I also read the WSJ story advising people who were too broke to just consider skipping breakfast. In case you missed it, the Kellogg's CEO was interviewed on CNBC just a couple of weeks ago suggesting that "consumers under pressure" should eat breakfast cereal for dinner to save money. So if you add "skip breakfast" to "eat breakfast cereal for dinner", I guess what we're really being told to do is skip dinner!
As you did in South Korea, I do at home, eating kimchi every day (usually as part of breakfast!). And it’s the real thing—Jongga brand, made in South Korea.
I imagine "beanie weenies" are making a comeback--that was one of the easy and cheap meals I used to see in the old days. My folks were children of the Great Depression, and one thing my dad liked to make when we were kids was something we just called “Dad’s Bean Soup”, which was soup made from a mashed up can of baked beans and some milk. I actually liked it enough that I ate it for some years even after leaving home as an adult (it's great bachelor food). Later on, I even fed it to my daughter a few times. I learned later that what we called “Dad’s Bean Soup” was really Grandpa’s, since that is where my dad learned it. So for my daughter, it was “Great Grandpa’s Bean Soup!” That's how traditions get started.
The consumption of fermented cabbage, obviously a very hardy and wide-spread vegetable, is pretty common throughout Eurasia.
In the West it takes the form of Sauerkraut in the East, Kimchi. Several years ago, while living in California, I had a friend whose mother was Korean and she would make enormous batches of Kimchi in the autumn which is how I was introduced to it.
Fermented vegetable products like fermented cabbage and particularly the Japanese product of fermented soy beans, Natto, are purported to be very high in vitamin K2. This vitamin apparently plays an important role in making sure calcium dissolved in the blood goes to strengthening bone tissue rather than being deposited in arteries thus contributing to arteriosclerosis.
So consuming fermented cabbage (in whatever form) may contribute significantly to good health. Particularly the health of the cardio-vascular system. I was introduced to Natto late in life and I find it unpalatable. However I may try it again if I can get an authentic Japanese recipe for its use. They usually mix it into rice and various vegetable dishes.
Interestingly enough I found Natto in an "authentic" Japanese supermarket in Sacramento, California. (Boy, did I get some strange looks walking around that store. On the West Coast there is sort of a rumor that East Asians consider white people to be "dirty". It's generally not openly expressed but I came across at least some evidence to back that up.)
When I was in the Philippines this past January I came across Kimchi in a local "Sari-sari" store. I ate it with sardines and it was good!
Anyway, the Dad's Bean Soup sounds pretty good and very cheap. Food prices have gone through the roof here. I'm back in Connecticut now, retired to where I was born, and I'd bet all the money the bankers stole from the middle class over the past decade -- that's about 30 trillion dollars -- that I will NEVER find Natto anywhere here in Connecticut.
Which reminds me, apropos of nothing, that we do have delicious lobster around here! I wonder if it is no longer politically correct to drop a live lobster into a pot of boiling water? Will the Woke people come and take me away?
I know all about the health benefits of fermented food, which is why I worked at figuring out the kinds I would like the best. Kimchi is definitely at the top of my list, although I'll go with sauerkraut if I can't find kimchi easily. I also eat plain yogurt regularly, and a little kefir every day. I've been eating this way for 6 or 7 years now, and my overall health and digestion have been very good during that time.
I'm with you concerning natto--I tried some last year and didn't care for it at all--must be an acquired taste. Nattokinase is the enzyme derived from it, which is available in pill form if you want to get the benefit; I read that it is a good treatment for people with respiratory problems.
I lived in New London CT for a few years back in the mid-1990s, and I remember the Connecticut lobsters. You could get those little "chicken lobsters" over in Niantic harbor for $3/lb in the summer, so my wife took it on herself to learn good ways to cook them.
I've occasionally looked longingly at a bottle of hand-sanitizer with its 80% ethyl alcohol content wondering why the vodka bottles I buy for a much greater price have a mere 40% alcohol content. However the alcohol in the hand-sanitizer has apparently been "denatured" which, it is my understanding, is treated to make any miscreant who attempts to consume it, sick. So much for beating the system trying to obtain cheap, albeit gelatinous booze.
