After the recent post about spaghetti peperoncino with cabbage and sardines, I read a bit about Moroccan sardines. Initially, I was curious about the local method of cooking sardines. Though I couldn't find too many references on line about Moroccan way of preparing sardines, I did find a few interesting articles about Moroccan sardine industry.

According to this article, Morocco is now the leading supplier of sardines in the European market, beating the competition from Spain and Portugal. (So, maybe, the tin I picked up, although it bore an exotic image of turbaned man, was mainly intended for the American/European market, not for the domestic Moroccan market.) To consolidate their position as the leading exporter of sardines, Reuters reported in 2004, Morocco apparently had discontinued the fishing accord with the EU in the late '90s, banning foreign fishing boats in its waters. To the same end, Morocco heavily subsidizes the Moroccan fishing industry.

What complicates the political ethics of eating a tin of Sultan's sardines, though, is the fact that the sardine fishery takes place along the coast of the Western Sahara, which both the Moroccan government and the separatist Polisario movement claim as their own. According to the same Reuters article on Planet Ark (which is an Australian environmental non-profit), the Polisario Front, with its base inside the Algerian border, has been battling the Moroccan government over the control of the Western Sahara. Since 1991, the UN has been trying to set up an autonomous political entity in the region for the Saharawi peoples, but it hasn't seen success. So, the very existence of the Moroccan fishing industry in the area is in itself a sort of political statement on the part of the Moroccan government, as well as an important economic stabilizer that the government can point to as a proof of its success in guiding the region.

Why this area has come under the Moroccan control and why the Moroccan control has been in dispute have a much longer history: the area was not under any "nation state" as was imagined by the European colonizers back when France and Spain were busy setting up marionette colonial governments all over Africa. Since the colonizers didn't have the sensitivity to perceive or acknowledge the often blurry "zones of tribal influences" in the area, the arbitrary boundaries they drew on the Saharan sand cut through these zones. (Sounds awfully familiar, right?)

There's a much longer history that seems really interesting (to me) before that, of course, of the Islamic influences and the native Berber peoples, but that's way beyond I can sum up here. (Plus I feel I should know more before writing it up.) Meanwhile, two Wikipedia article--one on the Polisario Front and the other on Saharawi peoples--were intriguing and helpful. I'm all for just enjoying the sensations of what's in the plate in front of me and not think about it, but at the same time I can't deny my fascination with the sudden, explosive connection to history and politics that a mere tin of sardines can produce--with just a little bit of curiosity on my part.

It's been a week since we moved into our new apartment, but I seem to be still not in the pre-relocation rhythm of cooking-eating-blogging. For one thing, we haven't had a steady Internet connection since our move: our new landlords have been very generous to let us use their wireless connection, but somehow it's been flaky, to say the least. We had our phone line finally hooked up yesterday, but the AT&T person Patrick spoke to today told him (out of the blue) that we wouldn't be getting Internet until the 19th, God knows why.

I have been cooking, though; I made pretty good fried rice with the sweet, aromatic Chinese sausages I picked up after my fingerprinting sojourn with the USCIS (there was a sizable Asian market in the same shopping mall where the USCIS service center was located) on Wednesday, and on Thursday, we had Korean-ish stir-fried squid with kimchi. But the most noteworthy was (if any of my cooking ever is) the "relocation soba" we had on Monday, the day after we surrendered our old apartment.

Relocation soba, or "hikkoshi soba" in Japanese, is a customary meal after one moves from one place to the next. Usually a simple bowl of soba in warm dashi soup, or the same soba served chilled with cool dashi accompanied by wasabi and scallions in summer), hikkoshi soba is supposed to be shared with one's new neighbors. The Japanese can be quite fond of puns and jokes when it comes to what to eat for special occasions, and the hikkoshi soba isn't an exception.

Eating long noodles together with one's new neighbors is a way to wish for a good, long-lasting relationship with them in the new community. Although not too many people, especially city dwellers, engage in this ritual any more today, I'm sure it used to serve as an ice breaker, too, where the new neighbors would offer their help and share knowledge of the neighborhood while the newcomer would try to hide his skeleton in the cupboard from the plying noses of the new neighbors.

The same logic--long soba noodles corresponding to long something else--holds true for another special occasion: the New Year's Eve. Traditionally, the Japanese eat soba as the last meal on the New Year's Eve, usually waiting for the 108 gongs of temple bells that cleanse away our 108 worldly obsessions (yep, we have that many!). The idea here is to wish for the family members' longevity for years to come. We didn't share our relocation soba with our landlords/neighbors (who, I suspect, might have been amused if we had, but were away on vacation), hopefully the not-so-stunning soba I boiled up will bring us many fun years at our new apartment. (And hopefully we're getting the Internet back sooner than on the 19th! I'm quite tired of not knowing anything that's going on out in the world...)

I spent ten years of my childhood in an agricultural town in central Japan. Our house stood on the edge of a tableland overlooking carrot fields. In spring, the smell of freshly turned earth permeated the air, and soon, deep green leaves of the carrots turned into a swelling ocean. In summer, reflections of the intense sun on the transparent plastic sheet that covered the green houses below in the field sometimes surprised my sleepy eyes as I ate breakfast. This was the east side of the house, and east was where my primary school stood, in relation to my house. I walked through the carrot fields to and from school, occasionally picking mulberries along the way, until my purple fingers looked like an alien's. In early summer, when farmers pulled out and discarded smaller carrots to give room to the better-growing ones, I would pick up the small yet still good ones from the side of the fields and take them home. Though my friends from farming families didn't do this (most likely they had more carrots than they would ever wish to see lying around at home), I didn't think picking up discarded vegetables was a shameful act; to me, the small carrots slowly withering away in the afternoon sun were perfectly good food going unappreciated. I might still feel the same way. With berries to pick, carrots to find and nectar to suck, twenty minutes of walk twice a day, along the same route through the field, across an irrigation canal and up the last steep climb to my house was never a routine.

