Posts Tagged ‘Food’
“Beans, Beans, the Musical Fruit”*…
Then remarkable Umberto Eco on his candidate for the most important innovation of the last millennium. After considering the stern mounted rudder, the horse shoe, the yoke, the improved plough, crop rotation, gunpowder, and other candidates, he nominates a humble but central development…
… But what I really want to talk about is beans, and not just beans but also peas and lentils. All these fruits of the earth are rich in vegetable proteins, as anyone who goes on a low-meat diet knows, for the nutritionist will be sure to insist that a nice dish of lentils or split peas has the nutritional value of a thick, juicy steak. Now the poor, in those remote Middle Ages, did not eat meat, unless they managed to raise a few chickens or engaged in poaching (the game of the forest was the property of the lords). And as I mentioned earlier, this poor diet begat a population that was ill nourished, thin, sickly, short and incapable of tending the fields. So when, in the 10th century, the cultivation of legumes began to spread, it had a profound effect on Europe. Working people were able to eat more protein; as a result, they became more robust, lived longer, created more children and repopulated a continent.
We believe that the inventions and the discoveries that have changed our lives depend on complex machines. But the fact is, we are still here — I mean we Europeans, but also those descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers and the Spanish conquistadors — because of beans. Without beans, the European population would not have doubled within a few centuries, today we would not number in the hundreds of millions and some of us, including even readers of this article, would not exist. Some philosophers say that this would be better, but I am not sure everyone agrees.
And what about the non-Europeans? I am unfamiliar with the history of beans on other continents, but surely even without European beans, the history of those continents would have been different, just as the commercial history of Europe would have been different without Chinese silk and Indian spices.
Above all, it seems to me that this story of beans is of some significance for us today. In the first place, it tells us that ecological problems must be taken seriously. Secondly, we have all known for a long time that if the West ate unmilled brown rice, husks and all (delicious, by the way), we would consume less food, and better food.
But who thinks of such things? Everyone will say that the greatest invention of the millennium is television or the microchip. But it would be a good thing if we learned to learn something from the Dark Ages too…
What innovation was most instrumental in creating the modern world? “Best Invention: How the Bean Saved Civilization” (gift link) from the April 18, 1999 edition of @nytimes.com.
(Image above: source)
* children’s playground saying
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As we lionize legumes, we might note that today is National Buffet Day, a celebration of an occasion to heap one’s plate with beans (or whatever).
“In my experience, clever food is not appreciated at Christmas. It makes the little ones cry and the old ones nervous.”*…
With this post– and with all best wishes for the Holidays!– (Roughly) Daily heads into its annual seasonal hiatus. Regular service will resume in the new year.
Tis the season when thoughts turn to festive feasts… featuring, for many, turkey; but for others, a range of alternate “mains.” Adam Shprintzen shares the history– and his personal experience– of a real outlier– but one that played an important role in the development of American food culture…
… Meat substitutes marked a turn for the vegetarian movement at the start of the 20th century, one that led to a depoliticization for a whole generation of vegetarians. Protose—the name mashes together the word protein and the suffix -ose, or full of—was the most popular and enduring meat substitute crafted in the experimental kitchen at the Battle Creek Sanitarium (or San), the Michigan health resort operated by John Harvey Kellogg from 1876 to 1943. Promoted as a versatile meat alternative, Protose could be eaten as an entrée like a beef steak, on a sandwich for a light lunch, or as a roast to be carved ceremonially. The product was served to San visitors, marketed via mail order, and available at local grocers. The marketing of fake meats in early-20th-century America represented a transformation from vegetarianism’s radical, 19th-century political past into a community of individualistic consumers looking to produce healthy, economically productive bodies and minds…
… Research based on product descriptions led me to an approximation of the product: wheat gluten, cereal, and peanut butter. I used a wooden mixing spoon to work the ingredients together, which increased in resistance as the peanut butter activated the gluten proteins. The ingredients combined into a meatish paste with the consistency of raw, ground beef.
To turn the basic recipe into a real meal, I followed a 1913 recipe for Protose cutlets from Lenna Frances Cooper, the San’s head dietician. The recipe called for Protose to be mixed with corn flakes, milk, eggs, and salt. The mixture was slow-roasted in an oven and filled our apartment with a smell that can best be described as vaguely chicken-adjacent. The result was texturally satisfying, though admittedly a little bland….
