100 Million Years of Food, page 8
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Fish and other small sea creatures comprise the lifeblood of coastal Vietnam. However, catches have been dwindling over the past few decades, and the Vietnamese are resorting to eating smaller fish. This means that more fishermen may end up relying on making fermented fish sauce to support their families. In the short term, this may give fishermen’s families an alternative source of income—and give a boost to fermented fish sauce businesses like Hang’s—but in the long term, the intensified pressure on populations of smaller fish may prove to be unsustainable. It’s a disturbing scenario, especially for an already-poor country like Vietnam. Meanwhile, at a 2013 Tokyo fish market auction, a 490-pound bluefin tuna reeled in a $1.7 million bid; this translates into roughly $250 for a single one-ounce sushi serving of the behemoth’s flesh. Tuna were once considered garbage fish by fishermen on the northeast coast of the United States, but now fish flesh has become the newest star on the nutritional stage, acclaimed for its stores of miraculous omega-3 fatty acids and vitamin D.1
High-quality sushi is an orgasmic experience in its own right, but paradoxically, quite a few people would be happy to pass on a bite. As scholars have documented, taboos against eating fish were once observed among groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Central Asia, Tibet, Mongolia, northern Thailand, many regions in Africa, England and Belgium in the Iron Age, Tasmania, and Fiji, as well as among the Norse in Greenland and North American Indian tribes like the Zuni, Hopi, Navajo, Apache, Crow, Kiowas, Comanche, and Niitsitapi (Blackfoot).2 To all these traditional fish haters, we could add a few children and adults today. In my house, when we ate a lot of fish, my mother would sometimes mutter, “I’m eating so much fish, I’m becoming one!”
When asked why they avoided fish, people gave many answers: Fish looked like snakes; fish ate people’s corpses and therefore eating fish would be equivalent to an act of cannibalism; water was sacred and therefore fish were sacred; fish were unclean; fish could not cry for help or mercy, so killing them was especially cruel; eating fish would cause one’s teeth to fall out; most commonly, they said eating fish was simply disgusting. All of these explanations may have been quite real to the noneaters, but they still do not answer the question of why so many different people around the world felt (and feel) dire revulsion at the thought of dining on a source of animal protein and fat that happened to have fins instead of feet. To make matters more complicated, many people who avoid eating meat are often fine with eating fish.3
The first drawback to eating fish that comes to mind may be the bones. Ingestion of fish bones carries the risk of piercing the esophagus or intestines, and triangular fish bones, such as those located around fish heads, can be tricky to extract from the esophagus. A second drawback is that fish meat is generally lean, and while that seems fine considering our current fat-abundant diets, too much protein in a diet can be an issue. Another concern is that top-of-the-food-chain tropical fish may accumulate toxins from a marine plankton (Gambierdiscus toxicus), which can cause ciguatera poisoning. Its symptoms—including nausea, intense vomiting, diarrhea, and paralysis may persist for several years, and it can lead to coma and even death. Worldwide, between ten thousand and fifty thousand people are poisoned by ciguatera toxins annually. Carnivorous fish may also accumulate toxins from feeding on plants, worms, mollusks, corals, and other toxic fish.4 In recent decades, larger fish have also been noted for their tendencies to accumulate mercury, PCBs, and other toxins from human-made pollution in their flesh.
