In the Quentin Tarantino movie “Kill Bill,” Uma Thurman flies to Okinawa on a fateful mission: to find the greatest samurai blade ever forged. There she meets a white-robed master blacksmith who hands her a gleaming katana and solemnly intones, “I can tell you, with no ego, this is my finest sword.”
Like Uma, I went on a quest for “Japanese steel.” But my intentions were less homicidal: I needed it to chop shiitake, fillet tuna and julienne carrots. I’m a reporter by trade but am fascinated by Japanese food — so much so that I volunteer a couple nights a week in the kitchen of a Japanese restaurant. The knives of the cooks all say the same thing: “Made in Japan.”
And not just those of the cooks. Since the mid-’90s, Japanese knives have become de rigueur in professional kitchens of all stripes — edging out, so to speak, German and French blades. As top chefs like Thomas Keller, Charlie Trotter and Jean-Georges Vongerichten discovered Japanese knives, home cooks began to follow, and in the last five years sales have exploded. Even the enterprising Rachael Ray now hawks an “East/West” blade based on Japanese design.
“They’re perfectly engineered,” said legendary four-star chef David Bouley. As he pulled out blade after Japanese blade — he owns 50 — he explained that these knives cut through the cells of ingredients so cleanly and precisely that food oxidizes more slowly, and tastes better as a result.
When I asked chef Eric Ripert, of New York’s hallowed Le Bernardin, he got philosophical about his Japanese blades (all 25 of them): “When you own a Japanese knife, you show your commitment and passion for cooking,” he said. “You’re showing the other guys you’re serious about what you do.”
My own chef put it simply: “Get yourself some Japanese knives, man.”
I decided to travel, à la Uma, to the source: a gritty industrial city called Sakai, 350 miles southwest of Tokyo. This old port has been the capital of samurai sword and knife manufacturing in Japan since the 1300s. A small band of artisans here still work in the traditional way, handcrafting blades in tiny workshops tucked between bland apartment buildings and factories.
A knife wholesaler named Junro Aoki offered to guide me, and we drove to a prefab warehouse that doubled as a smithy. Inside the soot-covered, dimly lit space a blacksmith stood in a cramped 2-foot-deep pit, face-to-flame with a coal-fueled forge breathing 1,400 degrees of blistering heat. He was 5 feet tall and wire thin, wearing a grimy turtleneck tucked into grey slacks, a denim shop apron and wooden flip-flops with purple socks. Prescription glasses framed his eyes. A cotton glove covered his right hand. That was it for protective gear. The fire from the forge cast an orange glow on his long face.
He didn’t look up at us. With a pair of steel tongs, he shifted a white-hot steel bar from the forge to an anvil and began smacking it with a hammer. His head bobbed as he whacked the fiery metal only a couple of feet from his face. Sparks kicked up at him, but he didn’t flinch. A knife — a fish-slicing yanagi — began to take shape from the bar. He tossed it on the dirt floor to cool.
Only then did he hop out of the pit to greet us. Up close I could see his clothes were peppered with tiny burn holes from the sparks. His name is Keijiro Doi. He’s 80 years old and has been blacksmithing for six decades. He forges more than 100 different kinds of knives, shaping them by intuition and feel. “The fire and steel are both alive to me,” he explained. His work is part craft, part art — part sorcery. I asked him how he knows when a blade is ready.
“I can tell,” he said.
By the time he finishes a knife, Doi has pounded it from a half-inch-thick steel bar down to a fifth-of-an-inch hardened carbon steel blade. He and his 52-year-old son, who helps him, finish about a dozen a day. The blades are dull gray in color, with no edge yet. The thin steel is incredibly strong. I tried to bend one I found in a junk pile. No dice.
This metal is key to understanding Japanese knives. Steel, of course, is an alloy of iron and carbon and other elements. Hardened steel — the stuff of knives — comes from heating, cooling and pounding steel until you crush together its molecules. Japanese carbon steel derives from techniques originally developed to produce steel for samurai swords. Its exceptional hardness lets you hone an incredibly sharp edge on the blade.
