Pig, noun

An omnivorous domesticated hoofed mammal with sparse bristly hair and a flat snout for rooting in the soil, kept for its meat. Here, pretty much every household has at least one pig, fattened with maize, wheat and general-leftover broth for about a year. Note that industrial fattening takes about 3 months now, and new orientations of taste with health concerns have definitely changed how pigs should be in other regions of Europe (and even in the big farms here, e.g. maximum of 12% fat), those bred in individual households should have a proportion of at least 40% fat. They should not lack ‘sunca’, the subcutaneous fat that will be turned into ‘untura’ (Lux: Schmalz – is there a special word in English?… I am tempted to say ‘blubber’ but I am sure that’s only for sea mammals’ fat…). Over a thousand pigs will be ‘cut’ from now until Christmas in the village. The black market in a neighbouring town is flourishing in this period of the year, unhampered by a smiling vet inspector (encountered in a different part of the official part of the market) who probably gets his own Christmas feast-pig from there. You can get pigs quite cheaply there (about €90 for a carcass with 120 kg meat, dead weight). There are all kinds of colourful pigs there, because people here have old breeds, not the ‘modern’ hybrids recommended/prescribed for industrial farming. I like colourful pigs. There was one black pig with a lot of hair on the market screaming as if it was being slaughtered already, because someone had tied it with its hind leg to the back of the truck, and it really did not like that, and wanted to escape. The vet inspector used to go and threaten with fines, in the summer, making the market dissociate at once in a cloudy moment of dust and noise, everyone getting their pigs in the car or horse-wagons and taking off. The man probably decided probably it was to no avail, given that every Sunday morning, the market was recreated under his nose.
Generally the issue is not (yet?) about whether raising a pig is profitable. It has become a lot more difficult lately to give your pig away, but it is still possible. Prices have hit rock bottom. If EU standards will be enforced, it will be more difficult to keep pigs in the backyard. For now, people know that no money is to be made in the pig business for small producers, but they are still holding on to their eating practices, and what it means to have a good household.
People here say that they should be killed on Ignatius day on the 20th December, but this is not respected in the region. The cutting of the pig is an important event, uniting families, neighbours, friends and attracting guests into the courtyards. I was told that from now on I would hear screaming pigs every morning. The pigs are slaughtered the traditional way. Even though people are vaguely aware of the (considered, and so-called Occidental) EU prescription to ‘anaesthetize’ pigs (through electroshock, shot…) before cutting their throat, they do not put this into practice. The pig is cut through an incision to the throat, which immobilises it immediately, but which kills very slowly. The pig is transported to a makeshift table, usually with a ladder. When it is dead, it is scorched black with a massive burner, removing the hair, and the outside of the hooves. The pig is washed, cleaned, and its head cut off. Then the actual cutting into pieces begins, and it takes some skill to do this properly. The times I have witness this event, a lot of discussion was going into various, and differing opinions of expertise on how to cut, where, when, and what. The carcass steams in the cold December air. Despite variations there is a rough prescribed order of cutting, and at this time, pieces of ‘sorici’, pig skin, are offered to guests and participants, along with salt and coffee. The cutting up proceeds from the outside to the inside, and the guts are dealt with lastly. The pig needs to be turned from being on its side first, to sitting on its belly. Every bit is used (apart from the gall bladder and the bladder), including the bones. After the cutting, more work awaits, because most people do not have freezers! Preservation methods include the ‘untura’ that I mentioned. Much of the meat is smoked, but not entire hindquarters, as is done in North-Western Europe. The meat is cut into manageable pieces and smoked with a slow woodchip fire in a small room. The organs and lower quality pieces are minced and made into ‘toba’ (a kind of pate) and ‘carnatoi’ (a kind of sausage). Pofta buna!

Vegetarian Sarmale (Cabbage Rolls) with Mushrooms.

