The Week in Food

Georgia scared away its illegal aliens. Now they're wondering who's going to harvest the crops....

Happy 185th, Union Oyster House.

Forget about MOMA and the Statue of Liberty: here's the real reason to tour New York City.

No, this isn't what they have in mind when they say "fusion cuisine."

The Prison of Regionalism

My good friend over at A Brilliant Shade of Red alerted me to an online treasure for lovers of Southern literature: an audio archive of William Faulkner's talks to faculty and students at the University of Virginia in 1957. I had never actually heard his voice before. I know it sounds silly but I experienced a slight thrill as I heard Faulkner himself tell students how to spell "Yoknapatawpha" or answer questions about determinism in his fiction. But it was incredibly maddening and disappointing to hear him respond to questions about integration in the aftermath of Brown vs. The Board of Education. He essentially said that the court ruling should not be enforced:

I think that the Southerner, the—the provincial backwoods Southerner, will have to be let alone because he is—he is ignorant, he is proud, and he is—is limited to where he will let nobody tell him what he must do. It's a—a childish sort of recalcitrance, that anyone—when he is told that he must do something, he will do the opposite just to show them. He knows that he is—is wrong, that he has a condition which must be changed, and he has been trying to change it by his own methods. He's too slow about it. He should've known that this Supreme Court decision would be made. There was a—a lawyer in my town that told people fifteen years ago that sooner or later the Supreme Court would have to say that, but nobody believed him. They were—in their—their slow way, they were doing things to improve the Negro's condition. When the Supreme Court decision came out saying they must do it now, people that—that were working in their slow way toward it, took the other side. They say that the government shall not tell us what we will do, can do, must do, in our own country, with our own people, with our own culture and system.

Translation: "Yes, the South is wrong in this. Yes, segregation has to end, and we were trying to do it but we were too slow. The Supreme Court decision was inevitable. But the Supreme Court really screwed things up because it triggered Southern defensiveness so that now even the Southerners who were trying to end segregation are standing shoulder to shoulder with the rednecks against those interferin' Yankees. "

As for his contention that Southern whites were dismantling Jim Crow on their own, I know of nothing in the historical record that supports that other than the token admission of three black students to the University of Arkansas in 1948: two black men to the law school and one black woman to the medical school.

The notion that the South could and should handle the racial problem on its own is one of the themes of his 1948 novel Intruder in the Dust, which you could call the To Kill a Mockingbird of Faulkner's works. Lucas Beauchamp, a black man, is falsely accused of murdering a white man. He is acquitted, largely thanks to the efforts of two teenagers, one white and one black, who set out to prove Beauchamp's innocence. The mouthpiece for Faulkner's values in the novel is the uncle of the white teenager and Beauchamp's attorney, a lawyer named Gavin Stevens. Gavin talks to his nephew about what he calls Lucas' "shameful condition" (being regarded as inferior by whites and his subordinate legal status) and the sense of impending pressure from the rest of the country to accord full civil rights to Southern blacks (in 1948 an African-American had already sued the University of Oklahoma for admission; the novel was also published in the year of Harry Truman's executive order declaring an end to racial discrimination in the armed forces). Stevens says, in effect, "We [white Southerners] need to do this ourselves because we owe them [black people]." But then Stevens says, "if Lucas' equality is to be anything other than its own prisoner inside an impregnable barricade of the direct heirs of the victory of 1861-1865, which probably did more than even John Brown to stalemate Lucas' freedom..."

Faulkner seems to be blaming slow progress in according full equality to blacks on efforts to change the condition of African-Americans by force. The Civil War, court rulings, all that does is impede black progress. What will work is for the right sort of Southern gentleman to come 'round and Do the Right Thing.

Faulkner's attitudes about civil rights illustrate the insidiousness of the Southern white persecution complex: it was capable of infecting one of the greatest literary minds of the past century, who peopled his fiction with strong and complex black characters, and who realistically and devastatingly portrayed the strength and destructiveness of racism in Southern life. And yet, once it stopped being him who was criticizing the South, but "outsiders," it was a completely different matter.

His attitude also reflects one of the more absurd strains of American conservative thought: that enforcing something necessary and just by legislation or court ruling is an infringement on our freedoms (during the Civil Rights era, white Southerners often declared their fight against the Civil Rights Movement as a defense of their rights).

Time and again during the effort to pass health care reform, I heard various conservative objections such as, there are doctors who will cut you a break on your bills, or people who are really hurt can go to the emergency room.

