Mentoring eccentrics

When my children were quite young, my second daughter took great interest in serenading our chickens which could not escape because they were firmly tucked under each arm as she walked around the house, talking and singing.

Her next sign of good communication and eccentricity was to regularly climb our huge mango tree and sing and play her school recorder to the birds that parked thereon.

I kept up her supply of musically challenged chickens.

More eccentricity came with my youngest son, who reached the age of three and began making up songs about anything mundane or traumatic that happened around the house. He then invented the word congrubulate, the first of many new words, and presented himself as a cartoonist, singing and cartooning the daily lives of people in his vicinity. To prevent laziness I enrolled him, when aged 13, to study cartooning and do the cartoons for this book. I also regularly supplied him with Mad magazines. I was doing something that would benefit our family for the rest of my life. I was mentoring eccentrics.

If you are taking notes, this is how I encouraged creativity and spontaneity in my children. I tried not to say things like, “don’t lean, don’t run, don’t lurch, don’t drool, don’t laugh, don’t fiddle, don’t be silly, don’t climb, don’t fall, don’t be as mad as a hatter.”

Value of eccentrics

American researcher, Dr Augustin de la Pena, at the San Jose Medical Centre in California, has linked long-term boredom with ill health. He said that the human brain functions best when it processes copious amounts of data. To starve the brain of data (variety) and conversation is to spark a series of physiological reactions producing stress and depression.

I would like to go further by proposing that quality and even eccentric conversation is a way to relieve the mind of boredom.

Remember the last time someone said: “I’m depressed because my family won’t stop talking to me or forcing me to laugh?”

Me neither.

Irritating people until they laugh

So this is the spot where eccentrics can step forward and take a bow.

My theory is that real characters and eccentrics help to keep the world alive. One of Australia’s experts on humor, Dr Jessica Milner Davis, at one time an honorary research associate with the University of New South Wales, says that ten minutes of hearty laughter can lower the heart rate and blood pressure for 45 minutes. Even smiling has benefits for the nervous system, hormonal levels, muscle metabolism and respiration

Crazy people may even help keep us alive if we talk to them and laugh with them. It has been rumored that children laugh an average of 146 times a day, but adults struggle to laugh an average of 4 times a day.

A Harvard Medical School researcher was quoted in USA Today as saying that billions of dollars could be saved if hypochondriacs who run up 15% of US medical bills, were identified and treated in brief therapy groups. In other words, would anyone reading this please mentor all the hypochondriacs in their family or social circle.

Quality conversation and good relationships can save squillions on medical bills.

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Pictured below, the author discovered a great sense of community at Vanuatu fruit and vegetable markets. It was open for business 24 hours a day. You could buy freshly cooked food at 2 a.m. in the morning and talk until you dropped from exhaustion.

Understanding migrants with diverse cultures might provide insight into youth suicide and how to prevent it.

Is this an outlandish claim or is there serious evidence to back it up?

Sanderson Media’s website has labored the point that notionally Anglo Saxon peoples generally have the worst dietary habits, poorest communication skills, not much sense of community and are notorious at putting their elderly parents into old folks homes.

If that isn’t bad enough, notionally Anglo Saxon people’s have the worst youth suicide rates in the entire world. All this information is in a book entitled, Anglo Saxons can’t communicate, which fortunately is freely available on this website.

Notably, according to a study by WHO, (World Health Organisation), the lowest youth suicide rates in the world are among the very people that Anglo Saxons accuse of spending too much time on food and conversation. This includes migrants from Asia, Mediterranean areas and other diverse cultures.

On this blog, we reproduce the list of countries in order of worst to the best, but be assured, a strong sense of community is pivotal to this social success and the preservation of teenage lives. Low suicide rates come with cultures that love a wide variety of produce, love to cook and sit and talk for hours, and love to take good care of their extended families.

How does it work in these cultures with connectability, among those that get accused of talking too much and dragging out a meal for hours on end.

When a relative is depressed, they can they always find a cousin, an aunt, an uncle, a family member in which they can confide.

Someone is needed that can help them unwind and unburden themselves.

Why did we list these tragic social disasters? Because the solution is right under our noses, right with the cultures of which we have historically been very suspicious.

If we are too narrow-minded to learn from migrants, then there is a strong possibility any depressed member of our family will not discover a sense of community exists around them.

Because even businesses are realising you can sell more stuff if you show an interest in customers.

Consider the girl in my local bank in Springwood, Brisbane, who  tried to talk to me, to improve her Banks image. I appreciated it although she didn’t  have time to talk about deep stuff.

If we are to learn anything from migrants and diverse culture, it is that it is an honor to talk for hours and listen to and pass on the stories of our lives. Furthermore it is wonderfully innovative to try to enjoy recipes, produce, food preparation, the eating of food with friends and the enjoyment of conversation as almost an art form.

