Food Coloring Warnings

food dyes and hyperactivity/ Food Coloring Warnings

F.D.A. Panel to Consider Food Coloring Warnings

By GARDINER HARRIS

Studies suggest a link between food dyes and hyperactivity in children.

hyperactivity 過動

哈蜜瓜回收/蛋糕中的草莓是不能吃的

cantaloupe/ salmonella

The Food and Drug Administration issued a voluntary recall of cantaloupes sold at Costco stores in Missoula, Kalispell and through warehouse clubs across the West because they may be contaminated with salmonella. Nearly 5000 crates of "Del Monte Fresh" ..


cantaloupe
n. - 香瓜, 哈蜜瓜

• [kǽntəlòup | -lùːp]
• 
  

[名][C][U]《植物》カンタロープ（果肉が橙黄色のメロン）；マスクメロン.

［最初の栽培地であるRome近郊のCantelupo］


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蛋糕中的草莓是不能吃的

一位朋友因為在蛋糕房做過助手，所以知道草莓蛋糕中的草莓是不能吃的，

他說:不論草莓是用來做裝飾或是用來做內餡 ，製作中是絕對不洗的，

因為草莓一沾到水就很容易爛掉 。

有機蔬果中是沒有草莓的，因為根本栽種不活，通常，越是漂亮的草莓，農藥越是多，

但是為了維持它的漂亮和美觀，通常是直接從盒子中取出，去掉變黃的葉子，就直接放到蛋糕上去，有些在盒中被壓壞的，就切掉壞的部份或是擺久了爛掉的部份，把好的那一半用進去，所以，草莓蛋糕的切片草莓最好不要吃 。
草莓糖葫蘆 (糖裹草莓)也一樣碰不得，
一次連吃30顆(約500公克)以上就會肝中毒！!

亂真的素漢堡Masters of Disguise Among Meatless Burgers

Masters of Disguise Among Meatless Burgers

Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times

Some new veggie burgers are so authentic that they've been mistaken for meat. The one at Hillstone on Park Avenue South includes beets and rice.

By JEFF GORDINIER

Published: March 22, 2011

THEY were the four syllables that had the power to make both carnivores and vegetarians cringe: veggie burger.

Multimedia

Multimedia Feature

Meatless Burgers, Masters of Disguise

Related

• Veggie Burgers of Note Around Manhattan (March 23, 2011)

• Diner’s Journal: Come Back, Veggie Burger. All Is Forgiven. (March 22, 2011)

For meat-lovers, the veggie burger was long seen as a sad stand-in that tried to copy the contours and textures of a classic beef patty while falling pathetically short of the pleasure. And for meat-refusers, the veggie burger served as a kind of penitential wafer: You ate this bland, freeze-dried nutrient disc because you had to eat it (your duty as someone who had forsaken the flesh) and because at many a restaurant or backyard barbecue, it was the only option available.

If that has been your mental framework since the days when Jerry Garcia was still with us, it might be time to take another bite. To borrow a phrase from the culture that produced it, the veggie burger seems finally to have achieved self-actualization.

Across the country, chefs and restaurateurs have been taking on the erstwhile health-food punch line with a kind of experimental brio, using it as a noble excuse to fool around with flavor and texture and hue. As a result, veggie burgers haven’t merely become good. They have exploded into countless variations of good, and in doing so they’ve begun to look like a bellwether for the American appetite. If the growing passion for plant-based diets is here to stay, chefs — even in restaurants where you won’t find the slightest trace of spirulina — are paying attention.

“I just think it’s important to accommodate everybody,” said Josh Capon, who opened Burger & Barrel in SoHo last fall and quietly slipped a chickpea-based veggie burger onto a menu heady with pork chops, charcuterie and carpaccio. “And I don’t think somebody should feel like they’re eating an inferior burger. If you’re going to do a veggie burger, it should have that richness and mouth feel and overall texture. When you pick it up, it should eat like a burger.”

