Hello

In general, things that delight, instruct or entertain are the order of the day here. Occasionally, though, I find it necessary to point to stuff I really do not like. This is one of those days, in part.

It isn’t the science, stupid

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Perhaps you’ve heard stories about the history of the potato in Europe. Ignorant peasants shun the potato until a wily aristocrat — or even the monarch — plays a trick on them to open their eyes to the true value of the humble etc.

Mea culpa — I believed the story and even retold it myself on occasion. So I naturally slapped my forehead, hard, when I heard Rebecca Earle give an online lecture about the history of the potato and resolved to talk to her myself.

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It was nice to wake up this morning with the sun shining, although it will be awful to drink my tea this afternoon in the dark.

Still, I do love the constancy of change.

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Rachel Roddy’s new book is An A-Z of Pasta: Stories, Shapes, Sauces, Recipes.

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A mixed bag, and that’s the way, uh-huh uh-huh, I like it.

I hope you do too.

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After the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, a young chef brought the tandoor oven and his tandoori chicken from Peshawar to a new restaurant he opened in Delhi, the Moti Mahal. There, he created , butter chicken; tandoori chicken in a sauce that combines tomatoes, butter and cream.

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Advanced technology is a wonderful thing — how else would I be able to communicate with you all? — but there are some problems that just aren’t amenable to technical fixes. Also, history will decide.

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The California Roll was only the beginning. Or at least, the beginning of global domination, after a couple of thousand years of quiet evolution. In the mid 1980s, sushi was the poster child for the average Westerner’s idea of hard-to-understand foods.

Interconnected

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Hello

And we’re back, after a terrific summer break.

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An unforeseen circumstance dashed my hopes, and perhaps yours too, of a new episode of the podcast today. But there’s no point in being your own boss if you can’t occasionally give your staff a break. Next week, and that’s a promise.

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The temperature suddenly dropped by about 10 degrees C a couple of days ago, a sure sign that I need to get back to producing episodes of the podcast. I hope to have one for you next week. In the meantime, here’s this week’s roundup of food news.

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My thanks to the people who wrote to tell me that garlic noodles is indeed a dish worth pursuing, and especially to Lenore, a supporter, who pointed me to her favourite online recipe. I have yet to try it, but I will, and I will report back.

First, though, this week’s collection of food-related trifles.

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Is it voyeuristic to want to learn about things you are unlikely ever to experience? Obviously I don’t think so, or I wouldn’t be doing what I do. Either that, or “voyeuristic” needs to be rescued from its shameful reputation. Three items speak to that, and one to non-local concerns.

Flavours of autism and food

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Nice to have a little uptick in subscribers this past week. Welcome, and thanks to Susan MacMillan, whose newsletter Taking Stock is one I enjoy reading.

Hello

Straying somewhat from the beaten track, I blame the heat here, which has scrambled my brain. I take some solace from the observation that there are many other scrambled brains out there.

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At last, somewhat authoritative figures on the aggregate costs of cheap food. Will they change anything? You tell me.

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Some older items this week, which nevertheless are still well within their eat by date. Also, lots of historical contingency. And I’m still looking for writing about unhyphenated African food.

Consider the fish finger …

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It is so annoying when a headline or link promises a story that ought to be interesting and then fails to deliver. Normally, I just give a snort of derision and move on, but not today. And please, I really do want to read more about the foodways of countries in Africa.

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Greetings from sunny Puglia, where some of the dead olive trees have been cleaned up and there are clear green shoots on newly planted trees. This is a slightly truncated edition with an eye on cereals, because holidays.

A peculiar pasta

Counterfactual

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Hello

India, like most places on Earth, suffered its fair share of famines over the centuries. When Indian politicians gained independence in 1947, they promised that they would do better for their citizens.

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Why shouldn’t people in Alaska have strawberries year-round, if that’s what they want? And why shouldn’t students in Delhi latch onto an abominable street-food if that’s what they want?

Arctic strawberries, lettuce, zucchini and tomatoes

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Chris Otter’s book Diet for a Large Planet shows how the British Empire, starting in the late 18th century, outsourced much of its food supply, paving the way for the modern food system.

