Quotulatiousness

March 14, 2019

Tyler Cowen’s tips on visiting India

Filed under: Food, India — Tags: — Nicholas @ 05:00

Although the blog post is nearly a month old, I completely missed it when it was first posted. It’s called “How to travel to India”, but it’s really more about how to get the best of your visit while you’re there. I’ve never been to India (and it seems unlikely I’ll ever get to visit), but from reading the accounts of other visitors, Tyler has some excellent advice here:

4. Every single part of India is interesting and worth visiting, as far as I can tell after five trips. That said, I find Bangalore quite over-visited relative to its level of interest.

5. My favorite places in India are Mumbai, Chennai, Rajasthan, and Kolkaata. Still, I could imagine a rational person with interests broadly similar to my own having a quite different list.

6. India has the best food in the world. It is not only permissible but indeed recommended to take all of your meals in fancy hotel restaurants. Do not eat the street food in India (and I eat it virtually everywhere else). It is also permissible to find two or three very good hotel restaurants — or even one — and simply run through their menus. You won’t be disappointed.

7. Invest in a very, very good hotel. It is affordable, and you will need it, and it will be a special memory all its own.

8. Being driven around in the Indian countryside is terrifying (and I have low standards here, I do this all the time in other non-rich countries). If it were safer, I would see many more parts of India. But it isn’t. So I don’t.

I’ve posted this before, and it doesn’t really relate to Tyler’s travel tips, but I still find it amusing:

India as seen by a cool Bangalorean

March 12, 2019

9 British Dishes Everyone Should Try – Anglophenia Ep 2

Filed under: Britain, Food, History, India — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Anglophenia
Published on 22 May 2014

British food has a bad reputation, but Siobhan Thompson’s here to set the record straight, offering nine tasty U.K. dishes that will quiet the naysayers.

Visit the Anglophenia blog at http://www.bbcamerica.com/anglophenia

Photos via Fotolia.

Follow Anglophenia on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/anglophenia
Follow Siobhan Thompson on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/vornietom

March 10, 2019

Irish Potato Famine – The American Wake – Extra History – #4

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Food, History, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Extra Credits
Published on 9 Mar 2019

Not all of the 214,000 Irish immigrants in 1847 made it safely to their new homes — and of those who did, many faced classism and xenophobia and even bullying from the “Ulster Irish” or “Scots-Irish” folks who had previously established themselves. In New York City specifically, the Five Points neighborhood became an infamous center of conflict — while local Irish-American John Joseph Hughes became instrumental in restoring Irish Catholicism.

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March 4, 2019

Irish Potato Famine – Black ’47 – Extra History – #3

Filed under: Britain, Food, History — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Extra Credits
Published on 2 Mar 2019

Watching the Irish suffer from the view of London, Sir Charles Trevelyan believed that the potato famine was part of God’s will. Inspired by the meritocracy-based philosophy of starvation that Thomas Malthus held, Treveylan created a relief plan with the sole goal of protecting the markets, and not the people. Thus the new year of “Black ’47” brought chaos and horror to the Irish people.

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February 26, 2019

Irish Potato Famine – The Corn Laws – Extra History – #2

Filed under: Britain, Food, History — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Extra Credits
Published on 23 Feb 2019

Prime Minister Robert Peel was caught between the political pressures of the Whigs and the Tories. He repealed the corn laws in Britain to keep food prices low in Britain, with the secondary goal of famine relief for Ireland, but that bureaucratic multi-tasking would not help the Irish very much…

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February 23, 2019

How a statistical error became the key argument in the “everyone must turn vegan” movement

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Food, Health, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At The Conversation, Frank M. Mitloehner explains how a flawed statistic — comparing numbers derived from non-parallel bases — evolved into one of the most widely quoted arguments for governments forcing people to give up meat in their diet:

As the scale and impacts of climate change become increasingly alarming, meat is a popular target for action. Advocates urge the public to eat less meat to save the environment. Some activists have called for taxing meat to reduce consumption of it.