He will get no argument from Adam Fleischman, the owner of the expanding Umami Burger chain in Los Angeles. Even though his Earth Burger includes no meat, it offers the taste buds a gooey, decadent tradeoff by dandying up a mushroom-and-edamame patty with ricotta, truffle aioli and cipollini onions.

At Cru, a largely vegan and raw-food-focused cafe in that city’s Silver Lake neighborhood, the dietary and structural restrictions only seem to open up pathways of metamorphosis. Cru’s South American sliders are made of sprouted lentils and cooked garbanzo beans pulsed with garlic and spices. They’re deep-fried, dressed with a mojo sauce of blood orange and paprika and Peruvian aji amarillo chilies, and served on leaves of butter lettuce instead of a bread bun.

“We’re trying to stay away from that dry, tasteless veggie burger thing,” said Cru’s chef, Vincent Krimmel. “We have a lot more to play with now.”

Sometimes that sense of play leads to accidental discovery. The three Westville outposts around Manhattan serve a daily array of fresh vegetables. One day about four years ago, Sammy Victoria, a Westville chef, had an impulse to combine some of that garden produce into little cakes. “It went over amazingly well,” said Jay Strauss, an owner of Westville. “And Sammy said, ‘Let’s try this as a veggie burger — the exact same ingredients, just larger.’ ” Westville’s deep-fried blend of corn, cauliflower, broccoli, roasted red pepper and other ingredients now sells out on a regular basis.

Gone are the days, it seems, when the veggie burger was almost a source of shame. Sure, some restaurants fixed their own, from scratch, but many others served a dry mass-produced patty — one that might well have been made of natural ingredients like mushrooms and oats and black beans and brown rice, but which nevertheless had been gathering ice crystals in the freezer for an unknown period of time.

Tal Ronnen, 36, the author of the 2009 cookbook “The Conscious Cook,” has seen the frozen versions, too, gradually improve in the ensuing years. (Lately he has collaborated with Gardein in creating the food company’s new Ultimate Beefless Burger patties.) “When I first started eating this way, they came in a box,” said Mr. Ronnen, a chef who signed on this month to create vegan choices for the restaurants in all of the Wynn and Encore hotels in Las Vegas. “You had to add water to it. It was embarrassing to eat it around anyone. Imagine showing up to a backyard barbecue with a box and saying, ‘Hey, can I have a little bit of water to form a veggie burger?’ ”

If there is a primary reason they are improving, it comes back to the force that drives just about anything in the marketplace: demand. According to Mintel, a market research firm, there was a 26 percent increase in menu items labeled vegetarian or vegan between the last quarter of 2008 and the same quarter in 2010.

With more and more people pledging themselves to vegan and vegetarian modes of dining, it seems self-defeating for restaurants to ignore them — or to pretend that those diners will be satisfied with yet another droopy grilled-vegetable platter. The signs are clear enough that two high priests of the global burger gospel, Burger King and McDonald’s, have for years given veggie burgers a run, although only Burger King currently has one on menus in the United States.

“It is really awesome to see a lot of places starting to make their own patties from scratch, instead of simply stockpiling premade ones in the freezer,” said Joni Newman, the author of a cookbook, “The Best Veggie Burgers on the Planet,” which Fair Winds Press is to publish in May.

But with thousands of flora-based recipes in the world, why the compulsive return to the burger genre? “There’s something really satisfying about a hand-held food that’s served on a bun,” said Lukas Volger, the author of “Veggie Burgers Every Which Way,” a cookbook that was published last year. The patty-bun-condiments format of a burger holds sway over us the same way the dependable verse-chorus-bridge structure of a perfect three-minute pop song does.

That said, there is vigorous debate over how closely a veggie burger should ape the look and taste of beef.

“I never like to tell people that this is going to taste exactly like ground beef, because you’re setting yourself up,” Mr. Ronnen said. “It’s its own thing.”

Chefs might adhere to the architectural limitations of a burger, but within that framework, the challenge of trying to make a veggie burger that tastes good (and doesn’t fall apart) seems to free up their imaginations.

