the confined nomad

As I was skimming through blog headlines on my Google Reader, trying to digest the absurd events of the week in 5 minutes or less, a Boing Boing post called “TIME on unsustainable farming practices,” caught my eye.  After reading their quick excerpt of the article, I was motivated enough to head over to the TIME website and read the entire article, “Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food,” by Bryan Walsh.  My interest was partly because I was surprised to see this story in TIME, and partly because I’m actually very interested in this topic. read more »

I recently finished reading Michael Pollan‘s bestseller The Omnivore’s Dilemma.  The book was a real eye opener.  It digs deep into the growing, raising, producing, and collecting of food before it reaches our dinner tables.  Specifically dealing with food production in the US, Pollan journeys across our edible landscape: he visits the corn belt to scrutinize the crop that makes up a large percentage of industrial food products (coke lovers be aware — your favorite beverage is 100% made of chemical derivatives of corn), takes a closer look at organic and what the label really means, spends a week on a farm in Virginia, wrestles with vegetarianism (and ultimately favors on the side of omnivorism with an arguement that supports the animals), hunts pigs and forages for mushrooms.  I found each section of the book equally enjoyable, and many of the lessons I learned from it will probably stick with me forever.

The reason I’m bringing it up here, however, has to do with one particular passage, that was a very minor theme in the book as a whole, but I felt resonated particularly well with our project:

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Robert Sietsema, our ethnic food guide

I feel like I’ve found the Holy Grail. I even wondered at first why I’m even going to bother continuing to attempt to eat food from every nation on earth in New York City. It seems that it’s been done, and well documented. But then I took a closer look and thought, not quite. There is no entry for Algeria in Robert Sietsema’s The Food Lover’s Guide to the Best Ethnic Eating in New York City. Whew! I now have reason to keep going.

Robert Sietsema is longtime Village Voice food critic, and author of now-on-hiatus foodzine Down the Hatch. His book is a mandatory resource for anyone who is interested in multi-national eats in our fair city. First published in 1994 with the title Good & Cheap Ethnic Eats Under $10, the latest revision came out in 2004, and includes entries for what appears at first to be every cuisine under the sun. The guidebook, slim and rectangular, in a shape and size not unlike the Zagat guides, is organized by region/country/cuisine, more or less in alphabetical order. Each entry is limited to one paragraph, and includes a rating of one (good) to three (amazing) stars, a $ if the meal is more than $20/person, and other symbols if spicy food is available, the fish is particularly good, and/or if the establishment is vege friendly. A helpful little box of common food items to look is placed at the beginning of each section. All five boroughs and New Jersey are well covered, and a neighborhood index makes browsing your local hood easy.

This book is going to be a huge help when we get to places like Azerbaijan and Guyana, and for figuring out which restaurants in Flushing have Sichuan food and which represent Beijing. But with 100 cultural and national groupings represented, it is definitely not exhaustive of the entire UN.

We can already pride ourselves on having identified, located, and devoured Algerian cuisine in Astoria, Queens. Supereg will be filling you in on the details of that adventure very soon. In the meantime, I’m going back on the hunt for Andorran food (also not represented in the Sietsema book), which is proving to be our first real challenge.