Food for thought

Porco is a creature of habit – 25 years after he left secondary school, he still eats the same stuff for lunch almost every day. Fried chicken, sambal sotong and bean sprouts from a Malay rice stall. Same stuff, different stall. As Mr Ping (Kungfu Panda’s father – and yes, he is a bird so go figure) says “we are noodle folk, broth runs through our veins”. We are what we eat.

That said, I am not sure if I want my daily lunch to be my last supper. Porco has been reading a book about 50 chefs and what they want for their last meal. Foie gras figures a lot but then so does context. Where you eat, who you eat with and even the background music. Perhaps in this case, it’s a question of what you want being a function of who you are – so chefs have to eat what they have to cook so they end up liking what they have to cook. So much for work-life balance. I once met a chef who was appalled that I’d never had caviar and Krug – he felt I hadn’t lived and he had to remedy that immediately – never mind that I was 20 years old at the time. Context? You want context? You can’t handle context!

At some level, food is about being fed and probably the best meals you’ve ever had are the ones when you’ve needed or wanted food most. So for his last meal, Porco wants what he had after every swimming lesson when he was young (and cold, tired and very hungry) – pork porridge with a raw egg, some spring onions and coriander, a bit of pepper and soy sauce.

Love in a time of cholera

Well, not quite but the most visible symptoms of the swine flu non-pandemic have been paranoia and stupidity – on Wednesday (about a week after the threat level had been raised to orange) the landlord of the building where Porco works announced the commencement of screening for all tenants and visitors to the building on Friday. Yesterday, the threat level was reduced to yellow. No screening today – what a surprise. Last weekend at the public library, they took everyone’s address details but not their temperature – so they can find us if someone gets sick, but they don’t worry about preventing sick people from walking into the place, talk about pearls of wisdom before swine.

And another thing – the stuff looks treatable and apart from cases in Mexico, not many people are dying. I know there were a couple of deaths in the US but those looked like they were not getting treatment until it was too late. Is it something about the state of healthcare in Mexico? Or is it a question of – death, where is thy sting?

Porco’s brother – who has an advanced degree in epidemiology – thinks it is more about life and less about death. He thinks it’s about the way the animals we farm for food lives – pack them in and pump them full of antibiotics. Most of the time everything goes as planned and nothing happens. Once in a while, the drugs don’t work and the sickness gets to people. Like a bad case of agricultural terrorism, people need to be vigilant all the time but the pigs (or more specifically, the viruses) need only be lucky once in a while.

As the words of the Maori haka go – Ka Mate! Ka Ora!