Hyperactive nutritionist and dear friend Lois Englberger in Pohnpei, Federated States of Micronesia tells me that the Community Food Data Tables of their Pohnpei case study have now been posted on the Centre for Indigenous Peoples’ Nutrition and Environment (CINE) website. Pohnpei was one of the twelve case studies in the global health and indigenous foods project led by CINE’s Prof. Harriet Kuhnlein. There’s background information and the main findings of the Pohnpei study based in Mand, a list of the research team members, as well as photos of Karat (banana), Meikole (seeded breadfruit variety), Simihden (well-liked giant swamp taro variety), pandanus and fish liver. Yummie.
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”.
Un-spinning “natural” skimmed milk
Muck and Mystery unspins “natural” skimmed milk.
Australian fruits
Aussies scour their flora for cool fruits.
Rice for diabetics launched
There’s a very odd story in The Hindu. It describes the launch of a “new variety of low glycemic rice“. Low glycemic foods are digested more slowly and create less of a spike in blood sugar, and have been pushed for diabetics, weight loss and sundry other benefits. One of the nice things about basmati rice, quite apart from its wonderful fragrance and flavour, is a relatively low glycemic index (although strictly speaking it has a medium GI). The new rice is not a basmati rice.
The rice, called Moolgiri, is marketed by Taj Mahal Agro Industries, and according to independent tests does indeed have a glycemic index of 54, just in the “low” category. That could be very interesting news, especially if Moolgiri is one of the many thousands of rice varieties that just happens to have this property. But the story got murkier the more I looked into it.
For a start, it is not a variety but a trade name. A rice with its own web site! There’s all kinds of information there, but not an awful lot about what exactly makes Moolgiri special. We learn that:
Moolgiri rice is a clear blend of tradition and technology. After ten years of continuous research Tajmahal Agro industries identified suitable traditional grain and developed innovative process to achieve Moolgiri.
There’s also a lot about how it is grown, tested and so on. But you have to dig deeper to discover that the variety itself is called manisamba, and that it
undergoes a patented process to remove 70% of the starch content.
So I did a little more digging, in SINGER, and discovered that there is a rice called Pamani samba, that it was collected in India, and that there is a sample (of unknown status) in the genebank at the International Rice Research Institute. And there the trail goes cold. There seems to be no further information about this wonderful variety. No “special traits” are noted.
All of which is both satisfying and unsatisfying (rather like a meal of high GI rice?). I found the variety. But no more about it. Maybe the special patented process could do the same to any old rice? I doubt it, but you never know. And maybe there are actually rice varieties out there that would have a low GI without a special patented process. I think that’s what I had been hoping, that there existed a rice that, polished and purified, would be have a naturally low glycemic index. Alas, it ain’t so.