Month: March 2009

Natto Shopping (continued)

Seth Roberts9 Comments

I found some natto not made in Japan. It is from Japanese Traditional Foods, in Sebastopol, California. It comes in one-serving containers with tiny shoyu and mustard packets, just like frozen natto. It costs more – 50% more — than the frozen stuff, to my surprise. Since Japanese Traditional Foods was founded in 2006, and the Japanese natto makers are huge, I suppose it makes sense. It tastes almost the same as frozen natto, although I plan to do side by side comparisons just for fun.

The package had a curious statement:

Natto is a fermented food product, so it is best to consume it as soon as possible.

Huh? I think this is basically false: the fermented bacteria prevent other bacteria from growing. Sure, you can overferment but that won’t happen soon. Just as you can leave cheese at room temperature for quite a while, nothing bad will happen.

The Nutrition Lesson Hidden in a Bowl of Miso Soup

Seth Roberts10 Comments

Tyler Cowen is the only person I know who talks about the great value of travel. Schools should teach it, he says. I agree. If you’ve read The Shangri-La Diet, you may remember the turning point was a visit to Paris when I inexplicably lost my appetite. You don’t know that my belief in fermented food — to be healthy, we need to eat lots of fermented food — also began with foreign travel: A trip to Japan.

When I got back to Berkeley from Beijing a few months ago, I looked around my kitchen: What should I make? I came up blank. Huh? I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t think of anything. (In Beijing I had never cooked.) The first few days back in Berkeley I made grilled fish. The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis. Then I went to the Fancy Food Show in San Francisco. At a Japanese food booth, including miso soup packets, I suddenly remembered: For my last nine months in Berkeley, after a trip to Japan in January 2008, I’d been eating a lot of miso soup. Every day. Which I’d never done before. Nine months was long enough to block out what I’d cooked before January 2008 yet short enough to be forgotten after three months in China.

Why did I start eating so much miso soup? In a Tokyo supermarket I had noticed they sold a lot of miso paste. Maybe there were ten types for sale. When I got home from Japan, that experience inspired me to buy a tub of miso paste. I’d add one or two tablespoons to a few cups of water, along with vegetables and thinly-sliced meat (plus vinegar and hot sauce). It was so delicious and easy that I started making miso soup every day. I went through five or six tubs of miso.

The miracle was how easy it was — that one ingredient (miso) should so easily produce such a delicious result. No one spice will do that. Garlic alone won’t do that. Ginger alone won’t do that. One ingredient was so compelling, pulled me so far from my previous cooking that I completely forgot about it after a three-month absence. During those nine months, while I was eating all that miso soup, I didn’t wonder why miso made such a difference. But when I finally thought of the umami hypothesis — we like umami, sour, and complex flavors so that we will eat more bacteria-laden food; bacteria tend to produce those flavors — all of sudden it made sense. Miso was so tasty because it was fermented. It was so tasty because it was so missing.

Natto Shopping

Seth Roberts9 Comments

After re-reading this post, written before my current fermented-food craze, I decided to see if I could buy natto (fermented soybeans) in Berkeley. At Whole Foods, they didn’t know what it was. Nor did they sell it. At Berkeley Bowl, which Saveur magazine recently seemed to say was the best food market in America, they told me it was in Aisle 3. I looked and looked and couldn’t find it. Okay, frozen natto is in Aisle 7, I was told. There was a surprisingly large selection, maybe 10 choices. Frozen natto comes in one-serving plastic containers bundled into packages of two or three that look like this:

That’s a two-container bundle. One serving is about $1.
Introduction to natto.

Do They Eat Dogs?

Seth Roberts5 Comments

From a post about life in Taiwan:

Don’t they eat dogs and other odd stuff like snakes?
No. They don’t eat dogs.

I think a small fraction of restaurants in Beijing serve dog, but I never encountered one and I never saw dog meat for sale. In Seoul, however, they obviously eat dogs. I saw dog meat for sale in a traditional market. The dogs were alive (as many animals are in Asian “wet markets”). I later saw a booklet aimed at visitors to Korea that dismissed dog-eating as some sort of urban legend.

