Kyle Cornforth, Thai corn

Now in The Faster Times: Kyle Cornforth tells all about her year away from Berkeley’s Edible Schoolyard, her forays into Thai farming and cooking, and her deep worries about the future of Thai food. Read the story.

Some of Kyle’s students learn that lemongrass helps deter snakes from gardens.

One set of new chopsticks

Jerry left me in Boulder with a tiny kitchen and dishes for one. He shopped at a local culinary fun house (which I’ve yet to explore) and found a pretty set of new chopsticks, Japanese style, with bright red tops and little yellow squiggle designs. But only one pair.

Only one set of chopsticks, on purpose. Though we’ll both be traveling to and fro in the next 8 months, I am, for all practical purposes, on this particular journey alone. I’m only one week into it, and I’m discovering my comforts and annoyances. Things I’m happy to have, others I miss. I’ve been taking mental notes from a largely ecological perspective. In no particular order, these are

THINGS I LOVE:

- This open-minded, educated, forward-thinking community. Its brain jibes with mine.

- Trails. Everywhere—for feet and wheels. All I do to find the view below is head half a block downhill, turn left past the nature center, and there it is: covered in myriad paths up and into and around the Flatirons. Heading there right now with my coffee….

- Drivers, who more or less are courteous to the cyclists and pedestrians who—almost—dominate Boulder’s roads.

- Fitness. I thought I was in reasonable shape (and I know I am). Yet I sputter in the wake of so many pro and nearly-so runners, bikers, hikers and all-around athletes who scale these mountains with barely a breath. But I’ll get closer—I’m walking or cycling everywhere these days.

- The Boulder Farmers’ Market, a beautiful sprawling tapestry of fresh foods and colors, accessible by bike (it’s right on the Boulder Creek Path, another new commuter’s love).

- The Chautauqua Dining Hall, a first-class restaurant one block out my door. Huge wrap-around porch, the perfect place for a glass of wine and sunset. (Plus, residents get 10 percent off!)

- So many restaurants and pubs with live music and general liveliness all around. Welcome back to college!

- And last but definitely not least, the Scripps program, one of the greatest contributions imaginable to journalism and the environment today.

The Flatirons, from Chautauqua

THINGS I MISS:

- My husband, of course. Family and friends. Remember the song, “Make new friends, but keep the old….”

- My big, open kitchen with room to maneuver and the appropriate dish or utensil for every idea in my cook’s mind.

- New Mexico food, wine and beer prices. Period.

- The ability to buy all of the above at one store.

- Perea Farms, El Mezquite, Valencia Fresh Fruteria, my neighborhood farmers’ market, fresh tortillas made daily, honey and eggs for sale around the corner, the scent of roasting chiles in the air everywhere this time of year. I know the local food scene has a lot to offer Boulder, and I have much to explore. But I do miss the down-to-earth nitty-gritty feel of food plucked straight from the dirt—a benefit of living so close to so many farms.

- My garden. Right now, right this very minute, I am missing loads of grapes, peaches, tomatoes, eggplants, chiles, chard, collards and arugula.

- My herbs. It’s a jungle out there among the dozen basil plants, oregano, onions, chives, parsley, sage, thyme, tarragon, marjoram, rosemary and mint. I’ve bought a few little plants for my Boulder porch (below), but I no longer have the option of chopping down a bundle of onions or a heap of basil and mint for a proper batch of laap.

- Dark and quiet. Previous residents have raved about Chautauqua’s peaceful nature. But I’m spoiled, already having the experience of living and staying in some of the world’s most serene locations. I’m liking my cozy cottage quite well, but this park is a tourist destination and a favorite of anyone in hiking boots. I get foot traffic through my little yard all the time. At home in New Mexico, I almost never need to close the drapes. Here, I feel just a bit as though I’m living in a glass house.

- Patio dining. Cooler nights spell perfect times for BBQs. Miss that.

Small herb garden in the making

AND A FEW RANDOM ECOLOGICAL OBSERVATIONS:

- My graduate-level environmental studies class watched a video clip of Rachel Carson this week. The last time I’d seen similar footage was in Burma for an Earth Day celebration last year. Here, 20 percent of the class had never heard of Rachel Carson.

- Laundry. I’m actually less efficient living alone because I brought few clothes. I’m having to wash smaller loads more often. The machines here are not ENERGY STAR, and I can’t adjust for load size. Plus, I have no laundry line, which means I’m using the dryers.

