Walk into a supermarket in Bolivia and witness the unfolding of what might have been the world’s next big food fad. The aisles are lined with boxes of cereals, cookies, candies, granola bars, soft drinks and even flour tinged the earthy green color of the exalted coca leaf. One dubiously neon-lime liquor, Agwa de Bolivia, advertises “a coca leaf way of life.” A new soft drink, Coca Brynco, was launched with government support on Jan. 18. Touting extraordinary health benefits, including both energy-boosting and appetite-suppressing properties, these sweet, nutty-tasting coca products are burning hot in South America. Coca is even making inroads in fine dining; South America’s most famous chef, Peruvian Gaston Acurio, uses the leaf to season meat and shellfish, and to make Andean-style cocktails. But, unfortunately, without a plane ticket, you probably won’t be enjoying one of his coca sours any time soon. Outside of the Andes, coca isn’t really known for its culinary and medicinal uses. It’s mostly known as the raw source of cocaine.
This association is the reason why Bolivia’s campaign to end the U.N. narcotics ban of the coca leaf will fail today. The ban, which began in 1961, lumps the leaf — and all products made with it — in with the powder, and called for the elimination of all forms of coca consumption. The United States, as the largest consumer of cocaine and home of the “War on Drugs,” leads the opposition (Britain and Sweden have also filed objections), and its argument against the leaf basically boils down to “mo’ coca, mo’ cocaine.”
But coca has been used as a food and medicine in Andean culture far longer than crack has ravaged American cities, far longer than lines on a counter were a party favor. Since before Incan times, Andean tribes have chewed or brewed the leaf into teas, extracting a mild stimulant entirely unlike the über-concentrated crazy-making stuff in cocaine. (The effect is comparable to a weak cup of coffee.) Coca is packed with nutrients and aids in oxygen absorption, which makes it particularly important to the Andean people who live at high altitude, and its use and consumption has become a powerful marker of cultural pride among indigenous people. It is why Bolivian President Evo Morales, the first indigenous Bolivian elected to that office, has made it his pet project to repair the little green leaf’s reputation, starting with amending the U.N. ban.
Still, the U.S. just isn’t having it — after all, we’ve spent the past several decades and a lot of taxpayer dollars bulldozing, burning and spraying coca crops with herbicide from planes. However, with Morales’ encouragement, a local array of coca food products has exploded to provide a legal market for coca farmers. Coca has always been a dominant crop in the Andes, and many farmers had no other options but to sell their products to cocaine manufacturers.
Of course, coca leaves have attracted curiosity outside the Andes before. A 19th century French chemist created a precursor to Four Loko, called Vin Mariani, out of Bordeaux wine and coca leaves. It was so popular that an American company developed its own non-alcoholic coca drink, which you may have heard of: Coca-Cola. Incidentally, Coca-Cola is the only coca product in the world that may be exported overseas (the cocaine component is removed first). For the most part, though, the Western reaction to coca use has been negative, ever since the Europeans first penetrated the Andes and railed against the “pagan” practice. In fact, the 1961 ban is largely based on an unsubstantiated 1949 report claiming that coca made the natives lazy and drove up poverty levels.
This history lends a sense of urgency to the development and marketing of this new slew of coca products. On Friday, indigenous activists organized a mass protest of the U.S. opposition, with thousands of Bolivians gathering to chew coca outside the U.S. embassy in La Paz and throughout the country. For them, legalization is but a long overdue recognition of the value of indigenous culture.
And then there’s the economic development of the Andes. Of course, in America, where little-known “exotic superfoods” like açai and goji can suddenly become enormously popular, “valuing indigenous culture” is often just fancy talk for a marketing opportunity. Retailers have successfully sold us on products like agave nectar with lovely narratives of pristine streams, muggy rain forests, mysterious ancient origins and so on. We seem to respond to these stories, believing in the exotic, “natural” authority of the natives. Maybe we can chalk up this reaction to Western guilt, or maybe we are genuinely excited to be exposed to another culinary culture. Either way, coca’s history is certainly long and rich enough to capture the imagination.
Why shouldn’t coca farmers be able to capitalize on the romantic ideas of post-colonial, fair-trading Westerners like everyone else seems to be doing? It’s not hard to imagine a Whole Foods display of the goods already on the market in Bolivia. Forget those pop-up ads touting the shocking truth about açai or the rare African weight-loss fruit: “Meet the energizing wonder-leaf, the ancient secret of the Andes, full of all-important B vitamins! Don’t guzzle Coke, grab a Coca!”
