betsuni
betsuni's JournalWriting about food: Sumo Size Me, from Michael Booth's "Sushi & Beyond"
"It was lunch time: what I had been waiting for. ... Amused at my interest in his lunch plans, Sumo Monster explained that he was making a chanko nabe, the traditional sumo hotpot. 'There are lots of different kinds,' he said. 'Maybe as many as ten. We all take turns to make it and each of us has a specialty. This is a chicken and soy sauce one.' He chopped daikon radish then carrots into a pot of simmering water seasoned with soy, as if sharpening a pencil ... . He then added half a ladle of salt. Did he have a recipe? 'No, this is man's cooking, we don't really worry about the details. The important thing is that there is enough -- this is how the chanko nabe developed. Sumo stables used to be much larger, up to a hundred wrestlers, and they needed a dish that could be cooked in one pot but feed many.' With Sumo Monster engrossed in his chanko nabe I took my chance to sneak a look into the fridges. Instead of the cakes and chocolates I was hoping to find, they were full with sweetcorn, tofu, chicken, and other vegetables -- a veritable showcase of healthy eating.
"The lunch spread, though relatively healthy, was on an impressive scale. As well as the protein-rich chanko nabe, there was omelette, rice, cocktail sausages and, of all things, fried spam ... . We barely made an impression on the amount of food at the table, and left them to enjoy their well-earned feast and afternoon beauty nap."
I attended a morning sumo practice and lunch at a shrine a couple of years ago. During the practice I couldn't stop obsessing about how if I stepped, even a little, onto the sacred sumo dirt place I would instantly pollute it because of my woman parts. They'd have to get the Shinto priests to come and purify it for the fat guys to be able slap each other around again safely. I felt guilty ten years ago at my father-in-law's funeral ceremonies when the Shinto priest waved around sacred branches in his pure white garments and I was there quietly menstruating, polluting everything.
The chanko nabe was superb because the wrestler in charge made the broth from scratch, no instant dashi with MSG. I can taste MSG, I don't care what people who can't tell the difference say about it. You can or you can't. There were deep-fried things, a large mayonnaise noodle salad, other things I avoided. It was a hot summer day and who can eat so much besides wrestlers. The stable master asked me if I liked sweets and when I said I didn't, complained about the foreign wrestlers who did, and how obscenely large food portions were in the U.S. when he traveled there. Heh. Then the wrestlers bathed and had their hair done and took naps.
Writing about food: James Villas, "American Taste"
"Often I have occasion to glance into home refrigerators, and what I usually see makes my temperature rise; gallons of soda, frozen vegetables, pizzas and TV dinners, pounds of processed cheese in individual plastic wraps, boxes of disgusting breakfast cakes and rolls, and packages of those processed meats I wouldn't even feed to my beagle. At movies I'm dumbfounded at the amount of popcorn, candy, and sweet drinks that is consumed (when and where do those people eat dinner?). ... Nerves wracked, metabolism shot, and overweight, much of this same society (roughly 20 percent of the American population at any given time) eventually reaches out for any means possible to correct the damage.
"Basically people know that the answers to good health and weight control ultimately come from no other source than plain old common sense, but big business stands steadfast. 'The will to be cheated,' Lucius Beebe commented some years ago, 'is, apparently, a deep-rooted and inherent American instinct, but it seems a pity when it leads to the rejection of the all-too-frequent natural pleasures that make life bearable at all. As someone once remarked, the customers at diet-fad groceries always seem to look as though they got there ten years too late.'
"Well, at least as far as I'm concerned, healthy weight control is no more problematic than brushing teeth or walking the dog or preparing breakfast, meaning that what might appear to be a boring chore can, through habit, be transformed into a very enjoyable experience. When I wake up in the morning (even with a hangover), I know exactly where and what type of food I'll be eating throughout the day and night ... the anticipation nears being erotic. ... Many enlightened souls throughout the centuries have championed gourmandism as one of life's more civilized pleasures, but surely none stated the case more colorfully than the composer Rossini: 'Aside from doing nothing, I know of no more delightful occupation for myself than eating -- eating, that is, properly. What love is to the heart, appetite is to the stomach. The stomach is the chapel master which activates and directs the great orchestra of our passions. An empty stomach represents the bassoon or piccolo, one groaning out dissatisfaction, the other yelping for contentment. A full stomach, on the other hand, is the triangle of pleasure, the tympani of joy.'"
Writing about food: Jim Harrison, "The Raw and the Cooked, Adventures of a Roving Gourmand"
"I spent two weeks at the Rancho La Puerta health spa ... in order to quit smoking ... . Almost incidentally I lost seventeen pounds in two weeks. ... The menu was total vegetarian with fish twice a week. ... At the Rancho one day at lunch I told some ... ladies what I thought was a charming story of simple food. One August, years ago, I was wandering around the spacious property of a chateau up in Normandy, trying to work up a proper appetite for lunch. The land, owned by a friend, doubled as a horse farm and a vicious brood mare had tried to bite me, an act I rewarded with a stone sharply thrown against her ass. Two old men I hadn't seen laughed beneath a tree. I walked over and sat with them around a small fire. They were gardeners and it was their lunch hour, and on a flat stone they had made a small circle of hot coals. They had cored a half dozen big red tomatoes, stuffed them with softened cloves of garlic, and added a sprig of thyme, a basil leaf, and a couple of tablespoons of soft cheese. They roasted the tomatoes until they softened and the cheese melted. I ate one with a chunk of bread and healthy-sized swigs of a jug of red wine. ... A simple snack but indescribably delicious. I waited only a moment for the ladies' reaction. CHEESE, two of them hissed, CHEESE, as if I puked on their sprouts, and WINE! The upshot was that cheese was loaded with cholesterol and wine has an adverse effect on blood sugar.
"At dawn the next morning I decided to skip human life and spend the day in the mountains. ... I took my binoculars, an orange, a hard-boiled egg, and a one-once bottle of Tabasco for the egg. ... Four hours into the mountains I ate the egg and the orange with relish. ... Then out out of the chaparral appeared a tough, ragged-looking Mexican who asked me if I had anything to eat. I said no, wishing I had saved the orange. He smiled, bowed, and continued ... presumably toward the United States and the pursuit of happiness, including something to eat.
"I remembered, in my wandering starving artist years in the late 1950's, spending subway fare for a thirty-five-cent Italian-sausage sandwich and walking seventy blocks to work the next morning, eating free leftovers given to me by Babe and Louis at the Kettle of Fish bar, buying twenty-five-cent onion sandwiches on rye bread at McSorley's. I had wonderful meals working as a poetic busboy at the Prince Brothers Spaghetti House in Boston; I often devoured two fried eggs after Storyville, the best jazz club ever, closed at dawn. In the San Francisco area there were two-for-a-nickel oranges, the oddly delicious macaroni salad at the Coexistence Bagel Shop for a quarter, the splurge of an enormous fifty-cent bowl of pork and noodles in Chinatown. And let's not forget the desperation of eating ten-cent cafeteria bread and ketchup in Salt Lake City or the grapefruit given me by an old woman in the roadside dust near Fallon, Nevada."
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