Ice Cream News

See this article for a description of really tempting new ice cream arrangements: "Ben & Jerry's Nails It With New Core Ice Cream Flavors." Each pint has two flavors of ice cream and a contrasting core of fudge, jam, or salted caramel:

I love Ben and Jerry's ice cream, even though their original social conscience was probably cast off when the corporation was sold to some big conglomerate. I don't buy it often enough. This new arrangement of multiple flavors really does sound wonderful. A link posted on Facebook by George Takei made me aware of this article.

A Banned Book

In India, at the request of backward-looking religious groups, copies of The Hindus: An Alternative History by Wendy Doniger have been pulped. This widely commented action inspired me (and I gather many others) to buy the book. It's a difficult reading choice, but I've read around half the chapters; that is, around 400 of the 780 pages, skipping the middle of the book. This might be all I can manage.

Food in Hindu practice:

As I always do when I read, I've paid attention when the topic of food was mentioned. Obviously, I expected to learn about the history of vegetarianism in the Hindu religion and about the views of cows held by various Hindu groups. No disappointment here, though the case is clear that not all Hindu tradition is a vegetarian tradition, nor even a cow-avoiding tradition. Early animal sacrifice was a part of Hindu practice, replaced in a historical process with balls of rice in place of a sacrificial animal. (p. 244)

In recent times: "The Brahmin priest often sacrifices a goat made of dough and papier-mache... . In Kerala, Nambuduri Brahmins use rice wrapped in a banana leaf. Often the rice cakes that are used in place of the goat are wrapped in leaves, tied to little leashes, and carefully 'suffocated' before they are offered." But sometimes, the vegetarian god lives inside a shrine, while a carnivorous goddess accepts meat sacrifice on the outside. (p. 655-656)

In the Indus valley, very early, beginning around 2300 BCE, inhabitants left traces of their agricultural and culinary activity: "Typical signs include seeds, fruits, sprouts, grain plants, pulses, trees, farm instruments (hoes, primitive plows, mortars and pestles, rakes, harvesting instruments, etc.), seasonal/celestial or astral signs, and even at times anthropomorphized plowed fields. The images... tell us that the winter Indus crop was barley and wheat; the spring crop, peas and lentils; and the summer and the monsoon crops, millets, melons, dates, and fiber plants. They also probably grew rice. ... They ate meat and fish." (p. 70)

Early Hindu gods, like many parallel deities elsewhere, expected to be fed as a part of ritual. "The Vedic gods," writes Doniger, "were light eaters; they consumed only a polite taste of the butter, or the animal offerings, or the expressed juice of the soma plant, and the humans got to eat the leftovers. What was fed to the fire was fed to the gods; in later mythology, when Agni, the god of fire, was impregnated by swallowing semen instead of butter, all the gods became pregnant." (p. 109)

Dogs were especially hated by Hindus, a topic that recurs throughout the book. Doniger constantly presents little stories from Hindu myths to illustrate various points. Here's a story I liked: "A group of dogs asked a Vedic priest, 'Please, sir, we'd like to find some food by singing for our supper. We are really hungry.' He asked them to return the next morning and so the dogs filed in, sliding in slyly as priests slide in slyly in a file, each holding on to the one in front of him. They sat down together and began to hum. then they sang, 'Om! Let's eat! Om! Let's drink. Om! My the gods bring food! Lord of food, bring food! Bring it! Bring it! Om!" Doniger's interpretation: "The author of this text may be poking fun at Brahmins or pleading for more sympathy for dogs (and therefore for the lower castes), or both or none of the above." (p. 189)

Some things I learned: 

Everything about the history of Hinduism is political. This is probably true of most other religions too, but not relevant here. I think a particularly political aspect of the book is the finding that throughout Indian history, "Non-violence is an ideal propped up against the cultural reality of violence." (p. 10)

Hinduism attained the definition of a religion in the modern sense in modern times, not so much in ancient times when Europeans had already formed what we still call religions, including a sense of identity and moral values based in them. The reasons are complicated -- not just because lots of the sects, beliefs, customs, social factors, and stories/myths were separated into different regional and class-oriented packages. This is so complicated I can't possible summarize it.

The simultaneous development of classes and castes in India also explains a lot about the development of Hinduism. How caste and class are embedded in Hindu myths, tales, and religious thought is important. As many religions do, Hinduism contains a sense that the present is the only time, that truths are permanent and did not emerge in the past, and will not change in the future.

The author's historic approach includes evidence from religious and historic texts, from archaeology including stone inscriptions, from oral and later-written-down-oral traditions, and from reports by travelers from other cultures. The book is organized historically, with each era viewed through whatever such evidence exists. This is challenging for a novice like me: I don't know any of the background that would make it easier to read.