Shape is also critical. Japanese knives come in two broad styles: Western and traditional. Western looks like the double-edged knives we know. A gyutou is what we’d call a classic chef’s knife — this is the one American chefs typically buy. Traditional Japanese kitchen knives, on the other hand, come in three main shapes: yanagi, usuba and deba. The yanagi, which looks like a long willow leaf, is for slicing raw fish. The usuba has a wide rectangular blade for cutting vegetables. The deba is a heavy blade like a thick chef’s knife, for portioning fish and chicken.
The Japanese endlessly riff on these three shapes. The local knife museum displays more than 160 different styles of knives, specialized blades to cut sea eel, freshwater eel (four distinct styles from four cities), whale, horse mackerel, the head of the bonito fish, Chinese cabbage, watermelon, silkworm, rolled sushi, soba noodles and 800-pound tunas — this last one an astonishing 6-foot-long maguro kiri that looks like a sword. On top of this, the knives come in different sizes and combinations of steel. The museum alone sells 18 kinds of deba.
Traditional Japanese knives typically have one side sharpened, the other not, which lets you make precise, parchment-thin cuts.
In Sakai City, I was after that old-time religion: traditional Japanese knives, still hand-forged from carbon steel by master blacksmiths like Mr. Doi. (Western-style knives, on the other hand, are typically machine-stamped from a variety of alloys.) Once ready, the wholesaler walks the blades over to a sharpener’s workshop. I never realized sharpening was such a fine art, but here “master sharpeners” are revered craftsmen.
The wholesaler introduced me to Yukinora Oda, another 5-footer north of 70. He’s been sharpening knives for more than half a century. A stocky, gruff man with a green beret framing his fleshy face, he wore a tattered sweater vest over a sweatshirt and shuffled around in an ancient pair of bedroom slippers. A Mild Seven drooped from his mouth with an impossibly long ash.
The sharpener stood on a crate hunched over a stone grinding wheel 4 feet in diameter and a half a foot wide, a wheel that screamed like an airplane engine as it turned. Securing the blade in a wooden holder, he pressed it against the whirling stone, sliding it from side to side, his face 18 inches off the surface. He guided the screeching blade by feel — he couldn’t actually see it. Long sparks shot forward as he worked. The cigarette hung from his lips.
Sharpening and finishing a knife is a 25-step process, he explained. In the final step, the sharpener knelt on a worn cushion and stroked a knife along a fine grit sharpening stone. He pulled a finished yanagi from a bucket of neon green anti-rust liquid. The transformation from raw blade was remarkable: The handcrafted knife was perfectly engineered, polished and scalpel sharp. A thing of beauty.
At the wholesaler’s office, another one of Sakai’s Sunshine Boys, an engraver in his 70s — also 5 feet tall — arrived to freehand chisel Japanese calligraphy on the surface of the blade. Mr. Aoki tapped a hand-turned magnolia-wood handle onto it and wrapped it carefully. The knife was ready. “Hojo toiro,” he said, satisfied — an old expression meaning that each knife has a unique personality because it was fashioned by hand.
That evening Mr. Aoki invited me to dinner at a restaurant specializing in fugu, or blowfish. If there’s anything that puts a chef — and his blades — to the ultimate test, it’s this Japanese delicacy. Fugu’s internal organs have lethal levels of tetrodotoxin — a poison with no known antidote. How you cut this fish makes all the difference between a repeat customer and a dead one. Chefs need a special license to prepare it.
As we sat on a tatami mat before a low table, the chef delivered a platter of raw fugu so fresh the flesh was still twitching. We poached them in boiling fish stock and sipped hot sake infused with roasted fugu fins. Tetrodotoxin or not, it tasted great. The chef was a fit 42-year-old with a buzz cut, proud of his fugu-making skills — and his knives.
“Yeah, I’ve spent a lot of money on knives,” he said, laughing as he walked into his kitchen, an open space before a long dining counter. He pulled out blades from drawers and boxes. A half-dozen more were stuck into two old Yellow Pages taped together and sitting on a shelf above his head.
The chef soon laid 20 knives on the counter. Each had a specific purpose: Three were just for slicing fugu into sashimi. How sharp were they? He grabbed one of the slicers and split in half a piece of fugu skin — thinner than cardboard — lengthwise.
As I watched the chef work, it seemed his knives didn’t so much cut ingredients as float through them. “The knife becomes an extension of my hand,” he explained. He rested his index finger on a blade’s spine and guided it almost effortlessly.
