Eat This Newsletter 242: Ontological uncertainty
Hello
It is a mystery why sub-editors continue to ask questions in headlines, when the answer is almost invariably “No”. But they do, which gives me the opportunity to make fun of them. Enjoy.
More Pasta, and More
[W]hile “pasta” has a different meaning when it’s an ingredient in a recipe versus when it’s a recipe in itself, at the same time, it also means the same thing … pasta. This is a crucial idea for culinary history, as a pasta historian would likely wish to find results about both.
Yup, some more on the difficulties that face culinary historians, part 2 of the article on obstacles in digital culinary history by James Edward Malin and Gary Thompson. While the lack of interconnected ontologies for food and recipes may not matter to most people, it clearly does to historians. And to nosy non-historians.
Malin and Thompson point to Wiki-Data as a good standard ontology that “can improve interoperability and reduce duplication of metadata creation”. So I took a quick look at the entry for a vexatiously-named spice, the seeds of Nigella sativa. I know it as kalonji, but there are a few other names, notably onion seed, black cumin and black caraway, the last two making absolutely no sense to anyone who has ever seen cumin, caraway and nigella seeds. Onion seed I might allow. Wiki-Data gives black cumin as “the” English name and black caraway, onion seed and kalonji as AKAs. The photograph of black cumin, however, actually depicts a completely different spice also known as black cumin and labelled Bunium bulbocastanum or Bunium persicuum” (sic). And those names are misleading too, as they are now not even both members of the genus Bunium. Which is it? No idea.
My point here is not merely to pick nits. It is to illustrate that there is even more difficulty in considering the meaning of foods, ingredients and methods than culinary historians might worry about. And yes, I could edit the Wiki-Data page, but it is definitely beyond my wiki-skillz, so I left a comment on the talk page and made sure to take a snapshot in the Internet Archive in case someone does edit it.
No, Probably.
Could the Global Boom in Greenhouses Help Cool the Planet? asks Yale 360 above an article by my old mucker Fred Pearce. I’m sure Fred did not approve the headline, which calls for a quick “No!”, given that the thrust of his well-researched piece is that there is some evidence for a bit of local cooling in the vicinity of reflective greenhouses, polytunnels and even plastic-mulched vegetable crops, but where’s the fun in that?
Hard evidence: The vast expanse of glass and plastic that covers more than two-thirds of the Campo de Dalias in Almeria, Spain, greenhouse to the continent, cooled by 0.7 deg. C over the past 23 years, compared to a more general warming of 1 degree C in the surrounding area. “So, the cooling caused by the vast expanse of plastic was at least 3.1 degrees F (1.7 degrees C).”
Wrap the world in reflective plastic, then? Not so fast. Pearce’s article also goes into the many downsides of greenhouses and plastic mulch, not least on water resources. As with so much about food production, trade-offs are everywhere you look.
The banner photo shows satellite images of farmland in Weifang, China, in 1987 (left) and 2024 (right), courtesy NASA.
Still No
Here’s another silly headline: Can nanotechnology make agriculture more sustainable? Again, a resounding no, at least from where I stand. Anthropocene magazine reports on research into “nano-enabled precision delivery in plants,” which is just as well because the article itself is behind a paywall.
I dunno, really. Maybe feeding the future really does require the kind of blue-sky imagination that sees nanoparticles engineered to help plants fight fungi, for example, somehow applied to large areas of cereal crops. But we already know how to use plant mixtures to fight fungi pretty effectively. Likewise, we know how to prevent 35% of the 75 million tonnes of synthetic nitrogen dumped on plants each year from being wasted. Those solutions, however, are neither whizz-bang nor shiny, so they probably don’t fit the bill as “disruptive technologies to overcome challenges to meeting future food demand,” which is what the researchers, for their part, seem to demand.
Savouring Ant Species
The new-old fad for eating insects just got turned up a notch. According to Cosmos magazine, the latest research into the flavour of different ant species has revealed that “they can have very diverse and interesting flavour profiles”.
So far the researchers at San Diego State University have looked at only four species of ant. What they call the common black ant (which may be Lasius niger) “has a sour flavor that can be used in place of lemon juice” — probably the formic acid they use as venom. Chicatana ants (Atta mexicana, a leaf-cutter ant and main ingredient of chicatana ant sauce) are “nutty, woody, and fatty, which the researchers attribute to the presence of aldehydes and pyrazines”.
Good to know, but I still don’t really see ant-based flavourings sweeping across the Western world.
Hope for Puglia’s Olives
Xylella fastidiosa is the bacterium that has laid waste to the massive olive trees in Puglia, the heel of the boot of Italy. For all kinds of reasons the disease was allowed to expand almost unchecked, leading many local growers to abandon their trees. Around the area, gaunt tree skeletons, black against the piercing blue sky, suggest there can be no easy recovery and yet, to belabour a metaphor, one can now see actual green shoots, though it has not been easy.
According to Olive Oil Times, a recent two-day meeting in Puglia was almost optimistic. Growers and millers are cooperating with researchers, varieties resistant (although not immune) to the disease are being replanted, and growers are applying more intensive techniques to manage the new trees. The expectation is that while nothing will bring back the huge trees laid low by Xylella, Puglia will emerge with a more sustainable olive industry that will produce better quality oil. Here’s hoping.
I’ll be heading down to Puglia in a couple of weeks and will try to find out more. In the meantime, let me point you to a couple of earlier episodes:
- Xylella is here and it could be dangerous, 25 July 2016.
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold, or What I did on my holidays, 12 August 2019.
Take care