Stomachs on legs are proud to present

I went to watch Food, Inc. yesterday.

It was not only in line with what Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan were saying - Eric Schlosser does not only show up in the film but also is a co-producer, and Michael Pollan speaks a lot in the film.

The story itself was not so new if you have been following the food issues in the past several years - what this film tried to do, it seems, is to make the message even clearer, make it approachable for the general public, or should I say, the consumers.

Sort of a similar fashion how Stonyfield grew into the third biggest yogurt producer in the U.S., and Wal-mart trying to move into organic business - efforts to bring the alternative into the mainstream are happening, and they are not without criticism for having come so far from the hippy small-scale idealism-laden operation.

There was something I did not like about the film - they sort of overused the image of the little boy Kevin who died of E-coli poisoning in the hamburger meat. I can see the filmmaker used it a lot to generate the sympathy from the concerned mothers - if that was the only effective way to communicate, it just tells me something about the self-centeredness of people - only when their children are at the risk, they want to make chanegs - in other words, they do not care unless they consider their children are at risk. The parents' protective nature may be only natural, but sometimes it seems that they only want to protect theirs and not many others.

In a strange way this movie made me cry, for thinking how far we have come to the point where they had to make this kind of movie, for thinking how this will appeal to the general public in the U.S., while at the same time it may be possibly viewed as a technological marvel in the eyes of the Third-World farmers, and for thinking why the U.S. consumers deserve to execute their purchasing power to change the world for the better - is this another kind of the America-saves-the-world story?

It's like the dairy version of Black Sheep: here in Germany, calves are dropping dead from mysterious blood sweats. The blood sweats occurred only on farms where the mother cows were given a vaccine against blue tongue disease. A causal link between the vaccine and the disease has not been proven. The vaccine has been mandatory for cattle in Germany for about a year, though some organic farmers have chosen not to abide by the law.

Me, I'm willing to hedge my bets and consume a little milk & cheese (even after hearing the alarmist claims by British nutritionist Patrick Holford that milk consumption is linked to increased cancer risk). But since reading about the blood sweat scare the other week, I'm trying to stick to organic milk products.
I like gruyere, but I don't dig gruesome.

Scientists have found that free-range pork can be more likely than caged pork to carry dangerous bacteria and parasites. It’s not only pistachios and 50-pound tubs of peanut paste that have been infected with salmonella but also 500-pound pigs allowed to root and to roam pastures happily before butting heads with a bolt gun.

If I lived in the States, I'd be more motivated to buy free range pork not because of taste but due to reports of the high levels of antibiotics in industrially farmed pork, and the inhumane manner in which pigs are often killed.

But if letting pigs have a more pleasant existence makes them even more unsafe to eat, argues McWilliams, what are we supposed to do? His conclusion:

If clean and humane methods of production cannot be developed, there’s only one ethical choice left for the conscientious consumer: a pork-free diet.

NOOOOOOOooooooooooo.....

I have been writing my second to last chapter lately on vegetables. Within agricultural development ciricles it is a well known fact that the emergence of fresh fruit and vegetable commodity chains are indisputably linked with a rise in development and propserity specifically of the middle class urban dwellers. Growth and propserity in Asia in recent years has seen the proliferation of fresh fruit and vegetable production and marketing, with this region now accounting for over fifty per cent of worldwide production. Most of thise produce is consumed locally if not regionally.

In Cambodia, kitchen gardens are a common sight around the raised household lands or river banks where the perils of flooding are diminished. These polycultures are known in Khmer as chamcar. More recently specilaised growers have emerged in nearby provinces supplying the growing consumer market. But still, for the most part, kitchen gardens in Cambodia exist to service the day to day non-market needs of domestic kitchens

On the other side of the world vegetable gardening has seen a resurgence in the developed world. Garden centres have reported increased sales during the financial crisis as people turn to cheaper hobbies that also provide sustenance.

Growing your own occupies a special place in a lot of people's psyches. My own little vegetable patch in Canberra gives me unique sense of satisfaction, and I find myself often memorised by my vege.

It is however, far more of a hobby than it could ever be called "livelihood strategy". For that I would need a much larger plot, seedling production centre and possibly be growing some grain as well.

But for now I potter and I gaze. I relish in the fact that my strawberries are so happy and I am puzzled by my tomatos sad performance.