- Garbage. I’m tossing more, more often because Chautauqua does not yet have composting facilities (we’re told they’re coming soon!). At home, we are able to compost or recycle almost all our waste. Some weeks, we have but one little bag in the trash can. Since I’m also tossing food scraps here, I’m having to take out the garbage more frequently because of the smell.

- Attitude. Despite the notes above, it’s a given in Boulder—people consider the environment in their daily actions. Bags aren’t immediately given in stores. Shops everywhere sell organic, biodegradable, compostable items. (Just bought a biodegradable plastic file folder.) Living green is the community norm.

- Cooking for one. Either I must change my habits, or I’ll have to start giving daily dinner parties. After so many years of cooking for at least myself and a hungry husband, it’s hard now to think and shop in terms of one. I can’t believe how long a single dish lasts—through the next breakfast, lunch, dinner and beyond. Must. Think. Small.

Just for the record, I do not feel as though I’ve had a summer. Is early August too late to start? For many reasons, big and small, this feels like the shortest, most harried summer on record. Now, suddenly, it’s August. And soon I will embark on this next important phase of my life. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not complaining. It’s all good, what lies ahead. And I’m thrilled to be doing it. But right now, I just want a little rest and a little peace and a few free moments to watch the night hawks circling overhead (they’re very graceful).

So tomorrow morning, waaaaaaay too early, we’re catching a flight and we’re taking a short trip to see family for a few days. We’re going to a baseball game and a pool party, and we’re going to have ourselves a little bit of summer. (If you’re a friend back home, wondering why I haven’t told you—this is a spur-of-the-moment journey. We haven’t told anyone outside of family and friends who water our plants.)

And then next week, I hope, I will return refreshed, ready to face a few more deadlines before I pack and gather my conscience for the big shift.

It’s life—it’s always on the move. Just like culture, just like food. Everything always grows, changes, evolves. Nothing ever stays the same (first lesson in Buddhism, first lesson in anthropology—and first lesson in the kitchen, I think). If ever I need reminding of these facts, all I need do is look at my garden or the nearest farmers market. The world is constantly in flux.

Which, finally, leads me to the picture above. Not too long ago I bought a bunch of fresh, sweet garlic from our summer market. Along with the cloves came a bundle of scapes—those beautiful long flower stems that some people say resemble an octopus (true). They have many uses in the kitchen, and believe me—I had plans. But the scapes escaped me.

They sat on our counter, and they evolved. Life moved on, and so did they.

Their flower heads grew and burst, putting forth masses of little bulbils—this plant’s answer to seeds. At first I was slightly annoyed with myself for not having eaten the scapes sooner. But then I examined them closely and realized they had become works of art.

And now, as I think about those scapes in my frazzled state of mind, I realize they had something to say. They were trying to tell me: just sit back for a while, and let life take care of itself. It always does.

Just a photo I’ve always liked. Those are my hands in the upper left corner. I was in southern Thailand, learning about cashew apples. I’d spent the hour before exploring Krabi’s Ban Laempho Gastropod Fossil Beach—an ancient cemetery of mollusks preserved in layered beds—when lunch called my name. A few little stalls selling fried chicken and Muslim curries were clustered at the park entrance above the beach. I climbed the hill, pointed to a bin, and immediately roused a swarm of women.

“Himaphan!” they shouted in unison. “Cashew! Eat! Eat!”

But it wasn’t the nut I found in my salted-fish curry—it was the cashew apple. A vendor ducked into her kitchen and returned with a bowl of freshly cut fruits, pale yellow, some tinged in red. She sprinkled them with sugar. They were juicy, with a guava-like flavor and an endnote that sucked my mouth dry.

The women showed me a specimen recently plucked from a tree. “Here’s the flower. Here’s the fruit,” they explained. A curious thing: the nut, which is technically a fruit, resembles a green lima bean. It dangles beneath the apple, a pseudo-fruit, which swells as it grows—until it’s picked and sliced and curried by the enterprising Muslim cooks of Krabi.

There in the picture above, you can see the bowl of whole fruits beneath the sugared slices and just to the right of the mustard-colored salted fish curry.

