I have been sitting on a couple of blog posts that I wanted to expand upon since they appeared on 3 Quarks Daily on the same day in the beginning of March. Both pertain to food, both are written by Indian born authors who muse on Asian food habits and their relation to religion, culture and the versatility of the human taste buds.
The first article is written by Namit Arora who is familiar to our readers through his comments and blog linked on A.B. Namit took his readers through the eating habits of two large Asian countries - India and China, geographic neighbors with ancient histories and vastly disparate culinary cultures. He focuses on the prevalent natural, religious, and philosophical climates that may have influenced the choice of food of the two peoples, in particular, meat eating and vegetarianism. Read the article and comments below and see if you find the arguments convincing. Although Namit did not address the morality of eating meat in this article, I know that he had the thought in mind (he admitted to me as much in an email) as I myself do occasionally. If I were to ponder this issue, the practice of killing animals for food or other consumer products, I will have to answer some of the following:
As an animal lover I have oftentimes grappled with the above thoughts. I have answers to some and not to others. But I continue to eat meat. If some day, the fact of another animal dying (being killed) for my food starts to weigh too much on my conscience, I will indeed become a vegetarian. And if I do, one particular veggie will definitely figure prominently on my menu. That vegetable is bitter melon or karela (in Hindi), a delicacy in some parts of the world, mostly in Asia. Not everyone can stand the taste of it, some not even when it is disguised with spices and other ingredients. The second post on 3QD is about this very same bitter item of food. Author Aditya Dev Sood waxes philosophical on why some among us would choose not only to eat but thoroughly enjoy something that by normal standards of palatability, should be quite unpalatable.
Karela is a truly bitter vegetable and the taste is somewhat acquired or perhaps one has a genetic predisposition to enjoying it or not. I myself have loved it from early childhood, when most children reject bitter, to the astonishment of adults. I enjoy almost all the ways the vegetable is prepared. I can even eat it plain, just boiled with a sprinkling of salt. My husband on the other hand, can only consume a few mouthfuls even when it is spiced up. If any uninitiated reader would like to try it, I will present here a few tips and recipes for consuming karela.
First, a quick guide to karela buying. There are two varieties of the vegetable. The Chinese variety features larger, smoother gourds which are less bitter and less delicious to my bitter loving palate. It is more widely available both in Asian markets as well as in the produce section of large grocery stores. The Indian variety is smaller, crunchier and more bristly looking (see photos of both varieties in the Wiki link). Usually, only Indian or Pakistani stores carry the Indian variety. Also, the Indian bitter gourd is decidedly more bitter and truer to the karela taste that I crave. If you have never tasted the veggie, you may wish to begin with the less bitter Chinese variety.
Recipes follow.
I have never been impressed by overly sensual/ carnal language applied to food. I know, I know, sex too is a natural appetite and lust and gluttony can describe urges both above and below the belt. But for some reason, calling a piece of chocolate cake "sinfully delicious" doesn't make me want to eat it more. So it was not a surprise that I found the following article about marketing a burger with overt sexual imagery quite annoying.
When I watch the Carl's Jr. commercial featuring "Top Chef" host and mega-model Padma Lakshmi make hot sweet love to a Western Bacon Cheeseburger, I have many thoughts, some of which, I confess, are not entirely to my credit. The spot features the former Mrs. Salman Rushdie sitting on a brownstone stoop in a clingy sundress hiked up mid-thigh, cramming the giant burger into her educated maw and sucking barbecue sauce from her fingers and wrists. Let's not mince onions here: This is sex with a burger.
You might think that here, at last, television advertising might have crossed some sort of debauched Rubicon, or at least some tripwire at the Federal Communications Commission. Not even close. It's merely the latest chapter in the weird mash-up between sex and diabolically unhealthful fast food.
What gives?
Go ahead and read the whole unappetizing story and take a good look at the model, Padma Lakshmi aka ex-Mrs. Salman Rushdie #4. The only sentence you need to pay attention to is the one at the very end.
And so you have the impossibly lean and beautiful Lakshmi wolfing down a 1,000-calorie burger. Now that's hard to swallow.
I am not an observant Jew. To put it more succinctly, I am not Jewish at all. Yet I look forward to Passover each year for one gastronomic reason - kosher Coca-Cola. I am not much of a soft drink lover either, tea and water being my beverages of choice. But when I do drink soda, I prefer ice cold Classic Coke or regular Pepsi to anything else. Both are familiar soft drinks of my childhood in India - delicious tingling beverages that brought much relief on hot sunny days at home, in restaurants or by the shack of a road side vendor.
