All posts by Crystal Cun

About Crystal Cun

Crystal Cun ate and earned her way through a master’s in Food Culture and Communications from the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy. For one year, through March 2011, she was awash in a sea of olive oil, photojournalism and sustainable food production. Prior to this peripatetic European adventure, she worked in research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and studied economics at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. At the moment, she is a student in the Culinary Techniques program at the International Culinary Center. She lives in Brooklyn, New York and works at W&T Seafood, a family-run seafood distributor specializing in premium oysters. Sometimes this requires abundant amounts of research with wine and oysters. She also works as a consultant for FRESH, an indie documentary about the farmers, activists and entrepreneurs who are reinventing our food system.

Mutato-Archive: Celebrating the Beauty of Heterogeneous Fruit

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SwissMiss pointed me to this gorgeous poster from the Mutato-Archive, a collection of misshapen and irregular fruits, vegetables and roots. With an eye for color and careful selection, Uli Westphal took dozens of photos of gnarly tubers, trident-shaped carrots and Siamese mushrooms. In other words, the set is a stunning display of natural diversity.

Too often, produce is bred to be perfectly uniform, symmetric and well, monotonous. Anything that shows a little too much character is often thrown out at the supermarket. What a shame! At least the EU has finally abandoned a law that bans the sale of irregularly-shaped but still nutritious produce. Maybe it’s not always about looks after all.
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The Story of Stuff

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GorqroigqM]

This is the Story of Stuff. It is a project from Annie Leonard centered on telling how you got the stuff in your hands, who paid for it (hint: it wasn’t you) and what happens when you throw it away. It is the story of how we’re destroying our planet (but mostly just ourselves), while becoming less and less happy all the time.

Yes, it’s 20 minutes and most of you will just think “tl;dw” (too long; didn’t watch), but I hit play and couldn’t stop watching. It’s a chunk of time well-spent for anyone interested in connecting the dots between many of our environmental, economic and social problems. Certainly, some of the information was played up for dramatic effect, but overall, I found the film to be clear, concise and informative for the intelligent layperson.

Check it out.

Escape from Heathrow Hell

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This tale is getting published about a month later than I had anticipated, but I figure everyone likes listening to a good yarn of travel woe, so here it is.

Like most disasters, this one started out with a quiet whimper buried amidst the lull of complacency. True, I had checked the BBC the day before, and the headline story was about “severe weather disruptions” and cancelled flights at London’s airports due to snowfall. However, the amount of snow that had fallen (4-5″) was piddling by North American standards, and the article seemed to indicate that everything would be functioning normally by the next day. And so, I happily hopped on a flight out of Turin to London, where I would transfer to a connecting flight to New York. I was returning “home,” whatever that word meant after seven months of expat life in Italy. In Turin, British Airways staff boarded the flight with nary a hint of distress. Naturally, while we were in the air, my connecting flight out of London was cancelled.

When I arrived, the scene at Gatwick airport was a madhouse of stranded travelers—part refugee camp, part crisis counseling center. Behind me, an Italian girl wailed into her cell phone, crying, “Non ci sono voli, niente! Niente!” (There are no flights, nothing!) I resolutely joined the customer service queue to rebook a flight to New York. In line, I soon made friends with Maddie, who had also just flown to London from Turin. Her dad was frantically trying to find a new flight for her online, with no luck. After 90 minutes of waiting, the clerk gently informed me that the earliest flight I would be able to take would be the evening of Dec 23rd, four days later.