Also, you can see my fingers in the process of scribbling. Yes—I do it the old-fashioned way. When I’m out and about and eating in the great, wide world: I write my notes in cheap little notebooks sold at 7-Elevens and local markets all across Southeast Asia. I stuff them with business cards and maps. Sometimes I sketch little diagrams to aid my notes; sometimes my pages get smeared in the curry at hand. Sources often grab my notebooks and jot information in their own language, which I can investigate further as I proceed with my story. This is enormously helpful when working across language and cultural barriers. And in these cases, a digital recorder (which I do have) or other electronic gadgets wouldn’t help. I might go through five or 10 notebooks on an in-depth article; many, many more for projects and books. The result is that my office closet contains giant boxes filled with years and years of little notebooks.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, as I work my way through Nicholas Carr’s account of the Internet’s effects on our brains—the way we think, read, see and process messages. It’s a fascinating read and an enlightening examination of the way our brains change with the technology around them.

And then, of course, we have the issue of all that paper accumulated after years of reporting. What’s the ecological footprint of that? (Then again, what’s the ecological footprint of factories that poison the workers who make our electronic gadgets?)

Much to ponder.

(In other ponderables, today’s GlobalPost contains our story on tools made from bombs in Laos. It’s one in a series of articles we’re doing in conjunction with our forthcoming book on UXO in Laos — a project I noted almost entirely by hand, in little notebooks.)

Ya carries her basket of beef along the road between Ban Lung and Ou Chum in Cambodia’s Ratanakkiri province.

As some of you know, I’m at work finishing a collection of travel essays to be published next year. In the past few months, I’ve wandered aimlessly (and pointedly) for hours through old notebooks and files I’d long forgotten. This is something I love about reporting: it allows me to live at least twice. I have an experience. I write it down. And ever after, I retain access to the details of that event. Years later, I’m sometimes shocked at how much of my life slips from the forefront of memory until prodded with photos and notes.

Ya, pictured above, is a Kreung tribal woman in the far northeastern corner of Cambodia’s Ratanakkiri province. She was 40 years old when Jerry and I met her nine years ago. I’d almost forgotten the encounter until I stumbled across her photo hidden in a pile of neglected files on my laptop. Yet as soon as I read the photo slug—Woman with Meat—I knew exactly who she was. And I vividly remembered the day we met on a slick muddy road to Ou Chum. Jerry and I had left the capital, Ban Lung, on foot—an unusual thing for a couple of foreigners to do, especially in a steady rain. But we donned our ponchos and walked the long route in search of an old woman who made copious batches of rice wine. We never found her—but here’s a bit of what I noted that day:

We walk and walk. The son of our hotel manager has told us Ou Chum has a woman, 104 years old, who makes rice wine every day. We walk to find her, and the chunchiet (tribal villagers) along the way think we are very strange. We pass a parade of women with baskets as we all huff up a red-dirt hill. The woman in the lead says her name is Ya, she’s 40, she has seven kids. “I don’t speak much Khmer,” she says. She tells us she has no rice, but her basket is filled with beef and a young boy beside her carries a small water bottle with fish inside—dinner. The girls walking behind Ya say they’re all going to Ou Chum, as they often do. We pass them, they pass us—again and again along the road.

All the chunchiet carry their daily needs in tightly woven baskets with little straps around their shoulders. Oranges, beef, rice, clothing—it all goes into the basket. The older folks, men and women, have drooping earlobes, sliced in two or shaped from giant plugs stuck through skin. Each man stashes over his shoulder a machete with a long wooden handle, a shoulder rest, and a sharp curved blade. The machete is his companion for any long walk.

The road twists and turns into gullies and gorges. The rain plows through earth, creating an orange landscape resembling the American Southwest in miniature. If 1,000 feet equaled an inch, this path could be the Grand Canyon.

We walk past huts, bucolic fields, a man with a pig strapped to a board behind his moto. (He has a moto, but most people walk.) We pass cows, ducks, chickens, dogs and boys on bikes. We pass through rubber trees, tapped and collected, shading the way. Past a turquoise butterfly wing, glued in mud. Past screaming babies, men toting corn. Past families draped over the railings of their thatch huts. Past little foot paths leading to thick jungle. Past indigo and ginger and hibiscous and frangipani. Past the stench of manure.

Two little girls run up beside us. One says she went to the Ban Lung market at 5 a.m., and now she returns with pomelo. She doesn’t go every day—but often. For food, for the family.

