The Food they Never Tasted

In Hungering for America, Hasia Diner tells of the starving Irish, who never tasted the delicacies that their native land produced. While the English ate Irish bacon, the Irish had rotting potatoes. Diner describes the effect of this on the Irish immigrants once they got to America. Irish women who became cooks in America were expected to cook according to food traditions to which they had no personal commitment. I summarized this in my post yesterday.

Today, I suddenly had a moment of connection with this as I read a newly-posted essay by Barbara Ehrenreich, about excesses in New York foodie places. The restaurant Serendipity3, Ehrenreich points out, recently created a $25,ooo dessert, "Frrrozen Haute Chocolate," containing edible gold, truffles, and ultra-premium chocolate. (Ehrenreich is more restrained, but I googled until I found the picture at right showing what a $25K dessert looks like.)

A week after setting a Guiness record for costliest dessert, Serendipity3 received a visit from health department inspectors who found: "a live mouse, mouse droppings in multiple areas of the restaurant, fruit flies, house flies, and more than 100 live cockroaches."

Ehrenreich's article juxtaposed these facts to highlight more general issues. She writes of "the inevitability of cockroaches in a world divided between rich and poor and served by a public sector in a state of bad decay." She discusses workers and kitchen conditions in New York's fanciest food establishments. She mentions how Whole Foods and Balduccis offer a buffet of stunning-looking food, but it doesn't taste all that good. Here is her conclusion -- look at the parallels with the starving Irish!

But there could be something else behind the consistently bad prepared food at these upscale sources: Many, if not all, of the people doing the cooking behind the scenes are making foods they are unlikely ever to confront in real life. Ask a Salvadoran immigrant to whip up chicken masala and he or she will no doubt follow directions, but in complete ignorance of the desired taste. One of the women working at the Balduccis I have patronized has only one visible tooth in her mouth, which in addition to speaking ill of the store's dental benefits, means she can never have bitten into one of the lamb burgers she sells. [From Roaches in the World's Most Expensive Dessert posted November 19, 2007.]

See this for a full description of the dessert: $25,000 for a Hot Chocolate?
See this for a full description of the mouse droppings: If You Give a Mouse a $25,000 Frrrozen Haute Chocolate…

Two Books: "Paradox of Plenty" and "Hungering for America"

I recently read two books on the history of food in America.

Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America (revised edition, 2003) by Harvey Levenstein is very often quoted. It's encyclopedic. Decade by decade, it discusses food trends, the food industry, the politics of food, the growth of fast food, and fads in fine dining. Beginning with the era of the great depression, it catalogs both food and hunger -- though he finds more paradoxes than just simultaneous gorging and starvation.

Leverstein's sources include newspaper clippings, food industry publications, restaurant reviews, reflection of food and body image in TV and film, and many other popular cultural sources. The overwhelming detail in each chapter makes this more of a source book for study of something more specific. The notes are very detailed, so you could probably go to his sources to learn more. However, the net result is not a good read. It just doesn't focus enough.

Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration by Hasia R. Diner (2001) approaches food history in a different way. I especially appreciate the author's use of fiction and personal memoirs as a source of information. (I mentioned this in an earlier blog post.) For each of the three groups -- Italians, Irish, and mainly Eastern European Jews -- Diner presents the foodways of their place of origin. She discusses the meals that were served at Ellis Island. For each group, she illustrates how adjustment to America affected foods that the group eventually "owned" in America.

In her discussion of how "Italian" food in America was different from the many regional cuisines of Italy I found quite a few interesting facts, though some points weren't so surprising. Even as a teenager, eating pizza for the first time at a restaurant called Rinaldi's, I was told that it was really an adaptation to American taste. My more sophisticated friends said that if I ever went to Italy, no pizza would be on the menu.

My friends, in fact, were wrong. By the time I went to Italy, American-style pizza had been adopted by the Italians. Pizza in Italy wasn't an obscure street food any more -- though it was still different from Rinaldi's pizza. Similarly, spaghetti with tomato sauce and meat balls, certain kinds of sausage, and a few cheeses were much more prominent in American than in regional Italian cooking, said Diner. She clarifies the process by which the food became defined as "Italian."

As for the Irish, Diner makes the case that she scoured every possible source, and found that the Irish immigrants had no particular empathy for the cooking of their former land. The unbelievably harsh policy of the English colonial masters had left them in such terrible food need that when the potato crop failed, they starved while Ireland was still exporting bacon, vegetables and many other foods that they had never in fact tasted. The bitterness over this experience possibly left them indifferent to food until later in their American experience. Beer and whiskey, yes, Irish bars and saloons, yes, but corned beef and cabbage didn't became Irish until almost 100 years after the main immigration.