It seems that in the west the history of kitchen gardens has always been an earthly pursuit of the wealthy or middle classes, first emerging as part of the economies of large feudal estates, and toiled by estate workers to cultivate and provide the freshest and most seasonal and sometimes exotic varieties to the tables of their masters. I read this in the History of Food book, which also noted that the popularity of kitchen gardens grew tremendously in France with the rise of the bourgeoisie.

My sister's has a kitchen garden of this order,of course, in true big sister style the eldest has the most enviable of gardens, carved out the clay soils of the Waitakere ranges, the garden is unlikely to ever "pay" for itself in vegetable yield terms, least the entire world meltdowns and New Zealand remains cut off from international trade and the film industry in which she works (an event it seems that my sister is apparently prepared for giving her predilection to hoard cans of food and bottles of wine)



The garden cascades down the hill from fruit tree terraces lined with feijoas and heirloom variety pears, limes, grapefruit, lemons, peaches etc etc which is interspearsed with edible herbs and other vegetables such as squashes, cabbages and cucumbers. The pergola with sitting bench is framed by two grape varieties to the side and passionfruit vines to the front



The raised beds are planted at the moment with summer vegetables of all variety, corn, tomatoes, potatos, raddishes, peas, beans.....These are interspeared with marigolds and other herbs



Plans are afoot to start bee hives behind the garden shed too

The garden gets a lot of sun but is sheltered from wind by native New Zealand bush. Around the outer borders before the bush begins are strawberries, sage, tamarillos trees.

Finally there is a platform suspended up the terraces where one may lounge in partial shade , read a book and survey with satisfaction the view of fruit and vegetables growing.



This garden truely out does my modest patch of dirt, it verges on an estate garden in my books and fulfils in all my family's pastoral fantasies that our middle class status permits us to have....When I'm there I wander around the garden, picking off sprigs of herbs for making salsa verde. My other sisters like to sit and wander too. But of course my sister has a gardener that comes a couple of times a week to look after the garden, she is after all very busy making money "off-farm"

Which brings me to all the kerfuffle about the White House garden and the Alice Watery and Michael Pollan demands for the White House to dig up the lawn and plant an organic vegetable garden. This is in some way supposed to be "symbolic" of the presidents commitment to good fresh local food, and a commitment to transforming the american agricultural system from the pit of disaster that it currently is..... But should the Obamas capitulate to these requests by middle class food champions? Should the White House be aiming to fulfil the pastoral daydreams of Alice Waters by planting an organic garden. They'll be no shortage of serfs this year to tend these gardens no doubt.....or should Obama not worry so much about the front lawn and concern himself with the very real challenges of transforming the agricultural system and rural communities, rethinking farm policies and introducing a new farm bill?

The day we left New York was a Sunday, and after a week of eating up and down the American East Coast food chain and checking out the full spread of NYC cuisine, it felt almost like a parting gift from the NY Times gods on high that their Sunday edition magazine section was entirely about food and aptly named "Food Fights". The magazine included some interesting articles on tipping, one about kosher meat and a very long open letter by Michael Pollan (post-productivisms poster boy) to the next president of the United States, Farmer in Chief, as he so optimistically called him.

In the article Pollan argued, pleaded and cajoled for the next president (now we know him as Obama) to rethink the American food system on a grand scale. Pollan called for Obama to:
- move away from oil dependent productivist farming practices that produce mountains of food and drive down the price of food at the peril of the climate, energy independence, American health, farming ecologies and rural communities everywhere around the world
- to move towards "post-productivist" practices and systems based on "alternative" food systems: organic, local, pasture based, humane and above all based on solar power not carbon energy.

The 8 web page long article, Pollan acknowledged that while the industrial food system is indeed a marvel it is inherently unsustainable, and called out the ill-logic of seperating protien production from grain, advocating a move back towards poly cultures rather than subsidised mono-cultures that don't even go into "food" production but low quality calories, animal feed and biofuels. He railed against globalised food economies and warned they are coming to an end. He advocated supporting municipal composting and "perrenialising" agriculture, through solar based grass fed livestock production aimed at reducing meat production and consumption. Although by Pollan's own admission whether or not such a food system would be capable of sustaining the American population is up for debate. Yet Pollan is self-assured it's worth a try, believing that organics can produce same amounts of food, but requires people to move back to the farm. Yes, he supports re-ruralisation and the re-education that would be required to achieve this new American food system (a statement that conjured horrifying images of the Khmer Rouge or China's disastrous past). He advocates decentralised local regional food systems, grants to support farmers markets, reduced food processing regulations and the introduction of local meat inspectors. Pollan believes there should be a strategic grain reserve and a regionalised food procurement system which if the Republicans haven't had enough of smearing Obama as a socialist by now, they surely will be reinvigorated to do so if Pollan's manifesto was ever to be implemented. Pollan also requests the creation of a Fedaral definition of food, which makes "real food" exempt from sales tax. In Pollan's utopia, food stamp cards would double in value when used at farmers markets. We would educate children a la Alice Waters with edible gardens and oil used in the production of food would be on labels. Finally barcodes would include stories of the full production process when scanned.

