Make vegetables great again!

Sure, there are 70 million fellow citizens who are in mourning.  I don't care.  

We have taken our country back from the sociopath and his followers.  I am ready to move on to pontificating about stuff like I usually do, even when I have no idea what I am talking about.

When I was a kid, cauliflower was rare.  I hadn't even heard of something called broccoli.  Chances are that if I had been asked what broccoli is, even into my teens I would have said it was perhaps a type of bacterium--like E. Coli.

After coming to America, it has been an introduction to a world of vegetables and fruits that I didn't know even existed.  Patty pan squash?  Come on!

Or strawberries and raspberries.  I had read about them, but didn't taste one until I came to California.  The first blackberries that I had were after I moved to Oregon.

Years ago, a neighbor gave me a small packet of quinoa and said that I might like to cook and eat it.  I had never heard of quinoa until then, and I certainly didn't know how to pronounce it either.

My point here is this: In five decades, the varieties of fruits and vegetables that I consume has increased phenomenally.  There is more that I don't know about. 

Extrapolate from all these, and I could hypothesize that there are way more known-unknowns that we need to make a lot more people aware of.  Especially because of climate change:

The old strategies of improving size and yield are no longer enough. A couple centuries of human greenhouse emissions have caught up with us. With the world likely to get at least 2 degrees Celsius warmer, on average, by the middle of the century, and with extreme storms, rains, and drought already happening more frequently, growing conditions are changing faster than farmers and their crops can adapt.

Diversity is the key to our healthy future:

Solving the food-and-climate crisis will require going back to basics, finding ways to make our mix of crops broader rather than even narrower. ... We can do that again, adding overlooked crops to the mainstream food supply and working to broaden the agricultural gene pool after centuries of going the other way. That adjustment will help ensure that farmers will have crops suitable for the extreme growing conditions they are likely to encounter in the coming decades.

“We haven’t done a very good job of maximizing diversity,” Lippman says. “And diversity is what you need to win the battle of climate change.”

Like with orphan crops:

ones that are cultivated on a small scale in some parts of the world, but that have not benefited from breeding and research to the same extent that major crops have. Some of them are already suited to relatively hot or dry conditions. Because they have not gone through the same extensive breeding as corn, soy, and wheat, the orphans have more untapped potential.

Quinoa is an example of an orphan crop.  Though it was consumed for centuries in the Andes, the rest of us had no idea about it.  I knew about it barely a decade ago.  Once when visiting with a way-out-there in the extended family cousin, I was pleasantly surprised that the cousin's mother was making a quinoa uppuma.  Adapting a new grain or vegetable is not a big deal--coming to know about is the hurdle. 

Lippman’s research group at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory has been investigating orphans in the Solanaceae family, a diverse group that includes tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants, and peppers. At least 25 orphan crops exist in this family, and there are many other uncultivated wild relatives that have crop potential. Lippman is particularly interested in the domesticated African eggplant, grown for its fruit, and a wild relative, Solanum anguivi, whose leaves are eaten. Only local communities eat these species, because there hasn’t been much interest in developing them into mainstream food crops. “There are dozens of Solanaceae plants that have more widespread agricultural potential than we currently realize,” Lippman says.

The next time somebody tells you that we cannot feed more humans, ask them to explain their logic.  And then talk to them about the orphan plants.  Help them understand that not everybody on this planet eats the same stuff, and that all of us could benefit from a lot more diversified portfolio.  "We missed the chance to stop climate change, but Lippman believes we can still win the race to remake agriculture and safeguard the food supply for humankind."

The food of the gods

When we were kids, once in a while, usually on a Sunday, amma made vengaaya sambar (onion sambar) and a potato-curry.  Would I love to have that combo for dinner tonight!

I didn't know then that potatoes, red chilies, and coriander (cilantro) were not really Indian. There was no reason to suspect they were not.

How wonderful to later find out that none of those is native to the old country.  Two came from the world of the Aztecs and the Incas--from the other side of the planet!  I was more shocked to learn that the coriander plant is native to the eastern Mediterranean.

The Subcontinent made them all its own.

But, there is one kitchen ingredient that I would never have imagined not being Indian.  Never would I have even remotely wondered if it was really Indian.

Asafoetida.

Who would have thunk that!  No sambar can ever taste great without a pinch of asafoetida, but this ingredient is not Indian!

It was only late in life did I figure that out.

The BBC adds more to my understanding.

Asafoetida, or hing as it's commonly known in India, is a perennial, flowering plant that largely grows in the wild. It thrives in dry soil in temperatures under 35C. So India's tropical plateaus and plains, humid coast and heavy monsoons rule out much of the country for hing farming.

So, where does India get its fix?

Instead, Indians rely on imports mostly from Afghanistan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan - worth more than $100m in 2019 - to get their fix.

They should rename that region as Asafoetidastan ;)

asafoetida in Latin means "fetid gum". The smell is so strong that raw hing, a greyish-white sticky resin collected from the roots, is dried and mixed with flour - wheat in India's north, rice in the south - to turn it into an edible spice. ... Although the Persians once called it "the food of the gods", hing is now barely found in cuisines outside of India. In other parts of the world it's either used for medicinal reasons or as an insecticide!

However, unlike the potato or the red chili, which came to India after the "Columbian exchange," asafoetida has a long history: "It also makes an appearance in the grand Hindu epic, Mahabharata, whose composition historians believe began around 300 BC."

Now, Indian scientists have "planted about 800 saplings of the plant in Lahaul and Spiti, a cold desert nestled in the Himalayan mountains."  If those plants survive, and the resin is collected, then asafoetida will be made for the first time ever in the old country.

Step back and survey this landscape of food.  Global is a simple and routine combination of vengaaya sambar and potato-curry.  There is so much good that comes from being open to the world.

If only we would think globally!

Until you taste their bread, you don’t really know them

"I trust everything is good in your part of the world."

The recipient of the email in which wrote that sentence lives far away, diagonally across the country from me.  Jim moved there a few years ago.  Every once in a while, we trade emails in which we share awful groaners.  Like this one that he had sent me a while ago:

Jim is much older than I am.  So, naturally, I was/am concerned about him in the time of the coronavirus.

In his reply, Jim writes that he is healthy, and adds, "I haven’t had much in the way of puns for awhile so have not sent you any."