The scenery changed when I moved on to middle school. The middle school was to the north of my house, and most of the way there was residential. Beyond a railroad and a busy national highway and past a small, dark shrine, the way to middle school never felt as fun as the road to the primary school. I may not have paid as much concentrated attention to the surrounding, either, for I talked and talked and talked with a close friend as we walked from school together. With a good friend to share it, the world seemed to be much larger than the mulberry trees and carrot leaves. We trashed school policies, discussed politics as if we'd been cynical adults, lamented environmental destruction and exchanged our thoughts on books. As we immersed ourselves in the conversation, old houses and little rice paddies disappeared into the indistinguishable background. Until my friend made a turn at the national highway, I was oblivious of what was around me. In a strange way, thus, my memory is much more vivid between the highway and my house; the cracked surface of the pedestrian bridge, tall summer weeds swaying violently on the roadside as cars zoomed by, and the tiny corn field between the railway and my house.

The farmer who had that field must have been alternating his crops, for all sorts of vegetables showed up: taro, sweet potatoes, carrots, pumpkins, peas, and what I remember the most--corn. During the harvest season, the farmer would set up a small shack--more appropriately, a small shelf with a tin roof--by the green, erect stalks of corn and sold his harvest directly. I don't really know if that was a he or a she, because I'd never seen the farmer manning the shack; there was a tapper ware box with a slit on the lid to put coins in, and everyone left a few hundred yens in exchange for the sweet, plump corn cobs just cut in the morning. When I saw the corn shack on the way back from school, I would run to my house and told my mother. She then would grab her purse and walked up the hill to get the corn before that special sweetness evaporates into thin air. She would boil them immediately, and often the main fare of her dinner was that corn, just boiled with salt.

For a long time, I didn't understand the "corn as snack" or "corn as dinner" concept. It was tasty, but I didn't think it was good enough to replace my cookies and chocolates, or my spaghetti or curry and rice. I watched my mom sink her teeth into the thick, yellow stick, thinking of the prehistoric meat on the bone that troglodytes feasted on. When she ate corn this way, her eyes focused on the next row of pearly kernels to guide her teeth and her fingers tense from the pressure to hold the fat cob, there was a simple, child-like pleasure that emanated from her. While I almost envied her delight, simplicity of food didn't convince me. And I suppose that hadn't changed too much even now: I do enjoy less complicated good food much more now, but I still don't think I can be as happy as my mom was with a dinner of a corn on the cob. I can't help adding the "twist."

Supper on A Farmers' Market Day

Summer Festival Corn on the Cob

Corn on the cob is a ubiquitous summer festival food, sold in multi-colored tents with a long and narrow charcoal grill set in the front. The vendors roast the corn on the grill, occasionally brushing it with soy sauce. The soy sauce burns and adds a wonderfully earthy and nutty flavor to the corn, which I think perfectly complements the sweetness already in the kernels. To recreate this flavor, I often sautée the boiled corn in a bit of butter until the kernels show brown burn marks. Then, I sprinkle some soy sauce and let it burn a bit on high heat. You need to be careful not to set off the smoke detector (it can be pretty smoky, but that's what makes it so tasty), but a box fan in the kitchen window should be enough. Eating this festival corn transports me back, in time and space, to the rural Japan I grew up in--picking mulberries and all.

The New York Times has an amusing op-ed article about the American fear of eating raw fish during pregnancy. Steven A. Shaw compares the situation with that in Japan, where eating raw fish during pregnancy is never discouraged. He denounces the governmental recommendation not to eat raw fish during pregnancy and backs up his claim with factual supports. For one, Shaw says, most (85% indeed) of the food poisoning from consuming raw seafood comes from eating oysters grown in contaminated water, not sushi and sashimi (because most of the fish used for sushi and sashimi don't have parasites). He worries that the over-concern about food poisoning from raw fish might be scaring people (pregnant women or not) away from taking advantage of the excellent nutrients in fish.

While I agree with his points, what struck me the most was his last remark: "the sushi ban is insulting to Japanese culture." I never thought of the fear of eating raw fish this way, but I suppose in a way it could be. While I do appreciate the cultural sensitivity of the author, I myself may not be able to go as far as saying it myself. For one thing, I'm sure there are many complicated factors behind the fear (epidemiological or not) of raw fish--like the relative novelty and the resultant, possibly deadly, ignorance of the proper handling of the material; in other words, the Japanese might have a hygienic advantage thanks to the much longer and more intimate history with the raw fish.

But for another, I'm slightly weary of combative rhetoric surrounding the question of cultures and eating, the least of which is the long-standing issue of whaling. In a similar vain, I often find it odd that the Americans, who eat far less seafood than the Japanese, seem much more concerned about the mercury level in seafood than their Japanese counterparts are, but I'm not sure if I would want to characterize it as "insulting" to the numerous fish-eating cultures around the world that aren't as concerned. With all that said, though, what remains is my appreciation of Steven Shaw's concern over the American paranoia of fish (raw or not) and his sincere effort to culturally decipher that paranoia.

Japanese food is very healthy.

Is that what you generally take to be true? Apparently it is, for many Americans. I've been slowly reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a recent book in which Barbara Kingsolver, the author, documents her year of thriving on locally grown foods, including ones from her own garden. This otherwise very informed author ventures to say that Japanese kids prefer boiled and salted edamame over Twinkies for their snack food of choice. Excuse me? As far as I know, most Japanese kids reach for sweet or fried snack food over such "healthy" veggie alternative, any day of the week. (God knows I grew up on cookies, chocolate and potato chips!) They may not have Twinkies there, but they have plenty of other oh-it's-bad-for-you snack foods that sell extremely well. I have to wonder where she got that wild idea. ("Unless there's a group of people without the genes that crave for sugar and fat, everyone more or less would go for Twinkies; we're hard-wired for those flavors associated with high calories," Patrick said, and that's true.)

