It was ten below in the Catskills as I forked up some pickled herring while squinting at the frozen river from my window. I was wondering why they put onions in the jar. Then I remembered that onions are bactericidal, which led to further speculations, as pickled herrings tend to do – whether or not they are red ones. Not for nothing did Bertie Wooster ascribe the mighty intellect of his butler, Jeeves, to the effect on his brain of the fish he ate.
So many of our acquired tastes are a serendipitous by-product of our attempts to preserve food and drink. Even wine and beer are really just imaginative ways to preserve fruit juice and solutions of grains, since the yeast and alcohol kill off other, more noxious life forms while preserving, and indeed enhancing, nutritional value. Smoked fish, bacon, ham and a host of other delicacies are tastes developed over centuries of preemptive battles against the mad post-prandial rush for the bushes.
These challenges to food preservation are carved deep into our folkways. Allegedly, in the UK, you can tell where the Vikings settled – in their cold and drafty fjord-side homes, they didn’t need much salt to preserve their butter, and their distant descendants in the British Isles still buy the unsalted version. In the cold north, a bit of salt, vinegar or onion is enough to stun the salmonella bacteria, somnolent as the little critters are when frostbitten. There is a gradient of culinary expectation, with bland foods above the Arctic Circle rising to furnace-hot curries and chili sauces as you approach the equator, where the micro-fauna get friskier.
Onions kill germs, but garlic does it better, while hot peppers and other spices are microbial neutron bombs. The effect on your taste buds parallels what these ingredients do to the bacteria, but in the cooking pot, no one hears the latter scream. If you’ve ever had Montezuma’s revenge, it was not because the chili peppers were too hot, but because you ate the salad without steeping it in chili sauce first.
In the tropics, meat goes the way of all flesh much faster, as the maggots race the bacteria to see who can degrade it first. Until refrigeration, the goal was simply to get the meat into the curry pot as fast as possible, so it is perhaps not surprising that places like India are centers for vegetarianism.
Global warming will have an effect on these culinary latitudes – and indeed, may have consequences for the preservation of your portfolios and pension plans. As the temperatures rise in northern climes, maybe we should be rebalancing our investment profiles on the fast food front. Get out of salad and fried chicken restaurant chains (if you are still in them, what with avian flu and all that). Plain burgers will no longer cut the mustard on the globally warmed food front.
Keep salmonella at bay and dividends in the bank, and look for start-up chains of infernally hot Thai, Indian and Pakistani curry houses to pour your hard-earned dollars into. I have seen the future – and it’s bright, hot and sizzling!
