Tag: food

The mythical pre-history of plant-based meat

In reading Matthew Cobb‘s fascinating new book on the history of ethics and genetic engineering I came across this quote from Martin Apple, president of the world’s first transgenic plant research institute, the International Plant Research Institute, in 1981:

We are going to make pork chops grow on trees!

Of course, long before the first soy latte was even a twinkling in the woke barrista’s eye, people were concerned with plant-based substitutes for meat and dairy for religious reasons. And this reminded me obliquely of the myth of the barnacle goose.

In the Middle Ages it was widely believed that this bird grew from its snout from trees hanging over the water, or out of a barnacle attached to the bottoms of ships or loose pieces of wood. This raised a conundrum for medieval rabbis: For purposes of kashrut, should these geese be classed as fish, meat, or something else?

Some authorities said they were neither fish nor fowl, but rather like shellfish were impermissible no matter how they were slaughtered. But Rabbi Mordechai ben Hillel Ashkenazi of Regensburg said that, effectively, they are fruits:

Regarding birds that grow on trees, there are those that say that they do not require shechitah [ritual slaughter], because they do not reproduce sexually and are like any wood. (Quoted in Sacred Monsters: Mysterious and Mythical Creatures of Scripture, Talmud and Midrash, Nosson Slifkin, p. 319.)

Truly the world’s first plant-based meat!

Diwali sweets and the tofu-eating wokerati

I’m always fascinated by the way foods define people’s identities — their own and other people’s — and particularly how they are politicised, used to recognise one’s own folk and reject the Other. Bush-era attacks on “latte-sipping liberals” made a big impression on me (“sipping” was a good touch there — not just expensive coffee, but effeminate sipping), as did the scandalised mockery of Obama when he remarked in 2008 on the price of arugula. (According to some, arugula was also effeminate.)

I find the ethnic dimension particularly interesting. It is no coincidence that these two foods that lefties were ridiculed for consuming have Italian names. Jews, of course, have always been attacked for their exotic food preferences, as with the probably anti-Semitic attack on Ed Miliband for looking insufficiently natural when eating a bacon sandwich.

Nowhere is the political valence of ethnic foods more complex than with Britain’s Asian population. Whereas I grew up in the US thinking “Asian” meant by default Chinese and Japanese, in the UK the term refers primarily to the former colonies of Indian subcontinent. Hence the justified pride, in the whole country, in the Indian community, and particularly among the conservatives, in having the first prime minister from an Asian background.

Interestingly, this was emphasised by the King providing Diwali sweets (marking this week’s Hindu festival) when Sunak visited the palace recently. But these gestures of pride and acceptance are not extended to Asians and their foods when their heritage is not British colonial. Particularly striking was the attack in Parliament just last week by the Tory Home Secretary on the “tofu-eating wokerati”.

Hindus can be good Britons and eat Diwali sweets, but those who indulge in other Asian foods are foreign, most especially if they don’t even have the excuse of ancestry. At least the Chinese eat pork…

Exotic animal farming

I remember when people were muttering about Covid-19 being all the fault of the weird Chinese and their weird obsession with eating weird animals like pangolins.

So now we have a second version of Covid, that may start a completely novel pandemic, and it comes from the weird Europeans and their weird obsession with wearing the fur of weird animals like minks. Apparently, it was well known that Covid was spreading widely among the minks, but the animals were too valuable to give up on, so they tried to get away with just culling the obviously sick ones. And now we can just hope that they can get the new plague out of Denmark under control before it becomes a second pandemic.

But the people who advocate just giving up on eating and wearing animals are still treated as something between dreamy mystics and lunatics…

Capitalist omelettes

Communists are routinely stigmatised by association with the adage “You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs”, which is taken to summarise their willingness to excuse present cruelty in the name of never-realised lofty future goals.. In the 1930s it was sufficiently widespread that the hero of Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here exclaimed

If I ever hear that ‘can’t make an omelet’ phrase again, I’ll start doing a little murder myself! It’s used to justify every atrocity under every despotism, Fascist or Nazi, or Communist or American labor war. Omelet! Eggs! By God, sir, men’s souls and blood are not eggshells for tyrants to break!

Sick of hearing this justification on a tour of the Soviet Union in the early days of Stalin’s rule, Panait Istrati famously retorted, “All right, I can see the broken eggs. Where’s this omelet of yours?”

Anyway, these days the true radical utopians are the capitalists, and so we have seen the right wing in the US — and elsewhere — following Donald Trump in obsessing over stock market declines in a pandemic. “Don’t let the cure be worse than the disease.” The deadly cure being a reduction in economic activity, and the disease being… an actual often fatal disease. The epitome of this tendency was the Lieutenant Governor of Texas proclaiming that the older generation — in which he includes himself, to be fair — needs to be ready to die in the current pandemic to avert destruction from the American economy: “keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren”. In other words, we need to break some elderly (and young immune-compromised) so our grandchildren can have the omelettes.

Except they’ll still have to eat their omelettes indoors, because the same people insist on boiling the planet. More eggs, more omelettes.

The bourgeoisie will not only sell the rope for their own hanging. On the scaffold they will try to underbid the hangman to take on the hanging themselves, and sell off part of the rope as really more than is strictly needed to carry out the task.

Capitalist utopianism, it might be mentioned, was beautifully summarised by Joe Hill in his song The Preacher and the Slave:

You will eat by and by
In that glorious land above the sky
Work and pray, live on hay
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.

