[This edition's pic Invasion of the Omega Fatty
Acids 2015 52x42 cm paper collage, pencil, ink. Max
Dingle]
This edition of Compost has
several articles I have come across in the last month that talk about the lack
of diversity in food writing and dining.
I haven’t put my usual
commentary with them because I find the area both confronting and problematic
to discuss. What they say has long been something I also see and feel. They
speak to something deep within the structures of, for want of a better word, Anglo
foodways which cannot but help replicate the deep discriminatory structures
within Anglo cultures. So, redressing what these writers observe is not as
simple as having diverse voices in the food media or diversity in more than the
dish pig end of the kitchen. It involves deep questioning of the ways we
construct our worlds and complex strategies at the personal and the structural
level to reconstruct those worlds.
King Lear
is the play above plays for me full of insights and challenges. One the comes to
mind, and the word ‘insight’ is apposite to what I have been saying. The play
is very much about seeing, with a beautiful pairing of Gloucester’s physical
blindness and Lear’s more troubling psychological and moral blindness. In Act
1, soon after Lear has exiled Cordelia, Kent urges: ‘See better, Lear’. I think
this is the challenge in its deepest meaning that these articles ask of us, and
by seeing better to act, to be better.
Eat insects and fake meat to cut impact of
livestock on the planet – study
‘Globally, twice as much
land is used to raise cattle, pigs and other animals than is used to grow
crops. Furthermore, a third of those crops harvested are fed back to livestock.
The new research is the first systematic comparison of the environmental impact
of various sources of food, and found that imitation meat and insects are
vastly more efficient than raising livestock.
The work, published in the
journal Global Food Security, found that if half of traditional animal products were replaced by
imitation meat or insects the land required to produce the world’s food would
be slashed by a third.’
It’s ironic that the very
diets that many of those in African and Asian countries are moving away from
are those that are being promoted as important components of sustainable
foodways for the future.
The Struggles of Writing about Chinese Food as a
Chinese Person
“Of the 263 entries under
the "Chinese" recipe filter on the New York Times food
section, almost 90 percent have a white person listed as author in the by-line.
Only 10 percent of the recipes are authored by Chinese writers.”
This article raises many of
the dilemmas and frustrations I face as someone who writes about South Asian
cuisine in Australia. I don’t hold that only South Asians can write about South
Asian food, as Wei also does not hold that only Chinese can write about Chinese
food. But I reckon if I did a count of who gets their recipes for South Asian
food into mainstream food media in Australia, I’d find an analogous situation.
The non-Anglo-Australia voice does not get heard outside of a very small number
of exceptions. But lest this sound like wog pleading, as I was working on this
Compost I chanced to see a promo for Gardening Australia where Costa said that
next week, he would be showing how to use native produce. Now, I haven’t seen
the ep yet, and I trust Costa will have an Indigenous provider or cook on as
well, but he gave no indication of that.
Highlights From Our Interview with Kusuma Rao of
Ruchikala
‘So when I see other people
that don't have that moral conflict of selling something they didn't have a lot
of personal experience with, or marketing for food businesses that use a lot of
religious imagery of brown people to sell businesses...it makes me wonder what
it would have been like for them to have had the experience of being the
"other," and how that would changed how they market what they do.’
The Calls Are Coming From Inside The House
‘This post reminded me of a
conversation that I had at a dinner with a manager of one of the top
restaurants in Boston. I mentioned that I would love to see more people of
color at hospitality events. He responded with, ‘well, maybe those kinds of
people don’t care about hospitality.” My jaw dropped. Then I felt angry. Then I
felt embarrassed as I looked around at my fellow restaurant workers, managers,
chefs, all of whom were white, and realized that none of them were challenging
him in this assertion.’
http://bit.ly/2r7JctD
BD Wong teaches you how to eat a chicken wing
And here I thought all I had
to do was put it in my mouth and scrape it against my teeth 😊
Which oils are best to cook with?
‘He thinks the ideal "compromise"
oil for cooking purposes is olive oil, "because it is about 76%
monounsaturates, 14% saturates and only 10% polyunsaturates - monounsaturates
and saturates are much more resistant to oxidation than polyunsaturates".’
Has this mob ever tasted a
Sri Lankan curry cooked with olive oil? It’s shite. Can we just get on with
using oils appropriate to the cuisine the oils are supposed to serve and stop
endlessly imposing a problem which developed within a - I hate to use the term but I can’t find another
– Western, market driven high fat content per se diet and the neo-liberal
individualistic solutions that this article and others like it promotes?
Plot 29: A Memoir by Allan Jenkins review –
childhood trauma and the solace of gardening
‘The garden cannot cure
Jenkins’s fragile state of mind, nor stop him having vicious dreams of men with
knives, but it does at least allow him a space to breathe, a “chemical-free”
form of medicine. When he buys seed packets, he feels he is “collecting hope –
at £2 a packet”. Those of us who are not so green-fingered sometimes make the
mistake of thinking that gardening is a bland activity, but Jenkins shows that
it can be a meaningful and muddy sort of stoicism: an acceptance of the way
things are. This haunting memoir offers a reminder that after the digging,
sometimes all you can do is plant.’
Thanks Helen for putting me
on to (a) this review and so (b) the book which I look forward to reading.
What comes first: the free-range chicken
or the free-range egg?
‘When we asked shoppers what they look for
in terms of products that promote animal welfare, the most common answers
involved free-range or cage-free eggs. We then asked people why they chose
these products. A strong theme emerged: many shoppers preferred these types of
eggs because they viewed them as higher quality, having better taste and
colour, more nutritious, and safer than eggs produced using other methods such
as barn systems.’
I’ve just finished Dan Jurafsky’s the Language of Food and this is an
excellent example of what he discusses so genially and powrfully - the persusasive power of words.
War on waste: Recycling shells from your plate to
benefit the ocean
‘But for the last two years, restaurants
and seafood wholesalers in Geelong, south-west of Melbourne, have been donating
their shells to a local shell recycling program.
The donated mussel, oyster
and scallop shells are then used to form a reef foundation, in the hope of
restoring the once abundant shellfish reefs of Port Phillip Bay.’
I love a good food waste
recycling venture and this one is a beauty which not only does good by waster
but also by a social enterprise.
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