The ground staff at Tokyo Haneda airport, tiny uniformed Lego people from the window of the 767, wave and bob and bow and salute excitedly at our Asahikawa-bound plane like they’re from the 1940’s when families still gathered to wave their handkerchiefs at departing airplanes.
We rise through so many layers of smog-yellow clouds that it feels as though we’re flying through lemon meringue pie, but when, an hour an a half later, we break through them again on the way down, I see a totally unfamiliar landscape. Someone has sliced the very top layer off of the Midwestern United States, big square plots and cows and crops at all, and set it down like a quilt over mostly rolling but occasionally jagged hills. But in the distance, flat-topped volcanoes rise through the misty clouds, and in the even farther distance, the sparkling curve of the ocean appears, a sweeping peninsula cutting into it. As we bank to make our landing, double-peaked Daisetsuzan suddenly rises close on the right, still slightly snowy in July.
The fact that American Airlines’ idea of a vegetarian meal had been white rice with boiled cauliflower on top, along with the fact that I had chosen to go to the Saryo Itoen at Haneda and eat matcha green tea ice cream with red beans and mochi instead of anything resembling an actual dinner, catches up with me in a big way as I ride the bus from Asahikawa airport to downtown. Briefly, I curse my luck arriving so late when there will almost certainly be no restaurants open to feed me, nor energy to sit down and have a meal even if any were, but when I alight I remember – duh – I’m in Japan, where the nearest 7-11 will give me delicious onigiri (rice balls) fit for a queen, and the nearest corner will overflow with drink vending machines.
So, at 9:00pm, munching on delicious cod roe and horseradish wrapped in rice and seaweed with one hand and drinking lemon-flavored coconut water with the other, I navigate the dark, deserted-but-for-the-occasional-businessman-on-a-bicycle streets to my hostel.
Monday, July 24, 2017
Wednesday, July 19, 2017
Have You Tried This Before?
I’ve noticed that many (if not most) of my most enjoyable meals are preceded by a waiter or waitress trying their best to dissuade me from ordering them.
Bún Nước Lèo Sóc Trăng at Sóc Trăng Restaurant: “This soup…a little bit stink.” (while holding nose)
Bún Mắm Nước Lèo Bạc Liêu at Thanh Mai: “Even some Vietnamese people don’t like it.”
Bún Mít Mắm Nêm at Ngự Bình: “This dish, I think, not for you.”
Oc Len Xao Dua at C&C Express: “Uh, you know snail, right?!”
Hột Vịt Lộn at Hột Vịt Lộn Long An : “Egg with BABY.” (Direct, meaningful eye contact.)
Thịt Heo Luộc Cuốn Tôm Chua at Huế Ơi: “The shrimp is fermented! Pickled. If you don’t like it I will replace it for you.” (Later, watching me take – and enjoy – each bite: “Is it OK? I will replace it with something else!”)
Ốc Lá Lốt at Chả Ốc Gia Huy: “You know… we have grilled pork too.”
Lest you think it’s just Vietnamese places warning me about fish sauce, anchovy paste, or some iteration of fermented sea creature:
Udang Sambal Petai at Mutiara: “Have you had this before? Maybe you shouldn’t.” (After pressing for more information: “When you go to the bathroom it will smell.”)
Shirako at Ohshima: “Do you know shirako? I will tell you what it is after you eat it.”
Preserved Egg With Eggplant and Chili at Xi An Tasty: “So, this egg purple and green…”
Spicy Fish Paste Curry at Yoma Myanmar: “Not fish… fish paste. Not the same.”
Etc., etc.
This is embarrassing to admit, but before I gave it careful thought, this type of thing used to really offend me. I felt discriminated against as a white person (I KNOW, but I was in my twenties) and that it wasn’t fair that everyone assumed my tastebuds would prefer all the mainstream, bland menu items. I’m so misunderstood. Why must people judge my tastebuds by the color of my skin? I would lament as I added way too much purple shrimp paste to my baby clam salad just to prove a point to the waitress (who was not watching and did not care).