And of course, she's not alone in that belief. Maybe it is generally true that the average Japanese eating habit is healthier than the average American eating habit, but it seems bizarre to me that so many people automatically associate Japanese food with healthy eating. Because, every so often, it's not so.

A bowl of katsudon in the food court of Mitsuwa Marketplace.

Take this bowl of katsudon, for example. A favorite lunch item for many a Japanese corporate soldiers, katsudon features a piece of center cut pork, breaded and deep-fried in oil, then cooked briefly in soysauce-and-sugar broth, topped with an egg, some onions and served on a thick bed of rice. I haven't met a single Japanese person who doesn't like this dish, and it's a comfort food for me, too. But, the horrifying truth is, an average bowl of katsudon packs, perhaps not so surprisingly, over 1,000 calories and about 60% of your daily fat allowance. And forget about vegetables; a few cooked-down pieces of onions are all you get. (If you're lucky, it might come with a small dish of pickled cucumbers and daikon, but that adds to the sodium intake, too, while most of the vitamins are probably long gone.) Katsudon is no healthier than a Big Mac, and we love it.

Sushi, which is considered to be healthy in the U.S., is also a nutritional suspect in Japan. The fish part is fine. The rice part is the problem. Sushi vinegar has so much sugar and salt dissolved in it that diabetics and those with high blood pressure are often advised not to eat too much sushi. (My father was, for one.) And let's face it, where are the veggies for which the Japanese cooking is so prized?

Well, maybe I'm being too harsh on the eating habits of my own people. We do seem to place less emphasis on fatty meat than an average Western cook. But we do have our own culinary problem, which is (traditionally) the excess intake of sodium. Miso soup, pickles and salted dried fish--it all adds up pretty quickly. The Japanese may not die from colon cancer in massive numbers, but we do die massively from strokes and heart attacks. Different food cultures have different healthy problems inherent in them, and fantasizing an exotic food culture to be purely healthy without acknowledging its dubious side(s) seems not just dangerous but a little symplistic. I was in fact surprised by Kingsolver's innocent remark, for throughout the book, up till the (doomed?) 303rd page, she kept me admiring her wide range of knowledge about how food is grown and how it's preserved, with an occasional social and economic expositions of American industrial food production.

I suppose everybody fantasizes about exotic food, in one way or the other. And it's perhaps quite telling that many of us in this society attaches health claims to our fantasies of exotic food and the culture that accompanies it.

Recently I've been thinking about recipes and copyright. Several Japanese blogs alerted me to this question; they had explicit warnings against "copy-and-pasting the copyrighted recipes" on their sites. "Copyrighted recipes!?" I thought. It had never occured to me that recipes could be copyrighted.

Curious, I went to the U.S. Copyright Office to see if a recipe could be copyrighted. According to the laws regarding the issue, it appears that recipes could be copyrighted as literature. While the method itself cannot be copyrighted, recipes "accompanied by substantial literary expression in the form of an explanation or directions" could. In the same vein, cookbooks could be copyrighted as a specific combination of recipes. Japan seems to have a similar understanding of the copyright surrounding recipes.

According to an article in Food & Wine, there is a movement in a corner of the culinary world to change the copyright law to include recipes--cooking methods themselves. Implicated in that movement is none other than Homaro Cantu, the executive chef at Moto. Given what he does with his molecular gastronomy (edible menus, foam of food extract, etc.), it is understandable that Cantu wants to copyright his recipes. Both in form and process, his cuisine might resemble an art object than food in the traditional sense of the word. And yet, there’s still something strange about the idea.

A part of that discomfort comes from the fact that recipes, traditionally, are a result of collaborative effort. Behind many dishes, there are generations of cooks, both amateur and professional, who learned, modified and shared the recipes. An innovative chef might make a radical change in the cooking method or the ingredients to a recipe, but chances are, there still is some sort of an original on which he bases his innovation.

Furthermore, even if a truly innovative chef comes up with a strikingly new dish that doesn't resemble anything else, his creation might very well be a mutated cross-reference of two or more traditional recipes or cuisines. (This process is sort of similar to that post-modern favorite idea of intertextuality, I suspect.) I realize that a similar confluence occurs in the area of arts, which does enjoy copyright protection, so the fact that there are many culinary traditions behind a dish alone cannot justify the lack of copyright protection in cooking methods.

And yet, copyrighting recipes seem to be rather contradictory to the communal nature of cooking and eating. I cook dishes I learned from my mother (who might have learned it from her grandma, or from her friend), eat it with my friends and family, and while eating, share the recipe with others around the table. I do modify recipes and sometimes come up with a new combination of ingredients and condiments, but sharing these ideas with others seem to be a rather crucial part of cooking and eating--because I might have learned the recipe from someone else who was also willing to share it, because I might have gotten the idea from someone’s suggestion, or because I might have simply combined two culinary traditions that usually don't mix together. I'd feel like I should reciprocate. Of course, there's probably a whole other set of pressure and competition when you cook for a living, and it must be quite frustrating to see someone else run a successful business with a menu that's a complete copy of your own (which you spent weeks to develop). But still.

The copyright situation surrounding the Japanese food bloggers may be closer to the professional cooks' than that of some random amateur like me. In Japan, quite a few cook-bloggers, not necessarily professional but with an admirable skills and talents, have had their recipe books published purely because of their popularity in the cyberspace. If you are looking for an opportunity like that, it is understandable that you would like to prevent others from copying your ideas and recipe modifications, for that would erode the appeal of your brilliant originality.

And of course, the food is not simply nourishment. As I wrote before, cooking exotic food, adding an original twist to an existing dish, and coming up with an unheard-of recipes are talents that are highly valued among the Japanese cook bloggers. Their food/cooking life seems almost all-encompassing: Who cooks the coolest food is deemed the coolest person. Although the cook-bloggers may not openly admit it (because they blog "for fun," "to make friends" and "to share recipes"), there is definitely an element of competition. Since the coolest cook on the block (pun not intended!) might get a chance to get her recipe book published, the competition only intensifies.

