Seened ja kartulid (or: Man I miss onions)

Photo by Lars Blankers on Unsplash

I was having a conversation with a friend about potatoes (which is always something worth doing – I recommend you find a friend right now and have a conversation about potatoes with them), when I mentioned a potato-based dish I used to eat all the time during my schmegan phase.¹

It was an Estonian dish called "seened ja kartulid" or "seened karulitega". This dish literally translates to "mushrooms and potatoes" or "mushrooms with potatoes", and consists of mushrooms, potatoes and onions. Many versions also add bacon (because Estonians add bacon – or "salted pork" – to everything), but you can just have it as a vegetarian dish.

Basically, you boiled a couple of potatoes until just tender (like for a potato salad) and then cut them into bite-sized slices, then you fried up some sliced onion (about half a smallish onion per serving) and as many different types of mushrooms as you could get your hands on (sliced), along with the potatoes. Rapeseed/canola oil was standard, but some nice olive oil would work if you were fancy. Fry the lot until they lose all the excess moisture and start to crisp. Then you just added some salt and cracked pepper.

No sauce or anything like that, just a good oil, good salt and good pepper (along with good mushrooms and potatoes [and onions]). It's one of those dishes where you get the best quality ingredients you can get your hands on and make some magic with only a handful of "basic" things.

I tell you, this was the simplest meal on the face of the earth, but just good wholesome comfort food. The more varieties of mushrooms you could get your hands on, the better, but even if you could only get one type of mushroom it was still Good Foods. Have a slice of good rye bread with it, and you've got yourself a decent meal.

And then, of course, I went on that dratted FODMAP diet where I wasn't supposed to eat onions, mushrooms or rye bread. That pretty well knocked this one off the roster. I've since discovered that rye bread and mushrooms are okay in small doses, but onion is actually something likely to give me grief...

Man I miss onions. They're just so tasty, and so central to all of the good dishes. 

Someone somewhere made a comment that white people start any given meal with cutting an onion, and they're right. You know, when you come from a climate where pretty much the only vegetables you can eat for most of the year are root vegetables, onions become the star of the show. I used to know I was about to make something really enjoyable when I started with cutting an onion.

For some reason, a lot of the dishes I used to make all of the time before the FODMAP thing have completely disappeared from my repertoire, even though I'd probably be able to work out a few substitutions (or just put up with a bit of discomfort). It's like something interrupted the usual transmission and now I've forgotten what I eat.

But I think I'll revisit seened ja kartulid and see whether or not I can get away with it, without too much drama. Good Foods is Good Foods, after all.

Ooh, let's do the recipe blogger thing and add a recipe to the bottom of this post, so you can skip reading the whole dang thing and get a recipe, even though the rambling story about my relationship with onions was the whole point of the post!

Seened ja Kartulid

Ingredients:

• Mushrooms - sliced. As many as you like and as many different kinds as you can find.
• Potatoes - cooked until just tender and sliced. Approximately one small-medium potato per person.
• 1 medium onion - sliced.
• Oil for pan frying (no I'm not going to give you proper amounts - just wing the darn thing).

Method:

Heat oil in a frying pan and cook the onions until soft. 

Add the mushrooms and heat through, then add the potatoes and keep stirring until the onions are translucent and the mushrooms and potatoes begin to crisp.

Serve with sea-salt and cracked pepper, with a slice of rye bread to the side.

To drink? Beer. This is a good meal to have with a good farmhouse ale.

(1) For anyone who is new here, I spent a couple of years cooking and eating vegan food - more or less for the heck of it - but wasn't actually vegan as I ate everything on offer when someone else served it to me. Hence, "schmegan".

Pudding Vegans and Pudding Omnivores

Photo by American Heritage Chocolate on Unsplash

One of my friends at work is a vegetarian, but I've never seen her eat a vegetable.

Well, that's not strictly true; I have seen her eat potato chips. So, to be precise, I've never seen her eat a vegetable that wasn't a deep-fried potato.

