20 March 2017
[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“.
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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.
Last night I was lucky enough to go to a conversation between Fabrizia Lanza and Evan Kleiman. Fabrizia is taking over from her mother’s world-famous cooking school in Sicily, most notably with an amazing programme called Cook the Farm. And Evan, among her many other achievements, hosts a show called Good Food on KCRW. They were talking about Food and Agriculture in Italy.
The discussion was very interesting, thoughtful and thought-provoking, and here’s the main thought it provoked in me?
Where’s the romance in milking 300 sheep by hand, twice a day?
Fabrizia made much of her local shepherd, who indeed milks 300 sheep by hand each morning, makes cheese, takes the sheep out to pasture, where they spend six hours or so whatever the weather, brings them back, milks them again, makes another batch of cheese and does it all over again tomorrow.
And he has to milk them by hand, because “how else will he know whether they are happy?”
The whole shepherd thing was connected to determining a fair price for food and embedded in a much wider discussion of sustainability. Then, a little later in the conversation, Fabrizia Lanza talked about the idea of creating “a good Monsanto”. She fully recognizes the need for a food industry alongside the romantic, the artisanal and the authentic, but an industry that has values other than pure profit.
So why shouldn’t her shepherd use milking machines? The use of a milking machine does not in and of itself mean that the practice is in any way inhumane or bad for the animals. You can choose whether to rush, treating the sheep as no more than milk-producing machines. Or you can choose to take things a little more slowly, assuring yourself that each ewe is as happy as can be. The milking machine is not the problem; the way it is used may be.
Maybe the shepherd can’t afford such a thing, probably he wouldn’t want to get into debt. My point is only that he doesn’t have to milk by hand to produce an extremely fine product. If the community truly wanted to support him, they could help him to milk by machine. Maybe he could repay a loan with that fine cheese.
This is all part of a much larger problem, which is what Fabrizia was alluding to when she spoke of good industrial food. In many cases, as Rachel Laudan has pointed out on the podcast, Industrial is best. She spoke about salt and sugar, but there are other examples too, including the gentler pressing of grapes that some people say makes more delicious wines, and a high-tech brewery turning out very fine beer. Indeed, Fabrizia Lanza acknowledged that much of the olive oil in Sicily used to be rancid, and now it isn’t. She didn’t say whether this might at least partially be the result of modern pressing equipment. I suspect it is.
And that’s the point, for me. No industrial machinery automatically results in an inferior product. It is the entire system in which it is embedded and used that determines the quality of the food we eat.
6 March 2017
