Thai Food Conspiracy: Back to Rehab… Again…

My wife Tang is in hot dog heaven. Think all Thais are ladling creamy curries over rice three times a day? Think again. You wouldn’t believe some of the s**** that passes as Thai food in country. One of them should be very familiar, though—hot dogs (that’s a Thai word btw). Hot dogs are an exotic item in Thailand, along with buttered bread and waffles (I’m serious). So to actually be in a New World country in common descent from the Northern European hot dog homes of Germany, Austria and Poland is like a culinary Mecca for her (go ahead, issue a fatwa, you humorless mullahf***ers; I could use the publicity). Normally I would protest, given the 30% fat content of your typical weiner and Tang’s ongoing middle-age battles of bulges, but given the high costs of travel and restaurants these days and the ease of nuking a unit of encased meat for lunch, I’ve signed off on this one albeit with prejudice. I’ve even got her going for the turkey wieners, since she doesn’t eat beef out of respect for Kuan Yin, and the fact that the cost of beef is prohibitive in Thailand. A good Buddhist eats pork of course, as do many Hindus. You can even find the little babis all over Bali in a predominant Muslim country, but I wouldn’t look elsewhere down there. It even seems proscribed in Malaysia, and that’s barely 50% Muslim. For Muslims in Thailand, that’s generally the threshold of the religion, little else rating a mention, even alcoholic beverages. Malaysians cross the border into Thailand regularly to do the things that are outlawed at home, even advising that “you’re wasting your money” to merely drink a beer or three since it’s not enough to get you totally plastered. Welcome to Mississippi and the universal law of Overcompensation on Prohibitions.

America is a food court, little Italy ceding to Chinatown in both New York and San Francisco, giving typical ‘American’ food like pizza and spaghetti a run for its money. Actually I can remember when pizzas were called ‘pies’ and pesto was pig Latin for someone you didn’t like but we’ve come a long way since then. In the Flagstaff Mall the no-name Chinese food easily outsells Sbarro, so that’s encouraging for us Asiaphiles who start going into withdrawal without rice. Tang’s hot-dog thing is a mutation in the culinary DNA, a nine-item deletion on chromosome 14 if I remember correctly. Hotdogs notwithstanding, broadly speaking there are basically only two kinds of Asian food, rice or noodles. Everything else are local variations on regional Asian themes, Thailand being the point where hot-wok Chinese food and slow-simmer Indian curries mix and mingle into something greater than the sum of its parts. Their transplantation to America is a boon for us frequent travelers, since you’ve got to eat a real meal once in a while; sandwiches and instant noodles only go so far. Asian food is almost the only cuisine that places any emphasis on vegetables, too, so that’s necessary to avoid blurry-eyed ‘camp-out malaise’, unless you want to pop vitamins instead of trail mix. Even in New York Chinese food is cheap as dirt, like a five-item meal going for less than five bucks at the little place where Chinatown meets Soho. I doubt you could beat that in Beijing. This is especially important in high-altitude places like Flagstaff where the high-pressure oxygen in every cell is in constant expansion against the low-pressure oxygen outside, resulting in some internal discomfort for many of us. In other words you don’t need any extra help from Mexican food. Santa Fe, though, at the same altitude is a real temptation with its creative take on variations of corn, beans, dairy, meat, and chile a la Mexicaine.

So Tang takes the new culinary realities in stride, though old habits die hard, like baby dried shrimp for use in soups and stews. Fortunately Mexicans like them also, so being in a place like Arizona helps the adjustment. The cashier almost gagged looking at them, but that’s her problem. They came from Thailand anyway, the small print reveals. Mexico certainly has plenty of chiles available for perusal, being their native place of evolution, but that’s overkill. Thais will only eat the three or four types that made it across the ocean presumably with the Portuguese or Spanish galleons a few centuries ago, though they hardly believe that story, they being so attached to spicy food nowadays that they assume they invented it. If avoidance of pork is the test of Islam, the ability to endure spicy food is the test of your ‘Thai-ness’. It’s hard to believe that they’re enjoying the flavors, so busy they are fanning their mouths and chugging water, but they swear by it, typically the first question they’ll inquire about a Farang. “Can he eat hot food?” Hey, you gotta’ have priorities. Things crossed the ocean in the other direction also, especially silk, but also the ikat weaving technique, notable in that it was picked up by the lower and indigenous classes of society, hardly the same market as for silk, though it may have indeed been copied from silk products. I have a cotton weaving from East Timor part of which is the spitting image of weavings from the town of Solola’, Guatemala, and weavings from West Timor are much more similar to those of Guatemala than they are to those of its Indonesian neighbors. I’d be hard pressed to hazard a guess as to the flow of influence, though the origins of ikat (a Malay word) in the South Pacific are well-known, and the Portuguese presence in Timor ditto.

Back when I was single, Thais used to ask me, “Which do you like, white meat or dark?” But they were talking about women, not chicken, though the word for chicken is frequently used for women in Asia, usually of the looser variety, i.e. falling off the bone. But I digress. Tang informs me that the eggs I just bought are duck eggs. That’s because in Thailand the only white eggs are from ducks. All the chicken eggs are brown. Why should the US be any different? The funny thing is that she says this with such country-girl authority, not realizing that she’s talking to a guy who had a purple ribbon winner in the laying-hen category in the Mississippi State Fair and who knows that leghorn is more than some town in Italy, however bastardized the English name, and that Rhode Island Reds are not a baseball team. They assume that the US is a nation of modern technology and that only, not realizing that agriculture is a major US export and our historical legacy. But tell that to someone from an agricultural third-world country that must borrow the English word ‘farm’ for everyday use. Old habits and notions die hard. Tang refuses to use a washing machine and can be seen in hotel bathrooms washing clothes by hand and hanging them to dry. We should charge admission to watch, extra if you want your own clothes actually washed in the process. If you want Thai food, though, go to your local eatery. Tang is no expert cook (pronounced kook, a Thai word meaning ‘a person who prepares food for eating’). But if they have hot dogs on the menu, run for your life, and don’t look back. You could get lost in there.