It was now about 5 pm. I was homeless, flightless and my cell phone was very low on credit and battery. On the plus side, I had all the time in the world. Dazed, Maddie and I trekked to the internet lounge on level 1, where she tried to buy a Boingo pass for wifi access, but the servers were so swamped that nothing was loading. There were three workstations off in a corner, and on a lark, I sat down at one and opened a browser. Much to my surprise, it did not ask me to pay for internet access. Concerned that this lifesaver could be yanked away at any moment, my fingers moved at hyperspeed, posting pleas on Facebook, Twitter and Gmail to please let me know if anyone could house me in London. In short order, my plight had been publicized everywhere from Argentina to the Couchsurfing SOS list. Meanwhile, it was slowly sinking in that I was going to be here for a while. “You know,” said Maddie, “they’d planned a welcome party for me tonight.” I winced and tried not to think about my dashed plans for a triumphant return.
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A Grating Topic: Parmesan Cheese

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Toward the end of 2008, there was an unpopular multi-million dollar bailout by the government for the benefit of a single industry. No, I’m not talking about Wall Street, or the auto manufacturing industry, or insurance on obscure structured finance products. I’m talking about the Italian cheese market.

Back when the rest of the world’s politicians were stumbling over how to manage the global financial crisis, Italy enacted measures to help its cheesemakers. The government bought up 100,000 wheels of the highly touted parmesan cheese, along with 100,000 wheels of another popular cheese, grano padano. The reason? The wholesale price of these cheeses had fallen to €7-7,50/kg, below the production cost of €8-8,50/kg needed to make traditional parmigiano-reggiano cheese. And if the country’s signature cheese industry went under, what else would Italy have to offer? Mio dio! Thus, much parmesan was bought to help prop up the price and rescue Italy’s 430 or so parmesan cheesemakers. The food was subsequently donated to charity.

Now, you may be an Italian taxpayer or a mozzarella maker who is cheesed off about these interventionist government shenanigans, but all this goes to show that parmesan cheese is Kind of a Big Deal in Italy. In 2009, just under 3 million wheels of the stuff were produced, for sales totaling € 1.533 billion. For an industry that claims to be comprised of only small-scale, artisanal cheese producers, these numbers are nothing to sneeze at.
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The Barilla Gorilla: A Day Inside Academia Barilla

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Do you know what Italian company was single-handedly responsible for changing the texture of America’s pasta?

Barilla was founded in 1877 by Pietro Barillo Sr., who began the business as a simple pasta shop in Parma. The company is now on its fourth generation of family owners, and has been almost continuously privately owned, save for a gap in the ‘70s when Barilla was bought out by U.S. multinational W.R. Grace. In 1990, Barilla began aggressively expanding into international markets, through the acquisition of local pasta companies and the development of manufacturing plants abroad. This included the creation of the first American plant in Ames, Iowa in 1999, with a second plant following in upstate New York.

Today, Barilla is the world’s largest pasta corporation, and the largest producer of baked goods in Italy, with sales in 2010 totaling €4.535 billion. The firm encompasses over 20 brands, exports to 125 countries, and holds 16,000 employees. They are also the single largest buyer of durum wheat in the world, and consequently, a major player in the supply chain, able to set price and quality demands.
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Internships & Books: Putting My Pen Where My Mouth Is

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Photo: E. Bennett

It’s internship season here at the University of Gastronomic Sciences, and everyone is abuzz with plans for the near-future and exit strategies post-graduation. Our last classes will take place on March 4th, at which point we will each set off on two-month long internships of our own design. These can take place anywhere in the world (though you have to fund your own food and housing), and can take a variety of forms, from independent research to a structured corporate program. At the end of the two months, we must turn in a thesis, which is usually (but not always) related to your experiences on internship. Graduation is set for May 13th, and then we officially become UNISG alumni.

Some examples of internships from my classmates:

  • working with chef and UNISG lecturer Barney Haughton at Bordeaux Quay on educational initiatives
  • WWOOFing on farms throughout the Mediterranean and N. Africa
  • training as a pizzaiolo in Naples
  • collaborating with Slow Food headquarters to develop the incipient chapter of Slow Food Norway

Of course, there are still a number of us who are frantically trying to make arrangements and hammer out final details. Good luck to you all!
Continue reading Internships & Books: Putting My Pen Where My Mouth Is →