Posts tagged food and drink

To make tortillas the traditional way, first you have to cook the maize with something alkaline (cement, for instance), and then grind the wet grains by hand, kneeling on the floor with your metate. It takes about an hour to grind enough to feed one person for one day. Until fifty years ago, there was no effective widespread way to automate this process: every Mexican household would have one woman in the back room, grinding wet corn for five hours a day. Since then, things have changed—bringing great benefits, widespread social change, and some losses too.

re: agriculture, cultural worlds, food and drink, mexico, women

Nate:

Of course, there are trade-offs. Bimbo is not as good as a bolillo. A machine-made tortilla is not anything like a homemade tortilla – it’s not even in the same universe.

Mexican women that I have talked to are very explicit about this trade-off. They know it doesn’t taste as good; they don’t care. Because if they want to have time, if they want to work, if they want to send their kids to school, then taste is less important than having that bit of extra money, and moving into the middle class. They have very self-consciously made this decision. In the last ten years, the number of women working in Mexico has gone up from about thirty-three percent to nearly fifty percent. One reason for that—it’s not the only reason, but it is a very important reason—is that we’ve had a revolution in the processing of maize for tortillas.

Maybe nothing has surprised and pleased me more about the response to Culture Making than the enthusiasm for my chili recipe. But Jason Panella has taken it to another level—inspired by Culture Making, he is making a year's worth of chili, and learning about the United States, and himself, along the way. I love it.

re: chili, cultivation and creation, food and drink, travel

Andy:

My year-long exploration of the United States is—so far, at least—surprisingly cost-efficient. My trip from the state of Washington to Pennsylvania, for instance, only cost around $9. If I keep this up, I'll be able to smell the smells and taste the tastes from the Atlantic to the Pacific—non-contiguous states and the District of Columbia included—for a little over $100. And it'll keep me fed in the process. So far, this journey has taught me a lot about myself, about discipline, about improvisation under pressure, and an awful, awful lot about chili.

Chili. Chili con carne, or "peppers with meat" in Spanish. Simply meat and chili peppers, if you're a purist (plus a lot of other ingredients, if you're not). OK, so I'm not actually traveling from state to state, but instead I've been using Jane and Michael Stern's Chili Nation (Random House, 1999) cookbook as a tour guide. The Sterns made stops in each state and collected recipes that they felt captured some of the local flavour—coffee-accented chili from the state of Washington, chili with seafood in place of beef from Maryland, a flavourful dish popularized by some of the diners on Mississippi's Route 61, and so on.

So, in lieu of spending a year traveling, I thought I'd let my tastebuds and stomach take a trip instead. Fifty-one chili recipes in 52 weeks. One chili a week, with one week off (which I'll probably cash in on my honeymoon, but my fiancée likes chili too, so maybe not!)

I suppose this finding would fall into the "interesting but unsurprising" category, but I'm nevertheless overjoyed that historians of art, food, and culture do this kind of stuff.

re: art, cultural worlds, food and drink, painting

Nate:

Wansink teamed up with his brother Craig Wansink, a religious studies professor at Virginia Wesleyan College, to look at how portion sizes have changed over time by examining the food depicted in 52 of the most famous paintings of the scene from the Last Supper.

"As the most famously depicted dinner of all time, the Last Supper is ideally suited for review," Craig Wansink said.

From the 52 paintings, which date between 1000 and 2000 A.D., the sizes of loaves of bread, main dishes and plates were calculated with the aid of a computer program that could scan the items and rotate them in a way that allowed them to be measured. To account for different proportions in paintings, the sizes of the food were compared to the sizes of the human heads in the paintings.

The researchers' analysis showed that portion sizes of main courses (usually eel, lamb and pork) depicted in the paintings grew by 69 percent over time, while plate size grew by 66 percent and bread size grew by 23 percent.

From an essay on the culture and history of dirt-eating, often undertaken by pregnant women (presumably craving specific needed minerals), but until recently surprisingly widespread. "In the 1970s, fifty percent of Black women admitted to eating clay, about four times the frequency among white women ..." I like the idea outlined below, of sniffing the soil and then tasting produce grown in it.

re: agriculture, cultural worlds, dirt, food and drink, taste

Nate:

People living in San Francisco can find a soil tasting in a nearby art gallery; the rest of us can e-participate through a website (tasteofplace.info) run by performance artist and "agricultural activist" Laura Parker. Parker strives to answer the question "how does soil touch our lives and affect our food; and why does it matter?" To stimulate public dialogue, Parker fills wine goblets with various soils and adds a few teaspoons of water to release the aromas and flavors. The soils aren't ingested, but participants place their noses deep into the wine bowls, inhaling the newly released molecules to the backs of their tongues, where taste receptors lie. The website even provides "Tasting Notes," such as the soil of "Apple Farm-Indian Camp Ground, 'Arrowhead Reserve,'" which has a "texture like ground espresso between your fingertips with a rich, chocolate color. The nose is both flinty and grassy with finesse and subtlety." After the soil tasting, participants dine on food grown in the various soils and identify the qualities of the dirt in the food to strengthen the connection between what we eat and where it's grown.