And about those many texts: "There is no Hindu canon. The books that Euro-Americans privileged (such as the Bhagavad Gita) were not always so highly regarded by 'all Hindus.'" (p. 25) Thus even the identification and attributed importance of the main religious texts of Hinduism is political, as the texts came to seem more important because of the views of the British in India and also foreigners reinterpreting the religion for many purposes. Again, a  historically complex subject.

Things I still would like to know:

In Judaism and Christianity, an important part of the religion is a personal relationship with God. Maybe I'm not reading right, but after all those chapters, I don't feel I have any grasp of how Hindus, modern or historical, relate to their gods. There are occasional references to the topic of religious practice, but I don't feel that I have any real mental image of how a contemporary Hindu family or one in the past would have expressed their religious feelings, whether they engaged in prayer or regular attendance at a worship service, whether they attended temple festivals together, how they educated their children in their religion, and how their ethical and moral lives were related to religion, if at all. I was interested in Doniger's suggestions about how Bollywood films have changed Hinduism, but I need more background.

I have read other accounts of life in Indian families that related to food preparation and food taboos in Hindu kitchens, from which I got more information. I feel I know little about their actual beliefs. This indeed makes it hard to understand the political Hinduism that has led to the book being banned. Maybe this line of questioning just marks my incompetence to understand the point of the book. I don't think the chapters I skipped had more such details. I guess I flunk the quiz.

My reaction to banning the book:

I see why the book offends some Hindus, though I am completely opposed to banning or pulping books under any circumstances, even if they offend me. The book's dry academic style punctuated with flip American and English cultural references might make the book more readable for some, but I found that it also hinted at a lack of respect for the topics. Further, there's a type of relativism expressed in the book, seemingly a type of postmodernism, that would surely annoy a believer. The discussion of women, sexuality, and other controversial topics was the most cited reason that the faithful hated the book, but I think there's more to it than that.

For example:

• "Hindus continue to drive, like King Vrisha in the Brahmana story, with one foot on the accelerator of eroticism and one foot on the brake of renunciation." (p. 196)
• "When Rama's brother Bharata is given the throne that should have been Rama's, each of the brothers, like Alphonse and Gaston in the old story, modestly and generously tries to give the kingdom to the other." (p. 302)
• "We have to be careful how we use history and myth to understand one another. ... I would define a myth as a story that a group of people believe for a long time despite massive evidence that it is not actually true; the spirit of myth is the spirit of Oz: pay no attention to the man behind the curtain." (p.   23)
• "You could easily use history to argue for almost any position in contemporary India: that Hindus have been vegetarians, and that the have not; that Hindus and Muslims have gotten along well  together, and that they have not; that Hindus have objected to suttee [women immolating themselves on their husbands' funeral pyres], and that they have not; that Hindus have renounced the material world, and that they have embraced it; that Hindus have oppressed women and lower castes, and that they have fought for their equality." (p. 688)
• "So we say that Sanskrit is older, and the vernaculars younger. But Sanskrit, the language of power, emerged in India from a minority, and at first its power came precisely from its nonintelligibility and unavailablilty, which made it the power of an elite group. Walt Kelly's Pogo used to use the word 'Sam-skrimps' to describe highfalutin double-talk or manipulative twaddle. Many Euro-Americans mispronounce it 'Samscript,' ... " (p. 5)

The British Empire and how it imposed colonialism on India, the American adoption of Hindu thought in some form or another in several eras, and various other Western reactions and definitions are rather central to Doniger's account of Hinduism. Why is Rudyard Kipling so important in the view of the author? Because his presentation of Hindu thought was so influential with Westerners that it also affected Hindu self-definition. But obviously to a practicing Hindu who doesn't want Western thought involved in his private religion I would think the focus on  how the West affected Hindu thought and definition has potential for offense. Only guessing.

UPDATE: More on free speech and its benefits here.

"The Emperors of Chocolate"

Yesterday night: culinary book group again. Book selection: The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret world of Hershey and Mars by Joel Glenn Brenner.

Agreed by the six participants who had read it: the book was great!


Also agreed: the Reese's PB Cups (brought by one of us) were a great way to kick off the discussion.


Reese's Cups and Reese's pieces, Snickers, 3 Musketeers, Hershey Bars, M&Ms, Milky Ways, and many of the other candy bars from these corporations are their best-known products, but we were also surprised to learn that Mars makes pet food and Hershey is a major producer of pasta.

From Time

Any mention of candy bars anywhere is a big deal: in Time magazine this week, there's an article on "The 13 Most Influential Candy Bars of All Time." The Hershey bar, Milky Way, and Snickers, as featured in our book, are all on the list, along with more obscure bars like "Chicken Dinner" which was available from the 1920s to 1960s, with vintage pictures of some of their original labels. This perpetual relevance made Brenner's work all the more fun to read.

