Posts Tagged ‘Food’
“In the last analysis, a pickle is a cucumber with experience”*…
In an excerpt from their book, The Pickled City: The Story of New York Pickles, Paul van Ravestein and Monique Mulder explore the evolution of fermentation across the ages…
Pickling vegetables began in Mesopotamia around 2400 BCE, where brining cucumbers addressed the challenge of preserving food in a hot climate. Brine, a mixture of water and salt, proved effective at inhibiting spoilage while enhancing the flavor of food. This innovation quickly spread to neighboring civilizations, embedding itself in the culinary practices of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome.
Cleopatra, one of Egypt’s most iconic figures, believed that pickles contributed to her legendary beauty. This association between pickles and vitality reflected a broader cultural fascination with preserved foods. Julius Caesar ensured that his soldiers carried pickles on their campaigns, claiming that the preserved vegetables fortified their strength and stamina. This notion of pickles as both nourishment and tonic was echoed by Greek philosophers like Aristotle, who praised their medicinal properties.
The culinary sophistication of ancient Rome brought pickling into sharper focus. The Roman cookbook attributed to the Roman merchant and epicure Apicius, De Re Coquinaria, included numerous references to preserved vegetables, particularly olives and cucumbers. Apicius wrote of the importance of balance in brining, using spices like dill, mustard seed, and coriander seed to create complex flavors that complemented meals. The ability to elevate simple ingredients through preservation became a hallmark of Roman gastronomy, showcasing pickling as both art and science.
The spread of pickling innovations along trade routes like the Silk Road and the Spice Route highlights its significance in cultural exchange. Roman traders, for example, likely encountered Asian pickling techniques through the Silk Road’s bustling networks of goods and ideas. Spices such as cinnamon, peppercorns, and cumin—integral to pickling recipes—traveled vast distances, linking the culinary practices of the Mediterranean, India, and China.
In Asia, pickling developed independently but with striking parallels. Chinese records from the Zhou Dynasty (1046-256 BCE) mention fermented vegetables, including pickled radishes and cabbages, which were essential for sustenance during harsh winters. Similarly, Indian achar evolved as a culinary treasure, incorporating local spices like turmeric, fenugreek, and mustard to enhance preservation and flavor. Japanese pickling methods, such as nukazuke (fermentation in rice bran), emphasized minimalism and balance, reflecting the cultural values of harmony and simplicity.
The maritime trade routes of Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean allowed pickling traditions to travel across vast regions, influencing cuisines from the Malay Archipelago to the Arabian Peninsula. The Indian Ocean trade ensured that spices like cloves and nutmeg became integral to pickling recipes worldwide, enriching their flavor profiles and preserving their cultural legacies.
Pickling’s role extended beyond culinary practices, becoming intertwined with religious and cultural rituals. In Jewish tradition, the Talmud makes numerous references to pickled vegetables, particularly turnips, which symbolize abundance and endurance. Pickled foods often accompanied bread during blessings, emphasizing their role as both sustenance and spiritual connection.
Their transformation through pickling—turning a simple, earthy root into a tangy, vibrant dish—was often seen as a metaphor for renewal and the endurance of the Jewish people through adversity. During the springtime Jewish holiday of Purim, which commemorates the triumph of the Jewish people over oppression in ancient Persia, the giving of food gifts (mishloach manot) occasionally included pickled vegetables, reflecting the value of sharing preserved foods that sustained communities through lean times. And colorful Yiddish sayings like er drayt sich arum vie a forts in roosl (he wanders around like a fart in a pickle barrel) highlight the humorous associations with pickling, eating, and bodily functions.
Hindu culture imbued pickles with sacred meaning. The balance of flavors in achar—salty, sour, sweet, and spicy—was seen as a reflection of life’s harmony. Pickles were often prepared as offerings during religious festivals, symbolizing prosperity and the nurturing of the human spirit.
Christian monastic traditions adopted pickling during the Middle Ages as a way to sustain communities through long fasting periods. Pickled fish and vegetables became essential components of monastic diets, reflecting the intersection of faith, practicality, and culinary ingenuity.