We pass another clump of girls, and one asks us where we’re going. We tell her Ou Chum, and she asks where we’ve hidden our motorbike. Do we have a moto? No moto? She can’t believe it, as though she expects us to pull one from our pocket.

Later, after Jerry and I give up on finding the old woman and her wine, we see that girl again near her house. She calls us over. She tells us she’s 12 years old, and she introduces us to her sisters — 15, 10 and 4. Their mother died four years earlier, and their father has gone to market to sell something. They have  two thatch rooms—one on stilts for sleeping, another next door for cooking. The girls say they don’t go to school, they work in the fields instead. Young green rice grows around the home. A banana tree, a gourd vine, a pile of corn. No pigs, no cows, no chickens, no other fruits or vegetables. What we see is what they have. We leave them a bag of peanuts and a small wad of riel….

*****

I read my own notes, and I’m back in Ratanakkiri. That’s the magic in keeping track of life’s intricate details (I consider it a job perk). I’ve come across so many little tidbits, many of them dealing with food. And many of which will never see print—in book or article form. Yet I’d like to do something with them.

Starting this week, I’ll be posting little food-related blurbs on the Rambling Spoon Facebook page. Most accounts will be much shorter than this—great dinners, interesting kitchens, market excursions, mealtime conversations. I’ll call them “More Better Food,” taken from the title of my forthcoming book, This Way More Better. These postings are in addition to the nibbles and bites I’m already putting on Facebook. So, if you haven’t already, check it out—and stay tuned for more. You can also follow along on Twitter—just look for @RamblingSpoon, where I’ll tweet these under #morebetterfood.

Let me begin with disclosure: this review comes with attachments. I share entangled endeavors with Kim Fay, author of the newly released Communion: A Culinary Journey Through Vietnam. Her publisher, ThingsAsian Press, will publish my next two books. And I have contributed essays to Kim’s guidebook series, To Asia With Love. Though Kim and I have never met in person, sticklers for objectivity would argue that I cannot write an unbiased review of her book.

But I can write a fair review.

And in fact I’ve waited months to do just that. Back in October, with days growing shorter and winds colder, Kim sent me a draft of her manuscript—double-spaced type on 8 ½ x 11 paper, no photos except a rough copy of the book’s cover. But now I have the real thing, nearly 300 pages of intertwined essays and full-color photos taken by Kim’s sister, photographer Julie Fay Ashborn. It is one of the heftiest, most beautiful food and travel books I’ve seen from Asia. (The type is a bit tiny—my parents would have trouble reading it—but the photos are big and bold.)

“I thought about how much better food tastes when it fits into a narrative.” With this, Kim captures the nugget of great food writing. Ingredients are important—yes—but context is so much more so. (If you know this blog, you might notice I’ve said this before. Stay tuned for a forthcoming essay on this topic.)

Communion doesn’t simply tell us what Kim thought about the crispy fried eggplant she ate in Hoi An. Instead, it guides us through the life of Miss Vy, the restaurateur and instructor who opened her history to Kim. By the time we reach the recipe for that eggplant, “as delicate and flavorful as Miss Vy,” we know all about the chef’s upbringing, her family’s post-war struggles through Doi Moi, and her thoughts on communism, poverty and sexism. In turn, I am all the hungrier for her food.

I’m reminded of Paul Theroux, who wrote years ago about how Conrad, Hemingway and the other greats “had not done Africa justice.” Their writings “ignored Africans or else made them insubstantial figures in a landscape.” They wrote of Africa with out any Africans.

I see the same today in writings on Asia. I see it in the travelers themselves, and I find it in the ever-burgeoning world of food lit. “The tourists I met when I was young were better,” a Hmong woman recently told me. “Before, they come because they love Vietnam. Now, they come because they are just traveling.” Just traveling—with iPods in the ears and eyes cast inward (or hidden behind tiny digital cameras). I don’t want to know about their fave banana pancakes or their perception of Saigon’s best noodles—not unless their opinions reflect something more than themselves.

Tell me, instead, about the woman serving those awesome noodles and how she came to be behind a steaming wok on the street. Tell me her history and ideas. Tell me how her noodles fit—or don’t—into the texture of modern-day Asia.

Of course, no writer succeeds at this all the time—but it is what I strive to do. And it is what Kim Fay has done in Communion.

