Follow-up to Good Eatin’: Health Benefits of Coffee (The Detourist 2012-05-17): The Case for Coffee: All the Latest Research to Defend Your Caffeine Addiction, in One Place by Brian Fung (The Atlantic 2012-07-03).

*

Among dog-eared volumes on The Detourist’s crowded kitchen shelf none has suffered more wear and tear than Food Without Borders, a slim menu of healthy recipes using mostly proteins and vegetables compiled by French foreign correspondent, military analyst and adventurer Gerard Chaliand. Now nearly 80, Chaliand is an expert in armed-conflict studies and in international and strategic relations, especially in what are known as asymmetric conflicts, as for example in the fight in Afghanistan between the powerful military of the United States and the diffuse, lightly armed Taliban.

In 40-plus years as a freelance journalist and academic, Chaliand has traveled to more than 60 international hotspots from Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Nagorno-Karabakh and Sri Lanka to Chechnia, Peru, Chiapas and Kurdistan. Even at the time he published this cookery, in 1981, early in his career, he had already spent time in various parts of the Middle East, South-East Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas. Along the way, he came to the conclusion that there are, in his words, no “such things as national cuisines. In fact there are only regional cuisines or cuisines with local variations which cover a vast geographical area.”

In that spirit, Food Without Frontiers divides the world into geographical/historical regions with “cuisines which seem to me outstanding or worthy of special attention.” From each of these Chaliand presents foods that he found most appealing during his travels. Though its author has had long career as a social scientist and his interest in what people eat springs from a desire to understand the cultures he visits*, Foods Without Frontiers is anything but pedantic. Instead, it is a highly enjoyable visit to the kitchen of an opinionated Frenchman as he whips up meals that are exotic at the same time that they are well within the ken of most American cooks (Chaliand includes a list of substitutes for ingredients that may not be available in your neighborhood, although these days it is unusual for an urban supermarket not to devote a row or two to ethnic foods and fixings).

Food Without Frontiers is parceled into seven sections: Middle East, North Africa and the Balkans (lamb dishes are typical); East and South East Asia (steamed duck); India, Pakistan and South Asia (Mulligatawny Soup); The Americas including the Caribbean (Chicken Sauté à la Creole); Black Africa (Bobotie – Cape Malay-style meat loaf); Northern, Central and Eastern Europe (Hare in the Pot); and Western Europe — the Latin Countries (Blanquette de Veau). Although only 120 pages including an index, I’ve used it for 30 years without tiring of it. Most of the recipes are easily adapted to US kitchens. As with many regional cookbooks, it will lead the adventurous cook to experiment with new flavors and ingredients.

*Regional cuisines “and probably also music,” Chaliand says, writing before cable tv, the internet and Putumayo Presents, “are the most accessible parts of a culture and, at the same time, the most resistant to outside influence. They are the first points of real physical contact with a different society. Part of knowing how to travel is to have an appreciation of other cuisines: this is the very essence of the pleasure of traveling.”

Food Without Frontiers by Gerard Chaliand, long out of print, is available used from Amazon and other booksellers. He is also the author of such works as The Art of War in World History: From Antiquity to the Nuclear Age; The History of Terrorism: From Antiquity to al Qæda (with Arnaud Blin); and Nomadic Empires: From Mongolia to the Danube.

Street art takes a philosophical turn in Mexico.

Isla Mujeres, Quintana Roo, Mexico (photo: John Gabree)

Wall art and abandoned furniture, Isla Mujeres — July 2012

A handy and convenient improvement on the insulated lunch bag

PackIt is a freezable, foldable lunch bag that the manufacturer says will keep food fresh for up to 10 hours. The personal cooler bag gets the job done without resorting to melting ice or bulky, toxic ice packs. PackIts come in a variety of styles and sizes — for mini, individual and social lunches; accommodating single and double bottles; for bringing frozen and refrigerated food home from market — priced between $15 and $27. Store it folded in the freezer until you’re ready to pack it. Available online and many retailers.

Hotel Las Palmas, Isla Mujeres, Quintana Roo, Mexico 07/2012

Here are some links to cost-effective summer travel from Tips and Tricks: Summer Savings by Robert Brokamp (Motley Fool‘s Rule Your Retirement Newsletter 07/2012):

Summer travel season is here, and FareCompare.com, Kayak.com, HotWire.com, FamilyVacationCritic.com, AirFareWatchDog.com, SkyScanner.com, SkyAuction.com, and CheapTickets.com have great deals. For spur-of-the-moment trips, see Jetsetter.com, LastMinuteTravel.com, and Sniqueaway.com. Go uncoventional with time shares at CondoDirect.com, EVRentals.com, and ResortTime.com, or vacation rentals from owners at VRBO.com. Check out hostels, adventure travel, or temporary work overseas at BootsnAll.com. Go to SlowTrav.com for tips if you’re looking to settle in and explore a locale in Europe or North America. Use Hotelsweep.com to find places skipped by the bigger travel websites. Backbid.com shops your hotel reservation around for a better deal.

