Posts tagged food and drink

Here's some bracing local culture—and cultural change—for you. I first heard about the festive Ugandan grasshopper harvest and consumption from a just-returned biologist who'd done some fieldwork there. He reported that the hoppers, fried in their own fat, tasted like popcorn shrimp. In any case, here's a recent update from a blogger in Kampala.

re: africa, business, consumption, cultural worlds, food and drink, least of nations, technology and change

Nate:

To those that have acquired the taste, nsenene is the object of undiluted greed for many Ugandans of all ages. A favourite joke is to tease a husband about finding himself on the receiving end of his pregnant wife’s tantrums if she asks for nsenene in the middle of the night, moreover on the wrong month.

During the month of Musenene, everyone was sure to get a mini harvest and neighbours would freely (maybe grudgingly too) share their catch.

Well, the romantic story of nsenene of old is no more. Today most of the grasshoppers that make the long trip from the Abyssinian heights end up at commercial harvesting rigs set up by ambitious greedy capitalists who have monopolized the catching of nsenene.

Weeks before the first insects are expected, building sites with top floors are booked and leased for the sole purpose of catching the most nsenene possible. The ‘combine harvesters’ consist of rows of huge barrels fitted with shiny new iron sheets and crudely wired light bulbs. The fluorescent lights bounce off the iron sheets, at once attracting and blinding the insects. When they hit the iron sheets the nsenene slide all the way down to the bottom of the barrel, literally. Security guards are hired to keep watch, and sometimes live electric cables are wired around the area to deter thieves. This way the monopolists lag home tonnes and tonnes of nsenene, and close out the ordinary people who used to get free ‘manna’ from heaven.

What if every office worker vowed to buy lunch only from people they know?

re: community, cultural worlds, food and drink, neighborhoods

Andy:

Several years ago, I lost my patience with our alienated, unattached world at lunch one day. I was waiting to get a sandwich at a place called Au Bon Pain. It’s a chain, it’s cheap enough, it’s fine. I was in a bit of a hurry. I eat late and the place was empty. There was no one in line, but I obediently stood in the proper place between the stanchions and waited to be told to approach the counter. Two sandwich makers were talking to each other behind the counter. They looked up, and I stepped forward meekly, and they continued their conversation. Fine, I waited. And waited. They laughed, I presume at me. I gave the customary attention-seeking cough and laser stare. Eventually one of them asked what I wanted in a surly tone and with a put-out look. The other guy slowly made the sandwich. I went back to the office to eat. The sandwich had tomato on it. I asked for no tomato.

I vowed never, ever buy lunch on a workday from a stranger again. It was a solemn vow that I break only under drastic circumstances. So, now I get lunch from Frank, Art, or Tommy, guys I have come to be friends with who run three different places. I like them. I think all three are funny, and they usually laugh at my jokes, which is key. I don’t see them except for lunch, but that’s fine. I enjoy spending money where I know the people. Lunch is now a little social part of my day, and I feel like I work in a real neighborhood, which it really isn’t. I love being a regular. I love purposefully limiting my choices instead of expanding them. Most of all, I think that I enjoy being loyal just for the sake of being loyal.

I don’t ever hate lunch anymore. I consider lunch one of my greatest triumphs.

My favorite social historian writes on the place of spices—and the importance not just of their rarity but of their foreign-ness—in the culture of Medieval Europe.

re: cultural worlds, exoticism, food and drink, odor, paradise

Nate:

The one thing that pepper, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, ginger, saffron, and a whole series of other spices had in common was their non-European origin. They all came from the Far East. India and the Moluccas were the chief region for spices. But that’s only a prosaic description of their geographic origin. For the people of the Middle Ages, spices were emissaries from a fabled world. Pepper, they imagined, grew, rather like a bamboo forest, on a plain near Paradise. Ginger and cinnamon were hauled in by Egyptian fishermen casting nets into the floodwaters of the Nile, which in turn had carried them straight from Paradise. The aroma of spices was believed to be a breath wafted from Paradise over the human world.