I was not aware that kosher dietary laws extend to soft drinks until just a few years ago (probably 2001 or 2002). During the Passover week that year, I happened to pass a special table displaying kosher goods for the upcoming holiday at my local grocery store and noticed 2 liter bottles of Coke with distinctive yellow caps among the items. I brought one home purely out of curiosity. It turned out to be a pleasant surprise - it tasted like real Coke, a nostalgic taste no longer found in the modern incarnation of the drink. Having never paid any attention to the ingredients in Coca-Cola, I had no idea why the kosher cola tasted so much better than the ordinary variety. A Jewish friend shed light on the mystery. Kosher Coke is made with sugar - it is indeed the Real Thing. In the mid '80s the Coca-Cola company led the way in switching to high fructose corn syrup as sweetener for soft drinks, ditching real sugar from the ingredients. No wonder the kosher Coke tasted so good - it invoked the happy times of youth. Since then every Passover season, I keep an eye out for this rare commodity - kosher Coke is as rare as it is ephemeral. It makes its fleeting appearance for just a few days around this time of the year and if one is not vigilant, it is gone. Last year I missed it. So, I am determined to obtain a couple of bottles this year. I was at the grocery store this morning looking for kosher Coke. It hadn't arrived. I talked to the manager and he assured me that he has some on order and I should check back tomorrow or the day after. Greedy though I am for this special concoction, I only purchase moderate quantities partly out of consideration for Jewish shoppers and partly because 2 liter bottles are not the best option for our household of just two members, neither of whom consumes carbonated drinks in large quantities. Most years I have only managed to find this large sized packaging. Just once, the store also carried cans of kosher Coke which I much prefer.
If you are too young to have ever tasted soft drinks sweetened with sugar and you didn't know about kosher Coke, do try to find some this week and taste the Real Thing. Read more about this special edition of Coca-Cola here.
Note: This post originally appeared on March 18, 2008. I am bringing it to the front for the Passover week that begins today.
H2OM - a blessed beverage, Intentional Chocolate - a snack that is "imbued" with a monk's meditation, Creo Mundi - a protein mix that has been praised loudly. How much will you pay for these "good feeling" (not just feel good) foods? An article in the latest issue of Time magazine reports that some are shelling out generously for foods which are embedded / infused / imbued with good intentions, on the assumption that nourishing powers of edibles are enhanced by good thoughts.
Move over, organic, fair trade and free range--the latest in enlightened edibles is here: food with "embedded" positive intentions. While the idea isn't new--cultures like the Navajo have been doing it for centuries--for-profit companies in the U.S. and Canada are catching on, infusing products with good vibes through meditation, prayer and even music. Since 2006, California company H2Om has sold water infused with wishes for "love," "joy" and "perfect health" via the words, symbols and colors on the label (which "create a specific vibratory frequency," according to co-founder Sandy Fox) and the restorative music played at their bottling warehouse. At Creo Mundi, a Canadian maker of protein powder, employees gather around each shipment and state aloud the benefits they hope to imbue it with for their consumers--increased performance, balance and vitality. Intentional Chocolate, founded in 2007 by chocolatier Jim Walsh, uses a special recording device to capture the electromagnetic brain waves of meditating Tibetan monks; Walsh then exposes his confections to the recording for five days per batch.
We hear your eyes rolling. But some claim there's actually something to the idea that humans can alter the physical world with their minds, and they offer research to prove it. Dean Radin, a senior scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Petaluma, Calif., conducted a test in which, he says, subjects who ate Intentional Chocolate improved their mood 67% compared with people who ate regular chocolate. "If the Pope blessed water, everyone wants that water. But does it actually do something?" Radin asks. "The answer is yes, to a small extent."
James Fallon, a professor of psychiatry and human behavior at the University of California at Irvine School of Medicine, is skeptical. "So I take a rutabaga and put it close to my head, and it somehow changes the food and improves the mood of the person who ate it?" he asks. "Nah."
Gimmick or not, in this economy any product that promises a spiritual pick-me-up could be in high demand. Since the recession, says Phil Lempert, editor of health-food site Supermarketguru.com "everyone is ready to jump off a bridge." With the right marketing, he says, embedded foods "could be huge."
Still, not everyone is keen on the idea of packaging spirituality. Once the profit motive comes into play, "it's difficult to keep things pure," says George Churinoff, a monk at Deer Park Buddhist Center in Oregon, Wis., who was involved with Intentional Chocolate in its early stages. "Then [the product] may not be blessed in any way with motivation except maybe to make money."
Like the Navajos, I too grew up in a culture where food is routinely imbued with spirituality and blessings, not so much by humans but by gods. (see prasad) I have therefore consumed large quantities of "embedded" foods, mostly from the household shrines of my mother and other relatives. The divine fare was always delicious and I don't know if the goodies imparted any special benefits because of the worthy intentions infused in them. I however remember my mildly observant but supremely hygienic mother's cautionary words regarding the consumption of blessed foods outside the home : "Eat only the whole fruits, not the sliced ones; take very small amounts of cooked food and only if it is still warm; stick mostly to dry items; avoid all cold liquids, milk based products and especially the holy water; do not consume anything in a large communal place of worship." I may have ignored her advice a couple of times - once for a delectable helping of suji halwa in a large, crowded Gurudwara and on another occasion, when I ate some pre-sliced coconut in a South Indian temple. Given the frequent cases of food poisoning, hepatitis and other nasty outcomes of eating in public holy places, it was amply clear to me that the blessings of the gods didn't always protect against earthly maladies.