Another interesting comparison of the groups in Diner's book shows how immigration patterns affected foodways. Many more Italian men than women immigrated to the US. Many more Irish women than men immigrated . Among the Jews, the pattern was for whole families to immigrate together. Diner's discussion is very specific about the results of this difference.

Irish women, she showed, worked as domestic servants. Stereotyping and negative attitudes of popular writers characterized the Irish cook as "Biddy." They deprecated her skills and her attitude. This was another factor that deterred the development of an Irish-American cuisine -- the first contact with food here was for so many learning to cook other people's food. Italian laboring men, in contrast, often lived together and cooked together. Also, eventually, Italian restaurants adapted their foods to broader American tastes.

Diner's treatment of the attitudes towards food in the shtetls of Eastern Europe was particularly interesting. Even the poorest Jews, she felt, were enabled to have an attitude of deserving to eat well. She discusses "eating days" where Jewish students would be fed by volunteer families one day each week, because they felt an obligation to learning. I don't have time to summarize this very interesting piece of scholarship.

I enjoyed reading both books. I've hardly done them justice in this short summary.

News of the Fat, or There Will Always be an England

The New Yorker rubric "There will always be an England" really fits this BBC article: "Huge hedgehog goes on Atkins diet." The larger picture shows George the Hedgehog, brought to the Wildlife Aid Centre in Leatherhead, England. The smaller picture shows an ordinary hedgehog.

George weighs almost 5 pounds, several times the weight of a normal hedgehog. The article doesn't mention if there's a Body Mass Index recommended for hedgehogs, but explains that George had been gorging on easily-available greens and on bread that was meant for the birds.

George's nurse at the Centre explained his new catfood diet:

"We've got to reduce his weight and we've got to do it slowly. Cat food is high in protein and we're stopping him eating bread. So it's a bit like the Atkins diet."

My Two Blog-Reading Interests Overlap

Besides being interested in food, I love reading blogs about language. There's an overlap this week: a foodie word became Oxford University Press word of the year. Quote from the announcement on the OUP website:

The 2007 Word of the Year is (drum-roll please) locavore. ...

The “locavore” movement encourages consumers to buy from farmers’ markets or even to grow or pick their own food, arguing that fresh, local products are more nutritious and taste better. Locavores also shun supermarket offerings as an environmentally friendly measure, since shipping food over long distances often requires more fuel for transportation....

“Locavore” was coined two years ago by a group of four women in San Francisco who proposed that local residents should try to eat only food grown or produced within a 100-mile radius.

Over at Languagelog.com (the writers always refer to their blog this way), Benjamin Zimmer of OUP has also been reporting on research about the reason why the four women chose the spelling "locavore" rather than "localvore." From Zimmer's Languagelog post:

I wondered why the original "locavores" ... chose that particular spelling instead of localvore with an extra l, favored by some other groups. I wrote: "Unlike other word formations lost in the mists of time, this is a case where the origin can be firmly pinpointed, so perhaps the true story of loca(l)vore will be revealed in more detail by the coiners themselves." Well, sure enough, the coiner of locavore, Jessica Prentice, emailed to explain how she came up with the word.

Jessica writes:

I thought about both "localvore" and "locavore" and decided on the latter. First of all, it's easier to say, has a better flow, and almost sounds like a "real" word. But also my understanding is that the prefix "loc(a)" has to do with place — as in "location", "locomotive" and "locus"... The ending "vore" has to do with eating, and is the same root as the word "devour". To me the word "locavore" means, in a sense, "a person who eats the place" or even "one who eats with a sense of place" or, better yet, "one who devours the place" (I enjoy eating). To have used "localvore" would have limited the possible resonances and shades of meaning of the word — in my opinion. [FROM "Locavore vs. localvore: the coiner speaks"]

To summarize my favorite language blogs:

• Languagelog -- This is a fascinating blog by several famous linguists.
• Linguist and editor Benjamin Zimmer's Oxford University Press Blog -- OUP are the Oxford English Dictionary folks.
  
• You Don't Say -- John McIntyre, The Baltimore Sun's assistant managing editor for the copy desk, looks at issues of language and writing.
  

The Silver Diner, Fairfax, VA

The diner has every feature that any diner anywhere ever had. A juke box. Art Deco signs. Meatloaf dinners. Eggs lots of ways. Plus lots of new kinds of foods -- thai chicken salad, bagels, quesadillas -- which were never on a diner in the fifties. But good. Miriam and Alice had authentic diner food: a P.B.&J. and toasted cheese.

