America's declining life expectancy, China's solar surge & how Carbonara vindicates Eric Hobsbawm
America's declining life expectancy, China's solar surge & how Carbonara vindicates Eric Hobsbawm
Great links, images and reading from Chartbook newsletter by Adam Tooze
Frans Krajcberg Painting 1 1957 Moma
American life expectancy
See also Chartbook #148
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China export slump
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Chinese solar
How did China become such a dominant force in solar? Low costs, of course. But also dramatic domestic demand growth.
Source: Reuters
The invention of tradition
Panettone is a case in point. Before the 20th century, panettone was a thin, hard flatbread filled with a handful of raisins. It was only eaten by the poor and had no links to Christmas. Panettone as we know it today is an industrial invention. In the 1920s, Angelo Motta of the Motta food brand introduced a new dough recipe and started the “tradition” of a dome-shaped panettone. Then in the 1970s, faced with growing competition from supermarkets, independent bakeries began making dome-shaped panettone themselves. As Grandi writes in his book, “After a bizarre backwards journey, panettone finally came to be what it had never previously been: an artisanal product.” … Tiramisu is another example. Its recent origins are disguised by various fanciful histories. It first appeared in cookbooks in the 1980s. Its star ingredient, mascarpone, was rarely found outside Milan before the 1960s, and the coffee-infused biscuits that divide the layers are Pavesini, a supermarket snack launched in 1948. “In a normal country,” Grandi says with a smile, “nobody would care where [and when] a cake was invented.” Parmesan, he says, is remarkably ancient, around a millennium old. But before the 1960s, wheels of parmesan cheese weighed only about 10kg (as opposed to the hefty 40kg wheels we know today) and were encased in a thick black crust. Its texture was fatter and softer than it is nowadays. “Some even say that this cheese, as a sign of quality, had to squeeze out a drop of milk when pressed,” Grandi says. “Its exact modern-day match is Wisconsin parmesan.” He believes that early 20th-century Italian immigrants, probably from the Po’ region north of Parma, started producing it in Wisconsin and, unlike the cheesemakers back in Parma, their recipe never evolved. So while Parmigiano in Italy became over the years a fair-crusted, hard cheese produced in giant wheels, Wisconsin parmesan stayed true to the original.
Which is all great but here comes the killer line:
For Grandi, the story of carbonara perfectly encapsulates Hobsbawm’s idea of the “invention of tradition”.
I Mean!
That is because, as the food historian Luca Cesari, author of A Brief History of Pasta, puts it, carbonara is “an American dish born in Italy” and it wasn’t born until the second world war. The story that most experts agree on is that an Italian chef, Renato Gualandi, first made it in 1944 at a dinner in Riccione for the US army with guests including Harold Macmillan. “The Americans had fabulous bacon, very good cream, some cheese and powdered egg yolks,” Gualandi later recalled. Cesari dismisses myths that carbonara was the food of 18th-century Italian charcoal workers as “ahistorical”.
FANATASTIC stuff from Marianna Giusti in FT
Stuart Hall “I'm not English and I never will be. The life I have lived is one of partial displacement. I came to England as a means of escape, and it was a failure."
"I got involved in cultural studies because I didn't think life was purely economically determined. I took all this up as an argument with economic determinism. I lived my life as an argument with Marxism, and with neoliberalism. Their point is that, in the last instance, economy will determine it. But when is the last instance? If you're analysing the present conjuncture, you can't start and end at the economy. It is necessary, but insufficient."
Source: Guardian
Who bought the Prius?
Easy to forget that in the early 2000s the US led the world in hybrid adoption!
How much PIzza domino’s bosses ate
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On America's structural inability to effectively compete with China in Africa.
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Darién Gap
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Frans Krajcberg (1921 - 2017) Untitled
Source: Christies