Eat This Podcast

29 May 2017

1. Wendell Berry takes the coastal elites to task, with style and grace.
2. I like what the American Anthropological Association had to say on the matter: “Maybe the colonial narrative is as guilty of reductionism as the nostalgia narrative – but at least it moves the conversation away from a weakness of rural character to the demonstrable effects of economic policies and practices.”
3. Then there’s the whole question of who is actually doing the work in agriculture. Longreads has an extract from a new book that gives a voice to migrant workers in California.
4. From Berkeley, mind, a little bit of history on innovations in food processing. “Today, there are more than 400 types of mixed salads.” And that was just the start of it.
5. Do people perceive those bagged salads as “healthy”? Probably not, according to one graphic Marion Nestle lifted from the 12th annual Food and Health Survey produced by the International Food Information Council. She also reminds us that the IFIC is “industry-funded” and that “the data come from an online survey taking 22 minutes to complete”.
6. A Feast for the Eyes is celebrated in The British Journal of Photography. You may never look at food photographs in the same way again. Well, you probably will, but you may also think a bit more about them.

Let me take a brief moment here to moan again about how hard it is to find interesting food news that originates outside the USA. Help me out, if you can.

15 May 2017

1. You’ve seen the photographs of “Eating Spaghetti by the Fistful” now learn how they came about.
2. Sharanya Deepak takes us Inside the Birthplace of Indian-Chinese Cuisine.
3. If you eat cheap chicken, you do not want to read Exploitation and Abuse at the Chicken Plant in The New Yorker.
4. The Rituals of Dinner by Margaret Visser was one of the first books to really open my eyes to the meanings of food and eating. Now it has been reissued.
5. Civil Eats writes about Seed Rebels. In the past, I’ve interviewed many of the principles: Carol Deppe, Jack Kloppenburg of the Open Source Seeds Initiative and Lane Selman of the Culinary Breeding Network.