At Blue Smoke, the barbecue restaurant on East 27th Street, the team creates patties out of French lentils, quinoa, carrots, onions and cauliflower and smokes them over hickory. If they seemed like a fluke when they were introduced in 2008, they now feel like a perennial. “It’s one of those items that I wouldn’t take off the menu because there’d be some kind of backlash,” said Kenny Callaghan, the executive chef.

At 5 Napkin Burger, another joint unapologetically devoted to meat, you’ll find a veggie option that derives a loamy richness from mushroom duxelles while getting its ballast from sunflower seeds, wheatberries and brown rice.

When the 5 Napkin team originally tested contenders in their kitchens about three years ago, they found themselves pondering the Zen koan of veggie-patty enlightenment: If a burger is not a burger, how do you make it stick together? “They were falling apart,” said Andy D’Amico, a chef and partner. “They would just kind of collapse in the roll.” The solution was something familiar to the home meatloaf maker: seal the mix with eggs and panko crumbs.

The veggie-burger pendulum of peril swings between too dry and too wet, and sometimes, achieving the right balance of moisture and texture has to do with knowing which seeds, nuts and vegetables to mash and which ones to leave whole.

There are other challenges. A patty made of puréed vegetables may be healthy, but “you might say it doesn’t have much tang to it,” said Mr. Strauss of Westville. To give it flavor layering, Westville tops the patty with mushrooms and a spicy tartar sauce. (With a successful veggie burger, Mr. Ronnen observed, “so much of it is the condiments.”)

If you need extra evidence that this hippie-town mainstay is venturing into territory that once might have been seen as hostile, look no further than Shula Burger, a chain scheduled to open this summer in Florida. Shula Burger is the latest food enterprise from the family whose patriarch is Don Shula, the legendary football coach. One of his sons, Dave, said in a telephone interview that Shula Burger’s test kitchens were in the midst of “trying a lot of different versions.”

The root conundrum of a veggie burger, he said, comes down to its “bite profile” — or what happens at the moment of impact between teeth and patty. And what bite profile does a restaurant want to avoid? “Picture taking a bite out of a hockey puck,” said Mr. Shula, also a former N.F.L. coach. “And the other end of the bite profile to avoid is when it’s really squishy and mushy.”

Mr. D’Amico wanted his version, in keeping with the 5 Napkin mission, to have the traditional cheek-smeared pleasure of a beef burger. But sometimes it seems as if he’s been almost too successful with that, thanks in part to the incorporation of beets, which give the patty a color reminiscent of rare steak. “I have to tell you that my veggie burger has freaked out some vegetarians,” he said. “They’ve been put off by the color of it. They feel like it looks too much like meat.”

Brian Stefano, the chef at the Hillstone branch on Park Avenue, has had similar moments with the restaurant’s lauded griddled, crispy-exterior version. If you eat one, it’s hard to miss the presence of beans, rice and beets. What’s less obvious is that another ingredient — the one that gives the mix a touch of sweetness and stickiness — is prunes. “We’ve had vegetarians think that it is meat and send it back,” Mr. Stefano said.

Apparently most just chow down, though. The Park Avenue Hillstone, previously known as Houston’s, sells 400 to 500 veggie burgers a week.

“I give them a lot of credit,” Mr. Capon, the chef at Burger & Barrel, said of Hillstone. “Their veggie burger has a little bit of a cult following. I know people who go there just for that.”

Still, Mr. Capon zagged in a different direction. He found inspiration during a Saturday night “family meal” with his cooking crew when Ryan Schmidtberger, the chef de cuisine at another of Mr. Capon’s restaurants, made falafel for the team. In converting the chickpea fritter to a burger, Mr. Capon amped up the herbs, smeared on plenty of tzatziki sauce and chose a coarser, crunchier grind.

Ultimately, how a restaurant rises to the challenge of a veggie burger can be a telling sign of its cooks’ core values.

“It gives you a lot of room to create,” said David Burke, the chef behind New York restaurants like Fishtail and David Burke Kitchen. At Fishtail, Mr. Burke eventually went with the tried-and-true pleasure-delivery system of a portobello mushroom with roasted peppers, basil mayo and mozzarella. “We treat it like an Italian sandwich without the meat,” he said.