The foods described in the Time magazine article of course pose few such disease causing threats. What is suspect is their ability to transmit the good intentions and peaceful vibes via the gastrointestinal pathway. If a controlled study can be done to prove their efficacy, perhaps such fare can be of greater use than just soothing the nerves of antsy individuals. How about India and Pakistan sharing "laddus" of peace? Israelis and Palestinians feasting on falafel of harmony? The whole world exchanging grains of accord and amity? The placebo effect alone may be worth the trouble.
There may be many a slip between the cup and the lip. But do you know that the drinking cup is etymologically a close cousin of the skull? I did but that knowledge is tucked away in a distant enough corner of the brain that it doesn't color the way I look at my tea cup.
I am an avid tea drinker. I like "real" tea - the slightly acrid and soothing liquor made with tea leaves, both black and green. I drink the former with milk and the latter without. Not for me the new age concoctions contaminated with orange, lemon, pomegranate, elderberry, wild flowers and other unnecessary flavors although I do occasionally enjoy jasmine, ginger, chamomile, mint, Indian chai masala or a few strands of saffron in my brew. But mostly, I like to partake of the undiluted version of the beverage. There is no special tea ceremony in our home. The kettle is put to boil whenever the craving strikes for a hot refreshing cuppa.
I grew up around copious tea drinkers. Tea was served all year round at breakfast, at afternoon teatime and when guests came. Though not particularly tempted as a child to drink the beverage of the adults, I was nevertheless fascinated by the paraphernelia of the tea tray. My mother owned three sets of tea service made of fine English bone china. They were part of her bridal trousseau - gifts from her father. One was an elegant and sedate cream color set with green and gold edging. Another, a dainty design of pink roses on pristine white. The third, my childhood favorite, consisted of a very round teapot surrounded by globular tea cups of impossibly thin and exquisitely translucent beige china festooned with tiny red, deep blue and gold birds, flowers and berries. Although I did not start drinking tea regularly until I entered college, the sight of the steaming amber-gold liquid being poured from one of the gorgeous teapots into a waiting cup was an aesthetic experience even my childish eyes could appreciate.
Perhaps it says something about my austere mother's indifference to material possessions that those beautiful pieces, an anomaly in our otherwise in-ostentatious Bengali kitchen, were not stowed away in a cupboard for special occasions but put to daily use by the family as well as guests who regularly dropped by for a cup of tea. It is therefore not surprising that most of the tea cups and pots from the collection were gone by the time I began drinking tea in my late teen years. Isolated pieces of the beautiful china remained - a few cups and saucers, a mate less creamer from one set and an unmatched sugar bowl from another. The teapots were all gone - chipped, cracked or broken due to years of use and careless handling. We then drank tea from non-descript ceramic cups and tea pots. No one bothered to go out and shop for good china. When I earned my first pay check, I bought my mother a set of eight cups and saucers (no teapot, creamer or sugar bowl) made of locally produced bone china. They were not half as elegant as my mother's old collection but she accepted the replacements with whole hearted enthusiasm.
As a person who loves tea and tea sets, I do own some nice tea cups and mugs. But sadly, my kitchen pantry is currently devoid of a good china / clay teapot. I have owned a few ceramic and clay ones since I set up independent house keeping after marriage. They were all traditionally attractive, affordable and eminently serviceable fat bellied pots. They are now gone and I currently own a few glass, stainless steel and pewter ones. My "formal" dinner set did not come with a teapot. By the time I went back and searched in a catalog of Mikasa's line of accessories, the design had been discontinued. I never got around to buying a suitable tea pot to go with the set. Perhaps this nostalgic blather will act as an impetus to begin a new search.
My sudden outpourings about tea, teapots and cups was set in motion by an excellent article, Fragments of Bone and Clay by Aditya Dev Sood, a new writer at 3 Quarks Daily. Among other observations about the culture of tea drinking, Aditya goes into deep musings over bone china and the the drinking cup.
The form of a teacup awaits and anticipates its human users with intimacy, affording a second finger leverage, varieties of opposition for the thumb, and of course, that slippery kiss. But it has still more intimate links with the human body: the word ‘cup’ has Indo-European roots, being linked to cupola, as in dome, as well as the Latin cephalus and the Sanskrit kapala, both cognate words for skull. The kapalika-s, of course, are members of that now nearly extinct sect of Saivism, who carry around a human skull, from which they both eat and drink. I believe it is a false calumny that their skull belongs to someone they have killed, but rather that their purpose is, like Hamlet, to be in proximity and awareness of death, the better to feel their own quickness and capacity for live action. How much does it matter whether one’s cup be found whole in nature or be crafted by human hands? Whether it be a human relic or a fine puree of mammalian bones? The important thing is that a cup can serve as a means for dialogue, for silent communion, for mutuality and shared sustenance.
For more on the kapala - cup connection see here.
so bad, that it's good!
"Look at this Richard. Just look at it: [see image 1, above].
I imagine the same questions are racing through your brilliant mind as were racing through mine on that fateful day. What is this? Why have I been given it? What have I done to deserve this? And, which one is the starter, which one is the desert?
