Horsemeat and Loss of Cultural Knowledge

I was reading this article today about how British butchers have seen a spike in business since this whole horsemeat lasagna thing broke. The piece at the end is for some reason very depressing to me, even though I already know it to be true. I excerpt it here:

At a bustling London street market, butcher Raymond Roe said he had been in the trade for 37 years but at least eight of his local competitors had close their doors since 1976.

Even though shoppers are angry with supermarkets now, he was pessimistic about the future.

"They've lost their trust," he said. "I get a lot of people saying they're not going buy from them (supermarkets).

"But the thing is, supermarkets are convenient for everyone and most people haven't got much time. A lot of it is, people don't cook no more."

Pointing behind him on the wall to diagrams of animals with lines drawn to indicate cuts of meat, Roe described his role as butcher, teacher and chef for his customers.

"I show them the charts where the cuts come from to try and educate them because years ago, the older people - a lot of them are dead now - they knew the cuts but no one knows nothing now," he said sadly. "They don't even know how to cook."

And that last statement is really the crux of it for me. I'm not motivated to moralize about "kids these days", or get nostalgic and romantic about "simpler times" or other bland and obvious tacks. The post-WW2 industrialization and distribution of food at least in most of the global north has led to better nutrition for most people lucky enough to be born there, and as a future post will show, I'm not averse to eating processed foods. When I do get a frozen pizza, I don't expect it to be wholesome and wonderful (though I do have a favorite that seems less crappy than others), I expect it to be convenient and salty and so on. As a friend of mine said to me, it doesn't make sense that there are all these people feeling betrayed by the substitution of one kind of shit with another kind of shit. When I buy beef anus lasagna I expect 100% pure beef anuses, not 50% horse anuses and 50% beef anuses!

Anyway, the last part up there really hits me. People don't even know how to cook. A lot of the people that knew the cuts of meat are dead now. I already know this and yet it hits me in a surprising way. Well, it brings to mind a parallel process by which linguists used to describe the loss (i.e., the death) of languages under colonial domination. Maybe this model is out-moded (as an anthropologist I should be up to date on this, but I'm not) but the general sketch is that the first generation of the colonized is forbidden from speaking their mother tongue, and they gradually learn the dominant language. The next generation grows up speaking the native language mostly at home but is taught in the official language, and expects to conduct all public business in that language. The third generation rarely hears the native language spoken, except at home in the presence of extended family (grandparents generation), and they don't develop fluency and the whole range of the language's expressive capacity. After that, it doesn't survive much outside of purposeful efforts to preserve it (when that's done it's often in the context of a resistance identity movement like the Gaelic resurgence of the late 1800s in Ireland).

Same with cooking. If you rarely or never witness the act of cooking as a young person -- transforming produce into a meal -- then of course how are you going to learn how to cook? Or what about just learning how to identify good produce? Tomatoes are the perfect example. I once got in a long argument with an old boss of mine (Italian of Albanian extraction) about organic produce in Santa Cruz. He was convinced that it's all bullshit and they do use pesticides and they're just gouging everyone. I disagreed, mostly on moral grounds about chemicals, etc. We went back and forth and eventually we arrived at the real issue: supermarket tomatoes are fucking nasty; they are nothing like homegrown tomatoes. We agreed. They are symbols of a thing and people participate in maintaining the illusion that these are tomatoes by buying them and attempting to eat them. Purchasing these bland, mealy, pale, non-tomato-tasting things and performing "tomato" rituals such as adding them to a salad and then nodding along saying how good this dead matter is in your mouth is to affirm the farce of industrial tomatoes as real.

The damage is immediate in that you are eating shitty unripe food (they are bred to look ripe on the outside before they are truly ripe; they can not properly ripen anyway because not enough sugars have been produced). But there are deeper repercussions. People complain about kids these days not liking fruits and vegetables. Well, the supermarket tomato is foul. The kids are right to reject it from their somatic experience with the thing. How much other foul produce are kids given to eat, almost as punishment so they fulfill part of a food pyramid? Real, non-industrial tomatoes, apples, bread, yogurt, etc, carry the smell and look and feel of ripeness, abundance, goodness. It's empirically verifiable. Now, if children are not exposed to the process of judging and selecting the crispiest apple, the juiciest lime, the exactly ripe cantaloupe, then, like language, like cooking ability, like other fairly important aspects of cultural heritage, it can be lost within a couple generations. TASTE, is what I'm talking about, the gradual dying out of taste. Not classist taste, but literally the ability to use the senses of smell and taste to discern the quality of the food, and hence the quality of the environment around you.

