Seven
things in food to stay livid about in 2017
‘Good news. Comfort
eating dealt brilliantly with the horrors of 2016, though sadly
the effect was only temporary. Once I’d eaten all the salted caramel ice cream,
the things that drove me nuts about the world were still there. This made me
angry. After sticking a fork in my hand repeatedly to see if the feelings would
go away, I’ve decided to stay angry. Because this year, being furious is the
only way forward.’
What, only seven things! And really, the list is pretty tame, I think.
What about superfoods? The Paeleo diet?!
Do write back with the things foodwise you will stay furious about this
year.
A women’s business
– street food vending in Accra
I grew up on street food after school in Sri Lanka
and crave it wherever I travel. In SL, and PNG also where I have often had
lunch from a street stall, as in Accra the work is mainly done by women. This
is a lovely short doco about some of these women. Yes, a lot of plastic bagging
and Styrofoam, depressingly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDJV3ldx_Ac&t=10s
Parrot pie and possum curry – how colonial Australians
embraced native food
‘In her 1895 book The Antipodean Cookery Book,
Rawson noted that “I am beholden to the blacks for nearly all my knowledge of
the edible ground game” and that “whatever the blacks eat the whites may safely
try”.
Rawson’s
relationship with Aboriginal people was complex and nuanced. Demonstrating an
understanding of the dispossession of land occurring in Queensland at the time,
she wrote sympathetically of
The lessons white men should learn from the blacks
before the work of extermination which is so rapidly going on has swept all the
blacks who possess this wonderful bush lore off the face of the earth’
http://bit.ly/2ku6Lsu
And
for more on Wilhelmina Rawson http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/rawson-wilhelmina-frances-mina-8163
Dreams of cooking behind barbed wire
‘It's
a cookbook, its recipes written by the inmates of Ravensbrück,
the largest female concentration camp in Germany during World War II. Its
writers were starving and the recipes recorded are a mixture of memory and
fantasy.’
Utterly
fascinating and touching.
Would you eat a 3d printed pizza?
“But
that’s not all. There’s also the radical idea of using insects and laboratory-grown
meat in 3D printed food as a sustainable alternative to
traditional protein sources. Meat and Livestock Australia also recently
announced that it is looking into ways to use 3D printing to
produce new meat products to extract the most
value from animal carcasses. So it is not far-fetched to imagine serving a
Christmas lunch with 3D printed food made from red meat and poultry, or
decorative edible items made from fruit or vegetable purees, sugar or
chocolate.”
The wow factor with the video embedded in the article is through the
roof for me. Sure, it’s sugar sugar and more sugar, but that you can create
these shapes with food by printing has me totally entranced.
And if it can do for insects what it can do for sugar, I am there, as I
am with them using the technology to print food for people with chewing and
swallowing difficulties or as a way of getting food into emergency zones.
A slower pace fot tv’s ‘Galloping
Gourmet’
“His wife, he said, always
advised him against looking too closley at what he did so spontane and so well,
because studying what worked and what didn’t would destroy the spontaneity –
and the joy.”
Loved watching his show and I suspect a tad of my flamboyance in the kitchen
was instilled by him. Nice to see what he has been up to since.
Make a fresh start with your fridge
in 2017: apps to reduce food waste and save money
‘It doesn’t sound very sexy, but planning meals and knowing what’s in
your fridge and pantry when you go shopping is a great way to reduce food waste
and save time and money.’
Another neo-liberalist solution to a systemic problem, says this
grouchy socialist. As one of the comments here points out and material I have
posted in Compost shows major food wastage happens at the grower/production
end. I also heard a disturbing paper by Dianne McGrath at last year’s Symposium
of Australian Gastronomy on research by RMIT on food wastage in the food
service sector showing that the biggest share of wastage here comes from the
diners’ plates, with 1 in 4 diners saying they left food on their plate, often
because of portions being too large. Up to 317 g of food waste per cover. The
research itself is now closed but you can sign up for a newsletter update
at http://watchmywaste.com.au/
