Author Archives: Jason
Community News: Uncle Ben and Old Lace
Turns out most rice we eat has dangerous levels of arsenic. This is particularly true in baby and infant food. Arsenic is a Category One carcinogen specializing in lung, skin, and bladder cancer. Oh, happy day. The gist: eat less rice, no more than half-a-cup per day.
A while back Consumer Reports ran a study that turned up serious levels of arsenic in many brands of apple and grape juices. This prompted them to do another round of tests on rice, particularly susceptible to arsenic because it’s a water plant. What CR found was that pretty much each of the 65 rice products they tested with 223 samples—brown or white, organic or synthetically-altered, adult cereal or infant cereal—were tainted far above EPA standards.
The EPA does not regular arsenic in food. It does so in water, though, choosing 10 parts per billion of inorganic arsenic as the threshold of acceptability. This level was negotiated by the USA Rice Federation and chemical companies up from the 5 ppb threshold favored by scientists, and negotiation of thresholds for naturally-occurring arsenic are still being negotiated. The cost to the rice and chemical industries of working that negotiation are far less than the cost of making their products safer, you can be sure. Rice is a $34 billion-a-year enterprise.
Once CR released its study, the FDA, who has been studying arsenic in rice for decades, released its findings thus far. The results are more-or-less the same. Continue reading
Witness My Chicken Call
A Book Fest Reading with Debut Lit: A Cambodian Thanksgiving
Last night, Shannon and I had the privilege of co-hosting a Brooklyn Book Fest Bookends event with Debut Lit, an organization that showcases writers whose first books have just been published. Pacific Standard bar hosted, so beer and food were the themes. Consequently, we broke out the following tale of our first makeshift Thanksgiving in Cambodia.
Special thanks to Rebekah Anderson, the energy behind Debut Lit, as well as the other readers: Greg Gerke, Austin LaGrone, Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, Laren McClung, Ralph Sassone, and Hugh Sheehy. It was a pleasure to hear what everyone brought to the table.
Suzie Homemaker
Shannon
I’ve never been particularly fond of Thanksgiving, and so it is Jason who begins inviting people over to give them a taste of the quintessentially American ritual. Some Khmer friends, some lonely American expats…who am I to complain? It isn’t until he comes home one day listing people I’ve never heard of (“The Norwegian girl just looked so sad,” he explains) that I do some tallying and realize that we’ve committed to cook for over twenty people with a two-burner stove and a single toaster oven.
In a panic, we hitch a ride to Psah Leu and while Jason scours the market for matching forks, I attempt to convey to the proprietors of a kitchen supply stall that I need a potato masher. Unfortunately, I have not yet learned the Khmer word for potato, but I try to compensate by making a series of vigorous mashing motions. The entire family (confused patriarch, earnest daughters, delighted baby) gathers around, wide-eyed, and we continue this game of charades until the eldest daughter gives me a pad of paper. When she looks at my sketch on the pad, her face clears with understanding, and she runs to the messy tower of supplies stuffed into the back of the stall. “At last!” I think, and then she comes back with a toilet plunger. Continue reading
Dead Man Gnawing: Rock n Roll Dinner Demise II (1972)
Last week I wrote about Duane Allman’s death and the lore surrounding the band’s subsequent album, Eat a Peach. Now on to Mama Cass.
Long before I knew who Duane Allman was, I knew that Mama Cass died from choking on a ham sandwich. I don’t know why I knew about Cass and not Duane, except maybe that my mother would have appreciated the Mamas and the Papas’ harmonies and have had no idea whatsoever of what to do with the Allman Brothers. As I type this, though, I now recall a Scooby Doo episode with the Mamas and the Papas. I never dug Scooby Doo that much, except for those celebrity guest stars. Hello, Laurel and Hardy. And didn’t Don Knotts and the Apple Dumpling Gang make an appearance? Am I making this up? Somebody help me out.
Anyway, word was that Cass choked to death on her sandwich in a London flat. This word was passed because the doctor who pronounced her dead on the scene reported to The Daily Express, “She appeared to have been eating a ham sandwich and drinking a Coca-Cola while lying down – a very dangerous thing to do.”
Firstly, why is the combo of sandwich and soda dangerous? The implication is that drinking, say, water would be better if lying down. Is there a similarity here to the stone-cold fact that you should never mix carbonated beverages with Pop Rocks?” Continue reading
Food News: A Wackjob Farm Bill to Eat More From Your Wallet
So we’ve got this drought in the Midwest and its attendant spiked food prices forecast for the next three years. We’ve got the existing farm bill scheduled to croak on September 30th.
And we’ve got two new farm bills in Congress waiting to entrench our problems.
The drought is assuredly caused in part by global warming, just as last weekend’s tornadoes in Queens and Brooklyn were, just as all of the wackjob weather we’ve seen for the past few years has been, just as the wackjob weather surely to come will be.