You don’t get to a position like yours Richard with anything less than a generous sprinkling of observational power so I KNOW you will have spotted the tomato next to the two yellow shafts of sponge on the left. Yes, it’s next to the sponge shaft without the green paste. That’s got to be the clue hasn’t it. No sane person would serve a desert with a tomato would they. Well answer me this Richard, what sort of animal would serve a desert with peas in:"
The apoplectic passenger who composed the above is the next James Beard awardee for food writing, for sure.
During my Ph.D. program, there were two important premises that kept recurring throughout the 7 year process:
1) There is no thought outside narrative -- rather than escape a mythical way of thinking to truly "see reality," we can only move from one "prison-house of language" to another.
2) Stay away from the cheap wine at Trader Joe's -- you get what you pay for.
But in the grand tradition of passing knowledge between generations, I'd like to direct current grad students to this report in The New Scientist, suggesting that exposing new wine to electrical fields can help speed up the aging process. The electricity causes the acids in the wine to react with the alcohol more quickly, getting rid of some of the nasty-tasting long proteins and aldehydes, while creating some of the esters and free amino acids that give particular wines distinctiveness.
No word on whether passing a grad student through a pair of high-voltage electrodes will speed the dissertation process though.
If you are, like me, bemoaning the costs of your regular groceries due to the uptick in oil and gasoline prices, be prepared for worse this coming fall.
Driving through rural Illinois and Iowa over the Memorial Day weekend, I was shocked to see vast stretches of unplanted corn fields. Very few had a faint fuzz of sprouting seedlings. I was puzzled: I had been assured of what a spectacular sight they would be, and had at least hopes of seeing growing crops, even if they wouldn't be anywhere as large as they would be at harvest time.
Food personality Andrew Zimmern was recently in Delhi - to eat, eat and eat! He ate a lot, at a lot of different places - glittering dining destinations in posh New Delhi restaurants, traditional eateries in the dingy alley ways of Old Delhi, roadside stalls and confectionery and even sacred temple offerings in a Gurdwara. He tasted everything - the hot, the sweet and the tangy. With able guidance from food aficionados, Zimmern sampled cuisines from many parts of India- from soup to nut to ... tree bark. And he ate and ate and ate. (I sure hope he was packing a generous supply of Pepto-Bismol)
Zimmern has enthusiastically chronicled his experience of eating (pigging?) out in Delhi at his blog Bizarre Foods. Some excerpts:
Delhi is the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world going back at least 2500 years. The ruins of 7 cities have been discovered here, and it is said that Delhi’s food is often descended from that of the mediaeval lashkars garrisoned around the forts of the capital. But today, Shahjahanabad, or Old Delhi is home to an army of office-goers and shopkeepers who trade in everything from spices to bridal trousseaux to electrical fittings. If you venture to untangle the streets that twist and turn from dark alleys into busy boulevards, you are likely to find an inevitable surprise lurking around the corner, at least that’s what my new pal Hemanshu Kumar, a college Economics professor who is also the titular head of Eating Out in Delhi, a local club always in search of the most interesting and most bizarre food in town. Today, The Professor and I went on a search for the nearly extinct and increasingly overlooked traditional foods that can only be found on a dedicated filed trip. We found spiced milk froth, tiny Nihari stands, and anything else that popped up, like fruity sandwiches that reside in a shop behind large iron gates on Chawri Bazaar Road--- made from pomegranate (anaar) or apples and paneer (Indian cottage cheese made from curdled milk) lathered in orange marmalade, then dusted with secret masala and anaar seeds all on white bread.
I am particularly pleased that Zimmern didn't depart Delhi by sampling just the customary north Indian fare of saffron rice, nan bread, creamy gravies and meat kebabs. He wisely checked out the food in a new Bengali restaurant in Delhi (a must for me next time I am there). I have said here before that Bengali cuisine, the food that was cooked in my parents' home, is a distinct cooking style dominated by fish (including sea food), rice, vegetables and a dazzling array of desserts. It is not served in most Indian restaurants. Bengalis eat meat too but consume it in lesser quantities than fish. (In our home, we ate meat every Sunday and on holidays). The food flavors are varied and subtle and the sauces lighter in body than in north Indian preparations - one size does not fit all. Along with the ubiquitous Indian spice mixes of onion, garlic, cumin, coriander, cardamom, cinnamon and clove, which are used judiciously, Bengali cooks artfully mix and match ginger roots, bay leaves, hot green chili, fresh coconuts, poppy, mustard and nigella seeds in their culinary creations. Also, alongside the more common vegetables and fruits, Bengalis are known to transform a whole host of unusual roots, leaves and even tree barks into mouthwatering dishes. In his post Zimmern mentions the delightful experience of eating bananas .... or rather, the whole banana tree, at New Delhi's fancy and gastronomically ambitious Bengali restaurant, Oh! Calcutta.
As I noted in an earlier post, there is widespread speculation in the media about the link between rising food prices and diverting food grains for the manufacture of biofuels. The Washington Post has begun a series to examine the various posssible causes that have triggered the recent world food crisis. Wednesday's featured article takes a closer look at food and fuel. There was another related story in the paper that also caught my eye. That one reports that the spike in food prices has affected not only man and beast but even the gods must put up with hunger pangs - at least, in India.