And, as you might have suspected, I see this competition with a bit of weariness. The cook-bloggers are creating a huge reservoir of cooking references as they reference each other and try to come up with something new, and I certainly do benefit from their effort. (Hell, I've borrowed ideas...) But at the same time, going for copyright protection for their recipes seem a bit too far-fetched. It is also true that there are predatory companies that exploit the accumulation of unprotected amateur recipes for profit, but when we start to think only defensively, we may be stifling our own creative freedom and our tie to all the other cooks and cuisines from which we draw.

Continued from the previous post about the recent history of Japanese eating habits.

The recent Japanese interest in "other" "ethnic" cuisines, especially those from Asian countries, is rather similar to the ethnic food boom in the United States. Eating at ethnic restaurants and cooking ethnic food at home are considered to be the proof of one's awareness and appreciation of the exotic beauty. Being able to appreciate the exotic is, in turn, an expression of one's truly "international" character--something that has been much hyped about in Japan in the last few decades (as is evident in their feverish desire to master the English language). And oddly enough, the Japanese interest in once-neglected regional food of their own country may be seen in the same light.

Even during the westernization of the Japanese eating and cooking habits, certain types of Japanese cuisine survived as a much revered tradition. Sushi, which is originally a Tokyo fast food, spread to the entire country, and enjoying expensive, super-fresh sushi remained firmly grounded in the Japanese eating habits. Similarly, things like "kaiseki ryori," an elaborate, myriad-course meal with its origin in tea ceremony, continued to be deeply revered as a very-special-occasion meal. But these did not include ingredients and cooking methods indigenous to most of the regions within Japan. Regional cuisines were (considered to be) merely down-home, grandma-style cooking, which one would only enjoy when back at home. You would never have run into a trendy restaurant that served regional food. There were certainly restaurants that specialized in regional cuisines, especially in urban areas where people from all over Japan craved for the down-home cooking of their regions, but these establishments were usually not hip or trendy. This type of down-home regional restaurants still abound in Japanese cities, and remain to be great places to appreciate the wide variety of regional specialties (and sometimes, oddities).

In the past decade or so, however, the scenery has changed dramatically. The Japanese epicureans have found a new fountain of exotic food in their own country. They did not abandon French, Italian and other conventionally "cool" cuisines, but they started to pay much more attention to the different regional cuisines and ingredients within Japan (along with Thai, Vietnamese and other Southeast Asian cuisines in particular). The recent explosion of interest in traditionally produced vinegars (which was the starting point of this long series of posts) is just one aspect of this re-discovery. It is a full circle, in that the Japanese, who once pursued Western cuisine and followed the standardized national cuisine, started to look back into the regional origins of their cooking and eating habits. But in a few significant ways, it's not just a completion of the circle of capricious culinary trends.

First, the regional cooking and ingredients are now very much a part of the consumer economy, which attaches all sorts of fantasies to its commodities to sell them. So, even though the regional cuisines might have been a part of the mundane (for those who come from the specific regions), they are now exotic food in the eyes of the Japanese consumers who have lost (or never even had) the tie to the foods' origins. Closely tied to this commercialization of the regional cuisines is the tremendous change in the way the Japanese people assign meaning to food and eating. Perhaps it is just a nostalgic fantasy on my part to imagine a time when food didn't carry any meaning beyond subsistence and familial (and/or communal) sharing, but the degree of fantasization that now surrounds food and cuisines seems rather unprecedented in the Japanese history.

As I've touched upon earlier, the consumption in restaurants , and re-creation at home, of certain food items, be it a Thai curry or a specialty from Hokkaido, mean that the eater or the creator has a cool lifestyle with a flair or two. It also means that the eater or the creator can afford that luxury, both economically and psychologically. (Leisure is a psychological state, as much as an economic one.) Being able to "enjoy small moments in life" seems to be one of the hallmark of the "cool" lifestyle among the Japanese food bloggers. Procuring (often over the internet) regional specialties and cooking it up in a recently popularized traditional method seems to fit perfectly into that ideal. It doesn't take an exorbitant amount of money, unlike going to a high-end French restaurant in Shinjuku. Rather, it takes connoisseurship and creativity--two highly prized attributes (at least as far as I can tell through reading various Japanese food blogs and comments left on them). For the most part, the people who support the renaissance of the regional condiments, cooking methods and ingredients are common people with mortgages to pay, children to raise, and/or retirement plan to worry about. With relatively small amount of money, regional condiments and ingredients can give them the edge that’s lacking in the mundane.

To be continued, yet again, till a future post on the role of internet and "otoriyose" boom in the regional food renaissance...

As the summer sun started to bake the region, Patrick and I joined Danielle and Margarette of Slow Food Chicago for a food tour of Little Village Today. We were ten minutes late to the meeting spot, in front of the Panadería La Baguette on the 26th street, but managed to join the tour before they headed into the Mexican bakery. The walking tour was along the 26th street, which gives you the impression of being in Mexico, with its Spanish signs and lots of street vendors of tamales and horchata. Many of the businesses we stopped at--La Baguette, Dulce Landia (a Mexican candy store chain), El Milagro tortilla factory, among others--weren't extremely new to us, since we live in a Latino-heavy neighborhood in Rogers Park. But we did get to try things we'd never had enough courage to try before.

Fresh-baked sweet bread waiting to be displayed at Panadería La Baguette

A worker at El Milagro tortilla factory swiftly packs bags of tortillas behind a large container of fresh masa

The fresh-off-the-oven tortillas we nibbled on in front of the tiny El Milagro store were wonderfully moist and flavorful. Though they demanded that we eat them with some salsa or mole, the yellow and white tortillas just baked in the factory at the back of the store were quite far from the stale ones you might find in your local Jewel store. Patrick and I usually get our tortilla fix from the Morse Mart, which stocks very fresh tortillas, but still the ones right off the factory tasted better.

