Food and Drink

I’m back in the UK after a trip to the US which included a week spent at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Thanks to Harry and everyone else who made it such a memorable and enjoyable visit, and to those Crooked Timber readers who made suggestions about what to eat. (The frozen custard was excellent, but I passed on the cheese curds.) One piece of good luck I had there was the following. Having eaten dinner and enjoyed interesting conversation with some of Harry’s students, I was wandering down State Street last Thursday when I saw a poster advertising a Mary Gauthier gig. When? I wondered. Tonight! I produced my $15 dollars admission and made my entrance. It was a terrific performance by Mary and her German guitarist Thomm Jutz, leavened by some great monologues including one about “Brits who listen to Radio 2.” Afterwards, I was able to identify myself as such whilst getting my copy of Mercy Now autographed, a memorable evening.

Browsing people’s Flickr accounts I came across pictures from CANstruction.

Canstruction® combines the competitive spirit of a design/build competition with a unique way to help feed hungry people. Competing teams, lead by architects and engineers, showcase their talents by designing giant sculptures made entirely out of canned foods. At the close of the exhibitions all of the food used in the structures is donated to local food banks for distribution to pantries, shelters, soup kitchens, elderly and day care centers.

The official Web site has pictures of this year’s winners, but I think it’s much more fun just to browse the Flickr photos tagged with “canstruction”. Check out the list of participating cities to see whether you can still catch the show somewhere.

I’m in Madison Wisconsin for the week and enjoying my first experience of the US away from the east coast. As visitors are, I keep being struck by the micro-details of life and how they differ from the UK. Harry and I just had lunch in a student cafeteria. Having finished our sandwiches we got up to get some coffee from a machine and simply left our coats and bags by our table whilst we did so, even though they were not always in sight. The cafeteria was also organized with the tills at one end and the seating back in the same space as the self-service access to food. Everyone stands in line and pays before taking their seats. All of this is radically different from the UK where (a) one learns from an early age to hang on to all one’s property because otherwise it will be stolen and (b) where given an opportunity to take food from the university, sit down and eat it and not pay, many (even most) students would do so.

(On the downside, the built environment has far too much concrete, especially on roadways and pavements (flagstones would make such a difference) and people eat dinner barbarically early—6pm!!).

(On the very downside, I tuned into Country Music TV in my hotel room and found no overlap whatsoever with the stuff that gets played by Bob Harris : Emmylou, Steve Earle, Gillian Welch—forget it—it is all wall-to-wall pap by people wearing cowboy hats. Appalling.)

Getting drunk part of Australian culture, study finds. “The National Drug and Alcohol Research Council study of 1,500 Australians found that some 58 percent of people agreed that sometimes having too much to drink was ‘simply part of the Australian way of life.’”

Oh, sure, they’ve been thinking about the whole bird flu thing. But what about zombies?

“When it comes to defending ourselves against an army of reanimated human corpses, the officials in charge have fallen asleep at the wheel,” [Pittsburgh Mayor Tom] Murphy said. “Who’s in charge of sweep-and-burn missions to clear out infected areas? Who’s going to guard the cemeteries at night? If zombies were to arrive in the city tomorrow, we’d all be roaming the earth in search of human brains by Friday.”

I’m afraid it’s all too likely that zombie-preparedness has been neglected in New Orleans, especially given former FEMA head Brown’s focus on tasty food—other than human brains.

At 11:20 a.m. Aug. 31, Bahamonde e-mailed Brown, “Sir, I know that you know the situation is past critical . . . thousands gathering in the streets with no food or water . . . estimates are many will die within hours.”

At 2:27 p.m., however, Brown press secretary Sharon Worthy wrote colleagues to schedule an interview for Brown on MSNBC’s “Scarborough Country” and to give him more time to eat dinner because Baton Rouge restaurants were getting busy: “He needs much more that 20 or 30 minutes.”

I was born in Savannah, GA, and raised just outside the city; I spent many a happy childhood hour playing on the various above-ground crypts which enhance the picturesque nature of the city. You can bet your life we were armed to the teeth against possible zombie intrusions. Wait, maybe that was just the paranoia talking after my parents were in on that big shipment of DMT from out west when I was a kid. When my mom woke up still tripping on the third day, stuttering things like “wheels of fire…wheels within wheels…” I knew things were bad. But by then I could totally make pancakes and stuff, so me and my 3-year-old brother were fine. Wait, what was I saying? Yeah. Zombie preparedeness. Don’t rely on the government. Y’all are going to be on your own. Mmmmm, braaiins. It makes the pain go away. The pain of being dead.

Via Radley Balko, a rather nice BBC article about the crappy statistics behind the claim that the British are engaging in more binge drinking.