In Islamic cultures, pickles played a central role in Ramadan feasts, their tangy flavors providing refreshment after a day of fasting. Preserved lemons, a staple in Moroccan cuisine, became symbolic of hospitality and were often served to honored guests. Ancient Chinese rituals also celebrated the cultural significance of pickling, with fermented vegetables used in ancestor worship as symbols of continuity and filial piety.
Trade routes such as the Silk Road and those across the Sahara were pivotal in spreading pickling techniques and ingredients across diverse cultures. These routes facilitated the exchange of goods like salt and vinegar, essential to pickling, along with the culinary knowledge that transformed them into staples of global cuisine…
Read on for medieval and early modern innovations, pickling evolution in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, industrialization and the modern culinary renaissance, and pickles in pop culture: “A Brief and Essential History of the Most Important Food Ever Invented: The Pickle,” from @lithub.com.web.brid.gy.
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As we break out the brine, we might spare a thought for a man who put fermentation to a different kind of use, André Tchelistcheff; he died on this date in 1994. An oenologist, he was a pivotal figure in the revitalization of the California wine industry following Prohibition (1919-33) and used his (French) training in viticulture and wine-making to define the style of California’s best wines, especially Cabernet Sauvignon, and to pioneer such techniques as the cold fermentation (now widely used in producing white and rose wines) and the use of American oak barrels for aging. He also developed frost-prevention techniques and helped curb vine disease in Napa Valley. In addition to managing Beaulieu Vineyards in Napa for 35 years, Tchelistcheff operated a private wine laboratory in St. Helena for 15 years. He also assembled a fabled library of wine literature.
“The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.”*…
News you can use…
I kept throwing away food because I couldn’t remember when I bought it. Thursday’s chicken from Monday? No idea if it was still safe. DoesItLast gives a clear answer based on FDA/USDA guidelines, so you can decide with information instead of guessing…
E.g…
Instant answers for safe food storage: “How long does food last?“
See also: “The Curious History of Leftovers” (source of the image above)
* Calvin Trillin
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As we burp the container, we might spare a thought for a man who made a monumental contribution to food preservation and storage: John Landis Mason; he died on this date in 1902. A tinsmith, he patented the metal screw-on lids for fruit jars that have come to be known as Mason jars (many of which were printed with the line “Mason’s Patent Nov 30th 1858”).
That same year he invented the screw top salt shaker.
“Where’s the beef?”*…
There’s been some consternation over the FDA’s new food pyramid, with nutritionists arguing that, while the emphasis on “whole foods” (as opposed to processed) is a plus, the guidance overstresses satured-fat-rich foods and under-recommends gut-healthy fermented foods, and beans and grains (see also here).
There could be material economic costs as well. The Federal goverment already spends over $72 Billion subsidizing livestock— not counting the reduced cost grazing permits offered ranchers on Federal land. And as ranch and farm land ownership has become more and more concentrated in fewer and fwer hands, the benifits are flowing to fewer, wealthier “ranchers” (like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, a clutch of large corporations, and foreign investors).
Then there are the environmental implications. Oliver Milman ponders the potential scale of that impact if the new pyramid is followed…
The Trump administration’s new dietary guidelines urging Americans to eat far more meat and dairy products will, if followed, come at a major cost to the planet via huge swathes of habitat razed for farmland and millions of tons of extra planet-heating emissions.
A new inverted food pyramid recently released by Donald Trump’s health department emphasizes pictures of steak, poultry, ground beef and whole milk, alongside fruits and vegetables, as the most important foods to eat.
The new guidelines are designed to nearly double the amount of protein currently consumed by Americans. “Protein and healthy fats are essential and were wrongly discouraged in prior dietary guidelines,” said Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary. “We are ending the war on saturated fats.”
But a surge in meat-eating by Americans would involve flattening vast tracts of ecosystems such as forests to make way for the hefty environmental hoofprint of raised livestock, emitting large quantities of greenhouse gases in the process, experts have warned.
