Posts Tagged ‘Food’
“All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret”*…
A graphic– and painful– reminder that the latter two are under constant attack…
Think about a personal and private google search and post it on this website. Something you might not have told the ones dearest to your heart. Google uses these searches to generate a data profile of you to sell on open bidding markets. This website creates a bubble for each search to remind us of all the data collected…
Every time we ask Google, we give it answers about ourselves: “Search TM.”
* Gabriel García Márquez
###
As we Duck (Duck Go), we might recall that it was on this date in 1937 that Hormel introduced Spam. It was the company’s attempt to increase sales of pork shoulder, not at the time a very popular cut. While there are numerous speculations as to the “meaning of the name” (from a contraction of “spiced ham” to “Scientifically Processed Animal Matter”), its true genesis is known to only a small circle of former Hormel Foods executives.
As a result of the difficulty of delivering fresh meat to the front during World War II, Spam became a ubiquitous part of the U.S. soldier’s diet. It became variously referred to as “ham that didn’t pass its physical,” “meatloaf without basic training,” and “Special Army Meat.” Over 150 million pounds of Spam were purchased by the military before the war’s end. During the war and the occupations that followed, Spam was introduced into Guam, Hawaii, Okinawa, the Philippines, and other islands in the Pacific. Immediately absorbed into native diets, it has become a unique part of the history and effect of U.S. influence in the Pacific islands.
“The only kind of seafood I trust is the fish stick, a totally featureless fish that doesn’t have eyeballs or fins”*…
A minority opinion, it seems… we’re consuming more seafood than ever, and increasingly from farmed sources, which have overtaken that of wild-caught fish for the first time in history…
At the latest count, the average American was eating ~5 lbs more seafood per year than they had been in the 1990s, and globally the consumption of seafood has been outpacing population growth since the 1960s. But where exactly is all of that shrimp, tuna, and salmon coming from?
When we think of fishing, it’s easy to romanticize weather-beaten boats helmed by wizened sea captains. But, on a global scale, much of modern fishing looks very different. In fact, increasingly, the contents of a seafood tower or “catch of the day” is more likely to have been farmed rather than caught in the wild.
That’s the latest conclusion from The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture, an annual report published earlier this month by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which revealed that — for the first time in history — the majority of the world’s seafood came from fish farming rather than wild catching in 2022.
The practice of aquaculture — rearing fish and sea plants in controlled ponds, pens, and pools — produced more than 94 million metric tons of seafood in 2022 and is being hailed by some as a means of sustaining seafood production in the face of depleting wild fish stocks. The 2022 tally was double the production figure from 2006 and reflects decades of investment and innovation in the aquaculture industry, which 30 years ago accounted for just 15% of total seafood.
Note: Total aquaculture production, which includes algae and aquatic plants like seaweed, overtook wild fishing efforts more than a decade ago (the more recent milestone excludes sea plants).
Asia, which has long been at the center of the world of commercial fishing and seafood more generally, is driving much of the aquaculture boom. In fact, the FAO attributes more than 90% of total global aquaculture production (including aquatic plants) to the continent, helping to secure fish farming’s spot as the “fastest-growing food production system in the world”…
Read on for more about aquaculture– it’s history and practice– and for the rise of U.S. seafood imports and the fall of shrimp: “We now farm more fish than we catch,” from @sherwood_news.
* Dave Barry
###
As we reach for the ketchup, we might send aquatic birthday greetings to Frank Rattray Lillie; he was born on this date in 1870. A zoologist, he was an early pioneer of the study of embryology (making key discoveries about the fertilization of the egg (ovum) and the role of hormones in sex determination).
But he is probably better remembered for his role in building the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Lillie formed a lifelong association with the laboratory, eventually becoming its director in 1908, then turning it into a full-time institution.
Sadly, Lillie was also involved in the American eugenics movement at several levels: he was member of Chicago’s Eugenics Education Society; he was a committee member of the Second International Eugenics Congress; and he served on the advisory council for the Eugenics Committee of the United States. His status as a leading scientist likely helped to legitimize the movement.
