Category: Markets

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More bhang for your buck

Yesterday’s Nibble about the way a high value-added agrobiodiversity product is produced in the Chu Valley of Kazakhstan…

It begins with a freshly showered person riding naked for hours on a clean, washed horse inside a two-meter-high “forest” … Afterwards, the human body and that of the horse are covered with a thick layer of resin mixed with sweat. This produces a substance that is usually dark brown in color, which is then thoroughly scraped off the human and horse’s bodies. The mixture is subsequently pressed, molded into bars, and dried.

…elicited from Dirk (on Facebook, via) the observation that in India “they must have a better method to collect concentrate…” The resulting product is shown above, thanks to ezola’s Flickr stream and a Creative Commons license. And thanks to Tom Maisey, and the same source, we can also see how the stuff is marketed in (some parts of) India.

Alas, I could find no conclusive photographic documentation of how they do things in the Chu Valley, although a music video and a movie trailer give some tantalizing hints.

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Nibbles: Gardens, Food/nutrition jargon, Photos, Pacific livestock, Durian descriptors, Oysters, Thai breeders, Meat-reducing, Gender, Chinese fortification, G20

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Punjabis saving iconic Italian cheese

It was almost exactly 345 years ago that Samuel Pepys famously dug a hole in his garden in order to save his parmesan cheese from the Great Fire of London:

…and I took the opportunity of laying all the papers of my office that I could not otherwise dispose of. And in the evening Sir W. Pen and I did dig another, and put our wine in it; and I my Parmazan cheese, as well as my wine and some other things.

I like to think the great diarist would have been fascinated to know both that production of that caseinic wonder continues to this day around Parma (with the no doubt invaluable protection of the European Union), and that it is currently largely in the hands of Sikh immigrants:

In the middle of the Po Valley, where the xenophobic Northern League has its core voters, there is now a symbol that coexistence between different cultures and religions can work very well. In Pessina Cremonese, between Mantua and Cremona, the largest Sikh temple in Europe was recently inaugurated. And all agree: without this Indian folk and religious community this area would be much poorer, and typical Italian products such as Parmesan cheese would perhaps be no more.