The International Food Name Conspiracy: The April 1st Post

I’m looking to inject this blog with more nationalism and xenophobia in order to court controversy and consequently increase web traffic. I would consider a “diplomatic incident” the pinnacle of achievement in this regard. So, without further adieu delay, here are some examples of other countries’ attempts at misleading American citizens into seeming stupid/eating something gross. (My conception of geopolitical machinations approximates rival frat houses having a prank war. If you happen to work in international politics and have a better understanding, or know anything about it, please send me an email.)

German chocolate cake: In an act of sabotage lacking the subtlety of our craftier foes, the Kaiser planted a deep cover operative on our soil in the 1850s. His name was Sam German. (Such a pseudonym confirms that espionage was not the Kaiser’s strong suit.) Using his own baking chocolate recipe, German created a unique chocolate cake with more layers than a spy thriller. His employer, Baker’s Chocolate Company, named a new baking chocolate in his honor: Baker’s German’s Sweet Chocolate. Germany’s gambit was successful: 162 years later, and most people ascribe this delicious confection—an American creation— to our erstwhile ally. Well played, Germany, well played.

Refried Beans: In an effort to deprive us of a (clearly beneficial) second frying, the conniving chefs of Mexico called their bean concoction frijoles refritos, knowing, I’m certain, that we would mistranslate the name. Where I come from (AMERICA), when you attach “re” to something, that means you’re fixin’ to do it again. Apparently, they do things a little different down south: in Mexican Spanish, “re” means “well,” or “very.” Thus, “well-fried beans.” The rub here is that these beans are often baked, not fried. Well played, Mexico, old chap. Or should I say “replayed?”  

Sweetbreads: Picture a fluffy cinnamon-infused dough, glazed with cream cheese icing and sprinkled with candied almonds. Now take that picture and set it on fire. “Sweetbreads” have less to do with sweets or bread, and more to do with thymus glands and calf pancreas. England is our oldest enemy (temporary alliance notwithstanding), and it’s fitting that England is a frequent culprit when it comes to naming foods in a purposefully misleading manner. This one goes deep: some 12th-century rascal decided the word for “flesh” or “meat” should be brǣd, and so shall the unsuspecting expect scones and receive gullets for all time. England: 1. Guy hoping for biscotti and getting pancreas: 0.    

Oranges: Geolurēad doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. But before circa 1512, that’s the monstrosity you would have uttered in the English-speaking world when referring to the color nexus between yellow and red. Presumably embarrassed, the English language quickly sought something else to call the color. It found a solution in a tangerine-pomelo hybrid that the French were already calling orenge. The name was a mutation of the Arabic naranj, whose descendants can be seen in such words as the Spanish naranja. So the fruit name came before the color name. That this is a vast international conspiracy designed to humiliate the United States is proved by this simple fact: “oranges" grown in exclusively tropical weather are green, not orange. Green! Cold weather causes the chlorophyll to retreat, not unlike the sensation one has when jumping into a freezing pond.

Baby carrots: The name, “baby carrots,” is not misleading unto itself; baby carrots are, indeed, the infantile offspring of adult carrots, brought each spring to the carrot patch by an intrepid stork. What’s deceiving is the myth that baby carrots are simply large carrots, cut to less-intimidating specifications. The product resulting from that process is called a “baby-cut carrot.” “Baby carrots” are immature carrots, bred specifically for their diminutive size and sweeter taste. “Baby-cut carrots” seek to ride the tiny orange coattails of their legitimate cousins. I wish I could pin this on a foreign government. Alas, this is the work of good ole American marketing.

Canadian Bacon: The mendacity of Canadians generally is well-known, but never is their innate deviousness more apparent than when ordering Canadian bacon in Canada. What you and I, and every other red-blooded patriot, call “Canadian bacon” is either A) ham, or B) “back bacon.” While ham needs no explanation, back bacon, if you didn’t know, is a slice of pig which includes both belly and loin. This is a leaner bacon than the fatty belly bacon America calls its own. In a blatant display of Canadian culinary insanity, Canadians’ actual signature bacon—peameal bacon—is a cut of pork loin rolled in… peameal? No. Cornmeal. Typical.

