"they don't seem to have understood"

Shit just got real for some French cheese-making monks:

"The Cîteaux Abbey, just south of Dijon, birthplace of the Cistercian Catholic order, usually sells its raw-milk, semi-soft discs only to restaurants or visitors to its on-site shop. But a drop in demand since the coronavirus crisis erupted last year has left the abbey’s 19 Trappist monks with 4,000 cheeses too many, a 2.8-tonne problem.

'We tried explaining to our 75 cows that they needed to produce less milk but they don’t seem to have understood,' said brother Jean-Claude, in charge of marketing at the monastery, which was founded in 1098.

'Our sales are down nearly 50%,” he said, with French restaurants still closed since 30 October as authorities try to stifle a third wave of cases. 'We need to clear out our stock.'”

Good cheese is one of my top three foods that I'm happy to have access to now that I'm back in America (real bagels, Maryland style crabs would be the others).

Honestly, just send me to this monastery with a fork and I'll take care of it.  Maybe some bread and fresh tomatoes too, natch.

"children who do not necessarily have access to the internet"

As the coronavirus continues to rage globally, people are forced to adjust to hard times.  In Kenya, church pastors are taking to "balcony churches":

"The balcony church started when a Sunday school teacher at the cathedral delivered a service to children on their balconies to entertain them while they were stuck at home. The service was a success, and the teacher enlisted Machira’s help to spread this mtaani – 'in the neighbourhood' in Swahili – Sunday school. While All Saints Cathedral has been providing online services for young people, Machira says the mtaani helps him reach more of them.

'This Sunday school mtaani allows us to do ministry to children who do not necessarily go to church,' said Machira. 'And children who do not necessarily have access to the internet.'

Soon after its first Covid-19 case was announced in mid-March, Kenya closed down schools. 'You’ll find children being confined in their houses from the time they wake up till the time they go to bed,' said Machira, who has three children himself. 'It’s been a difficult time.'”

It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better, but local, bottom-to-top initiatives like this one provide some optimism.

Buddha In Your Belly

Is Korean Temple Food, in all of its simple, vegetarian, locally sourced glory, going to be the next "wave" of Hallyu?  Maybe!  Here's an interview with a monk who teaches how to make the stuff:

Q:  "What do people, who are not monks, say is the most delicious dish?"

A:  "We say that we do things a certain way to make it tastier or even prettier. But frankly speaking, that’s contradicting Buddha’s teachings. The teachings say never to be greedy for anything, but looking for a good taste is desiring food.

So, talking about whether a particular food is tasty doesn’t make sense. However, that doesn’t mean that food doesn’t need to be made in a delicious way, as food should be something ordinary to help monks meditate and study. If a monk is distracted after having some bad food, that’s an inadequate way to cook food."

So, in a fascinating paradox, a truly Buddhist food experience can't, by definition, serve anything "delicious" that would inflame the desires of taste.

That's punk as fuck, if you ask me.

"safe treyf"

My step-father is Jewish, so I have a small bit of insight into the ways of The Tribe.  And I knew that going to a Chinese restaurant for Christmas wasn't just a myth.  (Then again, we never went to one because he genuinely loved Christmas himself.  Much more than I ever did, being the Grinch that I am.)

But here's a great article that gets into the history of Jews eating Chinese food on Jesus' Birthday:

"[Q]  Was there any reason, beyond proximity, that Jews wound up eating Chinese food, as opposed to some other immigrant cuisine?

[A]  In terms of kosher law, a Chinese restaurant is a lot safer than an Italian restaurant. In Italian food, there is mixing of meat and dairy. A Chinese restaurant doesn’t mix meat and dairy, because Chinese cooking is virtually dairy-free.

In Chinese-American cooking, if there is any pork (which is not a kosher food), it is usually concealed inside something, like a wonton. A lot of Jews back then — and even now — kept strict kosher inside the home but were more flexible with foods they ate at restaurants. Sociologist Gaye Tuchman wrote about this practice. She described (the plausible deniability of non-kosher ingredients) as safe treyf. (Treyf is the Yiddish word for non-kosher.) A lot of Jews considered the pork in Chinese food to be safe treyf, because they couldn’t see it. That made it easier to eat."

Of course, the history of Chinese food in America is a whole other story.