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This week’s haul has prompted me to mull over how hard it is fully to understand other discourses. It’s good to be reminded how little I know.

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That’s the title of a new book from Jess Fanzo, a globally-recognized thinker on food systems and professor at Johns Hopkins University.

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If it seems to good to be true, it probably is.

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Arun Kapil first started selling spices from a farmers market stall in Cork, Ireland. That was about 15 years ago. This past month, Green Saffron, the company he started, opened a spice hub warehouse in Holland which, he says, will be landing about 200 tonnes of fresh spices from India, without compromising on quality.

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What is it about countries that makes them want a national dish? Or, indeed, a national myth?

Rants from Down Under

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A little less than a year ago I talked to Professor Jeremy Haggar about his successful search for in Sierra Leone. A hundred years ago, it had an extremely good reputation, but was shoved out by much more productive robusta coffee. Although they found a few plants, probably not more than 100 in total, they were disappointed that there were no coffee berries on the bushes.

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Hard to believe this is edition No. 150 of Eat This Newsletter. When I started, in April 2015, I justified myself thusly:

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Colin Tudge has been writing about food and farming for a long time in a series of thought-provoking books. His latest is The Great Re-Think, which sets out the steps needed to get to where he (and many other people) think we ought to be. The start, though, is to really think about what it is that we want our food system to provide.

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Sometimes I get the feeling I’m just spinning my wheels here, as the same topics go round and round. Then I console myself with the thought that that’s because they actually are important.

Of chickens and eggs

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“[B]etween 2011 and 2015 there was a phenomenal 202% increase globally in the number of new food and drink products launched containing the terms ‘superfood’, ‘superfruit’ or ‘supergrain’,” according to Mintel research.

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As we in the northern hemisphere round the corner into spring, let’s start this round-up in Australia.

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Naomi Duguid travels the world — mostly in Asia — and brings back sensitive insights into the people and their food. She’s a photographer, writer, traveller, cook, geographer, culinary anthropologist and more, and her books have won numerous awards.

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The internet has been bountiful once again, so here are the things I have found most interesting these past couple of weeks.

Archival cockle collectors

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Three billion people couldn’t afford a healthy diet even if they wanted to.

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I know we should all be eating just a little animal-sourced food for a balanced and sustainable diet, but sometime, overindulgence beckons.

This is one of those times.

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As a young biology student, one of the things I and my classmates worried about was population. Firebrands like Paul Ehrlich whipped us up, and Limits to Growth from the Club of Rome provided food for thought as we contemplated future famines. And then, just like that, population vanished as a suitable subject for conversation.

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No pictures, no preliminaries; let’s just have at it.

A long noodle story

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Modern livestock breeds are incredibly efficient, gaining weight at a prodigious rate and supplying astonishing quantities of milk and eggs. That efficiency, however, comes at a cost: the food needed to support such a metabolism. Much of that food could be eaten directly by people, and certainly the lush pastures that support modern dairy cows, for example, might be put to better use growing food for people. But then, where will our meat, milk and eggs come from?

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A day late and a dollar short — except that it isn’t short. I won’t whine about why this edition is late, it’s all my own fault. But I will point out that in order not to be later still, I stuck a bunch of leftovers into the back of the fridge. Perhaps I will find time to exhume them in the future.

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This is the International Year of Fruits and Vegetables, as designated by the United Nations and implemented by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

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I’m still enjoying the winter break, and hard at work on the next series of podcasts, so here’s another newsletter, for now.

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Of course marking a new year on one specific day is a cultural artefact, and many cultures are doing their best to maintain their own markers. Throwing caution to the winds, let me just wish you a Happy New Year with a few links to lots of words from lots of cultures. Not least, the intangible cultural heritage of .

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I’ve noticed in the past how, when I am thinking about some topic, I am much more likely to notice things related to that topic, and so it was with recycling human waste. The past couple of weeks see me flushed with material.

“Peecycling” is too good not to steal

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It’s time to face an uncomfortable fact. After more than 200 episodes devoted in their various ways to what we eat and drink, I’ve never looked at the direct consequences of all that ingestion: excretion.

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Once again, I’ve been sipping from the firehose of the internet so you don’t have to.

