I was relaxing in the hot tub with the New York Times on Sunday afternoon, when my dear little brother Rob Roy came walking up the deck steps. He took a seat in one of the chairs I have set up around the hot tub and pulled a long face, waiting for me to notice him.
“Whassup, lil’ bro’?” I asked, putting aside the book review section, “you don’t look like no happy camper to me.”
“It’s Katje,” Rob said, staring down at the deck, “this food contamination stuff has her totally freaked out.”
Katje, as regular readers of this Web log know, is Rob’s wife. They have a teenage son, Jason, still living at home with them, and they work in the local IT industry. “How is she behaving in reaction to all these negative news stories?” I enquired, pointing at the bottle of champagne and the pitcher of orange juice I had squeezed by hand not twenty minutes previously, “Care for a mimosa?”
Rob went over to the outdoor dry bar, opened it, took out a champagne glass, poured it half full of orange juice, then carefully topped it off with champagne. He sipped a taste, then one more, then killed the whole glass and made himself another.
“Good stuff,” I commented.
“You have no idea, Tom,” Rob replied, taking another healthy belt of mimosa, “Katje won’t have citrus fruit in the house anymore. She’s afraid that E Coli are going to give her kidney failure. Forget about spinach, of course – or lettuce, or any kind of greens. She’s dug up our entire yard – back, side and front – to plant our own vegetables. She says she’s going to feed them organic fertilizer,” Rob related as he killed his second mimosa and started making a third, “and to do that, she’s started a compost heap!”
“In the back, I assume,” I hopefully assayed.
“Yeah, in the back yard, in one of the corners,” Rob moaned.
“I bet the neighbors on the other side of the fence just love that,” I speculated.
“Well,” Rob chuckled, “they finally did start talking to us, if only to threaten calling Fairfax county. But Katje did her homework and made sure that having compost is legal – unless there are vermin or an odor problem. So she’s out there covering it with lime twice a week and has the entire backyard staked out with HavaHart traps. That’s why I decided to stop by and talk to you about this business – I was out here in Great Falls releasing the critters she caught this week.” The two quick doses of champagne were rendering Rob thoughtful; grasping the stem of his third mimosa, he contemplated the sky and mused “do you think it’s possible, Tom? Could Katje grow enough organic vegetables on our lot in suburbia for the three of us to eat?”
“I’m no expert in agronomy, Rob, but I sort of doubt it,” I opined, “I’m sure you could get a lot of good veggies out of a scheme like that, but probably nowhere near enough calories for three people to live a year – if that’s what you’re talking about. And even if, by some miracle, you hadn’t eaten all the produce by October, and actually had some surplus, you’d have to put the produce up in Ball jars using a pressure cooker. And really, Rob, can you imagine Katje trying to operate a pressure cooker without precipitating some kind of ditzy disaster?”
“Nope.” Rob morosely grunted, killing his third mimosa, noticing that there was no more orange juice, and pouring the last of the champagne into his glass.
“Even if you didn’t end up with eight quarts of tomatoes on the kitchen ceiling,” I continued, “the truth is, unless you’re very experienced at it, home canning is much more dangerous than shopping for fresh spinach at the supermarket. There’s botulism, you know – and no particular reason why other bacteria might not end up in an improperly prepared jar of home canned fruit or vegetables.”
I saw a cartoon light bulb flash above Rob’s head. “How about we freeze stuff for the winter instead?”
“Okay,” I agreed, “that would be much safer for you guys than Katje trying to preserve it. But I still doubt you can grow enough vegetables to sustain two adults and a teenage male on what, a quarter acre?”
“Thirteen thirty-seconds of an acre,” Rob clarified, “Half acre lot with the area of the house, deck, patio and garage foot prints subtracted. Katje measured it before she laid out the garden plots.”
“Well, maybe you could get the vegetable part of your diet from that,” I conceded, “as long as you have a source of protein. Maybe some fish…”
“We’re vegans, Tom,” Rob interjected, “or at least she is.”
“You and Jason – not so much?” I pried, eyebrows raised.