… The experience [helped] me understand why this was a culinary step forward for vegetarians, both fulfilling a desire to have more food choices and to present vegetarianism as socially acceptable by emulating meat. Smelling, tasting, and touching this fake meat helped me appreciate the sensory power of food as a historical force. And as a vegetarian of 16 years, the process also helped me appreciate and understand that my own food choices were and are very much shaped by the fake meats of the past…
The emergence of fake meat: “Protose Cutlets,” from @veghistory.bsky.social and @historians.org.
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As we size up surrogates, we might consider an alternative to eggnog: today is National Sangria Day. The name derives from the Spanish word for bloodletting and refers to the red wine that was used as a base for the wine, fruit, and fruit juice punch.
While it’s typically associated with summer, one notes that Sangria’s red color makes it a perfect celebratory libation for the Holidays.
“The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese”*…
… not so, Americans, who have been, as Millie Giles reports, speaking loudly with their wallets…
Topping off a pizza. Eyeballing a slice for cracker-stacking. Perfecting your own combination for a grilled sandwich. Many of us have spent time ruminating on one of life’s great questions: what’s the right amount of cheese?
The answer turns out to be exactly the same reply you’d give to a Parmesan-doling server: just a little more…
A great report from Bloomberg’s Ilena Peng last week outlined how America’s dairy processors are planning to build new facilities across the US to meet surging demand, which is a headline that could have been from just about any decade in the last 50 years. Indeed, data from the US Department of Agriculture shows that American consumption of cheese amounted to a record-breaking ~42 pounds per year for the average person in 2022, the latest figure available — more than double the amount reported in 1975.
Interestingly, cheese is something of an exception in the world of dairy. As America has sprinkled, grated, and sliced its way through more and more cheese, there’s also been a concurrent 47% decline in fluid milk consumption observed over the same period. In the 20th century, drinking milk was a mainstay of daily life, with its nutritional completeness cementing its place in the American ideal of “growing big and strong” (as well as giving us arguably the best ad campaign of the ‘90s).
Today, a considerable number of people have ditched dairy in favor of plant-based milks like almond, soy, and oat for ethical and dietary reasons (parallel with a counterculture of anti-milk drinking, which some people think is simply “gross”). The boom in alt-milks created a lucrative landscape for fledgling brands like Oatly, which at one point was worth an eye-watering $13 billion (although it is now worth just a tiny fraction of that, some $530 million).
Meanwhile, non-dairy cheeses haven’t taken off in quite the same way. Iterations have struggled to recreate the flavor and texture, with some people, frankly, scarred by sampling a few of these pseudo-cheese attempts, as even VeganCheese.co itself admits.
The discrepancy between these dairy dupes might boil down to one of the unique selling points of regular dairy cheese. As outlined by Bloomberg, the process of making a complex, artisan-derived product from a few simple ingredients, which is hard to do at home, carries weight with an increasingly organic-oriented public.
As well as this, the high protein content of dairy cheese is resonating with a growing number of “gains-conscious” consumers. For example, typically divisive but protein-dense cottage cheese has recently blown up on social media. The longer list of generally viral TikTok recipes also has a very high hit rate for having cheese as a main ingredient.
As Americans dine out more, they may also err on the side of their favorite foods — many of which involve at least some degree of cheese (think: pizza, burgers, pasta)…
Americans eat mozzarella more than any other cheese, with the average citizen getting through 12.55 pounds in 2022, per the USDA.
Consumption of the semi-soft Italian cheese has been sharply on the rise since it knocked cheddar off the top spot back in 2010; though, cheddar has hardly fallen out of favor, with the average person eating over 11 pounds of it each year. Interestingly, processed cheese (think: melty slices) has been mounting a comeback since 2020, after consumption dropped at the turn of the millennium.
What do crude oil and cheese have in common? Not a lot, except that America can’t seem to function without either… and, in recent years, they’ve both become an important American export.
Indeed, while most of America’s favorite cheeses originally derive from elsewhere in the world, the US still makes much of its own supply, accounting for some 29% of the world’s cheese production, second only to the European Union, per the USDA. And, in recent years, it’s started selling more of it abroad.
The US has been a net exporter of cheese since 2010, sending over 450,000 metric tons at its 2022 peak to large international markets like Mexico, where America accounts for 87% of all imported cheese… sales of American cheese abroad are only expected to grow, with the USDA forecasting cheese exports to rise 17% from 2023-24…
… While authentic varieties from places like France and Italy must still be shipped into the country, the US has gone all-in on its own overseas sales. Part of this can be chalked up to the continued drive in global demand for cheese, but the US also has a history of having too much of it lying around.
