Coprophagy Now!

Much has been written lately about the disgust reflex, (see Pollan, The Omnivores Dilemma, Stuckey Taste What You’ve Been Missing,). It’s a fascinating facet to any discussion of taste. Why and how we develop a “disgust” reaction to certain things varies from the biological to the most narrowly cultural.  It’s a defense mechanism, but also a way to align our tastes with peers, and express group preferences. That’s where things get sticky.

While the sources of disgust may seem self evident, they are not universal. The mere mention of drinking ones own urine, though met with extreme disgust in America, is common among many peoples. Former Prime Minister Morarji Desai of India drank a glass of his own urine every day. Urine is known to be an effective disinfectant and a useful field dressing for small wounds. But its association with solid excrement, which can indeed be deadly, puts it off limits in our culture.

Certain foods are also grouped under the general heading of Crap, one of our many words for excrement. Anything not liked can be called by this name.
And recently, we’ve been going through a sort of renaissance of coprophagy―the eating of excrement―in the form of Fairground foods, and even in places ostensibly reserved for Haute dining.

Now, this is a phase that many infants go through, and so it’s not surprising that our more infantile food culturals are trying it out too.

And that’s a good thing. It’s necessary to get this out of our system, and the sooner the better. Throwing, eating, and being generally fascinated by the waste products of our bodies-or our society-will lead to a deeper understanding of our foods and our bodies.

“We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.”.

~Orwell.

SPAM: NOT LOCOVORE.

I can’t imagine a food less local, less organic, or less seasonal than Spam. Not to mention fake tasting and bad for you. Oh, and expensive. But there it is…

Meanwhile many people, particularly in Hawaii and on certain stretches of Melrose Ave. speak of how Spam got them through the War. We don’t see them huddled in bomb shelters, out of nostalgia, instead of going to the beach…. but they’re perfectly happy to eat the feces of our processed food industry.  And many, nostalgic and determined as can be, defend it as a good food.

Like babies in a nursery playing with their own feces…as the adults suppress the gag reflex, and wait for the Food Revolution to start up again..

Madonna In The Bordello?

Art and Commerce have never more shrewdly mingled than at a restaurant; especially now, in the US, where most people think of good food only as restaurant food.

The reason that we believe this is that our cuisine, like the rest of society, has been commodified, and those in charge of it are rated by their wealth and their fame. Meanwhile the act of cooking has been falsely over-complicated, and the deterioration of our cooking skills enables all of the show business.

Only a few years ago, when asked to name a memorable meal most people, regardless of class, would have thought of a meal with family, around the table. If asked to name a favorite dish, most would think of something that a Grandmother, or an Aunt used to prepare. This is still true in most of the world.

But in today’s America, where most people eat quite poorly, we think of a restaurant meal as the pinnacle of dining…Our ideal is a meal prepared for us, for money, by professionals.

And in a sad way, this is like saying that the best sex you ever had was not with your spouse, or high school sweetheart, or lover, but at a brothel, served up for money, by professionals.

If that were true, would that be OK? And how did the idealization of our food coincide with the simultaneous degradation of it? It’s not an accident and it’s not a mystery. It’s just business, at the expense of culture, and it highlights precisely the harm that comes automatically when we trade one for the other.

That’s one big reason that home cooking, real cooking, is important. The connection we have to our cuisine and what it represents emotionally begins, as it does for all mammals, with milk, the breast, and love. Being held, caressed and fed at the same time is so natural, and so important, that babies can die for lack of it. Simply put, love is as vital to our survival as food and breath. And later in life we still need these connections. Can we get them from restaurants? Or is that like expecting love from a prostitute?

The business of America is business. The culture of America…is in trouble.

Madonna/Whore Syndrome

The Madonna–Whore complex: “The inability to maintain sexual arousal within a committed, loving relationship. First identified by Sigmund Freud, this psychological complex is said to develop in men who see women as either saintly Madonnas or debased prostitutes. Men with this complex desire a sexual partner who has been degraded (the whore) while they cannot desire the respected partner (the Madonna)”.

