A brief digest of food and nutrition-related items that caught our attention recently. Got items you think we should include? Send links and brief descriptions to dberiss@gmail.com or hunterjo@gmail.com.
In South Africa, efforts to resist the mining agenda continue, in part through using the land for agriculture:
Living on the northern-most portion of the Wild Coast of South Africa, the coastal Amadiba villages have been resisting the proposed Xolobeni Mineral Sands Project for over ten years through directly confronting attempts to mine, and have also used the very land that is under threat of destruction as a weapon in creative ways. These tactics show us powerful forms of resistance to the state’s political project from above.
If you don’t have space but want to farm animals, would you consider dormice?
There’s dormouse stuffed with pork and its own trimmings, then pounded out with pepper, laser (the juice of a giant fennel plant), broth, and nuts; after, this concoction is put in a casserole dish, roasted, or boiled. Not a bad way to chow down—especially considering the mice were extra-succulent after hanging out in their own special jar.
Here’s an article about really old potatoes. Apparently North Americans were eating potatoes 10,000 years ago! On the subject of potatoes, there was this recent celebration of Eva Akblad:
Today Google’s Doodle – which is visible all around the world – is celebrating the relatively unknown Eva Ekblad, the Swedish scientist who rescued the spud from being the rarefied preserve of the aristocracy and made it into the useful and common stuff we know today.
On the subject of UK farms, there is the challenges of surviving brexit and supplying more of it’s own food, combined with the imperative to supply food with a low carbon footprint:
So carbon footprinting is a blunt tool, but it still has much to recommend it (when combined with environmental subsidy based on outcome, as per above). Anecdotally, producers have told me that the process of engaging with it, and therefore of trying to enable a smaller carbon footprint, has led to greater efficiencies across the food chain. Examining one element of environmental cost leads to an engagement with all of it.
Also in the context of Brexit, this article in the Guardian talks about the rise of mega farms:
Leaving the EU provides us with an unprecedented opportunity to shape our farming industry so it works for the UK and helps our farmers grow more world-class food. We are determined to make a success of it, but we will not compromise on our high animal welfare or environmental standards, and we will always protect our proud and varied farming traditions.”
This article about Princeton’s “farminary” was beautiful and reminiscent of Wendell Berry:
The physical labor of farming provided respite from all that talking and feeling—and offered new lenses through which to process it.
Although the writer’s qualify their results quite a bit this article about the Mediterranean diet, it’s super interesting that experiences of the diet differ by socio-economic status:
The researchers tracked participants in the Moli-sani Project for an average of four years, and found that adherence to the Mediterranean diet was associated with an approximate 60 percent reduction in risk of cardiovascular disease – but only for those who had education beyond high school or a household income greater €40,000 (approximately US$47,300) annually.
Over on NPR’s The Salt, a chef presents a compelling picture of the glaring blind spot in the farm-to-table vision:
Farm-to-table’s sincere glow distracts from how the production and processing of even the most pristine ingredients — from field or dock or slaughterhouse to restaurant or school cafeteria — is nearly always configured to rely on cheap labor. Work very often performed by people who are themselves poor and hungry.
Lastly, over at vice, one of my favourite articles this week was about clean eating and the ways it reinforces diet culture. There’s a lot of great lines, but here is just one:
And yet throughout these books – the very same ones that tell us to locate our self-worth not in how we look but in who we are and how we feel – there is a consistent, entrenched fear of fatness. When Deliciously Ella allays our fears that “things like avocados and almonds will make you fat,” she leaves that foundational anxiety around fatness intact as a valid concern.
FoodAnthropology 