1. Cupcake Facism: Gentrification,
Infantilisation and Cake.
'The cupcake has always itself
been a gentrifying force: after all, the “pop-up cupcake shop” is the paradigmatic
pop-up shop. But what all these things do is assert the infantilized values
of an increasingly infantilized middle-class world on general society.
This is how the passive-aggressive violence of the infantilized twee fascist
manifests itself: moving across the world with a cupcake as a cowcatcher,
shunting out everything that does not correspond
to the values manifested within it; a much more effective way of sweeping up
the sort of (poor, working-class, black) forces that informed the 2011 London
riots than any broom. 'This is flat out one of the funniest, cleverest and most acute commentaries on food as politics I have come across in a long while. Thanks heaps to Ghassan Hage for posting it on Facebook.
http://bit.ly/1q1PfHH
2. Jonathon Meades:
Kitchen sink dreamer
‘I knew for certain that this ancient form of
corporeal succour would soon be replaced by non-food. Plastics were replacing
wood; cotton and wool were not needed in the age of terylene, nylon and tergal;
open nibs were yesterday’s nibs – today’s nibs were hooded; transistors would
soon vanquish valves. Chemists’ boundless researches into algae’s proteins
would have boundless ramifications. What had, for half a century, been
wishfulness was now, according to excitable magazine articles, making its way
from lab to consumer. In the new world just over the horizon there would be no
school food, which was an unspoken punishment, a further means devised by
adults to torment children.’
3. The Green Revolution and the Economics of
the Food System
I don’t know if you managed to watch this when I first
emailed about it, I didn’t until now, but it is really terrific. An excellent critique not just of the Green
Revolution but the ideological underpinning of it and its failures both as
ideology and achieving substantial change in food security. Also some
interesting and challenging things so say about the work of the Gates
Foundation in agricultural research and aid and large scale philanthropy as a
‘big man’ approach to ‘solving’ world problems and the Obama administration’s
food policies.
4.
The shopping mall’s socialist pre-history
‘In the era of the
mall, whole swathes of the world are heated to precisely 72 degrees Fahrenheit
and lit at 350 lux. Shopping malls have been used as tools for development in
India, sites of protest in Brazil, and targets of terrorism in Nairobi. For
geographers and historians, the sites have been seen as neoliberalism’s most
precocious architectural form, instruments for enclosing and segregating public
space, for fusing leisure and consumption and annihilating small independently
run retailers.It was not always this way. Shopping malls have a little known socialist pre-history — one that has been largely forgotten.’
Who knew that Gruen was a socialist!
5.
What make the perfect burger
‘Although I'm unlikely to be popping into a
branch for a chimichanga and a jolly jogger mocktail (thank you for the
memories) any time soon, I agree with development chef Terry McDowell that
lettuce adds nothing to the overall flavour of the burger – in fact, I'd go so
far as to argue that, as the leaves wilt into soggy submission on contact with
heat, lettuce actually detracts from the experience... The same goes for those
warm, woolly slices of bland beef tomato – always the first thing I pick out.
In short, salad has no place in the perfect burger.’
This from
someone who thinks on the other hand that cheese is a ‘welcome addition’,
particularly when it is one ‘added to the patty during cooking so it drapes
round it like a cloak’.
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