Day 330: Untangling My Chopsticks

I celebrated my arrival in Kyoto with a dinner of grilled eel, a sublime delicacy in Japan. In the water the fish resembles a ferocious jagged-toothed snake. But when sizzled over hot charcoal it looks like a fillet of sole that has spent the winter in Palm Beach. The skin turns crisp and smoky and the fatty white flesh, basted with a sweet soy syrup, becomes deeply tanned and as succulent as foie gras.

The restaurant was located in a cheery yellow mall beneath Kyoto Station, home to the southern bus terminal, north-south subway line, and Japan Railroad Tokaido Main, one of the four major bullet train routes. Being coatless and having underestimated how cold it gets in Kyoto in early November after the sun goes down, I had ducked into the mall in search of warmth and something to eat.

The restaurant lay at the end of a long corridor lined with inexpensive clothing emporiums, elegant Japanese sweet shops, and trinket stores selling sandalwood fans, pottery tea bowls, and I Love Kyoto key chains. Like all the other eateries in the area, the eel restaurant displayed lifelike plastic models of the items on its menu in a brightly lit picture window. I chose a small wooden table for two in the back of the restaurant and sat down in the chair facing the kitchen. I was the only diner. The chef, sporting a clean, pressed, white cotton band around his forehead, came over to my table. He was apparently also the waiter.

“Are you kmrmshtka?” asked the chef.
“Hmmm?” My eyebrows shot up.
“What would you nsmsplka?”

I giggled nervously, then bit my lower lip. He gestured to the window and started walking. I followed him outside. “Unagiijxwbrp?” he asked. I began to tell him I wanted the tray holding the single, not double, fillet of grilled eel with rice, soup, and pickles, but he interrupted.

“No English,” he said with a frown, shaking his head. I tapped my finger several times against the glass in front of the dinner I wanted, hoping he might make the connection.

“Ah, ah,” he exclaimed, pointing at the glass, “Unagixpxwz.” I squinted and leaned toward the window to read the plastic plaque marked with the meal's price in yen, then slowly wrote the price on my palm with my index finger and tapped the window again.

“Hai, hai.” He beamed, nodding vigorously. “Kirin?” Now, that I understood.

“Yes,” I said loudly, as if increasing the volume might lead to an increased understanding.
“Ladzkmttaka?” He opened his hands as if holding an invisible fire hydrant from top to bottom.
“Yes!” I boomed, not having the foggiest idea of what he had just asked.

The double-size beer arrived quickly, along with a glass. It wasn't one of those huge Henry the VIII steins like we get back home, but instead a teensy tumbler, similar to what budget hotels in America use for juice glasses at their complimentary breakfast buffets. I filled the glass and took a sip. The amber liquid tasted bitter and refreshing.

After about ten minutes, dinner came to the table looking identical to its plastic counterpart. Unfortunately, the eel's texture was similar too. But the accompanying steamed rice, pressed into the shape of a chrysanthemum, had a clean, delicate sweetness unlike any rice I had ever tasted. The tray also held a plastic bowl of miso soup, clear in parts and cloudy in others. I stirred the mixture with the tip of my chopsticks, then picked up the bowl and sipped the savory liquid enriched with diced tofu and emerald wisps of wakame seaweed.

In a shallow dish sat a small block of bean curd splashed with soy sauce and topped with pinkish curls of dried bonito that looked like pencil shavings. I cut into the silky white cube and tried to balance the craggy chunk on the slender pieces of wood. It tumbled off. After trying again, success was rewarded with the sweet taste of milky custard mingled with dark soy and smoky fish flakes. There were pickles too, crisp neon-yellow half-moons of sweet daikon radish and crunchy slices of eggplant. Although I had not expected culinary brilliance from a mall restaurant, dinner was exceeding expectations. The ingredients were plain, but exceptional in their purity and freshness.

