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.

CR in CR- Death by Thai Food

My father-in-law is dying. I tell him he’s not, but he is. They’re killing him, not some vast faceless conspiratorial capital ‘T’ “They”, but the very faceful wife, daughter, and doctors surrounding him. I took him to Chiang Rai general hospital five days ago complaining of chest pains. They checked him over, declared him normal, invoked the diabetes clause (anything they don’t know the cause of they blame on Diabetes, a family of musicians in Mali I think), and then released him, in and out in less than two hours. How’s that for service? Would we have taken him in if he were normal? Yesterday he complained again of the same chest pains, only worse. We took him to a different private hospital, where they put him on a pacemaker after a pulse reading dipping below forty and a blood pressure reading up to a hundred-ninety-plus over a hundred. Did I mention that he’s been in the hospital at least once a month for the last six months with the same symptoms? So what does he do when he gets one of these attacks? Typically he’ll start walking down the street, clutching his chest all the while, ignoring my commands to lie down, as if he’d rather see the Homies one last time than actually try to ease the offending condition. If there’s anything worse than watching someone grow old, it’s watching someone refuse to, a warning to myself included. When someone goes into the hospital with the symptoms of old age at sixty and then gets the brilliant idea to start exercising, it’s probably better to save the brilliance for something else. It’s too late for anything but tai chi. Anything else and you could hurt yourself.

Stupidity and stubbornness are not usually listed as causes of death, but they probably should be, along with denial. That’s the longest river in the world, and seems to run through every country, drowning millions in its frothy waters. Thai food could even be considered a contributing cause of death in many cases I think. I told them all the first time that he’d have to give up salt, including fish sauce, totally- anybody knows that- and cut sugar and oil back sharply too. That means Thai food in general. For you people down south the local food up here’s a bit raunchier, hotter and nastier. Central Thai food can pass as health food in the US. Don’t try that with northern food. If you don’t believe me try some nam ngieow sometime. The doctors didn’t say anything about diet, either for his heart condition or diabetes. They never do, even though anybody who knows anything about diabetes knows that diet is the crucial factor. They gave him pills. They always do. He takes them religiously as his condition worsens. Guess what they feed him in the hospital? You guessed it, Thai food. That’ll keep ‘em coming back. Every kind of Thai food has sugar in it btw, in case you were wondering what that secret ingredient is. Variations on the combinations of sugar, salt, and red pepper pretty much define Thai food and are condiments ladled liberally on everything, even sugar in noodle soup, yes that’s right. Every one of those delicious curries has sugar in it, as does even fried rice. If it’s too hot, add sugar. If it’s too sweet, add chile or salt. It’s a vicious circle. Why not just add little or nothing and concentrate on creative combinations? After a trip to Penang, northern Malaysia, with food very similar to Thai, obviously a branch off the same culinary DNA, my wife’s only complaint was that it was too jeut, not sweet enough, salty enough, or hot enough. Guess what my complaint was? Thai food’s too much of all of those.

I told them I’d foot the bills for my father-in-law’s medical treatment if they’ll keep all the salt and sugar out of his diet, added salt and sugar, that is. It’d be almost impossible to totally remove it of course. I’ll probably keep my part of the bargain with a simple promise, but I doubt they’ll keep their end. Most Thais would probably rather die than eat ‘Farang’ food. I can understand the sentiment but it wouldn’t have to be so extreme if they could just cut back and the lower the ‘intensity’ of flavor in their food. In general they can’t. They live for that intensity, so even de-fanged Thai food won’t work. They pride themselves and compete with each other on threshold levels of intensity. They don’t eat for health; they eat for entertainment. Welcome to Italy. The idea that food has anything to do with health is totally foreign to their way of thinking. If you want to take something for health, you take pills, simple. Old men walk around villages selling out-of-date pills that they’re not even qualified to throw away, much less prescribe. Sales are brisk. Aside from that everybody’s got a favorite home remedy, ranging from the bizarre to the bazaar. In Hammurabi’s day in ancient Babylon patients had to run the gauntlet of people giving cheap advice, they say. Actually it was the other way around and the patient had to sit or lie there and endure these quasi-eulogistic epithets, whether as punishment or sincere advice would be hard to determine. I firmly believe in self diagnosis. Who knows your symptoms better than yourself, after all? But that doesn’t extend to the advice of any Barney or Betty who claims to be able to cure gout with apple cider vinegar. It’s not that easy. Self-diagnosis only goes so far also. At some point you have to surrender to the long loving arms of- not conspiracy, not science, but faith- and hope for the best.

