Eat This Newsletter 006 Gleanings

What happened to 005? Work got in the way. Maybe later.

30 June 2015

  1. Hands up all those who thought the fish in sushi had to be raw? Nordic Food Lab has some news for you as it seeks “to reproduce a gravlax, in its old fermented version, that is delicious to us now – or let’s say, for this first trial, at least palatable”.
  2. Could you make 1,000,000 good tortillas a day? Chipotle founder Steve Ells is working “to make artisanal tortillas on an industrial scale”.
  3. I remember the concert for Bangladesh, but nobody seems to want to celebrate the good news with a big party at the Albert Hall. Bangladesh is no longer a basket case; it’s a food basket.
  4. A guide to egg labels for the confused, which is all of us. I’d love to see cross-country comparisons.
  5. Smaller peaches save water and taste better. No surprises there. So why aren’t people buying them? A sad story of one California farm family trying to adapt to climate change.
  6. Bonus shameless self-promotion. Good thing the regulations that preserve Parmigiano-Reggiano say nothing about who works the dairies. BBC News reports on Punjab in the Po.

How to eat well in Italy Listen to someone who has been there for you

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elizabeth-minchilliPeople looking for a good place to eat in Rome can choose from almost as many opinions as there are restaurants. Truth be told, though, a lot of those opinions have been shared by ninnies. Seriously, if you’re looking for some harmless entertainment as you wait for the bill to arrive after an excellent meal that you’ve thoroughly enjoyed, read what some of the people on some crowd-sourced websites have said about the place where you are eating. But I digress. Rather than wade through countless ninny-posts looking for a realistic recommendation, many visitors, and some residents, turn to one of the food writers based here. Among those, one person reigns supreme: Elizabeth Minchilli. Through social media, apps, books and tours, she tirelessly points people in the right direction. Her new book came out this spring. That’s a good enough reason for me to sit down for a drink with Elizabeth in her local neighbourhood.

Notes

  1. The book is Eating Rome: Living the Good Life in the Eternal City. Her blog is here. Elsewhere, she’s @eminchilli.
  2. We met at Urbana 47 which is indeed a fun place to hang out.
  3. I captured the banner image, and the rigatoni a la gricia that grace the podcast cover on iTunes, at Perilli, immediately after Elizabeth and I met, and which, I swear, had been selected long before our conversation. The food is a lot more consistent than the typography.

These aren’t the pests you’re looking for Searching for the species that threaten food security

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small-snail-1Day after day, week after week, special agents keep a look out for invaders that they really don’t want to find. And we, the ordinary public, give them barely a second thought. Worse, we sometimes provide the means for the invaders to get in. Of course when it all goes wrong, there’s an outcry, as there has been for the Mediterranean fruit fly, the European corn borer, the giant African snail and many other pests. Most of the time, however, we remain blissfully unaware. And most of the time, pests either don’t get in or are detected fairly quickly and eradicated.

I was lucky enough to hitch a ride on a field trip in Puerto Rico, organised by the local survey teams to show plant health experts how they go about the business of keeping pests from establishing.

An aside: I can remember, back in the 1980s, sitting on a plane at Sydney airport ducking my head as the cabin staff wafted through spraying us with insecticide. These days, I learned, aircraft are mostly treated with persistent pesticides, eliminating the spray but not the need to keep insects out.

Notes

  1. The opening and closing music is Che Che Cole, by Willie Colón with Héctor Lavoe. I had no idea when I chose it that like some species of giant African snail, it’s original home is apparently Ghana. Some incursions are better than others.
  2. The music in the middle is La Boriqueña, the national anthem of Puerto Rico, but the site where I found this version has apparently vanished in the interim.
  3. The banner photograph shows two male Mediterranean fruit flies facing off, and is by Derric Nimmo.
  4. The cover photograph of a giant African snail – no Photoshop – is by R. Anson Eaglin of USDA APHIS.
  5. And those pathetic dead snail shells? They’re the ones I found, all excited like, but they weren’t the pests I was looking for.

Tasty Morsels 004 Gleanings

25 May 2015

  1. The cost of ingredients has never been that big a factor in the price we pay for food. Latest evidence: in the US the price of bacon plummets – fattening restaurant margins. And waistlines? I actually think the hypocrite burger – a veggie burger with a couple of strips of bacon – is a great idea, a dish for the thoughtful consumer.
  2. I tried to ask Willy Staley, who wrote the eye-opening A Conspiracy of Hogs: The McRib as Arbitrage from 2011, for a comment on the bacon thing, or even a prediction as to when the McRib might reappear, but he’s a hard man to find. Can you help?
  3. Enough of the US-centric stuff: here’s Paul Levy’s fine piece from last October, on The exotic history of British fish and chips.
  4. And where do chips come from? Some people would have you believe only from a potato called Russet Burbank. Not Morrice and Ann Innes. Their exhibit of 140 different potato varieties has just won gold at the Chelsea Flower Show. Mature tubers in May; that takes some doing.
  5. Something to wash your fish and chips down with? The University of Vermont seems to be making an awfully big deal about the rise in hard cider, or what I, a Somersetian at heart, prefer to call cider. Or zider. I suggest that the Vermonters pay God’s own county a visit.

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