The blinding whiteness of people who write about Chinese food

When Lorraine Chuen searched “Chinese” in The New York Times food section, 90 percent of the 263 articles that appeared were written by a white person. That’s because when it comes to commenting on Chinese food — or most cuisines — the microphone goes to the white majority. “White people are able to establish outrageously successful careers for being experts and authorities on the stuff that racialized folks do every day simply by existing. But of course, people of colour will rarely, if ever, be called experts on how to simply be themselves,” says Chuen, who is trained in experimental psychology. Likewise, white food writers spend much of their time interviewing high-end chefs or fellow white connoisseurs, not the Mandarin-speaking cooks in the back of the kitchen. And in the West, many readers are more thrilled by stories of China’s most exotic dishes, like dog soup, than in a serious review of hand-pulled noodles or the difference between Shanghai and Sichuan dishes — even as they buy entire magazines dedicated to the regional flavors of Italian cooking.

Farm robots are good little workers — but still not as good as humans

Financial Times

Thorvald, the British farm robot, can carry trays of strawberry plants to human pickers, “sparing them miles of walking through vast fields,” and at night, he stays up, passing “over plants with ultraviolet lights to kill mildew that might otherwise spoil as much as half the crop,” says Financial Times. Best of all, as the UK prepares to leave the EU after Brexit, Thorvald doesn’t need a work visa. Companies have been tinkering with farm robots for years, but suddenly they’re in high demand as countries like the UK and the U.S. clamp down on immigration and farmers worry where they’ll find enough labor. In 2015, British farms hired 22,517 EU-born workers, or about a fifth of the total. But post-EU, farmers could lose access to that foreign pool. And yet, even if Thorvald and other machines like him can pick up some of the slack, teaching them how to do critical tasks, like actually picking delicate strawberries, is still 10 to 20 years away. (Story is paywalled.)

Women are the ‘invisible farmers’

Chicago Tribune

Around the world, women often aren’t paid for the work they do on the farm, which is why they’re called the “invisible farmers.” A new Australia-based project is trying to document their contributions in the country over the course of three years. Liza Dale-Hallett, the project’s leader, says, “We know that around 49 percent of real farm income in Australia is contributed by women. This figure includes a whole range of activities such as on-farm work, off-farm waged work and household, volunteer and community work, however unfortunately a lot of this work tends to go unnoticed, undocumented and uncelebrated in the public eye.”

The scientist behind ‘mindless eating’ is getting a statistics lesson

Ars Technica

Brian Wansink, head of Cornell’s Food and Brand Lab, has almost certainly influenced the way you eat. “Perhaps you’ve adopted the tip to use smaller plates to trick yourself into eating less, moved your unhealthy snacks into a hard-to-reach place, or placed your fruit bowl prominently on your kitchen counter. Maybe you’ve scoffed at the “health halo” marketing of a decidedly unhealthy food, or chosen 100-calorie snack packs to control your intake,” says Ars Technica. All of those were Wansink’s ideas. But now his research, which produced the notion of “mindless eating,” is being sharply questioned after other scientists have discovered glaring statistical errors. By one count, there are 42 publications by Wansink with anywhere from minor to serious issues, which have been cited 3,700 times and published in 25 different journals in the course of 20 years. Whether Wansink knew about the mistakes is unclear, but many of them center around what’s called p-hacking, essentially mining a failed study for good data — a process that can turn up false positives. But if Wansink’s errors are a blow to his credibility, they’re also raising questions about the process of peer review, which some critics say relies too heavily on unpaid, busy individuals who are prone to mistakes themselves.

Why the digital age is all about food

Bloomberg View