Jeremy Chefas discusses the history of cashews and the arrival in Mozambique via the Portuguese. He then discusses the challenges associated with production and cheaper labour in India. The catch with ‘cheaper’ is that this comes with an often hidden cost to the women when do the processing with the support of their children.
Tag: Food
What McCoy had done in Huntington was exactly the kind of thing Republicans claim to celebrate. She wasn’t a Washington bureaucrat telling people to do it her way, or no way at all; she was a well-intentioned local who had figured out what made sense for her community and acted on it.
Jane Black explores the complexity associated with school meals. Although Jamie Oliver argued that it was simply about providing students with healthy food, Black explores the challenges of standards, funding, equipment, and training.
Fruit ripening is all about plants getting animals to eat the seeds that are inside their fruits. This helps the plants get their seeds to somewhere new where they can grow into a new plant.
To me, a pedant and a purist, a pickle by rights ought to have gone through a proper fermentation. It might have been pasteurised afterwards and bottled, but at some stage it needs to have supported microbial activity. And yet, I don’t think of kombucha as pickled tea or yoghurt as pickled milk. Maybe that’s because they aren’t salted. Just being boiled in vinegar or soaked in brine doesn’t qualify either, for me.
Luckily Jan Davison, author of Pickles: A Global History, has a much more open mind, which is great, because I learned a lot from her little book. And it gave us plenty to talk about.