Africans vastly prefer tough, tough meat,” said Robert Sietsema, longtime restaurant critic for The Village Voice. “They will eat tree snails that are so tough you would have difficulty distinguishing it from a section of rubber tire. “For them, eating something for dinner is not an appreciation of tenderness. It is an appreciation of toughness, and they want to really chew on the meat and enjoy it because meat is so rare.”

I am not making this up. Yes. This was published in a story about African food in New York City in this weekend The New York Times which went about “What is African food.” See here. This comes a few weeks after two prominent New York food bloggers felt compelled to “debate” whether the city’s people are ready for a “high-end African restaurant” since “high-end” and “African” don’t apparently go together. Like we care anyway. For a better treatment of African food culture, though, you’d have to turn to Al Jazeera. Like this program on Kenyan “street food” (in two parts) here and here.

Darwin’s Nightmare is hardcore filmmaking. That it was nominated for an Oscar does not take away from its impact or importance. (It’s about the brutal politics and economics of globalization on Lake Victoria in East Africa; at the heart of the film is the arms trade and the export of nile perch to Europe.)  But I have always had that nagging feeling about it.

Michael Massing (he’s the one writing those long, thoughtful pieces on US stenographer ‘journalism’ in the New York Review of Books), unpacked the film this week as part of a larger rant on what’s wrong with documentary film-making in the US currently.

Full piece in the Columbia Journalism Review here. (Its about a 3rd into the piece).

INC. magazine recently profiled an American distributor working with a group of South African winemakers in the Western Cape province of South Africa. The story is interesting for its focus on black wine makers and their attempts to access the lucrative US market.

Since the end of apartheid and lifting of sanctions in 1994, South Africa’s wine industry has grown to $3 billion. But freedom and opportunity are not identical: The vast majority of blacks still lack the capital and business expertise to attempt wine production. As part of an economic transformation initiative, the government created a land transfer program and announced a goal of 30 percent black land ownership. But black ownership remains below 5 percent, and black ownership of vineyards is below 2 percent. Black-owned wine companies have had trouble making inroads with customers, distributors, and the white winemakers that are often their partners.

Though the well-researched piece focuses on the travails of the American wine importer, Selena Cuffe, the writer does well to integrate that focus into a larger one about the racial politics of wine making in South Africa and depicting the small group of black vintners as a complex group.

She does the same for the white wine makers. But one startling passage is when she highlights the racism within the industry and among consumers: Some whites do not want to drink ‘black wine’ and go on about that wine’s ‘quality,’ conveniently forgetting who the majority of the workforce is producing the ‘white’ wine.

Read the rest here.