As Chicagoans might remember, the shopping mall in which La Baguette does its business was recently in the news. In April, INS conducted a heavily armed raid on a storefront fake ID manufacturer in that mall. This raid had left a deep gash in the community of Little Village. According to some of the business owners, the area, which used to be always packed like festival days, are now deserted. "Everyone's scared," one of them said. Indeed, as we walked down the 26th street around 10 in the morning, it was eerily quiet. The mall's parking lot was only half full, and the wide sidewalks seemed vastly empty. Food vendors stood empty-handed at street corners, without customers.

"So we just made her day," someone joked, as we sipped champurrado from small plastic cups. "We might be her only customers today." She laughed, but there was something chilling about what was meant to be a joke. The champurrado itself--an Aztec-style hot chocolate thickened with masa and flavored with cinnamon--was quite good, though I'd prefer to have it during winter. We crossed the street and tried little bit of horchata--sweet drink made with rice flour--from another street vendor.

An horchata vendor at the corner of 26th and Kedzie (or Sawyer)

Dulce Landia feels like a dream jungle of various candies and colorful piñatas suspended from the ceiling.

We also nibbled on some imported Queso Oaxaca from Cremaria Santa Maria, a few gorditas from Aguascalientes (they allegedly invented this poor-man's feast of cooked meat and cheese in corn-based pocket bread) and a few different Mexican candies from Dulce Landia. Again, none of this was news to me, but it was fun to actually try things I'd been aware of but never tried. Sometimes it requires a lot of chutzpa to walk into ethnic stores and restaurants that seem to only cater to the people of that ethnicity, as if I were intruding in their private sphere. Being a part of a tour partially numbed that sense of intrusion (I don't know if it's a good thing of not, though), and made it easier to enjoy the unfamiliar food.

If I were to choose one "most fun" place from our tour, I would pick Dulce Landia. With hundreds of different candies piled high and lots of colorful piñatas (those paper dolls stuffed with sweets, which blindfolded Mexican children attacks fiercely with a stick on festive occasions) hanging from the ceiling, it reminded me of the candy stores I went to as a kid in Japan. Danielle, who was volunteering to give a tour, recommended two traditional sweets: goat milk caramels (called "cajetas") and a chewy candy made of tamarindo and sugar, coated with chili powder. I liked the tamarindo candy a lot. Sweet, sour and spicy at once, it reminded me of something I'd had before. Though the sense of palate nostalgia was quite wonderful, I couldn't locate the memory of that flavor. I might have had something similar in my childhood in Bangkok, or maybe I was conflating it with a similar Japanese candy made from sugar and pickled plums. Either way, those tamarindo candies were addictively distinctive. Another pleasant surprise was marzapan-like sweets made from peanut powder. Fragile and delicate, it burst with the nutty peanut flavor when put into my mouth. Since there's a Dulce Landia within a few minutes' walk from our apartment, we'll probably revisiting them pretty soon.

I was curious how an American Slow Food movement would establish its identity in a country where there is no truly "traditional" cuisine that lives on as a part of our everyday life (as there are in Italy). I still need to process what I heard and saw during the tour to really wright about this, but joining the tour was definitely an interesting experience, both in seeing a community I'd never been to and in hearing a small part of what the Slow Food people are thinking right here in Chicago.

A family waiting to get their cups of cool horchata

Okay, this was going to be the last of the three-part vinegar story, but it's spiraling out of control, stretching into the recent Japanese history and what not... I'm going to post the first half of it here.

So I'm back to vinegar. In the previous post, I left off the topic with a remark about the increased interest in traditional regional cuisines in Japan in recent years. (The first part of the vinegar sequence, one about a successful PR campaign by a large producer is here.) This trend may be seen as a grand culinary circle that started with homogenization and Westernization in the Meiji Restoration era now coming to a completion with a renaissance of regional food traditions of the old days.

Japan, though small, was divided into even smaller regions, especially before the Meiji Restoration in the mid-19th century, by a bunch of different factors. One large factor is geographical: steep mountains and wide rivers often drew natural boundaries beyond which people did not interact. In the long, relatively peaceful years under the Edo Shogunate (which lasted for about 250 years without too many disturbances), the shogunate promoted this regional division, with the hope of keeping its subjects from forming horizontal alliances behind its back. The idea was to keep the "han" (smaller geopolitical entities led by feudal lords who exercised certain amount of autonomy within their boundaries but were under direct control of the shogunate) separate from each other. This policy of geographical isolation somewhat matched the feudal lords' need to keep their subjects under control. People were not free to travel, and both the shogunate and the individual han's established checkpoints ("seki" or "seki-sho") at strategic junctions along the road system to control the flow of travelers, ranging from samurai's on business to merchants, itinerant theaters and pilgrims.

This strict restriction of travel, combined with the natural obstacles, kept different regions in Japan fairly unique and isolated until very recently. Geographical, political and economical isolation enabled these regions retain their linguistic and cultural variations, and these included, of course, food and cuisine.

All this started to change when the Meiji government abolished the "han" system and established prefectures under direct control of the central government. In order to strengthen the nation's economy and military to face the imminent threat of colonization by the Western countries (the Japanese officials had seen the colonization of China after the First Opium War, 1840-42 with alarm), the central government tried to integrate the previously fragmented country into a powerful and coherent nation state. (Much like the case in Italy around the time of its unification, ordinary Japanese people probably didn't have the sense of "Japan" as a nation. Their loyalty was tied much more strongly to the "han" to which they used to belong.) Food and cooking may not have been the newborn government's primary concern, but this march toward integrated nationhood did have a significant impact on the regional food cultures.