Ironically, other disadvantages of eating fish in traditional times may have stemmed from the very reasons that fish are now celebrated: omega-3 fatty acids and vitamin D. Cold-water deep-sea fish have bodies that are replete with omega-3 fatty acids, since the structural flexibility of these fatty acids allows the fish’s body to compress and expand in response to changes in depth and pressure and maintain membrane fluidity in a cold environment.5 Humans cannot synthesize omega-3 or omega-6 fatty acids from scratch.6 If either is completely removed from the diets of children, growth is impaired. However, despite the fact that they are both essential, omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids often have opposing functions in the human body, with omega-3 generally decreasing inflammatory reactions (the sequence of pain, swelling, heat, and healing of wounds and infections) and omega-6 generally increasing inflammation.7
A diet of wild or traditionally raised foods has a ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 of around 1:1, but over time, that balance has skewed toward a greater proportion of omega-6 fatty acids, particularly in industrialized countries, where omega-6 is common in cooking oils and processed foods. The dietary ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 has been estimated at 1:2 among rural South Asian Indians, 1:4 among the general Japanese population, 1:6 among urban Indians (South Asia), 1:8 among Australians and Belgians, 1:9 among twenty-something Japanese, and 1:10 among Americans. In 1909, omega-6-heavy vegetable oils combined did not make up even half a percent of calories consumed in the USA, but by 1999, they provided nearly 10 percent of all calories consumed, with soybean oil alone accounting for 7 percent. The major impetus for the newfound devotion to vegetable oils in the American diet was the decision by politicians and health authorities to shift their efforts to eliminating saturated fats, beginning in the late 1960s, as part of the assault on heart disease. Feeding livestock omega-6-rich seeds instead of grasses and insects and the longer shelf life of omega-6 fatty acids also helped swing the pendulum in favor of omega-6 fatty acids in Western diets. Diets replete with these roughneck omega-6 Rambos have been investigated for possibly delaying recovery from surgery and trauma and exacerbating autoimmune diseases, heart diseases, obesity, depression, and bipolar disorder.8
On the negative side, high serum levels of omega-3 fatty acids have been associated with more aggressive prostate cancer. More worrisome for people in preindustrial societies, however, would have been the tendency for omega-3 fatty acids to increase bleeding incidents and bleeding time (omega-3 fatty acids are runny), a problem that the Inuit had to contend with.9
Besides omega-3 fatty acids, the other reason fish are heralded as the new saviors of health food is that they tend to contain a lot of vitamin D from eating vitamin-D-replete plankton and algae. More vitamin D in the diet might seem like a good thing, but in traditional societies where people worked outside all day, they had all the vitamin D their bodies needed, and taking in more vitamin D could have led to vitamin D intoxication.10 The Pacific Coast Indians ate a lot of salmon, but archaeologists observe that their children did not eat as much salmon as the adults, perhaps to avoid the effects of vitamin D poisoning, which include kidney stones, nausea, vomiting, headaches, constipation, and elevated levels of calcium in the blood.11
Troublesome bones, overly lean flesh, and overdoses of marine toxins, vitamin D, and omega-3 fatty acids can explain some of the aversion that people have often demonstrated toward fish. But we need a theory of food taboos that can explain why fish become acceptable fare in some areas and not in others—fish avoidance was historically common among Bantu speakers in East and South Africa, but neighboring groups such as Bushmen and Hottentots were not necessarily put off by fish—and why other foods, such as meat, milk, and insects, are avoided by some and relished by others.12
To solve this puzzle, consider the following problem: If you need to buy a shirt, which color should you select? There are two easy shortcuts to this problem: Buy the color that most people are currently wearing (the follow-the-crowd rule) or buy the color preferred by your favorite athlete or musician or any other public figure (the copy-your-idol rule). Either way, you leverage hidden information that your peers or idols may have about the cool thing to wear, so you won’t look like a dork on the street, as many academics tend to do. (An ex-girlfriend once asked me, “Do you dress in the dark?”)
Employing heuristics means you won’t waste time agonizing over making the right decision in those soul-draining wastelands known as shopping malls. The anthropologists Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd argue that these kinds of quick-and-dirty cognitive shortcuts allow us to acquire information efficiently, but with the result that we sometimes end up acquiring information of dubious value. As they put it, the human capacity to acquire culture was built for speed, not for comfort.13
Food taboos challenge us with the same kinds of conundrums. What should we eat? Most animals don’t need to worry about this problem, because the information is more or less wired into their brains from birth and constrained by predictable environments. Humans, on the other hand, do worry, because our brains do not come prewired with food preferences. Instead, we’re equipped with a raft of heuristics that can be applied to the problem of deciding what to eat and what to reject. Almost choked on a bone at the age of three? Does the food in question smell like sweaty socks? Parents and older siblings like it? Someone you admire and respect likes it? The great advantage of heuristic-based food preferences is that a kid can grow up anywhere in the world and quickly acquire an effective repertoire of safe foods. The principal drawback is that we sometimes end up rejecting perfectly good grub, as every parent knows and fears.
