Podcasts

Grass-fed beef A better way of putting meat on the table

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 17:38 — 12.7MB)

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mark-shelley What kind of business wants customers to buy less? The beef business, or at least, one tiny corner of the beef business.

Mark Shelley is an environmental film-maker turned cattleman who raises grass-fed beef near Carmel, California. The methods he and many others have adopted make beef far less environmentally damaging than industrial methods. Quite apart from anything else beef is, as Mark puts it, “the big elephant in the room” when it comes to climate change. Anything to address that ought to be welcomed, and grass-fed beef is far less damaging. It does, however, cost more, not least because we’re all paying the external costs of industrial meat. That’s fine, Mark says. We should all be eating better beef, just doing so less often. How to make that happen? Mark has no idea, he’s just doing his bit, one piece of meat at a time.

Mark’s recent visit to Italy offered the chance to find out more. I completely forgot to ask him about the drought.

Notes

  1. Tassajara Natural Meats has a website. I reckon they’re too busy taking care of the cattle to take much care of the website.
  2. Photo by Carrie Cizauskas, used with permission.
  3. You may remember that ages ago Eat This Podcast talked about the benefits of frozen beef.
Extra Matter

While you wait

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I’m trying an experiment, sharing some things I find interesting via the email newsletter that announces each new episode. Here’s the first issue. Even if you’re already a subscriber to the podcast, via iTunes or your favourite podcatcher, you can still subscribe to the newsletter. And if there’s enough demand, I’ll create a separate mailing list.

Podcasts

A second helping of citrus in Italy Not a lemon, nominated for an award

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:23 — 19.1MB)

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citrus-repeat-coverThis episode is a repeat of one first published in October 2014, and the reason is that it has been nominated for a James Beard Foundation Award. I’m utterly thrilled by the news, and gratified that more people have downloaded episodes and subscribed to the show. Strangely (at least to me) the original did not see huge renewed interest, which is why I thought it worthwhile repeating. If you’ve heard it, and don’t feel like listening again, you could go and listen to one of the other two nominees, in the notes below.

Being nominated is an immense honour. I won’t know whether I have actually won until the award ceremony on 24 April.

The original show notes:
Citrus, thanks to what writer Helena Attlee calls their great “suggestibility,” confound the botanist and the shopper alike. What is the difference between a clementine and a mandarin? That was one of the few questions I didn’t ask Helena Attlee when we met recently to talk about citrus in Italy, the subject of her new book The Land Where Lemons Grow. And not just lemons. Attlee writes beautifully about all the citrus and all of Italy, from Lake Garda in the north to Palermo in the south. She covers not merely the tendency of citrus to interbreed and mutate, but also history and economics, culture, cooking and organised crime. Through it all runs a continuous thread that links the very difficulties of growing citrus productively to the desirability of the finished products, on which fortunes and entire communities were built.

The Land Where Lemons Grow proves, as if it needed proving, that food provides a perfect lens through which to view the entire world, as a result of which I had to cut some choice sections from our conversation. That, however, has prompted me to try something new here, which will become apparent in a day or two as I also attempt to tidy up a bit here.

Notes

  1. More about Helena Attlee at her website
  2. The other award nominees are Gravy and The Feed.
  3. Intro music by Podington Bear.
Extra Matter

Nominated

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Jbfa medal

Of course, I knew that it was a possibility. That’s how the Awards work. You enter, and I thought, “nothing ventured, nothing gained”. To have gained an actual nomination is a surprise and a delight. Helena Attlee was probably my secret weapon, talking about Citrus in Italy.

It is honestly hard to express my delight and excitement.

Podcasts

A visit to Koshari Street An upmarket hole in the wall that serves couture street food

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 17:39 — 16.7MB)

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koshariStreet food is big. Not just in places where eating on the street is the only place many people can afford, but in happening neighbourhoods around the rich world too. Burrito trucks, Korean barbecue in a taco, ceviche, you name it; all are available on the streets of London and Los Angeles, Sydney and San Francisco. They have strange exotic takes on porchetta on the streets of Raleigh, North Carolina, and pizza ovens parked in English railway station forecourts. In many neighbourhods you can barely move for falafels.

One of the iconic street foods of Egypt – koshari – is now available in London, in a slightly upmarket hole in the wall place. I’ve always maintained that this podcast is not about happening restaurants or the latest groovy cocktails, but the chef who made Koshari Street happen happens to be a friend, so on a recent visit, I went to try for myself. And, of course, we talked about far more than the restaurant.

 

Notes

  1. Koshari Street is at 56 St Martin’s Lane, London, WC2N 4EA. And online
  2. Anissa Helou is also online and her book Mediterranean Street Food is still available.
  3. We were interrupted by Lauren Bohn, and she too has an online presence, although there’s not much evidence there of her interest in food.