It's November and today Deb and Marian depart to the other side of the world.  They will be traipsing across Nepal, hiking through the Himalayas, and then resting at a resort in Bangkok.

You can count on Deb to bring back tales of food and culture, so hang tight.  Expect our worldly travelers to return Thanksgiving week with stories and photos to share.

Get it? Plate tectonics...? Shifting...? 

Come on...... somebody throw me a bone.

Vineyards cover one half of one percent of the world’s cropland, far less than wheat, rice, corn, soybeans, barley, and sorghum, agricultural products that collectively represent more than 40 percent of our planet’s cultured land. But when is the last time you engaged in spirited discourse about soybeans at a cocktail party? Wine is a beverage that is widely enjoyed but also fiercely debated. It is a philosophical battleground on which the lines between the old world and the new are clearly drawn, the quaffable poster child for the benefits (yea, cries the new world chorus) and evils (oh, fie, says the vanguard of the old) of globalization. The debate, traditionalists would have you believe, is about terroir (the sense of place associated with the geography of the vines), but as with all things in our modern world, it is more likely about money.

“Wine’s globalization has brought major economic gains to participants in the expanding countries,” observes economist Kym Anderson, “but pain to many traditional producers.” Old world wine producing countries such as France, Italy, and Spain are losing their foothold (and their profits) as new world wines saturate the market. The old guard isn’t taking this lightly, describing imbibers of new world Australian wines, for example, as philistines and raising the alarm that “the barbarians are at our gates.” It is instructive to bear in mind that the “old world” of wine is not the “oldest world.” Evidence of fermented grapes has been uncovered in 7,000 year old neolithic sites in Iran, an indication that ancient Persians were enjoying wine long before the Baron Phillipe de Rothschild smashed his first grape. Nonetheless, while brand may equal bland to viticulture traditionalists, old world wine countries face a real challenge to their regulated, tradition-based industry by the more technology-based, market driven practices of their new world counterparts, the United States of America among them.

The US wine industry has come a long way since William Penn planted vitis vinifera in the hills of Pennsylvania more than 300 years ago. At present, the United States is the world’s fourth largest producer of wine behind the old world triumvirate of Italy, France, and Spain, but it accounts for less than five percent of the 1.7 billion gallons of wine sold outside of its country of origin. While globalization has opened the wine market for many new world countries, the US has been slow to recognize the “strategic importance” of exporting American wines. Increased competition on American soil from winemakers in the southern hemisphere, however, is changing that. Twenty years ago, imports from Australia, Chile, Argentina, and other countries south of the equator comprised only four percent of the American wine market but nearly one third today. To preserve market share at home and to gain market share abroad, American wineries have become more aggressive in their efforts to brand and market their products. US winemakers have begun to make headway in foreign markets, but this is often driven by the dollar’s position against foreign currencies, which – when down – gives American wines a price point advantage. A weak dollar boosts international sales of American wines, leaving old world producers to develop strategies of their own to preserve their dwindling market share.

While American winemakers have not fully leveraged the potential economic benefit of a global wine industry, the American wine drinker enjoys its benefits. Last year, the Journal of Wine Economics published a study that analyzed changes in price, quality, and variety of wines available to American consumers since the late 1980s. The cost, for example, of the top 100 wines listed in Wine Spectator was more than $4,300 in 1988 and less than $2,500 in 2004, a 44 percent decrease in price with no discernable dip in quality. Good wine, thanks to globalization, is more widely accessible to consumers regardless of geography. Even in the domestic US market, consumers are benefitting from an increasingly competitive marketplace. Robert Mondavi – the king of California wineries whose terroir grab in Aniane, France, was foiled by locals, environmentalists, and anti-globalization activists – is faced with slaying its own dragon – Two Buck Chuck, the California wine bottled by Charles Shaw and sold for the bargain basement price of $1.99.