How Things Begin (I Got Uggs! update)

Seth Roberts1 Comment

A year ago I wrote how the website I Got Uggs! began. Since then it has done well. I interviewed the proprietor recently.

Since our previous conversation about I Got Uggs! (April 2008), what’s happened with the site?

A lot more page views. On average, approximately 6,000 more. I’ve also increased revenue greatly by adding some revenue producing advertising. When we last spoke I was only using Google Adsense, but now I’m using three more sources.

How did you increase page views?

The first thing I did was change some keywords in my heading. For example, I added the words “Buy UGG Boots on Sale”. By doing that alone I got an increase of almost 2,000 hits overnight. The second thing I did was join three affiliate programs: Amazon Associates, Chitika, and ShareaSale. When someone buys a pair of UGG boots from the site, I get between 7 and 10% commission. Furthermore, I get money from other websites that want to place an advertisement on the site, and I charge them a monthly fee based on the number of page views using a formula I found on the ‘net. Now since, I changed the keywords, if you type “uggs” or “ugg boots” into Google, I Got UGGs! is on the first page or number 1.

What were page views before the increases?

I was getting an average of 1,800 page views per day in September and early October. That number went to close to 4,000 page views per day on October 4, and then to averaging 6,000 page views per day beginning October 5.

You get significant income from both I Got Uggs! and I Got Converse!?

I’m getting more from I Got Uggs, but it’s going down as the weather gets warmer, but I Got Converse is going up everyday. I Got Uggs is showing some seasonal changes in terms of the income stream, but I’m praying that I Got Converse will eventually pick up the full slack.

You hired an assistant so you would have time to write a book. What does your assistant do? What do you pay him/her? How did you hire him/her?

She currently scans pictures, looks for pictures in the tabloids, and proofreads for me, in addition to other things like going to the post office and make 99 cent latte runs to the Dunkin’ Donuts on 8th avenue. More importantly, I’m training her to do the postings for both sites.

I pay her $10 per hour and she works about ten hours per week. She’s actually a Landmark [High School] student [where he teaches]. Despite being a straight A student, she wrote a paper on wanting to be a personal assistant as a career goal. Another teacher told me about her, so I offered her the opportunity to try it out. Thank God, she’s awesome and she loves it! She’s actually my 5th assistant. The others didn’t work out for various reasons.

You still have your teaching job, right?

Yes, I’m still teaching, but I’m looking to do the blogs and writing full-time after this school year ends. At the most, I plan on teaching part-time at a college, but not full-time anymore.

A Shangri-La Diet Skeptic’s Log

Seth Roberts4 Comments

From the Shangri-La Diet Forums:

I chanced upon the book on sale at Barnes and Noble for $4.98. I pored over the book with a slice of stratta, one chocolate lava cake, and a large Green Tea Frappuccino. I was smirking as I read it, in disbelief — it sounded ridiculous!! . . . I’ve been on different diets since 2003. I weighed 137.5 lbs at my heaviest in 2006. The lowest I’ve been was 126 lb in 4/2004. For New Year 2008 I resolved to take a break from caring about my wt. I wanted to see how big would I actually get if I do nothing – I canceled the GYM (saved $100/month) and ate all the food I wanted anytime. I was happy as a lark and actually shed some weight without even trying. My weight settled between 128-130 lb. New Year 2009 came and a coworker asked what diet I was planning to be on. She also informed me of the company’s drive, inviting employees to a health challenge: For every pound you lose, Pound For Pound will donate 10¢ to Feeding America . . . A sucker for “causes”, I committed to lose 7 lb. I have been procrastinating ever since – it’s not that easy to get back on track and start working-out again. I couldn’t give up Belgian Chocolates or Nutella Crepes. The first thing I do when I wake up is pop a truffle or 4 in my mouth. (isn’t that gross?) I do the same at night, before eating my lunch or dinner etc. There’s nothing quite like it – the texture of different truffles, the smell, etc., especially after having no food for at least 2 hours. I eat my dessert before my meal. When I read this book, I thought – this can’t be true. Lose your appetite without even trying? Let’s see… 3/18/2009 I cleaned up my dusty Tanita scale, replaced the batteries & weighed myself. It registered 128.5 lb . . . 3/26/2009 It’s not really time to weigh in or measure but yesterday my belt had to be re-adjusted down a notch. Results WT= 123.5 lb Body Measurement of parts with losses (inches): Waist = -.5; Abs = -.5; Hips -.5 ; Under Bra -.5 Total lost = 2 inches. I guess it works. I only have 2 lb more to go for the Pound for Pound Challenge. Have I changed my eating habits? I’d say I’m eating a lot less chocolates (by far). I’m so motivated to lose more wt. I have already shared the news at work, of course. This is by far the easiest diet I’ve ever been on with the quickest results.

