Category: Abstain Project

"There may be some foundation to Indians' accusations of hypocrisy by the West. The United States uses -- or throws away -- 3,770 calories a person each day, according to data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization collected in 2001-3, compared with 2,440 calories per person in India. Americans are also the largest per capita consumers in any major economy of the most energy-intensive common food source, beef, the Agriculture Department says."

--"Indians Find U.S. at Fault in Food Cost", New York Times, May 14, 2008*

(image: Pradeep S. Mehta, whom the article refers to as having said, "archly, that the money spent in the United States on liposuction to get rid of fat from excess consumption could be funneled to feed famine victims.")

 
Over a heavenly brunch of fried eggs, Tamarack Hollow bacon, biscuits, roasted asparagus, butter-sauteed fiddlehead ferns and red-eye gravy (fck yeah!) chez Winnie, the subject of the Abstain Project came up. Winnie figured (rightly) that pork is going to be the next to get the axe in my diet, and was encouraging me to get my bacon on while I can.  A few of the brunch attendees asked why I was cutting certain foods out completely, why it wasn't enough to just buy from suppliers like Tamarack Hollow who farm sustainably -- eat it to save it and all that.

I have to admit that I felt a little uncomfortable discussing the project among acquaintances.  I realize it sounds self-righteous asshole-y, and I hope that's not what I've become.  At the time, I gave a half-assed answer that I was more interested in the push and pull of desire and denial, the co-existence of hedonism and conscience -- and that if I just ate good meat from good producers, I wouldn't have anything to write about. 

But there's more to it than that.   I feel myself pulling away from, not just the culture of excess, but also of access.  It's so easy to buy food, to eat too much food, to waste food, to obsess over food.  Here in New York, you can get anything you want at almost any time of day, from barely legal mangosteen to runny reblochon to guarana soda to dorowat over injera to Barossa Valley shiraz.  Everything's special; nothing's special.

And I think my appetite and curiosity for food has disappeared because food was becoming straight consumption, detached from its communal, human, personal aspects.  Venturing to some Queens outpost to judge a meal by taste alone, eating a cheese with a fancy name but no back story, choosing a new honey vendor over my standard, known, beloved honey purveyor for the sake of reporting -- yawn.

What I do treasure now are meals at home with friends or family, like that brunch at Winnie's, less for the content of the plate than for the company and the kind of chatter you make when you break bread.  Meals in are so rare for me these days.  I'll take relaxed company over a quesadilla with canned black beans and pre-shredded cheese mix over a loud night at the -estest (latest! greatest! best!) spot in town.

Ceci n'est pas un statement.

Still, I keep putting off the pork ban.  I keep telling myself that once I finish that fennel pollen sausage in the freezer, and that kale soup with merguez**, and the jamon iberico de bellota I've been saving, I'll give up the pig.  And, really, bacon I could live without.  But there are so many porcine products I'd keep ahead of bacon -- Thai-style fried pork jerky, pork gyoza or mandoo, Italian sausage...

*Also, check out the comparison consuming chart.  1,674 pounds of corn per person in 2006!!  Children of the corn indeed!

**Remembered while heating up my soup that merguez is lamb.  Which is sort of out by default, and I figure should go out with the other mammalian meat.

Photo from the New York Times: Coffee, Tea or Meat?

It's amazing what you can learn when you sign up for a news alert.  I've been getting daily updates on beef media and I'm fascinated by a bovine brouhaha being stirred up in South Korea.

According to this Voice of America article, South Korea banned U.S. beef imports in 2003 after a U.S. cow died of sponge brain.  Just last month, South Korean president Lee Myung-bak promised our Prez Bush that he'd lift the ban, noting that the U.N. says the beef is safe and so does Bush.  (Bush, of course, showing conservative compassion as number one advocate for the health and safety of the South Koreans.)  Lee's peeps ain't havin' it, though; protests have ensued, with government officials being challenged to "test-eat" imported beef on TV (officials have refused, so far). VOA says last week, "a prominent South Korean TV documentary asserted Koreans possess a special gene that makes them more susceptible to mad cow disease."  Wha?

But apparently, we're talking big Won here -- according to this article, before the ban, South Korea was the third largest market for U.S. beef imports in the world, to the tune of $850 million.  Tiny South Korea!  Third largest!  That's a lot of BBQ.

If kalbi, bulgogi, bibimbap, and sul long tang weren't evidence enough that Koreans take their beef seriously, check this out: students held candlelight vigils in protest of lifting the beef ban.  Can you imagine U.S. teenagers getting that up in arms over, oh, I don't know, salmonella in their dorm food?

