Eat This Newsletter 144: What goes around
Hello
A day late and a dollar short — except that it isn’t short. I won’t whine about why this edition is late, it’s all my own fault. But I will point out that in order not to be later still, I stuck a bunch of leftovers into the back of the fridge. Perhaps I will find time to exhume them in the future.
The finest sewage treatment plant in the world
Truly, there is a tide … and in Kolkata, India, it is just one of the many moving parts that do a superb job of recycling the city’s sewage. The Economist’s 1843 magazine had a breathtakingly beautiful article about the whole intricate system and threats to it in the form of property developers. Amitangshu Acharya and Sudipto Sanyal do a wonderful job of explaining how the system works. Perhaps surprisingly, there is almost no mention of the value of the service provided by the ecosystem and the people who manage it. Just this:
A research study in 2008, conducted as part of a project by the Asian Development Bank, estimated that the East Kolkata Wetlands had saved the city a total investment of $125m by treating the sewage at no cost, money that would have otherwise been spent constructing conventional sewage-treatment plants.
That seems to me like a huge underestimate, but what do I know? Only that if the city loses the wetlands it will be a disaster beyond rupees.
(If you’re interested in an historical look at how another part of India managed its waste not so long ago, I suggest this post, about Kerala in the 1950s.)
Citrus, a gift for all seasons
I’m late to an entry in the University of Reading’s botanical advent calendar of last year, on the joy of citrus, but I don’t feel too bad about it because it is recycling earlier articles still.
John Warren took the tangerine as his starting point to take a look at parthenocarpy — virgin birth. And no, that’s not the same, botanically, as seedlessness. Lots of tangerines (and other parthenocarpic fruits) have seeds, but the seeds can be either genetically identical clones of the mother plant or sexually produced seeds involving pollen. It’s just that parthenocarpic fruits don’t require pollen to start them developing.
In the same retread, Alastair Culham pursues the idea of asexual seeds as he delves into the evolutionary history of citrus. As has often been observed, citrus taxonomy, formal and informal, is a vale of tears, but this will give you a bit of an overview. And it does attempt to answer the most difficult question of all: what’s the difference between clementines, satsumas and tangerines? (I’m not convinced.)
Sticking, briefly, with citrus, Taschen has published what looks to be a gorgeous edition of J.C. Volkamer’s The Book of Citrus Fruits. I know because my friend Luigi pointed me at a review in Apollo magazine, which gives a lot of the historical and botanical context.
Saved for posterity
If you’re interested in the history of food you probably know about Lynne Olver’s Food Timeline. If you didn’t know about it consider this a gift to help you while away the hours. Before you do so, I highly recommend Dayna Evans’ first hand-account of how the site and all its scholarship has been rescued from possible oblivion by Virginia Tech University. Thank goodness.
There’s no RSS feed for The Food Timeline, so the next best thing is to follow it on Twitter
And some leftovers
- From the vaults: Maybe you like Celestial Seasonings teas, maybe you don’t know about the wacky beliefs of its founder, maybe you don’t care. (I couldn’t get through to the original article.)
- Scandi noir pommes de terre, all cleaned up and ready to grow.
- Bizarro beetroot saved from landfill by Lidl. Who cares what shape the root is if it going to end up in borscht?
- Something strange in the holler: Rice in Appalachia and the Laotians growing it. For sale in Asheville, natch.
- You know it has gone too far when sourdough reaches the South Pole. Well, not quite, but close enough.
- An interesting enough collection of notes on The spellbinding history of cheese and witchcraft.
- I suppose everybody knows by now who is America’s biggest farmer. Why, though?
- A coffee machine made of coffee waste. Why, though?
Take care, and stay safe.
Jeremy