Stomachs on legs are proud to present

This label is a bit misleading - I thought it was referring to how the chips were made from manioc, which is a bit funny eh?
(I was almost disappointed to find out that Funny is the brand name)

The chips don't taste that great: salt, sugar, artificial additives and hydrogenated oil being the general vibe. Funny in the tummy.

Today's electro youth aren't content with choreographing their own Merce Cunningham-inspired dance routines. They make it a signature to bake fish for their cats and hang around disconsolately in supermarkets trying to choose a flavour of UHT chocolate milk.
And other times they just feast on human carnage on the beach.

Food blogs often serve as a thinly veiled excuse to brag about one's travel experiences. This blog is no exception.

So last Wednesday I found myself bumping around the back of a four wheel drive for seven hours along logging roads in the district of Berau, Borneo, Indonesia on my way with a convoy of forestry officials, climate change experts and conservationists to visit a remote tribe of forest dwellers known at the Dayaks. We arrived after dark and were ferried across a river in traditional long boats to the village.



The Dayak's are traditionally hunter gatherers/ swidden agriculturalists and gold panners, dependent on the resources of the incredibly dense rain forest in which they live to survive.

After a quick bucket shower, we were treated to a meal of freshly caught mullet, fried fish, vegetables, rice and an incredibly hot sambal, prepared in this kitchen



by the Dayak's women folk



During the tribe's power point presentation to us (they may be remote and tribal but they sure ain't primitive) on their forest management strategies the male folk frequently referred to the forest as their "supermarket". I supposed that they were seeking to translate to us the abundance and utility that the forest provided them in ways they believed we would understand. Indeed, some of their household decorations attested to the fact that somehow, they managed to live in the forest



However, having already poked around the kitchen where the Dayak women prepared food, and having uncovered a large ice bin containing bags of processed sausages and chicken nuggets



it was patently obvious to me that the supermarket was also their supermarket, even if only in the advent of catering for large groups. Indeed, their remoteness did not seem to preclude them from a great deal of modern convenience. Although there was no electricity, there were generators. They had satellite tv and their children were all sent to the provincial town for high school education. The tribe had successfully established their own forest management committee comprised of local leaders, district government officials, logging companies and international conservation groups.

The next day I awoke to survey the village I had arrive to in darkness.



Cacao grew in the front gardens and piggies posed for me





After a breakfast of white processed bread, rice, chicken nuggets and fried eggs, we travelled for one hour by long boat through the forest and up the river to meet with a neighbouring tribe and learn more about forest management practices.



We were accompanied by this cool old guy who caught fish with a spear, and owned a poison blow dart (something that me and a good friend have decided would be of great use at our university)



After forestry discussions lunch was served.



Plain rice, fried eggs, eggplant and prawn crackers, sambal, salty duck egg, more sausages and chicken nuggets and some plain cabbage soup which we ate with our right hands. As we ate a family speed by on their long boat with dogs to go wild pig hunting. A tribal member speared a fish.

After the bank wrote a polite letter asking me not to use my credit card until my balance was out of the red, we started scrounging around for change at the back of sofas, and examining the nutritional value of all those condiments stockpiled in the fridge. Is it possible to subsist off of plum sauce?

Probably not, but gladly our friend Carmen dropped by with coconut milk and cauliflower last night, which we combined with various fridge and pantry remnants to make a tasty cashew curry for four. Heidi Swanson's website 101 Cookbooks is very useful when you have just one or two vegetables lying around or half a block of tofu left over, & it's a good place to get inspiration for using up those way-too-healthy dried things in the pantry.

After pooling our loose change, today I took nine euros to the supermarket and was pretty amazed at how far it stretched.

Milk, broccoli and whole grain bread for 40 cents each, oats and tinned tomatoes for 30 cents each, a decent müsli with whole grains, hazelnuts and linseeds for 1.20, a bunch of radishes for ten cents, a head of lettuce for 20 cents, and white asparagus for 1.20. The most expensive thing was a kilo of organic short grain brown rice for two euros.

With the dried beans and aforementioned condiments at home, I think we almost have enough to get us through a nuclear winter – or at least until the end of the week. Tonight we're having rice with black beans and fried plantain (the plantain has been lying on our bench for a week); salsa with chile and coriander; coleslaw with basil, radish, shiso (from one of the plants we're growing) and sesame seeds. If we have to eat oats with plum sauce in a week or so, then so be it.

