People often identify themselves or others by the food they eat. I guess for some it even becomes a point of national pride, as the BBC points out in a report about the latest nations to join the EU:

Mamaliga is so central to Romanian life, that Bulgarians sometimes refer to Romanians pejoratively as Mamaligi – though the dish exists in Bulgaria too, under the name kachamak.

One elderly Romanian voiced anxieties about Romania’s membership of the EU, telling BBC correspondent Oana Lungescu: “We’ll no longer be able to make our mamaliga, because we’ll have to eat sliced bread wrapped in plastic with a food safety stamp on it!

But do the Bulgarians mean it in a positive or negative fashion? What would New Yorkers think if everyone started calling them Bagelers? The funny thing is, Mamaliga not only exists in Bulgaria but many other parts of the world under the more common name of Polenta.

…a cornmeal dish popular in Italian, Savoyard, Swiss, Austrian, Croatian, Slovenian, Serbian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Corsican, Argentine, Brazilian, and Mexican cuisine, and it is a traditional staple food throughout much of northern Italy.

Will Romanian cornmeal-based dishes survive an onslaught of competitive foodstuffs? Hard to say, but it seems highly likely, especially if someone manages to market it to the EU or beyond as a more traditional, unique, or essential element of Romanian life (or maybe BalmoÅŸ is a better candidate). Actually, it did not take long to find exactly that kind of discussion already underway:

Again, with Romanians things are more complicated and tricky, because ‘mamaliga’, as many other things Romanian, is not just food; there is a whole symbolism behind the poor innocent ‘mamaliga’. The mystery dwells in, at least, few aspects: how ‘mamaliga’ is cooked; our history; how we dealt with our history across time.

[…]

Here is the trick: ‘mamaliga’ is made of corn, which is the peasants’ bread, is thick but not as consistent as bread, is not baked but boiled to a certain point. You eat it fast; the leftovers are not good, as it is with bread. If is chilling out too much, then ‘mamaliga’ is not good; if is not boiled enough is flawed. So, there you go to an ad-hoc manual in defining Romanians: we need to boil to the hottest point until we take any action; even so, we might get it wrong if not boiled properly or chilled out too much.

Look deep within your bowl and you may find the secrets to understanding geopolitical security. Reminds me of the movie Tampopo as I mentioned once before — the Japanese quest to create the perfect bowl of ramen. If nothing else, this story again just takes us back to the old saying “you are what you eat”.

The Onion with breaking news in this report:

The sweeping new law prohibits all living beings within state borders from being born with random genetic mutations that could make them better suited to evade predators, secure a mate, or, adapt to a changing environment. In addition, it bars any sexual reproduction, battles for survival, or instances of pure happenstance that might lead, after several generations, to a more well-adapted species or subspecies.

Comprehensive approach. They’ve certainly done their homework.

To enforce the law, Kansas state police will be trained to investigate and apprehend organisms who exhibit suspected signs of evolutionary behavior, such as natural selection or speciation. Plans are underway to track and monitor DNA strands in every Kansan life form for even the slightest change in allele frequencies.

Your cell-phone may soon include DNA analysis capabilities. And surely things like used chewing gum will be treated as essential personal identity information.

Anti-evolutionists such as Hellenbaum have long accused microorganisms of popularizing “an otherwise obscure, agonizingly slow, and hard-to-understand” biological process. “These repeat offenders are at the root of the problem,” Hellenbaum said. “We have the fossil records to prove it.”

Oh, nice dig Onion!

“No species is exempt,” said Marcus Holloway, a state police spokesman. “Whether you’re a human being or a fruit fly—if we detect one homologous chromosome trying to cross over during the process of meiosis, you will be punished to the full extent of the law.”

Although the full impact of the new law will likely not be felt for approximately 10 million years, most Kansans say they are relieved that the ban went into effect this week, claiming that evolution may have gone too far already.

Hilarious stuff. When you read the whole article, note the sage point (pun not intended) about protests from Agribusiness leaders who depend on evolutionary science for genetic modification of crops.

Maybe I just haven’t spent enough time in Japan, but this part of a story about raising tuna caught (pun not intended) me by surprise:

This is clearly a labour of love, but how will he feel when the time comes to send his fish to the market to be slaughtered for the first time?

“It will be like sending my daughters off to get married,” he says with a grin. “Joy and sadness.” But will he be eating them? “Definitely!”

Eating your daughters after they are married? I think something must be missing in that translation. Although it does make me wonder why people are often so intent on eating things that are raised in far away places, often saying the further the better the taste, but they do not want their children marrying anyone from outside a small radius…strange analogy, I know, but the BBC started it.

This site has some useful information about how sulfur is regulated quite differently for different foods, although the risks may be the same:

Sulfites are not allowed on red meat. Sodium bisulfite does such a good job of color fixing, that sulfited ground beef can be rotten and you can’t tell by looking at it. For this reason, the FDA has an absolute prohibition against sulfites in meat. However, the rule doesn’t apply to other ingredients that may be mixed into the meat. For instance, sausage may legally contain corn syrup, molasses, or wine.

SharkFish is another story. Sulfites are a preservative for fish. Theoretically, sulfited fish must carry a warning somewhere near the fish display, but I’ve never seen one.

The author goes on to describe how he has tried to find sulfur in various foods but often suspected the wrong thing, or had a hard time tracing the source(s) of his allergic reactions.