The food events that dominated 2008 were the world food crisis and China’s melamine scare. Both crises were the result of markets behaving unexpectedly: one was the outcome of complex and systemic market forces and the other the result of unhinged capitalist opportunism. I wrote little directly about either on Mouthful but both tended to sit in the hazy background of other posts. For a blog about "what the world eats" to become about what the world is not eating and what the world cannot eat smacks of a terrible irony. It is a strange era to be writing about food when the biggest issues are about not consuming.

While for most of the West, authenticity is now concerned with whether their Thai curry is "real" or not, Melamine in Chinese milk products was a tangible, literal breach of authenticity. Most Western nations had assumed that adulterated food would never return as a widespread problem. The mystery as to why food journalists were banned from entry to China  preceding the Beijing Olympic Games is now solved.

Neither event has ended (the food crisis is still on the World Bank's map in both the figurative and literal sense) but in the spirit of New Year’s optimism, there is some hope that the People’s Republic of China will clean up its industrial kitchens.

Other than the two big crises, Mouthful has had a mixed year. When PETA announced that they would fund a competition to grow meat in a vat, I asked bioartist Oron Catts what test tube meat tasted like (just like meat jelly on fabric, it appears). I wondered about umami in time for MSG's 100th birthday. I looked at the art and science behind Korea’s national rotting cabbage dish kimchi.

In home cooking, I replicated moments from the Food Safari back catalogue to varying degrees of success: Portuguese Charcoal Chicken, Tajine, Thịt heo kho trứng, Mechoui. Looking back now, I realise how overwhelmingly meaty all of the dishes that I selected ended up (although possibly not as meaty as making bacon in my small apartment. I really should make a note to focus more on vegetarianism in 2009 and less on the spurious notion of semivegetarianism).

In drinking, I looked at China’s budding wine industry and growing consumption (which with the benefit of Wall Street collapse hindsight may just have been a shortlived anomalous moment on the thousand year history of Chinese grape wine drinking. The price of hops continued to scare the microbrew industry . I took on the myth about aluminium cans causing beer to taste tinny, unsuccessfully. I took on the Australian macrobreweries faking import beer to slightly better effect (at least, now the Australian Consumer's Association is now paying it some heed).