This book is a work of profoundly important research, as the author was allowed to interview people and read documents that are now off-limits to journalists or researchers. The author describes culinary history, social history, economic history, food manufacturing history, and more -- and makes them all very appealing to read about. The Emperors of Chocolate is around 15 years old, and we all would have liked to know more about the recent past (some of us googled it) and about the larger chocolate industry. No doubt, this is a classic book.

A few of the things we liked about the book:

• The historical coverage of the founding of each of the two biggest players in the history and present of candy bars -- Mars and Hershey's. We read how candy making went from small-batch, local production to mass production and mass consumption. Detailed descriptions of the experiments that went into chocolate processing and creating the flavors and colors of the candy were fascinating. Attitudes of European chocolate makers and cognoscenti towards American chocolate are also interesting: mainly, they are contemptuous of the sour flavor of Hershey's milk chocolate. But the book stays pretty much on the topic of the two American dynasties.
• The personalities and family dynamics of Mars, still a privately held corporation and Hershey, long dominated by Milton Hershey. We were intrigued by the horrible relationship between Forrest Mars, Sr. and his sons and daughter who inherited the company. Also by the relationship of Milton Hershey with his parents and his immediate employees, and his legacy. Though public, much of the Hershey corporate stock is owned by a foundation that he created, which runs a school for orphans or children with difficult family situations.
• Rivalry of the two companies over time. This story of business and adverising is also compelling. They vied with each other to supply chocolate for the troops in World War II; they cooperated in the creation of M&Ms (the first M is for Mars but the second is for Murrie, a Hershey executive's son -- hired then driven out of Mars when the family wanted to compete rather than take advantage of Hershey), and then they rivaled each other for popularity and for shelf space in supermarkets and anywhere candy is sold. Still do!
• The blindness of the Mars family to modern business practice because the owners are secretive and neurotic, and some of the slips at Hershey's because they weren't aware of the need to promote their product. Above all, we liked the story of the Mars family's refusal to let M&Ms be used in the film "ET" -- instead as everyone knows, ET ate Reese's Pieces, a Hershey's product, which were just becoming popular and received a huge sales boost from the film.

Next time we are reading Wine and War, which describes the events of World War II in France through the eyes of wine growers, wine merchants, and other French men and women in the wine trade, beginning in about 1939 and proceeding historically as the Nazis conquered France. I've read it before and wrote about here: Wine and War. As always I'm looking forward to another lively discussion.

Wordless Wednesday: Fondue

The Big Snowstorm

Fairfax, yesterday: playing in the snow

Eating maple snow

Today: sunny and incredibly warm: all the shoveled places are
getting down to bare pavement.
But there's no school again

Snow tunnel

Wordless Wednesday: Olympic Food

Borscht: from a wonderful article on Russian food to celebrate the
Olympics. See "6 Things to Eat and Drink While Watching the 2014 Olympics"

Utensils

"There have been books on potatoes, cod, and chocolate, and histories of cookbooks, restaurants, and cooks. The kitchen and its tools are more or less absent. As a result, half the story is missing. This matters."

Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat by Bee Wilson is about much more than the often repeated history about how nobody used a fork until whenever it was supposed to have been discovered (or maybe re-discovered, since maybe the Romans used forks).

This highly amusing and interesting book talks not only about the fork, but about the spork. It also describes the history of the hearth and various types of cook stoves and spit roasting devices; cook pots and pans and skillets; rice cookers; knives, Chinese cleavers, and other cutting or mincing tools; egg beaters; spoons; the blender; ice boxes and refrigerators; and other interesting devices. The author explores the history of level measurements in the US and of measuring by weight elsewhere. She talks about the history of canning food, and the very slow development of an effective can opener.

Many elements affect the way people eat. One that's explored in a way that's new to me is how the supply of firewood or other fuel affects the way food is cooked. I knew that the combination of Chinese cleaver to cut food in clever small bits and the use of the wok to cook quickly was a response to scarce fuel, and Wilson explores the result of this fact. Less obvious: the habit of roasting huge cuts of meat, even sides of beef or whole smaller animals in an open fire was available in England because fuel was plentiful. However, the supply of cooking fuel in France was less plentiful, so other techniques of cooking became more prevalent. So the French call the English "les Rosbifs."

Wilson discusses how slaves or servants in the kitchen have affected attitudes towards labor-intensive cooking, quoting various people including the Roman philosopher Seneca: "I like food that a household of slaves has not prepared, watching it with envy, that has not been ordered many days in advance or served up by many hands." And in our own time, she points out that we depend on invisible workers far from our own kitchens. "We do not see the hands in the chicken factory that boned the breasts… nor the workers who labored to assemble the parts of our whizzy food processors. We only see a pile of ingredients and a machine ready to do our bidding. Alone in our kitchens, we feel entirely emancipated."