“The recognition of oneself as a part of nature, and reliance on natural things, are disappearing for hundreds of millions of people who do not know that anything is being lost.”*…
The estimable Alan Jacobs on the (glorious) novels of Robertson Davies, and (what Jacobs suggests is) a central question running throughout them: What ways of Wisdom have been discarded by modern Knowledge?…
Long ago every village in England had a cunning man, or woman—an untrained but intuitive healer, a person with a good nose for other people’s troubles and a tactical shrewdness about how to handle them. If your problems were simple and obvious, if you needed a broken bone set or a bad tooth pulled, you’d go to the surgeon. Everyone knew that. But what if you weren’t quite sure what was wrong with you? What if your spirit was troubled but also your digestion, and you didn’t know which was causing which, or if they were separate miseries? Then you needed to consult the cunning ones.
The Cunning Man is the last novel by the great Canadian writer Robertson Davies, and its titular figure is a man of the late twentieth century named Jonathan Hullah, who grew up in a remote outpost in northern Ontario and got his first ideas about healing by hanging around with Elsie Smoke, an Ojibwa herbalist and healer, a “wise woman”—a cunning woman. Hullah ultimately becomes a doctor and a practitioner of what some now call “holistic medicine,” though that term is not used in the book by Hullah or anyone else. Hullah thinks of himself as a disciple of the great Renaissance physician Paracelsus— the first person to theorize that physical disease can be the product of what we now would call psychological distress. As Hullah comments, “The problem for a Paracelsian physician like me is that I see diseases as disguises in which people present me with their wretchedness.” It is a problem because people are happy to speak of their diseases but reluctant to acknowledge their wretchedness.
Hullah’s creator almost certainly learned about Paracelsus through reading Carl Jung, who was perhaps the most important guiding figure of Davies’s intellectual and religious life. From my point of view, which is that of a generally orthodox Christian, Davies’s embrace of Jungian ideas is a convenient way to get all the benefits of belief in transcendent order with none of the obligations of obedience to a personal God. Nevertheless, there is much in Davies’s picture of the cunning man—and in closely related ideas that he developed in the latter part of his career as a novelist—from which thinking Christians can and should learn. Above all, I think, we should adopt a kind of historically aware intellectual pluralism, a willingness to learn from and make use of the past, and especially those elements of the past that have been discarded by modernity as refuse and waste. The thoughtful Christian should be a cunning practitioner of filth therapy.
In Davies’s wicked and wonderful novel The Rebel Angels, a scholar named Clement Hollier—whom Davies refers to as a “paleo-psychologist,” a student of ancient and discarded ways of thinking—grows fascinated by what he calls “Filth Therapy.” He suspects that a scientific colleague is pursuing a similar path: “He works with human excrement—what is rejected, what is accounted of no worth to mankind—and in it I suppose he hopes to discover something that is of worth.”…
…
… In his many novels Davies returns over and over again to this theme. He portrays modernity as a world in which we love our crowns even as we despise and try to rip up our roots. The Rebel Angels is the first novel in what has come to be known as the Cornish Trilogy because it deals with the Cornish family, and in the novel that follows it, What’s Bred in the Bone, a young painter named Francis Cornish struggles with his love of Renaissance painting— struggles because he doesn’t just admire the Old Masters but wants to paint as they painted. And yet, he thinks, “surely one must paint in the manner of one’s day?” Anything else is “a kind of fakery, or a deliberate throw-back, like those PreRaphaelites.” And he has a very specific reason for believing that one must choose between “the manner of one’s own day” and a historically informed “fakery”: “Even if you are a believer, you cannot believe as the great men of the past believed.”
