3quarksdaily

the pao of love (part one)

by Vivek Menezes

It’s 1am, pouring heavily on an overcast monsoon night, and I’ve been waiting to talk to Sebastiao Frias for almost two hours.

But he’s still elbow-deep in his work, dusted from brow to toes in wheat flour, and moving with the distinctive balletic grace that master craftsmen acquire after decades of practice. 

A seemingly unending series of trays are lined up next to his hip, become filled at full speed with little nubs of steadily ‘proving’ dough (each snipped off by feel alone, yet almost exactly identical to the next), then set aside to await a pre-dawn turn in the massive, ancient oven which dominates the largest room in this old house in Panjim, the pocket-sized capital city of India’s smallest state.

Frias began his evening’s labours as always, preparing thousands of ‘unde’ for baking. These palm-sized, egg-shaped loaves of crusty bread are the addictive favourite of Ponnjekars, the residents of this pleasant riverside city, where ‘pao bhaji’ has to be accompanied by an ‘undo’ or it is not considered the genuine article, and most dailyroutines begin with the ritual purchase of the morning’s supply from a deliveryman who brings the bread right to the front door of every household in the city (the evening’s supply comes separately, in another round of deliveries).

The clock keeps ticking, and I find myself mesmerized by Frias’s swift, efficient movements, the dough rolled out in table-top sized slabs, then kneaded into cables and ropes and knots, then back again across the counter.

By now, he had moved on the ‘katre’, the squarish, flat loaves that give shape to the sandwiches in innumerable tiffins across the city and state, with little toasted corners that small children love to chew on. These are a refined taste in Frias’s neighborhood, so he will lay out less than half the loaves-to-be than he did with the ‘unde’. In full flow, it takes no more than 25 minutes, the baker’s hands ablur in the shadows cast by the  tube light on the wall behind him.

And now Frias acknowledges my presence again for the first time since he started work hours ago, He nods towards the dough at his fingertips – it’s finally time to lay out the iconic ‘poee’, the pita-like, whole-wheat bread that’s laced with fresh palm toddy.

Generations of locals have grown up on robust, toothsome ‘poee’ but the demand for its old-fashioned charms is dwindling. Frias now makes just a few dozen every day for his older clients, who count on his bakery’s ‘poee’ just as their parents and grandparents did in previous decades. The clientele is now insignificant, but Frias keeps producing ‘poee’ because it’s a way of life, just like every other aspect of his laborious existence, nothing much changed from generations of baking Friases past, stretching all the way back to the first decades after the establishment of the Estado da India in 1510.

--

The Portuguese had food on their mind from the moment that they arrived in India – after all it was the scent of spices that lured them across the oceans in the first place.

From Roman times and even before, exotic aromatics from the East were prized across Europe for their ability to transform bland staples into desirable delicacies.But these cameat an extraordinarily heavy price, comparable to gold. A chain of traders was required to shift the precious goods via Malaya and China to the ports of India, and then the Arabs took over, moving them by ship to Africa, whence they came overland to the Meditteranean to be collected by Venetian and Genoan traders who kept a near-monopoly going for centuries.

So when Columbus sailed off in 1492, the main reason was to try and break this centuries-old monopoly, to access the fabled spice markets of the Indies without having to go through middlemen. Thus began the so-called Age of Discovery, which remade the world, with Columbus crossing the Atlantic to the New World, and Vasco da Gama finally making the crucial breakthrough to sail right around Africa and the Cape of Good Hope to wind up in the sheltered bay of Calicut in May, 1498.

It was not a very grand arrival, contrary to European expectations. They were immediately greeted in their own languages, which confounded them. And then the Zamorin and his court were comrehensively unimpressed by the gifts that were presented to them:  a dozen coats, six hats, a bale of sugar and four barrels of butter and honey. But da Gama had brought coin along as well, and the multinational traders of Calicut accepted it with alacrity.

The Iberian managed to fill his ship with tens of thousands of kilos of black pepper, bought for 3 ducats the hundredweight. Back in Lisbon, he found the price holding steady at 22 ducats – da Gama and his crew became rich overnight, and the royalcourt immediately began to pay close attention.

Less than three years later, Lopo Soares was back in Calicut with 9 ships in his flotilla. This time, the Portuguese shipped back more than a million kilos of pepper, and thousands of kilos each of ginger, cinnamon and cardamom. The captain and his entire crew became fabulously wealthy, and now there was no stopping the interest of the members of the court, and the sovereign himself.

In 1510, Alfonso da Albquerque moved stealthily up the western coastline of India towards Goa, alerted to the possibility of an easy takeover by local Saraswat Hindu chieftains who were tiring of the Adil Shah’s onerous tax regime. He finally took Goa after a brief, bloody battle.

Just 20 years later, the entire trading routes across the Arabian Sea were controlled by the Portuguese, who had already arrayed a string of 50 forts to control their monopoly, with further military outposts in Bengal and the Coromandel coast, and 100 fast ships devoted to cutting off and killing any competition that might arise.

By the dawn of the 17th century,  the Cidade de Goa, the sprawling port city on the Mandovi River whose ruins are now known as ‘Old Goa’, had grown far larger than London or Paris in the same era, and become one of the most important marketplaces in the history of globalization.

It is here that Asia and Europe met,  traded, and mingled on a large and sustained scale for the first time, with profound results that have changed the world since then. Goa became the locus of intense cultural exchange and technology transfer: the home of the first printing press in Asia, the first modern lighthouse, the first public library, the first universal civil code, ad infinitum.

Right alongside, the diet of the subcontinent changed permanently: potatoes were introduced (India is now the world’s largest producer); chilies came in for the first time. Corn, cashews, guavas,  pineapples, custard-apples, papayas, all came into the Indian diet via the Estado da India.

But it was bread that came in for special emphasis by colonial authorities, who found no substitute in India’s panoply of unleavened chapattis and rotis, thin dosas and appams, soft breads made from ground rice and lentils.

Wheat bread did not merely signify subsistence to the Europeans, it was required for the celebration of Mass. The early Portuguese presence in India was missionary-heavy, and they made bakeries and baking into a priority. It was missionaries who trained a large number of converts from the ‘Chardo’ caste (of Kshatriyas), from South Goa in the arduous art of baking bread in wood-fired clay ovens, and found an alternative to yeast in fresh coconut toddy. In time, the ‘Poders’ of Goa became ubiquitous, and constituted a powerful caste-based union that played an outsized role in state politics right into the 20th century.

The last Poees are ready for the oven, and Frias indicates that he will be ready to talk after he cleans up a bit. I retreat to the tiny balcony overlooking the front yard, and watch the rain crash down in sheets on this small cluster of traditional houses, tucked invisibly into a clump of trees at the base of the Altinho hill that dominates the centre of Panjim.

The Frias bakery is named after the nearby spring that gives it its name (Boca da Vaca = Mouth of the Cow). The modern flat that I live in with my family is just a kilometer south down the riverfront,  but the scene I am looking out on feels part of a village world far different from what an Indian state capital is supposed to look like in 2011.

In fact, the Padaria Boca da Vaca came as a revelation to me when I found it a couple of years ago, having never stumbled across it while criss-crossing the city on foot since childhood, despite the fact that Panjim is by far the smallest state capital in the subcontinent (and not even close to the largest city in Goa, either).

The main commercial drag of the city – 18th June Road – is probably less than 150 metres away from the Frias establishment, but a universe apart nonetheless. Each step away from blocks of unremarkable apartment buildings, and up a tiny by-lane lined with bougainvillea, takes you further towards a small stand of soaring, old coconut trees, until you’re completely out of sight of the city, and the countryside atmosphere pervades,

But long before I visited Padaria Boca da Vaca, I had surely eaten its bread. Like every other traditional bakery in Goa, its bicycle salesmen fan out across the neighborhood and beyond, honking insistently on bulb horns that set Goan households salivating at first earshot. ‘Phonk phonk, phonk’ and you know bread is on its way in a fabulously democratic exercise where every home in the state – mansion, hovel, in-between – is served by the network, and everyone buys the same article for the same price: the government-mandated Rs. 2.50 per undo, katre or poee. It’s beyond a daily staple, and more like a basic human right: if every Goan doesn’t get his fresh daily pao, every politician knows that the government will fall immediately.

Similar thoughts turn out to occupy the mind of Sebastiao Frias, when he finally settles down in the comfortable gloom of his balcao a little past two in the morning, with moonlight breaking though the rain clouds overhead.