Finally, I came to the simple realization that everyone just wants the people they feed to like the food they feed them. That’s why my family used to try so hard to cook for my vegetarian ex-boyfriend despite a) not agreeing with his dietary choices and b) him preferring to just eat cereal anyway. They wanted his tastebuds (even though they thought that his tastebuds were stupid) to enjoy themselves. They wanted him to feel cared for and considered.
No restaurant wants to shock a new customer out of her presumed comfort zone with a brined, weeks-dried green and purple mushy gelatinous egg, and have her throw up or scream or cry and make a scene. Obviously. But it also doesn’t want the customer to suffer in silence or even be quietly unpleasantly surprised with all the weirdness happening in her mouth. They just want her to enjoy her food. And assuming that a white customer is going to be unfamiliar with – and perhaps offended by – fermented shrimp paste or fish testicles or duck fetuses or snails is not at all unreasonable.
It’s great that I have become more tolerant of people treating me with human decency and all, but I still need to examine my affinity for trying the oddest-looking thing on the menu just because it’s the oddest-looking thing on the menu. There are some things I just plain straight-up actually love, like fish/shrimp/anchovy paste, cod testicles, and betel leaves, but there are other things, like duck fetuses and the slimy or rubbery types of snails (i.e. most of them), that I eat just because they’re not something I’d normally eat. In the best case scenario, this can be traced to my natural affinity for novelty. In the worst-case scenario, it reeks of exoticism, appropriation, and other fancy ways of describing individuals from dominant cultures being insensitive, bumbling jerks.
Realistically, it’s probably somewhere in the middle. I do believe that many of us narrow our experiences unnecessarily. When it comes to food, that tendency can cause harm. Only being open to eating certain parts of the animal, for example, leads to massive, widespread waste, with animals being killed for a mere fraction of their flesh. (Shark fin soup comes to mind here, as well as male baby chicks being slaughtered at birth.) Being open to all that is edible reduces waste and invites diversity of crops – which in turn provides them with some protection against pests/disease/natural disaster.
So maybe my insistence on trying the most unfamiliar thing on the menu is a little questionable on the cultural sensitivity scale, but the intention behind it is pure. Let’s hope the justification isn’t just a post-hoc scramble.
Bún Nước Lèo Sóc Trăng at Sóc Trăng Restaurant: “This soup…a little bit stink.” (while holding nose)
Bún Mắm Nước Lèo Bạc Liêu at Thanh Mai: “Even some Vietnamese people don’t like it.”
Bún Mít Mắm Nêm at Ngự Bình: “This dish, I think, not for you.”
Oc Len Xao Dua at C&C Express: “Uh, you know snail, right?!”
Hột Vịt Lộn at Hột Vịt Lộn Long An : “Egg with BABY.” (Direct, meaningful eye contact.)
Thịt Heo Luộc Cuốn Tôm Chua at Huế Ơi: “The shrimp is fermented! Pickled. If you don’t like it I will replace it for you.” (Later, watching me take – and enjoy – each bite: “Is it OK? I will replace it with something else!”)
Ốc Lá Lốt at Chả Ốc Gia Huy: “You know… we have grilled pork too.”
Lest you think it’s just Vietnamese places warning me about fish sauce, anchovy paste, or some iteration of fermented sea creature:
Udang Sambal Petai at Mutiara: “Have you had this before? Maybe you shouldn’t.” (After pressing for more information: “When you go to the bathroom it will smell.”)
Shirako at Ohshima: “Do you know shirako? I will tell you what it is after you eat it.”
Preserved Egg With Eggplant and Chili at Xi An Tasty: “So, this egg purple and green…”
Spicy Fish Paste Curry at Yoma Myanmar: “Not fish… fish paste. Not the same.”
Etc., etc.
This is embarrassing to admit, but before I gave it careful thought, this type of thing used to really offend me. I felt discriminated against as a white person (I KNOW, but I was in my twenties) and that it wasn’t fair that everyone assumed my tastebuds would prefer all the mainstream, bland menu items. I’m so misunderstood. Why must people judge my tastebuds by the color of my skin? I would lament as I added way too much purple shrimp paste to my baby clam salad just to prove a point to the waitress (who was not watching and did not care).