I particularly love an exchange she had with a “stylish” Vietnamese friend on the subject of a trendy restaurant resembling a series of street-food stalls, minus the grime. It’s popular with locals. “I don’t have to sit near sewage while I’m eating,” the friend said. “I can get fruit juice or coffee, or even both if I want, and I can eat all sorts of different foods. My kids can have one thing, and I can have another. Maybe it’s not the best, but we can each have whatever we like. And when we leave… my hair doesn’t smell like cuttlefish.”

There. That right there is what I want to read in a story on Vietnamese—or Thai, Lao, Khmer, Malaysian, Indian or Burmese—eating. Kim questions whether sitting at a stall, sucking on exhaust is an essential part of the street-food experience. And it very well might be for many of the glossy-eyed foreigners who write glowingly about such settings. But the vast majority of my Asian friends choose cleanliness when given the chance. They like indoor restaurants with tables and chairs, too. Imagine that.

Kim does express worry over the incremental sanitization of Asia leading to the sanitization of Asian flavor—a legitimate concern, considering the popular restaurant in question served a mediocre bowl of bun bo Hue that needed more shrimp paste. But thank you, Kim, for including your friend’s perspective. So many culinary missives fall flat on scope and view. We get street food, 24/7. But Communion covers the spectrum—from fish sauce aficionados to the “master grafter” of Dalat’s famous fruits; from humble bowls of clam rice to the haute creations of Didier Corlou. It portrays the breadth of a Vietnamese palate as varied as the people themselves.

I open books, blogs and magazines with cravings for Asian food and the people who deliver it. Too often I find, instead, another foreigner in a vacuum. I read Kim Fay and I feel I’m meeting Vietnam all over again.

A pig wanders freely through Sophoon, Laos.

What do Lao villagers think about free-range vs. industrial farming? Find out in The Faster Times. This is the first in a three-part series on the lives and deaths of Asian pigs.

I wanted to add a P.S. here. While the article focuses on pigs, some of the villagers I interviewed had pointed opinions about free-range chickens as well. A young woman named Taeng, who raises a variety of farm animals, said she couldn’t really imagine cramming her chickens into a coop without letting them run freely. Ït’s not good for the animal,” she said.

Neither she nor her mother, Noi, had ever tasted industrial chicken, but they were certain village chicken tastes better. Her birds have thick, sturdy legs, she said. Industrial chickens, she imagined, must have very soft, flimsy legs from sitting in a coop all day. She didn’t think that would taste very good. “Farmed chickens, their legs are not too strong,” she said. “Chickens fed by nature are best.” By that, she meant chickens free to peck the earth for the food of their choosing.

Davone, a villager in Sophoon, shaves her homegrown cassava in Phongsali province, which is considered one of the country’s poorest and most remote. Sophoon, however, enjoys relative prosperity: most families have enough rice to sustain them through this year’s dry season. The village sits on a swiftly flowing river, which spins family generators that power a lightbulb, TV, satellite dish and DVD player (often bought from Vietnamese traders in a package deal).

It’s always strange, emerging from a week or two or three in the outback, where word-of-mouth remains the only source of news—even in these technological times. Our encampment at the Sophoon village dispensary had no TV, no radio, no Internet, and only the barest of cell phone connections. (And only sometimes.) True, many families have spent a few hundred dollars on a river-run generator that provides them with evening entertainment (see caption above). In theory, those families could watch Thai TV news—but they didn’t. If anything, they listened to Lao pop music or watched Thai movies until about 9 p.m., when the village went totally dark and the world slept. We, too, finished most nights by candlelight with books in hand and eyes squinting at dimly lit pages. I confess: I loved the serenity.

As for information: it traveled the way of the old “telephone” game. One person told another person told another person told another person told another person. Bits and pieces of a story—any story—made their way through the village so that every villager had a general idea of what went on in Sophoon. If he didn’t, his neighbor did. Like that. But almost no one had much of an idea of what went on in Udomxai or Luang Prabang or Vientiane or Bangkok.

So, what a treat the other day to sit to a cup of hot Lao coffee at Luang Prabang’s Scandinavian Bakery (one of the longest-running foreign-oriented restaurants with great coffee, yogurt and bakery items) and READ THE NEWS! The Vientiane Times, three days’ worth! I quickly noticed a slew of food and farming stories, from all across Laos, and I took note. In no particular order, here’s what’s new in the Laotian food world:

• Severe water shortages have wreaked havoc with northern Lao’s rice harvests. The rivers are too low to provide water for irrigation.