“I think you are probably educated,” he says, peering at me rather doubtfully, “so I don’t have to tell you what bread is, what it means to the people.” Now his eyes start to shine with excitement, “bread is not just food to me, bread is not just money to me, bread is life, man.” The baker sits back with a sigh, “Poder means respectable, honest, trustworthy. We always deliver, we are known for nevercheating. This is what my family tradition means to me -  we have been bakers for more than 300 years!”

The broad-shouldered poder gestured his world to me with his hands – the small hotel he owned in Majorda, the bank account that had grown enough to give him enough interest to live on without having to bother with the odd-hours and endless physical labour of the bakery profession. But, “I was born in this,” he says, with a shrug of acceptance and finality, “and there is no doubt that I feel a big gap in my life when I am way from the bakery, and the smell of my pao.”

‘Te poder gele and te unde gele’ is a pointed Konkani aphorism. “That bread is gone, and the bakers who made it too.’ But while decolonization meant the departure of the Europeans, our cultural landscape has been irrevocably altered.

Can we imagine Andhra food without chilis, or a Bengali culinary landscape without sandesh and rosogollas made from chhana (the cottage cheese preparation introduced by the Portuguese to Bengal)?

Bread is right at the forefront of this cultural exchange – in fact, the original Portuguese word ‘pao’ itself is a amazing cross-over phenomenon, incredibly widespread, and used in every Asian language from Japanese to Marathi.

Without much exaggeration, you could actually read much of modern human history in the spread of these little loaves.

To begin with, they’re made from wheat flour, one of the original grain-bearing grasses that were first cultivated on a large scale in Mesopotamia, and made human civilization possible in the first place. Wheat soon catapulted ahead of the other ancient grains, because it was discovered to have a secret ingredient – gluten.

Though this complex of proteins can be found in oats, barley and rye (and some others), it is found in the highest concentrations in wheat. It is gluten that combines with water to make dough made from wheat flour malleable, and it is precisely this stretchable consistency that is critical to the way that gases are trapped when they’re released by the active yeast in the dough. The result is something like the perfect food: nutritious, easily digestible, highly durable, portable and versatile, bread in all its forms.

But there is a twist, too. You have to take a great deal of trouble and time, and require considerable expertise to bake bread consistently and efficiently. So in every single bread-eating culture, professional bakers emerged quite early, and served the development of this new culinary habit.

Voila, Frenchmen frequent boulangeries to buy their daily baguettes, and Egyptians all troop to get their daily pitas from government-run bakeries, and that is what leads us straight back to Goa’s proliferation of traditional bakeries, and the burgeoning ranks of expert bakers who fanned out across the British and Portuguese colonial possessions all through the 19th century, right up to 1947.

(PART II to follow sometime soon!)

Deep Vanilla

by Jenny White

Gus Rancatori is a Renaissance man who owns an ice cream parlor. Cambridge-based Toscanini’s is a hangout where you’re as likely to run into a Nobel Laureate in chemistry and a molecular foodie as a furniture maker or novelist. One day I met a dapper man with gray hair who had been a physicist at MIT and gave it all up to start a business making high-end marshmallows. Tosci’s staff is memorably pierced and talented. One of the managers, Adam Tessier, is a published poet and essayist who last year filmed a customer a day reading a Shakespeare sonnet. Some scoopers are music majors, hard-core rockers who play for bands with names like Toxic Narcotic. You might receive your khulfee cone from the hands of the next big pop star. Gus Rancatori circulates through the wood-paneled room beneath displays of art, the host at a rotating feast of words, ideas and, above all, ice cream. Gus is discreet, but has some favorite customer stories.

A very famous MIT type used to attempt to pay with his own hand-drawn funny money and then he would launch into a lecture about the symbolic value of money, which I tried to squelch by claiming to remember that class from Freshman Economics.  If you asked to help him, he would say, "I'm beyond help."  When another MIT student found out that I didn't have a computer he offered to give me one, so strong were his evangelic instincts and also, like many of the customers, he was exceptionally generous.

With one hand Gus makes what The New York Times has called "the best ice cream in the world”; the other takes the cultural pulse of the city.

 He has published a mini-memoir, Ice Cream Man, and writes a column for The Atlantic  -- close observations on what we can know about society through ice cream.

Customers! They're so nice. They're so weird. Some of them are so naked. We get a big cross section.  We're near MIT but we're also in Central Square near a housing project. We get people who don't speak English because they're incredibly smart and have come to MIT and we get people who don't speak English because they just snuck into this country. We get people from nominally Spanish-speaking countries who don't speak Spanish. I like to hire people who can speak other languages. It can help in the store. 

We often discuss the customers after a long night and I think most of us would agree that some of the most difficult customers are suburbanites who come into town on weekends or during the summer and are a little lost.  Maybe I'm seeing anxious tourist behavior, but it often seems that adults from the suburbs like to play a little stupid when they're out of their element, "Look at this, honey, they have Saffron ice cream!"  Any customer is capable of asking a question that is not really what they want to ask. "What's in the Goat Cheese Brownie?" really means, "Can I taste the Goat Cheese Brownie?"  A customer once pointed at the chocolate ice cream and asked if it was vanilla.  My playful brother, Joe, said, "Yes.  It is."  The customer thought for a minute and said, "I thought vanilla was white."  My brother feigned surprise and slapped his forehead, "My God. You're right.  That is chocolate."  When customers arrive while we're mopping the floor and all the chairs atop tables, they ask "Are you closed?"  Obviously we're closed, but they want to ask, "Can we still get something?" and if it is at all possible we try to serve them something, but something to go, so we can finish cleaning and go home ourselves. 

Time takes on a cultural dimension in the shop, as people develop a circadian rhythm in which the cosmos aligns with their stomach: I can do this important thing here and only here, now and only now, and I need French Toast to do it.

Some customers are like Japanese trains.  Every morning at 8:45 AM they get a double espresso or every night they come to study and begin with a White Peony tea.  One customer only drank nocciola frappes and when he died suddenly his friends at MIT all came to the store after a memorial service and drank nocciola frappes.  An accountant often arrives just before we stop serving weekend brunch and is upset when we are out of breakfast items. "This is very important to my week.  Why do you always run out of French Toast?" Another was indignant when we asked people to leave after our 11 PM closing. We need to get home, catch a bus or subway, or simply lock the doors to keep any night goblins outside. Many people do not like our policy prohibiting the use of computers for a few hours every week.  People think we are intentionally serving unusual flavors they like when they're not in the store; we make Cocoa Rum Chip every other week, but they only come occasionally.  We try to set aside special flavors for special people, but customers also have "commitment issues" about ice cream flavors.

For the IgNobel Awards, an internationally broadcast spoof of the Nobel Prizes held at Harvard University, Gus developed a new ice cream flavor as homage to the discovery by 2007 IgNobel Chemistry Prize winner, Mayu Yamamoto, that you can extract vanillin from cow dung. (Gus admitted that his recipe for Yum-a-Moto Vanilla Twist did not include poop.)  When I pointed out to Gus that he treats ice cream the way a novelist regards a blank page, he responded,

The idea of ice cream as a blank page might be very appropriate.  I think about many things but it is easy for any idea to slip across the surface of my mind and end up as an ice cream flavor.  Flavors come about from mistakes and misunderstandings.  Ginger Snap Molasses was the result of wordplay.  Steve's Ice Cream made Ginger Molasses and I wanted to get the cookie, the word "snap" and the idea of that snap into the flavor or at least flavor name.  Black Bottom Pie came about while reading a cookbook one morning when I should have been getting to work. Jeremiah Tower, the first chef at Chez Panisse, described a favorite dessert from Alabama and I realized I had all the ingredients but should probably invert everything.  So instead of making a chocolate rum pie with a ginger snap crust, I made a Chocolate Rum ice cream containing pieces of ginger snap cookies.  I have a lot of curiosity and even a food as simple as ice cream can provide a large playing field.

Running rough-and-tumble on the playing field of food, fun, and social analysis, Gus, together with the  anthropologist Merry “Corky” White, puts on a semi-underground annual food film festival that in its execution itself becomes a piece of performance art. Graduate students from Harvard and MIT volunteer their technical and lugging skills. The festival uses scavenged equipment and university rooms opportunistically acquired for that evening’s showing. Sometimes the films are shown in a room repurposed from a small swimming pool, chairs set inside the tiled chin-height walls. While watching the movie, you imagine Harvard men in knee-length bathing suits taking bracing morning constitutionals.

