Running Is Good For You

Today I just got told by my cleaning lady.

Amy, our daily housekeeper (everyday except Sundays and public holidays as stipulated in our lease agreement), came in this morning in an especially chatty mood. She speaks Mandarin which is great for me to practice speaking putonghua.

I said brightly, "Ni hao, Amy!"

"Ni hao," she replied. "Good morning. Afternoon."

Then, out nowhere, she started talking about how everyday (I caught that part, mei tian), there were runners in that park (pointing out our bedroom window to the little track down the street from us) very early in the morning. I didn't catch the word for runners, so I said, "Mei tian zhe shi shenme?" (Everyday, there's what?) She said, runners, gesturing outside then making elaborate motions of running like a mime.

"Oh, runners," I said in English. Then she started speaking more agitatedly in putonghua. With some help from Stu, I gathered what she said which was something along the lines of, "There are runners in the park every day early in the morning. You two sit inside in front of your computers all day. The air in here is bad for you! You need to go outside and exercise, run!"

"But, Amy," I replied reasonably, "the air outside is very bad too, even worse! Besides, I do yoga everyday." It was more like me pointing outside and wildly gesticulating while saying, "bu hao, bu hao." (Not good, not good.) "Mei tian, women qu yu jia."

She laughed and shook her head. I'm going to the gym and a yoga class tomorrow. Amy has shamed me.

Why, you little weasel...

This one is for my buddy Alex, so patiently waiting for a blog entry from his lazy friend in Hong Kong. Hope you like it!

Funny, well sort of, thing just happened to me, and I don't know whether to organize it under faux pas, plain old incident, or food for thought. It's probably a little bit of everything. I had recently returned from Vietnam and missed a friend's birthday here in Hong Kong. I brought back with me a 100 gram bag of freshly ground "weasel" coffee as a small birthday gift for said friend.

I had first heard of this type of coffee when I was perusing a gourmet grocery store either in London or New York, and distinctly remember the feeling of my eyes growing very wide when I saw the price tag on those tiny bags. A friend with me at the time said nochalantly, "Oh yeah, in the Philippines, they go around collecting these coffee beans that weasels eat, but can't digest, and poop out. Something about the digestion process makes the coffee beans really tasty. But it's a little labor intensive so they're pretty expensive." I was intrigued, but there was no way I was shelling out something like 30 USD for a 100 gram bag.

One major joy of living in Asia is the ability to find for dirt cheap what was exotic and too expensive in the States. Dragon fruit, star fruit, precious Indian mangoes, pristinely hand-wrapped, sweet, crisp Asian pears, pounds of fragrant vanilla beans, you name it, they sell it. So you can imagine my excitement when I found weasel coffee for a bargain in the Old Quarter of Hanoi. The very perceptive and capable sales lady even offered us a sample, quickly filtering a fresh cup. The result? Chocolately, velvelty, nutty, simply delicious. And with condensed milk, I was sold. I picked up a bag for myself and a bag for the friend thinking it would be the perfect gift since she enjoyed coffee.

I handed it to her at a casual birthday get-together at a bar. She opened it and said, "Hmm, weasel coffee? That's a strange name." It sparked a brief conversation about where I got it, and I don't remember what I said, but I think I heard Stu mentioning the origin of it. Or maybe I did. Or maybe someone else did. In any case, I thought my friend was clear on how it was produced.

The next day, I saw my friend, and she said brightly, "Oh hey, we tried that coffee, and it was really good. It was really nutty or something!" I replied, jokingly, "Yeah, you know where that taste comes from." I couldn't help it. She looked at me, confused, "What do you mean?" "Well, you know, weasel coffee... How they poop out the coffee beans and all." "What? I didn't know that!" "Oh no," I cried, "I thought you knew!"

She looked a little sick to her stomach. Her friend visiting from the States looked horrified. And her husband's eyebrows were furrowed. "Oh yeah, thanks for the coffee," he said dryly. Hmm, what the hell had I done? I felt awful that I might have caused them distress from a simple cup of coffee. Had I ruined their whole day? Would she throw out the rest of the coffee in a fury? "I'm never accepting any crap from Sandra ever again!" (No pun intended, okay, maybe a little.)

In any case, it got me thinking. I found it interesting that my friend and her companions had reacted badly to the knowledge that their coffee this morning was not their normal cup of joe. What makes people revolted by their food on certain facts rather than others? Certainly, it's a complicated answer - cultural, historical, anthropological, biological - but mainly, this little incident was more proof that we, mostly Americans but increasingly the rest of the world like Europe and China, need to be removed, as far away as possible, from our food. I would venture to say that most people don't know which part of the cow their steak dinner comes from, or how their chicken from KFC was raised. But as movies like Food, Inc. and books like The Omnivore's Dilemma increasingly inform us on these murky practices, we would probably begin to find weasel coffee a very appealing alternative.

This desire for transparency won't happen overnight, it may even take generations as it has taken a couple of generations to gradually remove ourselves from the origins of our meals. Even I, having grown up on offal, dried and raw fish, the heads still attached to whatever cooked carcass on a plate, had a rare moment of sick-to-my-stomach-ness when I was attacking a prawn in Vietnam. We were on Ha Long Bay, and maybe it was the gentle rocking of the boat, maybe it was the echo of the gentle chastising from my doctor about high cholestoral foods in my head, but my stomach flipped when I tore off the little legs and pulled off the crunchy exoskeleton helmet with the long tentacles and beady black eyes that make up its head. Holy crap, I thought, I just pulled the head off this creature and its contents, including the juices that it was cooked in, just spilled all over my plate. I'm a murderer! And it was kind of gross. But once I popped the succulent meat in my mouth, I remembered exactly why I'm an omnivore. And I found no dilemma there.