Well, just as hoping that a Gavin Stevens or an Atticus Finch will step up and save you from the noose isn't a substitute for having actual legal rights, hoping a doctor will cut you a break isn't the same as confidence that being sick won't bankrupt you, and knowing you can go to the emergency room when you're hurt isn't the same as being able to get regular exams that can detect an illness before it gets serious. Sometimes we just need laws to make sure justice is done.

And I will never understand why some people don't get that.

Technology and Our So-Called Shrinking World

Recently my sister-in-law in Mississippi forwarded me and several other relatives an "Open Letter to President Obama" by a former VP of Proctor & Gamble. It included several of the utterly wrong and paranoid claims about Obama common among people who watch Fox News or post to Free Republic: that Obama is "scary" because he wants to turn the U.S. into a "European style country where the government dominates instead of the private sector," that Obama is scary because "culturally" he is "not an American," that it's scary that the source of his wealth and the money that paid for his Ivy League education is mysterious, that Obama is scary because he refuses to "consider opposing points of view."

And yes, the letter actually is by a former Proctor & Gamble executive.

I've been getting wrong-headed, delusional email forwards from family members for years. And yet one simple phrase struck me: the auto-generated text that accompanied my sister-in-law's one comment "He scares me too:"

"Sent from my iPhone."

I realize that nothing I am about to say is at all original, but that simple phrase "Sent from my iPhone," made me realize anew one of the paradoxes of our times: we are theoretically more connected than ever before, theoretically the world is a smaller place than ever, and yet people are growing more isolated. In the age of the Web, smartphones, and social media, members of my family down South (and people throughout Red America) are as culturally isolated from someone living in Boston or the Bay Area as they would have been in 1948.

Yet at one time technology did break down barriers of culture and distance. Television was critical to winning national support for the Civil Rights Movement. And sometimes TV made small differences on the individual level. An on-line acquaintance told me that interviews with gay people on the talk show Open End in the late fifties and early sixties humanized homosexuality for her, leading her to question the prejudice she had been brought up with. My oldest sibling told me that seeing the TV show I Spy when she was twelve years old in Mississippi (this was in 1965) made her question all of her assumptions about race. For those of you who don't know the show, Robert Culp and Bill Cosby played U.S. government secret agents. They were partners. My sister told me it was the first time she had seen any portrayal of a relationship between a black person and a white person in which they were equals. After some initial confusion, she accepted it. She realized that after the initial surprise, there was nothing about it that was uncomfortable for her or in any way wrong. It just seemed natural. I don't doubt that for many people major changes in how they view the world have similarly small beginnings.

I'm not sure how often that can happen anymore. I would like to think that there are 12-year old kids with homophobic parents who watch Glee and find themselves questioning their parents' prejudices simply because of Kurt. I am hoping there are small white kids who will never share their parents' racism in part because they spent some of their earliest years seeing a black president on TV.

But what I see more often as a result of communications technology is isolation, people reinforcing each other in their preconceived notions. I read Salon and DailyKos. My sister-in-law watches Fox News and reads email forwards from the sort of people who post to Free Republic and Redstate. As I've probably written here before, in the early seventies everyone watched Walter Cronkite. When Walter Cronkite declared the Vietnam War a disaster, LBJ famously said, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost America."

We don't have a Walter Cronkite anymore, someone everyone trusts. For news on Iraq and Afghanistan, I and my friends will read Juan Cole or listen to NPR. People like my sister-in-law will watch Fox News. There's no common reality anymore.

That's what I find scary.

After Long Absence...

It's the return of The Week in Food:

Come September, some kids won't be too happy about these meals, in spite of the caramel sauce.

Meanwhile, analysts are looking at Argentina and asking, "Where's the beef?"

The Wisconsin State Fair: they come for the deep fried beer, and stay for the bacon sundae.

I can't believe I missed National Lasagna Day.

The J.R.R. Tolkien Guide to American Politics

American political discourse moved even further from reality this week. The Lord of the Rings now frames debate over the debt ceiling impasse. The Wall Street Journal called the Tea Party House psychos members who have rejected John Boehner's proposed shredding of the social safety net budget as a sellout to the ideas of big government "Hobbits."

Yes. Hobbits. The little guys in The Lord of the Rings. Money graf:

The idea seems to be that if the House GOP refuses to raise the debt ceiling, a default crisis or gradual government shutdown will ensue, and the public will turn en masse against . . . Barack Obama. The Republican House that failed to raise the debt ceiling would somehow escape all blame. Then Democrats would have no choice but to pass a balanced-budget amendment and reform entitlements, and the tea-party Hobbits could return to Middle Earth having defeated Mordor.