When we've been out for dinner and I ask her if she's ordering food this time, she assures me she's eaten something at home so she doesn't have to worry about ordering something suitable at the restaurant, and she occasionally makes comments at work about recipes that involve vegetables, but in all the years I've known her I've yet to see her eat something that wasn't 2 minute noodles or chips. 

And we're not talking huge serves, either. Basically, I can't figure out how she's not dead.

Now, what she eats is her business and I really shouldn't pass judgement, even if she is skinny as a rake and freezing all the time so I have severe doubts that she'll survive the winter on her current caloric intake.

But whenever I notice what she has for lunch, it puts me in mind of a phrase that has stuck with me ever since I read it in a cookbook back in my ill-fated vegan experiment: "pudding vegans."

Many years ago one of my work friends was vegan, and he usually couldn't eat anything brought to the office parties except whatever he made himself. I decided to take up vegan cooking as a hobby so I could provide at least one alternative for him at the morning teas. I ended up reading many, many vegan cookbooks, and I went through a period where pretty much all of the cooking I did was vegan.

As I mentioned in a post I wrote back in 2016, I kind of fell in love with the smart-arsery of vegan cooking. I loved experimenting to see what I could come up with that was delicious and nutritious without a single animal product. One of the things I absolutely hated, though, was the way the majority of vegan recipes were so meat-centric. But that's a digression for another post.

For a while there, I went so far down the rabbit hole that almost all of the food I made for myself was vegan - and I usually tried to buy vegan food when I was out, too. I'm pretty sure there was a time when the only non-vegan ingredient I had in my house was honey. But I still ate whatever my family was eating when I had dinner with them, so I didn't regard myself as "vegan" - just "vegan-adjacent", or "veganesque".

Then I was put on a FODMAP diet to sort out my IBS, and the whole veganesque thing went out the window because you can't be FODMAP and vegan at the same time without dying from malnutrition.

Which brings me back to "pudding vegans."

I first encountered this term in a cookbook that had been translated from German, and I think it's an Austrian thing. Basically, its about vegans who hardly eat any vegetables. The majority of their food is "plant-based", but not "plants". I think the "pudding" thing refers to the fact that most of the food they eat may as well be pudding.

It's a concept that haunted me during my veganesque phase. I made damn sure that I didn't just eat a plant-based diet, but ate actual vegetables. I wanted to make sure my meals had more nutritional value than pudding (even if I did eat my fair share of pre-packaged food from the freezer section of the supermarket).

I noticed recently that my "vegetables first!" approach to food that I had during my veganesque period had severely fallen by the wayside in my post-FODMAP meal planning. I've fallen back into my old habits of using cheese and meat as a crutch. Who needs real food when you can have grilled cheese on toast? Who needs to plan a proper meal when you can have a corned beef sandwich?

Not long ago I read a "cheat's guide to meal planning" article where the woman said she starts by asking "what's my source of protein?" and builds the rest of the meal around that. I realised I need to do that with vegetables. So now I'm trying to approach each meal by saying "what's my vegetable?" and taking that as the starting point.

It doesn't help that 80% of the time I really can't be bothered thinking about food, but at least trying to make myself think "vegetable first!", like I did back in my veganesque days, is helping me get some vegetables into my system.

Hopefully, if I keep this up, I won't be too much of a "pudding omnivore."

The trouble with food

I've basically hit a point where food is too hard and I don't want to do it any more. It brings me very little joy, and far too much trouble.

Pretty much everything available to eat fits in one of three categories:

• Food that will cause me pain, or is otherwise no good for me
• Food that is produced in such a way it causes suffering and misery, or negatively impacts the environment
• Food I really just don't like - as in, I find the taste or texture entirely unpleasant.

That's it - that's what I'm eating these days. Things that hurt my body, things that hurt my soul or things that make me gag.

I sit down for a meal knowing that if I actually enjoy it, I'll pay for it later. Or I'll spend the entire time I'm eating it feeling like I'm committing some sort of betrayal I need to apologise or atone for in some way. Sometimes both. Actually, often both.