NEW DELHI -- Every morning, Hindu devotees haul buckets of fresh, creamy milk into this neighborhood temple, then close their eyes and bow in prayer as the milk is used to bathe a Hindu deity. At the foot of the statue, they leave small baskets of bananas, coconuts, incense sticks and marigolds.
But recently, Ram Gopal Atrey, the head priest at Prachin Hanuman Mandir, noticed donations thinning for the morning prayers. He knew exactly why: inflation.
With prices soaring for staples such as cooking oils, wheat, lentils, milk and rice across the globe, priests like Atrey say they are seeing the consequences in their neighborhood temples, where even the poorest of the poor have long made donations to honor their faith.
"But today the common man is tortured by the increases in prices," Atrey lamented during one early morning prayer, or puja, adding that donations of milk were down by as much as 50 percent. He had recently met with colleagues from other temples, along with imams from local mosques, who reported similar experiences. "If poor people don't even have enough for bread, how will they donate milk to the gods?" he said. "This is very serious."
From Haiti to Senegal to Thailand, prices for basic food supplies have skyrocketed in recent months. The increases have been attributed to a confluence of factors including sharply rising fuel prices, droughts in food-producing countries and the diversion of some crops to produce biofuels. In India, milk prices rose because of increases in gasoline prices, which made it more expensive to transport the product from dairy farms to cities.
The food shortage and high prices are naturally a cause of great worry for families, especially those with children. But what about the gods? Some Indian Vedic gods, like their Greek counterparts are known to enjoy alcoholic beverages. Until the milk shortage disappears, could they be propitiated with another liquid offering - ethanol from corn?
In recent days we have repeatedly heard news reports of the rising cost of food and food shortage. The effects have been mild to moderate in wealthy, developed nations like the US, more worrisome in Asia and severe in some poorer parts of the world. Namibia and Haiti have already seen food riots. The cause of the shortage and soaring prices are manifold, some of it brought about ironically, by rising standards of living in Asia and a proportionate increase in demand for food.
The recent issue of the Economist calls the burgeoning world food crisis The Silent Tsunami and suggests ways to bring it under control - generous aid from richer nations, scientific innovations for high yield crops, end of government interventions to manipulate international food markets and re-assessing the cost of biofuels .
PICTURES of hunger usually show passive eyes and swollen bellies. The harvest fails because of war or strife; the onset of crisis is sudden and localised. Its burden falls on those already at the margin.
Today's pictures are different. “This is a silent tsunami,” says Josette Sheeran of the World Food Programme, a United Nations agency. A wave of food-price inflation is moving through the world, leaving riots and shaken governments in its wake. For the first time in 30 years, food protests are erupting in many places at once. Bangladesh is in turmoil (see article); even China is worried (see article). Elsewhere, the food crisis of 2008 will test the assertion of Amartya Sen, an Indian economist, that famines do not happen in democracies.
Famine traditionally means mass starvation. The measures of today's crisis are misery and malnutrition. The middle classes in poor countries are giving up health care and cutting out meat so they can eat three meals a day. The middling poor, those on $2 a day, are pulling children from school and cutting back on vegetables so they can still afford rice. Those on $1 a day are cutting back on meat, vegetables and one or two meals, so they can afford one bowl. The desperate—those on 50 cents a day—face disaster.
Among the many causes cited in the article, the alarm bell about the negative effects of diverting staple crops like corn, wheat and soy to manufacture fuel has been sounded by many in the past. Not only has the practice made those crops too expensive for poor people who depend on them for food, it has also raised the price of other staples like rice because farmers are increasingly choosing to grow crops for fuel rather than for food. While the idea surrounding ethanol as the clean-green fuel has gained successful foothold in wealthier nations concerned about pollution and global warming, biofuels are coming under increasing attack in less affluent countries.
(See also Anna's article of February 2006 where among other things, she argued that ethanol as the affordable and environmentally friendly fuel is a notion that is mostly bunk, promoted by the corn lobby)
A recall of 143 million pounds of beef, one of the largest in U.S. history was made recently, affecting thousands of school districts supplied by a California plant under the National School Lunch program. This stemmed from an undercover investigation of practices at the plant, complete with a disturbing video shot of animals being forced into the chutes, even when they were sick and unable to walk in.
Wrangler isn't an ordinary slaughterhouse worker. He is an undercover investigator for the Humane Society of the United States, who got a job at the Westland plant and filmed the abuses with a hidden camera. "There wasn't a formal strategy or anything like that," he says. "You're there just doing the job, and this stuff is just happening all around you." On Jan. 30, the Humane Society broadcast excerpts of the video on its Web site. The next day, the United Stated Department of Agriculture suspended Westland Meat Co. as a supplier to the National School Lunch Program. A few days later, USDA pulled its inspectors from the plant and shut down the plant, pending further investigation. The acts of animal cruelty have led to the arrest of two meatpacking workers by Chino police.
