Category — Worth Watching/Reading

Great stories this past Sunday — both in the main news section:

Harvesting quinoa (Equador)/by Didier Gentilhomme

A Food’s Global Success Creates a Quandry at Home: Quinoa is Now Too Expensive for Many Bolivians

Two thoughts: 1) we need to find a way to let the world benefit from a great source of nutrition like quinoa without taking it away from the people who have based their culinary culture on it, 2) will be interesting to see what, if anything, Bolivians substitute for quinoa

Black and White and Married in the South
Not about food at all, but couldn’t help wondering, hmmm…..what kind of awesome new twists on Southern cuisine might come out of this?

photo by Alessandro Scotti

Or is it? Western chefs and even some Japanese are snarking at the notion after the Michelin guides bestowed three stars on 12 restaurants in the Kansai-area, more than any other place in the world.

But even more interesting is the response of many Japanese chefs: that loyal customers have sustained them. Why would they want a bunch of crass foreigners coming to their restaurants?  See today’s Wall Street Journal for more.

I love Swiss chocolate — love, love, love — but it’s rare that while rolling it around my tongue, making pacts with the devil over “just one more piece” I wonder about how the Swiss actually came to possess chocolate as the national confection (no cocoa trees in the Alps.)

Turns out chocolate isn’t the only thing given to the world by Latino culture. “When Worlds Collide,” premiering on PBS Monday (Sept. 27) at 9pm, explores the transfer of culture that took place during the century after the “Old World” encountered the New. As to be expected, much of the communication was achieved through food.

“It was probably the most important transfer of foods in world history,” says James Amelang, a historian at the Autonomous University of Madrid. “Think of Italy without tomato sauce, Spain without gazpacho, Switzerland without its chocolate, and France — and everyone else — without its French fries.”

Sounds like a terrible world to me.