The chef sharpens and polishes his knives every day (carbon steel rusts if you’re not careful). He pointed to a new deba — the heavy fish chopper — and one a decade old. The older blade had shrunk by a third from repeated honing.
“Our knives are like our swords,” the chef said, invoking the devotion the samurai had to their weapon. He wiped his slicer with a towel, reached up and jammed it back into the tattered phone books. It was time to get some Japanese knives, man.
NEW YORK (AP) — “Pink slime” was almost “pink paste” or “pink goo.”
The microbiologist who coined the term for lean finely textured beef ran through a few iterations in his head before pressing send on an email to a co-worker at the U.S. Department of Agriculture a decade ago. Then, the name hit him like heartburn after a juicy burger.
“It’s pink. It’s pasty. And it’s slimy looking. So I called it pink slime,” said Gerald Zirnstein, the former meat inspector at the USDA. “It resonates, doesn’t it?”
The pithy description fueled an uproar that resulted in the main company behind the filler, Beef Products Inc., closing three meat plants this month. The controversy over the filler, which is made of fatty bits of beef that are heated and treated with ammonium to kill bacteria, shows how a simple nickname can forever change an entire industry.
In fact, beef filler had been used for decades before the nickname came about. But most Americans didn’t know — or care — about it before Zirnstein’s vivid moniker was quoted in a 2009 article by The New York Times on the safety of meat processing methods.
Soon afterward, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver began railing against it. McDonald’s and other fast food companies later discontinued their use of it. And major supermarket chains including Kroger and Stop & Shop vowed to stop selling beef with the low-cost filler.
Bettina Siegel, a food blogger who posted an online petition asking the USDA to stop using the filler in school lunches, said the controversy isn’t based on the term alone. She said consumers are just upset that the filler is not what they think they’re getting when they buy “100 percent ground beef.”
But Siegel acknowledges that the name doesn’t hurt her cause, either. She said the term “filled a vacuum” in the public arena about the filler; her petition, “Tell the USDA to STOP Using Pink Slime in School Food” had more than 200,000 signatures within a week.
Beef Products, which makes the filler, blames its plant closings on what it calls unfounded attacks. About 650 jobs will be lost when plants in Amarillo, Texas, Garden City, Kansas, and Waterloo, Iowa close on Friday. Another plant in South Sioux City, Neb., will remain open but run at reduced capacity.
Still, the company, based in South Dakota, said it’s not considering changing the filler’s name. Instead, Beef Products set up a website, beefisbeef.com, to combat what it calls “media-perpetuated myths” about the filler.
Meanwhile, the author of the term “pink slime” makes no apologies about his creation. Zirnstein, who has since left the USDA, said he thinks “pink slime” is a better descriptor than “lean finely textured beef.”
“It says it’s lean. Great. But it doesn’t describe what kind of lean it is,” said Zirnstein, who doesn’t think the product should be mixed into beef. “Textured. What does that mean?”
PREY VENG, Cambodia, and SAMUT SAKHON, Thailand — In the sun-baked flatlands of Cambodia, where dust stings the eyes and chokes the pores, there is a tiny clapboard house on cement stilts. It is home to three generations of runaway slaves.
The man of the house, Sokha, recently returned after nearly two years in captivity. His home is just as he left it: barren with a few dirty pillows passing for furniture. Slivers of daylight glow through cracks in the walls. The family’s most valuable possession, a sow, waddles and snorts beneath the elevated floorboards.
Before his December escape, Sokha (a pseudonym) was the property of a deep-sea trawler captain. The 39-year-old Cambodian, his teenage son and two young nephews were purchased for roughly $650, he said, each through brokers promising under-the-table jobs in a fish cannery.
There was no cannery. They were instead smuggled to a pier in neighboring Thailand, where they were shoved aboard a wooden vessel that motored into a lawless sea. His uncle had fallen for the same scam five years prior and escaped to warn the others. But Sokha told his son, then just 16, that this venture would turn out differently. He was wrong.
“We worked constantly, for no pay, through seasickness and vomiting, sometimes for two or three days straight,” he said. “We obeyed the captain’s every word.”
