Emeka Okafor over at Timbuktu Chronicles points to a blog that sounds really fascinating: BetumiBlog. Betumi is the African Culinary Network. It “connects anyone who delights in African cuisine, foodways, and food history.” BetumiBlog is run by Fran Osseo-Asare, who is clearly incredibly knowledgeable and enthusiastic about African food and cooking. She has contributed a chapter on Food and Foodways to the Sub-Saharan Africa volume of The Greenwood Encyclopedia of World Popular Culture ((Edited by Dennis Hickey, with Gary Hoppenstand the general editor of the series.)). That includes a very useful table summarizing the many different ways Africans prepare their starchy staples. My personal score is nine.
Cheese and olives
A column in the current issue of The Economist uses the example of Gruyère and Emmental cheeses in Switzerland to make the case that, if Europe wants to protect its traditional farmers and producers — and the agrobiodiversity which underpins their livelihoods — in the face of globalization, moving upmarket and selling expensive niche products to rich foreigners may be a better bet than “to deploy subsidies and tariffs to compete artificially on price.” Which is mostly what’s happening now.
[EU farm Commissioner] Mariann Fischer Boel … has urged food producers to focus on quality, heritage and new markets. This summer, she told exporters that import tariffs will move in only one direction in the coming years: “downwardsâ€.
Of course, that will require marketing savvy. It will also require a robust quality-monitoring and labelling systems. Because, as a New Yorker piece on the “slippery business” of trading in fake Italian extra virgin olive oil entertainingly demonstrates this week, there are plenty of wise guys around ready to exploit loopholes and weaknesses.
Later: Cheese, olives, and wine!
Bon appetit
Never rains but it pours. More food stuff from bookforum.com.
Down on the levee
A riverine trifecta today, describing threats to the biodiversity — including agrobiodiversity — associated with major rivers around the world…
From Italy, news that students and teachers from the University of Gastronomic Sciences at Pollenzo (founded in 2004 by Slow Food guru Carlo Petrini) — over 150 of them — Â will travel down the Po River watershed by bicycle and boat in September and October. They’ll be giving the river and its valley a source-to-delta checkup, they say, diagnosing their ills but also identifying their abiding strengths — ecological, cultural and, presumably, agricultural.
Further east, Hubert von Goisern, an Austrian musician, has done something similar — but in his own way — for the Danube. He’s spent the summer giving a series of concerts down the river for a WWF campaign to raise awareness of the damage that planned development projects will do to the habitat of the Danube sturgeon. Plans to straighten and deepen the course of the river to facilitate shipping are expected to affect a thousand-kilometer stretch, destroying a unique natural and cultural heritage.
And further east still, Nguyen Huu Chgiem, the son of a Mekong delta rice farmer, reflects on how climate change, deforestation and saltwater intrusion are affecting Vietnam’s “rice basket.” And what he can do about it now that he’s a professor of environment and natural resources management.
Food politics links
There are links to a whole bunch of interesting stuff on “Why our food choices matter” on bookforum.com today.