Empire builders with no relationship skills

Westernised people banging on about building empires and making great profits is so trivial by comparison to relationships and family preservation.

If you have doubts, ask anyone who has a depressed family member or who has lost friends to suicide. It is advisable to build up those relationships and crank up that sense of community and see what a difference it makes in your life, and the lives of your friends.

If you family tree is hopeless then go out and adopt some people and someone else’s family tree.

Ok lets sum this up: Anglo Saxons can learn from migrants but be warned. Sticking to boring foods and culture and being a standoffish snob will never teach your children to communicate and have a sense of community. Therefore have a go at this idea: Turn off the television, select an exciting new recipe, drag your children into the nearest produce market, prepare the ingredients and cook with your children. Yep, communicate in a talking kind of way. It is a talking method better than hairy animals, which never gather in kitchens and historically only do takeaway foods.

Here are the youth suicide figures from the World Health Organisation:

Some races, like the Pacific Islanders, have never lost their sense of community.

Family food and conversation

My local commonwealth bank did something very scary today.

As I walked in the front door, a cheery employee asked me if I needed anything and then I met Cassie, the bank teller, who engaged me in a very interesting conversation, while banking my cheque.

I wasn’t ready for this and it really took me by surprise.

My wife has often warned me not to talk too much to the shop assistants because “they will get into trouble for talking.” She is usually correct.

But at the bank, these weird bank people had turned the clock back a full 50 years to a time when we all enjoyed a sense of community and I am still trying to get over the experience.

An hour later someone called Kerry phoned and ran me through a quick survey. I was fully like soft clay by this stage.

“What was your experience at the Bank like today and how can we improve on it?” she asked this astonished writer.

Firstly I wanted to know why the bank people wanted to conduct small talk, and then follow up with a phone call.

“Well each day we pick a customer at random and you are the one for Thursday.”

I told Kerry I had been writing on a 21^st century phenomenon, our lost sense of community.

I warned her that, if the bank kept up this friendly approach, people would come to expect friendly conversation at all times.

I gave her my crazy request for a coffee machine in the bank’s foyer, and the one about providing seating for people in the queue, in case people have back pain.

I don’t expect a coffee machine to turn up any time soon. Chatty staff are enough for me.

No one knows we have lost this ability to connect

Now this is the scary part: Most people don’t realise they have lost this sense of community.

Westernised people and notionally Anglo Saxon peoples have lost it however if you have a Mediterranean background, or a Pacific Island origin, you may still enjoy chatting to everyone around you.

Chatty people can really annoy their work colleagues however. Take the case of my good friend Ruth who works in the public service, a very Anglo Saxon public service. Recently they were thinking of sacking her for being too friendly. Years of cold, rude, standoffish treatment had not dented her warm south American heart, until they gave her the first warning for being too friendly.

“Tell them you have an editor friend that is writing extensively on this subject, and he wants an interview will all of them,” was my excited request.

Ruth passed it on and the cold public service tsunami subsided, turning into a mere ripple.

I used to work in the public service so I knew what ethnically challenged people are like. An interview with politically correct grumblebums was like being able to enter communication heaven. Maybe I didn’t use enough tact.

It separates us from the hairy animals

When I was young, 50 years ago, country towns and cities had plenty of seating on its main streets. Civil planners considered that people had a right and an inclination to sit and talk in an extended fashion. Hairy sweaty animals don’t do it so we should do so.

It was a glorious time when people listened to stories and retold rubbish of their own. It was better than television. It was direct communication art, part of being in a living play, which the participants may have taken all for granted.

So if you have migrants in your community, you may be very blessed. Why are the friendly shopkeepers so popular?

If you have a Greek butcher, he will talk to you; or a Turkish baker or an Italian grocer, they will all listen to your stories and give you their ideas, totally free of charge.

It was a sense of community, making even the most unusual folk, feel they were worth something.

In many English speaking communities, you can’t pay money to be listened to, so many go to their local doctor and whinge and waste his time.

Surveys indicate that if more than 50% of people in doctor’s waiting rooms had someone to talk to, they wouldn’t be there and would probably not be ill.

People vote for rudeness

In Australia, England, Germany and France to mention just a few, political parties have sprung up based on the fear that migrants will change the local way of life.

Politicians have been elected to parliaments as a reward for parroting things like, these migrants stick together and won’t assimilate.

Anyone that cared to make friends with Asians peoples, Indians, Sri Lankans, Pacific Islanders and many other groups, might have appreciated the variety of food and the sense of community that comes with it.

Lets make this easy to understand, and join the dots, because it forms an unbelievable picture.

Peoples that love variety in food, enjoy cooking and eating together, usually include good wine, beer and extended mealtimes with plenty of communication, have the lowest youth suicide rates in the world. This is fact and it comes from the UN’s World Health Organisation.

There is much less depression among these folks. They are not totally devoid of problems however there is always someone around who can share the problem and a problem shared, is a problem halved.