During a family dinner in Sapporo, I quizzed one of my Japanese friends about the ethics of eating whale and dolphin meat. The doctor, normally extremely congenial, but with a few glasses of wine in his system, turned beet red. “People in America eat cows and pigs! What’s the difference?” he sputtered. I described the viewpoints of Westerners with regard to dolphins and whales (smart animals, TV shows) versus cows and pigs (long association with barnyard status) but the doctor became ever more irritated, so I decided to drop the matter, lest a perfectly good evening and excellent meal be spoiled. Sometimes our food heuristics lead us into strange dilemmas. To a pescatarian, a fish has membership in the edible category, while mammals belong to the realm of friends; laudable philosophy to some, laughable to others. To the Bantu in East and South Africa, fish were despicable snakelike monsters. To Tibetans, fish were helpless beings that lacked the ability to cry out in pain and therefore deserved compassion.
Just as notions about friendship can be recruited into food psychology, so can cultural rules about eating be drawn into ethnic politics and used to fence off outsiders. When I was growing up in Ottawa, Canada, English-speaking kids would slur French Canadians with the epithet “frog,” apparently referencing their habit of including frog legs in their dietary preferences. I, too, quivered with revulsion at the thought of frog legs passing my lips, but when I overcame my prejudice as a teenager traveling in Quebec, I found the slight flesh of cuisses de grenouille, fried in a batter, to be exquisitely tender and savory, better than any chicken wing.
According to the Roman historian Plutarch, an elephant-nosed fish species was worshipped by the Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus. When the residents of Oxyrhynchus discovered that the residents of Cynopolis were eating the elephant-nosed fish, they retaliated by eating dog, sacred to the Cynopolitans, thereby triggering a civil war.14 If it seems far-fetched that humans would wage war over someone dining on their city’s mascot, consider that in Vietnam, where dog meat is commonly eaten (particularly in northern and north-central Vietnam), dog-kidnappers have been caught and killed by village vigilantes in recent years. Hang, who lost two of her dogs to thieves, told me that she would have happily joined in to thrash the miscreants. (One theory is that dogs may have been originally domesticated as a source of meat.15) A Vietnamese ex-soldier recounted to me that when he was interned in a refugee camp on a Malaysian island during the 1970s, refugees caught cooking pork in their dwellings were caned by local authorities. In southwestern Ethiopia, the Walamo were said to be so offended by people eating fowl that they killed such transgressors, though ritual experts were exempted. Clearly, one person’s totem is another person’s meal.16
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Fresh fish, generally odorless, quickly decomposes at or above room temperature, exuding its distinctive odor. People in Southeast Asia, as well as ancient Rome, discovered that the rapid decomposition of fish could be controlled and transformed into a tasty and pungent condiment. The technique is ingenious. Small fish like anchovies, sardines, and mackerel are placed in a vat and covered evenly in salt, which draws out the water from the fish and prevents the fish fats from going rancid. Spices, sugar, or rice bran may then be added, and in the case of the Romans, wine as well. The fish flesh, slowly dissolved by enzymes from the fish stomachs, feeds fermentative bacteria. Weights are used to push the fish below the surface of the accumulating liquid; if the fish are exposed to the air, they soon rot. After one year of fermenting in the sun, the amber-colored fish sauce is ready to be drawn off.17
Lower-quality fermented fish sauce stinks because it contains too much bacteria, which leads to spoilage. Factory-produced fish sauce contains sugar and added chemicals to boost the flavor of a cheap, watered-down product. Despite growing up with Vietnamese food and traveling all over Vietnam, I never knew what genuine high-quality nuoc mam tasted like until Hang emailed me an address on the outskirts of Saigon, where her fish sauce, still in the infant phase of production, could be purchased every Sunday. I arrived by motorbike at a house with no signage, no placard, not even any indication of fish sauce bottles. A young man and woman came to the gate. “Hello! I’m a friend of Hang. Is this the shop that sells nuoc mam?” I asked cheerfully.