2 heads of cabbage
1 cup of rice
3 big onions
2 carrots
100 g raisins
400g mushrooms (tinned)
0.5 l of tomato juice or 3 tbs of tomato paste
spices: dill, parsley, savory fresh if possible, one bundle of each
stock (the kind of stuff we used for soup at the fair trade café, yellow powder), salt, pepper, two potatoes


Clean the potatoes and cut them into rounds. Unmake the cabbage leaves and clean them, cut them into small pieces and leave them in cold water along with the potatoes. Put the rice into cold water. Cut the onion into small pieces, clean the carrot and grate it, cut the mushrooms and drain the juice. In a pot put some oil and fry the onion, the carrot and the rice, with a little bit of salt, adding a bit of water after a while. Stir often. After 20 minutes, put the mushrooms and the raisins. Leave it to boil 10 minutes and put the tomato juice/paste diluted with water. After 15 minutes, add the spices, finely chopped, and put the pot to cool down. Take the cabbage leaves and the middle bits, pressing them in your palms so as to drain the water. You no longer need the potatoes and the water. In every leaf of cabbage put, with a teaspoon, of the mixture, roll the leaf and fold in the ends so the rice doesn’t come out. Don’t make the roll too tight because the rice will still grow during the cooking process. Put the sarmale on a platter and turn the oven on. The remaining leaves and the middle bits you chop very finely, and you put the juice on them and with them you cover the bottom of the pot in which you want to put the sarmale. Put a row of sarmale, put the cimbru and continue with the sarmale until you finish. On top you put the rest of the cabbage that was left over. Leave the pot until it boils on the cooker, then put the lid and put it into the oven. They need to stay there two hours, on low fire, after which you try to cut one sarma with a fork, and if you can cut it, they’re ready to be eaten….
Pofta buna!

Plums, prunes and tuica

Now for a lovely example about words expanding or compressing their meaning when introduced into a foreign language. Linguistically, the origins of the word ‘prune’ are to be found in the Middle English period, from Old French, via Latin from Greek prou(m)non. In Latin ‘pruna’ denotes the genus of the actual plum tree, but today, in English, prune merely denotes the plum ‘preserved by drying, having a black, wrinkled appearance’. Further, it has the secondary, metaphorical meaning of an ‘unpleasant or disagreeable person’. Plum, on the other hand, signifies the fruit, the tree, the colour, and, informally, as an adjective, ‘a highly desirable attainment, accomplishment, or acquisition, typically a job’. This word is recorded in the dictionary as coming from Old English plume (with a line on the u), from medieval Latin, pruna. So this word existed earlier in the English language. In Romanian, which is the Romance language that has kept the most Latin forms, the word is, unsurprisingly, pruna, plural prune. How about for a historically unverifiable (? I put my faith in you historians out there) question: since when have people made brandy and jams and what not? What was on a medieval food table – of the wealthy, let us say, to leave more scope? All answers, albeit speculative, welcome.
People here are picking plums at the moment. They go for days and days, because it is a year with a lot of plums. There are more than 100,000 plum trees in this valley, mostly planted during communism, and not a penny has been invested in the orchards since the revolution at least... Part of the neighbouring comuna’s territory was a state farm of fruit trees, mainly functioning by unpaid labour, recruiting students into so-called Praktika, and the army into agricultural labour. People were considered chiaburi if they owned a still, because they could apply the custom of asking for a tax amounting to a tenth of the production of people who would use the still in the village. The plums are delicious, and will be mostly end as the traditional brandy, tuica (pronounce: tzuica, because of the , below the t that I cannot reproduce on the internet). For this end, they are kept in wooden casks for a while until they have fermented. Then, through a distillation process, the alcohol is separated from the fruit, and the wash remains for fodder purposes. The first bit that seeps out of the still is very strong and I recommend waiting… (one coughing, cursing anthropologist-wimp will result otherwise, in my own experience). I am very curious whether and how the new EU regulations will be applied in this regard, and whether a new return to secret brandy making will happen, just like in communist times (for the Aberdonians: Illicit Stills will multiply in the village…). In the spring, when there was some distilling going on in the other valley, people were arguing that, in fact, the legislation of last year needed to be applied to these plums (and apples) because the harvest was from 2006. I feel this discourse is on the brink of changing (it don’t take no clairvoyant to predict this… ;-P). Noroc!