There are a couple of posts in which I have referred to this old friend, who was a good neighbor for a few years.

The following is an edited version of a post from August 2012.
***************************************************

It seems like during crises in the recent past, the younger generations texted, or posted on Facebook, or emailed sympathetic messages, whereas the older generations who lived close by went beyond that and asked if they could help out by bring over food.  The younger generations who lived close by didn't think about the food aspect.

Of course, with the coronavirus, it is a whole new paradigm of the young and the old keeping to ourselves and engaging in virtual interactions.  Damn COVID-19!

My best memory of a neighbor sharing food left me with a deep appreciation of the neighbor and the idea of sharing food.  I was in high school when my grandmother died.  In the traditional brahminical context in which I grew up, no celebrations for a year, which meant that we kids wouldn't get to eat all those wonderful goodies that mother would have otherwise made.

Well, fully aware of this, our neighbor then sent across home-made sweets for every major religious event that entire year.  Not just a couple of pieces, but a tray full of tasty eats every single time.

The neighbor's actions were immensely louder than powerful than the most commonly expressed phrase of "I am sorry to hear about your loss."

Of course, the situation doesn't have to be mournful in order to share food.  We can do it on good days too.

One of my best experiences when I reconnected with old school mates was when they invited me over to have food at their homes.  Equally wonderful was when I got some of them to come over to my parents' home to spend some time together and break that proverbial bread.

These experiences of interacting with, and understanding, friends is not the same as interactions with friends on Facebook.  There is simply no comparison at all, which is what the NY Times' David Carr found out a few months ago when he was invited to a dinner with a bunch of people with whom he had had extensive online interactions.  The host had baked the bread that Carr found to be very tasty, and he writes that the"connection in an online conversation may seem real and intimate, but you never get to taste the bread."

As I have often blogged (like here,) interactions on Facebook seem far from the real and substantive friendships that most of us prefer.

Carr notes:

you can follow someone on Twitter, friend them on Facebook, quote or be quoted by them in a newspaper article, but until you taste their bread, you don’t really know them.

When my neighbor Carol was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, I took food over a couple of times.  Before a road trip, I took Jim and their son a salad that I had made.  Jim asked me whether I wanted to visit with Carol.  I followed him to the bedroom, but she was asleep.

That was my final visit with her. Soon after that, Jim sold the house and moved. 

You cannot virtualize all these from the real world.

Empathy Through Enchiladas

The NY Times had an interesting report on the predictive power of food:

Voters who had been to Europe, Australia, Canada or Mexico or had eaten at an Indian restaurant were less likely to choose Mr. Trump by 10 to 12 percentage points beyond the differences explained by other factors like the ones mentioned above.
...
Of course, it’s not that eating Indian food leads a person to support one Democratic candidate over another — that’s silly. (And there are voters for whom Indian food is the taste of home.) But a voter’s orientation toward the world is related to candidate choice, and it turns out that eating in restaurants that celebrate less familiar cultures is one way to measure where people think they are more connected: to those around them locally or to people farther afield.

Indeed.  Food is a portal to understanding the world around us.

There's something remarkable about breaking bread together--even if that breaking bread happens at an "alien" restaurant.  That magic is powerful when we share food at home, as I quickly realized when I came to the US.

Siddiqqi, who was from Pakistan, or the Taiwanese girl whose name I have long forgotten, came over to my apartment to eat with me.  And then there were more. Greeks. Nigerians. Or my meals with Palestinians. A Guyanese-American with roots in India.  And, of course, white Americans too.

It was never really about the food.  What is it about then?

According to anthropologists and psychologists who have studied food in recent years, cuisines from international cultures can take us out of ourselves and help us better understand distinct people and cultures. The secret ingredient is empathy. And the process begins with stirring our emotions.

Food and emotions, and that wonderfully important ingredient to being human--empathy.

Empathy, about which I have blogged a lot because of the importance that I attach to it, means that we are placing ourselves in somebody else's shoes and understand their feelings.  When the others are from cultures that are alien to us, food is a phenomenal portal through which that "other" slowly becomes "us."

A culture may seem unfamiliar to a person, but after that person discovers the way people from an unfamiliar culture “prepare their food, the way they eat, somehow they understand it. There’s link between you and them, and that gives you insight.”

But, we need to keep in mind that it is not merely about food.  I have always stayed away from the international food fairs at college campuses because it seems to perpetuate the mistaken notion that it is all about food.  I want people to begin to understand the "other" through food.

Food alone, though, is often not enough to complete the trip to another culture. The journey needs other people.

Which is why white Americans eating Mexican and Indian foods can also be racists and xenophobes!  The "others" serving food is what the supremacists think is the norm--the equivalent of "shut up and dribble."  As if we are here only to keep the masters happy!

"Without the ingredient of human empathy, food from another land can only have a bland effect."  As I noted in this post a few months ago, I wish people would think about this:

“Have you or your family ever invited a person or a family of another race to your home for dinner?” ... When is the last time you or your family had dinner in your home with a person or family of another race?

Breaking bread at my home is about empathy and understanding. I have no place in my life for people who lack empathy.

How my DAILY 10-hour fasting works

It is true. I fast every day.  Ten, maybe even eleven, long hours every single day.

Which is why I am always surprised when people make a big deal out of their fasting rituals.  Bah humbug!

My daily fasting is a part of my regimented life.  Dinner and dessert/snacking is done usually by 8 in the night.  And the eating/drinking starts again the following morning at about 6.  Ten long hours of fasting, you see?

This is how our biology is supposed to work.  We animals lived in the tropics close to the equator, and our lives were determined by sunrise and sunset.  There were no Cheetos to nosh on while watching TV.

The access to processed and packaged food has apparently messed things up for most people that some now compel themselves to a 24-hour fasting.

Which reminds me of the 24-hour fasting the the true believers in my extended family in the old country used to observe.  They did that for religious reasons--a sacrifice in order to remember and praise their favorite god, and to also be thankful for the foods that they were able to have.

The modern fasting, in contrast, is secular and supposedly for health reasons alone.  But, ahem, eating irresponsibly and then fasting for one day is not going to do any damn good, other than provoke a craving ;)  “There’s nothing magical here. We’re tricking people into eating less food, in different ways” ... exactly!