The meddling EU

I think maybe the leftist Euroskeptics have a point:

EU to ban meat and dairy names for plant-based foods

Henceforth mushroom steaks will be called “fungus slabs”. The meat of a nut will be the “nut turd”. Coconut milk is exempted, but what was formerly called coconut meat will now be known as “interior coconut lumps”.

This has nothing at all to do with protecting meat and dairy producers, and it has everything to do with the outcry from carnivorous consumers who buy “veggie sausages” as a main course to go with their veggies, and then are outraged to find that they’re not really “sausages” at all.

Mother’s milk may only be referred to as human mammary excretions. The “milk of Paradise” that Kubla Khan drank will, in future editions, be “slime of heaven”.

Weirdly, “salad cream” is exempted. The German Käsefüsse (cheese feet), for stinky feet will still be permitted, owing to their animal origin.
Strangest of all is the restriction on the word burger. While it has its origins in the word hamburger, from a meat dish common in Hamburg — oddly, this has not received AOC protection — among the earliest uses of the term “burger” is for the vegeburger, attested by the OED in a 1945 advertisement. The word “hamburger”, on the other hand, will be banned entirely, as it tends to promote cannibalism.
Henceforth a nothingburger will be called a nullity on a bun.
“Sausage” is only allowed to be of animal origin, even though the word has its origin in the Latin salsicia, meaning “salted”. And the English word meat itself, unlike the German Fleisch (and its English cognate flesh) has traditionally meant any kind of food, as in the phrase “meat and drink”, and the now somewhat archaic word sweetmeats.
Performances of Romeo and Juliet in the EU will now require that the third act be revised to remove the line

Thy head is as full of quarrels, as an egg is full of meat.

Because eggs have no meat, and it would be misleading to suggest to the audience that they do.

Schrödinger’s menu

I was just rereading Erwin Schrödinger’s pathbreaking 1944 lectures What is Life? which is often praised for its prescience — and influence — on the foundational principals of genetics in the second half of the twentieth century. At one point, in developing the crucial importance of his concept of negative entropy as the driver of life,  he remarked on the misunderstanding that “energy” is what organisms draw from their food. In an ironic aside he says

In some very advanced country (I don’t remember whether it was Germany or the U.S.A. or both) you could find menu cards in restaurants indicating, in addition to the price, the energy content of every dish.

Also prescient!

How odd that the only biological organisms that Schrödinger is today commonly associated with are cats…

FDA sample menu with energy content

Written wordplay

Isaac Asimov, in a side-remark in his Treasury of Humor, mentioned a conversation in which a participant expressed outrage at a politician blathering about “American goals”. “His specialty is jails, not goals,” and then seeming to expect some laughter. It was only on reflection that Asimov realised that the speaker, who was British, had spelled it gaols in his mind.

I was reminded of this by this Guardian headline:

Labour has shifted focus from bingo to quinoa, say swing voters

The words bingo and quinoa look vaguely similar on the page, but they’re not pronounced anything alike. Unlike Asimov’s example, this wordplay is in writing, so spelling is important. My feeling is that wordplay has to be fundamentally sound-based, so this just doesn’t work for me. Maybe the Guardian editors believe in visual wordplay.

Alternatively, maybe they don’t know how quinoa is pronounced.

Warring factions seek EU mediation

That was my immediate translation when I saw this headline yesterday:

Theresa May and David Davis to travel to Brussels for urgent Brexit talks

Obviously the British are trying to create an impression of comity with the EU negotiators, to show that misunderstandings are being swept aside, and the negotiations are now going to run smoothly. An impression that is not fostered by this:

Though Downing Street insisted the dinner had long been in May’s diary, EU sources suggested it may have been more last-minute, but were not able to provide confirmation.

On the other hand, given the warnings about the security of post-Brexit food supplies, maybe they were just hoping to get a solid meal.

Bearing your cross to Cadbury

The Church of England wants people to know the true meaning of Christian faith, which is, apparently, chocolate eggs. Official church spokesmen have attacked Cadbury’s and the National Trust for conducting “egg hunts” without mentioning Easter. It’s just like when Peter denied his Lord three times, and then left his name off the adverts for his Galilee fish shop.

The chocolate-maker retorts “it clearly used the word Easter on its packaging and in its marketing”, and no greater love hath a man than to use his suffering and death in packaging and marketing. But the Archbishop of York* says that’s not enough:

The Archbishop of York said calling the event the Cadbury Egg Hunt was like “spitting on the grave” of the firm’s Christian founder, John Cadbury… He said if people were to visit Cadbury World in Birmingham “they will discover how Cadbury’s Christian faith influenced his industrial output.”

I think we can all agree that Easter is a time for all Christian believers to reflect on industrial output.

And despite the politically correct marketing gobbledegook of the Cadbury’s representatives — “We invite people from all faiths and none to enjoy our seasonal treats” — it is appropriate to expect that people should think of the Church of England when looking at a hollow shell stuffed with unhealthful, cloyingly sweet goo.

I’m reminded of the stories I heard from East Germany about attempts to rechristen the Christmas tree to Jahresendbaum [end-of-year tree] and the traditional angel on top to Jahresendflügelpuppe [end-of-year winged doll]. Christmas itself was supposed to be called Fest des Friedens [festival of peace]. I’m not sure if these were jokes, or whether they referred to genuine government initiatives — maybe both — but here is one report of these designations actually being used, and even compulsory.

* This statement really should have come from the Archbishop of Cadbury…