In some ways using The Lord of the Rings as a lens through which to examine American politics makes some sense, given the black-and-white way many Americans view issues. For those of you who don't know your Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings is the story of an epic war between good and evil. There was no compromising or negotiating with the Dark Lord Sauron, the chief baddie of LOTR. And the Tea Party crowd certainly sees our Eisenhower Republican Kenyan socialist president as someone they shouldn't meet half way on anything. And like Hobbits, who live in this bucolic paradise called The Shire when destiny calls them into the company of the great and the wise such as the elves of Rivendell and the wizard Gandalf, the Tea Party guys are really in over their heads.

John McCain apparently liked the phrase "Tea Party Hobbits" so much he used it himself to mock House Republicans. But then freshman senator and Tea Party darling Rand Paul shot back that he would "rather be a hobbit than a troll," slyly alluding to the little known fact that John McCain will turn to stone if exposed to direct sunlight.

However, there is one big problem with the LOTR analogy, as originally presented by the Wall Street Journal:
"the tea-party Hobbits could return to Middle Earth having defeated Mordor."

As any pathetic geek Tolkien fan could tell you, Mordor, the land of absolute evil, is actually in Middle Earth. That's the problem. The Dark Lord inhabits the same continent, the same reality, as everyone else. Frankly you can't truthfully say that Washington (represented by Mordor in this analogy) or the Tea Partiers inhabit the same reality as the rest of us.

I think another fantasy analogy for American politics would work much better. Over the past 80 years this country worked out a basic consensus: it's in everyone's best interest to ensure old age doesn't mean poverty and illness, to provide the unemployed with financial help, to make sure poor people get at least some assistance feeding and caring for their kids.

Time and again somebody shows up contesting these notions, which are the underpinning of any society's claim to call itself civilized. Time and again, we think we've beaten them, and they keep coming back.

And those enemies of our modest welfare state seem to be making more progress than they have at any time since Clinton dismantled Aid to Families with Dependent Children in 1996.

Voldemort is in charge of Washington. Where's Harry?

Why Do We Say "Do?"

At any given time I'm sampling at least two books that aren't on the "Currently Reading" list on the sidebar of this blog. The latest is John McWhorter's Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English. One of the quirks of our language that he discusses is what he calls "meaningless do." Think about it: most of our uses of "do" mean nothing. In the sentence "I do like to swim," do adds emphasis, but "I like to swim" says more or less the same thing. In the question "Do you read a lot?" 'do' adds nothing. In other languages the question would be asked, "Liesst du viel?" (German) or "Lees mucho?" (Spanish) both meaning "Read you much?" which says essentially the same thing.

Another oddity of our language is the use of -ing verbs. Other languages have an equivalent construction, but English is one of the few languages that uses the -ing form (i.e., the present progressive, also considered a sort of verb-noun hybrid) of a verb to say This is what I am doing right now. Since I speak English, if somebody were to ask me what I'm doing as I'm typing on my laptop in my neighborhood cafe, I would say "I'm writing." If I were a Mexican typing on my laptop in a cafe in Mexico City or Guanajuato, I would say, "Escribo" (I write). Similarly, if I were a French speaker pecking away on my laptop in Montreal or Lyons, I would say "J'ecris."

McWhorter ponders why English is so odd in this respect, and in doing so he also tackles head-on one of the most absurd (and unquestioned) assumptions of English history. The area we now call England enters many history books as the Roman province of Britannia after being conquered by the Emperor Claudius in 43 AD. As Roman power waned in the following centuries and the Roman Empire was under constant attack by peoples such as the Germans, Huns and Visigoths, the Emperor Honorious decided the best way to defend the empire was to concentrate his armies on a somewhat smaller area of territory. In other words, the Romans left Britain, which was now defenseless against attacks from peoples from north-western mainland Europe: the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. The result of these invasions was a society in much of what is now England speaking a Germanic language called Anglo-Saxon with its own distinctive laws and culture, and people in Wales and Cornwall speaking Celtic languages descended from "British," the common language spoken by the Celtic inhabitants of Britain who were there when the Romans arrived (and who saw them leave). The people of Wales and Cornwall, needless to say, had their own distinctive laws and culture. Historians have mostly assumed that the Germanic invaders exterminated most of the Celtic inhabitants of what is now England, the survivors being pushed into the hinterlands of Wales and Cornwall. However, that assumption doesn't take into account one basic fact: before the twentieth century, with its repeat-firing guns and gas chambers, genocide was extremely labor-intensive work. The one exception was the European conquest of the Americas, in which the invaders brought diseases to which the natives had no immunities: completely unintentional biological warfare.

