Jeremy Cherfas

"9 Inconvenient Truths About Jewish Food (That Nobody Wants To Talk About) | First We Feast"

PESOS from Reading.am.

"Our Hidden Wound | The Contrary Farmer"

On World Food Day, so delighted to see this piece from Gene Logsden pop up in my feed.

https://thecontraryfarmer.wordpress.com/2018/10/15/our-hidden-wound-2/

Latest episode of the podcast now up, talking about food, power, pubs and politics in Ireland. http://ow.ly/U8zm30mdTik

Cornell's Brian Wansink: A Crisis in Food Science

Not the most important point in the article, but an important point:

Wansink’s sense for harnessing buzz may have been a skill in the wrong domain. He’s a camera-friendly performer who might’ve done very well as a Bill Nye– or Neil deGrasse Tyson–type infotainer, in an industry where simplification to build a compelling narrative is not a bug but a feature, given the explicit mission to deliver an attention-grabbing-and-holding product to an audience.

Had an amazing nine-course tasting menu last night at The Edinburgh Food Studio. Photos would have ruined the experience. From the single radish to begin to the dram of Old Perth 1996 to finish it was a delight for eyes, nose and mouth. Superb all round.

Our Daily Bread 26 - Wheats and Measures http://ow.ly/jVLd30lxI4x Eight wheat seeds of silver gets you 5 pounds 10 ounces of bread. The very first English law about food regulated the size of a standard loaf of bread. The Assize of Bread and Ale kept the price constant, but that price bought more or less bread depending on the price of wheat. It never was a very useful system, for bakers or bread buyers, but it survived from at least 1266 until 1836 and provides an opportunity to consider a pound of silver versus a pound of bread.

Our Daily Bread 18 - Allied forever http://ow.ly/2vIi30lqICw Size brings benefits to bakeries as much as to flour mills. The episode tells a small part of the story of how George Weston turned a bakery route in Toronto into one of the biggest food companies in the world, responsible for more brands of bread than you can imagine. And not just the bread, but many of the ingredients that make megabakeries possible.

Our Daily Bread 16 - Water and Power http://ow.ly/dcKc30loDEM The rotary quern was perhaps the first labour-saving device. Using water power, rather than muscles, to turn the millstone made it even more efficient. Without watermills, it is doubtful whether ancient Romans could have enjoyed their bread and circuses. Because they require capital investment and skilled workers, watermills also set the trend for concentration in the food industry.

Our Daily Bread 08 - Nikolay Ivanovich Vavilov http://ow.ly/nxbJ30liJUz This short episode fails to do justice to the man who, more than anyone, first grasped the importance of knowing where and how wheat arose. It does, however, explain why Vavilov wanted to collect the 'building blocks' of future food security, for wheat and many other crops. In more than 60 countries, Vavilov and his colleagues gathered diversity from farmers' fields; they died protecting their collections.

2018-06-11

1 min read

It's all about power. Where the Dublin Gastronomy Symposium leads, the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cooking and the Agricultural History Society follow.