A key claim underlying these arguments holds that globally, meat production generates more greenhouse gases than the entire transportation sector. However, this claim is demonstrably wrong, as I will show. And its persistence has led to false assumptions about the linkage between meat and climate change.

[…]

Global livestock production by region (milk and eggs expressed in protein terms).
Source: United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

Setting the record straight on meat and greenhouse gases
A healthy portion of meat’s bad rap centers on the assertion that livestock is the largest source of greenhouse gases worldwide. For example, a 2009 analysis published by the Washington, D.C.-based Worldwatch Institute asserted that 51 percent of global GHG emissions come from rearing and processing livestock.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the largest sources of U.S. GHG emissions in 2016 were electricity production (28 percent of total emissions), transportation (28 percent) and industry (22 percent). All of agriculture accounted for a total of 9 percent. All of animal agriculture contributes less than half of this amount, representing 3.9 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. That’s very different from claiming livestock represents as much or more than transportation.

Why the misconception? In 2006 the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization published a study titled “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” which received widespread international attention. It stated that livestock produced a staggering 18 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. The agency drew a startling conclusion: Livestock was doing more to harm the climate than all modes of transportation combined.

This latter claim was wrong, and has since been corrected by Henning Steinfeld, the report’s senior author. The problem was that FAO analysts used a comprehensive life-cycle assessment to study the climate impact of livestock, but a different method when they analyzed transportation.

For livestock, they considered every factor associated with producing meat. This included emissions from fertilizer production, converting land from forests to pastures, growing feed, and direct emissions from animals (belching and manure) from birth to death.

However, when they looked at transportation’s carbon footprint, they ignored impacts on the climate from manufacturing vehicle materials and parts, assembling vehicles and maintaining roads, bridges and airports. Instead, they only considered the exhaust emitted by finished cars, trucks, trains and planes. As a result, the FAO’s comparison of greenhouse gas emissions from livestock to those from transportation was greatly distorted.

February 21, 2019

Food rituals and observances among the very woke

Filed under: Food, Health, Politics, Religion, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Americans in the 21st century are far less religious than their parents’ or grandparents’ generations, at least as far as formal, organized, traditional religion is concerned. In the place of old-fashioned religion, many have adopted a replacement that functions very much as religion used to:

Muslims eat halal. Jews eat kosher. Devout Catholics and Orthodox Christians abstain from meat on Friday and certain holy days. Hindus are vegetarian. But you will never see food practices take on religious intensity like they do in the more politically blue/left-wing bastions of the United States. This food intensity has been a gold mine of joke material for comedians like JP Sears.

Spend some time with vegan, gluten-free, and paleo devotees and you will realize that a fish filet on Friday can never match the cultlike seriousness these food fads take on. (And if you should ever be trapped at a restaurant table with somebody who is both vegan and gluten-free, run like the wind.)

Studies show left-leaning individuals are less likely to identify themselves as religious. But the truth is they have merely replaced well-known western religious traditions with more rigid ones. If you move to a politically blue part of the country, you will experience the cultural shift the minute your kids enter preschool. School picnics, snack time and birthday parties can become an anxiety-inducing strain as you try to determine what you can bring that all the children can eat. The parents are generally nice people who would never expect you to consider their dietary rules, but you will nonetheless feel a twinge of guilt if you bring that batch of traditionally-made cupcakes and accidentally feed it to a kid who is not allowed to experience it.

[…]

The popular food fetishes of these cultural enclaves often go hand-in-glove with a neo-pagan mishmash of Gaia-worship, 4th century Gnosticism, and rejuvenated new age/occult practices. Every religion has its food rituals. The left is no exception.

Now I know there are valid reasons to be concerned with the mistreatment of animals on factory farms and there are legitimate medical reasons that some must reduce gluten. Paleo eaters can have points about unnecessary additives in contemporary foods. But the reality remains that the food habits of contemporary leftists have the ritualistic feel of dogma, with many of its followers being far more rigid than the most fundamentalist religious believer.