More than two weeks after Wrangler's video caused a sensation online, the USDA issued the largest beef recall in the history of the United States: 143 million pounds of beef products, most of which has already been consumed. About 40 percent of that meat went to the National School Lunch Program and other federal nutrition programs. Amazingly, all of the abuses occurred with USDA inspectors on the premises. Secretary of Agriculture Ed Schafer said he was "dismayed at the inhumane handling of cattle" at the plant.
The school district my children attend was among the many listed as having received the recalled meat cases, and while the authorities assure us that the recalled meat has been off the lunch menus since the start of February, there are still anecdotes of some kid or the other having stomach problems after eating meat at lunch. Who knows whether the un-recalled products are any safer or more humanely harvested than the recalled batch? We will probably never find out.
A recent book that I read, "Animals in Translation" by Temple Grandin, who is autistic, brought fascinating insights into the behavior of animals, as 'autistic savants' of sorts. She is also an industry expert on the design of humane slaughter house facilities, and is even invoked in a Feb 3, 2008 Westland letter promising more investigation into the cattle abuse:
During 2007, we had 17 third party audits of our operation to confirm that we meet the statutorily mandated humane handling and food safety standards. In addition we have conducted 12 internal audits by our own personnel to ensure that such standards are met. We also, conduct weekly humane handling audits based on standards set forth in the American Meat Institute’s (AMI), Recommended Animal Handling Guidelines and Audit Guide 2007 Edition, which was authored by Dr. Temple Grandin, a world renowned expert of humane handling practices. Complete documentation of this activity has been made available to the USDA investigation team currently at our plant.
What problems have been rectified by the recall of meat that have been largely consumed by now? Will it really save unwary consumers from eating problem meat? It seems more like a case of bolting the stables after the horses have run away, similar to the situation with declaring clone-derived meat safe for human consumption after the offspring of clones had already entered the food-chain.
Anna sent me a link to this article in LA Weekly from food critic Jonathan Gold, about what he claims
is a rise in regional specialization among the Southern Indian restaurants in Artesia (a suburb of Los Angeles):
Gold, who won the Pulitzer Prize this year for criticism, made his mark enthusiastically opting to report on restaurants in ethnically distinct commun ities rather than the latest French Bistro in Beverly Hills.
Continue reading "Restaurant Critics, Roadside Stalls (Sujatha)" »
Ruchira has directed my attention to a piece in Slate by Ron Rosenbaum, about a visit to the newly reopened Second Avenue Deli in New York City. The title is, "Where Is the Schmaltz of Yesteryear?" with the subheading, "Christmas Eve in a Jewish Deli." Schmaltz, of course, is a Yiddish word for the rendered fat, usually chicken or goose fat, traditionally used by observant Ashkenazim for preparing meat meals (Sephardim more often relied on olive oil for this purpose). In this usage, it's sister to the arresting (cardiac arresting, that is) gribenes, which I find most easy to explain to Los Angelinos as "Jewish chicharrones." In American English, schmaltz has also come to mean "sentimental or florid music or art." Since oil is the organizing theme of Hanukkah and "White Christmas," "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer" and "The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting Over An Open Fire)," among many Christmas songs penned by Jews, the unavoidable background music of shopping centers between Thanksgiving and December 25, 2007, I feel like we've been swimming-- not to say drowning-- in schmaltz around here this past month.
Rosenbaum's basic point, however, seems to be that it's hard to enjoy the food of the Second Avenue Deli when the yiddishkeit culture out of which it came-- the world of the Second Avenue Yiddish theater district-- no longer exists (you can get some sense of Yiddish theater from the wikipedia entry, these music samples, and these interviews). And Rosenbaum sees as a secondary symptom of that loss of cultural foundation that the food at the new Second Avenue Deli has fewer "rubbery textured chicken giblets":
In some ways things were the same. The matzo brei (a pancake of eggs, onions, and chopped matzo) I had for breakfast that morning was heartwarming, the chicken soup I had for lunch unchanged in its clarity, and the egg barley—an entirely underrated concoction of plumped barley grains, delicately sautéed onions, and assertive black mushrooms with a subtle touch of schmaltz—just superb.
At dinner the next day I did have some nitpicking complaints. The chicken fricassee that used to contain a stingy but welcome number of tasty, rubbery textured chicken giblets had none, as in not a single one.
In directing my attention to the article, Ruchira asked, "What does Ed Levine think?" Ed is the food maven uncle whom I wrote about in a previous post on AB. The short answer is that Ed's thoughts on the Second Avenue Deli are easy to find firsthand at his website, since he's posted at length on the subject, first here and more recently here.
I think the first article sets forth fundamental differences in approach to food that account for Ed's happiness and Rosenbaum's somewhat more morose take on the experience. For Ed, it's the food, and not just the nostalgia, that recommend the deli:
What Witchel and everyone else writing this story (which is a wonderful story to write, of course) hasn't mentioned is the reason the Second Avenue Deli was so great when Abe was alive was that Abe was not only one of New York's most generously spirited mensches, he was a food guy, a very good cook who knew what good and delicious were. Abe knew that dried porcini mushrooms were the key to the Second Avenue Deli's incomparable mushroom-barley soup. It was Abe who came up with the terrific cure that made the Second Avenue Deli's superb corned beef. It was Abe who refused to compromise the quality of his french fries when places like Katz's started serving mediocre frozen ones.
