry in Ireland at the Dublin Gastronomy Symposium. As one wag in the audience said, it might have something to do with the fact that most of the Members of Parliament who passed the bill allowing restaurants to serve alcohol were publicans.

Notes

Diarmuid’s recommendations for good places to eat in Dublin:

  1. The Pig’s Ear
  2. Mr Fox
  3. Vaughan’s Eagle House
  4. L. Mulligan Grocer
  5. Chapter One (I can vouch for this one; astonishingly good.)
  6. The Greenhouse

Photo by Alexandre Godreau on Unsplash

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Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 085 Read the label -- if there is one

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8 October 2018

  1. 60 tonnes a couple of weeks ago, 3130 tonnes the next, pretty soon you’re talking about a genuine whopper. The world’s largest meatpacker, a company called JBS, just recalled potentially contaminated beef that amounts to “more than double the amount of beef recalled in 2015, 2016, and 2017 combined”. What happens to the recalled meat? You may not want to know.
  2. Bracing for the Vanilla Boom is an absolutely fascinating account of how farmers in Madagascar respond to the crop that gives us a lot of pleasure and them a lot of problems. I’m still not surely I fully understand.
  3. Maybe you saw the news about the world’s oldest cheese. It offers an opportunity to get up to date on the story of why most human adults cannot drink milk.
  4. New to me, a history of bitters. I’m not a huge one for cocktails at home, but I do like a drop of Angostura in fizzy water on a hot day.
  5. Last week was full of bread news, good, bad and informative.
Podcasts

Making sense of modern recipes It's not your fault; even professional chefs encounter problems

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:16 — 19.2MB)

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Peter Hertzmann tells a great story of a chef telling a bunch of students to go and double the recipe for a batch of cookies. Minutes later, one returned and said he couldn’t do it because the oven wouldn’t go up to 700 degrees. Ho, ho, ho.

But there’s a serious issue here for people who are trying to follow a recipe without a clear understanding of the process and methods beneath it. Come to think of it, Peter says, even for professionals, there can be big problems trying to follow some modern recipes. Which prompts me to wonder, how many people these days buy cookbooks in order to use the recipes?

Notes

  1. Peter Hertzmann’s website à la carte will keep you occupied for hours. If you just want the paper we were talking about, here it is.
  2. Measure for Measure is the article I mentioned by Raymond Sokolov on why Americans measure by volume. It was published in Natural History magazine, July 1988, pp 80–83, and there seems also to be a version in the 1988 Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cooking. Good luck finding it online. Or, drop me a note …
  3. I was pleasantly surprised to find a facsimile of the original Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book at Amazon.
  4. Thanks to Dr Ana Tominc and the organisers for allowing me to attend the 1st Biennial Conference on Food and Communication at Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh.
  5. Cover photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

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