It’s like a weight-loss ad come to humorous life.

Hanging Birds

Seth Roberts9 Comments

In the comments, Patrik links to a fascinating post about “hanging game birds” — that is, hanging them at low temperatures (such as 50 degrees) for several days to improve their flavor. I especially liked this quote from Brillat-Savarin:

The peak is reached when the pheasant begins to decompose; its aroma develops, and mixes with an oil which in order to form must undergo a certain amount of fermentation.

Yet another example of more bacteria, better flavor. I can’t find my copy of Brillat-Savarin but in Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking I found this (p. 144):

Despite the contribution that aging can make to meat quality, the modern meat industry generally avoids it, since it means tying up its assets in cold storage and losing about 20% of the meat’s weight to evaporation and laborious trimming of the dried, rancid, sometimes moldy surface.

Okay, I am taking those short ribs I bought today out of the freezer. If people knew that well-aged beef is healthier, as I believe, this meat-industry practice might change. There should be a recommended daily allowance of bacteria. A few billion, perhaps? Bacteria count would be included in the nutrition label. Because the numbers would be so large, everyone would learn scientific notation.

What Did Eskimos Eat?

Seth Roberts13 Comments

In the early 1900s, the anthropologist/explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, after living with Eskimos for a long time, returned to tell Americans what he had learned about nutrition. Eskimos ate meat almost exclusively, he said, which contradicted the usual emphasis, then as now, on diversity and fruits and vegetables. Yet Eskimos were healthy. Eskimo diet became even more fascinating when it was realized they had very low rates of heart disease — much lower than Danes, for example. In the 1970s, two Danish doctors, Bang and Dyerberg, found that Eskimos had large amounts of omega-3 fats in their blood, much more than Danes; that was the beginning of the current interest in omega-3 and the idea that fish and fish oil are “heart-healthy”.

As I pointed out earlier, discussions of the Eskimo diet have ignored the fermented food they ate. Here’s what Stefansson said in 1935:

I like fermented (therefore slightly acid) whale oil with my fish as well as ever I liked mixed vinegar and olive oil with a salad. . . .

There were several grades of decayed fish. The August catch had been protected by longs from animals but not from heat and was outright rotten. The September catch was mildly decayed. The October and later catches had been frozen immediately and were fresh. There was less of the August fish than of any other and, for that reason among the rest, it was a delicacy – eaten sometimes as a snack between meals, sometimes as a kind of dessert and always frozen, raw. . . .

[At first, Stefansson didn’t want to eat decayed fish.] While it is good form [in America] to eat decayed milk products and decayed game [well, well], it is very bad form to eat decayed fish. . . . If it is almost a mark of social distinction to be able to eat strong cheeses with a straight face and smelly birds with relish, why is it necessarily a low taste to be fond of decaying fish? On that basis of philosophy, though with several qualms, I tried the rotten fish one day, and if memory serves, liked it better than my first taste of Camembert. During the next weeks I became fond of rotten fish.

So Eskimos ate fermented whale oil and a lot of rotten fish. (“A lot” because if they didn’t eat a lot of it, Steffanson wouldn’t have felt pressure to eat it.) I had no idea that Americans used to eat decayed game.