The films are usually accompanied by a speaker reflecting its theme, and Corky, an accomplished cook, makes film-appropriate food. After “Ratatouille”, the animated movie about a rat assisting a young Parisian from beneath his chef’s hat, the food critic Corby Kummer regaled the audience with stories from the field, but what the audience saw was the snooty food critic in the film, to whom Kummer bore a remarkable resemblance. Then Corky served up samples of ratatouille. When Gus and Corky realized the series was attracting a covey of attendees who skipped the movie and came just for the food, the series went even further underground in a game of cat and mouse (or rat) with the film grazers.

Food and drama embrace on screen and off. “The Kings of Pastry” is a documentary that follows three pastry chefs in the grueling competition for France’s most prestigious pastry title. Some of the men broke down under the pressure, their enormous sugar confections toppled, lifelong dreams ground to sugar dust. The audience in the borrowed Harvard room was tense; in the film, the judges were about to announce the winners. Just then there was a commotion at the door; members of the student shooting club claimed to have booked the room and demanded that we surrender it immediately. But we all remained in our seats, eyes glued to the drama on the screen, our noses twitching at the platter of Corky's cream puffs waiting on the table.

What is the secret of this enthusiasm for food -- not just for nurturance, but as a philosophical platform and for “deep play”?

The mysteries of ice cream?  Moving past the maternal link I think the fundamental appeal of ice cream is juvenile.  It is a food you get to play with and is actually improved by that combined stirring-melting spoon business.  As you soften the ice cream it warms.  Cold numbs taste buds so warming up the ice cream actually does make it taste better.  It is the little boy's equivalent of letting wine breathe. 

Playing with your food can be hedonistic and it can be dramatic, fusing our passions in one grand gesture of denial. You cannot have my Dulche de Leche. You may not pass. One customer was mugged when he refused to surrender a pint of ice cream to teenage thieves. And on another occasion the police caught a fleeing thief after first bringing him to heel with a well-aimed Toscanini frappe.

(Photo credit: Merry White)

Read the Label Before You Buy

by Wayne Ferrier

I was driving home from the gym and stopped at the convenience store to grab a power drink, a crunchy snack, and dinner for the cat. I'm being hypothetical here, I don't really work out at the gym, and I rarely buy snacks at the convenience store, but for the sake of this story indulge me please. I looked around at the myriad of choices, not feeling compelled to comparison shop—it's a convenience store remember—so I grabbed what seemed the most appealing and headed to the cash register. What I had chosen was a bottle of POWERADE, COMBOS and a can of FRISKIES Classic Pâté for the cat. Cats are so suave aren’t they? We eat COMBOS and they have pâté. I had skipped dinner so I would have time to go to the gym. I want to be healthy you know. 

Back in the car I tore open the bag and downed a fistful of COMBOS and had a swig of POWERADE. Having gotten my initial fix, I took a moment to glance at the nutritional information that is on the food label. The first ingredients listed on food labels are the primary ingredients in that product. The first two or three are the ones you want to look at closely. Ingredients at the bottom of the list may be in smaller amounts than the first ingredients that are listed.

By now most consumers should be aware of what to look for and what to look out for. Experts have been telling us for years to eat whole grains. But my bag of COMBOS listed Wheat Flour as the first ingredient. That's not whole grain. Well that's to be expected. Maybe this snack food wasn't the best choice to get my daily fiber. So what was the second ingredient? It said Palm Kernel, Palm Oil and/or Hydrogenated Palm Oil.

Hmm, it may or may not have Trans Fat, yet this is the second ingredient. Isn't Hydrogenated Oil supposed to be really bad for you? Doesn’t it supposedly contribute to coronary heart disease and other health problems? And why won't they just tell me if it's in there or not? The third and fourth ingredients are Maltodextrin, and Food Starch-Modified. I don’t know what Food Starch-Modified is but Maltodextrin is supposedly a natural product. It is believed to be more easily metabolized than other kinds of carbohydrates, making it popular with athletes and bodybuilders who want quick energy. It is used as a filler and thickening agent making it a popular ingredient for dieters, because it makes you feel full and therefore you don't eat so much. It also may be good for diabetics who may benefit from Maltodextrin being processed easily by the body, assisting in the regulation of metabolic functions. But that's where the positive info ends and the warning is that in small amounts Maltodextrin is perhaps harmless, maybe even healthy. Long term consumption of Maltodextrin, however, we just don't know for sure. This is not too bad information. I was feeling better.

Moving down the list I saw a host of food dyes including Yellow 5 Lake, Yellow 6 Lake, Red 40 Lake, and Blue 1 Lake. To me consuming food dyes is like playing Russian roulette, the consensus is that we think some may be benign, others we think might be carcinogenic, and many we just don't know very much at all what they might do. I drove home. Curious now, I booted my computer, and logged onto the COMBOS website. This is when I really got concerned, perhaps even a little frightened. Upon entering the site I was greeted with this message:

Find your inner self. Hint: It’s not at the dinner table. Congratulations on your first step towards the Combivore lifestyle, where hearty snacks are always the right choice. Remember being a Combivore isn’t about trendy eating or fad foods, it’s a way of life.

I’m not sure what that means. The way it comes across to me is the company who makes COMBOS knows my inner self, and it ought not to be eating healthy, well balanced meals with my family at the dinner table. My inner self is a brute, a creature whose main diet isn't meat, nor fruits and vegetables. I'm a Combivore, to whom snacks are all that matters. I'm not to pay attention to the latest fads; health fads? Okay, I will admit to you that what was left in the COMBOS bag went straight into the garbage. But what about the POWERADE, that has to be healthy right, with all those electrolytes and all? So here we go. The first ingredient is water. I guess that makes sense. Here’s what was next: High Fructose Corn Syrup, citric acid, and salt. Further down the list are food dyes, namely Blue 1, which is really an intense blue, not like those pale looking colors you see in GATORADE.

I did a quick search on High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) and found that the American Medical Association (AMA) insists that it is no better and no worse than any other commonly used sweeteners. Again I was feeling better. Then I went and checked what Andrew Weil says because I respect his opinion and he is definitely against it. I also checked out Dr. Oz to see what he had to say and he agrees with Weil. The low down is that HFCS is a relatively recent invention and consumption of HFCS in the United States has increased by more than 1,000 percent between 1970 and 1990. HCFS may promote weight gain because it behaves in the body closer to fat than to glucose. According to Weil, there is some evidence to suggest that fructose might disturb the normal function of the liver, and unlike glucose, doesn't seem to trigger the process where our bodies tell us that we are full. Oz further clarifies this by saying that High Fructose Corn Syrup is not recognized by our brains as real food, so we never feel satiated and we keep eating more and more. The result is our blood sugar level keeps rising, and abnormal amounts of insulin are needed to metabolize it, and then we crash and are hungry again. Not recognized by our brains as food!

Oh great! I just ate half a bag of COMBOS with Maltodextrin which gave me the feeling of being full. Then I drank POWERADE, which leaves me feeling perpetually hungry? But what really worries me are those insidious food dyes. They don't draw much attention. I'm no expert, but they really concern me. We really don't know what they are or what they are doing for us or to us. Natural and artificial flavors, Yellow 5, Yellow 6, Red 40, Blue 1, etc. I just don't like the sound of them.

Here's a bit of evolutionary rumination. We evolved to prefer certain nutrients in certain forms. Young primates normally avoid bitter tasting food because many toxic plants contain alkaloids which have a bitter flavor, while sweetness in natural foods is usually an indication of ripe, health-giving fruits and vegetables. Over time adult primates, through trial and error, become savvy consumers knowing which bitter plants are good to eat and which are not. Primitive peoples are often just as discerning about what are good or useful alkaloids from those which are bad and dangerous. Even in modern society drinking coffee, tea, beer, and eating spicy foods and bland vegetables are acquired tastes.

But many food manufactures, it seems, are colluding to keep us perpetually naive, bombarding us with mega amounts of sweeteners and easily digestible carbohydrates. Why sit at the dinner table eating healthy food, which takes time to digest, when you can get what you want quick and cheap at the convenience store? Unfortunately these perpetually available sweets and carbs are also loaded with other man-made substances, which we know very little about. 

Rats cannot vomit. That’s a weird fact but true. When a rat eats something it has to digest it, it cannot throw it up. A rat encountering an unfamiliar flavor the first time will nibble then walk away. After a number of hours if it doesn’t get sick, the rat might return and finish its meal. The rat does this to see if what it is eating is poisonous. Manufacturers of rat poison have to make their products appealing to rats yet not be so toxic so that the rat comes back for seconds or so toxic it gets them on the first nibble.