We tend to have a lot of gluten-free meals here, but it’s a medical necessity, not a food-religion observance, as two of the three of us suffer from gluten-intolerance. One outcome of the “fashionability” of gluten-free dining, there has been a substantial increase in the availability of gluten-free foods which has been welcome. Unfortunately, as a lot of the demand has been due to fashion rather than necessity, some restaurants have been remarkably casual when gluten-free dishes are ordered, where the main dish may be safe, but it’s been covered with a sauce or glaze that isn’t gluten-free.

February 19, 2019

Irish Potato Famine – Isle of Blight – Extra History – #1

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Food, History — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Extra Credits
Published on 16 Feb 2019

The potato blight hit the United States first before it came to Ireland (and other countries). But what made it particularly devastating in Ireland was the factor of human influence — behind-the-scenes bureaucracy that prioritized economics over human lives.

The Irish Potato Famine ranks as one of Europe’s worst agricultural disasters — scattering a people to the winds.

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January 24, 2019

The latest incarnation of the Canada Food Guide

Filed under: Cancon, Food, Government — Nicholas @ 05:00

It’s … not as bad as it could have been, says Chris Selley:

The Canada Food Guide reliably gets a rise out of Canadians who would prefer the government get off our lawns and stop trying to tell us how to live. And the long-awaited update, released Tuesday fully 12 years after the past one, is something of a feast for curmudgeons. In addition to new guidance on what foods we should be consuming — in brief: more plants, fewer animals — it suggests we consider such novel concepts as cooking foods ourselves more often, and eating foods with other people.

Have you considered that if you cook a larger batch of food, you’ll have more food left over to eat at future meals — perhaps having frozen the food and then defrosted it? If you struggle to drink as much water as the guide thinks you should, have you considered that you can “drink it hot or cold”?

I try to keep my curmudgeonly instincts in check. An exercise like this is bound to produce a few silly, infantilizing recommendations. Most countries like Canada have a food guide of sorts. It makes sense that a health ministry would have basic nutritional guidelines on the books to inform institutional policies, not least what kids get fed at schools. Goodness knows you needn’t follow them at home — and indeed, it would surprise me if very many of us do. Modern Western human beings do seem to love being told what to eat, but it’s generally by people with a hell of a lot more charisma than the authors of “Eat well. Live well.” Food porn this ain’t. Protein choices suggested in accompanying photographs include a few tragic slices of skinless chicken, a mighty kebab of three (3) cubes of mystery meat and nothing else, and a portion of salmon to which something brown has happened.

January 19, 2019

The Lancet‘s new guidelines are a great leap forward … to worse-than-WW2 rationing

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Food, Health, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:17

A new initiative by The Lancet and EAT, a billionaire’s pro-starvation advocacy group, involves new food guidelines that may leave Britons feeling a tiny bit … hungry:

The Lancet has got into bed with EAT to transform the global food supply. EAT is a campaign group run by a Norwegian billionaire who flies around the world in a private jet telling people to eat less meat to save the planet. The Lancet‘s interest is in getting people to live off lentils for the good of their health.

How much less meat do these people think we should be eating? Much, much less. Less than a sausage a week would be the pork ration in their brave new world.

As “Captain Nemo” commented on David Thompson’s blog:

“It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank The Lancet for raising the sausage ration to seven grams a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be REDUCED to seven grams a week…”

My apologies to Orwell.

January 9, 2019

The past is a foreign – and very smelly – place

Filed under: Europe, Food, Health, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

We moderns tend to take ordinary public health issues for granted, yet the development of adequate sanitation and improvements in personal hygiene have probably contributed more to eliminate disease and expand human lifespan than any number of medicinal innovations. Marian L. Tupy reminds us just how … aromatic … the past was, and why:

Most of us take modern restrooms for granted, but proper sanitation is a relatively modern phenomenon and is still far too rare in the poorest regions of the world.

The need to keep human and animal waste away from human contact may seem obvious today, but for millennia that was not the case. Before the emergence of the germ theory of disease, and the subsequent public health campaigns and construction of adequate sanitation infrastructure in most of the world, people and waste commingled – with catastrophic results.

