ACA goes after faux import beer

Guess what? Blogging can change the food system. A few months back I wrote about faux import beer: the beer that looks imported but is actually brewed locally or by some third party. Yesterday, in The Age:

The Australian Consumers Association is demanding clearer, more prominent labels on bottles of foreign beer made locally under licence, to show drinkers exactly what they are buying.

Beck’s, Heineken, Stella Artois, Kirin, Guinness, Kronenbourg and Carlsberg are some of the foreign brands being made here.

The Sunday Age bought a random selection from a liquor store in St Kilda last week. A 330 millilitre bottle of Heineken ($3.39) was brewed in Sydney and a 330 millilitre bottle of Carlsberg ($3.49), which had “Copenhagen, Denmark” and “by appointment to the Royal Danish Court” on the front, was brewed by Foster’s Australia in Victoria.

Now, lets argue about correlation equalling causality.

Future of Fish in the NYT

It’s taking me a while to catch up on my reading at the moment, but Mark Bittman’s overview of the decline of fish is worth a look. From Bittman:

Industrial aquaculture — sometimes called the blue revolution — is following the same pattern as land-based agriculture. Edible food is being used to grow animals rather than nourish people.

This is not to say that all aquaculture is bad. China alone accounts for an estimated 70 percent of the world’s aquaculture — where it is small in scale, focuses on herbivorous fish and is not only sustainable but environmentally sound. “Throughout Asia, there are hundreds of thousands of small farmers making a living by farming fish,” said Barry Costa-Pierce, professor of fisheries at University of Rhode Island.

But industrial fish farming is a different story. The industry spends an estimated $1 billion a year on veterinary products; degrades the land (shrimp farming destroys mangroves, for example, a key protector from typhoons); pollutes local waters (according to a recent report by the Worldwatch Institute, a salmon farm with 200,000 fish releases nutrients and fecal matter roughly equivalent to as many as 60,000 people); and imperils wild populations that come in contact with farmed salmon.

Originally, Last Appetite was going to be about the collapse of fish. Maybe I should revisit that when the fish stocks that have already collapsed hit 50%. Which is possibly now.

Food Pornographers against Internet Censorship

Bananas!

If you haven’t been following Australian news, the Australian Government is about to embark upon its attempt to censor the Internet (or at least, censor websites and not HTTPS, IPv6, encrypted data or the torrentz, which is where the depraved of Australia will flee to get their porny fix). For me, it is going to be a great time to be working in the “Internet industry” and have the rest of the industry elsewhere laughing at you.

To take a guess, the first websites to be banned as “false positives”, (where a site that the filter says is illegal, but is in fact, not) will be food websites. Who else turns charcuterie objects into a fetish or makes the same volume and diversity of dick jokes about vegetables? These are freedoms that are dear to the heart of many Australians and need defending.

If you’re keen to do something about it, the irrepressible GetUp is running a campaign.

Alternatively:

Call the Minister

Express you opprobrium in person. Call Senator Stephen Conroy, Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy’s office on (03) 9650 1188 and have at them.

Write to the Minister.

A physical letter to the Minister clogs their inbox in a way that email cannot. Mail to:

Senator Stephen Conroy
Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy
Level 4, 4 Treasury Place
Melbourne Vic 3002

Email the Minister

Pretty much a waste of time, but worth a try. Email Senator Conroy at: minister@dbcde.gov.au.

Food Blogging as Wunderkammer

More than occasionally I wonder what is food blogging and how can it continue to differ (and differentiate itself) from other media. The late-90s chestnut of blogging being “all about community” has been all but superseded by real communities moving online. As much as I’m not a huge fan of Facebook, there’s 120 million other people whom think otherwise. Then this week I came upon, this article from Julian Dibbell:

A Web log really, then, is a Wunderkammer. That is to say, the genealogy of Web logs points not to the world of letters but to the early history of museums — to the “cabinet of wonders,” or Wunderkammer, that marked the scientific landscape of Renaissance modernity: a random collection of strange, compelling objects, typically compiled and owned by a learned, well-off gentleman. A set of ostrich feathers, a few rare shells, a South Pacific coral carving, a mummified mermaid — the Wunderkammer mingled fact and legend promiscuously, reflecting European civilization’s dazed and wondering attempts to assimilate the glut of physical data that science and exploration were then unleashing.

Just so, the Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the “discovery” of the networked world. And there are surely lessons for us in the parallel. For just as the cabinet of wonders took centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to any very tidy scheme of organization.