As generations begin associating fruits and vegetables with bad somatic experiences, they gradually reject those foods, they eat them less, and then even if you want a revival, no one even knows that tomatoes CAN be good. And so good tomatoes -- the ones grown in your backyard in the summer that you eat off the vine with a little salt when you get home from work and the smell is in your nostrils and the tangy depths of the juices are on the back of your tongue, and you suck out the pulp and tear at the skin with your teeth, and for one instant you totally comprehend Pablo Neruda, and the taste of the fruit and your lover's nipple, slightly metallic and tangy, are the same -- those good tomatoes are no longer propagated, and they have been lost to our descendants.

And this is the real horror

Luke: I don't .. I don't belive it.

Yoda: That is why you fail.

Not a bad thing to take seriously when you're 8 years old. Or older.

Neither Hard- nor Soft-Boiled Egg

I found this picture from Fall 2011, where I guess I was trying to make a soft-boiled egg and ended up just barely over doing it. Apparently this warranted a photo. I suppose you don't hold such a specifically cooked egg in your hand everyday.

Leftover Vegetable Soup of Doom!

Just before I left for Fresno for the holidays (so called) I checked the fridge and saw that I had accumulated a variety of vegetables. I envisioned two alternate futures for them:

1) I could just leave it all and let it funk out while I was gone, and then throw it all away when I returned, or

2) I could chop it all up and cook it in a big pot and then have several quarts of soup in the freezer for the coming winter months.

What hung in the balance on the purely material level, you ask? Dear reader, you should know that I had carrots, celery, a parsnip, two crowns of broccoli, and three Russet potatoes. I also had a half head of garlic and an onion that probably would last another week without much harm (they weren't in the fridge though). Luckily, I was carried along by a slowly building agitation and excitement by the idea -- and the clear prospect of mass-production awesomeness -- and I went for option 2. In the alternate PKD universe there is a very depressed person blogging his regrets about leaving good food to rot over the holidays, and probably vowing to not waste food and to not be so lazy in the future, and writing a hollow but emphatic manifesto about improving his quality of life from a behavioral perspective. But none of you have to read that blog. You are in the beneficent parallel universe thanks to my bold actions, and you can leave praises to me in the comments as is your wont.

Leftover Vegetable Soup of DOOM!
I pureed this at the end, so broad strokes in prep and cooking are all that's required. Peel as necessary/desired and chop up into more or less medium/small pieces and throw into a big old pot, mine being a cheap-ass ersatz (cf. PKD) lobster pot:

4 carrots (organic, whoop-de-doo)
6 celery stalks
9 cloves of garlic
1 big old parsnip
2 broccoli crowns (stalks were roughly peeled and the cores were chopped into the soup)
1 big yellow onion
3 Russet potatoes
Not chopped:
2 bay leaves
12 whole black peppercorns
2 Tbsp canning salt (NB: This was slightly too much. I say 1-1.5 Tbsp or salt to taste only at the end.)

Add 4 qt of water and bring to a steady boil for about 30 min.

Add (all dry):

1 Tbsp basil
1 tsp tarragon
1/2 tsp thyme
1/2 tsp dill
1/4 tsp cumin

Stir in and turn down to a simmer/low boil for 30 min or so. Remove bay leaves and puree it all in a blender in batches and remix it. Salt, etc., to taste.

This made about 5qt, which mostly I froze in ~1 qt increments. As I note above, this was a bit too salty, but not to the point of being inedible, to my taste anyway.

Frozen quanta of soup, in situ, next to quanta of Amish chicken.

I'm pretty happy with the mix of herbs here, since I always have a hard time getting the distinctive dill, sweet tarragon/basil and earthy cumin flavors to have any balance. Probably the mix of sulfurous brassicas, sweet roots, and smooth alliums make a complementary set of contrasts to them. Anyway, Rock!   

A Reflection on Guinness

Yes, I've been away from the blog. The holidays took their toll.

But fresh on my mind since I was trying to drink it today is Guinness. I went to a local sports bar, The Westside Stadium, to watch the 49ers play the Falcons, of course hoping to see the reemergence of the good-old days of Montana or Young. It's pretty obvious the whole structure of the game has changed since the 80s and 90s, so I won't dwell on that. But I started with a pint of Guinness since it was the afternoon.

It sucked. Overcarbonated. It ended up tasting like Coke ... no, Pepsi.

The last couple of times I was around Dublin (Ireland) I drank some stout with a much older cousin of mine in his 70s. He told me both times that the pub we were in had good Guinness, and you'd never go wrong with it. Allegedly they sent their people out to clean the pipes and so no mold ever grew in the Guinness taps. Fair enough. But they also get their Guinness from the St. James's Gate Brewery itself, not from afar.

Since some time in the last decade or more, all the North American Guinness is brewed in Canada. It was first Labatt's in Montreal, I believe, and now since the whole thing was bought out by Diageo, it just says "Product of Canada" on the label. And of course it's okay, but not all that great. Very carbonated.

