Talk to Me About Food

The 2024 explosion of cicadas didn’t happen here in North Texas. This was going to be a once in a lifetime event. A coincidence of thirteen-year and seventeen-year broods that hasn’t occurred since Thomas Jefferson fretted over pests in his Monticello gardens. Maybe it has been a bigger deal in the upper Midwest where the bugs were expected to darken the skies. If broods XIX and XIII have made national news or the viralverse, I don’t know about it.

I did come across cicada recipes published in anticipation of the bumper crop of bugs. Some thoughts on the cicada as a food and on cicadas in general...

What follows now are musings about the forces impacting what we choose to eat AWAY from home 

Priya Krishna, a contributing writer to the New York Times food section shared her assessment of what she and her team discovered surveying 121 menus from restaurants around the country in a story called “The Menu Trends That Define Dining Now.” This was in the February 7th 2024 edition. It's mostly a light-hearted take on what is on menus and observations about the menu itself. 

In a previous episode I explored themes Ms. Krishna identifies around what’s being served. On this episode I muse about the ways restaurants are serving up the menu; the physical object you find on the table or wall or otherwise conveyed in the establishment, or the menu that’s displayed on your personal screen.

On this episode of Talk to Me About Food I share top line findings from "The Menu Trends That Define Dining Right Now," by Priya Krishna, writing in The New York Times. I also muse specifically on Caesar salad which is one of items that's hot across the country from the survey of 121 menus that underpins Ms. Krishna's article.

This episode is one in a mini-series about a range of soups and simple foods from different food traditions that are suggested, prescribed, maybe sometimes even foisted on someone feeling under the weather.

I consider a basic udon soup. Where it’s the bounty of the land that nourishes a chicken, it’s the bounty of the ocean and sea washing up on every millimeter of Japan’s coastline that infuses udon noodle soup with its curative power.

Marc Matsumoto talks me through how to make dashi; the basic fish stock at the heart of a good bowl of udon noodle soup and okayu, a rice porridge.

Marc is a private chef, culinary consultant and TV host with a base of clients around the world. He grew up and worked for a time in the US, but is now based in Tokyo. He has a website, norecipes.com, that teaches you basic cooking techniques but also offers a range of recipes from different cuisines, with a skew to Japanese food, including a basic dashi and udon noodle varieties.

How much, if at all, does the food you eat define who you are and where you come from? Do the choices around what food you buy, where you buy it, how you prepare it and even how you dispose of it subscribe you to a specific community (willingly or unwittingly)?

In this episode I muse about "gastronativism" -  a word coined in a book titled Gastronativism, Food, Identity, Politics by Fabio Parasecoli. The author, a professor of food studies at NYU, defines gastronativism as the use of food as a political tool to specify and then galvanize a community into action.

Brief musings around discovering overnight oats. Beats regular old hot oatmeal any day of the week.

Sandor Katz, a self-described fermentation revivalist and author of three books on the topic helps me unpack fermentation. What it is and why it’s so engrained in all food cultures. He talks about the role of fermentation in preserving food then explains how fermentation plays a vital role in helping us get the most of the nutritional content of food by breaking food down into easier-to-digest elements, like amino acids. Apparently, we don’t benefit from the full nutritional potency of manufactured, fermented foods. The better to make your own yogurt or sauerkraut. We also talk through how fermentation brings out strong flavor profiles. Acquired tastes, for most.

We are again turning to fermentation to show us the way. We are leveraging one of nature’s fundamental organic processes – a single-celled fungus digesting sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide to make bread, for example - to learn how to provision ourselves in a more sustainable way.

Bioengineers are leading the way. They are learning to mimic the natural fermentation process to create completely new foods and food ingredients through precision fermentation and biomass fermentation.

Audrey Gyr, from Good Foods Institute, a non-profit organization which promotes alternative proteins to animal-based ones, helps explain these Fermentation 2.0 approaches.

On this episode I consider healing meals; traditional dishes believed to help cure what ails you, physically, emotionally, even spiritually. 

First, I reflect on my conversation with Ashley Thuthao Keng Dam, a PhD candidate in Eco-gastronomy, Education, and Society at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy. I recently came across their blog post entitled Curative Cuisines of Cambodia. The article reflects on ethnographic research done in rural Cambodia, looking at the impact of seasonal changes on how plant-based traditional medicine complements maternity diets. This is a very focused, maybe esoteric piece of research. But, I think it offers possibilities around how food can cure or heal that go beyond traditional Khmer medicine and what pregnant mothers should consume.

I also share snippets from my chat with Amy Foote, Executive Chef at the Alaska Native Medical Center. The traditional food she serves is one important aspect of the more culturally relevant care patients get there. Donations from hunters really help Chef Amy deliver traditional meals - like seal soup - patients really miss and ask for. She explains how the Traditional Native Foods Initiative works and what it means to the patients.

I wonder if we can all do more with healing dishes; curative cuisines as Thao coined them. To “eat right” when we’re out of sorts and out of balance despite our best efforts to follow a healthy diet. I suggest thought starters that go beyond boiling milk or making a cup of tea for someone in need. Something more  than your go-to soup. Or toast, rice, oatmeal or plain yogurt.

In this audio blog post I consider Squareat; a start-up meal delivery company that delivers a box of brownie-sized pieces of animal protein (like chicken breast) and same-size, same-shape squares of veggie and grain side dishes. 21st century food to ponder while you enjoy your Thanksgiving meal.

In this Halloween audio blog post I muse about the results of an experiment where a human gene that codes for obesity was implanted into the genome of a potato. The spuds grew to be 50% larger! What could be wrong with that? The research is real; only some of the implications conjured here are plausible...