I must admit my growing up years were very strange. I felt like an ethnic that was raised in a totally Anglo Saxon country community of Queensland. People I knew were suspicious of Australia’s first inhabitants, the Indigenous Aborigines, and also any migrants that usually ran cafes, restaurants and grew and sold fruit. You didn’t talk about these groups, unless you threw in a joke.

Number one Aussie complaint: they spent too much time talking to their relatives. While Aborigines pass their stories on to their next generations, Australians generally don’t.

In fact some of our most celebrated explorers, Burke and Wills, perished from hunger and thirst in the Aussie outback, because they were suspicious of the local Indigenous people, and didn’t wish to talk to them. That’s a bit like a suicide, emanating from prejudice.

Masterchef can fix some things but not everything

Now if you take an old fashioned concept…………people with great produce, cooking and talking and eating together; what do you get?

You get an incredible social reaction that is most amazing in notionally Anglo Saxon communities.

Basically you are encouraging people to stop buying takeaway junk food by going back to the old days of cooking, talking and eating together.

This website has already run a story on the Masterchef phenomenon and how it gained higher television ratings than for the grand finals of any of Australia’s football codes. We strange, non hairy, non communicating types, shocked ourselves that it could be more fun to buy exciting produce, collaborate with people on new recipes, and cook and eat together and communicate in a talking kind of way.

Way to go dudes. Hello out there……………..most non Anglo Saxon communities have never lost their sense of community and have been doing this for thousands of years. In my next post, you get the WHO youth suicide statistics and it is a scary picture.

Just hug the next chatty stranger that wants to connect and talk to you, with no ulterior motive. My next major writing will be on the value of eccentrics, and what vital public service they provide.

Will it solve everyone’s depression problems? Probably not, but at least the Anglo Saxon empire can at last see where it was severely lacking. It’s not a total solution but it is a start to the solution. We can at last see why migrant ladies love to cook  a fancy dish and share it around. Should depressed people start cooking in earnest and begin sharing the food around? It wouldn’t hurt.

Today TV chefs are treated like rock stars.

In Australia, the finals last year of the country’s Master Chef program was watched by 4.1 million people.

It was many more than watch the finals of any football code, almost double the ratings that some finals get. This year’s cooking final pulled in even more viewers.

It has been a worldwide trend but why is this happening?

Some social commentators think we are drifting away from the Darwinist (survival of the fittest) model of kicking someone’s butt in a reality type of television show.

In addition, world financial insecurity may be coaxing people to select entertainment that lets them spend more time at home, while learning the lost art of cooking and being more supportive of each other.

Those cooking shows also remind people of the sense of community they have lost. And there is a great benefit of trying  to cook with friends.

We might even develop some great conversation skills while cooking and eating wonderful varieties of foods together.

Junk food took its toll

In the past, the ease with which people bought take away and junk food, might have destroyed any ability or desire to search out good produce and cook sumptuous meals and share it with friends.

Now here’s a good sentence for people who don’t like migrants and the great variety of food they promote:

The best food and cooks and recipes can be found in countries that have not lost their love of produce, conversation skills or abilities to make a meal last for hours.

Take Cyprus for example.

This is in the centre of the Mediterranean area and this has resulted in the introduction of food from Greece, Turkey, Armenia, Lebanon, Middle East, Western Europe and Egypt.

Cypriots have gone on to create and promote their own distinctive recipes.

The best way to enjoy Cypriot food to stop rushing around madly, prepare a meal, invite your friends around, and thus prepare to sit and talk for a couple of hours. In Cyprus, the landscape and backyards are dotted with olive trees. It is a constant reminder that the Mediterranean diet has got its menu about right by teaming hot dishes with olive oil and salads that are garnished with olive oil.

Longer life with a Mediterranean diet

The World Health Organisation has had years to study health statistics and deduce that this kind of food gives you a 40 percent less likelihood of getting heart disease. The balmy summer nights in Mediterranean land gets the population to sit out of doors to eat and talk. In many areas people are sitting outside happily chatting, playing cards or listening to music up until 11p.m. In the Old Port area of Limasol, streets are blocked off every night and hundreds of tables and chairs magically appear in front of cafes and restaurants where patrons eat under the stars and appear to talk for hours.

You may not be able to change the climate where you live but at least you can restore the sense of community to your family, making it a time to celebrate variety in food, friends and conversation.  It may be of interest to non-Mediterranean folk that Greeks, due to their constant chatting and philosophizing, have the lowest youth suicide rates in the world. The figure is 2 per 100,000. Other countries that value extended families have similar low figures although Greece has the lowest. If a relative ever gets depressed, you can imagine the wide range of relatives or extended family with which they can converse and receive help and reassurance. The best option may be to visit your local grocer or wholesale market, select some produce you haven’t tried before, and a recipe, do some cooking and invite your friends around, pretending all the while that they will warm to your choice of music, wine, conversation. If the produce aisles at your local supermarket don’t have recipes and avoid talking to customers, find a small retailer that pushes produce and cooking ideas. Remember to pretend you are out of doors and keep that pack of cards handy. Opening the windows or eating on your verandah might help.