I hardly think that in the era of the Second Avenue Yiddish theater district, any deli was putting porcini mushrooms in the mushroom barley soup. But what Ed's post suggests, a sentiment with which I'd agree, is that porcini mushrooms aren't a reason for shirt tearing, but rather what we call "progress." You get a sense of this scientific and somewhat cheeky approach to aesthetics in Ed's post on our family Hanukkah, as well.
Without having had the chance to know my grandparents, I think it pretty safe to say that, though some of my relatives actually lived almost directly above the Second Ave Deli at East 11th Street in the early 1940s, my grandparents would also have found Rosenbaum's nostalgia for the ghetto and its culinary compromises misplaced. In the oft-repeated family lore, my great-grandparents met at a Bund meeting in Russia, and my grandparents at a Communist Party meeting in Brooklyn. Certainly my few relatives of that generation who are still alive would say that the ability to eat muscle meat rather than "stuffed cabbage and the stuffed derma...soused with heavy gravies," and the dispersion of Jews out of the inner city, are progress, and while my family strongly identifies as Jewish, it also identified, particularly in the older generation about which Rosenbaum waxes nostalgic, as "progressive," in every sense of that word.
There's something to the longing for a lost Yiddish world. Certainly it saddens me that there's nowhere outside of America that I could visit that would give me insight into that heritage, and that a language notable for its worldly complaints and colorful profanities is now almost exclusively used by a handful of small Orthodox religious communities. But then, a third generation Chinese American whose great-grandfather was a Confucian scholar and royal bureaucrat would no longer find that world represented in a visit to any of the Los Angeles/San Francisco/New York Chinatowns, nor would he or she get much insight into it from a visit to modern Beijing. Ditto an African-American who searched for his or her roots in Africa, or a South Asian American whose family had lived for generations in Uganda. Time marches on, and ethnic identities are fluid. I'd have more sympathy for Rosenbaum if he had a direct connection to the lost Yiddish culture; instead, he's clinging to something he never directly knew. The equivalent would be if one of the people in the pictures he admires longed for shtetl life back in Russia. Some, no doubt, did, but most knew better.
A related point that Rosenbaum doesn't seem to acknowledge is that even Ashkenazic culture and food were never monolithic. German Jews use only pike and whitefish in their gefilte fish while those of us from farther East add carp, giving it a more fishy flavor; Litvaks like their food (including gefilte fish and stuffed cabbage) sour while the Galicianers from the beet growing regions to the South add sugar (and often raisins or fruit) to savory dishes. There are few Jews left in those geographic regions, and the Jewish community in the United States has not, for the most part, preserved the cultural distinctions and prejudices that went along with them (thank goodness), but differing preferences have been preserved, even when people don't necessarily know their origin. To my Levine tastes, my father-in-law, following the Rosenblum tradition, uses too little onion and egg and shreds potatoes too fine when making latkes; but others use mashed potatoes and I've seen recipes that don't even call for onion. If and when Andrew and I have children, I'm sure they'll think the "right" latkes are the ones I make, not only because I am right, of course, but because I cook most of the food in our home.
Schmaltz is fabulous stuff.
A couple of weeks ago, Andrew and I threw a "Hebernian Holiday Party" for about 14 people, celebrating our shared Irish (Hibernian) and Jewish (Hebrew) traditions of winter merriment, grease, and potatoes (another example of the fluidity of ethnic tradition: potatoes are "traditional" to both cultures, but their widespread use dates only to the 18th century). I roasted a goose, using an Alsatian Hanukkah recipe served with apples caramelized in sugar, Calvados, and goose schmaltz, but a dish which is also traditional for Christmas in Ireland, as featured in Joyce's The Dead;
cooked a glazed corned beef (Ashkenazi and Irish-American, in fact, adopted by the Irish in America from their Jewish neighbors); 
and fried up a passel of latkes (some with parsnips added for sweetness, some with sweet potatoes and paprika, and some according to the traditional Levine recipe, which is basically a 1:2:3 onion to egg to potato ratio, with a little matzoh meal to bind it). An off-menu item that I shared with Andrew and with the girlfriend who helped me cook for the party, before guests arrived, was a goose pate I made from the neck meat and offal (liver, heart, gizzards, etc.) with garlic and onion, a little Riesling wine and, yes, more schmaltz. Mm-mm.
In any event, since my 13 pound goose rendered about 2 pounds of fat, I have two wonderful jars of snowy white schmaltz, which I've fittingly stored in emptied glass jars of "Bubbie's" brand sauerkraut.
I've used it to roast potatoes, fry eggs, to cook cabbage and apples, and to make some caramelized onion jam that I ate with a baked potato and some Greek yogurt (good thing I don't keep kosher). It has a very high burning point, which gives it excellent "crisping" qualities, and is apparently lower in saturated fat, and higher in good cholesterol, than butter, though not so healthy as olive oil, my usual fat.
Schmaltz lives. Viva la schmaltz.
Time to feast on those holiday leftovers, and to get ready for Shopocalypse!
