Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 032

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6 June 2016

Authentic food news

  1. I had intended to do my own guide to homemade butter when I published the episode on Irish butter, but haven’t, yet. In the meantime, here’s a quick guide to quick homemade butter.
  2. To use that butter, you need to bake some bread. But forget about that bag of flour; obviously you need to mill some fresh. (I couldn’t access the original in the Wall Street Journal, so that’s the précis.)
  3. And if you’re going to mill some flour to bake some bread for that butter, you’re going to want to use newly fashionable ancient wheat. All you need to know about einkorn.
  4. A little bit of cheese for the royal slice of bread?
  5. OK, I really hadn’t intended to go all-in on bread and butter and cheese, but like London busses, these things sometimes hunt in packs. So what else have I got? How about some tarnished Golden Rice. I’ve honestly got nothing against specific GMOs, but sometimes failure to deliver really is a failure to deliver.
  6. In search of Ibn Battuta’s melon. No cheap jokes about how he came to lose it, please.
  7. Which came first, bananas, or banana flavour?
Podcasts

The True Father of the First Green Revolution Nazareno Strampelli, born 150 years ago this week

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Strampelli-banner

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:09 — 16.4MB)

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strampelliToday’s show is something of a departure; I’m talking about someone who is crucial to global food security and yet who is almost unknown.

It’s true, as Jean-Henri Fabre, the French naturalist wrote, that “History … knows the names of the king’s bastards but cannot tell us the origin of wheat.” Most people are blissfully unaware of the men and women who created the plant varieties that keep us fed. I say as much at the beginning of the show, when I guess that perhaps one in a hundred people can name a plant breeder, and that the name they’re most likely to come up with is that of Norman Borlaug. (The true stats, from a very small, self-selected sample, are somewhat different. Two out of 13 – about 15% – can name a plant breeder, although neither of the names they came up with was Borlaug’s.)

I thought Borlaug might be the most familiar plant breeder because he is credited as being the Father of the Green Revolution, for work that won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.

Nazareno Strampelli, an Italian plant breeder, exactly foreshadowed Borlaug’s work by about four decades. His wheats doubled production in Italy and beyond and were crucial to the second green revolution ushered in by Borlaug. He was born on 29 May 1866, 150 years ago as I write this. He deserves to be better known (as do all plant breeders, actually).

Notes

  1. There is very little about Strampelli’s life and work in English. I am indebted to Sergio Salvi for his books, articles and time, without which I could not have produced this episode.
  2. Music for the show graciously provided by Jon Fuller, aside from bits of soundtrack lifted from archive Italian newsreel.
  3. The banner image I grabbed from Ridley Scott’s Gladiator; it’s a little in joke for anyone who does know even a smidgen of the history of wheat.
  4. There is so much more to the story of Strampelli and the early days of plant breeding; would you be interested in an e-book?
Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 031

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23 May 2016

Authentic food news

  1. Philip H. Howard collects great data, so you don’t have to. His latest chart, Organic Processing Industry Structure, is bursting with informational goodness. Even that, though, doesn’t include the latest assimilations.
  2. Assimilation, appropriation, whatever you want to call it, it’s still a hot potato. Let a thousand carbonare flourish, just not on my table.
  3. And all I need to detect fake Parmigiano-Reggiano is a gas chromatography mass spectrometer. Actually, it doesn’t even do that. It only identifies cheese made from cows fed silage, forbidden by the rules that bind Parmigiano-Reggiano.
  4. As befits it’s subject matter, a quaintly anachronistic website from the Mann Library at Cornell University, on The History of Kitchen Gardens in America.
  5. Attempts to suborn the language continue apace:
    This is what life would actually be like without processed food. Chewing is processing, in the same way that brewing is biotechnology.
  6. Speaking of biotechnology (ahem), I wonder whether the use of integrated pest management to protect citrus trees from huanglongbing (aka citrus greening disease) will beat GMO citrus to the punch.
Podcasts

A brief history of Irish butter The world's first quality control system made it great

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butter-banner-1

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 18:00 — 14.8MB)

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butterThe Butter Museum in Cork, Ireland, features on some lists of the world’s quirky etc. food museums but not others. It ought to be on all of them. This is a seriously interesting museum for anyone who likes butter, and in my book, that means just about everyone. (I refuse absolutely to say anything about the impact – if any – of butter on health, not least because there’s nothing certain one can say.) It sits next to the grand Butter Exchange, built when the Cork Butter Market sat like a colossus astride the global market. The Irish butter traded through Cork was done in by refrigeration, fell to the lowest level possible, and then emerged again after Ireland joined the European Union, by returning to the principles that made the Cork Butter Exchange great. The Butter Museum tells the whole story. This episode tells a bit of it.

Notes

  1. Regina Sexton is @culinaryireland on Twitter.
  2. The Cork Butter Museum really is worth a visit.
  3. The banner photograph is my own, and the butter curls are by Dennis Miyashiro, used with permission.
  4. I snarfed the music from SoundCloud. I still have no idea how permissions there work.
Extra Matter

A promise kept

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Last summer i had a really good conversation with Frederik van Oudenhoven about his book With Our Own Hands, documenting culture and agriculture in the Pamir mountains of Central Asia. Frederik and his co-author Jamila Haider promised that they would return copies to the people whose information they had collected; I’ve only just learned that they kept their promise late last year.

Five tonnes of book travelled overland from the Netherlands to Tajikistan, where it met with a great reception.

Everyone who has seen the book, whether in the police, the bus stop or bazaar, has immediately asked how to get one. The Mountains Societies Development Support Programme will help distribute them to every community, to ensure that at least one copy is accessible in a public space.

The book should live, it is not a monument set in stone. Already we have received critiques: mistakes in spelling, which differs from valley to valley based on pronunciation; differences in recipes from grandmother to grandmother, village to village and certainly valley to valley; and discontent about showing some of the less appealing sides of the Pamirs (like the opium addiction especially on the Afghan side). We would love to find a way to create a live forum for discussion, to capture these differences and nuances – to open up a space for imaginings.

How hard can that be, in this hyperconnected world?