In 1981, when faced with a milk surplus, the federal government under Ronald Reagan began storing the product as cheese in huge quantities. In fact, the ~560 million pounds of cheese mostly kept in subterranean facilities was at one point costing the government ~$1 million a day in storage and interest costs, according to the Washington Post.
While many countries follow the same food stockpiling rulebook to stabilize prices, a recent surge in milk production, alongside the decline in milk consumption, has meant that America’s cheese pile hasn’t gone anywhere. New, tariff-subsidized deals and a greater national appetite for the yellow stuff have helped… but not by enough. As of August 2024, the total cheese cold in storage holdings in the US was reported to be ~1.4 billion pounds…
More on “Making America Grate Again”: “America is eating, and exporting, more cheese than ever before,” from @chartrdaily.
* G. K. Chesterton
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As we stuff the crust, we might note that today is National Farmers Day in the U.S.
“This massive ascendancy of corporate power over democratic process is probably the most ominous development since the end of World War II”*…
Food is a major topic of conversation these days. Americans feel that they’re paying more for less, with explanations ranging from rising production costs and supply chain disruptions, to concentration among suppliers leading to profit-gouging. In an excerpt from his new book, Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry, Austin Frerick reminds us that, while those issues are all too real, the emergence of food behemoths has brought other issues as well…
Like the broader Gilded Age economy that Walmart exemplifies and has played a role in shaping, the wealth in Bentonville obscures the hardship surrounding it. After all, the Walton family has so much money to spend on museums and bike trails because they have extracted it from the communities in which Walmart operates—from shoppers but also from the company’s employees, the towns themselves, and even from taxpayers through a series of hidden government subsidies.
For example, as Walmart expanded its traditional stores into Supercenters, it would often construct a new, larger building nearby instead of simply adding on to the existing one. Those old stores frequently sat empty or underused, just like the original Walmart in Rogers. That may be why Walmart openings have been linked to declines in nearby home values.
Walmart and other major retailers have made the situation even worse by including restrictive covenants in the deeds of old buildings, which prevent other retailers from using the space for competitive purposes. These provisions perpetuate food deserts and tie the hands of communities struggling to figure out what to do with these ghost buildings. After all, it’s not easy to find a use for an old Walmart that doesn’t involve grocery or retail. One former Walmart Supercenter in Brownsville, Texas, became the center of a national debate when it was bought by a firm detaining migrant children.
Limiting competition is apparently not enough for Walmart. The company understands what happens to communities when its stores are abandoned, and it uses this knowledge to leverage a tax break. The company often engages in what is known as the “dark stores” loophole, a tax dodge that lets it evade millions in property taxes by valuing its stores as if they were closed.
These shenanigans further tilt the scales in Walmart’s favor and deprive local communities of needed tax revenue. They are particularly egregious in light of the fact that many of their stores were built with massive taxpayer subsidies in the first place. Of course, this isn’t the only tax loophole the family has exploited. In 2013, Bloomberg reported that the family pioneered an estate tax loophole that is now widely used by American billionaires.
As bad as Walmart is for communities as a whole, it creates conditions that are particularly damaging for workers. As labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein noted, Sam Walton built a company rooted in a “southernized, deunionized post-New Deal America.” Walmart has long been defined by transnational commerce, employment insecurity, and poverty-level wages, which is an ironic geographic twist on history given that the region was at the heart of the New Deal and the antichain movement.
Walmart employs about 1.6 million people in the United States alone, making it the nation’s largest private employer. In fact, more people are on the company’s payroll than the populations of eleven states. The company’s impact on the labor market is so big that it drives down wages in the areas in which it builds Supercenters. In the words of one academic, Walmart effectively “determine[s] the real minimum wage” in the country. That’s why it’s national news when the company decides to raise wages.
From its founding, Walmart has been notorious for its poverty-level wages; in its early years, the company exploited a loophole in order to pay the mostly female store employees half of the federal minimum wage. It took a federal court battle for the workers to receive the minimum wage. In 2021, Walmart employees’ median income was about $25,000, whereas CEO Doug McMillon took home $25.7 million that year.