As I moved around my tray—sipping, plucking, and crunching—I thought of all I had seen that day. Exotic images flashed to mind, including the painted orange gates of Yasaka Shrine, shaped like giant croquet wickets. There were the streetlights, heralding safe crossings, which chirped “uh-oh” for north-south foot traffic and “wheesh-wheesh” for east-west. Ginkgo trees fluttered banana-yellow leaves shaped like tiny fans against the turquoise sky. Red and white vending machines, clustered near subway stations, glowed brightly with offerings of beer, batteries, and cans of hot sweet milk tea. In a tiny noodle shop near Tea Bowl Lane, where pottery shops flanked both sides of the street, I joined mothers, children, and old men to slurp thick starchy udon (white wheat) noodles from a bowl of savory fish broth. At Kiyomizu-dera (Clear Water Temple), a massive wooden structure looming over the city against a backdrop of vermilion maples, I stepped inside the main hall to see the female Buddha of Mercy and Compassion. Fabricated from gold, she stood on a pedestal waving her “thousand arms” in a dark room with slippery wooden floors and smoky air pungent with the musky sweet smell of incense. Afterward I drank cold clear water from an aluminum ladle at the Sound-of-Feathers Waterfall below the temple with a crowd of boisterous schoolchildren, then sampled a green tea butter cookie at a gift shop in the mall beneath Kyoto Station. Even the beer with dinner tasted new to me, cleaner, crisper, and less fizzy than what I was used to back home. It had been a day of pure exhilaration, an unexpected adrenaline rush in anticipation of the thrilling, unpredictable, hopeful promise of Kyoto—my new home.

~~Untangling My Chopsticks: A Culinary Sojourn In Kyoto -by- Victoria Abbott Riccardi

Day 299: The Story Of The Human Body

Are you worried about rapid global climate change today? If not, you should be, because rising temperatures, altered rainfall patterns, and the ecological shifts they cause imperil our food supply. Yet, as we have already seen, global climate change has long been a major impetus in human evolution because of its effects on the age-old problem of “what’s for dinner?” It turns out that getting enough food in the face of global climate change also triggered the age of humans.

Getting dinner (or, for that matter, breakfast and lunch) probably does not dominate your list of daily concerns, yet most creatures are almost always hungry and preoccupied with the quest for calories and nutrients. To be sure, animals also need to find mates and avoid being eaten, but the struggle for existence is often a struggle for food, and until recently the vast majority of humans were no exception to this rule. Consider also that acquiring food is even more taxing when your habitat alters dramatically, causing the foods you normally eat to vanish or become less common. As we saw, the challenge of finding enough to eat sparked the first two major transformations in human evolution. As Africa became cooler and drier many millions of years ago, fruit became more scattered and scarce, favoring those ancestors who were better able to forage by standing and walking upright. Additional evolutionary responses were big, thick cheek teeth and large faces well suited to eating foods other than fruit, including tubers, roots, seeds, and nuts. Yet, as important as these transformations were, it is hard to think of Lucy and other australopiths as human. Although bipeds, they retained ape-sized brains, and they didn’t speak, think, or eat like us.

Our bodies and the way we behave evolved to be much more recognizably “human” at the dawn of the Ice Age, a truly pivotal period of change in the earth’s climate that was initiated by continued global cooling between 3 and 2 million years ago. Over this period, the earth’s oceans cooled about 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). Two degrees may seem trivial, yet as an average of global ocean temperatures, it represents an enormous quantity of energy. Global cooling involved many back and forth shifts, but by 2.6 million years ago the earth had chilled sufficiently to cause ice caps at the poles to expand. Our ancestors had no idea that gigantic glaciers were forming thousands of miles away, but they certainly experienced cycles of habitat change that were intensified by tumultuous geological activity, especially in eastern Africa. Because of a massive volcanic hotspot, the entire region was pushed upward like a soufflé, and then (like some soufflés) the central portion collapsed, forming the Great Rift Valley. The Rift Valley created an extensive rain shadow, drying out much of eastern Africa. The Rift Valley also harbored many lakes, which to this day continue to fill up and then drain out in cycles. Although eastern Africa’s climate was constantly changing, the overall trend was that forests shrank while woodlands, grasslands, and other more arid, seasonal habitats expanded. By 2 million years ago, the region looked much more like the set of The Lion King than Tarzan.

