Stomachs on legs are proud to present

Miller (1995) views consumption rather than production as the new vanguard of history and as a key site through which political options must be articulated. He suggests that it is the bourgeois female rather than the working-class male who will become the progressive force in the twenty-first century

LESLIE, D. & REIMER, S. (1999) Spatializing Commodity Chain. Progress in Human Geography, 23, 401-420.

Is Alice Waters the vanguard of history?

Courtesy of my one-time boss in Tokyo, Jun Inoue, via Facebook. Jun more often posts pics of glistening meaty noodle soups and bacon-draped cabbage, but below is the slightly more wholesome proposition of 118 aji and 2 saba fish.

There is no wine appropriate for salad.

Joël Robuchon goes on to say that chocolate is also hard to match with wine. He suggests a better choice is flat water, fortified wine "with chocolate accents", or perhaps coffee.

In his Complete Robuchon, the yoda-like Frenchman also suggests taking eggs out of the refrigerator 30 minutes before you plan to boil them.

"My father's a farmer from birth. My auntie, great auntie, they're all farmers."
So says Rohan Marley, son of Bob, and co-founder of Marley coffee, which is grown to Ital certified standards. Marley Coffee plans to expand its market from the US to the UK by end of year, and says their aim is improve the lives of farmers while promoting organic farming. The promo vids (above/below) inform about the loss of top soil in Jamaica and the teachings of rastafari, alongside footage of assorted cute kids with bright white teeth who describe their dreams of becoming pediatricians.



In what XLR8R calls "a hip hop first," LA coffee purveyors Intelligentsia (home to at least one award-winning barista) have launched a limited-run blend named after Stones Throw producer Madlib aka the mad kid. They describe the blend as "syrupy and sweet," but they might just as well have described it as "sticky icky" in reference to another west coast hip hop legend.

What's next - artisan Black Milk cocoa powder?
Peanut Butter Wolf's homemade grape jelly?
or MF Doom's yard bird pizza and beer combi packs.



Lyrics: MF Doom - One Beer
"She asked him to autograph her derriere, it read
To wide load, this yard bird tastes like fried toad.

Study how to eat, to dine by the pizza guy
No, he's not too fly to skeet in a skezzer eye

A whole string of jobs like we're on tour
Every night on the score, we're coming to your corner store"

Word on the street is that comedian Louis CK was the best act so far at this year's Edinburgh Festival. So here are some food-related gags from him.

Sadly, despite my deepest intentions & dearest wishes, I forgot to organise a trip to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this month. Blast!

Back in the day I was a comedy groupie, and one of my fave comedians was Ross Noble, who made a few return trips to NZ to do psychedelic stream of consciousness rants that stood in stark relief next to the rehearsed routines of the other comedians.

Why just be funny when you can also incite civic unrest? (See sausage roll clips below)

Another tasty option for live buffoonery is the Glasgow Comedy Festival each April – some day I want to go there, and partake of the infamous Glasgow deep fried vegetarian haggis. Speaking of comedy.

Comedian Zach Galifianakis drinks from his wine helmet. From the blog of photographer, Terry Richardson

One of my favorite Chinese contributions to Khmer food is cha kvai (ឆាវខ្វៃ). Cha kvai are fried dough sticks, more like crullers than churros. They are sold in pairs, for dipping in or adding to your noodle soup. I got hooked on them in Phnom Penh. But I would bet that they, like the Teochew people, may be found throughout Southeast Asia. In Cambodia, they are most commonly found on restaurant tables alongside the condiments in the morning, and any given restaurant's supply is usually all eaten up by noon. Initially, I had assumed that each restaurant made their own. But after long hours of observation (lots of mornings sitting eating my soup and taking my coffee), I realized that they seemed to be produced elsewhere and either delivered to restaurants in the mornings by courier or picked up by restaurant employees. I stumbled upon one of these cha kvai production facilities one morning near Psah Kandaal.

During business hours, it is just an unassuming moto parts shop.


But early in the early morning, it is a bustling hub of fried dough production!





If you want to make your own: http://lilyng2000.blogspot.com/2007/05/yau-char-kway-ii.html

The 1969-70 "Menu" B-52 bombings of Cambodia's border areas, which American commanders labelled Breakfast, Lunch, Supper, Dinner, Desert and Snack, aimed to destroy the mobile headquarters of the South Vietnamese "Vietcong" and the North Vietnamese Army (VC/NVA) in the Cambodian jungle. However, these and later bombardments forced the Vietnamese communists further west and deeper into Cambodia, and ultimately radicalized Cambodian local people against Lon Nol's regime.

Ben Kiernan and Taylor Owen on the similarities between the current war with Afghanistan and the past bombing of Cambodia

A couple of years ago, my hometown paper published a story which caught my eye...

They told the story of the reverse engineering of KFC's secret fried chicken recipe by Ron Douglas (pictured above, and below on YouTube). Committed to cracking the KFC code and re-creating his favorite chain restaurant dishes in his home, Douglas had quit his job as a finance manager on Wall Street in order to devote all of his energy to his quest. He now runs a website for folks who do the same thing and sells cookbooks full of recipes so you can join in the fun.



This is interesting. I both self-identify as, and follow food media targeted at, the sort who appreciates DIY and some reified notion of authenticity. Generally, I eschew chain restaurants preferring instead independently-owned businesses. And here is a whole community (check out the forum) devoted to folks who are doing the same thing (DIY, authenticity) but with an eye towards franchises. Neat!

For another fun take on franchise food, check out the food stylings of Fancy Fast Food too!

Image: gratuitous yellow grinder, via Village Voice

Giorgio Milos wrote as an aside on The Atlantic website yesterday that Intelligentsia barista Michael Phillips won this year's World Barista Championship at the end of June. On the official championship website you can link to a streamed video of the competition.

Other finalists were: Raul Rodas (Guatemala), Scottie Callaghan (Australia), Colin Harmon (Ireland), Soren Stiller Markussen (Denmark), and Stefanos Domatiotis (Greece).

Although no kiwis placed in the finals, several New Zealanders are on the judging panel, including newly certified Wellingtonian Jessica Godfrey, who has her espresso machine plumbed in at her house to get proper water pressure. I guess everyone in Wellington does. Don't you?

Check out a recent post here on Gut Feelings for pictures of the LA workplace of the winning barista – where they play early Nas records, allow cute mongrel dogs inside, and make good joe. As a friend wrote recently on twitter about Intelligentsia, "It's the little things".

The Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog recently had a couple of neat posts on the multiple meanings of plant names in Chinese. They addressed pak choy...

...Chinese characters for pak choy, or Chinese cabbage (白菜), can also be pronounced to mean “100 types of prosperity and luck.” Which explains why this vegetable is a favourite of Chinese jade carvers...

and peanuts...

...the peanut (huasheng 花生) is an auspicious symbol because its second character (sheng 生) means “to give birth.”

Shu Flies has more on the jade pak choy pictured above (from the National Palace Museum in Taiwan) and on carved jade cabbage, in general. Additionally, on a note unrelated to cabbages and peanuts, she touches on the most brilliant bit of stone carving I have ever seen. Check out the picture here. Seriously.

Last night, I posted a link to a song by Sapoun Midada in which he drowns the pain of romantic loss in coffee at a roadside stand. However, others experience the drowning of emotions in coffee quite differently:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvg8_0NKFQI

Sad coffee music...



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi0W2c-RIcM