My daughter gave me a copy of the new Joe Beef cookbook last Christmas. It is a beautiful work, equal parts culinary tale and cookbook, drawing on some of that much glorified (and deserved) restaurant’s best recipes.

It was card night on Saturday; the first in months. A beautiful day, 23C (about 75F), nice and sunny.

First step: Rub the ribs with the dry rub and let sit a couple of hours.

Soak the cedar chips for a couple of hours as well, drain and place into a disposable aluminum plate, cover with foil, punch a few holes into the foil and place directly onto the gas BBQ’s first heating element on the left side, set to low. Place the ribs on the right side covering two of the three burners (which are turned off). This is a convection method: The smoke moves from the heated side to the unheated side, slowly basting the ribs with smoke and gentle heat. BBQ temperature should be around 230F. See smoke rise and engulf the ribs as well as the yard.

After two hours, check ribs to make sure the edges aren’t burning. Leave in for another two hours (or less if they appear done). In this recipe, the wet BBQ sauce (made separately) is served on the side and used to dip the dry ribs as you devour them. I made plenty of sauce and stored the remainder in my new favorite storage containers: Harmony organic milk bottles (They’re worth keeping for the $2 deposit).

The ribs turned out beautifully after 4 hours at a very low heat of about 230F. They are much leaner than conventional pork back ribs and don’t have that greasy mouthfeel (you may or may not like that). Notice the penetration of the spices into the meat in the cross-section photo below.

Breaking news about vegan godess Alex Jamieson’s decision to end her 12-year vegan lifestyle has the vegan community in a tizzy. See the brief Globe and Mail video interview at the link here.

And you gotta love this guy:

First-year students at the Purdue Vet School were attending their first anatomy class with a real dead cow.  They all gathered around the surgery table with the body covered with a white sheet.

The professor started the class by telling them, “In Veterinary medicine it is necessary to have two important qualities as a doctor.  The first is that you not be disgusted by anything involving the animal’s body.  For an example,” the professor pulled back the sheet, stuck his finger in the butt of the cow, withdrew it, and stuck his finger in his mouth.

“Go ahead and do the same thing,” he told his students.  The students freaked out, hesitated for several minutes, but eventually took turns sticking a finger in the butt of the dead cow and sucking on it.

When everyone finished, the Professor looked at them and said, “The second most important quality is observation.  I stuck my middle finger in the cow and sucked on my index finger.  Now learn to pay attention.  Life’s tough, but it’s even tougher if you’re stupid.”

One of the great dangers of being a boomer is that because our cohort is so large and the wealth that we control even larger, we risk forever being catered to in terms of what’s familiar rather than what’s new. You may have noticed how we’re still hearing the same freaking music on the radio, and the Rolling Stones are still bouncing on stage like teenagers despite being in their ’70′s.

It takes a conscious effort to get out of one’s comfort zone and explore the new stuff that the “kids” are into. Although, sadly, I also notice that the old-timers are pretty popular with the 20 and 30 somethings, a rather sad phenomenon IMHO, although I’m sure it’s quite validating to the aging boomers who will never grow old, as if that’s a dirty word.

During the Q&A, one young food blogger asked Bourdain about his disdain for veganism. He gave a very evasive and politically correct response, as in, “It’s all about respect”. He did however, make one interesting point about veganism and other eating distortions.

Bourdain emphasized that we must make a distinction between people who are vegan or vegetarian (or kosher, halal, etc., for that matter) as a function of their cultural and religious upbringing, and those who “take it up” as some form of born-again redemption. For the former, there is no requirement of intellectual integrity, i.e., they do not have to be able to explain why they do it, because it is interwoven in the larger fabric of their religious, cultural, and familial experience; it is largely “hardwired” as a function of early childhood experience, and inseparable from their cultural identity. An ultra-religious Orthodox Jew would no longer be an Orthodox Jew if he gave up kosher food laws, even if he followed every other tradition in that faith.

But there’s more to this story that Bourdain did not touch upon. We must understand that food and the act of eating are extremely vulnerable to being co-opted for psychological reasons. In my experience, I have met very few people (from the born-again variety) with a distortion of the basic human omnivorous tendency, who weren’t using food for psychological purposes. The reason for this is very straightforward: Human beings (and most higher order animals), have a unique relationship with food that is different from all the other external substances and things with which we interact.

Food is our first experience of the outside world and of another person. The newborn wants to eat not because he is hungry (up until a few seconds ago he was perfectly fed through the umbilical cord), but rather, as an act of soothing from the stress of being born and the need for comfort. This need binds the newborn permanently and inextricably with the mother, and connects food and eating forever with love, safety, comfort, and with the larger sense of “another”.

We may well say that food is the only substance for which we are hard-wired to be addicted and to use to medicate our daily stress. Many have speculated that all other addictions are sublimations and distortions of the food-for-comfort instinct. In fact, the 1995 discovery of the endocannabinoid system (the neurochemicals that control pleasure), showed conclusively that all addictions are very closely clustered in the same part of the brain as our sense of pleasure from eating, and managed by the same biochemistry. That’s why I laugh with frustration when I hear smokers, shopaholics, boozers, dopers, gamblers, etc., express contempt for fat people. Now that’s the pot calling the kettle black!

But on to veganism and other eating distortions. Veganism isn’t just a way of eating. Properly executed, it is a complete system of living that focuses on non-harming of other life forms. Vegans with a high degree of intellectual integrity eschew all forms of animal products down to the remotest by-products such as gelatine, milk cultures, etc. They don’t wear leather shoes or accessories. True vegas are like being pregnant…there’s no half-way, “I’m doing the best I can” veganism. Even within the vegan “community”, there are ultra-vegans, who will not eat anything not intended by Nature for consumption and seed dissemination and propagation. So they only eat fruits, nuts, and seeds. I’m not sure they live very long.

