Keys Corner

The Guardian reports that the mafia has started selling cheap bread in Naples, attracting lots of customers, but the local authorities warn that the bread could cause cancer and that it is not so easy to identify. Originally, it was sold from car boots, but now they are also supplying shops, making it difficult to know if you are buying contaminated bread or not:

...Open 24 hours a day, the street sellers are drawing shoppers with cheap, crusty bread fresh from wood-burning ovens, the way Neapolitans like it. But police say Naples’ new breed of bakers are slowly poisoning their customers by burning old varnished wood, nut shells covered in pesticides and even planks pulled from exhumed coffins. ‘Whoever buys this bread is eating dioxins and carcinogenic substances and putting their health at serious risk,’ said Francesco Borrelli, assessor for agriculture for the province of Naples.

Borrelli’s investigation into the underground bakeries prompted raids by Carabinieri police who found dough being mixed by illegal immigrant labour in filthy, humid and mould-streaked cellars, some perilously close to burning piles of toxic waste dumped in fields around Naples by the Camorra, which was linked earlier this year to suspected tainting of local mozzarella…

The New Yorker asks if the world’s food system is collapsing, and looks at how modern agriculture has defied the predictions of Thomas Malthus in his book “Essay on the Principle of Population” written in 1798.

The picture is not pretty:

American consumers demand huge amounts of cheese and meat. One consequence is the giant “poop lagoons” of Northern California. In traditional forms of mixed agriculture, animal manure is not a waste product but a valuable fertilizer. By contrast, the mainstream food economy is now dominated by monocultures in which crops and animals are kept apart. This system of farming has little use for poop, despite churning it out in ever-increasing volumes. The San Joaquin Valley has air quality as poor as Los Angeles, the result of twenty-seven million tons of manure produced every year by California’s cows. “And cows are relatively benign crappers,” Roberts points out; hogs—mass-produced to meet the demand for bacon on everything—are more prolific. On June 21, 1995, Roberts tells us, a hog lagoon burst into a river in North Carolina, destroying aquatic life for seventeen miles…

...much of the apparent abundance of choice available to the affluent Western consumer is an illusion. You may spend hours in the supermarket, keenly scrutinizing the labels, but, when it comes down to it, most of what you eat is derived from the high-yield, low-maintenance crops that the food industry prefers to grow, and sells to you in myriad foodish forms.

The article is appeal to push back on the industrial food producers who provide us with flabby mass-produced chicken (the average American eats 87 pounds of chicken a year – twice the figure for the 1980’s) and convenience meals packed with soya extract, and eat food which comes from lower down the food chain – more vegetables, rather than meat; more sardines and herring, rather than salmon; less produce from the large mono-culture food factories. We’d be healthier, and there would be less people in the third world starving.

From today’s Guardian:

The European Union is preparing plans to allow pig remains to be used to feed poultry. The practice – banned in Europe after the BSE crisis 10 years ago – would save farmers millions of pounds as prices of cereal feed for chickens soar, say officials in Brussels.

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The justification for this idea is that chickens are omnivorous (they eat worms when they are pecking on the ground). One more reason for us to continue not eating meat.

Coca-Cola is going to test market Coke in aluminium containers shaped like their traditional bottles – initially at night clubs and special events. I suppose its no different to packaging it in cans, but at the moment, looking at the samples, I don’t think it looks more attractive than the existing cans or bottles.

...Researchers at the California Institute of Technology have shown that a person’s enjoyment of wine can be heightened if they are simply told that it is an expensive one…

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The run up to Christmas seems to start earlier each year. One way to tell it’s Christmas in Germany is when everyone starts eating Lebkuchen (gingerbread), which comes in many different forms, but the most common is as round pieces of gingerbread baked on a thin wafer of white oblate, like in the picture above. It’s yummy and you can usually only buy it over the Christmas period.

Yesterday, Ruth and I took our cars to the local tyre dealer to get our winter wheels mounted – when we paid, we got given our first Lebkuchen of the year.

We found this recipe a couple of days ago on Simply Recipes and tried it this evening. It’s easy to make and very tasty – so it’s been added to our (non-computerized) recipe collection!

If you are despairing of ever eating at El Bulli (the waiting list for this year would take them 125 years to work through), there is hope for you yet. Their chef, Ferran Adria, has made a deal with a British company to market some of the famous products from their kitchen to the catering trade.

November 1st was Sushi Day (there’s a day for everything, these days), but I only noticed today. Nonetheless I love sushi, so here’s a link to a little web site, which tells you all you wanted to know about sushi. Sushi, by the way – as you will discover on the website – is not raw fish (which is called sashimi); sushi refers to the rice with which the fish, or other ingredients, are prepared.

If you didn’t like recipes in structure diagram format, you could take a look at Elise Bauer’s whole food Simply Recipes instead. Interesting recipes and very few ingredients that come out of tins or packets – yum!