I particularly liked Wilson's awareness in the book of the differences among various social classes when it came to cooking and kitchen equipment. She quotes a great comment from Laura Ingalls Wilder -- "The rich get their ice in the summer, but the poor get theirs in the winter."

Happy Birthday, Alice

Alice making fudge as a treat for her class

Wordless Wednesday: Recent Reading

Food in Art and Art in Food

Tastes and Temptations: Food and Art in Renaissance Italy by John Varriano is like a banquet of fascinating concepts. I felt, when reading it, as if I have been waiting for such a book to tell me many things I wanted to learn about the relationship of food and art!

Italian Renaissance cookbooks and books on the art of cooking inform one of the most interesting parts of the study. Varriano compares developments in food theory to developments in art theory. He shows, by many examples, how these two focal points of Renaissance thought are parallel.

Intellectual and culinary currents in the Renaissance are linked in ways I found remarkable. Early paintings used a background of gold, with rather stiff colors and skin tones in the human subjects. Painters slowly developed more naturalistic ways to present human forms -- and in this process, they employed a number of food substances. Egg as a medium for tempera, a number of different oils as a medium for paint, and pigments from foods like saffron provided a variety of effects that the innovative artists explored. Renaissance cooks, meanwhile were also developing new uses for oils, eggs, and of course many other foods. Varriano summarizes these trends:

"By 1500 oil had replaced eggs as artists' binder of choice, whereas cooks continued to choose from an array of possibilities. Whichever method they adopted, it derived from somewhere else -- oil paint from Flanders, cooking oil from Arabia, and butter from northern Europe. Collectively, these ingredients became essential to the creation of Italian Renaissance tastes; indeed, many of the visual and gustatory refinements of the period could not have taken place without them." (p. 159)

Cellini Salt Cellar

Art works were sometimes made directly from foods. Sugar sculptures were popular as a luxurious way to decorate the large and opulent dining tables of the richest Renaissance princes and churchmen. Varriano gives many examples of how the sugar statues were made and decorated with gold or with colors. Some were made in molds that also were used for metal objects of greater permanence. Architectural and other decorative banquet items were also made from cheese, salami, capons and other unexpected foodstuffs. (They really make this weekend's L.A.Times Super Bowl stadium made of various foods look pitiful! )

Tastes and Temptations also discusses the development, in this era, of different types of elegant tableware, including pottery dishes decorated with classical figures and elaborate metalworks. I've seen many of these in art museums, and felt that the description gave me quite a bit of insight into what I've seen. The famous gold salt cellar of Benvenuto Cellini, shown above, is one of these objects.

"The Bean Eater"

Still life paintings, religious paintings of subjects like The Last Supper, and paintings of ordinary people and shopkeepers all provide material for studying food as the subject of art. Each of the author's treatments offered new insights about the paintings under discussion. For example, about Annibale Caracci's work "The Bean Eater," Varriano wrote:

"Judging from the man's garb and demeanor, he is clearly a villino, or country bumpkin. The meal so carefully laid out before him is consistent with the peasant diet... beans, dark bread, a torta da bietola (chard pie), scallions, and red wine -- all foods 'not to be eaten except by those who labor hard.' But in this context, the food probably signifies something more than lower-class humors and appetites."(p. 139)

In fact, scallions "incite the libido... Thus, a link between food, sex, and procreation may underlie the eroticism of many of these Italian genre scenes," continued Varriano. He gave illustrations from various writers about the effect of foods on the humors -- that is, Renaissance health theories, and showed how these theories were reflected in various paintings. All, I find, just fascinating.

Kugel

Challah Kugel at kugel-making lesson, January 29,
Jewish Women's Circle

Potato kugel. Lokshen kugel or noodle kugel. Challah kugel. Apple kugel. Yerushalmi kugel. Vegetable kugel. Rice kugel. What do they all have in common? As with almost any Jewish question, every suggested answer to this question has a sort of counter-answer. Yes, but…

Kugel has always been a dish for the Jewish Sabbath, or Shabbat – at least it was so for Eastern Europen Jews and their descendants in many lands. Traditional Friday night Shabbat dinners often included kugel, as did the foods for Saturday midday meals. On Friday night and Saturday, observant Jews don’t light a fire and don’t prepare or reheat foods, so Shabbat dishes have to be made by Friday afternoon and kept warm on a low, unchanging flame. In other words, a traditional kugel had to be cooked for hours or even overnight without losing its flavor, often in a slow oven.

Yes, but kugel now is also popular with many Jews who don’t observe these restrictions. They make kugel any time, for holidays or potlucks – their kugels most frequently are baked in a hot oven, and have to be taken out while still puffy. Lots of contemporary Jewish cooks would tell you that a kugel is a dish that’s baked, sort of like a casserole.