Colonial goose: Not, in fact, goose, but rather lamb—coated in breadcrumbs and bacon. I suppose this is the sort of bait-and-switch we might expect from Australia, considering its somewhat… ahem… unsavory colonial origins.

Bear Claw:  This may sound like something one would wear around the neck to intimidate a village one is pillaging. Sadly not the case. An invader with a bear claw around his neck would likely be laughed back into his longboat, as the bear claw of modern times is an almond-flavored pastry. The shape, I suppose, resembles the the mighty paw of a dangerous apex predator, in the right light. But I still feel swindled. If you're struggling to find the scapegoat here, kindly recall that bear claws are a subspecies of Danish. 

Gunpowder Tea: This tea’s misleading name led to a very anticlimactic Fourth of July for this patriot. Do not be misled: this tea from the Guangdong and neighboring provinces of China will not explode, no matter what. It is so named for the small pellets into which the tea leaves are rolled, resembling coarse black powder. Or is it? The Mandarin phrase for “freshly brewed” is gāng pào de (剛泡的). Say this quickly in English and the origin of the tea’s name becomes less certain. Another conspiracy.

Tune in next April 1st, when I shall unmask further clandestine treachery in the world of food!

What Villains Eat

Frankenstein’s monster is in great shape, considering. Building muscle mass as a vegan requires care and planning. And working individual muscle groups is especially difficult if your muscle groups are from different individuals. Frankenstein's monster is straight up-ripped for a reanimated vegan. He’s also not real, so this may not be a good model of health to pursue. But it did get me thinking about what villains eat.

Before you get all professorial on me—I know the doctor is “the real monster in Frankenstein.” The monster seems to be a fine fellow, generally. He’s a sensitive sort, and seemingly an ideological vegetarian. I like him, and so did his creator. A little insight into Mary Shelley’s era tells us how much. The iconic monster’s abstinence from meat was likely a product of Shelly’s own “radical inclinations.” In 1818, vegetarianism was just finding purchase in circles where reading a lot and eating salad were “totally extreme.” Vegetarianism was revolutionarily weird, decried by the conservative establishment, and a crucial part of Shelley’s countercultural scene. In A Vindication of a Natural Diet, Mary’s husband Percy Shelley asserted that a vegetarian citizenry would not have "lent their brutal suffrage to the proscription-list of Robespierre." (Maximilien de Robespierre was a politician during the French Revolution... although calling Robespierre a "politician" is like calling Sauron's orcs "a group of disgruntled laborers.") So the monster’s vegetarianism brands him as the Good Guy, according to his creator.

This fact of the monster’s (invented) diet reminds me: the “villains” to which I refer are not real. So investigating their dietary choices requires oscillating between two (sometimes conflicting) judgemental paradigms: 1) Assessing villains as real people/creatures, subject to the logic and morality of the fictional universes they occupy, and 2) Assessing villains as constructs/pieces of art/folklore.

 As constructs, villains are often drawn with broad strokes. While a hero may have a long list of defining traits, exploits, powers, and the all-important tragic flaw, villains are usually simplistic, out of narrative utility. Villains, in the classic sense, have no analogue to the “tragic flaw,” no “fortunate virtue.” They do not necessitate having any redeemable facets, incidental interests, or defining backstories. Surely many villains do have these things, and I’d argue the most memorable ones all do. But these ancillary facets are part of the villain’s cover letter, not his resumé.

And yet, within the logic of any story, all villains must eat. They may eat caviar, or plankton, or simply worlds, but eat they must. Many of our classic villains prefer the most cunning prey imaginable—that of mankind. If protagonists are proxies for the reader/viewer’s identity, or vessels into which we pour our perspective, then villains are the opposite. They are resistance and obstacle made flesh. They are the antithesis of our most lauded ideals. The villain is an avatar of all that is other. If one harkens back to humanity’s earliest days, our chief concerns were a scant few: eat, make more of us, don’t get eaten. The fact that so many villains enjoy humanity as their dish of choice should not be surprising. What is a more instinctual threat than something higher up in the food chain?

Tigers are apex predators, but few would consider tigers immoral. They exist outside morality, and therefore outside “villainy.” But they are cunning, lethal, and have aims that may interfere with yours, were you occupying the same room. But we don’t blame the tiger, even if it invites questions about its fearful symmetry. If said tiger prowled along the periphery of civilization, picking off stragglers and livestock, we may kill it, but we would not condemn it. After all, look at its claws and jaws; It’s doing what comes naturally.

