Mouthful

What in the world are you eating?

Lost in Menu Translation

25 June 2008 | 13:46 - By Phil Lees

One of the smaller joys of eating abroad is a poorly translated menu; a small joy because it tends to precede a meal that contains a disproportionate quantity of offal. This happens regardless of which of the wackier named dishes that you order. The crazier the name is, the more lungs that it has to offer.

But the novelty of a list of foods given the literal translation treatment never wears thin. I still find myself laughing at the Cambodian menu at the Teo Hotel in Battambang, Cambodia (pictured) that offered the cryptic but peace-shattering "Dove on Fire (one)".

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Saving Mediterranean food

18 June 2008 | 10:30 - By Phil Lees

Does Mediterranean cuisine even exist? Phil Lees asks the big questions in response to a bid by the Spanish government to put the Mediterranean diet on the world heritage list.

Earlier this week, the Spanish Government's Development Minister Elena Espinosa announced that Spain would be seeking to have "the Mediterranean Diet" appended to UNESCO's List of Intangible Cultural Heritage, possibly as a rejoinder to French President Nicolas Sarkozy's earlier call for UNESCO to formally recognise French food.

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Comfort food

11 June 2008 | 12:09 - By Phil Lees

I steal other people's comfort food.

It's certainly not at all intentional but of the twenty or so recipes that I cook for the sole purpose of restoring my sense of mental wellbeing, probably one or two are those from my own childhood. The rest have been collected haphazardly from other people's cultures.

Thit heo kho is one of them.

Thịt heo kho trứng (or thịt lợn kho trứng, if you're from Northern Vietnam) is a rich pork belly, star anise and boiled egg stew that you tend to find pre-cooked in bain maries and aluminium pots in any Vietnamese market from Phu Quoc to Bac Ha. In series one of Food Safari, Nhut Hunyh, whips up his thit heo kho recipe for Maeve: he associates it with going home for Tet, the Vietnamese lunar New Year festival.

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The taste of test tube meat

04 June 2008 | 10:26 - By Phil Lees

PETA, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, recently offered a million dollar prize for growing a saleable quantity of artificial chicken in vitro, slabs of meat grown in a laboratory destined for human consumption. The aim: to produce a meat product identical to "real" chicken meat without any involvement from a free-roaming chicken apart from the unwilling donation of a few starter cells.

The New York Times' knee-jerk reaction was to practically republish the same article the last time something interesting in the world of lab-grown meats came around in 2006. Slate has two of the more insightful articles: one decrying the idea as a poorly conceived prize and economically unviable in the given time frame; the other strangely optimistic. Neither source investigated whether meat from a vat is a taste sensation.

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About this Blog

A blog about what the world eats, when and where it eats it, and why it matters to us all. Only much less ambitious than that sounds and with more excruciating puns.

Phil Lees grew up in rural Victoria, the first generation in his family to not have lived on the farm and thereby not slaughter their own meat.

In 2005 he moved to Cambodia and started the nation’s first food blog, Phnomenon.com, named after the best pun that he has ever made. It turns out that Cambodian food is delicious and unlike the warnings in most guidebooks, is not likely to kill you with any immediacy. Gridskipper called him a “national treasure”. Lonely Planet’s Greater Mekong guide called him “the unofficial pimp of Cambodian cuisine”. The New York Times laughed at a funny hotdog he saw.

Phil makes a mean sausage, a hoppy pale ale, a modest laksa. He owns three barbecues and is in the market for a fourth. He’s never eaten at a Michelin-starred restaurant. There is more important food in the world to be eaten.

 
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