Yes, but in the past, women made kugel in a frying pan or in a pot on top of the stove. For example, a woman described in a New York Times article a few years ago, “makes her potato kugel without matzo meal and in a pot rather than the usual Pyrex dish so it can finish cooking on the automatic flame.”

In the still-more-distant past, kugels were steamed inside the pot that held the slow-cooked Sabbath stews, often called cholent (though the name varied depending on the time and place). Only slowly did kugel become a stand-alone dish. It seems, in fact, that way back in time there were essentially two types of slow-cooked dishes: cholent, or stew, and kugel, a more solid dish, basically made from a starch bound with eggs.

Kugel could be a very simple dish. Shabbat potato kugel added an egg or two to the daily fare of potatoes and onions that a Jewish family in the shtetl could afford -- like other very poor rural and village people in Poland and Russia in the 19th century. Indeed, almost all kugel recipes include eggs. When people were really poor, putting scarce eggs into a starchy dish was a way to share a few eggs with a large family. So some people say that a kugel has to have eggs. Yes, but somehow the use of eggs doesn’t seem to define the dish, just to contribute to the flavor and texture.

Yes, kugel is a dish for helping a poor family to share a few eggs. But rich people in those shtetls made rich kugels full of eggs. In America, everyone could eat like the rich people in the old world. Like so many foods in America, kugel got richer and richer, so now many American Jews eat kugels with many many eggs, cheese, lots of sugar, and a variety of fruit. While observant Jews distinguish between kugels that could be eaten with meat meals and those ok for dairy meals, that’s no longer important for many Jewish people today.

Apple Kugel at kugel-making lesson

Yes, but now people are health-conscious, and they make new recipes to be healthy by modern standards – with vegetables. Broccoli. Spinach. Apple kugels made with a batter rather than noodles or potatoes are another variation – healthy or not? I don’t know. There are even gluten-free versions.

Raisins were another frequent addition to Eastern European kugels. One bit of evidence for that is the history of Yerushalmi kugel – Yerushalmi means “from Jerusalem.” One story says that Jews who originally came from Lithuania began making it in Safed (Tzfat) in the early 19th century. Yerushalmi kugel is made from caramelized sugar and fine egg noodles, flavored with a strong dose of black pepper. No raisins, but that’s supposedly because they “couldn't afford raisins … so they browned sugar to make their kugels look dark.” Later these Jews were driven out of Safed and settled in Jerusalem where they kept making the kugel. As the name suggests, it’s still very popular in Jerusalem, especially in the Orthodox neighborhoods, where it’s eaten with a slice of pickle.

Yes, but there’s another story: some attribute the Yerushalmi kugel recipe to Rivka Vinegarten, “the curator of Or Chaime Museum in old Jerusalem. Her father, Rabbi Avraham Mordechy Vinegarten, was the last rabbi of the old Jewish quarter at the outbreak of the 1948 war.”

Some rabbis in the 19th century said it wouldn’t be Shabbat without kugel. They felt that kugel was a holy dish, perhaps because of its simple origins among poor people whose lives were seen as holy. Quite a few of these rabbis preferred potato kugel to any other kind. Noodle kugel, called lokshen kugel in Yiddish, was their other primary choice. There are those who limit their definition to just these two kinds of kugel. In any case, kugel was a strictly Jewish dish.

Yes, but I have found so much else about kugel. And I’m going to stop now.

Sources: 

• Eat and Be Satisfied by John Cooper (1993)
• “Holy Kugel: the Sanctification of Ashkenazic Ethnic Foods in Hasidism” by Alan Nadler, in Food & Judaism, ed. Greenspoon, Simkins, and Shapiro (2005)
• “Kugel Yerushalmi (Jerusalem lokshen kugel)”
• “At Home, in a Stranger's Kitchen” by Alex Witchel, New York Times (April 4, 2001)
• “Strike While the Kugel is Hot” by Rivka Tal (August 31, 2006)
• “The History of Kugel” by Gil Marks (September 1, 2011)

Wordless Wednesday: A Winter Lunch

"Still Life With Oysters" by Gustave Caillebotte

Notes on Food Memoirs

The first food memoir?

I suspect that the first food memoir might be The Physiology of Taste: or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (born 1755), notably translated by M.F.K. Fisher. Brillat-Savarin's memoir is famous for originating the expression "you are what you eat," as well as for the aphorism "The discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a new star."

I have enjoyed reading food memoirs for many years, perhaps beginning with A.J.Liebling's memoir Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris and Orwell's memoir of being Down and Out in Paris and London. Early in my food reading experience, I thoroughly enjoyed Calvin Trillin's many memoirs in the New Yorker and in book form -- often also about dining in France. Also, I loved several books about about life in the wider Mediterranean region: an older memoir titled Honey from a Weed and several memoirs by Mary Taylor Simeti, an American who married a Sicilian and has lived there for years.

