How do you get through a cauliflower? Via a wormhole!

When visiting India a couple of years ago, an old high school friend offered an advice/warning: "avoid eating raw carrots because of reports of tapeworms."

Of course, I did not pay attention to the advice; when have I ever listened to anybody telling me what to do! ;)  I kept devouring the carrot-tomato-onion-cilantro salad that my mother made practically every other day for me.

Now, with mother not her old self, I did a lot more household work than I usually do when visiting with the folks.  One morning, I sat down at the table with a cutting board, a knife, and a large cauliflower head.  A couple of cuts later, I jumped out of the chair freaked out by the sight of a large green worm.  My father calmly walked over, guided the worm on to a cauliflower leaf, and took that out to the trash.

I got back to the chair and continued from where I left off.  Now, I was intensely cautious.  I didn't want to surprised with any more worms.  I was ready for them.  If there was one, surely there could be more.

And there were.

I jumped out of the chair.  No, not because I was freaked out.  But to grab my camera.  After all, I knew then that this had to be blogged.  I suppose there is that writer in me sensing that opportunity to write about.  I am reminded of Roz Chast's comment that having a writer in the family is danger to the rest because sooner or later they will feature in the writings, and not always flatteringly ;)

So, I rushed to grab the camera, and hoping meanwhile that the worms--yes, more than one--hadn't crawled away.  They were there, alright, as if waiting to strike a pose!

After clicking, I slowly removed the worms and tossed them away--didn't have to wait for father to do it.

In all these years of cooking cauliflower in the US, never have I seen worms.  Dipping raw cauliflower pieces in hummus, or a dressing, before munching on them, I have never ever seen a worm.

"This is why we first soak the cauliflower in warm water and a little bit of salt" was the typical response from the women who were all too familiar with worms in such veggies.  To them, it was not worth even talking about.  It was like making a big deal out of the sun rising in the east.  Not for me though.

When young, every once in a while we would find a small worm in the cooked rice.  Yes, a dead worm--about the size of the rice grain itself, which is a good camouflage effect--in the cooked rice.  Which would freak the life out of us kids.  My grandmothers always calmly said, "keep that to the side and continue eating."  Easier said than done!

I suppose this is one downside of eating "organic"--something that I am not fixated on.  The cauliflower that I buy here is not anything that is certified organic, which means that there is always a fair chance that chemicals had been used to prevent the worm eggs in the first place.  Thanks to those chemicals, the worms and I live in different worlds, and I am happy to keep them away ;)

(un)sustainable agriculture

Influential food writers, advocates, and celebrity restaurant owners are repeating the mantra that "sustainable food" in the future must be organic, local, and slow. But guess what: Rural Africa already has such a system, and it doesn't work. Few smallholder farmers in Africa use any synthetic chemicals, so their food is de facto organic. High transportation costs force them to purchase and sell almost all of their food locally. And food preparation is painfully slow. The result is nothing to celebrate: average income levels of only $1 a day and a one-in-three chance of being malnourished.
If we are going to get serious about solving global hunger, we need to de-romanticize our view of preindustrial food and farming. And that means learning to appreciate the modern, science-intensive, and highly capitalized agricultural system we've developed in the West. Without it, our food would be more expensive and less safe. In other words, a lot like the hunger-plagued rest of the world.

One might think that such views will not be found in countries like India where not only do poor and undernourished live number in the millions, but also where millions of others have been lifted out of abject poverty and undernourishment.
Think again; more from the article:

Celebrity author and eco-activist Vandana Shiva claims the Green Revolution has brought nothing to India except "indebted and discontented farmers." A 2002 meeting in Rome of 500 prominent international NGOs, including Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, even blamed the Green Revolution for the rise in world hunger. Let's set the record straight.
The development and introduction of high-yielding wheat and rice seeds into poor countries, led by American scientist Norman Borlaug and others in the 1960s and 70s, paid huge dividends. In Asia these new seeds lifted tens of millions of small farmers out of desperate poverty and finally ended the threat of periodic famine. India, for instance, doubled its wheat production between 1964 and 1970 and was able to terminate all dependence on international food aid by 1975. As for indebted and discontented farmers, India's rural poverty rate fell from 60 percent to just 27 percent today. Dismissing these great achievements as a "myth" (the official view of Food First, a California-based organization that campaigns globally against agricultural modernization) is just silly.

Who you gonna believe? Walmart or Whole Foods?

“They do a lot of good things they don’t talk about” .... “It’s getting harder and harder to hate Walmart.”

Those are quotes in a wonderfully honest and objective report from my favorite food commentator, Corby Kummer.
Kummer takes a look at Walmart Supercenters selling organic and locally grown produce, and is impressed:

I had trouble believing I was in a Walmart. The very reasonable-looking produce, most of it loose and nicely organized, was in black plastic bins (as in British supermarkets, where the look is common; the idea is to make the colors pop). The first thing I saw, McIntosh apples, came from the same local orchard whose apples I’d just seen in the same bags at Whole Foods. The bunched beets were from Muranaka Farm, whose beets I often buy at other markets—but these looked much fresher.

And then he devises the following experiment:

Walmart holding its own against Whole Foods? This called for a blind tasting.
I conspired with my contrarian friend James McWilliams, an agricultural historian at Texas State University at San Marcos and the author of the new Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly. He enlisted his friends at Fino, a restaurant in Austin that pays special attention to where the food it serves comes from, as co-conspirators. I would buy two complete sets of ingredients, one at Walmart and the other at Whole Foods. The chef would prepare them as simply as possible, and serve two versions of each course, side by side on the same plate, to a group of local food experts invited to judge.

Read his essay on what that experiment revealed. 

Organic farming bad for the poor

From the Economist:
FROM farmers' markets to happy chickens, sales of organic food have rocketed in recent years. And to meet this demand, the share of farmland used for organic production has also increased in many rich countries. Switzerland has upped its share from under 2% in the mid-1990s to over 10% today, the highest in the OECD. But as global food prices soar, hurting the poor in particular, environmentalists may find organic farming trickier to promote. Organic farming produces far less than conventional intensive methods, and so more land must be farmed for the same yield.