Old School

The tradition of Korean shamanism is still alive, even for people who grew up outside of the country:

"From a young age, Soholm says she’s been having mystical dreams, dreaming about making contact with the spiritual world. As she got older, she began dreaming about things that would happen in the future. 

'If I meet somebody, for example,' said Soholm, 'I would have a dream about them and get information about them that they didn’t tell me. I began to have such intuitive knowledge and they’ve just been growing stronger and stronger as I got older.'

Usually, those who felt tormented by a so-called spirit illness in Korea look for different ways to be treated, but end up admitting that the affliction marks a call to become a shaman, or mudang in Korean, and receive naerimgut. 

Her spirit illness hasn’t been as serious as other traditional shamans, but Soholm says her health has been deteriorating, especially after deciding on the naerimgut date. 

'Deciding on receiving naerimgut took a long time for me because I never considered myself that way. I thought I was just intuitive,' recalled Soholm. But after years of research and interviews she did with Western shamans, she realized that the stories she gathered mirrored her life."

"small mutton"

A very brief and cool overview of vegetarian "fake meats," why they originate in China, and why they aren't nearly as popular in Japan and India:

"While mock meat has a place in some temple kitchens, much of the cooking consists of vegetables, rice, and plant-based proteins that have not been purposely twisted to resemble meats. This is especially true in Japan, where Buddhist law prohibited the consumption of four-legged animals throughout the empire for centuries, eventually doing away with the edict in the 19th century. Due to a lack of appetite for meat, Japanese people never tried to imitate it with other substances, says Akiko Katayama, a food consultant and host of the Japan Eats podcast. Similarly, in the heavily vegetarian country of India, you won’t find traditional mock meats for the same reason. 'For many Indian vegetarians, I don’t think a meat substitute would even register since meat was never a reference point to begin with,' says Chitra Agrawal, the author of the vegetarian Indian cookbook Vibrant India.

However, in China, the origins of both tofu and wheat gluten are somewhat linked to their use as meat replacements. In Mandarin, mianjin, or wheat gluten, means literally 'wheat meat' (George Ohsawa, the founder of the macrobiotic diet, coined the term 'seitan' for the same food in 1961). And tofu, a food that dates back to prehistoric times in China, was popularly known as 'small mutton' in the 10th century, according to records. Although they need not only to be enjoyed as meat analogs, they have been used as such for centuries. There is mention of seitan textured to emulate goose in the classic Chinese cookery book Recipes From the Sui Garden by the Qing Dynasty Chinese poet Yuan Mei. And the Ming Dynasty novel Journey to the West references wheat gluten several times, including a scene in which demons attempt to serve a monk a meal of human flesh and brains fried to resemble wheat gluten—that is, meat masquerading as mock meats."

The author concludes that if we always approach these foods as "substitutes" we'll never learn to appreciate their own culinary virtues.

Charity Gone Wrong

"Life Release" is a Buddhist practice of freeing animals destined for slaughter.  While it sounds compassionate, it can actually lead to huge headaches when basic rules of biology and the environment are ignored:

"The ritual dates back to the third century, but has seen a resurgence in recent years. Hai Tao, a champion of animal rights, advocates fangsheng – saving the lives of creatures destined for slaughter – as a way for Buddhists to demonstrate compassion, create good fortune and earn merit.

According to Humane Society International (HSI), hundreds of millions of birds, fish, monkeys, turtles and other animals are involved in acts of fangsheng every year. But these days, it says, 'mercy release has become an industry built on the capture and supply of wild animals, for whom there are devastating consequences of injury, illness or death'. In Taiwan alone, 200 million wild animals are used every year in release rituals, according to HSI in 2012. Fangsheng is also practiced in China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Nepal, the United States and the UK.

The organisation says many animals are fatally injured in the ritual, and those that survive release often die soon afterwards from exhaustion, injury or disease, or else become prey to other species. Some are re-captured after the ritual and re-sold. Release can also cause environmental harm, it adds. Animals 'may be released outside their natural habitats and in groups large enough to establish breeding populations, often wreaking havoc on local ecosystems. Some are invasive species that may threaten the survival of the native species.'”

Something about the road to hell and using good intentions to pave it.

Also, won't someone think of the turkeys?