Ever since I read this, I can't seem to get this slightly edited chorus out of my mind ...

"Just churn, churn it ... "

This February, the Baroness Philippine de Rothschild, grande dame of France’s most revered vineyard, unveiled the label for the 2006 Chateau Mouton Rothschild, a childlike painting of a zebra head and a plant – an illustration the Chateau described as “a joyously exotic transposition of the pleasure of drinking, in which the vine stock is transformed into a springing palm tree and the wine lover into a happily anticipatory zebra.”

One could view the Chateau’s statement as commentary on the power of art to communicate intangibles, but I perceive it as evidence of the abundant mythology surrounding the fermented grape in France. (Coincidentally, the artist behind the Chateau’s new label is Lucian Freud; his grandfather Sigmund would likely be proud of the vineyard’s interesting interpretation of his grandson’s rendering.)

Food, in the view of Barthes and many other scholars, is a language, a system of communication. Barthes describes wine, in particular, as an institution, a consumable that implies “a set of images, dreams, tastes, choices, and values.” Wine is never only wine any more than a rare steak is simply a piece of meat. The food we consume tells others much about us. A cart holding a top shelf cabernet and two porterhouse steaks, for example, communicates a message to fellow shoppers that is vastly different than the one transmitted by a basket filled with soy milk and a block of tofu. But both wine and steak in France represent something much more than affluence, power, social status, and other the abstractions commonly associated with these items. They are not simply symbols; they are the source of abundant (and sometimes contradictory) myth.

Myth is used to define and add meaning to our gestures, our rituals, and our social interactions. We develop myths to explain, to justify, and to create meaning beyond that which we are capable of seeing. Take wine, for example, a substance that transmutes as it is imbibed. Instead of simply accepting the physiological effects of intoxication, such as loss of social inhibitions and exhibition of uncharacteristic behaviors, the French have ascribed alchemical properties to wine, believing it is “capable of reversing situations and states.” More than simply being the “totem-drink” of France, as representative of the country’s gestalt as the milk of the Dutch cow is to Holland, the French believe that wine has “plastic powers” – making the weak strong and the silent talkative, empowering the worker and transforming the intellectual into a man of the people. Steak in France is similarly steeped in myth. Not simply a slice of beef, steak is a defining morsel of the country’s soul, its full-bloodedness the very essence of French national pride.

The copious mythology surrounding wine and steak in France attests to the centrality of these items not simply to the French culinaria but also to French culture itself. Barthes’ observations, particularly those promoting wine and steak as consumable effectors of patriotism, remain relevant despite Barthes having penned his observations more than 50 years. More than any other country, the French have successfully defended their food heritage in the face of globalization. Could the deep-rooted mythology of French food and French foodways have been instrumental in that defense?

In an extreme show of anti-globalization sentiment, vineyard owners in France's Languedoc-Roussillon region have resorted to wine “terrorism,” a shocking attempt to spur the French government into protecting them against the assault of inexpensive imports from New World wine-producing countries. I cannot imagine any sector of the United States food industry that would defend its heritage and territory as vociferously as French winemakers have protected the wine industry – not even the producers of the very symbol of American patriotism, the hot dog.

Each year, Americans spend more than four billion dollars on hot dogs, eating 150 million on Independence Day alone. But in response to a recent anti-hot dog advertising campaign sponsored by the Cancer Project, all the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council (by all rights the propagators of the myth of American patriotism by hot dog) could muster was a polite rebuttal in the press.

From its first appearance on American shores in the late 1800s, the humble frankfurter (by most accounts a German invention) has come to represent American national pride. But a 140-year history, only two or three generations, is clearly not long enough to create the depth of myth – revolution-inspiring myth – associated with French wine. The French have been drinking fermented grapes, and creating their wine myth, for centuries, many more years before the first New Yorker ordered the first frank from the first hot dog stand on Coney Island.

Worry no more, friends. The friendly folks at the Blue Ocean Institute have developed FishPhone - and, now, marine dining advice is just a text away. For illustrative purposes, I texted FishPhone to inquire about Chilean sea bass and here's what I received in mere seconds:

(RED) significant environmental concerns; problems include illegal fishing and high bycatch; HEALTH ADVISORY: high mercury; try striped bass or pacific halibut instead. 

You'll get the same response - the RED light - if you text Patagonian Toothfish, the real moniker of Chilean sea bass before the marketing folks got a hold of it. If you're worried about the sustainability of your sushi roll, you need to try this. It is informative and addictive. ChaCha for foodies. 

Simply text 30644 with the message FISH followed by the name of the variety in question. Pacific cod, whitefish, sablefish, red snapper, squid... Just like Lay's potato chips, betcha can't text just one!

A baby doll that cries and moves its arms and legs? Creepy. A life-sized toddler doll? Creepier. Guns, tanks, soldiers and other war paraphernalia? Out of the question. A plastic pony with hair that changes color when your blow dry it? WTF?!

And then I saw it. And, I swear to you I heard a choir of angels. There ... on the tip top shelf out of the reach of anybody under five feet nine inches (I managed to get to it thanks to the extra lift of my Dansko clogs) ... a 95 piece kitchen play set.

Tiny plastic chicken legs and cakes and hot dogs and asparagus spears. Spoons and bowls and rolling pins. Chinese take-out boxes. All packaged in a nice square bucket with a handle. Oh ... my ... god. I had to have it. I purchased it and carried it home like a baby. I sat with it on my lap until we left for Ann Beth's. When we got there, I didn't simply put it on the table; I dragged Ann Beth in the dining room to show it off. And when we left, I couldn't stop thinking about all those little pieces of plastic food. 

I'm not dropping hints here. Please don't run out and buy me a set from the Rite-Aid in Daniel Village on Wrightsboro Road in Augusta, Ga. I'd feel ridiculous. But I'd probably find a way to get over it.

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.