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Food for hungry brains – Capra and Counihan

Recently I posted a link to Time’s What the World Eats feature (and later found a related article), and have since found an NPR radio feature on the book (Hungry Planet) that these images come from. The NPR page features some interesting background and interviews with the photographers, who enlisted an impressive list of writers to flesh the book out, including Marion Nestle, Alfred W. Crosby, Francine R. Kaufman, Charles C. Mann, Michael Pollan, Carl Safina, and even our upcoming lecturer Corby Kummer.

Last week we had four things to occupy our minds. Still reeling from Serge Latouche‘s lectures, we were offered some therapeutic time in the kitchen with Barny Haughton, as previously reported. Then we had two head-spinning days with Fritjof Capra, a day of gelato, and a concluding meeting with Carole Counihan. I have covered the gelato day separately.

Speaking mainly from his book, The Hidden Connections: A Science for Sustainable Living, Capra explained his theories about food’s systemic role, from the molecular to the environmental level. In brief, he said his view was all about ecosystems; that every living thing – even a cell – is part of a system, and we consider anything in isolation at our peril.

He also expanded on the point that had brought him to Carlo Petrini’s attention: that living things are divided and defined by food. For example, the two categories at the base of the kingdoms, bacteria and protists (single celled nucleated mechanisms), ingest food through semi-permeable cell membranes; the intake of food actually determines the molecular (biological) identity of the cell. Distinctions between the other three kingdoms – fungi, plants and animals (humans) – are also through food. Plants are defined through photosynthesis; fungi send enzymes outside the organism, digest the food outside the organism and then ingest it in digested form. Animals ingest and then digest food. In the human realm: biologically we are animals, but for us food also has its cultural dimension – which we share through communal, social and cultural events. So, he argued, you need to understand cognitive as well as cultural elements to fully understand human relationships with food.

He talked as well about the globalised world: its foundation on the whims of electronic investors, which he described as a global casino. No longer, he said, are companies measured by ‘bricks and mortar’, but by their place in ‘analyst expectations’ – which can change in a moment with immeasurable impact on the lives of the real people who work for those companies, while enriching a global elite. Like us, he had been greatly affected by the film Life Running Out of Control, and its message about our unprecedented destruction of and genetic tampering with existing life forms.

So: to survive on this planet, we must change the rules of the game, he says. The underlying principle that making money is the only company value is outdated and dangerous. Human values are not laws of natures; they can be changed. He urges us to consider a new global civil society, built on networks and an underlying pair of basic values: human dignity – the right to shelter, housing, food, security, free speech, educational and religious freedoms; and ecological sustainability.

Implementing this kind of change includes three areas: addressing the negative impact of globalisation, reshaping governing rules and institutions, through such organisations as the International Forum on Globalisation; agroecology, reshaping food and agriculture, oppositn genetically modified foods and promotion of sustainable agriculture through such organisations as Slow Food; and ecodesign, redesigning technology, buildings and physical structures for sustainability, through such institutions as the Rocky Mountain Institute.

It was a relief to have some tangible resources to explore and find concrete ways to counter the bleak global vision we’d been thinking and talking about. It made me think some more about what and how I think about food; and sustainability and ecosystems have got to have more to do with the total picture.

Barny Haughton had asked if we felt optimistic about the potential for people, companies, countries to change, even in the midst of unassailable evidence of environmental damage. He didn’t get much of an answer, but he himself observed rather bleakly that from his experience he thought people unlikely to change unless forced to do so.

Indeed. We can talk till we are blue in the face about the need for change, but will we give up our cars, our pre-packaged convenience foods, our comfortable heat and cold, our plastics and fossil fuels? Just one more little car ride to the mall when we could have walked. Just one glass bottle we can’t be bothered to wash for the recycling. Just one more package of pre-washed salad with individual portions of inedible dressing, all in full plastic armour. Who else can stop it?

We had concluding food anthropology meetings with Carole Counihan, who shared her research into food cultures in the San Luis Valley of Colorado, and had us share our mini-research (observation studies of local food-related places) with her. Mine was the quirky and I think laudable Progetto Latte, one of several interesting enterprises of the Bertinelli family.

Watching food

Mostly a visual week, this. We’ve had a series of talks on food television from the Swiss film maker Annette Frei Berthoud, who’s been showing us various clips (including a bit from Mondovino) and documentaries. We had one yesterday about cacao growers in South America, which talked about Kallari organic cocoa from Ecuador, and the Presidia product cacao nacional.

