100 Million Years of Food, page 9
My cousins’ suspicions that I’ve gone stark mad seem to deepen. Anh Quy, ever the analyst, takes off his glasses and turns the bottle around and around, examining the dark liquid. Chi Vinh asks, “Where was it produced?”
I tell them it’s from Quang Tri, a poor province in Central Vietnam. Chi Vinh really thinks I’ve lost it. “Quang Tri! What does Quang Tri have to do with fish sauce?? Phan Thiet and Phu Quoc are famous for fish sauce.”
The dinner table is piled with lovely Vietnamese dishes: papaya salad with pork, shrimp, and peanuts drenched in a vinegary dressing; and a big bowl of sour fish soup with pineapple, the family favorite. While five kids wolf down the feast, I remind My-Hanh, Chi Vinh’s daughter, about Hang’s fish sauce, and she brings it out to the table. My request seems a trifle absurd, this introduction of a Vietnamese food product among a family of food connoisseurs who were born and raised in the country. Everyone stares at the small bottle. The label has no fancy lettering or flashy colors. My-Hanh pours out a little dish of the dark amber liquid. They dip their fish into the sauce. I pray that no one gets an upset stomach. Suddenly, My-Hanh’s husband blurts out: “This fish sauce is very good!”
I’m amazed. My-Hanh’s husband and I have exchanged perhaps ten words in fifteen years. He seems to regard me as akin to lint, a minor inconvenience that came with the rest of his wife’s belongings. Yet here he is, eagerly dipping bits of fish into musky Bamboo Boat fish sauce, his face lit up as if he’s just encountered a long-lost friend. The rest of the family also begin to show signs of delight at the earthy flavors of Hang’s fish sauce. My-Hanh asks me where she can buy more Bamboo Boat fish sauce and how much it costs. The price is a significant premium over the regular factory-made fish sauce that they buy, but I sense that Bamboo Boat will pull in the customers nonetheless, once Vietnamese are reawakened to the pleasures of traditional handmade food that harkens back to their ancestors.
*
Nuoc mam is a condiment of coastal Southeast Asia (and formerly ancient Rome), but in mountainous areas of Vietnam, it’s considered a luxury. Family matriarch Aunt Tam told me in Ottawa that when she was a girl growing up in northern Vietnam, only the rich families could afford fish sauce. Everyone else resorted to tuong dau, fermented soybean paste. I asked her for the recipe for tuong dau, but she told me it was too complicated to write down. She brought a bottle of her home-brewed fermented soybean sauce to our house. It smelled like old shoes and tasted like tofu would if it went to a bar, got drunk, was mugged on the way home, and woke up with a hangover. Nonetheless, it’s a famous seasoning for committed Vietnamese vegans who abstain from fish sauce.
When I fly to northern Vietnam to learn more about fermented soybean sauce, everyone tells me the same thing: go to Hung Yen, famous for the production of this condiment. I call up my old friend Ly to help me with translation and also as an excuse to catch up. Ly and I know each other from days of dancing Argentine tango in Hanoi. Early on a Saturday morning, Ly is still as feisty as ever. I know I’m in the company of foodies because it takes us an interminable drive through Hanoi and the outskirts to find a place to eat breakfast. I glance longingly at all the noodle and bread stands through the van window, but Ly and the driver dismiss successive eating options that seem perfectly acceptable, all packed with diners at seven in the morning. We continue along several miles of asphalt until Ly and the driver agree on a grungy restaurant at the edge of the highway. We dig into beef noodle soup redolent with fatty flavor and served with a stack of fresh herbs, and accompanied by a special side of tangy bitter melon for me—worth the wait.
After breakfast punches all our pleasure centers, we locate Ban Village. Dozens of shops display racks of fermented soybean sauce by the road. Tuong ban fermented soybean sauce, formerly associated with the miserable poverty of Ban Village, has become a signature food item for tourists shuttling along the Hanoi–Ha Long Bay tourist trail. We drop in to visit Thuy, whose name had been independently passed to me twice by friends helping to connect me with the fermented soybean business in Ban Village. Short, smooth-skinned, burdened with a preoccupied air, Thuy agrees to show us around the premises, with one stipulation: “No picture-taking allowed.”