302

That’s the number which has woken me up. It stands for the total cholesterol levels in my blood. Cholesterol (C 27 H 45 OH) is a compound of the sterol type found in most body tissues, including the blood and the nerves. Cholesterol and its derivatives are important constituents of cell membranes and precursors of other steroid compounds, but high concentrations in the blood (mainly derived from animal fats in the diet) are thought to promote arteriosclerosis. My cholesterol levels are double of the maximum it should be, despite a diet that is relatively low in animal fats, and despite moving about quite a lot. The price to pay for the stress of the phd? It means I will try to be a vegan for a while, and see what that changes. It worries me a bit, but it is strange how a number like that tells you about what happens inside your body. I feel angry about how this body of mine, that, since my early twenties, has been letting me down repeatedly. I am not sure what this cholesterol implies, but I have so many plans in my life that I need to pay heed to it...

Place and Season

I have left to Bucharest for a week. Upon leaving I find myself looking at everything again, in the hope to remember everything, should I not return. As much as I want to leave at times, I have grown very attached to the place. One woman told me that she was like salcam, that she could put her roots anywhere and feel well. I wonder to what extent that is true for me?
The lushness of those trees and all the climbing plants on the houses make me want to have very special drawing abilities that could capture all the windings and shadings and colour shades perfectly. They even have vines, despite the altitude at which we are. I am forever amazed by the way in which seasonality still makes sense in the village I have now been staying at for about four months. The products correspond to certain times. Winter was the time of nuts and onions and cabbage. We had salcam honey, then the apple trees started to flower. Now soc is in bloom, and people prepare a kind of pancakes with these flowers that I find absolutely gorgeous. The garden is full of salad, spring onions and the tomatoes are starting to grow. The prune trees are full of little green bulbs that stick into the air. While I got more cascaval in early spring, now I get strawberry jam and honey. Soon we'll have cherries, and I cannot wait...

O Lume Minunata

What comes to mind when you see this kitchen? What does it do to your imagination? How would it be a different experience if you had been in the kitchen, met the woman in the picture, smelled the food she was preparing and heard the rain coming down the mountains? How would it be the same? What features did you concentrate on and what memories did they recall for you? How would it feel if you had lived there all your adult life? What about childhood? The reconciliation of worlds, even if just for a moment, happens all the time. That is the most important lesson I learnt ever so recently.

Forthcoming...

Here, the news about the forthcoming World Development Report that - almost surprisingly - acknowledges the damages made to agriculture and other sectors by deregulation policies and laissez-faire to the point of abandonment. You may have heard it all before, but it needs to be remembered and made present more often. Still a third of humanity lives in absolute poverty, still the gap between rich and poor rises, with rural areas in the "third world" at the bottom of the bottom rungs. Quote from Le Monde: "Bien que l'agriculture ne soit pas le seul instrument capable de les sortir de la pauvreté, c'est une source hautement efficace de croissance pour y parvenir." An important sentence after all these years during which agriculture has been devalued, underpaid and the consequences remained little considered.
I wonder what impact the following strategy will have on the world and how exactly the World Bank will re-orient its policies for what Le Monde says may be 20 years...
"L'accélération du changement climatique, l'imminence d'une crise de l'eau, la lente adoption des nouvelles biotechnologies, et le bourgeonnement de la demande de biocarburants et d'aliments pour le bétail créent de nouvelles incertitudes sur les conditions dans lesquelles la nourriture sera disponibles dans l'économie mondiale".