Well golly!

Now I don't disagree with Pollan that there are some serious problems with the American food system (and this does not in my view mean by extension the whole world's food system, although many people seem to think it does). The noticeable lack of fresh fruit and vegetables and indeed the cost of anything green was most surprising to Hock and I on our visit. A bowl of fruit salad was roughly double the price of a bacon and egg sandwich, which left me with no doubt that their's is a fucked up food system indeed. But does it require radical change?

A small insight into the minds of American food radicals came to me on a visit to the Museum of Natural History. (I love Natural History museums. I love looking at rocks and species of bugs stuck to pin boards and the like). The Museum had some pretty spectacular exhibitions, especially the planitarium and whole space area in general. Some big money had obviously gone into funding the space section, as opposed to say the "agriculture" area which presented a uniquely linear, mid-century/ modernist/ productivist world view of agriculture. I'm sure most visitors to the museum don't even notice the exhibit situated in a corridor on the way to the far more sophisticated presentations on evolution and ever-intriguing rocks. Instead the exhibit is so outdated that it could be considered an artifact unto itself, with its dusty old cabinets and Fifties fonts invoking a kind of sentimentality for the good old days of Elly May and Uncle Buck, apple pie and soda pop. Harking back to those pre-diabeties, pre-obesity epidemics days, long before the term "food dessert" could be understood in urban terms and when corn was simply the best thing before sliced bread. Perhaps that is why they keep the dusty lined cabinets which detail agricultural development as a linear process that moves from "primeval forest dweller" (note dark skin colour) to settlement and high production (note white farmers, no slaves present in farm scenes). Maybe they keep it for posterity's sake, or maybe its just because Michael Pollan lives in Berkley.











I was also much amused by the diagram on soil fertilisation, which depicted in no uncertain terms the benefits of agrochemicals. The smaller grassy mound's title reads "unfertilised" with the large towering grassy mound reading "fertilised". It is quite clear from this and the other exhibits that more is certainly more, bigger better.



Which is pretty much where that the diagrams end. The museum's outdated "agriculture" exhibit serves as a pertinent reminder to the fact that very little thought has gone into "developing" agriculture in America by the federal state since the 1950s. Here "agriculture" remains locked in "space" and "time" and with not a hint towards the food fights and furores that continue to rage outside in post-modern America and indeed the globe. Should the exhibit be merely extended on beyond its current displays, what would we see? Perhaps there would be landscape paintings of the horrors Pollan describes....corporate farming in America....perhaps an exhibit devoted to explaining the problems associated with mono-cultures? Maybe an exhibit with smell-o-vision where one can sense they are approaching a pig or cattle feed-lot? Further still, some particularly radical curator might have taken delight in scaring the hundreds of children that tour the museum each day with an exhibition on the modern abbattoir? Maybe they could just have one horrible black stinking miniature scale pit to represent the black hole that Pollan believes American agriculture has become. Perhaps they would have an exhibit filled with cheap Mexican labour picking fruit, or even a diorama of small-scale african farmers starving due to global agricultural commodity dumping by countries like America that compromises their economic viability and puts food sovereignty of developing nations at risk.

But if the exhibit extended further still and took the "agriculture" exhibit to its present day Micahel Pollan ideals, perhaps we might end up with a miniature version of Stone Barns a new type of "post-productivist" farm located half an hour by train outside of New York in a place called Tarrytown. A model farm or vision of what some people want agriculture in the United States to be like today. Something that looks very "Alice Watery" indeed.

For this we would need diorama of a medium scale diversified farm, including upscale restaurant with resident "celebrity chef". As such a medium scale farm these days can barely be economically sustainable, true to real life the exhibit like the farm should be funded by the Rockerfeller Foundation. Multiplicity here is the key, as mentioned by other rural sociologists of the developed world. Thus this farm would also have a cafe, walking tracks, events room and more. It would be more than a farm, but instead an educational centre and tourist attraction. There would be mini porches and BMW's in the car park and white people riding horses. There would be tiny signs everywhere that educated people as to what garlic chives look like and spelt out proper farm place behaviour. There would be tiny home-made jams and pickles for $10 USD a jar and overpriced egg and beet salads.













