Further reading
Food, farming, and food culture digestations from writers that do not include this one
I have no WFJ story for you this week. This is due to a coalescence of things: arriving back from holiday (clue: it involved scones and seafood, not all at once), planning the last stages of a communal eating experiment in Frome, all while working on some projects for yet-to-be-released food magazines.
In any case, it does give me the option to try something a little different. Namely, a round-up of some particularly good writing I’ve read recently, and which you might like too. All of which on food, farming, and food culture – though not necessarily to do with Somerset.
Alt-meat does something its supporters said it shouldn’t do
One of the arguments for cultured (commonly referred to as ‘lab grown’) meat is that such food, and the facilities it relies on, can be administered to and managed by local communities, which is to say not necessarily owned and controlled by profit-driven corporations intent on selling more product.
That argument was dealt quite a blow recently when Impossible Foods – manufacturers of the Impossible Burger – won a patent dispute against rival firm Motif Foodworks over the precision-fermented protein heme.
(the Frome-based smallholder, social scientist, and author of Saying NO to a Farm-free Future) writes:I’ve warned in my previous writing on this topic – and it’s a fairly obvious point – that it’s easier to create corporate monopolies around manufactured plant-based or microbe-based proteins than it is around agricultural products.
I’ll leave this as an introduction to Chris’ ongoing criticism of these and other ‘ecomodernist’ approaches in supposedly fixing food and farming issues in the UK and rest of world:
Man walks into a pub
Will Hawkes is one of my favourite writers at the moment – if you, like me, enjoy drinking beer and/or going to pubs, and are at least loosely attached to London, then his monthly newsletter London Beer City is always a good read. He captures pub culture so well – this from his latest, upon finding a perch at The Black Friar in, um, Blackfriars:
Three men to my left are chatting - although it might be more honest to say two of them are listening to the other’s prejudices. A West Ham fan, he has strong if not entirely well-informed opinions. He rattles through mobile phones and football before alighting on foreigners, one subsection in particular. “They haven’t got no history,” he tells his two apparently long-suffering pals, one of whom offers half-hearted opposition. “No they ain’t … all they’ve got is Ned Kelly.” Australians? No. As his subsequent sentence clarifies, he’s talking about Americans.
As if on cue, a large group of Americans wander in behind a tour guide, all baseball caps, shades, colourful windcheaters and self-assured bafflement. My pint’s finished and I’m occupying a huge table, so I put it on the bar, tapping one of the Yanks on the shoulder to get by. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he says, and I tell him not to worry - it’s the angry West Ham fan in the corner he needs to worry about (full disclosure: I say this in my head).
One of Bristol’s best restaurants doesn’t look like you think it would
Not a particularly new piece of writing, but was reminded of it recently. It’s a review of Chez Candice, which by Bristol24/7 food writer
’s initial estimation (rudimentary horsebox-turned-kitchen, rusty tables, and a lack of basic plumbing) shouldn’t be anything to recommend.But that is where we must throw out the rule book, because in reality, the cornucopian sandwich I enjoyed in that greenhouse was one of the best things I’ve eaten all year and all those idiosyncrasies only add to the charm.
As I have pointed out on this newsletter, and will continue to point out in this newsletter, the best places to eat out are, often if not usually, on a farm. Guess where Chez Candice is situated.
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