Eat This Newsletter 119: Ceci n’est pas une poire
Hello
Few but good, that’s the underlying narrative for this edition of Eat This Newsletter.
Apples and pears
A charming story about Isabella dalla Ragione, seeker after old varieties of fruit, gives a potted history of how she and her father came to collect more than 600 different varieties. What tripped me up, though, was the whole business of apples and pears.
The story explains how Isabella found that the pear in Albrecht Dürer’s Madonna and Child With the Pear is not, in fact a pear but an apple. In Italian it is a mela ciucca or muso di bue, which I prefer to think of as ox muzzle rather than “mouth of the ox”. The story also tells me that the fruit at the base of Mary’s cloak in Francesco Squarcione’s The Virgin and the Child is a pear – pera verdacchia – rather than, as most art historians apparently believe, an apple.
And this is where I need an art historian to advise me. The identification of the fruit in Squarcione’s painting is a matter of missing expertise. But for the Dürer, various sites online tell me that Dürer painted “a pear (a symbol of pacification) instead of an apple, which would remind the viewer of the Fall of Man”. Did he not know that the fruit was an apple? Did someone else give the piece it’s title? And what about the fruit Baby Jesus is clutching in his other painting Madonna of the Pear. Is that really a pear? Or might it be, in fact, an apple, deliberately fraught with symbolism?
You can tell, I’m way out of my depth here.
The colour of nutmeg
Where does nutmeg come from? Ten points if you said Indonesia, which produces around 75% of the global nutmeg harvest. A hundred extra points if you added Grenada, the Caribbean island that, I have only just learned myself, is apparently the second largest supplier of nutmeg to the world.
Introduced in 1843, the tree took to Grenada and Grenada took to the tree. Hurricanes have knocked it back a bit, and while new trees are now producing again, a lot of nutmeg goes unharvested. This, according to the article, offers “a simple, untapped opportunity for growth in global market share”.
One interesting facet of nutmeg is that it is dioecious, with separate male and female trees. A few male trees are, of course, necessary if the female trees are to produce fruits, but far fewer than the 50% to be expected from seeds. The preferred ratio seems to be 1 male to 10 females, and Grenada has recently taken to grafting female buds onto “hundreds of male trees”. This suggests that farmers mostly multiply nutmeg by planting seeds, which is probably a better idea than just cloning the best trees as it preserves some genetic diversity to adapt to changing conditions.
I do, however, still have a question. The article tells me that nutmeg was “dubbed ’black gold’ by locals”. Huh? The ripe fruit is yellow-green. The fleshy aril, surrounding the nut, is reddish orange (and becomes the spice mace). And nutmeg itself is, brown. Pantone160 brown, apparently. So, how did this notion of black gold arise?
Bean there, done that
Joe Yonan has a book out called Cool Beans: The Ultimate Guide to Cooking with the World’s Most Versatile Plant-Based Protein. In an extract from the book, he writes about visiting a famed bean restaurant in Mexico City and scoring a bowl of bean soup unavailable at that time to ordinary customers. Which is fun, for sure. But he also goes briefly into the deep, earthy, global appeal of beans, and by that he means all pulses. If you’re not already into pulses, maybe the piece will encourage you to at least give them a try.
Meatless Mondays will never be the same.
Because “Meatless Mondays” aren’t enough
A provocative piece by Alicia Kennedy in The New Republic asks whether much writing about food is dodging the deeper issues, such as labour practices, sustainability, climate change and others. She’s definitely got a point.
The national section of a magazine might be reporting on Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids at Mississippi poultry processing plants, while a food writer extols the joys of Popeyes’s chicken sandwich. The insatiable demand for a viral item is treated as though it exists in a different universe from the arrests and possible deportations of 680 people tasked with slaughtering its primary ingredient.
Kennedy points out that there are still a few places doing the harder work of presenting the food system as it is rather than as an adjunt to a desirable lifestyle. She also gives the guardians of the lifestyle outputs a lot of space to defend their lack of engagement. To be fair, The New Republic does seem to report on food policy quite often (I’m not a regular reader, so I’m just going by what I see on this page). But I, for one, am always in the market for more. Send me your tips, and I’ll spread the word.
Who is writing well about food systems without requiring us to abandon all joy?
All the best,
Jeremy