If you go into (the) hospital in the US with kidney pains, the first thing they’ll ask is, “Do you have health insurance?” “No.” “Drink lots of water.” That’s it, cold and brutal. They don’t even ask, “Visa or Mastercard?” The credit limits don’t go that high. Thais have a more unnerving way of objectifying your health conditions- you don’t exist when you’re incapacitated. When I was laid up with a cracked coccyx, the little neighborhood girls who used to play with the hairs on my chest (shut your dirty mind) wouldn’t even look at me, kind of like ex-lovers forced to share the same old friends, even when I called to them in the same room. I finally had to make jokes about the diapers I was wearing- I prefer foreign-made Pampers over the local Momy Poko’s- just to break the ice with girls I’d known for months if not years (shut it, I said). The diapers were there ‘just in case’, since I couldn’t feel anything ‘down there’ any way. I’m better now. Ever wonder what it’d be like experiencing ‘the first time’ all over again? Ever see ‘Dante’s Peak?’ Actually being laid up half conscious in a hospital in Thailand for a Thai is probably a lot like being a Farang. They like to talk about you behind your back right to your face. It’s unnerving. Hospitals in Thailand are surrounded by coffin shops. Sales are good, even though they’ll only be burnt in the fires of cremation as the corporeal body (redundancy intended to simulate three dimensions) reverts to primordial hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen- one or six or eight electrons to an Adam- in preparation for the Big Recycle/Reincarnation/Rebirth.

The Big Moment for any Thai cremation is the moment when they open the coffin right before sliding it into the fire and anybody who can, the younger the better, rushes up for one last look at the body, imitating the facial gestures and bodily contortions of that ‘mere vessel.’ The coffin’s usually been on display for a week by now btw, if the family can afford the party. Carbohydrates or hydrocarbons? Alive or dead? Consumed or consuming? On the rocks or straight up? These are the choices for organic chemistry. You draw the lines and choose sides. As I watch the lines on my pa-in-law’s bedside EKG- I’ve never seen one before btw- I explain to the village people about the pulse and pressure readings. I might as well have been pointing to ancient hieroglyphics. They’re telling him to eat hotter spicier saltier food to ensure good health. Just for fun we each try the pulse-o’-meter on our own index fingers. I’m in fine shape in the high sixties and the wife’s okay for a woman in the low eighties. Her mother tops ninety, going going going… uh oh, it’s looking like another rehab, but I say no no no... Suicidal tendencies might help cut health costs, true, but it really shouldn’t have to come to that now really, should it?

Thai Food: a Survival Guide

I have old-hand friends in Thailand whose first introduction to Thais and Thai culture was along the canals in Amsterdam. For me, though, it was along the canals of Venice, Beach that is, LA, CA, USA. There I discovered my first Thai restaurant back in 1984. If it seems hard for some of you kids born since then to realize that there was ever a time when there were no Thai restaurants in the US, then believe it. It’s true; I’ve got witnesses. Though I wasn’t long in LA, so won’t swear that that little place along Robertson Blvd. was the first, it was the same in the Bay Area the next year, where I stayed for several, one Thai restaurant amongst a sea of Chinese and Mexican and Italian, back when that was considered ‘ethnic’. I remember it like it was yesterday, a little family-run place along San Pablo Ave. just outside the Berkeley city limits in Oakland, BYOB. Those creamy curries were like heaven for someone raised on soul food, enlightened by Mexican, and surviving on Chinese, colors and flavors mixing and mingling on the palate and palette in a playful synesthesia of the gods. The smart money was on the continued success of Thai food in America, and sure enough, they multiplied like Mississippi mushrooms in cow shit, like Farang bars along Sukhumvit in Bangkok. It’s nice to be right. A quick Google search of ‘Thai Restaurants—Los Angeles’ at this juncture is still going strong after a hundred pages, and that says nothing of the multifarious locations around the country and the world. Nothing succeeds like success. If you don’t have any new ideas, then copy someone else’s. You can’t get any more Thai than that. It’s nice to be safe. It’s nice to be in Thailand. It’s warm.

The reality here at ground zero is a bit different of course. For one thing, those creamy curries are not necessarily the most representative food of Thailand, and indeed can be hard to find for a first-time tourist. For another thing, those curries should probably not properly be considered ‘Thai’ in the first place. If their scarcity in the northern and eastern provinces is the first clue to this, then their presence in Malaysia and close similarity to the ‘Padang’ (Sumatra) curries of Indonesia is the next, presumably adapted from Indian curries by the same people who adopted and adapted Indian culture and religion. The Malay language was full of Sanskrit loan-words long before it was full of Arabic ones, after all. But Thais are the ones who introduced wet curries to the US and the world, so such food will forever be ‘Thai.’

Perhaps most importantly, those curries are not especially healthy, despite the universal tendency of ‘health-food’ counters and eateries in the US to include some mock-Thai dishes to lend some mock-cachet and currency to their selection. In addition to the excessive use of oils, frequently palm oil of lubrication fame, and the unnecessary use of sugar, which the Malays fortunately tend to avoid, the ingredient that makes those curries creamy is coconut, in a form known as ‘ka-ti’ in Thailand, the water/milk recombined with the meat into a thick creamy paste. Well, this is some tasty sauce that goes down easy, but there’s only one problem- it stays there. That leftover curry in the fridge next day has a crust on top, a breakable crust. “What kind of oil are you using?” I scream at my wife. But it’s not the oil; it’s the ka-ti. Like nitroglycerine, ka-ti apparently freezes at about 55F/13C degrees. Unlike nitroglycerin, it’s bad for your heart. So say the posters on the wall of Thai hospitals. The posters in the US would probably say the same if the product were widely used there. My HIV friend says that coconut in any form is strictly proscribed for him.