If the Museum of Natural History were to continue its agriculture exhibit in a linear fashion true to Michael Pollans views, it would go from Primeavel Forest Dweller to the 1950s, through to the horrors of industrial agriculture and on to Stone Barns and beyond to the full utopia. Food systems would be presented as an either/or dilemma, a binary choice between evil corporations or medium scale organic farms filled with re-educated workers. Or perhaps the Museum should just trash the whole section in favour of something far more interactive, diverse and inclusive? Perhaps the Museum should, more sensibly, rethink the whole idea that agriculture and food systems are in some way linear and instead represent them as mixed diverse systems that at times need of intervention to ensure peaceful coexistence. Where, industrial and local food are all deployed to ensure resilient food systems that provide both quantity and quality to all people at all budgets whether primeval forest dweller or New York foodie hipster.

For sure a week of wandering around New York and craving more green things gave me an understanding of why many Americans are increasingly radical about their food politics, but utopians and binaries always create the need for radical opposition.

A couple weeks ago it was a long weekend for Buddhist Lent...so with my Dad's car on loan we drove to Khao Yai national park...165 kms out of BKK and 57th wonder of the world apparently

We saw a monkey on our first encounter through the park. I gave her a banana and she became fascinated with us and the possibilities of more bananas



Some people stopped and tried to lure her with potato chips to no avail...apparently they hadn't got the message that monkey's don't really know what potato chips are


we arrived late without a hotel booking so drove around a bit until we found Cabbages and Condoms, a hotel/ farm/ restaurant/ community development project funded by the UN to raise aid awareness and stuff about population and development. We had a great meal there with mushrooms fresh from the farm including shiatke, oyster, eringi and black cloud. But the rooms weren't very nice.

Cabbages and condoms garden


Khao Yai is also home to the Thai dairy industry, replete with Thai cowboys and all along the road are little milk containers for pick up

Milks bottles




and dragon fruit plantations



The next morning we went to Dairy Home for breakfast.... Dairy Home makes specialist yoghurt and dairy products for the Thai market

The restaurant reminded me of my step-mother...it was filled with cutsey pictures and plastic flowers

Dairy Home


The bread was that typically fluffy Thai white bread that reminded me of cartoon bread

Bread


Thai families most likely from Bangkok, if judged by their attire, turned up in hoards to eat this strange mix of Thai/American bucolic fantasy food


We found another hotel, Fah Sai Khao Yai...that wasn't very nice either and rather pricy, no jug or tea, no bath just basic...(we are fussy bitches) and we went for a bike ride up hill for 3 kilometres...until Hock's bike broke and we decided to call it a day...we rode to a nearby vineyard and had ice coffee and cake

In the evening we went to a restaurant recommended by Austin called Krua Khao Yai. We didn't order very well and had an average meal. Half of Bangkok was there. We shared a table with two middle class Bangkokian's. One who works as a construction consultant and protests for PAD in his spare time. I kept my politics to myself.

Anyway, anyway, anyway

There are two vineyards in Khao Yai that produce wine of dubious quality. Hock and I couldn't quite figure out why people bothered at all. It's a bit like deciding you want to grow mangos in the Swiss Alps, sure you may find a way to make it happen but is it worth it? It reminded me of a quote from an academic article I had read recently, about even the dreams and aspirations of the developing world being colonised. Although I'm not sure I agreed with the article, there is a distinct sense in Khao Yai that some high society Thai people are spending a great deal of money trying to recreate Italy or the Nappa Valley in Khao Yai.

After dinner we went to a faux Italian villa, which had a rather bad restaurant attached and candles lit up through the vineyard. We had some so so gelato, then went for a walk in the vineyard, until I saw a big ugly toad

Winery


The next day we went to the national park and managed to avoid paying the 400% farang mark up price of 400 bht per person and instead paid the Thai price of 40 baht. We went on a walk through the bush....which said it was to a water fall

there were lots of bugs and leeches!!!



