Food

Nothing smells better than freshly-baked bread. Take it out of the oven, let it cool a little, and cut into it. A puff of steam comes out and fills your house with that amazing aroma.

I've been baking bread for nearly 10 years. I started with a technique called the French knead, or the aptly-named "slap and fold". You pick up the dough then slap it onto the counter. Then turn it, pick it up, and slap it down again. The process is noisy, exhausting, and you end up with tiny bits of dough flying around your kitchen. They stick to the walls and are hard to scrape off. The bread tastes good, but I'm not sure if it's worth it.

Fast-forward to last month. I've refined my process to near perfection. You just put the ingredients in a bowl, stir them for a minute, cover them, and leave them all for a full day. The bread comes together perfectly. There's no mess, it's dead simple, and it tastes amazing.

English is a tool you can use to do many things. Since English is a global language, you can use it to learn things from different cultures.

A fun way to learn English is cooking. You have to know how to talk about the ingredients, measurements, textures, times and flavor descriptions, and explain the process. And, if you teach cooking in English, your pronunciation needs to be clear enough for others to understand.

Accordingly, in 2015, two English language teachers in Manchester, UK, set up a program called Heart and Parcel. Karolina Koscien and Clare Courtney gather immigrant women together to cook dumplings. Why dumplings? Because "parceled foods" are universal to all cultures. Women from different countries can all come together with their recipes and share their unique histories with each other. Besides language learning, social connections are formed that help the women thrive in their new home.

Bessie Williamson (1910-1982) was a woman in a man's industry. She ran a whisky distillery in Scotland at a time when women weren't managers in any business, let alone the whisky business. But Williamson worked her way up from a typist to the owner and CEO of the Laphroaig [lah-FROYG] distillery, becoming a well-respected boss and highly successful manager. She brought Laphroaig distillery through difficult times during WWII and began a far-reaching modernization process before retiring.

Williamson was known in the business as the "Islay Labour Exchange" because she found a job for almost everyone who needed one. And if workers didn't have a pension plan, she kept them on well past the usual age of retirement. Her employees were always first in her mind, even in the hard times.

Atlas Obscura, a publication about travel and culture, notes that a pub has always been more than just a place that sells beer for the British. The pub has brought communities together for centuries, and the tavern tradition of spending the evening with your peers continues to this day. Few know, however, that pubs became popular following the plague known as the Black Death of the 14th century.

The Black Death killed nearly half of England's population after it reached the British Isles in 1348. By the 1370s, it had caused a critical labor shortage. Eventually, this proved a boon for the peasantry of England, who could demand higher wages for their work and achieve higher standards of living. As a result, households selling or giving away leftover ale were replaced by more commercialized, permanent establishments set up by the best brewers and offering better food.

In late April, the Indonesian government announced a temporary ban on exports of crude palm oil and its refined products, such as cooking oil. The decision came as a surprise to commercial goods traders as the government had previously stated the ban would only apply to refined products. After the government’s initial statement, prices of crude palm oil significantly fluctuated given uncertainties about what products the ban would cover. Prices have again skyrocketed in light of the most recent announcement.

Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, the world has seen a wave of food protectionism, as governments seek to protect domestic food supplies in light of surging agricultural prices. As the world’s largest edible oils shipper, providing one third of global supplies, Indonesia threatens to worsen global food inflation with its decision and raises the risk of a full-blown hunger crisis.

California has been trying to ban the delicacy foie gras for quite some time. The French dish is well-known in fine dining, but it is made from the liver of a duck or goose that has been force-fed to increase the fat content. Many have said the process constitutes animal cruelty.

The ban was passed into law back in 2004, but it was phased in gradually. It finally went into full effect in 2012, at which time foie gras producers promptly sued the state government. Fast forward to 2015, and a federal judge overturned the ban, stating that it was unconstitutional and went against federal poultry law.

Two years after that, the higher Ninth Circuit court ruled 3-0 that the federal judge had made an error, and allowed California to keep the ban. Again, foie gras producers appealed, this time to the U.S. Supreme Court. But the Supreme Court declined to hear the case, making the previous Ninth Circuit ruling final. 

Seikatsu Club is a huge food cooperative, founded in 1965 by a group of women in Japan, which has exacting standards on everything from radioactivity levels to the number of additives in food.

Their initial focus was on bringing down the price of milk for households by securing bulk-purchase discounts. Fast-forward five decades and Seikatsu is now a sprawling operation of nearly 400,000 members (90% women) that runs its own milk factory and has food supply agreements with about 200 outside producers. In addition, some of the production is now done by workers collectives that are part of the cooperative.

Massimo Bottura is one of the world's greatest chefs. He has made it his mission to put an end to global hunger and believes that technology can make this a reality.

"The refrigerator and freezer revolutionized how we use food. They keep food fresh for much longer, but they’ve also made the visible, invisible." he explains. When you can’t see the food, it’s easier to let it go to waste. “Increasing the supply of food is not what we need. What we need to do is stop wasting it." Currently, about one third of the world's food is thrown away while 800 million people are malnourished.

Bottura founded the nonprofit organisation “Food for Soul” to help communities around the world put an end to food waste. Food for Soul has set up community kitchens, called "Refettorios," in several cities around the world where renowned chefs cook healthy meals for guests using surplus ingredients. 

Amazon.com Inc. spent its first day as the owner of a brick-and-mortar grocery chain cutting prices at Whole Foods Market as much as 43 percent.

In a sign of how the retailer is changing, the Amazon Echo, a voice-activated electronic assistant, was also for sale, for $99.99—a sharp pivot into electronics for a company known for kale and quinoa. The Echo Dot, a smaller version, was advertised for $44.99.