In honor of Presidents’ Day and Inauguration Day, here’s a little quiz to see how much you know about presidential food history. If you’re inspired to cram before the test (or after, for that matter), check out The Food Timeline and this helpful resource guide from the Library of Congress. The answers are all after the jump.
1. Which U.S. president described his diet this way: “I have lived temperately, eating little animal food, and that not as an aliment, so much as a condiment for the vegetables which constitute my principal diet.”
a. Thomas Jefferson
b. Jimmy Carter
c. Harry Truman
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2. Which president liked coffee so much that his cup was “more in the nature of a bathtub,” as his son jokingly said?
a. Bill Clinton
b. Theodore Roosevelt
c. George Washington
–
3. Which U.S. president liked to cook his own beef stew?
a. Millard Fillmore
b. Richard Nixon
c. Dwight Eisenhower
–
4. Who is the White House’s current executive chef?
a. Walter Scheib
b. Gordon Ramsay
c. Cristeta Comerford
–
5. How did President Harry S. Truman like his steak cooked?
a. Rare
b. Well-done
c. He was a vegetarian
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6. Which U.S. president was fond of squirrel soup?
a. Richard Nixon
b. George W. Bush
c. James Garfield
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7. Which of these vegetables was President-Elect Barack Obama referring to in 2007 when he said, “I mean, they’re charging a lot of money for this stuff?”
a. Arugula
b. Broccoli
c. Corn
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8. Which president died of a gastrointestinal ailment, possibly food poisoning?
a. Zachary Taylor
b. James Garfield
c. Warren Harding
–
9. Which president was a self-professed jellybean addict?
a. George W. Bush
b. Ronald Reagan
c. Jimmy Carter
–
10. The menu for Barack Obama’s inaugural lunch was inspired by which past president?
a. Abraham Lincoln
b. George Washington
c. John F. Kennedy
Esculent Swallow and Nest by John Latham, 1831/Wikipedia
Up there on the weirdest-things-you-can-eat list has to be bird’s nest soup. It would be weird enough just to eat your standard twiggy-grassy robin’s nest, but this predominantly Chinese delicacy is made almost entirely from the goopy spit of a southeast Asian bird called a swiftlet (check out a couple of close-up nest photos over at EatingAsia). The birds glue their nests hundreds of feet high on sheer cave walls. When cooked, they yield a slick, nearly flavorless broth that’s prized for such medicinal chestnuts as increased longevity and, you guessed it, libido.
Unfortunately, swiftlets are not an invasive species we can proudly devour. To the contrary, growing demand from a prosperous China is compromising the birds’ ability to continue, uh, spitting out the nests. It doesn’t help that the sticky nests are the devil to clean, so collectors take the nests before they’ve been used to raise any young swiftlets. And in a weird double-twist, an unlikely solution—farming the nests—has increased supply and at the same time endangered some wild populations.
The monetary incentive is tremendous: swiftlet nests can sell for more than $1,200 per pound and fuel a multi-million dollar trade that can rival the fishing returns of poor regions. One Web site offers an 8-ounce “family pack” for about $600 (five percent discount on orders over $1,000).
In traditional harvesting, extremely daring men scale teetering bamboo poles to reach the nests, then scrape them from the cave walls. If you’ve ever shinnied up a flagpole with a basket and stick slung over your back and then performed your favorite yoga poses at the top, you may have some idea how dangerous this is. (Rock climbers tend to be fascinated; one has even made a documentary.)
The set-up appeals to enough swiftlets that Indonesian production of the nests is booming (up to 280 tons, valued at more than $800 million, according to a 2004 source). Unfortunately, the high prices encourage wild-nest collectors to redouble their efforts. The toll is felt most keenly on islands, where nest farming is limited and so is the ability of swiftlets to recover from raids. In a 2001 study in India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands, swiftlet populations had declined 83% in 10 years.
Overharvesting was a clear cause, with declines recorded in 366 of 385 known nesting caves. Of 6,031 nests surveyed, only two had been left alone long enough for swiftlet chicks to have hatched. Harvesting was so devastating that the authors urged the islands’ governments to encourage nest farming as the swiftlets’ only chance for survival. (Though nest farming still involves destroying nests, the damage is counterbalanced by the increased nesting opportunities provided by the farms. Farmers typically allow late-nesting swiftlets to raise young, and even captively raise swiftlets in the nests of other birds to keep numbers up.)
National parks in India, Thailand, and other countries typically ban wild nest harvesting. But restrictions have yet to be enacted on a comprehensive, international scale - partly because farming has been so successful and global numbers are fairly high. Swiftlets are not listed as endangered by CITES or the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.
I’m fascinated by the good-news bad-news saga of farming. Since its inception 10,000 years ago, farming has been our solution to the difficulty and unpredictability of securing animal food. By all accounts it’s been a huge success, but never a complete one. Disappearing swiftlets are just another curve ball in a world tainted by the likes of mad cow disease, brucellosis, and avian flu. Farmed salmon, anyone?
Um, nothing. Never mind. I meant to say, did you hear that consuming too much caffeine could make you more prone to “hallucinatory experiences?”
According to a study published this week in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, “high caffeine users”* are three times more likely to experience auditory hallucinations—hearing voices when no has actually spoken—than people who consume little or no caffeine.
How did they figure this out? Well, psychology researchers at Durham University in England surveyed 200 students about their eating and drinking habits, stress levels, and proneness to hallucinations. Many of the most highly caffeinated students reported experiences of “seeing things that were not there, hearing voices, and sensing the presence of dead people.”
