Happy Thanksgiving
After a week of grey, Austin has reverted to its sunny, blue skies.
It seems like the New Year, the first day that I have not had looming deadlines in the past couple of years. Cuisine and Empire is out, the first push to promote is over, and we’re more or less settled in Austin.
I’m looking forward to moving on to new projects: a talk on wheat, one of my favorite subjects, for the Borlaug100 conference; another on cuisine and empire in the Pacific for a series on Asian and Pacific cuisines organized by Sam Yamashita at Pomona; and publishing the extraordinary story of how and why convent sweets swept the globe in the sixteenth century. I’m even beginning to dip my toe back into history of science.
And then I want to continue exploring the United States as an exotic land, take time to really make friends in Austin, hang pictures in my study, organize my library, and master the latest round of electronic gadgets , always such a mix of the frustrating and the satisfying.
Not to mention my blog. I have a backlog as long as my arm of ideas about food and food politics that either didn’t fit into Cuisine and Empire or that have occurred to me since I sent it off to the publisher. I can’t wait to bring the design up to date, fix some of the glitches, and post more regularly.
- Thanksgiving, Or How To Eat American Politics
- Hunger is best sauce. Or the republican culinary tradition
We don’t celebrate Thanksgiving here in Oz, but I wish you a happy family day for yours, Rachel. And I look forward to more of your thoughts and writing to come. Cheers!
Happy Thanksgiving, Rachel — a deliciously leisurely one at last!
Ah! what grand schemes you have! We will all be glad to see more blog posts.
I look forward for your ‘talk on wheat.’ Just some thoughts from Holland.
1. In Holland at these days you’ve almost defend yourself if you say: I love grains, I love bread. Paleo’s and the translation of Wheat Belly and the book of a Belgian autor Kris Verburgh have put bread and grain in a bad daylight, specially among the ‘yuppen.’ So this is a nice subject for study, Rachel. What makes bread and grains such a subject that should disappear?
2. The paleo’s say, people didn’t eat grains. I cannot believe them. When you are hungry and you find ripe seeds, than you pick them and put them in your mouth and you chew on it and you ‘get’ carbohydrates, fats and protein for free. More over, I suppose that people who crushed seeds, mixed them with water, saw that it was going to ferment, found out that the porridge got more digestible, well, of course from than they knew it and use it. How can people think that people in those days dit not know about this?
3. Funny for history: before 1970 Holland got much wheat from the USA. Because of the importfee law at 1970, the wheat sellers looked for wheat from Europe.
4. The b.d. organisation (from Rudolf Steiner) always has done lot of research for farmers and bakers in Holland to bake with Dutch grain, specially by the Louis Bolk institute. They are convinced that it is important to have a ‘circle’ on the farms and also to have small circles of farmers/bakers.
5. I am making a new book on breadbaking; had an interview with a windmiller in the south of Holland, Zuid Limburg. The miller told me that his father milled ‘wheat and rye’, and that the boundaries where clear. Rye flour was for the mineworkers: compact bread, full of energy. Where there were no mines, they ate wheat bread.
Nowadays he (water)mills wheat, rye and spelt (triticum spelta) as thirth grain.
The German customers want much bran; the French and Belgian customers want less bran; the Dutch want something in between. So. Grain is culture.
6. In Holland it’s trendy now to bake with grain ‘from the region’. So that makes the bakers in doubt: should we add more improvers to make sort of ‘well accepted’ bread or should we educate our customers in eating more compact bread?
7. There is another trend to sow old sorts of wheat, rye, barley. For instance the German Biobakker, in Ahaus, is quite specialised in it. They have 20 farmers in Holland and Germany who grow the grains, where they bake breads from. The raw materials for there breads are very clear and the breads are beautifull. Not only the breads. Also the grains. I picked some of them to use as picture material for my new book. I am not a Steiner adept, but I like very much that farmers try to find ways to sow what they want to sow. In fact I think the grains should be free, not be possessed by Monsanto, Kamut and how their names are. Should it be possible to have more of these circles, instead of 10 big companies who let at last disappear the biodiversity of seeds, of way to work without artificial manure and pesticides? Well, enough ‘food for thought’ for now and looking forward to the text of your ‘talk on wheat.’
It’s just in the gestation stage now, Ineke. But I’ll keep you posted.