Pan

I don't like the taste of green peppers; I don't mind the taste of ripe bell peppers (yellow, orange, red, etc.). But all bell peppers are tough on my stomach. I have a limited tolerance for them, but really prefer to avoid them.

You sound like my Baba (grandmother): "Every day I die a little." Sheesh. I mean, I get your point and all, but...

Now, now, is that fair? There are assholes and criminals everywhere. There might not be delivery menus left at doorstops everywhere, though.

Yet some of them do, anyway, with pride, which goes back to the personal choice question. But another salient fact is that I could afford to cook my own food much more often but don't, because as a single man, I prefer to eat good, inexpensive restaurant food. It's not as healthful as what I'd cook would be, but it's tasty and I don't find it as rewarding to cook for myself. Things might change if I moved somewhere else or I had a girlfriend who enjoyed eating my food. So there you go.

Your point about overgeneralizing is well taken. And I did offer a disclaimer. It's not that you're implying that the poor are responsible for being poor, but that they're responsible for being malnourished, and the case history I offered was of a very responsible person being hungry, having been reduced to pennilessness and not having eaten anything in two days (and this was in any case a slim woman). I doubt that's the most extreme case one can find. Hunger does exist among plenty, both in generally well-to-do countries like the U.S. and much poorer ones in Africa and so on. As you said, we shouldn't overgeneralize: Personal responsibility on the part of the poor is only part of the issue, though I agree it's important.

Well, poor people certainly have less access to a decent education. Would we all agree on that?

In addition to finding all the flambees impressive and fun, I liked the Galloping Gourmet's liveliness. He was a lot of fun to watch, and I know that many of my 1st- and 2nd-grade classmates as well as the food service workers in the lunchroom at my public school enjoyed watching his show during lunchtime. I enjoyed Julia Child, too. I don't know whether I really learned that much about cooking from either of them, but I liked their enthusiasm and joie de vivre before I knew any French expressions like that.

Do you buy those? I remember hearing a story about an upland Thai village, where there was according to the report a misguided aid program that promoted strong pesticides that ended up making people sick, so the villagers bought only the insect-eaten vegetables at the market and refused to touch the ones that looked perfect. Now, I don't think we're dealing with anything that drastic in these parts, but still, I'm interested to know what you do with that information.

I never heard that one. Why not? Do people want to eat dirt (let alone pesticides)?

I'm allergic to those, too (yes, peeled, roasted, whatever). For some reason, though, chilis are fine.

I was a fan of the Galloping Gourmet when I was in first grade. He put his food on fire!

Why propose only a simple, extreme, and wrong solution for a complex problem? If there's a complex problem, the solution isn't to throw up an extreme, unacceptable "solution" as a straw man but to deal with the problem in a whole series of different ways. One idea that I believe has been tried is subsidies. Someone who's studied the results may be able to comment on whether and to what extent that's helped to encourage businesses to locate in and serve poor neighborhoods. JohnL, there is no doubt that personal responsibility is important for the poor and rich alike, but I'm very uncomfortable with any implication that the only reason that people are poor is because they're irresponsible, not because they were laid off, got sick and were fired, got burned out of their houses, got abandoned by their husbands or boyfriends, had no medical insurance to pay for a sudden health emergency, etc., etc. I don't know if you do mean to imply such things, so this isn't meant to be personal, and I apologize in advance if it comes across that way. But I think it's an issue that needs to be addressed. My viewpoint on this is affected by my experiences as a professor at community colleges in New York. When I was at Bronx Community College, there was one terrific student I had one semester who stopped showing up a couple of weeks before the midterm exam. I ran into her on campus a week or two after the midterm, told her I had been worrying about her, was glad to see her, and asked her how she was. She told me that her boyfriend had left her and her little daughter, she had been laid off from work, and she had been evicted from her apartment, and as a result, she was on campus to withdraw from all her classes. She also told me that she hadn't eaten for two days. I took out my wallet and was going to give her $5 so that she could get the roast chicken special at the local Dominican restaurant, but she told me to put my wallet away and said that there was a shelter downtown that would feed her and her daughter. This woman was doing straight-A work in my class, participated well, and was in every respect a model student. The story does have a happy ending, in that the following semester, she had a new apartment and a new job and was able to register for my course again and earn an A for a final grade. But the point is, even very responsible people can be hit by combinations of disastrous events that leave them homeless, jobless, hungry, and reeling. And as a matter of fact, there but for the grace of God (or whoever/whatever) go all of us. Think about it: The property you own can all be destroyed, the insurance companies could go belly up, the Stock Market could crash, the monetary system could collapse. Do these things sound extreme? They are. But even more extreme things can and have occurred throughout the world. Consider some of the people caught up in the tsunami in the Indian Ocean, for example. How wealthy do you think the formerly rich people in coastal Aceh and Sri Lanka are today? Now, reduce such extreme events to more prosaic individual disasters, and that explains a lot of the poverty in a country like the U.S.