Basically, because our metabolism has evolved to digest food during the day and rest at night, changing the timing of meals to earlier in the day may be beneficial.

And you made fun of my regimented life?

Time-restricted feeding — fasting overnight and into the next morning — is likely the easiest form of fasting to comply with. A longer than normal fasting period each night allows you to burn through some of your sugar stores, called glycogen. That does a couple things. It gives your body a little bit more time to burn fat. It also may help your body get rid of any extra salt in your diet, which would lower your blood pressure, Dr. Peterson said.

Seriously, why isn't this immediately and instinctively obvious to most people?

Lunch time approaches and I need to break my 2-hour fast since I last had a banana.  You know what I am going to eat, don't you? ;)

Teach Your Children "Palate Training"

In yesterday's post on childhood obesity, my formula for addressing that began with "It is about the overall health.  Eat your veggies. ..."

But, what if kids don't want to eat the veggies?

To me, this is impossible to imagine.  As a kid, I ate every vegetable that my mother and all the women in the extended family cooked. There wasn't a vegetable and its prep that I did not like.

I tell ya, if all kids are like how I was as a child, then the mothers of this world won't have a single problem ever ;)

The New Yorker--the magazine that published my short letter, yay!!!--has an informative and thoughtful essay on baby food and kids not taking to veggies.  It is a must-read (though it might be behind a paywall.)

I loved this there:

[Saskia] Sorrosa has a simpler goal. She wants her children to eat the way she ate as a child. “In Ecuador, we had whatever the adults were having—it was just puréed and given to babies,” she said. “I learned to eat spicy young.” On weekends, friends and neighbors would descend on her parents’ farm for buffets of ceviche and sancocho soup (a beef broth with mashed plantains and lime juice), braised goat stew and shrimp in peanut sauce. All of which found its way into Sorrosa’s mouth as she hung from her mother’s hip.

That's how I remember life in India.  Adults would offer just a tad of whatever they were eating.  And, of course, they would also praise the kid for eating it--reinforcing the good behavior.  There was no concept of making something different for children because they didn't like something.  According to grandmothers, our job was to eat what was in our plates and clean it up.  My life in India was no different from Sorrosa's childhood in Ecuador--without the ceviche and sancocho and ... ;)

“Self-weaned” infants, who dispense with purées and just gnaw on their parents’ food, tend to be slimmer and healthier than those raised on baby food. But only if their parents eat healthy meals themselves.

There is your important link to the discussions on childhood obesity too.

The author wraps up the essay by contrasting the American finickiness with how a Congolese immigrant mother in Portland (Maine) was preparing food for her baby.

Rachel’s lenga-lenga was like no baby food I’d ever seen. It was full of onions and garlic and bitter green pepper. It had mashed eggplant and leeks that could give a baby gas. It was salty from the bouillon—the rest of the family would be eating it, too—and far from sweet. By the time it was done cooking, it was a thick green porridge, pungent with smoked fish and sulfurous plants. It made kale look like Christmas candy. And yet, when Rachel brought a bowl of it over to Soraya on the couch, she bounced up and down and clapped her hands.

Moringa: From India to The Philippines

I had no idea that there exists a huge grocery store that caters to Filipino tastes.  The smell and sight of fish made me a tad uneasy though.  While intellectually it is easy to understand and appreciate the vast diversity of human eating habits, well, the real world experience is not always easy.

The vegetables, however, looked familiar.  I was pleasantly surprised to see a few. Like moringa leaves.  Moringa? Here in the US?  Not in any frozen food section, but as fresh food?  (Here's a post on moringa from 3 years ago.)

A big bunch of those leaves we picked up.  I made my own version of a favorite moringa leaf dsih from the old country.  While my mother might have laughed at my creation, it was awesomely tasty.

As kids, my brother and I ate everything that mother made.  My sister was the picky one who stayed away from quite a few.  We didn't need any grandmother to tell us that we had to eat them in order to be healthy.  We loved the taste of them all.

The moringa leaf dish was one of those.  Moringa is one of those that can easily quality as a superfood. (Read this essay in The New Yorker on why it is an under-appreciated superfood.)  Or like the neem tree that I was talking about a few nights ago with a visitor from West Africa.  "Veppampoo rasam" (a soup made from neem blossoms) was possible only because there was a neem tree in our yard.  The world continues to find out more and more about the awesomeness of neem--maybe soon I will also find neem blossoms in a store here!

I don't ever understand why people have a difficult time embracing a diet that has a wide variety before they are highly processed.  Instead, they rush from store to store buying the latest health fad at prices that shock me.  Like kombucha--I have never ever tasted one--that is not cheap, especially as a regular habit.

The moringa and the neem are examples of foods that do wonders to the awesome bacteria in our gastro-intestinal ecosystems.

One way to foster healthy intestinal bacteria is to eat more of the foods these bugs like to eat—namely, fiber.  Increasing your intake of plant fibers from vegetables, fruits, legumes, whole grains, nuts, and seeds is like filling a bird-feeder with the kind of seeds that the beautiful songbirds you want attract like best. If you feed them, they will come!  
And if we want to attract a lot of different types of songbirds—er, bacteria—then we want to put out a variety of foods. That means you don’t just want to get all your fiber from a single source, such as a fiber supplement. You want to get it fiber from lots of different kinds of vegetables, fruits, legumes, grains, nuts and seeds. 

Like I often mention here, sanitas per escam! 

You are what you eat?

Last night's dinner was a big salad.  Nope, there was no argument or disagreement on who gets credit for it ;)

It is a healthy meal even though it had cheese and oil and carbs!  Damn healthy while being damn tasty.  Unlike the ultra processed foods that are the curse.

Don't worry--this is not a post about the virtues of being vegan or vegetarian or about eating salads.  Nor am I going to argue that that the old days before processed foods were better. Nope. In fact, even students in my classes know how much I critique the "bad old days."  I have also blogged often quoting people like Rachel Laudan that we are much better off thanks to not having to grow our own greens, raise our own cows, make our own breads, ...

If we romanticize the past, we may miss the fact that it is the modern, global, industrial economy (not the local resources of the wintry country around New York, Boston, or Chicago) that allows us to savor traditional, fresh, and natural foods. Fresh and natural loom so large because we can take for granted the processed staples—salt, flour, sugar, chocolate, oils, coffee, tea—produced by food corporations.