“It wasn’t that hard to stay vegan before the food scare,” Rob explained, “not that hard for me, anyway. Jason always cheated, every chance he got, really. But before she stopped buying stuff at the supermarket, we had three-bean chili with textured soy protein, all kinds of vegan breads, lots of stuff with eggplant – it wasn’t so bad. Now, after she heard about the melamine in vegetable protein products, plus this E coli stuff, she’s been eating nothing but organic brown rice grown in California.” Rob gave me a searching look. “Macrobiotic Diet Number Seven, Tom. For the last five weeks.”
“My God,” I exclaimed, “eating nothing but Macrobiotic Diet Number Seven for five weeks is more dangerous than any food-related risk of death or disease you could possibly run, even if you bought everything at Food Lion!”
“Tell me about it, Tom,” Rob sadly replied, “Eating nothing but brown rice and then busting her butt getting that garden started every night after we get home from work and all day long every weekend. I mean, yeah, she’s thin, all right – Kate Moss thin; Calista Flockhart thin, and she’s got a pretty good tan going for May, that’s for sure. But hell, Tom, she’s covered with tatoos, so who can even see a tan, know what I mean, and to tell the truth I don’t really like women that thin! I don’t think very many men do, when you get right down to it. I mean, her period is late, and I don’t think it’s because she’s pregnant, either.”
“No, it’s because female adipose tissue is an endocrine gland,” I pointed out, “and she’s got none left, eating nothing but brown rice and then doing field work what, fifty hours a week?”
“Something like that,” Rob estimated, “forty-five maybe.”
“You don’t see the real original, organic farmers – and by that I mean the Amish, behaving like that,” I observed, “they put down eight, ten thousand calories a day so they can buck hay bales onto horse-drawn carts with nothing but their backs.”
“Well, she eats one hell of a lot of brown rice, Tom,” Rob noted, “but not enough to keep her from slowly disappearing, right before my eyes.”
“All this because of the melamine thing?” I decided to finish my mimosa, since Rob, having finished the last of the champagne, was now staring at it. “I’m not sure that melamine is toxic enough to present a health risk equal to living off nothing but brown rice.” Rising from the hot tub, I grabbed a towel and began drying off as I walked toward the door leading to the kitchen. “Care for a beer?” Rob nodded eagerly, following.
Inside, I cracked open a couple of premium microbrews. Rob was standing next to me when I opened the refrigerator to get them, and the expression on his face was priceless. Here’s a guy, I thought, who, no matter how hip his appearance and lifestyle, is as pussy whipped as any nerdy, conformist Milquetoast – Rob’s just pussy whipped in a whacky, new-age way, that’s all. “Hold it, a second, Tom,” he whispered, staying my hand as I made to close the door, “lemme just look at this.”
Ah yes – the contents of Tom Collin’s fridge – most assuredly a monumental test of will power for any vegan who is not a rock-solid, dyed-in-the-wool true believer.
“New York strip,” Rob intoned, as if repeating the name of Temptation Itself, “grass fed, dry cured. Farm raised venison… Duck… Wyoming antelope… Rabbit… “
“That’s an Alsation hare,” I corrected, “and it’s wild duck; from Portugal. Those are my entrees for the next few days.”
“Fern fiddle heads?” Rob pointed at the vegetable bin.
“Yep. Got a nice bag of morels to go with it,” I elaborated, “you think I should have them with the antelope, the venison or the strip steak? I was thinking maybe a nice morel sauce, steamed fern fiddle heads with goat butter and Breton gray sea salt, accompanied by some homemade fresh basil and Asiago d’Allevo Oro del Tempo pesto penne…”
“Yeah,” Rob whispered dreamily, “let’s have the antelope.”
“Not enough antelope for two,” I observed, “so how about the antelope and the duck? Both wild game; nice contrast of flavors. I can combine the juices from a light ginger plum and cognac teriyaki meat marinade for the morel sauce and alternate medallions of duck and antelope on a bed of sliced braised Bolivian canary fingerling potatoes garnished with fresh, chopped cilantro and rosemary leaves.”
“Oh, yeah, Tom,” Rob said, unconsciously licking his lips, “let’s do that.”
