Jeremy Cherfas

Top Album Artists last week:

1. Ralph Kirkpatrick 35
2. Charlie Haden & Pat Metheny 14
3. Galactic 13
4. Jenny Scheinman 12
5. The Iguanas 12

Eat This Newsletter 268

- Link to a truly thought-provoking essay on Malthus
- Fiction, fact, and myth in rural–urban conflict
- Crop variety names
- Celebrate Passover != Jewish

Read (and subscribe) at https://buttondown.com/jeremycherfas/archive/eat-tn-268-will-the-circle/

Just for fun I went to look at the four sites Jason linked to, the ones he thinks may be of no value. Each asked me to share my information with 119 vendors. I'm not going to do that. And spending on adverts is not going to deliver visitors either.

Always good, and this time, super pleased by the link to a chart of which glue to use when, and how.

Top Album Artists last week:

1. Willie Nelson 15
2. The Cranberries 13
3. The Little Willies 13
4. Salif Keita 10
5. Jerusalem Quartet 9

Interesting and educational to read about Reilly’s bash script for writing a now post. I’m still in the metaphorical Dark Ages of having a template that I save in the right place under a new name with updated variables.

XKCD on tariffs is actual genius.

https://xkcd.com/3073/

I feel the same, and am now tempted to rename Miscellaneous to Dunno.

Time again for Eat This Newsletter.

- Some things called pepper
- Welsh oats
- Chickens with olives
- Hot potatoes
- Civil Eats’ Food Policy Tracker

Read (and subscribe) at https://buttondown.com/jeremycherfas/archive/etn-267-more-diversity/

Thanks for the introduction to wikiloc.

Might just be me, but Apple’s launchctl seems badly broken, at least for new services. Followed https://www.navidrome.org/docs/installation/macos/ to the letter, and it just doesn’t work. The exactly same command directly from the terminal works perfectly. Cannot figure it out, but it seems I am not alone.

New episode: Quinoa’s Rise and Fall

Between 2007 and 2014 farmers on the altiplano of Peru saw their income from quinoa increase by almost 900%. The boom was followed even more quickly by a bust.

https://eatthispodcast.com/quinoa

It is good to share some of the downs as well as the ups or even the plain level-going. I sometimes censor myself from sharing all the joy because I don't want to give the impression that everything is always perfect, but it darn near is, for which I am grateful.

Most people know that Jewish dietary laws forbid pork. A new book asks why the pig — rather than any of the other animals banned by the Hebrew bible — should have become so inextricably bound up with Jewish identity.

https://eatthispodcast.com/pigs

Just wow! https://www.c82.net/natural-colors/

The Natural System of Colours: Recreating Moses Harris’ color wheels from the eighteenth century.

h/t https://anhvn.com/posts/2025/weeknotes-29/

Eat This Newsletter, for your delectation.

- 16,000 calories per calorie: isn’t that rather inefficient?
- NuFood: ready for water lentils?
- Marmalade, membrillo: what’s the difference?

And more, at https://buttondown.com/jeremycherfas/archive/etn-265-past-and-future/

I think my problem with Douthat and this essay is that I just don't find myself attracted to systems of belief, any systems of belief. To be a part of life, yes, but no more than a part, and a part with no special talents beyond self-destruction -- which is easier maybe if life eternal beckons.

Latest episode: Food facts are not the answer to fear of foods

Charlotte Biltekoff, author of Real Food, Real Facts: Processed Food and the Politics of Knowledge, on how industrial food and real food talk past one another.

https://eatthispodcast.com/real-food

I got over the grave disappointment of Apple’s Books messing my Notes and Highlights for long enough to discover that a solution had been close at hand all along: Calibre!

https://www.jeremycherfas.net/blog/a-farewell-to-books

Grave disappointment. Cleanfeed has removed the ability to record left and right channels from its free tier, and there's no way I can afford €28 a month for separate tracks. I guess I need to rewrite my podcast instructions for guests. Pity, it worked well.

I bought a pair of “cycling" insoles for my non-cycling shoes (trainers) and on the first two rides, coming up the long hill to home seemed a lot less effort. Can that possibly be the result of the insoles? Or self-delusion? Not just a jump in fitness, I am sure.