Imagine being a hungry hominin about 2.5 million years ago, living in a shifting mosaic of grasslands and woodlands, and wondering what to eat. How would you cope as preferred foods, like fruits, became scarcer? One solution, which we saw in the big-faced and humongous-toothed robust australopiths, was to focus even more intensively on increasingly prevalent tough, hard foods like roots, tubers, bulbs, and seeds. These hominins must have spent many hours a day arduously chewing, chewing, and chewing. Fortunately for us, natural selection seems to have also favored a second, revolutionary strategy to cope with changing habitats: hunting and gathering. This innovative way of life involved continuing to gather tubers and other plants but incorporated several new, transformative behaviors that included eating more meat, using tools to extract and process foods, and cooperating intensively to share foods and other tasks.

The evolution of hunting and gathering underlies the evolution of the human genus, Homo. Moreover, the key adaptations that were selected to make this ingenious way of life possible among the first humans were not big brains, but modern-shaped bodies. More than anything else, the evolution of hunting and gathering spurred your body to be the way it is.

The Ice Age precipitated the evolution of hunting and gathering along with modern bodies in several species of early Homo, but the most important is H. erectus. This consequential species has figured prominently in our understanding of human evolution since 1890, when Eugène Dubois, an intrepid Dutch army doctor inspired by Darwin and others, set off to Indonesia to find the true missing link between humans and apes. Blessed with good luck, Dubois found a fossil skullcap and a femur within months of arriving and promptly named it Pithecanthropus erectus (“upright apeman”). Then in 1929, comparable fossils were found in a cave near Beijing (then Peking), China, and named Sinanthropus pekinensis. In the ensuing decades more fossils of a similar nature started turning up in Africa, at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, and in places like Morocco and Algeria in North Africa. As with the Peking Man fossils, many of these finds were initially given new species names, and it wasn’t until after World War II that scholars came to the conclusion that the far-flung specimens actually belonged to a single species, H. erectus. According to the best evidence currently available, H. erectus first evolved in Africa by 1.9 million years ago and then rapidly started to disperse from Africa into the rest of the Old World. H. erectus (or a closely related species) shows up in the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia by 1.8 million years ago and in both Indonesia and China by 1.6 million years ago. In parts of Asia, the species persisted until less than a few hundred thousand years ago.

As you might expect for a species that endured for almost 2 million years on three continents, H. erectus came in a variety of shapes, much as we still do. They ranged from 40 to 70 kilograms (88 to 150 pounds) in weight, and from 122 centimeters to more than 185 centimeters (4 feet to almost 6 feet) in height. Many of them were the size of humans today, but females were at the smaller end of the human range, as was an entire population discovered in Georgia (at a site named Dmanisi). If you met a group of H. erectus on the street, you’d probably recognize them as being extremely humanlike, especially from the neck down. Unlike australopiths, their bodies had modern human proportions with relatively long legs and short arms. They had tall, narrow waists and completely modern feet, but their hips flared out more to the side than ours. Like us, they had low, wide shoulders and broad, barrel-shaped chests. But their heads were not entirely like ours. Although H. erectus didn’t have snouts, their faces were tall and deep, and males especially had an enormous, barlike browridge above their eyes. H. erectus brains were intermediate in size between australopith and human brains, and their skulls were long and flat on top and angled out at the back instead of being round like ours. Their teeth were nearly identical to human teeth today, but just a little larger.

~~The Story Of The Human Body : Evolution, Health, and Disease -by- Daniel Lieberman.

Day 185: Stuffed and Starved

The concerns of food production companies have ramifications far beyond what appears on supermarket shelves. Their concerns are the rot at the core of the modern food system. To show the systemic ability of a few to impact the health of the many demands a global investigation, travelling from the ‘green deserts’ of Brazil to the architecture of the modern city, and moving through history from the time of the first domesticated plants to the Battle of Seattle. It’s an enquiry that uncovers the real reasons for famine in Asia and Africa, why there is a worldwide epidemic of farmer suicides, why we don’t know what’s in our food any more, why black people in the United States are more likely to be overweight than white, why there are cowboys in South Central Los Angeles, and how the world’s largest social movement is discovering ways, large and small, for us to think about, and live differently with, food.

The alternative to eating the way we do today promises to solve hunger and diet-related disease, by offering a way of eating and growing food that is environmentally sustainable and socially just. Understanding the ills of the way food is grown and eaten also offers the key to greater freedom, and a way of reclaiming the joy of eating. The task is as urgent as the prize is great.