In other words, most historians of England have assumed that the Angles, Saxons and Jutes arrived in enough numbers to kill, one on one, by sword or axe, the vast majority of the natives of what is now England. That's ridiculous. When the Spaniards arrived in Mexico and Central America in the sixteenth century they had primitive firearms and the unintentional help of smallpox, but even today (in spite of the deaths of millions of natives) the Mexicans and Central Americans of indigenous descent vastly outnumber those of Spanish descent. The logical conclusion is that the original, Celtic inhabitants of Britain survived under new rulers and ultimately adopted their conqueror's language.

But before they became culturally assimilated by the Angles and the Saxons, they seem (according to McWhorter) to have put their mark on their conquerors' language. Interestingly, what other languages besides English have the "useless do" and use the present-progressive construction to express the present tense? According to McWhorter, only two: Welsh and Cornish, the languages of the people who were supposedly wiped off the map and pushed into the corners of Britain. In Welsh, the word "nes" means do (or did). So if you were asked in Welsh if you had opened the door (and you hadn't) you would say, "Nes i ddim agor" ("I didn't open") instead of "I opened not." And in Cornish, if a friend of yours is shopping at the farmers' market and somebody asks what she's doing, you say, "Yma hi ow prena hy losow" ("She is at buying her vegetables")—as if buying is some kind of condition she's in. In Welsh, if your daughter Mary is practicing for choir and someone wants to she's doing, you say, "Mae Mair yn cynu" ("Mary is in singing").

Now I mentioned that these constructions don't show up in written Anglo-Saxon (charming sample of which at left). So it's fair to ask, if English got these constructions from Celts wouldn't they have shown up in written Anglo-Saxon, given that Anglo-Saxon is the predecessor of Modern English? McWhorter's got a good answer for that: think about how much difference there is between how people talk and how they write (at least before texting and tweeting). Now think about how much greater that difference would be if, say, only a small percentage of the population could read or write? Furthermore, for about 150 years after the conquest of England by French-speaking Normans, most writing in England was done in Latin or French—Anglo- Saxon more or less disappeared. But during that time, the language spoken by most the population England was changing into a hybrid of French and Anglo-Saxon now known as Middle English. And when the first Middle English documents were written, what curious grammatical constructions appear?

Take a wild guess....

This book is utterly fascinating. More later.

Adventures in Food (or Stupidity, Take Your Pick)

I used to consider myself a spicy food aficionado (one of my readers is already laughing, and I know who you are). I grew up in a house where jalapeños and Tabasco sauce were staples. I love wasabi. Among my college friends (for most of whom Cajun food and Americanized Chinese were the outer limits of exotic), I was considered a daring, even foolhardy eater.

Well, I'm a chile wuss. Sometimes eating a mere vindaloo just hurts. Once in Chapel Hill I ate buffalo wings that made me feel as if my mouth was about to blister. I quit, on the verge of howling with pain, while everyone else around me ate with relish.

I was reminded of how low I rank among chile eaters last Friday evening. Earlier in the day I had been in O'Hare Airport in Chicago. I had not had lunch and knew I wouldn't have time to sit down and eat before boarding my plane. I discovered, to my delight, that Rick Bayless (the Julia Child of Mexican food, for those of you unfamiliar with the name) had opened a take-out restaurant in that very airport.

I scanned the menu and ordered a cochinita pibil (Yucatán-style pork) sandwich. The plan was I would eat half for lunch on the plane and half that night for dinner. The sandwich came with salsa in a small little plastic container. I did not use the salsa on the plane for fear of making a mess. I just ate half the sandwich (and very tasty it was).

At home that night, I unpacked the uneaten half of the sandwich and the salsa. I had a Homer Simpson moment of longing: mmmmmm.....chipotle salsa (chipotles are smoked jalapeños). I opened the sandwich and poured the salsa on it. I replaced the bread and started eating.

A minute or so later, I entered a world of pain. I hurt so much I couldn't sit still. I was walking around manically. I drank milk to to try to get relief (lipids are the quickest way to counteract pepper). No dice. I put ice in my mouth for temporary relief (even though I knew the melting water would actually distribute the capsaicin.)

After about four or five minutes the pain stopped. Another two or three minutes and I stopped sweating. I thought, "God, I can't even handle chipotles now? What has happened to me?" Then I had a vivid visual memory of the Tortas menu.

I had briefly considered a chicken sandwich. That was the one that had chipotle salsa. The cochinita pibil came with habañero salsa. I should have known better: the people of Southern Mexico (where the Yucatán is) consider habañeros the only real peppers. If you eat jalapeños like Northern Mexicans do, you're little better than a gringo wuss (at least according to the good people of the Southern third of Mexico).

Check out this chart that ranks chiles. As you can see, habañeros approach the frontier that divides food from weapons.

And yes, I did finish the sandwich: I'm way too cheap to not eat food I paid for.