From a nice long article on the history and psychology of tipping—which is of course as much about the tipper's needs as it is the tipee's.

re: food and drink, horizons of the possible, labor, manners, psychology

Nate:

In 1904, the Anti-Tipping Society of America sprang up in Georgia, and its 100,000 members signed pledges not to tip anyone for a year. Leagues of traveling salesmen opposed the tip, as did most labor unions. In 1909, Washington became the first of six states to pass an anti-tipping law. But tipping persisted. The new laws rarely were enforced, and when they were, they did not hold up in court. By 1926, every anti-tipping law had been repealed.

I ended up covering two topics in much more detail in Culture Making than I had expected when I first conceived the book: family and food. We simply cannot talk reasonably about culture without addressing these core elements of it. In this article, one of the most important I have read in the past several months, Michael Pollan makes a plea for leadership from the next president in changing America's relationship with its food. I hardly know which section to excerpt—they are all important, not least the idea of restoring farming as a viable and valuable occupation in the minds of youth and young adults. My only caveat would be that a memo to the president, as well-thought-out as this one may be (one might quibble with any number of minor points), is no substitute for starting right where we are, right now.

re: cultivation and creation, family, food and drink, gardens and cities

Andy:

The choice of White House chef is always closely watched, and you would be wise to appoint a figure who is identified with the food movement and committed to cooking simply from fresh local ingredients. Besides feeding you and your family exceptionally well, such a chef would demonstrate how it is possible even in Washington to eat locally for much of the year, and that good food needn’t be fussy or complicated but does depend on good farming. You should make a point of the fact that every night you’re in town, you join your family for dinner in the Executive Residence — at a table. (Surely you remember the Reagans’ TV trays.) And you should also let it be known that the White House observes one meatless day a week — a step that, if all Americans followed suit, would be the equivalent, in carbon saved, of taking 20 million midsize sedans off the road for a year. Let the White House chef post daily menus on the Web, listing the farmers who supplied the food, as well as recipes.

Since enhancing the prestige of farming as an occupation is critical to developing the sun-based regional agriculture we need, the White House should appoint, in addition to a White House chef, a White House farmer. This new post would be charged with implementing what could turn out to be your most symbolically resonant step in building a new American food culture. And that is this: tear out five prime south-facing acres of the White House lawn and plant in their place an organic fruit and vegetable garden.

When Eleanor Roosevelt did something similar in 1943, she helped start a Victory Garden movement that ended up making a substantial contribution to feeding the nation in wartime. (Less well known is the fact that Roosevelt planted this garden over the objections of the U.S.D.A., which feared home gardening would hurt the American food industry.) By the end of the war, more than 20 million home gardens were supplying 40 percent of the produce consumed in America. The president should throw his support behind a new Victory Garden movement, this one seeking “victory” over three critical challenges we face today: high food prices, poor diets and a sedentary population.

I think this is getting at something important, though perhaps from the wrong angle. I feel like the dignity of plants (and, I think more usefully, that of landscapes and ecosystems) can only have meaning when you approach it with a view towards relationships: creation/creator, creation/cultivator. The relationship, not the plant, is what has or can be denied dignity. Two other notes: I don't think the "interference with the plant's ability to reproduce" is a great litmus test in any case, since most domesticated plants have lost the ability to make it without human help (and we with their help). And finally, fittingly, it's worth remembering that Switzerland was the setting for Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, that great and terrible tale of a creator's failure to love his creature.

re: agriculture, biology, cultivation and creation, dignity, ethics, europe, food and drink, frankenstein, horizons of the possible, law, switzerland

Nate:

For years, Swiss scientists have blithely created genetically modified rice, corn and apples. But did they ever stop to consider just how humiliating such experiments may be to plants?

That’s a question they must now ask. Last spring, this small Alpine nation began mandating that geneticists conduct their research without trampling on a plant’s dignity.

“Unfortunately, we have to take it seriously,” Beat Keller, a molecular biologist at the University of Zurich. “It’s one more constraint on doing genetic research.”

Dr. Keller recently sought government permission to do a field trial of genetically modified wheat that has been bred to resist a fungus. He first had to debate the finer points of plant dignity with university ethicists. Then, in a written application to the government, he tried to explain why the planned trial wouldn’t “disturb the vital functions or lifestyle” of the plants. He eventually got the green light.