Near-daily death threats reinforced the captain’s supremacy. So did his Vietnam War-era K-54 pistol, and the night he carved up another slave’s face in view of the crew. “For 20 hours a day, we were forced to catch and sort sea creatures: mackerel, crabs, squid.” It’s back-breaking work, under the searing tropical sun. “But the fish wasn’t for us,” he added.
So who was it all for?
The answer should unsettle anyone who closely examines Thailand’s multi-billion dollar wild-caught seafood industry and the darkest links in its supply chain.
“It’s an export-oriented market. And we know the countries where these products are exported to,” said Lisa Rende Taylor, chief technical specialist with the United Nations Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking or UNIAP. “Do the math.”
For Americans, the calculation is worrisome. Thailand is the United States’ second-largest supplier of foreign seafood. Of America’s total seafood imports, one out of every six pounds comes from the Southeast Asian nation.
In 2011 alone, Thailand exported 827 million pounds of seafood worth more than $2.5 billion to the US, according to National Marine Fisheries Service figures. The only nation that consumes more Thai seafood exports is Japan.
Murder is an occupational hazard. But a monotonous job assembling iPads is heaven compared to slavery on a Thai trawler, where conditions are as grueling and violent as any 19th-century American plantation. The lucky escape within a year or so. Less fortunate are those traded several times over for years on end.
Denying that the fruits of forced labor reach the biggest importers of Thai seafood — Japan, America, China and the European Union — has become increasingly implausible.
The accounts of ex-slaves, Thai fishing syndicates, officials, exporters and anti-trafficking case workers, gathered by GlobalPost in a three-month investigation, illuminate an opaque offshore supply chain enmeshed in slavery.
A long trail of offshore operators — slave boats, motherships and independent fishmongers — can obfuscate the origins of slave-caught seafood before it ever reaches the shore. While the industry’s biggest earners rely on clannish and violence-prone fishing crews for raw material, they’re distanced from the worst abuses by hundreds of nautical miles and several degrees of middlemen.
The result is that many Thai factory bosses have no idea who caught the seafood they process for foreign consumers.
There are caveats. The majority of Thailand’s two largest seafood exports to the US — tuna and shrimp — are sourced differently. Most “Thai” tuna is actually imported from overseas and processed for re-export. The shrimp industry, though routinely accused of abusing poor migrants, is at least vulnerable to spot checks on seaside farms.
The same cannot be said for deep-sea trawlers, the favored vessel of slave-driving captains.
The species caught by Thai trawlers legal and illicit alike include sardines, mackerel, cuttlefish, squid, anchovies and “trash fish,” tiny or foul-tasting catch ground into animal food or preserved to create fish sauce. Americans consume these breeds en masse. One in five pounds of America’s imported mackerel or sardines comes from Thailand, according to US government records. For processed fish balls, puddings or cakes — made from trawlers’ trash fish — the figure is one in three pounds. Thai fish sauce supplies nearly 80 percent of the American market.
All that trawler catch ends up in familiar American fare: anchovy pizzas, squid linguine, smoked mackerel salads and fish fillets on ice. Even pets are entangled: trash fish is a common dog- and cat-food ingredient. But industry representatives in Thailand admit there’s often no way to tell whether a particular package of deep-sea fish was caught using forced labor.
Using bar codes, American shoppers can track packaged Thai-exported seafood to its onshore processing facility, said Arthon Piboonthanapatana, secretary general of the Thai Frozen Foods Association. “You can trace it back to the factories.”
But exporters, he said, are not in the business of policing the fishing syndicates that supply their factories. “We only have the power to enforce our members,” Arthon said. “We have no power to enforce other stakeholders such as boats or fishermen.”
American seafood importers consider themselves similarly powerless in overseeing far-flung Thai boats. “Western regulatory agencies have little or no reach, or authority, over various parts of the value chain,” said Gavin Gibbons, spokesman for the National Fisheries Institute, America’s chief seafood trade organization and lobbying group based outside Washington, DC. The institute will promptly respond to allegations against specific factories, he said. But so far, it has not found an effective way to monitor conditions on deep-sea boats catching US-bound fish.
“We have started discussions with our members about just how far an audit could realistically go and whether, perhaps, there are dockside audits that could be developed,” Gibbons said.
The “nature of boats being at sea,” he said, presents a major challenge to industry’s self-policing efforts.