For more money-saving tips, go to Motley Fool’s Rule Your Retirement newsletter for July 2012.

Double the health benefits of your daily walks with free urban foraging.

“Fallen Fruit is a long-term art collaboration that began by mapping fruit trees growing on or over public property in Los Angeles. The collaboration has expanded to include serialized public projects and site-specific installations and happenings in various cities around the world.

“By always working with fruit as a material or media, the catalogue of projects and works reimagine public interactions with the margins of urban space, systems of community and narrative real-time experience. Public Fruit Jams invites a broad public to transform homegrown or public fruit and join in communal jam-making as experimentation in personal narrative and sublime collaboration; Nocturnal Fruit Forages, nighttime neighborhood fruit tours explores the boundaries of public and private space at the edge of darkness; Public Fruit Meditations renegotiates our relationship to ourselves through guided visualizations and dynamic group participation.

“Fallen Fruit’s visual work includes an ongoing series of narrative photographs, wallpapers, everyday objects and video works that explore the social and political implications of our relationship to fruit and world around us. Recent curatorial projects reindex the social and historical complexities of museums and archives by re-installing permanent collections through syntactical relationships of fruit as subject matter.

“Theoretically, David Burns, Matias Viegener, and Austin Young are the three artists of Fallen Fruit that imagine fruit as a lens through which to see the world.” — from the website.

From Detourist's “Places I’d Like To Go” on Pinterest

“Coffee linked to lower risk of death”

So said the headline in today’s Los Angeles Times. “A study that tracked health and coffee consumption finds that coffee-drinkers had a lower risk of death,” continued the story. “Subjects who averaged four or five cups per day fared best, though it’s not clear why.”

Cuppa longevity

I know why, I think. People who enjoy life — who like the kinds of things we like: interesting companions, food and drink, music and art, exotic travel — have a firmer grip on life. Good coffee is a pleasure, an indulgence, a blessing. It wouldn’t be entirely surprising to find out that it isn’t coffee that makes for a longer life, but that many people inclined to a long, full life include coffee as one of its satisfactions.

Still, this isn’t the first time coffee has found favor with scientists. As long ago as 2005, as I wrote at the time, a study by a University of Scranton professor, Jon Vinson, found that coffee is the best natural source of the antioxidants that help protect cells in the body from damage caused by unstable molecules known as free radicals. Among other harms, free radicals may cause cancer. So, more antioxidants, fewer free radicals, less cancer, longer lives.

There was plenty of other good news for people who relish eating and drinking, I said then: that red wine improves cardiovascular health and life expectancy and wards off the common cold; that dark chocolate helps prevent diabetes and lowers blood pressure; that virgin olive oil is not only good for the heart, but fights cancer, diabetes, asthma and arthritis, and obesity, and that garlic, the staff of life, will cure everything from cardiovascular disease to the plague.

Throw in shellfish and mushrooms, and that pretty much describes my diet. It’s gratifying to find out you’ve spent so many years doing the right thing.

Given what she was told, your mother was doing the best she could when she tried to get you to eat your broccoli, but she might have done better to have poured a little vino on your Cocopops.

For it to turn out that java is superior in the antioxidant department to such fodder as carrots, collard greens, wheat germ and kale that we have been made to feel guilty our whole lives for not eating is sweet revenge. It only remains for someone to document the incontrovertible health benefits of Häagen-Dazs coffee & almond crunch….

Red wine and resveratrol: Good for your heart? (Mayo Clinic)
Association of Coffee Drinking with Total and Cause-Specific Mortality (New England Journal of Medicine 2012-05-17)
Studies show wine is heart healthy, but what about the calories? (WebMD)
Source Of Major Health Benefits In Olive Oil Revealed (ScienceDaily 2009-04-01)
Garlic (NIH: National Center for Complementary and Alternative medicine)
Dark Chocolate Lowers ‘Bad’ Cholesterol And Blood Sugar Levels When Eaten In Moderation: Study (Huffington Post 2012-04-30)

Extra reading:
6 Surprising Facts about Oysters (Rodale Press)
Mushrooms for Good Health? (Weil 2012-03-27)

Perfect evening. James Lee Burke. Bushmills. Ellington "live."

But it needs to be said: Although he may have been one of the best trumpet players who ever lived, and he was, Cat Anderson is arguably the worst thing that ever happened to the Duke Ellington Orchestra.

