I ❤ the Nineties: D.C. Suburbs.

July 15, 2024

Continuing my search through decades of photos and negatives, I'm slowly rediscovering insignificant moments from my long life. Around the corner of one of my homes was a Wonder Bakery Thiftshop in an industrial area inhospitable to food, which I would sometimes stop by on my way home; I would pick up those Hostess fruit pies covered in frosted sugar with a pocket of brightly colored goo on the inside, and oversweetened mushy fruit chunks: the fluorescent red cherry pie, the neon yellow lemon pie, and the golden apple pie, with sparkly glittery specks of cinnamon. If I recall correctly, the pies were priced at 3 for 1. I've eaten so many hostess pies; all my memories blend into one experience of eating and chewing the sweet teeth rotting substance. I had a very unhealthy diet: chips and soda for lunch, Domino's pizza, canned tuna, or a Lean Cuisine frozen meal for dinner eaten alone. I found a photo of one of my kitchens growing up; it's cluttered but looks relatively clean. All my memories include access barriers to food: not being able to access the sink, kitchen countertop top, or stove; things filled all space, and the concept of minimalism or sparseness did not exist in my upbringing. American things, products, and goods would fill my space, continuing to come through the front door but never leaving. Another photo is from an unforgettable memory: lobster with a friend's family; we picked up lobster from an aquarium tank, boiled it, and ate the chunky white flesh inside the bright red shell. I slathered it in lemon butter. The other photo of the Filipino grocery store and Moby Dick Seafood, I don't remember. My teenage self likely took the picture because of the shadow; however, the photo shows the diversity and incredible range of foods surrounding me, while I mostly survived on factory-processed premade foods. With all the embassies from the nineties, the Washington D.C. suburbs were a great cultural hub of global foods. While at home, I depended on canned, frozen, and fast food. However, I had access to many "cheap eats," the term used during the period and a concept that allowed me to learn about food. However, it was exploitative of immigrant communities, which is a topic to explore and discuss. Without cheap eats, I would still be eating cheese in a can. My teenage allowance would provide access to food experiences along the red line—Peruvian, Vietnamese, Italian, Chinese, Mexican, Caribbean, African, and Thai: one new dish, one lifelong memory. I remember eating sugarcane sticks chopped with a machete at a food festival. One of my most memorable learning experiences at this food festival was discovering granular sugar is from a plant: a delicious fibrous stick. I have many more random food memories and random photos that I will find; these are from 1998-2000.

Northern Africa

RIP Crest Hardware (1964-2024)

Louisiana Crawfish Boil

Chinatown / Lower East Side

July 11, 2024

I have about 30 years' worth of negatives and images, which is wild. I'm slowly going through the material. As a photographer, I've documented my life since high school. There is a record for most things: photographs for the first part of my life and written docs for the remaining. About ten years ago, a little Greek god called Eris visited uninvited and sowed discord in our home. Unfortunately, I unintentionally threw out all my negatives from art school. I still have some copies on CDs, but the outtakes have perished. September 11 just happened; I moved to the vacated downtown Chinatown and Lower East Side shortly after I started art school. My rent was $500 per month. It was not great; many nonsafe things happened that kept me living on my friend's futon in Brooklyn, including one gruesome event that left dozens - if not fifty - detectives in trench coats lingering around the sidewalk in front of my apartment asking for surveillance footage. I remained terrified of all the blood during my midnight walks back from school. My neighborhood, at the time, was chaotic and dangerous, yet I would choose it over the American suburbs any day. My apartment was one block away from the NYPL, where Parker Posey worked as a librarian in the movie Party Girl (1995), not to mention the nonexistent falafel stand. And I live a few blocks away from the neighborhood of my New York ancestors who lived downtown 200 years earlier who had an indoor vineyard and horse stable if I recall correctly (and were also, like me, documented complaining about crime in the early 1800s before they left the Lower East Side for good). I hold on to this blood connection, fantasizing that my ancestors still own property on Wall Street. You can now find Trader Joe's and Target downtown, but I never entered a grocery store while living downtown. I ate many meals at my local Taiwanese Fay Da Bakery and Domino's. For those years, I survived cheaply on pizza, bagels, donuts, ramen, and cigarettes. The above images summarize my "home" environment and neighborhood: fluorescent lights, run-down, lifeless, and disorganized with the dreaded metal Venetian blinds. It was a temporary hell, a toxic dust cloud purgatory. The years downtown after September 11 were dark, and nothing good happened again until 2005, when the world started warming up again. The photos of my basement kitchen, Chinese restaurant, and medicine shop that sold teas and tinctures above show the time period and space. Grim. Somehow, I survived, with only one major emergency room visit.

