Wonders of International Trade

Wonders of international trade. Belle Waring's recipe calls for coarse polenta--that is, corn mush--that has been incompletely ground by preindustrial stone-grinding technology in Oregon, 10,000 miles away from her kitchen, by the Bob's Red Mill company and then shipped by containership all the way across the Pacific to Singapore.

How much does Bob's Red Mill coarse stone-ground polenta cost in Singapore, anyway?

John & Belle Have A Blog: Fried Shrimp: I invented these last month, and each time I cook more, and each time at the end of the meal John starts looking around the kitchen vainly. "Did we eat them all?"

• 1 1/2 lb shrimp
• 2 T teriyaki sauce
• 6 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 c coarse polenta (the Bob's Red Mill stone-ground one is nice, and if you live in Singapore you can get it at Tanglin Mall!)
• 2 T flour
• salt, pepper, cayenne pepper
• vegetable oil for deep-frying

1. Take the heads off the shrimp, peel them leaving the last section and tail on, and butterfly them. Let them marinate with the teriyaki sauce and garlic in the fridge for 40 minutes or whatever.

2. Put polenta, flour, salt, pepper, and cayenne in a bag and mix. Take the shrimp out of the fridge. Heat oil in a dutch-oven over high heat until it gets rilly, rilly hot. Let's say, until a bluish haze starts to form over the oil and a cube of bread put in is well-browned in 30 seconds.

3. Drain any extra liquid off the shrimp, and then put them in the bag with the polenta. Shake to coat. You can fry them all in one batch. I'd say it takes 1-2 minutes. More like 1 minute. Take them out with a skimmer and put on brown paper. EAT. Try not to burn your fingers too much.

Sauce:

This is pretty flexible, you could put whatever. Substituting Greek-style yogurt for part of the mayo is nice.

• 3/4 c mayonnaise
• juice of 1 lemon (or limes)
• 1 T dijon mustard
• 4-5 chopped cornichon pickles, or go for sweet and put drained hot dog relish, also nice
• 2-3 serrano chilis, chopped into extremely thin rounds on the diagonal
• salt and pepper and chili flakes
• chopped fresh herbs, such as chives, cilantro, sweet basil, flat-leaf parsley
1. Make like Sir Mixalot.

This is really very tasty and I recommend it to you all. It would be a nice party snack, though I don't know how it would hold up keeping warm in the oven. All fried things are good party foods, but all fried things are best eaten right away; it's like some kind of paradox, man. Its the big nubbly bits of fried corn grits that make it good...

---

And here's Bob:

Bob's Red Mill - Whole Grain and Gluten Free Products and Recipes: Bob's Red Mill also produces over 50 different certified organic products, including Steel Cut Oats, Whole Wheat Flour, Cornmeal, and Flaxseed Meal. At Bob's Red Mill, our grain buyers search for the best organic grains in the world, providing our customers with high quality, whole grain organics.... Bob's Red Mill is the nation's leader in stone milling and offers the widest diversity of whole grains found anywhere. We are dedicated to producing natural foods in the natural way. Try our outstanding products today and we guarantee that you will not be disappointed....

Organic Steel-Cut Oats are freshly milled from high protein, organic oats and cut into neat little pieces on a steel buhr mill. Organic Steel Cut Oats are one of the healthiest foods you can eat and they make a delightful full-bodied hot cereal with an appealing texture. Try some Organic Steel Cut Oats today!

Bob's Red Mill - 800-349-2173

At this point, I have to channel the loa of Friedrich Hayek, and marvel at the wonders of the market--that, like a god, knows that in Singapore there is demand by Belle Waring for Red Mill stone-ground coarse polenta, and that diverts bags of the stuff to be carried by truck, train, containership, and porter to her local store. How wise is the market! How its information dwarfs that of any conceivable electro-mechanical-electronic-positronic-gluonic brain!

