Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 014

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5 October 2015

Don’t fear the fungi

  1. It’s odd that “cure” has two such distinct meanings, but don’t let the scare mongering of What we know about fungi and cured meats put you off.
  2. The life and times of domesticated cheese-making fungi could also put you off, if you let it.
  3. More sciencey stuff: a review of The Food Lab, the giant new tome from Kenji López-Alt. I know I’ve given him grief, but the book sounds worthwhile.
  4. This is all turning very negative, but sometimes that happens. Stuff like the Future Food District makes me so glad I didn’t get to Milan for Expo 2015.
  5. Likewise the Foresight project, which “aims at understanding what decisions do policymakers need to take in the coming decades to ensure that by 2035 food systems deliver high quality diets in low/middle income countries”. Because they really still don’t know?
Podcasts

Just Mayo and justice I can't believe it isn't an emulsion stabilised by egg lecithin

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:34 — 14.4MB)

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just-mayoIt’s hard to know what this episode is really about. Government bullying private enterprise? An evil conspiracy to crush a competitor? Confused consumers unable to read a label? All of the above? In a nutshell, on 12 August 2015 the US Food and Drug Administration sent a warning letter to Josh Tetrick, CEO of Hampton Creek Foods, informing him that two of Hampton Creek’s products:

are in violation of section 403 of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (the Act) [21 U.S.C. § 343] and its implementing regulations found in Title 21, Code of Federal Regulations, Part 101 (21 CFR 101).

Just Mayo and Just Mayo Sriracha are the two products, and their crime is that they do not contain eggs. So they cannot be called “mayo”. Who sicced the FDA on Hampton Creek? has become the big question, as a pile of emails winkled out of the government by a Freedom of Information Act request seem to show that the American Egg Board orchestrated a campaign against Hampton Creek.

I mentioned the story in my newsletter three weeks ago, which prompted Peter Hertzmann, an independent researcher and a friend, to suggest that the reality, as ever, is not quite so straightforward. Peter was good enough to fill me in on some of the background.

Notes

  1. Peter Hertzmann’s website is well worth exploring for all sorts of good things.
  2. The American Egg Board is just one of several commodity checkoff programs. There have been some very interesting challenges to the whole idea of a mandatory checkoff, one of which recently featured on BackStory, a history podcast. I did ask if I could use it, but no reply yet; you can hear the segment here, but you will need a sharper legal brain than mine to decide whether mandatory funding of something called government speech raises First Amendment concerns.
  3. What got Peter and me into the sciencey discussion of mayonnaise and emulsions was his mention of the Harvard University Science and Cooking lecture series. I’m mortified to admit that I didn’t know about it. Many of the lectures are on YouTube, and one in particular that Peter pointed me to showed Nandu Jubany from Can Jubany restaurant in Spain making an aioli from nothing but garlic, salt and olive oil, and a bit of water. You can see him do that from about 13:30 to 17:30 in this video, but the intro, on emulsions, is worth watching too if you want to a better understanding.
  4. I’m sharing, without comment, some of the AEB material obtained by Ryan Shapiro.
  5. The FDA’s letter is, of course, online.
  6. The banner image of a mayonnaise emulsion under the microscope is from a scientific paper on substituting eggs with a modified potato starch.
Extra Matter

Artisan is dead

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I bought a sandwich that proclaimed it was made of “artisan baked bread”. The bread was brown pap which, to be honest, I could see from the start. So, I wrote an obituary for artisan.

Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 013

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21 September 2015

The last watermelon of summer

  1. Stop and think for a minute: how do they make seedless watermelons? All you need to know, and more besides.
  2. A report from the fourth Beeronomics conference. In other news, there are enough “economists and other scientists who work on the economics of beer” to merit a conference series.
  3. I’d be really interested to know what a decent ag economist would make of this chart from the USDA, showing that fewer and fewer beef sales are transparently priced.
  4. A long and complex discursion that springboards from “the first prong in the anti-hipster food backlash”. I suspect that there’s a lot less to this than meets the eye.
  5. It’s an ill wind … the Russian ban on decadent Western foods is proving a godsend to local cheese producers.
  6. As ever, some shameless self-promotion. This discovery of oriental fruit flies in Florida makes it worth linking to the episode These aren’t the pests you are looking for.
  7. And finally, a tail piece: the true history of culatello.
Podcasts

A year of cooking almost everything from scratch How one young woman discovered unprocessed food

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:08 — 14.1MB)

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unprocessedMegan Kimble — that’s her on the left — is a young journalist in Tucson, Arizona. Back in 2012, she set out to stick it to the processed food man, by eating only unprocessed food for a year. Her book Unprocessed: My City-Dwelling Year of Reclaiming Real Food tells the whole story.

It’s odd that two books that have at their core the prevalence of processed food came out within a month of one another, but while Anastacia Marx de Selcado explains how it is that the US military came to occupy supermarket shelves, Megan Kimble simply wants nothing to do with processed foods. Her reasons boil down to taking control of what she eats and boosting the local economy. Along the way she discovers she can’t really do without chocolate, so she learns to make her own.

Notes

  1. Megan Kimble has a website.