This is not news – the New York Times and Slate have already been on it – but I’m still astounded at how easy it is to make your own yogurt.

Dairy products that go beyond milk tend to have an air of magic or sorcery about them. Yogurt, in particular, is a little eerie for being alive, and it’s certainly not anything I’d ever heard of my friends or family whipping up at home. Like butter, which I still naively tend to imagine being churned by a Swiss milkmaid in an idyllic meadow somewhere, I always kind of thought yogurt was something that only highly specialized masters could produce – yogurt elves, perhaps, or maybe an Indian yogi who spent all of his time on top of a mountain, meditating in front of a giant lake of milk until fermentation occurred. (more…)

As civil war ravages Sri Lanka and militants approach the capital of Pakistan, do you ever stop to wonder: in the throes of war, who’s making the chapatis?

If it seems as though I’m making light of serious situations, the film Cooking History asks you to consider the gravity of the question. The documentary by Slovak director Peter Kerekes, which picked up a special jury prize at the Hot Docs documentary film festival in Toronto last week, looks at major European conflicts of the 20th century from the perspective of some often-ignored but crucial figures in warfare: military chefs. (more…)

Poor pork farmers. The so-called “other white meat” has enough image problems to contend with on a good day; roughly 1.6 billion people already consider it an unclean and possibly blasphemous foodstuff. Now, with swine flu and attendant swine flu fever (the cultural kind, not the physical one – don’t panic) sweeping the globe, the pork industry is taking a serious hit as consumers avoid pig meat, fearing that their otherwise benign pork chops and ham hocks are harbouring the dreaded Influenza A (H1N1) virus, familiarly known – until now, anyhow – by its porcine handle.

Thing is, say farmers, it’s not possible to get the illness from eating pork, and there’s no evidence to show people are getting H1N1 from physical contact with pigs; therefore, it’s pretty unfair to be calling it “swine flu.” I can certainly see their point. We are afraid enough of food as it is, and giving us an excuse to panic over one particular foodstuff, especially a meat, is like telling a xenophobe that his new Somali neighbour is a witch doctor. (more…)

You may be familiar with the recent advertising campaign in which a man refuses a bite of his female friend’s salad on the grounds that he’s a “Meatatarian.” “Beef, bacon – you know, a Meatatarian? It’s a personal choice,” he says, thoughtfully jamming a Wendy’s burger with six strips of scar-pink bacon and two glistening brown patties into his mouth.

Putting aside just how ugly the word “Meatatarian” looks in print, the campaign gives us the latest interpretation of an interesting quirk in North American culture: the privileged status of meat. The central joke relies on the basic assumption that being a vegetarian is ridiculous and/or fey and/or heretical, and that any reasonable person knows meat is the best food you can eat.

This assumption – widely held by pit jockeys, CEOs and the few dozen cranky old men who had dinner at Fran’s Diner in Toronto before the Willie Nelson show earlier this month, one of whom I sat beside long enough to hear him give a long sermon to his mute wife about how vegetarians are all skinny, pale and sick-looking – is based in a few ideas about meat that ostensibly go all the way back to our caveman beginnings, but that, upon reflection, seem a bit out of touch with current realities. (more…)

It’s strange to think of food as “popular” — you may as well suggest the cool kids are really into breathing these days. Yet it’s inescapable: glance at the bestseller lists, turn on your TV or strike up a conversation over smoked salmon and arugula canapés at a cocktail party, and you’ll inevitably end up in some kind of dialogue with, or about, our collective obsession with food. And not just cooking and eating it, either, but where it comes from, where to buy it, how to eat it without destroying the world, who swears about it best, and what kind of potential there is for various hormone-injected forms of it to evolve into intelligent, malicious beings that will conspire to turn the tables on our consumer/consumable relationship and force us back into a Stone Age situation, in which we all live like nomads, running from cave to cave to escape notice and absorption by our genetically superior Grāpple® overlords. (more…)

