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May Day fritters (trippaleivat), courtesy of Flickr user karviainen

May Day, the first day of May, doesn’t usually get a lot of love—or anything else—in this country, but elsewhere it is observed as an important holiday. In some countries it has become associated with the worker’s movement and is a day for protests; interestingly, this tradition began in 19th-century America, where Labor Day is now observed, usually protest-free, in September. In the last few years, though, the activist tradition has been revived in some large cities, where (predominantly Latino) immigrants have chosen May 1 to rally against anti-immigrant sentiment and laws that they consider unfair, such as the one recently passed in Arizona.

But the holiday’s origins are ancient, and have little to do with labor or politics. The Celtic festival of Beltane was a celebration of fertility and renewal. Huge bonfires were lit, around which people danced and feasted. A highlight was the serving of the Beltane cake, which had a scalloped edge and held a special surprise—more frightening than the baby in a king cake—for the person who received this blackened piece. What happened next is described in the 1922 book The Golden Bough, by Sir James George Frazer:

Towards the close of the entertainment, the person who officiated as master of the feast produced a large cake baked with eggs and scalloped round the edge, called am bonnach bea-tine—i.e., the Beltane cake. It was divided into a number of pieces, and distributed in great form to the company. There was one particular piece which whoever got was called cailleach beal-tine—i.e., the Beltane carline, a term of great reproach. Upon his being known, part of the company laid hold of him and made a show of putting him into the fire; but the majority interposing, he was rescued. And in some places they laid him flat on the ground, making as if they would quarter him. Afterwards, he was pelted with egg-shells, and retained the odious appellation during the whole year. And while the feast was fresh in people’s memory, they affected to speak of the cailleach beal-tine as dead.

About 15 years ago, I stayed in Edinburgh, Scotland, for several months, and attended the revived Beltane Fire Festival on Calton Hill. The bonfire reached three or four stories high and lasted all night, with people in wild costumes parading and dancing around it to a constant drumbeat. It was one of the most memorable experiences of my visit, though I don’t recall any cake.

In Northern Europe, related festivals have merged with the feast day for St. Walpurga. Called Walpurgisnacht in German and Vappu in Finnish, the night before is often celebrated with bonfires, student pranks and other mischief, and the following day with picnics. Maiwein, or May Wine, is a traditional beverage flavored with the herb sweet woodruff. In Finland, a version of mead called Sima is the drink of choice. May Day fritters, called Tippaleivät, look like miniature funnel cakes and are a customary Finnish treat for the holiday.

In this country, by coincidence, the first Saturday of May is always Derby Day, when the Kentucky Derby thoroughbred races are held. Mint juleps and a thick stew called Burgoo are the traditional way to celebrate Derby Day. If you read the 1970 account of the festivities by the original Gonzo journalist, Hunter S. Thompson, called “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” you might get the sense that the raucous event is not all that different from May Day revelry elsewhere.

America’s colonies are being severely taxed, and it could have serious implications for our future.

Honey bee, courtesy ARS News Service

No, I’m not trying to start a revolution; I’m talking about bees. The USDA’s Agricultural Research Service has just released a new survey about the health of managed honey bee colonies nationwide, and the results are disturbing: We’re losing a full one-third of our roughly 2.46 million colonies each year.

From the press release:

Losses of managed honey bee colonies nationwide totaled 33.8 percent from all causes from October 2009 to April 2010…This is an increase from overall losses of 29 percent reported from a similar survey covering the winter of 2008-2009, and similar to the 35.8 percent losses for the winter of 2007-2008.

If you’ve been paying attention to the news over the past couple of years (or if you’ve seen that charming Bee Movie), I probably don’t need to tell you why you should care about this. But basically, bees are important pollinators that make it possible for plants to bear many of the fruits and seeds which humans like to eat. Thus…fewer bees doesn’t simply mean less honey; it means fewer (and more expensive) almonds, apples, avocados, oranges, watermelons and so on.