Countless millions of people got sick or died from diseases such as diarrhoea, ascariasis (a type of intestinal worm infection), cholera, hepatitis, trachoma, polio, schistosomiasis and so on.

In due deference to our ancestors, it has to be noted that some cultures, such as ancient Rome, paid due attention to cleanliness. The Romans built numerous public baths, which were accessible even to the very poor for a nominal fee, and a sophisticated system of sewers that enabled Rome to grow and reach a population of over 1 million people around the start of the first millennium. That feat would not be replicated in Europe until London and Paris in the 19th century.

In general, however, standards of hygiene tended to be very poor. A typical urban dwelling had a cesspit underneath the house or next to it. That’s where human and kitchen waste accumulated and fermented. Inadequate drainage, irregular emptying and heavy rains could make the cesspit overflow and seep into the house. While discouraged by the city authorities, people often emptied their chamber pots into the streets below.

As Johan Norbeg of the Cato Institute wrote in his 2016 book Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future, “When pedestrians heard the shout of ‘Gardyloo!’ they ran for cover. This phrase, taken from the French for ‘Look out for the water,’ was your only warning that someone was about to throw their waste out of the window.”

In rural areas, people lived with their animals, including chickens and cows, and used both animal and human waste to fertilise their crops – an extremely dangerous practice compounded by the fact that people could go throughout much of their lives without ever washing their hands. That led to epidemics of disease as well as other unsavoury consequences.

January 3, 2019

The “Full English Breakfast”

Filed under: Britain, Food, Health, Personal, Randomness — Tags: — Nicholas @ 03:00

My friend Liam emailed me to ask whether I had strong opinions on this serious debate despite having been raised in Canada. This was my response:

Yes, of course. I have a pulse, you know.

A proper Full English Breakfast is actually composed of eggs, bacon (English bacon, not side, back, or peameal), beans, and black pudding. Sausage is for wimps who can’t handle black pudding. Optional, but completely acceptable additions include fried mushrooms, fried onions, fried tomatoes, potato fry-up, and toast.

Anything else is an Abomination in the sight of the Lord. ESPECIALLY chips.

As to the positioning on the plate … these must also be people who colour-code their sock drawers and have secret notebooks filled with locomotive spotting numbers. You know, “anoraks”.

Bloody wankers.

December 29, 2018

English public health officials angling to ban most restaurant meals due to excess calorie counts

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Food, Government, Health — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The bureaucrats at Public Health England (PHE) apparently want the English to go back to those gloriously hungry days of rationing during and after the Second World War, at least based on their diktats on the allowable limits for calories in purchased meals:

The idea of the government controlling the number of calories in meals is so outlandish that few people have taken it seriously, despite PHE explicitly stating that this is what they are working on. They have been busy setting calorie limits for almost every food product available in shops, cafés, pubs and restaurants. The plan was to publish them in the spring but Laura Donnelly at the Telegraph has got hold of them and has leaked them today.

They are astonishing, not only because they are so low but because they are so comically precise. Sandwiches and main meal salads will be capped at 550 calories, ready meals will be capped at 544 calories and main courses in restaurants will be capped at 951 calories. Vol-au-vents or onion bhajis will be capped at 134 calories and salad dressing capped at 145 calories. The spurious precision of these numbers is presumably meant to imply that they have been worked out scientifically. They haven’t, of course (why is OK to have a 900 calorie lunch in a restaurant but not OK to have a 600 calorie microwave dinner?). There is no way of working out how much energy a single meal should contain. The concept is ludicrous.

But the detailed proposals have infuriated manufacturers – who say they are far too complex and confusing to be workable.

No kidding.

These are not legal limits. Not yet. The plan is for the bureaucrats at PHE to ‘work with’ the food industry to magically remove calories from their products without destroying flavour. PHE have no knowledge to bring to the table so their part in the ‘partnership’ amounts to setting targets, issuing threats and naming and shaming businesses.