In humans smell and taste might have evolved to give us the ability to identify good food from poison. If it is acidic the food might be spoiled, if it is bitter it could be potentially toxic. Carbohydrates and other simple sugars provide quick energy for primates on the go. Associating sweetness with energy may be behind our present addiction to processed food. Food that was once hard to find is now overly abundant and the rule of nature is that too much of a good thing can be harmful, even dangerous. The very definition of pollution is too high of a concentration of anything. Our supermarkets are cesspools of too much of what we crave. Abundant sources of easily digestible carbs are difficult to find in nature, salt is equally scarce. Food manufacturers have caught on to this and create processed food with the right combination of the goods we want: salt, sugar, fat, etc. The food doesn’t even have to taste good; if the right combination is there people will buy it and consume it.

And that can of FRISKIES? Just for the shock value I would love to tell you that it beats human food hands down but I can't. The ingredients in that can of FRISKIES Classic Pâté are Meat By-Products, artificial and natural flavors, and the omnipresent food dyes are there too. Nobody really knows what Meat By-Products are except the manufacturer. To conjure up images of what Meat-By Products are exactly sounds too much like a horror flick to me, so I'll leave it at that. 

We are a society that is caught in the middle of a battle between exploitative marketing and a raging health-kick movement. I am constantly being reminded of the dangers of cancer, cardiovascular disease, stroke, and diabetes. I see the word “cancer” mentioned dozens of times per day on television, in newspapers, magazines, on the Internet—every form of media. Even my Facebook friends are constantly posting warnings and reminders of these maladies and asking me to post them too. Eventually one of these killers is going to get me, but preferably later than sooner. The fear and threat of cancer, heart attack, stroke, and diabetes is fed to me so many times a week I just can't get them out of my head. I really think we need a break from it as it seems that's all we think about these days! We've really become quite a paranoid culture.

Yet a quick trip to the supermarket reveals that there are still a lot of companies out there that have resisted changing the quality of the ingredients in their products. Other companies are bent on fooling us, making us think that their products are healthier when they are really not. Read the labels please, and then don't worry so much about the dangers. I already know the dangers. If a company is making crap why don't we just stop buying it? And if we're not sure what an ingredient is then let us take a lesson from the rats. Wait until the verdict is in, scientific investigations conclusive, and meanwhile choose something else on the way to the cash register.

The don of Pérignon

A year ago (February 2010) I met, in Lagos, Nigeria, Pascal Pecriaux, “Ambassador” for French champagne brand Moët & Chandon. The profile below provides insight into Pecriaux’s life – in and out of wine-tasting – and the Nigerian obsession with champagne. Nigeria ‘discovered’ champagne in commercial quantities (by importation, of course) following the oil boom of the 1970s (starting in 1973/74 and lasting much of the decade). The love affair has continued to this day. Time Magazine reports that the coup-plotters who murdered Nigerian Head of State, Murtala Mohammed, on February 13, 1976, "apparently made their move after an all-night champagne party."

I wrote this piece not long after meeting Pecriaux:

By Tolu Ogunlesi

On a Friday afternoon at the Lagos Sheraton, a group of people are gathered in one of the banquet rooms. Most are Sheraton staff – waiters and waitresses. There are also a few journalists, like me. We are all waiting for Pascal Pecriaux.

Pecriaux is a “Wine Ambassador” who has flown all the way from the village of Champagne in France, to spread the gospel of Moët to a Nigerian audience. By the time he steps into the room, two hours behind schedule, we are not the only ones waiting for him. Rows of empty champagne flutes line the tables in front of us, and half a dozen or so bottles peek from ice-boxes at the far end of the room.

Moët is one of the most easily recognizable badges of honour flaunted by Nigeria’s elite, especially its young upwardly mobile class. If the frequency of its appearance in the lyrics of Nigerian hiphop songs and in music videos is anything to go by, Marc Wozniak, Deputy General Manager of the Lagos Sheraton, is absolutely right when he says that Moët is “the most common and most well-known champagne in Nigeria.” David Hourdry, Moët Hennessy’s Market Manager for Western Africa says that “Nigeria is today the biggest market for Moët & Chandon in all Africa.”

In his heavily accented English Pecriaux encourages us to ask questions. “I really can be boring,” he quips. But his job, which he describes as travelling around the world “to taste our champagne and to talk”, is certainly not boring. In the last decade he has visited 60 countries.

Pecriaux has worked with Moët & Chandon since 1978, when, over a one-month period, he “changed everything” – moved homes, got married and changed jobs (his old job was as an internal auditor at Unilever). Around that time he even started to grow a moustache as well (his wife took ill, and he settled on the idea of a moustache to amuse her). “But at the time the moustache was brown. Now it is white,” he quickly reminds me. Unlike the moustache, however, I doubt that the bald patch atop his head is a personal choice.

Travelling the world tasting and talking champagne has given him tremendous insight into patterns of human behaviour across the world. He is dismayed by consumers who, because of inexperience, “consider champagne [merely] as a drink of pleasure and of celebration, and [thus] pay less attention to the complexity of the wine and the fact that it is wine.” Such consumers, he says, are only interested in consuming champagne because it is “something fashionable and expensive, which can be replaced by any other fashionable thing.”

The Russians were like that at first, he says. On his first trip to that country (which, before his first trip there, hadn’t hosted a “champagne training” since the Russian revolution in 1917), he observed that “[they] were not really interested in quality, they were interested in brands, in spending as much money as possible on what they consumed.”

But things soon changed, the inexperience increasingly giving way to a sophisticated appreciation. On a return visit, two years later, “people were really asking questions… very precise and sometimes tricky questions.” He likens the Nigerian market to the Russian one, and foresees a similar transformation happening here. “I think that affluent Nigerians who enjoy Moët are also people who travel abroad, who meet foreigners, so are exposed to other experiences. Naturally they become more demanding and they try to understand the pleasure they have.”

If he hadn’t become a Moët Ambassador, what else would he have been? “[A] hermit,” he says, straight-faced. “The pleasure which I have with [Moët] probably cannot be replaced with something else.” Possibly not even his love for hot-air ballooning.

Pecriaux takes literature as seriously as his wines. “Mainly French classical literature,” he explains. “My best friend is a writer of the French renaissance of the 16^th century, Michael du Montaigne, he wrote one big book which I’ve read maybe four times or five times.” His post-retirement reading list is intimidating: Balzac, Stendhal and Proust. “I made the choice a long time ago, with a few exceptions, to read dead authors, because then there’s a natural selection… [the] selection is made by time. If after two centuries a writer is still printed, he’s still talked about; maybe this means he’s worth reading.”

This trip is his first to Lagos, and he’s loved every bit of it. He says it reminds him of his year-long stay in Ivory Coast in the early 1970s, on French military service. “It was my first experience of another culture; I’m still marked by it. I still feel it, it was a great experience. It’s the Africa I love, and I found elements of it [in Lagos].”

When he retires, in a few months, it’ll be to “take care of my cellar, drink my wines instead of drinking my employer’s wines, read my books, take care of my garden, settle down and travel for my own pleasure.”

Making Moët

Moët is manufactured from three different varieties of grapes: Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier and Chardonnay. “What really matters is the raw material,” says Pecriaux. He explains that the wine-making process can only “maintain / magnify” the innate qualities of the grapes.

The grapes must possess “very specific characteristics”, conferred by the weather – which varies from year to year. One important quality the grapes must possess to make the final cut is that they must be “just ripe”. Coming a close second to the quality and character of the grapes is the wine-making process (“Méthode Champenoise”).

At harvest, the grapes are picked by a band of 3,000 “pickers” employed by Moët & Chandon. Picking is done only by hand. The grapes are then taken in small baskets to processing centers (the company currently has six of those). Everything possible is done to avoid damage to the grapes. At the processing centers the grapes are crushed gently, so gently that only 2,500 litres of wine is taken from 4,000 kg of fruit; and each batch of wine is transferred into a giant stainless steel vat. (The company has 700 of those vats). 

The choice of stainless steel is to help minimize the risk of oxidation of the wine. With the juice sitting in the vats, waiting patiently to be turned into wine, Moët’s secret practices are ready to commence. The wine house has its own secret strains of yeast (“yeast that respects the aromas coming from the grapes”) to facilitate the fermentation process.

Following this is the blending process, where batches (from different vats, and even different years) are combined by a team of 11 “winemakers”. The blending is done in a giant vat (6,000 hectolitre capacity). When full the vat will contain hundreds of thousands of bubbles.

The wine is then transferred into bottles. Special strains of yeast, as well as rock sugar, are added to the bottles, which are sealed with crown-corks. A second round of fermentation, which may last weeks, takes place in the bottles. The wine-making process is deemed completed only at the discretion of the “Master Blender”.

After the secondary fermentation, impurities are expelled from the bottles by a special freezing technique, sugar is added, and the bottles are corked, and labelled. The world’s leading champagne, and one of its finest luxury brands, is born.

