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Havana restaurants thrive on available local food

HAVANA — You run a restaurant famous for its pork chop. But there’s none in the fridge. You check the pantry only to find that salt is also running low. You call your local store and they inform you that the entire city is out of these items. The replenishments will arrive two days later.

This scenario is reality for restaurateurs in Havana. To invigorate the struggling economy, the government loosened the regulations on private restaurants in 2010, but food shortages and rationing persist in the country. “It is still hard to find ingredients we need,” says Enrique Núñez, owner of La Guarida, one of the longest established and most reputable private restaurants here. “This has nothing to do with the restrictions. You simply cannot find them in Cuba.”

Continue reading my Boston Globe story here…

Bitch

Bitch Winter Issue

Bitch Winter Issue

This issue of the Portland-based feminist magazine tackles women’s food production and consumption roles. What is refreshing about this magazine is that many of its contributors take on a scholarly approach, calling on histories, data and stakeholders’ interviews to challenge the readers’ existing knowledge of the topics at hand. Yet the articles are not typical of scholarly papers—incessant and sometimes sleep-inducing. Most stories run only a couple of pages, an appropriate length for a casual read over a cup of coffee.

The piece that I find most intriguing is about a group of women who quit their jobs to collect, categorize and utilize coupons in the most efficient and tactical ways coupons can possibly be used. The larger issue revolving around couponing is that it challenges the age old idea of shopping as trivia and the women responsible for it as frivolous and wasteful. Full-time couponers demonstrate wisdom and economic muscle, no less than the working women, and as a result they save thousands on child care, commuting, and grocery bills yearly. Most importantly, couponing proves the economic value of household chores that is so often ignored by the tax-paying segment of society. How homemaking is different for these women compared to their home bound mothers and grandmothers is that it has become a financially viable choice as opposed to a duty imposed upon them. But what I wish the author had also discussed is the types of food discounts available on the coupons. My fear is that the choices are limited to nutrients-deficient processed food and that couponing further drives the domestic diet towards a high-in-sodium/fat one if modernity hadn’t already done that. In other words, couponing isn’t as empowering as it appears to be. Instead, it has given manufacturers and retailers more intimate control over where consumers spend their buck.

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Modern Farmer

A modern connection to the lay on serious farm issues

A modern connection to the lay on serious farm issues

As the world wonders how it can feed itself with the growing appetite of the new rich and the increasing population in the underdeveloped world, some nations have turned to GMO for answers. GMO promises higher yield compared to conventional crops and better resistance against bacteria and pests. But it also destroys the livelihoods of smallholder farmers who can’t afford the more expensive seeds and the chemicals it requires. Modern Farmer, which content proves more constructive than its cover gives credit for, features success stories of farmers who returned to conventional seeds after their failed venture with GMO, which benefits waned after a few years of harvests. Their move is encouraged by the growing demand for non-GMO products and supermarkets like Whole Foods that recently decided to label all its foods containing genetically modified ingredients by 2018.

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Japanese comic serves palatable underbelly

A stripper walks into an eatery she frequents and orders mentaiko (cod roe). Medium rare, she says. Weird, because she usually likes it raw. But the chef and fellow regulars understand quickly – the change of her taste also means the change of her heart. She has met someone new, again. But no matter how she much wavers between how it is done, mentaiko is here to stay, as the sac that it comes cocooned in resembles the full lips of her childhood sweetheart.

One fine day at work (as she sits wide-legged on stage), her eyes meet with those of a man who wears a smile that looks deliciously like mentaiko. She disappeared from then on. Rumour has it that she retired to marry her childhood sweetheart.

Of course, like all of her past relationships, this didn’t last long either. “That man is a mummy’s boy,” she complains when she returns. So, amidst merriment, business resumes, and so is her hyper-variable craving for mentaiko.

Awkward reunion with childhood sweetheart

Awkward reunion with childhood sweetheart

This is chapter eight in book one of 深夜食堂 (literally translated Middle of Night Canteen), a Japanese comic on the events that happen in an eatery which operates from midnight to dawn. Because of its odd operating hours, its customers are often the underbelly of Japanese society – stripper, triad leader, elderly gay man, retired porn director, spinsters and obese woman. At this eatery, these people obtain redress as their person unveil in each chapter. The stripper desires love like any woman; the gangster turns out to be a generous man sharing expensive fresh Hokkaido seafood with the other customers; the director is coarse with the starlets but is a gentle lover to his girlfriend; the obese woman draws laughter and empathy as she swings between the extremes of starvation and food orgy.

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