A space for mostly short form stuff and responses to things I see elsewhere.
Eat This Newsletter today ranges from big stories in India and Europe to little gems about candy floss (aka cotton candy) and asparagus.
Oh, and a titan of industrial food calls for mandatory nutrition labels.
Read it at https://buttondown.com/jeremycherfas/archive/etn-255-gamut/ and while you are there, consider subscribing.
In the latest Eat This Newsletter
- Nutrition experts who feed off big food
- The tomato in India
- Tainted turmeric
- Cloves, with a hitch
- 陈麻婆豆腐: is the story true?
Read it at https://buttondown.com/jeremycherfas/archive/etn-253-conflict/ and please consider subscribing.
Eat This Newsletter points the finger at
* alt-protein energetics: the sums don't add up
* breastfeeding: formula looks "less like brain damage and more like a really bad kindergarten teacher", and
* food allergies and intolerance: the immune system loses its mind.
https://buttondown.com/jeremycherfas/archive/eat-this-newsletter-251-relevant/
I can write Eat This Newsletter while on holiday. Promoting it, however, is another story entirely. BLTN, the latest offers food-borne illness, conspicuous fruit consumption, and plant-based meat ... for pets.
https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas/archive/etn-245-fruity/
Illuminating talk by Banu Özden about the contribution of minority cultures - Rums, Armenians from Anatolia, and Sephardic Jews - to the food of Istanbul, an amalgamation of so many cuisines, she said, “the name of the city defines the cuisine”.
Latest Eat This Newsletter includes:
Can you talk about the hummus wars when there is an actual war on?
School food in Nairobi
Global — and Californian — production of calories
Silent Doritos
https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas/archive/223-enough-to-go-around/
"You could literally take a hungry climate refugee and put them in the middle of a field of food, and they’d still starve to death." Interesting take, with which I fully agree. I wonder how the writer might feel about Chris Smaje's Small Farm Future?
And it's out, the latest issue of Eat This Newsletter https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas/archive/linked/
A slew of stories from around the web, each of them connected to at least one of the others because that's the way of the food and agriculture system.
https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas/archive/linked/
Always feels good to finish tomorrow's Eat This Newsletter a little early. Sign up at https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas/ if you would like my take on nice rice, Big Food, gin, tomatoes and brassicas.
Finished reading: English Food: A People's History by Diane Purkiss, ISBN: 9780007255566
#Non-fiction
Currently reading: English Food: A People's History by Diane Purkiss, ISBN: 9780007255566
#Non-fiction
Just put the finishing touches to Eat This Newsletter 210, with:
* Ur-pizza
* Chinotto, eh?
* Entomophagy? Again!
* Food System Fixes
Subscribe at https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas/ now and find it in your inbox tomorrow.
Just put the finishing touches to Eat This Newsletter 208. Fancy a pot luck of food-adjacent links? Sign up at https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas
Nice to see someone else trying to revive blog carnivals in an IndieWeb context. Sara Jakša's first taster appeals on two levels; it is a blog carnival and it is about food. Count me in.
Indeed. Currently editing my next episode, from @ECLLD recent meeting in Budapest, celebrating how the new EU reg on OHM is allowing farmers and food producers to be more sustainable and nutritious.
Very happy to discover that my episode on Garum, Rome's museum of food and cooking, is peaking this week in Nigeria. What are they hearing that you haven't? eatthispodcast.com/garum-museum/
20/25 on Adactio's Font or Food? quiz. Not too shabby.
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
Chuffed to learn that @scotlandbread won @bbcfoodprog award for Food Innovation. If I were in Scotland, I'd be sourcing from Flour to the People. Instead, I gave a donation to the crowdfunder campaign at https://crowdfunder.co.uk/scotlandthebread
Eat This Newsletter 171 is out, with Canadian chickens, proletarian food systems, sweetness and dark, and a tribute to NI Vavilov. All connected, even if somewhat tenuously. Read it at https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas/archive/eat-this-newsletter-171-proletarian/
Huge congratulations to Chris Otter, whose fascinating book Diet for a Large Planet has just won the AHA Bentley Prize in World History. We had a great chat about how the British created global food outsourcing and made it was it is today.
https://www.eatthispodcast.com/large-planet/
Great fun chatting with Amalia Sacchi for @festletteratura about food, agriculture and the climate crisis, although ashamed not to be able to do it in Italian. It will be streamed on 8 September at 14:10 CEST.