A couple of classes were cancelled this week and replaced with documentary screenings. Monday we had a Canadian film that our Don worked on, On the Road to Bocuse d’Or. Yesterday saw the return of Stefano Sardo who showed us several things including the Sierra Club’s neat little education tool, The True Cost of Food, and then the wordless and sobering Our Daily Bread which is something to see if you have ever wondered whence cometh those tomatoes, pork chops, apples, eggs, cucumbers..

Most shocking to me in Our Daily Bread was seeing the industrialisation of work: evidently the design of industrial food production facilities builds in the isolation of its employees. These are not jolly production lines where the workers banter across the conveyor belts or bond over coffee break; here we have blank-faced drones in full hygiene kit arranged so they never face one another and probably couldn’t speak if they did for the factory noise and the ear protection; handling fruit, vegetables, chicks, piglets, animal corpses and a whole lot of machines in an efficient, dispassionate flow. Do they take breaks together or are they always sent off in sequence so as not to interrupt the production chain? I wondered how the designers of these factories had managed to divest from their consciences and their planning all those great 20th century concepts like job satisfaction, employee motivation, team-building; they’ve stripped these jobs down to a cold essence. The perfect 21st century environment for an alienated 21st century workforce?

Pausing in Puglia

Greetings from Puglia, where pigs fly.

Here in the heel of Italy, the weather has turned wet and cold and I have passed on a trip to Lecce to catch up with a few things. Naturally now that I have made that decision the rain has lifted and the sun has come out… Ah well.

We arrived in Brindisi yesterday at a desperately early hour and carried on to IAMB, the Bari centre of the Mediterranean Agronomic Institute: we will be visiting the institute’s Chania centre when we visit Crete next month.

Our Escher moment at IAMB.

They offer research training to agronomists from Mediterranean countries to study such issues as irrigation and water management, aspects of organic agronomy, and methods of managing endemic insects such as the olive fly.

Clever way to catch crawly insects on an olive tree: a collar of fiberglass.

We had an incredibly good lunch of local dishes, many of them seafood, and then paused for half an hour or so to view the characteristic conical houses, the Trulli, which are found in abundance in the area but particularly in a town called Alberobello.

On we sped to our appointment with butchers in Martina Franca where we watched the making of capocollo, another cured meat made of a whole cut of pork.

This one is trimmed to size, seasoned and dried for a few days, then marinated in boiled wine must and white wine, then wrapped in pork intestine, tied in a tea towel, dried a bit longer, unwrapped, hung to dry, then briefly smoked, and then hung again until start to finish it has gone through its paces for a total of about 120-150 days. By then it is a firm, sweet, slightly salty and lightly smoky treat, made in small quantities between October and Easter, when the climate is suitable for the cool dry winds it needs over part of the process.

After that we had a surprise gift of music and dance from a local folk troupe, then watched a bit of hand-crafting of orecchiette and maccheroni and sat down to another wonderful meal. We had a couple of soups – zuppa verde and zuppa di carciofi – and some pastas including the ones we had seen made. There was, for the strong, a further buffet featuring such specialties as Puglian salumi, raw artichoke and cheese salad, and a kind of risotto made with orzo (barley) and mushrooms. Some pastry and fruit followed, and a merciful sleep.

This morning we had a talk by Gino di Mitri, author of a book on Tarantism, the historic and region-specific ailment of Puglia, attributed to the bite of a spider, and which may have its pagan roots in Dionysian rituals, while its Christian expression took the form of prayers to St. Paul, saint of spiders. Affecting mainly, but not exclusively, women, tarantism was treated by music and a highly energetic dance, in which the sufferer used her body to describe the circumstances of the bite, and which ultimately evoked a trance that would allow the sufferer reconciliation with the spirit of the spider. The musicians – a tambourine player (almost exclusively female), accompanied by violin, guitar and accordion – would diagnose the colour of the spider, which corresponded to the nature of the ailment: for example, a blue spider would express melancholy and disharmony with the community. Homosexuality, we were told, was often entwined with the condition. Women who did not want to marry might claim to have been bitten, and the contaminating nature of the spider bite might in any case render them unmarriageable.