And rather than work to protect our national food supply by making it less vulnerable to climate change, both the Republican and Democratic farm bills make our meals more vulnerable. They also accelerate the threat.
The United States sends billions of public dollars to the growers of a few high-impact crops (corn!) through elaborate, Byzantine subsidies. Those crops—and more specifically the unceasing monocropping that sucks ever more nutrients out of the soil without putting any back—kills soil. Crop rotation can fix that problem, but our massive industrial agricultural machine doesn’t allow time for that. Instead, we use astonishingly large amounts of fossil fuel-based fertilizers each year (which accelerates climate change and whose use kills the microorganisms that make soil vital) and continue to monocrop corn and a few other grains (which means a single weather trend or a single pest can wipe out entire agricultural regions, as we’re seeing in this parched summer). Continue reading
Dead Man Gnawing: Duane Allman Was a Man of Peaches and Mutton (1971)
Dead rock stars occupy a strange place in the pantheon of Humanity’s heroes. You’ve got brave, doomed soldiers and noble, self-sacrificing leaders and visionary, steadfast iconoclasts and idealistic, graceful martyrs. And then 1938 rolls around, Robert Johnson is poisoned, and shortly thereafter you’ve got dudes who choke on their own vomit in the backseats of cars floating up to Heaven to chill with Hercules and Abe Lincoln and St. Thomas Aquinas. Rock star deaths tend to be violent or self-indulgent, which upon reflection seems to make them the perfect heroes of the Western World’s 20th Century.
Plane crashes, car wrecks, and suicide aren’t the prerogatives of PitchKnives. And though we do cover booze, instances of rock stars drinking themselves to death are pretty pedestrian. There are, however, instances of food becoming entangled with the myths of pop’s premature deaths, one of which I’ll note now, the first in a short series.
Duane Allman was, I was shocked to discover when researching this piece, only 24 when he died. Jesus Christ! The mutton chops on the man made him look 40. And mutton is certainly a food. Continue reading
Mac and Cheese, Naked Women, and the Offense That is Ketchup at the West Indian Day Parade
The West Indian Day parade rules every Labor Day in our part of Brooklyn. It’s the American version of Carnival. No where else will you see Chuck Schumer plodding down Eastern Parkway followed by a tractor trailer loaded with twenty 56-inch speakers, a brass band, a DJ, and 15 half-naked women rapturously grinding like bikinied peacocks in the headdresses of a golden Aztec god. These women always make me ashamed of my own stomach muscles.
This parade is stupendous in part because politicians seeking reelection are seemingly required to be there. Who knew the descendents of Carribian slaves carried so much clout. Hillary Clinton was a staple for her years up here. This year, Governor Andrew Cuomo was the most shocking manifestation of a Ken doll that I’ve ever seen. He gave a kid in front of me the point-wink-thumbs-up triple play.
Shannon is a parade person. We’ve decided that such a category of person exists, that she is one, and that I am not. I come for the costumes, to be reminded of countries I had forgotten existed, and to see so many people so happy.
And the food. This is a food blog.
Curried goat, ox, fish. Fried breadfruit and rice & peas. Ackee fish and fish cakes and oxtail. Grilled corn with its silk singed black and covered in butter, salt, and chili. Sorrel sugar drink that tastes like root beer. Collards and fried shrimp. Young men trolling the crowds and hawking little six-ounce bottles of booze juice in all the shades of a pack of Lifesavers. Continue reading
Tomato Porn
Witness the Brandywine’s bawdy sense of humor.
How did we enjoy her?
I laid her in slices, along with slices of a Purple Cherokee, alongside Bulgarian sheep feta, Damascus Bakery wholewheat pita charred on the stove top, and local beefsteaks roasted with salt, pepper, garlic, and rosemary and basil from the garden.
Super good. Super easy. Continue reading
DIY Tomatoes and 99¢ Boxer Support
Goddamn hallelujah it is tomato season! The seedlings I planted in May have exploded into thickets of green and red. When water from the sprinkler hits the leaves, the sweet, sharp smell of their insides blooms up. When I try to arrange one branch this way or another vine that way, the delicate green-white outer skin rubs off, leaving a seeping window into a deeper, interior green.
I don’t want those tears. You don’t either. But tomatoes are scraggly, lurching vines. Without some kind of support, they really would weave through and around themselves along the ground into thickets.
A case in point. Notice that I'm double-teaming with both a dippy cage and a craptastic bamboo stake. Notice that I've already tried to bundle the beast into some sort of manageable order. Notice how Nature laughs at me.
And tomato cages only do so much good. That is, if you’re giving your tomatoes the sun and the water they need, they will outgrow any cages I’ve ever seen at the hardware store. And stakes are a joke, which doesn’t mean I don’t have some from back in the day that I will continue to use until they’re splinters.
But you need to tie the limbs of your tomato plant up to support of some sort or another. If you don’t, you’ll end up breaking branches when you pick the fruit. The bounty is just too heavy for the source. Continue reading