Although the world of food is continuously getting smaller — name an exotic cooking ingredient and I can probably find it in Bay Area markets — when it comes to fruit, the world is still quite large. Many fruits just can’t travel more than a few hundred miles without a severe degradation in quality. Others, […]
Bali by bicycle
On my recent trip to Asia, my family chose Bali as one of our side trips for several of reasons — its distinctive culture, the beautiful scenery, and accessibility from Singapore among them. Beaches were not one of the reasons, so we gravitated towards the inland town of Ubud, one of the cultural centers of […]
Seeing cacao pods and other spices up close in Bali
(Updated 11/24/16: fixed broken links, updated photos) When I read Bill Buford’s 2007 New Yorker article, Extreme Chocolate, about cacao plantations in Brazil and the Dagoba chocolate company*, I thought, “After all of my work with chocolate, it would be amazing to see the trees up close, but I will probably never go to Brazil, […]
Drinking in Indonesia: avocado-chocolate shake and sludge-bottomed coffee
Open many menus in Indonesia to the fruit juice page and you’ll see the expected offerings — banana, pineapple, mango — and also a few surprises. Like avocado. Indonesians, it seems, look at avocado as a fruit as well as a vegetable, and therefore avocado appears on the fruit juice page. They make it into […]
Making Sense of the Swarm: Notes from Yogyakarta, Indonesia
Almost as soon as you walk out of the airport, Yogyakarta, Indonesia immerses you in its chaos and liveliness. After a block or two of an airport road, you are cast into a sea of motorcycles (which carry all sorts of things, and all combinations of people), cars, bicycle taxis (becaks) and trucks, all somehow […]