Using the oven in summer…

So, first: I am think­ing about Japan. Lit­tle bite-sized, soy-based, meat-textured odd­ments of indus­trial man­u­fac­ture… not Japan, or Japan­ese for that mat­ter (you sick pup­pies, all…), but chick­en­less chicken nuggets. My entire meal– just eaten– was taken up in a lost reverie about what small, con­ve­nient, and strange food­stuffs it must be pos­si­ble to buy in Japan, a land por­trayed as tech­no­log­i­cally effi­cient, rather taken with the small scale, and absolutely mad about packaging.

I recall, while liv­ing in Boston, my var­i­ous sojourns through Chi­na­town– which did have a small but sig­nif­i­cant Japan­ese pres­ence– and drink­ing jelly sodas, red-bean or avo­cado milk-shakes, and being the only one in my lit­tle group who was will­ing to eat some­thing with its eyes still attached. (That is inter­est­ing– I am squea­mish when it comes to raw onions, but am will­ing to put an eye­ball or two in my stom­ache :). I won­der from what small, sty­ro­foam pack­age I might be spoon­ing tasty ocean-derived sub­stance, were I stand­ing in Tokyo.

Con­trary to pop­u­lar mis­con­cep­tion, I began eat­ing tofu when I first came to San Diego: in fact, I would (after kung fu prac­tice) often eat raw slices of the ol’ curd on bread with only ketchup and mus­tard, in order to get some pro­tein in my sys­tem. Now I’ve heard sev­eral decla­ma­tions con­cern­ing tofu, dis­tilled down to a cou­ple of trou­ble­some pre­sen­ti­ments: 1) that males who eat a lot of tofu end up hav­ing smaller brains, and 2) that tofu was invented to curb sex­ual appetites. On the first, I have lit­tle to say– there is a study that states exactly that; how­ever, it is impor­tant to note that the largest brain was found in a man named Cromwell, and he was an idiot– the IQ clas­si­fi­ca­tion scheme from which we derive so many of out juicy insults.

On the sec­ond note, I did some pok­ing around, and here is a nice, con­densed ver­sion of the leg­endary his­tory:

Accord­ing to Chi­nese leg­end, tofu was invented by acci­dent in the West­ern Han dynasty (206 B.C. to A.D. 8), when the glut­to­nous feu­dal lord, Lu An ordered his cook to add salt to soy­bean milk for fla­vor and unwit­tingly cre­ated tofu. After some exper­i­men­ta­tion, Lord Lu dis­cov­ered that cooked tofu was par­tic­u­larly tasty, and it soon became a pop­u­lar dish among the pub­lic. By the Tang dynasty (A.D. 618–907), tofu was intro­duced to Japan, Korea and South­east Asia. Due to its pop­u­lar­ity, tofu started being sold pre-packed in Japan in the 1960s.

Now, inter­est­ingly, Sylvester Gra­ham– whose home is now a resta­raunt in Northamp­ton, Mass­a­chu­setts, the ‘stomp­ing grounds’ of my youth– was of the mind that a veg­e­tar­ian lifestyle was a more healthy lifestyle, espe­cially in regards to the sex­ual appetites:

All kinds of stim­u­lat­ing and heat­ing sub­stances; high-seasoned food; rich dishes; the free use of flesh (meat)�; all more or less� increase the con­cu­pis­cent excitabil­ity and sen­si­bil­ity of the gen­i­tal organs.

It is said he “believed that ill health was due to sex­ual excesses � erotic dreams, mas­tur­ba­tion or sex­ual inter­course more than once a month”. Now, tofu hadn’t reached the states by this time, so it wasn’t included in his hype, but the now-famous Gra­ham Cracker was…

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