The final post from Joel McConvey’s Korea blog, on his return to Toronto, CanadaWinter. I march down the slush-slick sidewalk, at constant risk of wipeout as my neck cranes sideways to ogle the enticing photos of Korean dishes taped up in all the shopfront windows: ddeok bokki, dalk galbi, bibim bap, bulgogi… I linger on the signs in hangeul, puzzling the clusters of characters into sounds and, sometimes, meanings, timing my reading speed, which is nowhere near instant, but is quick enough now that familiar words only take seconds to snap into place: 은행, bank. 여행, trip. 책, book. 약국, pharmacy. I enter a grocery mart and begin trolling the aisles for the ingredients I’ve come for – gochujang, red hot pepper paste; kuk kanjang, soup soy sauce; yellow packets of Ottogi instant curry mix; long red boxes of Pepero, the Korean version of the chocolate and cookie stick snack, Pocky. At the counter, I pay for my items and mumble a shy Korean thank-you – “Kamsamnida…” – followed by a more confident “Thanks.” English is fine here. It is, after all, Toronto.

It’s been almost a month since I returned from Korea to this frozen city, and I am naturally drawn to the corridor that runs along Bloor Street from Christie to Bathurst, referred to on the area’s street signs as the Korean Business Area, but more informally called, simply, Koreatown. In this stretch of a few blocks I find a surprisingly thorough concentration of things familiar to me from two years teaching in South Korea – scents and sounds, but also unexpected details. I skulk around a small market called E-Mart, named after Korea’s ubiquitous giant department store chain and boasting the same yellow-and-black colour scheme. Outside the norae bangs, advertised with the more familiar Japanese word KARAOKE, I listen for strains of earnest, soju-fueled caterwauling. Sitting at a 24-hour restaurant called Bu-ong-ee and slurping a bowl of gamja tang – unflatteringly rendered on English signs as “pork bone soup” – I inadvertently tap my fingers to the beat of the K-pop hits that I often wished to escape in Korea, but that here give me an odd sense of comfort, as though I’m ensconced in a sonic helium bubble that can, at any time, rise up and transport me back over the ocean to the breezy shores and pale, gentle sunlight of Jeju-do. (more…)

A local saying lists three things Jeju is famous for: wind, stone and women. The island certainly has all three in abundance — the wind, in particular, is strong enough to tear off your scalp. In truth, though, the thing Jeju is most known for in Korea is tangerines (also known as Mandarin oranges). Winter marks the beginning of tangerine season, and these days it’s hard to drive a kilometre without passing an orchard tucked behind low stone walls, blazing with thousands of bright orange globes.

I once laughed outright at a hapless young American who’d purchased tangerines at the grocery store, and although I’ll admit it wasn’t very nice, my mirth was justified; in tangerine season, almost every social or commercial transaction conducted on Jeju commences or concludes with a gratis exchange of the juicy little devils. Taxi drivers hand them to you as you climb into their cabs; buckets of them sit out in the staff rooms at school; waiters bring trays of them as dessert; and any kind of major purchase — a jacket, say, or a torque wrench — will just as likely as not be augmented with a couple shopping bags bulging with fruit. It’s a friendly time of year, when Jejuites are visibly proud of the island’s most valuable and abundant crop, and the heaps of tangerines making the rounds seem to contain the very nectar of goodwill within their dappled, vivid skins. (more…)

One of my Korean students’ favourite pastimes is pulling on my beard. These days, I can’t blame them — circumstances having forced me into (temporary) bachelordom for the first time in years, I’ve made it a project to accumulate as much hair on my face as possible, and even I will admit that the resulting thicket is eminently tuggable. (It’s when the kids figure they can swing from it that problems arise.)

There’s a lurking belief that Koreans can’t grow facial hair. This is profoundly untrue, as anyone who’s familiar with Korean money can tell you; each of the three denominations of Korean won (the 1,000, 5,000 and 10,000) boasts a likeness of an eminent figure from Korean history, and all of them are rocking killer beards. The most impressive is surely the white mop cascading from the chin of Confucian scholar Yi Hwang on the 1,000, but neither fellow Confucian Yi I on the five nor King Sejong the Great (arguably the most famous Korean of all time, at least within Korea) on the ten have anything to be ashamed of — each sports a missile-shaped goatee and full moustache that would make Tom Selleck’s nose pillow bristle with envy.

It is true, however, that in contemporary South Korea, prominent facial hair is a rare sight. (more…)