It might be noted how generally miserable the European diet usually was before Europeans stumbled across the New World. Peas were probably a staple in the Old World leading to the ancient rhyme: "Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold. Peas porridge in the pot nine days old."
The Spanish brought back to Europe from the Americas now standard fare such as Potatoes from Peru as well as Corn (Maize), tomatoes and, chili peppers from MesoAmerica, now known as Mexico.
The cuy of Peru is also known to American schoolchildren as the hamster.
Cuy being served whole with the head intact reminds one of the Aztec ritual of priests engaged in human sacrifice. It was believed that on a "good" sacrifice day the priests may have killed thousands of people to appease the capricious Mexican gods. There is some speculation that, because of the lack of domesticated animals in the Americas (no pigs, cows or horses, just cuy, llama and dogs and don't forget "pavo" i.e. turkey) the sacrifice victims may have served as a surreptitious but high quality source of animal protein. But who can say for sure; the Conquistadors put an end to all that very quickly in their quest for the "oro" (gold).
Well, enough of all that. I'm on my way to the store to buy bottled water apparently full of microplastics to ingest. (All those folks who have been spending money to buy in bottles what they can get for free from the tap are in for a rude awakening!) On Monday I go back to my job selling ice to the Eskimos -- opps! I mean the Inuit. (I wouldn't want to slur anybody. It's okay to starve people; just don't call them bad names!) Naomi Klein was right: it's all "disaster capitalism" around here.
Enough talk about disgusting food! If you really want to see something interesting check-out Senator Ron Johnson's four hour panel on the Covid vaccine fraud/crime. For all the people who shamed the anti-vaxxers as "kooks" and "granny-killers" this is your comeuppance.
I don't know whether the Vietnamese also have the saying, but, in China, they say, "If it moves, it's food." And they aren't kidding. I told myself that I was going to eat everything they ate, so, over the two years I was there, I ate beef, pork, and chicken, like we do, but also every single component of those animals including things like eyeballs and penises. There were also penises of deer, penises of dogs, dogs in general, cats, rats, bats, mice, live carp, sea horses, sea urchins, sea this, sea that, crawling things, slithering things, floating things, diving things, creeping things, hanging things, galloping things, waddling things, hovering things, scuttling things, gestating things. You name it, I ate it.
With one exception. One night, some of my students took me out for an expensive banquet and the owner/hostess really laid it on. When everyone was good and drunk, the pièce de résistance was brought out and, with the owner standing nearby, beaming with pride at such an exotic and, no doubt terribly expensive dish, it was set down before us in the middle of all the other dishes.
It was a "hot pot." It was a large platter in the middle of which was sauce boiling over a flame and around the sauce pot the delicacies were arranged and, around the delicacies, radishes cut to resemble flowers, and so on. It was all very impressive except one of the delicacies was live baby mice. Pink, hairless, squirming, translucent enough their innards were visible, eyes not yet opened. The idea was to take one in your chopsticks, dunk it in the sauce to fry it to a crisp, then pop it in your mouth like a piece of popcorn chicken.
I just knew if I did that, I was going to puke. Which, actually, is no problem at a Chinese banquet. If you are discreet about it, you don't even have to leave the table.
The Chinese a gastronomically fierce. I don't know, but maybe no one takes food as seriously, except possibly the French. They talk about food like we talk about the weather. It's central. A common greeting is chi fan le ma. It's like our, "Hey, what's up?" but it means "Have you eaten rice yet?"
Skipping breakfast and having "corn flakes" for dinner. Well I guess humans have survived worse, but it's in bad taste when rich men tells the proles what to eat. Marie Antoinette's detractors said that she said "let them eat brioche" (she didn't, actually, and the Revolution was a bloodbath that should never had occurred, and likely the marker of the beginning of the end of the "West"), but, since then, things have gotten quite worse.