In fact, according to the ARS, you have honey bees to thank for about one of every three mouthfuls of food in your diet. The economy needs bees, too—they represent some $15 billion in added crop value.

So what’s killing the bees? Beekeepers in this latest survey—which covered about a quarter of all colonies—pointed to factors like starvation, poor weather, and weak colonies going into winter. Then there’s something called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), a mysterious syndrome whose hallmark is absence: all or most of the adults are missing from affected hives, but no there are no dead bodies in sight. The cause is unknown, though theories abound that blame everything from pesticides and genetically modified crops to high-fructose corn syrup.

The incidence of CCD seems to be holding steady—it was reported in 28 percent of beekeeping operations that lost colonies, compared to 26 percent last year and 32 percent the year before—but “apparently manageable” disorders like starvation are on the rise.

Losses may get even more severe, the study’s authors caution:

The survey reports only winter losses and does not capture colony losses that occur throughout the summer when queens or entire colonies fail and need to be replaced. Those summer losses can be significant. All told, the rate of loss experienced by the industry is unsustainable.

A complete analysis of the survey data will be published later this year; the abstract is available in the meantime.

If you’re interested in learning how you can help to “save the bees,” check out these suggestions from the organizers of National Honey Bee Awareness Day, which takes place on August 21 this year.

Dolsot bimbimbap, courtesy of Flickr user jen maiser

As I’ve mentioned before, I live in a rural area that is not very diverse in its restaurant offerings. So when I go to New York City, as I did over the weekend, I don’t rush for the traditional New York specialties—pizza and deli sandwiches, say. I want foods from faraway places.

I got to satisfy one of my long-denied cravings this trip, for dolsot bibimbap. Standard bibimbap is one of the best-known Korean dishes—a bowl of rice with some combination of vegetables, meat and, usually, an egg on top. It’s good as is, but when made in a dolsot—a heavy stone bowl that is heated to a very high temperature—it adds a whole other textural dimension.

Brought to your table sizzling in the bowl, the rice cooks into a crispy bottom crust that, especially with a healthy dose of the Korean hot sauce called gochujang or kochujang, is every bit as satisfying (at least to me) as a good slice of pizza, if far less portable.  The elaborately carved dolsots at the restaurant I went to must have weighed at least five pounds. Not that I would have tried picking one of these scalding bowls up, unless I wanted to turn my hands into Korean barbecue or reenact the old “hot plates” skit from “Saturday Night Live.”

There are any number of variations of the dish. My favorite is made with only kimchi and bean sprouts atop the rice, but some versions have a mixture of vegetables and meat topped with a raw egg that cooks in the bowl. You can buy a dolsot and try making it at home or improvise with a cast iron pan, as this blogger did. It sounds like the perfect recipe for people like me, who can’t seem to make rice without burning it anyway.

Koreans aren’t the only culture to have discovered the joys of overcooked rice. It features in Chinese sizzling rice soup, and in Iran, a dish called tahdeeg is made in a regular pan but cooked long enough for a crust to form at the bottom. This crispy layer is loosened and served on top. I haven’t tasted it, but from this recipe, which includes yogurt, saffron and lentils, it sounds delicious.

By the way, in between the Korean, Middle Eastern and Japanese food I ate over the weekend, I did manage to squeeze in a pretty delicious slice of New York pizza.

There are some food truths we hold to be self-evident, and one of them is that orange juice is inherently good. It’s packed with vitamin C; it’s what your mom tells you to drink when you feel a cold coming on; it looks like sunshine in a glass. Plus, it’s delicious.

Courtesy Flickr user TerriSeesThings

Those things are true, but Alissa Hamilton‘s book “Squeezed: What You Don’t Know About Orange Juice“—released today in paperback—reveals some other truths.

Things weren’t always this way. The ubiquitous presence of pasteurized orange juice in chilled cartons, all tasting basically the same, dates back only to the 1960s. That’s when the FDA began regulating and standardizing orange juice, and decided what consumers did and didn’t need to know about it.