Seems that if you shop at the discount supermarket Lidl in Germany, even figuring in the occasional bottle of beer, mirin or tamari, you could definitely reduce the daily food budget to about two or three euros per person, and still eat like a king.
A spartan sort of king, anyway - the type who likes to go hiking.

In terms of healthy eating I give myself a six or seven. I stop a few inches shy of bitter herbal tinctures and drinking wine on auspicious biodynamic dates. We buy very little pre-prepared food. Luckily there are no burger bars or hotdog stands around here, and despite living in cake-proud Germany, I eat cake rarely enough that when I do, I blog about it.

But sometimes, I eat trash. Not fancy truffles or gourmet artisan ice cream.... I'm talking cold, hard trash.

I'm talking about the kind of supermarket foods that exploit the weak and devilish recesses of your soul.

In NZ I had an unhealthy, secretive, co-dependent relationship with Earnest Adams ginger kisses, and Cyclops organic yoghurt with coffee jelly.

Here in Germany, I've recently developed a Dickmann's addiction (the coconut-sprinkled version is pictured above & below). When I first stepped onto German soil, my boss actually gave me a packet of Dickmann's as a welcome gift, but they didn't make too much of an impression on me. Looking back it seems auspicious (or suspicious).
A few years have passed in the mean time, and somehow, within the last few weeks - god knows how or why - I became addicted to Dickmann's. It's a mystery. I'm starting to think they put crack cocaine in those things.

The worst thing is that Dickmann's have a dubious public record - back in the day the proto-Dickmanns were called 'Neger Küsse' (Negro kisses). Dick means 'fat', and a more recent slogan on TV used to go "Man, they are fat, man" (Mann, sind die dick, mann)

I'm told that these nefarious treats are commonly eaten inside white bread rolls at swimming pools. After swimming, kids usually get either hot chips, or they take a Dickmanns and whack the two sides of a bun around it, squashing it into gooey smithereens.

A packet of six costs about one euro and ten cents. They are creepily melty and soft - like sweetened stiff egg whites. With a thin dark chocolate shell, and a thin wafer on the bottom. Rather like a next level mallowpuff or english teacake, without all the biscuit nonsense, and with a much gooier centre.

I'm afraid that I currently have a daily obsession going on. And I've found that a succession of recent kiwi visitors felt the same. Which makes me feel all the more justified in my habit. ....I think it's called 'enabling'.

But I can definitely stop. I just need one more, y'hear?

Just...one...morrrrre....



Below is a photo of my other supermarket craving, this time from the Biomarkt (organic supermarket). If I'm hungry I can't seem to resist buying a kreta-strudel and scoffing it down before someone tries to steal it from me. (It's crispy pastry with a tangy mix of feta and roasted peppers inside).
At least this particular weakness doesn't have quite the same white trash overtones as Dickmann's. It's like the bogan and bourgeois parts of me are duking it out on the daily.



What's your supermarket nemesis?

...naked egg slice rolls get hip. Kind of attractive but unappealing I'm afraid. Below is possibly the scariest looking marzipan bunny I've ever seen. (All items pictured @ Rewe supermarkt, Brüsselerstrasse, Cologne)

If you happen to be in Canberra on the 19th of January, then you may be interested in this.

Thai fresh markets to Tai hypermarkets: new class based consumption in Chiang Mai, Thailand

Increasing attention is being given in academic and policy research to the rise of TNCs supermarkets in the Global South but few cultural analyses or ethnographic investigations of this 'supermarket revolution' are yet available (Coe and Wrigley 2007). This research uses ethnographic study in Chiang Mai, Thailand to reveal how European supermarkets are integrated into national and local level modernities, histories and narratives, and used by local subjects to define class differences and create middle class identities around notions of cleanliness, leisure and development. In particular, this paper examines how Chiang Mai hypermarkets transfer agency away from the consumer as they present themselves as new spiritual and cuisine authorities, rendering fresh markets as nostalgic motifs of obsolete Thai tradition. The research also explores the possibility of local circumvention and resistance of global markets by considering Chiang Mai consumers' parallel participation in the relational economies of local fresh markets.