The Thai food available in Thai restaurants overseas is central Thai food. Maybe the best representative of this style is tom yam goong or tom kha gai, right tasty dishes if you don’t mind pulling weeds out of your mouth while you eat. Except for lahp, which is starting to be found more in the US, almost no dishes come from the north or northeast, which are more influenced by Burma and Laos, respectively, than the Malaysian-inspired dishes of the south. Some popular dishes in US restaurants, like pat thai and kaow pat, are street food in Thailand, and quite different from the stylized US restaurant versions. The curries and soups, on the other hand, might be difficult to find in street stalls in Thailand. They are usually found only at stalls specializing in curries, and not usually tourist oriented, though those dishes may be simulated in fancy restaurants. Spring rolls are also nearly impossible to find. That’s Vietnam. Probably the single most popular street food in Thailand, noodle soup, also originally from Vietnam, would be hard to find in a US-based Thai restaurant.

Then there’s the dark side. Northern Thailand has its own food, most famous of which is probably kaow soi, though more typical would be nam ngieow, a hot murky tomato-based concoction served over khanom jeen or rice noodles, and which people here in Chiang Rai go ape-shit over. Actually kaow soi in Laos or Xishuangbanna is closer to nam ngieow than it is to the standard kaow soi islam to be found here, a kati-based concoction brought from Burma. Then there’s gaeng awm, something like lahp that apparently got lost and then rescued a few days later, older but wilder. They also go ape-shit over som tam, which is shredded unripe papaya salad mixed with peanuts, tomatoes, crab, hot peppers, and only God knows what else. He ain’t tellin’. If you’re eating papayas to help promote bowel movements, this’ll get you there in a hurry. Naturally it’s eaten with sticky rice to help repair the damage. Does raw papaya sound strange? Thais also typically eat their mangoes green. Go figure. By the time they get ripe, supermarkets are discounting the price and I’m stocking up. Some varieties are actually quite tasty green, but I can’t help feel they’re missing the boat on this one, ripe mango being one of the finer flavors in the world. So, if you like green mangoes, hot spicy raw papaya salad, and gut-slashing spicy noodles, then northern Thailand might be just the ticket for you, especially if you like Mexican food already. Mexicans in LA are some of the best customers for Thai food in the not-so-fancy restaurants.

Let me clarify something for you people overseas or too down-country or up-scale to know or care. Sticky rice is not rice that somebody decided to ‘stickify’ for reasons culinary or esthetic. Sticky rice is properly called ‘glutinous rice’, because of its higher gluten, or protein, content. This makes it a staple food among the protein-poor country folk, who may eat it with little or nothing besides chili paste. It calms the stomach excellently, though you may pay for that with subsequent constipation. They don’t call it ‘sticky’ for nothing. At least is has some nutritional benefit. ‘Polished’ white rice has little or none. Nevertheless, the main problems plaguing Thai food are simply the indiscriminate use of salt, sugar, and hot peppers. If the food’s too hot or salty, Thais will add sugar. The inverse is also true. If the food is too sweet, then they’ll add salt or peppers. This totally misses the point, which is that the minimum of any these would be preferable, especially for health considerations. Thais tend to maximize for ‘intensity’ of flavor. Anybody who puts sugar in noodle soup needs a psychiatric examination, in my opinion, but there it is, every time. Sometimes the soup seems but a base for the combination of condiments within it. I’m finished eating while some Thais are still taste-tasting and stirring. Nearly every dish has sugar in it, and nearly every elder in Thailand has diabetes. Fortunately this is the type that comes and goes from one medical exam to the next. Huh? That’s the rap. When an American dies there is usually a single cause of death, of course. When a Thai dies, there are usually four, I’ve noticed. One of them is typically diabetes.

The over-dependency of Thai food on superficial condiments and less reliance on freshness and originality is what keeps it from becoming one of the world’s great cuisines. Though much is made of balancing the ‘five food groups,’ judging from the results, you might assume that these would be peppers, sugar, salt, and oil. And oh yeah, rice. A master chef could change all that, and indeed, some of the less-authentic ‘Thai’ dishes in the US are indeed tastier, and almost certainly healthier, than the home-grown varieties. My solution is to eat it with brown rice, which is becoming increasingly available, and eat it at home, reducing all measurements of oil, sugar, and spice by half. Not only do you increase the nutritional value, but now you can actually taste the flavors, since your tongue doesn’t have to run for cover. I swear by it. And oh yeah, beware of curries sitting out all day in stalls. Thais think that a ‘pie-safe’ will keep food safe. It’s paradise for bacteria. Curries are best mid-day. You’ve been forewarned.