Do you like hot foods? What is the limit of your personal "heat" index - black pepper, jalapeno, serrano, the slinky Thai pepper or the more daunting Habanero? When does mouth-watering enjoyment deteriorate into eye-watering agony? The Aztecs utilised chilli peppers in a traditional drink. With heat levels spanning a wide range of "burn," chilli peppers are an essential ingredient in cuisines across the world from Mexico to the Far East, to suit every type of dish and palate. My own palate is far from fire-proof, but I do love hot foods. Sadly enough, as I grow older, my level of tolerance for "heat" is dwindling although I have heard that the opposite should happen with advancing age. I could handle Thai foods at a respectable 3.5 to 4 level of spicy with relative ease just a decade ago. Now I order a wimpish 2. Even then, my refrigerator is always stocked with a fresh supply of jalapeno or serrano peppers which I like to bite into during meals and an assortment of hot sauces to spread on bland dishes. I read once that the Indian born conductor Zubin Mehta carries hot peppers in his pocket when he is invited out to dinner, even to the fanciest banquet. Some people need a touch of "fire" to truly enjoy a meal. Southern and eastern Indian cuisines are normally hotter than the northern Mughlai cooking which most Indian restaurants serve. I knew that some of the hottest peppers grow in eastern parts of India. But this hot?
CHANGPOOL, India — The farmer, a quiet man with an easy smile, has spent a lifetime eating a chili pepper with a strange name and a vicious bite. His mother stirred them into sauces. His wife puts them out for dinner raw, blood-red morsels of pain to be nibbled — carefully, very carefully — with whatever she's serving.
Around here, in the hills of northeastern India, it's called the bhut jolokia — the "ghost chili." Anyone who has tried it, they say, could end up an apparition.
"It is so hot you can't even imagine," said the farmer, Digonta Saikia, working in his fields in the midday sun. "When you eat it, it's like dying." Outsiders, he insisted, shouldn't even try it. "If you eat one," he told a visitor, "you will not be able to leave this place."
The rest of the world, though, should prepare itself.
Because in this remote Indian region facing bloody insurgencies, widespread poverty and a major industry — tea farming — in deep decline, hope has come in the form of this thumb-sized chili pepper with frightening potency and a superlative rating: the spiciest chili in the world. A few months ago, Guinness World Records made it official.
If you think you've had a hotter chilli pepper, you're wrong.The smallest morsels can flavour a sauce so intensely it's barely edible. Eating a raw sliver causes watering eyes and a runny nose. An entire chilli is an all-out assault on the senses, akin to swigging a cocktail of battery acid and glass shards.
For generations, though, the pepper has been loved in India's northeast, eaten as a spice, a cure for stomach troubles and, seemingly paradoxically, a way to fight the crippling summer heat.
Now, though, with scientific proof that put the bhut jolokia into the record books — it has more than 1,000,000 Scoville units, the measurement of a chili's spiciness — northeast India is taking its chili to the outside world. Exporters are eagerly courting the international community of rabid chili-lovers, which has traded stories for years about a mysterious Indian chili. Chances are no one will get rich. But in a region where good news is rare, the world record status has meant a lot of pride — and a little more business.
"It has got tremendous potential," says Leena Saikia, managing director of Frontal AgriTech, a food business in the northeastern state of Assam that has been in the forefront of bhut jolokia exports.
In Assam, the wealthiest of the region's states, the long-dominant tea industry is facing falling prices and rising costs, and one-third of the population lives below the poverty line. Attacks by the militant group the United Liberation Front of Asom and retaliatory government crackdowns, have brutalized the region.
"Maybe this bhut jolokia can help change things here," says Ranjana Bhuyan, a high-school teacher. "People have been eating this forever," she says.
The Bhut Jolokia (also known as the Naga Jolokia) made it to the Guinness Book of World Records by scoring a mind blowing 1,001,304 Scovilles on the Scoville Scale of pepperiness. To put that in perspective, please note that the mighty Habanero scores between 20,000 and 35,000 200,000 - 350,000!
The current buzzword in marketing is 'going green' or 'eco-friendly'.
Today's New York T
imes has an apropos look (subscription required)at the phenomenon ( which I had ranted about earlier in my Madness of Magazines post on my personal blog), thus confirming my suspicions that while going green might be desirable, there will always exist a vast contingent of eager pilers-on who see marketing manna in attaching a 'green' label to just about anything.
For instance, Home Depot's ubiquitous green labelling which already came in for derision in this NY Times op-ed titled "How Green is that Chain saw?".
"Plastic-handled paint brushes were touted as nature-friendly because they were not made of wood. Wood-handled paint brushes were promoted as better for the planet because they were not made of plastic.
An electric chainsaw? Green, because it was not gas-powered. A bug zapper? Ditto, because it was not a poisonous spray. Manufacturers of paint thinners, electrical screwdrivers and interior overhead lights claimed similar
bragging rights simply because their plastic or cardboard packaging was recyclable."
Never mind that not buying into the newest 'green' craze and reusing your ancient battered but perfectly serviceable stuff would in fact be the more environmentally friendly approach.
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