The Madonna–Junk Food complex: “The inability to maintain gustatory arousal within a committed, culinary culture…….this is said to develop in people who see food as either a culinary and nutritional delight, or as debased and impure junk. People with this complex desire food which has been processed, branded and marketed, (the whore) while they cannot desire the respected, pure natural and cultivated variety (the Madonna)”.

As Foodies gush about the culinary whores, ‘awesome’ donuts, ‘yummy’ In-N-Out burgers, ‘amazing‘ Poutine’, etc. (Whores), all just in it for the money, they pretend, dutifully to be faithful to the precepts of higher faith―local, fresh, in season―of their pure and adored goddesses, (Madonnas).

The Madonna/Whore syndrome has morphed into a single phenomenon: Madonna has assimilated the whore. Now show business has done us the favor of providing both a face and a name to hang our theories on. The same things that make Culinary Pornography, can turn culture into a whore as well, until finally the whore becomes a Madonna: The burger as fine dining fad, (Mhyrvold’s 30 hour burger, etc.). We develop extravagant rituals and recipes for the simple burger, whose charm is in fact its humbleness. Like taking a hooker to the prom. This can lead to confusion.

Madonna in 1979-Always Ahead Of the Curve, Contemplating The Ascendancy Of The Bush Years

“Freud argued that the Madonna-Whore complex is caused by oedipal castration fears which arise when a man experiences the affection he once felt for his mother with women he now sexually desires. In order to manage this anxiety, the man categorizes women into two groups: women he can admire and women he finds sexually attractive. Whereas the man loves women in the former category, he despises and devalues the latter group.”

And which is exactly what happens when foodies, enamored of the fresh local and seasonal ethos, cavort happily with the most foreign, plastic and out of season ingredients such as:

• Trueburger in Oakland Ca. Two local sous chefs with actual experience in fine kitchens create a milkshake made with Hostess Twinkies.
• From Animal in L.A., CA, the Loco Moco Burger, which includes Spam and Fois Gras.
• And the ubiquitous Iceberg and blue cheese Wedges, trawled from our recent culinary past (to provide comfort to those who fear culinary castration?).

It looks like we have yet to reconcile our youthful indiscretions with more mature desires for beauty and truth.

“Animal’s Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo have no limits when it comes to meat. From the chefs now dubbed “carniwhores” comes the latest and tastiest creation: foie gras loco moco ($35), a caloric time bomb that’s worth every heart-clogging moment.”

“Carniwhores”! The secret’s out!

Ingredients, (partial list): foie gras loco moco, quail egg, spam, hamburger, Maple syrup, Teryaki sauce, rice, scallions…Cost: $35

How to be ‘pretty genius’:

“I think anyone that can use Spam on a dish and make it work is pretty genius.”

Is there a definition for “making it work”?

Animal Chef Vinny Dotolo:

“I started wondering out loud what Hawaiians eat. …It eventually sparked this idea of doing a Loco Moco. It is a big thing over there and people weren’t really rocking it too much here. The challenge was to make it both traditional and Animal-esque, which is where the foie gras comes in. I felt it needed some heat, so I added Sriracha, which gives it some acidity as well.

We put seared foie gras and lightly browned Spam on a burger patty, top it with a quail egg, and also scallions, plus we use Carolina Gold rice instead of usual white rice. There are about four sauces here and they can be hard to distinguish as they mix together and form a different flavor. There’s a foie gras sauce with a little maple syrup, a homemade teriyaki sauce, and the Sriracha. The Sriracha really tied it all together, adding heat and acid, otherwise it’d be just a hamburger with foie gras.”

And what we’re left with is the feeling that many young cooks and diners are made uncomfortable by the simplicity, the purity of “Madonna” food, (Fois gras for example), and find comfort in the street-smart confusion of canned, preserved, processed, factory food like Spam and bottled hot sauce, which also, conveniently saves them from having to actually taste or know anything.

Because you know, this is awesome. And Pretty genius.

