Category: fermented food

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts2 Comments
  • Benefits of fermented wheat germ extract
  • Why Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is unlikely. A list of AGW-associated “miracles”. Some of my favorites: “Unique among all sciences, climatology develops yet finds no surprises whatsoever, apart from when it’s worse than we thought” and “AGW is a grave threat to humanity, yet it can take the backseat when AGWers have to score their petty points (such as not sharing their data with the “wrong” people)” and “Having won an Oscar, a Nobel Prize and innumerable awards, having occupied more or less every audio or video broadcast for years, having had the run of more or less every newspaper for the same length of time, suddenly AGW leaders declare they’re not “great communicators” and blame this for the generally high levels of skepticism.”
  • Denmark has started to tax butter. “To discourage poor eating habits and raise revenue.”
  • Life-saving personal science: Mom figures out cause of daughter’s problems. “One spring night in 2002, she stumbled upon an old photocopy of a 1991 Los Angeles Times article that described a young girl whose condition had uncanny parallels with [her daughter’s].”

Thanks to David Cramer.

Absence of Fermented Food From the Thoughts of a Foodie

Seth Roberts11 Comments

A diagnosis of stomach cancer and the need for radical surgery led a writer named Anna Stoessinger to plan a series of meals before surgery. She and her husband care enormously about food:

My husband and I have been known to spend our rent money on the tasting menu at Jean Georges, our savings on caviar or wagyu tartare. We plan our vacations around food — the province of China known for its chicken feet, the village in Turkey that grows the sweetest figs, the town in northwest France with the very best raclette.

Yet in her two-page article she doesn’t mention fermented food even once. (Leaving aside a mention of cheese.) Here are some foods she does mention:

  • roast duck, crostini and rich fish stews
  • roast chicken with leeks
  • roadside cheeseburgers, bonito with ginger sauce, hazelnut gelato
  • peanut butter and jelly doughnuts, ginger ice cream, sashimi, grilled porterhouse, wild blueberries
  • candy
  • foie gras and fig torchon
  • butter-poached smoked lobster
  • passion fruit coulis
  • butter-seared scallops
  • wild boar terrine and Guinness vegetable soup with rosemary whipped cream
  • apple and cinnamon tarte tartin

Of the thousands of fermented foods, eaten daily by people all over the world from time immemorial, nothing. To me, it’s like she’s had a stroke and has spatial neglect. She is unaware of half the visual field but doesn’t notice anything wrong. The absence of fermented foods from her article reflects the larger near-total absence of fermented foods in American restaurants (both high and low), supermarkets, cookbooks, newspapers, and health advice.

I no longer use cookbooks. I rarely use spices. I make the food I cook taste good by adding fermented foods — for example, miso or yogurt or stinky tofu or fermented bean paste. The result is much tastier than almost anything I can get in restaurants (if I say so myself) and no doubt much healthier.

Ms. Stoessinger’s article reads like a series of boasts: look how much I know and care about food. I think that’s part of the problem: You can’t boast about fermented food. It doesn’t require expensive skilled preparation to taste delicious. You can’t impress guests with fermented food, you just serve it. A bowl of miso soup: big deal. The bacteria made it delicious, not you. So fermented food can’t be a high-end product. Nor can it be a low-end mass-produced product because it takes too long to make, is hard to standardize, and is “objectionable” (e.g., stinky tofu). The growth of our modern food economy has pushed it to the margins, with very bad consequences for our health.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts7 Comments

Thanks to Tucker Max, Melissa McEwen, Peter Couvares, Edward Jay Epstein, and Alexandra Carmichael.

The Beer Archaeologist

Seth Roberts9 Comments

Patrick McGovern is a professor of archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania who studies fermented beverages. His work reveals their long history. Just like modern nutritionists, modern archaeologists overlook this:

Many of McGovern’s most startling finds stem from other archaeologists’ spadework; he brings a fresh perspective to forgotten digs, and his “excavations” are sometimes no more taxing than walking up or down a flight of stairs in his own museum to retrieve a sherd or two. Residues extracted from the drinking set of King Midas—who ruled over Phrygia, an ancient district of Turkey—had languished in storage for 40 years before McGovern found them and went to work. The artifacts contained more than four pounds of organic materials, a treasure—to a biomolecular archaeologist—far more precious than the king’s fabled gold.

Beer figures more in his work than wine. I’m not surprised. I’m a beer snob. The best beers at a recent beer tasting were far better than the best wines at similar wine tastings. The upper-class preference for wine over beer may have the same explanation as earlier upper-class preferences for white rice over brown rice (rich Japanese got beriberi more than poor Japanese) and white bread over dark bread. Or it may also have something to do with the fact that cheap beer in America is terrible.

Thanks to Melissa McEwen.

“Everyone Agrees: Fresh Food Better.” Uh, Not Everyone.

Seth Roberts8 Comments

In a brief Atlantic article about the paleo diet, Alesh Houdek writes:

There is no question that we should eat more fresh and unprocessed foods. . . . The Paleo diet’s dictum to eat as fresh as possible is shared universally with all modern sane eating guidelines.

As regular readers of this blog know, I disagree that “fresh is better”. Fermented is not just better but necessary. To work best, I think our bodies need substantial daily doses of fermented food or their microbial equivalent. Evolution has shaped us to like sour, umami-flavored, and complex-flavored food so that we will eat more microbe-laden food. More about this in these posts. Pass the umeboshi.

 

 

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Unofficial Beer Tasting Winner: Uncommon Brewers

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Last night I went to a beer tasting in San Francisco. I didn’t taste all the beers but of the 15-odd I did taste the best were by Uncommon Brewers — especially their Siamese Twin (“the floral notes of lemongrass and sharper bite of kaffir lime blend with the deep malt”) and Baltic Porter (“whole licorice root and star anise”).

Five or six years ago I went to a sake-tasting event in San Francisco called “The Joy of Sake”. About 140 sakes. In a few hours I became such a sake connoisseur that the sake I could afford — and used to buy regularly — I now despised. The only sake I now liked was so expensive ($80/bottle) that I never bought another bottle of sake.

 

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Thanks to Anne Weiss.