The track took us to a swamp


I wasn't impressed. Hock told me to try and look like I was enjoying myself. I argued that the "appreciation of nature" is a recent phenomenon in human history and it was not until recently that we're all supposed to love leech infested swamps, previously humans feared the wild and avoided it or chopped it down. Now we are supposed to "appreciate it"

So, we decided that Khao Yai is beautiful but what makes us happier are noodles

So we took a detour drive back to Bangkok through Ayuthaya and stopped at Lung Lek's famous Kwayteow Reua joint and had excellent beef noodles

This week Phil brings us a story about banana pancakes as harbingers of mediocrity

More ominously The New Yorker explains why the global food market is about to collapse , which it blames it on the over production of mediocre food.

Given this I thought I should also include their witty ruminations on hang overs, because the previous article may lead you to drink

When you recover from your hangover you might want to get serious and check out some sites on survival gardening, alternately also called armageddon gardening and/or defensive gardening or hardcore homesteadingbecause according some of the opinions expressed in the NY article, you may as well get a head start if you're going to be forced back to the farm anyway

Which may not be as bad as you think because at least you'll be able to brew your own which brings us neatly back to hangovers

Hangovers are probably as old as alcohol use, which dates back to the Stone Age. Some anthropologists have proposed that alcohol production may have predated agriculture; in any case, it no doubt stimulated that development, because in many parts of the world the cereal harvest was largely given over to beer-making

So nothing to worry about really, so long as you master hardcore homesteading your food will mostly taste better and if it doesn't you'll be too drunk to notice anyway

Today I found a cool site that provides a basic historical timeline of food.

Earliest known foods are

water & ice
salt I & II
shellfish & fish
eggs & mushrooms
insects
rice I, II & III

if you want to know more about salt part one and part two, and more interestingly rice I, II and III click on the link

with the agricultural revolution around 10,000 BC came, soup, bread and beer.....4000 BC bought us yeast breads, and chestnuts apparently hail the beginning of "bible era foods"

Although it hasn't been included yet, I'm sure 2008 will be recorded at the year of the french fry battered bacon on a stick

"When you buy a box of Cheerios in New York and one in Champaign, Illinois, you know they are going to be the same. By shortening the genetic pool using clones, you can do a similar thing."

- JON FISHER, president and owner of Prairie State Semen in Illinois, after the F.D.A. declared cloned animals safe for the food
supply: NY Times.

Is it true that most (American) consumers prioritise predictability above all else?
Will we see same-tasting name-brand tomatoes and pork chitlins uniting the palates of the world like McFish burgers and Krispy Kreme?
Seems to me it's easier to make stuff taste the same by adding low-cost soy meal, corn products and artificial additives. Who cares what the cow tastes like in the first place?

As the NY Times reported (see below), of course those same-tasting Mac n Cheese boxes are not the be all and end all for lower income American consumers. Farmer's markets need not be the preserve of the middle classes. If only they weren't so damn expensive.

Vouchers that permit low-income women to shop at a local farmers’ market increase fruit and vegetable consumption in poor families, a new study shows.

The research, published this month in the American Journal of Public Health, comes just as states are making important changes to national nutrition programs. For years, the federally-funded Women, Infants and Children (W.I.C.) program, which subsidizes food purchases for low-income women and young children, hasn’t included fruits and vegetables, except for fruit juice and carrots for breastfeeding women. After a push by health groups and a recent report from the Institute of Medicine, the United States Department of Agriculture in December revised W.I.C. to include monthly subsidies for fruits and vegetables. States will begin implementing the new rules in February.

While this latest report shows that subsidizing fruit and vegetable purchases can make a big difference in eating habits among low-income people, it also suggests that the new amounts recently approved for W.I.C. fall far short of what is needed. The U.C.L.A. study gave women $10 a week, while the W.I.C. program will provide monthly vouchers worth $8 to each recipient and $6 to each child. Breastfeeding women will receive just $10 a month toward fruits and vegetables.

Subterranean farm in Tokyo (of course, where else)

Image: A protest in August against genetically modified crops in France. The modified corn that would be banned has been grown in America for years.

PARIS, Nov. 22 — European Union environmental officials have determined that two kinds of genetically modified corn could harm butterflies, affect food chains and disturb life in rivers and streams, and they have proposed a ban on the sale of the seeds, which are made by DuPont Pioneer, Dow Agrosciences and Syngenta.

Article

A blog today on the New York Times website broke down some key organic priorities from a new book by Dr. Alan Greene (what a serendipitous name...)


