Edited by Marc Brazeau
[You can subscribe to the Food and Farm Discussion Lab Dispatch with an ongoing contribution of $1, $2, $3, $5 or $10 a month on Patreon.]

• Extra Crispy reports on 100 tons of Mexican avocados turned away at the border. The beginning of Trump’s promised trade war? Not so fast. The truth is much more boring and interesting. OTH, a legislator in Mexico HAS written a bill to direct his country to begin buying corn from Brazil and Argentina instead of the US. [ FAFDL thread here ]

• Reason has a #mustread, #longread on what’s gone wrong with seed development and markets in Uganda. [hint: everything]

• GulfNews reports on the presentation made by Isha Datar (TEDx presentation), Executive Director of New Harvest and a pioneer in the field of cellular culture, to the World Government Summit 2017 in Dubai. ‘Bio-engineering: Eggs without Hens’ covered the cutting-edge research in the field of cellular agriculture, applying methods of tissue engineering to food production to generate meat and dairy products that are molecularly identical to those made conventionally.

“Brewing milk from yeast, for instance, will produce 84 percent less greenhouse gases than producing milk from cows,” she added.

• Trump blocks the inclusion of the rusty patched bumblebee, an important pollinator from the endangered species list.

• Women Who Farm – Thirteen Things To Expect When Becoming a Market Farmer

• Saveur reports on Baku, the capital city of Azerbaijan and home to The World’s Last Great Undiscovered Cuisine. Recipe below.

” Oil. It was why Hitler veered calamitously toward Baku, but his Luftwaffe held off bombing. The Führer wanted the city’s vast energy reserves intact. Since ancient days, oil and natural gas have fueled the unexpiring flames of Azerbaijan’s Zoroastrian cults, and now they underwrite post-Soviet Baku’s futuristic high-rises, malls, and Dubai-worthy starchitect showstoppers—while the city’s ornate fin de siècle facades testify to the late 19th-century heyday when Azerbaijan pumped half the world’s crude and local peasants turned overnight into oil barons. On my previous trip here I’d ogled the fantastical architecture, toured a Zoroastrian fire temple, and filled a plastic bottle, amazed, from black oil pools oozing in the arid moonscape outside Baku. And then I met Zulya, cousin of an Azeri friend in New York and such a fiercely formidable cook that the trip turned into my own Ottolenghi-esque mirage of charred eggplants, yogurt swirls, and dried rose blossoms.

So now I’m back, to pry out Zulya’s and her mom’s kitchen secrets. In between dolmas and pickles and syrup-drenched sweets, I’ll try to untangle Baku’s complicated cultural layers. “

Left: A re-creation of the original 13th-century Bibi-Heybat Mosque, destroyed by the Bolsheviks in 1936. | Right: Mehriban Kazimova is a skilled home cook who doesn’t shy away from old Azeri cooking techniques—like yelling at her stews to help them color.

This thread on antibiotic use in organic livestock and poultry production turned out to be one of our best threads in a long time. In responding to some anti-organic hysteria about a farms marketing claims not to use antibiotics (or herbicides), a number of “not organic” farmers chimed in to say that those marketing claims would describe their operations as well. Lots of other useful information. A good one to share with friends who are trying to think through ABx use in livestock.

Jodi’s thread on Tamar Haspel’s desire for crop neutral federal insurance was interesting and took off on a great tangent on what would happen if SNAP and farm programs were delinked from the farm bill.

A thread asking about the regulatory status of organophosphates didn’t have a great discussion, but it did end up with lots of links to resources. It also prompted me to finally collect our best threads on chloripyrifos, organophosphates and pesticides/Parkinson’s Disease and add them to the archive.

Chicken Pilaf in a Lavash Crust (Khan Plov)

Like many rice pilafs from the region, this one is spattered with saffron-infused water to create patches of fragrant yellow rice. The whole pilaf is wrapped in butter-saturated lavash to create a crispy, golden-brown casing that’s cracker thin. Any shape of lavash will work—just trim the pieces as needed into strips, rectangles, or ovals to fit the pot.

Instructions here.

3 Ways to Move the Goal Posts on GMOs and Defend Your Position Without Getting Caught (very often)

1.Strategy: Insist that other, major variables that require massive resources and a lengthy time horizon need to be addressed in tandem with your solution in order for your preferred solution to work and your rival’s solution to become obsolete. The moral bonus of this strategy is that only you are addressing the roots of the problem. (Not really, but keep telling yourself that.)

Example: If we ended poverty there would be no need for Golden Rice.

What you are really saying: If the world was a completely different place than it is, then my strategy would be more appropriate than yours. ….

Famine Doesn’t Just ‘Happen’ – Those Who Cause Famine Must Be Held to Account

The continued representation of famines as disastrous events largely sprung upon populations by the forces of nature, prevents us from understanding famine – and food insecurity – as a socio-political process, even though doing so is especially important for realising its future prevention.

How Neighbors Turned Unused Buildings into a Thriving Community Hub

As rents rise and independent businesses in Minneapolis lose their leases to large national chains, a first-of-its-kind co-op found a solution. They created the economic space for a cooperative brewery and brewpub and other co-ops in their neighborhood.

The 4 Essentials of Sustainable Agriculture

ANDREW MCGUIRE: There are certain requirements that agriculture must meet to produce food and to keep producing food. We should view them as a hierarchy, such that if the top requirement is not attained, the lower requirements do not mean much, but once the top requirement has been met, we can move to the next one, provided that how we do it does not threaten any of the requirements above it.
[You can subscribe to the Food and Farm Discussion Lab Dispatch with an ongoing contribution of $1, $2, $3, $5 or $10 a month on Patreon.]
Copyright © 2017 Food and Farm Discussion Lab, All rights reserved.

Want to change how you receive these emails?
You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list

Email Marketing Powered by MailChimp