#foodreadsis our weekly digest of food and cooking ephemera from around the internet.
Gizmodo predictshow we'll be feeding ourselves 30 years from now, with guesses ranging from the well established (crickets,algae) to the frankly unbelievable, like "stop eating and photosynthesize," i.e. ditch food altogether and draw energy instead from the sun's golden light. Obviously in three decades war will have darkened the skies and those of us remaining will be scraping by in underground bunkers, sogood luck with that.
At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Whirlpool debuted thehigh-tech Zera Food Recycler, a device that chews up your unwanted food and turns it into compost. (This is also what a compost bin does.) What does all this—plus the pleasure of a "mobile app that lets you operate it remotely"—set you back? Just a cool $1,199. (Also in the "expensive solutions to problems that don't exist" category, Anheuser Busch InBev and Keurig are teaming up to find a way for you to getdrunk one K-cup at a time.)
"The food of the true revolutionary is the red pepper," said Chairman Mao. "And he who cannot endure red peppers is also unable to fight." In"Why Revolutionaries Love Spicy Food,"Andrew Leonard explores how the chile pepper, native to the Americas, came to be embraced in China's rebellious Sichuan province, with many fascinating tidbits sprinkled throughout. (For instance! Capsaicin, the compound that makes peppers spicy, may exist to discourage mammals from eating them, as that decreases the propagation of the species since our digestive system destroys the seeds. Birds, however, excrete chile pepper seeds unharmed, thereby spreading the plant. [Birds also, as it happens, do not share our receptors registering spice.])
The formerNew York Timesjournalist Jennifer 8. Lee campaigned the Unicode Consortium to add a dumpling to the list of available emoji, as per thisbrief history of food emojifrom NPR, which focuses on the cultural nuances of creating tiny images that will be used around the world. In that vein, Lee's a co-founder of Emojination, an organization that advocates for "a more inclusive emoji-proposal process."
The Atlantic's eminently reasonable James Hamblinlists a few problemshe sees with the Paleo diet, including the fact that eating all that meat is a crappy thing to do to the planet.
This past weekend, a lot of people on the internet became worked up upon discovering a trove ofvideos of a hot guyseasoning, cooking, and butchering—tenderly, except when he gets a little rough—some very beautiful pieces of meat. SFW, depending on your reaction to the videos.
Panera Bread and Sodexo, the food service provider, are embracing the slow-growing chicken: both companies signed on to pledge to stop trafficking in conventionally grown birds, which are bred to grow quickly and encounter a raft of health problems in their short, unpleasant lives. (In the Netherlands there's a name for these:plofkip, or "exploding chickens.") Still, it's not all good news,according to the New Food Economy—some people argue that slow chickens, by sticking around longer and demanding more feed, are worse for the environment.
Here's a beautiful reflection,written byThe Jemima Codeauthor Toni Tipton-Martin, on a recent gathering of chefs and food writers and thinkers who got together to discuss the question of "how difference based on color imprints and imperils American food culture." Also from that summit sprangthis dialogue, which originated in a dinner that saw the Nigerianchef and writer Tunde Weyvisiting the home ofAppalachian native Lora Smith.
ForIntersectional Analyst, the writer Lorraine Chuen crunched some numbers and found that in theNew York Times's recipe database, 90 percent of recipes tagged "Chinese" are written by white people; 95 percent of recipes tagged "Vietnamese" are by white people; less than 5 percent of Indian recipes are authored by people of Indian descent; and so on. Basically Chuen created a kind ofVIDA Countfor recipe writing, andthings don't look good.