Cornish’s mentor, a brilliant restorer of art named Saraceni, disputes this, and constantly holds out to young Cornish the challenge of acquiring “the ability to work truly in the technique and also in the spirit of the past.” And Cornish achieves this ability, at least to Saraceni’s satisfaction; but when his masterful painting is discovered to be new rather than old, it is immediately and universally decried as a fake— even though Cornish never pretended that the painting was by anyone else. For artists and connoisseurs of our age, only the crown—the thought-world of the moment—can provide an authentic and valid mode of artistic (or religious) experience. To work from the root is necessarily to be inauthentic…
…
In a city in Paraguay you may find a curious assembly of musicians called La Orquesta de Instrumentos Reciclados de Cateura—the Recycled Instruments Orchestra of Cateura. But these instrumentos are not professionally designed and built objects that have been discovered and repaired: they have been made out of recycled materials. Violins are constructed from cans and bent forks, a discarded oil drum forms the body of a cello, a saxophone somehow emerges from a drainpipe and a few bent spoons. Most of the musicians are teenagers from Cateura, which is a slum, and a slum built on and around a landfill. They too are among the world’s discards, thought to be without value, people in whom society invests no hope. But Fabio Chavez, the creator and director of the orchestra, has invested in them. He has said, “People realize that we shouldn’t throw away trash carelessly. Well, we shouldn’t throw away people either.”
In The Rebel Angels Maria’s mother healed the souls of great instruments that had been damaged by time and use. This is a wondrous art and worthy of great praise.
But then what praise is appropriate for those who have taken the filth of the world and given it souls, souls capable of the loveliest utterance? And what wonder is adequate to the imaginative dedication of Fabio Chavez, whose name should be known throughout the world? “The world sends us garbage,” he says. “We send back music.”…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Filth Therapy: A Cunning Word.” Also eminently worth reading: every one of Robertson Davies’ novels.
This essay dates from 2017. Jacobs brought it back up in response to his reading of a fascinating new book: Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic, by Tabitha Stanmore. It’s on Google Books, here.
* Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels
###
As we find treasure in trash, we might recall that it was in this date in 1953 that John Kraft (the younger brother of James Kraft, the founder of Kraft Cheese [later Kraft Foods]) received U.S. patent No. 2,641,545 for the manufacture of soft surface cured cheese. Just one year earlier, the company had introduced Cheez Whiz.
“There’s no better feeling in the world than a warm pizza box on your lap”*…
On the origin of that sacred vessel…
Ah, the humble pizza box. When else has such a more modest creation kept so many so well fed? Patented in 1984, after being filed in ‘81 by a Robert E Hall, the creation is described as such: “A box is formed from a unitary, double-sided corrugated cardboard blank having a plurality of scored lines which enable a set up in box form. A bottom panel of the box has cemented thereto a single-sided, fluted corrugated cardboard medium with the fluted side facing upwardly. A moisture-resistant glue is used between the smooth faces of the fluted corrugated medium and the confronting liner of the blank to provide an impenetrable barrier which prevents grease from penetrating through the box. The boxes are manufactured on a conventional production line which is modified by, in effect, running one stage in a reverse direction in order to invert the single-sided medium and to apply the glue in a different manner to establish the moisture barrier.”
In truth, the pizza box has many parents, with patent 4,441,626 simply improving grease absorption and venting (dunno who came up with the weird little three legged table you sometimes see.) Neapolitan pizza bakers would put their pies in metallic containers called stufe as far back as the 19th century. Corrugated cardboard was added to the recipe in the ‘60s, with Domino’s creating something pretty similar to the package we know and love — aka the Chicago Folder — shortly thereafter…
“Who Invented the Pizza Box,” from Modern Delivery.
More at: “Pizza packaging: Overview and History.”
See also: “My favorite dish to prepare is something on the takeout menu.”
* Kevin James
###
As we hold the mushrooms, we might recall that it was on this date in 1901 that Chapman J. Root opened the Root Glass Company in Terre Haute, Indiana; his specialty was the manufacture of glass bottles that would withstand high internal pressures. In 1915 the company entered, and in 1916 won the design competition for what would become another packaging superstar: the iconic 6.5 ounce Coca-Cola bottle.