International pressure to rid Thailand’s seafood trade of slavery is mounting. Thailand teeters just above the US State Department’s worst human-trafficking ranking and could be downgraded this summer. Last year, during a visit that vexed Bangkok officials, a UN rapporteur declared that forced labor is “notoriously common” in Thailand’s fishing sector and even alleged police complicity.
“It’s not like monitoring brothels, plantations or factories … all this labor is at sea,” Rende Taylor said. “So it’s essentially a universe where captains are king. Some are out to make as much money as possible by working these guys around the clock and being as cruel as they want to be.”
Would Americans eat less meat, and would animals be treated more humanely, if slaughterhouses were made with glass walls and we all could see the monstrous killing apparatus at work? This is the query at the heart of Timothy Pachirat’s new book, “Every Twelve Seconds” — the title a reference to the typical slaughterhouse’s cattle-killing rate.
Before you think this is a column merely about food, recognize that Pachirat’s question isn’t (only) about the immorality of the cheeseburger you had for lunch. It’s about the larger phenomenon whereby modern society has reconstructed itself to hide so many horrific consequences from view.
Calling this the “politics of sight,” Pachirat’s blood-soaked experience inside a slaughterhouse spotlights only the most illustrative example of how we’ve divorced ourselves from the means of producing violence — and how, in doing so, we have made it psychologically easier to support such brutality. Sadly, billions of factory-farmed animals dying barbaric deaths are just one subset of casualties in that larger process.
Today, for example, free trade policies that promote offshoring allow Americans to enjoy consumer goods at ultra-low prices without having to see that those low prices represent companies taking advantage of the developing world’s poverty wages, environmental destruction and human rights abuses. A veritable slave may have assembled the iPad you are reading these words on, but thanks to the supply chain’s geography and Apple’s lack of transparency, you can easily avoid dealing with the ethical implications of that reality.
Another example: Many Americans drive gas-guzzling SUVs, proudly slapping patriotic declarations on their bumpers. This seems perfectly reasonable, but only because many either don’t live near polluted oil-drilling sites or don’t have to personally experience the ramifications of our petroleum-focused military policies. Ultimately, by separating the consequences of gas consumption from the driver, we’ve created the psychological conditions for fossil fuel consumption to seem like an honorable statement of strength rather than an endorsement of environmental degradation and war.
Speaking of war, the politics of sight sculpt our martial policies. We ended conscription, separating most of our fellow citizens from the consequences of military action; we conduct combat via unmanned aerial vehicles that remove the pilot-shooters from the populations being bombed; and both the military establishment and the media themselves suppress photographs of coffins or battlefield viscera that might show us what war really looks like.
Some of this, of course, is an inadvertent byproduct of larger trends like globalization that stretch supply chains across the planet. Some of it comes from a culture narcissism that teaches us to consider only on our immediate surroundings and nothing else. Much of it, though, is a deliberate effort to hide the truth. From the Pentagon’s photo policy to agribusiness now championing so-called ag gag laws to punish activists who expose factory farm atrocities, vested interests are exploiting the fact that “out of sight, out of mind” is a default setting in the human mind.
For his part, Pachirat ends his brave journey unconvinced that, unto itself, removing the veil will be enough to make us a more thoughtful — if not moral — society. He’s almost certainly correct. The atrocities that power modern life are now integral to what we define as the norm. And whether that norm is eating meat, driving massive cars or flippantly waging war, changing the status quo warrants more than just knowledge — it requires the will to change once knowledge is available.
Fortunately, history proves Americans can summon that will. However, without knowledge — without an end to the moment’s deceptive politics of sight — the most important changes can never happen.
Jazmin is 27 years old and beautiful. She has the fierce, dark beauty of a Mexican Indian, but she’s tall, and when you see her move, you think Masai warrior or maybe ninja. And it’s true: She does have ninja skills. When I first met Jazmin, she’d just killed a pheasant. She was sitting on the deck talking with a friend when she spotted the bird at the edge of the yard, 20 feet away. She casually picked up a two-by-four and hurled it. The missile hit the pheasant in the head, a neat kill. Jazmin walked over and picked it up. “Dinner,” she said.
