A space for mostly short form stuff and responses to things I see elsewhere.
Latest Eat This Newsletter, and the last one of the year. From pedants on pintxos to bread and circuses, all your food-adjacent reading needs.
Find it at https://buttondown.com/jeremycherfas/archive/etn-259-ring-out-the-old/ and while you're there, please consider subscribing.
A new Eat This Newsletter: the other shoe drops on lead in cinnamon; rye in Scandinavia and the recent oldest bread, which requires a small qualifier; doubts about agricultural subsidies that “that when reached will make them redundant”; and a history of British pies https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas/archive/etn-233-leavened/
Just finished putting together the latest Eat This Newsletter, looking at label as a form of truth, ruined bread as a metaphor, tree-planting as a menace, crop-modelling as a pipe-dream and cheese as surplus.
If you want to know more, subscribe at https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas
A little late with the first Eat This Newsletter of the New Year, but my boss says that's OK.
Read it at https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas/archive/eat-this-newsletter-172-policy-potato-and/ for thoughts on FOPLs, ag and food policy in the US and the UK, potato bread etc
I have enormous admiration for John F. Appleby, who in the 1870s perfected a machine that would tie a knot in twine, thus enabling a machine to bind sheaves of grain together and setting in motion the giant combine harvesters that enable our daily bread.
#mbnov
Currently reading: Our Daily Bread by Predrag Matvejević, ISBN: 9781912545094
#non-fiction
#food
#history
#mythology
Delighted to learn that Subway bread in Ireland is cake, in the same way that Jaffa Cakes are cake, at least as far as VAT is concerned.
I am amazed and saddened by the number of beginner bakers I see in forums saying that their bread tasted fantastic but didn't rise enough, or didn't have giant holes, or didn't a shiny crust, or whatever.
Just eat it.
Bread porn too has a lot to answer for.
Thanks Aaron for your mention of my wheat and bread podcasts. You raise an interesting question about aboriginal bread in Australia. I've listened to a podcast with Bruce Pascoe and read a general piece that was awfully muddled, but I have not read his book. I have no reason not to take his claims at face value, although I also think that the freight he is adding to those claims owes as much to the general status and recent past history of aboriginal people in Australia as it does to archaeology. I will certainly be including something in the book I am working on.