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.

A farmer in Sepon, Laos, stands in his field, which he cleared of ordnance by himself. He said he found many munitions. The small banana behind him grows in a bomb crater.

An international treaty banning the cluster bomb takes effect today. Cluster bombs are large weapons that hold up to several hundred small explosives designed to scatter across the land when dropped from the air. They are deadly hazards to farmers in postwar societies around the world.

Farmers in Laos have faced these dangers for decades. Millions of cluster munitions remain in their soil since the U.S. bombing campaign ended nearly 40 years ago. Since then, more than 20,000 people have been killed or maimed in accidents involving unexploded ordnance (UXO). Aside from soldiers, farmers account for the majority of UXO accident victims in Laos. Note: the United States has not signed the treaty banning cluster bombs—but 107 108 other countries have.

My story on Banning the Bomb runs today in The Faster Times. It’s part of our ongoing project to document the effects of UXO across Laos. Earlier this week, we had an article in GlobalPost examining the many ways Laotians turn bomb scrap into tools. This is all part of our forthcoming book, Eternal Harvest: The Legacy of American Bombs in Laos, to be published next year. This work is written and photographed with support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

A boy in Xieng Khouang digs for ant eggs on a hillside that was heavily bombed. Many locals have found bombies nearby. When a teacher tried to warn the boy about UXO, he said he was not afraid because he had dug in the area many times before.

Part of a cluster munition found in a farm field in Khammouane province in 2009. Farmers placed the bombie near a tree stump in the hopes that a clearance team would return and demolish it. It was still there in late April 2010.

A woman weeds her garden while a clearance team searches for bombs behind her. The woman did not want to stop working. That day, the team found a bombie in her neighbor’s field.

A boy in Khammoune sits in his family’s field, which they have set afire in order to clear the land for planting. Fires can cause buried bombs to explode, and many people do not stick around for the burning. Another boy in the area said he finds UXO every dry season. “When we burn the rice field—BOOM, BOOM! Explode. Every year. When we burn the field, we run away.”

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.

A villager named Haum waters her onions, growing in an American cluster bomb casing in Kunpho, Laos.

Laotians everywhere have turned war scrap into useful tools. The large metal casings from cluster munitions can sell for upwards of $40—a near fortune to many rural villagers. But some gardeners prefer to keep the casings, turning them into sturdy raised herb gardens. Village to village, province to province, Laotians insist: the bomb is the bomb when it comes to gardens. Read the story in The Faster Times.

Onions grow in an American bomb casing in Gnommalath, Laos.

A villager in Boualapha tends her herb garden, planted in a type of bomb dropped during the early stages of the American war in Laos. Boualapha, near the Vietnam border, remains one of the country’s most contaminated regions.

A pig feeds from a bomb casing that has been used as a trough for years in Ban Pakeo village.

Children stand beneath a rice storage hut built atop posts made from bomb casings in Xieng Khouang province.

A bomb casing serves as a planter in Najat village, where scrap-metal collecting is one of the community’s largest—and deadliest—sources of income.

WARNING: Some readers might find the following photos offensive. This is the third in a three-part series on the lives and deaths of Asian pigs. Read about a Cambodian pig slaughter in The Faster Times. In much of Asia, butchery is a mundane duty, and the average villager knows precisely the origins of his dinner. This pig was killed for a celebration, a special event. The slaughter took just a few moments, swift and as careful as could be, given the setting and circumstances. Not a single part would go to waste.

As I noted in The Faster Times, I wrote this piece because I eat pig and I want to know, exactly, the steps that lead from field to plate. I realize many readers might find this offensive (even an ad for a Memorial Day sale on grass-fed ground beef at my local co-op drew criticism from vegetarians). But the bottom line remains: much of the world eats meat. Yet not everyone has the chance to see just how an animal becomes food.

A few weeks ago, Jerry and I had the remarkable opportunity to witness an animist ceremony honoring the forest gods in a northern Lao village. Read the story in The Faster Times, and take a photographic scroll through that afternoon here. The villagers sacrificed a pig, offered bits of it to the spirits and divvied up the rest among dozens of families. This is the second in a three-part series on the lives and deaths of Asian pigs.

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.

Khmer sour fish soup, Boeng Keng Kang Restaurant, Phnom Penh

In Cambodia, sour fish soup with water grass is everyday food. It’s basic, it’s cheap, it’s easy to make and everyone eats it. A day without samlor machou trou kuon trey is almost like a day without rice–almost. But not quite. Our story on this simple tamarind-rich dish is now out in The Wall Street Journal.

This is but one of many sour soups found across Cambodia. When we return to New Mexico this summer, I have every intention of experimenting with a whole stash of recipes from this trip. So stay tuned. I can taste a batch of samlor machou kreung in the future — and I’ll tell you all about that lovely green tint extracted from lemongrass leaves.

Meanwhile, imagine a bowl of this (restaurant details in the story):

Khmer sour fish soup, Khmer Kitchen, Phnom Penh

Khmer sour fish soup, Sa Em, Phnom Penh

Fish for sale in a Chiang Mai market

Readers, we are en route to rural areas. I expect to be far from Internet range for a couple of weeks, which means a brief hiatus in posting. But rest assured, I will return with stories to tell (assuming nothing goes explosively wrong). Meanwhile, don’t forget to check The Faster Times for upcoming posts. On March 15, I’ll have a story on the stigma of prahok. I hope to be connected again by April 1, but if not, you’ll find my article on Thailand’s obsession with plastic.

See you soon!

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.”