Posts tagged food and drink

A fascinating detail from one of the many good, inspiring, and challenging obituaries of the Green Revolution's pioneering crop scientist, Norman Borlaug. The Economist's obit is also full of lovely details.

agriculture, cultivation, food and drink, gardens and cities, science

Nate:

In 1953, Dr. Borlaug began working with a wheat strain containing an unusual gene. It had the effect of shrinking the wheat plant, creating a stubby, compact variety. Yet crucially, the seed heads did not shrink, meaning a small plant could still produce a large amount of wheat.

Dr. Borlaug and his team transferred the gene into tropical wheats. When high fertilizer levels were applied to these new “semidwarf” plants, the results were nothing short of astonishing. The plants would produce enormous heads of grain, yet their stiff, short bodies could support the weight without falling over. On the same amount of land, wheat output could be tripled or quadrupled. Later, the idea was applied to rice, the staple crop for nearly half the world’s population, with yields jumping several-fold compared with some traditional varieties. This strange principle of increasing yields by shrinking plants was the central insight of the Green Revolution, and its impact was enormous.

Of course all these lists of "50 best things" are, even at their best, arbitrary and hyperbolic. But they're also fun—clearly scratching some itch in the collective mind of reader and writer. In the case of food/travel lists like this one, they really can be a treat.

asia, cultural worlds, england, europe, food and drink, lists, philippines, turkey

Nate:

20. Best place to buy: Olive oil
Turkish embassy electrical supplies, London

The most unlikely olive oil vendor in the world? At his electrical supply shop in London’s Clerkenwell, Mehmet Murat sells wonderful, intensely fruity oil from his family’s olive groves in Cyprus and south-west Turkey. Now he imports more than a 1,000 litres per year. His lemon-flavoured oil is good enough to drink on its own.

76 Compton Street, London EC1, 020 7251 4721,www.planet mem.com

26. Best place to eat: Filipino cuisine
Lighthouse Restaurant, Cebu, Philippines

“The Lighthouse in Cebu in the Philippines is my favourite restaurant. We always eat bulalo (beef stew), banana heart salad, adobo (marinaded meat), baked oysters, pancit noodles, lechon de leche (suckling pig) and, to drink, green mango juice – my daughter is addicted to it! The staff are so friendly and welcoming. The chef has been there for more than 20 years, so the food is very consistent.”

Gaisano Country Mall, Banilad, Cebu city, Philippines, 0063 32 231 2478

A great post by my friend Robin Goldstein about the power of word-choice when it comes to signalling the quality of wine. But I wonder: are some sensory experiences (wine, chocolate) really harder to reproduce than others (the color white, a C-major scale), or is it just that we're culturally trained to be more forgiving of poor reproductions in some areas than we are in others? (Or are the two really the same thing?) The famous whites in John Singer Sargent's portraits are anything but white; the overtones and subtleties of a scale played by Yo-Yo Ma are still near-impossible to reproduce (let alone synthesize) with true fidelity.

chemistry, copying, food and drink, metaphor, taste

Nate:

We may disagree about our favorite artists and musicians, but it’s relatively easy to agree that a particular color is blue, or that a particular note is C-sharp. They’re described by wavelengths and frequencies along a clearly defined spectrum. That’s why the technologies of visual and auditory reproduction—photo, video, audio—work so well, relatively speaking.

With taste and smell—the so-called “chemical” senses, which are more complex (humans have about 400 different types of olfactory receptors) and less well understood than the others, we don’t have the luxury of those points of reference. That’s why we so often resort to loose analogies—“tastes like chicken”—and it’s also why reproducing tastes and smells is so difficult (grape soda doesn’t taste much like grapes, and nobody’s yet synthesized a bottle of 1945 Pétrus—an activity that would surely yield tremendous profit).

To challenge this barrier, we resort to analogy. Coffee tastes like nuts and chocolate; Sauvignon Blanc smells like grapefruit and cat pee. In a Sauternes, you might sense the brine of the first green olive you tasted in Italy; in a Pedro Ximénez sherry, the viscous maple syrup that your grandmother once drizzled on your pancakes.

