"vietnam" news and stories

In the past it wasn't so, but now it looks like Asia has taken on the challenge and stepped up to bat in the organic produce game. Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and most especially China have moved into the game. So far China is producing 85% of the organics in the region, but the other countries are gearing up and increasing production every year. The quality they produce is very good, with China growing excellent crops at great prices.

Europe and North America currently consume a vast majority of the worlds organic produce with Asia only just starting to join in, but they are starting to catch up. Since organic still costs more to produce each of these countries consumes less by far than they export. The West consumes organics for a variety of reasons from perceived health benefits to sustainability, animal welfare, humanitarian reasons, and environmental concerns; while the East's focus is primarily on the supposed health benefits. Although "Buddhist countries like Thailand and Singapore also tend to favour organic production because of its perceived harmony with nature."

There is a tendency that as production goes up, prices should come down, and so organic foods will be more in demand domestically in Asia over the next few years as well. So expect to see more and more of the world's high quality organic produce coming from Asia in the next decade as additional countries join in, and production rises dramatically.

Source

Joe and I already have beef about this (pun absolutely intended). The guy absolutely loves banh mi, the Vietnamese version of a hoagie -- a French roll stuffed with grilled meat (Vietnamese meatballs, grilled chicken, beef, pork, or other choice cuts of animal), julienned cucumbers, lightly pickled carrots and daikon, and a few condiments. I, on the other hand, am not fond of Vietnamese cuisine to begin with, and found the banh mi I tried at Pho 99 in Los Angeles to be a somewhat strange juxtaposition of cuisines. To be quite honest, it seems sort of plain for as much hype as it gets. I'd just rather eat those same ingredients, mixed with rice noodles, out of a bowl. Am I missing something, Joe??

I will concede to the fact that banh mi tend to be very inexpensive, though I find it hard to comprehend that Joe spent $12 on his at 5 Ninth. That's a lot of money for any sandwich, banh mi or otherwise.

If you enjoy Tony Bourdain's adventures into exotic cuisines and like watching him experience things that we don't normally get to see on a day-to-day- basis (iguana? cobra heart?), then you've got to check out the most recent post from Deep End Dining's Eddie Lin. He goes to Little Saigon in Orange County, CA to meet a cookbook author and her father, and instead of simply enjoying the simplicity of a bowl of pho, tries pho topped with a bull's organ, and were' not talking about internal organs here, folks. Eddies' pho had bull's penis.

And it doesn't just stop there. His dining companions also encourage him to try pre-mature egg yolks (not premature fertilized eggs, which he has eaten before), and snails with bananas.

Hey, pho isn't just about noodles and broth anymore.

I love food, but I will admit that I am not a hugely adventurous eater. I love to watch the likes of Tony Bourdain travel to faraway places and eat things like, oh, cobra hearts, but i doubt that I'd be able to stomach it myself. In fact, I can hardly stand to think about some of the foods of my own cultural cuisine, Korean.

Frogs aren't considered all that adventurous, and yet, I doubt I could have eaten it, as Reid of Ono Kine Grindz did on a recent trip from his home in Hawaii to San Francisco. The restaurant is Dragonfly, a contemporary Vietnamese restaurant that he read about. He hasn't written any notes about what it tasted like yet, but the picture makes them look, at least to me, pretty damn good.

Cacao trees have been grown in southern Vietnam for a good six years. Now the Mekong Delta has joined the country's other provinces. Ben Tre province recently began exporting processed cocoa with a whopping 12-ton shipment to the U.K. And it plans to keep up the pace with another 12-ton batch next month.  
The province has 5,000 acres of cacao trees and plans to expand to 25,000 by 2010. That's a lot of processed cocoa. I'm all for the economic development of Vietnamese agriculture, but my secret hope is that the Brits start doing some really interesting things with chocolate now that they have all that cocoa.

[photo: Thanh Nien News]

Source