Eating, in these modern times requires some kind of a ethos. A culture.  We need to think long and hard about it.  "Never has food been delivered in such abundance, so far, or so safely."  And this requires a new ethos, writes Rachel Laudan.

I agree with Laudan.  Even the big salad that we had is case in point.  We didn't grow the greens that went into the salad.  We didn't make the olive oil or the vinegar. We didn't make the paneer that we fried and added to the mix.  Yes, you read that correctly--fried paneer.  Nor did we bake the baguette.  "Never has food been delivered in such abundance, so far, or so safely."

And I agree that in developing a new ethos, we first ought to acknowledge this:

I find the complexity thrilling; the human ingenuity that has so improved our food, impressive. Yes, the systems are flawed, but they always have been. There never was a golden age when everyone in a given society was fed without environmental problems, social and economic inequalities, or nutritional inadequacies. Modern food systems have reduced the proportion of the globe’s population that goes hungry even as that population has soared. They have made safe, fresh food available in cities of a size not even imagined a century ago. They have expanded culinary options so that much of the world can enjoy dishes invented half the globe away. And they have unlocked the secrets of taste that chefs rely on.

From that point of departure, how do we develop a culinary ethos that will be about our health, about the environment, about justice, about ...?

Abandoning the slogan “Our food system is broken. We must fix it” would be a good start to this ethos. It is at best unhelpful, at worst misleading. “Our food system” suggests a monolith, perhaps even a conspiracy, with problems that no one except a chosen “us” has noticed or is trying to improve. “Broken” suggests that in the past this imagined food system was whole when it never was. Instead of such sloganeering, I urge continuing the steady, ongoing work of identifying and solving the multiple problems of our multiple food systems so that, without exploiting workers or endangering the earth, the riches so many have come to enjoy can be spread yet further.

Yes.

The way to a foreigner's heart is through their stomach?

"There are Thai restaurants all over," said M as we passed a window that announced the opening of a restaurant at what was previously one of those Mongolian grills.

"All because of the Thai government that saw the benefit in this," I said, as a smug know-it-all.  Sometimes, the know-it-all stumbles.  But, is mostly on the correct path, mostly thanks to reading across a wide range.  And, thankfully, not forgetting them.  Of course I forget the particulars, but I do remember the big-picture.  Thanks to Google, I can always hunt down the details.  Did I say I am a know-it-all? ;)

Which is what I did even about this Thai restaurant diffusion, so that I can blog about it ;)

Way back in 2002, The Economist, which used to be a regular source for me until they went all out with the paywall, reported about the Thai government's ambitious plan:

The Thai government has discovered that foreigners quite like Thai food. There are about 5,500 Thai restaurants around the world. In a plan ambitiously called Global Thai, the government aims to boost the number to 8,000 by 2003. This, it is argued, will not only introduce deliciously spicy Thai food to thousands of new tummies and persuade more people to visit Thailand, but it could subtly help to deepen relations with other countries.

The government aimed "to make it easier for foreign restaurants to import Thai foods, to help them to hire Thai cooks and sometimes to benefit from soft loans."

It is amazing that there are so many Thai restaurants now!

[According] to a representative from the Royal Thai Embassy in DC, there are just 300,000 Thai-Americans—less than 1 percent the size of the the Mexican-American population. Yet there are an estimated 5,342 Thai restaurants in the United States, compared to around 54,000 Mexican restaurants; that’s ten times the population-to-restaurant ratio.

That's impressive!

Using a tactic now known as gastrodiplomacy or culinary diplomacy, the government of Thailand has intentionally bolstered the presence of Thai cuisine outside of Thailand to increase its export and tourism revenues, as well as its prominence on the cultural and diplomatic stages.

Has worked out well, don't you think?

The Ministry of Commerce’s Department of Export Promotion, most likely run by bureaucrats rather than restaurateurs, drew up prototypes for three different “master restaurants,” which investors could choose as a sort of prefabricated restaurant plan, from aesthetic to menu offerings. Elephant Jump would be the fast casual option, at $5 to $15 per person; Cool Basil would be the mid-priced option at $15 to $25 a head; and the Golden Leaf prototype would cost diners $25 to $30, with décor featuring “authentic Thai fabrics and objets d’art.”

Systematically creating the "authentic" ;)

Success spawns imitation.

Though Thailand’s efforts may have been the most extensive and successful, this initiative to gain soft power through food has been utilized by other governments as well. Inspired by Thailand’s success, South Korea, for example, has earmarked tens of millions of dollars beginning in 2009 for its Korean Cuisine to the World campaign. Taiwan has followed suit, as has Peru with its Cocina Peruana Para el Mundo (“Peruvian Cuisine for the World;” quite creative) initiative, as well as Malaysia (“Malaysia Kitchen for the World 2010”—clearly there’s a pattern here).

I am ok with this kind of a foreign influence in America, unlike the tRump supporters who prefer the illegal and immoral kinds!

Of course, as with most foreign foods, the foods at the Thai restaurants here are not what most Thai folks eat in Thailand.  It is like with the Indian restaurants here.  But, does "authentic" matter more than how the food tastes?

From breakfast to dinner ...

You have heard a gazillion times that breakfast is the most important meal of the day.  Yes?

That is bullshit.

I would argue, based on what I practice, that every meal that we eat is absolutely important.  What we eat, when we eat, and even with whom we eat, together makes sanitas per escam.

First, let's handle the breakfast aspect. You have seen all those images of kids emptying cereals from cartons into bowls, and add milk, right?  Have you ever wondered about the sugar content in those cereals?  Or, people having doughnuts, with all that sugar?  Starting the day with sugar is a very, very, very recent thing in human history:

“The idea that children should have bland, sweet food is a very industrial presumption,” says Krishnendu Ray, a professor of food studies at New York University who grew up in India. “In many parts of the world, breakfast is tepid, sour, fermented and savory.”

Tepid, sour, fermented, and savory.  I think that is how I was described in my last evaluation at work ;)

Back to sugary breakfasts:

Getting children to eat sugar is easy. Teaching them to eat slimy fermented soybeans, by contrast, requires a more robust and conservative culinary culture, one that resists the candy-coated breakfast buffet.

