Quick roundup of the diversity of Italian summer drinks.
Southern cooking
“A shared love of okra can unite us.” Col. Sanders unavailable for comment.
Reasons to be green: drink
I wonder how many pesticide residues make it from grain ethanol past distillation into liquor? Still, there may be other reasons to favour an organic tipple, like the fact that it encourages biodiversity. Good greens have also given up bottles, and corks, in favour of plastic boxes. But if the drinks industry doesn’t use corks, there’s almost no reason to preserve the groves of cork oaks. And plastic boxes can’t be recycled. Or can they? It’s enough to make my head spin.
Rice art
Unusual, stunning use of variation in rice leaf colour in Japan. Via Salon.
Rescuing the American chestnut
You know, these Nibbles (the short, soundbite-type things which appear at the top of the right sidebar of this page) are fun to do, but sometimes you end up downplaying, or over-simplifying, an important, interesting — and interestingly complex — story. Take what I said about the American chestnut a few days ago. The recent history of Castanea dentata is proud and tragic 1, and efforts to bring it back from the brink of annihilation well-nigh heroic. To imply, as I did, that these efforts were confined to hybridizing the American with the Chinese chestnut was justified only by the necessity for extreme brevity. In fact, of course, it is not just hybridization but repeated back-crossing. And not just interspecific crossing but also painstaking crossing among the few remaining pure American chestnuts, as reported in the article that prompted me to revisit the original story and hopefully make amends for my earlier flippancy.