From the Italian:
Cibo (colloq) grub/food
Matto (pazzo) crazy/daft (slang) meaning Food Crazy.
You may have heard the name before in reference to a certain Japanese Duet on Grand Royal. That’s cool but this is not about them. This, of course, is about me. Me and my lust. My lust for food.
Recently, realizing I could live a 2-3 star lifestyle on a 1 star budget has gotten my juices flowing. The fact that I currently reside in 1) Asia – known for the spiciest, healthiest cuisine worldwide 2) Japan – a country where it’s not so much polite to slurp your soba than rude not to 3) near the Fukuoka coast – one of the best sushi markets this side of Hokkaido 4) the Onga River valley – just a stone’s throw from many decent (though lacking in chilis) local and international food resources, and finally 5) my dorm apartment building – with 8 other foreigners all born of different taste buds for different fare, so a little neighborly competition has given my culinary libido more a dose of viagra jambalaya than solo almond butter fellatio ever could.
“I wanted a pig.” starts off Bill Buford’s New Yorker piece which, thanks to Maria, and despite a deficit of feduciary proliferation, has awakened our inner desirer culinaire to begin getting our hands hot diggity hog dirty. Read on… I think if we could, we too, would want a pig. I imagine Maria & I carving that sacred heifer up amidst curses, screeches and howls. No wait, Maria’s knives are shit and my collection is incomplete (though I recently smuggled a $.50 6″ iron job in from Indonesia). I’m still a good bone and filet knife away from respectability. Yet somehow I persist.
Seasonal is the key to cuisine, using what’s fresh and available can only make your food better. We take this for granted in the U.S., especially in California, where due to a combination of our agricultural capital, huge demand and reverse trade restrictions we have access to most everything year round. Sure there are more strawberries in the summer, but you can always find them somewhere. Here, the stores are short of (hothouse) tomatoes these days, and those that they are selling were picked so early that they’re white, coming in pairs for around $2-4. A few months ago I bought a box of beautiful, big nipply things for less than $4. So these days, just in time for Autumn nabe (hotpot) parties, tomatoes are out, but asparagus, eggplant, imo (sweet potatoes), shiitake, shiso, squash, takenoko (young bamboo), zucchini, aji (Spanish Mackeral), fugu (Blowfish), hamachi (Yellowtail) is fresh and flying off my cutting board into the wok for tempura, the grill for kebabs, the teppan for searing and, basically, my mouth for beautiful union between Man and His Divine Works.
All this obsessive behavior strikes me as odd coming, as I did, from the relatively boring meat and potatoes background of late 70s early 80s Southern California. The cusp of LA and Orange counties was not a particularly exciting nor experimental environment to grow up in despite the fact we were surrounded by exotic tastes from every part of the globe: Iranian Kebab, Indian Curry and Dahl, Korean and Mongolian Barbeque, Ethiopian Mesir Wat and Injera, Vietnamese Pho, Honduran Pupusas, Greek Suvlaki and Dolma, plus many I can’t even pronounce.
So like most boring W.A.S.P. families, I grew up grinding away absent-mindedly on overdone steak, dry chicken, no-comment meatloaf, store-bought sauce spaghetti, steamed vegetables, and milk. When the time came to eat out or order in we invariably chose from the ZERO INSPIRATION yellow pages consisting mainly of too-greasy Chinese joints, stereotypical Italian (read: Delivery PIZZA) or, of course, fast food. Fast food was a new phenomenon back in the early 80′s. So was Mtv (which used to show nude videos in the wee hours) and AIDS. No one knew that these seemingly innocuous things would eventually kill you in horrible ways. But as I said, we lived in Southern California. Whether we believed it or not we were the blessed children of America’s far-reaching Frontiersman tradition, though like the Israelites on countless occasions, we too had lost our way, and we needed to be thumped in the head by Yahweh. Our forefather’s once tough brazen exterior had curdled into a W.A.S.P.y goulash of watery boredom. What to do?
Thank god for foreigners. They – we – make the U.S. what it is. Our collective Gumbo culture is always being used as the base for tomorrow’s Lentil Stew. I don”t think the austere Japanese appreciate what we – as windows to the world – do for them here. Which is try to loosen things up. (“Yes, you won’t disgrace the emperor by putting soy sauce on your rice and no, brown rice is not just for dogs and criminals…”). They certainly don’t learn our language. Yet they need us still. They are interested in us as spectators at a zoo are mildly curious in seeing a Panda. Mostly they stay far away, pointing as they ogle, though occasionally they poke through the bars or jump in the pen and try to hug us and, well, sometimes we bite back. Once the natives find out I can make sushi, I get requests to open up my longtime dream of a Sushi Joint, White Boy Sushi here in Japan and let the traditionalists have a look-see at what the barbarians are doing to their national food. Japan, not a foreigner-friendly country, is not a place I would like to settle and raise what family I may someday have. That said, I will be damned if I ever live in a Renaissance of Food as delectable as Los Angeles again and mindlessly head to the Jack-in-the-Box Drive-thru because I think the “pancakes are less rubbery than at McDonald’s.” (Actual quote).
In the end, I can’t have my pig. Not yet. So I’ll be satisfied with my hamachi.