If you’re in most of the developed world, you’re bombarded with data about food: maybe food blogging is just an attempt to order it while staying in a state of constant amazement.

How to make coconut milk

I make my own coconut milk. It tastes nuttier and richer than that from a can, and frankly, I enjoy spending vast amounts of my spare time preparing food. Most recipes for making milk mention grating up the coconut or extracting the white flesh with a zester or fork – but it is much faster to pulp the flesh up in a blender.

You’ll need a hammer, a clean cloth, a blender and an old brown coconut.

In his book Thai Food, David Thompson recommends cracking the coconut open with the back of your heavy cleaver but a hammer is much more efficient and satisfying, with the added bonus of not risking losing an ear. Whack the coconut with the hammer until it cracks open. Let the juice inside run out and discard (or drink it, if you’re into sour coconut water).

Opened.

Peel out the white flesh using a knife or a spoon. There is a thin and woody brown membrane that coats the flesh, the testa.

Cut it off.

Continue until you’ve separated the brown parts from the white. Place the white flesh into your blender along with about two cups of warm water. Blend until thoroughly shredded.

Pour the shredded mix into the tea towel or clean cloth.

Squeeze out the milk. I’d do this with both hands, but my other one is holding the camera.

Let it settle. The thick layer on top is coconut cream, the thinner milk is beneath.

Red Emperor, Melbourne

Har gau from Red Emperor, Melbourne

I always thought that only tourists ate on Southbank.

It’s the wrong side of the river for me; that strange cultural divide that bisects Melbourne wherein both sides can say that the other is the morally and culturally wrong side. Since the Casino that dominates the south bank of the Yarra is now taking restaurants more seriously than ever, it is time to reevaluate my prejudices. Southgate, the slightly earlier development on the river still looks like a soulless, polished shopping mall but maybe the food within has changed.

Red Emperor, the Cantonese restaurant within the Southgate complex, is showing its age. The mirrored tiles on the roof, cheap vinyl seats and silver spray-painted concrete columns make the restaurant feel more like a suburban reception centre than one of Melbourne’s leading proponents of Cantonese food (and specifically, yum cha). The superlative view of Flinders Street Station and Melbourne’s skyline from across the Yarra remains unchanged; floor to ceiling windows lend ample distraction from the interior.

Yum cha means “drink tea” in Cantonese. Dim sum is what you eat at yum cha. Yum cha is what you do at Red Emperor. I’ve never ordered much more than a plate of stir-fried gai lan or an extra serve of fried squid from their menu. My guess is that if the gai lan is A$22 a plate, then the rest of their à la carte fare will require me to promise them my first-born in exchange for one of the lobsters crowding their tanks at the entrance.

Salty, fried squid tentacle.

I’ve never set foot in the place after dark. Lobster before noon is morally reprehensible.

As a midday meal, yum cha is more about the company that you keep than the food itself. It is built to be social: the most memorable yum cha meals should have very little to do with the food. Bamboo steamer baskets filled with mystery dumplings waft by on a trolley for your pleasure, you pick whichever takes your fancy, and then get back to the real task of constructing a conversation. Memorable dumplings help but are not essential.

At least since the last time I’d eaten at Red Emperor, the more interesting items that drift by on the trolley have vanished. The pickles, slices of 100-year old egg, and the cartilaginous steamed chicken’s feet have disappeared. I thought that Melbourne was well past gentrifying its Chinese Food, but in this case, I guess not.

The quality of dumplings – while still good – is only marginally better than you’d receive at one of the mid-range yum cha-focused joints around the CBD, like Westlake, Shark Fin House or Shark Fin Inn. Trekking out to the suburb of Box Hill is even better. At $40-ish a head, you’d get better value elsewhere and charging $8 for tea, normally gratis, is a bitter end to the meal.

Anyhow, on with the short depth of field dumpling porn.

Har gau (North); Random seafood roll (East); “Shark’s Fin” dumpling, not containing actual shark’s fin (South); Siu Mai (West).

Sin Chet Kuen: Beancurd skin rolls stuffed with prawn and shitake mushrooms.

Char Siew Sou: Flaky pastry topped with sesame seeds, filled with sweet red roast pork. My friend J uses these salty-sweet pastries as his yardstick for a good dumpling joint, which makes sense. Both an excellent pastry and top roast pork are hard to achieve, not to mention plating them up to the punters steaming hot.