Two books about becoming a chef especially interested me, the stories of Marcus Samuelsson and Jacques Pépin. Samuelsson was born in Ethiopia, was adopted by a Swedish family, trained in various parts of Europe, and is now an American celebrity chef (blogged here: "Yes, Chef"). Pépin was one of the last generation to experience the completely traditional chef's apprenticeship beginning at the age of 14; he also ended up in America (blogged here: "The Apprentice").

Recently, I read Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking by Anya von Bremzen. Sort of a tour-de-force, it manages to present the history of Russia just before, during, and after Communism through a selection of typical meals that might have been served each decade of the 20th century (blogged here: Cuisine without Food). And for a completely different cultural milieu: Climbing the Mango Trees by Madhur Jaffrey describes the girlhood in India of this famous woman who has been highly successful both as an actress and a cookbook author (blogged here: "Climbing the Mango Trees").

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of other food memoirs, and many lists of favorites from many sources such as 50 from Abe Books or over 700 from Goodreads. Here is my choice of memoirs among which I think we could pick one that would be enjoyable for our book club this year:

• Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking by Anya von Bremzen -- most  highly recommended.
• Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris by A.J. Liebling
• Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
• Alice, Let's Eat by Calvin Trillin
• Honey from a Weed: Fasting and Feasting in Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades and Apulia by Patience Gray
• Bitter Almonds: Recollections and Recipes from a Sicilian Girlhood by Mary Taylor Simeti
• Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl (note: we read the first of this series, Tender at the Bone, several years ago)
• Yes, Chef by Marcus Samuelsson
• The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen by Jacques Pépin
• Climbing the Mango Trees by Madhur Jaffrey

I wrote this originally for my other blog where I'm making lists for my book club's annual selection.

Wordless Wednesday: Snow

Pieter Bruegel's Hunters in the Snow makes me glad we don't have to hunt for our dinner in all this snow and cold!

"Hungering for America"

The first paragraph of Hungering for America by Hasia Diner presents her basic premise and what she set out to do:

"People," novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote, "do not love alike." "Neither do they starve alike," he observed in his commentary on Hunger, ... by... Knut Hamsun. ... The comment suggests a relationship between food, scarcity, and the social history of immigration. How people experienced hunger in one place and then recalled its pangs in another had everything to do with who they were, where they came from, and where they went." (Hungering for America, p. 1)

Last night, my culinary book club, sponsored by Motte and Bailey Bookshop, had a far-ranging discussion of this book, which covers three immigrant groups who came to America in the 19th and early 20th centuries: Italians, Irish, and Jews. We were all interested in how the book showed that Italian immigrants created a cuisine by combining elements of regional cooking from Italy, and used this food to forge an identity; showed how Jews extended the food rituals and great importance of food in their lives when they came to America; but that the author strongly showed that the Irish came without any strong feelings about food and identity and did not create foods that gave them a sense of identity at all until they had been in the US for nearly100 years.

The chapters that describe each group's pre-immigration situation -- in each case a situation of great food insecurity -- were extremely interesting, we all found. The fact that the Irish starved due to potato blight while their colonial masters were growing and exporting many kinds of food is well known. In earlier days, the author shows, Irish lower classes had had access to at least some of these foods, but in the 18th century were reduced to a diet almost exclusively made up of potatoes. The hostility and almost total separation between the British upper classes, even those who seemed to have become "Irish," and the poor people meant that there was no transfer of  foodways or use of foodways to form an Irish identity; this carried over when the Irish fled the "Great Hunger."

As we discussed the book, we talked about a number of different experiences and observations we have made about immigrant foods in our experiences. We wondered about other ethnic groups, such as Germans, Lithuanians, Swedes, and others -- the very special characteristics of the three groups -- that all experienced. I was recalling my exposure, through Arny and Tracy's Irish sabbatical years, to Irish people now, even during a time of great (though temporary) prosperity. They continue to harbor deep hostility towards those who mistreated them, and remember how their forbears starved. We each remembered a variety of experiences in the places we came from: Southeastern Kansas, the Boston area, near Buffalo, New York, and St. Louis.

Previous posts I have written about Hasia Diner's book:

• Two Books: "Paradox of Plenty" and "Hungering for America" -- a much more thorough description of the contents of the book.
• The Food they Never Tasted
• Gefilte Fish
• More on "The Fortune Cookie Chronicles"

At one point we talked about the differences that the book noted between Irish saloons, where men went to drink together; German saloons where food was served and families gathered; and Italian restaurants where wine was part of the dining experience. Irish drinking was a recognized problem; Jewish drinking wasn't even mentioned. So I had the opportunity to tell the old joke:
     Q. Why don't Jews drink?
     A. Because it dulls the pain. 