The rule, based on a constitutional amendment, came into being after the Swiss Parliament asked a panel of philosophers, lawyers, geneticists and theologians to establish the meaning of flora’s dignity.

“We couldn’t start laughing and tell the government we’re not going to do anything about it,” says Markus Schefer, a member of the ethics panel and a professor of law at the University of Basel. “The constitution requires it.”

In April, the team published a 22-page treatise on “the moral consideration of plants for their own sake.” It stated that vegetation has an inherent value and that it is immoral to arbitrarily harm plants by, say, “decapitation of wildflowers at the roadside without rational reason.”

On the question of genetic modification, most of the panel argued that the dignity of plants could be safeguarded “as long as their independence, i.e., reproductive ability and adaptive ability, are ensured.” In other words: It’s wrong to genetically alter a plant and render it sterile.

Insight into the cultural world of Munich's Oktoberfest, via its lost and found (here's the official site in German, in case you're missing anything). By my book, the best-ever Munich beer-binge description (which involves its own bit of lost-and found) can be found in Patrick Leigh Fermor's exquisite travel book A Time of Gifts—the link will drop you right at the start of Fermor's Hofbrauhaus set-piece.

re: cultural worlds, europe, food and drink, germany, literature, loss, patrick leigh fermor

Nate:

Anyone who has visited the Oktoberfest and seen hundreds of revellers dancing on the wooden tables, holding up their beer glasses and chanting along to DJ Ötzi’s cover version of “Hey! Baby” knows how merry the atmosphere can get.

For those who haven’t, a look at the lost and found register evokes the raucous celebrations.

Members of staff found 680 identity cards and passports, 410 wallets, 360 keys, 265 spectacles, 280 mobile phones and 80 cameras, one set of diving goggles, one set of angel’s wings, a superman costume and four wedding rings. A long-haired Dachshund was also found roaming the festival ground, but was later reclaimed by its owner.

“For the first time, no dentures were found,” the Munich city press department said with a mixture of surprise and disappointment. “Is this a sign of demographic change, good dental hygiene or a higher rate of tooth implants?”

Andy Warhol—who along with being a painter of soup cans was a volunteer at soup kitchens—would doubtless be pleased.

re: failure, finance, food and drink, horizons of the possible, poverty, wealth

Nate:

Campbell Soup Co. was the only stock in the S&P 500 that escaped yesterday’s historic sell-off. That’s right: 499 fell, and just one rose.

Could there be a clearer metaphor for Americans refocusing on the basics after a decade of greed and excess?

A great example of culture-making in America's prisons. Canned mackeral's value as a currency (as opposed to just a means of barter) is apparently that a) it's cheap, and b) few inmates actually want to eat it.

re: cultural worlds, food and drink, horizons of the possible, prison

Nate:

When Larry Levine helped prepare divorce papers for a client a few years ago, he got paid in mackerel. Once the case ended, he says, “I had a stack of macks.”

Mr. Levine and his client were prisoners in California’s Lompoc Federal Correctional Complex. Like other federal inmates around the country, they found a can of mackerel—the “mack” in prison lingo—was the standard currency.

“It’s the coin of the realm,” says Mark Bailey, who paid Mr. Levine in fish. Mr. Bailey was serving a two-year tax-fraud sentence in connection with a chain of strip clubs he owned. Mr. Levine was serving a nine-year term for drug dealing. Mr. Levine says he used his macks to get his beard trimmed, his clothes pressed and his shoes shined by other prisoners. “A haircut is two macks,” he says, as an expected tip for inmates who work in the prison barber shop.

There’s been a mackerel economy in federal prisons since about 2004, former inmates and some prison consultants say. That’s when federal prisons prohibited smoking and, by default, the cigarette pack, which was the earlier gold standard.

From an interstitial essay in a wonderful book of portraits and reportage examining what foods "typical" families from around the world eat in the course of a week.

re: agriculture, cultivation and creation, cultural worlds, food and drink, horizons of the possible

Nate:

Cooking is universal among our species. Cooking is even more uniquely characteristic of our species than language. Animals do at least bark, roar, chirp, do at least signal by sound; only we bake, boil, roast and fry....

