Bagged another geohash, yesterday, which miraculously was within walking distance. Not sure how best to own this contents though. [2021-09-06 41 12 - Geohashing](https://geohashing.site/geohashing/2021-09-06_41_12)

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/

Looking at an old post of mine from this day in 2007 and wondering, does anyone, anywhere, host a blog carnival on any topic these days? Time for a revival?

Huge credit to @theMaggieAyre for a wonderful edition of BBC Soul Music on The Parting Glass. Moving stories and beautifully mixed. A real treat.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000y6n2

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/

Funny. I read Peter's post today and was so taken with it that I immediately started the process myself, before reading this post and seeing that Ton had inspired Peter.

Like the year, what goes around, comes around.

#IndieWeb

Getting a teeny bit peeved with apps that require OSX 10.14 and later. Not all of us can afford (or want) to upgrade our machines that often.

Argh! @help I accidentally downloaded the latest micro.blog for OSX but cannot use it because I am stuck on 10.13 and I can't find the old version in the Trash. Is there any way to download a previous version compatible with 10.13?

Wouldn't it be nice if Twitter et al. somehow indicated that a link shared by some well-meaning influencer was behind a paywall. It would save me a lot of clicks.

Eat This Newsletter 157 is now online with stories from @SejalSukhadwala @SarahTaber_bww @IrishSeedSavers @UniofExeter and others.

Read it at https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas/archive/eat-this-newsletter-157-almost-global/ and while you're there, consider subscribing.

Latest Eat This Newsletter is at https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas/archive/eat-this-newsletter-155-counterfactual/ with links to good stuff from @serbiaireland, @JaysonLusk, @colin_tudge, @NatureFoodJnl and, most horrifying, https://twitter.com/CeriseFlegal/status/1405939411330629634

As I said in the newsletter: read it and weep.

Every time I read pieces about banking from people who have experienced banking systems outside the US, I marvel that they put up with it at all. I'm constantly amazed at just how easy things are with the online banks I use in Europe. No wonder I'm not tempted by crypto,

Australian journo swaps one set of fibs for another.

"British forests were first subjected to clearing with the Roman conquest of AD 43." Really?

https://www.smh.com.au/environment/sustainability/like-comparing-apples-with-dried-oranges-will-aust...

A pox on both their houses.

Excellent Conversations with Tyler episode talking to David Deutsch (apart from the whole multiverse thing about which I am not competent to judge, and nor do I care).

Made a start on the annual tweakage of the automatic watering system for the terrace, but the main enemy remains lack of pressure. It fluctuates through the day so need to try and find the maximum.

Never having had to deal with prescriptions and refilling them in the same way, I thought I had it bad, needing to send a fax to cancel my account with my internet service provider! This reminds me of a movie where the entire plot hinges on a fax that fell behind the machine and so was never seen. Not that I can remember the movie.

There surely has to be a better way.

Currently reading: The Screaming Sky by Charles Foster

#Non-fiction

Currently reading: The Arrest by Jonathan Lethem, ISBN: 9780062938787

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...

If I were a winemaker in Salento, I think I'd support change to ensure that I wasn't cutting myself off from customers.

Jeremy Parzen with some rival etymologies for Negroamaro grapes and why, whichever one is "true" it might be wise to rethink.

https://dobianchi.com/2021/05/05/negroamaro-racial-slur-racist/

Terrific article on dates in SoCal.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-05-03/muslim-tradition-break-ramadan-fast-with-dates

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.

"Scotland is a colossus in native breeds."

That's all you really need to know, but if you want to read about the "six big asks" (yuck) it is all here https://www.thescottishfarmer.co.uk/news/19213969.vote-native-breeds/

TIL that dumdum bullets were made originally in Dumdum. By design?

I have an hour or so to myself, so, Moom or Johnny.Decimal, that is the question.

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 always wanted to try a sensory deprivation tank, though deprivation seems like entirely the wrong word. Floating in the Dead Sea is all well and good, but those salts sting. I would expect a proper tank to be much nicer.

"Decellularized spinach serves as an edible platform for laboratory-grown meat"

A less mouth-watering headline, you're unlikely to read.

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-03/bc-dss033021.php

I agree that people should learn to protect themselves against pseudoscience, especially medical quackery. But before you ask "How is this supposed to work?" it might be even more worthwhile to ask "Does this even work?"

Without evidence of an effect, a mechanism is worthless.

Of course I am going to resurrect my podcast episode about Celebrating Passover and Easter. Maybe a bit late for tonight's seder, but plenty of time for a little didactic baking next week.

https://www.eatthispodcast.com/passover/

I really enjoy using #loopback from @RogueAmoeba for more complex things, but I cannot seem to fathom the simplest thing. If I'm on a straightforward Zoom call using an outboard mic though a USB mixer, how can I get my mic into my headphones with zero latency?

As noted in the latest Eat This Newsletter, the new Plant Humanities Lab website is absolutely terrific, and would be even better with some sort of feed of new items. How about it, @DumbartonOaks ?

https://lab.plant-humanities.org/

I'm not mad keen on subscription services myself, though I do pay for a few because they keep on delivering. Another twist to the story, though: when an app I am happy to pay offers a discount on a new version that my OS won't be able to handle until I get a new machine.

Fine episode of Gravy from @southfoodways, all about horchata. A little disappointed that @rachellaudan didn't bring English barley water into the story. Or if she did, that they cut it.

https://www.southernfoodways.org/gravy/horchata-podcast/

Currently reading: The Anarchy by William Dalrymple

#History
#India

That was a couple of hours well spent, fixing up the PESOS from Instagram to here, via Bibliogram. Of course, it shouldn't have taken nearly that long, but I had to go slowly. And I haven't tested it from the cron job yet, only locally.

Today was a very appropriate day to learn about Grace Murray Hopper in my ongoing attempt to become a better dilettante programmer.

This deserves mention. An industry-funded study that doesn't entirely find what the industry would like. Whole grain oat flakes reduce blood glucose and insulin responses, but thin or instant oats do not. Funded by PepsiCo, owner of Quaker Oats.

https://www.foodpolitics.com/2021/02/industry-funded-study-of-the-week-a-rare-exception-to-the-rule/

TIL “people believed an ice cream named “Frosh” was creamier than an ice cream called “Frish”. Makes me wonder whether whiff might be a better name than Cornish Sole.

More in Eat This Newsletter later today. Sign up now at https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas

Peter Rukavina asks: "What category of Judaism would you self-identify with?"

And I can think only of Jonathan Miller's "Jew ... ish", which appears to be a line from the original Beyond the Fringe.

"[T]he University of Plymouth has found that managing the density of crab and lobster pots ... increases the quality of catch, benefits the marine environment and makes the industry more sustainable in the long term." Great. Now, how to export the catch.

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-02/uop-mca021221.php

It has been both salutary and disappointing to go back to original material from the late sixties, early seventies and 1994 and realise that we have basically squandered the gift of the Green Revolution. Not that tomorrow's episode is pessimistic or anything.

Thanks for the link to the video. I've done a few workflows and, like Ton, had some difficulty really understanding how they work, so I am going to find time for this. I don't think Automators.fm has ever done an episode on Alfred; I wish they would.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Clarke's Third Law.

This morning, sitting outside a cafe that was actually closed because of the lockdown here, Syncthing made a believer of me.