Talking about the topic sent Mr. Burke into something of a creative reverie on the phone. “Falafel makes a good burger,” he started musing. “A corn risotto cake. Even a potato pancake, because a good burger has a little crunch, a little snap.”

That led him to think about creating an altogether different twist on an American icon: something perfect for the summer.

“A veggie lobster roll,” he said. “I’m going to try that.”

麵茶/茶麵子

台灣的"麵茶"
=茶麵子 田宗堯《中国古典小說用語辭典》台北:聯經 1985 p.803

牛奶雪花糕 (台大農廠及其他)

牛奶雪花糕 (台大農廠)
170g +/- 10 g 18元
熱量:128 大卡
脂肪: 4.0 g.....


進階:
"自從上次到台大農廠買了牛奶雪花糕後，我就戀上了這一味。剛好最近迷上烘焙，於是就想動手試試看。看看包裝盒上的成份：奶粉、牛奶、鮮奶油、糖、玉米粉、蜜紅豆，食材看起來很簡單，應該不難。上網爬文，查到食材的用量，牛奶900CC、玉米粉120g ，不囉嗦，馬上動手試試看。 2010.05.06DIY結果，味道不錯，不過吃起來像粿，失敗！不能暴殄天物，還是吃光光。 2010.05.18把玉米粉的用量減少20g，再試一次。哇塞！好吃到不行，一點都不亞於台大農場喔！超開心的啦！

自從上次到台大農廠買了牛奶雪花糕後，我就戀上了這一味。剛好最近迷上烘焙，於是就想動手試試看。看看包裝盒上的成份：奶粉、牛奶、鮮奶油、糖、玉米粉、蜜紅豆，食材看起來很簡單，應該不難。上網爬文，查到食材的用量，牛奶900CC、玉米粉120g ，不囉嗦，馬上動手試試看。

2010.05.06DIY結果，味道不錯，不過吃起來像粿，失敗！不能暴殄天物，還是吃光光。

2010.05.18把玉米粉的用量減少20g，再試一次。哇塞！好吃到不行，一點都不亞於台大農場喔！超開心的啦！更多 -->牛奶雪花糕- 清蘭小舍- Yahoo!奇摩部落格

chirashi/"Gomoku chirashi"

chirashi
[chee-RAH-shee] A term meaning "scattered sushi" and referring to a Japanese dish consisting of sushi meshi (vinegared rice) served with various ingredients including chopped vegetables, sashimi, cured fish, roe, nori and omelet slices. In Japanese homes, the ingredients are either scattered on top of or mixed throughout the rice. In sushi bars, chirashi is more formal-ingredients are separately arranged on top of the rice for a more elegant presentation.



----五目並べ

gomoku chirashi sushi | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

- [ 翻譯此頁 ]with lotus root, bamboo shoot, konyaku, carrots, shiitake, string beans, egg and shiso leaves.

JAPANESE HOME COOKING: "Gomoku chirashi"

2011/03/17

"Gomoku chirashi" (Provided by Katsumi Oyama)

"Gomoku chirashi" is sushi rice topped with a variety of colorful vegetables and others. "All you have to do is to stir-fry the ingredients together. You will get the perfect flavor that way," says cooking expert Atsuko Matsumoto.

INGREDIENTS (serves four to five)

540 cc (about 3 cups) rice

Vinegar seasoning (1/2 cup vinegar, 2 Tbsp sugar, 1.5 tsp salt)

Ingredients (60 grams dried shiitake mushrooms soaked in water, 1/2 piece konjac, 80 grams each of burdock root (gobo) and carrots, 2 pockets of deep-fried tofu (abura-age))

1 Tbsp cooking oil

Cooking stock (1 cup dashi, 2 Tbsp each of sake and sweet mirin sake, 3 Tbsp each of sugar and soy sauce, 1/2 tsp salt)

3 eggs

Young rapeseed flowers (nanohana)

Pickled ginger strips (benishoga)

METHOD

Cut all ingredients into 3-cm matchsticks. Soak burdock root in water to remove bitterness.