In the documentary Mondovino, a discouraged winemaker from the south of France sadly proclaims, “Wine is dead.” Globalization has not killed wine; it has killed the exclusivity associated with wine. Full disclosure: the last batch of wine I purchased included a bottle of Australian Yard Dog (because the beast on the bottle reminds me of my skinny little rescue shar pei) and Smoking Loon Pinot Noir from California because the colors in the label match my dining room. Not exactly a nod to the old world masters. While the aggressive branding and marketing of wine may have tarnished some long-standing viticultural traditions, it has not destroyed the industry, rather it has successfully attracted legions of new devotees of the grape, particularly in the United States, a country whose history of spirits is more firmly rooted in whiskey than in wine.

A century separates the likes of Auguste Escoffier and Anthony Bourdain – one the legendary chef who simplified, modernized, and popularized traditional French cooking during the late 19th century; the other the former executive chef of Brasserie Les Halles and author of the swaggering culinary expose, Kitchen Confidential. In The World of Escoffier, Timothy Shaw vividly documents the conditions in which Escoffier and his contemporaries worked – dark, dangerous, poorly ventilated, subterranean kitchens, brutal and degrading surroundings that drove their inhabitants to alcoholism, contributed to physical disabilities and, in extreme cases, early death. Bourdain, in his best-selling glimpse behind the kitchen door, describes a similarly harrowing environment – where aspirin is eaten like candy, alcohol and drug abuse is rampant, and men and women who cook and support those who do are ground to dust by the intensity of their daily effort. While fire, building, and health inspection standards have done much to improve safety and overall conditions for modern kitchen staff, laboring in a professional kitchen (as executive chef or as lowly plongeur) remains, to this day, as Bourdain has written, “king hell, bone-crushing” work.

While Escoffier enjoyed influence and was widely celebrated in European culinary circles, he – like Bourdain – toiled in obscurity for years in the harsh conditions of professional kitchens. In 1903, he wrote his classic Le Grande Culinaire. His last book, Ma Cuisine, was written one year before his death in 1935. But even so, Escoffier – a gastronomic legend from our modern perspective – never achieved the notoriety (or financial remuneration) enjoyed by legions of lesser figures of the modern food scene whose culinary contributions pale in comparison. Bourdain, after working nearly 30 years in kitchens first as a dishwasher and eventually as executive chef, wrote Kitchen Confidential in 2000. Within two years, he was on American television screens as the host of A Cook’s Tour and, by 2005, had premiered his second televised series, No Reservations. Bourdain, while known for his potshots at food personalities such as Emeril Lagasse, Bobby Flay, and Rachael Ray, has benefited from a celebrity chef culture that he himself describes as a “remarkable and admittedly annoying phenomenon.”

Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson and Sharon Zukin explore how the “glorification of individual chefs” is a modern trend, a logical and necessary outgrowth of the substantial investments chefs and their underwriters make in opening new restaurants. Contemporary chefs, they write, are “no longer crafts workers or even artists … but media stars.” Emeril, Mario, and Ming – like Cher, Madonna, and Prince – are single-name super novas, not simply chefs but culinary empires. We have super-sized our chefs. We have turned cooking into televised entertainment, something to be passively enjoyed in the same manner as Monday night football or mid-morning soap operas. Would Bobby Flay, without the modern media machine, be anything more than a boy with a grill, a hardworking chef turning out respectable southwestern cuisine in New York City?

To suggest, however, that the defining difference between chefs of the late 19th and late 20th centuries is that today’s chefs are media stars is an overly simplistic reduction. In the United States alone, nearly one million outlets for eating are staffed by more than 13 million people – line cooks, assemblers, and wait staff among them – but also many chefs who don’t have a television show, aren’t represented by an agent, and never dueled with an Iron Chef. Most Americans can recite a litany of celebrity chefs fed to us by the Food Network – Mario and Morimoto, Paula Deen and Paul Prudhomme – but these are not the men and women who turn out our meals, night after night, at our nation’s restaurants. “What’s been lost in all this food-crazy, chef- and restaurant-obsessed nonsense,” Bourdain observes, “is that cooking is hard.” Shaw, Escoffier’s biographer, writes of French cooks “who shudder at the memory of apprenticeships served only forty years ago,” men who were subjected to “experiences very similar to their 19th century counterparts.” Hard work and rough treatment are realities in the lives of those who work in professional kitchens. Whether being struck by a 19th century Parisian chef, verbally berated by a fiery Gordon Ramsay on an episode of Hell’s Kitchen, or simply overrun with orders for chicken piccata at a neighborhood Ruby Tuesday’s, life behind a stove in a professional kitchen is a life replete with hardship and difficulty. While the status of the profession itself has certainly changed – and indeed the status of certain individual chefs – most men and women of the apron work in relative obscurity. The 19th century had its stars, Escoffier among them. We, however, have created superstars to feed the public’s endless appetite for food entertainment. Despite the glamorization of the lives of chefs, the work, as Bourdain has observed, is hard. Safer, cleaner, more regulated – but still “king hell, bone-crushing” work. 