Wordless Wednesday: Food for the Lorikeets

San Diego Zoo, Lorikeet House (unknown child)

Miriam

Alice and Miriam

Alice

Sunday Brunch

Sunday Brunch at Gabi's

Yesterday my book group met to have brunch and discuss the book Memoir of the Sunday Brunch by Julia Pandl.

 

The brunch was delicious and the discussion was lively; however, most of us had serious reservations about the book. In my opinion, shared by several others, the book was awkwardly written, repetitive, full of suggestions that didn't go anywhere, and inconsistent in style. There were passages that read like writing workshop exercises, just dropped in place without any explanation. One of my friends pointed out that the theme of brunch that predominated in the beginning chapters, then was forgotten for a while, and made a brief reappearance, contributing to a lack of coherence.

The emotions the author described were raw, clearly showing how she had been a child or young adolescent who didn't know a lot of what was happening to her, and later showing an adult floundering as she dealt with the sad deaths of her parents. Unfortunately, she did little or nothing to shape these emotional passages into a well-written narrative. Some of us felt that an editor would have helped; Gabi, our discussion leader and hostess, had researched the history of the book and thought that the editing gap was due to the original self-publication of the work. That is, Pandl published without editing herself or profiting from a professional editor. Several people in the group, nevertheless, felt that the authenticity of the emotional content made up for the lack of smooth writing. I think we all felt that the book simply failed to live up to expectations for a published memoir -- even one describing confusion and emotional issues.

"On Such a Full Sea"

The New York Times review on January 2 described Chang-Rae Lee's novel On Such a Full Sea as "a wonderful addition not only to Chang-rae Lee’s body of work but to the ranks of 'serious' writers venturing into the realm of dystopian fantasy." The reviewer compared it favorably to similar novels by Margaret Atwood, Doris Lessing, Cormac McCarthy, and Anthony Burgess. I decided to read it.

On Such a Full Sea was a terrible disappointment overall. The author's choice of showing a distopian future by describing a naive member of society making a road trip isn't very original as far as I'm concerned. The traveler's  discovery of a series of enclaves with varying types of people and levels of control by government is predictable. Her encounter with rapacious or pathological expressions of human nature didn't rise above the ordinary. Pointed parallels to the tendencies or dangers of our own society in fact become tedious and a bit hackneyed. I just don't agree with any of the favorable reviews I read.

The naive traveler, a very young woman named Fan, comes from B-Mor, once the city of Baltimore, and she travels west into "The Smokes." The one unusual feature of the novel is the narration by a collective voice representing the people of B-Mor: people who came from "New China" in the nearly-forgotten past and displaced the original inhabitants. The voice relates what "we," the people of B-Mor at some unspecified future time, know about Fan and her journey, and above all how "we" don't know what her motives were or why she made each decision to move on.

The people of B-Mor in this distopian era make a collective living by producing industrial and very hygienic food -- specifically fish raised in tanks and hydroponic, very uniform vegetables -- for more elite towns, where the people are very rich. In B-Mor people like Fan worked very hard and had little imagination or richness to their lives; they appreciated having a schedule: "it helps one to sleep more soundly, to work steadily through one's shift, maybe even to digest the hearty meals, and finally to enjoy all the free time." (p. 2; Kindle location 76)

In fact each part of the region that hasn't been totally ruined makes a living from some collective occupation serving the rich, while out in "The Smokes" poverty and living by hook or crook prevades. Ok, sounds like Hunger Games, but the NYT reviewer didn't stoop to that comparison.

Traveling in search of her disappeared boyfriend Reg, Fan discovers new sorts of people as she grows hungrier and hungrier -- she's pregnant and struggling to hide her condition from each group of people or family that take her in, mostly for terrible motives. The author does a good job using food to distinguish the old inhabitants from the "New China" interlopers, Fan's people. Food enables the author to let the reader know what he thinks of various people: vegetarians who are also murderers, poor people living on the edge, rich people obsessed with cuisine. But it's a bit predictable.

In B-Mor the "New China" people are fond of their native food; a funeral feast illustrates this. "Homemade delicacies" included "Shanxi-style smoked pork belly, stuff you hardly ever see these days. The fatty peppery scent of the dish was absolutely transporting ... but ... it was a cloud you kept wishing would blow away, so you could taste only woe." (p. 28; Kindle location 419)

As the collective "we" describes their view of Fan, sometimes the reader learns more about them; for example as they hear stories about old times "Auntie Virginia poured cups of iced tea to go with the boiled peanuts she'd bring out in a white plastic bowl." (p. 68; Kindle location 927)