I began removing the ingredients with Rob’s enthusiastic assistance. Soon everything was laid out on the granite island top, and I began preparation of our late Sunday lunch while quaffing a beer and continuing our conversation.
Rob seated himself at the end of the island, well out of my way, and watched me – pots, pans and utensils flying – as I did one of the things every good Italian loves to do with all their heart: cook great food. “What the hell is melamine, anyway, Tom?”
“It’s a chemical intermediate, mostly used to make plastic, notably cheap plastic dinnerware.” I explained, vigorously chopping away at a pile of herbs, “Dinnerware – now that’s ironic.”
“You mean, Katje and I might have some plates and dishes at home made from that stuff?” Rob was genuinely astounded by the prospect of that, I think.
“It’s used to make acrylic, so why not? Shop at the Crate and Barrel, JC Penny, Wal-Mart, that sort of place? Buy any plastic dinnerware off the Internet?”
“Yeah,” Rob admitted, somewhat sheepish, “Katje’s always looking for bargains.”
“Well, not to worry, once it’s made into plastic, melamine is harmless. What’s a vegan doing with plastic dinnerware, though? Shouldn’t you two be eating your vegan meals on hand-thrown free-trade third-world diatomaceous sun-dried, wood-fired ceramic clay with genuine Neolithic pot glaze finish?”
“Katje says,” Rob explained, “that as long as no animals were involved in making something, then it doesn’t matter where it comes from. And she checked out the kind of stuff you’re talking about and said it was too expensive. What’s more, she actually recommends plastic shoes to people because they don’t have any leather in them.”
“I see,” I said, slicing antelope medallions, “she in PETA, then? I don’t think I ever asked.”
“Yeah,” said Rob, “and no, you never did ask before.”
“Right – well, melamine’s not all that toxic, generally speaking. The acute oral LD50 for rats is more than three grams per kilogram.”
“What is it for humans?” Rob looked at me expectantly.
“Well,” I went on, slicing up the duck, “the term ‘LD50’ means ‘lethal dose for fifty percent of the test subjects,” so I’m sure you can appreciate why there are no human LD50 figures for melamine. On the other hand, the number we do have does imply that half of the rats in fact died at dosages less than that.”
“They kill animals to get those numbers?” Rob was genuinely upset by the idea.
“Dude,” I replied as I fired up the grill, the hood fan roaring to life so that it was necessary that I raise my voice just slightly, “the science is called ‘toxicology!’ With a name like that, it stands to reason something’s going to get poisoned, maybe even die. Hey, look, animals were killed so we could eat lunch, Okay?” I grasped a duck medallion, lifting it up from the cognac marinade so Rob could see it. “You still up for this or should I put half of it away and cook it for myself later?”
“No! No, that’s fine, Tom, I… I donno… hell, f***k ‘em, I’m f***king starving, no problem, I see what you mean!”
“You think you’re starving now, boyo…” The marinated meat hit the grill. The air blossomed with the smell of roasting seasoned game as I shouted “Check that out!” Poor Rob, he nearly swooned as the aroma wafted over him – then he began to drool, just a tiny bit. Sensing his helplessness in the face of such primary and atavistic carnal stimulation, he chugged his beer to cover it up.
“Smells great, Tom,” Rob volunteered as he set down his beer bottle, “So why in the hell would anybody put melamine in vegetable protein products in the first place?”
“Oh, that,” I said, lowering a steamer filled with fern fiddle heads into a pot, “to get undeserved money by committing fraud.”
“Fraud?” Rob looked around the kitchen. “Got any cheese?”
“Does Boeing have airplanes?” In a trice, Rob was looking at a plate covered with a selection of fine goat, sheep, yak, buffalo and the occasional cow’s milk cheese of distinction. A few seconds later, he had some water crackers to go with them.
Rob regarded the water crackers askance. “Got any with sesame seeds or any kind of flavors?”
“Of course not,” I shot back, “flavored crackers are for cheap cheese. And I guarantee, whatever else these cheeses may be, they aren’t cheap. The water cracker is like a blank canvas covered with gesso, upon which the artisan may express himself without interference.”