If I could find a small group of foods that provided the nourishment a human body needs without hurting anyone, and be palatable for a long period of time, I could just feed myself like some people feed their cats - put the same food in front of myself day after day and feel confident that even though it's not enjoyable, it's at least doing the job.

I have IBS, which means my gut reacts strongly to foods that humans struggle to process. Apparently my intestines are kicking me for eating things that give other people mild discomfort. One of the main ways to control IBS is to find your trigger foods and just eat fewer of them. So slowly but surely I'm eating less and less food that's tasty and nutritious. Eating too many of the wrong kinds of vegetables can see me floored with abdominal pains for most of the next day.

It feels like a zero sum game.

At least, that's what I've been told most recently, that I have IBS. I was also once told I couldn't possibly have IBS because it's not a real thing, and I must have functional dyspepsia. That doctor, I'm reasonably sure, told me that because I had suggested IBS as a possibility after reading about it in a magazine (so of course it must be anything but that - can't have patients diagnosing themselves, now, can we?).

I found out a few years later that "functional" basically means you don't have a reason for it, just symptoms. Which, to my mind, sounds a little bit like throwing your hands up in the air and saying "well, I dunno - it's probably all in your head."

But I read just recently that IBS is a "functional" condition as well. And this article that I read also pointed out that "functional" means the problem is with the way something functions - like a malfunctioning piece of firmware rather than a damaged piece of hardware.

All of which is making me wonder whether I've got the wrong end of the stick, when it comes to trying to avoid pain. Maybe I should just eat the "delicious and nutritious" food that's good fuel for the machine and doesn't make me miserable, and then find a way to simply disguise/squash/shut up my stomach when it complains, rather than trying to avoid upsetting it in the first place.

Of course, I'll probably try this technique and then find out that I've actually got some sort of hideous auto-immune condition that I should have been treating this whole time, instead of covering up my symptoms and hoping they go away.

But I've got to do something. Food has become thoroughly depressing and I'm beginning to dread it.

What’s for Dinner?

By Steven Groves from Denver, CO,
United States of America
Sammie, CC BY 2.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/
w/index.php?curid=48825930

I’ve been struggling to find something I want to eat lately. For a few months now, I get to mealtime, think to myself, “I’m hungry, I should probably eat something,” and then spend an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out what I actually want to eat. Most of the time I end up dismissing what I don’t want to eat and picking the least objectionable of what’s left. I can’t say I often enjoy what I end up eating, either.

For a while I went through a phase where all I really felt like eating was a sandwich, but my mother assured me I couldn’t have sandwiches for every meal. I gave it a shot, but then I got sick of the sandwiches. I don’t think that’s what she was getting at, but that’s what happened. I have to admit, though, I still get to a point most evenings where the only thing stopping me from giving up on “real” food and eating a ham sandwich instead is the fact that I don’t currently have any ham.

It gets especially annoying when I’m in a food court or something and I’m surrounded by options I don’t particularly want. Then I also baulk at the amount of money I’ll be paying for the privilege of eating something that I don’t actually want to eat.

It’s not a problem when I’m over someone’s house and they’re feeding me. I don’t have to want it, I just have to say “thank you,” and politely eat it. That actually works for me.

I don’t know that I’ve lost my appetite. I still feel hungry, and I still eat a full meal most of the time. I just can’t think of a single thing I actually want to eat, and largely just end up picking something I should eat instead. When I get especially stumped, I just eat breakfast. I have the same thing for breakfast every morning with minor variations, and if I could figure out what I’d stomach on high rotation for lunch and dinner every day I’d probably try to repeat that formula (maybe a sandwich?).

What would really work for me is some sort of dining hall or refectory, where I pay some sort of subscription for the “meal of the day”. If they could also give me a packed lunch every day, that would be awesome. I keep fantasising about simply turning up to a counter, saying “today’s special, thanks” and that’s it – dinner is sorted.

