Awards on pause. Rethinking Healthy Food. Airplane meals at sea level. And when it snows chocolate.
Joining us this week and next is Susan Boyle @miss_susanboyle, alongside Joshna @joshnamaharaj while Mirella @beerology is on leave. Susan is a drinks consultant, researcher, writer, storyteller, and performer based in Ireland. She writes about beer, presents drinks features on Irish national television and radio and hosts tasting and masterclasses. Susan is also one half of Two Sisters Brewing, makers of Brigid’s Ale. She is pursuing a PhD at the Technological University of Dublin focusing on the importance of storytelling and place to beverages, and won an outstanding speaker award at the Oxford Symposium of Food and Cookery for her research. Susan was recently named a Fulbright Creative Ireland Fellow at the Smithsonian Museum of American History.
In this episode we talk about: The James Beard Foundation Awards are on pause. After no Black winners in any of 23 categories and multiple allegations of varying kinds of poor behaviour among nominees, the Foundation decided to hit the pause button until further notice. We dig in on what that might mean for the awards and the industry.
Susan and her family had a deeply personal experience of the intersection of healthcare with food when her mother passed away suddenly. Susan's feeling is we need to rethink what we think is healthy and is healthy food in relation to our physical health.
Do you have a soft spot for airplane meals? Airplane food is now available on the ground, thanks to COVID-19. In some strange way we're interested to try it, not only because we'd love to know what they're eating in first class… but because it literally tastes different down here.
To cap things off, we have a delightful story to report: it recently snowed chocolate in Switzerland!