No spring chicken

I've commented elsewhere about the tendency of local restaurants serving Coryphaenidae hippurus or Dolphin, a favorite locally caught Atlantic fish, to use the amusingly inappropriate Hawaiian name of Mahi-Mahi so that the timid tourists from New Jersey won't think they're being served one of those cute mammals.

China, which already has a partially deserved reputation for restaurant menus suggestive of the local zoo's inventory list, is afraid of a bigger problem emerging during the 2008 Olympic games; a much bigger problem than the US has with Chinese tourists suspecting canine origins of the hot dogs they see everywhere. Xinhua, the State News agency of China says that the "confusing, even ridiculous translations" found on menus are on the way out and that The Beijing Tourism Bureau has released a list of 2,753 dishes and drinks that are to be revised. No more items that "either scare or embarrass foreign customers and may cause misunderstanding of China's diet habits" please.

Don't tell the foreigners their chicken was a virgin or that the meatball wrapped in cabbage leaves is a lion's head. That sweet pudding-like dòufǔ naǒ I enjoy for breakfast? For heaven's sake, don't call it bean curd brains; they tend to believe anything, you know.

Year without China

One of the least charming things about Americans is the dog-like way we respond to the signals of our trainers. A word or gesture or toot on the dog whistle and we go after the designated enemy with all the eager bravado our little brains are capable of. Of a sudden we have an urgent desire to fetch that stick or rip that throat and rarely stop to ask whose needs we are responding to.

Of a sudden we have cartoons everywhere portraying Chinese food as poison and Chinese goods as dangerous. Some street vendor out of millions of street vendors in a place we couldn't find on a map add chopped cardboard to his dumpling filling and we know and care about that while ignoring the diner in Arkansas that puts sawdust in the sausage. The FDA finds things in farmed fish that might, after many years of eating it, possibly be detrimental, but we're not sure and we panic more then we do when we read several times a year about millions of pounds of tainted hamburger. Some toys are found that have some unspecified amount of lead in the paint and no incidents of harm and we panic. Some crook in china looked the other way when someone sold anti-freeze as glycerin and let melamine into some dog food. He was shot for it the other day, but China is now an enemy - the enemy of our economy and out health - although it accounts for about 15% of our imports.

Somehow when hundreds die from bad hamburger or spinach or peanut butter, when a restaurant chain sells a burger that's nearly 100% filler, when hundreds of thousands of cars and tires are recalled for safety concerns, when thousands of toys are pulled off the market because some kid could stick it in his ear we don't think about war with Germany or Japan or Korea whence we import huge amounts of stuff or with California or Kansas. Domestic fish, farmed and wild, contain industrial pollutants. Tap water in some places is unsafe. Domestic Chicken, beef and milk contain residues from hormones and pesticides and perhaps antibiotics. As a nation we don't care that much or feel terribly unsafe, even though people die from domestic products.

many people have died from defective Fords - we don't boycott Michigan products. Firestone built a tire that failed too often when abused - we didn't declare war on them or on Japan nor did we write books about a year without "made in Japan" much less any of the other countries we import food and manufactured goods from.

In fact we prefer imported good and we have for a long time. Whether it's California wine or Detroit automobiles, we will spend more for the imports even when they are demonstrably inferior or more dangerous. In my local grocery store, Mediterranean sea salt sells for more than Caribbean sea salt, even though the salt is identical. We will pay more for coffee with some fake foreign sounding name and a paninni is much more desirable than a toasted ham and cheese sandwich. Nearly all our decisions and most that we defend the most strenuously are based on pure prejudice and our prejudices often are plug and play items furnished us by others for their gain.

If someone now wants us to be really upset with China, but not upset with the countries we import more from, shouldn't someone ask why? Isn't it time we asked some questions of ourselves when we hear the dog whistle blow?

Look who's coming for dinner!

I know it’s fashionable to assert that there is no scientific basis for “race” and indeed you can define race in a way that makes it true, but the idea is a political one and designed to stifle discussions of population genetics in the same way as discussions and scientific investigations of human gender differences has been stifled in the interest of promoting gender equality and attempting to avoid discrimination. It’s the politics of “you can’t handle the truth” and it’s the argument that says, don’t believe your eyes, believe what we tell you. Sometimes the only way this can be discussed is through humor as when Stephen Colbert declares “I don’t see race” when of course, we can’t avoid it.

We see family resemblance because families tend to have more similar inherited features than they share with the total world population. Likewise populations that have been isolated for a great deal of time share an extended family resemblance. Recognizing this has nothing to do with racism which is about postulating that these relatively minor things constitute some sort of hierarchy in the abilities, worth and human rights of various populations.

Of course the criteria by which some people assign an individual to one race or another is subjective and not very scientific; there is a great deal of genetic variation amongst people we commonly and erroneously lump into one group and that’s because we can only see genetic variations that determine external morphology. There is a great deal below the surface and that gets to the point of all this. It’s possible that there are two unrecognized and invisible races of mankind and the only way we can tell them apart is to see whether they can taste things like a bitter synthetic compound called phenylthiocarbamide, or PTC. Some can detect it and some can’t and to those that do, like me, it tastes absolutely awful.

This has been known for 75 years but recently, the gene responsible for making me hate Brussels sprouts was isolated. An article in Science Daily postulates that this gene once served to keep our hirsute ancestors from eating poisonous fruits and vegetables: like Brussels sprouts, spinach and all that other foul smelling, evil tasting green stuff my mother tried in vain to get me to eat. Like many lethal plants, these dreadful items are rich in bitter alkaloids and many alkaloids are deadly. It’s a truly sad thing that I cannot hold these facts up to my mother as vindication: to prove that it was a token of my ability and not of my obstinacy that ruined so many dinners.

Now I don’t want to insinuate that we of the taster race are superior to those who lack the ability, but then we do have an ability that they lack – who knows what else they lack? And look at what those people eat! Would you really want one moving in next door and cooking their nauseating foods or want your daughter to bring one home for dinner?