When I lived in Santa Cruz, CA, in the 90s, I often went to The Poet and Patriot pub. They were so Irish they had a separate tap of Room Temperature Guinness. All the people in the know drank that. It took longer to pour since the keg was kept at room temperature, whatever that happened to be, from January to August and back again. Wanting to be authentic I always asked for that, even in the summer.

I was in Dublin (Ireland) in the summer of '98 drinking away at my favorite bar there, The Quays -- which is now more cleaned up and corporate, like everything in Temple Bar and Grafton Street and the rest of the fucking town -- and asked the proprietor about this "Room Temperature" Guinness, does he serve it, did they used to in the rare auld times, etc.?

"Room temperature? No. It's undrinkable like that." And he went on dealing with other stupid foreigners. When he came back I explained the Poet and Patriot to him and he still just wrinkled his brow and shook his head. Then he said:

"Back in the days, there was no carbonation. Everything was pulled from the casks and they were down in the basement. So they stayed more or less cool year-round." Then he diverged into stories about when he was a teenager  he had to wrestle the casks off the wagon and down the stone steps and into the cellar in the rare auld times. The final analysis was that "Room Temperature" probably meant cellar temperature, not the heat in the room where you're drinking. And so room temperature Guinness in August in California is not only nasty, but inauthentic.

Which of the two crimes you consider to be the greater will tell you something about yourself, it seems.   

Pig! Delicious Insults

I met on short notice to share lunch with a friend of mine the other day, and since I already had a sandwich and an apple ready, she picked up Chinese take-out and we sat down to eat and converse. We ate and talked and she gradually started extracting from one corner of the styrofoam clamshell box (that central PA is enamored of) pieces of pork and laid them to the side.

"I don't like this, the halouf. But they gave it to me as an extra."

She's Algerian by birth and spent several years in Paris before coming stateside.

SoE: "That's good. They don't want to leave a corner empty in a take-out box. I like that."

Friend: "Yeah, but I don't like it. Yes, I like the charcuterie and les saucissons but not just the meat."

I didn't ask about bacon. After a moment she asked:

"What is your sandwich?"

SoE: "Halouf", waving it in front of her. A few days before I had baked a pork tenderloin covered in thyme, cumin, coriander, salt and pepper, and made the sandwich with (ostensibly) Vermont cheddar and baby something or other greens with mayo and Grey Poupon. My apple was an Empire from New York State, a variety advocated by my friend Carter up in Brockport. I was fairly delighted by my sandwich, and I shared my apple with my friend, despite her lack of enthusiasm for the halouf.

Pig (as opposed to pork as a material, as it were) carries a lot of negative connotations in many cultures. With my pal here it was not just about halal or other formal ideological prohibitions, though that plays a part.

The exchange we had reminds me of a time when I was on a dig in Spain and we sat down for our 3pm dinner after excavations. After the waiter rattled off the possible dishes in Spanish, all I knew after my on-the-fly translation of what he said was: I wanted the pork dish. So when he turned to me, I simply said, losing the subtler bits of my Spanish culinary vocab:

"Cerdo!"

Which got me a sneer from him and laughs from everybody else. Apparently I had just called our waiter a pig. As far as I can tell, no one spit or shit in my food, but if they did I don't want to know. Ignorance is bliss.

Poor pigs! Even I don't respect them as animals as well as I should, but they taste so good!

DIY and Fermentation

I'm not very inspired by doing Asian bean fermentations now, nor have I ever been. I'm not against them, it's just not what drives me. But this passage at the end of Sandor Ellix Katz's procedure for making tempeh encapsulates what I love about his book, Wild Fermentation (p. 66).

Maintaining a temperature around 85 to 90 degrees Fahrenheit (29 to 32 degrees Celsius) for twenty-four hours can be tricky. Making tempeh when the weather is hot is the easiest method. Other times, I generally use the oven of our propane stove with just the pilot light on, with a Mason jar ring propping the door open just enough so that it doesn't get too hot. I've also incubated larger quantities of tempeh in the greenhouse on a sunny day, then in a small room somewhat overheated by a wood stove at night. Be sure to maintain good air circulation around the incubating tempeh. Innovate, make it work.

The last bit has my added emphasis. Sandor's voice in this book is ... what? Encouraging, reassuring, redoubling? Yes. Compassionate? Yes. He's succinct and direct while acknowledging hundreds of angles of uncertainties faced by his (hers/its/whatever/not-whatever) readers. At the end Sandor is telling folks it's up to them to figure out the process that works for them, where they find themselves. But by telling folks to make it work, the message is that inevitably we can make it work. Not WE, really, each of us can make our efforts produce something that works for ourselves.

It shouldn't be such a revolutionary act to tell people that they have the capacity to consciously change and direct their lives, but in fact, here we are. And this is why I love this book, even if I'm not a fan (yet) of tempeh.