Category: General

How Things Begin (Japan Traditional Foods)

Seth Roberts14 Comments

I eat natto (fermented soybeans) once/day. Most of the natto I see in stores is from Japan (soybeans from America) but I found one local source: Japan Traditional Foods, in Sepastopol, California. Like many people I believe traditional diets are far healthier than modern ones. How can such diets, now almost extinct in rich countries, become popular again? To learn more about this, I interviewed the owner of Japan Traditional Foods, Minami Satoh.

How did your company begin?

I started it in 2006. We started to produce product in November 2008. So far natto is our only product. I went to business school at the Thunderbird School of Global Management, a private business school in Arizona, and graduated in 1983. After that, I worked for DuPont in Japan, but I wanted to work in the US. At DuPont, I did marketing of Teflon and Silverstone (a sister brand of Teflon). Then I worked for my father’s company selling wholesale steel pipe and tubes. I was successful but felt it was boring. I thought food would be more interesting. I acquired a small natto-making company (Yaguchi Foods ) in Japan in 2004 or 2005. The owner had died. His relatives sold it to me.

In 2004, I came to America to meet Malcolm Clark. He’s the great-grandson of Dr. Clark, who is very famous in Japan. Malcolm Clark was responsible for introducing shitake mushrooms to America. He owns Gourmet Mushrooms in Sebastopol and lives in Occidental. Natto is an unusual food, like shitake mushrooms. I thought he could give me good advice about how to start making natto or other possibilities. That’s why the company is in Sebastopol. When I met Clark, he was thinking of retiring. I bought a stake in Gourmet Mushrooms; now Gourmet Mushrooms helps Japan Traditional Foods sell natto. I moved here in June 2008 to manage this company.

Why natto?

Americans already eat tofu, soy sauce, miso, edaname, and soy milk — but no natto. Natto is more nutritious than the other forms of soy that we currently eat. It’s more nutritious because of fermentation. It has more vitamins. A enzyme found in natto called nattokinase dissolves blood clots. In Japan natto is a traditional health food. It is usually eaten at breakfast.

How is natto made?

You boil the soybeans in a steam basket. Spray with bascillus. Put the soybeans in a paper cup. Put the cups in a fermentation container for 20-24 hours. Take them out and put in packages. Then give to the distributor. If you ferment more than 20 hours, natto bascillus start to eat themselves, which produces ammonia. Most companies stop fermenting at that point to avoid ammonia. If fermented longer, it may smell of ammonia. Japanese accept this, but Americans may not.

How big is Japan Traditional Foods?

One person plus myself. I hired someone from my natto company in Japan. He makes artisanal natto. He handcrafts it.. We put it in the paper cups by hand.

How did you get distribution?

It wasn’t hard. There are two distributors, one for Los Angeles, the other for San Francisco. They specialize in Japanese markets. Now it’s in close to 30 stores, including Korean and Chinese stores. The Los Angeles distributor wanted to sell his stuff in New York but the shipping costs would have been too high. This summer we will start going to farmer’s markets. We’ll have a booth there to sell and sample. The goal is to educate and share recipes. We’ll be at the San Rafael Sunday market and the Ferry Building Tuesday lunchtime market. It’s a kind of test. We’re talking to distributors about getting the product into non-Japanese grocery stores, such as Berkeley Bowl and Whole Foods. From the farmer’s markets we hope to get feedback to improve the packaging, size, and recipes. We want to find the best ways to make the Western market receptive to natto. For example, we can sample it in different ways. In Japan, the most popular way to eat it is over rice with finely chopped green onions, often at breakfast. I’ve come up with many different recipes: with rice or bagel or lettuce or crackers. With different sauces and toppings.

What were the hard parts?

It was difficult to find a good temperature control system here; I had to import it from Japan. I also needed a big steam cooker, which I had to import. This was hard because it is prohibited to export them from Japan to other countries.

Your promotional leaflet says “stir natto more than twenty times” before eating it. Why?

We do not have any valid research on this. But somebody says stirring natto creates the “Fifth Taste” we call “umami.” Somebody else said that it gets the natto bacillus awake again with oxygen because the bacillus was sleeping in the refrigerator.