Oh, Rats

We finally saw Ratatouille in the last-run $1 movie theater on Friday. And yesterday it arrived from Netflix. I'll watch it again. It inspired me to cook -- as it inspired Evelyn some time ago. Here are before and after baking photos followed by Evelyn's first-run-inspired dish.

More on "The Fortune Cookie Chronicles"

Continued review of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles by Jennifer 8. Lee. Chapter 7: "Why Chow Mein Is the Chosen Food of the Chosen People; or, The Kosher Duck Scandal of 1989."

Before I sat down to formulate my thoughts on connections between Jews and Chinese food, I searched my pantry for Kosher Chinese products. Out of several jars and bottles, two displayed the Kosher certification mark (the OU and the OK symbols at lower right in both pictures). My chili garlic paste, hoisin sauce, and rice vinegar had no such marks. Nor did Japanese ponzu or Thai fish sauce, but they're not Chinese anyway.

I guess this is evidence for the obvious: Jewish cooks make Chinese food. As Lee points out, there are lots of non-obvious things about the love of Jews for Chinese restaurants. Early in the 20th century, she points out, Jews and Chinese as immigrant groups lived in neighboring New York areas. Both were non-Christians in a Christian land, and they shared their non-observance of major holidays. This leads to one traditional Jewish Christmas dinner -- having Chinese take-out or dining in Chinese restaurants. Why? All the other restaurants are closed.

Further, Lee claims that as a dairy-less cuisine, Chinese cooking is easier to make simultaneously authentic and kosher. My adventure in the pantry makes me doubt this: the lack of kosher condiments would be as challenging as separating milk and meat. Vegetarian/dairy pizza and pasta are also kosher favorites. Not to mention the ubiquity of shellfish and pork in Chinese food -- though the old joke has it that anything is kosher in a Chinese restaurant. I'd look further for an explanation.

Lee traces references to Jewish-Chinese dining to 1928, citing a secondary reference to an article in Der Tog, a Yiddish newspaper. I think this was probably the article "The War between Chop Suey and Gefilte Fish," cited by Hasia R. Diner in the book Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration. Diner's study has an even earlier reference to Jewish-Chinese food links. She writes that the Jewish pattern of "going out to Chinese restaurants emerged quite early. In the 1890s the American Hebrew, a magazine oriented to the English-reading middle-class traditional Jews reported on the trend and criticized it." (p. 2o5)

The Kosher Duck Scandal of the chapter's title gets a lot of attention. For me, it's the least interesting part of the whole book, as it's really more about competition between Jewish groups and interests that aren't part of my life. In keeping with Lee's wide-ranging interests, though, she does document the role of Jewish entrepreneurs in such areas as producing the small packets of soy sauce that come with Chinese takeout and even in occasional ownership of Chinese restaurants. I think there's a lot of material on Jews and Chinese food that could be explored. I hope Lee will get to it in some future book, but skip the minutia of kashrut and its politics.

The bond between Jews and Chinese is deeper than food, I think. In the chapter titled "American Stir-fry" Lee discusses the question of Chinese identity. She discusses the word hua, "the distilled essence of being Chinese." This concept ties together Chinese throughout the world, no matter what language or culture they have adopted or how little of the Chinese language they know: "as though one day we all might return, as though departure from the homeland is only temporary, even if it may last for generations upon generations." Sound familiar, anyone?

In the fiction of author Gish Jen, another second-generation Chinese-New Yorker, Jews and Chinese people have startlingly many things in common. Jen's book Mona in the Promised Land creates Mona, a wonderful Chinese-American teenager. The book is a very funny story of her life and effort to convert to Judaism. It's another way to look at this same interesting question. Like Hasia Diner, I think fiction is a wonderful source for understanding immigrant experiences, though not one that The Fortune Cookie Chronicles is based on.

Made in America

Thoughts on reading The Fortune Cookie Chronicles by Jennifer 8. Lee.

How many ways of looking at a Fortune Cookie? Jennifer 8. Lee found more than thirteen. For starters, she looks at the famous incident where the "Lucky Numbers" repeated on fortune cookies distributed far and wide by Chinese restaurants randomly predicted a winning Powerball jackpot. Instead of a handful of winners, 110 people claimed at least $100,000. As a start into the world of Chinese restaurants, Lee traveled to the places where the winners live and eat Chinese food. Cool idea!

As she looked at the fortunes of fortune cookies, Lee offered all kinds of information about American Chinese restaurants. Using restaurant industry journals and interviewing suppliers, she explored the economics of these small businesses. Based on legal records and interviews, she illustrated immigration issues. The customer's side of the story came from some of the interviews with the Powerball winners, as well as from food-history writers. She even discussed the effort for international regulatory control of soy sauce!