Australian National University Human Geography Seminar
Monday, 19 January 2009, 3.30pm - 5.00pm, Seminar Room C, Coombs Building

Bronwyn Isaacs
Geography Honours Student (University of Sydney)
ANU Summer Research Scholar

Question? Are Thai hypermarts "red" or "yellow". Personally I prefer to shop at Wealthy Mart in Siem Reap in Cambodia to affirm my class status.



Source

Sometimes I feel like the parallels between class and food is overstated and somewhat boring, especially in places like Thailand where even the "middle class" love to eat at shabby noodle shacks. Indeed, the princess of Thailand is rumoured to eat at a number of famed street noodle stands. And if supermarkets are all about development and supply chain domination then perhaps its only a matter of time before every poor man/ woman and their dog is sourcing their cheap eats from sterile isles?

I'm not sure if there was wild horse culling in North Rhein Westphalia last week, but when I went to buy chicken for our chipotle salad, the meat section contained a truckload of horse in various stages of being chopped, processed or cured.

The whole horse meat thing is something I can't get down with. Hypocritical (considering I am OK with eating other equally noble & cute animals), yes. Do I care? No.

I tried horse sashimi in Tokyo and don't think I'll ever get over the memory of that strong, funky taste.
Yuck.

In fact, one of my favourite Rheinland meat dishes, sauerbraten, was traditionally made with horse meat, though I've only had the beef version. It's marinated for a few days in vinegar and a sweetening agent, with spices like juniper and cloves, plus raisins, and then roasted. It turns out extremely tender and has that great sour/sweet/spicy edge to it. A very delicious christmas dish.

I guess I might one day give horse sauerbraten a go. But I've got to say the horsemeat bierschinken& jagdwurst below (luncheon meat, usually had on bread at breakfast time) looks like the devil's work.

These lucky swine look a bit envious of their marzipan snowman counterpart. People like him better lately.
Note how they are all wearing lucky chimney sweep hats.

By the way, German marzipan is delicious. My favourite is the marzipan kartoffeln (like small potatoes dusted with dirt).

(spotted at Rewe supermarket on Brusselerstrasse, Cologne)

Nothing says "I love you" like a nice box of chocolate cat tongues from Kaiser's Supermarket.

"Please accept this fun salami-holder, including salami, as a token of my appreciation."

In case you were worried your winter salami might dry out in the refrigerator, you can make use of one of these creepy santa tubes.

(Spotted yesterday at Kaiser's Supermarket on Zulpicherplatz, Cologne)

1) (Surprise..) Fish

I don't know about you but one of the things I find most interesting in foreign countries is going to the supermarket. It's always interesting to see the packages and raw stuff that make up people's everyday existence. The mundane en masse. We went to a supermarket in the basement of a department store on Placa Catalunya yesterday morning. Though it wasn't really a gourmet deli or anything, they still had plenty of produce to rival the more atmospheric fresh market down the street, La Boqueria.

They had a whole aisle full of tinned sea-things: clams, razor clams, mini clams, and of course, stacks of oily sardines and tuna.



When you're a lobster, it's lonely at the top. The 146-euro chattering classes can do nothing but clack their claws against the growing middle class.



2) Cheese: we bought a piece of Tetilla cheese from Galicia, at least in part because of the saucy breast-shape. I stashed it later in the mini-bar at the hotel and ate it after getting back to the hotel at 1am. A favourite with children? I'm not surprised - it's nice and mildly nutty, just soft enough to scoop out with your fingers.



3) Ham

We mostly came to the supermarket to get water, and were surprised to see a bunch of 125-euro Bellota Iberico ham haunches strung up there. Like it's the kind of snap purchase people make when they come to the supermarket dehydrated? And I thought *my* supermarket bills get out of hand.

The quote of the day is interesting and reminds me of a blog debate I was following a couple weeks ago on whether or not supermarkets are good for poverty. Much maligned as evil corporate enterprises that cannabalise mom and pop stores and screw farmers down, supermarkets tend to eptomise all those things bad associated with progress...but is this really the case or are we yet again falling prey to belief in false binaries?

Personally when it comes to matters of "progress", development and poverty I tend to throw ideology out the window and drag in the pandora's box of empiricism.