This is what makes judging the English language’s oldest villain difficult. Grendel, of Beowulf fame, is a bipedal beast who generally stalks vikings and eats them. The vikings outsource some muscle in the form of the Geats, who are basically like vikings who have been exposed to gamma rays. Beowulf, the Geats' leader, confronts Grendel and (spoiler alert) tears off Grendel’s arm. Though my knowledge of Old English is...rusty, I don’t believe Beowulf says, “Disarmed!” or “Need a hand, Grendel?” or anything like that. A wasted opportunity. But Beowulf does make a point of facing Grendel unarmed, since Grendel is unarmed (especially later! Tee-hee). This is a sort of chivalric honor that one would only extend a fellow warrior; concerns regarding “fair fighting” would not apply when fighting a tiger, for instance. So Beowulf, ultimately, sees Grendel as more man than beast.

Physically, though, Grendel falls firmly into the beast camp. Scales, claws, enormity—he’s rocking the beast style full-on. He is clearly designed with the bloodiest sort of life in mind. Eating vikings, AKA “evil,” chose him, not the other way around. Aims that conflict with humankind’s are intrinsically “evil,” since we made up the word and get to decide its meaning. We do not condemn the tiger. But we might if it walked upright. We would if it had the vocabulary of a five-year old, despite the case the claws make.

So the English language’s first villain remains a unique and compelling entry among those villains who feed on man, if only due to reasons of imperfect taxonomy.

"What exactly makes a mimosa a 'girly drink?'"

Dexter, of the abysmally-concluded Showtime series, is almost Grendel. He is compelled by a nature incomprehensible to most people. But, unlike Grendel, his sociopathic escapades serve no purpose—they do not put food on his table. His meal of choice is steak, as rare and bloody as possible. This steak can help us cast Dexter as a complex apex predator, or we can see bloody steak as a predictable, pat choice made by a writer, only meant to induce a smile. The same could not be said of his Smith and Wesson kitchen bar stool, which distracts from the scenes in which it's framed. But it still must take a back seat (see what I did there?) to food when it comes to insane relationships between nefarious characters and recognizable brands.

While it may be laughable that James Bond would ever use a low-rent paperweight like the Sony Ericsson C902 issued by MI6, it’s nowhere near as mind-shattering as watching the Joker shill for Snickers in this (obviously not American) commercial.

I suppose, when you’re selling food, there’s (almost) no such thing as bad publicity. (Almost. The film Se7en (1995) probably didn’t move a lot of spaghetti sauce.) At first, it seems that the rule regarding “embedded advertising” is simply that your food must be promoted by a character that is charismatic, powerful, or hip; said character’s moral alignment is simply not part of the equation. That seems true, but it’s not. It turns out that context is hardly even a factor in product placement.

You know how, about thirteen minutes into Fritz Lang’s 1931 classic M, you’re simultaneously feeling vexed about the the child murderer at large, but also inexplicably craving the fresh, long-lasting taste of a good spearmint gum? That’s because there’s a big Wrigley banner stretched over the action. Because nothing says “fresh” like a mob frantic about a child’s disappearance. (If you watch this scene without subtitles, and don’t speak German, it looks like you’re watching the most volatile product rollout in the world. There’s a guy who keeps pointing at the Wrigley banner and shouting. He probably just quit smoking. Good for him.)  

So what we learn about what some villains eat is that they eat what they’re told, which not only drains their mystique, but renders a philosophical inquiry about their culinary habits empty.  

At least we can mock icons of darkness as they become shills and spokesmen for fast food. I can imagine a snarky entertainment show quipping, “For a CEO of sorts, Darth Vader’s ‘golden parachute’ was pretty meager. Gorbachev selling Pizza Hut is the pinnacle of integrity compared to these Dark Side burgers.”

Television and movies create a sort of shotgun wedding between art and commerce. Product placement, both as intentional mechanism of advertising, and as incidental prop, can color a story’s mood or tell us about a character’s sympathies. But are villain's culinary predilections ever telling in an era of inescapable advertising?

