Eat This Newsletter 231; Globalised
Hello
A circumnavigation for you all this issue — from the US via India, Japan, Australia and Mexico back to the US — with a few ingredients holding the various spots together.
More Than Magic Milk
A while ago I briefly mentioned efforts to make real cow’s milk without whole cows, just mammary cells in culture. Others are making some of the components separately and mixing them to make a sort of milk. In the latest New Yorker, however, a new twist: mother’s milk from human mammary cells. Biomilq describes itself as a “a mom-forward brand”. One of the founders was unable to produce enough milk for her child and, in the wake of the first lab-grown beef a decade ago, started tinkering with cow cells.
As you might expect for the New Yorker, in addition to telling the story of Biomilq it also situates the company and its efforts in the broader history and current debate around breast feeding, formula, social injustice, business, maternal leave and all. It doesn’t shy from the inherent tension of milk substitutes that are likely to prove even more expensive than current formula, at least to begin with, which may make them even less available to people who really need them. I liked this from one of Biomilq’s founders:
“There are two factions in the world: ‘Breast is best’ and ‘Fed is best,’” Egger said. “Everyone always wants us to pick a camp.” What Biomilq proposes instead is an escape from dogma through technology, a Third Way politics of breast-feeding.
Alas, I’m not really sure what would constitute an escape through technology for women who have to go back to work two weeks after giving birth. Michelle Egger told the New Yorker’s Molly Fischer, a recent mum, “If you can breast-feed -- do it. Great. But the reality is, a majority of parents cannot exclusively breast-feed. . . . And that’s not for lack of trying.”
Really? A majority? Or a majority under current circumstances, circumstances that formula and substitutes do little to address.
Milking Camels for All They Are Worth
You could be forgiven for not knowing that 2024 is the International Year of Camelids — IYC. Alpacas, Bactrian camels, dromedaries, guanacos, llamas, and vicuñas are all jostling for their 15 minutes of fame and first out of the gate, for me at any rate, are the Raika camel-herders of Rajasthan. Goya magazine waxes lyrical about the camels of the Thar Desert and their herders in Rajasthan. It isn’t all nostalgia, though. Where once they gave away any surplus milk, the herders are beginning to sell camel milk through Rajasthan’s dairy cooperatives, and new equipment is enabling them to produce longer-lived products, including cheese, butter and ghee. The goal is to preserve the pastoralists’ way of life with its attendant benefits for the desert environment.
Behind this rosy picture, though, there are disturbing currents. One is that the common property rangeland, through which the Raika used to move with their camels, are increasingly being enclosed. Another is the politicisation of the camel as “state animal” by the Bharatiya Janata Party, part of “cow vigilantism … against Muslim and Dalit minorities”. Those are serious concerns. Less so is the failure of Goya’s article to make any mention of the IYC.
Costly Perfection
One of the things I sort of know about food in Japan is that fruit is both very expensive and a gift of great status. But are those connected? Is it a great gift because it is expensive? Or is it expensive because that makes it a good gift? Tokyo Weekender explains that fruit has long been a valued gift, and that other factors then conspire to increase its cost. Small farms by law must be worked by their owners. “As a consequence, the farming industry is incredibly inefficient.” To that you can add the shortage of suitable land, and the desire for those small farmers to make as good a living as they can. Naturally they concentrate on the perfection that high prices demand, and the article explains some of the characteristics of perfection. But what happens to fruit that doesn’t make the grade?
In many other countries, produce that does not meet supermarket standards may well go to waste. So what happens to mangos that are not sweet enough to measure 15° Brix, or Ruby Roman grapes that don’t have a diameter of at least 3 cm? Tokyo Weekender does not say whether they are composted or are for sale at lower prices.
China and Cherry Downunder
Here’s one for the lunar new year, a celebration of Chinese restaurants in the rural areas of Victoria in Australia. Of course I’ve no idea how accurate the piece is or how good the food, but I enjoyed reading it. Wouldn’t it be amazing if anyone reading this has eaten at one of those places and can offer an independent assessment. Let me know.
And while we are down under, it would be very remiss of me to ignore the 100th anniversary of the one and only Cherry Ripe. If you know, you know.
Vanilla at Home
As experts argue the merits of vanilla from Madagascar, Réunion or Indonesia, they might slip in a mention of vanilla’s ancestral home: Mexico. The discovery, by a 12-year old slave in Réunion, of how to artificially pollinate the flowers enabled it to spread around the world, and partly as a result of that Mexico ranks a dismal number three in global production, with less than 8% of the total. Now the LA Times asks: Could a vanilla renaissance finally bloom in Mexico?
The hope is to increase the area devoted to vanilla ten-fold by 2030, with most of the production being used locally. One of the biggest challenges is that at the moment Mexican vanilla is just not very high quality, and the rock-bottom price of artificial vanillin makes it extremely difficult to improve quality and cost. They are trying though, and if I ever find myself in Mexico again, the article makes me want to visit Papantla, vanilla central.
Yes MSG
Is there anyone who still believes in Kwok’s disease, aka Chinese Restaurant Syndrome? There’s a fun article in Food & Wine In Praise of MSG giving a brief potted history of its discovery and subsequent decline along with signs that cutting-edge chefs and even home cooks are again, or still, dabbling in MSG. Fun, as I say, but more interesting to me because of the rabbit hole it led me down.
More bizarre even than Chinese Restaurant Syndrome is the story behind Dr Robert Ho Man Kwok. Colgate University’s magazine explains how Jennifer LeMesurier, an Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric, was shocked to discover that Kwok’s original letter to the New England Journal of Medicine was a prank by a Dr Howard Steel, a Colgate alumnus. He told her he had made it up; Kwok’s name (a dumb pun), the institute where he worked, everything. That, LeMesurier said, only strengthened her point, that people who flocked to believe in Chinese Restaurant Syndrome were motivated more by anti-Chinese sentiment than anything else. Then the radio programme This American Life found the real Dr Kwok, or rather his children, and colleagues at his institute, which did exist. After which, Howard Steel’s daughter Anna came to believe that the admission that the letter was a prank was itself one of the last pranks by her late father.
The truth about the “hoax” may be in doubt, but there is no doubt about the truth of MSG poisoning: it does not exist.
Take care
