Our Daily Bread, Podcasts

Our Daily Bread 00 Introducing a series on the history of wheat and bread

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It’s magic, I know. First a pretty ordinary grass becomes the main source of sustenance for most of the people alive on Earth. Then they learn how to turn the seeds of that grass into the food of the gods. Join me, every day in August, as I dig into Our Daily Bread for the Dog Days of Podcasting with short episodes on the history of wheat and bread.

Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 082 A day late, a dollar short

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  1. Katherine Preston, aka The Botanist in the Kitchen, goes to town on a self-serving, bullshit-peddling soy milk manufacturer and finds several teaching moments in her rant of the month. My one complaint; why not name and shame Silk and it’s owners, DanoneWave?
  2. What’s behind the USA’s efforts to torpedo global efforts to encourage breast-feeding. What did you think?
  3. The most food secure country in the world? Hint: it isn’t the USA any more.
  4. Way, way more than you’ll ever need to know to refuse a bottle of corked wine. Just remind that sniffy sommelier that you’re grateful to chlorophenol O-methyltransferase for protecting us from evil.
  5. A move away from rice could save water and improve nutrition in India. Just one thing: “would [people] be willing to incorporate more of these alternative cereals into their diets”?
  6. The US discovers that an Argentinian beef carcass cut into steaks can be labelled “Product of U.S.A.” The EU has been wrestling with all this for decades.
  7. If a picture were worth 1000 words, Kay at Big Picture Agriculture would have written 6,000 words on corn (maize) in global trade.
Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 081 Summer abundance

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  1. Two posts about technological fixes in the food industry. Wouldn’t it be cool to eavesdrop on a discussion between David Zilberman and Rachel Laudan?
  2. Germany is helping India’s spice growers to undo some recent technological fixes.
  3. A peer-reviewed study of the Mediterranean diet is retracted on 13 June and republished a week later with essentially the same conclusion. Marion Nestle asks: What are we to make of all this?
  4. Hard to believe I somehow had not mentioned the first of One Angry Chef’s two carefully considered pieces about Jordan Peterson, but here they are: Thermidor Part 1 and Part 2.
  5. The London Review of Books often releases articles from a while back. Here’s a joy, Angela Carter reviewing Redcliffe Salaman’s classic book on the potato.
  6. CDC retracts finding that farmers have the highest suicide rate in the country. Solid detective work by Nathan Rosenberg and Bryce Wilson Stucki busts another agricultural myth.
  7. Farm Aid is awfully sorry about the high suicide rate among farm workers, but “will continue to prioritize farmer stress despite [the] retraction”.
  8. Maybe they should just go back and listen to Nathan and Bryce butzing the myths of American agricultural history.
Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 080 Is the living easy yet?

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  1. Have you ever wondered how all those different specialty sauces get to supermarket shelves? Wonder no more.
  2. By now we all know that chocolate is a fermented food, right? But there’s still so much we don’t know about The Microbial Ecology of Chocolate.
  3. You know what else is fermented? Coffee. Take a deep draught from the annals of coffee vessels.
  4. Date of Italy’s earliest olive oil pushed back a few hundred years. Probably a bit fermented by now.
  5. The author of Big Chicken scratches in the dirt to locate figures on the use of antibiotics in American agriculture.
  6. Which is a perfect opportunity to plug my podcast on antibiotics and agriculture, in case you haven’t heard it.
Extra Matter

Eight Degrees of assimilation Buying a brewer for the barrels not the beer

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Irish Distillers, itself owned by Pernod Ricard, recently bought Eight Degrees Brewing, a craft brewer in Ireland. That’s interesting for lots of reasons.

For a start, I’ve had a lot of enjoyment from the beers produced by Eight Degrees, which are delicious no matter what you’re listening to. They’re good beers, not fussy, and excellent drinking.

On the other hand, consolidation in the beer industry is proceeding apace, with big players swallowing craft brewers and putting out their own “craftwashed” beers at a premium, at least in the US. In many cases, the product has suffered, so there could be some cause for concern among Eight Degrees’ fans. To be honest, though, there isn’t much evidence of any concern.)

But … the reason given for the “multimillion-euro deal” is more interesting than a mere takeover.

The primary objective of the purchase of the brewer is to ensure a long-term beer supply to sustain the continued growth of Jameson Caskmates, a product introduced by Irish Distillers on a trial basis in 2014.

Caskmates, as I did not know, is a Jameson mark that ages whiskey in barrels first used by craft brewers. (I’m partial myself to a single malt aged in sherry barrels, but that’s by the by.) Caskmates is, apparently, very popular. And its previous supplier of used craft beer barrels, despite being owned by giant Molson-Coors, risked running out. By buying a much bigger but still craft brewer, the deal secures a supply of barrels in which Jameson can age their whiskey, which with luck means that Eight Degrees will have every incentive to produce tasty beer and plenty of used barrels.

I remain cautiously optimistic.