BBC – The Food Chain
I would like to draw your attention to the podcast by BBC — The Food Chain. Addressing various topics related to ‘the economics, science and culture of what we eat,’ the podcast is highly relevant to the topics we discuss in class. Just last week, the episode ‘Tech at the Table’ explores how technology influences our eating behaviour (when we tend to our phones while eating, how does it affect dining dynamics and the amount that we eat), how the sociality of dining changes with the advent of social media (e.g. food blogging/food bragging). Particularly interesting for me is the discussion on new technology invented with relation to eating/dining. For example, the vibrating fork that warns us to slow down when we bring food too rapidly to the mouth, a digital/mechanical reparation of ‘hey, don’t you think you have had enough to eat?’. Also a ‘Dinner Time’ app that lock apps or screens on children’s phones to bring them to the dinner table (the irony of having to resort to technology to ban technology from the table!) Most intriguing was the super cognitive computer by IBM called Chef Watson that is programmed to make new recipes such as ‘Vietnamese apple kebabs.’
The episode from the week before, ‘Eat my words,’ is also worth listening to. Host Angela Saini speaks with ‘superstar apple breeder’ David Bedford on how he comes up with names for the apples he cultivates, in this particular discussion, the ‘Honeycrisp.’ Steven Poole talks about the unnecessarily ‘pornographic’ way people describe food, undoubtedly, he avers propagated by the phenomenon of food-blogging/bragging and restaurants trying to impress with menu jargon (might be helpful to know that Poole was the winner of 2014 Plain English Award?). Also interesting is the discussion on how the Patagonian toothfish, after having rebranded as ‘chilean sea bass’ almost faced extinction due to the dramatic rise of its consumption. And apparently ‘pacific rockfish’ is just a trade name to sell all the bycatch, fish species that are unintentionally caught in the nets along with the intended species, that one normally wouldn’t sell.
For our class next week, it might also be relevant to check out the episode ‘The Cold Chain,’ which deals with ‘fridgenomics’, i.e.the ‘wider networks at play when it comes to getting fresh food to your plate.’ But I’ll stop spoiling the content for you now.
Enjoy!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/food
Contributed by JamieWong on 23/02/2015