Even a 25% increase in the amount of protein consumed in this way in the US would require about 100m acres of additional agricultural land each year, an area about the size of California, and add hundreds of millions of tons of extra pollution to an already overheating planet, according to an estimate by the World Resources Institute (WRI), a non-profit research body.
“We are seeing millions of acres of forest cut down and agricultural expansion is the lead driver of that – adding 100m acres to that to feed the US means additional pressure on the world’s remaining ecosystems,” said Richard Waite, the director of agriculture initiatives at WRI.
“It’s already hard to feed the global population while reducing emissions and stopping deforestation, and a shift in this direction would make the challenge even harder. We need to reduce the impact of our food systems urgently and the US is an important piece of the puzzle in doing that.”
While many Americans will simply ignore the guidelines, the new framework will probably influence institutions such as schools and federal workplaces. The average American already eats about 144kg (317lb) of meat and seafood a year, second globally only to Portugal, and ingests more protein than previous federal government guidelines recommended.
Any further increase will be felt in places such as the Amazon rainforest, which is already being felled at a rapid rate for cattle ranches and to grow livestock feed.
Red meat, in particular, has an outsized impact upon the planet – beef requires 20 times more land and emits 20 times more greenhouse gas emissions per gram of protein than common plant proteins, such as beans. The raising of cows, pigs, lamb and other animals for slaughter is also associated with significant localized air and water pollution.
“To the extent that people follow these guidelines and eat more animal protein foods, particularly beef and dairy, they will negatively impact our environment, since the production of these foods emits way more greenhouse gases than vegetable protein foods, or even other animal foods,” said Diego Rose, a director of nutrition at Tulane University.
Choosing beef over beans and lentils is “a big choice we make that has real consequences”, said Waite. “If people want more protein there are ways to do that via eating plant-based foods without the environmental impacts. We can have our protein and our forests, too.”
Animal agriculture is responsible for about a fifth of global emissions, with little progress made in recent years to reduce its impact as more of the world starts to demand meat products. Worldwide consumption of pork, beef, poultry and meat is projected to reach over 500m tonnes by 2050 –double what it was in 2000.
In the US, much of this meat-eating is concentrated in a relatively small group of avid carnivores – just 12% of Americans consume nearly half of the country’s beef, a 2024 study found. But plant-based options, including “fake meat” burgers, have suffered a slump in sales in recent years amid a resurgent trend in meat-eating, fueled by online “meatfluencers” and a broader desire to consume more protein.
The environmental problems associated with the meat industry were previously highlighted by Kennedy himself, when he was a campaigner on green issues. At one point, Kennedy even said the pork industry was an even bigger threat to the US than Osama bin Laden, the terrorist mastermind.
“The factory meat industry has polluted thousands of miles of America’s rivers, killed billions of fish, pushed tens of thousands of family farmers off their land, sickened and killed thousands of US citizens, and treated millions of farm animals with unspeakable and unnecessary cruelty,” Kennedy wrote in 2004.
However, since becoming Trump’s health secretary, Kennedy has sought to elevate meat-eating, dismissing an independent scientific committee’s advice to emphasize plant-based proteins to instead favor meat.
“The Trump administration will no longer weaponize federal food policy to destroy the livelihoods of hard-working American ranchers and protein producers under the radical dogma of the Green New Scam,” a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services said in response to questions about the knock-on environmental impacts of the new guidelines.
“Americans already eat a lot of meat, so this promotion of more meat and things like beef tallow is puzzling to me,” said Benjamin Goldstein, a researcher at the University of Michigan who has studied the huge emissions associated with meat-eating by city-dwellers in the US.
“We needed to be addressing climate change two decades ago and we are still not doing enough now. If we are adding more greenhouse gases to impose unnecessary ideas of protein intake, that’s going to destabilize the climate further. It’s going to have a big impact.”…
Even 25% increase in meat and dairy consumption would require 100m more acres of agricultural land: “Huge amounts of extra land needed for RFK Jr’s meat-heavy diet guidelines,” from @olliemilman.bsky.social in @theguardian.com.