Tested my abstaining mettle tonight over dinner at Hill Country.  IMO, best thing on the menu there is the moist (read: fatty) beef brisket, obvs off limits to me right now.  I made do with a thick but somewhat dry smoked pork chop, starry with coarse black pepper. Fuchsia pork spare ribs were also a bit dry and stringy but with a nice wood smoke ring.  Sides we chose were variations on warm, milky mush -- defrosted "French cut" green beans swimming in canned mushroom gravy with French fried onions, creamy penne topped with broiled, sunny cheddar, and a chewy shoepeg corn pudding.  I know it's authentic to have bad sides, but I would have welcomed a little freshness.  Also, the Epcot Center-style country band playing downstairs was loud enough to loosen my fillings and digest the pork chop for me.  Grandma's too old for that shit.  By the end of the night, my throat was hoarse from yelling at my pals across the table, my hair was reeking of smoke, and my doggie bag was full of unfinished meat.  I'm not a huge BBQ fan to start with, but I've been to Hill Country three times now and I still gotta say it -- what's the BFD? 

According to this article on L.A.'s hot dog scene, New York is the number one hot dog town in the nation.  Not surprising, right?  Dirty dogs, as my friend Dottie calls them, rule the street corners of Manhattan.  You can get plump dogs slathered in sweet onion sauce at Katz's; you can nosh on snappy kosher franks at the resurrected 2nd Ave. Deli; there are as many riffs on Gray's Papaya as there are on (Original?) Ray's Pizza; if you really want to rub it into atherosclerosis's face, you can always go to Crif Dogs for the disgustingly magical Spicy Redneck*, a bacon-wrapped, deep-fried wiener smothered in chili, coleslaw, and pickled jalapenos to cut the grease.  (I have eaten more of those in my life than I would dare to admit to an insurance investigator.)

I can't say I'm so discerning about hot dogs.  I mean, if it's spiced right, dyed pink and moistened with mustard, what do I care if it's made of tofu instead of cow scraps?  So I don't think I'll miss them too much. 

My favorite dogs are Violet Hill Farms' hot dogs, which I hear they sell from a cart called Dogmatic on Bleecker St. these days.  When I was in Thailand in 2003, I had, believe it or not, fish hot dogs, nitrate-free, which we ate for breakfast with soup and sticky rice.  And they were DELICIOUS.  Wrap your head around that.

In this episode of Radio Lab (my latest obsession), Jad Abumrad talks to a guy at the Fresh Kills landfill who says a core sample uncovered a 10 year old, intact, totally recognizable hot dog.  Our intestines are basically sausage casings, so that's pretty narst.

Here's a little Wonder Showzen lesson on how hot dogs are made:



*Never had it, but had to laugh -- they've also got a bacon-wrapped hot dog covered in kimchee called a Chang.

I don't know, this creeps me out.  Meat is not just a cluster of cells -- it's blood, it's the grass a lamb eats, the exercise a chicken gets running around its pen, the breed of pig...I just don't get it.  I often think this dissociation is the root of our fucked up "relationship with meat". The delicious pork chop I ate tonight came from a pig that died for my dins.  I knew a guy who could only eat meat that didn't look like meat -- so drumsticks, lamb chops, a T-bone steak were out of the question, but McNuggets, pepperoni and hamburgers were totally acceptable.  What's that about?

I've never been a fan of the mock duck, mock chicken, etc.  I don't want something made of hydrolyzed proteins shot up with stabilizers and coloring agents etc. so it can parade poorly as meat.  And come on, who's being fooled by that perfectly striped fake bacon?  Certainly no one who actually knows and likes meat.  I like my proteins like I like my people -- true to themselves and honest. 

From the New York Times' Green Issue:

Dashka Slater:

"Pork, lamb and poultry all have their impacts, but beef is undoubtedly the Hummer of the dinner plate."

Michael Pollan:

"Which brings us back to the 'why bother [going green]' question and how we might better answer it. The reasons not to bother are many and compelling, at least to the cheap-energy mind. But let me offer a few admittedly tentative reasons that we might put on the other side of the scale:

If you do bother, you will set an example for other people. If enough other people bother, each one influencing yet another in a chain reaction of behavioral change, markets for all manner of green products and alternative technologies will prosper and expand. (Just look at the market for hybrid cars.) Consciousness will be raised, perhaps even changed: new moral imperatives and new taboos might take root in the culture. Driving an S.U.V. or eating a 24-ounce steak or illuminating your McMansion like an airport runway at night might come to be regarded as outrages to human conscience. Not having things might become cooler than having them. And those who did change the way they live would acquire the moral standing to demand changes in behavior from others -- from other people, other corporations, even other countries."

****

Over Meet the Press this morning, La Doug and I were discussing the awful but not impossible scenario where McCain wins the White House over a fractured Democratic party. 