Finally, I came to the simple realization that everyone just wants the people they feed to like the food they feed them. That’s why my family used to try so hard to cook for my vegetarian ex-boyfriend despite a) not agreeing with his dietary choices and b) him preferring to just eat cereal anyway. They wanted his tastebuds (even though they thought that his tastebuds were stupid) to enjoy themselves. They wanted him to feel cared for and considered.
No restaurant wants to shock a new customer out of her presumed comfort zone with a brined, weeks-dried green and purple mushy gelatinous egg, and have her throw up or scream or cry and make a scene. Obviously. But it also doesn’t want the customer to suffer in silence or even be quietly unpleasantly surprised with all the weirdness happening in her mouth. They just want her to enjoy her food. And assuming that a white customer is going to be unfamiliar with – and perhaps offended by – fermented shrimp paste or fish testicles or duck fetuses or snails is not at all unreasonable.
It’s great that I have become more tolerant of people treating me with human decency and all, but I still need to examine my affinity for trying the oddest-looking thing on the menu just because it’s the oddest-looking thing on the menu. There are some things I just plain straight-up actually love, like fish/shrimp/anchovy paste, cod testicles, and betel leaves, but there are other things, like duck fetuses and the slimy or rubbery types of snails (i.e. most of them), that I eat just because they’re not something I’d normally eat. In the best case scenario, this can be traced to my natural affinity for novelty. In the worst-case scenario, it reeks of exoticism, appropriation, and other fancy ways of describing individuals from dominant cultures being insensitive, bumbling jerks.
Realistically, it’s probably somewhere in the middle. I do believe that many of us narrow our experiences unnecessarily. When it comes to food, that tendency can cause harm. Only being open to eating certain parts of the animal, for example, leads to massive, widespread waste, with animals being killed for a mere fraction of their flesh. (Shark fin soup comes to mind here, as well as male baby chicks being slaughtered at birth.) Being open to all that is edible reduces waste and invites diversity of crops – which in turn provides them with some protection against pests/disease/natural disaster.
So maybe my insistence on trying the most unfamiliar thing on the menu is a little questionable on the cultural sensitivity scale, but the intention behind it is pure. Let’s hope the justification isn’t just a post-hoc scramble.
Thursday, July 13, 2017
Portland: Food Carts and the Surface of the World
“Don’t miss the food carts,” said pretty much everyone when I mentioned I was visiting Portland.
Having never been to a city in the US where semipermanent food cart encampments were allowed (cities in China, Korea, Malaysia, etc, sure, but not in the US) I sort of blew off this advice, figuring they meant something like a food truck gathering, which in LA is now synonymous with hordes of hipsters, $20 parking, and hour-long lines.
What they meant, it turns out, is that on random street corners throughout the city, the edges of parking lots are full of trailers, RVs, converted buses, wheel-less or wheeled trucks, or tiny houses, serving food from all over the world. They have weird hours and even weirder seating options, and look a lot like the encampments at Slab City, but their menus are overall pretty mouthwatering-looking.
There’s a lot of emphasis on Middle Eastern food, and Egyptian and Iraqi food in particular. Dinner one night was a sabich, billed as a ‘Jewish-Iraqi breakfast’ – a soft, warm pita oozing a mixture of egg, hummus, pickled mango sauce, and eggplant guts all over the potatoes inside. This was from Wolf & Bear’s, which looked like one piece of an old-timey caravan, tucked pretty permanently in a parking lot across from a bookstore. I wish I had had time to get into the nuances of the differences between Egyptian, Iraqi, Lebanese, and Jordanian food, as the carts were pretty explicit about specifying their origin, but their menus looked identical: falafel, kabobs, hummus, dolmas, tabbouleh, etc.
On a different day, a failed attempt at eating at “the only Mauritian restaurant in the US” (apparently it has a ‘Closed When Out Of Food’ policy) led me to hold myself over with some Haitian meat pies and a papaya smoothie at Caribbean Kitchen next door. The pies’ dough was perfectly light and flaky, graduating slowly into a melty symbiosis with the meat filling, which felt like all its spices had been muted.