Piquantly contrarian essay on Starbucks' real genius: its appeal to the unreconstructed American consumer.

re: coffee, consumerism, food and drink, starbucks

Andy:

For Schultz, this mainstream customer base was both a boon and a curse. In Pour Your Heart Into It, his 1997 account of Starbucks’ rise to global behemoth, he reveals a preoccupation with authenticity that echoed Kurt Cobain’s. In 1989, he initially balked at providing non-fat milk for customers—it wasn’t how the Italians did it. When word trickled up to him that rival stores in Santa Monica were doing big business in the summer months selling blended iced coffee drinks, he initially dismissed the idea as something that “sounded more like a fast-food shake than something a true coffee lover would enjoy.”

Eventually, Schultz relented. And really, what greater punk-rock middle finger is there to purist prescriptions about what constitutes a true coffee drink than a blended ice beverage flavored with Pumpkin Spice powder? . . .

In reality, the chain’s customers have played a substantial role in determining the Starbucks experience. They asked for non-fat milk, and they got it. They asked for Frappuccino, and they got it. What they haven’t been so interested in is Starbucks’ efforts to carry on the European coffeehouse tradition of creative interaction and spirited public discourse.

Over the years, Starbucks has tried various ways to foster an intellectual environment. In 1996 it tried selling a paper version of Slate and failed. In 1999 it introduced its own magazine, Joe. “Life is interesting. Discuss,” its tagline encouraged, but whatever discussions Joe prompted could sustain only three issues. In 2000 Starbucks opened Circadia, an upscale venue in San Francisco that Fortune described as an attempt to “resurrect the feel of the 1960s coffee shops of Greenwich Village.” The poetry readings didn’t work because customers weren’t sure if they were allowed to chat during the proceedings. The majority of Starbucks patrons, it seems, are happy to leave the European coffeehouse tradition to other retailers.

What a fascinating and funny idea: a café where you get what the previous person ordered. No peeking!

re: consumption, creativity, food and drink, humor, unintended consequences

Andy:

Located inside the Urban Design Center Kashiwa-no-ha, the Ogori cafe looks innocuous enough, but holds a surprise in store for its patrons. In a nutshell, you get what the person before you ordered, and the next person gets what you ordered. Thus, if you’re in on the game, you can choose to be either a generous benefactor, and treat those that come after you – or try your luck at being cheap. Either way, it’s an interesting experiment that explores surprise, kindness and encourages interactions. . . .

[Caleb Stasser explains:] "As I sat down to enjoy my surprise Appletizer, loving this insane idea and wondering what would happen if you tried it in America, a Japanese woman approached the cafe. Since she could actually speak Japanese, she could read the large sign at the front and, fortunately or unfortunately, got advanced warning of what she was in for. Before making a final decision on what to order, she quietly snuck up to me to try to ask me what I had ordered, knowing that it would be her unwavering refreshment destiny. The staff put a quick stop to her trickery, and I didn’t answer.

"Of course, regardless of what she ordered, she got the orange juice I ordered a few minutes earlier. But here’s one of the moments that make this experiment cool: she actually chose orange juice, just like I did. So she got what she wanted. Ogori cafe synchronicity!"

Chopping is also excessively cinematic in that it mimics the very techniques of film production and editing, the precise chopping of continuous reality into 24 images per second, the mini-guillotines used to trim and edit film stock, the terminology of cuts and splices.

re: cultural worlds, food and drink, movies

Nate:

One of the delights of watching food-centric films is to see the main characters demonstrate their culinary skills. The breaking of an egg, the flipping of an omelet, the chopping of an onion (or a carrot or a piece of celery) become impressive feats when performed with dexterity and brio. The food writer Michael Pollan has noted that television cooking shows have come to resemble athletic events, showcasing the spectacular, often competitive talents of their chefs. In narrative film, however, the spectacle of cooking is always more than spectacle; it is also a dynamic means of representing character. Chopping, in particular, in being both precise and violent, is an exceptionally cinematic activity, capable of expressing repressed emotions of rage, bitterness, and passion. It is no wonder that most every film in which food plays a role invariably has a chopping scene.

