three things

a wednesday wander

1:

I’m starting work on a book about Singaporean food and food culture, and I’d love to know what you’d like to see in it – please leave a comment, or several!

2:

This interview with the owner of a Chicago bakery was a great listen. It’s a pretty big small bakery, but you still get the sense that they’re just flotsam on the tides of the national economy.

Around 75% of the way through, they start telling a story about how a shortage of semiconductors was creating a shortage of Haribo gummi bears. The chip shortage is causing a slowdown in car manufacturing, which reduces demand for all the other myriad components that go into an automobile. One of these is leather, and the gelatin that makes gummi bears gummi is a byproduct (or co-product) of the leather that covers automobile dashboards. A food manufacturer with an estimated revenue in the billions is ultimately flotsam too.

3:

I recently cooked a number of meals for many, using dishes from the Superiority Burger cookbook, which I wrote about way back when. It’s been a few years since I tested the recipes, and I was reminded not just of how high-spirited the food is, but also by how well they designed for manufacturability. Whatever your position on meat eating, this book is a delight.