Glutenous

Before I worked out that gluten is not my friend, I was 20+ kilos heavier, tired all the time, constantly feeling like I was coming down with a cold, achy, prone to mouth ulcers and experienced frequent abdominal pains (I shan't go into detail regarding the bowel movements, but they weren't optimal). However, that was normal, so it seemed okay.

Now I know better, but I also know that I can get away with *small* amounts of things I shouldn't eat. The only problem is, I rarely know if I've eaten too much until several hours later. Then the discomfort that used to be "normal" becomes quite noticeable and somwehat inconvenient.

So when I'm going to go somewhere where I know I'll want to eat many things I shouldn't be eating, I'm faced with a bit of an awkward choice:

A) I could try to stick to a "good" diet as much as possible, splurge occasionally, then pay for the splurge with accute discomfort, OR

B) I can just eat stuff I shouldn't eat all the time, and try to zone out chronic discomfort. (In preparation for this, I start eating wheaten things a few weeks in advance, so I'm good and "normalised" before I go. It's delicious, but I feel like crap.)

I've done both in the past. They both suck. But I wasn't going to go to Europe and not eat the pretzels in Germany or the pizza in Italy. And I'm not going to go to the UK and not eat the pasties in Cornwall.

It's a bit cheesy

I have a chequered history with cheese.

When I was younger, I didn't mind the odd piece of cheese in something like a ploughman's lunch or the like (possibly for the texture, more than the taste), but I never particularly liked it as an ingredient.*

It wasn't too bad if it was melted, but otherwise it just tasted, well, too cheesy.

Whenever I ordered sandwiches or salads I would ask for "no cheese"... but people just kept putting cheese on it anyway, so I just got used to having cheese in everything.

And then, eventually, it seemed normal.

Then there was the Blue Cheese Incident. While I eventually adjusted to having cheese in everything (whether I wanted it there or not), I always hated blue cheese. I thought it tasted like some kind of weird fungal infection. This was probably rather accurate, seeing as blue cheese actually is some kind of weird fungal infection.

Then, one day, back when I was living in Tasmania, I was invited to a cheese tasting event. It sounded like fun, but it turned out that this was actually some market research by the local cheese factory who wanted feedback on their line of blue cheeses. They had their own blue cheeses, but also the blue cheeses of their competitors for comparison.

So I was essentially locked in a room and force fed seven varieties of blue cheese over the course of an hour. Of course, I wasn't actually "locked" in the room or "forced" to eat the cheese, but it would have been terribly impolite to run from the building shouting "keep your weird fungal infections to yourself, you swine!"  Plus, I had been given a lift by someone who was there having a lovely time, so I stuck it out.

By the end of it, I actually kind of liked blue cheese. And yet, I didn't. It's like I knew it was horrible, but ate it for the challenge of surviving the horribleness of it all. Just like I enjoy eating super-sour kumquats for the sake of feeling like I've been kicked in the head by a mule.

Hey, I never said I was sensible.

But I've discovered an interesting thing about cheese lately - it's an acquired taste that can be unacquired.

After I lost my gall bladder (well, after I treated it so badly I had to have it removed), I started looking at my diet a bit more closely and decided that I didn't need to consume dairy. It's not like I'm a baby cow.**

And after a year of not eating cheese, that tolerance that I had built up for the taste of it has gone. Now it just tastes, well, too cheesy. I have a taste of the stuff every now and then, and it seems like every time I taste it I'm less and less impressed by the flavour.

And I've discovered something most intriguing - I actually prefer the taste of traditionally cheese covered things without the cheese. At first, eating pizza without cheese seemed a bit odd, but now I like it better that way. Even when I have a "just go for it" day when I order food I shouldn't eat because my innards don't respond well to such things, I'll still order pizza without cheese because it tastes better that way.

I like tacos better without cheese in them. I like jacket potatoes better without sour cream and cheese on top. Once, I would have wondered what the point of that was - now I order it on purpose.

It's a strange thing. But then, when you think about cheese, that's a pretty strange thing anyway.



*With the exception of Kraft singles, but I'm pretty sure that's not really cheese.
**I'll thank you to let that comment stand without any feedback, if you please. No comments from the peanut gallery.