British Medical Journal and the Mediterranean diet

A study released last month in the British Medical Journal reports that consuming a Mediterranean-style diet, rich in vegetables, fruits and nuts, olive oil, and legumes, may lead to a longer life. “…higher adherence to a Mediterranean diet was associated with a statistically significant reduction in total mortality,” wrote the researchers.

Researchers found that nine components of the Mediterranean diet contributed to the benefits: moderate alcohol consumption, low meat and meat product consumption, high consumption of vegetables, fruit, legumes, olive oil, and nuts, and a high ratio of monounsaturated fats to saturated fats.

In another recent study review, the Mediterranean diet was found to be the only dietary pattern associated with a lower risk for heart disease.

Researchers analyzed 146 other studies and 43 controlled trials published between 1950 and 2007.

These recent studies add to a large body of science supporting a Mediterranean-style diet. It seems that the diet results in some of the lowest rates of colon cancer, breast cancer, and coronary disease in the world, as well as fewer problems with inflammatory conditions and menopause.

Add to that the recent news that this diet significantly reduces the risk of developing Alzheimer’s.

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John Sanderson is a photographer, writer and editor who has spent a lifetime connecting with and challenging his readers.

He recreates history in a way that you’d think he lived way back when.

He has just spent two years writing, editing and composing Australia’s most widely circulating national produce and farming newspaper, National Marketplace News.

John was nominated for journalism’s Walkley Award a few years back, so your news could not be in  better hands.

Here is John’s definitive manual on communication to assist you to examine your “talking gene” and discover its state of health.

ASNHTC – Chpts 1-14

ASNHTC – Chpts 15-25

Anglo Saxons need your help. Can you please assist us stiff-upper-lip folk to discover and value our extended families. While we have your ethnic attention, we need your help to string a meal out for several hours, during which time we might learn to talk for extended periods.

An excellent goal might be for us to stop thinking about protocol and building monuments and actually find out what is in the hearts of our friends and family, instead of just banging on about procedural matters and infrastructure creation.

While you ethnic minorities are at it, can you please help us find our talking gene so that improved relationships might discourage some of our youth suicides and prevent some of us from getting plonked into aged care facilities. It happens when us elderly Westernised folk are seen as part of the infrastructure we helped to create.

So what does making a meal last for two hours have to do with alleviating depression, longevity, crook national symbols and the exportation of convicts to Australia and the USA?

The Talking Gene connects this by way of humor, cartoons, insightful quotes, a bit of sadness and funny relationship stories along the way. You will never again feel the same way about logging your family tree, bureaucrats, ethnic minorities or Australia’s first settlers. You owe it to your talking gene to read this.

John@sanderson-media.com

A coffee table book that will provoke conversation

(This writing remains the property of John D Sanderson, Sanderson Media, Springwood Queensland, Aust, 4127)

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A big thankyou to my son Peter for the cartoons he produced when aged 13. Appreciation to my beautiful wife for teaching me to make a meal last long enough to enjoy the conversation.

Contents:

1     Anglo Saxons need your help

2    Trying to break the cycle

3    Penguins can’t understand Romance

4    Reading a living page

5    Building relationships and pointless monuments

6    Conversation versus efficiency

7    Reading your family tree

8    How to dig up your tree with love

9    Swapping stories with Turks and neighbours

10  Coffee talk

11  What our genes tell us

12  Genetic research at your local flea market

13  Oracy from a Greek blacksmith

14  Using dental talk as a barometer

15  Humble dung throwing promotes communication

16  Revenge on Bob the bully

17  Why some can’t connect

18  Standing on one leg for Captain Cook

19  Upgrading social and business genes without surgery

20  How to be sure you can’t communicate

21  Can’t talk to big spending tourists

22  Bureaucrats can’t talk

23  Excusing the debacle

24  The Talking Gene and teenage suicide

25  Communication is good for your health

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Why Vietnam sparkles

Have you ever had the urge to hug an entire country? Some countries won’t let you get close to them, but this should be easy in Vietnam.

Would delicious draught beer on tap for around 50 cents a mug, tempt you to find out that this is a very special destination?

Vietnam probably has the most friendly and polite people on earth and  as a bonus, they make the most delicious street food for less than $1.50 a bowl.

Could that tempt us away from more unfriendly Westernised destinations that won’t talk to you?

When I arrived for a 20 day vacation, I was apprehensive about the food and traffic but then something occurred that melted my heart.

