Hello from Kintyre, where I have been busily planting bulbs and working on samples for our new collection. While I knit, I like to listen to podcasts, books, and journalism and really appreciate the audio availability of formerly text-exclusive media. Here are a few of the things I’ve enjoyed listening to and thinking about over the past few days.
First, in the week when Meta announced it was going to begin filling its users’ IG and Facebook feeds with synthetic material that has been automatically generated from their own likenesses and likes, I enjoyed two intelligent pieces about the giddy digital doom-loop of AI slop, which in so many ways defines our present moment. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, Max Read’s essay offers a great introduction to, and analysis of, the internet’s current slop problem (also available via NYT audio, which is how I came across it). On the BBC’s Artificial Human, meanwhile, Aleks Krotoski and Kevin Fong have a different take on the question Will Shrimp Jesus Kill Social Media?, which takes them on a journey from Instagram’s fake sweaters (we all know about those) to AI’s impact on the communities of the Global South.
As someone living in a part of Scotland, where “terroir” is a particularly important component of local whisky production, I find myself thinking about what it means to “taste” a place a lot. On a recent episode of The Food Chain on the BBC World Service, Ruth Alexander does a brilliant job of interrogating – and challenging – the very idea of terroir (what might it mean to “taste the place” of a vertically-grown lettuce from a hydroponic warehouse in Liverpool?) whilst simultaneously acknowledging the unshakable connection of terroir to our sense of who, and where, we are (I really enjoyed her account of her own sense of the differences between British and Swedish potatoes).
Why do we find the idea that you can taste a place so very persuasive? What kinds of cultural value are being added to the things that we eat and drink through knowledge of the practices and places of its production? A few months ago I offered a jar of my favourite jam to a no-frills friend who, when I earnestly explained the fruit types and regional agricultural practices that made it so very special, laughed at me for my bourgeois pretension. Such moments – in which we are able to recognise terroir as an idea that might be both fatuous (my description of the jam was undoubtedly pretentious) and tangible (this jam IS very good, because of how and from what it is made) – remind us of the curious power of this notoriously fuzzy concept. In Lily Kelting’s fine essay for Emergence Magazine, she takes the process of terroir interrogation several steps further, exploring the distinctive taste of the milk of India’s urban cows.
This thought-provoking and thoughtful piece offers an important challenge to Western notions of terroir, while simultaneously re-claiming the taste of India’s marginal urban spaces as distinctive (and delicious). Highly recommended (and many thanks to Felix for mentioning it to me)
Finally, as a Stevie Wonder superfan, I have to say how much I loved Wesley Morris’ terrific podcast series, The Wonder of Stevie. This is an unalloyed and completely joyful celebration of the great albums of the 1970s, whose many wee gems include audio excerpts from a Terry Wogan interview with Stevie and his mother; a great discussion of the significance of the cover of Talking Book; Barack Obama’s description of his feelings about Living for the City, and Morris’ own emotional account of his eventual recognition of the cosmic significance of As.
Enjoy your Sunday!
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