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When the British East India Company decided to try their hand growing tea in Assam, they came up against one big problem: back home, nobody much liked the taste of Indian tea. Racist rhetoric, fearmongering and little glimpses of heaven on earth helped persuade them, and more or less created the modern propaganda machine.

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Excuses? I got ‘em. One aspect of working from home can truly bite you when you least expect it, and that is internet access. All week, ours had been up and down like a dog at a fair. A man came and fixed it, and it was OK for half a day. On Friday, it dropped 26 times in about 4 hours. This morning another man came and fixed it and it has been solid. So far.

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Not so long ago, the only clues we had to animal domestication came from archaeological digs, and the origin stories they told were vague and unsatisfying. More recently, molecular biology has come to the rescue in the form of DNA sequences, which can even be extracted from very old bones. Better yet, it has become routine to sequence DNA from all manner of living creatures, and those sequences can shed light on ancient events even when there are no bones in the picture.

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Things aren’t always what they seem. Temporary offers, healthy appearances, artisanal breads, culinary history and edible class signifiers all come under scrutiny in this issue.

Enjoy!

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Teresa Lust teaches Italian at the Rassias Center for World Languages of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and is an acclaimed translator. A Blissful Feast begins with a trip she made to Italy to connect with her mother’s family. Their food triggered a succession of visits to her family in Piedmont as well as others further afield, in Maremma and Le Marche. Her stories of the people she met, the recipes they shared and the history of the food are full of delights.

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Hoard food, harvest olives and handle a 3000 hectare farm, plus price-fixing and molecular gastronomy.

You’re welcome.

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This week, the European Parliament will vote whether to ban food labels like “veggie burger“ and “veggie sausage”. Producers of plant-based foods say that’s nonsense, and that claims of consumer confusion are ridiculous.

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A bumper haul this time around, with a lot of long, informative reads. To be absolutely honest, I don’t have much to say to put any of them in context, so I think I might just try something a little different.

I hope you find this selection as interesting as I did.

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That picture is of what one scientist called the vampire of the vegetable world: coffee leaf rust.

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Quite a bit of sciencey stuff this time around, and opportunities to point you to previous episodes of the podcast. Let’s get to it.

Coffee and terror (Yes, you read that right.)

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I was pleasantly surprised to get an email recently from an intriguing address: careme.co.nz. Naturally, I had to investigate further, and what I found was Jo Crabb, who teaches cooking in Martinborough, a small town about an hour from Wellington. I wanted to know how the pandemic had affected her, how she got into cooking, and why Carême.

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Newsletter items this week are a bit like fondly-remembered London busses; you wait for ages and three arrive at once. Coffee and wet markets get a reprise, although there are also some newer topics.

A date with history

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And we’re back, with a scorcher.

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I’ve enjoyed doing the newsletter every week, and I’m also enjoying arranging and editing forthcoming episodes of the podcast, which will resume next week. From now till I next take a break, it’s back to podcast and newsletter alternating week by week.

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The main conclusion I draw from this week’s selection of goodies that that when you really think about things, they are seldom as simple as others would have you believe.

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No sooner have I got it into my head that a weekly newsletter is a good thing, especially while I am not actively making podcasts, than the well runs a bit dry. So, not much this week, but I am gearing up to start a new season of podcasts in early September, which is something I hope we are all looking forward to.

Breads of Other Lands

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Lots of stories today strung together somewhat loosely by the nature of place. The places people are from, the places crop plants are from, the places different people understand in different ways. I remain grateful for the many ways in which foods and people transcend place, for what would an Italian heatwave be without luscious tomatoes and refreshing watermelon.

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My plan was to lead this issue with the news that foie gras can now be had legally in California, with a link to the episode about foie gras with Michaela DeSoucy. I had to abandon that when I realised I couldn’t make head nor tail of the story in Eater LA. So I’m just going to leave it until it clarifies.

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I hope you enjoyed the previous edition of Eat This Newsletter.

Because I was away, I have a bit of a backlog of stuff I’ve collected, and because I am not making podcast episodes I have a bit of time to spare, which means I can do the newsletter more often.

At least until I have cleared the backlog.