Dinners around the world are varied too.  Even the time that people have dinners.  I am always shocked at how late in the evening that most people in India eat--in this collection, note that the family in India sits down at nine in the night.  Nine, on a weeknight!  And it is not any light meal either:

The family eats around 9 p.m., and on this night, the meal consisted of palak paneer (spinach with cheese), raita, kadai aloo (potatoes with onions and spices), cucumber salad and roasted chapatis.

A carb-heavy dinner that close to bedtime, which is a contrast to my sanitas per escam schedule in which I want to make sure that my stomach is light after all the digestion by the time I head to bed.

After reading what the Nigerian family in that collection had for dinner, I am ready to fly to Nigeria:

Wednesday nights are for wraps at the Sokoh home in Lagos. Ozoz Sokoh, right, a food writer, with her daughter Riobo, flipped freshly made plantain flatbreads, which were served with chicken suya, lime-pickled onions and a tomato and eggplant salsa thawed from the freezer. Dinner included condiments galore, including peanut butter sauce, papaya chutney, hibiscus green chile sauce, mint and spring onion oil, tamarind ginger sauce, and beet and carrot sauerkraut.

The plantain flatbreads are done in the old country too, especially in the cultures along the Malabar Coast.

I loved the Turkish dinner too:

homemade kofte (meatballs), lentil soup and bulgur pilaf with grated tomatoes and bell peppers, along with dolmas (stuffed grape leaves) and red beans in olive oil. They ended the meal with a rice pudding called sutlac and pumpkin with tahini and walnuts.

Sutlac?

Google answers with this image that makes me drool all over:

Source

What do you have cooking for dinner?

Would you rather have imperfect ways to grow more food, or let people starve?

I read this BBC report on "the man who helped feed the world."  And, yet again, I was blown away by the man's contributions to making the world a far more peaceful world by making sure that the people are fed.

The man is Norman Borlaug, whose work I have often noted in this blog and have also talked about with students.

As I have often remarked in this blog and elsewhere, a primary trigger for me to get to doing what I do now was the context in which I grew up--born into relative privilege with a great deal of material deprivation all around me.  I did not know how I could ever contribute to help in reducing that deprivation; but, I wanted to at least understand it.

Thus, even in the early semesters in grad school, I was impressed with how much people had invested their time and energy into not only understanding many of those issues but even doing something about them. 

One of those was Norman Borlaug.

In 2019, especially in the obese and overweight US of A where we routinely waste food without giving it a second thought, it might be difficult to imagine that not too long ago there was a real threat of food shortages. And famines.  While there were political reasons, such as Mao's crazy policies, the threat of undernourishment was real.  Which is where Borlaug's contributions in developing better varieties of staples take on remarkable weight.

In graduate school, it was a shock when I also read works that were intensely critical of Borlaug's work.  The volume and magnitude of his criticism seemed to increase with every passing day, especially over genetically modified (GMO) crops.

Borlaug was well aware of his critics even when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.  In his acceptance lecture, Borlaug said:

Some critics have said that the green revolution has created more problems than it has solved. This I cannot accept, for I believe it is far better for mankind to be struggling with new problems caused by abundance rather than with the old problem of famine.

He didn't stop there; he added:

One must ask: Is it just to criticize the green revolution, with its recognized accomplishments, for failure to correct all the social-economic ills of the world that have accumulated from the days of Adam and Eve up to the present?

India's farmers, for instance, continue to face immense problems not because of the Green Revolution but because of atrocious politics, which was demonstrated yet again in the latest round of elections.  If the socio-economic structure were different and better, then the rewards of the Green Revolution would have been distributed a lot more equitably than is currently the case.

Above and beyond the Green Revolution, thinking about Norman Borlaug makes me wonder if the bright minds of today are dedicating themselves to the urgent human problems all around, especially in the less affluent countries.

There is a lot more research and development work on the rich people's problems than on the poor people's problems. Viagra is a poster-child for this! The apathy towards malaria and Ebola, always worry me.  Where are the Borlaugs of today?

And in a world in which the United  Nations and its agencies like the FAO, which actively supported Borlaug, have been terribly weakened no thanks to the United States, we are left to the small mercies of philanthropic foundations who tinker at the margins.

There once was a man named Norman Borlaug!

From The Tamil Kitchen

The other day, we watched the first episode of Samin Nosrat's Salt Fat Acid Heat. A few months ago, I bought Preeti Mistry's The Juhu Beach Club Cookbook as a gift after reading about her in the NY Times.  And, oh, how can I forget Yotam Ottolenghi or  Nik Sharma or ... This a glorious time for cookbooks and food shows, it feels like.

And there are kitchen gadgets galore.  A few minutes even in a small little kitchen store leaves me dazed, and wondering about my rather primitive kitchen where even the knives are not sharp, very much like me!

Yet, home cooking is becoming equally rare.

Not only is cooking at home a rapidly dying tradition, the foods that people eat are far from healthy--despite all those cookbooks and shows and all the scientific evidence that is touted every day.  Here in the US, and seemingly everywhere.  The global food revolution "has overwhelmed traditional diets pretty much everywhere in the world, and at an astonishing speed. This revolution is making massive numbers of people fat and sick."  I agree that "Cooking isn’t a luxury; it’s a survival skill."

Most of us "traditionalists" who cook at home will agree with this author who writes:

Here’s why I cook:
I like the way that closely following a recipe can alleviate pressure after a long day of having to make all the decisions.
I love how a dish that worked, or a meal that everyone liked, has the power to change my day.
I like that pulling off a good meal when you least expect it is the fastest way to feel victorious, even when real life does not.
I like the way that, even when I’m standing over the stove, cursing the recipe writer who suggested that onions might caramelize in 10 minutes, I’m totally absorbed. I’m not on group texts. I’m not following the outrage of the moment on Twitter. I’m getting a brief, needed respite and refuel from fretting over our democracy or forcibly separated families or any of the other horrible things humans do to one another. 

Indeed.

Well, except the part about "closely following a recipe," which I don't.

Last night, it was a table for four at The Tamil Kitchen ;)  Good times were had without junk food, without recipes, and without complicated gadgetry.  We had salt, fat, acid, sugar.  And laughs.

I am on a diet ... really!