NYC Art Grub

Advertising in America

Family Photo Album

Family Lore

July 7, 2024

Growing up, I was not allowed to speak in public at grocery stores, or at least when I was with one of my parents; I was silenced. Be quiet; we don't want anyone to know anything about our lives. For part of their lives, they had security cameras around the parameters of their homes that recorded conversations and, to my stumbling surprise, also inside their home. Knowing this about me is important for understanding why I strongly believe in transparency, uncensored speech, and free access to information. I became a librarian to fight restrictions, access barriers to education, and challenge censorship. I'm a tenacious fighter, and I strongly dislike corruption and inequality. It's interesting how life changes for different generations. My parents grew up dirt poor. My mom didn't have indoor plumbing for parts of her childhood in and out of foster homes, but their grandparents, before the great depression, were gluttonously wealthy. They lived in enormous Victorian mansions (plural) on endless land and danced in scandal. They owned grocery stores, farms, ice cream businesses, and a dairy industry. And that gun-swinging investigator above was someone you did not want to "provoke" and, for that matter, steer clear of his black-laced, gilded-age mother who would eat your heart on a silver banquet platter. That stern guy, my great-great-grandfather, and his grandfather were the Kings of New York. That little woman in white was my great-grandmother, a legendary saint and protector of small children. Her husband - the son of a man who killed himself in a wine barrel over Niagara Falls - was in the newspaper industry and lost their fortune during the Great Depression. Towards the end of their lives, they lived in a small vestry that eventually kicked them out for my great-grandmother's weak and declining Biden mind. One hundred twenty-five years of regality crashed and burned the souls of many generations. I have one surviving cookbook from my great-grandfather's sad, impoverished years, which I will explore tomorrow. 

Ocean and the Beach

Othea’s Letter to Hector

Othea’s Letter to Hector by Christine de Pizan (1365-1429)♀. Illuminations by Willem Vrelant (ca. 1460). Source:  Friedrich-Alexander University (FAU) Erlangen-Nuremberg.

Edible Reading List

Sheboygan Ginger Ale

Wonder Bread: Seeing Spots

Artists' Books: Bananas, Cake, and Beef

June 16, 2024

On my most recent excursion to Printed Matter, a local purveyor of artist books, I purchased three books. Hot Beef Sandwich is a book of photographs by Kirby James Pilcher. It's a narrated story about food, death, and family-centered around South Dakota hot beef sandwiches served at local diners. A hot beef sandwich is sliced roast beef served on white bread with gravy and mashed potatoes. The Banana Republican Recipe Book by Johannah Herr and Cara Marsh Sheffler covers the United Fruit Company and their evil deed involving the creation of Banana Republics, death squads, corruption, Chiquita lawsuits, and deadly black fungus. It's a creative take on sharing information through art.  The artist Johannah Herr also creates war rugs, which are popular in Afghanistan. Herr's War Rug is about the history of Chiquita in Latin America and is titled Above the Fruited Plain (America! America!). It's genius. My last book is Cake Cutting by Kaamna Patel, a book of photographs and text about Nationalistic cake-cutting food ceremonies in India. The photos are low-res and fair-use news images grabbed from the internet, usually of political photographs highlighting tensions between the diverse religious communities in India. Cutting cakes with faces frosted onto the celebratory dessert sometimes results in serious conflict and legal issues; don't mess with Modi. 