The woman and man ushered me in. A small collection of nuoc mam bottles occupied a corner of the room. Inside the house, another young man joined us. The trio conferred among themselves in the lilting Central Vietnamese dialect, vanished into a kitchen area, and soon came out bearing a circular tin tray arrayed with rice noodles, broad leaves of lettuce, thin slices of boiled pork, a bowl of pickled fish, and two bowls of fish sauce, one with added chili. We sat on a reed mat on the floor. This fish sauce was distinctly darker than standard mass-produced factory nuoc mam. I wrapped some rice noodles and pork in a leaf of lettuce and dipped it into the fish sauce. The first bite sent a jolt through me—a remarkable medley of salty, velvety flavors, as if the little fish had been transformed into fine whiskey.
With such lively flavors jostling around the tongue, one can understand why fish sauce anchors the cuisine of the Southeast Asia archipelago, from Thailand to the Philippines, and why the Romans also celebrated fish sauce. Garum was called for in more than 75 percent of the dishes listed in the cookbook of the first-century Roman gourmand Apicius and was transported in terra-cotta amphoras across the breadth of the Roman Empire. One garum trade route started from Spain and went east to Lebanon, via Sardinia and Rome; another route plied the Rhine and Rhone rivers into the heart of Europe, and across the English Channel to consumers in London and York.18 The Roman poet Marcus Valerius Martialis observed, in an epigram on oysters: “A shellfish, I have just arrived.… Now in my extravagance I thirst for noble garum.”19
Hang’s name and mission are steadily rising in public profile, thanks to Vietnamese media. Hang is constantly texting, making calls, checking the Internet, networking, traveling around the country—all of this from a woman not yet thirty. It’s a rare and inspiring combination: a condiment that tastes heavenly, the key to a savory, low-meat, affordable traditional cuisine; shepherded to market by a visionary from a humble background; each drop of fish sauce churned and wrung by families from one of the poorest regions of a developing country, using small fish in a fermentative process that can take up to a year to complete. It’s like fair-trade coffee but with an odor evocative of boatyards and tidal pools. This area in Central Vietnam is cursed with agriculturally unproductive sandy soil, so the fish sauce venture could be an important source of income for locals. Hang is also committed to raising money for children in the area who are believed to be suffering from the lingering effects of Agent Orange. Many have serious medical conditions and lack quality care, leaving them and their families suffering in squalid conditions.
While Vietnamese cuisine, particularly in the central and southern regions, hinges on nuoc mam, I grew up with food that was a mixture of Canadian and Vietnamese, potatoes alongside rice, butter next to fermented fish sauce. Since my brothers and I whined about the smell of fish sauce—part of the confusion of being a second-generation immigrant—it was only used sparingly at our meals. To see whether Hang’s traditional nuoc mam brand tastes as extraordinary as I believe it does or whether it’s just bias from my knowledge of Hang’s methods and ideals, I purchase a small bottle of dark fish sauce. It’s the link to a culture that I once struggled to accept as my own, and it’s important that I understand my ancestral cuisine inside out, beginning with fermented fish sauce. To do that, though, I need to consult some genuine experts.
It’s been ten years since I’ve seen my first cousin Chi (Elder Sister) Vinh and her family. I first met them during my inaugural visit to Vietnam in my twenties, and I knew that Chi Vinh’s son, Duc, was a perfectionist over a soup pot, and everyone in the family had strong opinions about good and bad Vietnamese food. They would be perfect to judge the quality of Hang’s fish sauce.
Chi Vinh and her engineer husband, Anh Quy, have retired but still live in the same house, with the doorbell that I first rang fifteen years ago. When she sees me, Chi Vinh exclaims, “You are very thin!”
While affluent urban areas in Vietnam like Saigon have been swept up in a tidal wave of obesity in the past two decades due primarily to the replacement of walking and cycling with motorbikes, cars, TV, and video games, my weight has remained more or less the same, creating the illusion that I’ve lost weight. I reassure Chi Vinh I haven’t, not much.
“I just thought you were sick,” she responds.
By Vietnamese standards, I’m doing everything wrong: no wife, no children, no stable job, and I have no comfortable fat around my waist. These are not people to mince their words. I pull out Hang’s fermented fish sauce.
“A small present for you, Anh Quy and Chi Vinh. It’s also part of my research.”
