Beating a Dead ...

My glee for horsemeat-related news will eventually taper off, I assure you (or since we're talking about perissodactyls I should say tapir off -- rimshot), . Until that day...

In the process of researching an Italian tile with a saint on it that an uncle in Ireland owns, I came across a post about horsemeat in Iceland by Yrsa Sigurdardottir at Murder is Everywhere, a blog by 7 crime writers I've never heard of. She opens the post with this:

In 2007 Romania banned horse carriages on its roads. As a result there were lots of unemployed horses around. Fast forward to 2013 and the food scandal that has rocked Europe. Turns out that the Romanian horses are showing up in lasagna and other prepared foods supposed to contain ground beef.

In Iceland we do not shy away from eating horse meat. We do like to know when we are being served it and would not like to be sold beef and get horse. I do not know if it was because of this or because we did not want to be any less vigilant that other European countries but Iceland decided to do testing of its own market. The results were pretty darn good for most of our producers as the ingredients proved to be in check with the labeling. There was only one exception actually, a company that specialized in making meat pies – that were supposed to contain ground beef. I am going to keep you waiting a bit before telling you what the meat pies actually contained.

Building up the suspense, she then kills me with the fake or "troll" logos people had proposed for the shitty meat-pie company -- Strobe.is -- even before they were exposed as totally shitty. Even though feelings about eating horses vary among cultures, the reaction to straight-up corporate bullshit is universal. A taste:

Good old Icelanders. Have a look at the post for the denouement to the meat-pie mystery.

Horse Flesh vs Horse Urine: One is Disgusting, One is (or was) Awesome

Obviously I am fascinated by the European horsemeat McDealio. My interest seems slightly out of proportion, but whatever, I'll go with it.

Last night I was thinking about my mom, who had hip surgery last month and I began pondering her medical history, in the somewhat morbid way somebody approaching middle-age does. Looking for clues both about what lies ahead for me that I've inherited genetically, and how the next couple of decades will play out for her. I was thinking of the drug interactions she had to look out for before the surgery, and recalled that for a time in the late 90s, early 00s, she was taking Premarin for menopausal symptoms. She's not anymore; a lot of women aren't since it's been linked to cancer and other bad things.

Why do I mention this on my food blog? Well, some folks may not know that the trade-name "Premarin" is an acronym for PREgnant MARe urINe, which is the source of the estrogens in the pill. I gather that before it was shown to cause cancer, it had become the MOST PRESCRIBED drug in the US at a point in the 90s*. Tens of millions of women have ingested hormones derived -- literally -- from the excreta of pregnant horses. And nobody was screaming about that, i.e., ingesting horse chemicals per se, though there was plenty of real alarm when the link to cancer was proposed. Of course, Wyeth wasn't out there publicizing the urine part, so that helps explain the non-chalance about what on the face of it would be multiple layers of food taboo in the USA: ingesting horse and ingesting urine/urine by-products (and urine accessories, maybe).

It's an odd contrast to the current situation in Europe, where folks are repulsed by having consumed the flesh, but a decade ago women here were gladly devouring the urine by-products every day on a massive scale.

Humans are weird.

_________________________

*NB: This was before Viagra and Cialis were heavily marketed.

Horsemeat Scandal has IKEA by the Balls

I have no real reason to post about the news that IKEA has discovered horsemeat in its "iconic" swedish meatballs. I just wanted to write that title.

It is curious that IKEA, which ships these meatballs all over the world to their famous little restaurants inside the stores, somehow knows that the horsemeat is only in the European meatballs, and not in the US or other meatballs. If they just figured out there was horse in the European balls, how can they know anything about the general supply chain at this point?

Knowing how some people really love shopping at IKEA, and the sense of well-being it brings to them, I send my condolences out to those whose illusions have been shattered by this event.