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Yes, I’ve been away. No, I’m not going to anguish here about all the dead olive trees still littering the landscape of Salento. And though I will continue the break from producing podcast episodes, I do intend to resume regular production of the newsletter.

Antibiotics on the farm: it isn’t just animals

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I thought I was pretty savvy about coffee taxonomy knowing that there were two kinds, arabica and robusta. Not surprisingly, perhaps, a research paper about ” and , the Forgotten Coffee Crop Species of West Africa” caught my attention. As I should have known, there are scores of different coffee species. What is particularly intriguing about , however, is that in its day people considered it a very fine coffee indeed. A 1925 monograph recorded that “The beans are said, by both the natives and the French merchants, to be superior to those of all other species.”

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Frog legs have never really appealled to me. I can see that they might provide useful protein as well as pest-control services to a rice farmer, but as a delicacy? Not for me. That doesn’t stop the rest of the world though: somewhere between 100 million and 400 million frogs end up in international food trade each year.

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Long before the current crop of celebrity chefs, Alexis Soyer showed how it should be done. He cooked unimaginably luxurious — and expensive — dinners for royalty and the aristocracy. He invented kitchen equipment. He also opened soup kitchens and campaigned for better food for the poor. His cookbooks and bottled sauces carried his name far and wide. He transformed cooking in the British army.

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It has been a difficult couple of weeks, even sitting on the sidelines, trying to listen rather than to speak. However, speak I must, if only to acknowledge the many people who saved me the trouble of having to point out that a bad apple is not in and of itself a bad thing. It is a bad thing only in close proximity to many other apples, for example in a barrel. You don’t identify a bad apple merely to give it a name or excuse its badness. You identify it so that you can remove it from the barrel, lest its badness spread to all the other apples, ruining the whole barrel of them.

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This is the third in a little mini-series on taste.

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Bit of a mixed bag this time, so let’s start with possibly the most useful news of the past two weeks: . No more wondering whether you pressed too hard, no more scrambling around for a paper bag and a banana when you get home. Cranfield University engineers have a system that taps the avocado, and then uses laser Doppler vibrometry (I don’t know either) to measure the resonant frequency of the fruit, which drops as it softens. I guess it is a high-tech version of thumping a watermelon and listening for that particular kind of bong.

Or maybe you drink what you are.

Hello

Hello

Last time I tried hard to find stories that were not about Covid-19. What has emerged clearly, though, is that the disease has suddenly opened people’s eyes to the fragility of the entire food system. With luck, that will result in some fresh thinking too. Maybe all that cheap labour that puts food on shelves and tables at your convenience is too cheap. Maybe long, brittle, just-in-time supply chains are OK for car factories, not so much for factory farms. The fuss about slaughterhouses and meat-packing plants in the US brings that home with a vengeance.

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Can we say anything sensible about taste? Part of me knows that taste is entirely subjective. But another part of me is quite willing to think about good taste and bad taste and even, dare I confess, to use that as part of a value judgement.

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It is all but impossible to avoid Covid stories about food, or anything else. I’ve tried, honest.

Other diseases are still around

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is the title of a new TV documentary about Norman Borlaug, the plant breeder credited with launching the Green Revolution. I chatted to Rob Rapley — writer, director and producer of the film — about Borlaug’s unshakeable belief in technology and some of the more complex origins and consequences of Borlaug’s revolutionary mission.

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I hope everyone is bearing up. We certainly are, and if my homemade pizza isn’t as good as the stuff we’re accustomed to, well … too bad. At least it is pizza.

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Darra Goldstein combines a scholar’s knowledge of history and literature with a cook’s interest in recipes and ingredients. Her latest book took her on a search for what she calls “the true heart of Russian food“. She found it on the Kola Peninsula, a wild and forbidding part of Russia right at the top of Scandinavia. went further afield to include glimpses of food revivals and innovation in Russia today.

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I’m honestly torn about today’s issue of the newsletter. People are sharing all sorts of tips about how to cook in a time of crisis, some more paranoid than others, but I really have nothing to add on that front. And yet, this truly is a time of crisis, and somehow we have to get through it.