Comments

[Doctor Jay]

Well, the all-knowing market is very frequently wrong about what I want to see on the supermarket shelves. Prepackaged drumsticks? Gone. My daughters 3 most favorite flavors of Sobe? Also gone. The list goes on. Enought so that I think that the market DOES know, it's just feeling perverse.

[DILBERT DOGBERT]

Sometimes I think the good prof is following my mouse clicks around Blogistan. Or is it the other way around?

[Gene O'Grady]

Two quibbles:

(1) Not being an economist I'm probably simply ignorant, but is Roman agriculture "pre-industrial?"

(2) Wonderful that Oregon is shipping its traditional food products to Singapore. Now if you can arrange something for the lousy nutrition that has come over larger shares of the population here in the last hundred years....

[Scott Martens]

Doctor Jay has it right. If the market's so damn omniscient why in hell can't I get sweet chili-onion sambal anymore?

[Jon Fernquest]

To the wonder of markets I would add the wonder of language. The lush English description of those oats makes me very hungry but Quaker Oats are a best selling product in Burma and does steel cutting it or grinding it with stone really change the taste? The power of language to capture markets, definitely something to work on!

[belle waring]

re: cost, the price tag has come off. I'd say around $sing 9. I am sorry to report that I also often get american produce better than what my mom can get at home. also litchis. mmmm. you know, I should have gotten some of those green plums from CA to do on the grill today! /smacks forehead./ I'll call the wet market and see if it's too late to add to my order...happy 4th, y'all.

[cymack]

WOW, Hello, Ms. Waring!:-) Was just typing this when I noticed:

Hmmm... maybe get a price from Dean&DeLuca or your favorite SF equivalent and scale by real rate?
From "Orchard Road Walk" at The Inn Crowd:
"Tanglin Mall has a supermarket at its basement and it is popular with the residents who live in this exclusive enclave. The apartments and houses close to the Orchard Road area are the most expensive in Singapore. ..."

Thinking that maybe a comparison to a high-rent district here in the U.S. would work. Instead, I adjusted the price Ms. Waring remembered by the exchange rate as of yesterday from x-rates.com, and got an equivalent of about $5.68.

The price has also fallen off my Ann Arbor-area bag, but Bob's stuff usually runs $3 to $4 around here, most oat products being a bit pricier. So a guess: about a $2 mark-up over an upper-West-side type price, the greater part of which probably represents transport costs?

Not so incidentally, the recipe sounds tasty, Ms. Waring. And to Prof. DeLong: who knew Hayek had a loa? (Maybe the loa likes shrimp ... )

[John]

Yes, if the market is so wonderful why are there so many items that I miss?

I love grapes. Where are the tokays, the muscats, the concords, the ribiers, of yesteryear? Now all we have are these damn seedless things.

And, oh, chicken. There were stewing hens for fricassees, capons for roasting (really tender and juicy), roasters, and pullets. Now all we get are hormone inflated fryers.

There are so many foods that have all but disappeared, not because the public didn't want them, but to suit corporate convenience.

And any recipe that calls for a product however worthy that is obscure and from far away, is récherché. If the recipe calls for sea salt, which is nothing but marketing) shun it. If it calls for grits ground in an expensive and spendy mill in Georgia, shun it. These recipes are just newspaper blather.

[Cranky Observer]

As long as you leave out the parts about (1) the whole process being based on lots of cheap oil for transportation (2) how "the market" destroyed all the local flour mills, which could make the same stuff as BRM [*] except fresher.

I actually live in an old railroad suburb, and although the line is fast freight now it could be re-converted to handle commuters, milk trains, and local produce runs. I wonder what is going to happen to those isolated exurbs (too far from any fuel-efficient transport to food sources, density too low to support local manufacturing) when oil hits $400/bbl?

Cranky

[*] Note that I am currently a Bob's Red Mill customer myself.

[Cranky Observer]

> If the recipe calls for sea salt,
> which is nothing but marketing) shun it.

While it is true that all salt is in the end sea salt, products labeled "sea salt" typically do NOT have iodine added. You need some iodine to prevent goiter, but it can add an odd taste to many baked goods. That is why bread recipes, for example, often call for sea salt meaning non-iodized. You can certainly use the cheapest non-iodized you find though.

