Podcasts

Mistaken about mayonnaise — and many other foods Food history and alternative realities

  6

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:47 — 19.3MB)

Subscribe: Google Podcasts | Spotify | Android | RSS | More

Who invented mayonnaise? Could boiling down tonnes of cattle concentrate beef’s nutritious qualities? Did lemonade put a halt to the plague in Paris?

Tom Nealon writes about these and (many) other topics in his book Food Fights and Culture Wars, a title that does the contents no favours at all. The obvious temptation is to talk about the book as a feast of food history, a smörgåsbord of tasty treats, some old, some new, all interesting. It is all that and more, not least because it is lavishly illustrated with fascinating images. All in all, a great read, but a hard topic for an episode, because the only thing that really connects all those dots is Tom Nealon himself. We talked a lot, covered a lot of ground and, inevitably, left a lot of things out.

I think I disagree with Tom on at least one thing: cannibalism. I’m just not as persuaded as he is by the evidence, and his argument that if you’re eating “others” from over the mountain, then you’re not really eating people, cuts both ways. What better way to make people seem fundamentally different from “us” than to stress that “they” eat people? But that’s a topic for another episode, I hope.

Notes

  1. Food Fights & Culture Wars is currently riding high in Amazon’s New Releases.
  2. Lots more details on mayonnaise in Tom Nealon’s original account of Salsa Mahonesa and the Seven Years War.
  3. To be honest, I had no idea mayonnaise was a topic of such intense interest, but it is.
    1. Hellmann’s Mayonnaise: A History
    2. A Brief History of Mayonnaise and Mayo-phobia: Why do some people hate mayonnaise so much?
    3. On the Etymology of the Word Mayonnaise
  4. For a fine collection of Bovril nonsense, this is the place.

huffduffer icon   Huffduff it

Extra Matter

But there were people starving in China …

0

… and the Romans did knead

Bread Matters magazine recently linked to an interview with Jim Lahey, “inventor” of no-knead bread. I eventually tracked it down ((The audio here is not what it ought to be.)) and gave it a listen, and on the whole it is very interesting. Two things, however, irked me.

One, relatively trivial, is an idiot comment on the Serious Eats website. In the course of discussing Lahey’s memories of his childhood family table, he mentioned having to clean his plate. Host Ed Levine butted in “because people are starving in China”. Which was, exactly, the reason we were given, as children, for needing to clean our plates. ((I suspect I am a little older than Lahey, and in my case it was India, rather than China, but hey.)) A commenter called luosha was incensed:

“… because people are starving in China.” Levine, 2016. I can’t decide whether it’s worse that Levine is perpetuating outdated stereotypes, or that he thinks this is a funny thing to say.

Worse, the pusillanimous Levine bothered to reply:

My apologies for an obvious perpetuation of of outdated stereotypes. I should not have said it. Won’t happen again.

Sheesh. They were talking about a time in the 1950s or 60s, when there actually were people starving in China and in India. Lots of them. That there aren’t as many now (though malnutrition remains worryingly high in India despite everything) is a wonderful thing. But are we to ignore history completely? I hope not.

And speaking of ignoring history, Jim Lahey offered his opinion that the Romans too did not knead their bread, prefiguring his own success by a couple of thousand years.

I don’t know how he came to this notion, but a lot of archaeologists would disagree. Kneading by hand is shown on various bits of sculpture and, as befits the production of bread on an industrial scale, there were also kneading machines. The Tomb of Eurysaces near the main Rome train station has what are probably the basins of kneading machines as part of its decoration. Kneading machines have been found at Pompeii and elsewhere. A recent book A Handbook of Food Processing in Classical Rome has an entire section on kneading.

I’m all for letting time and water do the work of giving structure to my bread, though I don’t actually go the whole no-knead hog any more. But to add no-knead bread to the litany of things the Romans did for us seems a stretch too far.

Extra Matter

Food safety in Vietnam

  0

[F]reshness is responsible for much of the safety as well as the deliciousness of Vietnamese dishes. Researchers have found freshness to be the most preferred attribute of pork for Vietnamese consumers, with pork meat typically being purchased very fresh every day.

Two recent publications from ILRI, the International Livestock Research Institute, provide further evidence of the difference between risks and hazards associated with pork in Vietnam. You may remember Delia Grace, an ILRI researcher, talking about this important distinction in the episode In praise of meat, milk and eggs.

The papers look at two hazards — bacteria and harmful chemicals — and they find, as Delia Grace said, that what people worry about and what makes them sick are not the same.

People worry about toxic chemicals, but actually they’re not much of a risk in pork in Vietnam (although they may be undesirable for other reasons, such as antibiotic resistance).

By contrast, Salmonella is relatively common and causes a fair bit of disease, but people don’t worry that much about it, possibly because of the “freshness fetish”.

[T]he burden of the biological hazard (Salmonella) was orders of magnitude greater than that of the chemical hazards.

However, as the market for pork expands, and the chain from pig farmer to pork eater lengthen, freshness is likely to suffer, raising the food safety stakes.

The upshot is that officials tasked with improving food safety in the very rapidly developing pork markets of Vietnam need to focus on “putting in place basic food safety practices along pig production and pork processing, selling, cooking and eating to minimize the risk of infection with Salmonella“.

Podcasts

A computer learns about ingredients and recipes What else would you put on a peanut butter sandwich?

0

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 13:33 — 11.1MB)

Subscribe: Google Podcasts | Spotify | Android | RSS | More

Recommendation engines are everywhere. They let Netflix suggest shows you might want to watch. They let Spotify build you a personalised playlist of music you will probably like. They turn your smartphone into a source of endless hilarity and mirth. And, of course, there’s IBM’s Watson, recommending all sorts of “interesting” new recipes. As part of his PhD project on machine learning, Jaan Altosaar decided to use a new mathematical technique to build his own recipe recommendation engine.

The technique is similar to the kind of natural language processing that powers predictive text on a phone, and one of the attractions of using food instead of English is that there are only 2000–3000 ingredients to worry about, instead of more than 150,000 words.

The results so far are fun and intriguing, and can only get better.

Notes

  1. Jaan Altosaar published an article about his work that gives an explanation of how it all works. It also allows you to investigate the food map and use some of the other tools he built.
  2. A scientific report that may have inspired Jaan (and possibly Watson) to take up the challenge is Flavor network and the principles of food pairing.
  3. That paper offers great explanations for why some novel food pairings work, including Heston Blumenthal’s iconic white chocolate and caviar, published in 2002.
  4. The madcap adventures of Chef Watson are everywhere on the internet. The recommendatiuon engine that is me suggests a report from Caitlin Dewey which includes a recipe for the ubiquitous Austrian chocolate burritos (but no explanation of what makes them Austrian. Just the apricot purée?).
  5. The banner shows a small part of the food map, with East Asian ingredients tightly clustered while North American ingredients are all over the shop.

huffduffer icon   Huffduff it