*

'Pop Something' (below), by Nigerian dentist-turned-hiphop-musician, Dr. Sid, is one of the country's best known Champagne-Anthems. Yahoozee, another of those anthems, proclaims a manifesto of "Champagne Hennessy Moët for everybody." The Moët brand is a too-conspicuous feature in the song's video. Yahoozee, a shameless celebration of the art - and rewards - of email scamming, and the cash-suffused lives of its youthful practitioners, is the song which famously got former US Secretary of State, Colin Powell dancing, at the ThisDay Music and Fashion Festival in London in 2008. (None of the blame should go to Mr. Powell though; he could not have been expected to understand the lyrics, which are a mixture of Yoruba, pidgin English and urban Nigerian slang.)

  

New York, at the moment

David Schneider

Last Sunday, April 4, Spring came to New York City. Sixty-two degrees it was, and calm in the bright sun of a cloudless sky. The city had been waiting.

The winter seemed unusually brutal and long. As late as March we got mugged by the winds Chicago-style – sucker-punched from the northeast, a roundhouse kick to the southwest quadrant, then a blow to the kidneys and thrown into traffic. The winter was long. But the city was waiting.

Rites were given: the cruellest month, 1968. No, the City said, the greatest respect that can now be paid is called celebration, and forward. Miniskirts and boots, scarves sun-yellow and lollypop red, out the door on the long stroll and the City was again a New Thing.

In the East Village, across 3rd Avenue from the regal brown bulk of the Cooper Union on Astor Place (where Lincoln and Rushdie have spoken) a new extension of Arts and Sciences is rising: titanium cladding on the north, glass-frame on the south, and a delicious titanium wave cascading down four storeys: its form says, We'll surf this. It adds a dangerous excitement to the new skyline of the Bowery, where a white sail of a condo rises. Behind it, the textured white boxes of the New Museum totter like blocks stacked by Modernism's gargantuan infant.

At Lincoln Center, the new Alice Tully Hall is a clean, white, graceful dagger of 21st-century elegance, angling its excellence to a fine point: the classical performing arts yet have a home in this new era; "In this silicon world, art remains organic," the Alice Tully Hall says with its soaring wood interiors. Is it unfortunate, or symbolically meaningful, that its broad, 30-foot-tall windows look out upon, and reflect, ugly '70s tower blocks and bland '80s condos? What does it say about this Temple of the Performing Arts erected on a razed block of Puerto-Rican tenements where West Side Story was sourced? 

Yes, the East Village as you've known it is almost all gone: Kim's Video AboveGround on St. Mark's – where it moved after being rent-wrested from its subterranean West Village haunt – is boarded up. The greatest pillar of eccentric, curatorially-defined, independent video/music emporia is no more. The Holiday Cocktail Lounge, one of New York's classic dive bars, is on its last legs, with owner Stefan Lutak in his 90s and suffering from health problems. I don't know how much longer I'll be able to nurse a beer in a darkened corner booth, on cushions held together with duct tape, while reading Walter Benjamin to the purple light of neon beer ads, overhearing a punk-rock guitarist debate politics with an art-history professor. 

Love Saves the Day, on 2nd Avenue, known as the place where Madonna goes to trade in her jacket in "Desperately Seeking Susan," closed in January. It fills me with heartbreak. It was a happy bedlam of kitsch, pop culture, antique clothes and old Playboy magazines – a retail archive of American popular culture, and a total playground for anyone who was a kid between 1950 and 1995. Star Wars figurines and The Simpsons family, Barbies primping astride a herd of My Little Ponies and a starting-line of Matchbox and HotWheels cars – fake poop, Mexican finger traps, crenoline ballgowns from the '50s, leather jackets from the '70s, jester hats, fedoras, Garbage Pail Kids, and vintage copies of Penthouse all razzed each other from parts of the shambly scrum.

Even when the New York City winters were a-bleedin' me, I knew what to do: head down 2nd Avenue, overcoat collar turned up against the snow, and look ahead: right there, in Day-Glo '60s bubble-letters, was the sign beaming out in the dun sky, the sign you need to read, comforting you that yes, Love Saves the Day.

Simon & Garfunkel knew: the words of the prophets are written on subway walls. This winter, the 86th Street 4/5/6 said:

Hey, New York: fill 'er up, please, and check under the hood. While you're at it, can you you make sure the headlights are aimed properly? We need both high- and low-beams if we're going to drive this dark twisty wood of middle-life; the potholes are hell. I know that we're all lined up in the Self-Service lane, but buddy– can you spare a technician or two?

Prophets may be scrawling underground, but the visionaries are scattered from the lowest tunnels to the highest billboards. POST NO BILLS? What are we, Communists? Savvy New Yorkers know the City is a Language – its accents, dialects and mannerisms voiced not just from a billionaire Bloomberg and a bodega cashier but by the names of the stores and the advertisements everywhere. The ancients had tea leaves; we have construction sites, plywood walls and restaurant façades to tell our futures. But you have to know where to look.

In October and November, 2008, Microsoft bought up the entirety of the Grand Central subway corridor leading to the Times Square Shuttle, and plastered its walls and columns with Windows logos and a green gallery of unsung heroes all creating a chorus of "I'm a PC!" in a weird fanfare for the common man, voiced in the weary shuffles and trudges of the office-bound. But then you'd step in the Times Square Shuttle: and you were transported – back to a grand 1950's office lobby with marble floors, wood accents, and Modernist chandeliers with brass sconces – in an omnidirectional promotion for HBO's "Mad Men" that encompassed the complete interior of each subway car. 

You could read something in that.

In deepest, darkest January, I shlepped that path again. This time – BAM! A sunburst of yellow, a tunnel of smiling light, advertising (of all things) Western Union. They'd called up the 411: gone was their legendary "crisis" advertising. Instead they concentrated on your sense of empowerment and relief when you got the money you wired for. Two-dozen sun-yellow poster-ads, half of them scoped from your right eye, half from your left, exclaiming YES! YES! YES! all the way to the train. Molly Bloom couldn't have thunk it better.

Inside the Shuttle car, Pepsi had taken over. That leaked (and faked?) PDF for Pepsi's redesigned logo, in its orgy of metaphysical and quantum-mechanical hokum, seemed designed to throw the wool-eyes over a simple headsmack fact: its circle was merely a funked-up volley off Obama's campaign logo, turning that frown upside down.

"Optimism," the candy-colored strips of blue, yellow, red, and orange sang out above your transiting head, "Yes you can!" "Together," "One for all," "Let's refresh America."

Now you and I, as savvy mental travelers in New York's neurons, will not get off at Times Square, where the great Maw of America threatens to devour us in a sea of Red Lobsters, a zone of ESPNs, an industrial farm of old McDonald's, an angry hive of Applebee's and an epileptic blizzard of LEDs. Sure, you may think you can read the news here, but the Zipper will leave you huddling naked with fear, only to be unctuously bling'd by big boxes that put you in small ones.

No, let's go to Union Square, where some smart slender boxes are going up on the western face. Here's  where we fear, with Circuit City gone and the Virgin Megastore bailing in June, that all will head south if Wal-Mart's Great Eye is focused upon that block, as we suspect. But we're okay for the moment – cutting through the park I spy Mr. Wendel, grizzled and toothless, who's puttin' on the Ritz  with a silver top-hat, mirror-shades, a yellow-and-gold sequined dress, and a black tuxedo vest with beer-tab brocade. 

"I want money for that," he growls as I snap his photo.
"Well, I can give you fame," I say.
"To hell with fame," he says, "I want some money."

He's surprised I recognize his name. I tell him I'm three feet high and rising, too.

"Ev'rybody asks me why I dress like this," he says. "People got no sense of fashion any more. Th'girls're practically naked."

I tell him I'm all right with that.

"Trees are getting their clothes on," he says, looking up to the budding branches. I smile.

Down in the Union Square plaza, on the north end, a European-style café will soon occupy the arch where amblers rested and skateboards skipped. I suppose that isn't too bad, with the weekend green market creating a nice fluidity of purpose. On the southern end, the artists, man, they're getting down to some serious work. A year ago, nothing but commercial tat and tourist trophies. Now look.

There's even a guy making three-string guitars out of lacquered and polished cigarette boxes.

On the way across the street, we catch the conversation between two men in khakis and striped button-downs. "Yeah, he was saying that only poor people use debit cards." There it goes again: the black dog panting, the cymbal crash, the culture clash, the ripping threads.