Thus over-breaded, I stole bites here and there of my companion’s vegan hiyashi ramen, an angry red cauldron of shichimi togarashi (Japanese seven spice), oil, mushrooms, cabbages, and very al dente noodles. The overall effect was somewhere between that chunky red pepper paste served at dim sum restaurants and a mushroom salad dressed in oil. Not one to shy away from excessive oil, my lunch the next day was a plate of meat oil-soaked kielbasa, pierogi, and cabbage stew from a cart at the Saturday market.
Some non-food cart adventures included a vegetarian combination Ethiopian lunch plate, trendy ‘Korean-fusion restaurant‘ (I put this in quotes because there was very little Korean about my honey-anchovy encrusted potato chips, Dungeness crab seaweed noodle concoction, or the okay-I-guess-vaguely-Korean-esque scordalia pancake topped with gravlax and greens), a ramen joint that didn’t skimp on the Sichuan peppercorns (yes, Sichuan hot-pot-inspired ramen!), and an outrageously tasty goat-milk/marionberry jam/habanero ice cream. Right before leaving, I enjoyed a neat, spare, and walnut-brea-accompanied Swedish hash with trout, getting to the restaurantmere minutes before the rest of Portland.
It sounds like I had a world-traipsingly good time, and I did, in a way. If you want a the most accessible tour of the culinary surface of the world, you can’t do much better than Portland. However, my travel-scarred tastebuds tell me that it was just that: the surface. Nowhere were my preconceptions or preferences challenged, my mouth heated to more than a ‘mild’ (except for in the case of the Sichuan peppercorn ramen), or my horizons expanded. Everything I ate was well within the comfort zone of the average mildly adventurous American. Not once did I have to try and parse an unfamiliar language or a questionable translation, make an embarrassing faux-pas, or feel like a visitor to a different culture’s space.
It felt like everything was being marketed TO me -or at least the part of me that exists as a white American culinary tourist. I was the intended audience. Not the people whose culture’s food was being marketed.
I’m not knocking Portland for this, necessarily. If you want to make the most money, you obviously want to market to your biggest, well, market, and in Portland, maybe that’s the mainly white American culinary tourist. And maybe this kind of dabbling leads to more people being more open and experimental with food choices. I didn’t start out eating pork knuckles and beef tendons. First I needed to know that pork knuckles and beef tendons were food and were being served at restaurants. Others may need a larger shove than just awareness: first sausage, then blood sausage, then blood cubes, then raw goat blood pudding, for example?
Still, such extreme accessibility, no matter how convenient and at times even tasty, feels weird and a little icky. I’d rather pay a steeper price of admission into another culture’s universe.
My favorite thing about Portland was something that needed no marketing at all: the local berries! Vancouver (Washington)’s farmers market provided me with all the marionberries, tiny strawberries, and Rainier cherries that I could eat, and the flavors were so wholly different from anything available in California that they instantly made the whole trip worth it.
Having never been to a city in the US where semipermanent food cart encampments were allowed (cities in China, Korea, Malaysia, etc, sure, but not in the US) I sort of blew off this advice, figuring they meant something like a food truck gathering, which in LA is now synonymous with hordes of hipsters, $20 parking, and hour-long lines.
What they meant, it turns out, is that on random street corners throughout the city, the edges of parking lots are full of trailers, RVs, converted buses, wheel-less or wheeled trucks, or tiny houses, serving food from all over the world. They have weird hours and even weirder seating options, and look a lot like the encampments at Slab City, but their menus are overall pretty mouthwatering-looking.
There’s a lot of emphasis on Middle Eastern food, and Egyptian and Iraqi food in particular. Dinner one night was a sabich, billed as a ‘Jewish-Iraqi breakfast’ – a soft, warm pita oozing a mixture of egg, hummus, pickled mango sauce, and eggplant guts all over the potatoes inside. This was from Wolf & Bear’s, which looked like one piece of an old-timey caravan, tucked pretty permanently in a parking lot across from a bookstore. I wish I had had time to get into the nuances of the differences between Egyptian, Iraqi, Lebanese, and Jordanian food, as the carts were pretty explicit about specifying their origin, but their menus looked identical: falafel, kabobs, hummus, dolmas, tabbouleh, etc.