A major appeal of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles is learning about the perspective of the immigrants who own, run, and staff Chinese restaurants. Or one might say, slave in them. In "Waizhou, U.S.A." she tells the story of John and Jenny, immigrants who bought a Chinese restaurant in a tiny Georgia hamlet (pop. 850) and their painful experiences. What seemed normal treatment of their three children to Jenny and John, looked otherwise to well-meaning authorities. They temporarily took the children into foster care and even arrested the parents for a time. The story ends ambiguously: the family returns to New York and then disappears so that neither Lee (who had been periodically interviewing them) nor local Georgians (who had rescued them from their legal problems), could find them.

Most recent immigrants who have later owned and worked in Chinese restaurants throughout America start in New York -- including Jenny and John -- says Lee. Most come from one area of China. From the immigrant perspective, there's New York and everything else: the name for the rest is Waizhou. Not only did she visit many restaurants in the South and Midwest, Lee visited the villages and cities of China where restaurant workers primarily originate. She's especially effective at all this because of being bilingual. The much longer history of San Francisco Chinese restaurants receives less attention in the book, mostly in the search for the origin of fortune cookies.

Besides the cultural and economic aspects of Chinese restaurants, Lee discusses the ways that people look at food. Americans, says Lee, have a very different philosophy of eating. We learn how completely adapted Chinese restaurants are to American tastes. For starters, there's a detailed look at both chop suey (more than a century ago) and General Tso's chicken (recent): dishes that, like fortune cookies, are virtually unknown in China.

The differences in cultural food preferences that Lee explained were especially enlightening, I thought. In America, she says "what goes into the mouth should never come out. That is, there should be nothing where you have to chew on something and then spit out an inedible part. This means no chicken feet, no fish with bones, no shrimp with shells. Peanuts come shelled, and even watermelon is preferred seedless."

She contrasts this to Chinese native habits: "the aftermath of most restaurant meals is a pile of bones, shells, and other detritus on the table at every place setting." She explains the Chinese love of whole shrimp "with the eyes and tails still on," of chicken feet and legs with lots of bones, and their disfavoring of the American favorite, boneless chicken breasts -- tasteless and bland.

From my personal experiences with Chinese food (like my photo of the ducks in Toronto Chinatown), I had always thought that the difference was that Chinese food was always cut up bite sized, ready to put in your mouth with chop sticks. I also always thought of Chinese food as full of exotic vegetables, while Lee emphasizes the overuse of broccoli. When I've had duck, in fact, even that was served in little slices. American food differed -- I thought -- because it came in big slabs like steak, requiring a knife and fork. My understanding of the difference was that the Chinese didn't want to fool with food at the table. But I had it almost backwards!

Lee looks at American Chinese restaurants both individually and collectively. Although there is no central organization (such as the huge corporations maintaining the consistency of MacDonalds or Burger King) she says "at times it seems that America's Chinese restaurants operate as a single giant, pulsing entity, a lively example of one of the most fertile research areas for biologists, sociologists, and economists: spontaneously self-organizing networks. The principles that govern ant colonies, slime molds, and the growth of the Internet also extend to Chinese restaurants; from local actions emerge collective wisdom."

One more thought: it's interesting to read a proof copy -- reminds me of my days in various types of publication jobs. Many typos show that it still needs proofreading, which I'm sure it will get. The notes all refer to "page 00." This shows me that the publishers' text processing software doesn't automate cross-referencing -- odd, such software has existed almost as long as the author herself. An index (if one is to be) must be in progress. I hope they have good software for that!

My next post will cover what The ... Chronicles has to say about Jews and Chinese Restaurants!

"The Fortune Cookie Chronicles"

Here is the book I plan to read next: The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food by Jennifer 8. Lee. It arrived in the mail today.

I'm especially looking forward to Chapter 7: "Why Chow Mein is the Chosen Food of the Chosen People." I can't wait to see whether she agrees with my speculation about Jews and Chinese food.

At the lower edge of the cover in the image at right, you can see the words "ADVANCE READING COPY - NOT FOR SALE - TO BE PUBLISHED IN HARDCOVER - MARCH 2008"

How did I manage to get an advance copy? Well, for a while I've been reading Jennifer 8. Lee's blog. (Same name: The Fortune Cookie Chronicles). A couple of weeks ago, she invited her blogging blog readers to apply for a proof copy of the book and review it in their own blogs. I'm among the chosen!

I'm already convinced that I'm going to like this book, because I like her blog. Further, Jennifer 8. Lee's articles in the New York Times are often on topics I like and are written with an approach that I like. (Reporting for the New York Times is her day job. And if you wondered, the middle initial 8 connotes prosperity in Chinese, says the publisher's note at the front of the book.)

