It’s official. After the demise of artisan (recorded in this week’s newsletter), I now pronounce “genetic engineering” officially dead. It’s been on the way out for decades, as people sought to blunt it’s impact by attaching it to beer, bread etc. But this announcement, in the New Food Economy newsletter, is the final nail in the coffin.
You tell me what that means.
I know it’s only marketing, but a little something inside me dies at the loss of a useful word like artisan. Culture watcher extraordinaire Grant McCracken confirms the loss, with a link to a television advertisement for McDonald’s McCafé. Go watch it, and see whether you agree that “the artisanal theme is beginning to run out of steam.”
Staying, for a moment, with food trendiness, the Prime Minister of Malaysia created a major storm when he told a live TV interview “I have to control (my eating). For example, I don’t eat rice, but quinoa. My son introduced me to quinoa, a food from Peru.” A predictable backlash from local-rice-loving political opponents ensued. There are a couple of interesting things about this farrago. One is the assumption that quinoa is a staple food, just like rice. We know that it isn’t. More interesting, and kudos to Malaysiakini for following up, the Prime Minister’s son introduced quinoa to more than his dad. He also introduced it to the country. Nice celebrity endorsement, for those Malaysians who can afford quinoa.
SNAP benefits are under fire again. Thanks to President Trump for hoisting aloft his replace-food-stamps-with-canned-food kite, because it prompted a really interesting post from Jonathan Katz: What Does Disability Have To Do With Cooking?. A rant on Twitter attracted lots of comments, and because it mentioned disabilities, part of Jonathan’s day job, some of the responses were from people with disabilities. Those are the basis of his blog post, which I found extremely informative.
Marion Nestle has also weighed in on SNAP, aka food stamps, but this time I’m thanking her for a link to a new report, Reaping What We Sow: How the Practices of Industrial Agriculture Put Our Health and Environment at Risk. I have not yet had time to read any more than the executive summary, but Marion Nestle says “If you are interested in understanding how our current agricultural system came about, what problems it causes, and what to do about them, this report is an excellent place to start.” That’s good enough for me.
It’s all very well saying that recipients of SNAP benefits should buy healthier food from farmers’ markets, where they can also get a discount. But two new studies say that almost two-thirds of poor people have never been to a farmers’ market and three quarters did not know they got a discount there. The solution? Social media campaigns.
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Industrial accidents, tragic though they may be, can also lead to change. The fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York in 1911 is credited with changing a generation’s attitudes to worker safety, unions and regulation. Eighty years later, another industrial fire also killed workers because, like the Triangle fire, the doors were chained shut from the outside. That fire, at the Imperial Food Products plant in Hamlet, North Carolina, changed almost nothing.
In his new book The Hamlet Fire, historian Bryant Simon uses the fire to tell what he calls A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government and Cheap Lives. Simon’s thesis is essentially that the Hamlet fire wasn’t really an accident; circumstances conspired to make it likely, and if it hadn’t happened in Hamlet, it would have happened somewhere else. Among the points he makes: at the time of the fire North Carolina, a state that my imagination sees as resolutely rural, was the most industrialised of the United States. It had become so essentially by gutting control, regulation and inspection in order to attract jobs.
The USDA, responsible for the safety of the food people eat, agreed that a good way to keep out flies would be to lock the doors of the plant. But the North Carolina Occupational Safety and Health Administration had never once inspected the plant.
There’s a whole lot of Bryant Simon’s analysis that just wouldn’t fit comfortably in the episode. One nugget I really want to share here is a brief little scene from the first season of The Wire.
In a minute and a half, David Simon’s characters offer an object lesson in poultry economics, which Bryant Simon uses to explore the real history of the chicken nugget. And the dipping sauces are the key to overcoming chicken fatigue. Genius.
