Think globally, eat tinily
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| A little cheese goes a short way in the locavore world |
Since last August or so, our house has been buying some food through a new community-supported agriculture (CSA)... thing (I don't think they'd want to be referred to as a business). Rather than support agriculture in the typical ways, with money or a shovel, a CSA simply requires more money. Product for product the various price premiums reflect the fact that the berries, carrots, chard, kale, more chard, and more kale are from just down the road or over the hill. We can now claim that we are locavores (not to be confused with locovores -- those people will eat anything). You might think that cutting out transportation costs, distribution costs, and big-government chard taxes would lead to
lower prices. But, locavoracity is complicated. It turns out that the people growing and picking these berries live in the same real estate market and have grad school loans. But sometimes the nuances of "sustainable" foodie-culture are too funny to avoid the attention of Sporadigram and so I ramble about it here. The first shock came when our weekly CSA e-mail encouraged us not to miss their debut of chicken -- a whole bird for $26. Last week a wedge of cheese in our box weighed less than the plastic pouch it rode in... in. It was almost cute-a-vore.
Big milk -- too big to pail
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| Got milk? |
Up here on the border, a strong Canadian Dollar, Canadian price supports for dairy products, and a lot of migration from India to British Columbia over the last thirty years have resulted in an impossible-to-ignore spike in cross-border milk buying by Indo Canadians. This has led to easily overheard speculation by non-Indo Bellinghamsters about what
anyone could do with so much milk. Urban legend (if you can call Bellingham urban) already has it that many Indians use the milk for baths. I've also heard conjecture about milk-buying clubs, re-sale in Indian-owned convenience stores, and, less-sensational-thus-less-satisfying explanations involving heavy use of milk in traditional Indian cuisine. After exhaustive research by Sporadigram's investigative arm, there is no evidence that milk baths (not an unheard of though excessive attempt at skin care) have any special place in Indian culture. And how could anyone really get away with repackaging and selling milk in a convenience store? Haven't you heard of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Special Dairy Crime Tactical Unit?
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| Paneer: when milk looses its whey. |
So, literally, the milky [high]way running from Whatcom County, WA to Surrey, BC boils down to Indian cooking -- specifically
ghee, a clarified butter that's made through a process that begins by boiling large amounts of cow's milk; and
paneer, a fresh cheese generally made by heating a lot of milk and curdling it with lemon juice (or other food acids). The bottom line: you need more than a gallon of milk to make two servings of paneer.
Thank you. That's really weird.
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| If you were tiny, you'd be home by now. |
Staying with South Asian tangents, last summer I was asked to meet with a delegation of of Pakistani border enforcement agency managers to discuss, well... work stuff (regional cross-border coordination and investment strategies). While I did not have a chance to ask them what they knew about Indian milk consumption, I scored a cool thank-you gift (I think). The presentation of my gift was great. Abdul Rehman Rind (the deputy collector of customs in Islamabad) stood up and announced that the group wanted to leave me with something from Pakistan. He then made some short remarks to the effect that, since I was a planner (sure, that will work I guess) they wanted to give me something that embodied the results of good planning. This turned out to be a miniature wood, string, and bead bed assembled inside an old Johnny Walker Red bottle. (Looks like an optimistic view of the future to me.) It seemed obvious that this was the same gift they had ready for each person they were meeting with over their three-day tour, so I had to wonder how the bed-in-a-scotch-bottle was spun as a metaphor for others' jobs. "...and since you're a border inspector, you know you never know what's inside unless you look..." "...and as mayor of a border city, you know how important it is to provide a bed for people who crawl inside a bottle..." "...since you write a blog, you know that nothing is ever too stupid to present to others in hopes they'll be as amused as you."