"Some vegetables, like broccoli, asparagus and onions, as well as foods with peels, such as avocados, bananas and oranges, have relatively low levels [of pesticides etc.] compared to other fruits and vegetables." (Also, their crops are not so big so do not have as much of an impact on the environment)

So how do you make your organic choices count? Pediatrician Dr. Alan Greene, whose new book “Raising Baby Green” explains how to raise a child in an environmentally-friendly way, has identified a few “strategic” organic foods that he says can make the biggest impact on the family diet.

1. Milk: “When you choose a glass of conventional milk, you are buying into a whole chemical system of agriculture,'’ says Dr. Greene. People who switch to organic milk typically do so because they are concerned about the antibiotics, artificial hormones and pesticides used in the commercial dairy industry. One recent United States Department of Agriculture survey found certain pesticides in about 30 percent of conventional milk samples and low levels in only one organic sample. The level is relatively low compared to some other foods, but many kids consume milk in large quantities.

2. Potatoes: A simple switch to organic potatoes has the potential to have a big impact because commercially-farmed potatoes are some of the most pesticide-contaminated vegetables. A 2006 U.S.D.A. test found 81 percent of potatoes tested still contained pesticides after being washed and peeled, and the potato has one of the the highest pesticide contents of 43 fruits and vegetables tested, according to the Environmental Working Group.

3. Peanut butter: More acres are devoted to growing peanuts than any other fruits, vegetable or nut, according to the U.S.D.A. More than 99 percent of peanut farms use conventional farming practices, including the use of fungicide to treat mold, a common problem in peanut crops.

4. Ketchup and tomato paste: About 75 percent of tomato consumption is in the form of processed tomatoes, including juice, tomato paste and ketchup. Notably, recent research has shown organic ketchup has about double the antioxidants of conventional ketchup.

5. Apples: Apples are the second most commonly eaten fresh fruit, after bananas, and they are also used in the second most popular juice, after oranges, according to Dr. Greene. But apples are also one of the most pesticide-contaminated fruits and vegetables. The good news is that organic apples are easy to find in regular grocery stores.

Other top priorities for going organic:

Cotton: although it's not one of the biggest commercial crops it accounts for a large percentage of pesticide and insecticide use. Dr. Greene says it may be the most important crop to change, for the sake of the environment.

Beef: for the same reasons as milk, it is worth going organic for the sake of the planet...Also, corn-fed cows have more acidic stomachs which promotes E-Coli bacteria. (there have been a lot of E.Coli scares in the States recently). Dr. Greene suggests replacing conventional beef either with grass-fed organic beef, or with a variety of other plant or animal sources of protein, such as organic eggs, garbanzo beans (a huge source of plant protein around the world), quinoa (a complete protein), or organic soy.

Soy: In recent years soy has been the U.S. domestic crop found most contaminated with organophosphate pesticides. Beyond this, soy leads the way in genetic modification, with 87% of the soy planted in the U.S. genetically modified (62 million acres).
Organic soy products can be a healthy part of the agricultural system.

Corn: We all know non-organic corn is an agricultural demon. In that corn is largely an American crop, corn syrup and other corn derivatives are luckily not so wide-spread in Europe. Check all American products' labels.

Baby food: For obvious, developmental reasons!

Wine: Organic wines in one study had an average of 32% higher antioxidant 'resveratrol' levels.

Check it out: NZ Pumpkin growers try to corner the Nihon-Kabocha market ....

As far as I can tell, the site doesn't tell you what pumpkin variety it is, but it looks like Nihon-kabocha no?



UNIVERSITY PUMPKIN

Cook 250 g pumpkin in the microwave for 40 minutes.
Cut into bite-size pieces.
Heat some oil and saute the pumpkin til it starts to get coloured and a skewer can be inserted easily.
In another small pot heat 2 tsp soy sauce, 3 tbsp sugar, and a tbsp sake. Add the pumpkin pieces, coat thoroughly and sprinkle with black sesame seeds.

The word for pumpkin in Japan is Kabocha.

Due to the many sub-divisions of botanical types into squashes, gourds and even zucchini the story is a bit confusing. But stick with me, dear readers. In the end it all comes down to the difference between moschata and maxima, smooth and knobbly.

According to the Japanese Wikipedia,

Portuguese were the main traders with Japan in the 16th century. The Portuguese called the vegetables "Cambodia abóbora" (Cambodian pumpkin), because they had visited Cambodia before Japan, although the types of pumpkin they introduced were Central American 'Cucurbita' squash. (Cucurbita is known as the 'winter squash' family in America).