Canned Meat Taste Test in Belize

I did my dissertation fieldwork in southern Belize and had some very good food, some not good food, and also was influenced by some food prejudices (of specific gringos) that I worked to overcome. In the Fall of 2010 I made it a point to survey the various Spam-oid canned meats available done there, after I realized I'd been eating American cheese/tortilla sandwiches for months at a time (and therefore being starved) largely because a certain dipshit buying food thought Spam et al. was just too low class to eat. Oh, and any meat sandwich would rot by noon in the tropics. Bullshit. I decided to just say no to starvation, and for my short trip started to make sandwiches with canned meat and make a critical evaluation of their merits.

Three of the four are pictured above (the fourth was Hormel "Black Label"). I cut the loaf/block vertically into ~1/4" slabs and made two sandwiches from each can. I think I used mayonnaise and slabs of Western Dairy "cheddar" "cheese" on all of them. So I had each two days running while out hiking around in corn fields and hauling corn around and doing lightly strenuous work.

Overview:
I was glad to have protein, fat, salt and flavor for lunch in every case. There's a reason these things exist in the tropics, and only dicks scoff at canned meat. Meat is good. My Maya co-workers have meat for lunch when it's available. The main axes of difference were texture, flavor(ing), and clarity of palate. Seriously, clarity of palate. Don't fuck with me in a taste test, Belize or Normandy or anywhere.

The Rankings:

4th: Hormel Black Label. Of the four this was clearly the most processed of them all, and the slippery (silky would be giving it too much credit) texture signals that you're probably dealing with the slimmest leavings of the butchering process. Taste was salty, but otherwise bland; like super cheap bologna. No real sense of a unique, distinct flavor. It's like they aren't even competing for a greater share of the market that Spam, Dak, etc., comprise. Hmm. I sense a horrible insight to be revealed pending further reflection. 

3rd: Tulip "Pork Luncheon Meat". In fact it's an even split between Tulip and (#2) classic SPAM overall, but Spam wins on texture. Tulip, being the second Danish entry into this melee, manages to carry the ground-up bologna texture and flavor of Hormel Black Label up as step, mostly by being cleaner and less-preservative tasting. But they're obviously not gunning for Dak in terms of respectability. If you close your eyes you have the sense that you are eating a hot dog near the mermaid statue in Copenhagen, and therefore you make allowances for the slightly odd taste of the hot dog. If you like hotdogs, this is #2.
  
2nd: Spam. Fighting (as ever) for primacy in the canned meat dept. is Msr. Spam. As noted, if you don't like the Spam taste, and prefer North American hotdog-ish stuff, Tulip is #2 and this is #3. Spam in North America amounts to a bad word for most people, but when you've had cheaper canned meats you realize how much worse this stuff can get. The texture is more firm than the "mousse" style (if you can call it that) of Tulip and Hormel, and overall the flavor is fairly light and not especially chemically. For those who have been estranged from Spam, the gelatinous goo that used to encase the loaf appears to be a thing of the past. I have an image of my dad spooning that stuff up and slurping away at it when I was a kid that still repulses me. Clearly Spam saw there was room for improvement and they took the horse (hah. European food supply.) by the reins.

1st: Dak. When most readers of this blog (or both readers, I should say) hear "Dak" they probably think of Luke Skywalker's doomed co-pilot on Hoth who gets stomped on by an AT-AT. His pointless and melodramatic death was echoed by that of Goose in Top Gun a decade later (seriously, he was killed because he hit the ejected canopy? gimme a break. (Cue Nell Carter: My game is The Bible!)). But the rest of the world knows Dak as a fine canned Chopped Ham. It is actually finer in taste than Spam, and I believe it has more variation in the texture, so there's some depth that develops as you chew. And it has a Viking of the front and the can itself is a delightful Rosetta Stone of European languages. I was going to bring one back to use as a teaching aid in archaeology classes, but I ate what I had and got too loaded the night before I left to stop at the store.

So Dak is where it's at for me. If I end up being starved by idiots down there again, I will pony up (hah! again with the horse jokes! how do I do it?) the 5 Belize dollars (2.50 USD) to get my supply of this stuff. It goes to show that it pays to be open to new foods, and that even when the choices are limited you can still try to get the best quality food available.

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.