Eat This Newsletter 158: Cultured, innit?
Hello
Some older items this week, which nevertheless are still well within their eat by date. Also, lots of historical contingency. And I'm still looking for writing about unhyphenated African food.
Consider the fish finger ...
... or, if you prefer, the fish stick.
Before the stick or finger, there was the brick ...
... quick-frozen filleted fish packaged like blocks of ice cream. The main selling point was that "the housewife can cut the fish into any shape and be confident that the shape will be retained even after cooking"; no defrosting was necessary.
That's from a cracking paper that I came across in someone's else's newsletter, more concerned with technology than with food. Published in 2008, it goes into the many developments in technology, society, government policy and elsewhere that conspired to make fish fingers possible.
[T]he fish stick arose during the 1950s not because consumers cried out for it, and certainly not because schoolchildren demanded it, but because of the need to process and sell tons of fish that were harvested from the ocean, filleted, and frozen in huge, solid blocks.
There is so much of interest in the article. One to note is that bigger manufacturers embraced government regulation, even though it increased costs, precisely because smaller fry could not afford it. Another is an explanation of why in the end consumption of fish sticks declined, a victim of their own popularity and a race to the bottom.
A closer look at Indian food
Two entertaining pieces on Indian food.
First, another newsletter pointed me to Mrinal Pande's 2017 article on the long history of meat eating in India. Beyond the first three paragraphs, which try to root the necessity for the article in contemporary Indian politics, it explores the meat Indians have eaten through history. I am completely unable to judge the article's worth, but on face value (and why not?) it makes a nonsense of any ideological, nationalistic claim that true Indians must be vegetarian.
Second, a heart-warming and, apparently, slightly heart-burning tale of one skeptic's re-education on the subject of Indian food. Tom Nichols, a columnist, tweeted that “Indian food is terrible and we pretend it isn’t.” The wrath of the internet fell upon him, and quite right too. Preet Bharara, offered to set him straight, and they did it all for charity. Good fun, and having managed, by his own admission, "to insult over a billion people," Nichols helped Bharara raise about $90,000 and discovered that he quite liked lamb biryani.
I'll have his left-overs.
Hyphenated food
In response to my desire to know more about African-African foodways, Adrienne Smith kindly sent me a bunch of links to one of her local papers, the Toronto Star. They're mostly reviews of local restaurants, and they made me long to be back in Toronto. Perhaps there are Somali restaurants and jollof rice (Nigerian and Ghanaian; no fighting please) here, but I haven't yet found them. Those pieces, though, are about Canadian-African food, so I am still in the market for African writing about African food.
Black mac
Episode three of High on the Hog included a sequence on Mac and Cheese and how, while Thomas Jefferson is usually credited with bringing it to the US, it was his enslaved chef James Hemings who did the actual work. I found it interesting to watch a historical expert at Monticello recreate the dish with modern ingredients and I confess I hadn't fully appreciated the extent to which African Americans consider mac and cheese their own. The Almost-Sacred Dance of Making Southern Mac and Cheese in Eater informed me of that at some length, and pointed me to a more detailed account of the history of the iconic dish.
And just as white folks appropriated the history of the dish, it seems only right that James Lewis Kraft's genius was to appropriate the breakthrough of an unnamed St Louis salesman, "who wrapped rubber bands around packets of grated Kraft cheese and boxes of pasta and persuaded retailers to sell them as a unit".
Can there ever be a true and complete history? Maybe, thanks to Karima Moyer-Nocchi's online History of Mac 'n' Cheese - A Deep Dish Italian Perspective: A Three Part Course. It starts on 30 July.
Pointless food
I do mostly understand the push for lab-grown meat, although I still cleave to my view that a more enlightened approach to livestock within farming is overall a better solution. Still, I find it hard to get behind lab-grown foie gras.
I understand the business logic:
Foie gras, it turns out, is uniquely suited for this kind of substitute. A common hurdle for lab-grown meats is re-creating the fibers and texture of the original product, such as a chicken breast or steak, which can add steps and expense to the process. But foie gras, with its famous fatty smoothness, doesn’t come with that expectation. And because it’s at the top of the premium scale, lab-grown foie gras can more quickly reach a price parity with the conventionally made product.
I don't fully understand the marketing angle.
Most people who currently enjoy foie gras would, I hope, know that gavage is not nearly as savage as it is painted. And if they object on "humane" grounds, are they going to accept cultured meat? I forecast the high-end market will move to even more expensive seasonal, natural foie gras, even as cultured foie gras loses it cachet.
How to build a community
Speaking of enlightened agriculture, I really enjoyed reading How to Build a Small Town in Texas by someone who goes by Wrath of Gnon. Although they are specifically dedicated to "traditional urbanism", what really pleased me was the attention to local food supply without which, of course, no town can be considered sustainable. There's a lot there, and it will be interesting to see how those ideas develop and whether anything ever becomes of them.
In the meantime, I'm intrigued to know how this kind of idea would play out elsewhere. Like, er, Poundbury, which includes cars and which doesn't seem to have attracted any independent assesment of its sustainability that I can find.
Take care and stay safe.
Jeremy
p.s. fish fingers by Oleg on flickr