noodsletter #.0007

Self-inflicted wound, future food is bad, meat-packing.

Hello!

You’ve received this email because you’ve signed up for noodsletter. Thank you. The recipe section is usually located at the bottom of the email, everything else on top, but there’s no recipe this week.

As ever, I welcome your feedback! Leave a comment, send an email, whatever; you don’t have to be positive, you don’t even have to be nice, just be humane.

Self-Inflicted Wound

Earlier this week I lopped off the tip of my thumb while using a mandoline to slice up some Pink Lady apples for Tim Chin’s outstanding gateau invisible. Nothing too serious; I didn’t have to go to the ER or anything, and as a result I can joke about a little blood sacrifice for that cake, which turned out quite well despite the fact I only had one fully functional hand when I was layering the mangled apple slices. I’ll spare you a pic of my thumb, but look at this incredibly bad job I did of layering in apple slices in this incredible cake:

It still tasted amazing, one of those recipes where the reward is sort of unnatural for how little actual work is put into it. The miso caramel sauce, which may seem unnecessary, is definitely worth making, and the leftover caramel keeps for a very long time in the fridge. However, in light of the fact that my thumb is still essentially out of commission, I’m begging off producing a recipe this week, and this newsletter is a little light. Make the apple cake! You won’t regret it.

I must confess that I got very mad at my past self when I cut my thumb, and not just mad at the stupid thing I was doing just before my thumb got cut, which, had I not stopped doing it when I did, would have certainly resulted in me having to go to the ER rather than whimpering over to my bathroom. I have insisted in the past that if you just use a mandoline correctly and use a wadded kitchen towel as a kind of hand guard, you’d be a blithering fool if you hurt yourself. Now I can’t help but feel foolish. People use the dangerous things incorrectly all the time, including me, obviously; it’s just a matter of dumb luck whether or not you hurt yourself when you’re using it incorrectly. So while the cake baked, I went and ordered a pair of these cut-proof gloves:

I will never use a mandoline ungloved again.

That being said, I am unsure of how much to trust this cut-proof glove company given the odd comic they included in the package to advertise their warranty. I honestly do not get it!

Finally, I published a recipe for pork ginger this week. It’s not bad, I think (yes, it is incredibly simple).

A Book Bit

They feasted on bread and cheese, and a vegetable stew that was unreservedly delicious. It was over the dessert of frosted fruit, the only imported item on the menu, that, for the first time, the Outlanders became other than mere guests. The young man produced a map of Trantor.

—From Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov.

I just re-read the original Foundation trilogy and the quotation above is literally the most expansive description in the entire ~600 pages of food of any kind; it is, I’m pretty sure, the only time that food is even described as tasting good. I was a little surprised at that, in part because I dimly recall that in Prelude to Foundation, Hari Seldon likes spicy food? And there’s a sort of risqué semi-sex scene that takes place in a fungus factory staffed by bald people? Anyway, I looked around online and apparently Asimov also wrote a short story called “Good Taste,” which focuses on the artificial food flavoring technology and “microfoods” that apparently made Asimov’s entire galactic empire (science fictionally) possible.

Very strange! Future food always sounds bad.

“News”

A good love story in The New Yorker.

A less good love story in Conjunctions, but I liked the perfume recipe/pyramid.

People are mad they’re serving meat and seafood at COP26, and you really can’t blame them.

Thanksgiving really is the most American of holidays, all the good parts and all the bad.

Alice Driver @reporterdriver

In January 2021, I signed a contract @nytimes to publish an oped about how Tyson needed to vaccinate meat processing workers. After I informed Tyson of the oped (it had been fact-checked, translated into Spanish & the photos edited) it was suddenly killed. Nice PR story today.

Here’s the (paywalled) NYRB article Driver ended up publishing.

Shrimp farming is so awful: Fishmeal processors, who supply shrimp farms, are buying up all the small fishes poor people in India typically eat (because they are delicious, cheap, and nutritionally peerless). Also, the dried fish industry is suffering. Pfui.

Seems like our entire regulatory system failed in the face of COVID, most clearly in meat-packing plants.

Well, maybe not “failed” so much as “revealed to be entirely ineffectual,” as this enraging article about salmonella in chicken shows:

[T]he [USDA] relies on standards it can’t enforce and that don’t target the types of salmonella most likely to make people sick. The USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, unlike its counterparts in some countries, has no authority to control salmonella on farms, where the bacteria often spreads. And even when there’s persistent evidence of contamination in a plant’s products, the USDA can’t use those findings to suspend operations. All the agency can do is conduct a general review of the plant, and that rarely leads to a shutdown.

You can look up your turkey and chicken and see whether the plant that processed it is freaking awful.

The best Vietnamese food in San Jose, a comic.

Fucking hell, dude, can you seriously not see the problem here?

Linking this only because it says Ken Hom “bears an uncanny resemblance to the Dalai Lama” and… he doesn’t? Is it just me? He really doesn’t!

Sometimes think it would be nice to have the communitarian spirit of Japan, which means stuff like COVID would be handled more reasonably by the general populace, but then you have to consider the outrageous sexism:

Still, the policy hasn’t been all bad. Before the pandemic, Rekishi wo Kizame was a ramen shop frequented mostly by men. Porky, garlicky, and inelegant to eat, his ramen was somewhat of a tough sell for female customers. But the silence and privacy of the cardboard dividers has led to an uptick in women visiting the shop, Kitagawa said. They no longer have to fend off any unwanted stares or attempts at conversation, and can wolf down their ramen without a thought to decorum or composure.