"Let them eat bugs and 'meat' made in a lab", they are openly saying now.
The idea of destroying your food supply and economy to help Mother Gaia defeat the Sun God is really only beloved by Western whites, no one more so than university educated white women and billionaires (who won't let it impact their eating habits any more than they let lowering carbon footprints decrease their use is private jets).
It just isn't catching on with the rest of the world including Russia. Sri Lanka tried to go all WEF and tank their food supply and economy by outlawing evil fertilizer but, for some backward reason, the rest of Asia didn't seem to look upon that as a great idea to be emulated.
So you may be still able to eat real food and not bugs in 10 years in Vietnam.
I must admit your omelet looks delicious! I had what I've had every day for ten years or so.....oatmeal with blueberries, hemp seeds, cinnamon and maple syrup. And coffee!
It's been said by many before me but fast food used to be food and cheap. I can't believe anyone eats at McDonald's. It is expensive and it is absolutely disgusting. Even sit down restaurants in the US have cheapened their food until it is just better to make it at home.
I'm blessed with the free time to cook most meals. Had blueberry pancakes and homemade pizza today. Both far more delicious and healthy than any crap you'd get from IHOP or Pizza Hut.
Personally, I'm not a great fun of the "if it moves it's food" theory which seems to apply to a lots of parts of Asia. I like Italian food best of all. Much of it also started as poor people's fare, by the way.
I also read the WSJ story advising people who were too broke to just consider skipping breakfast. In case you missed it, the Kellogg's CEO was interviewed on CNBC just a couple of weeks ago suggesting that "consumers under pressure" should eat breakfast cereal for dinner to save money. So if you add "skip breakfast" to "eat breakfast cereal for dinner", I guess what we're really being told to do is skip dinner!
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/27/kelloggs-ceo-cereal-for-dinner
As you did in South Korea, I do at home, eating kimchi every day (usually as part of breakfast!). And it’s the real thing—Jongga brand, made in South Korea.
I imagine "beanie weenies" are making a comeback--that was one of the easy and cheap meals I used to see in the old days. My folks were children of the Great Depression, and one thing my dad liked to make when we were kids was something we just called “Dad’s Bean Soup”, which was soup made from a mashed up can of baked beans and some milk. I actually liked it enough that I ate it for some years even after leaving home as an adult (it's great bachelor food). Later on, I even fed it to my daughter a few times. I learned later that what we called “Dad’s Bean Soup” was really Grandpa’s, since that is where my dad learned it. So for my daughter, it was “Great Grandpa’s Bean Soup!” That's how traditions get started.
Hi Bill,
The consumption of fermented cabbage, obviously a very hardy and wide-spread vegetable, is pretty common throughout Eurasia.
In the West it takes the form of Sauerkraut in the East, Kimchi. Several years ago, while living in California, I had a friend whose mother was Korean and she would make enormous batches of Kimchi in the autumn which is how I was introduced to it.
Fermented vegetable products like fermented cabbage and particularly the Japanese product of fermented soy beans, Natto, are purported to be very high in vitamin K2. This vitamin apparently plays an important role in making sure calcium dissolved in the blood goes to strengthening bone tissue rather than being deposited in arteries thus contributing to arteriosclerosis.
So consuming fermented cabbage (in whatever form) may contribute significantly to good health. Particularly the health of the cardio-vascular system. I was introduced to Natto late in life and I find it unpalatable. However I may try it again if I can get an authentic Japanese recipe for its use. They usually mix it into rice and various vegetable dishes.
Interestingly enough I found Natto in an "authentic" Japanese supermarket in Sacramento, California. (Boy, did I get some strange looks walking around that store. On the West Coast there is sort of a rumor that East Asians consider white people to be "dirty". It's generally not openly expressed but I came across at least some evidence to back that up.)
When I was in the Philippines this past January I came across Kimchi in a local "Sari-sari" store. I ate it with sardines and it was good!