Given this history, it should come as no surprise that Sam Walton hated unions. “I have always believed strongly that we don’t need unions at Wal-Mart,” he stated in his memoir. Over the years, the company has aggressively fought efforts to unionize, and it seemingly closes stores whenever they gain traction. For example, after deli counter workers in a Texas Walmart Supercenter voted to unionize in 2000, the company switched to prepackaged meat and closed the department. In 2015, Walmart suddenly closed five stores to deal with what it said were extensive plumbing issues, which it said would take six months to fix. Some speculated that the real reason it closed the stores was to let the employees go as retaliation for labor activism.
And it’s not just labor laws that the company has eluded. A 2017 report based on a survey of over one thousand Walmart employees found that the company was likely violating worker protections such as the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Family and Medical Leave Act, among others. According to the New York Times, the company “routinely refuses to accept doctors’ notes, penalizes workers who need to take care of a sick family member and otherwise punishes employees for lawful absences.”
As the company’s power grew, it reshaped labor options and norms for millions of Americans. Gary Chaison, a labor expert, told the New York Times in 2015, “What you’re increasingly finding is that it’s the primary wage earners who work at Walmart, because a lot of workers have more or less given up on getting middle-class jobs.” Meanwhile, many older Americans are working at the store past the normal retirement age because of their financial insecurity, a sad reality reflected by the recent TikTok trend of elderly Walmart employees asking for donations.
This power imbalance between Walmart and its employees explains the poverty-level wages for many of Walmart’s 1.6 million workers but also for employees of its competitors. Some unionized grocery stores have even used the opening of a Supercenter as an excuse to demand cuts to their own employees’ wages and benefits.
These low wages also obscure a generous hidden subsidy that the company receives from taxpayers. Many Walmart workers depend on government public assistance programs such as Medicaid (health care), the Earned Income Tax Credit (a low-wage tax subsidy), Section 8 vouchers (housing assistance), LIHEAP (energy assistance), and SNAP (food assistance), among others. In 2013, one estimate by congressional House Democrats found that taxpayers subsidized Walmart to the tune of more than $5,000 per employee each year through all of the government assistance programs that its workers need.
In effect, instead of paying a living wage to these employees, the Walton family shifts the burden onto taxpayers. Although many people may recoil at the idea of the public filling the gap between Walmart’s pay and the income its workers need to survive, not all policymakers see an issue with this sort of billionaire welfare. Jason Furman, former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama, wrote a paper before joining the administration titled “Wal-Mart: A Progressive Success Story” that called for even more of these subsidies to Walmart’s bottom line.
There is, of course, another way to address the issue. Walmart failed to establish dominance in Germany because of the country’s strong labor protections and antitrust guardrails. These market protections may explain why the company eventually threw in the towel and sold off its operations there.
In some instances, Walmart even receives a double subsidy. Its workers and shoppers frequently rely on SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as “food stamps.” The program originated as part of the New Deal as a temporary measure and was made permanent by President Lyndon Johnson in a bill signed in 1964. This program and several smaller food assistance programs are now part of the Farm Bill. In fact, these food assistance programs make up more than 75 percent of the most recent Farm Bill.
SNAP is in many ways a triumph of progressive social policy, with an average of 41.2 million people participating in the program each month in 2022. The use rate is so high because, unlike many other programs, SNAP was structured by the US Congress so that anyone who qualifies is guaranteed to receive assistance. As a result, the program is a lifeline for millions of Americans who might otherwise struggle to put food on the table.
But because of Walmart’s dominance of the grocery sector, a very large portion of SNAP dollars now run through the company’s cash registers. In 2013, the company received $13 billion in sales from shoppers using SNAP. By comparison, farmers markets took in only $17.4 million of all SNAP spending that same year. The amount of SNAP money received by the company surged with the expansion of SNAP benefits in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. With some back-of-the-envelope math, I came up with a rough estimate that Walmart now receives somewhere around $26.8 billion each year from SNAP.
Unfortunately, more concrete numbers are not available because the US Supreme Court has ruled that the amount of taxpayer money that the company receives from SNAP can be kept secret. In 2019, the Court heard a case involving the USDA’s decision to deny a request by a South Dakota newspaper for this information. “Most of the time, the government tells the public which companies benefit from federal dollars earmarked for taxpayer-funded public assistance programs,” agriculture and food reporter Claire Brown noted. “We know which insurance companies make the highest profits from Medicare and Medicaid, for example, and those figures have been used to pressure them to offer better options to their clients.” But in this instance, the Court rejected this level of transparency, with Justice Elena Kagan joining the Republican-appointed members of the Court to uphold the USDA decision under the notion that it was “confidential” business information.