Personally, my biggest problem has been the choice of words. Social distancing carries exactly the wrong connotation, for me. What is needed is physical distancing. Social support is more important than ever, and there are so many ways to give and to receive without actually being in close physical proximity. Maybe the phrase was chosen initially by people who don’t spend much time being social online, and certainly it is too late to change now, but for what it is worth, we need to be social now more than ever.

I saw a lovely thought from :

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The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food – published in 1939 – was a complete guide for Soviet citizens. It was both practical and propaganda, with pictures of lavish spreads that no ordinary citizen would ever enjoy. It was, effectively, the only cookbook most Russians knew, and for a few writers acted as a springboard to produce a food-based memoir.

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Few but good, that’s the underlying narrative for this edition of Eat This Newsletter.

Apples and pears

A charming story about , seeker after old varieties of fruit, gives a potted history of how she and her father came to collect more than 600 different varieties. What tripped me up, though, was the whole business of apples and pears.

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You can be perfectly well fed, maybe even too well fed, and yet still malnourished. Hidden hunger reflects a lack of essential micronutrients in the diet, but tackling the lack of micronutrients is tricky because people do not really feel their hidden hunger.

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Maybe it’s because I have now been at this lark for almost seven years, but everything I see as I wander the interwebs seems to relate to something I’ve done here. As I was finishing the second cup of coffee culture a couple of weeks ago, The Guardian published From khat to coffee: revitalising an age-old Yemeni crop. It is a fine story, of heroism in the face of hardship and all that. Read it, though, and you would have no idea that the revival of Yemeni coffee was a standard trope even before the current war.

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The UK was not a big coffee drinker for quite a while after the first proper espresso machines made their appearance in Soho. Not so the United States, where coffee became an essential drug for the Union during the Civil War. In this episode, Jonathan Morris tells me how the habit lingered and grew into the bottomless cup of diner coffee. I also learned about Starbucks and Friends, and the truth about the flat white.

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I’ve been doing a bit of an early spring clean in some of the places where I keep lists of things I want to read at some point, and in the process found some that were clearly intended to be shared with you. So there are a couple of, er, heritage items in this issue’s mix.

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Why is this man having a shave while he is being served a cappuccino?

Eat well to do good

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Hello

With a bag of porridge oats in my baggage, I set off for Georgetown University and a date with science. What we discovered, thanks to the efforts of Dr David Gagnon and his rheometer, explains why purists are correct that a spurtle is the best stirrer for porridge. I was completely wrong to mock the idea.

Some things to chew on

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Hello

In some cities, you can download an app to your phone that gives you access to a car, yours to drive for a flat fee per minute. Something similar is now going on in the European Alps, where you can buy a share in a cow. Unlike car sharing, when you buy a share in a cow, you are not free to drive her wherever you want. So what, actually, are you sharing?

Wring out the old

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Hello

Each week, a kindly, twinkling grannie creates pasta by hand, making it look as easy as falling off a log. Her hands work unsupervised; kneading, stretching, pinching, rolling, the myriad shapes emerging, perfect. Welcome to the world of Pasta Grannies, a YouTube Channel that provides almost half a million subscribers with a regular dose of nostalgia and good eating.

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Christmas has come early this year, with a sackful of pieces that are not only long and entertaining reads, but also stretch beyond the USA, even those published there.

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After the previous episode on how capuchin monkeys find their food, a few of you told me that you hadn’t known how difficult and dangerous it is to get cashew nuts. Not for us, of course; we just buy a little bag of them. But most of the women who process the nuts to fill those bags suffer permanently damaged fingers, burned by the acid that protects the cashew.

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Here’s a . A group of young people in Indonesia were offered tastes of nine different samples of tempeh. (Tempeh is a very nutritious, and delicious, food made by fermenting soybeans.) Four of the samples were produced using modern methods and five using traditional methods. The youths liked the modern ones well enough when they didn’t know which was which. However, when they were informed about the source of the beans and the way the tempeh was produced, they far preferred the traditional varieties.

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Chimpanzees fishing for termites with a slender branch is, by now, old hat. But did you know that capuchin monkeys, much less closely related to our clever selves, are also adept tool users?