Vegan Schmegan

I've been thinking a lot about vegan food lately.  I've had a few friends and acquaintances over the years who were vegan, but I've never had to worry about feeding them.  Recently, however, I spent a couple of years working with a guy who was vegan, and noticed he was more or less resigned to having nothing to eat at the staff morning teas because no one would ever think of bringing food that didn't involve an animal of some description.

I started trying to think of things I could bring or make to help him have some options, and developed a bit of a habit of trying to work out if something was vegan - or if I could adapt a recipe to make it vegan.  It's a bit habit forming, and after he left I still found myself looking for the vegan alternative.

Like most smug jerks who never had a religious, ethical or health based diet to worry about, in the past I'd always dismissed the word "vegan" on something as being a bit of niche marketing.  Vegans are, after all, a group of people who just chose not to eat something.  There's no pressing need to cater to what amounts to a whim, right?

Now that I'm actively avoiding dairy products, I've seen the light and fully understand the wonder that is the "vegan" designation on food.

You see, if something is labelled "vegan" you know instantly that it won't have any sneaky dairy products in it anywhere.  Anyone who is allergic, intolerant or just plain "avoidant" of dairy knows that it's perfectly safe and they don't have to ask any questions.

The same goes for anyone who's allergic (etc) to eggs, honey, fish or shellfish.  It also covers anyone who is on a religious diet and can't eat animal products that aren't Halal or Kosher - and Buddhists, Hindus, Janists and any other religious groups that have controls around the consumption of animal products also know it's safe to eat.

That one word, "vegan", has more than half a dozen collateral benefactors.

It turns out that there were actually a few staff members who, although not vegan, had problems with milk or eggs.  They would also have great difficulty finding something to eat at the staff morning teas, and often didn't bother coming because of that.  When the vegan guy was around, though, these people came out of the woodwork because they knew they could eat whatever he brought to share (and he was a pretty good cook).

This makes me wonder why more food providers don't jump on the vegan bandwagon.  By offering a range of vegan products, you actually cater for a bunch of different interest groups - not just vegans.  You don't actively have to think about all of the different allergens and cultural groups involved, you just make it vegan and it will work for a variety of people.

Plus, vegans have a deep and abiding love for anyone who will feed them, so they make a point of buying stuff from them.

So, I started looking for vegan options to help out a friend, and now I'm looking at them because I actually benefit from them myself - and so do a bunch of other people.

I do have to report an interesting side-effect of thinking about vegan food, however - I sometimes forget that I'm not actually vegan.  I'll be looking at something for myself, to see if it has any dairy in it, and think "Oh, it's got eggs in it", before remembering that I actually don't have any issues with eggs (at least, not at the moment).

And, while I'm talking vegan things - I actually spent a night out at a restaurant the other evening and it did such a good job of catering for vegans that I went vegan the whole night.  It was fantastic.  It was a brilliant example of what could be done if you just gave it a bit of thought.  If I was vegan, I could consider this a good restaurant to visit with a decent range of options.

Cabbage and Mince (Eesti toit)

I've been hankering for cabbage and mince for a while now.

It's hard to explain it, but I have some sort of deep memory of this dish - like I ate it once a long time ago and can no longer remember where, when or under what circumstances.

I expect my grandmother probably made it once.  She made cabbage rolls on more than one occasion.  My grandmother left Estonia when she was a child, and the only part of her culture she really kept was the food she made on special occasions.  Sauerkraut and skumbria, mainly, but occasionally cabbage rolls and brawn (we never called it "head cheese", and I refuse to).

My mother was never keen on cabbage rolls, so actively avoided encouraging the combination of cabbage and mince.  I made them once, under my grandmother's guidance, and realised that the amount of work involved wasn't worth it just for the delicious goodness of combining cabbage and mince.

Some time ago I bought a dual-language Estonian cookbook, and one of the recipes was for cabbage and mince.  I filed it away in the "I must try to make this" compartment of my brain.