Consider the following excerpt from here:

 A satiating diet includes foods that are high in protein (such as fish),; high in fiber (whole grains, for example) and high in fruits and vegetables. It contains healthy fats, such as the polyunsaturated fats found in avocados, and includes dairy products such as yogurt. Perhaps surprisingly, it might also include capsaicin, the substance that makes jalapenos and other peppers so hot.

Guess what?  That pretty much is my diet too. Except for the fish.

Foods with protein? Check. (rarely ever animal protein though.)
High in fiber? Check.
High in fruits and vegetables? Check.
Healthy fats? Check.
Capsaicin? Check.

Of course, this is not anything new.  It is, for all purposes, a healthy Indian vegetarian feast.

I present to you the dinner from last night--home-cooked, of course:

Spinach cooked with seasoned cumin seeds and red chili flakes, and then gently boiled with coconut milk and shredded coconut, to which I added cubes of paneer that were cooked in ghee (clarified butter) ... this was served over white rice. 
The side was a salad with cucumber, onions, tomatoes, cilantro, tossed with freshly squeezed lime and then freshly and coarsely ground black pepper. 

Cheese and ghee? Yep. Healthy.  Coconut milk? Yep. Healthy.

What is so special about that combination?

What’s so special about these foods it’s that each of them possesses specific characteristics that benefit our health either by decreasing hunger, reducing body fat, lowering blood sugar, improving blood pressure or increasing metabolism. For instance, yogurt contains protein, calcium and lactic acid bacteria, which are the live and active bacteria that help with the growth of good bacteria in the gut. A healthy gut microbiome has been found to help control body weight and improve other aspects of health.

Scientists being scientists, they "don`t have the answers yet, but we are planning further studies that we hope will address these questions."

Seriously, why do scientists even bother doing these expensive studies when I could have provided them with the answer for a fraction of that cost! ;)

I have always believed that healthy eating can/should also mean eating tasty foods.  It never ever has to mean any big sacrifice.  A satisfying full meal where we don't deprive ourselves of the fat and salt and sugar.  If we deny us those, then that is exactly what we will end up dreaming about all the time, which does not contribute to good mental health, leave alone the physical part.

Oh, there was a finishing piece to the dinner.  This:

Source

Health before wealth

Ever since I came across the phrase sanitas per escam, well, that is a motto that I have used a lot.  Even my food photographs on Facebook, before I took it all down, were in an album under that title.

My food photographs.  As in I made them. I took those photographs too.  And, yes, there was a separate album for foods made by M.

We continue to cook most of our meals.  And we continue to plate and serve in a manner that is pleasing to the eye as well.  We have simply stopped taking photographs.  We cook, we eat, and we enjoy.  Just like humans always did for the longest time.

Cooking and cleaning takes up time, of course.  No wonder I don't have time for Game of Thrones or whatever else that people are talking about.  Heck, I don't even get enough time in the day for me to play bridge online!

Well, yes, such tasty and healthy meals all the time means that I might live past 75, and die only at 99.6 years of age; but, that is a different problem for another day.

But, is spending time on Game of Thrones, or Facebook, or whatever else more important and valuable than cooking ones own meals?  Do people ask themselves this question?

The author of this op-ed argues something similar, by particularly aiming at what he refers to as The Prepared Food Industrial Complex.  Like the ones that young people rave about. Sometimes even the older ones.  But, ...

The $17 billion- a-year food delivery market is very flexible and well-intentioned like that. All these companies want to do is give me my life back by keeping me out of the kitchen — more time for YouTube, more time for CrossFit — and they’ve created myriad ways to do so.

I don't ever understand why time spent for cooking is a waste, and why time spent at the office or at a ballpark or in front of a digital screen is more valuable!

In fact, much of the P.F.I.C. pushes the idea that any time and any effort put into cooking is a waste. The goal, one meal kit company declares, is “saving time to make time — for everything else you want to do.” (Just so long as what you want to do isn’t “cook from scratch.”) Another meal kit service praises mail-order smoothies as a life-changing idea because there’s “no time to research, prep, buy, measure and blend before work.”

An acquaintance once joked that in most homes the kitchen is the most expensive real estate that is never used.  If only that was indeed a joke and not the reality!  Perhaps uber-clean stove-tops and ovens are no longer the result of prideful home-cleaning but merely a reflection of non-usage.

People who cook at home are conclusively healthier, consuming less sodium and fewer overall calories than people who mostly eat out. Cooking at home is better for the planet: it avoids the single-use plastics and paper goods that delivered food usually comes with, and with just a bit of creativity with leftovers, home cooking can be entirely free of food waste. Cooking is being studied as a promising tool for improving mental health, and even as a method for eliminating unhealthy behaviors such as smoking. And no matter what restaurant you order in from, there’s always a home-cooked meal that can be made for less money.

People seem to want to deny all these facts when they talk about the convenience of eating out all the time.  Crazy!

I am with the author when he writes:

Do I cook at home every day of the year? No. I love the burger at my favorite bistro too much to do that.

Yep. Same here.  Our burger bistros are different, however ;)

Sanitas per escam!

When nobody reads the Mueller Report, ... who cares about Azodicarbonamide!

Alexandra Petri, who writes an awesomely funny column at WaPo, has one right after the Mueller presser.  She writes as if she is Mueller talking:

My fellow Americans, it is not Mueller Time. It will never be Mueller Time. I wish you would remove my likeness from your T-shirts and steins. I, Robert Mueller, will not be fired. I quit.
First off, it is obvious that none of you has actually read the report, or you would all sound like Justin Amash. Pete Buttigieg read “Ulysses,” but you will notice how quiet he is on the subject of my report findings.
I guess I should not be surprised that people hate to read so much that they will let folks just go around willy-nilly obstructing justice. Donald Trump’s rise is general proof that people hate to read. I kind of thought that maybe one or two people would want to see if the Wikipedia plot summary matched the book, but no.

And all that is just the beginning!  Hilarious. Laugh is all we can do in these stressful times.

If we don't read books, newspapers, and all that big items, what are the odds that we will read the list of ingredients in the food stuff that we buy?  Like in the bread.  Until today, I had no idea that there is something called Azodicarbonamide.  I have often joked with students that if they see an ingredient that they cannot even spell, they should not even think about buying it leave alone eating it!

