14 December 2015
Give us this day
- Our daily bread, being a long interview with one woman’s bread hero, the Finn behind Bread magazine.
- Not everything here is new; thanks to my compadre Luigi for pointing me to an article from a couple of years ago, Bread in the Middle Ages.
- Not to nit-pick or anything, but articles like this debase the term “genetically modified”. Which is a shame, I think, because it is a good explanation of the difficulties of breeding wheat, in French.
- You’ll be wanting a bit of cheese with all that bread, to be sure, to be sure.
- Never mind the jetpack, where’s my complete meal in a pill?
Visitors to Rome are often astonished not so much by the big famous fountains that dot the city but by the smaller flows that gush or trickle from what seems like every street corner. All that water, going to waste. Those drinking fountains – known locally as nasoni or big noses – deliver endless streams of delicious, cold water night and day, summer and winter, and it surprises many people to learn that public water fountains have been a feature of the city since well before the Republic. Indeed, clean water was the right of every Roman citizen.
How should we measure what farms produce? The answer drives some pretty important trends. For the past 60 years and more, the key metric has been yield – tonnes per hectare or equivalent. And it has resulted in extraordinary improvements in productivity, at least as measured by yield, and at least for some crops. Over the past 60 years, the productivity of the three major cereals – wheat, rice and maize – has gone up 3.2 times, more than keeping up with the 2.3-times increase in population. And the total production of those three has gone up from 66 per cent of all cereals to 79 percent over the same period. Largely as a result, we no longer see the same large-scale famines that we used to.