All pumpkins & squash are called Kabocha in Japan.

They advise wikipedia readers that people in the West only call orange pumpkins 'pumpkin', so the Japanese pumpkin (which is green) is referred to in America as 'kabocha squash' (and, I guess, 'Jap Pumpkin' in Oz, which makes more sense than Kabocha squash, which is sort of like saying pumpkin-pumpkin).

The sub-breed known in Japan as Japan-pumpkin (Nihon kabocha) is part of the 'Cucurbita Moschata' group of kabocha which includes butternut squash.

"It has an exceptional naturally sweet flavor, even sweeter than butternut squash. It is similar in texture and flavor to a pumpkin and a sweet potato combined together. Some can taste like a Russet potato."

"Kabocha originated on the American continental mass. Christopher Columbus found it and took it back to Europe along with tobacco, potatoes, and tomatoes. After that, the vegetable traveled around the globe and was brought to Japan from Cambodia on Portuguese ships in 1541, during the Azuchi-Momoyama period. Subsequently it became known as kabocha. That type of kabocha was the one we now call Nihon kabocha. It has a knobbly-looking skin and is a variety to which the Japan people are well accustomed."





Another group of pumpkin or Kabocha in Japan is 'Cucurbita Maxima' (they call it 'seiyou kabocha': occidental pumpkin), which includes Buttercup pumpkin (Buttercup squash to Americans). It's the largest pumpkin commonly on offer in Japan and is widely cultivated there...

"Today many kabocha in the market are of the type called Kuri kabocha, which was created based on Seiyo kabocha [Occidental pumpkin, which includes buttercup squash] brought from America to Japan during the late Edo period. These are different to Nihon kabocha and are popular for the strong yet sweet flavor and moist, fluffy texture, which is like chestnuts. It's found in the market under such brand names as Miyako, Ebisu, Kurokawa, Akazukin, etc."

The one on the left is Nihon kabocha (Japanese pumpkin, C.Moschata), the one on the right is the common-in-Japan Seiyou kabocha (C.Maxima):


The third category of 'kabocha' is 'Cucurbita Pepo', which includes varieties of squash, gourd and pumpkin. It includes 小型kabocha (small size pumpkin), Donguri kabocha (Acorn squash), Soumen kabocha (Spaghetti squash/spaghetti marrow). This family also includes the orange pumpkins used at Halloween, and zucchini! But zucchini are neither called kabocha in Japanese nor pumpkin in English.

The Cucurbata Pepo family came to Japan from South America by way of China, and the 'China eggplant' is also part of that family.

Pepo:








In Japan the bulk of pumpkins are grown in Hokkaido: so outside of Japan, the main green and red Japanese cucurbata varieties are often known as Green Hokkaido and Red Hokkaido. Thus '北海道' (Hokkaido) can be seen as a label of origin, similar to 'Queensland Bananas'. Just keep in mind that 'Red Hokkaido' usually seems to refer to a Japanese variety of C.Maxima, whereas what the Japanese call Japan-pumpkin is C.Moschata. They're different, G.



HOKKAIDO PUMPKIN, KABOCHA SQUASH OR JAP PUMPKIN: WHAT'S THE DIFF, CLIFF?

This Australian website describes the ideal growing conditions for Japanese pumpkins in South-Eastern Australia.

It seems that in Australian terms, Japanese Pumpkin (probably the C.Moschata variety called Japanese pumpkin or Nihon-kabocha) is a sub-type of Hokkaido pumpkin, but 'Hokkaido pumpkin' can also refer to a number of other varieties, including C.Maxima.

Varieties include: Ajihei, Ajehei No. 107, Ajihei No. 331, Ajihei No. 335, Cutie, Ebisu, Emiguri, and Miyako.

Answers.com claims that Nihon-kabocha [which the Japanese wikipedia says is a sub-species of Cucurbata Moschata] is "a member of the species Cucurbita maxima, along with the Hubbard and Butternut squashes."
I think they got confused, since Butternut actually belongs to Moschata, and Buttercup to Maxima.

The photo below of a smooth orange pumpkin comes from a site where it was labelled as "Cucurbita maxima 'Uchiki Kuri'/Orange Hokkaido."