I'll be posting my reviews here as I read the book. It's edged out Krugman's Conscience of a Liberal which I was about to start reading.

Happy Halloween

Be sure to eat a balanced diet -- as illustrated.

News of the Fat

I just discovered an amusing website/blog with ironic news of fattening food and related trends. The first story I came across was about the "Small World" ride at Disneyland. In "Small World ride revamped for bigger passengers" I learned that the average size of riders has increased enormously since its origin in 1963. Thus, the cars, which float in a very shallow flume of water, sometimes bottom out when twenty-first century sized passengers ride on them. And the passengers become irate when they have to get off to let the ride start up again. So the aptly named "Small World" ride has to be revamped.

In another post, the blog offered the following diagram, predicting future increases in Big Mac size:
The blog is called Calorie Lab.

Peg Bracken: She Didn't Hate to Cook

Today I read the obituary of a culinary figure whose books were popular in the 1960s: "Peg Bracken, 89; author struck a chord with the irreverent 'The I Hate to Cook Book'" by Elaine Woo, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer, October 23, 2007. My venerable copies of Bracken's most famous books -- with a 60¢ price on them -- are pictured at left.

I always found The I Hate to Cook Book and its sequels very amusing. I also learned a few good recipes from them -- especially "Cockeyed Cake" in Chapter 9, which is titled "Desserts or People are too Fat Anyway."

This chocolate cake recipe regularly appears in other easy-cooking sources: it involves a flour and cocoa mixture placed in a greased pan and then stirred briefly with oil, vinegar, vanilla, and water and baked.* Advantages: you need not have milk or eggs on hand, and you never have to wash a mixing bowl.

I Hate to Cook... offered just one cake recipe -- in Bracken's opinion, the ready-mix aisles of the supermarket "make you see clearly how far science has come." She suggests that "ready-mixes, fresh fruit, frozen fruit, canned fruit, and ice cream" should provide the solution to most dessert challenges.

Although I've read her books, I found much to learn from the article. Here are some highlights:

Peg Bracken, the dry-witted former advertising executive who relieved the kitchen anxieties of millions of readers with her 1960 bestseller, "The I Hate to Cook Book," died Saturday at her home in Portland, Ore. She was 89....

Bracken sold more than 3 million copies of "The I Hate to Cook Book," which helped busy women save time in the kitchen by cutting steps and shamelessly relying on convenience foods such as dry onion soup mix as key ingredients....

Although [Julia] Child addressed an audience eager for sophistication, Bracken -- who sold three times as many copies of her book as Child and company did of theirs -- spoke to everyone else. And although Child explained in step by voluminous step how to beat egg whites into a perfect froth or mash potatoes for gnocchi, Bracken stuck to tried-and-true basics, such as lasagna and beef stroganoff, leavened with a dash of sarcasm....

Culinary historian Laura Shapiro said Bracken wrote in a genre she calls "the literature of domestic chaos." Like Jean Kerr and Shirley Jackson (and, later, Erma Bombeck), Bracken approached the experiences of mid-20th century wives and mothers from an ironic perspective.

She also was truly interested in good food.

"James Beard used to cringe when her name came up," Shapiro told The Times. "He thought she was one of these can-opener cooks. He was underestimating her and misreading her. There was a real food person in there. She had no particular wish to get out of the kitchen. She just didn't want to be a maniac when she was in the kitchen."

*The Recipe for Cockeyed Cake:
1.5 cups sifted flour
3 Tbsp cocoa
1 tsp baking soda
1 cup sugar
1/2 tsp salt
5 Tbsp cooking oil
1 Tbsp vinegar
1 tsp vanilla
1 cup cold water

Put your sifted flour back in the sifter, add to it the cocoa, soda, sugar, and salt, and sift this right into a greased square cake pan, about 9 x 9 x 2 inches. Now you make three grooves, or holes, in this dry mixture. Into one, pour the oil; into the next, the vinegar; into the next, the vanilla. Now pour the cold water over it all. You'll feel like you're making mud pies now, but beat it with a spoon until it's nearl smooth and you can't see fhe flour. Bake it at 350 degrees for half an hour.

Over the years I have tried various changes to this, but I don't recommend any of them.

The image by the recipe shows the cover of the most recent edition, which seems to combine both volumes from the 1960s. However, the obituary in the New York Times notes: "Today, 'The I Hate to Cook Book' is out of print, doubtless a casualty of the Age of Arugula." From Peg Bracken, ‘I Hate to Cook’ Author, Dies at 89.

164,000 year-old man is a bold man...

