Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 044

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21 November 2016

Authentic food news

No apologies this week for focusing on North America. There are still plenty of things to give thanks for.

  1. Revisiting authenticity, this time in the context of mezcal. It’s only the abstract of a student anthro paper, but it looks really interesting, examining the differences between local authenticity and global authenticity.
  2. 538 unravels a weird fact about farms in the USA: The number of farms has stayed about the same, and yet there has been huge consolidation among farms. Part of the answer: “These aren’t the farms of the poor; they’re the yards of the upper-middle-class.”
  3. The official estimated price of Thanksgiving dinner has dropped. Again

    What’s nice, to me, is that we both have questions about what the headline price of that feast leaves out.

  4. Back to 538 for the last word on Thanksgiving, and a self-selecting, undoubtedly biassed but nevertheless fascinating attempt to define “the best possible Thanksgiving dinner”. I expect the results to be really scary.
Extra Matter

More foie gras. Please.

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Over at the other place, I wrote about some of the things that just wouldn’t fit here. Mostly, that was about the anatomy and physiology of the digestive system of ducks and geese, and the question of how essential is the process of gavage to the production of foie gras. In French law, it is required. No gavage, no foie gras.

So what do you call the fatty liver that some people seem able to persuade ducks and geese to make?

Also, some links to things other people have written, and truly the most horrifying discovery of the past couple of weeks: foie’camole.

Podcasts

Foie gras A sociologist looks at perhaps the world’s most contentious food

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 22:57 — 18.7MB)

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foie-grasAny way you slice it, foie gras — the fatty liver of a duck or goose — is a fighting matter. To animal rights activists it is quite obviously cruel and depraved. To many chefs and eaters, it is a delicious extravagance. To many other chefs and eaters, it is something they would rather not countenance. To the vast majority of French people, it is a symbol of their nation and an essential part of their identity, the rare product of smiling rustic grandmothers, making a bit of pin money on the side. And for the industrial producers responsible for 90% of French foie gras, those rustic grandmothers are icons of perfect marketing.

The whole foie gras story — which is by no means over yet — offers a fascinating insight into the role of politics in food — which happens to be the subtitle of a new book by Michaela DeSoucey, a sociologist who got caught up in foie gras just before the topic exploded all over the food scene in Chicago.

In this episode, we talked about just a few of the things that make foie gras such a special topic.

Notes

  1. Michaela DeSoucey’s book is Contested Tastes: foie gras and the politics of food, published by Princeton University Press.
  2. There has been an awful lot written about foie gras in America, more than I care to link to here. But the Chicago Tribune did publish a look back at what they called Chicago’s foie gras fiasco. I took the cover photo from there.
  3. If you want some straight talk on foie gras, and how to prepare it from scratch, you could do worse than visit Peter Hertzmann’s website.
  4. Banner photo of Chef Doug Richey (c) Heather Irwin.
  5. And the music? Sonata IV in C Major for Trumpet and Strings by Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber.

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Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 043

  0

7 November 2016

Authentic food news

  1. Let’s get the shameless self-promotion out of the way first, for a change. Read Tim Hayward’s piece about the seven essential kitchen knives and then, to help you get over the idea that more than one of them is essential, listen to Peter Hertzmann on knives as bling,
  2. Have you ever wondered about “mouthfeel”? What is it, where did it come from, and how does it differ from texture? Read The mystery of “mouthfeel”, from Language Log, and wonder no more. Or maybe still more.
  3. Fish farming is fraught with problems, but then, so is hunting for seafood. A Q&A from Foodtank offers some answers and lots more questions.
  4. “Catfish farms are roughly as sexy as catfish themselves.” For an entirely different perspective on fish farms, turn to Landscape Architecture Magazine and an essay on the catfish ponds of the Mississippi delta.
  5. I’m shocked, I tell you, Shocked. Not all the produce sold by farmers at farmers markets was produced by the farmer doing the marketing.
  6. Some people seem to think that a label showing country of origin is a good guarantee of quality — as long as it is their country. A political scientist surveys gastronationalism in Europe.

That last piece credits “The American sociologist, Michaely DeSoucey” with the term gastronationalism. Actually, her name is Michaela DeSoucey. How do I know? She happens to be central to next week’s episode.