So I found this quote interesting regarding superstores in developed countries

The expansion of superstores – like Wal-Mart and Target – has also played an important role in accounting for the inflation differentials between rich and poor. Superstores sell the same products as traditional shops at much lower prices. Today the poor do roughly twice as much of their buying of non-durable goods in these stores than the rich. So poor consumers have been the biggest beneficiaries of Wal-Mart coming to town.

And this one, from The International Food Policy Research Institute on the impact of supermarkets interesting too.

Supermarkets tend to charge consumers lower prices and offer more diverse products and higher quality than traditional retailers - these competitive advantages allow them to spread quickly...The food price savings accrue first to the middle class, but as supermarkets spread into the food markets of the urban poor and into rural towns, they have positive food security impacts on poor consumers.

Not that I remain convinced that supermarkets are all out great, but I do believe that their power and hegemony to exclude is often times vastly overstated.

There's no decent butcher close to our place in the Belgischesviertel, so when it comes to red-meat cravings, we usually settle with the most palatable offerings on the shelves of the local Rewe supermarket. And sometimes, that means we find ourselves wondering what to do with several pieces of vacuum-sealed ostrich meat.

Ostrich meat is low fat (a uniform shade, with no marbling) yet does not suffer for this, yielding a strong meaty flavour. I'd hesitate to say 'gamey', although in its raw state it has a fruity blood scent (if you sniff it up close that is). We've found that it is good used in Japanese dishes which require a bit of simmering to soak up the broth, because it cooks evenly, and does not become chewy or sinewy, as good sirloin can do when cooked in this manner.

We kiwis have a certain history with large flightless birds. At one point, it was our native Moa that could lay claim to being the largest living species of bird. But muscle isn't everything, as the Moa discovered to its peril.

Don't know how fast the Moa could run, but the Ostrich's land speed of 65 km/h does not seem to be much use against a fate on our dining tables, either.

Ostrich & New Potato Nikomi (adapted from a recipe by Hiroko Shimbo)

300 g ostrich meat, sliced into strips across the grain (not that there's much grain)
3 tbsp olive oil
2 medium onions, one cut in thin disks, one in thin wedges
2 handfuls of small new potatoes cut into bite size chunks.
1 tbsp sesame oil
1 cup dashi or water (I use powdered kombu/kelp stock from the Japanese supermarket, mixed in water - vege stock could also work)
2 tbsp sake
2 tbsp sugar
1/4 cup shoyu
1 cup or more of fresh or frozen green peas (I'm a big fan of peas)

In a bowl, combine the meat, 1 tbsp olive oil, and the onion disks. Marinate the meat for 30 min.
While it marinates, cook the potatoes in a large pot of boiling water for 8 minutes or until cooked through but still firm. Drain and wipe with paper towel.
Heat a flat pan and add 2 tbsp olive oil. When hot, saute the potatoes, rolling until golden all over. This might take a while the but the golden-browning is worth it. It means they still have a delectable slightly crisp layer even after being simmered in the broth.
Remove potatoes from pan and set aside.
Drain off excess oil, and add sesame oil to pan. Remove ostrich meat from marinade, discarding the onion, add to pan and cook til it turns pale.
Add potatoes and onion wedges and give several large stirs. Add the dashi and sake and bring to a boil. Cook over low heat, covered with a loosely fitted lid or a japanese-style wooden drop lid, for 8 minutes. Add the sugar and cook for a few more minutes, then add the shoyu/soy sauce, and cook until liquid is somewhat reduced (probably just another few minutes). Add the green peas and cook til heated through. Serve hot!
You'll love this umami-filled take on meat & 3 veg.




As cold comfort to animal activists, or those who loved Big Bird on Sesame St, many parts of the ostrich can be utilised, making its demise a bit less wasteful. For instance, the leather can be used for expensive Japanese sneakers.

But maybe the big question should be...... do ostriches fart?

And does Pharell catch the bus to the office where he designs his ostrich Bape Stas? And does he recycle his bus ticket or throw it away, or simply chew it up and swallow it? And how much of his lung capacity does he use?

Spotted on the shelves of my local supermarket in Canberra...



Some people had obviously agreed cause there was only one packet left. I only hope that they bought it to cook their mother a meal with rather than gift wrapping it and presenting it to her.

BBC Four investigates efforts to introduce carbon labelling for food in the program "Costing the Earth"

An argument for fair trade ready made mircrowave chicken meals from africa?