There are certain culinary boundaries you just don’t mess with — beloved foods that are not just synonymous with their native lands, but a source of deep local love and pride. You don’t kvetch to New Yorkers about the carbs in bagels. You don’t chide Napa Valley residents about the benefits of teetotaling. And you will pry the cheddar out of Wisconsin’s cold, dead, non-beer holding hands.
Led by Neal D. Barnard, the nonprofit PCRM shares similar goals with PETA: the promotion of veganism for the benefit of both health and animal rights. And lately, it’s had something else in common with it — attention-getting stunts. Where better to pick a fight than the heart of dairy country, with a big billboard near Lambeau Field, home of the Green Bay Packers, featuring a cheesehead grim reaper. The sign warns football fans that “Cheese can sack your health. Fat. Cholesterol. Sodium.” Don’t forget deliciousness!
Cheese, of course, is to Wisconsin what suicide-inducing rain is to Seattle: a way of life. So it’s unlikely that too many Packers fans driving Route 41 this weekend to watch the Super Bowl champions do their thing will screech to a halt in the road and declare, “Maybe I’ll just have a Miller and some soy feta today.” What the PCRM is shrewdly banking on here is the power of location. By defiantly taking its case to the heart of dairy country with an in-your-face, “cheese kills” message, the organization knows it’s sure to rile up controversy — and spark conversation.
Sure enough, the battle lines have already been drawn. Surprisingly, though, the first retort came not from angry cheese lovers but from the company Foamation Inc. — makers of the iconic cheesehead. Speaking to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, office manager Denise Kaminski declared, “We by no means would condone that. We’re a dairy state, for gosh sakes.” She reiterated Foamation’s pro-cheese stance — and proved that there are still places in America where people say “for gosh sakes.”
In a hasty display of butt covering, the PCRM’s general counsel responded that, “There’s no way that anyone could perceive this as an attack on a hat. We have no intention of impugning Cheeseheads as individuals, we have no intention of impugning Cheeseheads as articles of clothing.” I just want to take a step back here and remind everybody that we are talking about an image of the Grim Reaper. Brandishing a scythe and wearing cheese on his hooded head.
Absurd as the whole contretemps is, it does present an opportunity to examine our less-than-stellar American eating habits. The PCRM notes that we are eating triple the amount of cheese we did back in 1970 — an artery-clogging 33 pounds a year. And its list of the delicacies at Lambeau Field are enough to make even the strong-stomached reach for the Lipitor: “deep-fried Wisconsin cheese curds; Cheesehead Beer Cheese Soup, made with cheddar cheese, beer and then topped with more cheese; and nachos piled with cheddar cheese and sour cream.” And in a state where “one-third of children and half of adults are already either overweight or obese,” all that cheddar can’t be helping the public health.
But should the treats at Lambeau, as the committee has asked Green Bay Mayor Jim Schmitt, get warning labels? And is cheese, as PCRM spokeswoman Susan Levin says, a “junk food”? Surely 65 million French people would say non. Or as Mayor Schmitt calls the whole thing, that’s “kind of silly.”
We live in an all-or-nothing culture. For some, that works out fine. But not everyone who savors the occasional fondue or croque monsieur is headed down the road of arterial blockage. Dairy products, in moderation, can be a reasonable source of calcium and protein. Cheese can also be one of the most beautifully crafted, deeply complex foods human beings can create. If you think understanding wine is complex, talk to someone who knows cheese.
And that’s the distinction. Taking aim at “cheese” is like dissing “bread.” It doesn’t recognize the distinctions of varieties; it doesn’t allow for the different ways in which it can be created and consumed. Which, by the way, is not a put-down on those fried cheese curds, which sound kind of amazing.
The American diet needs to be examined, and if you’re living on all nachos, all the time, you’re begging for health problems. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that everybody driving down the road to a Packers game needs the icy finger of death wagged in their faces — especially when many of those people make their living in the industry the PCRM is trying to shame. Scolding doesn’t change minds or habits. Fear rarely does either. And though shock tactics may get publicity, do they ever really help win anyone’s goodwill? Life, health and work are far more complex than a smug message on a billboard. And maybe next time the PCRM wants to get people to cut the cheese, they can start with a campaign that doesn’t stink.
”Natural Beauty” answers that burning question once and for all, “What would you look like if you put on a year’s worth of makeup all at once?”
