Truffle

Somewhere I read that truffle oil is the “tomato ketchup of the middle class” and that it gives a “simplified picture, a sort of cartoon version — bright and colourful but ultimately false” of what truffle should taste like. However, since Umeå is not Umbria, my choices are slightly limited, and I felt like attempting another recipe by Gennaro Contaldo based on what I could find at ICA earlier today.

In the real world, Afghanistan is quickly falling under Taliban control with President Ashraf Gani resigning. Though perhaps not that surprising per se, the speed by which it has happened has been shocking, with possibly grave humanitarian implications. As I have argued many times in the past, the 2001 invasion was a fundamental mistake. Even if one believes that the invasion was somehow justified, the half-hearted way that the occupation has been carried out has only prolonged the suffering of the Afghan people and, now, ultimately led to defeat. If one were ever serious about turning Afghanistan around, millions of soldiers would have had to be deployed to pacify the country from the ground up and build a new democratic society based on the universal provision of education and health care. Instead of this, short-termism and the worst tendencies of NGO projectification have been given free roam, creating a kind of New Public Management hellscape of bottomless youth unemployment, lots of drug money and unresolved ethnic strife.