Silicon Valley Days » Cooking

Fermented Taro in Hawaii

Silicon Valley Dazed — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 19:32:30 +0000

I read this Organic Gardening article about farming in Kauai, and the most interesting part to me was the information on taro. The taro root serves a similar position to the potato in Hawaiian cuisine. In Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire, he describes how there were hundreds of different varieties of potatoes created to adapt to the many different growing conditions in Peru. There were also hundreds of taro varieties created in Hawaii for different environments. A disturbing trend that’s mentioned in the Organic Gardening story is how the many varieties of taro have been supplanted by only one high-yielding modern hybrid. This taro variety produces more, but it needs a lot of fertilization. The problem is that, just as with the potato, this lost of genetic diversity could lead to a wipespread wipeout of the main foodcrop. In addition to disease resistance, there’s also probably a loss of the many different flavors among the hundreds of varieties of potatoes and taro.

Although the only use of fermented potatoes I could quickly find is in the production of vodka, many Hawaiian natives prefer fermented taro. The article has a vivid description of 2-week old poi (mashed taro) with a fuzzy layer of white mold on top which is stirred into the poi. This fermentation provides a source of beneficial bacteria to the Hawaiian diet. I wonder why potatoes aren’t fermented for probiotic reasons.

Modern day food muckrackers

Silicon Valley Dazed — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 13:09:08 +0000

I remember reading The Jungle by Upton Sinclair in high school and reveling in the gory tales of human body parts and other contaminants entering the assembly line of the meatpacking plants of Chicago. In college, I would read Diet for a New America and have the image of hundreds of chickens soaking in shit baths impressed upon my mind. I sublimated these books and happily ate my way without really thinking about my food over the past two decades. Recently, I’ve become engrossed in the works of the modern day food muckrakers via books like Fast Food Nation, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Fatland, In Defense of Food, and Eating Animals. What I take away from these books is that we shouldn’t take for granted what we eat. Not in a sense that we should be thankful that we have enough to eat, but we should really take a close look at WHAT we are eating and how it finally arrived on your plate. As the decade ends, I’ll try to think and act more upon my daily food decision, not only for me, but also for my children. I find it sad that over a hundred years after the publication of the Jungle, the U.S. is still having so many issues with its food. The battle will probably never end though as long as assembly line production methods and profits are paramount factors for modern civilization’s food supply.

Cooked baby back ribs on the grill

Silicon Valley Dazed — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 04:34:32 +0000

I cooked two racks of baby back ribs that I bought from the farmer’s market on the grill tonight. It only took a little over an hour on low heat with the ribs between the two burners. I wish there had been more meat on the ribs since Ally, Jen and I quickly ate the … Continue reading »