For instance, the Meiji government promoted the consumption of meat--once a taboo in the Buddhist tradition--in order to transform the physique of the Japanese into one that’s fit for a Western-style military. If this kind of deliberate governmental intervention in the field of food and cooking was rare, the increased inter-regional commerce and human interaction accelerated the homogenization of Japanese cooking. Although there still exist a wide range of regional cuisines in the present-day Japan, something that could be called “national cuisine” has come into being in the past century. (Long after the Meiji Restoration, the power of cooking shows and cooking magazines for housewives throughout the 20th century was tremendous in this homogenizing process.)

As was the case with the meat-eating habit, the birth of the standard Japanese national cuisine was often paired with the desire for Western-style cuisine and westernization of lifestyle in general. From the era of the Meiji Restoration (which promoted the slightly hypocritical combination of “Japanese in spirit and Western in practicality” (”wakon-yosai”) all the way after the World War II, all things Western were cool in Japanese eyes. The hostility between Japan and the Western world in the first half of the 20th century dampened the trend a little, but when the United States took over Japan in 1945, the Japanese people were ready to go back to their worship of the West. The particularly Japanese interpretation of Western cuisine (called “yoshoku”), which I discussed a little in the post about okosama lunch, was born in this atmosphere in the early 20th century. Going to restaurants that served “yoshoku” was the coolest thing to do for urban intellectuals for a long time. And in a way, it still is. High-end French and Italian restaurants are still among the most revered places to eat and to be seen among the Japanese who are increasingly more interested in cuisines other than French and Italian.

To be continued (again)!

This is a continuation of yesterday's post about the increased consumption of vinegar in Japan and its relation to a PR campaign by a large producer. While I poked around online for information about the Japanese vinegar consumption, I came across a short report prepared by the Development Bank of Japan. This report, though only three pages long, turned out to be a vault of interesting vinegar facts I had no idea about.

In Japan, most of vinegars are made from rice, which is first brewed into sake, using yeast. The alcohol in this sake is then converted into vinegar by introducing various acetic acid bacteria. Old records suggest that the production method of vinegar came from China in the 4th century (along with that of rice-based sake). From the Asuka court in Nara, vinegar started to spread in the Kansai (Western Japan) region, but the spread was slow. Some cities in Osaka and Wakayama became known for different methods of vinegar production, but it was not until Edo period that the use of vinegar became popular among commoners all over Japan. Even now, the Southwestern Japan consumes much more--according to a study, four times more--vinegar than the Northeastern Japan.

In addition to the East-West gap in the consumption of vinegar, there's another complicating factor that we shouldn't ignore when talking about vinegar in Japan. Although there are a few national producers of vinegar (Mizkan, Tamanoi etc.), there are quite a few local producers that make vinegar in traditional ways specific to their regions. One concentration of such producers is in Fukuyama, Kagoshima. Instead of converting ethyl alcohol into vinegar in an accelerated "force-ventilation" method, vinegar makers in Fukuyama let brown rice and wheat ferment naturally in gigantic clay pots. Because of the long fermentation period, the Fukuyama vinegar has a dark cherry wood hue. (This type of vinegar is called "kurozu", black vinegar.) It takes about 3-6 months for fermentation and an additional year or so of aging before kurozu can be shipped out. There are other kinds of regional specialty vinegars, many of them in the Southwestern part of Japan.

In recent years, these regional specialty vinegars have been in the media spotlight. There seems to be two trends merging together to push this trend: the boom in the "health food" industry and another boom in the locally produced specialty food in general. When I did an Amazon.co.jp search for "vinegar," six out of the first 24 results somehow claimed health and aesthetic benefits of eating (and drinking!) vinegar. Three approached regionally produced vinegar as a part of a general quest for high-quality specialty condiments. (Five promoted the use of vinegar as cleaning agent in eco-conscious households, one was a straightforward vinegar recipe book, and others were mysteriously irrelevant results.)

Vinegar has been "discovered" as a new health food that supposedly lowers bad cholesterol, fights allergies, lower blood pressure, accelerates weight loss (a bit thing in already-rail-thin Japan), beautifies skin, and generally betters body condition. Although these healthy claims have never been conclusively proven, many Japanese people have turned to vinegar for a miraculous cure for what ails them (or may ail them in future, if, god forbid, they don't drink vinegar every day!). In this regard, traditionally produced vinegars are regarded as more beneficial than mass-produced ones, because they often contain more of the stuff that's supposed to do good to your health.

The other half of this rather sour phenomenon is the increased interest in regional specialty food in general, but this post is long, I'm getting tired. So that part is for tomorrow...

This morning I biked down the Lake Shore Path to the Green City Market. Since it's Wednesday, it would be pretty empty, I thought. Wrong. Daley's pet farmers market was just about the most crowded I'd ever seen. There were people everywhere, from a battalion of moms with expensive-looking strollers to a slightly smaller yet sizable army of stylish young men (stylish in a meticulously-created-five-o'clock-shadow-and-carefully-rolled-up-bottoms-of-torn-jeans kind of way). I chained up my bike and walked in, wondering what the deal was. It turned out that Rick Bayless, the stellar chef of Topolobampo and Frontera Grill was doing a kitchen demonstration. One of the vendors at the nearby crepe stand told me that she'd never seen a chef demonstration this popular. (By the way, their cheese & herb crepe was pretty good, though the crepe itself could have been a bit less sweet.)

From a bunch of different stalls, I picked up überfresh asparagus (photographed), two heirloom tomatoes (photographed), about 1/4 pound of shiitake mushrooms and a pint of tiny strawberries. I got some stares when I was biking back home with the bag of strawberries hanging from the handle of my backpack, but that was definitely worth it--most of the fragile fruits survived the bumpy ride along Clark, on my suspension-less road bike. When Patrick comes home, I'll have them with some brownies and the leftover whipped cream (out of a spray can). Though I've snacked on some already...