She says she doesn’t particularly like killing animals, but she does kill from time to time, if she has good reason. A deer invaded her garden and she killed it with a machete, and she sometimes nets fish in the surf near her home on the coast of Guerrero, Mexico. It’s a skill born from practice and necessity: She grew up rural and poor. Her father abandoned her family when she was 8, and her mother, Esperanza, had to find a way to support seven children. “We ate a lot of natural things,” she says. “Things from the forest. My brother used to kill iguanas. I’ve got a good iguana recipe if you want it. It’s the best meat as far as I’m concerned. There are two types of iguana: green and black. The black is good to eat. The green is too beautiful to kill. Last winter I found a big black one in my house! Can you believe it? The way you kill them is you step lightly on their heads and then pull on the tail.”
Humans worship athleticism, talent and perfection. We have a fascination with the tiny fraction of people who stand on the other side of the line that separates life from art: the grand master, the prima ballerina. We are drawn to people who embody something of the divine; the ones who, through their grace and inspiration, remind us that to be alive is majestic. Often these heroes in our spotlight are athletes. Sometimes they are leaders — warriors, politicians or rebels. Sometimes they are great chefs or composers or guitarists. But outside the spotlight and the enchantment of our collective worship, there are other artists, who turn mundane actions into magic, who approach humble tasks with perfect artistry. The masters of skills born of necessity and perfected to fulfill a pride that is autonomous from credit or accolades, a pride based on the perfection of the action itself, the economy of movement, the swiftness of results.
Jazmin Rudin is one such person. She possesses the grace and determination to execute any task at hand with astonishing efficiency. For example, she hunts shrimp in the river with a homemade metal spear. ”You take a long sharp piece of metal, filed at the end. It has to be really sharp. You attach that to a piece of surgical tubing so it snaps back to you when you throw it,” she says. She mimes aiming a spear, and remarks that on a good day she can spear two kilos of shrimp this way. I express disbelief. She shrugs.
“It’s a cultural thing. If you learn when you’re really little it’s easy enough. You have to learn because the shrimp are not going to come to your house and knock on your door.” She explains her technique: “The shrimp are under the rocks. You go underwater, and lift each rock. Don’t lift it all the way. You need to lift gently so they don’t see you.” She’s a demonstrative teacher. She talks slowly, and pauses to make eye contact. She’s checking to make sure I understand her. To help me get it, she uses hand motions. “They also like to hide in the roots of the trees that grow into the river; they hang out in there, caved up. Before you go for it, you have to check out all the potential exits they might have.” She mimes looking around and adds, “Sometimes you have to grab them with your hand, which can be prickly. But I say no! You’re for me. I don’t care if you bite me, you’re not escaping me!” She laughs. “But really, it’s all about taking aim. Just like hunting with a gun. When everything is correct you’ve got your shrimp.”
But hunting isn’t Jazmin’s only talent. The lectures on killing iguanas and spearing shrimp are just digressions: I’m here in her Oregon kitchen for a lesson in grilling chicken, estilo Mexicana. She learned this recipe for pollo asado from her mother, who raises chickens. Her mother learned it from her grandmother. Both women have lived their entire lives in the same small Guerrero village. Jazmin describes her grandmother as “muy antiquada,” or very antiquated. “She has Indian ways, folk ways,” Jazmin says. “There’s something a little witchy about her.”
Jazmin starts by butterflying a chicken thigh with a deft stroke of her knife. When I admire her technique she says, “My mother always says: ‘I know how to cook chicken, but you are the chicken maestro.’” There’s too much delight and humor in Jazmin’s countenance for this revelation to sound boastful. Besides, as I watch her demonstration, I realize she’s just stating a truth. “Take the leg,” she says. “Find the thickest part and slice it open, like so. Don’t cut it all the way through. Leave a layer of flesh so that you can fold the meat back. When you fold it open, the bones and meat are on one side, and there’s pure meat on the other side. You want to cut it so both sides are of equal thickness.” She slams the chicken leg flat on her cutting board. “Chickens prepared this way absorb more sauce,” she says and gives me a challenging look. I’m not about to argue with someone who can kill living shrimp with a handmade spear.