Walking around the streets of Ho Chi Minh city on a steamy pre-monsoonal night, we crossed a busy street near the Korean embassy when suddenly several women on scooters were tempted at the same time to jump the red light and drive over my foot. Like a traffic cop, I held up my hand and yelled, “no wait…….”and was met with as very loud “shorry” from one of the riders. You don’t hear “shorry” in westernised traffic.

We noticed a national politeness ran through this picturesque and charming country. I couldn’t wait to get back to OZ and quiz my local Vietnamese doctor, “hey Vu, you won’t believe what happens in Vietnam. People apologise when they don’t have to, which means there might be a national politeness policy?”

“There sure is John, you’ve hit the nail on the head,” he said.

Intrigued and charmed by the traffic in Ho Chi Minh City.

From that night onward, in Ho Chi Minh City, my wife and I fell in love with the other thing we’d been nervous of, the traffic. We sat and got mesmerised by the thousands of happy motor scooter riders for ages. While eating and drinking coffee we watched it. As a break from the scenery we enjoyed the traffic. Most Vietnamese are born, raised, romanced, married, earn a living and expire, in close association with motor scooters. Import duty on cars is about 100% and their purchase and reduces traffic congestion. Some were seen to have their daily siesta on a parked motorbike.

The blushing bride makes her way to the ceremony, accompanied by the wedding party.

And here is the leap of faith for a tourist: You walk right out into the traffic with your eyes shut, and the hundreds of scooters politely drive around you.

No one swears or gets enraged in western style.  For tourists accustomed to road rage, this traffic is like poetry.

I experimented by walking into a pulsing mass of about a hundred scooters, while operating a video camera and simultaneously speaking a commentary.

However I did not fear because the national politeness thing meant they make allowances for silly tourists.

Vietnam News reports that around 30 motorcyclists are killed in road accidents each week. My wife and I hired a scooter four times and only once saw a bicycle accident where some fruit got damaged.

It is quite safe to hire a scooter and get your adrenalin in the traffic or on the steep mountains for $5 a day.

A girl can get no bigger buzz than flying through the mountains of northern Sapa, sharing the road with cycles and construction vehicles, amid the low hanging clouds.

Young men and women were whizzing around those mountain roads while clutching a map, and no one looked in endangered.

The ideal way to forget you are aged in your 50′s is to zip around

the glorious mountain roads north west of Sapa,

10,000 feet above sea level, as if you are still a teenager.

The Viet road toll has seen a significant reduction and is probably reasonable considering the more than 50 million scooters on the road each week. However national politeness doesn’t extend to the police that often pull up a cyclist and elicit a bribe for some minor infraction.  Viet Nam News says that the police have dressed like farmers to trap an unsuspecting motorcyclist. The dirt poor drivers have also been known to run over these camouflaged police, with some being injured and bleeding to death.

The green oranges are delicious and the bananas are not picture perfect but equally yummy.

Healthy quality food

At the Than binh restaurant , number 3 district at Ho Chi Minh, we sat and ate 30,000 dong worth of prawn rolls in rice paper, with three dips, worth around $1.50 Au.

The surprises continued with 60 cents for a small bottle of water and $1 for a large 1.5 litre bottle. They can still make a tidy profit after importing it from USA.

While we chomped on super healthy spring rolls, the locals were happy to talk to us,  answering our nosey questions. Most wealthy countries have a majority that will tell you to rack off, mind your business or just ignore you, but Viets will answer prying but sincere question. Education has been highly promoted by the Communist government and it has changed many lives.

My taxi driver’s sister was a teacher but his mother is a more lowly paid cook and his father, a farmer.

Thanh was a 22 year old tour guide in HCM city, getting paid 3 million dong per month while her mother, a day’s bus ride away in Tuy Hoa province, cooks for 200,000 dong per month.

My mad friend from Sydney spent three months learning Vietnamese by talking to people at random. Quite a few would then sit him down and spend five minutes correcting his pronunciation. Tell me where you find people like that.

Getting to know the mighty Mekong River, below Ho Chi Minh City.

Most tourists try to get down to the Mekong Delta where you can see villages that make confectionary from coconuts, produce exquisite embroidery and offer delicious fruits. If that culture isn’t enough for you, there are very wrinkly Mekong musicians that play beautiful music on ancient instruments while beautiful girls in traditional dresses will sing and dance their way into your heart.

It takes a couple of hours to travel there by bus but when you can look out the window and see two guys on a scooter balancing a double bed, you know it’s a special place. The mighty Mekong was massive, fast- flowing and wide. We negotiated this rapid river in a tired junk that had a length of fishing line for a throttle cable. The boat’s accelerator pedal was a piece of pine with a primitive rusting hinge. Everything worked and they took such good care of us. Then an 84 year old lady paddled us up a tributary to further cultural experiences in one of the villages. We all took her picture, she smiled through missing teeth but you couldn’t have paid her to be a stay-at-home gran.

It is not unusual to see three children and one parent, scooting to their destination at the same time.