Tentacle.

Location:
Level 3 Southgate,
Southbank, VIC 3006
Tel: (03) 9699-4170

Lunch: Mon – Sat 12 to 3pm, Sun 11 to 4pm
Dinner: 6pm onwards, daily

Spring blogging doldrums

Spring scared the hell out of me this year. It is so much more radiant and incredible after living in the tropics for a while. Trees aren’t supposed to change colour and regrow. In the tropics, most trees that look as if they are dead are in fact dead with invariable certainty. I’m blaming this existential botanical terror on my lack of updates of late. I have no good reason.

I’m eating great food and not telling anybody at all about it, just like regular people.

And I’m busy: over at SBS, I’ve been rolling out an article on “world food” per week on Wednesdays for the Mouthful blog and my very first article on Melbourne for Wall Street Journal Asia appears soonish.

Also: if you happen to be in Bangkok, be sure to check out food blogger Austin Bush’s exhibition, The Last Chinatown at Kathmandu Gallery, 87 Pan road (near Indian Temple off Silom road) Bangrak, near the Surasak or Chong Nonsi skytrain stations from 6 December. It’s the culmination of a year’s worth of him trawling the back streets of BKK’s Chinatown.

What makes a good food blog?

A few months ago someone asked me what makes a good food blog; a question that begs to find a common thread through the hundred or so food blogs that clog my feed reader with other people’s meals. As somebody that spends plenty of their working life measuring user behaviour on the web, I know that people’s actions are a much better measure of “goodness” than people’s intentions. If people say that they think the NY Times website is their favorite site but then spend 8 hours a day on Facebook which is the better website?

For instance, I love Converse’s This Is The Index Page campaign. It’s exactly what I wish more web marketers were doing: taking their brands less seriously and playing with the web in new and foolish ways.

I’ve been there a total of three times, once for the purpose of checking the above link. I average between eight and sixteen hours a day logged into Google. If someone asked me to name a “good” website, the Google sites wouldn’t be the ones that came to mind. Given that goodness is entirely subjective and what I say is good will be definitely the wrong answer, at the very least my online reading behaviour suggest which food blogs are good.

What I read is diverse.

There are the obvious choices. Firstly the kindred folk whom I’ve met, shared meals within their slices of Asia and whom frequently comment here. Austin Bush Photography, a few members from the crew behind Gut Feelings (where I also contribute far too sporadically), EatingAsia, Tomatom, Abstract Gourmet, Rambling Spoon. The food blogs that got me started on this crazy game like Noodlepie (currently not blogging about food) and Stickyrice (currently MIA).

The local Australian blogs that I read all have a bent towards either academe, taking the piss, or preferably both like Progressive Dinner Party or the sublimely-named Thus Bakes Zarathustra. I like The Old Foodie, if only because it is 100% history and no photos. Otherwise, I’m very slack at keeping in touch with my local blog scene. When I get a chance, I flick through whomever local has linked to me and comment at random.

I’ve got a vague side interest in the molecular which comes from Ideas in Food, and have been reading back issues of marginal academic journals like Meat Science.

From the mainstream press, the newspapers are getting more blog-like with social sharing, user commenting, or just straight down the line blogging. I read Ruhlman, Observer Food Monthly and the associated Word Of Mouth blog, Jay Rayner, AA Gill, Robert Sietsema. Anything in the New Yorker that I can get my hands on. I read glossy food magazines at random, generally whenever I’m going to pitch an article at them rather than through loyalty or habit.

What I don’t read is multitude and what seems to run through all of those blogs is a sense of myopia. The pictures emulate the short depth of field, blurred macro shots that place food in the centre of the photograph and blur the background into deep bokeh territory. The context where the food sits fades into a characterless void. It is a seductive form of food photography because it ignores the rest of the world. The chaos of culture and politics that produce food is left in that hazy background.

The writing does the same. If you solely focus upon the plate or recipe in front of you, I don’t read your blog. There is a pantheon of well-edited, professionally photographed recipe books that fill that niche for me.

A sense of context seems to be what sets apart the blogs that I read from the ones that I don’t. Good food blogging contextualizes food. It makes it feel as messy and imperfect as the world from whence it comes and not like it appeared spontaneously, teleported in fresh from Planet Donna Hay. For me the hazy background is the interesting part of a food blog’s photography and writing; it just happens to have a plate of food in it.

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