After salting the butterflied chicken legs and breasts, she sets the meat aside in a bowl and works on the sauce. “You’ll want to put seven dried chiles guajillos to soak in a bowl of water,” she says, helpfully adding, “It’s important to soak the chiles first, because it helps the chile to retain the red color.” She assembles her spices: powdered oregano, cumin seed, ground cloves and whole peppercorns, which she’ll grind in a stone mortar and pestle, or molcajete. The basalt bowl stands on its own three legs; the grinding stone is the size and texture of an avocado. “In Mexico everyone has the rock,” she says, laughing. “But if you don’t have a molcajete, use the blender. It’s not quite the same, but it works.” To make the sauce, she places two cloves of garlic and strips of wet chile in the molcajete, and then deftly adds spices and water a little at a time. The finished result is a uniform liquid, which she ladles over the chicken.
While the chicken marinates and the grill heats, we talk. Jazmin’s pueblo on the coast of Guerrero sounds a lot like the village in coastal Jalisco where I spent part of my childhood. It’s a rural culture, rooted in farming and fishing and family. Jazmin has always felt different from the other girls in town; she’s never cared for makeup or clothes. “I’m old-fashioned like my grandmother,” she admits. But although her values may be old-fashioned, she’s not exactly a textbook campesina: Her great joy in life is surfing, she raves about Hank Williams III, and she’s taught her dog, Rambo, to ride on the front of her four-wheeler. She married Mark, an older guy from Oregon, when she was 19, so that could help explain her cultural idiosyncrasies. But as I watch Jazmin laugh uproariously at a silly joke, it strikes me that even without the foreign influence, she would have been an oddball. She’s one of those rare individuals who always cleaves true to some inner compass.
“The secret to barbecuing chicken is to make sure the flame isn’t too hot,” she says, holding her hand over the gas grill, which she views with some contempt. We’re standing on a back porch in Bend, Ore., and Jazmin has been waxing poetic about the superiority of Mexican chickens. “In Mexico, we get a chicken that’s been killed that day. And it’s double good when you grill it over real coals; these gas grills have nothing on real charcoal.” She slaps a chicken thigh on the grill. “Keep turning the chicken over and over again,” she instructs. “It’s a totally different style. Not as juicy maybe, but more flavorful.” She’s right; when we pull the chicken off the grill a scant 20 minutes later, the meat has a satisfying, chewy texture and the flavor sings, savory and complex. Jazmin gives me a look, as though to say, “I told you so.”
“What do you call this recipe?” I ask.
“It’s called pollo asado,” she says, grinning. Grilled chicken. The answer is pure Jazmin: no nonsense and uttered with the easy confidence of a maestro. Like any great artist, she knows to let her work speak for itself.
Ingredients
- 1 chicken, cut into pieces
- Salt
- Soy sauce (optional)
- 7 dried red chiles guajillos
- 1 teaspoon of ground cloves
- 1-2 cloves of garlic
- 1 teaspoon of cumin seed
- 1 teaspoon of whole peppercorns
- 1 teaspoon of powdered oregano
Directions
- Butterfly chicken.
- Splash chicken with soy sauce and sprinkle with salt.
- Rinse chiles and put them in a bowl. Fill the bowl with water until the chiles are covered. Let soak for 10 minutes. Reserve water.
- When the chiles are the consistency of wet satin, grind or blend them with the garlic and spices.
- Add the water left over from soaking the chiles to the spice/chile mixture.
- Pour liquid over raw chicken and leave to marinate for an hour.
- Heat your grill.
- When chicken is marinated and grill is hot, throw your chicken on the grill.
- Turn the chicken every minute or two until it’s done.
The battle over “pink slime” is getting messier. Blaming an “unfounded public outcry over the use of boneless lean beef trimmings” in the nation’s commercially sold ground beef supply, meat processor AFA Foods Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Monday. Beef Products Inc. — the South Dakota-based meat titan that invented the pink slime manufacturing process — is also reeling, idling plants in multiple states. In response, Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, a politician who hails from a state where there is a whole lot of boneless beef extrusion going on, called for a congressional investigation into the causes of the public uproar.
“We have a smear campaign going on against a product that is healthy and safe,” Branstad said. “If they get by with this, what other food products are they going to attack next?”
