The idea is simple. Pick something, dry it, and use it later. Not really very long ago, that was preservation. The clove flower was no exception and to this day, picking and drying is how it goes.
The clove in your cupboard is the dried flower bud from the tropical Clove evergreen native to the Spice Islands. It is highly fragrant and grows up to 50 feet tall. Harvesting trees are kept to about 30 feet. “In the days of sea travel by the great shipping line,” Toussaint-Samat writes, setting the scene of great passenger ships and the “wonderful scent of cloves, telling them they were approaching the island even while they were still far out to sea.”
Cloves are picked when mature but before the yellow petals of the flower open. They are dried in the sun and will lose 66% of their weight in the drying.
Tanzania and Indonesia produce the vast quantity of cloves, with Tanzania producing nearly 80% of the world’s cloves.
I found this in my in box. Foreign shrimp being raised in dubious conditions. I am being kind.
Here’s the link about it and why it is so very important to know, I mean to KNOW, where your food comes from. I have long avoided non-American shrimp and this is not any reason to stop my own personal embargo.
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Factory fishing?
Isn’t that a quaint picture? When you think of the fishing industry, is that close to the idea in your head? Yeah, me too. Commercial fishing is bigger than that.
Commercial Fish Processing
In the aftermath of the theater of the absurd, AKA, the State Of The Union speech-more for rhetoric than facts, and that’s for all SOTU speeches-a tempest of confusion, slight of fin, and plain deception forges ahead at full pace. That trickery is the fake fish industry. Let me remove confusion before it starts. Not every commercial operation is fake and there are many good people in many good companies doing good work. But, there are some bad actors, too, and it is they we need to guard against.
In the Foodnavigator-usa.com, Elizabeth Crawford writes an article, dateline January 31, 2018, about how molecular biology, and DNA scanning, will be the next of several efforts to curb fake fish by tracking the real fish from boat to store.
A recent post on this blog discussed the possible use of blockchain technology to track country of origin in foods, including fish.
In the media
USA Today writer Elizabeth Weise has written about the fish supply, stating in her February 23, 2009 article “Something Fishy? Counterfeit Foods Enter The U.S. Market!!” “Fish is the most frequently faked food Americans buy,” as well as here.
In Larry Olmstead’s recent book, Real Food/Fake Food: Why You Don’t Know What You Are Eating and What You Can Do About It, he writes a chapter of fake fish, including the fakery in the sushi industry. “How terrible is it? A study for New York City seafood done by scientists at a nonprofit marine conservation group Oceana found fraud in 58 percent of retail outlets and 39 percent of restaurants. The one especially scary finding . . . was that every sushi restaurant from which samples were collected—100 percent of them—served fake fish.”
There are ways to manage the problem. Fraud in fish may never be eliminated but measures can be taken to make significant impacts in the practice. Curiously, not one of these measures comes from the government. All are private enterprise, seeking innovative methods to solve a problem. The worst thing that can happen is the government to step in and with no expertise in the field, tell private business they have to stop or, maybe worse, impose a stifling amount of fees.
Read more about Olmstead’s suggestions as well as what he found in all manner of food fakery as well as food wholesomeness.
These are links to Amazon, for whom I am an affiliate seller. When you purchase from Amazon through these links, I earn a small commission at no cost to you. The first is for Olmstead’s book, the second for a well reviewed expose on olive oil.
open. They are dried in the sun and will lose 66% of their weight in the drying.