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If you’re reading this, relax. You’re already entered for the prize draw of a copy of Peter Hertzmann’s new book, 50 Ways to Cook a Carrot. Probably. (There’s a chance, of course, that someone forwarded this email to you, in which case, thank them and, if you still want to enter the draw, go and subscribe yourself; there’s a link at the bottom).

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A rainbow handful of carrots graces the cover of Peter Hertzmann’s new book. But you can’t judge a book by its cover. Or even by its title, because although all the methods in feature carrots in one form or another, they’re intended to offer techniques that, Peter says, you can apply to many other vegetables, fruits, and even meat and fish.

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Another round-up of food-related stuff that I think you may find interesting.

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Normally, I’m the last person in the world to know about the international day of this, that or the other. Not this year.

There’s no escape from agricultural policy these days, not even if you retreat to rice in history.

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“All the intrigue of a murder mystery and all the painstaking, arduous pursuit of an archeological dig.” For a radish.

An opportunity to change food for the better

I have no idea what Brexit will mean for food in the UK in the short-term. I do know what it could mean in the long term. But I doubt that the opportunity will be taken.

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Rome was founded on the promise of a food-based prophesy, and over the past couple of millennia has seen a lot of change in what passes for Roman cuisine. Karima Moyer-Nocchi’s new book looks at The Eternal Table in the Eternal City and how it has always prompted anguish from traditionalists and excitement from the adventurous. We talked about a whole range of things, from puls to pasta Alfredo and its somewhat surprising history.

Hello, and welcome to all new subscribers. Lots to chew on this issue.

Every month is microbes month

Sourdough September is upon us once again. A noble attempt to push the virtues of real bread, with which I wholly agree. But given that all my bread is raised with a starter (and I bake more than 95% of the bread we eat at home), it is hard to get excited about just one month celebrating sourdough. So here’s , a little something Bread Magazine dredged up from 2003, when the world of artisanal bread was new and fresh.

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A while ago, I was sitting in O’Seachnasaíth’s public house in Kilfinane, Co. Limerick in Ireland, enjoying a final Guinness after the Hearsay Audio Festival. A chap I recognised, because I’d seen him grilling hamburgers, introduced himself as part owner and creative force behind the Ballyhoura Artisan Food Park. What followed was an excellent conversation about the various apple juices he’d concocted, which I had been enjoying all weekend, and, which really piqued my interest, a brief account of how they made their apple cider vinegar.

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Who’d be a restaurant critic?

I’m old enough to remember when Bourne & Hollingsworth was a rather dowdy department store in London. Now, apparently, it is “a self-styled ‘creative lifestyle company’. They ‘curate beautiful spaces’.”

I learned this from , in which he lets the Bourne & Hollingsworth Garden Room, at the top of a London hotel, have it with both barrels. Delicious stuff.

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In 2013, a few olive trees near Gallipoli, in Lecce province in the heel of Italy’s boot, seemed to be dying of drought even though there was water. Turned out they had a disease caused by a nasty bacterium, , and it was the first time this particular disease had been identified in Europe. Plans were quickly drawn up in an attempt to control the disease, and equally quickly disrupted by selfish growers and activists, aided and abetted by vote-hungry politicians.

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There seems to be a dearth of interesting news about food these days. Maybe that’s a summer lull, which would reflect my northern hemisphere bias. Maybe it is just that I keep seeing the same old same old. No matter the reason, here’s what I’ve found. And there is one piece of news that I hope will be of genuine interest. The podcast will return next Monday, 12 August.

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This edition seems to be all about big pictures. Nothing wrong with that, not at all. But here’s a little dessert before the main course: The Delicious, Ancient History of Chocolate and Vanilla. I offered my opinion on at least part of the story last November, but don’t let that stop you enjoying it.

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I’m racing around a bit this month, having fun, teaching bread-making and preparing for the return of the podcast in three weeks or so. As a result, no pictures for these links. But I do have links, and quite a few of the topics have already had at least a bit of an outing here.

The Greek in question is Aglaia Kremezi, who is a force to be reckoned with in Greek food. So why isn’t her yoghurt Greek yoghurt? Chiefly because it hasn’t been strained. Aglaia’s charming article – part memoir, part food history – is based on a piece she wrote for The Atlantic, but I’m linking to her website so that you can see all the other lovely stuff she has on offer.

