5 out of 5 stars
The publisher provided a copy of this, free of charge, in return for an honest review.
Until the 1950s, agriculture had followed a similar pattern year after year. Some technologies had improved the way that the farmer worked the land, tractors for example, but mostly it was the same. But it all changed in the 1950s. This was the time that the first supermarkets began to open, and it was their rise in buying power that changed the farming landscape and made industrial farming a thing.
Gone was the attribute of flavour; instead, supermarket buyers wanted standardisation, robustness when being transported and cheap prices. It had taken 12,000 years, but the desire for flavour had gone, and since the 1950s, nutritional values in foods have declined dramatically as these policies have mostly taken over the food system. The ubiquitous availability of all foods all year round means that we have lost all notion of seasons.
Understanding our planet and remembering our connection to nature is essential if we are to see the seasons as a precursor to us.
Fubini set up his company, Natoora, after seeing a lady who walked into a food store one December demanding peaches and could not understand why they didn’t have any available. He specialised in providing top-quality fruit and veg to high-end restaurants with the emphasis on flavour. And with flavour, you get nutrients, animals instinctively know what minerals they are deficient in and will look to find a plant that has those, and will eat it until their internal balance is restored.
It is as much the locality as it is the variety that determines the flavour, hence the Protected Designation of Origin (PDO). Fubini writes about oranges and olives that come from a specific area of Sicily that can trace their origins back to the 8th or 9th century bc. I learn about the Cuore Del Vesuvio, a tomato from Naples. The variety is actually a Cuore de Sorrento, but she renamed it as it is grown in a slightly different region. The tomato is a really old species, and the families that grow it keep the seed year on year. It is thin-skinned and scars easily, but the flavour is another level, hence why it is grown still. This is a tomato that has never seen hydroponics…
Consumers, even in Italy, sadly, see supermarket ‘perfection’ as a desirable quality. Food that can be moved around the modern transport system is durable; it has few other qualities. Innovation does not replace flavour; the best tomatoes make the best pizza; the oven almost doesn’t matter.
He delves into the biological magic that is the relationship between fungi, bacteria and plants. The key is healthy soil that has all the ingredients, as healthy soil equals healthy and nutritious plants. He finds a farm that still uses horses, and the spinach that they grow and he gets to eat was the finest spinach that he has ever had. It is the same with onions that he finds in a tiny 2km square plot. It is the particular makeup of the soils that gives the onions their incomparable flavours from this place in Italy. When people have tried to grow them elsewhere, they have never tasted the same.
He is very scathing of the modern organic system. Modern industrial farming has done its thing and it is sadly no guarantee of quality; unless you know the farmer or smallholder, we are being deceived. One way to get a better-tasting crop and to add flavour is to stress the plants as they are growing. A Sardinian farmer does this by watering his tomatoes with slightly salty water and his tomatoes are deeply flavoured and flawed.
Modern farming likes to add lots of water to crops as this increases the weight and dilutes the flavour. There are crops though, that like lots of water, one of which is watercress. He visits a farm just outside Chichester that farms it in the old way, using the water from the chalk of the South Downs. The water itself is delicious, and the crop it produces is equally wonderful.
The industrial farming method revels in uniformity, but by mimicking the way that crops grow in the wild brings many more benefits in terms of flavour and sustainability. The roots of agriculture go back thousands of years, and this new system meant that societies and civilisations could grow. People developed methods that, because they worked, are still in use today. In Mexico, it’s called Milpa, where they plant three different crops together because they benefit each other.
Immigrants to new countries often leave their native languages behind, but they do hang onto their food traditions. Our childhood memories of food are deeply ingrained in our hippocampus, and even though the industrial food system is decades old, there is still time to embed food memories in our families.
He visits a Sicilian radicchio grower and sees the care and attention they put into growing the best crop they can. This method though, has a cost and Fubini’s solution to this is that we have to pay more for the food. It will sustain these methods and keep that link to the natural world that a lot of food production is missing. With his company Natoora he targets chefs who want the best-tasting ingredients they can get.
So, how do we go from where we are at the moment to where we want to be? We are told to eat local, too, but is this the case? Fubini doesn’t think that this is exclusively the case and he expands on some of his theories and reasons as to why this is the case; it comes down to how the food is grown, not where. Changing the system will mean pushing back against big corporations with powerful vested interests and deep pockets to ensure that the law is on their side.
At its heart though, this is a book about a search for a white peach that came from the Campania region of Italy. He had not other clues other than that, but it would be the craziest search that he would embark on trying to find the farmer who grew them.
The current food system is geared towards bland uniform food. What Fubini wants to do is make the artisan producer able to compete with the mainstream producers and win every time on flavour. One way on improving the system is education, teaching kids what seasonal food is and why foods with flavour is better for you.
This is an excellent book and is well worth reading alongside Ultra-Processed People. In that, van Tulleken lays out how bad the modern food system is for us. In here, Fubini lays out a way for us to get much better and tastier food onto our plates. Well worth reading.
Recent Comments