Apparently, eating local is the "in" thing right now in the food writing industry (Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetables, Miracles and Alisa Smith's Plenty immediately come to my mind.) But looking at the veggies and fruits on the farmers' tables this morning in Lincoln Park, I couldn't help noticing the limiting implication of this "locavore" movement. Especially in Chicago.

There were lots of baby greens, asparagus and strawberries. There were quite a few young onions (photographed), chives, snap peas and rhubarbs. But there weren't too many others. Even the things we might think of as perennial staples at supermarkets, like potatoes and carrots, aren't visible in the farmers' market. Not that they should have been--I'm all for seasonality in veggies and fruits. But if I decided to stick to the complete locavore diet, I would be eating baby green salads and grilled asparagus for about a month before other things come in season. (I remember the cucumber hell and eggplant hell when my mom had bountiful years in our backyard veggie garden in Japan.) And what would I eat in winter, anyway?

Frigid Chicago winter aside, I suppose it really comes down to principles. I've been accustomed to being able to eat with a ton of variety, all year round, thanks to the globalized food production and distribution system. This is not just about the cooking methods and cuisines, but also about the ingredients. There's a limit to how many ways you can cook your asparagus. (For me, it's like five or six.) My brain might question the whole system that enables this kind of varied diet, but my spoiled (trained?) palate craves for the very thing that my brain questions. It's a glutton's dilemma that seems to take a lot of determination to solve.

Meanwhile, I'm entertaining the idea of reading either of the locavore books, because, after all, eating what can be produced locally may not be that limiting. Or is this an optimistic illusion?

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Green City Market
At the south end of Lincoln Park, between 1750 N. Clark St. and Stockton Dr.

The NY Times article on equipping a no-frills kitchen for under $200 is predictable but interesting. While there are points I would go about differently, Mark Bittman's success in keeping the cost under a spartan limit is pretty impressive, too. But he missed one thing. One BIG thing. And that's not surprising, at all.

The missing thing is the saibashi--cooking chopsticks. They're basically a longer version of normal chopsticks, except that they aren't elaborately coated or decorated. Usually made of wood or bamboo (mine are the latter), the saibashi is a wonderful all-purpose tool in any Japanese chef's kitchen. I use them for almost anything: mixing sauces, tossing salads, stirring noodles in boiling-hot water, stir-frying veggies, turning meat over a grill, transferring food from a pan to individual dishes, whisking eggs, picking up piping-hot tempura from the frying oil, scraping off cookie dough from a mixing bowl. And I didn't even have to try hard to come up with this list. In a pinch, when my pot holder has gone AWOL, I even use them to slide out the hot baking pan from the oven, though I suspect this isn't really their intended use. Without these four sets of saibashi, I won't survive a day in my kitchen.

And of course, Bittman wouldn't have included saibashi in his kitchen essentials, because he doesn't cook (I presume) like the Japanese. (Instead, he included stainless tongs.)

Just Hungry points out that a "no-frills" kitchen would vary culture to culture, and if one cooks differently from Bittman, her kitchen might look quite different from his. This is a point well taken, and (sort of quietly) reveals the unconscious ethnic bias in Bittman's article. I don't plan to be hysterical about his lack of social awareness or ethno-racial sensitivity (it's just a short article, after all), but it does make me feel a bit ambivalent, especially given the newspaper in which the article appears. In the same section (Dining and Wine), New York Times enjoys, celebrates and consumes the very diversity of food and cooking within the United States. Then why this apparent disregard of "other" cooking traditions in this specific article? I don't know the answer to this, but it is, at least, quite interesting to see how cultural differences manifest in assumptions about cooking and, thus, what one should have in one's kitchen.

Although I expressed doubt about kids-specific menu in the previous post, the NY Times article on kids' menu also reminded me of a restaurant staple--one that's designed specifically for kids--in Japan. Called "okosama lunch" (okosama rather politely refers to kids), this staple is available in many restaurants. Just like chicken fingers can be on the menu in Chinese or Italian restaurants, okosama lunch can be found on the menus of any kind of restaurnats that cater to families. Just thinking about okosama lunch, I'm starting to drool... forget what I said about kids-specific menus; this thing is fun!

The makeup of okosama lunch is pretty consistent. It's usually served on a special, often plastic, plate with kids-friendly patterns (like animals, cars, etc.) Sometimes, the plates can be shaped like a space shuttle or train. The usual suspects include ketchup-flavored rice (sometimes wrapped in a super-thin omlette), breadded-and-fried shrimps, a mini hamburger patty with demi glace sauce, ketchup-flavored spaghetti (somehow called Neapolitan in Japan), maybe an octopus-shaped sausage, a few fruits and a small salad. Many restaurants lure kids with such sweet extras as custard pudding or orange jelly, and some even go as far as accompanying their version of okosama lunch with a cheap plastic toy that's sure to be abandoned after ten minutes. (The image is an example of okosama lunch, served at Komeya Ryokan in Okayam prefecture.)

Though okosama lunches are nutritionaly questionable with a lot of fat and a lot of carbohydrates, it's kind of fun to get one every once in a while. (Yes, you could get one even if you're an adult--some restaurants do have age limit, but others don't. All it takes is some balls...) To attract kids, the chefs tend to be creative with presentation: the ketchup rice often boasts a miniature flag, while the color scheme of red ketchup, yellow eggs and green cucumber is decidedly festive. Best of all, since each food item is very small in amount, and an average plate holds about six or seven different items plus dessert, you get to try a little bit of everything. What not to like?

Now, if you're familiar with the "yoshoku" (Western food) tradition in Japan, you'll notice that most of the items on a given okosama lunch come from that tradition. In the late 19th century, when Japan finally opened its doors to the rest of the world, there was an influx of Western cuisine. Restaurants serving Western-style food sprouted up in large cities, especially in Tokyo, and were regarded as the hip place to dine. By the early 20th century, the chefs had modified traidtional French and other European cuisines to suit the Japanese palate and customs, and a few standard "yoshoku" items had been born. The ketchup-flavored rice wrapped in a thin omelette (called "om-rice," photographed below), hamburger patty served solo with demi glace sauce, and breadded-and-fried shrimps are some examples. These are items that invoke the sense of nostalgia in many a Japanese mind, despite their origin in alien cultures.

