Category Archives: food

Lisbon’s Pastéis de Belém: Religiously Good?

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Lisbon, seaside port and the commercial heart of Portugal. For centuries, Portugal wielded outsize influence beyond its borders through a vigorous policy of mercantilism and colonial exploration. From these waters, Vasco da Gama captained the first ships to set sail directly from Europe for India. Other explorers would reach the shores of South Africa, China and Japan. “Look, we have Spain on one side, water on the other. So everyone either has to fight, to conquer, or face the ocean and see what’s beyond,” said our guide, Victor Lamberto, head of Slow Food’s Alentejo chapter.

Unsurprisingly, this thirst for international travel resulted in lots of foreign exchange—in food, in language and in culture. As Lamberto guided us through the mosaic-covered streets and tiled walls of Lisbon, he remarked, “Lisbon has always attracted people from all over. Here, you do not find traditional Portuguese food, but a mix of influences. The Portuguese were the first to take food and flavors from one place to another in a global manner.” Today, the Japanese use the Portuguese words tempura for battered, fried foods and pan for bread, while the African chili pepper piri piri is commonly used in Portuguese cuisine.
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A Chat with Slow Food Founder Carlin Petrini

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In 1986, the first branch of McDonald’s in Italy opened in the heart of Rome, at the Piazza di Spagna. As in many other countries, protesters howled and demonstrated. One man took decisive action.

Carlo Petrini, or Carlin as he is known to Italians, has quietly grown from being a little-known left-wing journalist, to becoming the leader of one of the world’s largest food activism organizations. Concerned about the encroachment of multinational influence on traditional food culture, he built a resistance movement to defend and protect local food ecosystems, a counterpoint to the unrelenting onslaught of corporate hegemony.

Today, Slow Food spans over 100,000 members in 153 countries, promoting thousands of small-scale producers, communities and educational initiatives. I sat down to interview Petrini (in Italian!), and asked him about the direction of Slow Food, the global food system, and what you can do to get involved.

In America, there are many people involved with Slow Food, but more who have never heard of Slow Food. For these people, what is Slow Food?

Slow Food is an international movement that is involved in the defense of biodiversity, not only in agriculture and food, but also culture; in the defense of small-scale producers, small farmers, fishermen, and artisans because these small producers are the ones who maintain biodiversity. So, Slow Food is a network of these actors that will grow ever stronger, until it finally reaches every country in the world. However, it makes no pretense of having a strong structure or hierarchy–no, it is very, very agile.
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Recipe: Potstickers, Politics and Pork

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Photo: Valeria Necchio

Last week marked a new lunar year, so in conjunction with my UNISG classmates, we held a Chinese New Year celebration, with all the Asian-style dishes you can possibly concoct (using the limited supplies found in Italy). There were all the classic, prosperity-bringing foods, like fish and tangerines, along with Thai-style noodles, pork with black bean sauce, and a heaping bowl of deep-fried squid. Yum, bring out the Sriracha!

For the occasion, I decided to make jiaozi (餃子) and nian gao (年糕). Now, I am pretty pro at making potstickers (although I haven’t figured out how to pleat them one-handed yet), but usually I just buy pre-made wrappers. Hey, stop judging, it takes long enough to mince the filling, fold and cook everything! However, in the bountiful land of Italy, packages of jiaozi wrappers are a little more difficult to come by. I could spend the day going to Turin to search them out, or alternatively, make them from scratch. It probably would have taken the same amount of time. In the end, cost won out and I decided to tackle making wrappers by hand.

So, I skyped my mom and asked her for a wrapper recipe. Now, you have to understand that when you ask Asian moms for recipes, they tell you something like, “Oh, that’s easy. First, you take two spoonfuls of X and a bag of Y, then you mix in some Z and add a cup of water, then steam it until it’s done. Is that clear?” Wait, what do you mean a spoonful? Is that a tablespoon or a teaspoon? And a bag, how much is that? “Oh, I mean a Chinese soup spoon. And you know—a bag! The brand of flour I always buy, I just use the whole bag.” Whoa, hold on, so when you say a cup of water, what kind of cup is that? “Oh, I always use this cup [gestures], the porcelain one with the flowers on it.” Um, okay, what about the steaming? How do you steam this? “What do you mean, how? Don’t you know how to steam things? Ai-yah, college-educated and brains are still empty!” At this point, we both throw our hands up in dismay.
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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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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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