Eat This Newsletter 107: microbes!
Hello, and welcome to all new subscribers. Lots to chew on this issue.
Every month is microbes month
Sourdough September is upon us once again. A noble attempt to push the virtues of real bread, with which I wholly agree. But given that all my bread is raised with a starter (and I bake more than 95% of the bread we eat at home), it is hard to get excited about just one month celebrating sourdough. So here’s The Biology of … Sourdough, a little something Bread Magazine dredged up from 2003, when the world of artisanal bread was new and fresh.
Fake meat, or real mycoprotein?
I’ve yet to try any of the fake meats currently being praised here and there, but I do recollect that about 50 years ago I ate some Quorn.
Quorn is a protein produced by a fungus called Fusarium venenatum. In some ways it resembles other protein chunks such as seitan, in that it absorbs the flavours of whatever it is cooked in and with, so it can be pretty tasty if used well. Leaving all that aside, though, I was fascinated by What Would It Take to Feed the Entire Human Population with Nothing but Mycoprotein?.
It’s just a thought experiment, to get a feel for the size of the problem. And according to the author, Tomas Linder, a world of 10 billion people could have all its energy needs met by fewer than half a million mycoprotein factories. (There’s more in his journal article: Making the case for edible microorganisms as an integral part of a more sustainable and resilient food production system.)
Linder ends on a somewhat optimistic note.
[M]ycoprotein produced from acetic acid could be scaled up with already existing technology to meet a significant portion of future food demand in a scenario where conventional food production is severely disrupted.
Of course, that would also mean eating only something like Quorn.
Sloppy Quorn? “A condimental synechdoche”
Tom Nealon has another great piece up at Hilobrow, constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing the Sloppy Joe.
If condiments are how we express our freedom as we eat, free from the tyranny of restaurants, then sloppy joes are an ecstatic version of that, an outpouring; messy, ocasionally stupid, overwrought and ill advised, but often delicious. Just like America.
If anyone could make a great dish of mycoprotein, I think it would be Tom. And if I ever get to “the St. Tropez of the poor,” as Ernest Hemingway called Key West, you know I’ll try and get a taste of what passes for a Sloppy Joe these days. Mojito optional.
A strange survey
A recent Daily Chart from The Economist perplexed me. Based on a paper in the Journal of Cultural Economics, it purports to show that Italian cuisine has the greatest surplus of exports over imports. That is, more food is eaten in “Italian” restaurants outside Italy – to the tune of about $170 billion – than is eaten in “non-Italian” restaurants in Italy. The United States has the greatest deficit, a little more than $50 billion.
I confess, I have all sorts of problems with this approach. The main one, I suppose, is akin to authenticity, but distinct from it. The Economist somewhat sniffily says that “few Neapolitans would consider Domino’s Pizza a real taste of home,” and that’s just it. Who says that a dish like pizza, which in any case is more of an idea than a dish, remains an item of “cultural trade” once it has adapted to a local environment? The author of the paper, obviously, but still.
Not out of the woods yet
There’s been some recent news about Xylella, the bacteria that is devastating the olive trees of the Salento and Puglia.
- On Thursday, the European Court of Justice will decide how much Italy has to pay for its successive failures to immediately remove infected plants, to monitor the presence of Xylella, and to intervene to prevent the spread of the disease.
- There was a gushing press release from the Puglia branch of Coldiretti, the national agricultural cooperative of Italy. It announced the start of the 2019 olive harvest and, in particular, “a hope for the future with the first oil from olives infected with Xylella”. The oil came from resistant varieties grafted onto infected trees.
- That was quickly followed by an editorial rebuttal of the claims as repeated in the press. While acknowledging the symbolic value of the pressing, it also pointed out that media attention can be a double-edged sword. In the end, this first pressing was little more than a trial to see whether the resistant varieties, which are known to be somewhat precocious, were ready for harvest. As my informant said, the trial pressing “perhaps yielded enough oil to dress a salad or two”.
Translations of the two pieces:
- 2019 Olive Harvest in Puglia Begins for First Crop of Xylella-Resistant Cultivars
- Correction to the Preceding, which, to be honest, I would not have called a correction, but that’s just me.
And that’s it, until a fresh episode of Eat This Podcast next week.
If you come across things you think I should know about, please do send them to me.
Jeremy