black holes and gray matter. in one thousand tangos.

             

A panel from Les Séductions du Palais, with a recipe from the Shang dynasty (1570 to 1045 B.C.) for bear paw states that the ”the bear paw cannot be eaten immediately after it is cut off. It is necessary to let it go rancid for one or two years before cooking.”

Here’s a sample recipe:

“1 bear paw, 2 ounces of honey, 1 teaspoon of salt, 20 ounces of chicken broth, 1/3 ounce of ginger and 7 ounces of grain alcohol.

The paw was to be peeled and cleaned, coated in a thick layer of honey, cooked in a pot at low heat for an hour, rinsed, then simmered for three hours in a pot with the chicken broth and seasonings on the embers of a fire. 

“Today, bear parts are in high demand at black markets throughout Asia. The prized organs and extremities have reportedly been used in medicine to cure anything from sexual impotency to a fever. On the dining table, bear paws are used in soup and have even been known to get turned into ash trays.”

Heartbreaking black markets of Asia | The Week

Boucherie Chevaline, or horse butcher, Paris “Certainly, the French share the global concern about lack of transparency in food labeling and the untrustworthiness of processed foods. But they also defend their right to grow, raise, hunt and eat whatever they want. And they are convinced they do it better than anyone else. “To give all of Europe the idea that horse meat is an illicit, dangerous product” is a “demonstration of English ethnocentrism that is also applied to rabbit, andouillette, frogs and tête de veau,” wrote the food critic Jean-Claude Ribaut on the Web site of Le Monde. “The butchers are laughing.” France, after, all gave us the very idea of cuisine, and food here holds an almost sacred place in the culture. Never mind that 40 percent of the French food budget is now spent on prepared dishes and frozen products, according to a 2012 report commissioned by the Ministry of Agriculture. […] Additionally the report noted that cooking is a source of pleasure and enrichment for 94 percent of the French, and ‘health, pleasure and conviviality’ are more important to them than money in determining what to cook and eat. ‘France is still far away from the Anglo-Saxon culinary model,’ the report said, which it defined as ‘no matter what, no matter when, no matter how and often alone.’” Lumière | They Eat Horses, Don’t They?

Boucherie Chevaline, or horse butcher, Paris

“Certainly, the French share the global concern about lack of transparency in food labeling and the untrustworthiness of processed foods. But they also defend their right to grow, raise, hunt and eat whatever they want. And they are convinced they do it better than anyone else. “To give all of Europe the idea that horse meat is an illicit, dangerous product” is a “demonstration of English ethnocentrism that is also applied to rabbit, andouillette, frogs and tête de veau,” wrote the food critic Jean-Claude Ribaut on the Web site of Le Monde. “The butchers are laughing.”

France, after, all gave us the very idea of cuisine, and food here holds an almost sacred place in the culture. Never mind that 40 percent of the French food budget is now spent on prepared dishes and frozen products, according to a 2012 report commissioned by the Ministry of Agriculture. […]

Additionally the report noted that cooking is a source of pleasure and enrichment for 94 percent of the French, and ‘health, pleasure and conviviality’ are more important to them than money in determining what to cook and eat. ‘France is still far away from the Anglo-Saxon culinary model,’ the report said, which it defined as ‘no matter what, no matter when, no matter how and often alone.’”

Lumière | They Eat Horses, Don’t They?

“As the three continued their work, they noticed something else that was remarkable: again and again one group of people appeared to be particularly unusual when compared to other populations—with perceptions, behaviors, and motivations that were almost always sliding down one end of the human bell curve. In the end they titled their paper “The Weirdest People in the World?” (pdf) By “weird” they meant both unusual and Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. It is not just our Western habits and cultural preferences that are different from the rest of the world, it appears. The very way we think about ourselves and others—and even the way we perceive reality—makes us distinct from other humans on the planet, not to mention from the vast majority of our ancestors. Among Westerners, the data showed that Americans were often the most unusual, leading the researchers to conclude that “American participants are exceptional even within the unusual population of Westerners—outliers among outliers.” Given the data, they concluded that social scientists could not possibly have picked a worse population from which to draw broad generalizations. Researchers had been doing the equivalent of studying penguins while believing that they were learning insights applicable to all birds.” We Aren’t the World (Why Americans Are the Weirdest People in the World)

“As the three continued their work, they noticed something else that was remarkable: again and again one group of people appeared to be particularly unusual when compared to other populations—with perceptions, behaviors, and motivations that were almost always sliding down one end of the human bell curve.