• Officials met to discuss worries over environmental degradation and the future of tourism. Businesses along the Nam Ngum, Nam Theun and Mekong rivers reportedly dump waste directly into the water, causing high levels of pollution as well as parasites in the people living nearby. There is talk of imposing an environmental tax on polluters.

• International fast food comes to Laos, with the opening of Swensen’s and The Pizza Co.

• Lao fish farmers are losing business to Chinese fish farmers who are selling their fish at lower prices.

• Officials met to discuss a five-year poverty eradication plan, 2011-2015. Eighty percent of the country’s total land area is considered remote; and 80 percent of people, villages and districts are categorized as poor.

• Illegal gold mining in Xieng Khouang province has poisoned water sources with cyanide and mercury. These toxins are mixed with soil to create the foundations of people’s homes. Cyanide and mercury are blamed for livestock deaths and polluted rice fields, rivers and lakes.

• Vientiane farmers are asking to postpone debt payments after last year’s crops failed due to water shortages. Many fruit trees and vegetables died in the past month because farmers didn’t have enough money to buy pumps necessary for irrigation. “Unusually low water levels in the Mekong River” are cited.

• Lao farmers are losing business in light of illegal chicken egg imports. Lax border controls are blamed.

• The demand for shrimp has risen sharply in the weeks before Lao New Year.

7 January Bread Co., 1998

It was 1998 when Jerry first visited the 7 January Bread Co., named for the day the Vietnamese invaded Phnom Penh and ousted the Khmer Rouge. The factory is tucked in a big building, blackened with the soot of continuous fire. Young men hustled through the blazing heat of the giant ovens that cooked the capital’s popular sandwich bread and breakfast baguettes. I wasn’t along on that story, at that time, but I remember Jerry telling me about the light. And I remember the photo above, which stuck in my mind for years, pulling me back to Cambodia long after we had moved on.

7 January Bread Co., 2010

Move ahead a dozen years. It’s a muggy morning at the sort of hour when slanted orange sunlight beams on the brink of hot months to come. We ride up to the factory entrance and peek inside. It’s still here. Most everything looks the same, Jerry says, as though no time passed in a span of 12 years. The young men, of course, are different, but the conditions haven’t changed—except the light, if anything, has diminished. And the ovens have nearly doubled in size.

We chat a bit with 12-year-old Mouy Sang, the owner’s daughter, who says they use a simple recipe of flour, salt, yeast, egg and water, just as her grandfather did when he started the business in 1984.

“When my father retired, I started to be the boss,” says her father, Tang Pao Sreng. Business has grown through the years, though “the profit is not good.” His baguettes sell for 400 riel (10 cents) apiece, but sidewalk vendors up the price to $1 or more per sandwich. His bread goes all over town, and he bakes as many loaves as needed. “If someone orders a lot, we make more than 10,000 pieces of bread a day,” he says. “If someone orders 5,000 pieces, we make 5,000 pieces.”

The factory is divided in half—one room dark and oppressive, with four giant ovens, each nearly the size of a single-car garage; the other room lighter and airier, with a two-story ceiling and a stainless steel MacAdams Baking Systems industrial oven. Ancient cobwebs are dipped in dust and dripping from the rafters. Three fire extinguishers hang on the wall, almost unrecognizable beneath a blanket of soot.

This place smells human, of yeast and sweat and young men at work. It’s the scent of necessity. Most of the 20 to 30 employees come from other provinces where the only job is farming for an income that falls short of need. Here, they live on site and earn $2 a day, seven days a week. The bulk of their money goes back home.

A thin man sits beside the doorway, weighing packages of yeast and salt. Around the corner, workers stack long, rectangular trays of uncooked loaves while a colleague sprays a fine film of water across the dough.

In the corner, by the door, sunlight streams through a storm of flour as two boys twirl a giant tub beneath a rotating mixer. Little dough dollops fly from the tub, splattering across the room. An orange cat snoozes beside a pink Buddhist shrine; it lifts its head in a look of utter contentment. Jerry asks Tang Pao Sreng about the feline’s proficiency in catching mice. He laughs. “Oooh, no! That’s a lazy cat.”