I nod my head meekly, like a novice ready to be initiated into a cult. Trieu Son is one of the biggest tuong works in Ban Village, bottling five hundred gallons of tuong ban each day. Workers carefully step along the rims of stone vats to stir wretched-smelling murky brown liquids. To the left of the stone vat area, molds are reared in a dark room on circular trays of glutinous rice as broad as an arm-span, then mixed in with dried, aged soybeans, along with precise proportions of salt and water. The vats are left to ferment for three months in the winter and half that time in the summer, after which a good batch of tuong develops the yellowy-brown sheen of “cockroach wings,” as Thuy describes it. Expensive tuong is fashioned from mold that was cultured on special fragrant varieties of glutinous rice.
At Dung (pronounced Zung) Nhat, a much smaller tuong house in the same neighborhood, the outgoing proprietor, Nguyen Dinh Lap, tells us that the stoneware vats are also critical to the quality of tuong. Vats from the province of Ninh Binh, to the south of Hanoi, have the proper mix of earth to produce the best tuong.
All morning we’ve been dipping our fingers into tuong vats to sample the fermentation process, but now it’s time for a proper tuong-based meal. At a house in Ban Village, Ly, the van driver, and I sit cross-legged on the floor with the family around plates of deep-fried tofu, fried pork sausage, sautéed morning glory, pickled spherical eggplant, and squash soup. The interior of the tofu is milky white, fresh and flavorful, with the consistency of Jell-O, set off perfectly by its honey-hued deep-fried skin. When dipped into musky tuong jacked up with chilies, it’s like a tango between an angel and the Devil, quivering white innocence wrapped in a lustful embrace. Uncle Hai, the van driver, gleefully recites a ditty about the powers of tuong:
Tuong with medium-rare goat
Eat a piece and you’re horny as a goat
Little darling stay here, don’t go home
We’ll have goat with tuong tomorrow.20
That evening, I meet Ly again to go dancing. The tango hall has the ambience of a decommissioned airplane hanger, the women dressed to kill, the men pacing the sidelines like hyenas, preening and hungry. As Ly and I spin on the floor, she is vivacious as ever, but the day of sampling decomposing soybeans like a connoisseur has taken its toll on me.
“Ly, did you get a stomachache from today?” I ask her.
“No. Why?”
Savage nips at my intestines threaten to topple me on the dance floor. Fermented soybeans may have been the condiment of my ancestors, but the bacteria in my stomach are a meek and callow lot, born and raised in a hypersterile foreign land. I am grateful that the carnage of my lunch stays in my stomach until I stagger up the four flights of stairs to my hotel room.
From the viewpoint of Western nutritional dogma, fermented fish and soybean sauce potentially harbor alarming levels of biogenic amines—microbially produced compounds associated with headaches, rashes, palpitations, hypertension, and diarrhea—as well as high levels of sodium. High sodium levels are also present in Japanese pickled vegetables (tsukemono), Korean fermented cabbage, sauerkraut, and fermented cheeses. Sodium inhibits the growth of bacteria that would otherwise spoil the fermenting food. With just enough salt, the bacteria thrive and transform their homes into praiseworthy repasts. Salt is like discipline in a classroom: too much, and the bacteria lose their self-initiative; too little, and all hell breaks loose, to the benefit of no one except the troublemakers.
Curiously, eating tsukemono and fermented full-fat dairy have both been associated with longer life spans.21 Fermented fish sauce also imparts amino acids that are potentially deficient in meat-scarce Southeast Asian diets. Fermented foods like nuoc mam, soy sauce, and soybean paste deliver a whammy of umami, or savoriness, transforming a meat-scanty meal into a satisfying feast.
If the umami flavor in this type of diet were reduced, people might compensate for the blandness of their meals by eating more sweet foods or more meat. Eating more meat in turn places serious environmental pressure on land that is far more densely populated than in North America and other Western countries. Fermented flavors help stretch limited ingredients in an area that can’t afford meat or fat.
The secret ingredient in nuoc mam and other umami foods is the amino acid glutamate, which Japanese scientists have identified as responsible for triggering the sensation of umami, a fifth unique taste, along with bitter, salty, sweet, and sour. Umami is often described as savory or cheesy. Fish sauce is one of the foods densest in glutamate. Parmesan cheese and marmite are also very high in glutamate. Other foods that harbor glutamate include tomatoes (especially when ripe), potatoes, Chinese cabbage, soybeans, prawns, and Japanese soup stock made from kelp. Mushrooms contain guanylate, which also elicits umami-ness.