In every country, the contradictions of obesity, hunger, poverty and wealth are becoming more acute. India has, for example, destroyed millions of tons of grains, permitting food to rot in silos, while the quality of food eaten by India’s poorest is getting worse for the first time since Independence in 1947. In 1992, in the same towns and villages where malnutrition had begun to grip the poorest families, the Indian government admitted foreign soft drinks manufacturers and food multinationals to its previously protected economy. Within a decade, India has become home to the world’s largest concentration of diabetics: people – often children – whose bodies have fractured under the pressure of eating too much of the wrong kinds of food.

India isn’t the only home to these contrasts. They’re global, and they’re present even in the world’s richest country. In the United States in 2005, 35.1 million people didn’t know where their next meal was coming from.1 At the same time there is more diet-related disease like diabetes, and more food, in the US than ever before.

It’s easy to become inured to this contradiction; its daily version causes only mild discomfort, walking past the ‘homeless and hungry’ signs on the way to supermarkets bursting with food. There are moral emollients to balm a troubled conscience: the poor are hungry because they’re lazy, or perhaps the wealthy are fat because they eat too richly. This vein of folk wisdom has a long pedigree. Every culture has had, in some form or other, an understanding of our bodies as public ledgers on which is written the catalogue of our private vices. The language of condemnation doesn’t, however, help us understand why hunger, abundance and obesity are more compatible on our planet than they’ve ever been.

Moral condemnation only works if the condemned could have done things differently, if they had choices. Yet the prevalence of hunger and obesity affect populations with far too much regularity, in too many different places, for it to be the result of some personal failing. Part of the reason our judgement is so out of kilter is because the way we read bodies hasn’t kept up with the times. Although it may once have been true, the assumption that to be overweight is to be rich no longer holds. Obesity can no longer be explained exclusively as a curse of individual affluence. There are systemic features that make a difference. Here’s an example: many teenagers in Mexico, a developing country with an average income of US$6,000, are bloated as never before, even as the ranks of the Mexican poor swell. Individual wealth doesn’t explain why the children of some families are more obese than others: the crucial factor turns out not to be income, but proximity to the US border. The closer a Mexican family lives to its northern neighbours and to their sugar- and fat-rich processed food habits, the more overweight the family’s children are likely to be. That geography matters so much rather overturns the idea that personal choice is the key to preventing obesity or, by the same token, preventing hunger. And it helps to renew the lament of Porfirio Diaz, one of Mexico’s late-nineteenth-century presidents and autocrats: ‘¡Pobre Mexico! Tan lejos de Dios; y tan cerca de los Estados Unidos’ (Poor Mexico: so far from God, so close to the United States).

A perversity of the way our food comes to us is that it’s now possible for people who can’t afford enough to eat to be obese. Children growing up malnourished in the favelas of São Paulo, for instance, are at greater risk from obesity when they become adults. Their bodies, broken by childhood poverty, metabolize and store food poorly. As a result, they’re at greater risk of storing as fat the (poor-quality) food that they can access. Across the planet, the poor can’t afford to eat well. Again, this is true even in the world’s richest country; and in the US, it’s children who will pay the price. One research team recently suggested that if consumption patterns stay the way they are, today’s US children will live five fewer years, because of the diet-related diseases to which they will be exposed in their lifetimes.

As consumers, we’re encouraged to think that an economic system based on individual choice will save us from the collective ills of hunger and obesity. Yet it is precisely ‘freedom of choice’ that has incubated these ills. Those of us able to head to the supermarket can boggle at the possibility of choosing from fifty brands of sugared cereals, from half a dozen kinds of milk that all taste like chalk, from shelves of bread so sopped in chemicals that they will never go off, from aisles of products in which the principal ingredient is sugar. British children are, for instance, able to select from twenty-eight branded breakfast cereals the marketing of which is aimed directly at them. The sugar content of twenty-seven of these exceeds the government’s recommendations. Nine of these children’s cereals are 40 per cent sugar. It’s hardly surprising, then, that 8.5 per cent of six-year-olds and more than one in ten fifteen-year-olds in the UK are obese. And the levels are increasing. The breakfast cereal story is a sign of a wider systemic feature: there’s every incentive for food producing corporations to sell food that has undergone processing which renders it more profitable, if less nutritious. Incidentally, this explains why there are so many more varieties of breakfast cereals on sale than varieties of apples.

~~Stuffed and Starved -by- Raj Patel