Conflict between cattle — and foot and mouth disease — and wildlife in Uganda.
Book: Artisanal cheeses in the US
Carlo Petrini of Slow Food waxes lyrical over the growth in American artisanal cheeses.
To celebrate these cheeses, I’d like to quote the great Italian writer Italo Calvino who, in his book Palomar, poetically described the value of the diversity of artisan cheeses:
Behind every cheese there is a pasture of a different green under a different sky: meadows caked with salt that the tides of Normandy deposit every evening; meadows scented with aromas in the windy sunlight of Provence; there are different flocks, with their stablings and their transhumances; there are secret processes handed down over the centuries.
From now on we can ideally add to these images the vast expanses of America with their “different greens and different skies”.
Petrini wrote the foreword to “Atlas of American Artisan Cheese”.
National Pollinator Week
It is National Pollinator Week in the US.
Eat weeds
A weed is just a plant in the wrong place. Round here, alas, three of my favourite weeds — purslane (Portulaca oleracea), amaranth (Amaranthus sp.) and fat hen (Chenopodium album) — are very much in the wrong places; on the streets and by the tips where they are the object of far too many dogs’ attention. If they weren’t, I’d hurry over to Vindu’s blog to print out her recipe for Thotakura pappu, dal with amaranth leaves.
Come rainy season, our backyard used to be so full of these plants almost like weeds that the only dishes on the table would be thotakura stir fry or thotakura pappu (actually it still is like that back home)
Perfection, really. Eat the weeds and do yourself some dietary good at the same time. But it does raise the whole thorny question of what to call those species. Neglected? Underutilized? Only by scientists and the mainstream. For local people who depend on diversity, they’re neither.
Minneapolis seminars
If I were in Minneapolis, this is where I’d be.