A couple of boxes hold the morning’s mistakes. “These are burnt so we keep for pig or chicken feed,” Tang Pao Sreng says. He delivers the crusty loaves to his relatives around Phnom Penh.

Each tray requires 30 minutes in the oven. Every few minutes, workers in mitts twirl the trays in a graceful maneuver that assures even baking. Meanwhile, two clean, woven mats are spread across the floor near the doorway, and a basket the size of a bathtub is placed on its side. When the bread is done, the trays are dumped, and hundreds of loaves cascade across the mats. The bread crackles in fresh heat, popping like Rice Krispies in milk. Five trays, six trays, seven, eight nine are emptied before the little shrine, as though each and every loaf is presented as a gift to the gods.

Workers squat on the edge of the mat, arranging loaves into symmetrical piles, then filling the giant basket for delivery across town. I chat with Hong Heng, 23, as he counts and moves the loaves. He arrived five years ago from Prey Veng province. “I came here to make a living. I was jobless there.” Every month, he sends money back to his parents. He works two shifts a day—3 a.m. to 7 a.m. and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. The job is OK, he says, but he tires of bread. “I work with bread every day. I don’t want to eat it.”

Jerry and I stay a few hours that morning, then return two days later, as workers unload a truck full of flour. Each man carries two sacks in the crook of his neck. Sweat follows a path down a tattooed arm. Meanwhile, another employee heaves an axe, breaking one log at a time into useful segments of wood to feed the belching fires.

I talk with a young man named Kum Orn, who comes from the nearby province of Takeo. He used to make palm juice, not a lucrative living. So he moved to Phnom Penh “to have the city life,” meaning a steady job. He tells me his story while spinning dough in the dark corner of this photogenic room. I look around and think this place has charisma, with shafts of light that scream through holes in the roof. Smoke billows through narrow openings between two walls. It’s hard to imagine a setting with more picturesque light.

But I realize my perception of beauty is that of an observer, not a worker. I don’t shape wads of dough into little loaves, day after day, in a monotonous cycle. It’s hot, it’s stifling and repetitious. I wonder what Kum Orn thinks of the light in this room.

“If we had more light, it would be too hot,” he says.

But is it pretty?

“I don’t know, I never think about that.”

I wonder what he thinks of my questions, or the fact that I’m here, looking around. I wonder what he sees in this place, which I find intriguing. Does Kum Orn think this factory is interesting?

“Yes, he says. “It’s interesting to me because I have a job here.”

It’s been one of those weeks of heat and fatigue, and a scratchy throat that won’t clear. A week of dusty boots and sweaty shirts and sunburned cheeks, after chatting with farmers in hot, dry fields. A week of crazy traffic, choking exhaust, and a blanket of air with perilously high PM10 levels.

But then I chat with a young Burmese woman who left home at 19 and has lived in fear and danger ever since. She tells me how she secretly returned to Burma last year, to retrieve her passport; how she hid and covered her head and faked an illness while riding a bus—just so the authorities would leave her alone. How she spotted her sister, briefly, until a neighbor recognized her and she was forced to flee. And how her heart thumped with fear the entire trip until she landed in Thailand and knew she had escaped arrest. She lives in limbo. Home is neither here nor there, she says. She is never truly safe in either place. She pays a lot of money to live here on the sly. So she sinks herself into her work, and spends her happiest hours quietly, in her room, alone. She used to wish for greater freedoms; for the chance to go outside and move around without thought. But then, she says, she met refugees on the Thai/Burma border who have never left in 20 years. Can you imagine? Twenty years in the exact same place, no chance to roam. This brave young woman is thankful for the life she has. I ask if she has ever published her story. No, she says, it’s not nearly as important or poignant as the stories of so many others from her homeland.

These are the reasons I write this blog: the people I meet, the things they teach me. And the food, of course, that intertwines our lives. (The conversation above took place over a simple plate of rice, a bowl of vegetable soup and a serving of fried bamboo.)

Yesterday, I learned that Saveur has nominated Rambling Spoon for Best Culinary Travel Blog in its first-ever food blog awards. Thank you, readers, for that honor. And thank you, Saveur, for the recognition.

Have a look at all the blogs nominated in nine categories. And if you feel inclined, you’re more than welcome to register and vote.