Congee vs COVID. Free Money.
I make congee over New Year. My microgrants evolve into Chatham House Sustainability Accelerator grants. My next show, Mar 11.
I was ready for the year but then Covid struck and I’ve been out of action for the last 2 weeks. I’m now recovering.
This week:
Microgrants (£1K grants): new applications open
Congee vs COVID, cooking over CNY
My ESG Webinar, next week I speak ESG
My next show, March 11 my next performance-lecture on death
Links and articles further in letter below:
Elon Musk on the Tesla robot
We should remember the euthanasia of children with disabilities by the Nazis
UK land use
Cancer survival rates
Evidence for voluntary carbon offsets
Micropoem and art submissions
Satya (Microsoft) on gaming and the meta verse
A profile on Miami and the VC investor Keith Rabois who thinks it’s the best place in the world.
Harvard endowment on where it is with its net zero journey.
A framework for thinking when shareholders should engage
The unclear edge of crypto philosophy.
Obesity Science
My friend changed their name and made a lovely piece of digital adventure about it.
The long cycle interest rate and inflation challenges
Sadly, I had to cancel the Jan meet up, but there will be another one in Feb, 24 if you want to come. Same idea.
My microgrants programme is still running (on creativity, impact) but I’ve co-sponsored the Chatham House one that has just launched, which is focused on sustainability ideas. £1,000 for your sustainability projects. Do apply!
My next show is on Mar 11. Booking open:
Happy lunar New Year. I was still sick so no major feasting or cooking, I ended up making congee. This rice porridge is soothing. For me, it’s not only the throat soothing properties but the memory congee invokes of my Mum making it for me when ill and young. Food is wrapped up in our memories and culture. We seldom eat only in isolation.
Whenever I eat durian, I always recall my father’s Ipoh house where I first smelled the fruit and called the durian the perfume fruit - to the laughter and astonishment of my father’s family and a nickname that stuck with it whenever I visited. (Amusement because most people find the smell repulsive it seems.)
What food evokes is intertwined with our culture and what it means to be human.
Back on congee, it seems it was a dish made as far back as 1000 BCE according to wiki/SCMP and Pliny (the elder) wrote about is in his account of India c. AD 77. The word congee derives from proto-Tamil Indian language.
According to this food writer, Dash:
Pliny The Elder who in his accounts extols the virtue of the Indian Congee/ Kanji served in the ports to weary sailors, called it the “powerhouse that can build or break a nation.” Upholding Congee as one of the brightest culinary idea of the time, Pliny had observed that such was the prowess of the dish that it can in its evolution help mankind evolve too. His object of obsession was the rice gruel – a easily available, popular one pot meal then – which had already conquered complete Asia and was influencing the porridges across the seas as well.
Dash goes on to suggest many chefs favour it at the end of a long service and extols the virtues of its versatility and also a “equality” about the dish. Kings to foot soldiers will all eat congee and have a sense of belonging from it.
I’m unsure if I’d go quite so far, but maybe - like an “English” breakfast in the UK, a congee is so universal that perhaps it’s true.
Regardless, it’s definitely something I find soothing even if it’s not a typical New Year dish! If you’ve never tried making congee you should give it a go! It’s hardly a recipe…
Congee recipe
Overnight left over rice
Stock or water (with stock cube)
Chicken, spring onion or other topping
Place the leftover rice in enough stock to genrously cover it. Gentlly simmer for 10-15 minutes or when the rice has broken up into a thick soup quality, only a touch of texture left. You can add mushroom, chicken or whatever you have or leave it plain. Salted or preserved eggs go well as well. Water is fine, but half a stock cube or some stock gives it a deeper richness. I often poach an egg in the soup and finish with some soy sauce and spring onions.
If you are into ESG / investing stuff… I’m doing a webinar for the Houston area CFA on ESG techniques and it’s open to all.
It’s an evolution of the talk I gave to the CFA UK in 2019, so if you want you can look up that talk on YouTube.
More on ESG stuff, I did a podcast with Graham Sinclair, quite a long time ago now and you can listen/watch here.
I was skimming my archive. I noted when I wrote about losing my hair, but more a reflection on how we still mostly do not understand female hair, particularly black female hair and the history and culture (and repression) around this.
I am unbothered by my hair. Its craziness was a small part of my outward identity previously, and its lack now doesn’t change much. But for so many people, it’s a lot more. If you are close to someone with black female hair and you’ve not had a conversation about it, you should ask them about their relationship with hair.
Mostly, lying in bed was a time for some thinking and light reading along with the coughing. I reflected how there are countries that have really grown wealth and developed over the few decades. Eg South Korea. Not only in GDP - as we know it’s not everything - but thinking about the culture that is exported (k-pop, Squid Game (Netflix series), kimchi etc.)
And some like Ukraine and Afghanistan (and many others) have stumbled; and some like Turkey today are at a very challenging tipping point. For all the challenges in eg UK and US, Americans and Brits are so incredibly lucky not to be Afghani.
Here are some slightly deeper looks at Turkey and Afghanistan.
In Turkey, much hinges around what happens with inflation.
The long cycle interest rate and inflation challenges are now challenges being debated at the very top of all central banks, particularly in the US / EU / UK.
This from macro hedge fund thinkers, Bridgewater/Ray Dalio tries to put the challenges and likely outcomes in perspective.
My friend changed their name and this is a lovely piece of digital adventure about it.
In obesity science this is somewhat technical but it pushes back against the carbohydrate-insulin model of obesity. Essentially, the paper suggests that the current consensus put the brain as the centre of the weight/obesity system and while insulin pathways are important they are better explained by a brain centric model.
A moving thought. A stranger writing in reply to your music articles for a period of 17 years.
The unclear edge of crypto philosophy.
A framework for thinking when shareholders should engage.
Harvard endowment on where it is with its net zero journey.
Putting COVID deaths in resp. in perspective (sort of).
A profile on Miami and the VC investor Keith Rabois who thinks it’s the best place in the world.
Satya on gaming and the meta verse:
Micropoem and art submissions:
Evidence for voluntary carbon offsets
Cancer survival rates
UK land use
YT comments improving:
Musk on the Tesla robot:
We should remember the euthanasia of children with disabilities by the Nazis