Well, caffeine is a drug, after all, but let’s not start locking those lattes behind the counter just yet—the researchers were careful to note that this is only a link, not proof that caffeine causes the hallucinations in a direct sense. The real culprit could be cortisol, a hormone the body releases under stress. If that stress occurs when you have caffeine in your system, your body seems to self-prescribe a higher dosage of cortisol than normal.
And it could be a classic case of chicken and egg. I mean, if I was in college and started hearing voices late at night in the library, I would probably deduce that I needed to get some sleep. But say it was finals week, and sleep wasn’t an option—I’d probably drink a lot of coffee. And if I thought there was a ghost in the room, I’m guessing I wouldn’t be eager to turn the lights out at night.
In other words, which came first for these students, the caffeine or the hallucination-proneness?
I don’t know, and neither do the psychologists, so it looks like there’s a whole field of caffeinated consciousness yet to explore. Here’s my research contribution: I surveyed a very, very small sample of the Smithsonian editors…okay, one…who drinks at least five cups of coffee a day (in the form of two 20-ouncers).
He said sorry, but no, he’s never heard voices when there’s no one there. Then he looked worried.
“Unless you’re not really asking me this,” he said. And reached for his coffee cup.
*The study defines high caffeine consumption as “more than the equivalent of seven cups of instant coffee a day,” although it could be consumed in a form other than coffee (such as tea, energy drinks, chocolate, or even caffeine tablets).
As my close friends know painfully well, I’m not exactly good at making decisions. At the wine store, I’m the customer who gets asked “Can I help you?” twice by the same salesperson because I’ve meandered between shelves for so long that they have forgotten our first encounter.
Then I usually say something brilliant like, “Can you help me find a red wine that tastes…you know, tasty…um, like the one I bought a few weeks ago…I think it was French…?”
It’s not that I’m a complete oeno-idiot. I know most of the major regions and varietals, and my palate can be downright picky (especially at parties, when it’s easy to surreptitiously abandon one’s glass after an unpleasant sip or two). But there seems to be a sensory-linguistic connection missing in my brain when it comes to describing delicious wine.
Fortunately, I just stumbled across a cool tool called the Vinogram (thanks to the Vinography wine blog’s links list). In the build-your-own version, it asks a series of questions about your taste in other areas, then uses those concrete examples to predict which wine characteristics (i.e. aged, floral, fruity, mineral) you will probably like more than others.
For example, do you prefer mild or strong cheese? (Strong.) White or dark chocolate? (Dark.) Would you rather smell “wood pitch and gasoline,” “honey and hay,” “nutty and dry apricot,” or “citrus and white flower”? (Anything but the first, please!) And so on. In most cases, it seems obvious where your answers will lead you,* but it’s still fun to see the results in graphic form.
Armed with this knowledge on my next shopping endeavor, I will seek out a “powerful, persistent, toasty” red with moderately floral, fruity and spicy notes and just a hint of sweetness. The Vinogram thinks I might like to try a Vin de Pays (”country wine”) from Languedoc, or a Merlot from Saint Emilion, among others. Of course, I’ll read the label carefully.
Between that and the helpful “Wine and Food Matcher” I found over at Natalie MacLean’s blog, I may never befuddle a wine salesperson again.
*Except for this question: When shopping for Christmas presents, do you tend to buy far in advance or wait until the last minute? Unless “procrastination” is actually a wine characteristic, this is probably a marketing question that snuck in there.
The good guys: the English red squirrel. Image courtesy of Friends of the Anglesey Red Squirrels webcam
Don’t eat the red ones. That could be the rallying cry in Britain’s coming squirrel wars. The U.K.’s adorable but endangered red squirrel is under siege from the American gray squirrel, and a last-ditch method of dealing with the invader has suddenly become popular: eating them.
The gray squirrel was introduced to the British Isles more than a century ago. It’s innocuous here in the states, but in Britain is an invasive species that outnumbers the native red squirrel by nearly 20 to 1. The situation has become so dire that red squirrels are now missing from much of the nation and remain on only a few islands and in the north of the country (you can glimpse them on this webcam from Anglesey, North Wales).
In 2006 a British lord urged celebrity chef Jamie Oliver to spearhead a squirrel-meat-popularization program. One way or another, by this year English butchers were having trouble keeping the 1-pound rodents in stock. Gourmets compared their taste to delicacies from duck to lamb to wild boar. One company started selling gray squirrel paté and another recently introduced Cajun-style squirrel-flavored potato chips.
Involving as it does a certain degree of revenge, eating invasive species must feel good—even if it is more of a gesture than an actual solution to the global problem of invasive species. After all, one typical trait of an invasive species is extremely high reproductive capacity. You just can’t eat them fast enough. Particularly in the case of squirrels, which have the problems of being hard to shoot (use a rifle; shotguns tend to ruin the meat), hard to skin (”like pulliing the waterlogged wellies off a toddler“), and hard to make look good on a plate, judging by some well-meaning but bizarre how-to videos on YouTube.
This is the sort of news that pleads for people to tell their weirdest-thing-I-ever-ate stories. The best I can offer beyond the occasional goat vindaloo or, let’s face it, calamari, is some beer my entomology professor used to brew, using yeasts isolated from her favorite beetle species. But eating invasive species sounds like a hobby I could get behind. From zebra mussels to blue-lined snapper to the bullfrogs wreaking havoc in California marshes, I’m picturing a nearly inexhaustible menu. What other species would you add to it?
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