Eat This Newsletter 209: Soup to Nuts
Hello
A full banquet for you this week, with thanks to my sister for the soup and reader Tom Robinson for the nuts.
Soup
If you read nothing else from this issue, please read Anya von Bremzen’s piece on borsch — “no ‘t’ at the end, that’s a Yiddish addition”. It is an extract from her new book National Dish, and it is personal. Any further commentary from me would be superfluous. Just do yourself a favour: read it.
Fish
Ah, buzzing insects and fluffy clouds in a perfect blue sky and lying on the banks of a babbling brook to tickle trout into submission. Or not, in Rachel Laudan’s case. She reminisces about the river Nadder that marked the southern edge of her family’s farm in the south of England and how the trout in it were too valuable to be eaten. The fishing rights were rented to an anglers’ club, who paid for a water keeper to manage the river and the trout in it.
In America, Laudan marvelled that fishing was a somewhat egalitarian hobby, but one that could never sustain it becoming a common food. The bulk of her blog post reports on a visit to the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina and some of the largest trout farms on the continent. You can learn what it takes to farm trout which, because they are so finicky, Rachel Lauden reckons are self-certifying; to make it to marketable size, conditions have to be pretty good, which includes vaccinating the fingerlings so the farms don’t have to dose the fish with antibiotics that could harm life downstream.
The piece reflects what Rachel Lauren calls “a minor hobby of mine: tracking the way different dishes move up and down the social scale,” trout moving from elite creels and fancy restaurants to cheap supermarket abundance. And of course, once that happens, as with all globalised, democratised foods, they either go out of fashion or are reinvented, although I’ve yet to hear of hand-tickled trout on a menu.
Meat
Get ready America. The government greenlit cell-cultivated meat, and Helena Bottemiller Evich has all the fascinating details, including why you will not be getting a taste any time soon, unless you strike it lucky.
Beverages
I’ll have a craft IPA, which uses up to 50 times more hops than Bud Light (which I suppose must use some, though you would be hard pressed to tell). This I learned from a blog post by Aaron Smith, agricultural economist, who uses data and hops to explain aspects of supply and demand. Craft beer production has been flat for the past five years or so, which might suggest that demand for hops is falling. But if that were so, prices would be falling too, and yet they remain high. What’s going on? A couple of bumper years means that hop stocks are high, almost double annual demand. And hops store reasonably well. So reduced acreage now reflects the past boom and resulting overstocks as the growth in craft beer production slowed down.
Smith notes in a footnote that the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service reports data on “55 different varieties of hops. For no other commodity do they report more than a few varieties. I have no idea why NASS provides such detailed hops data, but I’m glad they do.” Disaggregated data like that are so useful.
Perhaps you would prefer a coffee. If so, don’t expect easy-to-use answers from Which type of coffee is the most eco-friendly?. It covers many of the variables, without coming down firmly on any one choice. I think a black espresso of a light-roasted biodiverse arabica is the correct answer, but I am by no means sure. A cold brew might be even better.
Fruit
Are mangos the finest fruit in the world? Of course it all depends, but for me they are a strong contender, even though I know next to nothing about the hundreds of different varieties. Dussehri, Banaras, Langda, Chausa and Amrapali are all strangers to me, though I would love to make their acquaintance. So I am a complete goner when it comes to articles like this one: Inami Bagh, Punjab’s Award-Winning Mango Orchards, in a recent issue of Goya magazine.
The article focuses on the Doaba region of Punjab, which is apparently ignored or overlooked when discussion turns to the mangos of India. The story is fascinating and familiar, local varieties supplanted by commercially more attractive ones. No surprises there.
There are enough enticing hints in the article to make me wonder whether it would be worthwhile trying to visit some of those spectacularly diverse mango orchards at harvest time, to taste for myself the joys of the desi amb.
Nuts
That would be Apple, the computer company, on whose hardware and software I depend, suing the Swiss Fruit Union over the organisation’s symbol, a red apple with a white cross. As an article in Wired magazine points out, this is by no means the first time that Apple has tried to prevent anyone else using any kind of apple-like shape as an icon (and those of us with long memories recall what happened to The Beatles on that score).
It isn’t just apples either. The article says that Apple also went after Prepear, a meal-prep app with a pear logo (Geddit?), and — my favourite — the logo of the Apfel Route, a cycling network around Bonn. Why does it feel the need to do this? I have no idea. Which is probably why I am not an intellectual property rights lawyer.
Take care.
