Sep 7 2022 - the Garden of Eden leads to pork

 

I listened to a CBC interview on Sunday and its topic was whether Muslims and Jews would eat Impossible Pork  due to religious reasons.   When Impossible Pork was unveiled, the company said it was designed for halal and kosher certification. But Impossible Foods now says it's not moving forward with those certifications "as we wish to continue to use the term 'pork' in our product name," and "the authorizing bodies will not certify a product called 'pork.'"  Even though the product is called "Not Possibly Pork"  as in "Impossible Pork".   This is fascinating.  Here we have a question at the individual level that relates to personal faith and belief. These are questions that can't get much better.  Why is that?  This is in the realm of "speaking makes it so."   To cause something to come into existence by the speaking of it. My comparison is this.  When God said "Let there be light,  there was light".   And so if we speak this is "pork", then it is pork.  Whether it is impossible, plant-based pork, it is our speaking makes it pork.  Having pork in the name -  that's the argument of the Islamic Services of America and Orthodox Union Kosher organizations for not certifying it. To me this is an amazing existential situation.  I think of this as  Adam in the Garden of Eden  Syndrome. The articles by Muslims/Jews say they don't eat pork.  They don't need to eat pork.  They don't want to eat pork.  There are so many relationships to not eating pork that it makes it sound like a fascination with pork.    Like the temptation in the Garden of Eden, this  fascination can become the transgression itself - a wanting to know, a longing, a wishing. What if the product had been named really yummy food?  with no intention of marketing it as a pork comparison. Then there would be no existential question at all.  A comparison to pork must be present.  And how would a non-pork-eating Muslim make the comparison without any experience of it?  What if the product has been around for a thousand years through one country's cuisine, and there was no comparison to be made with pork?  There is no existential question. There would be no comparison to be made for the  Jew or Muslim to judge.  We'd all just be eating these dishes.   What if these ingredients can be gathered together and one can make the product oneself?   This is an interesting scenario.  Only if  I compare it to pork,  then it has a the potential to  become a challenge of faith and discipline.  One  Muslim writer of an article concluded with this:  "Given the plethora of other food options that aren't accompanied by a twinge of guilt, something tells me I won't be walking into a restaurant and ordering an Impossible Pork sandwich anytime soon.  At least not until my brain -- and stomach -- catch on." That  mention of guilt.   There it is.  Isn't this so remarkable a dilemma we could never have predicted.

These little piglets were at Our Gate to Your Plate Farm in Grimsby about 10 years ago.   Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblog.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Dec 17 2020 - Turducken for Christmas

 

My brother, Brian, had a grand dish for planned for Christmas dinner together this year, but it turns out the second wave lockdown has hit Toronto.   What did he get for the occasion?  Turducken - a dish consisting of a deboned chicken stuffed into a deboned duck, further stuffed into a deboned turkey. It is also known as a three bird roast, and Gooducken is a traditional English variant, replacing turkey with goose.    This seems like an exotic dish - a King's feast - to me.  It turns out it is.  And there are even more exotic feasts for kings of the past.  There are bizarre pictures  of a combination of pork and turkey - actually stitching together the butchered upper portion of a baby pig with the lower portion of a turkey (or chicken).  They are cooked, displayed as entertainment before being eaten.  You can look this up and see the creepy picture.   This was popular from 1500 to 1800.  Cockentrice is what it was called - a capon and a pig. The instructions include the following:  When it is done, gild the outside with egg yolks, ginger, saffron and parsley juice.  Then serve it forth for a royal meat.   What was the most extreme form of this tradition?  "Roast Without Equal" was formed by stuffing 17 birds inside each other like Russian dolls.  You can read about this strange tradition in the Atlantic article HERE.  I am on to Christmas Greetings from a visit to Longwood Gardens quite a while ago.  What a beautiful display in the fern house.

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Heme Here to Disrupt

Here it is Canadian Thanksgiving.  There's a turkey in the oven and my topic today is the key to the beyond meat and meatless trend these days.  CBC Radio told me about it yesterday - it is heme protein.  Impossible Foods have patents covering the use of heme in plant-based meat.  The core ingredient is soy protein and star ingredient is heme made via genetically engineered yeast. These are the proteins that transport and store oxygen in mammals.  This is  what makes the juicy, meaty flavour in non-meat burgers.  It can be used to produce anything like this - cheese, milk, and so on. The CBC interview was with Catherine Tubb from technology disruption think-tank company RethinkX - her point was that food and agriculture will no longer be raising livestock.  Instead protein will be generated - like yeast - we'll be doing it at home.  I found recipes for Impossible Burgers to make at home HERE.  I have to try this - it looks fun. So the prediction is that cows will be obsolete as a food source by 2030.  With precision fermentation products, food will be cheaper and superior to animal-derived foods.  The agricultural industry will collapse, including the value of agricultural land.   And the trend is unfolding - the Good Food Institute says that $16 billion has been invested into US plant-based meat, egg, and dairy companies in the last 10 years.  Impossible Foods is now valued at $2 billion.  In 2015, Google offered $300 million for the company. Just in our recent past, disruption occurred when the car replaced the horse and carriage.  There was no need causing it - there was opportunity.  She says that disruption in agriculture is the same.  There's more transportation disruption on the horizon.  Their website says: "By 2030, within 10 years of regulatory approval of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs), 95 percent of U.S. passenger miles traveled will be served by on-demand autonomous electric vehicles owned by fleets, not individuals, in a new business model we call “transport-as-a-service” (TaaS).  This means that even if it is slower than 10 years, we will experience it. Today we have a colourized version of one of the motion blur palm pictures.

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