A nice break for detourists: sign up for Library of America‘s free story of the week and have it sent to your e-reader. Perfect airport reading. Free.

I’m the first to own one of Los Angeles sculptor Robert Toll‘s new one-of-a-kind welded-steel belt buckles.

“In 1993 three Australians and one Englishman took their kayaks to two rivers in what used to be called Soviet Central Asia. As far as we can ascertain, it was the first time kayaks had been taken into Uzbekistan and Kirgizstan, and probably the first time kayaks had been taken down the Chatkal and Pskem rivers.”
Dancing with the Bear by Liam Guilar is a free online book that recounts their journey. It offers a reminder that not all roads have been taken, that there are still unique adventures to be had.

Hearing the news that Moat Brae, a Georgian townhouse in Scotland that sparked JM Barrie to create Peter Pan, is to be turned into a center for children’s literature got Emily Temple thinking about all the real-life places that have animated works of literature.


Not big cities that figure in thousands of books, like New York and London and their numerous incitements, but “houses and moors, caves and farmlands hidden away in authors’ hometowns or childhood vacation spots.” So she compiled a list of ten real life places that inspired the likes of Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, Emily Brontë, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Mark Twain, Robert Frost and F.Scott Fitzgerald to create literary classics.

The rest of the story: 10 Real-Life Places That Inspired Literary Classics by Emily Temple (Flavorwire 2011-08-06).

As an aside: it would be fun, wouldn’t it, to plan a summer trip to Durham, Maine (the inspiration for Salem’s Lot) and to locales such as the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado (The Shining‘s Overlook Hotel), around Stephen King Country: The Illustrated Guide to the Sites and Sights That Inspired the Modern Master of Horror by George W. Beahm. Available from Amazon

The Travel Film Archive sells commercial access to travelogues and educational and industrial travel films, “…from the boulevards of 1920′s Paris to the streets of San Francisco in the 60′s…from the Sudan to Palestine to Pakistan” and every place in between. All of the footage, much of it in color, was shot on film between 1900 and 1970. The library includes work by renowned travel filmmakers Burton Holmes, Andre de la Varre, and James A. FitzPatrick, as well as footage shot by journeyman cameramen. Although the films are not rentable by individuals, the catalog available on line is a joy to visit, especially for anyone nostalgic for locations and lifestyles lost to time. Here, to take one example, is New York City as it was a little more than a half century ago:

Website: The Travel Film Archive

(Photo: John Gabree)

“Yes,” says Geraldine DeRuiter about The Everywhereist,  “it’s a travel blog.” But that hardly does it justice.
DeRuiter is a clever, insightful and opinionated writer, and whether she is carrying on about obnoxious airplane passengers, the Seattle Gum Wall and the Most. Complicated. Shower. Ever. or splurging at Rome’s Hotel Raphael, overdosing on New York cupcakes (a descent into madness) and encountering L.A.’s Coolest Mailman, she is never less than entertaining. Bonus: guest bloggers.

The site: The Everywhereist

You may think summer is just around the corner, but I have proof to the contrary:

I-80, Donner, California June 1, 2011

Denver, Colorado

"Continental social food," the slogan of TAG restaurant in Denver, could hardly be more apt. With menu items that extend from sushi tacos with guacamole through meat loaf friended by bokchoy and kimchi, grilled lamb with Bambino watermelon, and Kobe sliders with irresistible duck fat fries, to salmon served in the company of spring ramps, shiitakes, English peas, cured wild boar, Meyer lemon confit and umami butter, comfort food has never been so edgy.

TAG’s barkeeps follow the same fresh, seasonal path trod in the kitchen by chef and owner Troy Guard. Some classics like daiguiris and stingers are delivered straight, but most, like the Kumquat-Jalapeño Mojito, receive a TAG twist. Also, since many of the bar's concoctions depend on seasonal ingredients, every visit is likely to be greeted with a surprise, and not one not limited to mixed drinks: the Bazi Shot is an energy swallow packing 12 vitamins and 68 minerals, and there's house-made ginger ale and a TAG-branded coconut soda. The beverage menu matches the lets-give-it-a-shot attitude emanating from the galley.

I never pass anywhere near Denver without a visit to TAG. It's the only way to find out what happens if, say, the flavors of yuzu, jalapeño and Pop Rocks find their way onto the same plate. Desserts -- peanut butter partfait, for example, with caramel, bittersweet chocolate and Nutella marshmallow ice cream -- prolong the adventure. Tag also has a raw bar and is open for lunch and dinner (social -- a.k.a., happy -- hour is 2-6 pm). TAG, 1441 Larimer St., Denver CO 303-996-9985.

http://www.tag-restaurant.com