Eat This Newsletter 266: A dream scenario
Hello
I cannot remember where or when (long ago!) I first learned that pigs and ducks in close proximity made an ideal melting pot for more virulent influenza viruses. Now it seems that the cows might be just as good as pigs. Enjoy!
The Price of Eggs
Personally, I reckon the claim that “H5N1 is a human creation” goes a bit too far. I mean, in one sense, yes, it recognizes that human behaviour has enabled diseases to move more easily and more frequently from animals to people, but to say we created it is a sub-editor’s fantasy, especially tied to the uncertainty over Covid’s origin. Still, modern journalism is an actual human creation, so I have to accept it.
The rest of Brandon Keim’s article on The Unnatural History of Bird Flu in Nautilus is by turns informative, scary, and occasionally repetitive, which is a good thing if it drives home some of the points he is making, like this one: “In June 2024, a total of three H5N1 infections had been reported in the United States; seven months later, that number stood at 67”. Overall, the big questions the article poses are all best answered “not if, when”.
Reading it will not protect you nor bring down the price of eggs, but it will leave you knowing more, and maybe knowing enough to respond appropriately to this report from CBS news: RFK Jr. warns vaccinating poultry for bird flu could backfire.
Roti Round the World
In a 16th-century Ain-i-Akbari report on Mughal Emperor Akbar’s government, an author refers to roti explicitly, explaining that the dish made with flour, milk, ghee, and salt “tastes very well, when served hot.” (Based on our extensive research and experience, this is still true.)
Some of that extensive research and experience is detailed in an account of the Roti Collective, set up in 2021 by Mariam Durrani and “dedicated to the study (and celebration) of roti and roti-making in all its forms, alongside the histories that have shaped roti’s travels through space and time”.
The way people take their foods with them on voluntary and forced migrations, adapting them to changed circumstances and ingredients, is a rich field of study, and roti is no exception. I had vaguely known about the Trinidadian roti, but the Ugandan rolex — “a vegetable-loaded omelet wrapped cozily inside a fresh chapati” — was new to me.
Not Roquefort
Have we had enough of terroir yet? JSTOR Daily wants us to go beyond the dictionary definition, which is all about physical factors, and take heed of the human element.
Terroir, argues historian Tamara L. Whited, is a “concept positing a set of tight connections among foods, their places of origin, and the skilled labor that produces them.” The land informs terroir; the land itself has been intimately shaped by people over the centuries.
As Whited’s 2018 paper is locked behind a paywall, I’m glad that JSTOR offers a summary. She looks at Ossau-Iraty, a sheep’s milk cheese from the western French Pyrenees and untangles the ways in which fire, rural depopulation, livestock and modern technologies all contribute to the envionment that underpins particular foods.
I didn’t know, for example, that Roquefort was made with milk sourced from across southern France; its famed terroir is only that of the caves in which it was aged. Nor that as demand for real Roquefort dropped, shepherds were unable to sell their milk to make Roquefort. And that is why “Pyrenean livestock owners and cheese makers were forced to ‘reinvent’ a tradition: Pyrenean sheep’s milk cheese,” which was granted AOC status in 1980.
Juiced by an Award
Thrilled to see that the apple juice produced by the Irish Seed Savers Association took the Community Food Award at the Irish Food Writers Guild shindig last week. ISSA put together and looks after the National Collection of Heritage Apple Trees on its organic farm near Clare. The winning apple juice celebrates the diversity of the orchard and serves as a reminder both of the history of Ireland’s apples and ISSA’s commitment to sustainability.
If you would like to know more, the ETP archives contain two episodes on the apple collection and the work of the Irish Seed Savers Association, which may explain my enthusiasm.
Could Do Better
The Guardian says UK ‘falling short’ in fight against rise of superbugs resistant to antibiotics. In at least one respect, however, this is good news. According to a report from the National Audit Office, of the five targets the UK set for itself in 2019, “only one – reducing antibiotic use in food-producing animals – was met”.
Take care