“Oh, yeah, right,” Rob replied, smearing a water cracker with Humboldt Fog grand coupe, “sure.” He bit and crunched, thoughtfully, chasing the bite with a swig of beer. “Hey, this… this absolutely rocks, Tom!”
“Just don’t spoil your appetite. So yeah, fraud. You see, the people who buy the raw materials – soy protein, gluten, whatever – they use a test for the nitrogen content. Protein contains nitrogen, so the test assumes total protein is proportional to total nitrogen. Now, you look at a melamine molecule…”
“I think you better do that, Tom.”
“Okay, when I look at a melamine molecule, I see beaucoup-dinky-dow nitrogen. So much, I’m a bit surprised it’s not an explosion hazard like ammonium nitrate. Mix that puppy in with the powder you’re selling and the protein test registers one hell of a lot more nitrogen. So the buyers mistake that reading for the real protein content and they end up paying you for protein that isn’t really there. So it’s fraud, plain and simple.”
Rob was busy slicing a generous piece of Caciotta Tartufo sheep milk cheese with black Perigord truffles and balancing it on a water cracker, but he did find time to look up and say “Who’s been doing that?”
“Well, the Chinese, mostly,” I told him as I began making the morel sauce.
Rob devoured the entire water cracker, piled high with truffle cheese, and chewed it contemplatively. Another hit of beer was followed by “Damn! I can like, taste it one way when I’m chewing it and taste it again after I wash it down with a brew, and it’s totally different!”
“No doubt,” I agreed, touching off the flambé for the morels. Rob jumped up, startled, as the blue alcohol flame leapt from the pan.
“Dude!”
“No problem,” I persisted, “it’s not an accident, it’s part of the cooking process.”
“Uh, sure. So,” Rob offered as he sat back down, eyeing the cheeses for his next foray, “I read that in China, when they catch a criminal, they shoot him in the back of the head and charge his family for the bullet. So how could anyone be stupid enough to break the law in China?”
“I’m not entirely sure,” I mused, turning duck and antelope medallions on the grill, “that putting melamine in protein-containing export products was actually against the law in China – until very recently, of course.”
“What?” Rob stopped, a water cracker decked with galette Lyonnaise poised halfway on its way to his mouth. “You mean that in China, it could be legal to put… I donno… anti-freeze or floor wax or something like that in food?”
“I’m pretty sure the Chinese have already been caught putting anti-freeze in food,” I replied, tossing bright yellow-skinned finger sized potato slices into garlic and shallot infused Tuscan olive oil, “and feeding industrial paint ingredients to poultry in order to make it appear that their egg yolks are brighter yellow and so contain more nutrients.”
“Why doesn’t somebody do something?” Rob had still not eaten that galette Lyonnaise.
“Ah yes!” I exclaimed, sprinkling gray Breton sea salt on the fern fiddle heads, “how many millions of people ask that question every day! I’ll tell you why – because of Microsoft!”
“Microsoft?”
“Yeah – and Hollywood.”
“Hollywood?”
“Uh-huh. And the RIAA.”
“The record industry?”
As I nodded affirmation, Rob finally ate that cracker with the galette Lyonnaise on it. “Unbelievable.”
“What?” I demanded, spooning penne and pesto onto a couple of Deruta plates, “It makes perfect sense. China refuses to do anything about software, movie and music piracy unless the United States trades with them! So scum bags like Bill Gates, Stephen Spielberg and David Geffen pressure the Administration to make the Chinese happy, and nothing makes them more happy than selling food to the United States – the one country in the world that doesn’t have to, and has never needed to import food, much less cheap food ingredients like soy and wheat protein!”
“No, no,” Rob mumbled through cracker crumbs, “I meant this cheese – the taste is unbelievable.”
“Oh, yeah, that,” I demurred, stacking roasted game medallions on their bed of herb covered, exotic potatoes, “it is pretty awesome – from France, near the Alps.”
“So it’s imported?”
“Yeah, but it’s not the same!” I must admit, I was kind of ticked off at such sophomoric sophistry. “People don’t import cheese from France because they have to – they import cheese from France because they want to! And I can damn well guarantee you, there’s no melamine in it, either!”