Set up for conversation

Another notable thing is that Vietnamese in the city and villages, have small plastic tables and chairs so they can spend many hours each day, sitting, eating and talking. I only saw wealthy boring people watching television on a hot steamy evening. The same togetherness thing is replicated by Viets that have settled in Australia. I did a survey at my local Sunday fruit and vegetable market at Logan City, Brisbane and discovered that refugees that came to Australia in boats, back in the 70’s and 80’s, continue to have regular reunions with their relatives. They sit on plastic furniture at the markets and sell their produce with the aid of children that are now dentists, accountants and pharmacists. Notably they are repulsed when I asked if they would consider putting their old people in an aged care facility. As a proper journalist and nosey pest, I asked why they all get up at 2a.m. and pack the van and come to the Logan markets so insomniac Aussies can buy produce at 5a.m. “It’s a family thing we did in Vietnam so we do it in Australia”, they said. Contrast this some Aussie vendors that assured me they could never pay their children enough to work at their Sunday fruit and vegetable stall. Therefore they employed non-relatives.

But all across lovable Vietnam, Wi Fi is available everywhere and the internet is free. A tourist laps it up and feels totally spoiled.

Delicious chicken noodle soup is a breakfast favorite.

My most memorable venue for eating was on the beach at Hoi An. Saturday night was when all the trolley, bicycle and scooter propelled cooks lay out their cane mats from the foreshore to the waters edge. As the sun sets, each mat has an oil burning lamp to create atmosphere and each row of mats has a  superb dedicated Vietnamese cook. They get your order and bring your food and drink so you can watch the stars, hear the surf and have the most romantic candle lit meal, surrounded by hundreds of people talking, candleing and canoodling. And in the beachside darkness, no one ever gets your order wrong. How did they cook our delicious potato chips on the back of a bicycle kitchen?

In district 3 of Ho chi Minh city, I found a mad Mexican named Moises who translated for me while I got to know a family that sold delicious food and drinks till late into the night. Fifteen year old Lee willingly told me that seven other family members slept in the one room above the shop. Lee and her siblings went to bed around 11p.m. but the parents and elderly trundled in and began snoring around 1a.m. This was after many delirious hours of chatter, while seated on the plastic furniture on their footpath while they watched their own traffic. Lee also said it was the sincere desire of millions of country Vietnamese to escape their low paid and much slower lifestyles and attain to more frenetic and highly paid city lives.

There are around 70 million Buddhist shrines in Vietnamese shops and households.

Buddah is at the top, the god of money is on the left and on the right is the god of good luck.

The people are always optimistic that things will get better.

Often the Communist flag can be seen on a shop front.

Money doesn’t bring more happiness

We noticed that Hanoi seems to have a higher standard of living and more shiny motorcycles than Ho Chi Min, but the award for happiness goes to the less developed areas, and to the crazy black Hmongs of Sapa.

On the windy mountainous drive up to picturesque Sapa in the north of the country, we noticed our local van driver was a fan of “Need for Speed” movies, 1, 2 and 3. We caught blurred glimpses of terraced rice, all with built-in irrigation on slopes steeper than 45 degrees. On the 70 degrees slopes, between the rice, the Hmongs grew entire mountainsides of corn. It was so steep that a farmer had to pack his lunch and toilet paper before starting his daily climb. You can see why my Hmong friends at Logan markets think that any Aussie backyard measuring a quarter of an acre, is a massive economic opportunity. Speaking of sustainable farming, it appears that Viets love to pee on their fruit trees. In 20 days we saw four men relieving themselves on their backyard fruit trees. We weren’t specifically looking for it but it added to the charm and reminded you of things you can’t see in Australia, the UK or the USA, because people are so busy with protocol.

Acres of corn grow on the sides of mountains and hills where it is not suitable for rice.

Once you embrace the Hmong’s zest for farming and selling things to the tourists, you can start to absorb their culture. Some tourists were repulsed by the Hmong’s eagerness to sell their hats, bags and shawls. They were multi-talented at needlework and probably had the best language skills of any group we met. It didn’t take long before you wanted to hug them.

If you could write 2,000 words about the charm and politeness of Americans, Australians or the British, you might get people to flock to their travel agents. With a westernised story, you’d have to struggle but with Vietnam, it comes easy.

Or maybe you could just say that four people can eat out on delicious street food for less than $15 and wash it down with 50 cent mugs of draft Da Nang beer, and the people actually want to talk to you.

One tourist, Laura from san Francisco, summed it up: “they’re the nicest people I have met, and they are so forgiving.”4

It was Saturday on the beach at Hoi An. In several hours it would become

a sea of lamps where conversation,delicious food and romance

would take centre stage for one of the most charming countries on earth.

Why can we be certain that migrants are  good for your health?

Lets wind the clock back to the early years of Australia’s proud Anglo Saxon heritage when many began looking suspiciously and obliquely at migrants.