Antibiotics Associated with Later Infection

Seth Roberts1 Comment

A 2005 study by David Margolis, a dermatology professor at Penn, and others, found that acne patients given long-term antibiotic treatment, which often lasts more than 6 months, were more than twice as likely to have an upper respiratory tract infection during the year after treatment began than acne patients not given antibiotics.

Does this correlation reflect causality? Two additional analyses suggest it does:

1. Perhaps acne patients who get antibiotics are more likely to see a doctor than those who don’t. However, a study of patients diagnosed with high blood pressure, which also requires relatively frequent doctor visits, had the same risk of upper respiratory tract infections as acne patients not given antibiotics.

2. A later study found that the contacts of acne patients (such as their family) are more likely to have upper respiratory tract infections if the acne patient has such an infection — as you’d expect from contagion. But it makes no difference to these contacts if the acne patient was given antibiotics or not. This means that acne patients given antibiotics do not live in more infection-prone surroundings than acne patients not given antibiotics.

Bottom line: Support for the idea that the bacteria in our body help us stay healthy.

The Good Scots Diet

Seth Roberts3 Comments

The Spring 2009 issue of Wise Traditions, a quarterly sent by the Weston A Price Foundation to its members, has an article by Katherine Czapp about traditional Scottish food. They too ate fermented food (pp. 56-7):

Farmers who grew their own oats but sent them to the local mill . . . received in return a bag of “sids” — the inner husks of the oats . . . From these sids, an ancient Celtic dish called “sowans” (or sowens) was made.

The sids were soaked in water for approximately one week (or even more) until they were well-soured.

Sowans takes more than week to make. Presumably the ancient Celts discovered this method of souring by accident and kept doing it because the result tasted good. It’s an example of how, in the right situation, what tastes good guides us to a good diet.

Judith Krug, RIP

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Judith Krug (1940-2009) was a librarian who defended libraries with objectionable books:

The importance of her work was made clear [to her] when she read “And Tango Makes Three” to her granddaughter’s class.

The book is often the target of censors because it’s about two male penguins who “adopt” an unclaimed egg.

When she was finished, a girl she later learned was being raised by two women stood and clapped her hands.

Via Radosh.net.

What Did Eskimos Eat?

Seth Roberts13 Comments

In the early 1900s, the anthropologist/explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, after living with Eskimos for a long time, returned to tell Americans what he had learned about nutrition. Eskimos ate meat almost exclusively, he said, which contradicted the usual emphasis, then as now, on diversity and fruits and vegetables. Yet Eskimos were healthy. Eskimo diet became even more fascinating when it was realized they had very low rates of heart disease — much lower than Danes, for example. In the 1970s, two Danish doctors, Bang and Dyerberg, found that Eskimos had large amounts of omega-3 fats in their blood, much more than Danes; that was the beginning of the current interest in omega-3 and the idea that fish and fish oil are “heart-healthy”.

As I pointed out earlier, discussions of the Eskimo diet have ignored the fermented food they ate. Here’s what Stefansson said in 1935:

I like fermented (therefore slightly acid) whale oil with my fish as well as ever I liked mixed vinegar and olive oil with a salad. . . .

There were several grades of decayed fish. The August catch had been protected by longs from animals but not from heat and was outright rotten. The September catch was mildly decayed. The October and later catches had been frozen immediately and were fresh. There was less of the August fish than of any other and, for that reason among the rest, it was a delicacy – eaten sometimes as a snack between meals, sometimes as a kind of dessert and always frozen, raw. . . .

[At first, Stefansson didn’t want to eat decayed fish.] While it is good form [in America] to eat decayed milk products and decayed game [well, well], it is very bad form to eat decayed fish. . . . If it is almost a mark of social distinction to be able to eat strong cheeses with a straight face and smelly birds with relish, why is it necessarily a low taste to be fond of decaying fish? On that basis of philosophy, though with several qualms, I tried the rotten fish one day, and if memory serves, liked it better than my first taste of Camembert. During the next weeks I became fond of rotten fish.

So Eskimos ate fermented whale oil and a lot of rotten fish. (“A lot” because if they didn’t eat a lot of it, Steffanson wouldn’t have felt pressure to eat it.) I had no idea that Americans used to eat decayed game.