However, umami substances alone do not trigger the magic of umami flavor—for that to happen, they must be paired with a nucleotide (the building blocks of DNA) such as inosinate, found in animal flesh like beef, pork, chicken, and fish, which explains why meat is traditionally cooked with glutamate-containing foods like potatoes, tomatoes, mushrooms, milk, cheese, Chinese cabbage, or fish sauce.22 Glutamate has a long history in human cuisine. However, the infamous monosodium glutamate, better known as MSG, is a different matter.
In 1907, a Japanese chemistry professor, Kikunae Ikeda, discovered how to mass-produce umami flavor by treating wheat gluten with hydrochloric acid, a process that was effective but potentially also dangerous to workers, due to the formation of hydrochloric acid vapors. Ikeda and an entrepreneur founded Ajinomoto, a giant in the food flavoring industry, and the use of MSG in cooking rapidly expanded. MSG, now produced by fermenting sugars, has been consumed for roughly a hundred years, about as long as other mass-produced convenience foods like vegetable oils, white rice, and pasteurized milk. The glutamates that are naturally found in foods are mostly bundled into proteins, like prisoners in a cellblock, and must be digested and released by enzymes before they can exert any effect. MSG, by contrast, is unbound and therefore has potentially stronger physiological effects. Since the topic of “Chinese restaurant syndrome”—a cluster of symptoms including numbness at the back of the neck, general weakness, and palpitations—was first discussed in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1968, MSG has been the focus of intense debate among both scientists and consumers. Food giants have fought hard to keep the reputation of MSG from being tarnished by paying researchers to support their product. This tactic has been extraordinarily successful, in view of the regularity with which scientists and mainstream media dismiss MSG concerns as uninformed public hysteria or even racism against Asians.
Nevertheless, bad news still trickles out. Most recently, German researchers have demonstrated that MSG can cause headaches when ingested in high quantities, which is physiologically plausible, given that glutamate is a neurotransmitter and elicits intense pain when injected into muscles.23 Chinese and Thai researchers have also discovered that higher intakes of MSG are associated with weight gain; not surprising, given that the role of MSG is to make food taste better.24 Since MSG is ubiquitous in processed foods, under a variety of pseudonyms (for example, autolyzed yeast, sodium caseinate, hydrolyzed vegetable protein), its effect on the epidemic of obesity may be considerable.25 Concerns about brain damage caused by MSG first surfaced during the late 1960s in tests on mice, but such effects have not been conclusively demonstrated in humans.26
One tantalizing question remains: Why do humans enjoy the taste of umami? The four other basic tastes have solid evolutionary credentials: Bitterness helps us avoid being poisoned; sourness helps us avoid foods that are too acidic, such as spoiled food or unripe fruits; sweetness makes us favor high-energy snacks; and saltiness directs us toward sodium, essential in the ancestral environment.27 Some researchers have speculated that umami makes us attracted to meat and other animal foods. However, raw meat and fish do not have an umami flavor—they’re almost flavorless—which may help to explain why people traditionally preferred to cook them with mushrooms, tomatoes, garlic, onions, cheese, and other umamish substances, or else to cook them over a fire, which produces delicious browning of the amino acids (also known as the Maillard reaction, after the French chemist who studied the interaction between amino acids and sugars).
We are still left, however, with the question of why evolution favored umami attraction. It’s true that garlic and onions have antibacterial properties, but these are the exceptions, as most umami-containing foods do not. However, umami foods tend to have high concentrations of the amino acid purine. As we discussed earlier, consumption of purine increases uric acid, which could have been beneficial to our ancestors after they lost the ability to manufacture vitamin C around 60 million years ago. Thus an attraction to umami could be our evolutionary adaptation to acquire antioxidant uric acid. However, these days, the attraction to the taste of umami is bad news for people who suffer from the inflammatory condition of gout, because the purine-rich foods that aggravate their gout attacks, like steak, lobster, and beer, are plentiful in industrialized countries.
