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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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?

Extra Matter

More eggless mayonnaise

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Aquafaba is kind of what it sounds like; pseudo-Latin (or Italian) for “bean water”. And so far in the boonies is Rome that until this morning, it meant nothing to me. You know how bean water froths? That’s because it contains surfactants, and apparently vegans have been doing all sorts of things that make use of its surfactant abilities as a replacement for egg yolks. The latest commercial product, turning 20,000 gallons of hummus waste aquafaba into gold, is Fabanaise. Read all about it at Food52.

Podcasts

Where’s the latest episode? An explanation

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 3:05 — 2.8MB)

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etp-coverBy rights, there should have been an episode last week, but there wasn’t because I was just back from New York and the James Beard Awards, and I just didn’t have time to put something together. Also, of course, I didn’t win — that honour went to Gravy, from the Southern Foodways Alliance — and richly deserved it was too.

If I had won, I’m sure I would have found time to record something, but it was an immense honour just to be nominated again.

So no episode, because nothing to say, but I have been thinking about the show, and the main conclusion is that I need to carve out more time for myself to make Eat This Podcast. To do that, though, I need to spend a little less time on paid work. And that’s the biggest change I want to make here.

After a lot of soul-searching, I’m going to put Eat This Podcast on the line and open a Patreon account. In case you don’t know about it, Patreon allows you to engage with people who are making things you like with a regular cash donation. You can do different amounts, and you can do it either per item — per show in my case — or per month.

Anyway, the point of this episode is to let you know why the show is late.

Next week, I will, definitely, for sure, have a new show — and details of how you can help me make more and better shows.