Eat This Newsletter 137: Renewal
Hello
Hoard food, harvest olives and handle a 3000 hectare farm, plus price-fixing and molecular gastronomy.
You’re welcome.
Food hoarding on a global scale
Forget emptying your local shop’s shelves of pasta and flour. Countries are doing the same thing in the global commodity supermarket. Bloomberg reports that Egypt, the world’s biggest buyer of wheat, has increased stocks by more than 50% over the past six months. Other countries too have been buying more than usual and giving up on just-in-time delivery to assure themselves of supplies just in case.
Unsurprisingly, the extra purchases have resulted in price rises for wheat, maize and soybeans and record profits for commodity traders and shippers.
Good news from Puglia
You know that I have been keeping a dismayed eye on Xylella, the bacterial disease that has been destroying the olive groves of Puglia, the heel of Italy. At last, some potentially good news. A couple of weeks ago, watched by representatives of the olive sector, the “first true harvest” took place of olives from young trees planted two years ago in in fields “completely destroyed by the bacteria“.
These were from a variety called Fs-17 Favolosa, judged by plant pathologists to be resistant to Xylella. It is earlier than another potentially resistant variety, Leccino, although the search for additional resistant varieties continues. The oil was judged to be excellent, with the characteristic organoleptic qualities that consumers appreciate.
This first decent harvest, albeit limited in scope, is being taken as a welcome sign. Dino Scavino, President of the CIA, the Italian Farmers Confederation, said, roughly, that the harvest represented important news for Italian olive growers and a message of hope for those have the future of the sector in their hearts.
Whether all the growers hit by Xylella will agree is yet to be seen. One difficulty could be that Ls-17 is a patented variety. Even though the patent holder is Italy’s central scientific research organisation, resistance to more mechanised, more industrialised olive growing, based on modern varieties, has been one of the factors that prevented a more effective response to the epidemic.
Naughty price fixers
Pilgrim’s Pride, the second largest chicken processor in the US, has agreed to settle the price-fixing case brought by the Department of Justice for $ US 110.5 million. That sounds like a big fine, but the company reported profits of $ US 456 million last year. The Counter says that, “the settlement will be a ‘miscellaneous expense’ on its next quarterly report”.
Tyson Foods Inc., the number one chicken processor, agreed in June to cooperate with Justice’s investigation, avoiding criminal prosecution by doing so.
There’s more to profitability that production
I enjoyed this account of one US farmer discovering how to deal with an infestation of herbicide resistant weeds that was smothering his operation. Despite the somewhat breathless prose, which to my taste tries a little too hard, Adam Chappell’s story is fascinating. It all starts with cover crops, which he plants to grow over the winter and then sows his cash crops into come the spring.
That’s not the only way he is using biodiversity as a resource, and if you want to understand the complexity of running a large farming operation, I highly recommend the article.
Kitchen chemistry summarised, and more
Martin Lersch, a chemist in Norway, has published a note summarising 20 years of experiments in molecular gastronomy by Hervé This. Samples:
- fig leaves do not tenderize meat in stews
- unwashed French fries stick together
- there is no difference in flavour between washed+dried fries and fries cooked directly after cutting
Personally, I’ve never tried to tenderize a stew with fig leaves. Why would I, when a long stewing itself is a great meat tenderiser? And I make French fries so seldom that I’ve never needed to experiment on them,
But …
There’s a lot more in the summary and, I’m sure, even more in the documents from This’ molecular gastronomy seminars that Martin shared. I’m definitely going to try cooking cauliflower in water with lemon for a firmer curd.
And …
I sometimes blather on about RSS feeds and the like. Feeds in general are a way for websites to tell you when they have published something new, removing the need to check them every day or rely on other sorts of notification. The lovely thing about subscribing to a feed is that it costs you absolutely nothing to keep up with a site that publishes very infrequently or goes to sleep for a long while. I mention that because until this post, Martin had published once in 2017, and that was after a gap since February 2014. If I hadn’t subscribed to his feed, I wouldn’t have seen this post, and I’m glad I did, for my sake and to be able to share it with you.
I hope he also resurrects TGRWT — a challenge to make use of new flavour pairings
Take care, and stay safe.
Jeremy