Podcasts

Whiskynomics How the world conspired to bring us single malts

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:47 — 16.8MB)

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maltIf you heard the episode on microshiners you’ll know that there is something of a boom in small-scale distilling. And you might be worried that every boom seems to be followed by a bust. One distiller, however, told me that it was an economic bust that kickstarted the malt whisky boom.

For most of its history, the only malt whisky most people ever drank was as a component in blended whisky. The stockmarket crash of 1973 and subsequent oil crises meant that people had no cash for whisky, which was costing more as a result of higher oil prices. Distilleries were shut and mothballed, and, desperate for a bit of cash, the big whisky blenders started to market single malts, which had all gone into blends before.

That seemed worth investigating in more detail, so I did just that. And I discovered that the story is a little bit more complicated. Booms and busts, however, have definitely played a part in the history of malt whisky. Will the draft distillery story end in tears? Some say no, others yes. Me, I just want to try some of their products.

Notes

  1. Mark Reynier’s Waterford Distillery looks absolutely fascinating. One to try and visit next time I’m in Ireland, for sure.
  2. Whisky Max, Charles Maclean’s website, is a great source of information about whisky and how to enjoy it.
  3. If you want to go deep, very deep, into scotch whisky, you need Alan Gray’s Scotch Whisky Industry Review.
  4. I learned an amazing amount from Scotch Whisky: History, Heritage and the Stock Cycle, a journal article by Julie Bower.
  5. If you want a personal tour of Scotland, Alastair Cunningham is your man.
  6. Aeneas Coffey is easy enough to run to ground. Aeneas MacDonald, the great whisky writer, maybe less so.
  7. Banner image © Glenfarclas Distillery, seen here
Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 040

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26 September 2016

Authentic food news

Some cracking long reads this time around, stuffed with history and cultures.

  1. Bee Wilson chews over London then and now. From here, mid-Victorian London really does look like a foreign country.
  2. From China, Fuchsia Dunlop on the irresistible rise of soy sauce has me wondering whether I have ever had the right stuff.
  3. Ashwaq Masoodi on Dalit food. Hard to get my head around the idea that beef is the stuff the lower classes have to make do with.
  4. Sort of self-promotion: In Canada, some people would have to spend half their income to eat healthily. Last year’s podcast with someone trying to fix the problem.
  5. And – of course – more from the front lines of cultural appropriation, as Disney abandons it’s recipe for princess-approved “healthy gumbo”.
  6. A brief moment of schadenfreude as Bloomberg slathers pea-protein stabilised emulsion on the face of Hampton Creek.
Podcasts

A far from dismal scientist In conversation with Marc Bellemare, agricultural economist

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:02 — 23.0MB)

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Speculators are responsible for food price spikes? Food price spikes are responsible for riots in the streets? First-world hipsters are responsible for hungry quinoa farmers in Peru?

No, yes, no – at least if you care more about evidence than emotions and opinions.

How do we know? Thanks to the work of agricultural economists like my guest in this episode, Marc Bellemare, director of the Center for International Food and Agricultural Policy at the University of Minnesota. I confess, I’m a little in awe of the analytical skills of ag-economists, their ability to find datasets and then persuade them to offer up reasonable answers. Sometimes it seems emotion and opinion are much easier ways to interpret the world, but I’m glad there are people who disagree. Marc was in Rome recently, and allowed me some time to talk about economics and agriculture.

Notes

  1. Marc Bellemare has a blog, and he’s not afraid to use it.
  2. Previous episodes: the one about price spikes and the one about quinoa.
  3. The graph in the banner photograph is from a rather good article from the USDA: Why Another Food Commodity Price Spike?