*
Hang and I catch a bus to Hue, as she attempts to get her fish sauce certified by visiting an office and meeting some officials. Hang hands over a wad of cash; she seems optimistic. To celebrate, we head to the river and relax on the banks. The madness of big Vietnamese cities like Saigon and Hanoi hasn’t come to Hue—yet. We watch the barges float along the water under a pale blue sky, couples nestled together on motorbikes. Hang buys sugarcane juice in plastic bags from a sidewalk vendor. I lay out a sheet on the patchy ground, sip the juice, let the sugar gently rot my teeth as ants march in search of the sweetness.
Hang spells out her vision of green development for Vietnam: Rather than the eco-friendly but costly practices of industrialized countries, she sees traditional rural enterprises like fish sauce as being the way forward. Vietnam is too poor to afford the expensive eco-friendly practices of Western countries, and traditional rural enterprises can help develop the country’s economy in a sustainable manner. It’s a smart, sensible idea. She tells me about one of her mentors, a Vietnamese who married a Swedish woman and came back to Vietnam to help in the country’s reconstruction. He gave Hang a scholarship to study English at a critical stage, when she had finished her agricultural studies and needed a high English score to win a foreign scholarship. In Hang’s eyes, her mentor represents the ultimate human being: a person who relinquished the easy pleasures of the industrialized world to nourish the hopes of a desperate nation. Hang had a chance to stay on in Australia for doctoral studies, but instead she came back to Vietnam, to pursue a life filled with meaning. I ask her if she misses Australia. “Yes, very much,” she replies.
If we take a step back and consider fish in the long view of the human diet, they were likely undesirable. Because of their abundance of fine bones, lack of fat, and perhaps preponderance of omega-3 fatty acids and vitamin D, which our ancestors already had plenty of from their daily diet and lifestyles, lean fish would have been far less popular than meat, though fatty and oily fish like salmon and candlefish could certainly be a substitute for land-based animal fare. However, once populations began to settle and meat became scarce, making use of the products of fish and soybean spoilage was a clever way of supplementing shortages of amino acids and boosting the flavor of meatless meals.
As for fish itself, it has undergone a strange transformation in Western nutrition, elevated from woeful pickings to contemporary superfood. However, the rush to fillet the world’s remaining stocks of big fish is obviously an unsustainable venture. Nor is it necessary to eat fish for health, because vitamin D can be obtained from adequate exposure to the sun, and omega-3/omega-6 imbalances can be corrected by using less cooking oil, eating fewer processed foods, and shifting to more sustainable protein sources like smaller fish, locally adapted mammals, and insects.
THE EMPIRE OF STARCHES
Many people do not like to eat vegetables—and the feeling is mutual.
—ADAM DREWNOWSKI AND CARMEN GOMEZ-CARNEROS, “Bitter Taste, Phytonutrients, and the Consumer: A Review”
Most people in Western countries today think of vegetables as healthy. However, as we have seen, cherished Western notions about food and nutrition often turn out to be wrong when viewed in a broad context. Despite the great efforts of Western nutritional scientists to show otherwise, eating plants has never been conclusively shown to improve a person’s health prospects; by comparison, drinking moderate amounts of alcohol, consuming moderate amounts of salt, or being somewhat overweight have shown more tangible benefits for overall health. Though the poor results of vegetables and the relatively clearer merits of alcohol, salt, and chubbiness might surprise people in Western societies today, these would have come as no surprise to the vast majority of people in traditional societies. Indeed, they would have been amused or shocked to see how “educated” Westerners today worship salad bars as the quintessence of healthy eating.
The English naturalist Charles Darwin was no poet, but he viewed the natural world with a clarity that was extraordinary for his time, and he captured the dilemma of eating vegetables exquisitely in these (for him, impassioned) lines: “what war … between insects, snails, and other animals with birds and beasts of prey—all striving to increase, and all feeding on each other or on the trees or their seeds and seedlings…!” In other words, eating plant foods is an act of war, every head of broccoli laid out on the cutting board a decapitation. Our crops are slaves to our hunger; farmer’s fields are prisons for thousands and millions of speechless, immobile inmates. I’m not saying this to turn your seven-year-old daughter off veggies forever; I’m saying this because it clarifies why George H. W. Bush and many other people don’t like many vegetables, including broccoli. The humorist Roy Blount Jr. conveyed the sentiment in a memorable couplet: “The local groceries are all out of broccoli / Loccoli.”1 Plants may be immobile, but they’re far from defenseless.