Score another scalp for social media. Because when Terry Branstad inveighs against “they,” that’s exactly who he’s talking about: the easily outraged masses of Twitter and Facebook. We’ve known about “pink slime” for years. Food Inc. took us into a Beef Products Inc. factory and showed us the repulsive stuff back in 2008. The New York Times referenced the name (coined by a USDA researcher as far back as 2002) and devastatingly punctured the safety claims in a breakthrough piece of reporting in 2009. Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver blasted it on his reality TV show a full year ago.
But only in the last few weeks has pink slime captured the national consumer consciousness, and in doing so provided us with just the latest example of how quickly social media grass fires can become conflagrations with real dollar-and-cents consequences. On March 5, the Daily reported that the USDA was holding firm to its plans to buy 7 million pounds of pink slime for its national school lunch program. The very next day Bettina Siegel, a blogger who writes extensively about food and kids, created a petition on Change.org titled “Tell USDA to Stop Using Pink Slime in School Food.” Within a week the petition had over 200,000 signatories and an Internet frenzy had been born.
Fox News columnist Dan Gainor would have us believe that the real villain here is ABC News, which jumped on the anti-pink slime bandwagon with particular passion, but make no mistake, “pink slime” is a semantic framing that was born for the Twitter era. When you have only 140 characters to spread the news, “pink slime” packs all the wallop you need. The process itself, in which fatty trimmings left over at the slaughterhouse are heated, disintegrated via centrifuge, and then dosed with ammonia, is easy to express in a simple Facebook illustration. We saw it with Susan G. Komen for the Cure and we saw it with SOPA — when the social media masses get a bee in their bonnet, they can’t be stopped.
Certainly, the beef industry knows whom it is blaming.
From the Kansas City Star:
The outrage over pink slime registered the sort of quick and virulent response that seems to characterize a new media age. Janet Riley, spokeswoman for the industry group the American Meat Institute, said she’d never seen anything like it — not with E.coli outbreaks, passing worries about so-called mad cow disease or sundry health studies.
“It’s been a social phenomenon,” she said. “Twitter just made it crazy.”
The beef processing industry is trying to fight back, with websites – Beef Is Beef, Pink Slime Is a Myth – and even a catchy slogan, “Dude, it’s beef.” Pink slime contrarians are also eager to point out that if we want low prices for our burgers and “efficient” use of our beef resources, we should learn to embrace pink slime. But I suspect that the defenders of “lean, finely textured beef” are unlikely to see a social media wave of support break in their favor.
I may be the wrong person to make this argument, as I am a Berkeley, Calif., resident who feeds his children hamburgers made from grass-fed cows raised in Marin. But the questions of whether “pink slime” is safe or efficient or guarantees us low-cost patties are all beside the point. It is impossible to look at the beef trimmings being transformed into pink goo in “Food Inc.” without being revolted. And when American consumers are revolted, they don’t reach for their wallets. Gov. Rick Perry can warn all he wants about how “social media rumors” and “hysteria” threaten to destroy any industry. Maybe that’s even true. But it’s not social media’s fault that pink slime is getting a bad rap. It’s the inherent disgustingness of the process that deserves the blame. When you see it, or think hard about the process that creates it, you just don’t want to eat it.
What’s amazing about the current social media revolution is that it is bringing to pass something that food activists have been dreaming about for decades: If only consumers were more informed about the nature of the industrial food system, they would change their behavior. Well, guess what, with a little help from grass-roots viral marketing, the activists turn out to have been right.
FILE - In this March 29, 2012 file photo, the beef product known as lean finely textured beef, or "pink slime," is displayed during a plant tour of Beef Products Inc. in South Sioux City, Neb., where the product is made. Gerald Zirnstein, the microbiologist who coined the term "pink slime," says it came to him in the spur of the moment as he was composing an email to a coworker at the U.S. Department of Agriculture a decade ago. Although it's been used as a filler for decades, the product became the center of controversy only after Zirnstein's vivid moniker for it was quoted in a 2009 New York Times article on the safety of meat processing methods. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik, File)(Credit: AP) 
(Credit: Alena Brozova via Shutterstock) 
Workers at a Seagate Wuxi factory in China (Credit: Robert Scoble / CC BY 2.0) 
Jazmin Rudin with her mother, Esperanza 
The beef ingredient dubbed “pink slime.” (Credit: AP/Beef Products, Inc.) 
