Sat at the airport for around four hours -- it seemed preferable to wandering around town in the rain with a suitcase -- I'm taking a pause from reading The Economist to think about what else I could be doing. The fact is, when I travel I don't often make good use of the downtime involved. Well, I make use of it, but not productive use. So, I'll read more of a magazine than I might otherwise and listen to more podcasts, but there's always the nagging guilt that I could be doing something else.

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One of the trickier aspects of home fermentation is the need to keep things anaerobic. The bacteria that do the work are perfectly happy without oxygen. Most spoiler moulds and bacteria need a bit of oxygen. So the usual advice is to ensure that all the stuff you're pickling is submerged beneath the liquid in which it is being pickled. Easy enough in a nice, straight-sided pickling crock, where a plate with a weight on top does the job smoothly. Posh crocks may have a fitted lid or even an air-lock. But they're expensive and second-hand ones are hard to find.

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There are quite a few podcasts that I keep an eye on but do not actually subscribe to. One of those is Econtalk, and recently I spotted a couple of things there that looked interesting enough to mark for listening. Rachel Laudan talked to Russ Roberts about the ideas in her book Cuisine and Empire, and as she's an old cyber-friend and previous guest on my own podcast, I was keen to hear what she had to say.

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It is with profound regret that we report the final sad demise of Artisan, a noun recently pressed into service well beyond its capabilities. As a young person, Artisan was to be seen practising its trade, making a variety of products in limited quantities, often using methods learned from its forbears Craftsperson and Handworker. More recently, alas, Artisan succumbed to blandishments of the men in shiny suits and lent its imprimatur to several tawdry enterprises as far flung as mousepads and kitchen mixers.

Artisan, absorbed in hookers and blow, was at no time aware of how its hard-won reputation as a mark of singular quality had been undermined by its unthinking endorsement of these activities. Even at the end, it was to be heard defending the right of all products everywhere to consider themselves handmade, no matter how unlikely that was. Individuality, Artisan was heard to mutter in its cups, was no great shakes anyway.

The end, when it came, came with a whimper: the simple phrase "artisan baked bread" attached to a sandwich package that very obviously contained nothing of the sort.

Artisan is survived -- barely -- by heirloom, homemade and authentic.

When it comes to publishing stuff online, especially when you're not doing it for money, some people seem to think that you should create only the things you want to create, that the work you do you do for yourself. And while that's true, at least to some extent, if it were entirely true, why publish at all? Why not just keep it to yourself, and please only yourself? Because having other people enjoy what you have made, and have it sufficiently valuable to devote some attention to it, is immensely rewarding and validating.

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