Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 052

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3 April 2017

  1. If you’re in the least bit interested in “the truth” about African agriculture, this special issue of the journal Food Policy is for you. I haven’t read it all yet, but I really should try to do an episode with Luc Christiaensen, who edited the special issue.
  2. If you want to keep up with the academics (even if you are an academic) you need to speak the lingo. Rachel Laudan offers useful insights into “food systems”.
  3. To him that hath, shall be given: The League of Kitchens in NYC sounds fun and rewarding. I found out about it from a column on Mark Bittman’s site.
  4. Dan Etherington has also been learning about breads, in his case Mamoosh pita, in Newhaven in Sussex (England).
Podcasts

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

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

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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.

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Extra Matter

But there were people starving in China …

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… 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

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[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“.