Immersethrough.com
engaging with the world
naomi's place
A Kenyah woman just returned from harvest carrying a huge basket of rice, in February, after the end of rainy season in Sarawak, on the island of Borneo.
She is sitting on a bench on the verandah of the longhouse where she lives. Now that the dam on the Rejang River has been built, despite years of opposition, this place, which is well upstream of Belaga, lies under water.
harvesting vegetables in Casamance, west of Ziguinchor, in southern Senegal, at a locally run woman's co-op
Where there's water, the soil in Senegal's Casamance region yields rice (the Dioula, who are the majority here, have an age-old rice growing tradition), as well as millet, and a wide variety of vegetables, including dia-kotu, known as African eggplant.
FACES
a chomo, a Tibetan nun, I met at the nunnery in Labrang, in China's Gansu, in 1985, just before I met Jeff in Lhasa
BOOKS, READINGS
It occurred to me that I should keep a list of books here, just add to it when a name occurred to me, from past reading, or when I discover a book that speaks to me in some special way.
This column is narrow, and so the book list may end up moving to take space in the writing block to the right. For now it's here.
mid-nov/08:
Do go out and buy Ann Mendelson's new book about MILK.
SHe is very special, and after seeing her again last weekend in NYC I am reminded of just how special. You'll be taken places you never dreamed of by her book!
Just bought a copy of Jennifer McLagan's new cookbook FAT, which engages with the myths and facts around animal fats. The recipes will be reliable, hers always are, and the arguments and discussion about animal fats should get people rethinking their prejudices.
And a wonderful classic cookbook that anyone interested in food will want to own is Dorothy Hartley's FOOD IN ENGLAND, first published in 1954 and reissued in soft cover about ten years ago. It has wonderful line-drawing by the author to illustrate details and is full of regionally specific English foods, a reminder that food there was generally wonderful until the end of the nineteenth century. Now once again England is a place of good food and fresh markets. The hundred year hiatus in between is what most people still think of when the phrase "English food" is mentioned.
A third book to mention in this first entry, also by an Englishwoman, is Elisabeth Luard's book about European peasant cookery, called THE OLD WORLD KITCHEN: great writing, wonderfully interesting recipes. Another classic.
And finally, to make a trio of English writers, there's Patience Grey's HONEY FROM A WEED, detailing with love and care the rural food tradtions of places she lived in the Mediterranean: Puglia, Tuscany, Catalonia, the Island of Naxos. Wonderful.
And to leave food for a moment, do engage with Karen Connelly's remarkable novel THE LIZARD CAGE, which won the Whitbread New Writer's award last year in Britain. Set in Burma, it tells a huge story by telling the intimate story of one man. And she writes so beautifully.
I'll be writing here from time to time, and posting some of my photographs too. But I'll be doing more writing and posting, blog-style, at my new blog. I realised it would be a lot easier to post at a blog than if I had to enter the website and publish this page freshly every time I had a quick thought, such as another book to recommend, or whatever. The blog is: naomiduguid.blogspot.com. Now, in the third week in November, I can look back and see that I'm posting once a week, or sometimes more often. I'm enjoying doing it, talking about a recent trip, or a recent encounter, some of them food related, others very much not.
And as we head into late fall and winter with this new site, I'm trying to remember to engage with each day with the same alert positive energy we see in the face and style of this Dong woman, whom I met as we were both walking to a rural market about an hour from the beautiful village of Zhaoxing, in eastern Guizhou.
Happy immersing!
- naomi
OCT 19/08 - THE COMING PROJECTS
I spent long chunks of last winter trying to figure out a coherent idea for a photo book celebrating the way food is grown and produced around the world. I called it Acts of Creation, sometimes, and other times it went by the title Food Everywhere. But though I still feel strongly that I want to work with our photos of people engaged raising animals, growing food, fishing, marketing, and cooking, I have put that book-shaping struggle aside for now.
Partly it’s because having this new website gives us both a chance to write freely and to engage with our photos, and partly it’s because we have emerged from our book tour tiredness (we've been on tour and doing interviews etc for our latest book Beyond the Great Wall: Recipes and Travels in the Other China, since April) with several new projects. One of them is the Chiang Mai project (described on the Chiang Mai page) and the other is a book focussed on food traditions in Burma.
We are in full swing with Chiang Mai, and that’s exciting. The Burma food book is still just a gleam in our eye, and in the eye of our editor Ann Bramson, and is not yet firmed up in the shape of a contract. But we’re firm; we know we will go ahead with it. To get ourselves launched, we’re each hoping to make a trip into Burma in November-December of this year. We’ll report back...
OXFORD COMPANION TO SOUTHEAST ASIAN FOOD: This volume will be a treasure house once it is published. For now it is an obligation for many people, and we are among them. Sri Owen and Roger Owen have undertaken to corral people to write all the entries needed to complete the book. We have been assigned only four, which should be a reasonably do-able task, you'd think. But somehow it's taking us a long time to get them done. We now have "Cambodia" and "Laos" in good shape. Our other two are more than halfway, but that's not as far as we'd like them to be. Anyhow, just a small update from the trenches... you might say!
I've been wading around in anthropology articles etc trying to pull together a coherent article on Forest and Mountain Peoples. The cultural diversity in Southeast Asia is of course staggering, and so is the fact that we know so little. It's another example of mainstream cultures setting the tone or the template, and smaller cultures getting less attention. I'll let you know when that article, and the fourth one we owe, "The Mekong Region", are ready to be sent off. I'm hoping to be done by mid-October. Yikes! It just is HARD!
I think part of the problem is that the entries are about delivering "the facts" in an orderly way. We're more drawn to story-telling that includes facts. And also it involves generalizing, which always feels dangerous and somewhat dehumanizing, when what is most interesting in culture (and food is after all is essentially an expression of culture) is the personal and specific. More later...
UPDATE October 21/08: Just heard from Roger Owen that they've received the three entries we sent off Sunday night: Mekong Region, Laos, and Cambodia and are pleased with them. Hurrah! Now only one unmet obligation left to deal with in this pile. It's crazy how much of a weight feels lifted, how free I feel to now get learning more about the new digital camera and how to download and sort and play with digital images. They're lovely! And seeing them come up on my computer screen is a fabulous treat.