Medieval fisherperson

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The Hive at Kew, bringing eyesight to the blind

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Hello

I’m in the middle of an exchange with Robert Shewfelt, whose definition of “processed” foods I took issue with in the previous Eat This Newsletter. So I’m just going to leave a couple of links here, until I have had time to read and, er, digest, the original research to which they refer.

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I’m going to be taking a little break. explains that, and rounds up some of the responses to the show about Eating Alone. Special thanks to everyone who took the time to get in touch.

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Cheese, processed food and wheat.

Not too many things caught my eye over the past couple of weeks, which is just as well as the few that did called for more than a little work.

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Eating alone is something we all have to do for one reason or another. In Maureen’s case, it was because her husband had died and left her cooking for one.

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Another round up of food-related stories for you, some fresh, some maybe not so fresh. And a little bit of a rant.

How did you celebrate ? Me too. Some day, though – maybe for 30 March 2020 – I would like to try making idlis (and dosas, but that’s another story). An old-fashioned egg poacher might be a way of steaming them without too much fuss. On the other hand, I suspect I could also find an old bun tray or similar and figure out a way to do it.

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I don’t know whether the last supper was a Passover Seder. I do know that the rituals of the Passover dinner have been in place for thousands of years, while there don’t seem to be any universal elements about Easter celebratory foods.

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I’m on the road, gathering fresh stories and trying to do the nomadic worker thing. To be perfectly honest, though, the wifi is too patchy to be scrambling around looking for witty images. Here, then, are just some words.

If you make things cheaper, for example with a subsidy or a tax break, you make people do more of them. So the news that US is considering offering subsidies to people who want to buy a new fishing boat is bad news. For the fish, obviously, but more subtly for the fisherfolk and piscivores. Fishing success depends on the power of your gear. A subsidy might persuade you to buy a bigger boat than you could otherwise afford. That will catch more fish, which will tempt your colleagues to scrap their old boats and get a new, government-supported boat sooner than they might have otherwise. Overall, the pressure on fish stocks increases to the point where the stocks probably collapse, the boat-owners cannot repay even subsidised loans, the government loses out on the subsidies, and we can no longer afford to eat fish. An extreme scenario, I agree, but that’s why an economist at Duke University argues that . The full article is behind a paywall, but here’s a snippet:

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William Rubel is a freelance food historian, and he takes a dim view of some of the claims made by modern artisan bakers. I thought it only right, having given the artisan bakers a bit of a platform, to offer William the chance to explain why he’s not happy with their talk of a sourdough revival and other aspects of bread culture.

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Something to chew on …

Let’s get this out of the way right at the start. You can now buy a “chewable vegetable-shaped baby toy which stimulates baby’s senses and soothes teething gums while introducing them into a healthy lifestyle from a young age”. So, what’ll it be? It’s never too young to start. (Image from .)

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A new research paper offers a more comprehensive – and more nuanced – view of where agriculture began and how it spread from small, localised centres of domestication to cover much of the Old World. Crops were moving much further much earlier, and as they did so early farmers grew the confidence, the resources and the knowledge to move up into the mountains and down into the river basins.

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With any luck, if these emails were going to your spam folder, they aren’t any more.

So, let’s get to it.

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Meat exercises the imagination in a way no other food can match.

Some people have always wanted to ban carnivory. For others it is an essential fuel. And now, meat is central to nutrition, sustainability, health and capitalism. What does meat mean?

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I’ve switched to a new mailing-list manager, for reasons that I may go into at some point in the future. For now, I hope you received the email I just sent from MailChimp and that you either retrieved this message from your spam folder or, better yet, that you didn’t even have to do that.

As ever, comments, criticism and suggestions are truly welcome.

Onwards

Hello

I’ve switched to a new mailing-list manager, for reasons that I may go into at some point in the future. For now, I hope you received the email I just sent from MailChimp and that you either retrieved this message from your spam folder or, better yet, that you didn’t even have to do that.

As ever, comments, criticism and suggestions are truly welcome.

Onwards