Some of the companies will attempt to play along, mainly by reducing portion sizes, but it is a doomed enterprise. The government initially planed to use the threat of advertising restrictions to make the companies play ball, but it has already capitulated to the ‘public health’ lobby on this, so the only thing left is to threaten them with mandatory calorie limits.

If that happens, it will mean an effective prohibition on many of Britain’s best loved dishes. Steak and kidney pudding far exceeds the 951 calorie limit for out-of-home food, as does ham, egg and chips, the all day breakfast, fish and chips, and beer and ale pie (based on Wetherspoons’ nutritional information). So does a normal Christmas dinner.

As for foreign cuisine, you can kiss goodbye to kebabs, curries, pizzas and Chinese food. But it’s a treat, you say! Tough luck. No exceptions.

December 22, 2018

Christmas Dishes From Around the World – Anglophenia Ep 44

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Food, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Anglophenia
Published on 16 Dec 2015

Join us for an international holiday feast, as Anglophenia’s Kate Arnell takes a look at several traditional Christmas dishes from around the world. Starting with the U.K., of course…

December 21, 2018

Why do we celebrate Christmas in December?

Filed under: Europe, Food, History, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The obvious answer is quite wrong: December 25th isn’t actually the birth date of Jesus … we don’t know when he was born (rather like the Queen’s Official Birthday, it’s been set to a particular date rather than tracking the actual natal day of the current monarch). So why did we end up with a fixed date in December? Tim Worstall explains:

… if you’re sitting in the middle of a culture that has a religious holiday that sends all children into a frenzy, you’re not part of that dominant religion, then you’d better come up with something quick. Don’t and you’ll find your hold on the minds – thus future religion of – the children loosening. Thus Hanukkah’s elevation in the holiday, if not liturgical, calendar. Thus, also, obviously the invention of Kwanzaa by those who would very much prefer not to be part of that dominant culture but were rather geographically stuck with it.

But then that’s why Jesus wasn’t born at Christmas too. We have absolutely no evidence at all that he turned up even one winter night let alone on Dec 25. What the Catholic Church in Europe did have – and at the relevant time there really only was the Catholic Church – was this inconvenient fact of a massive winter feast, what we might call Yuletide. This was very definitely pre-Christian and was sorta determined by climate.

You’re in Europe, you’re doing subsistence or at least peasant farming, this means you’ve not got enough fodder to keep all the animals going until the spring. Thus you slaughter near all – pigs not so much as they eat scraps, can forage for themselves etc – except your breeding stock. This gives you lots and lots of fresh meat and few good methods of meat preservation. This is also the last fresh meat you’re going to get until those spring lambs are ready in, say, April. So, you gorge on all that fresh meat.

Also, it’s cold outside, the days are short, why the heck not stay in by the fire while you burp through it all? Hey, bring the family ’round! And Pops, didn’t you get that beer going earlier in the year? OK, no hops, so ale. But mead maybe. Wine in many areas would be just about drinkable by now from that autumn crop.

This had been going on perhaps 6,000 years by the time those Christians turned up. The Church really needed to impose its views and authority on all of this, seriously, we can’t have the peasants continuing to celebrate the Old Gods, can we? Thus the invention of Christmas, a time for celebration, that called for lots of feasting of a happy event just about the time when everyone would be feasting anyway.

This is also the explanation for Halloween, All Hallows Eve. Or, All Souls Day followed By All Saints Day to replace the Celtic Samhaim. Hell, the oiks are going to be celebrating anyway, better make it a Church celebration.

Thus Hanukkah, thus Kwanzaa and thus whatever the next religion will come up with assuming that it’s one that initially grows in a European influenced culture. Even, perhaps any Northern Hemisphere, or northerly part of it, influenced one. Islam’s going to have a problem as it uses the lunar calendar and so no fixed feast will work, it’ll precess though the calendar and miss the yearly meeting with midwinter.

Hanukkah’s a big thing for the same reason Jesus wasn’t born at Christmas. At which point you’re expecting me to say Happy Holidays, aren’t you? Bah, Humbug!

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