Beat eggs with a dash of salt (not listed above), and strain through a metal sieve for a smooth texture. Heat pan, coat inside with oil and pour out any excess oil. Add drops of egg left in sieve to absorb excess oil. Then pour in enough egg liquid to cook a thin layer. Remove. Repeat, stack the egg sheets and cut into thin strips.

Boil rapeseed flowers.

Rinse rice, soak in water for 30 minutes and cook with a little less water than usual. In a pot, bring ingredients for vinegar seasoning to a boil and cool. When rice is cooked, transfer rice into a bowl, pour vinegar seasoning over the rice and mix it in with a rice paddle.

Add cooking oil to a pot and stir-fry ingredients other than carrots. Add cooking stock and stir with chopsticks over high heat for 7 to 8 minutes. Add carrots and cook for another few minutes. Remove from heat and let the flavors seep in.

When the sushi rice has cooled to body temperature, squeeze out some of the liquid in the cooked ingredients and scatter on top. Divide the rice into quarters in the bowl, and blend the ingredients and rice in quartered segments.

Serve in a bowl, cover with egg strips. Garnish with rapeseed flowers and pickled ginger.

* * *

From The Asahi Shimbun's Okazu Renshucho column

Rococo Chocolates

Rococo Chocolates

星期日現場﹕倫敦的頭像故事（下）——無味之國翻身記
香港新浪網
【明報專訊】如果我說開場白先來談一下英國的天氣，怕且太cliché，但置身倫敦，當你親身感受着晴雨不定的日子，一切就變得自然不過了。那天我們一行人坐車到距離倫敦的個多小時車程的Kew Gardens，天下着雨，人打着傘，除我們以外沒有遊人。 這個皇家植物園跟大英博物館 ...

Arvorig法式薄餅

我去年中碰到Arvorig法式薄餅主人的太太和她的嬰兒車
她遞給我一張名片 我每次經過那兒都猶疑要不要光顧

昨天晚上終於去叫一"巧克力杏仁薄餅"
坐在高椅上看他料理

心裏奇怪的是他們為什麼不加賣法式咖啡...

----精彩的介紹 營業時間擴充了.....

Arvorig是公館的新開店，
2009年12月的時候才剛開幕而已。
他的位子在羅斯福路上，
也就是以前的大世紀戲院入口處，
但要更往裡走才會發現這間有趣的小店，
所以當你看到招牌時，
不要懷疑，----> ARVORIG crêperie bar : 台北公館的法式薄餅--Arvorig 分享by rainmoon ...

茂谷柑

認識茂谷柑

台灣茂谷柑係台潔大學園藝系退休教授林僕教授將取名為「茂谷」，除音譯外並期望「滿谷繁茂」具有深長意義。在面對國際化、自由化之大經濟環境，台灣水果市場會愈來愈 ...

【聯合報╱渡也】 2011.03.08 12:21 am

橘生東勢 已在山上等候很久 活著，就是為了見詩人 受渡也命，遷南方兮 十六個茂谷柑，心裡很急 從台中奔向光中 詩人說一刀刺中柑橘心臟 光也刺中心臟 橘未呼救，卻有驚喜 一顆顆驚喜，從光中 奔向腹中，啊，腸胃感到甘甜 橘也覺得甘甜 然後吐出一首現代橘頌 圓渾渾，香香甜甜 立刻從光中奔回台中 多汁多肉的太陽 去高雄，溫暖那位大師 紛縕宜修，姱而不丑的好詩 來台中，餵飽我這老饕 ●過年前我寄東勢茂谷柑給余光中教授，他立刻回贈〈謝渡也贈橘〉大作，今試和一詩。

德國的自助麵包口水戰

德國的自助麵包口水戰

Food and Drink | 03.03.2011

Aldi and bakers in spat over fresh bread

Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Self-service options at discount grocery stores have hurt bakers

German bakers have taken discount store Aldi to court over its claim that machines in its stores dispense freshly baked bread at the touch of a button. A judge who wanted a look at the raw dough was denied permission.