I haven't actually checked Chinatown for them yet....the place that I found that sells them is in Alexandria. I'm sure the places in Chinatown will have them though. I've never tried the ones in a can...are they good too? ← Not bad at all, but nowhere near as good as the fresh ones. There's a kind of complexity (I'm tempted to say tartness, but people will misunderstand) that the preservation in syrup obliterates. Daniel, $3.50/lb. and $10/3 pounds for really high quality lychees is a good price in New York. I don't really expect to find anything passable for much less (maybe $2.50/lb. could be possible, but perhaps not this year).

If you're really hungry, go over to Yemen Cafe & Restaurant on Atlantic Av. For a more regular-sized meal, you can try Water Falls Cafe, also on Atlantic. I have yet to have anything savory there, but it always smells good in there, their sweets are good, and the place has gotten a lot of good mentions here and elsewhere. They serve Levantine food.

Alright, I did a web search and found out that rau ram is the Vietnamese name for what's called daun laksa (laksa leaf) in Malay.

This thread seems to be fading again. Obviously, nothing happened on the 10th. Shall we shoot for the 19th? The evening of the 18th or 17th? All look possible for me at the moment (but Father's Day is this coming Sunday, right?) The following weekend would look approximately the same for me. And the next question is, where? What shall we do, get a list of people who are available and then take a vote on where to go?

Helenas, where did you get that recipe for laksa? I guess rau ram is a name for the green leaves? In what language? Is there Vietnamese laksa or something?

Post-script: There's a play based on the Arab-Israeli Cookbook (or vice versa?), and so called. Read the rest here: Food and conflict merge on stage in 'The Arab-Israeli Cookbook'; After its West End success in 2004 Soans' play takes Los Angeles by storm

Read more about the honey of Socotra here: "Nectar of the gods, the world's most coveted honey" Have any of you ever had any?

I'm guessing that they're for sale in the little Chinatown in DC, right?

What do you mean by a "parallel argument"? Junk food will still be cheaper and easier to procure and carry, require no storage or preparation. ← And cheaper for the customer to purchase than high-quality fresh fruit and vegetables, in general, right? Which would be a relevant point.

Wow! didn't know that. How do they make those so supperior to other substitutes them? let say, how do you make a thing that mocks the texture of such a thing as duck? ← I've seen it argued that the thing that makes it best is that it isn't made to really be so much like duck, but good for its own sake. But when I was in Hong Kong, there was a little storefront that made wonderful vegetarian dim sum, and the things they made did taste and feel like ham, cuttlefish tentacles, and so on. I really have no idea how they did it.

John, I wonder what would happen if we brought price into the equation. How much does that good produce at a corner market in Washington Heights cost vs. the price for supermarket processed foods of lesser quality? Also, while immigrant communities like Flushing, Chinatown, and Washington Heights indeed have loads of markets that stock both fresh and processed staples of the local "ethnic" cuisines, what about heavily African-American (NOT Caribbean-American) neighborhoods? Yes, there's a Fairway way west near the Hudson River (which is not that convenient to much of Harlem), but that opened only a few years ago. Plus, Harlem has been on the way up (and starting to gentrify) for several years. I'd like to know what the situation is like in Brownsville, East New York, and Bed-Stuy.

Hey, you could have done a lot worse. One thing that's nice about Hot & Crusty is that at least some of their branches are open either 24 hours or really, really late (I forget which).

Thanks for getting back to us. Just FYI, Hot & Crusty is a chain. Here are the Yellow Pages Online results for a search of "Hot and Crusty" in Manhattan.