But how carefully are we really choosing these adjectives and analogies? How often do they correspond to real chemical commonalities? Does that matter? Do the analogies more frequently serve a more poetic (or at least suggestive) purpose, forging new neural assemblies that connect relatively arbitrary taste and smell memories with each other—connections that, reinforced over time, turn into sensory reality?

Here's a very different approach to temperance and addiction, one likely at least as controversial to the 12-step community as the successful Italian drug rehab facility that runs a very nice winery: the goal of the self-help program is to get people's drinking down to what the Dutch government regards as low-risk levels: "Dutch guidelines in terms of American drinks would mean: less than 15 drinks per week and no more than five in a row for men; and for women, no more than 10 drinks per week and no more than three in a row."

addiction, discipline, food and drink, internet, self-help

Nate:

Problem drinking in Western societies contributes to disease and death as well as social and economic woes.  Yet only a small number of people with alcohol problems – 10 to 20 percent – ever seek and participate in treatment.  This study examined the real-world effectiveness of a 24/7 free-access, anonymous, interactive, and Web-based self-help intervention called Drinking Less (DL) at http://www.minderdrinken.nl.  Findings show that DL can help problem drinkers in the privacy of their own homes.

Ironically, this article was written by the mother of one of my very-widely-traveled friends. I especially love the string of starchy verbs in the third paragraph.

africa, cultural worlds, food and drink, ghana

Nate:

There’s a profound yet simple proverb about ethnocentrism in many African societies (e.g., the Baganda, Akamba, Kikuyu, Bemba, Haya, Igbo, and Yoruba). Translated, it means “The one who has not traveled widely thinks his/her mother is the best cook.”

This proverb often comes to mind when I hear Americans talking about African food, especially Sub-Saharan African food, in a patronizing, superior way, and also lumping a whole continent together in a way they would never dream of doing for other global locations. A missionary in Ghana once sniffed and said to me disparagingly “They eat grass,” when referring to the greens cooked in stews. In Pennsylvania we carefully distinguish among varieties of apples (Rome, Gala, Granny Smith, Red or Golden Delicious, Macintosh, Pink Lady, Ginger Gold, Braeburn, Crispin, Cameo, etc., etc.). In Ghana that discrimination applies to greens, of which it’s documented that people savor 47 different kinds. Just because our palates haven’t been trained to detect the textures, degrees of bitterness, saltiness, etc. doesn’t mean that the food is inferior.

Similarly, people often say that Africans eat some kind of starch, but they lump them all together, without detecting the differences among, say, types of yams, rice, plantains, millets, sorghum, corn, sweet potatoes, potatoes, cassava, taro (cocoyams), even wheat, along with very different methods of preparation (fermented, unfermented, pounded, dried, fresh, boiled, fried, roasted, steamed, stirred, etc.).

This reminds me of the time I had to explain "American-style Easter" to a Kenyan Christian classmate of mine. Her eyes just got wider and wider, and I felt more and more the fool. "See, we take these baskets, and we fill them with plastic grass and chocolate eggs laid by rabbits. Then we eat a big ham."

africa, candy, cultural worlds, food and drink, symbols

Nate:

The Easter drugstore aesthetic is not unlike Midwestern casual apparel circa 1987, filled with pastels, baby animals and references to Jesus. Fluffy bunnies and just-hatched chicks come as colouring books, pinwheels, picture frames, candles, barrettes and bobble-head figurines. Manufacturers clearly abide by a simple holiday marketing formula with two primary modes:

1. Turn symbols into candy;
2. Turn candy into symbols.

To satisfy the first, we’ve got chocolate praying hands (three inches high, with attached religious card), an enormous solid chocolate cross, candy cross bracelets, lollipops printed with “He Lives” and chewy candies shaped like sandals, called “Walking With Jesus” Gummy Treats.

The second category includes the usual holiday favourites: carrot-shaped bags of orange M&Ms, foam cartons full of malt-chocolate eggs, hollow chocolate bunnies and marshmallow Peeps in lurid colours. The cutie-pie marshmallows appear to be the most irresistible: Just Born, the company that produces Peeps, reports annual sales of $1.5 billion. There’s even a sugar-free version.