2. “District 9″ … with robots
Kibwe Tavares’ short film “Robots of Brixton” imagines a world where sentient machines are given inhuman treatment by humans. An interesting memorial to the 1981 Brixton riots.
3. Joey Chestnuts, official winner of Nathan’s Famous hot dog eating contest
For the fifth year in a row, Joey “Jaws” Chestnuts won Nathan’s annual hot dog-scarfing contest in Coney Island.
4. Actual winner of hot dog eating contest
Professional eater Takeru Kobayashi technically ate more ‘dogs on the Fourth than Joey (setting a world record with 69 buns and beef) , but was considered ineligible for the Coney Island event since he won’t sign an exclusive contract with Major League Eating.
The police are not here to deal with your delivery mix-up.
How many times has this happened to you? You go home and try to enjoy a nice dinner of Chinese food delivery. But when your meal arrives, they’ve got the order completely wrong!
Do you:
A) Call back the restaurant and ask for a refund;
B) Just eat the food and promise to deal with it next time;
C) Call the police
If you answered C, you are not alone. A woman in Savannah, Ga., called 911 to rectify her dinner order yesterday. This was the result:
Sadly, these kinds of calls aren’t as uncommon as you might think. In March 2009 a woman called the police after being given the wrong order of McNuggets at McDonald’s.
Regardless, it’s 2011 now and we’re all grown-ups. That doesn’t mean we expand our 911 repertoires to calling in about botched Chinese food orders. It means that we stop tying up the police phone line unless we actually have an emergency that doesn’t involve a delivery service.
McDonald’s is under attack again for force-feeding our nation’s children greasy, delicious fries. A group called Corporate Accountability International took out full-page ads today in several prominent newspapers, titled “Doctor’s Orders: Stop Marketing Junk Food to Children.“
And while this grievance might not seem new, exactly, CAI is launching another campaign on Thursday against Ronald McDonald himself, whom the watchdog group called a “Deep Fried Joe Camel.” They claim Ronald’s the equivalent of a drug pusher for MSG-addicted kids.
But how “friendly” is Ronald? A new study done by outside marketing group Ace Metric found that in a survey group of 500, an overwhelming amount found a guy with big red lips and white greasepaint more creepy than cute.
McDonald’s refuses to give up on Ronald, though, and its defense on why it needs to keep a terrifying clown as its mascot would be charming if it weren’t so ridiculous and backward. Below, five of the responses McDonald’s has given for keeping Ronald on the payroll.
3. Complaint: Too many damn clowns running around.
McDonald’s response: “There’s only one Ronald,” McDonald’s chief creative officer Marlena Peleo-Lazar said in response to several questions about how many actors portray the smiling clown.
4. Complaint: He is hurting a brand image that is trying to be more adult … like Starbucks.
McDonald’s response: He is the brand image. “It would be almost as if the Geico gecko disappeared, or the Aflac duck,” says one marketing strategist. God forbid.
5. Complaint: Ronald encourages childhood obesity.
McDonald’s response: Around 2004, McDonald’s christened Ronald as a “balanced, active lifestyles ambassador,” and stuck him in commercials where he trained for the Olympics. He got workout clothes. He got a tuxedo. He moved from McDonaldLand into the real world.
You know who can also move into the real world after being trapped in a fantasy land? Freddy Krueger.
It’s actually in CAI’s favor to have a scary mascot act as a deterrent for children trying to buy fries. It should be thanking McDonald’s for keeping such a creepy figure right in front of the golden arches.
New York Times opinion columnist Virginia Heffernan alerts us today to a “great clash” of civilizations that many of us may not even have realized was occurring: “the clash between foodies and techies.”
An intriguing premise! Who knew that there was bad blood between the geeks and the locavores; or that hackers were manning the barricades against the baleful influence of Michael Pollan and Alice Waters? I certainly didn’t, and out where I live, in Berkeley, Calif., I find it a challenge to shop for organic scallions without bumping into half a dozen iPhone app writers and free-range, vegetarian-fed egg connoisseurs. Usually, everyone is very nice to each other, (although, it is true, some of the older hippies can get grouchy when you block them from easy tofu-counter access).
But Heffernan sees culture war!
While foodies look back and see the 1950s as the marshmallow-riddled dark ages of American culture, techies see a radiant renaissance. Not only could you get frozen spinach and canned chicken stock at the supermarket, but the first commercial computer appeared. The FORTRAN programming language and artificial intelligence were developed. IBM produced the first dot-matrix printer. To a techie, who cares if some ’50s housewives opted to skip the tedium and carpal-tunnel woes of flour-sifting by using yummy Betty Crocker cake mixes? The major turn in postwar American culture was that computers were invented.