During Fan's final adventure, in the poorer places people eat almost exclusively from canned goods and long-lasting food pouches, which are usable as barter as well as edible. Fan often observes them eating right out of the can or pouch. An evening meal in one household in the Smokes "meant sometimes frying up eggs, or game if someone shot or trapped any, but mostly it was heating stuff right in the cans... everyone would share what they had, a potluck of diced carrots and mackerel and kidney beans, and if someone was feeling extra-generous maybe a tin of beef chili or chicken stew." (p. 86; Kindle location 1151)

In contrast, in one of the elite compounds, she's taken to a kind of rogue fair where people dare to eat street food. It's daring to eat this rather than the very pure and artificially grown food like that raised in B-Mor: "you could get Belgian street frites, or a Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki, or a gravy-sopped plate of chicken and dumplings. They went to Vik's favorite, the Chinese-Korean tent, where he ordered them bowls of chive jajang noodles and a small platter of braised sea cucumber, which Fan could not stop eating." (p. 271; Kindle location 3517)

Fan's final stopping place, in the high-status compound, introduces her to one of the wealthiest families of the tale, where the head of the house believes that "Eating was obviously elementary, it was what people did most of their day, literally taking in the world." He was fascinated by food preparation, and tried to involve all his children in it "from the selection of the ingredients at the village market to the chopping and measuring and cooking (the babies given a strong whiff of everything from ginger slices to cinnamon sticks, after which they'd sometimes cry), the idea being a holistic appreciation through mindful exertions that would result in the best chance for well-being." (p. 343; Kindle location 4436)

Obviously, this noble view of food suggests that the character is out of touch with the lower classes. He too ends up not so nice, but I'll refrain from spoiling the ending. No one is nice in this distopia!

Food Security in 2014

Percent of population that is undernourished, 2012 data -- Wikipedia

Thinking of the grim topic of hunger throughout the world, I have been trying to read about food security and insecurity in the coming year -- a very broad topic. Discussions of inequality in our own society often touch on the consequence, for the poorest Americans, of having too little food and on the political motivation that causes much of the hunger in America. Throughout the world, both climate change and population growth are already affecting food supplies in many areas. Wars and conflicts also can drastically change the distribution of food, as when a dominant group oppresses its traditional or new opponents. Certain conflicts, like those in the horn of Africa and Syria, in fact, may themselves have origins in declining supplies of food and other resources.

Hunger will continue to be widespread in 2014, and growing: "the reality [is] that by 2050, the world will likely have another two billion mouths to feed and face an estimated 70 percent increase in global food demand." source  

First, what is food security? A useful and frequently cited definition from Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations:

"Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life." source source

Who are the insecure in the US, and why are they suffering in a country that seems so prosperous? Changes to government aid to the poor (such as reductions in SNAP benefits, formerly called food stamps) are a major reason why the poorest people in America are losing ground in the struggle for food security. Poor people of all ethnic and racial backgrounds are suffering; here is one example:

"Even though a large percentage of American Indians receive SNAP benefits, current data suggests that a large percentage of American Indians are food insecure. ... In total, roughly 22 percent of American Indians do not have sufficient food maintain healthy lives." source

Who are the insecure outside the US? Almost every Asian and African country suffers from the threat of food insecurity. Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, China, Nepal, the Phillipines, North African and sub-Saharan countries, and many others have been the subject of recent news articles about hunger.

"'We should expect much more political destabilisation of countries ...,' says Richard Choularton, a policy officer in the UN's World Food Programme climate change office. 'What is different now from 20 years ago is that far more people are living in places with a higher climatic risk; 650 million people now live in arid or semi-arid areas where floods and droughts and price shocks are expected to have the most impact.

''The recent crises in the Horn of Africa and Sahel may be becoming the new normal. Droughts are expected to become more frequent. Studies suggest anything up to 200 million more food-insecure people by 2050 or an additional 24 million malnourished children. In parts of Africa we already have a protracted and growing humanitarian disaster. Climate change is a creeping disaster.' he said." source

What are some of the consequences of this widespread disaster? In the underdeveloped world, the consequences are simple to grasp: many children and adults tragically starve to death; others experience terrible suffering.

In the US, things aren't quite as grim, but there are consequences. Two examples:

"In the US, chronic food insecurity has been documented to lead to, paradoxically, obesity, especially in women and girls. One theory as to why food insecurity leads to obesity is that episodic periods of food insecurity cause the sufferer to overeat in an attempt by the body to recoup missing calories. The type of food consumed in food insecure households may be another factor: high calorie food made from commodity crops (e.g., fast food and 'junk' food) is often cheaper and easier to access than healthful food with high nutritional value." source

"Poor people with diabetes [in the US] are significantly more likely to go to the hospital for dangerously low blood sugar at the end of the month when food budgets are tight than at the beginning of the month, a new study has found." source

 The subject of food security is broad and complex. I have excerpted just a few quotations to try to grasp the breadth of the problem.

Wordless Wednesday: How the Squirrel Defeats the Bird Feeder