When customers visit one of the 1,770 Aldi Süd stores equipped with a self-service bread machine in the southern and western parts of Germany, they may think they've walked into the future. They simply press a button on a machine panel, and out pops what the discount chain claims is freshly baked bread.

But it's too good to be true, according to the German Bakers' Confederation in Berlin, which has brought a lawsuit against the chain claiming false advertising. They believe the machines simply warm up the bread, and maybe put a bit of a brown crust on it.

The fight recently heated up when Aldi denied a judge in Duisburg - where the lawsuit has been filed - the right to inspect the raw dough fed into the machines, which are largely hidden from customers' view.

Armin Werner of the German Bakers' Confederation told Deutsche Welle that "there are very strong indicators that they have something to hide."

"Various bakers discovered that the bread comes out at different temperatures, and that sometimes the rolls come out with a still-frozen center," he said. "We found their advertising claim that 'we're baking bread and rolls for you all day long' to be impudent."

Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Not your neighborhood bakery: Aldi's claim it offers fresh bread have been contested

When contacted by Deutsche Welle, Aldi Süd reiterated that a baking process takes place in its machines, and claimed it was protecting a trade secret by not allowing the judge access. Its supplier, Düsseldorf-based industrial baker Leiken, declined to comment.

German bakers under pressure

In a country with 300 individual bread types and a baking tradition dating at least to the Middle Ages, the issue of bread can be a sensitive one. Independent, artisanal bakers who Germans used to purchase their bread from have long been losing market share to nationwide franchises and discount chains.

Self-service bakeries like Back-Factory, Back-Werk, Baking Friends and Mr. Baker now produce freshly baked bread and pastries throughout the day with minimal personnel. Employees simply dump batches of fresh bread into Plexiglas partitions for customers to take and slide trays of prepared dough loaves into convection ovens.

But self-service bakeries only have 2 to 3 percent of the market, mainly because their low prices cause them to depend on sheer volume in order to profit, according to the German Bakers' Confederation. That means they need plenty of foot traffic. Back-Factory locations reportedly receive between 1,000 and 8,000 customers each day, depending on their location.

Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Germany's baking tradition dates back to at least the Middle Ages

Reinald Wolf, an editor with the trade publication Allgemeine BäckerZeitung, says bakers generally aren't too concerned about their self-service counterparts.

"The grocery discounters are the ones who are making life difficult for bakers," he told Deutsche Welle. "They just undercut prices, and bakers can't match them."

Aldi's bread machine has been dubbed a "black box" in industry circles, according to Wolf, who added that the quality of bread coming from such machines varies greatly. By contrast, chains like Lidl, NORMA and Real bake bread in convection ovens on the sales floor, something which has won over customers.

"Of course that's more attractive because it is transparent - you can watch as it's done - and the bread stays fresher longer," Wolf said. "But in neighborhoods with these kinds of stores, revenues (for bakers) have to some degree dropped - sometimes up to 10 or 20 percent."

Catering to rock-bottom prices

For all their love of bread, German consumers are also known for extreme frugality when it comes to food. Not only do discount grocers provide the convenience of a one-stop shop, they are also willing to cut their prices to a bare minimum.

NORMA, for instance, recently reduced the price of a 1 kilogram loaf of bread by 10 euro cents to 1.19 euros and ciabatta-style bread from 35 to 29 euro cents. But as with many other foods in Germany, highly discounted prices may come at the expense of quality.

Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Bakers are struggling to maintain market share in the face of rock-bottom prices

In the case of Aldi, the German Bakers' Confederation has also accused the discounter of skimping on ingredients. It claims the mixed rye bread available in Aldi's bread machines only contain 34 percent rye flower, instead of the regulation 50 to 90 percent.

"Concepts like Lidl has are significantly more threatening than that of Aldi," Werner said. "It's very difficult - year after year our bakery branch looses a little bit of market share to the grocery industry."