LA DOUG: I talked to Mark, who was in D.C. when we went from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration.  It went from a sushi town to a steakhouse town overnight.

This is a statue of Jao Mae Guan Im, known to the Chinese as Guan Yin which, according to this site, means "Who Contemplates the [Supplicating] Sound of the World".  She's apparently a bodhisattva, the female incarnation of Avalokitesvara, embodiment of compassion.

Growing up, I only knew her as "that statue of a woman in my aunts' houses."  Jao Mae Guan Im was not part of our standard issue Sunday school Buddhism.  First of all, she was a she, and for all the wonderful things Buddhism is, it is not a culture of the feminine divine.  Secondly, she was often distinctly Chinese-looking, standing among swirls of water or curling lotus petals in a sort of Venus on the half-shell tilt into the wind so her long robes and pretty beehive/Crystal Gayle hair combo were permanently aflutter.

Not everyone had shrines to her in their houses,  which made her seem that much more mystical to me.  Those who did worship her had to give up beef.  (This was the only thing I knew about her because, go figure, I only ever seem to remember details about food.) Depending on where you google, her followers believe her cruel father was reincarnated as a cow; since they don't want to eat him, they don't touch beef; the other story is that Guan Im was so compassionate that she was always a vegetarian, even in utero.

Interesting too that it's beef her believers give up, as the cow so often represents matriarchy.  Even the word cow (as opposed to bull or the neutral food term cattle) refers to the female -- how many other animals do we call primarily by the female gender's title?  Not sows, not ewes, not hens, not mares, not bitches.

Here's a fun page on cross-cultural cow lore. 

And in case you've forgotten why corned beef and pastrami got kosher clearance (except when applied in a Swiss-cheesed Reuben): it's the Leviticus-approved combo of cloven hoof + chews the cud.

CHARLIE: I don't want to go to this party.  I always wind up talking to the same girl.

ME: Well, is she cool?

CHARLIE: She's Korean, from Minnesota.  And she's a vegetarian.  It's so unattractive.

ME: ...

CHARLIE: The first two are interesting, but vegetarians...I guess it depends on your relationship with meat. 

Number of search results in Google news for downer cows: 462

Many of you may wonder, what happened to the Ganda we once knew and loved?  Has she been lobotomized?  Is she a frakking Cylon?  Has she been listening to too much NPR? 

The answers to those questions are: I'm right here, no, I wouldn't tell you if I were, and probably.

None of that can explain this sort of sea change I've been feeling lately. A confluence of events has conspired to unseat me  -- an election year/leap year, the tanking economy, the rising cost of food, turning 30, hormonal shifts, pollen counts, star alignments, tight underwear, god knows what else.  This hiatus has been an incubation period for a new experiment I've been thinking about for a while.  I know it's not going to make sense. It's sort of antithetical to everything this blog was always about.  It's probably going to alienate my core readership, if my total neglect over the last few months didn't already do that.  But it's an idea that I'm finally ready to get cracking on.

It's called The Abstain Project.  It's just what you might imagine.  Every so often, I will abstain from something, and I'll report on the effect of the abstinence.  I'll keep abstaining until I can't take it anymore.  It's really about setting up a parameter and seeing where I come up against obstacles, and finding out whether or not the obstacles are too much for me.  Like a rolling permaLent.

The point is not to become someone who abstains completely from all things; the point is more to see what I can live without and what I can't live without.  And to find out what life is like for someone who chooses, or has no choice but, to live without.

What really clinched it for me was probably this episode of This American Life, which chronicles the realities of modern pig farming.  (Extra bonus which made me never want to go to another wiener house -- the disgusting choads in Act Two who are probably the same dumbass mfs who think race is not an issue in this country anymore.)

I know, I know, I spent the last four years pushing reckless gluttony and guilt-free hedonism.  But I'm wondering if a different kind of pleasure can be gleaned from life, one that comes not through consumption but through abstinence.  And hey, if I try veganism and decide it's a crock, I can denounce it from the high horse of experience.  But what if it isn't?

I don't think I'll be able to give up all meat, but I might try to, just to see how long I can go without.  Dairy and eggs?  Soy and all soy products?  Certainly would be a challenge.  Alcohol?  Well, that probably wouldn't be too hard, but I don't think I'd enjoy it much.  Fruits and vegetables?  Now there's a real challenge.  Refined sugar?  Seems horrifying, but maybe it clears the head. Eating out? E-mail?  Cell phone?  Lots of possibilities.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.   First things first -- I'm going to cut out beef for now.  Too easy, I know, but I feel like I need to ease myself into the project if I'm going to sustain it.   I'm sure I'll fall off the wagon with certain things; I don't expect refined sugar to be off the table for more than 2 days.  But it should be a wacky little ride.  And at least now I'll have something to talk about.