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Basil: Seriously, Sybil, do you remember, when we were first...manacled together?  We used to laugh quite a lot.
Sybil: Yes, but not at the same time, Basil.
-- a Fawlty Towers moment

Dear friends, there is laughter to be had this week, I’m sure, but not at LuthorCorp.  I will not bore you with the intricate details of what makes this week at the box factory different from any other, but it is different this week, even more airless and cheerless than usual, and it is starting to tell on my non-box-factory life.  I’ve been playing through lunch, I’ve been missing my lunchtime workouts at the gym, I come home feeling shaky and utterly without attention span.  I know there are worse ways to make a living, especially since reading How Green Was My Valley, but I can’t help but feel that there has to be a better way, there just has to be a better way, a way that doesn’t fill me with fury all day long, and leave me too spent to read or write or play nicely with my blogroll/nonblogroll/IRL pals.

Friends, this is a very short pity party, one I’m going to nip in the bud right now.  I just received a very nice e from a writer who once edited a food zine I couldn’t get enough of, and she has very kindly given me permission to reprint one of her articles in this space.  I will probably save it for the weekend, as I want to make it part of a larger reflection about food writing, but until then I will just be quietly stoked about it.  (whisper) Woo-hoo.  (/whisper)

In the meantime, in the spirit of a trivia-minded friend, here are three interesting things I learned this week:

1.  Until the year 2000, the U.S. was the number-one grower of tomatoes in the world.  In 2000, the U.S. was eclipsed by China.  China now grows and sells more tomatoes than any other country in the world.  None of these tomatoes are exported, and they are sold and consumed exclusively in south China.  The preferred method of consumption is raw, with salt.  (Source: “From Marcus Apicius to Julia Child:  An Introduction to Culinary History,” a class taught by Andrew F. Smith at New School University in New York City.)

2.  In response to the aforementioned orionoir post, that seaweed in your toothpaste is probably carrageenan, a derivative of various red seaweeds used as a stabilizing and emulsifying agent in all sorts of foods (I used to find it in my old brand of drinkable yogurt) and nonfoods (like dog food and air freshener gels).  I used to think of it as a spooky nonfood until I read in one of Nick Nairn’s cookbooks that you can buy powdered carragheen in supermarkets in Scotland and Ireland and use it to prepare things like carragheen pudding.  Whoa.  (Source:  The Food Reference Website and Wild Harvest 2 by Nick Nairn, BBC Books, 1997.)

3.  In a 1937 study, Witchcraft Among the Azande, E.E. Evans-Pritchard describes the use of the “poison chicken oracle” practiced by the Azande in Sudan.  A chicken is fed poison and then asked a question.  If the chicken dies, the answer to the question is “yes.” If the chicken survives, the answer is “no.” (Source:  The Chicken Book by Page Smith and Charles Daniel, University of Georgia Press, 2000.)

Okay, I’ll throw in a fourth, just because I can’t resist this recipe for brandy broth, another piece of beautiful food writing from How Green Was My Valley:

O, Brandy Broth is the King of Broth and royal in the rooms of the mouth.  A good chicken and a noble piece of ham, with a little shoulder of lamb, small to have the least of grease, and then a paste of the roes of trout with cream, a bit of butter, and the yolk of an egg, whipped tight and poured in when the chicken, proud with a stuffing of sage and thyme, has been elbowing the lamb and the ham in the earthenware pot until all three are tender as the heart of a mother.  In with the carrots and turnips and the goodness of marrow bones, and in with a mixing of milk and potatoes.  Now watch the clock and every fifteen minutes pour in a noggin of brandy, and with the first a pint of home-brewed ale.  Two noggins in, and with the third, throw in the chopped bottoms of leeks, but save the green leaves until ten minutes from the time you sit to eat, for then you shall find them still a lovely green.

Drink down the liquor and raise your eyes to give praise for a mouth and a belly, and then start upon the chicken.