The concensus seems to be that okosama lunch was invented by a Taro Ando, a then-manager of the restaurant department of Mitsukoshi department store in Nihonbashi. Anecdote has it that he came up with the idea of serving tiny portions of the popular menu items of his restaurant to children, when a supplier of ceramics showed up to his office with a bunch of plates with kids-orientated design. This was in 1930. Despite the exorbitant price (it went for 1/3 of a yen, when a month of newspaper subscription cost a yen), and despite the economic hardship faced by most, it became an instant hit. Soon other restaurants followed suit. The original okosama lunch sported ketchup rice with green peas, spaghetti "Neapolitan," potato croquettes, a sausage, ham sandwiches, and a few pieces of tiny sugary candy as a dessert. Though the selection might seem like a nutritional disaster in the eyes of a modern eater, this veggieless dish could very well have appeared "nutritious" in the eyes of the early Showa-era Japanese, whose protein and fat intake was much lower. (The photo is a slightly higher-end version of okosama lunch, served to the guests of the Shodoshima International Hotel in Kagawa prefecture.)

Quite a few Japanese adults are still hooked to their sweet memory of eating okosama lunch in department store restaurants (one of the most likely places to find okosama lunch; not a surprise, given its origin). To appeal to these nostalgic diners, there are now some restaurants that serve adult versions of the okosama lunch. Each item may be a bit higher in quality (i.e., cooked from scratch, rather than dunking a plastic pouch into boiling water), and it may be modified to suit "adult" taste, but the adult version preserves the festive presentation and the fun of "little bit of everything." The nice thing about the adult version is that the quality tends to be much higher. With some notable exceptions, the quality of food involved in okosama lunch could be infuriatingly low, with many items made from frozen or canned stuff. But when you get the adult version, you know they can't cheat as easily, thus you're getting better stuff. Note to myself: next time we go to Japan, we have to do this...

Just Hungry has a nice recipe for om-rice, accompanied by her memory of getting okosama lunch at department store restaurants.

NY Times has an article on the prevalence of menus designed exclusively for kids. The writer, David Kamp, himself a father of two, laments the tight grip that ubiquitous chicken fingers have on his (and others') children. This article reminded me of a few questions I've always had ever since I noticed the über-greasy stuff that kids always seem to be eating in this country (even at restaurants that offer nutritionally and culinarily better choices for adults). Is it common for kids to eat differently from their parents, even after they're physically able to eat the same thing as their parents? Is this a traditional thing, or is this somehting new? If it's a new trend, how did this came to be?

According to the above article, the answer to the question #1 is Yes. For #2, it's a new thing. And for #3, Kamp offers an explanation: the advent of Happy Meal and McNuggets at McDonalds' fundamentaly changed the American idea about what kids should eat. Just like Kamp, who remembers his childhood meals as the same as his parents', I remember eating pretty much what my parents ate. When my parents ate broiled fish and miso soup, I ate those. When they ate curry and rice, I ate those, too. My mom probably altered the "adult" menu to suit my kiddy taste (i.e., more spaghetti with meat sauce, more potato croquettes, etc.), but the idea was for everyone in my family to eat the same thing.

Kamp's question about letting kids eat "kid cuisine" revolves (mainly) around the poor nutrition that "kid cuisine" tends to offer and around the arrested development of kids' sense of taste. When I think about the issue, though, there's another important component missing from his article. As Michael Pollan pointed out in his excellent Omnivore's Dilemma, eating is not just about nutritional intake. The act of eating is (or--has been, was, should be, could be, whatever you like) relational, in that by sitting around a table and eating the same food, you experience a certain kind of affirming relationship with the fellow diners, be it your family or your friends. The key here may be "the same food." Sure, we might have lively conversation over four different dishes at a restaurant, but as far as I'm concerned, the sense of communality is much stronger when we pass around our foods so everyone can try a bit of everything. When eating at home, sharing the same food that came out of the same pan can be a symbolic statement of the intimacy. (In Japanese, there's a phrase "buddies who ate rice out of the same pot," that refers to a profound and powerful friendship after a period of intense closeness, as on a ship or in a battlefield.)

On a more practical level, eating the same food can give us the opportunity to talk about the food we're eating. It may become a compliment to the chef, or it may wander off to a conversation about a specific ingredient, or a cooking method, which could evolve into a whole discussion of history and culture. Wherever the dinner table conversation flies off to, it starts at the sharing of the same food. As a kid, I had a lot of conversation, especially with my mom, about the food she cooked and we shared. My mom appreciated my feedback on her food, and I learned how to cook certain dishes I especially liked. (We also "traded" ingredients we disliked--my mom would transfer her tofu bits to my soup bowl, while I would scoop out all the green peas from my plate and move them to hers. This was an opportunity for my mom to "educate" me about the evils of picky eating...) If she'd had "adult cuisine" while I'd had chicken fingers, this sort of conversation may never have happened. (This sounds a lot like the familiar conservative nostalgia surrounding the perfect family, but it is more about sharing and talking about the same food than eating it with blood relatives.)

This leads me to suspect that some of the breakdown of cultural inhibition about food and eating (something Pollan argues in Omnivore's Dilemma) has to do with the separate eating during childhood. This is not to say, though, I oppose all the kids' menus. As Kamp points out, it's quite handy to have smaller portions for smaller wallet damage for kids when we eat out. (And I do take advantage of "kids' scoop" when I'm at ice cream shops!) It's just that flavorless, highly-processed, grease-packed "kids' menu" completely different from "parents' cuisine" seems detrimental to one of the fundamental relationships we develop between parents and kids: one over eating.