Governments of all colours promoted this critical and superior attitude by devising the “white Australia policy” which was strongly backed by Australia’s mainstream churches. These groups conveniently forgot that Jesus might have had a neatly trimmed beard and olive skin.

This put up an immediate road block to anyone learning anything useful from “those strange migrants.”  Instead Australians wanted to imitate their no-nonsense Empire.

Back then you had difficulty migrating, unless you passed an English test that resembled riding a rampaging bullock while singing Waltzing Matilda. You had to sing it in tune and the bullock had to bellow the right notes. To many would-be-migrants, the literacy test seemed that hard.

Public servants and their bureaucrats devised an academic test that could trip up non English visitors who didn’t know about snakebite, shark attacks and the famous cricketer Don Bradman. The bar was set very high because some Aussies were a pretty intolerant lot and we didn’t accept changes too well.

Illustrating our intolerance, this country was quite shocking in its early treatment of Aboriginal, and Chinese folk. Chinese ill treatment took place around 110 years ago, in the gold rush days and it has been documented extensively. Furthermore it was felt that the first indigenous Australians might not fit into this exciting new colony of the Empire.

And so it was that our forebears got used to making comments unworthy of a fruit bat………….things like:  “they (migrants) don’t live like us, and they hang out with their ethnic groups too much.” “You migrants and indigenous folks should learn to do what we do, singing Waltzing Matilda while roping a bullock….. eat meat pies with sauce and turn your chops into charcoal and work work work, never having any time to spend with your relatives.”

Migrants seemed to  know how to work hard and accumulate shiny junk however, in their favour, they valued their relationships and kept a sense of community.

Anglo Saxons were quite suspicious of migrant Aussies having a strong “sense of community,” asking why they didn’t spread out and become cold impersonal locals.

On the other hand we singing, roping, bullock-riding Anglo Saxons liked to accumulate junk and generally disliked a sense of community.

As recently as the 21st Century, quite a few Australians were still rabbiting on publicly about how migrants eat funny stuff and have values that will change our way of life and the things we treasure forever, like famous cricketers, taking sickies from work and dodging sharks in the surf.

Sure migrants don’t live like us but in many ways they live better than we do, with more variety in food, more conversation at meal times, more reunions and more quality relationships.

This brings me to Why Australia embraced the televised Masterchef phenomenon so strongly.

Through this program, we cold folk have discovered we can actually learn from migrants who have long celebrated good food, cooking together and longer mealtimes.

We have learnt that you can buy produce together, try exotic recipes, cook with your loved ones and actually spend a bit longer than usual on

the eating process. It has meant a bit more conversation.

Add to that, family values, the benefits of extended family, respect for the elderly and a reluctance to plonk old relatives in nursing homes. Also include that migrant kids generally don’t want to kill themselves because there is always someone prepared to talk to them. Yep, those migrants and ethnic minorities sure don’t live like us Anglo Saxons.

Would you like a slice of that? Would you like it if you could convince your family tree to exercise its talking genes?

Lack of conversation can damage the body

Prominent author and health expert, Jillie Collings agrees with the aforementioned comments by saying, “the brain is just like a computer. If it doesn’t get enough input, it malfunctions, and as a result, damages the body.”

To feed our computer brain through eyes and ears by conversing means we don’t sit in front of a computer for hours and hours where our imagination dies and our communication genes get soggy and switch off.

In the London Daily Mail, Andrew Wilson quotes Alan Caruba, from the Boring Institute in America, recommending that: “The three most important key points are to develop the reading habit, find a new interest and involve yourself with groups of people.”

I hereby recommend that obtuse characters be utilised and eccentrics put to work. If you are safely crazy then cultivate it, don’t hide it. You will save lives.

It is worth repeating a quote from Polish magazine Wprost which reported a study by the Institute of Sociology at Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland. “Up to 74 per cent of respondents would not do business with gloomy people and 69 per cent could not make friends with them. (hence no relationship prospects) Sad people were often perceived as hiding something. Researchers found that when we smile, more blood reaches our brain and this improves our mood,” the magazine reported.

People who tell jokes and laugh often are healthy communicators. On November 22 2005 the Courier Mail reported that humour has been found to have an effect on the cardiovascular and respiratory systems, similar to exercise. It relaxes muscles, helps the immune system and reduces pain and stress. A US study found a sense of humour and laughter may prevent a heart attack. Laughter appears to cause the tissue that forms the inner lining of blood vessels, the endothelium, to dilate or expand in order to increase blood flow. People with heart disease are 40 per cent less likely to react to humor, compared to contemporaries without heart disease. Makes you think doesn’t it. Unless individuals, education curriculums and societies teach the value of extended family and extended conversations, we won’t have the desire or skill to do any of this and neither will our offspring. At the end of our highly achieving lives our jobs will be all up to date. However we will ask why we accumulated all our pointless monuments and junk, and why crazy people with talking genes did not stress like we did?