Thanks to improved crop varieties, “From 1961 to 2015, global crop output was higher by 226 million metric tons”. Is that a lot?

Eat This Newsletter runs the numbers and is not impressed. Or might just be mistaken. You be the judge.

https://buttondown.com/jeremycherfas/archive/eat-this-newsletter-264-curated/

As I continue to mull over Pixelfed, these suggestions from Matt Haughey make a lot of sense. Will they still do as after I am there? I expect so.

Brian has an interesting approach to inserting microformats from front matter that I could pretty easily emulate in Twig as I do my resign. Need to think through whether it would increase flexibility or tie things down.

Food, folklore and St Brigid

St Brigid’s Day, 1 February, traditionally marks the beginning of spring and the start of the agricultural year. There are special foods and other ritual celebrations, some of which delve in the pagan past.

Listen at https://eatthispodcast.com/brigid

It is too easy to connect the dots. Sugar craving, cheap ultraprocessed calories, cheap food for enslaved sugar workers, the hidden horrors behind plenty, information deficits.

I need a pinboard and some red string.

https://buttondown.com/jeremycherfas/archive/etn-263-connectivity/

Nice piece from Joe Crawford summarising his history of bookmarks and current use of LinkDing on PikaPods. Me too. The one drawback I have found it that editing my tags online seems to cost me dearly. But editing the XML offline is a huge pain.

#IndieWeb

Looking for free Seville oranges for your marmalade? Or any other food to forage? The latest Eat This Newsletter has you covered, with a link to Falling Fruit, an interactive map that aspires to be “the best tool available to the contemporary forager”. And more.

https://buttondown.com/jeremycherfas/archive/etn-262-forage/

I enjoyed Manu's post about photography and photographers he likes, and even more his page of photographs which has a very neat script to embiggen an image with a click and then smallish it again with another click. Very cool. Worth stealing?

Latest Eat This Newsletter.: Two pieces about food and place, two pieces about the perils of industrial food, and one blast about why the food system is as rotten state as it is and, maybe, what we might do about that.

https://buttondown.com/jeremycherfas/archive/etn-260-consolidated/

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.

Latest episode considers possibly the original pintxo. A plump Cantabrian anchovy, a spicy pickled guindilla pepper, and a juicy green olive, skewered on a toothpick. It's invention is contested, but not its name, nor the inspiration for that name: Gilda.

https://www.eatthispodcast.com/gilda/

Under Robin Sloan's reading, I fail to see any distinction between cults and tribes.

New newsletter: One bottled water company now owns Alhambra®, Arrowhead®, Crystal Springs®, Deer Park®, Ice Mountain®, Mountain Valley®, Ozarka®, Poland Spring®, Primo Water®, Pure Life®, Saratoga®, Sparkletts®, Zephyrhills® and others.

https://buttondown.com/jeremycherfas/archive/etn-258-gifted/

Back when I started podcasting, in 2013, it seemed sensible to include a page telling people that they could subscribe, and how. Is that still needed today? Does “wherever you get your podcasts” really cover it, or should I add links for all the apps and services?

Currently reading: The Amateur: The pleasures of doing what you love by Andy Merrifield, ISBN: 9781786631060

#Non-fiction

This is madness. I have 653 different tags on my ~4000 bookmarks in linkding. Fully 267 of them have a single entry. Clearly I urgently need to procrastinate by cleaning everything up.

Bennett's Law says that as poor people have more money they shift from coarse grains to fine and then to animal proteins. But it isn't really a law, more a regular occurrence. Today, the first empirical test of Bennett’s Law, with researcher Marc Bellemare.

https://eatthispodcast.com/bennetts-law

Trawling around after briefly noting Cooklang as a way of marking up recipes, I came across a recipe for gnocchi sauce that called for 300ml of cream as well as a burrata cheese and thought to myself, talk about gilding the lily.

After years of using it for spices, I put my coffee grinder to work grinding, er, coffee because a friend gave me some French Roast beans from The Philippines. The coffee is good, with more than a hint of cumin.

Long reads from Eat This Newsletter. Modern industrial production for better and worse. A review on dietetics so you don't need to read the book. UK farmers sharpening their pitchforks; I'm not convinced. And more.

https://buttondown.com/jeremycherfas/archive/etn-256-lengthy/