At the beginning of October of 2001, about a month after the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers, 11 experts from ten countries gathered at the Amerian Cordoba Park Hotel, a four-star establishment in Argentina, primarily targeted at business travellers. The experts represented the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations and World Health Organisation. The goal of this meeting, which took place over four days, was to evaluate “the scientific evidence available on the properties, functionality, benefits, safety, and nutritional features of probiotic foods”.
At the time, probiotics were starting to become a part of the popular conversation on nutrition, especially with regard to adding them to milk products for children and high-risk populations; there was “no international consensus on the methodology to assess the efficacy and the safety of these products”, according to a report from the meeting. A year earlier, in New York, another group of scientists had met to
First published in Daily Maverick 168 weekly newspaper
A music year like no other: 2020 has forced South African musicians to not only be creative and think outside the box but also to find different ways to reach their audiences. Online performances became a go-to for local artists, especially as the country went into a nationwide lockdown.
DJs have been at the forefront of the livestream concert trend with artists like Black Coffee, who committed to a residency of virtual shows – the Home Brewed series – alongside the Solidarity Fund to raise money for Covid-19 relief. After raising about R400,000 in a month through crowdfunding, he was applauded by the United Nations Foundation on Twitter for his efforts. The last edition of the Home Brewed series was in May.
2020: A year like no other for South African music and dailymaverick.co.za - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from dailymaverick.co.za Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
“Ever since I first came here in 2004 during a school outing, I knew I wanted to work here,” Crystal Birch told
Maverick Life editor Emilie Gambade and me back in February 2019, when we visited her at Parisian Milliners in Cape Town just a few months after she had joined the factory’s then 84-year-old owner, Harry Faktor, as a business partner.
In the 14 years between that moment in 2004 and April 2018 when she joined the business, she’d studied millinery, built a career as a stylist, unsuccessfully tried to intern at Parisian Milliners, and then went on to launch her eponymous hat brand in 2013, eventually hiring Parisian Milliners to manufacture her hats, and building a relationship with the factory. And then, as she tells it, in December 2017, she had a dream. “I had a dream about Harry picking up his jacket and leaving, so I came to see him in February 2018 and told him about my dream. And he said to me, ‘I don’t want to just pick up my jacket and leave. I want t