Food Fight

We get a lot of swag in the mail at work, sometimes edible swag. The other day, someone had left some cookies out for everyone to try. My co-worker walked by and said, "I better get away from those. They look dangerous." Isn't that an interesting choice of words?

This is an idea I've been obsessed with for a while: food as a weapon, and the ways in which food can be used against people. Of course we have the poisonings, from Snow White and Nero to Ukraine President Yushchenko and the Russian spy Litvinenko. But there's also the Parsley Massacre, in which a Dominican dictator executed Haitians who couldn't properly pronounce "perejil", Spanish for parsley. My friend Johanna was recently in Andalucia, and she told me about a book she read which said that converted Moors and Jews often proved their dedication to the Catholic church by consuming pork and crustaceans with gusto. A hail paella?

I saw this story on BBC the other day about arrests in China after a sting op uncovered solvent-softened cardboard being used in place of chopped meat in steamed buns. The cooks say they don't eat the buns themselves, they just sell them. I see this as an attack on their customers. But how do you get to that point, where you value your clientele so little that you would never eat the food you serve them?

How many dishes have been born of war, like budae jigae, a Korean stew of kimchi, spam, ramen noodles, and sometimes canned beans? Baby booms must happen in the kitchen as necessity and rations collide.

I wonder what role food is playing in the Iraq war. Paging food editors: there's a story I'd like to read about.