"It was a bold man that first tasted an oyster." The mirrored walls behind the oyster bars of New Orleans post cute, catchy sayings like this -- you also see them on T-shirts. According to Bartlett, Jonathan Swift was the author: "He was a bold man that first eat an oyster." -- Polite Conversation. Dialogue ii.

Well, now we know: Swift's bold man did his tasting far earlier than anyone suspected.

"Evidence of early humans living on the coast in South Africa, harvesting food from the sea, employing complex bladelet tools and using red pigments in symbolic behavior 164,000 years ago, far earlier than previously documented, is being reported in the journal Nature."

The new finding about food from the sea: "is the earliest dated observation" of humans eating seafood, said the author of the Nature article, Curtis Marean, a paleoanthropologist at Arizona State University. He stated that at that time, "in coastal South Africa humans expanded their diet to include shellfish and other marine resources, perhaps as a response to harsh environmental conditions."

Quotes are from: "Earliest Evidence Of Modern Humans Detected," in Science Daily yesterday. The story has been widely re-hashed in the press.

What if global warming makes our crops fail?

Global warming may have uneven effects, but sooner or later, it will cause scarcity. More immediately, America has intensified efforts to use grain for our possibly insane demand to fuel our vehicles. In response, the price of food is already rising in poor countries like Mexico. The result of global warming may be slow, but the major crops of the world are at risk.

Americans today have no experience of famine. Rather, we live with incessant glut. We middle class Americans don't even use grain as our main source of food: for us, bread is not the "staff of life." Reference to bread as food has become a metaphor. Consequently when we read about food disasters in the past, we can't imagine how it could happen here.

In reading about the past, I've collected a few quotations on how peasants and farmers coped when their crops failed and their governments had taken no measures to help. Maybe agrarian coping mechanisms won't be relevant in the coming era. And who knows how major food shortages will affect the majority of world populations who live in cities -- will they eat rats? Thats one thing city people have done during sieges in historic wars.

European peasants even until the mid-20th century had long-standing practical methods for making some facsimile of bread during grain-harvest failures and other disasters: "When the dark days of famine came, the [Italian] peasants tried to make bread with an infinite variety of materials. In practice almost anything could be used to prepare a rude surrogate: darnel or tares, licorice, erba del vetro (a rough grass commonly sown in fallow fields, used as animal feed), roots, thistles, various leaves, scorzonera, hawthorn, etc." Other famine breads could be made from acorns, chestnut flour, grass, bran, and other less desirable foodstuffs such as pear-tree or apple-tree sawdust or animal fodder. Children in those days would sing: "The master gets the grain, the peasant gets the straw."

When their crops failed, English farmers may "have eaten the bark from trees and grass from the fields. . . . the French peasantry, in their extremity, ate unripe grain, roots, grass, and the intestines and blood of animals that had been slaughtered as food for the better-off."

In 1585-6, French peasants were "forced to eat acorns, wild roots, bracken, marc and grape seeds dried in the oven and ground into flour -- not to mention pine bark and the bark of other trees, walnut and almond shells, broken tiles and bricks mixed with a few handfuls of barley, oats or bran flour." They also ate "bread made from a mixture of couch grass and sheep's entrails." Even in good times, peasants would practice eating bark and other inedibles to ensure that they could still survive in case of famine.

In the potato-crop failure of the mid-19th century, the Irish starved or saved themselves by coming to America. British colonial-era planning reduced the impact of famine in the Indian subcontinent -- at least sometimes. In Africa, scarcity has never been conquered. Lack of resources may be one of the causes of some of the 21st century horrors taking place there already.

Every specific famine I've read about had both political and environmental causes that led some people to starve. While the potatoes rotted, Ireland was exporting food to England -- but the poor had no right to it, and the politicians in Parliament preached about the Free Market. (Really.) This won't be different if global warming and governmental indifference begin to decrease the world's food supplies.

Basically, we've lost the knack. I don't think history can prepare us for what might happen.

References: Camporesi, The Magic Harvest, pp. 23-4 and 95; Appleby, Famine in Tudor and Stuart England, p. 8; Mennell, All Manner of Food, p. 26; MacClancy, Consuming Culture, p. 44; the source for the "practice famine" is Eugen Weber. The first picture was taken by Evelyn. The second is Van Gogh's "Potato Eaters" -- hungry people. This post is inspired by my earlier post for Blog Action Day.

Today is Blog Action Day

Today is Blog Action Day. I have already posted my thoughts on the environment, focus of today's action. I agree that danger to the environment is a very important issue. I plan to see what other bloggers have come up with as well. See Saving the Penguins, What if global warming makes our crops fail?, and Environmental Issues and the Food Supply.

