Modern Media's Communication Crises

    

    It's rarely pleasant but always interesting and informative to see what happens to social circles when communication hubs change.

I restarted this blog in part to ensure there was some sort of nominally independent, vaguely stable location where I could be found or contacted, as well as ensure I had a place to write without overmuch bother. Not that I really cared about being bothered before. Moderating my Twitch stream is an exercise in real-time manners management, so comments I can take my time to respond to are easy.

But that's not what I consider a concern. It's that the vast majority of the Internet's everyday interpersonal communication has been slowly, deliberately guided into very narrow channels, and funneled through a shrinking number of websites and services. Nominally for user convenience, but underneath it's mostly for data mining and ad placement. These things happen slowly, and companies tend to willingly do it at a loss for a long while- because they can afford to. Eventually the public stagnates sufficiently to become a captive audience, at which point comes inferior service, ad farms, and price gouging. Case in point: the car services and bnb-makers. The notion of "XYZ-as-a-(expensive subscription) service" for something that used to be a product is another major worry. I need look no further than the OS on this machine to see the problem with that- fundamental components like a word processor now require logins? Authorizations? It's a terribly unethical attempt to gouge the consumer, and that's on every PC around the world! 

Now the bird is circling the train, but Discord still exists, the mammoth is slowly growing, and Jack's second try seems to have gained an unfortunate amount of momentum. They're all rather fragmented though, and don't seem to be able to offer as much of the streamlined contact and information transfer that's been de rigeur all through these Years Of Plague. Worse yet, so much of modern life is internet-adjacent, what happens when a major online nexus withers and dies? The potential loss of past archives would be immeasurable... and would make for obvious easy ransom demands from the ethically bankrupt tech sector- whoops, tautology!

The idea of reestablishing a social media presence is nothing new, but there's also a lot of potential social baggage involved. Will you remember everyone? Can you contact them? Will you contact them? The machinations can become very complicated very quickly, even for those not 'aggressively online'.

Perhaps someday I won't be the one that reaches out first to reconnect.

Would much really change, I wonder?

Stop Asking For The Cheap Stuff- and No Billionaire Earned All That Money.

Courtesy of Eater SF- We've got a scoop on some local pasta supply companies trying to spin pedestrian product as affordable rather than simply... uninspiring? I don't want to say their product is bad, because I've eaten it and it's not. A major part of what makes restaurants appealing is scale- the ability to make more flavor than a home kitchen because more time and resources are devoted. These pasta joints just aren't very interesting. The pasta they sell is solid, but the composed dishes are no trick to replicate in part or in full, even with standard grocery store items.

But that's not the issue, not to me. What upsets me most is the approach and the mindset behind the concept.

"...the hospitality industry needs to figure out how to provide an inexpensive restaurant experience for customers since there’s certainly an audience for it. 'With the approachable, priced-less restaurant experience, there’s just an opportunity there that’s unserved'..."

Utterly absurd. There's such blatant desperation from struggling industries to reestablish the mindset of pre-pandemic ‘normalcy’. They aim to distract the general public from the fact that everything was already terrible- and that 'affordability' was treated as a selling point instead of more rightly as a warning sign.

'An inexpensive restaurant experience' is, to my mind, a cultural hazard. People get the idea that X or Y should be cheap, and then have the temerity to act surprised when things become popular, prices go up, and quality goes down. 

In short: Prepared food is a luxury item. Behave accordingly.

However, the notion of prohibitive expense is also deliberately engineered. The inability to have sufficient free time for one’s own cooking (or to garner the funds to properly compensate hugely underappreciated food industry staff) is almost entirely the fault of universally inadequate, deliberately hamstrung wages, salaries, and other compensation.

Such overarching systemic flaws come from the efforts of those who possess gratuitous, superfluous wealth and entirely undue influence. Too much hoarded at the top, too much attention aimed at the bottom, and too little attention to the social and cultural obligation to provide a given quality of life.

Fixing all of this is easy. It just requires the willingness to actually commit. It means making some very wealthy people very unhappy and less wealthy, but that's worth doing any day that ends in 曜日.

Cookbook Review: "The Fine Art of Chinese Cooking", by Dr. Lee Su Jan

 

Modern cookbooks are a marvel of marketing and engineering. Awash with elegantly placed photos and pathos-steeped stories, all punctuated by just enough recipes to attempt at justifying the expense. They all too often see service as coffee table books or shelf decor, and little more besides. A shame.