Our shelves of cookbooks are fascinating not so much as a body of knowledge, but as a body of ignorance: they contain what we don't know (or no longer know) about food, but our ignorance and aspirations take on very specific, trend-sensitive forms, a bit like—come to think of it—a good bundt pan waiting for batter.

re: books, cultural worlds, food and drink, ignorance, knowledge

Nate:

“Tell me what you eat: I will tell you what you are,” Brillat-Savarin challenged his readers in 1825, and his wisdom if not his brio was already old hat. Human meals serve those mixtures of raw and cooked that make up anthropological codes. Nearly every prescription or preference blends irrational faith and scientific requirements, as Marvin Harris shows in his fascinating Good to Eat: look long enough at a seemingly arbitrary food rule (cloven hooves, sacred cows) and one can probably discover a self-preserving logic behind it, but look hard enough at an apparently sensible directive (a glass of milk, a handful of supplements) and one will like as not detect a prejudice posing as sense. Omnivorous and hungry, body and spirit, we sit down at a table spread with necessary choice; we cannot eat to live, that is, without in some measure living to eat. As Laurie Colwin once put it, then, cookery books will always “hit you where you live.” What seems distinctive and disquieting now, what seems to have increased in the two centuries since Brillat-Savarin shot a turkey in Hartford or even in the two decades since Colwin roasted a chicken in her New York apartment, is the number of volumes hitting us combined with the force of their impact. A nation with a lot of food books is a nation without much sense of food, as The Economist recently pointed out.

I love how even standardized American-cum-global cuisine can still go off in its own condiment-slathered local direction wherever it lands. This list makes me simultaneously very hungry and just a little bit queasy.

re: colombia, food and drink, guatemala, south america

Nate:

Guatemala Generally called "shucos", are cooked in a carbon grill. They're served with the classic boiled sausage, guacamole, mustard, mayonnaise,boiled cabbage. If you want you can add ketchup, bacon, pepperoni, salami, Spanish chorizo, longaniza or meat. They cost around $0.50 in all Guatemalan cities. You may order the famous "mixto" who brings all the toppings already mentioned, but its price may rise to $2.00 or $3.00.

Colombia In Bogotá and practically all the country, the hot dog is eaten with an unusually great amount and variety of condiments and fixings. In a single hot dog, is normal to find mashed potato chips, cheese, strings of ham or bacon, ketchup, mayo, mustard, pineapple sauce, and chopped onion.

Dirt-eating is fascinating and, one must admit, kind of disturbing. It calls to mind strange associations—of little kids who experience the world by putting it in their mouth; of the pregnant heroine in Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible who craves dirt for its needed nutrients; of parrots flocking at clay banks for their own dietary supplement, of the American slaves described in historien Eugene Genovese's Roll Jordan Roll, who swallowed dirt in response to their dire conditions—and, more happily, of the farmer sampling his soil to discern how best to tend it.

re: agriculture, dirt, food and drink, taste

Nate:

“It used to be,” writes William Bryant Logan in Dirt, “that a good farmer could tell a lot about his soil by rolling a lump of it around in his mouth.” Today, apparently, it is harder to find someone who literally eats dirt:

Not in Texas, nor Vermont, nor Kentucky, nor California, nor western New York. Everybody knew somebody who once did it, but nobody could quite remember the name of the fellow.

Finally, Logan came across Bill Wolf, an organic pioneer who started his environmental research under Buckminster Fuller and who used to eat soil, until his doctor forbade him.

Soil contains bad bugs as well as good ones, and the physician did not want to have to sort them out in Wolf’s guts. But back in the days when he chawed, Bill could tell acid from alkaline by the fizz of the soil in his mouth.

A very acid soil would crackle like those sour candies that kids eat, and it had the sharp taste of a citrus drink. A neutral soil didn’t fizz and it had the odour and flavour of the soil’s humus, caused by little creatures called “actinomycetes.” An alkaline soil tasted chalky and coated the tongue.

Having conducted this simple taste test, Logan explains, farmers could apply calcium carbonate to the Sprite-flavoured fizzy soil and gypsum to the Milk of Magnesia tongue-coating soil, which would then “react with the hydrogen of acid clays and the sodium of salt-clays, respectively,” in order to re-balance the soil’s pH and improve its structure.

Michael Pollan asked readers to submit their favorite dietary rules and rules of thumb; of the 2,500 responses he received, he selected his top 20 for an interactive feature. The whole list is great, but the other one that stuck out for its similar emphasis on the importance of not just the food but the culture we create around it in our daily eating was this: "You don't get fat on food you pray over."

re: cultural worlds, food and drink

Nate:

"When drinking tea, just drink tea." I find this Zen teaching useful, given my inclination toward information in the morning, when I'm also trying to eat breakfast, get the dog out, start the fire and organize my day. I believe that it's so much better for our bodies when we are present to our food. Perhaps a bit of mindfulness goes a long way first thing in the morning. (Of course, some time ago, I came across a humorous anecdote about a hapless Zen student whose teacher taught him the aphorism and then was discovered by the same student, drinking tea and reading the paper. When confronted, the teacher said, "When drinking tea and reading the paper, just drink tea and read the paper!")

—Michelle Poirot