FLOUR, noun

A powder obtained by grinding grain, typically wheat, and used to make bread, cakes, and pastry
ORIGIN Middle English: a specific use of flower in the sense ‘the best part’, used originally to mean ‘the finest quality of ground wheat’. The spelling flower remained in use alongside flour until the early 19th century.
Willst du einen Kucken backen musst du haben sieben Sachen…. Butter und Schmalz, Zucker und Salz, Eier und Mehl, Safran macht den Kuchen geeeehl. Remember? My Tata Nin used to make me recite that. Along with Eia Popeia, and Bim Bam Biren… remember those, fellow Luxembourgers? Much too gruesome to be in my innocent little blog…
For those who did not know, I love making and sharing cakes…
CAKE MAKING. The messiness is great. First thing: I turn on the oven. I like assembling all ingredients, gathering them on the kitchen workbench. If you do not care to get first class ingredients, do not even bother to start. Here, the chickens are very kind (and happily walking around in the courtyard, with a caring rooster that gets upset if they make it over the fence, but not back again – they are good chickens but they are not very clever). They provide really healthy eggs without stress hormones, antibiotics, and the results of 24-hour artificial lighting. Those egg yolks are as yellow as it gets. The vagueness of recipes that do not really exist but in your head is something fitting with my philosophy of cooking. I had an argument with my high school chemistry teacher, who insisted cooking was a science. I still disagree, although I think I could take his point now without getting in a fight, quietly. You pour the wet things, the dry things and it mainly takes the will to improvise and use your powers of quick decision. The decision of mixing either with a fork or with a machine depends on what you want to prepare. As in most things I do, I do them impulsively-fast and without any show of patience and delicacy (though the intention might be present…). I may not know what I am doing but it is a lot of fun. I usually need a security radius of three metres, because I spill, the sugar leaks, and the flour scatters (here I wanted to write ‘poofs’, because this is what it does, but I was afraid of being misunderstood. Where are verbs like stëppsen when you need them in the rich English language?) in all directions, and I accidentally turn the mixer on maximum, spraying the cupboards with a snowy sweet substance. Then, after staining my front with flour, egg white and doughy stuff, I can finally get my hands dirty. I knead the dough and decide whether it is still too wet, taste briefly what it may need in addition, grease the pan quickly, and then put the mass of cholesterol-laden deliciousness into the shape, proceeding depending on the kind of cake you are making: layers, bottom, all-mixed-together kind. Let it get some heat (not too much at once, it will burn on the outside and be somewhat liquidy on the inside – not a pretty ending for a cake), and set your alarm clock. Go away and do not peer into the oven every three minutes. Cakes need their privacy. After your alarm has rung, you can go poke the golden sunrise with a knife. When ready, do not serve immediately, you fool. You will get sick, all your teeth will fall out, and you will miss out on the full enjoyment.
A WORD OF WARNING. When I was seventeen and on exchange in Australia, I wanted to impress everyone by making a cake. I found all kinds of ingredients in large, unlabelled glass jars. I mixed, worked, stirred, and tasted the ready dough. Damn. Salty as hell. How come? After a few more failed attempts, my hostmum came home from work, found a very messy kitchen and a desperate, stubborn teenager, and asked what on earth I was trying to do. I weakly offered to make something for the dogs out of the dough (stupid idea). Then she introduced me to one of the secrets of her household (or maybe of Australia – I cannot be so sure at the moment). Here sugar was brown, not white. Everything that was white was, in fact, salt. Yeah! A cake with 100 pinches of salt… yummy! So be sure what you are using is safe… or you will end up like that baker Mulles Mieltuut who was baking Mourekäpp on one of the Fausti tapes. He became paranoid they might contain washingpowder (Sääfepollefer), and tasted them one by one, until he became a huge Mourekapp himself… not a happy ending!
CAKE SHARING. It is an essential part of my research methodology. People give me all kinds of things: interviews, tuica, cheese, apples, time, laughs, coffee. I give them cakes in return. It is the least I can do. Cakes may also be given away as entirely free gifts, of course, and not only on birthdays. I miss my anthropology and history office and campus mates to give cakes to (of course only expecting kindness in return…).
OTHER REASONS FOR MAKING CAKES. It is a fun creative effort and takes less than an afternoon. Great for procrastinating, because it keeps your mind occupied and you will not have feelings of guilt in the process. Quick results, too, much unlike PhDs…
FINAL REMARKS. Of course I am resistant to bribes, but propositions welcome. Maybe I will be seduced, who knows, after all I live in a country where bribing is part of the deal (of course, only until they joined the EU… wait a moment… never mind). Should you ever wish to make a cake for me, be aware that chocolate cake is not really my favourite. In fact, I have had my decade of chocolate already. I am in the decade of cheese, just in case you were wondering. Here, given all the apples in the basement, I also deal with fruits. After that I will be ready to move on to something else. Life is full of surprises.
06.04.07