On a different day, a failed attempt at eating at “the only Mauritian restaurant in the US” (apparently it has a ‘Closed When Out Of Food’ policy) led me to hold myself over with some Haitian meat pies and a papaya smoothie at Caribbean Kitchen next door. The pies’ dough was perfectly light and flaky, graduating slowly into a melty symbiosis with the meat filling, which felt like all its spices had been muted.
Thus over-breaded, I stole bites here and there of my companion’s vegan hiyashi ramen, an angry red cauldron of shichimi togarashi (Japanese seven spice), oil, mushrooms, cabbages, and very al dente noodles. The overall effect was somewhere between that chunky red pepper paste served at dim sum restaurants and a mushroom salad dressed in oil. Not one to shy away from excessive oil, my lunch the next day was a plate of meat oil-soaked kielbasa, pierogi, and cabbage stew from a cart at the Saturday market.
Some non-food cart adventures included a vegetarian combination Ethiopian lunch plate, trendy ‘Korean-fusion restaurant‘ (I put this in quotes because there was very little Korean about my honey-anchovy encrusted potato chips, Dungeness crab seaweed noodle concoction, or the okay-I-guess-vaguely-Korean-esque scordalia pancake topped with gravlax and greens), a ramen joint that didn’t skimp on the Sichuan peppercorns (yes, Sichuan hot-pot-inspired ramen!), and an outrageously tasty goat-milk/marionberry jam/habanero ice cream. Right before leaving, I enjoyed a neat, spare, and walnut-brea-accompanied Swedish hash with trout, getting to the restaurantmere minutes before the rest of Portland.
It sounds like I had a world-traipsingly good time, and I did, in a way. If you want a the most accessible tour of the culinary surface of the world, you can’t do much better than Portland. However, my travel-scarred tastebuds tell me that it was just that: the surface. Nowhere were my preconceptions or preferences challenged, my mouth heated to more than a ‘mild’ (except for in the case of the Sichuan peppercorn ramen), or my horizons expanded. Everything I ate was well within the comfort zone of the average mildly adventurous American. Not once did I have to try and parse an unfamiliar language or a questionable translation, make an embarrassing faux-pas, or feel like a visitor to a different culture’s space.
It felt like everything was being marketed TO me -or at least the part of me that exists as a white American culinary tourist. I was the intended audience. Not the people whose culture’s food was being marketed.
I’m not knocking Portland for this, necessarily. If you want to make the most money, you obviously want to market to your biggest, well, market, and in Portland, maybe that’s the mainly white American culinary tourist. And maybe this kind of dabbling leads to more people being more open and experimental with food choices. I didn’t start out eating pork knuckles and beef tendons. First I needed to know that pork knuckles and beef tendons were food and were being served at restaurants. Others may need a larger shove than just awareness: first sausage, then blood sausage, then blood cubes, then raw goat blood pudding, for example?
Still, such extreme accessibility, no matter how convenient and at times even tasty, feels weird and a little icky. I’d rather pay a steeper price of admission into another culture’s universe.
My favorite thing about Portland was something that needed no marketing at all: the local berries! Vancouver (Washington)’s farmers market provided me with all the marionberries, tiny strawberries, and Rainier cherries that I could eat, and the flavors were so wholly different from anything available in California that they instantly made the whole trip worth it.
Sunday, July 2, 2017
The State of My Stomach: Stop 0 (USA)
I sit now on the cusp of a year-long trip, starting on July 23, 2017. That morning, I board a plane to Asahikawa, Hokkaido, Japan, and kick off a year of chasing regional specialty dishes, local plants, and seasonal seafood all around the globe (well, all around the Eastern Hemisphere). Predicted highlights will include fresh sea urchin in Hokkaido, various durian cultivars in Malaysia, pickled fish roe and fried algae in Laos, bluff oysters and freshwater crayfish in New Zealand, khinkali in Georgia, and sea snails and octopus in Sicily! Unpredicted highlights will include… who knows? I can predict, however, that this uncharted space is where the substance will be.
The ‘State of my Stomach’ posts will be monthly posts that chronicle how this trip is affecting my taste buds. Stop 0 is a bit of an anomaly because I’m still at home, but I’m using it as an opportunity to establish a flavor base.