As someone who takes cooking fairly seriously, what I look for in a cookbook is honestly quite simple. I want recipes, and I want the foundations from which they are built. The latter often includes solid amounts of context, be it from other recipes, the industry itself, or just history in general. I suppose you could get away with calling it 'flavor text'. Ahem.

The classic, best-known example is Julia Child's 1961 compilation, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking". Full to the brim with hundreds of recipes that have been deftly sectioned, each with a foreword to add background and useful bits of information about how to combine or modify the recipes for your audience of choice.

A book much more modern that does similar things is Tom Collichio's "Think Like A Chef". One of the cornerstones of my personal collection -when I had room to keep it, at least-, it teaches a home cook how to think about and prepare food in a manner akin to that of a professional while still imparting large amounts of useful information. These include flavor combinations, seasonality, and alternative or unconventional ways to use ingredients, all of which are fundamentals in a chef's arsenal.

But. We must return to the past, to make a vital note. There is another book. One that did everything Julia's book did for French food... but for China. This is "The Fine Art of Chinese Cooking", by Dr. Lee Su Jan. Published in 1963, it takes a no-nonsense approach to outlining the fundamentals of what has come to be thought of as contemporary Chinese-American cuisine. Realizing that the Kennedy-era American cook would never be able to find the wealth of authentic ingredients Chinese food needed, the author turned to recipes that used the basics. In doing so, he taught not only ways to prepare dinner, but the fundamentals of Chinese cooking technique, and the philosophy behind those techniques.

Seeing the pattern here?

There is virtually nothing of the author itself in the book, which tells strongly of his academic leanings. Most all modern cookbooks are heavy with anecdotes and vignettes to fill space and keep the casual buyer interested. The first third of this book has no recipes at all! But it lays the foundation of thousands of years of Chinese history, and reads most engagingly, each chapter discussing a new and vitally important part of Chinese cooking while providing background and encouraging further independent research.

Brilliantly informative even today, the book has upwards of two hundred recipes, a worthy note on its own considering the manuscript has all of 234 pages. Admittedly many of them are derivative, but that was almost certainly intentional. The underlying purpose was to show versatility- that a simple preparation can be nudged in many directions to please many audiences without harming flavor or legitimacy (I do try to avoid using 'authenticity', it being a painfully loaded word these days). Doing this would have given readers confidence to experiment and improve their recipes- something many cooks of the era would have hesitated to consider. Some of the recipes might be intimidating. Don't let them scare you. Everything I've tried works.

The primary drawback to this book is that it's A: hard to find, and B: dated. At many points the author makes substitutions for authentic ingredients, citing their inaccessibility- things like scallions, ginger, and sesame oil. Don't laugh! The modern cook has access to more ingredients than the author would ever have imagined.

Where I live in California, I have my pick of half a dozen Asian or Indian specialty grocery stores within a ten minute drive. in 1963's California, I would likely have had to drive from here to San Francisco's Chinatown to procure those same things! And that's in a state that's had a massive Asian population since the days of the intercontinental railroad. Imagine what a Midwestern housewife would have had to go through!

I recommend finding this book if you can. Try your libraries first- I haven't found it online except for a handful of secondhand copies. Really, though- any serious cook, anyone with an academic bent or a love of food, anyone who wants to learn how to cook Chinese style, and anyone who wants to appreciate how far the world has come in embracing other cultures will find this book a precious gem.

Birthday Musings

I had mine recently, and now I share an age (among other things) with Buck Godot. I didn't celebrate, really- though being invited to another friend's party over the weekend was nice since his birthday is the day before mine. (I'd have been invited regardless, but being the guy in my social circles who has the chafing dishes comes in handy sometimes.) 

As for my own, it was peaceful and quiet. I spent the day mostly at home. When my beau returned from work, he had a heartfelt birthday card and, in an inspired moment, a basil plant in lieu of a bouquet of flowers. Honestly delighted. Could not have been more pleased^^

Birthdays were never that big a deal for me growing up. Being in the summer meant I never got to bring in cupcakes or whatever for the class to celebrate with, and that everyone I knew was a long way off. Once in a while we tried parties, but most of them never panned out. Didn't exactly have a lot of friends growing up, either, so I hardly remember the lack even though I never really learned 'how to party', as it were.

In a lot of ways, birthdays are like Christmas. They aim to condense a year's worth of goodwill and kindness into a single day, and lose most of it in the process. Instead of that, why not do small things regularly? 

What makes people remember they're cared for? Repetition. A grand gesture in a time of need has little value if even minimal regular attention would have prevented that need in the first place.