Practical Philosophy and American Idol

Seth Roberts1 Comment

You’ve probably heard of the unexpected hanging paradox in which a man is ordered to be hanged during a certain week but must not know in advance the day of his hanging. The last possible day is Saturday. He must be hanged before Saturday because if he’s not hanged by then he will know that he is going to be hanged on Saturday. By the same logic he can’t be hanged on Friday . . . and so on. Yet he is hung on Wednesday.

American Idol producers have a similar problem during recent eliminations: There must be suspense. From six guys and six girls one guy, one girl, and one runner-up will be selected. This week, the first person selected, out of two girls and a guy, was a girl. This meant that at the next step — one person chosen from one girl and one guy — the guy would be selected because if the girl was selected, the remaining girls would have no chance. Making the remaining portion of the program much less interesting. As an EW.com commenter put it:

There was no suspense in the Kris Allen/Megan Corkey stand-off last nite. Allison had already gone through & if Megan had it would automatically eliminate the rest of the females. Wasn’t going to happen halfway through the show. That’s what they call a ‘gimme’.

The Wikipedia article on the paradox gives no practical applications.

What to Do about Beijing Air

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Beijing’s dirty air is easily the worst thing about living there. You might think what to do about it is obvious. Many people do, including this man who wants to sell the expensive air filter he bought:

I remember the day IQair Sales Rep Justin Shuttleworth came to my place [in Beijing] to give me a demo. This guy has the easiest job in the world. All he does is come with his little air quality measuring device, show you how bad the air you are breathing is in your apartment (indoor air is sometimes worse than outdoor air for those who don`t know), and as the minutes go by, you literally see the amount of particles in the air go down, until it’s basically nil. This was the first time that I could actually smell the difference.

This is from an email list I’m on.

I got the same demo. But it had the opposite effect: It made me not want to buy the IQair filter.

The air coming out of the IQair filter was very clean, yes. But there was only so much it could do. More dirty air was always coming into my apartment and no matter how high (= noisy) they ran the machine the overall level of dirt was no more than cut by 2/3rds. I already had an air filter. The air it produced wasn’t quite as clean as air from the IQair filter but it was still much much cleaner than the intake air. The IQair machine cost about 11,000 RMB. My filter had cost about 1,000 RMB. For 1,500 RMB I could buy a bigger version of what I already had, an air filter that cleaned twice as much air per minute as the IQair machine while producing roughly the same amount of noise. Its output was slightly dirtier than the output of the IQair machine but the overall cleaning effect — the reduction in dirt — was much greater. I ended up getting two of the 1,500 RMB filters.

I think of this demo when I hear someone talk about how this or that traditional diets is better than our modern diet. They make a simple point: People who eat the traditional diet are healthy, people who eat the modern diet are unhealthy. Just as the IQair demo guy has “the easiest job in the world.” They inevitably conclude: Eat the traditional diet or at least closer to it. Just as the conclusion of the demo is supposed to be: Buy an IQair filter. It seems so simple.

But it isn’t so simple. Eating the traditional diet isn’t easy, just as the IQair filter isn’t cheap. Maybe their abstraction — their description — of the traditional diet leaves out something important. Just as the IQair people do not measure cleaning power per decibel, which turns out to be what matters. (I traded air pollution for noise pollution. I wanted the best deal possible.)

If you read Good Calories Bad Calories you may remember the Canadian anthropologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson who spent many months with Eskimos eating what they ate. He came back and told the world “you can eat only meat.” In his conclusions and subsequent field experiment, he ignored the fact that the Eskimos ate a lot of fermented meat.

The End of Newspapers As We Know Them

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Michael Wolff, author of the excellent Burn Rate, writes:

Throughout the Tribune world—the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Hartford Courant, among others—everybody knows life as it’s been has ended. . . . You have to understand that this is the most momentous, and transformative, time in the news business—as significant as this moment is to the automotive and financial industries. There will be, practically speaking, no newspaper industry after this is done. A nobody-gets-out of-here-alive sort of thing.

A friend of mine who works for one of these newspapers said that the end has been coming for a long time. In the early 1990s, if I remember correctly, the audience started to shrink. At the time, and for a long time thereafter, this was ignored. Had the problem been recognized back then it might have been possible, given a lot of time to experiment, to find a solution, a way to survive much longer. But now it is too late.