Turns out the economies of scale via supermarkets might be quite good afterall...at least this might shut the holier than thou "locavores" up....but not necessarily

all and all it looks like the future is set to give us ethical dialemmas up the ying yang

enter the ethical quagmire here

If you go to most major supermarkets in Bangkok there is often a dried fruit section with an enourmous selection of really delicious dried fruits, below is a selection. There are some interesting fruits and even the standard fruits do not taste the same way that you would expect as a westerner. For instance, the dried prunes are a bit crunchy and have maintained much of their sour plum flavour. The stalls are (wo)manned exclusively by Muslim women. I haven't quite figured out why this is, but somehow they seem to have cornered the dried fruit market in Thailand.

Is there some well known Southeast Asian division of labour that so far has completely passed me by? Like "oh yeah, didn't you know the Thai grow the rice, the Chinese sell the rice and the Muslims dry the fruit" ????

As some of you know, my supermarket has a problem with suffocating mushrooms in styrofoam and clingwrap.... Now it seems that not only are they content to mistreat mushrooms they are also anti-semitic

Today I found this clearly racist mushroom labelling...."jew's ear" ???? WTF



It's a black cloud mushroom in my books.....

As the similarly named Jew fish has been plagued in controversy in the States ( wiki reports that in 2001 the American Fisheries Society renamed the jewfish (Epinephelus itajara) the goliath grouper out of concern for the potential offensiveness of the name). I feel that something should be done about this mushroom too....if I was Jewish I would definitely say something, I would go up to the manager dangle the mushroom by my ear and angrily demand to know if the mushroom in any way resembled my ear....

As much as I have berated my local supermarket in the past, especially for the way they treat their fruits and vegetables I keep going back.

I'm somewhat of a VIP at my local supermarket. Unlike most Thai's or farangs (europeans) who have maids go to the fresh markets each morning, I don't have a maid and do all my shopping once a week a la Australiasian style. Meaning when I spend, I spend up big. Not that it is that much by western standards. I spend around 3000 baht per week for food for Hock and I. That's roughly USD$90 per week for two people and given that I generally eat most of my meals at home, by western standards it's pretty cheap.

But by Thai standards it's a lot. So now when I go there I'm treated a bit like a star. The owner often rushes over and unloads my cart for me....the security guard at the door calls me Madam and yesterday in a whole new first, the staff there told me that I am beautiful.

So you can see why I keep going back.

i've decided that this is indeed a good marketing strategy that should be employed by western supermarkets. Instead of saying, say..."would you like to try a piece of salami" or "apples only 1.99 per kilo" supermarkets should start handing out compliements to all their shoppers. Imagine what a world of difference it would make to bedraggled and harrassed housewives or any stressed out western shopper for that matter if everywhere time they went shopping the staff said things like

"wow, I love your hair"
or "have you been working out?"
"wow, you're so beautiful"

Being an expat at large one tends to watch an awful lot of CNN or BBC World Service (but CNN is better these days, have you noticed that?)

We just moved to a new Wohnung, and while putting together new Ikea record shelves today we saw a clip on CNN about Paul Mackey, Whole Foods CEO
.




If you click the link above, you can read a short transcript, but it's better to watch the clip on the site so you can see how shifty Mackey looks when the interviewer asks if it's possible to maintain those original values when you are a big company and shareholders are pushing for profits.

Also amusing are the images of goofy guys spinning pizza dough as he talks about how his business model is built on the imagination of the individual.

Final snipey remark: when she describes Mackey as 'sitting on an organic throne' all I could think was that maybe he'd been eating too much organic Larb.

It's all very well to be so high & mighty about big companies when you are putting together Ikea shelves and about to drill in a Habitat toilet roll holder. These Swedish companies are to the world what Whole Foods may be destined to become once they expand into Europe (they are opening in Kensington, London next... though the one due to open before that I believe is in El Segundo... insert joke about wallet here).

My inner bargain hunter is always at war with my instinct that mass-production should not be trusted (and the hell that is Ikea really underscores that feeling... we got a few nice things that will no doubt fall apart in a year or two and their so-called famous swedish meatballs made me quite sick).
I believe I am the worst kind of hypocrite: I like things to be available and cheap. Therefore I am a cheap hypocrite. And I fell for the old Swedish meatballs trick which also makes me guillable.

And no, I still didn't read Omnivore's Dialemma, but I must!