As we have seen with the current epidemic of eating disorders, the act of eating is very easily affected by psychological problems. At the sub-clinical level, many people use food and eating as tools for getting love, power, and control. The infant quickly learns that if he/she refuses a certain food, Mommy will run around trying to find something else to please it and make it eat. Children use food all the time to control their parents. As they become adults, people understand at a subliminal level, that food has the power to make you different, distinct, and to make others “hop” at your discretion; it very quickly becomes a weapon of identity and power.

If you want to separate the true believers from the psychological dilettantes, ask them why they do what they do. Do they have intellectual integrity? Have they thoroughly thought out their veganism (or any other food distortion) and do they live consistently in every other aspect of their lives (or are they vegetarians who eat fish?). You will quickly find that 99% of people with food distortion have only a superficial sense of why they do it. “Oh, I am against cruelty to animals”, or, “It’s bad for the environment”, etc. They usually have no understanding of the research that supports or challenges their belief system. You will quickly be able to tell the fakers from the real McCoys!

So in summary, veganism and all other food “philosophies” can be genuine, or they can be (and usually are) forms of psychological manipulation and identity. You can usually tell them apart by the degree of intellectual integrity that they bring to their belief system.

For cooking time, my wife pulled out her vintage 1968 copy of Better Homes and Gardens Meat Cook Book. It was given to her in 1972 when she left Quebec City to attend McGill university in Montreal.  This book has been our go-to guide for all things meat related for the 38 years we’ve been together. 

I leafed through its pages this morning over my Greek coffee. It was really a time warp and I realized that if you want to glimpse any period in the past, investigate a cookbook from that time. A couple of things stand out about that time (1968) that coincide with my own memories:

1. Ingredients were very simple and locally available. There was nothing exotic: No smoked paprika, dijon, cold-pressed olive oil, Tellicherry pepper, caper berries, Madagascar peppercorns, truffle oil, quinoa, black rice, Herbs de Provence, etc. If they existed, they were for the “rich”. I distinctly remember my mother sending me to our local big-chain grocery store to get some yogurt and the owner asking ME what that was. “Oh yeah”, he said, “I think there’s a couple in the back of the dairy shelf”. There were: Two containers of plain…almost expired. If you’re under 40 you probably don’t remember a time when the yogurt aisle wasn’t the biggest section in dairy and there weren’t 200 types of yogurt.
2. MSG was a common flavour enhancer for any sauces and gravies (I remember Accent!). It is, by the way, making a comeback, and I’ve read many articles claiming that its purported negative effects were completely overblown. Glutamate is a natural amino acid and the key trigger of umami, the fifth taste.
3. Women were shown doing the cooking, but men were shown doing the carving. Recipes were often titled: “Get the oven ready for when HE brings home the game”.
4. My grandmother was able to produce some of the finest Greek food on the planet by substituting simple locally available ingredients. I’m not sure we’re quite as adaptable today: I’ll spend a day hunting just the right ingredient from the shady side of the mountain, in order to get the recipe “right”.
5. The food was delicious. There was no concern about fat, cholesterol, salt, carbs, glycemic load, gluten, and lactose. Only taste and pleasure mattered. Strangely enough, people were thinner too, perhaps because they worked harder physically and moved more in general. There was much less cancer and heart disease, although you died a lot quicker if you got sick. How ironic that obesity, diabetes, cancer, and heart disease have exploded (pun intended) in parallel to our health obsession.
6. The photography was absolute crap.

I’m going to start making some of these recipes in the coming weeks as a test vs. modern-day results.

Now this is really cool. Thanks to Mr. Italo for the find. Retronaut is a web site that takes you back to any era of your choosing and shows you amazing images from that time. Try the ’60′s just for fun and have a look at what Martha Stewart looked like when she was a model (She was a model??). Yup, that’s her in the picture above. Thousands of great shots that will really take you back to things you thought you had long forgotten.

Those who aren’t paralyzed, take a stand and stick to it with the fervor of a zealot, regardless of whether or not their beliefs and actions make any sense. Intellectual integrity is out the window, and people can rarely ever explain why they do what they do beyond superficial reasons. I remember sitting next to a lady at a dinner in a new Thai restaurant a few years ago. We were ordering, and I asked her if she wanted to share a shrimp dish. She said, “No, I don’t eat shrimp…I might be allergic”. I asked her when she had her first allergic reaction. She said, “Oh no, I’ve never had one; in fact, I’ve never eaten a shrimp. I don’t know if I’m allergic, but from what I’ve read I MIGHT be, so I avoid them”.

How then, does one make judgments about belief systems, business opportunities,  politics, relationships, etc.? Can one “judge”? It doesn’t even seem politically correct these days to make judgments without being seen as judgmental.

Some years ago, I interviewed a dozen leading psychotherapists in Montreal, for a paper I was writing on the integration of cultural value systems in therapy. It’s a hugely important topic, as changing ethnographics place a strain on therapists to provide effective services to their clients. I asked the question: What are the boundaries [if any] to cultural accommodation that must be made in the context of therapy? For example, if a client’s culture endorses corporal punishment of wives and children, should this be challenged in therapy, or is it culturally insensitive and inappropriate to do so?

The best answer that I received, came from one psychoanalyst. Not only did it answer my immediate question, but it formed the basis for a broader way of assessing and judging many situations, including belief systems, political parties, business ventures, etc.

She said: “We must certainly accomodate culture, but we need not kow-tow to it. Ask yourself two questions: 1. Does this belief system allow people to freely explore their full potential and capabilities, or does it limit, constrain, or oppress them into pre-established patterns?, and 2. Does this belief system encourage people to openly and freely question and challenge it, without negative consequences?”.

It’s a great start.