The program is important enough that it factors into Walmart’s operational decision-making. Many Americans enrolled in SNAP schedule their trips to the grocery store around the days when their funds get deposited. In fact, the company factors this bump into its ordering system…
Expensive food is only one of the prices we pay to “Food Barons“– @AustinFrerick in @ProMarket_org.
* “This massive ascendancy of corporate power over democratic process is probably the most ominous development since the end of World War II, and for the most part “the free world” seems to be regarding it as merely normal.” – Wendell Berry, Bringing it to the Table: On Farming and Food
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As we ponder the point at which profit becomes predation, we might recall that it was on this date in 1950 that Hormel registered the name and trademark “Spam” for its canned meat product. It is also interesting to note that the company had marketed the product since 1937, and only felt the need to protect the name 13 years later.
“Too few people understand a really good sandwich”*…
Every week author Talia Levin (and her editor David Swanson) drop an installment of what has become one of your correspondent’s favorite newsletters, The Sword and the Sandwich: “Notable Sandwiches, the feature where I, alongside my editor David Swanson, plunge into the strange waters of Wikipedia’s List of Notable Sandwiches, in alphabetical order.” It is, as advertised, a profile of one instance of that noble culinary form; at the same time, it is a cultural history lesson and a meditation on life itself. This week’s installment…
First things first, as they rarely are in this series: the kumru is a delightful Turkish variant on the grilled cheese—although, in this case, it is the cheese itself that is grilled. Sometimes called a Çeşme Kumrusu, the sandwich includes the aforementioned cheese (usually sharp kaşar), tomato, and a specialized ovoid chickpea-sourdough bun topped with sesame seeds. Optional but frequent toppings are griddled ribbons of spicy garlic sausage called sujuk (aka “meat spaghetti”); Turkish salami; green pepper; and pickles, served either atop the sandwich or as a side dish.
The sandwich originated in, and is one claim to fame of, the seaside town of Çeşme, facing onto the crystal waters of the Aegean sea from the westernmost point of Anatolia. The bread, in particular, is an ingredient found principally in the Aegean-Mediterranean vicinity: its signature chickpea sourdough starter, baked into generously-seeded loaves, is known in Turkey as kumru, in Greece as eftazymo, in Cyprus as Arkatena. The Greek and Cypriot names are somewhat straightforward: eftazymo, means “to knead seven times”; arkatena comes from arktis, the Cypriot term for chickpea foam. The Greeks seem to have it right: by all accounts, the chickpea-fermentation-sourdough process is temperamental and tricky; one nineteenth-century author, the dashing yet ill-starred Archduke Ludwig Salvator, claimed in an account of his Ionian travels that “to make this bread successfully you needed a black-handled knife, a red blanket and a holy book.”
The Turkish name for this temperamental bread, however, goes full-on figurative, which is where things start getting interesting. Due to the distinctive, pinch-ended oval shape of the kumru’s loaves, the name means “Turkish dove”—a bright-eyed little bird also known as the “collared dove.”
While not literally a bird in a starched ruff (although that’s wonderful to contemplate), the collared dove is an Eurasian species that is one of the great migrants of the avian world. It looks quite a bit like a mourning dove in a kind of abbreviated clerical collar, there to minister to its (literal) flock. Known as a “colonizer” among bird species, the avian “kumru” leapt from Southeast Asia to Turkey to the Balkans, and thence throughout Europe and eventually to the U.S. Its scientific name—bestowed upon it by a nineteenth century Hungarian entomologist and sometime-ornithologist named Imre Frivaldszky—is Streptopelia decaocto, “Streptopelia” meaning “wearing a twisted metal collar or torc” in Greek, and “deca-octo” meaning “eighteen.”
The number, here, is somewhat mysterious. As is often the case in sandwich stories, I’m working from third-or-fourth-hand hearsay, across a few centuries and multiple languages. But I tracked down Frivaldszky’s paper from 1837, in which he describes having discovered the species in Phillipopolis (the ancient Roman name for the modern city of Plovdiv, in Bulgaria), and hearing the following story from villagers (Google-translated from Hungarian, subsequently cleaned up by me):
“A poor but pious girl came to serve a miserly woman; from morning to night she worked, yet had hardly a mouthful of bread, and she was scolded constantly; but her annual salary consisted of 18 pennies. Discouraged under the burden of her meager fate, she raised her burning prayers to the heavens from the bottom of her heart, in order to make the world aware of the unworthiness of her fate. Zeus took pity on her and turned her into a dove, which now, in a turban, announces this bitter fate to the world.”