While Vader is certainly a villain (he might be the villain of 20th century pop culture), his 11th hour redemption and complex, if poorly expanded-upon, backstory contains elements of the “anti-hero.” Vader being an ultra-popular villain is no accident—it’s due to his anti-hero nature. As soon as people realized that anti-heroes are like heroes, except interesting, that’s all we got on cable serial dramas. For instance:

Don Draper (Mad Men); Walter White (Breaking Bad); Tony Soprano (The Sopranos); Nucky Thompson (Boardwalk Empire); Ray Donovan (Ray Donovan); Frank Underwood (House of Cards); Everyone (Deadwood); Everyone (Rome); Omar Little, and also Everyone Else (The Wire).

The moral ambiguity in cable dramas is fascinating from a culinary perspective, because anti-heroes actually eat.  Since they are not strictly villains, and we spend lots of time with them, we get to see more of the minutiae of their lives, more humanizing and incidental choices they make. Their food selections are less iconic and more “real.” But since fiction isn’t real, and television isn’t real life, these are still choices that someone else is making. There is no “default setting.” Someone still has to decide that Jack Torrance wants Triscuits and not Oreos. (Is Jack Torrance not the anti-hero of The Shining? Huh… well, you’re entitled to your opinion.)

This new breed of anti-hero and likable villain is so far from the archetype of Snidely Whiplash, and all his mustache-twirling predecessors, that we find their eating choices simply natural consequences of their era and environment. Avon Barksdale is a great BBQ chef, Augustus Caesar eats stuffed quail. Such is the fictional culinary landscape as the stories we tell ourselves tend toward authenticity. Meanwhile, the cackling top-hatted villain of antiquity is left to survive via photosynthesis.

I suppose it's all right if we can’t pinpoint what Snidely Whiplash ate, since we have Daniel Plainview. Besides an almost psychotic enthusiasm for milkshakes, the oil man of There Will Be Blood (2007) favors (again) steak and whiskey. As a hyper-capitalist caricature, Plainview is a sort of apex predator, and this is reinforced by his choice of meal. I struggle to think of a better nexus between hyper-masculine predation and affluence than steak and whiskey.

And affluence is a big part of modern villainy. You don’t see a lot of paupers/homeless people with top hats and waxed mustaches. (I don’t mean to assume too much about your life, dear reader.) The classic villain archetype bears an uncanny resemblance to the classic robber baron/railroad magnate/ rich guy operating the levers of the machine in which you are simply a cog. Lex Luthor, King Joffrey, and Monty Burns all enjoy things delivered on silver platters. And since we’ve absorbed this socio-economic projection of villainy into our cultural mythology, the food choices of our classic villain template tend toward caviar and away from a nice fruit salad.

This is ironic when considering the origin of the word “villain” itself. If you were tilling the soil for your livelihood during the Dark Ages, you would be doing so on a farming compound, or villa, naturally. This would make you a “farmhand,” or vilain, in the Old French, from the Late Latin villanus. This meant that you were not a knight, not bound by the strictures of chivalry, and therefore likely to commit heinous, villainous acts. (My experience with moderns farmers implies that this is no longer much of a concern.)

So “villainy,” as an etymological construct, is intrinsically bound up with fresh, local, organic produce. While this doesn’t mean that you should wear a stab-vest in the produce section of Foods For Living, it’s worth noting how the concept of "villainy" was historically sanctioned by the affluent, until an emerging literate middle class decided to vilify them through fiction. These distinctions may have been obliterated by the explosion of fictional perspectives in every medium over the last hundred years, but the underlying class tensions are (obviously) going nowhere. (Many thanks to Aerosmith for reminding us.)

It makes me wonder: On what shall tomorrow’s villains dine? What will that say about their creators? 

A SCIENCE Info Table at Article's End

 

Stimulus                  Your Feelings      A Psychopath's Feelings

Getting Promoted          Excited, proud     Apathetic, detached

Making a successful 

joke                      Proud              Apathetic, detached

Having a child            Grateful, proud, 

                          joyous             Apathetic, detached

Doing something           Horrified,         Really pumped

violently psychotic       regretful,                  

                          disoriented

Eating some great food    Content,           Content, stimulated

                          stimulated on      on a basic visceral

                          a basic visceral   level                                          level