Thursday, June 13, 2013

Short Eats: Bits and pieces from my reading this week



It is just me, isn’t it. I know I am a sad case of stick-in-the-mud. But I have to ask about these two recipes...WTF? It isn’t that I don’t get sweet breakfasts but absurdly sweet does it need to get? And for food’s sake can we get over salted caramel everything. The only thing exceptional about these breakfast ideas to me is how exceptionally gross they are.




1    Farmed fish production overtakes beef for the first time in world history
Holy mackerel! (You knew I would say that, dint you J ). Not that this is any reason to cheer. “Fish we see in grocery stores, like salmon, tuna and shrimp, are fed with smaller fish. The combined mass of these smaller fish is greater than that of those grocery store fish, meaning the input is greater than the output. In the Earth Policy Institutes's eyes, reliance on farmed fish is problematic also because it means we're eating beyond the constraints of our natural environment. It recommends "slowing population growth" and consuming less meat, milk, eggs and fish.”




1     Who are the better cooks, men or women?
       Given women's central role throughout the ages in applying these technologies and skills in preparing food for their families, it stands to reason that it has been women who have been largely responsible over many centuries and millennia for the development of the myriad regional cuisines of the world.” What most of this article says won’t come as any surprise to us, but this quote caught my attention and has set me thinking differently about regional cuisines and how they are spoken about in the literature, and indeed how they are still investigated and showcased in the media. I think I would be safe in saying it is the case that most tv shows that look at regional cuisines are still hosted by men though they are often about cooking by women. 

Stephen Mennell in his All Manners of Food. Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present posits that the dichotomy male chefs/women cooks may have arisen in the ‘origin of the social institution of the court not as a ‘private’ or ‘domestic’ household, but as a military establishment.  It is probable that men always served as cooks with armies (and by extension on fighting ships), and that their function in the court began as an extension of that role...men having established their monopoly of the courtly kitchens, they became the instruments of the refinement of cooking as the court itself developed as a locus of the arts of consumption’. (pp201-204) By extension then, men became seen as more capable of women of bringing technical perfection and refinement within the emergent restaurant culture. 

It’s an interesting suggestion. Your thoughts?
  


1    Can we feed 9 billion by 2050? Radio National Big Ideas program.
 Elizabeth Finkle
Associate Editor of Cosmos Magazine and Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow, La Trobe University.
Dr Philip Keane
Reader and Associate Professor, Department of Botany, La Trobe University.
Professor Snow Barlow
Foundation Professor of Horticulture and Viticulture at the University of Melbourne.

Elizabeth Finkle goes into bat for GM crops. Philip Keane urges developing a Land Food Ethic promoting the use of existing environmentally friendly methods of small farmers, particularly in poorer nations where those most needing to farm live. Snow Barlow identifies the need to incorporate the clear changes in world diets towards more meat/animal protein eating and the increasing use of agricultural land for biofuels into the equation and asks how do we have a greener revolution to get an agricultural productivity increase of an estimated 2% to meet the future food needs.

http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2013/06/bia_20130605_2005.mp3


The African Ancestor
Posting this re palm oil curious to see if you can read it as it is an article in the Slow Food e-newsletter and I am not sure how open the access is. The last few pars are of particular interest I think, again pointing out that in their place of origin and when used for what they have been historically used for, products like palm oil are not evil. It's when they get commodified in ecologically and nutritionally damaging ways that they become a problem. Not sure from the article whether there is a way of identifying palm oil that comes from the project mentioned in Guinea Bissau.

http://www.slowfoodfoundation.com/pagine/eng/news/dettaglio_news.lasso?-idn=189


1   The Raw Milk Club
 "My milk, my body, my choice." I love the slogan. Reminds me of when we used to go to pro abortion rallies, and later to gay rights rallies, and chant “Get you laws off our bodies!” This is another article from Slow which I hope you can read, about a small legal victory in Wisconsin.

http://www.slowfood.com/slowcheese/eng/news/82/the-raw-milk-club

 
1    Seeing stars: ministers poised to approve new food rating system but industry seeks a delay
It comes as no surprise that the food industry is trying to water down the proposed new star system for labelling the healthiness or otherwise of foods. I’d be interested to hear what you think about the proposed system. It builds on the star energy rating system. Does anyone know whether that has worked?

http://bit.ly/14zEzZ9

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for such an interesting collection of links this week. Still working my way through them but the iced vo-vo inspired breakfast sounds nauseating. Palm oil link worked for me but haven't explored very far - perhaps their oil is going into the sustainably certified stream?

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