Jeremy Cherfas

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/

Very cool. A new website dedicated to taking your bicycle on a train (in Europe). Sort of The Person with a Saddle in Seat 61. There's mention of it being crowd-sourced, which would be interesting. Instant follow.

https://cycling-on-rails.com/blog/2024/11/05/train-bicycle-guide-started.html

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.

Almost identical to my own journey, although I haven't scoured ALL the places I might have left a bookmark. I should watch the tagging video, because I know I am too lax about tags, and have too many tags with only a single item. AI could fix that, right?

I've often dreamed of handing headphones to people playing their shitty phone-based noises out loud, but never taken it beyond a dream. Terence Eden could be living the dream with his two quid shitty earphones.

Current me thanks past me for due diligence.

[Unable to login to Monocle](https://www.jeremycherfas.net/blog/unable-to-login-to-monocle)

New episode: How the Spanish learned to love anchovies

For hundreds of years, the people of Spain wanted nothing to do with anchovies, except perhaps as fertiliser for their fields. Today, they eat more anchovies than anyone else. How did that happen?

https://eatthispodcast.com/anchovies-spain

After a week away seeing family and mostly ignoring the online, it is very good to be back home and online.

Last week was National School Lunch Week in the US. The latest Eat This Newsletter wonders why there is still no such thing as a universal free school lunch.

Read it at https://buttondown.com/jeremycherfas/archive/etn-254-deja-vu/ and think about subscribing there.

Truly baffled by someone who has a kind of About page that links to their various online presences, and the one labelled “blog” takes me to a Substack signup. Whatever else you may think it is, a newsletter is not, on its own, a weblog. At least, not for me.

#IndieWeb

For some reason, we both woke at our normal time and then slept on for another 90 minutes. TGIS

I knew most of this history, as a relatively long-time user of Known, and I contribute to the project via Open Collective. A new version of Known would be even better than a functional exporter, but I would settle for that if I have to.

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.

Yet another plea for proper micropayments that don't gouge payer or payee. Even Patreon has been going down the tubes in this regard. I still fondly remember the original flattr. Couldn't someone, somewhere, please reinvent that.