Last week is already a blur, but we had some wonderful people talking to us, including Stuart Franklin who walked us through a fraction of his formidable portfolio and spoke movingly about his latest project and forthcoming book on the changing landscapes of Europe, a depressing tale of overproduction, land-grabbing, overdevelopment and standardisation. We also enjoyed Richard Baudains who led us through some of the issues of wine reviewing: the extreme ends of its readership and the difficulties of communicating subjective analysis of an edible subject. We saw some wonderful films as well, from the Slow Food on Film curator, including a fantastic documentary called Life Running Out of Control which encapsulated the complex issues of genetic engineering, including the contamination of organic seed stocks by GM crops in North America, the risks to the farmers of India of the dubious economics of GM seed developers, and the moral and practical issues of experimental animal development. Shades of Oryx & Crake…

Kitchen history and some pics

Had a great lecture today by visiting Belgian historian Peter Schollier, about kitchen workers in 19th century Brussels, with more to follow over the next couple of days, on food and identity, changes in food culture in Europe since 1945, and food culture in Italy vs Germany. He talked at first about the professional chef, how the title is bestowed rather than handed over on a piece of paper, having been earned through apprenticeship and observation.

It called to mind for me something said in We Feed the World, about how the industrial-scale food producers are run like cold-blooded corporations because there is no one at the top of these companies who worked their way up from the bottom, who understands farming as a learned skill.

In that context I particularly liked this text quoted in The Omnivore’s Dilemma: “Farming is not adapted to large scale operations because of the following reasons: Farming is concerned with plants and animals that live, grow, and die.”

And – timely, this – we’re looking forward to hearing about kitchen gardens from Antoine Jacobsohn this very week.


In case you were wondering where everyone was on Saturday.. I found them at the market on via Verdi. All of them. And their socks.


The Italian rule of construction seems to be: never use one sign when you could use eight. Or eleven.


Fido Park, en route to Bologna.


Colorno this evening. Daylight! Waning daylight, but… daylight!!

Piazza della Pace, by day…

…and by night.

We Feed The World

I watched We Feed The World the other night and it was more around the troubling subjects this year has been opening up for me. The film’s ironic opening and closing image shows corn cobs and husks being burnt for industrial fuel. Its title comes from the slogan for Pioneer Seeds, which appears to be the Monsanto of Europe. In the film, one of the company’s senior directors took a tour through Romania, observing that the small scale production there was a reminder of how European farming used to look about fifty years ago, and he hoped things would not change too fast there but the big companies are already moving in, and it probably won’t be long before their world changes for the worse. Some of the things that stayed with me from the film:

  • The initial subsidisation of hybrid crops (the example given was eggplant – which looks better but tastes nowhere near as good as traditional eggplants) by the Romanian government so that farmers buy cheap seed, reap the profits, and then the subsidies are removed the next year, leaving the farmers without saved seed from traditional crops, unable to plant the reproductively sterile hybrid seed, and eating into their earnings to buy the more expensive hybrid seed. And thus starts the cycle of uneconomic overproduction that must surely lead to selling out to industrial giants. And doing what after that: working in some peripheral industry for a poor hourly wage?
  • The wholesaling of Brazilian rainforest which is being systematically razed to plant genetically modified soya for European farm animals. The soil is good, but unsuitable for soya so all the nutrients must be brought in to make that happen. And it means that all the efforts to keep GM out of the European food market are in vain because the animals are eating it.
  • Vast areas of southern Spain are covered in warehouses growing the amount of vegetables needed to feed Europe. More monoculture, more hybrids, and lots of impoverished farm workers from Northern Africa, driven out of their homes and livelihoods by— cheap greenhouse vegetables from Europe. A story very much like the one told in Chicken Madness, where African chicken farmers were being driven out of business by cheap frozen chicken from Europe and Brazil.
  • Small scale fisherman are being removed from the equation by the EC which aims to make all fishing industrial-scale. Which means no more fresh fish for the markets, only the product of trawling deeper and deeper and selling anything and everything they can dredge from the ocean because there’s less and less of what we want. Fish that’s been sitting in the hold for a couple of weeks having died on the nets that are in the sea for 10 or 12 hours does not, the film said, compare with fish brought out of the nets by hand after a couple of hours and sold in the market later that same day.
  • The CEO of Nestle is captured giving a chilling talk about water. What he regards as an “extreme position” is that water is required for human life, and should be a human right. But he, his company (which just happens to be the market leader in bottled water) think it should be considered a “foodstuff” and priced and sold accordingly. He also says that we’ve never had it so good; we’re better fed with more money than any time in history. Yes, we agree, looking at his sleek and well-tended self, you probably are. But not so much those Africans living in greenhouse-shantytowns in Spain, or the farmers starving in Brazil and drinking unclean water while locally grown food is exported for animal feed. Or all the farmers and agricultural workers driven out of business, together with all the businesses that used to serve them.
  • Quote from the poultry breeder, whose mass produced chickens were shown from egg to packaging: “All the market’s interested in is the price. Taste is not really a consideration.” Nor are a lot of other things, from the looks of the world we’ve created.