In The Guardian's series on toxic items in our lives is where I came across Azodicarbonamide, and more.  It is more about caveat emptor.  (Read that too, in case you missed it or need a refresher.)  This latest is about food. About bread:

Azodicarbonamide has been banned for consumption by the European Union for over a decade.
But despite petitions from several advocacy groups – some dating back decades – the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) still considers these to be Gras or “generally recognized as safe” to eat, though plenty of experts disagree.

Insane!

For years now, I have been buying bread that is locally baked, often at prices that are way higher than the national or regional brands.  Apparently that might be a good strategy.  But, maybe I should check their label too?

But, don't we have the federal government to take care of all these?

“The system for ensuring that ingredients added to food are safe is broken,” said Lisa Lefferts, senior scientist at the consumer advocacy group Center for Science in the Public Interest. Lefferts, who specializes in food additives, said that once a substance was in the food supply, the FDA rarely took further action, even when there was evidence that it isn’t safe.

Seriously? WTF are the taxes for then?

“In EWG’s view, it is important for companies to start removing chemicals associated with health risks, so that shoppers don’t have to have a chemistry degree in order to decipher food labels,” said Naidenko.

I agree.

If you like such information from The Guardian, you want to contribute a couple of dollars to fund them?

Process this!

My father, who is almost 90 years old, helps out with the food prep by cutting vegetables.  A couple of months ago, when I was in India, one of those mornings when he was engaged in this work, for which he uses a dangerously rickety knife, well, that knife sliced a little bit of his skin.  After he cleaned it up, I put a finger cot on it, and he resumed the knife work.

A few minutes later, he wondered where that finger cot went.  We then located it among the wastes, thankfully.  I reminded my father about the health risks--to himself and to others.  For a good measure, I added, "paatti always said that you never know what went into the cooking in the hotels.  The chef may not have even washed his hands."

When we process and cook our own meals, then we know exactly what we are doing.  Chances are that this is the best way to practice sanitas per escam.  It is not only about the hygiene, but also about the amount of salt, sugar, fat, and whatever else is added.

One would think that this is common knowledge. Common sense.  But, we humans are not always about being sensible.  We then want science to tell us what is correct!

Over the past 70 years, ultra-processed foods have come to dominate the U.S. diet. These are foods made from cheap industrial ingredients and engineered to be super-tasty and generally high in fat, sugar and salt.
The rise of ultra-processed foods has coincided with growing rates of obesity, leading many to suspect that they've played a big role in our growing waistlines. But is it something about the highly processed nature of these foods itself that drives people to overeat? A new study suggests the answer is yes.

Next research question for scientists: Is the Pope catholic?

And ultra-processed foods include more than just the obvious suspects, like chips, candy, packaged desserts and ready-to-eat meals. The category also includes foods that some consumers might find surprising, including Honey Nut Cheerios and other breakfast cereals, packaged white bread, jarred sauces, yogurt with added fruit, and frozen sausages and other reconstituted meat products. Popkin says ultra-processed foods usually contain a long list of ingredients, many of them made in labs.

Seriously, a gazillion-dollar scientific study is needed to tell us this?

The convenience of inexpensive ultra-processed foods comes at a high hidden cost.  If only people will put their kitchens to use by cooking their own meals--without slicing their fingers!

Killing me softly ...

Killing animals for our purposes is what this post is about.  Take off now if you are convinced about this issue either way, or if denial is the way you deal with it.

If you are continuing to read this post, it then means that you are like many of us, who have made an uneasy peace with how we treat animals.

This post is in response to two essays that I read: One is about the way we treat animals for our food, and the other is about lab animals that we use in our search for medical and scientific understanding.

In both, we seem to operate with the same bottom-line:

We tell ourselves that their suffering isn’t the same as ours and that they don’t really care about life the way we do, so why should we care?

Many years ago, when I attempted to minimize my problems by comparing to some bigger ones that many others deal with, my daughter jumped to correct me: "You cannot compare pain. Your pain is your pain."

By the same logic, the cow's pain is the cow's pain, and we cannot compare that to our suffering.  The anxiety and panic that a lab rat experiences is not to be compared with what we humans experience.

Yet, we routinely eat juicy beef burgers and subject lab rats to "humane" experiments!

With the rise of Christianity, which preached that God made animals for humans’ use, attitudes toward animals grew bleak. French philosopher Rene Descartes wrote that responses to painful stimuli in animals are merely reflexes, and that animals are not capable of any internal experience because they don’t have souls. To this vacuous view, Voltaire delivered a devastating response about a century later. “Barbarians seize this dog, which in friendship surpasses man so prodigiously,” Voltaire wrote in his Philosophical Dictionary, in 1764. They “nail it on a table, and dissect it alive in order to show the mesenteric veins,” only to “discover in it all the same organs of feeling that are in yourself … Has nature arranged all the means of feeling in this animal, so that it may not feel?” Modern science has validated the great thinker’s rhetorical question, providing an overwhelming multitude of evidence that animals, from mice to macaques, robins to ravens, do feel pain and can suffer, physically and emotionally.

Of course, we have come a long way since the bad old years.

That people care about lab animal well-being is heartening, and the fact that the animals have any protections at all is not trivial. It wasn’t always so. Like much of human history, the history of animal experimentation is one of gruesome cruelty. In the pursuit of knowledge, entertainment, or profit, humans have inflicted unimaginable suffering upon billions of animals over centuries.

We have evolved that much.  But, we have a long way to go.

While modern technology has greatly reduced painful experiences of many lab animals, does that allow scientists to use them as we please? “I don’t believe that there’s a philosophical a priori answer to say whether we can do this or not,” Born said. “It’s a value judgment on the part of society. And it’s a discussion that society needs to have with itself.”

While those are about the animals in science labs, what about the animals we raise and kill so that we can eat them?  If you prick them do they not bleed?

Why is the "problem of meat-eating seems to be so intractable?"

We tell ourselves that their suffering isn’t the same as ours and that they don’t really care about life the way we do, so why should we care?

And, 

[Farm animals] share many of the same mental and emotional characteristics that we recognise in ourselves and acknowledge in the animals closest to us – dogs and cats. To continue our self-indulgence, we resist the evidence and reinforce the status of farmed animals as objects, as commodities, as food. Their inner lives have become ‘the forbidden territory’ we dare not enter lest we deprive our palate and shatter our sense of ourselves.

