Author Archives: Jason

A Date with Ginger Rogers

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Amongst the foods we can now enjoy (and pay for) in health-conscious, unprocessed, community-minded, brand-as-political-statement form is granola.  And folks charge an arm and a leg for it once it steps off the industrial-agriculture train.

But granola is easy, cheap, and quick to make at home. PitchKnives’s lowers cholesterol, contains lots of omegas and vitamins, and is a fiber powerhouse.  It contains significant protein, iron, magnesium, and zinc.

We’ve dubbed one of the versions I’ve developed A Date with Ginger Rogers.  It includes dates and ginger.  And it’s tasty as hell.  Ahh yes, we are clever. Continue reading →

Dead Man Gnawing: Loaves and Labor (1661 – 1928)

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In 1870, Napoleon III was waging war on the Prussians, and he needed one million tins of beef to feed his troops.  A Scotsman named Johnson landed the gig and concocted Bovril, a concentrated beef paste that can be spread on crackers, eaten with a spoon, whathaveyou.  Its most popular incarnation became, and remains, mixed into hot water.  Napoleon died and Prussia disappeared, but instant beef soup marched on.  Apparently, generations of soccer fans and sufferers of the common cold have soldiered through their bludgeoning English winters on the strength of Bovril.  Pope Leo XIII even stumped for it with the ad slogan: The Two Infallible Powers – The Pope & Bovril.

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Dead Man Gnawing: Cold War Cola (1959)

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There is obviously a deep human desire for sweetness, and blackness (in your tummy, fool, Heaven forbid the other!), and a good swift jolt of the jitters.  Once upon a time, spices drove economies—and thus politics—but today we have Coca-Cola and its descendents.  Just over one billion cans of Coke are sold each day across the globe.  Short of North Korea and the Mongolian Steppes, you’d be hard pressed, I suspect, to find someone who hasn’t tasted it.  Coke is America’s ambassador; Wikipedia lists 52 non-Coke colas, all built on the Coke template.

Now, if you’re a country that wants no truck with The States, you’ve got to come up with your own competitor to sate your masses.  Iran has three native colas, including Parsi Cola and Zam Zam Cola, the latter of which was owned by Pepsi from its creation in 1954 until the Revolution in 1979.

The Well of Zamzam is located 66 feet from the Kaaba, that big granite cube that everyone on the Hajj circles.  In Islamic lore, it sprung up from the desert at the word from God when Abraham’s son Ishmael was crying from thirst.  In the 2000s, Mecca Cola emerged from the U.K. to compete with Zam Zam, and a fourth Muslim cola, Evoca, boasts as its secret ingredient black seed, of which Mohammed apparently said, “It is the cure for all diseases but death.”

Perhaps Vatican alchemists are working on the Gethsemane Gulp as I type. Continue reading →

Community News: Big Government in Your Farmers Market

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Though few of us may stop to consider the fact, the modern farmers market is the true market of humanity.  The vast, fluorescent, all-in-one supermarkets where most of us buy our groceries are of a species only about 65-years-old.  They were born out of the boom of technology, cars, and suburbs that became the West’s reward for winning the Second World War.  They were a dramatic upheaval, and it’s a testament to their power that so many of us today see them as the default purveyor of food.

But the farmers market is the original market.  It’s the market that grew up along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates.  It’s the market that still delivers the goods on most corners of Earth.  And—with a simple obviousness that should make us stop and consider just how marketing psychology and a buck have shaped America—it’s the market that provides poor people all over the world with good, healthy food.  Only in America are the poorest people the fattest.  Elsewhere, they pay their neighbors for vegetables picked this morning and a chicken killed last night.

But some unsung, heroic bureaucrats in D.C. are getting it together.  The Feds have committed $4 Million Dollars to equip the country’s 7,100 farmers markets with the apps and bandwidth to process food stamps.  Food stamps aren’t really stamps anymore, they are electronic credits distributed among a few acronymic programs like the EBT and WIC.  Right now, less than a quarter of those 7,100 markets are able to swipe plastic cards and send a series of digits zinging through wires to a database somewhere.  Enter Big Government and their aim to add another 4,000 markets to that list.  And enter a company named the Novo Dia Group that has developed an iPhone app to take the process wireless.

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Regulators’ Aggravators

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In honor of the death of the mighty Maurice Sendak, whose classic book In the Night Kitchen dared to include in one of its illustrated scenes the three-year-old hero’s wee penis, thus earning a ban in various pathetic circles, today’s feature contemplates banned foods.  There is nothing here as fantastic as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but we can nonetheless appreciate the process of changing sensibilities, gastronomic if not linguistic.

 

Jesus Rode an Eeyore, Not a Trigger

You’d have a hard time finding horse on any menus in the Western world these days (though I seem to recall an article in The Times a few years back trumpeting its inclusion among the quirky dishes served by a new restaurant debuting to some fanfare.)  In general, though, eating horse is taboo, just half-a-step away from eating a pooch.  Eating horse was a staple, however, for early Anglo-Saxon tribes, who surely relied on the animal to win battles, make clothes, and till earth.  Eating the horse was a way to honor its contribution to their human existence.  Popes Zachary and Gregory III consequently banned the practice in the 8th Century as a way to help eradicate pagan religious festivals.  The ban remains on the Vatican’s law books to this day, but President Obama signed into law a bill allowing the slaughter and consumption of horse meat last November.

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Dead Man Gnawing: A Death’s-Door Déjeuner (1995)

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The Ortolan is a songbird about as large as your thumb.  Its head is green-gray, and its song is slight.  It eats seeds.

The high class and sophisticated of Europe have been dining on Ortolan since Antiquity.  The traditional first step was to blind the bird with knives.  Current preparation is more humane.  The birds keep their eyes; they are instead shut into a tiny dark box.  The rest of the preparation is the same.

Its brain processing the dark as endless night, the songbird gorges on millet day after day.  It balloons 400%.  On the day of your dinner party, it is reprieved from its gluttony.  It is held down flapping into a bottle of Armagnac until it is drowned.

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