In case you thought "organic" meant anything more than another way for industrial food to profit with no regard to any costs other than purely financial, Marion Nestle takes apart Danone's decision to abandon small organic dairies https://www.foodpolitics.com/2021/08/24686/
No favourites from Marion Nestle: Unethical food marketing ad of the week: infant formula, organic no less.
https://www.foodpolitics.com/2021/08/most-egregious-food-ad-of-the-week-infant-formula/
Fun to see @racheleats photo of Bonci Pizza illustrating this article, although that seems to me as far from ordinary pizza al taglio as that is from Mr Go’s pizza vendining machine.
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2021/may/07/dough-to-go-romes-first-pizza-vending-machine-gets-mixe...
USDA says there were about 2,019,000 farms in the US in 2020. But how many were actually farms in the usual sense of the word, growing food for sale as their primary business. I'm sure @rosenblawg said something about this recently, but I can't now find it. Help, please.
Let joy be unconfined: farm share of food dollar up from 14.2 cents in 2018 to 14.3 cents in 2019. Farmers get an even lower share of eating out dollars, and eating out dollars plunged during the pandemic.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery/chart-detail/?chartId=100802
I’ve been getting myself in a right old muddle about taste lately. Not music or architecture -- well, not entirely -- but gustatory taste, the taste of food. Of course, we all acknowledge that taste is subjective. 1/6
I do not believe that consumers are the main beneficiaries of recent trends in the centralisation and industrialisation of food production. Convenient, perhaps, but safe and affordable? At what price?
The big problem with the “all food is processed” and “everything is a chemical” arguments is that they fail to speak the same language as the people for whom “processed” and “chemical” have other meanings. I prefer to ask who benefits from the processing and the chemicals.
Where to push for greater food safety as food supply systems change is such a difficult question, as discussed in my podcast with Shirley Tarawali and Delia Grace @ILRI https://www.eatthispodcast.com/in-praise-of-meat-milk-and-eggs/
TIL that there is such a thing as a non-food interpretation of 🌮
Thanks. That's a very small part of his argument, and we've just had another good chat in which I asked specifically whether the UK could exclude or tax food imports. He said, absolutely. Look at Japan. Food is a strategic issue and outside the WTO. My fear remains that after Brexit there still won't be good food system policies.
Maybe it is because I had already noted a Washington Post piece about "real" food people ignoring the Magnolia cookbook, but I found Grant McCracken's piece about Martha Stewart doing the same so trenchant and also so sad. http://web.archive.org/web/20190514114829/https://medium.com/@grant27/martha-stewart-the-old-guard-d...
Had an amazing nine-course tasting menu last night at The Edinburgh Food Studio. Photos would have ruined the experience. From the single radish to begin to the dram of Old Perth 1996 to finish it was a delight for eyes, nose and mouth. Superb all round.
In so many respects, marijuana is a mirror of food, as noted at the mothership https://www.jeremycherfas.net/blog/marijuana-goes-mainstream
A late contender for the best thing about #food I have read all year. Michael Lewis's feature Made in the U.S.D.A. goes inside Trump’s cruel campaign against the U.S.D.A.’s scientists https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/11/usda-food-stamps-school-lunch-trump-administration
"Love” is not a common or usual name of an ingredient" I just love how the #FDA took Nashoba Brook Bakery to task. Because, truly, it is important to make sure that labels always tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, right? https://www.foodpolitics.com/2017/10/fda-says-love-is-not-a-food-ingredient/
Making use of food "waste" is a good, but it remains a Band-Aid. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-05-30/war-on-waste-funding-boost-for-food-rescue-groups-energy-costs...
Lookout world food. @ColinKhoury talking about #changingglobaldiets website on the podcast tomorrow.
Interesting conversation with @_amanda_j_lee about food prices and nutrition in Australia http://www.eatthispodcast.com/australia-where-healthier-diets-are-cheaper
I rather like the idea of a "food mirage". The Depressing Truth About Hipster Food Towns | Mother Jones http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/04/food-desert-mirage-gentrify-brooklyn-portland-groceries-...
Pork safety in Vietnam: further evidence from @ILRI that eaters and officials worry about the wrong things https://news.ilri.org/2017/03/15/a-deep-dive-inside-vietnams-pork-foodshed-to-determine-food-safety-...
Where’s the romance in milking 300 sheep by hand, twice a day? http://www.eatthispodcast.com/good-industrial-food