When you're cooking Japanese recipes, just remember that what most Japanese recipes use is the green 'Japan Pumpkin' (C.Moschata), knobbly and sweet, which can be substituted with butternut squash. The other main type of pumpkin (seiyou) also bred in Japan is the C.Maxima and tastes somewhat different, but is also commonly used in Japanese cooking. In the west these will most commonly be labelled hokkaido red or hokkaido green (if the skin is smooth), though there are many sub-varieties.

And if anyone tells you anything different, they're wrong, John.





Japanese pumpkin with pumpkin pudding inside:



Try grilling your Japanese pumpkin stuffed with 'sea chicken' (canned tuna) and cheese:



I guess Maytel's 'Jap pumpkin' could be any one of a number of crossbred-in-Hokkaido Japanese varieties of the South American originating Curcubata family... although if it was going to be called a Japanese pumpkin in Japan, it would need to be knobbly and dark green and heavy and have dense sweet orange flesh...
You'd have to see the skin to know I guess!

Like David Byrne sang "It could be black, it could be white, I could be wrong, I could be right"

An interesting point about the ripening process:

"When kabocha is just harvested, it is still growing. So, unlike other vegetables and fruits, freshness isn't as important. It should be fully matured first, in order to become flavorful. First, kabocha is ripened in a warm place (77°F for 13 days, during which some of the starch converts to carbohydrate content). Then it's transferred to a cool place (50°F and stored for about a month in order to increase its carbohydrate content). In this way the just-harvested, dry, bland-tasting kabocha is transformed into smooth, sweet kabocha. Fully ripened, succulent kabocha will have reddish-yellow flesh and a hard skin with a dry, corky stem. It is heavier than it looks. It reaches the peak of ripeness about 1.5~3 months after it's harvested."

Now that you know the difference, you can tell straight away that this is not a Nihon-kabocha:

I've mentioned before on a rant on my other blog about inventing food traditions. Many people came to Cambodia expecting to find a completely "authentic" "untouched" cuisine, where in fact, subsistence production and food scarcity means most food in the villages is pretty basic - a lot of rice, a plain fish soup perhaps, maybe some kangkong and some fermented fish. The truth is, it is only with economic growth and increased tourism and wealth that new food traditions are being invented in the previously non-existent restaurants and street vendors.

I find a lot of people like to try and boil down food to some essentialised and above all "authentic" number of dishes which must be cooked according to some said authorities "authentic" method using only prescribed ingredients.

But the thing I love about Thailand is that it has long been a multicultural hub, a regional and global centre, with different cultures introducing their own cuisine. Thai food itself is a kind of fusion between malay, chinese, indian, and laos traditions, mixed of course with chili from south america.

what I like is that after time different food cultures mingle with Thai food and new food traditions are invented, like Thai spaghetti....over time new food inventions become tradition


Much is made of the fact that Thailand is not and never has been colonised....from my own humble opinion I tend to think that one of the reasons for this is that Thais are experts at appropriating different cultural traditions and making them thoroughly Thai...I think that this is what makes Thailand interesting, dynamic and above all tastey...it comes from an openess to the world and a willingness to experiment

Hock's Sous chef takes many seeds and roots from a lot of the exotic varieties and imported vegetables they serve at the "high so" restaurant where he works. He takes them back to his farm upcountry and grows them. Among other things he grows avocados and horseraddish (he's been experimenting with asparagus but so far he's not successful)...of course there's no local demand for these exotic veges but he sends them to market anyway and more adventurous shoppers take it home and have a play...

Its all good in my books

Picture: Chiang Rai Parking Lot Pizza

spotted outside of the night bazaar and delivering all around inner city Chiang Rai....thoroughly Thai style pizza....cooked in portable convection ovens and only 49 baht...prices that Pizza Hutt can never compete with...





Picture: "Authentic Thin Crust Pizza at Da Vinci's Chiang Rai"



Chiang Rai Hilltribe Lamington

I kid not, found at the Bakery across from the major Bus Terminal in the centre of town which is reportedly a project set up to help Hilltribe women earn some extra cash...the hilltribe lamington has a layer of pandan flavoured marzipan inside...it was also very yummy

A good thing about being a chef is that you get invited to free dinners

Dan Moran and his little bro at the Met, cooked a wicked meal showcasing a new lamb product from Tasmania.

Billed as the "wagyu of lamb" the carpaccio was pretty impressive...it has to be a special little lamby to eat raw....it's not fed beer and massaged daily, but it is kept in a stress free environment including the freedom to roam indoors and out.

The lambs have their own playpens and no motorbikes, loud noises or children are allowed near the farm. No shit, no kiddies.