Every day in cities across India, tiffin wallahs (literally, “carriers of boxes”) execute an amazing feat of transportation genius. They arrive at the suburban residences of Indian workers to pick up savory home-cooked meals, they ferry those meals (packaged in tin or stainless steel lunchboxes known as tiffins) by bicycle and then by train to India’s densely populated city centers, where, miraculously, those meals find their way via other tiffin wallahs to the offices of the hungry workers. And then, in reverse, the tiffins are returned to their homes to be refilled for the following day’s incredible journey. In Mumbai alone, thousands of barefooted tiffin wallahs deliver hundreds of thousands of lunches six days a week—with the precision of Swiss watchmakers.

While the tiffin wallahs of the spicy subcontinent stand as an anachronism in a fast food world, India has not escaped the influence of convenience. Fast food outlets such as McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, and KFC can be found on the streets of Mumbai, Kolkata, Delhi, and most of India’s other urban areas. According to the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington DC-based think tank focused on sustainability, the fast food industry in India is growing at a rate of 40 percent a year. And, yet, the tiffin wallah survives—delivering lively curries and savory dal, a taste of home, to office workers surrounded by ever-increasing dining options.

In an essay about the industrial revolution and its impact on the history of food, Jean-Louis Flandrin discusses the role of modern eating establishments versus their predecessors—the rustic inns and taverns of a pre-industrialized world. Restaurants, he writes, “served food to growing numbers of men and women who no longer took their meals at home, either because there was no one at home to do the cooking or because the workplace was too far away to return for the midday meal.” The migration of rural populations to city centers, the shift from an agrarian society, increased opportunities for women outside the home—these are all features of the industrial revolution that have contributed to a devolution of traditional foodways. Every day at the noon hour, American workers fan out across their cities and towns to indulge in the Big Bacon Classic at Wendy’s, the 7-Layer Burrito at Taco Bell, and the Beef ‘N Cheddar sandwich at Arby’s. In the American south, the large midday meal enjoyed by our grandparents is a historical artifact—recreated only for Sunday gatherings, for funerals, or for other rites of passage. Flandrin writes that “the religion of progress has been paramount for two centuries, and for much of that time the drawbacks of progress seemed negible.” But at this juncture, when fast food has expanded the American waistline to alarming proportions, can we continue to ignore those drawbacks? In my town alone, McDonald’s and Burger King operate nearly 30 outlets for their hastily prepared fattening fare. But I can think of only a handful of locally owned establishments where one can enjoy unique meals made with locally farmed products. The National Restaurant Association reports that the US restaurant industry includes 945,000 restaurants and food service outlets with a workforce of 13.1 million people. While local food, slow food, and other iterations of “quality” food outlets are among the ranks of the industry, they are increasingly encroached upon by the steady and relentless march of the fast and the convenient.