“Yeah, okay,” Rob bobbed his head up and down, his attention now fixed on my hands as I poured the morel sauce over the meat, “so we let the Chinese get away with stuff like putting melamine in our protein powders so big industries with intellectual property issues in China can get the Chinese government to force people to either stop making free copies of their IP or pay them for it?”
“Exactly,” I declared as I set his plate and a fresh bottle of brew in front of my little brother, “and next Tuesday, the Chinese are visiting Washington to discuss how to go about that with the Bush Administration. So – mangi, il mio fratello!”
I think it was good that Rob had asked for some food before I served him lunch, because otherwise, I’m pretty sure that plate of gourmet artistry, which could easily have fetched seventy-five bucks at an appropriately upscale DC Metro area restaurant, would have disappeared faster than an Adams Morgan Big Mac at 1:00 a.m. on Saturday night. Instead, Rob dug in slowly, thus getting an opportunity to taste. He went for the game medallions first, of course, some wild duck, snagging a bit of the herbs and canary potato. He chewed it slowly, then sighed. “Oh, man, that’s… Tom you have no idea how good something can taste if you haven’t had it in a long, long, time…” Rob chased it with some brew, then turned to look at me. “What can I do about Katje, Tom?”
“First, get her to take a multivitamin every day so she doesn’t get scurvy and beriberi.”
“Okay, I think if I tell her you said she’ll get scurvy and beriberi from eating nothing but brown rice, she will believe me,” Rob speculated as he sampled the fern fiddle heads.
“Then let her go ahead with the vegetable garden. While the crop is developing, you can live off organic veggies you get from Whole Foods or someplace similar. Just buy stuff you can peel, like yams, eggplants, zucchinis and such. Wash the stuff you bring home in a solution of one cup Clorox bleach in one gallon of water. Then rinse the stuff six times with tap water. Then cut the peel off and cook the hell out of it. Put some plain old Morton iodized salt in it so she doesn’t grow a big old goiter like some backwoods peasant from the Old Country. See if you can get her to eat that. Then, when the garden starts producing veggies, eat those until the cold weather sets in, at which point you have to go back to store-bought peel vegetables, unless, of course, by that time, you have brought her around to sanity or the media stop carrying so many alarmist stories about food contamination.”
Rob finished chewing his first taste of the goat buttered fern fiddle heads with gray Breton sea salt. A beatific glow spread over his face. “You think she’ll be alright with that then?”
“Probably, but the sooner she gets back to eating some kind of protein, the better. Look around – I will, too. Let’s see if we can find some source of vegetable protein that’s not from China; that’s the best bet. But just in case, I’m going to put together a melamine test kit so you can prove to her that at least there’s none of that in whatever you buy. I know she’s going to hate to hear this, but if she’s really concerned about contamination of her vegetable protein products with chemicals and contamination of her vegetables with deadly bacteria, maybe she ought to consider eating wild-caught seafood and giving up fresh salads.”
“Wild caught seafood? What about the methyl mercury?”
“Oh boy, yeah, and another thing,” I replied, wearily, “see if you two can get a basic understanding of statistics, okay? Because, if I recall correctly, you two go Alpine skiing out west for a week practically every winter, don’t you?”
“Sure,” Rob replied proudly, “snowboarding, too. We even managed to do a few days in the back country last year.”
“Right. So, I would respectfully submit for your consideration, little brother, that if you and your wife had a decent grasp of probability and statistics, you’d realize that the excess danger you expose yourself to while doing that crazy stuff in Park City, Aspen, Steamboat Springs and Telluride every year is so astronomically great, any risk of injury or death you might run eating food you buy at the supermarket is completely insignificant by comparison!”
Rob stopped chewing his antelope medallion, swallowed hard and gaped at me, utterly flabbergasted.
“Really?”
“Really. And another thing – since Jason is my nephew, I have a responsibility for him. So I want you and Jason out here every weekend on Saturday for lunch at eleven o’clock sharp.”
Rob grinned slyly – hey, what’s not to like? “Ah, Tom, isn’t eleven o’clock a little early for lunch?”
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” I said, grinning right back, “We’ll eat at noon. You bring Jason out here an hour early so I can teach him.”
“Teach him what?”
“How to cook!”