Poverty and Precariousness

Someone pointed out to me that poor people on the countryside fare better than people in the city. The comment precipitated a lot of thought on the matter, because part of me at first rejected it entirely (always fascinating to see how we react to certain engrained assumptions qualified). Then I conceded that I had been wrong about certain things in this regard.
Not only two or three people here get twenty-five (25) euro pension per month. Some households are constituted of three generations, sharing one salary, and one of the said pensions. I have been wondering about the difference between the poverty here, and the poverty in Western Europe. It may be not just a question of difference in degree, but also a question of difference in kind. I take into account that a difference exists between the kind of poverty found in cities and the one found (here) on the countryside. People here get credit at the local food shop to buy bread (one bread costs 0.7 RON = 0.2 EURO – the shopkeeper explained to me that they had to have a sign saying ‘no credit here’, but that it was not possible to stick to this in practice). The people that have a pension, no matter how minuscule, do not get social benefits, apart from one-off money for fire wood (only heating source around here with very few exceptions). From what I hear from the Lux context, people do get enough money to cover their basic needs. And, speaking about basic needs, I do not think there is anyone in Britain or Lux who does not have access to running water, a bathroom, and electricity. There are a lot of people here who do not have number one and two, and a few who do not have number three. The reason elderly people hold as many animals as they can work is because they cut food bills and enrich staple diets. You can also (at the moment of writing: still) somehow sell the cheese you make, the eggs your chickens lay, and the meat of the spring lamb that your ewe has had. This helps, to some degree. Of course, the facts that communism collapsed and left a whole generation on terribly small pensions (who is to blame that they did not pay contributions to a fund then?), and that incomes are up to ten times lower than in some Western European countries needs to be taken into account in any characterisation of the kind of poverty here.
On the other hand, the kind of misery in Western Europe I mean may resemble the urban kind. It can mean a combination of the following: high debts, forms of social exclusion that include lack of access to education, to secure and fairly-paid jobs, to a secure, healthy living environment, and so forth.
I think one of the most important differences is that in the countryside here, people live without major debts, but in the cities, people have debts because they have commodities, too. In the cities, people may make more plans for the future to face uncertainty, but here, uncertainty is levelled out by minimising the risk in the present, because they do not have the resources to act otherwise. I am not sure how it is with risk deferment: people commit to take out mortgages and pay in health and pension cover, but what kind of percentage can still commit to this kind of responsibility in societies rapidly increasing in inequality, say, in ten or fifteen years’ time? Furthermore, there may be more of temporary poverty because the job situation can change quickly. The welfare state being under siege from various internal and external forces, I am not sure anymore in how far we can and should still speak about it. So these are my embryonic thoughts on the matter, and I am sure a lot has been written about it. I just need to find time to read all that.

OGM GMO - food and industry

please take some time to watch this (in french) it was not authorised to be screened by CANAL+. at the moment i am working with an NGO dealing with these sorts of issues in romania, and it is alarming how much complicity there exists of the authorities with the private sector.