"Oh Oracles of Madison Avenue," we genuflect northward, "Suns of the south have given us heatstroke. Bring us a breeze, o thou cool heads of Mad Men." We wander through the East Village. To

Oh yeah. We're grooving on the Matrix, jockeying that code. Yeah, we're thirsty for it. So we head down to the Lower East Side, and Clinton Street. First colonized by WD-50, that pod of molecular gastronomy, Clinton Street is now after a fashion. A lot of them, in fact. Japanese threads are lining the way, with Madame Killer, a terrific shop of Japanglish get-ups and deck-outs. In another, more upscale boutique, the managers apparently realized that their wares were so choice, their ambience so exquisite, that poorer-than-thine-pricetag sorts would want to embrace their brand too. So I bought this book at the counter.

That's an independently published book of poetry and collage (I note influences of Eliot, Ferlinghetti and e.e. cummings in the verse). Here are two important things that bring us passion right now: text || image; renewed language || mashed-up culture. It's a rare find, a limited edition, and all of $12. Less than half the cost of a glossy next-new-thing at Borders, and better, too, because it hasn't been hounded to death by editors and marketers. I'm broke, but there are some things you just can't resist.

On the corner of Clinton and Stanton, I was sad to note the departure of the scruffy coffee/bar Lotus, with its bookshelves and cheap Pabst. In its place, though, stands Donnybrook, a smart-looking pub that represents the new, modern Dublin: crisp slabs of marble for the bar top, lime-green leather accents upholstered with brass, rough-hewn wood tables – the ideal fusion of contemporary and traditional, without resorting to the clichés of the Irish Pub Company that have been boring our urban centers for 18 years now.

It's empty this afternoon, with a guy in the corner tapping on a laptop; on the t.v., Abruzzo quietly misses a goal. "We need a hangover cure," I say to the barmaid, "and not a Bloody Mary: something clear and light."

"I've got just the thing for you," she says with a brogue.

"What's in it?" I ask.

"Trade secret. All I can say is that it has bitters and soda."

It's fizzy and coral-colored, it's lightly sweet and slightly floral, like Spring. The hangover's gone in five sips. So we opt for some greater complexity at Schiller's Liquor Bar. This mural's across the street:

Yes, New York is of the moment. No, Pollyanna ain't my wife; I'm broke, folks, circling the drain. Shuysters, hucksters, flakes and fiends are curdling in the alleys. At a recent Midtown wedding, I learned that the bride had just been laid off. Back in my South Bronx 'hood, we pass by two Hispanic guys in their forties outside a bodega. One's saying to the other, "Seventeen theaters just closed. There's nothing out there, man, nothing." But then we walk down Alexander Avenue, where a few antique stores hold on by their fingernails. We stop at one, shyly named The Antique, and stare with amazement.

In the window, there's an antique map representing the very first days of  New Amsterdam colony on Mannahatta. At that moment, the shutters roll up and a door is opened. Inside, it's like the Library of Alexandria's been rebuilt in a studio apartment. All the archaic centuries, from every corner of the globe, are represented. Infinite riches in a little room? Hey Dr. Faustus, try this on for size. The owner can't be stopped – he's purling out his entire catalogue in a fluid, rolling baritone. There's a vast, 18th-century lithograph imagining the Temple of Solomon, a Life of Wellington published in 1814, a coffee-table book on the Medicis the size of a coffee table, a Victorian compendium of Byron, African histories, a 1769 edition of Plutarch's Lives, a Life magazine with the March on Selma. "I've got a stall outside Columbia every Tuesday and Thursday," he says.

"You know," I remark, "I've walked down this street a dozen times. I never knew there was a bookstore here; 'The Antique' makes me think this is just furniture and bric-a-brac."

He says, "You're right. We're going to get someone in here to change the sign next week."

•••

That was Sunday. On Monday, the weather turned round: gusty Novemberish, rainy, and a baROOM of thunder.

The thunder said: your sun day was my gift to you, o Visionaries. It is a vision of a future that does not yet exist. It is but to whet your appetite. Build it, and it will come. Give, sympathize, control.

This wasn't just another manic Monday. Yes, some lingered, grutching the theft of their robins. But for the rest, it was as if the entire city raised its voice, and in a hundred-fifty languages gave a rousing toast: "To work!" The spirit of the City is back, its relentless competitive drive aroused to experimentation, quality, distinctiveness. Get the customer, keep the customer. Even the sandwich-makers are making tastier sandwiches. Calls for marketers and writers streamed over CraigsList – the competition's Hobbesian brutal, no doubt, as veteran journalists outnumber each ad 10-to-1, but as the papers fold, businesses insist, "We need Information! Analysis! Someone please tell us what's going on!" Marvin Gaye can only ask the question, and the grapevine's fermenting piss and vinegar.

Doctored a press release. Jammed out for data entry and strategy session with a filmmaker. Stopped into a lush lounge called Simone for a white russian to calm my nerves. Overheard a PR girl talking manically to a filmmaking guy about collaborations. 6 Train home with the rustlings of the Doom Times, drop into the bodega looking beat, there's an immense thug with a full-on Mr. T mohawk, bling scarved around his linebacker neck, black Enyce jacket thrown over a chest as wide as a Mack Truck grille.

"Man, it's rough out there," I say, grabbing a Campbell's Chunky for dinner.

"What's your game?" the thug asks.

"I'm a writer," I say.

"Man, we gotta talk. I rap, I act, I'm a comedian. Here's my card." Long Run Entertainment, it reads. Stay Fresh Productions. Caviar Dreams, CEO.

Oh yeah, man.

"Damn, I like this place," Caviar says to the Iranian behind the counter, "You got a good shop here. Lots of good people in here."

I return home, to a postcard on my wall.

This is a sampler box of my Information. This is my gift to you, Gotham. But as Derrida wrote in Given Time: Counterfeit Money, the gift "is an impossibility" – any day now, the moral obligation or monetary bill will come due. O city city, unreal city, don't default on the credit I've given you. There's one Chairman of the Board who knew what he was talking about. He said, start spreading the news. And then he said,

It's up to you,
NEW
York
New
York.

Critical Digressions: Dispatch from Cambridge (or Notes on Deconstructing Chicken)

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,

After sojourning in Tuscany and Karachi for the summer, we have returned to the East Coast, to Cambridge, for the fall. Upon arrival, we spent the afternoon under the pigeon infested trees outside Au Bon Pain, leafing through the Boston Phoenix and the Weekly Dig. We overheard a woman in a white summer hat remark, “If the weather were always like this, Boston would the most popular city in the world.” Although her premise is tenuous, on days like these, there’s a sense of occasion here, an almost pagan celebration of nature. Lucid, incandescent skies had brought the denizens of Cambridge out in their Sunday best. We observed pale, lanky limbed academics in revealing skirts; teenage punks in torn leather and grimy boots; and fresh-of-the-boat families sporting tight pants and fanny packs, gawking at the spectacle: old men playing chess for money, bold panhandlers soliciting funds, the jazz band strumming “Take Five” in the Pit.

Although we participated in the festivity, come evening our vigor waned and we felt hungry. We realized, however, that our options were limited: Harvard Square may be a melting pot but it offers lackluster ethnic dining, whether Chinese, Indonesian, Italian, Indian or Arab. (To be fair, there are two exceptions: Smile Café’s chicken larb is excellent and the menu of the Tibetan place in Central Square features this delicious minced meat and turnip dish.) And suddenly, we felt pangs of nostalgia – nostalgia for nihari, for Karachi.

In Ha Jin’s next novel, the protagonist is a poet, a Chinese immigrant to America. In one of his poems, he writes about the handful of the dirt from his backyard that he carries around with him in his portmanteau. In a way, the poem and sentiment is a response to Cavafy’s “The City”:

You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore;
Find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
And my heart lies buried like something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I look, I see the black ruins of my life, here,
Where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”

You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
The city will always pursue you.
You’ll walk the same streets, grow old In the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses.
You’ll end up in the city.
Don’t hope for things elsewhere:
There’s no ship for you, there’s no road.
Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,
You’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.

Home might mean a few hundred circumscribed square yards to many; dirt. It might mean a bed to others - a threadbare chair, a red wheelbarrow; it might have to do with family and nation and tradition, with shared history, collective memory; it might be an idea; or it just might be a filet. Indeed, there is substance to the adage, “You are what you eat.” We may not carry dirt around but when traveling from Pakistan, we do carry carefully wrapped cellophane packets of various powdered spices in our suitcase. Wherever we are in the world, then, we can feed and nourish our self; wherever we are in the world, we can feel at home.