“Food is simply sunlight in cold storage”*…
Increasingly, as Patrick Sisson explains, that’s literally true…
If you had to identify a specific type of real estate that has seen its value increase because of changing consumer eating habits, global demographic shifts, worldwide pandemic preparedness, and US export policy — while its importance to reducing global carbon emissions and adapting to climate change rise in tandem — refrigerated warehouses may not be your first pick.
But there’s a strong case to be made that the expansion and evolution of the cold-storage industry — often called the “cold chain” — will play a significant role in energy, environmental, and economic news in the 21st century. Cold storage facilities aren’t fun places to visit; some are kept so frigid, at minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit, that the workers who toil in these windowless spaces rotate in 15-minute shifts, despite their heavy protective gear…
… refrigerated warehouses are great to build and own. Investors and developers expect 8 to 10% annual growth in this specialized real estate, according to Adam Thocher, SVP of Global Programs and Insights at the Global Cold Chain Alliance (GCCA). That’s made it a profitable real-estate niche…
The ability to more easily cool and freeze food for storage, preparation, and distribution has revolutionized grocery shelves, home cooking, and restaurants for decades, and will continue to do so for years because it taps into every trend all at once. Growing fast-casual restaurant chains, last-mile delivery, a surging global middle class seeking more protein, and the explosion in healthy, organic produce and industrialized frozen food, all need cold storage…
The pandemic accelerated these trends, spiking frozen-food sales in the US to over $74 billion in 2023, a $10 billion increase in just three years, and leading to a wave of refrigerator purchases by Chinese consumers. The need to refrigerate Covid vaccines underscored how important these sites are to global health. Even Ozempic and similar blockbuster anti-obesity drugs need to be stored at 46 degrees F. And the rest of the world is increasingly asking why, if you can always get a Granny Smith apple in New York, can’t you get one in Beijing or London?…
The GCCA estimates there is at least 7.4 billion cubic feet of cold storage worldwide, and 3.7 billion in the US alone, but that’s a vast understatement, Thocher said. The alliance only looks at partial data from 92 countries (not including China) and governments tend to be cagey about sharing his kind of data because of economic and food-security concerns, since these sites are crucial parts of food infrastructure and can reveal levels of economic activity…
Food security has become a global challenge with a growing population, Peters said, especially since roughly 30% of global food production is lost, making increasing supply and reducing food waste imperative. That’s extremely tricky when the critical loss of arable land and desertification, due to climate change, strengthens the case for cold-storage warehouses, which, because of their vast energy use, contribute to that very problem. A 2023 Columbia University study found the sector responsible for 3.5% of total global emissions. The cold-storage industry has responded with more energy-efficient designs and less harmful ammonia-based refrigerants, but it adds an additional challenge to efforts to ramp up sustainable energy production.
“This is a real system-level challenge, a wicked problem,” [Toby Peters, professor of the cold economy at the UK’s Birmingham Energy Institute] said. “My exam question is, how do we feed 9 billion people while economically empowering 400 million small farmers, all without using diesel?”…
Diets, demographics, desertification are all fueling “The Hot Business of Cold Storage,” by @patrickcsisson in @sherwood_news.
* John Harvey Kellogg
###
As we chill, we might recall that it was on this date in 1903 that Carl von Linde received two U.S. patents for his Linde oxygen process and associated equipment (Nos. 728,173 and 727,650). Linde had already invented the first industrial-scale air separation and gas liquefaction processes, which led to the first reliable and efficient compressed-ammonia refrigerator (in 1876).
In 1901, Linde had began work on a technique to obtain pure oxygen and nitrogen based on the fractional distillation of liquefied air. His 1903 patents were steps in that direction.
Linde founded a company to commercialize access to these pure gases. Now known as Linde plc (but formerly known variously as the Linde division of Union Carbide, Linde, Linde Air Products, and Praxair), it has become the world’s largest producer of industrial gases– and ushered in the creation of the global supply chain for industrial gases that serves the global cold chain.
You must be logged in to post a comment.