Historian Rachel Laudan explores this paradox in her essay on culinary modernism. She caution us – “if we unthinkingly assume that good food maps neatly onto old or slow or homemade food, we miss the fact that lots of industrial foodstuffs are better.” While I bemoan the imperial shadow cast by the “golden arches” over the world’s culinary landscape, I am always relieved to spy a sign for Chic-fil-a, the second largest quick service chicken restaurant chain in the United States, when traveling Georgia’s backroads and highways. That personal paradox aside, I am generally what Laudan describes as a “culinary Luddite,” one who pines for the “good old days”—days that contemporary analysis has shown us weren’t all that good. Shorter life expectancy, a food supply roiled by the whims of weather and war, polluted water, and bread, sausage, and flour that contained inedible “ingredients”—is this, Laudan asks, that for which we pine? “Nostalgia is not what we need,” she concludes. “What we need is a culinary ethos that comes to terms with contemporary, industrialized food, not one that dismisses it.” As a nation, Americans should strive for what India has achieved: a balance between a traditional food system (quality?) and a contemporary one (quantity?), a society in which the tiffin wallah can happily navigate his way through crowds of his fellow countrymen waiting to order McAloo Tikkis and Paneer Salsa Wraps under the golden arches in the heart of Mumbai.

Last week ... nut sacks (I mean, snacks). This week ... some late night culinary ruminations. We do it all here at Bitegeist. Tell your friends, and visit again soon.

I usually don't reach the execution stage on my kitchen projects. Oh, I'm a great idea person, strong out of the gate, but I peter out after the first turn. I believe it is my fatal flaw. But, this weekend, I rode that pony straight to the barn. 

I've been talking about salt for quite a while on this site. A couple months ago, I bought grey sea salt and Szechuan peppercorns in bulk when I was in San Francisco. And Egyptian basil. And lavendar buds. And a number of other ingredients that will factor into my salt experiments. I also bought whole vanilla beans for only 60 cents each, but this posting isn't about that culinary coup.

A month or so after assembled my base ingredients, I bought a new stainless steel Cuisinart grinder. And, yesterday, while trawling the aisles of TJMaxx, I stumbled upon a copy of Patricia Yeo's Cooking from A to Z for only two bucks. There - on page 13 - are her simple instructions for making Szechuan pepper salt.

As instructive as her short recipe is, Ms. Yeo is not my salt inspiration. No, I have Eric Gower - the Breakaway Cook - to thank for that. Eric has a long list of flavored salts he has created and uses in his cooking. It was he, not she, who planted the seed. Heck, he's the guy who gave me directions to the San Francisco Herb Company. Ms. Yeo's cookbook simply gave me a serendipitous kick in the seat of the pants.

And, now, here I sit, surrounded by an earthy, perfumey aroma, smiling proudly at my very first batch of flavored salt and fantasizing about all the things I can do with it.

Flavor a batch of homemade potato chips ... 

Season a burger ... or shrimp ... or a beautiful block of fresh tuna ... 

Or simply garnish a bright white plate with it ...

I'll be moving on to the Egyptian basil next. And then the dried persimmons.

Connie? Are you out there? Did you find our salt cellars? Girl, I'm on fire over here.....

Chongqing strang-taste horsebeans produced by Chongqing Jin Yun Food factory in 1958. The producte have special taste, fragrant and sweet and crisp, numb and sore, salty and fresh, comfortable and tasty and refreshing, it likes Mulberry tree's fruit color and lusterris Moise. Since the producte being to market, it is loved deeply by lots of people and sales very good for more forty years, it be recorded 1988 on <<Chinese famous food encyclopedia>> and is good for travel, recreation and gift.

Having read that, I'm still not sure what I've got.

"Do not drink" ... on a bottle of lotion (okay, it is called Body Milk, but still.......)

"Not for human consumption" ... on a package of dice

"Do not use as an ice cream topping" ... on a bottle of hair coloring

Years ago, I made a really big deal out of a key lime pie yogurt container that warned "does not contain pie crust." You know that hundreds of people must have called to complain when they pulled the lids off their yogurt and only found yogurt to warrant a disclaimer like that. In retrospect, that seems pretty mild. Maybe I'm getting soft. Nonetheless, I still keep that tidbit in my Food for Dumb Asses file. 

But try as I might - I cannot wrap my mind around how a person could think that dice were edible ... or that hair coloring on ice cream would be a good idea. Okay, maybe if you were raised by wolves ... or gazelles ... or chimps.