In the end they titled their paper “The Weirdest People in the World?” (pdf) By “weird” they meant both unusual and Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. It is not just our Western habits and cultural preferences that are different from the rest of the world, it appears. The very way we think about ourselves and others—and even the way we perceive reality—makes us distinct from other humans on the planet, not to mention from the vast majority of our ancestors. Among Westerners, the data showed that Americans were often the most unusual, leading the researchers to conclude that “American participants are exceptional even within the unusual population of Westerners—outliers among outliers.”

Given the data, they concluded that social scientists could not possibly have picked a worse population from which to draw broad generalizations. Researchers had been doing the equivalent of studying penguins while believing that they were learning insights applicable to all birds.”

We Aren’t the World (Why Americans Are the Weirdest People in the World)

claytoncubitt: Legend has it that Mardi Gras Indians originated as a show of respect for the neighboring Native American tribes that sheltered runaway slaves. Comprised of working class men and women, the Indians sew their own beaded costumes all year in preparation for Mardi Gras. Weighing up to 130 lbs and standing as tall as 10 feet, the costumes are different each year. But also, underneath the Indian imagery, intermixed with it, is African imagery and chants. As one big chief said, the costumes were also a way to celebrate their African heritage in a hostile culture. Mardi Gras has a long tradition of this, from the Indians to the gay ball culture, anything is possible when everyone is in masks.

claytoncubitt:

Legend has it that Mardi Gras Indians originated as a show of respect for the neighboring Native American tribes that sheltered runaway slaves. Comprised of working class men and women, the Indians sew their own beaded costumes all year in preparation for Mardi Gras. Weighing up to 130 lbs and standing as tall as 10 feet, the costumes are different each year.

But also, underneath the Indian imagery, intermixed with it, is African imagery and chants. As one big chief said, the costumes were also a way to celebrate their African heritage in a hostile culture. Mardi Gras has a long tradition of this, from the Indians to the gay ball culture, anything is possible when everyone is in masks.

claytoncubitt: Most people have heard the song Iko Iko, but they don’t know it’s a New Orleans classic that portrays a Mardi Gras Indian battle. Besides the Big Chief, there’s a Spy Boy who runs ahead looking for other tribes, and a Flag Boy who carries a symbolic flag to wave and warn the Chief when the Spy Boy spots trouble. Near the Chief is the Wildman, who is kind of like his hype man during battles.

claytoncubitt:

Most people have heard the song Iko Iko, but they don’t know it’s a New Orleans classic that portrays a Mardi Gras Indian battle. Besides the Big Chief, there’s a Spy Boy who runs ahead looking for other tribes, and a Flag Boy who carries a symbolic flag to wave and warn the Chief when the Spy Boy spots trouble. Near the Chief is the Wildman, who is kind of like his hype man during battles.

“MOSCOW — After 20 years of opining on weighty bilateral issues like NATO expansion and ballistic missile defense, the political analyst Nikolai V. Zlobin recently found himself trying to explain, for an uncomprehending Russian readership, the American phenomenon of the teenage baby sitter. In Russia, children are raised by their grandmothers, or, if their grandmothers are not available, by women of the same generation in a similar state of unremitting vigilance against the hazards — like weather — that arise in everyday life. An average Russian mother would no sooner entrust her children’s upbringing to a local teenager than to a pack of wild dogs.

But of course much in everyday American life sounds bizarre to Russians, as Mr. Zlobin documents meticulously in his 400-page book, “America — What a Life!” […]

With the neutrality of a field anthropologist dispatched to suburbia, Mr. Zlobin scrutinizes the American practice of interrogating complete strangers about the details of their pregnancies; their weird habit of leaving their curtains open at night, when a Russian would immediately seal himself off from the prying eyes of his neighbors. Why Americans do not lie, for the most part. Why they cannot drink hard liquor. Why they love laws but disdain their leaders. […]

He is not the first Russian to engage in this exercise. In 1935, Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov, Soviet satirists, embarked on a road trip across the United States. Their book, “One-Story America,” described its residents’ earnestness (“Americans never say anything they do not mean”) their provinciality (“curiosity is almost absent”) and the ubiquity of advertising, which, they wrote, “followed us all over America, convincing us, begging us, persuading us, and demanding of us that we chew ‘Wrigley’s,’ the flavored, incomparable, first-class gum.” […]

[Zlobin] devotes many pages to privacy, a word that does not exist in the Russian language, or in the airless human mass that forms when Russians wait in line. Americans, he reports, prefer to converse at a distance of at least four feet.

“I suppose that in a typical Russian line, your average American would lose consciousness,” he writes. “Any touch to an American is taken as a violation of his personal space, so in the U.S., as a rule, people do not take each other by the elbow and do not tap each other on the shoulder if they want attention, they do not embrace each other like brothers.””

Book Translates American Minutia for Russians | NYT

©2011 Kateoplis