For as much as it feels like I’ve always preferred what I currently prefer (and vice versa), there exists lots of evidence to prove me wrong. My recent slow march towards pescetarianism resulting in my taste buds turning against meat, for example. So too 20-year-old photos of me with bottles of Cherry Coke to my lips. Or my mom insisting that I used to order only bean and cheese burritos at Mexican restaurants. Or clear memories of running to the bathroom in disgust to spit an accidentally-bitten olive into my napkin before the flavor made me gag. Or consistently ordering cafeteria pizza and limp lettuce salad for lunch as a high school senior.
Taste buds are highly malleable.
So here’s Stop 0’s base:
Love: shellfish and sashimi, vegetable juices, very dark chocolate, tropical fruits, seared things
Hate: artificial flavors, most fast food, unnecessarily sweet things, celery, MSG as an excuse for being lazy about flavor, dishes plated to appeal mainly to Instagrammers, wine
General trend: I love to try things I am unfamiliar with – even more so if I’ve read about them previously. I like almost everything that is made of real (not chemically created/enhanced) ingredients, not overly reliant on a lazy spice like salt, sugar, or MSG, and prepared with skill and care. Strong herbs are a plus. Anything I can taste in burps hours later is also a plus.
Notable life influences:
- 1984: I am born into a family which holds the attitude that if it is edible, it should be sampled at least once.
- 1987: I eat deep fried fish eyes on a dare without understanding why this is a big deal.
- 1988: I am the only kid in preschool with cream cheese and caviar sandwiches in her lunch box.
- 1990: I decide to stop eating 90% of the food I like as an experiment (to see what not liking food feels like).
- 1991: I binge-eat Gulf oysters as fast as my uncle can shuck them at our Thanksgiving gathering in Houston.
- 1993: I randomly throw up in the middle of the night, am told it is because I only ate junk food the previous day, and then proceed to ask my mom every day for at least a year whether I have eaten enough healthy food to protect against night vomiting
- 1997: I rebelliously sneak Spaghetti-O’s and Chef Boyardee at a friend’s house because I know my mom would be mad if she saw me eating it.
- 2001: On a trip to New Orleans with my high school band, we’re supposed to be eating at our hotel and at places like Old Country Buffet, so I ‘run away’ into the city to sample some of New Orleans’ actual culinary offerings. I get in trouble with the band director, but not with my dad. He is proud.
- 2004: Sophomore year of college, I date a man with a nutritionist mother who is way too intense for me at the time with all her vitamins and sprouted grain bread, but who nudges me slowly but irreversibly away from the instant ramen, canned soup and frozen dinners I live on at the time.
- 2009: I discover Yelp, before Yelp is big enough to have armies of fake reviewers or significant sway over businesses’ success, and use it to redefine my understanding of Colorado’s culinary landscape. I also discover that, even more than discovering new food myself, I love introducing it to others.
- 2010: I move within striking distance of a Little Saigon second in size and Vietnamese population only to Actual Saigon.
- 2012: I travel through East/Southeast Asia for three straight months and discover that no matter how much ‘unhealthy’ street food I consume, I still feel better than I do at home in the States (as long as I chase all of it with handfuls of tropical fruit).
- 2016: I become too bothered by the existence of factory farming to sit idly by, but remain way too food-centered to go fully vegetarian. I do periodic vegan experiments and cut my (non-seafood) meat consumption drastically, which results, wholly unexpectedly, in my not liking meat as much when I do eat it. I have mixed feelings about this and write a maudlin blog post about it.
Rising interest: olives, creative vegan, durian varieties, coffee (in small doses), craft beer (in even smaller doses), chickpea-alternative hummus, eating in complete darkness, insects
Falling interest: smoothies, granola, meat (mammal and fowl), raw food, imitation meat
Targets in the next country (Japan): shirako (cod testicles), gindara saikyo-yaki (fried black cod), umi-budo (sea grapes), te-uchi soba, taimeshi (rice with sea bream and kombu), kabayaki (grilled unagi), namero (aji mince), dojo (tiny eel), and haskap berries.
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