Environmental Issues and the Food Supply

Blog Action Day October 15 inspires me to ask: what is the impact of environmental and climate changes on the world food supply? A variety of causes and effects have been debated, and I've read a number of different analyses in the past. I'd like to know: do we expect widespread famine? Will the Great Plains dry up? Will there be mass starvation in India?

I found no simple answers. Here are a few of the areas and what I found.

Increase in average temperatures worldwide has already decreased crop yields. According to a Carnegie Institute study -- "on average, global yields for several of the crops responded negatively to warmer temperatures, with yields dropping by about 3-5 percent for every 1 degree F increase." Crops studied were those that are most important to worldwide nutrition: "wheat, rice, maize (corn), soybeans, barley and sorghum.... These crops occupy more than 40 percent of the world’s cropland, and account for at least 55 percent of non-meat calories consumed by humans. They also contribute more than 70 percent of the world’s animal feed." -- From "Crops feel the heat as the world warms," News Release, March 16, 2007.

Global warming in the future will continue to affect crop yields. Optimists claim that warmer summers and increase in CO2 levels would actually improve crop yields. However, field tests give a different result: "for all four of the world’s main food crops -- maize, rice, soybean and wheat -- the real-world fertilization effect was only half as great as predicted by the contained experiments." Further, increasing ozone levels will reduce crop yields. Prediction: even CO2 effects "will not prevent the world’s crop yields from declining by 10% to 15%." Occasional extremes of high temperatures could also lead to crop failures and famines in India. -- From Climate change warning over food production, 26 April 2005, NewScientist.com news service, Fred Pearce.

The Great Plains of the US produce significant food resources, and will experience significant impact from climate change. The Great Plains Climate Change Workshop, held in 1997, produced a long website concerning this issue. They state that: "the potential impact of climate changes is expected to affect winter snowfall, growing season rainfall amounts and intensities, minimum winter temperatures, and summer average temperatures. The combined effect of these changes in weather patterns and average seasonal climate will affect numerous sectors critical to the economic, social and ecological welfare of this region."

In India, government reports have warned of serious consequences from extreme weather. "Developing countries are right to be concerned about the negative impacts of climate change as they will suffer most," said a government spokesman. An Indian government report warned "that the cost of rising greenhouse gas emissions will fall predominantly on the poorest people. Global warming ... threatens to reduce India’s farm output by as much as a quarter." The spokesman said: "Climate change will increase the frequency of natural disasters. Long-term changes will lead to water scarcity, food insecurity and increased risk of malaria and major displacements of people and economic activity.'" -- From "Warming impacts Indian food supply," Sajeda Momin, March 24, 2006.

Corn-based ethanol has been promoted as a replacement for petroleum-based fuels. But this has a number of environmental consequences, and draws resources from the global food supply. "An O.E.C.D. report two years ago suggested that replacing 10 percent of America’s motor fuel with biofuels would require about a third of the total cropland devoted to cereals, oilseeds and sugar crops. Meanwhile, the environmental benefits are modest. A study published last year by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, estimated that after accounting for the energy used to grow the corn and turn it into ethanol, corn ethanol lowers emissions of greenhouse gases by only 13 percent." -- From "The High Costs of Ethanol," editorial, New York Times, September 19, 2007.

Fenugreek Leaves

One of the intriguing foods that Madhur Jaffrey frequently mentioned in Climbing the Mango Trees is fenugreek leaves. Inspired by the book, we stopped -- after a long walk in the park -- for the lunch buffet at Madras Masala, a local Indian restaurant.

I enjoyed all the food. There were a large number of dishes with distinct flavors and different sauces and textures, including some chick-pea patties (seemed like a spicier version of falafel), goat biryani, several types of potatoes, and various breads. I really liked the lemon pickle and mint and coconut chutneys. The kulfi, a dense pistachio ice cream, was also very good. However, I have no idea which flavors and dishes corresponded to the many tastes in the book.

At the end of the meal, I asked about fenugreek leaves. For all I knew, maybe I was eating them. No, I wasn't. First the waiter (who didn't seem to understand me very well) went into the kitchen and brought me a napkin with around a tablespoon of fenugreek seeds on it. They were a little more fragrant-smelling that the ones I have in my spice collection.

I thanked him, but tried again about leaves. He asked the manager or someone. The answer: the leaves are only found in India. So I came home and googled: of course lots of bloggers and food writers have written about this Indian herb. For example, see Green Blog Project - Fish with baby methi (fenugreek) leaves -- incidentally, this is a very interesting-looking blog.