I’m back from a few days in Munich, which I’d recommend as excellent value to visit. (I suspect there’s an oversupply of hotel rooms in advance of next summer’s world cup.) It rained nearly the whole time I was there, but that didn’t stop me from visiting some excellent art galleries: the wonderful Alte Pinakothek , the goodish Neue Pinakotek and the sinister and intruiging Villa Stuck . Of course I also managed to consume a large number of excellent sausages and quantities of Dunkles Weißbier ! All of which brings me on to a less flattering observation on Germany and the Germans, namely, that the Germans may well be the worst dressed of the major industrial nations. Admittedly, the competition is stiff from us British and from the Americans, but I think the Germans may win on grounds of sheer uniformity. It is possible to sit and watch a string of people of all ages and sizes walk past all dressed as follows: dark denim jeans, dark denim jacket, trainers (sneakers). The monotony is hardly broken by the occasional deviant who leaves the denim jacket behind for a regulation black leather one. Since Jamie Oliver’s Naked Chef is now dubbed into German —so much for Chirac joking with Schroeder about British cuisine—I can’t help wondering whether the Germans aren’t in line for some British or American clothing-and-lifestlye fascism TV: Trinny and Susannah or Queer Eye for the Straight Guy perhaps. But perhaps they already get those shows and are showing a laudable determination to resist.

[For Alex: here’s a link to a picture of Gabriel Cornelius von Max’s Monkeys as Judges of Art from the Neue Pinakothek.]

An interesting story in the Chronicle (link should work for 5 days or so) on the ethics of scientific research. The National Academy of Sciences has decided to publish a paper describing the vulnerability of the nation’s milk supply to terrorist attack (yes, it’s a serious paper), despite a letter from the Department of Health and Human Services saying that publication would provide”a road map for terrorists” and not be “in the interests of the United States.”

In their paper, Mr. Wein and Mr. Liu describe how the milk industry is vulnerable because individual farmers send their product to central processing facilities, thereby allowing milk from many locations to mix. Terrorists could poison the supply by putting botulinum toxin into one of the 5,500-gallon trucks that picks up milk daily at farms or by dropping the toxin into raw-milk silos, which hold roughly 50,000 gallons each. Pasteurization would destroy some but not all of the toxin, and a millionth of a gram of toxin may be enough to kill a person.

The authors’ reasons for making these findings widely known (and the National Academy’s for publishing them) seem legit. There are safeguard measures that could be taken to make this kind of attack more difficult; for instance the simple step of locking milk trucks and tanks. While the government has issued voluntary guidelines recommending that milk suppliers take these precautions, it’s been unwilling to require them by law. In essence then, the government seems to be relying on voluntary compliance and security-through-obscurity, neither of which provide much protection as any system administrator worth his or her salt will tell you. As one of the paper’s authors notes, “Using Google, … it would take you all of 30 seconds to pull up these things.” It doesn’t seem at all unreasonable to raise a public stink about this, in the hope that it will provoke a serious response.

Learn the ways of the farm with the help of Ham Solo, Chewbroccoli, C3Peanuts, Tofu D2, Obi Wan Cannoli, Cuke Skywalker, Lord Tader and Princess Lettuce. [thanks]

Kieran’s recent analysis of Timberites’ blogging habits showed that one of my main contributions around here is in the area of trivia. (In a more generous or delusional moment one may call it the “other” or “interesting tidbits” category, but I digress.) So to live up to my role around here, I thought I would post an entry about the unfortunate downturn in the life of what used to be the wonderful Starbucks espresso brownie bar.

I don’t drink coffee so Starbucks holds limited appeal to me. I am also not fooled by most of their pastries, which tend to look good, but usually do not measure up in taste. There is one exception, however: their espresso brownie bar. It is great! Unfortunately, in the past few months they have added a nearly tasteless fudge on top. The bar in general seems to have gotten smaller and this may be a way to distract from that and put less quality chocolate in the product. Suffice it to say that it is a really bad innovation (if you can even call it that). They have pretty much ruined an extremely good pastry. Yes, I can get dramatic when it comes to chocolate. I do not like people messing with a good chocolate product.

It turns out that you can still get the fudgeless type in other markets, however. During my recent travels I noticed them at various airports. Maybe introducing the new version in some markets is their way of experimenting to see if the change holds up. If you would like to join my campaign [1] to help save a perfectly good pastry then please send the company a note by filling out this form on their Web site. Espresso brownie enthusiasts will thank you.

1. I will keep you posted regarding tax-deductible donations to the cause as the movement progresses.

Jared Diamond tells us more about rat by-product consumption in the Old West in Collapse:

In 1849, hungry gold miners crossing the Nevada desert noticed some glistening balls of a candy-like substance on a cliff, licked or ate the balls, and discovered them to be sweet-tasting, but then they developed nausea. Eventually it was realized that the balls were hardened deposits made by small rodents, called packrats. that protect themselves by building nests of sticks, plant fragments, and mammal dung gathered in the vicinity, plus food remains, discarded bones, and their own feces. Not being toilet-trained, the rats urinate in their nests, and sugar and other substances crystallize from their urine as it dries out, cementing the midden to a brick-like consistency. In effect, the hungry gold miners were eating dried rat urine laced with rat feces and rat garbage.

These middens are quite valuable to paleontologists interested in finding out about local vegetation in specific periods; they serve as rough-and-ready time capsules. Diamond seems to have an interest in rats as food sources; he also tells us in passing about recipes for laboratory rat that circulated among British scientists during the post-WW II period of food rationing.