As a result, despite what advertisers claim, most orange juice is neither fresh nor natural (not in the way most of us would define those terms). Think about it; how could it be truly fresh year-round, when oranges are a seasonal product? Sure, it may be “not from concentrate,” but raw juice is often heated, stripped of its volatile compounds and flavor-rich oils, and stored for as long as a year before it reaches the consumer. Something called “the flavor pack” is used to return most of the “natural” aroma and taste to the product, Hamilton explains:

The flavor is sourced from all parts of oranges everywhere…Typically, the orange oils and essences that juice concentrators collect during evaporation are sold to flavor manufacturers, who then reconfigure these by-products…into ‘flavor packs’ for reintroduction into orange juice.

Often, those by-products come from other countries and may contain unknown pesticide residues, but the producers don’t have to disclose that.

And as one citrus flavor researcher told Hamilton, replicating nature’s complexity is extremely difficult: “Right now the formula for fresh [orange] flavors is just about as elusive as the formula for Coke.”

In other words, that’s why it tastes so much better when you actually take a bunch of fresh oranges and squeeze them yourself.

Hamilton is careful to explain that she’s not against orange juice, she’s against deceptive marketing and believes consumers have a right to know what they’re buying:

The history of processed orange juice and its marketing highlights the fact that as a society we tend not to care too much about deceptive advertising unless the product being pushed is measurably harmful…As the gap in both geographic and mental miles between consumer and store bought food has widened, the role of product promotion as a source of product information has grown.

The bigger problem isn’t juice, but rather “food ignorance.” Deceptive, misleading or overly simplistic messages from both government and industry in recent decades have contributed to “the average consumer’s obliviousness to where and how that individual’s food is produced,” Hamilton concludes, which could have serious consequences for their own health, the environment and the economy.

Do you want more information about what’s in your carton of orange juice, or is this not a big deal to you?

Usually reading about food makes me hungry, or at least curious to taste what’s being described. But I just came across an example of something that I truly have no desire to try: Sea Pie.

A clipper ship, courtesy Flickr user Trodel

Working at a magazine often means receiving review copies of new books in the mail, whether I requested them or not, and thus I recently found myself leafing through something called Cruise of the Dashing Wave. It contains the recently rediscovered journal of a young sailor named Philip Hichborn, who set sail from Boston in August 1860 as a carpenter on a clipper ship headed to San Francisco (which, before the Panama Canal, meant tracing the entire length of South America first and crossing at Cape Horn, a journey of 143 days).

I figured the book had nothing to do with food and was about to cast it overboard into the sea of library donations—but then I noticed the index. Under “food,” even the sub-headings told a tale: “Crew dissatisfaction with;” “Crew preoccupation with;” “Fresh fruit, lack of;” “Fresh meat; lack of;” “Monotony of;” “Porpoise catching/cooking of;” “Short rations during storms.”

I turned to the reference for “Sea pie,” and found this amusing recipe related by Hichborn:

All the old pieces of the pig that the captain can’t eat, pieces of dough as large as your fist and as heavy as lead, as much water as will make it thin enough to swallow by giving your teeth a good greasing. Add pepper and salt to suit convenience of cook’s hand, depending upon whether it be large or otherwise. Put in a pan and place in an oven and let it stay until eight bells.

Hichborn swears it “proved very palatable,” but I take that with a heavy-handed dose of salt, since he was comparing it to typical ship’s fare of things like “cracker hash” and “dandy funk,” defined by one source as “a mess made of powdered biscuits, molasses and slush.”

Apparently, sea pie is also called cipaille, and it’s a traditional dish in Quebec. Anyone ever had it?

If you want to try it, and happen to have a dozen pigeons lying around, the Old Foodie’s blog has a recipe for sea pie. (No pigeons? Don’t worry, the Northwest Journal’s sea pie recipe says you can “by all means substitute duck, goose, moose, deer, elk, etc.”)