In It Must be Something I Ate, Vogue’s food critic, Jeffrey Steingarten maintains that “In all of Nature’s Kingdom, only mammals, female mammals, nourish their young by giving up part of their bodies. For us, food is not just dinner. Our attitude toward food mirrors our feelings about mothers and nurturing, about giving and sharing, about tradition and community…” We agree. Being Pakistani, we associate savian with Eid, korma with weddings, mangoes with summer. Furthermore, those who fancy themselves cosmopolitan, boulvadiers, men of the world, associate dining with culture, even civilization. They have sushi at Nobu, truffles at Da Silvano, lamb chops at the Grammercy Tavern.

Simply put, food defines us as we define food. The Guardian’s Lisa Hamilton avers, “Frankly, I’ve never had good sex with a vegetarian. I like men who eat properly, who like their steak bloody, their eggs Benedict runny. Fastidiousness is as unappealing in the kitchen as it is in the bedroom; there’s something emasculated about a man who let’s himself be faced down by escargot. Logically, someone as obsessed b the food/sex correlation as I am would select lovers accordingly; but as with crème brulee, I never quite had the discipline to resist what I knew would turn out badly (hence the vegetarian. He had little round glasses and did yoga. Really.) However, experience did prove that whether or not a man knows his artichoke from his elbow, when it comes to cooking, if not to sex, the clichés of national stereotypes hold true.” We’re not sure if Ms. Hamilton ever got it on with a Pakistani. Rest assured, we are carnivores. We make meat.

The following is a proprietary recipe for a dish we call (and have presently coined) Killer Karahi Masala:

Ingredients (and other materials)
1 chicken (or a packet of drumsticks and filets)
2 large onions, chopped
1/3 cup of vegetable oil
10 dried red chili peppers
1 teaspoon of salt
1 teaspoon of red chili powder
1 teaspoon of garam masala (available at any Pakistani grocery store)
1 teaspoon of coriander powder
2 large tomatoes, diced
1/2 teaspoons of garlic paste
1/2 teaspoons of ginger paste
1 clove of garlic, chopped
1 thing of ginger, chopped
One of those plastic lemon things with lemon juice inside it
1 Corona
1 Dunhill
“Carlito’s Way” Soundtrack (not the original score)

Instructions:
Close your eyes. Summon primal hunger. (You cook better when hungry.) Play first track on CD, Rozalla’s “I Love Music.” Pour oil into a casserole with diced onions and dried red chili peppers and turn up the heat. Strip and wash chicken. When onions become translucent, add chicken. (Wash your hands.) This should be around the time of KC and the Sunshine Band’s “That’s the Way I like It.” Add salt, red chili powder, coriander powder, garam masala, garlic and ginger paste. Throw in a diced tomato. Stir together and cook for half an hour on medium heat. Keep stirring. Then add chopped garlic and ginger. Have Dunhill, drink Corona; celebrate, you’re almost done. Fifteen minutes later, add the second diced tomato and squeeze the lemon thing over the dish as a sort of garnish. Serve hot (with tortillas as chapati proxies). “You Are So Beautiful” should be winding down in the background.

In our depleted state, however, we couldn’t venture to Broadway Market for groceries. We didn’t have it in us to make Killer Karahi Masala, or even a runny eggs Benedict. We somnambulated to Pinocchio’s for a steak-and-cheese and then, in this small corner, slept, full but incomplete.

Other Critical Digressions:
Gangbanging and Notions of the Self
The Media Generation and Nazia Hassan
The Naipaulian Imperative and the Phenomenon of the Post-National
Dispatch from Karachi
Live 8 at Sandspit
Chianti and History

The raw-food diet

From The Independent:

There was a time when only hippies and health fanatics would consider living on raw food. No more. A raw-food revolution is under way - and celebs are leading the way. Uma Thurman, Natalie Portman and Alicia Silverstone have all been eating uncooked food in the name of optimum health. Woody Harrelson went so far as to publish a 400-page tome on Living Cuisine. But then, the beautiful people, I suspect, were beautiful and shiny haired before they gave up ovens. What could raw foods do for me? I decided to give my oven a rest for a week, to see if I can catch any symptoms of glamour and gorgeousness. 

One week later...

My blood pressure is up to 110/70 but this is probably just because I have been rushing around in the heat. But I have lost weight. Two kilos, which is five pounds, which is almost half a stone. In just one week. No sign of celebrity gorgeousness yet, but maybe that will come. Perhaps raw is the way forward.

More here.

Critical Digressions: Dispatch from Karachi

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,

We have touched down in Karachi and are reacquainting ourselves with the city through rituals that we religiously repeat every six months: in the afternoon, we get into our ‘97 Corolla, turn up the AC, turn on FM 89 (that plays Duran Duran's "Wild Boys" and "Taste of Summer" back to back with Nazia Hassan and our new generations of rockers, Noori, EP and Jal), pick up a copy of the Friday Times from our man at PIDC (who asks us how we've been and inquires about the political climate in the US), drop our dry-cleaning at the Pearl, get a shave and olive oil massage at Clippers (where we are informed of the reflexology treatment that they have recently introduced), get a beer for the road at the Korean restaurant (which nestles between our legs), and then by the evening, meander through Saddar, passed paan-wallahs, underwear-wallahs, open-air gyms, tea houses, Empress Market, the Karachi Goan Association building, to get a shirt altered, buy some DVDs (Carlito’s Way, Aurat Raj and Disco Dancer), and have fresh falsa juice as the sun warms our back and the sea breeze wafts through the city, portending the monsoon. On Thursday nights we will attend qawwalis at moonlit tombs of saints, on Friday nights we will attend the rollicking Fez disco at the Sind Club, on Saturdays, head to Burns Road for a plate of killer nihari (a hot, soupy dish prepared with calves' calves), and on Sunday, chat with old friends over Famous Grouse and Dunhills about the way things are and will be. Here, we are ourselves and we are alive.

William Dalrymple, however, an insightful commentator on India, writes, "Karachi is the saddest of cities...a South Asian Beirut." The analogy, of course, is incorrect. Looking at a map of Karachi he writes, "The pink zone in the east is dominated by the Karachi drug mafia; the red zone to the west indicates the area noted for the sophistication of its kidnapping and extortion rackets; the green zone to the south is the preserve of those specializing in sectarian violence." Ladies and gentlemen, we have lived in Karachi and can tell you with great certainty that this take on Karachi is facile. It is as if we were passing through New York in the early '90s and were to comment: New York is today’s Sodom. Down Atlantic Avenue, across Brooklyn, in areas such as Bedford-Stuyvesant, Bushwick, and Brownsville, gang warfare and the crack epidemic have transformed traditionally middle-class cantons into a no-man’s land. Bullet holes and crushed needles mark and mar desolate facades and streets. But urban decay is not simply a peripheral phenomenon. In Manhattan, whether north or south, Harlem and Manhattan Alley or Hell’s Kitchen and the Bowery, ethnic warfare plays out on the streets: Blacks, Hispanics, Irishmen, Italians, Chinese pitted against each other, daggers drawn.

Dalrymple has written a number of brilliant books on India (and lives there) but neither his view on Karachi nor ours of New York is complete and consequently, is inaccurate. There is more to New York than bullets and needles. But Karachi gets short shrift: outside observers are able to reduce Karachi to a few facts and artifacts. Since we don’t control our own discourse, others are able define, in fact, redefine the city, see what they want to see. Take Tim McGirk’s ludicrous article in Time in which he perceived Karachi through the eyes of a “hit-man.” That’s like perceiving Los Angeles through the eyes of a 7th Street Crip! This variety of analysis is not only poor but wrong. Karachi’s murder rate, in fact, is at par with Delhi’s (and DC's). And in Bombay, mobsters not only run the movie industry but become politicians and politicians stir murder and champion rape! Of course, Bombay is not merely the sum of squalid facts. Neither are other megacities like Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Lagos and Jakarta (even Lahore), although they share many similar problems.

The problem with reportage is not simply one of dominant discourse but of the news infrastructure in this part of the world. Unlike other cities, Karachi (and indeed all of Pakistan), is typically covered from another country: the South Asian bureaus of major newspapers are based in Delhi. Naturally, then, the worldview of reporters like Barry Bearak, Celia Dugger, David Rhode and Amy Waldman (all of whom, incidentally, can't hold a candle to the knoweldgeable Dalrymple) are colored by local prejudice. On the other hand, former US Consul General John Bauman, an insider – somebody who has lived in Karachi for many years, not just passing through on a ten day junket – says “there are so many good things being done in this city. The city is a lot more complex than the single image people get in the United States.”

