Ptomaine Slaw
September 21st, 2010With Bait Sauce
I like kimchi, so I decided to make some. I cut up two cabbages and soaked them in salt water. I poured out most of the water and added some juice from a jar of store kimchi, so the bacteria would transfer. Then I left the cabbage out for several days, in a bowl on the table. I added ground Trinidad Scorpions, shallots, garlic, ginger, and paprika.
Today I tried some. It’s pretty good, but it looks like something that fell out of a dumpster. For the heck of it, I added a little Thai fish sauce, which is made from rotten fish. The fish sauce was a little over the top, but I managed to choke the kimchi down.
My question: am I a gourmet, or do I just like eating garbage?
I noticed something funny. A guy named David Zinczenko writes about food for Men’s Health Magazine. He knows absolutely nothing about good food. He’s probably just a hack writer who found a gimmick. He wrote some awful books with names like, “Don’t Eat This; Eat That!”
Yahoo runs his articles. They used to allow comments. Readers were generally furious, calling him a Nazi and so on. And they were right. He has the same attitude toward good food that liberals have toward conservative speech: don’t let people choose; just take away the things you think they shouldn’t have. He doesn’t just let you know food is bad for you; he whines that the restaurants that serve it should stop!
Now Yahoo won’t let people comment. Is that really the answer? His ridiculous articles still make people angry. Now they’re probably even angrier, because Yahoo won’t let them respond.
What is it with the left’s obsession with ruining our food? It predates Hitler, who (like some of his flunkies) was a health-food nut. If you want to tell people about healthy food, great, but why crusade to have real food taken out of people’s hands? I still get mad when I think about the ordinance they passed in LA, banning fast food restaurant construction in minority neighborhoods. Only white liberals should be allowed to decide what people eat; minorities are too stupid to take care of themselves!
No one who knows how to cook is dumb enough to think you can take the fat and carbs and salt out of food without ruining it. Some foods taste good even when they are completely healthy, but others can’t be made healthy, and there is no point in trying. Healthy cheesecake is garbage. Healthy pizza is garbage. Healthy steak is garbage. There are some foods you can’t “correct” without ruining them.
Cooking is an art, and neutering our food damages that art. Why don’t the food Nazis understand that? These are the same people who have a conniption if you suggest our tax dollars shouldn’t be used to subsidize “art” consisting of photos of crucifixes submerged in urine. They think pornography is art, but somehow, cooking doesn’t matter.
Thank God most of us can still buy a Coke or a pizza without bribing a local socialist official. I wonder how long that will last.
September 21st, 2010 at 1:00 PM
I’m a firm believer that food should be consumed in moderation and at full flavor.
The diet gurus are big in telling people to remove the fat from their diet.
It is also well known by woodsmen that you can be stranded in an area full of rabbits and deer and still die of starvation because there isn’t enough fat content in rabbits and deer to keep a human being alive for long.
The most disgusting thing I can remember tasting is nuoc mam which is Vietnamese fish sauce. Absolutely horrible concoction!
September 21st, 2010 at 1:03 PM
I think I’ve had Vietnamese fish sauce, but I’m not sure. A place I used to go to served banh tom (yam fritters with shrimp), and they had a light sauce that tasted a little fishy. I thought that was great, but the Thai stuff smells like garbage doused with fermented urine.
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Mmm…yam fritters.
September 21st, 2010 at 2:52 PM
They’re not even right about what’s unhealthy. Natural fats are good for us, pretty much uncategorically, from butter to bacon.
September 22nd, 2010 at 12:35 PM
“there isn’t enough fat content in rabbits and deer to keep a human being alive”
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The rumor I heard is, you get the most fat from a deer by eating the kidneys. Still might not be enough, but it’s more. Anyway, Greg’s right, fat is healthy, from butter to bacon and beyond. There are many essential fatty acids.
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Doesn’t mean you can make a healthy cheesecake. But if you’re going to combine fat with high-glycemic carbs, cheesecake is more delicious than french fries. If you work out real hard just before you eat it, then your muscles will grab some of the sugar for glycogen replenishment, blunting the insulin spike.
September 22nd, 2010 at 5:29 PM
The same control freaks who insist that the government stay out of our bedrooms have no problem allowing the government to invade our kitchen and garages. Don’t get me started…..
September 22nd, 2010 at 7:13 PM
I’ve come to the firm conclusion that the food nazis- and I don’t use the term lightly- are completely full of crap. A lot of what they push(“Don’t eat meat, eat bread and rice!”, etc.) DOES make people fat and unhealthy. Just think of the periodic crap we’ve gone through:
Coffee will give you cancer!(except it doesn’t)
Sugar will kill you!(only if you overuse it over time)
Meat/Fat will kill you!(except there are nutrients in it that you can’t get or can’t absorb as well from anything else)
and so on. Remember “Don’t eat butter!”, until it was ‘revealed’ that the substitutes are often worse for you?
Once upon a time I used to subscribe to Men’s Health, when it was an actual men’s magazine; then it started morphing into PC-Approved and I dropped it; they started running crap from the CSPI, for instance, as if it was studied and approved fact, and decreeing what you ought to wear(I think the last issue I got insisted you needed THIS raincoat, which cost a thousand dollars). Last time I looked, still a piece of crap.
September 23rd, 2010 at 3:52 AM
so the bacteria would transfer
Ok, sorry, but when I see that phrase in a recipe, it’s time to think about something else for dinner.
September 30th, 2010 at 3:55 PM
I had a vegetarian diet for YEARS for what I thought were health reasons. The truth was that I had a HORRIBLE diet before, so this stint of about six years was good for me, as it forced me to really explore food preparation, making good choices, and having a varied and healthy diet.
What I found was that the vast majority of foods that were vegetarian or vegan versions of a meat-based dish were TERRIBLE and that the eaters were usually kidding themselves. They really didn’t like it. In my observation – from experience and talking to other ex-vegetarians and ex-vegans – you get cranky because your food is awful, you feel like the whole world is against you because it’s really difficult to interact with normal people who eat real food – and you become more hostile and cranky.
i.e. veggie and boa burgers – always hated them – awful, awful food. Just totally inappropriate and a shell of real food items. Tofurkey? YUCK. Nasty. Why mimic something that you won’t let yourself eat? Just eat good food!
Of course, there are health problems with a vegetarian diet as well – a lot of people (like me) don’t actually tolerate soy in its non-fermented form. It’s basically toxic to them. Nice trick, huh? I had about four months of fantastic health as I adjusted to what was a much better track than the one I was on, then it went downhill. I was always hungry and let’s face it – the junk that vegetarians and vegans eat to take the place of meat is almost always much worse for a human than meat.
Moderation – eat real foods – health is yours.