Cooking In Reverse Part I

The most important intellectual decision a person can make is what to be interested in, what to ‘know’. If you’re a student beginning a specialized education it’s called choosing a major. If you’re young, then it’s general knowledge. But you choose whether something is important enough to add to your knowledge and experience.

We follow our interests, and integrate knowledge into our lives.

“Food Police”

“Nanny State” Out Of Control.

“At 8:00 A.M. this morning six year old Jennie Temple was dragged from her house, in front of her shocked parents, and taken to a government facility where she was interrogated for six hours.
Among the things the authorities wanted to know was: Who was the first president of the US, and how do you spell c-a-t. Brought home in tears at the end of the day, little Julia was comforted by family. “We have no idea why they are doing this to our child. She’s a good girl”.
Representatives of the government would only say: “It’s the law”.
In every city across the country this scenario is repeated again and again. If you thought we lived in a land of freedom and justice, think again. Your child is no more than a tool for the ruling class, forcing their ideologies on them. What’s two and two? Seven? 42? No, its four, because the number police say it is. Should your child be free to use their imagination, or just do as the authorities tell them? Do something now, tomorrow may be too late”.

This message was brought to you by Coca-Cola and McMothers for a Free America.

Little Jennie’s story is not hyperbole. Children are controlled by parents and by society. It’s normal. They are also routinely taught habits that will condemn them to lives of difficulty and ill health.

We send our kids to school, sometimes against their will, to learn good habits, and yet we often feed them things they should never even see. We punish them for not learning accepted ways to spell words that they may never use, or the dates of events which may never have taken place. Meanwhile they learn habits which will condemn one third of them to lives dependent on pharmaceuticals and wracked with pain. Diabetes isn’t pretty. No one ever died from bad grammar.

“Food Police” is a phrase often used against those who try to raise societies standards. Should we complain about the police who drag our kids off to schools to learn? Or should we accept that enforcing the common wisdom is the duty of culture?

Of course a well balanced child will ignore a candy vending machine and make good nutritional choices. But we have helmet laws, and seat belt laws because people often make the wrong choices. It isn’t all just a matter of opinion.

If the real food police, the FDA, did their job, we could all relax a bit and have some fun. But the FDA itself is on a short leash, and it’s governed by the market and politics.

Your child’s education is the responsibility of the family and of the ‘state’ because the state is, after all, our community, our culture. If parents fail to teach children how to prepare and eat food, then why not learn that at school, or on television?

Bad nutrition is damaging. It’s not always a matter of personal freedom, or personal taste. If you want to bang your head against the wall, that’s your business. If you want to bang your child’s heads against the wall, that’s everybody‘s business.

Grandmothers And Other Revolutionaries

Well. it turns out that the revolution was televised after all. The food revolution that is. (By the way, They won. More later)

But now that it’s about over and the real work begins, it’s time to think about what can replace the hype, help us satisfy the longing for meaning that we all share.  Are we going forward, or are we circling in a cul-de-sac of celebrity chefs and TV cooking shows? One thing we can be sure of: change won’t happen on the food network, or even in restaurants.

 Restaurants are the trophies of any culinary culture, the flower of the hard work which went before, but they’re not meaningful in themselves. Go to any country where the food culture is not dosed out between advertisements, or painted onto plates with squeeze bottles, and ask a citizen to describe a great meal. Most likely they’ll speak of a family meal, usually prepared by a Mother or Grandmother. That culture is integrated into the lives of the people, and across generations.

Why Grandmothers? Because Grandmothers, who are also Mothers of course, provided the most important meal of all, the one meal in nature, unique to mammals, which binds generations in a simultaneous embrace of physical and emotional nourishment: Mother’s Milk.

A Dangerous Mind

The Happy Meal Of Journalism

Now that open season has been declared on Malcolm Gladwell, mainly due to his descent into the mire of corporate shilldom, (via Bank of America), we thought it might be nice to re-visit the glory days.