Take our word for it: Karachi is wonderfully vibrant. There are dimensions of Karachi not often appreciated by outside observers (foreign reporters and disgruntled expatriates alike): Karachi's vibrant cultural life comprises open-air pop concerts, classical dance shows, art exhibits, independent film festivals and coffee houses; there is great dining, street-side or indoors, and a throbbing nightlife. Karachi is very similar to New York; the same frenetic rhythms beat under our feet.

Cheap Chow Now!

Robert Sietsema writes in The Village Voice:

You've probably never heard of most of these places, sprinkled throughout the five boroughs and Jersey, and distributed among three dozen different cuisines. That's because they haven't hired publicists—those seminal restaurant world figures who make sure that 1 percent of the restaurants receive 99 percent of the coverage. And, by the way: They'd love to see you spend $50 every night for dinner.

For our fifth annual 100 Best, we return to the format of the very first year: absurdly cheap eateries where you can down a humongous meal, often for $5 or less. Think of this as restaurant affirmative action. Ethnicities that have been redlined by other publications are here included and afforded their proper respect. You'll find Haitian restaurants and African spots, Fujianese steam table joints and Egyptian hookah parlors, halal places and kosher dives, ancient coffee shops that still concoct stunning egg creams, and self-effacing specializers in dumplings and bureks and hand-forged noodles, made fresh daily. There are fusty old nuggets like Flushing's Everbest [#45], and shiny new places like Bay Ridge's Damascus Gate [#21]. Some I've mentioned before; many are appearing for the first time, the result of three solid months of bushwhacking the boroughs, sometimes inspecting a dozen places in a wild ride of an afternoon, steering with one hand while fumbling like Harry Potter in my book of clues with the other. Thank you, tipsters, bloggers, and bulletin boardists! And bless you, obscure publications picked up in ethnic groceries!

More here.

Chianti & History

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,

Come summer, we escape Cambridge for points East and despite our poverty, find ourselves in Italy. Here, we do as the Romans do: during the day, we sprawl at piazzas in the shadows of mighty edifices, and at night, prowl the streets, like the progeny of the wolf-suckled. And soon, we will meander through the undulating gold and olive hued Tuscan countryside, drunk on fresh warm Chianti from roadside enotecas, and on the periphery of Montepulciano, will find our kinsman's villa where we will drink more, eat more and revel for a fortnight. Then we will head further east on a cheap ticket that includes a long layover in Amman, before arriving at our final destination, Karachi.

Sipping wine in the shadow of the edifice of history, we have mused that the next leg of the journey, from Italy to Jordan, recalls another made a millennium ago by the Franks of Italy who swept south circa 1097. Let by Peter the Hermit and Walter the Penniless, David Koresh-like figures, the First Crusade began with an attack on the Jewish communities across the Italian coast and ended at the gates of Nicaea where they were wiped out by the young Turkoman leader Arslan. Subsequently, one Bohemond of southern Italy, along with a French contingent comprising Raymond St. Gilles and the Brothers Bouillon, led another effort that succeeded in taking Jerusalem. Carnage followed the fall of the city: Muslims, Jews and Christians alike were slaughtered.  Soon, a tenuous Frankish empire comprising the principalities if Jerusalem, Antioch, Edessa, and Tripoli was established, one that relied on the Genoa and Venice for naval support.

The attack stirred a period of introspection amongst the disparate Muslim nations of the region: the Fatamids of Egypt, the Seljuk Abbasids in Baghdad and the Turkomans of "Rum." Ultimately, because of the attacks, the Muslims were able to summon a coherent response: Salahuddin. Salahuddin expelled the Crusaders circa 1290. There were other Crusades, the most unfortunate being  what has come to be known as the Children's Crusade (when bands of children were sold into prostitution before they left the continent.)

Although we don't like reading too much into history, today, when the horrid specter of jihad looms, the Crusades seem strangely relevant. Moreover, the quest for Jerusalem seems to be a powerful historical dynamic. Of course, the Crusades summon different memories for different peoples. Here in Italy, the Crusaders are lionized while in the Middle East they are remembered as the defeated. Of course, history like literature, is simply an exercise in perspective.

Ridley Scott's perspective on the Crusades makes for a mildly interesting spectacle (although Orland Bloom is an unfortunate casting decision). Amin Malouf's the Crusades Through Arab Eyes is a novel variety of historiography. P.M. Holt's unembellished version appeals to our sensibilities. It is, of course, the ascendant civilization that canonizes collective memory and defines discourse.

We remember things differently and different times (and like to think of different things altogether) but then we've had too much to drink. And we believe, "It's not where you're from/ It's where you're at."

The power of broccoli

Reported in Health News:

A University of Illinois researcher is learning about the anti-cancer power of one of the most famous vegetables: University of Illinois researcher Elizabeth Jeffery has learned how to maximize the cancer-fighting power of broccoli. It involves heating broccoli just enough to eliminate a sulfur-grabbing protein, but not enough to stop the plant from releasing an important cancer-fighting compound called sulforaphane.

The discovery of this sulfur-grabbing protein in the Jeffery lab makes it possible to maximize the amount of the anticarcinogen sulforaphane in broccoli.

"As scientists, we learned that sulforaphane is maximized when broccoli has been heated 10 minutes at 140 degrees Fahrenheit," said Jeffery. "For the consumer, who cannot readily hold the temperature as low as 140 degrees, that means the best way to prepare broccoli is to steam it lightly about 3 or 4 minutes--until the broccoli is tough-tender."

Read more here.

The restricted diet for pregnant women

A pregnant Sara Dickerman wonders about why she can't eat what she isn't allowed to eat.

I'm in my eighth month of pregnancy, and so far I have sheepishly eaten several slivers of air-dried Serrano ham, a few crumbles of blue cheese, and one shimmering piece of yellowtail nigiri. Then, there's the red wine. It started with furtive thimblefuls (just to taste a new wine at the restaurant where I work!) but has spiraled out of control into a biweekly half-glass. All of these items are on the do-not-consume list for pregnant women, but no one seems to be able to tell me how much of a risk occasional lapses like mine pose to my baby.

Julia Child, 1912-2004

Continuing with obituaries, here's one death that's had extensive news coverage: Julia Child's. But having been a fan for so long, I thought that I'd add my voice to the choir, or to the auidience pointing to the choir, by linking to the New York Times' extensive coverage of Julia Child. My fondness for Child comes from something best expressed by Sara Dickerman in Slate.

"In many ways, Julia's greatest contribution to cooking was not bringing French food to America. . .but in freeing Americans from the necessity of cooking for a purpose other than pleasure."

Food became more thoughtful, in the sense that that adjective can apply to the senses, with Julia Child.

And while it's old news, the blog of the Julie/Julia project, in which Julie Powell . . . well in her own word:

"Mastering the Art of French Cooking. First edition, 1961. Louisette Berthole. Simone Beck. And, of course, Julia Child. The book that launched a thousand celebrity chefs. Julia Child taught America to cook, and to eat. It’s forty years later. Today we think we live in the world Alice Waters made, but beneath it all is Julia, 90 if she's a day, and no one can touch her.

The Contender [Julie Powell]:

Government drone by day, renegade foodie by night. Too old for theatre, too young for children, and too bitter for anything else, Julie Powell was looking for a challenge. And in the Julie/Julia project she found it. Risking her marriage, her job, and her cats’ well-being, she has signed on for a deranged assignment.

365 days. 536 recipes. One girl and a crappy outer borough kitchen."

New York Gastronomically

My own New York imaginary contains a signification portion given over to eating. A good Marxist, I generally work towards eliminating the middle class of restaurants from my itinerary, preferring the low and the high. Examples: once a week I visit Zaragoza Grocery, a Mexican deli, really, where a rotating selection of tacos prepared by the proprietor's wife puts all four hundred other East Village taco spots to shame. Shame! All of Zaragoza's tacos are exellent, but if they have the tongue, the goat, or the lamb, thank the lord. As with much that is sublime, there are few components: just a braised meat, some onion, cilantro, salsa and a lime wedge on two tortillas. The service evinces a strong desire to see you enjoy your eating. That infectious stance, combined with stupendous food, is all I want from a place. On the higher side, I nominate the "Cuban" sandwich at Schiller's Liquor Bar, which is quite inauthentic but still fantastic, containing local cheese, ham, and Gus's pickles, and served with french fries that prove Keith's effortless superiority in the competition between the brothers McNally. The careful thought and algorithmic craft put into making sure a kitchen unfailingly delivers perfectly peanut-oil fried, sea-salt seasoned frites demonstrates that you're in a place where someone cares, cares to realize a place that ranks the importance of profit motives beneath (albeit slightly) the love of a world of good things to eat.