"Climbing the Mango Trees"

Madhur Jaffrey's memoir about her childhood offers a list of spices associated with every incident she describes. In her prologue she relates that at age four, in her grandfather's orchard, she shared with her many cousins sliced mangoes dipped in "salt, pepper, red chilies, and roasted cumin."

At the end of the book, she records the foods ritually prepared by the family and served at the final ceremony of mourning for her grandfather, "all prepared according to rules followed only on such a day." In particular, the meal included a delicate rice pudding. She continues: "The green pumpkin, cooked with cloves, fennel, and fenugreek was impossible to ignore. ... The potatoes, made mainly with ginger, tomatoes, and cumin, were simple yet extraordinary -- earthy, gingery, and hot. There were slim stuffed okra, tiny taro patties smothered with ajowan seeds.... and assorted desserts, including the rice pudding. I ate and ate until I could eat no more."

I was fascinated by descriptions of her bicycle trips to school with her books and her tiffin carrier -- and its contents. I enjoyed reading about her family's picnics where 30 adults, adolescents, and children could ride in just 2 cars. Later picnics, attended by just the high-school and college-age cousins and their friends, showed how her family's social life was changing. In every episode the most vivid element seems to be the spices.

For example, a trip to her maternal grandparents' house -- rarely visited -- seems dominated by a stop at a famous "Lane of Fried Breads." The young author ate paratha -- fried puffy bread -- stuffed with "green peas, potatoes, fenugreek greens, chickpea flour, spiced split peas, cauliflower, or grated white radish." She also describes special mushrooms that were never as good anywhere but her grandparents' house.

Yes, the book lists plays she read, leading to her career as an actress. She tells stories of her relationships to parents, uncles, and cousins, who lived as one large family in her grandfather's large house and adjacent houses. She touches on her family's reaction to British colonialism and to the Partition of India -- in fact, I hadn't really realized how passionately Hindu citizens of India opposed partition and favored a united country. But the book is really about her childhood experience of food, especially spice -- her early life is shown to predestine her to be a famous cookbook author and interpreter to the West of Indian cooking.

A delicious story!

Lamb with Eggplant

When I was around 12, a friend gave my mother some lamb and eggplant casserole -- a daring experiment she had cooked. She said it was a Persian recipe. I was the only one who liked it. I might have been the only one in the family who even tasted it. I started looking for new-tasting foods quite early, and wanted to try every new food that I could. I had never tasted eggplant before this, and never lamb except for lamb chops.

I think my next experience with eggplant and lamb was the moussaka in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, the first volume by Julia Child and her collaborators. Though maybe I tried some other version of this French adaptation of an eastern Mediterranean dish. Moussaka contains many of the ingredients of the recipe I tried this evening -- as shown in the photo. Tonight's recipe is from Binnur's Turkish cooking blog -- Lamb with Eggplant in the Oven. It's a little simpler to make than the Julia Child recipe, which isn't surprising.

We ate the eggplant-lamb casserole with some mujadara (a lentil, rice, and onion dish), Greek olives, and small Roma tomatoes from Whole Foods. I haven't made a meal like this one for a while, and it was a nice change.

News of the Fat

From the NY Times, a suggestion that obesity might be connected to prosperity:

Cuba’s economic crisis in the 1990s had a silver lining, scientists are reporting: a decrease in the rates of obesity, diabetes, coronary heart disease and stroke.And no wonder. Average calorie consumption dropped more than a third, to 1,863 calories a day in 2002 from 2,899 in 1989. Cubans also exercised more, giving up cars for walking and bicycling.

from Nutrition: An Up Side to Hard Times by NICHOLAS BAKALAR, October 9, 2007.

The article continues with a number of statistical measures of the obesity-related diseases that declined during the crisis, but notes: "As more food became available, obesity increased to about 12 percent again by 2002." As we keep hearing, in one form or another, people just seem to eat more when they can, and that makes them fat.
I also wanted to mention that Brian Wansink, author of Mindless Eating, a book I've mentioned several times, received an Ig Nobel prize for his invention of the bottomless soup bowl! What a great choice. From the CNN article:

The Ig Nobel for nutrition went to a concept that sounds like a restaurant marketing ploy: a bottomless bowl of soup.

Cornell University professor Brian Wansink used bowls rigged with tubes that slowly and imperceptibly refilled them with creamy tomato soup to see if test subjects ate more than they would with a regular bowl.

"We found that people eating from the refillable soup bowls ended up eating 73 percent more soup, but they never rated themselves as any more full," said Wansink, a professor of consumer behavior and applied economics. "They thought 'How can I be full when the bowl has so much left in it?' "

His conclusion: "We as Americans judge satiety with our eyes, not with our stomachs."