If we stopped to think about all these, it will " shatter our sense of ourselves."

Sunrise ... (to) ... Sunset

Ramadan began Sunday evening here in the US.

Chances are that tRump has not tweeted--presidentially--about Ramadan.  After all, he is no Justin Trudeau, who said that in English and in French too!

But, the great dictator's office did put out a formal release:

I wonder if his white-supremacist, Islamophobic supporters will approve of their Dear Leader's office issuing such statements!

Muslims are required to from abstain from eating, drinking, smoking and sexual relations from dawn to sunset.  Though, Neil deGrasse Tyson adds more to the timing of it all:

The Qur’an says plainly that daytime fasting during Ramadan ends at “Dark” not at sunset. “Dark” is a good match for the end of twilight. This time of year: up to 15 mins later in equatorial latitudes. 30 mins at middle latitudes. And 45 mins at higher latitudes. I’m just saying. pic.twitter.com/XAseweAIhM

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) May 6, 2019

I, of course, do not observe this or any religion's practices.  I don't fast either.  When "in moderation" is my mantra, when there is no binge involved--not even in reading or watching videos--to deny myself anything does not appeal to me.  Especially when it comes to food.

However, oddly enough, I seem to mark the passage of time by even noting the major religious observances.  It is almost as if I am an atheist without a cause ;)

Ramadan Mubarak!

Ramadan Mubarak!

Fasting. Prayer. Charity. Forgiveness. Renewal. That’s what Ramadan means to me. Here are a few things you may not know about it: https://t.co/hdZipWD0hQ

— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) May 5, 2019

I hate diets. I simply eat.

Every time I visit India, and when it is time for me to pack up to return home, I am asked the same questions by people around me, which are all variations of "are you taking with you sweets and savories?"

I tell them that I am not.  Well, sometimes I do sneak into the suitcase a packet of thattai.

The reason is simply this: I usually eat from whatever is available in the place where I am traveling.

In Costa Rica, I ate whatever tasty stuff that I got from the local diner and baker.  I ate what I was provided in Tanzania.  It is the same in Canada, France, wherever.   If I can't get nutritious vegetarian dishes, then I reluctantly reach for a cooked carcass! ;)

What we eat is cultural, not biological.  Which is why any fad for diets amuses me.  A few years ago, my grandmother claimed that the Idli/yogurt combination was the healthiest ever.  In response, I asked her to explain how the Japanese, who don't know idli, live long and healthy lives.  "They eat a lot of fish.  Will you also eat fish?" I asked her.  I tell ya, the eternal skeptic annoys everybody, including his grandmother!

These are the kinds of reasons why I agree with this author who writes that "the so-called Paleo diet is a myth."   Now, unlike me, the author is a real expert: "Peter S. Ungar is Distinguished Professor and director of the Environmental Dynamics Program at the University of Arkansas."  Ungar writes:

Many paleoanthropologists today believe that increasing climate fluctuation through the Pleistocene sculpted our ancestors—whether their bodies, or their wit, or both—for the dietary flexibility that’s become a hallmark of humanity. The basic idea is that our ever-changing world winnowed out the pickier eaters among us. Nature has made us a versatile species, which is why we can find something to satiate us on nearly all of its myriad biospheric buffet tables. It’s also why we have been able to change the game, transition from forager to farmer, and really begin to consume our planet.

We humans eat an enormous variety of foods.  The Finns eat differently from the Tamils whose foods are different from what Peruvians eat.  No other animal does like what we do.  Without understanding this, people--about three million Americans alone--are on a paleo diet.  But, did even the paleo people have any universal "paleo diet"?

From the standpoint of paleoecology, the Paleolithic diet is a myth. Food choice is as much about what’s available to be eaten as it is about what a species evolved to eat. And just as fruits ripen, leaves flush, and flowers bloom predictably at different times of the year, foods available to our ancestors varied over deep time as the world changed around them from warm and wet to cool and dry and back again. Those changes are what drove our evolution.

What our ancestors ate depended on where they lived.

Consider some of the recent hunter-gatherers who have inspired Paleolithic diet enthusiasts. The Tikiġaġmiut of the north Alaskan coast lived almost entirely on the protein and fat of marine mammals and fish, while the Gwi San in Botswana’s Central Kalahari took something like 70 percent of their calories from carbohydrate-rich, sugary melons and starchy roots. Traditional human foragers managed to earn a living from the larger community of life that surrounded them in a remarkable variety of habitats, from near-polar latitudes to the tropics.

So, when we refer to a paleo-style diet, which paleo are we referring to?  The Kalahari's carbohydrate rich food?  The Alaskan sea food diet?

It is one crazy world out there, and I have to struggle to maintain my sanity.

I have my own dietary protocols.  As I noted a month ago, even my lunch is pretty much predictable and same, day after day.

Too bad that thattai is not made freshly here though. ;)

sanitas per escam!

"About 11 million deaths a year are linked to poor diet around the globe," reports NPR.

Before you allow your bleeding liberal heart to command you to take your credit card and pay for some stereotypical poor people somewhere, read more.

What's driving this? As a planet we don't eat enough healthy foods including whole grains, nuts, seeds, fruits and vegetables. At the same time, we consume too many sugary drinks, too much salt and too much processed meat.

Have you put that credit card back in your wallet?

Btw, I am no grammar expert; but, leading a sentence with "as a planet we don't eat enough ..." sounds awful!  Sounds as bad as "buy local" or "save the earth." ;)

Mexico, in particular, is an interesting case:

The country ranked 57th on the list. On the one hand, people in Mexico consume a lot of whole grain corn tortillas, he says — and whole grains are beneficial. But on the other hand, "Mexico has one of the highest levels of consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages."

So, ok, more confirmation that sugar is bad for us, and it is awful how we are biologically programmed to enjoy it though.  And, yes, we need to eat healthily.

What if all of us, especially the soon-to-be 9 or 10 billion people, decide to eat healthily--you know, the wonderful mix of whole grains, nuts, fruits, and vegetables?

A recent study published in the journal PLOS One by researchers at the University of Guelph found that there would not be enough fruit and vegetables to go around.

Damned if you do, and damned if you don't! ;)

All the more why we need to seriously rethink agricultural production.  Check out this essay in The New Yorker. 

Source