Eat This Newsletter 198 -- A Fresh Look
Hello
Re-evaluating coffee, Jamaican jerk and industrial food waste.
Decolonising Coffee
Earlier this week I sat in on a webinar about how the industrial food system imagines us, the benighted consumers of its products. In sum, we’re ignorant, and if only we understood science, we would meekly accept what they’re telling us about the benefits of their products. We’re also fickle, discombobulated by “scientific” evidence that flip-flops. Butter is a villain. No it isn’t, it’s a hero. So we trust nobody.
I bring this up partly to slide sideways into the main story. An early treatise on coffee was, in many ways, hip before its time, extolling the virtues of keeping freshly roasted beans tightly packed until ground, for example, and insisting that only two people in Cairo could make a decent cup. But Benjamin Moseley also pointed out that people alarmed by coffee’s properties were just like “those who raise ‘declamations against mercury’ and ‘nonsense against tobacco’ — equally bunk”.
Science moves on, I’m glad to say, but sometimes history fails to keep up. That thought is prompted by an article in Goya, reappraising much-reviled robusta coffee. India may be the land of tea, but it is leading the way in decolonising coffee and promoting the virtues of better robusta. The article makes the point that coffee specialists in the west have gone some way in the same direction by focussing on “fine robusta” coffees. But that just solidifies other robustas as not-so-fine. In India, the preferred term is “specialty robusta”, which may seem a bit like specialty semantics but, I think, makes a valid point.
The point that the article makes is that the Specialty Coffee Association’s flavour wheel leaves many people in India bemused. The flavour wheel is “an industry standard for describing flavour notes most frequently found in coffee”. But what is an Indian to make of descriptors like blueberry and maple syrup, which they are not really familiar with?
That point is borne out in the responses to an interesting video by the article author’s partner on the YouTube channel of renowned coffee guru James Hoffman. Here’s just one:
It was difficult for me to appreciate descriptors like blueberries, raspberries, blood oranges, elder flowers. Those are premium stuff for us living near the equator and we don’t usually consume them. To me, washed Ethiopian Sidamo Guji tastes like sweet pickled green mango, and natural process La Esmeralda Pacamara tastes like deep fried cempedak fritter.
The whole video is well worth your time, even if you aren’t particularly interested in coffee, for the way in which it points out some of the difficulties in using western standards to describe local coffees as well as the benefits of local coffee technologies. At this point, I’m happy to concede that, philistine that I am, I can seldom taste blueberries or maple syrup in my coffee; not knowing the flavour of sweet green mango pickle or cempedak fritter is not a problem for me. But I’m all in favour of letting those who do know and use those flavour notes to extoll the virtues of good robusta coffee.
Blue Mountain Blues
Yes, I could have done a neat coffee-flavoured segue from India to Jamaica, but I resisted, almost. Jamaica may bring coffee to mind, but these days it might be even more likely to trigger thoughts of jerk. As ever, beware of imitations.
If global brands simply called their items “Jamaican-style,” “Caribbean-style” or “our take on Jamaican jerk,” rather than just jerk, much of the controversy over the past few years could have been avoided.
Smithsonian magazine’s article from a couple of years ago offers the lowdown on jerk, including a link to an inconclusive etymology. I found the explanations of the various components of true jerk, from smokeless fires to allspice flavouring, fascinating and informative and, I hope, a corrective to all those imposters.
Now, will someone please do the same for fajitas.
Waste Not
Of course less food waste is a good thing, so pointing out the value to be derived from wasted food is also a good thing. That’s probably the motivation behind a new research paper reported on at Anthropocene. Don’t be misled by the illustrative photograph. All that’s probably good for is compost, or maybe biogas. By contrast the byproducts of industrial food manufacture — “everything from tomato skins to cheese rinds, rogue soybeans, popcorn, spice dust, tea leaves, and the murky leftover water in vegetable tins” — could be transformed into something useful, such as biodiesel, alcohol, bioplastics, enzymes, rubber tyres and more.
Sure it will take investment, infrastructure and all the rest of it actually to use all that waste. But, Anthropocene reminds us, “the study is a step in that direction”.
Take care.
p.s. I have no idea what Indian coffee connoisseurs — or anyone else — would make of coffee that tastes like angel cake with strawberry jam.