Well, recently I've just been craving the dish.  I have no idea why, but something deep inside me has been saying "do you know what would be awesome?  Cabbage and mince."

So I rustled up a couple of different recipes, and sort of weaved a path between them that struck a balance between "tasty" and "lazy".

The results?  Good, wholesome food.  It really is awesome.  Plain, simple, yet tasty, and with a goodness that warms you from the inside out.  It honestly seemed like I've been eating this stuff my whole life.

And I fed it to my mother and she didn't hate it.  That's a success in anyone's books.

I think my grandmother would have enjoyed it, and it's a shame I didn't try making this years ago.

The recipe I cobbled together from a few different ones was as follows:

400g lean mince
1 onion, cut in half and thinly sliced
2 carrots, coarsely grated
1/2 a large head of cabbage, thinly sliced
beef stock (I used a heaped teaspoon of Bonox, but a crumbed stock cube would work)
Salt and pepper to taste
Cup of hot water
Bit of oil for browning the meat 

I also added about 100g of diced bacon, because one of the recipes I'd seen in the past had asked for a mixture of pork and beef mince, and my mother seemed more likely to eat it if the bacon was involved. 

Cook the cabbage in a pot with the cup of hot water, being careful not to overcook it. 

Meanwhile, in a deep frying pan, fry the onions and meat until the onions are soft and the meat is completely browned, then add the carrots and seasoning with a little bit of water to dissolve the stock.  Stir through, then add the cooked cabbage to the meat (including the water in the pot) and stir through.  

Cook for another ten minutes until the cabbage has infused with the flavours of the pan and the liquid has reduced. 

Serve with boiled potatoes and rye bread.

Doing it wrong: Food.

I usually avoid paying any attention to the news on television.  I often feel I'm better off being completely uninformed than being largely misinformed, and I know too much about how network television works to be able to take anything they say seriously.

But, I live in a house where the television is on at news time, and sometimes I hear things even if I'm not listening.

Some days ago someone on the news was talking about something (a budget?  A rate change?) that was going to make life harder for the people "doing it tough".  Someone said something about people having to chose between paying the bills or putting food on the table.  Someone else in the same story talked about people having to skip meals because they couldn't afford it...

This is incredibly callous of me, I know, but I couldn't help thinking "Well, they're clearly doing it wrong."

Yes, I know poverty is poverty, and it can be a real struggle to eat well... but we live in Australia, people - as long as you aren't actually homeless, you should be able to eat something.  You can buy a kilo of rice for less than $3 and a kilo of mixed vegetables for less than $2.  Curry powder, water and a tablespoon of flour makes it taste like something edible and you could feed four people with that.  It's not great, but it's food - and that wasn't even the best example.

As hundreds of generations of Asian peasant farmers will tell you, if you have rice, you have a meal.  I come from Northern European peasant farmer stock, and hundreds of generations of those will tell you that if you have a cabbage and a loaf of bread, you have a meal.

If you buy staples (especially if you buy them in bulk) when you have a bit of money, and you budget your food like you [should] budget your money, then you really shouldn't have to go a day without eating something.

Now, I say that as someone who has never had to raise six kids on a single income at minimum wage in rented accommodation, so I'm willing to admit that I could be very, very wrong.

And I'm also willing to admit that I'm prejudiced in this matter.  I abhor the kinds of people who spend their money on beer and cigarettes and giant TV sets and then complain about not having enough money for food.

There are people out there who are genuinely doing their best and still not making ends meet, and I wish the Giant-TV-Buying jerks weren't encouraging me to assume that everyone who can't afford food is going without basic necessities because they are morons.

However, I still have difficulty wrapping my head around the idea that people who are budgeting well can't afford a packet of rice.

Apart from making me wonder about their ability to budget, it makes me wonder if they are going without food because they don't know how to "approach" a packet of rice.

Jamie Oliver (so annoying, yet rather informative) drew my attention to the fact that "poor" people often eat badly because they don't know how to cook or can't see a meal as anything other than a hamburger or a pizza.