Cookbook Review: Madam Wong's Long-Life Chinese Cookbook

 

Very 70s, very simple and direct.

I often like to research old cookbooks. From an academic standpoint, it allows me to trace the history of food and cooking in a particular part of the world, and put various discovered works together to chronicle the gradual evolution of the culinary perspective. One of my other cookbook reviews (to be republished soon) dealt with the emergence of Chinese cooking in early 1960s America. I've discovered another volume, from the late 70s (1977, specifically), that both shows how far Asian influence had come, and also how far it had yet to go.

The book in question is "Madame Wong's Long-life Chinese Cookbook", and the huge societal change is clearly visible right under that title- "Recipes specifically designed for the West Bend Electric Wok". Fifteen years before, such a thing didn't exist anywhere in America, let alone in an English-language printed cookbook. Since many households had electric ranges that would make a wok a less than viable option, a simple and versatile tool that plugs into an outlet seems like it would have sold readily. (The fact that this book is still fairly easy to find also speaks to the popularity) On top of that, the draw of simple and exotic meals is strong- particularly those that could be prepared with only one vessel.

The author was a delightful old Szechuan lady who taught Chinese cooking in Shanghai, Hong Kong, New York, and California, even heading the department at UCLA at the time this book came out. A sprightly 71 at the time, she attributed her good health and long life to following Chinese cooking principles. And judging by her thousands of students over her forty years of teaching, and the fact that she herself lived to be 103, I suspected her skills and understanding might have held water. My reading and recipe testing within her book proved me very much right, and I hold this woman in highest regard.

Regarding the recipes, they're divided into sections by type and/or major ingredient. For example, there is a section 'Soups', but there are also sections such as 'Eggs', 'Pork and Lamb', and 'Sauces and Dips'. Each is full to the brim with recipes of varying types and difficulties, and many are found in some form on Chinese-American restaurant menus today. I noticed many duplicates from earlier Chinese cookbooks as well, and after a little recipe comparison, I found very little change. Some ingredients were altered as more authentic items became available in American supermarkets, but for the most part the dishes remained the same over the fifteen-odd years between the last major publication I have in my library.

Some of the directions in the recipes that may have been perfectly adequate at the time come across as vague. On a similar note, a number of the ingredients have the same problem: "Szechuan Preserved Vegetable"? "Soybean Pudding"? Even I was a little lost trying to figure out what some of the dishes had in mind. I thought I might have to knock this book a few steps down for being out of date and confusing, even to someone of my relatively high level of relevant skills.

Fortunately, that worry is deftly remedied in Chapter 16: Pantry Shelf and Storing Information. All the nonstandard ingredients are listed alphabetically in English, alongside the matching Chinese characters. After each name comes a thorough description, often including places they can be found and what the containers might look like when put up for sale, as well as an estimated shelf life. For those buying an exotic ingredient for a first time, this is an exceedingly valuable bit of information.

I can comfortably endorse this volume- and while I may not use the West Bend Electric Wok, I'll happily reference Madam Wong for as long as her pages hold together.

Personal Fitness: I'm Here To Help

My perspective on it is more balanced than most, I would wager. Being a chef with background in culinary nutrition helps. Spending most of my life as a high-performing athlete has given me a great deal of academic and practical insight into exercise science as well. My black belts, varsity letters, and world records didn't earn themselves, after all.

Having had to deal with several severe internal and external injuries just as the plague began left me in arguably the worst physical condition of my entire life, and that has the potential to be a Problem. People who look to me for answers trust me to know what I'm talking about, and it never hurts to look the part. I have clients who bank on my physical fitness knowledge and expertise, carefully working to mimic every stretch, swing, and smooth movement I show them. Not that anyone who knows me would doubt it of course- but given how many over-toned fitness fakers, mediocre nutritionists, or "wellness coaches" are out there, I need all the help I can get to not get lost in the noise.
(As with everything of value, the better you are, the less likely you are to try noisy, blatant, widespread advertising. The risk of overcommitting and credibility loss is simply too great.)

While far from lucrative, the work remains my duty and obligation as an educator. To make the world a better place- by making better people.

So I must return my fitness level to where it once was, and bring the willing along for the ride. But as always, it will be a rough ride. Fitness is an ephemeral thing, something everyone eventually learns. For many it's a lifelong struggle, one that so rarely results in, well, results. To be sturdy and strong, fast and agile? It's hard, grueling, time-consuming work, best started young and never stopped.

While the first steps toward fitness are always the hardest, and often the most painful, they are necessary nonetheless.

If you want help though, I'll be here.