[Sca-cooks] Question for Adamantius?

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Dec 9, 2009, at 8:24 AM, Elaine Koogler wrote:

> In a way, that's not surprising...one of my students spoke with some
> Japanese teachers who were spending the summer with her and asked about
> period food in Japan.  She was astounded to discover that they couldn't
> figure out why we cared about their food history...and they said that they
> eat now pretty much what was eaten then.

My mother-in-law (who is fairly literate considering she was educated by her mother on a farm in China) has a somewhat disturbing idea that the study of the past is somewhat overrated. I suppose this is not unprecedented among people who have suffered a lot. We could hope for the "learn from the past lest we repeat it" school of thought, but I can understand why one might espouse the other.

But I've also had extensive, rather astonishing conversations with people from various parts of China, prepared to swear that maize, capsicums, potatoes, etc., are all native to China and have been a part of their cuisine[s] since the emergence of homo erectus.

I can't remember the name of the film, probably from the 80's or 90's, about an Indian medical student posing as a fashionable Harley Street physician in London. It features a similar conversation in which the young man, in an attempt to find common ground with the father of some young lady he's been seeing, mentions the number of Hindustani words that have attained common usage in English, only to have the father angrily assert that "pajama", "bungalow", etc., are not only perfectly good ENGLISH words, but have been since at least the Roman occupation of Britain.

Adamantius






"Most men worry about their own bellies, and other people's souls, when we all ought to worry about our own souls, and other people's bellies."
			-- Rabbi Israel Salanter