For those new to this, Malcolm Gladwell may be America’s most useful thinker. If you’re looking to form an opinion on something, you can do no better than to find out what Gladwell thinks, then run away. The sheer wrongness of the man is a joy to behold. It’s virtuosic. But he seems to go into overdrive when the subject is food. In particular, his work on Ketchup, and French Fries, America’s favorite ‘pairing’, shows him to be in a class by himself. Here’s Gladwell’s take on Heinz Ketchup, (revised and annotated):

Post-Modernist Cuisine

Over The Top

So much has been written by now about Nathan Myhrvold’s Nebuchadnezzar Opus, Modernist Cuisine, the sensible thing to do, in the spirit of the book, is to add to it.

Before we even open the cover, the title intrigues. It seems apt, and yet, wasn’t Modernist architecture about paring down essential lines and forms of structure? Modernist painting disdained Victorian ornament, replacing narrative with pure form. Music could become a long stretch of silence. How does a 30-hour hamburger recipe, with over forty ingredients and as many complex operations, fit in to this?

Who We Are

Tell Me What You Eat, And I’ll Tell You Where You Are

Brillat-Savarin’s most famous quote may be too broad for individuals, but few aspects of a culture are more revealing than its diet.

A Window Into Our World

The TV Dinner. Now, most of us like to believe that this isn’t a representative example of today’s food. After all, it was a fifties fad and we’ve come a long way since…haven’t we? The most important thing about this meal is not the food. It’s not the package, or the cost, the calories, or the sodium content. It’s the name. The TV Dinner meant that for the first time since man invented fire, families didn’t look at each other as they ate. This is such a monumental shift that its importance can’t be overstated. The dominance of the television controls many important things about what we eat, how much, when, and so on. It provides clues to our health problems and dietary crises.

It is the most significant breakthrough in the history of food. We were actually able to look at electronic pictures of the food we were eating as we ate it. We were trained to look at idealized versions of ourselves as we became something else. Ozzie and Harriet never got fat and lazy, but we sure did. Families, feeding from endless arrays of frozen foods, bags of chips and bottomless bottles of soft drinks…watched. The dismantling of a hundred centuries of socialization took about 36 months.

Who Owns Our Vision? Who Controls Our Taste?

Where we are now

Americans adore movements, brands. Locovore, Fusion, Vegetarianism, raw-food, Junk food, or farm-to-fork, are all attempts to negotiate the relationship between our bodies and our land. Some pass, some become part of the culture. But this sometimes imposes impossible rules, and a confusion of tastes. To borrow from other cultures requires a structure, a philosophy. These things are bred naturally into ancient cultures through attrition and evolution, not from a box of spare parts. 

If cuisine is the Human being’s response to their land, then we need to look there to find our answers. For example, the needs of our bodies come before philosophy. Searching history we find one man who ate the flesh of animals and another who believed that eating animals was “harmful to humanity”. The first was Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha; the second, Adolf Hitler. Both adapted to the needs of their bodies, resources of their land.

The Slow Food Movement was conceived in Italy in 1986, but slow is only half the story, the other half is terroir, the French word meaning ‘a sense of place’. The point was to return the focus to the locus: To respect Terroir and the power of place, over the bulldozing effect of junk food and Multinational corporations. We often hear the accusation of “Food Police!”, but in Europe, Asia, Africa, where traditions are understood, it’s called culture. It’s the job of a culture to regulate itself, and problems with freedom of choice are rare in places where the culture itself has a voice. The land chooses, the culture chooses; then the individual chooses.

Slow food is a pan-cultural ideology, not a dining fad. Culture blends new ideas organically, infused like herbs into broth, rather than bolted on like wheels to a car. In Italy, the town of Parma makes Parmesan cheese and Parma Ham. In France, Champagne produces Champagne, Cognac produces Cognac, and so on for Dijon, Bordeaux, Armagnac, Benedictine, etc. The name expresses the work and the pride of the region, or tribe. That’s the birthright of the people and it’s no fad. I often hear that the fake Parmesan cheeses from Wisconsin or the fake Gouda from California are legitimate because they’re made in the ‘style’ of the genuine ones. But it’s not a ‘style’, it’s the grass of the land, the passion of the people, that makes it real. Parmesan cheese is part of the culinary dialogue between the people of Parma and their land. It’s not a marketing strategy.