Few advances comparable in importance to cooking have happened since [its development]. The most important have been more quantitative than qualitative. We began not simply to harvest but to adopt certain palatable plants and animals as aids and conspirators. By 3,000 to 4,000 years ago, we had domesticated all those that have been central to our diets ever sense—barley, wheat, rice, maize, potatoes, sheep, goats, cattle, horses, and so on.... We have domesticated nothing more significant than strawberries and reindeer since.

I just learned recently that Kellogg's Rice Krispies cereal is sold in Australia under the name Rice Bubbles—which reminded me of this description I'd read a while ago of a traditional Bangladeshi technique for making puffed rice.

re: breakfast, cooking, food and drink, parallels

Nate:

Joygun Nessa’s life revolves around rice: she eats it; her family raises it on their farm; and it supplies her with a livelihood: making muri (puffed rice).

Rice and salt and sand—as a medium for puffing the rice—are all she needs. Ms. Nessa, however, does not use just any old rice. She recommends IR8 developed by IRRI or BR11 for the best results.

To prepare her specialty, she uses a clay stove in which the fire is underground. It uses one-third less fuel than other stoves, which is important in a country suffering from fuel shortage. She has been using the stove for about 7 years.

Squatting by the stove, she stokes the fire by throwing fistfuls of wheat straw down the stove’s holes. Sometimes she uses balls of cow dung, rice hull, and sticks for fuel. The heat produced is intense.
Over one of the holes, she heats up a large clay pot with sand in it. Rice in salted water is warmed in a small pot over a different hole. She stirs the rice with a naruni, a utensil made of palm-midribs bunched together.

When the right temperature is reached, she skillfully pours the rice into the big pot with the sand and swirls it for 30 seconds. Suddenly, the rice becomes alive in a burst of steam and fills the pot.

Ms. Nessa knows exactly when the rice is done puffing. If she hesitates a moment too long, the rice will burn. With the precision of a master chef, she dumps the contents into a clay strainer and shakes out the sand.

The muri is warm and mildly salty, with a nutty taste. She makes it every day so that it’s fresh for her customers and family.

She markets the muri in bulk and in small plastic bags at the family’s grocery store. From 40 kilograms of rough rice, she gets about 26 kilograms of muri.

Longer hours and belt-tightening (of the financial sense, mostly, but who knows?) have hit the French business lunch. As an outside observer, though, I must admit it's fun hearing one odd culture ("prawn sandwiches"!?) documenting the waning oddities of another.

re: cultural worlds, europe, food and drink, france, uk, work

Nate:

It is seen as the mark of civilised eating, distinguishing well-fed French workers from the English who wolf prawn sandwiches at their desks. But France’s tradition of the three-course restaurant lunch is in danger of being killed off by the economic crisis.

Around 3,000 traditional French restaurants, cafes and bars went bust in the first three months of 2008 and unions predict a further rush of closures as people worry about making ends meet. The number of French restaurants going bankrupt rose by 25 percent from last year, and cafes forced to close were up by 56 percent.

Le Figaro’s renowned restaurant critic François Simon said yesterday that French consumers’ frugality had changed national eating habits and forced restaurant owners to the brink. Diners were now skipping the traditional aperitif, avoiding starters, drinking tap water, passing on wine and coffee and—at most—sharing a pudding.

A lovely anecdote (culture-making begins at home!) from a great feature about Berkeley Bowl, a produce-rich Northern California supermarket that sounds a bit like all three sections of the Divine Comedy rolled into one.

re: california, community, cultural worlds, food and drink

Nate:

Michael Pollan, author of the best-selling book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” is a [Berkeley] Bowl regular who calls the store one of his top three places to buy food in the world. Still, he knows there’s easier shopping.

One time, Pollan was picking out a box of cereal for his daughter when a fellow shopper interrupted him. “He said, ‘I’m watching Michael Pollan shop for groceries,’ “ Pollan recalled. “There was this note of disappointment that I was buying Fruity Pebbles. Berkeley is full of hall monitors. It’s a small town, and people are looking into each other’s baskets.”