Eat This Newsletter 273: Buttery
Hello
The heat is upon us, and yet the work must go on, scouring the internet for intriguing morsels, some more satisfying than others.
Butter munchers
Can anyone confirm that “the Dutch are known around the world as ‘Bouter-boutre’,” or, butter eaters? Not that I actually need to know, and neither do you, to enjoy a strange article about a 1664 book by Martin Schoock, on the benefits of butter. The article focuses on a review of the book, which goes beyond a mere appreciation to consider the role of butter in the commercial and colonial superiority of the Dutch. Did they really brush their teeth with the stuff? Again, I don’t need to know.
Cheese lover
Martin Schoock’s treatise on butter has an appendix on the dislike of cheese which, alas, gets no mention in the above article. A pity, that, as it robs me of the opportunity to somehow slide neatly into the love of cheese, amply on display in this interview with an affineur. Olivia Haver told Evan Kleiman all about the life and work of the cheese babysitter, who each day, with a mixture of art, science and sympathetic understanding, tends to the individual needs of each round of cheese maturing in a cave.
There is so much to be learned about how cheese matures, along with the fact that a cheese cave need not be an actual cave. And what if the cheese’s needs are ignored?
[A]ll of the moisture in the cheese would end up slumping to the bottom, and you would get a misshapen cheese. Your rind wouldn’t form properly on the bottom part because you’re not getting air flow there, it’s not interacting with the environment around it. And you would end up with uneven textures, off flavors and something very wild but maybe not in the best way when we think about having a wild, unusual cheese.
Agricultural experimenters
It is often supposed that early humans were forced to turn to agriculture by growing populations and dwindling natural resources. A new study analysed the bones of 16 individuals who lived in the Lake Titicaca basin, on the border of Bolivia and Peru from about 3000–5000 years ago, during the transition to farming. The research reveals something very striking about what those early farmers were eating, compared to the gatherers who lived there earlier.
They don’t differ at all. The transition to farming seems to be marked by a sudden and spectacular continuation of things exactly as they were before.
A report on the research points out that if the diet had altered to include new crops, that would have shown up in the bones. Rather, the people continued to eat the same plants and small animals, which they gradually domesticated and managed, creating “mixed farming-foraging economies”.
Amaranth admirer
Among the crops domesticated by the farmers around Lake Titicaca were some of the many species of amaranth, a relative of the more famous quinoa, but unlike quinoa, amaranths were widespread and eaten by many different societies. In an extract from his recent book, Michael Shaikh waxes very lyrical on How Amaranth Influenced Indigenous Culture and Cooking in the American Southwest. Focused on one chef of the Santa Clara Pueblo in northern New Mexico, Shaikh explores the structure of the Pueblo tribes and their history of colonialism, seeing in the resurgence of a locally-rooted cuisine a proof that “saving a food culture is the same thing as saving lives”.
Food system explainer
My first thought as I started to read The Grocery Store is the Food System, was to wonder which large language model had been responsible. That was churlish and uncharitable.
In a world where most people are so disconnected from the sources of their foods, it makes some important points about grocery stores — for which, on the whole, read giant supermarkets — as the only part of the food system that many people experience, which makes them also the only part people can easily change.
The author sees the supermarket as a place that listens to individual voices and often responds. He doesn’t say as much, but groceries represent a cut-throat business where people are more likely to shop at a place that has what they want. If, that is, they actually have a choice.
This responsiveness is both the grocery store’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness as a democratic institution. It can quickly amplify consumer preferences, but it also amplifies inequality. The preferences of wealthy shoppers get heard loudly and clearly, while the needs of poor communities go unmet.
I’m not as optimistic as the author, and I’m not convinced the grocery store is a “democratic institution,” but there is a lot of good sense in the article.
River cleaner
Upstream, as it were, from the supermarket, it is possible to influence the food system for the better, given stamina, money and expertise. The Guardian carried a report from Charles Watson, founder of River Action UK about a legal victory in its battle against Shropshire County Council to take waste into account when deciding whether to permit the development of industrial chicken houses.
It’s a bit of a complicated story. Historically, much of the recent expansion of chicken farms has been concentrated in the borders between England and Wales. Some local rivers, like the Wye, have already collapsed under the weight of pollution from chicken farms. Until now, however, planning authorities have not needed to consider existing pollution when assessing the suitability of a new intensive poultry unit. In this important decision, the High Court ruled that the council had failed to take into account the cumulative impact of adding another unit to those already present. Planning authorities “cannot continue treating each factory farm unit as isolated when together they create a systemic environmental crisis”. Applications for new units also now have to specify exactly how the waste will be dealt with, and that can be enforced.
River Action UK says it is committed to making the most of this recent ruling and will be working to get other local planning authorities to update their procedures. Will that be enough to halt the desecration of English and Welsh rivers? Not on its own, probably, but it is a start and it may even eventually restore life to the Wye.
Take care
P.s. The painting is Motte de Beurre (Mound of Butter) by Antoine Vollon from the National Gallery of Art, Public Domain.