Our continent was the source of so many of the world’s ingredients; we have yet to have a similar influence on world cuisine. Italy, a country roughly the size of New Mexico, has so many distinct cuisines that we can barely keep track of them. We need to realize that the foods of a culture are truly of that culture, not just from it. Potatoes, unknown outside of the Americas before Columbus, come back to us from Belgium as French Fries, from France as Pommes Dauphinoise, from Italy as Gnocchi, and from Russia as Vodka. Not to be outdone, we gave the world Tater Tots and Pringles, the products of our biggest cultural contribution, the TV dinner table.

“The Destiny Of A Nation Depends On How It Nourishes Itself”

Brillat-Savarin said that too.

But that destiny isn’t going to be found in restaurants, or in recipes. It has to come from the ground, and be prepared by families, served to families, so that families can continue to exist.

It’s time to do better. It’s our turn. It’s our duty. It’s our pleasure.

Life Is Never Wrong

Gustibus Non

Est

Disputandum

In the world of Architects, whose egos make Chefs look like cherubs, Le Corbusier is among the immortals. And yet, when the tenants of one of his buildings objected to certain details—ceiling heights, wall textures—he agreed to some changes, remarking: “Life is never wrong.”

This is a big step towards balanced nutrition. Life is never wrong means that whatever it is that you like, is not wrong.

The Clara Davis , “Wisdom of the Body” experiments shined some light on the matter. Babies are never wrong, but also are not always right.

Gustibus non est disputandum: Taste Is Not Arguable.

But, that doesn’t mean that taste isn’t accountable. Not being wrong is different from being right. There are reasons for everything, and every taste choice we make was initiated buy some minute event in our past, however obscure. That’s one of the mysteries of taste: it’s always accountable, but never arguable.

The Yin and the Yang Of Taste

We may ask : Do we like our food, (the Yin), but we also have to ask: Does our food like us? (The Yang.) If it doesn’t, then it’s fools gold.

Taste starts out as a tool of survival. Only later, both evolutionarily and personally, does it become a tool of pleasure. So, to respect both, we have to use a scale of survival, as well as of pleasure, to judge our own tastes. This means that we should try to “like” those things which “like” us. It’s that easy.

The food we eat shouldn’t kill us, and we shouldn’t like things that do. Luckily, tastes are naturally constructive, they only harm us when we abuse them.

Can Tastes Be Changed? Should They?

Our most basic tastes, those which are received genetically, probably can’t be effectively changed, and that’s OK. Those culturally acquired, like the accent of your hometown, we can change, if we choose to. Tastes created by marketing almost always need a closer look.

But to change your tastes requires motivation, and that motivation must be reinforced by reason. It may be no easier to give up soft drinks than to give up heroin, but people do it all the time, and it may be as worthwhile. The difference is that a drug habit is seen as sinful and criminal, while soft drinks are…FUN!.

The simple tonic which we know of as Coke began as a minor curative and refresher. It was of no significance as a drug until marketers got in the way and the dosage became abusive. Many cultures have used sugar for centuries with almost no harmful effects. But if we ignore the rules of dosage, we have an epidemic.

Now read that last paragraph again and replace marketers with traffickers, and sugar with cocaine, then reverse them again.
Even the means of ingestion are key. Natives of Peru have chewed Coca leaves for centuries. But when it’s refined and concentrated, then injected into the vein, things get weird. Same with sugar. Naturally sourced sugar will rarely be a problem for humans because the accompanying nutrients and fiber of a fruit will key the body to a reasonable dosage. That’s one of the sublime details of a natural diet: The ‘keys’—those ingredients which cause our natural limiters to kick in—are refined away. That’s why we overdose on Coke, but not on oranges. Refined and concentrated in a ‘soft’ drink, the body is clueless and confused, so overdose becomes far more likely, and so does diabetes and weight gain, and playing Dungeons and Dragons into the night.

In other words, to really know what you like, you have to respect your body, know what it likes and needs, and how much.