Coca Vin Mariani

June 15, 2024

During the 19th century, Angelo Mariani (1838-1914) invented a Coca Wine called Vin Mariani, a blend of Bordeaux red wine with coca leaves from Bolivian Yungas and Peru; the ingredients included cocaine. "The epicenter of coca's rediscovery was France, with its world-famous Vin Mariani of the 1860s" (Gootenberg). It was all the rage during the 19th century in France and the United States and was a recommended health beverage by the Pope and Sigmund Freud. Aymon de Lestrange published a book in 2018 called Coca Wine: Angelo Mariani's Miraculous Elixir and the Birth of Modern Advertising, which included the vast history of Vin Mariani. Angelo Mariani began as a pharmacist experimenting with health tonics; Vin Mariani was discovered during one of these experiments as a treatment for depression—the Mariani pharmacy located at 41 Boulevard Haussmann in Paris. Later, Mariani opened a factory in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, "it was from this factory, which would become the largest in the world for coca preparations, that Mariani's famous Tonic Wine with Coca from Peru, more commonly called Vin Mariani" (de, Lestrange). According to David Smith, who wrote a paper Hail Mariani: The Transformation of Vin Mariani From Medicine to Food in American Culture, 1886–1910, coca leaves during transportation from the South American jungles to Europe "lost their potency on the long voyage" (Smith) therefore an extract was invented which was used in the coca wine. In addition to wine, Mariani produced other products like Pepsi-Coca Mariani, Pate Mariani, and coca tea. It was all a great success for Angelo Mariani and Vin Mariani until "moral crusaders in the United States pushed for a ban even as coca leaf imports into the United States peaked at about 1.5 million pounds in 1900" (England). This led to the passing of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906; around 1907, New York State passed a law prohibiting products with coca. Other prohibited wines on the market included Peruvian Wine of Coca, Metcalf's Coca Wine, Dr. Earl's Coca Wine, Epstein's Wine of Coca, Green's Coca Wine, and Mattison's Coca Wine. "The production of wine combined with coca leaves... gradually ended with the U.S. prohibition of cocaine in the early 20th century." (England) Mariani wine continued to be sold in France long after Angelo Mariani died in 1914.

• Gootenberg, Paul. Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009. muse.jhu.edu/book/44113.
• de, Lestrange, Aymon. Coca Wine: Angelo Mariani's Miraculous Elixir and the Birth of Modern Advertising, Inner Traditions International, Limited, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central.
• Smith, David. "Hail Mariani: The Transformation of Vin Mariani From Medicine to Food in American Culture, 1886–1910." The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, (2008). Accessed June 16, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1086/SHAD23010042.
• England, Shawn L. "Wines, Cocainized." In The SAGE Encyclopedia of Alcohol: Social, Cultural, and Historical Perspectives, edited by England, Shawn L., 1406-7. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc., 2015. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781483331096.

Food Transportation Series

Chicha Morada

June 10, 2024

One of the greatest aspects of living in the Garden State is access to affordable international grocery stores. Recently, I visited Supremo Food Market, which carries various Latin American groceries. Chicha Morada was a food product found in many aisles. Chicha Morada is a Peruvian drink made of purple corn (maíz morado), pineapple, cinnamon, and cloves; sometimes it includes quince and lime; it is a “…common nonalcoholic beverage... found throughout Peru and made with a purple corn grown at a lower elevation”(Jennings). Inca Foods, located in New Jersey, specializes in distributing Peruvian products in the United States. One of the food products is a plastic bag of dried purple corn, and on the back is a recipe for Chicha Morada: 1 bag of Purple Corn, 3 liters of water, 3 lemons, 5 cloves, .1 oz of cinnamon, 5 oz of pineapple peel, 1 apple, and 1 cup of sugar. Boil for 1 hour. The drink is spicy, thick, sweet, and "...available commercially throughout South America" (Kharbanda). In addition to the bottled drink, dried corn, I also found a version of Chicha Morada as a tea, a product of Hanan Peruvian Secrets, which includes "...powerful ingredients originating from the Amazon jungle and the Andes Mountains..." (Hanan). Like the Spanish Sangria, the most authentic Andean option for Chicha Morada would likely be the freshest version, "Chicha morada... is a universal summer favorite in Lima, Peru" (Fan). But for those who don't have the time,  the teabag seems perfectly fine.  