Cranky

[belle waring]

dammit, John, this recipe has got to be BLOG blather, not newspaper blather. I also have to say that...moving away from america will get you all those different kinds of chicken back as well. maybe there is a farmer's market near you that does meat? I agree that US chicken is really bad. it doesn't have much flavor when simply roasted--the breast meat often tastes like sawdust, but somehow the next day the leftover chicken tastes unpleasantly chickeny. eggs, chicken, fresh tofu and soy milk (I hate american hippie tofu and soy milk, but this is made fresh daily, sold only in the am, and a whole different thing), seafood, fruits and vegetables: these things are much better here (not including my dad's place in bluffton SC, but it has better seafood because we go get it ourselves, or at the oyster factory in town.) cranky--I don't think it would be cost-effective for singapore to import grain and then stone-grind it. I hear your larger point, though.

[s9]

It's just a glorified multicast routing protocol.

[andres]

"Wonders of international trade. Belle Waring's recipe calls for coarse polenta--that is, corn mush--that has been incompletely ground by preindustrial stone-grinding technology in Oregon, 10,000 miles away from her kitchen, by the Bob's Red Mill company and then shipped by containership all the way across the Pacific to Singapore."

This sounds more like Brad is channeling Tom Friedman than Friedrich Hayek. And as mentioned by several posters, there is no hint that mass production agriculture, enabled by international trade, has also had some drastic and non-drastic external consequences. The lower quality of food, e.g. the ubiquity of the plastic chicken breast is actually one of the least important.

[yabonn]

How wise is the market! How its information dwarfs that of any conceivable electro-mechanical-electronic-positronic-gluonic brain!

Hihih. Brad thought he was just kiddin' around, but look! He found Belle a name for her recipe : "Shrimps à la Pangloss".

[derrida derider]

Singapore is pretty much the gastronomic capital of Asia - if you can't get exotic ingredients there, you can't get them anywhere.

As for cranky's nostalgia for "local mills", he's looking back with rose-coloured glases. These mills delivered *far less* variety within a given area (you took what the local mill made or nothing) and frequently far lower quality too, all at far higher prices.

As for the plastic chickens, if you're willing to look around you can get fresh free-range ones of various vintages, at a price that reflects the much greater production cost. That's so in most areas in my country (Australia) - I doubt it's different in the US. If I'm wrong about that there appears to be a great market opportunity over there for someone.

[sglover]

I don't know anything about ground cereals, but I'm still slightly astonished that it's economically viable to ship apples from New Zealand, grapes from Chile, and pears from Argentina to my local (East Coast) Safeway -- where they're competitive with North American fruit.

[belle waring]

mmmm, best of all possible shrimp.

[tgs]

For about $5 I picked up a one-pound package of shelled hazelnuts from a Trader Joe's market near Boston, MA. The label read:

Product of USA. Packed in Thailand.

What a remarkable oddyssey lies behind that statement! Presumably grown in the US Pacific northwest, shipped to Thailand, shelled and packed, shipped back to the US west coast, trucked to Boston, MA and finally distributed to the market there. Everyone -- from growers, shippers, packers, re-shippers, truckers, distributers, and the supermarket itself -- must make their cut from that $5 and remain profitable.

[Tracy]

Uh, Brad, just what do you think made the sudden appearance of Oregon corn mush show up in Singapore if it wasn't that "electro-mechanical-electronic-positronic-gluonic brain" on the desks at Bob's?

I've always thought that it was unfortunate that planning became unpopular at exactly the same moment when it actually became plausible and the normal way capitalist enterprises work.

[andres]

"What a remarkable oddyssey lies behind that statement! Presumably grown in the US Pacific northwest, shipped to Thailand, shelled and packed, shipped back to the US west coast, trucked to Boston, MA and finally distributed to the market there. Everyone -- from growers, shippers, packers, re-shippers, truckers, distributers, and the supermarket itself -- must make their cut from that $5 and remain profitable."