Anyway, the Dad's Bean Soup sounds pretty good and very cheap. Food prices have gone through the roof here. I'm back in Connecticut now, retired to where I was born, and I'd bet all the money the bankers stole from the middle class over the past decade -- that's about 30 trillion dollars -- that I will NEVER find Natto anywhere here in Connecticut.
Which reminds me, apropos of nothing, that we do have delicious lobster around here! I wonder if it is no longer politically correct to drop a live lobster into a pot of boiling water? Will the Woke people come and take me away?
I know all about the health benefits of fermented food, which is why I worked at figuring out the kinds I would like the best. Kimchi is definitely at the top of my list, although I'll go with sauerkraut if I can't find kimchi easily. I also eat plain yogurt regularly, and a little kefir every day. I've been eating this way for 6 or 7 years now, and my overall health and digestion have been very good during that time.
I'm with you concerning natto--I tried some last year and didn't care for it at all--must be an acquired taste. Nattokinase is the enzyme derived from it, which is available in pill form if you want to get the benefit; I read that it is a good treatment for people with respiratory problems.
I lived in New London CT for a few years back in the mid-1990s, and I remember the Connecticut lobsters. You could get those little "chicken lobsters" over in Niantic harbor for $3/lb in the summer, so my wife took it on herself to learn good ways to cook them.
I've occasionally looked longingly at a bottle of hand-sanitizer with its 80% ethyl alcohol content wondering why the vodka bottles I buy for a much greater price have a mere 40% alcohol content. However the alcohol in the hand-sanitizer has apparently been "denatured" which, it is my understanding, is treated to make any miscreant who attempts to consume it, sick. So much for beating the system trying to obtain cheap, albeit gelatinous booze.
It might be noted how generally miserable the European diet usually was before Europeans stumbled across the New World. Peas were probably a staple in the Old World leading to the ancient rhyme: "Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold. Peas porridge in the pot nine days old."
The Spanish brought back to Europe from the Americas now standard fare such as Potatoes from Peru as well as Corn (Maize), tomatoes and, chili peppers from MesoAmerica, now known as Mexico.
The cuy of Peru is also known to American schoolchildren as the hamster.
Cuy being served whole with the head intact reminds one of the Aztec ritual of priests engaged in human sacrifice. It was believed that on a "good" sacrifice day the priests may have killed thousands of people to appease the capricious Mexican gods. There is some speculation that, because of the lack of domesticated animals in the Americas (no pigs, cows or horses, just cuy, llama and dogs and don't forget "pavo" i.e. turkey) the sacrifice victims may have served as a surreptitious but high quality source of animal protein. But who can say for sure; the Conquistadors put an end to all that very quickly in their quest for the "oro" (gold).
Well, enough of all that. I'm on my way to the store to buy bottled water apparently full of microplastics to ingest. (All those folks who have been spending money to buy in bottles what they can get for free from the tap are in for a rude awakening!) On Monday I go back to my job selling ice to the Eskimos -- opps! I mean the Inuit. (I wouldn't want to slur anybody. It's okay to starve people; just don't call them bad names!) Naomi Klein was right: it's all "disaster capitalism" around here.
Enough talk about disgusting food! If you really want to see something interesting check-out Senator Ron Johnson's four hour panel on the Covid vaccine fraud/crime. For all the people who shamed the anti-vaxxers as "kooks" and "granny-killers" this is your comeuppance.
Hi Linh,
I don't know whether the Vietnamese also have the saying, but, in China, they say, "If it moves, it's food." And they aren't kidding. I told myself that I was going to eat everything they ate, so, over the two years I was there, I ate beef, pork, and chicken, like we do, but also every single component of those animals including things like eyeballs and penises. There were also penises of deer, penises of dogs, dogs in general, cats, rats, bats, mice, live carp, sea horses, sea urchins, sea this, sea that, crawling things, slithering things, floating things, diving things, creeping things, hanging things, galloping things, waddling things, hovering things, scuttling things, gestating things. You name it, I ate it.