* Wendy’s advertising tagline (from 1984)
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As we deconstruct diet, we might send bibulous birthday greetings to William Claude Dukenfield; he was born on this date in 1880. Better known by his stage name, W.C. Fields, an actor, comedian, juggler, and writer, became a vaudeville headliner, “the world’s greatest juggler” [which he may have been], then transitioned to Broadway (e.g., the Ziegfeld Follies revue and Poppy, wherein he perfected his persona as a colorful small-time con man) and began appearing in silent films. In the 1930s, Fields wrote and starred in a series of successful short films for (his golf buddy) Mack Sennett, then appeared in 13 feature films for Paramount. An illness sidelined him in the late 30s, but he roared back in the early 40s with Universal classics like My Little Chickadee, The Bank Dick, and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break.
Now widely regarded one of the comic geniuses of the 20th century, the Surrealists loved Fields’ absurdism and anarchistic pranks. Max Ernst painted a Project for a Monument to W. C. Fields (1957), and René Magritte made an Homage to Mack Sennett (1934).
The Firesign Theatre titled the second track of their 1968 album Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him “W. C. Fields Forever,” a riff on the Beatles song “Strawberry Fields Forever.”
“I personally stay away from natural foods. At my age I need all the preservatives I can get.”
– W. C. Fields
“First, we eat. Then, we do everything else.”*…
Tomorrow is, of course, Thanksgiving Day in the United States… and for many, an occasion to take “the cousin walk.” (R)D will be off for the day, returning (no doubt with a tryptophan hangover) on Friday.
Meantime, Alicia Kennedy on what’s become of “the foodie” and what it would mean to take taste serously again…
The foodie is in crisis. For forty years, the word itself has been hanging out in the culture, signifying a person who doesn’t just eat but knows what farm the arugula came from and which chef in town has the hottest pedigree. Where once the foodie had Anthony Bourdain roving the world in a leather jacket, telling them how to travel, what to eat, and how to be in restaurants, his death in 2018 left a hole that seemingly nothing in today’s food culture can fill. How does food emerge from its post-Bourdain malaise? Not even Stanley Tucci searching for Italy could resuscitate the culture into a consensus about who the foodie is now and what they care about.
Perhaps the foodie has become imperiled by the transformation of so many of our meals, snacks, and grocery hauls into mere fodder for social media. Preparing, serving, and eating food is now too often only a prelude to posting: the dimly lit dinner party featuring a mountain of whipped butter beside sourdough bread, the Saturday breakfast with an espresso cup placed just so upon the salmon newsprint of the Financial Times, a sun-drenched spread of shellfish on a trip to Lisbon—all in service to the almighty god of content. Being a foodie is no longer about experience and knowledge. Documentation is in; expertise is out, even if we can all cite Bourdain explaining that Sichuan food with Coke is the best way to cure a hangover.
The problem isn’t just about the domination of food culture by internet aesthetics. Instead, it’s about the way food enthusiasts use those aesthetics to curate away complexity and discomfort, leaving food systems unchallenged and food culture shallow. If all you want is a nice meal on the table, you don’t have to think about the overworked and underpaid farmworkers who made it possible. If you want pop history or recipes, you can gorge on them. This may all be perfectly pleasant. But what’s been lost in the process is the foodie’s potential power as both tastemaker and advocate…
[Kennedy consider two recent books: All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now, by Ruby Tandoh (former star of The Great British Bake Off) and Marion Nestle’s (author of Food Politics and originator of New York University’s Food Studies program) newly updated version of her 2006 classic, What to Eat Now. “Taken together, these books model what we’ve lost and point toward reclaiming it.” She then considers the late 20th century cultural history of food and foodies…]
… there’s a fundamental tension at the heart of foodie culture: everyone must eat, making food more universal than music or theater—yet class inequities shape how we do it, turning appetite into a marker of status. This is precisely why the term matters. Unlike other cultural identities, the foodie sits at the intersection of necessity and privilege, with the potential to bridge this divide—or to further entrench it.