• Jennings, Justin, and Brenda J. Bowser. Drink, Power, and Society in the Andes. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009. muse.jhu.edu/book/17479.
• Kharbanda, Jai, and Anda Lincoln. "chicha." In The Oxford Companion to Beer. : Oxford University Press, 2011. https://www-oxfordreference-com.i.ezproxy.nypl.org/view/10.1093/acref/9780195367133.001.0001/acref-9780195367133-e-302 
• Fan, Judith E. “Can Ideas about Food Inspire Real Social Change?: The Case of Peruvian Gastronomy.” Gastronomica 13, no. 2 (2013): 29–40. https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2013.13.2.29 
• Petroni, Katia, Roberto Pilu, and Chiara Tonelli. “Anthocyanins in Corn: A Wealth of Genes for Human Health.” Planta 240, no. 5 (2014): 901–11. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43565750 

Feeding Corrupt Leaders

June 3, 2024

It's an election year, and one of the U.S. candidates is now a felon. This historic moment is an inspirational beginning for my project on government corruption in America, focusing on food and drink as an intersection when the shift from ethical to unethical happens within institutions. I hypothesize that when food is offered, people lower their professional standards and become vulnerable. It becomes primal; we love those who feed us, and at this moment, the apple, so to speak, corrupts those in leadership. In my lifetime, I want to see America fortify its institutions and allow for more transparency, free and immediate access to information, no walls, and no delays. Government institutions, museums, libraries, and schools have been defunded for decades, and they are decaying. With that decay comes the inability to recognize complicity with corruption, nepotism, and cronyism. It's systemic and widespread across this country. We must break down the opaqueness and coercion and obliterate the concentration of power to allow for a more open and transparent government. Scandinavian countries have the least corrupt governments; perhaps we can learn from such models. I look forward to deconstructing and researching the transactional dinners of dictators like Idi Amin,  Julius Caesar, Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Francisco Franco, Donald Trump, and Slobodan Milosevic. I'll start with Chiang Kai-shek.

Food and Money

RIP Morgan Spurlock

Oxford: A Very Short Introduction 

Mary Cassatt

Carrie Mae Weems

The Flaxolyn Quack

May 19, 2024

Dr. Harris H. Luntz's Flaxolyn is still a mystery to me since not much has been written about the Flaxolyn health product, yet plenty of newspaper advertisements exist online. Flaxolyn is an example of quackery from the early 20th century, and the packaging from 1930 claims it contained Jamaican ginger, dandelion roots, sarsaparilla roots, Chinese rhubarb, Belgian valerian roots, California bark, bile salts, alcohol, and vitamins. In an earlier product from 1918, Flaxolyn contained flaxseed, juniper berries, vegetable charcoal, cardamon seeds, cascara sagrada, gentian roots, and licorice root. It claimed to be a laxative for "real good results" and a health remedy to "enrich the blood" and cure all sorts of ailments, including dizzy spells, nerves, and sleep disorders. According to a WorldCat record, the Flaxolyn cooperation operated from 1918 until 1957. In Nostrums and Quackery and Pseudo-Medicine (1936) by Arthur J. Cramp, M.D., a Director of the Bureau of Investigation of the American Medical Association from 1906-1936, the National Better Business Bureau found that the Flaxolyn advertising campaign included fraudulent testimonials and endorsements by paid actors claiming to be doctors. Such newspaper advertisement campaigns peaked around 1930. The Federal Trade Commission later ruled in 1938 that the Flaxolyn ad campaigns should cease. By 1942, Flaxolyn no longer engaged in fraudulent advertisement campaigns. Afterward, the product seemed to fade into obscurity.  Dr. Harris H. Luntz seemed to be a real doctor. However, more research is needed to identify the truth. Part two at a later date!

• American Medical Association. 1936. Nostrums and Quackery. Edited by Arthur Joseph Cramp. Chicago, Ill.: American Medical Association.

Food Books

NYC Art Grub