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Enlarge textLobsters on opposite sides of the planet are facing distinctly different fortunes.
It has turned out to be a strange year for lobster species. If you're thinking about eating WA lobster for Christmas, be prepared for a rude shock. In Western Australia, crayfish numbers are predictable. In its larval stage (or puerulus), Western rock lobsters settle into seaweed beds to grow to their larger and tastier size. This behaviour acts as a handy way to predict future numbers of crayfish. Each month, the Department of Fisheries in Western Australia harvests a sample of puerulus from sets of traps. There is a direct correlation between the numbers of puerulus caught and the number of full-size lobster in 3 years time.
topFoie Gras: Rich, buttery cruelty
Is the debate on the cruelty behind foie gras over?
If you happen to be following the Biggest Chinese Restaurant in the World blog (that as a coincidence, I write), you'll notice that the discussion centres entirely on animal cruelty. There is no escaping it and it is always a discussion that interests me insofar as it only occurs on blogs when an aspect of the food processing system is made obvious. Talk about meat as meat and the reaction is muted. Talk about how living animals become meat and the spectre of animal cruelty rises.
In cash-strapped times and with the need to appear frugal, the breakfast meeting supplants the three-martini lunch. Will 2009 hold the end of the restaurant?
The more sober food writers use the end of the year to round up the longer term issues that have already happened. With the spreading economic downturn and the decline in eating out at a corporation's expense, it is a grim time to be opening a restaurant or any other business that relies on discretionary income to survive.
Is Christmas pudding imperialist propaganda?
Plum pudding is a dish that over the last 600 years has transformed into a food almost completely unrecognizable from its original recipes. Plum pudding originated from pottage: a slow-cooked meat stew with dried fruit used as a means of preserving meats in late Autumn, a recipe first recorded in the 1400s.
SBS recipes in the wild: Portuguese Charcoal Chicken
If you want to please pretty much anyone who eats meat, cook a chicken over an open flame. It is difficult to get wrong in a disastrous manner and every culture that has ready access to birds does it.
The SBS Food Safari back catalogue yields not less than five recipes for chicken cooked over fire (Tandoori from Pakistani, Grilled chicken and banana flower salad from Thailand, Malaysian satay, Mexican (Yucatecan) bbq chicken, Portuguese charcoal chicken with piri piri).
The global search for delicious
I was called a "food warrior" this week, which begs the question, who or what am I fighting?
I'm not exactly roaming the world, slitting the throats of unscrupulous restaurateurs in defence of honest, law abiding food. I can but dream.
So what am I looking for?
Apart from the melamine-tainted milk crisis that seems like it will never grind to a halt, one of the more noteworthy trends to gain momentum in mainland China over the past year is the growth in interest in grape wine. Unlike the melamine, this has been a few millennia in the making.
While Chinese rice wines like Shaoxing wine and grain spirits are better known to the rest of the world, China has been crafting wine from grapes since some period between 7000BC (relatively unlikely, but not impossible) to 600AD (definitely). Grape wine consumption overall is quite marginal, as China's predilection is still for hard liquor and beer. In the present era, China consumes about a quarter of the world's spirits, but only two percent of the grape wine.
How influential are Australian food blogs?
A discussion on the influence of Australian food bloggers.
It's fairly common for other food writers and editors in Australia to overlook the Australian food blogging scene as a credible source of food criticism or recipes. So why do local food blogs hold so little sway over the local offline media?
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About this Blog
A blog about what the world eats, when and where it eats it, and why it matters to us all. Only much less ambitious than that sounds and with more excruciating puns.
Phil Lees grew up in rural Victoria, the first generation in his family to not have lived on the farm and thereby not slaughter their own meat.
In 2005 he moved to Cambodia and started the nation’s first food blog, Phnomenon.com, named after the best pun that he has ever made. It turns out that Cambodian food is delicious and unlike the warnings in most guidebooks, is not likely to kill you with any immediacy. Gridskipper called him a “national treasure”. Lonely Planet’s Greater Mekong guide called him “the unofficial pimp of Cambodian cuisine”. The New York Times laughed at a funny hotdog he saw.
Phil makes a mean sausage, a hoppy pale ale, a modest laksa. He owns three barbecues and is in the market for a fourth. He’s never eaten at a Michelin-starred restaurant. There is more important food in the world to be eaten.
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