With one exception. One night, some of my students took me out for an expensive banquet and the owner/hostess really laid it on. When everyone was good and drunk, the pièce de résistance was brought out and, with the owner standing nearby, beaming with pride at such an exotic and, no doubt terribly expensive dish, it was set down before us in the middle of all the other dishes.
It was a "hot pot." It was a large platter in the middle of which was sauce boiling over a flame and around the sauce pot the delicacies were arranged and, around the delicacies, radishes cut to resemble flowers, and so on. It was all very impressive except one of the delicacies was live baby mice. Pink, hairless, squirming, translucent enough their innards were visible, eyes not yet opened. The idea was to take one in your chopsticks, dunk it in the sauce to fry it to a crisp, then pop it in your mouth like a piece of popcorn chicken.
I just knew if I did that, I was going to puke. Which, actually, is no problem at a Chinese banquet. If you are discreet about it, you don't even have to leave the table.
The Chinese a gastronomically fierce. I don't know, but maybe no one takes food as seriously, except possibly the French. They talk about food like we talk about the weather. It's central. A common greeting is chi fan le ma. It's like our, "Hey, what's up?" but it means "Have you eaten rice yet?"
Did you know that, "Pumpernickel", means, "Devil's Farts"?
Skipping breakfast and having "corn flakes" for dinner. Well I guess humans have survived worse, but it's in bad taste when rich men tells the proles what to eat. Marie Antoinette's detractors said that she said "let them eat brioche" (she didn't, actually, and the Revolution was a bloodbath that should never had occurred, and likely the marker of the beginning of the end of the "West"), but, since then, things have gotten quite worse.
"Let them eat bugs and 'meat' made in a lab", they are openly saying now.
The idea of destroying your food supply and economy to help Mother Gaia defeat the Sun God is really only beloved by Western whites, no one more so than university educated white women and billionaires (who won't let it impact their eating habits any more than they let lowering carbon footprints decrease their use is private jets).
It just isn't catching on with the rest of the world including Russia. Sri Lanka tried to go all WEF and tank their food supply and economy by outlawing evil fertilizer but, for some backward reason, the rest of Asia didn't seem to look upon that as a great idea to be emulated.
So you may be still able to eat real food and not bugs in 10 years in Vietnam.
Some nutritionists advise that breakfast is the most important, for the health, meal of the day.
Probably why the depopulationists are recommending skipping it.
I must admit your omelet looks delicious! I had what I've had every day for ten years or so.....oatmeal with blueberries, hemp seeds, cinnamon and maple syrup. And coffee!
Admirable Ms. Bean. Me? I drank the hand sanitizer.
You know what they say: Clean hands, clean mind. What! They don't say that? Okay, maybe I drank too much of the hand sanitizer???
Supposedly nattokinase (from natto) helps thin the blood after the clot shot.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6043915/
The only reason Vietnamese aren't talented in basketball is systemic racism and climate change (there isn't anything it can't do).
We must not forget Lootin`Putin,Long Ass Covid,and Patriarchy.
It's been said by many before me but fast food used to be food and cheap. I can't believe anyone eats at McDonald's. It is expensive and it is absolutely disgusting. Even sit down restaurants in the US have cheapened their food until it is just better to make it at home.
I'm blessed with the free time to cook most meals. Had blueberry pancakes and homemade pizza today. Both far more delicious and healthy than any crap you'd get from IHOP or Pizza Hut.
I’m from East Anglia and yes, a tin of mushy peas in a bowl with some mint sauce, can be enjoyed with only a spoon.
In case anyone cares, further reflections on the "let them eat bugs" thing:
https://contrarium.substack.com/p/let-them-eat-bugs
Personally, I'm not a great fun of the "if it moves it's food" theory which seems to apply to a lots of parts of Asia. I like Italian food best of all. Much of it also started as poor people's fare, by the way.
SPREAD SOME CHEESE ON A BROKE CRACKER
is that the man...?
g.
sorry to busy right now