Do we have families going "without food on the table" because they don't know how to "eat poor"?  Have we forgotten how to eat like peasants?  Should we be teaching that in Home Economics in school?  Rather than teaching kids how to make quiche, should we be teaching them how to stretch a single chicken into four meals?  How to make a "decent" meal for a family out of 500g of mince, dried beans and rice?  How to use things like chili and curry to make the simplest meals tasty?

So much stuff is out there on austerity/ausperity at the moment, but who is it aimed at?  People who are genuinely poor and need to know this stuff, or middle-class hippies who have taken a pay cut and want to turn it into a project?

Mind you, I feel like I should put my money where my mouth is on this one.  I live like a laird - and, oddly enough, I always have.  In spite of the fact that I spent the first 15 years of my life living below the poverty line, I was raised by a genius who managed to give our family a Good Life even though we were living off a pension.

Apart from one year when I was living on a low-to-no income budget (and I've always wanted to take a second crack at that year, because I think I could have done it better), I've never had to be responsible for putting food on the table when money was particularly tight.

I feel like I should try living poor for a little while before I start waving my hands around saying "oh, but of course you can put food on the table for a pittance".  I think that would make me one of those middle class hippies treating "being poor" like a project, though, and that may also make me even more of a jerk than I already am.

Still, it probably is about time I started thinking about how much I waste on food (and how much food I waste) and whether I could be doing better with less.  I think I can safely say that, regardless of my budget, when it comes to food I'm still "doing it wrong".

Don't Eat the Crab in Shanghai

I saw the most horrifying thing on TV the other night.  I was so disturbed I actually lept off the chair and lunged for the off-switch on the TV itself, because I knew changing the channel on that particular TV set would take too long and I wanted it gone.  I couldn't bear to see one more image and I wanted it gone.

It was a cooking show.

I came into it part way through, so I'm a bit hazy on the details.  It was, I think, Singaporean, and involved a TV chef from Singapore doing the whole "chef on tour" thing in Shanghai.  When I came into the show he was buying crabs in a local market and talking about one of his favourite crab dishes, which is made with lots of chili.

We then went to the restaurant kitchen of a local chef and watched him (the local chef) prepare the meal.  He prized the top shell off the crab and started scrubbing the exposed muscles with a stiff brush under running water to clean it.  So far, not too horrific, right?

Then the TV chef asked him why it was so important that the crab should be alive while he was cleaning it...

And suddenly I realised what they were doing.  They had ripped the shell (skin and backbone combined) off a live crab and were in the process of brutally torturing it - quite without care or remorse - all because they think it has better texture if it is "cleaned" this way.

I couldn't stand to watch it for one more second.

Every day of the week, we do a hundred thousand horrible, painful things to the creatures with whom we share this planet.  We do it because we are big and clumsy and not paying attention.  You can't walk through this earth without causing death and pain.

However, we should never - NEVER - cause avoidable pain and suffering to another living being just because it tastes better.

It is reprehensible and wrong, and whatever gods you believe in will surely punish you for that.  The more extreme the pain, and the more avoidable it is, the more you deserve a slow and painful retribution.

When I visited Hong Kong I thought the way the Chinese kept live animals in their markets (the cramped, dirty cages with chickens that were clearly freaking out; the shallow Styrofoam boxes containing a few inches of water that didn't quite cover the gasping fish...) was an absolute disgrace . This was just...  Unspeakably wrong.

You don't flay something alive.  You don't rake stiff brushes over living, exposed muscles.  Surely anyone could see that was cruel and wrong?  What is wrong with these people that they think this is okay?

If you want to eat something, you catch it and then you kill it as quickly and humanely as you can.  Otherwise every second of torture that animal experiences is one that makes you more of a monster.

I have a feeling I'll be going vegetarian if I ever go back to Asia.


For the record, I'm not a big fan of a lot of Australian practices when it comes to food production, either.  Live exports are not good for the animals, or for your soul.  Battery farming is very bad.