Author: Gerhard Schneibel
Editor: Kyle James

台灣菜

這位"廚房裡的人類學家" 台灣還有許多地方沒去發掘 考古
有人談台灣菜總是好
不過 任何菜都不必跟"競爭力"起舞

***

莊祖宜：台灣菜的競爭力

【聯合報╱莊祖宜】 2011.02.28 02:22 am

前幾天與友人聊天，對方語重心長的說：「台灣人以前自認包羅了大江南北的菜系，但現在中國興起了，他們各省的地方菜做得自然比我們道地。比較之下，台灣飲食的競爭力在哪裡？台灣菜又究竟是什麼呢？」 我想，其實多元並蓄從以前到現在，一直是台灣飲食的獨特魅力所在。 過去三年我旅居香港，深深感受到這個國際大都會在異國餐飲方面果真應有盡有，但談到中式菜系，卻很明顯的是個華南城市，以廣東和潮汕口味稱霸，其水準自然 不在話下。但苦惱的是，愛吃辣的人走遍全城也找不到幾家像樣的川菜館，如果想來點有嚼勁的麵食，更是得踏破鐵鞋，或乾脆在家裡自個兒擀麵。 這種情形在中國大陸也很明顯，每個地方的人通常只吃那個地方的菜。即便是最靈光通達的上海人，日常用餐也難得逾越本幫與江浙菜的傳統。這當然沒什麼好壞對 錯，甚至可以說是最自然的狀態。但比較起來，台灣人因為長年受到族群遷徙融合的影響，口味明顯的雜而廣泛。賣包子、饅頭、刀削麵的店家往往與米粉、碗粿、 肉圓並列一條街，來客也不分族群，管你祖上是山東、客家、還是台南。不同的飲食傳統顯得稀鬆平常，因為完全被我們的肚子給內化了。 文化純粹論者或許惋歎世風日下，菜肴愈發欠缺道地。但我總覺得如果為了一個「道地」，硬把口味凝結在某個時空，未免有點畫地自限，因為食物和人一樣，是會 隨著時代與情勢演變的。為此，我們的江浙菜沒有上海吃到的那麼醬色深濃，我們的川菜也沒有四川吃到的那麼辣那麼油，甚至所謂的「川味牛肉麵」也創始於台 灣，總之就是本土化了的外省菜嘛！很通情達理啊！其實就連什麼算得上台灣代表性食物這件事，也不斷的在改變。廿年前，誰想得到台灣的「珍珠奶茶」會流傳到 世界各地，還常常附帶賣些「大腸包小腸」這種聽起來很奇怪的小吃呢？ 所以我認為，與其在大陸興起的當下跟人家打道地，或是回歸狹義的本土，只承認閩南與原住民的傳統菜肴為正宗台灣菜，還不如自自然然的擁抱我們的多元背景。 且看當今全球美食界很受矚目的「加州菜」與「澳洲菜」，都是族群融合下的產物—它們主要以豐富的本土食材為依歸，再擷取歐亞各地的烹調與搭配手法，呈現出 符合地緣時令又有原創性的飲食，還造就了好幾個世界知名的大廚。回頭看台灣，我們的農產品本來就以種類和品質傲視全球，如果同樣以本土的優秀食材為取向， 並善用我們開放的味蕾和豐富的烹飪傳統，哪裡怕做不出有代表性的台灣菜呢？ 近半年以來我住在上海，發現這裡到處都是台灣人開的餐廳。「永和豆漿大王」裡賣刈包也賣小餛飩，「鹿港小鎮」賣三杯雞也賣水煮牛，菜色的種類其實頗繁雜， 卻很清楚的讓人知道他們賣的是台灣菜；一來因為口味總有那麼點兒不一樣，二來因為他們清潔便利的小康形象很鮮明。再說十里洋場裡的老外特別愛去此地的「鼎 泰豐」吃小籠包，而且多半認定那是台灣菜，可見一道菜在人們心中隸屬哪個菜系，有時與傳統淵源沒有絕對的關係，反而深受周邊氛圍的影響。如果台灣菜能一直 與細膩的品管、舒適的環境和親切的服務畫上等號，哪裡怕沒有競爭力呢？ （作者為廚房裡的人類學家）