The bird’s cry does kind of sound like “deca-octo” if you really strain to hear that. It’s a weird story, honestly—quite possibly the inhabitants of Plovdiv were messing around with the scientist in their midst. (Frivaldszky sounds like a cool dude, though—he loved cave diving, explored the Balkans, and discovered 126 separate species, plus had god-tier nineteenth century facial hair). But also…what is the deal with Greek gods transforming people into things as an answer to prayers? This lady wanted a raise, not to become a bird! Maybe she pecked out her shitty employer’s eyes. Who knows. Personally, I would be wary of praying to Zeus, especially as a woman; if he’s not turning you into a dove or flower or whatever, he’s probably gonna turn himself into a bull or a swan and then try to have his way with you. And then you have to wear a torc and coo forever and the Turks name a loaf of bread after you, and you still don’t get a raise! If only there had been a “Servants of Misers Union” and things could have ended very differently. On the other hand, this bird would likely have had a less colorful name.
Anyway, I was extremely grumpy all day for reasons unrelated to this column, and felt the shitty, ozonic, bad-air swelter of a New York summer in all its oppressiveness, and a curdled lump of despair in my chest and gut and I briefly thought I’d lost the ability to write. (It turned out the cure was to poke around in old source material and get very excited about it. It took me like two hours to find the Frivaldszky paper—I had to go through a brief English summary and then a chatty German compatriot of the entomologist first—and, incidentally, all the contemporary English sources about this bird say it’s an “ancient Greek myth” about the servant girl and her eighteen pennies. They are all wrong, because in fact it was a bunch of nineteenth century Bulgarians pulling the leg of a credulous Hungarian traveler).
But before my journey of discovery I had to sulk for like, fifteen hours. It’s part of the process. So there I was, sitting and smoking on my back steps, really working myself up into a good sulk, building up a weighty inner bulkhead of surliness, and suddenly something moving very quickly hits my shoulder and I scream and flail because I have the startle response of a frightened rabbit on meth, and then a tiny little bird falls over next to me, dazed. He’s hopping a bit but seems to be favoring one wing, which is deeply concerning, because my neighborhood is absolutely full of ravenous feral cats, rats, and other things hazardous to an injured bird’s health.
I take a (hot, gross) breath and start getting very upset that I’ve inadvertently caused irreparable harm. I certainly didn’t mean to, just reacting to a feathered projectile striking me at speed. I hop on the phone and first call Animal Control, which directs me to the Wild Bird Fund. This little guy is sitting next to me the whole time:
Just as I’m about to leave a message for the Wild Bird Fund and gather my broken-winged little buddy in a shoebox and drop him off at Columbus and 86th, I try giving him a little stroke on his little wing, and all of a sudden he flies away, beautifully, like a feathered dart. He just needed to catch his little breath.
It turns out he was a fledgling mourning dove—apparently they’re adorably mottled while they’re little and still figuring out how to fly, before becoming the smooth and elegant avians of adulthood. So there I was, brooding over dove-shaped bread. And I thought I killed a dove, and it turned out he was OK! He flew off like a shot. He’s figuring it out! Sometimes life just smacks you with a metaphor. Learning to fly is hard. Even Simone Biles, the greatest gymnast in history, lost herself in the air once on the way to a towering height. But in the end she came up golden. Our little dove is going to be OK.
And so am I. And so are you. And I really want a chickpea loaf full of grilled Turkish cheese, and meat spaghetti, and tomatoes. But I’m not going to complain about it too loudly, because I’m worried some errant god will turn me into a bird whose call sounds faintly like “sandwich!” and a Balkan ornithological anthropology moment will ensue. I can’t risk it! From now on, I will not mourn my fate so bitterly. After all, I didn’t lose my ability to write, as I’d feared. The words are still here, numerous as sesame seeds on the top of a perfect, dove-shaped bun…
There’s much more where this came from: “Notable Sandwiches #104: Kumru,” from @mobydickenergy and @DavidSwansonNYC. You can check out past entries and add The Sword and the Sandwich to your newsletter haul here.
* James Beard
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As we contemplate the cultural consequences of compact comestibles, we might recall that today celebrates an auspicious choice of accompaniment to a sandwich: its National Root Beer Float Day.
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