I think every culture in the world would greatly benefit from a decision to cause less pain.

Gut wrenching

I have an exam tomorrow morning, and my gall bladder is playing up.  Or maybe it's my functional dyspepsia.   I don't know.  I have two diagnoses and I can't work out which symptoms belong to which one.  I suspect there's a certain amount of cross-over.

Meanwhile, whatever it is has been playing up since last Wednesday, so I'm kind of hoping it isn't my gall bladder or it might be an indication that I should be getting it removed.  I'm not a big fan of having internal organs removed if such things can be avoided.

The discomfort seems to be in the wrong place, anyway, so I'm assuming it's the dyspepsia - although attacks for both usually clear up after a couple of days, so it's a bit distracting either way.

The most annoying thing about both is the fact that I'm really bad at working out what triggers an attack.  It's the whole cumulative thing that's throwing me out.  Any given item of food could be perfectly fine or the thing that's going to give me hours of grief - it depends on what else I've eaten lately.

Take sausages, for example.  I can eat a sausage from a street vendor one day and have absolutely no problems.  I can even eat two such sausages in a week without issues.  Then, one day, I will eat a sausage from a street vendor and it will trigger an attack - not because there was something particularly bad about that sausage, but because something I'd eaten the day before (or, in some cases, two days earlier) had primed my innards for an issue, and the sausage was just the catalyst.

Maybe my gut is giving me signals that I've been "primed", but I'm not very good at recognising them, or maybe it really is a case of Russian Roulette with what I stick in my mouth.  I seem to go from "I feel fine" to "dang, my stomach is rather upset" without any middle ground.

Obviously, I should be adjusting my diet to exclude things like sausages, and maybe if I started eating like a 70s hippy I'd be able to avoid the primers and catalysts altogether.  It's just surprisingly hard to pull that off when you a) eat with other people and don't want to inconvenience them, b) get food from cafes and c) travel.

Stupid faulty internal bits.  Why can't I just eat stupid things that are no good for me like normal people?

Adopt a Food Intolerance

So, largely for my own personal amusement, but also as part of a poorly formulated scientific experiment, I've decided to cut back on the amount of gluten I consume.

Specifically, I'm going to try to avoid wheat for a few weeks, while opting for "gluten free" things as much as possible. I may occasionally make exceptions for cake - it depends on how well my will power holds up. Plus, I'll probably not shy away from oats, rye and barely as much as wheat, even though eatin "gluten free" things will probably cut those down as well.

I'm largely doing this to see what will happen. I happen to know I don't have coeliac disease (had the blood test a couple of years ago, which came back negative), but I also have a lot of symptoms that are often associated with it. It occurs to me that I might not have an autoimmune reaction to the stuff, but I might be reacting to it nonetheless.

I suppose I could go through a doctor or natropath and find out if I have an honest-to-goodness food intolerance, but where's the fun in that? I'd rather randomly pick something and see what happens if I just act like I have an intolerance. It's less stressful that way (an experiment, rather than a health imperative), and it gives me a slightly different perspective on the world. Even if it turns out that cutting my gluten intake to a minimum has no positive effect on my health, I'll have a better appreciation of the way people who are gluten intolerant see the world.

I'm already annoyed by the local cafe that, the other day, offered only two salads - one with crutons and the other with couscous. Surely someone avoiding gluten should be able to safely order the salad?

Anyway, my goal is to take as much wheat out of my diet as I can for a few weeks (to let it get out of my system), and then eat a big bowl of spaghetti and see how I feel. I like to think of it as scientific enquiry meets blind stupidity.

So far I've been doing it for a couple of days, and my rice intake has almost quadrippled. I keep looking at the amount of rice and corn I would be eating to replace the wheat, thinking "my, that's a lot of rice and corn"... Which, when you think about it, just highlights how much wheat I usually eat.

I should probably be looking at changing my eating habits entirely to default more to meat/fish/poultry and fruits and vegitables. It seems I have a lot of processed grains in my current diet.

We do tend to fall into a habit of processed foods in our modern world, don't we?