Books like Tandoh’s and Nestle’s point toward closing that divide. They recognize that food can’t be detangled from industry and profit—that’s how it reaches our tables—but insist we look at the whole system. Behind the perfect peaches on social media feeds puppeteered by corporate algorithms are exploited farmworkers passing out from heatstroke. Behind every foodie is someone who just needs to eat, especially now that the federal government is fighting about SNAP. The question is whether those realities can coexist in our consciousness, or whether our fractured landscape will keep them separate.
For more than forty years, the word foodie has functioned as an inescapable shorthand for “someone who cares about food.” The shape that care takes is the real question. Nestle and Tandoh are arguing for rigorous care but in different ways: these books ask readers to remember the corporate and political power behind every option at the supermarket, and to be conscious of how various kinds of media are selling us certain sorts of gastronomic pleasure. Read in tandem, they ask us to be active participants in our daily meals beyond mere procurement. The first step toward a more conscientious foodie might be reclaiming the idea that our relationship to food exists not solely through recipes and memes but through power structures and systemic inequities that govern how food is grown, sold, and shared. A foodie’s appetite must have room for both pleasure and responsibility.
Eminently worth reading in full: “Who Was the Foodie?” from @aliciadkennedy.bsky.social in @yalereview.bsky.social.
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As we contemplate comestibles, we might recall that this date in 1789 was chosen by George Washington (on October 3rd of that year) as the ocassion of the young nation’s first official Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving was first cellebrated as a regular national holiday on the fianl THursday in November, by proclamation of President Abraham Lincoln, on this date in 1863.
Read the full text of Washington’s proclamation here (and of Lincoln’s here).
“Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived”*…
The most under-rated of our senses is also the least understood. But as Yasemin Saplakoglu reports, a better understanding of human smell is emerging as scientists interrogate its fundamental elements: the odor molecules that enter your nose and the individual neurons that translate them into perception in your brain…
… Smell is deeply tied with the emotion and memory centers of our brain. Lavender perfume might evoke memories of a close friend. A waft of cheap vodka, a relic of college days, might make you grimace. The smell of a certain laundry detergent, the same one your grandparents used, might bring tears to your eyes.
Smell is also our most ancient sense, tracing back billions of years to the first chemical-sensing cells. But scientists know little about it compared to other senses — vision and hearing in particular. That’s in part because smell has not been deemed critical to our survival; humans have been wrongly considered “bad smellers” for more than a century. It’s also not easy to study.
“It’s a highly dimensional sense,” said Valentina Parma, an olfactory researcher at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. “We don’t know exactly how chemicals translate to perception.” But scientists are making progress toward systematically characterizing and quantifying what it means to smell by breaking the process down to its most fundamental elements — from the odor molecules that enter your nose to the individual neurons that process them in the brain.
Several new databases, including one recently published in the journal Scientific Data, are attempting to establish a shared scientific language for the perception of molecular scents — what individual molecules “smell like” to us. And on the other end of the pathway, researchers recently published a study in Nature describing how those scent molecules are translated into a neural language that triggers emotions and memories.
Together, these efforts are painting a richer picture of our strongest memory-teleportation device. This higher-resolution look is challenging the long-held assumption that smell is our least important sense…
[Saplakoglu recounts the history of our understanding of smell; explains the current science on how millions of molecules, often in complex bouquets, enter the nose and are processed by neurons to generate a sense of smell that’s deeply emotional and personal; and explores the ways in which it’s intstrumental in attraction, survival, and memory…]
… Because our sense of smell can be largely subliminal, in surveys many people, given the choice of losing one sense, choose olfaction. But “every day, I experience people sitting in my office and talking about how they are disconnected to the world,” [Thomas] Hummel said. They can’t smell their children or spouses anymore. They cannot detect bad-smelling food or dangerous smoke. They no longer have access to certain memories.
“I know the memory is there, but I don’t have the key to open [it] anymore,” Hummel said. “Life becomes a much more insecure place without a sense of smell in many ways, but you only realize it when it’s gone.”…
Fascinating: “How Smell Guides Our Inner World,” from @yaseminsaplakoglu.bsky.social in @quantamagazine.bsky.social.
* Helen Keller
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As we get to know the nose, we might celebrate the avatar of affecting aromas: today is National Cheese Pizza Day.
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