And tgs is also channeling Tom Friedman. My own take is that some pretty nasty horrors must lie behind this production/distribution chain. In order to offset the huge waste of shipping the hazelnuts to Thailand and back, either the Thai shellers and packagers in Thailand must be paid terribly low wages compared to the US, or for some reason, the machinery used to automate hazelnut shelling and packaging is much cheaper in Thailand than the US. I'm betting on the former.

But nevertheless, both hazelnut producers and sellers and US consumers are benefiting from the huge social inequality in developing countries: workers in poor developing countries only work long hours for almost nothing if the alternatives (eg, prostitution, the drug industry, subsistence farming in minifundio land plots, informal street vending, etc) are utterly execrable. The failure of developing countries to provide an egalitarian political economy in the end often amounts to an under-the-table subsidy for their unskilled labor-intensive export industries, and is thus a perversion of free trade rather than a faithful application of its principles.

[Kevin Marks]

Or possibly Jerome K Jerome?

http://epeus.blogspot.com/2003_10_01_epeus_archive.html#106632011746142844

[Robert Waldmann]

si ma il container ship è un po lenta.

Weirdness goes on and on. Corn comes from Mexico, the corn in question was probably grown in the USA and was ground in Oregon which isn't so far from Mexico and eaten in Singapore so why does Belle call it "polenta" a word coined in Italy .

What did Italy contribute ? the name ? the cachet ? the Je ne sais qua ? What is the difference between polenta and meely meel or corn pone or grits ?

The thing that really scares me is that I suspect that Belle Waring has answers to all my questions and that Italians really did discover know the best way to grind corn.

[piotr]

In the spirit of "spud is a spud" controversy, I conjecture that someone brought nicely packaged "Coarsely ground polenta" to Singapore be eaten by local masochists (a.k.a. microbiotics) and a genius chef noticed that it is actually edible and using it would sound so sophisticated that his customers would be overwhelmed.

My pet peeve about the wisdom of the market: a rather nice chain Lechter's went out of bussiness and now NOBODY sells garlic presses of the same quality as they did. Dreary uniformity reigns, everything produced in China of course.

Nothing against China, but the intercontinental organization and huge shopping chains make feedback from customers to producers and back impossible, at least in smaller markets (the grand total of garlic press markets is probably 1000 times smaller than electronic photographic camera market).

[tgs]

"And tgs is also channeling Tom Friedman."

Not at all: my statement that each of the various parties to this curious reimportation is making a profit was simply a statement of putative fact, not a pean to global trade. I've since been told that shelling hazelnuts is not easily or cheaply done by machine, so the utter cheapness of Thai labor is indeed the significant factor in making the oddyssey economically possible.

[Auros]

Having just returned from a trip up to Oregon for the Ashland Fourth of July Parade, I can attest that there is an extraordinary amount of excellent (locally produced) food and wine available in the Rogue River Valley. The Rogue Creamery is particularly wonderful, and was founded by some of the earliest Californians to invade Oregon.

[marc sobel]

Thank you for pointing me to Bob's Mills. I have been looking for
coarse milled corn meal. In return, I will share a cross cultural
insight. When I lived in Texas (don't ask) I found I liked grits as a
breakfast cereal (for use when oatmeal was appropriate but not to my
taste). I found the microwave recipe on the box worked great. I
realized that polenta was just yellow grits and started making it
instead of the "stir until it gets thick and watch for first degree
burns on your arms and face as it plops" traditional recipe.

So 1 part Bob's Red Mill coarse stone-ground corn meal to 3 parts
water, salt quant suff in microwave bowl. Stir. Cook stiring every
minute once it starts to thicken. ( for 1/2 cup to 1 1/2 cups about
2 minutes, 5 minutes total.) It is done when it plops. Pour onto
flat dish or mold of choice. let cool and slice for serving
microwave bowl will be hot, don't spill the hot polenta on any part
of your body you value.