The argument, such as it is, seems to be that techies have no problem with labor-saving shortcuts — microwaved bacon! — while foodies demand that every meal be a five-course extravanganza freshly prepared from scratch from ingredients grown in your own backyard. I say “seems to be” because Heffernan does a very poor job of defining the term “foodie.”
“Foodies complain about Twitter while they make emu-egg cassoulet with creme fraiche,” she writes, and are driven “crazy” by “invocations of efficiency and convenience.”
The concept of convenience in food preparation is steeply at odds with the idea that all food is sacramental, and eating expensive, rich foods is a devotional act that is somehow also politically progressive.
I would like to believe that Heffernan is purposely trying to be jaw-droppingly provocative here by overstating her argument to get a rise out of knee-jerking malcontents like myself. Because the alternative — that she actually intends what she says in that paragraph to represent something even vaguely akin to reality — is just too depressing. Unfortunately, previous experience with Heffernan — such as her notorious declaration almost exactly a year ago that “white flight” to the iPhone and iPad were causing the (unlamented) “death of the Open Web” — suggests that we have to take her at face value.
Sure, there is an annoying subset of “foodies” who fetishize the gourmet experience and don’t fully appreciate the time constraints that limit what a working parent can put on the table for the kids (or the whopping per-pound cost of fresh salmon). But there’s a larger context that Heffernan doesn’t even bother to wave her hands at — the ecological and physiological consequences of a food industry that has taken efficiency and convenience far, far beyond the land of useful tradeoffs out into a dark realm of outright unhealthy dysfunction. Maybe Heffernan doesn’t think there’s a connection between rising levels of obesity and the kinds of foods most Americans eat today, or that monoculture corn and soybean production are an ongoing ecological disaster, but if you’re going to imagine a great cultural clash between “foodies” and “techies” then maybe, just maybe, you should strive to fairly represent the issues that are actually at the heart of meaningful critiques of the status quo.
But even more ridiculous than Heffernan’s caricature of “foodies” is the idea that the class of “techies” somehow stand in opposition to the class of people who regard the question of what to eat with some level of seriousness. Speaking as someone whose mother was taking a class in FORTRAN while pregnant with her son, and yet still happens to prefer wild-caught Pacific King salmon to farmed Chilean factory fish, I feel fully overqualified to say fiddlesticks! There is absolutely no contradiction between the premise that advances in technology can improve our life and that we could stand to pay more attention to where our food comes from and how it is “made.” Call me crazy, but I believe in rural electrification, washing machines and grass-fed beef. And indeed, the connections between the ideologies of technological liberation and the “foodie” movement” are deeper than one might immediately imagine.
I’m guessing that Heffernan may not have read her New York Times’ colleague John Markoff’s fascinating tale of how hippie values intersected with technological innovation, “What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry.” Because if she had, she’d know that the same impulses that inspire the Michael Pollans and Eric Schlossers of the world to reimagine our food system — the same passion that finds nirvana in an heirloom tomato — was also present in the hearts and minds of the visionaries who saw the personal computer and Internet as tools for human enlightenment.
Some of those hippies became Silicon Valley moguls, while some started organic farms in Sonoma County — but to this day, those value systems still merge. Since when do foodies complain about Twitter? The foodies I know are swapping recipes in a world of food blogs that offers more would-be cooks more access to information about ingredients, cooking techniques, and quick 20-minutes-of-prep dinner meals than has ever before been possible in the history of humanity on this planet. The foodies I know can use the Web to tweak the contents of the farm box full of fresh vegetables and fruits that is delivered to their front door every week! The foodies I know are quick to head to Twitter to spread the news of the latest delicious recipe or stupid column.
The foodies I know believe in progress. They believe that we can do better, that our children can grow up healthier, our environmental impact can be more sustainable, and our diets can be less controlled by the chemists who work for giant agribusiness multinationals. And they know that the communication technologies of today are awesome tools to help achieve those goals.
All hail the techie-foodie harmonic convergence! Maybe you don’t like broccoli. But I guarantee you that a little elbow grease applied to your iPhone will usher you into a magical world of broccoli wonder. It’s easy. Try it. You might like it.
Coca leaves and refined cocaine 
I am robot, hear me roar. 
The police are not here to deal with your delivery mix-up. 
Who wouldn't accept food from this guy? 