Finally, if we are having difficulty getting our own personal family tree to interact with itself, why worry. We can connect with someone else’s family tree. Exercise your talking gene, you might be surprised at the result.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8644788.stm

Hot’ substance in chilli peppers key to killing pain

Capsaicin causes the burning sensation in chilli peppers
Studying chilli peppers is helping scientists create a new type of painkiller which could stop pain at its source.
A team at the University of Texas says a substance similar to capsaicin, which makes chilli peppers hot, is found in the human body at sites of pain.
And blocking the production of this substance can stop chronic pain, the team found.
They report their findings in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.
Capsaicin is the primary ingredient in hot chilli peppers which causes a burning sensation.
It does this by binding to receptors present on the cells inside the body.
Similarly, when the body is injured, it releases capsaicin-like substances – fatty acids called oxidized linoleic acid metabolites or OLAMs – and these, via receptors, cause pain, the researchers have found.
Blocking pain
Dr Kenneth Hargreaves, senior researcher at the Dental School at the University of Texas, and his team next set out to see if they could block these newly discovered pain pathways.
Lab work on mice showed that by knocking out a gene for the receptors, there was no sensitivity to capsaicin.
Armed with this knowledge they set about making drugs to do the same.
Dr Hargreaves said: “This is a major breakthrough in understanding the mechanisms of pain and how to more effectively treat it.
“We have discovered a family of endogenous capsaicin-like molecules that are naturally released during injury, and now we understand how to block these mechanisms with a new class of non-addictive therapies.”
Ultimately, he hopes the drugs will be able to treat different types of chronic pain, including that associated with cancer and inflammatory diseases such as arthritis and fibromyalgia.

http://www.naturalnews.com/021449.html

Thursday, January 18, 2007 by: Jessica Fraser

(NaturalNews) — Capsaicin — the compound that makes chili peppers spicy — can kill cancer cells without harming healthy cells, with no side effects, according to a new study by researchers at Nottingham University in the UK.
The study, led by Dr. Timothy Bates, found that capsaicin killed laboratory-grown lung and pancreatic cancer cells by attacking tumor cells’ source of energy and triggering cell-suicide.
“This is incredibly exciting and may explain why people living in countries like Mexico and India, who traditionally eat a diet which is very spicy, tend to have lower incidences of many cancers that are prevalent in the Western world,” Bates said.
“We appear to have discovered a fundamental weakness with all cancer cells. Capsaicin specifically targets cancerous cells, leading to the possibility that a drug based on it would kill tumors with few or no side effects for the patient,” he said.
Bates and his research team found that when cancer cells were treated with capsaicin, the chili pepper compound attacked the tumor cells’ mitochondria — which generate ATP, the chemical that creates energy within the body. Capsaicin also bound to certain proteins within the cancer cells and triggered apoptosis — natural cell death.
Bates noted that his team’s capsaicin experiments resulted in cancer cell death without harming the healthy cells surrounding the tumors. The capsaicin compound also managed to kill both lung cancer cells — a standard test for new cancer treatments — and pancreatic cancer cells, which are exceptionally hard to kill.
“These results are highly significant, as pancreatic cancer is one of the most difficult cancers to treat and has a five-year survival rate of less than one percent,” Bates said.
According to Josephine Querido, a cancer information officer with Cancer Research UK, Bates’ study is promising and needs further research. However, since the experiment showed only that capsaicin extracts killed lab-grown cancer cells, eating large quantities of chili peppers may not yield the same results in humans.

Why the addiction to chilli?

Why do some people crave spicy foods, chillies, curries, noodles and so forth while others go through life never wanting to challenge their taste buds?

Australian Chinese chef, from Sri Lanka, Jimmy Shu, has put forward a plausible theory.

After years of tempting foodies, he concludes that a palate corrupted by eating chillies and curries seems to turn a person into a discerning eater. He has noticed that the more his customers like chilli and curry, the more they need variety and spice. It’s all in the “corruption of the palate”, he says.

It is well known that chilli speeds up your metabolism, plus the hot little critters are a rich source of vitamin C and it might even work against the formation of cancer cells.

Nutritionists also claim that chilli helps fight pain and eases nasal congestion.

Just imagine it. When we put chilli in our cooking, we may be promoting good health, as well as good conversation.

Ever since the Portuguese brought chilli to India, after trading with Mexico, people have been learning to eat like the Maharajah. You also can “try it”:

“Food needs to be cooked properly and beautifully presented however I go further than that. I want people to go home and still be able to remember the taste. That is my motivation,” said Jimmy.

And if you can still remember the conversation a few days later, then the Jimmys of this world have achieved food without frontiers.

Jimmy Shu was born in Sri Lanka about 60 years ago when it was  a virtual melting pot of several continents’ flavours.

Imagine the combination of Hindu vegetarian food, exquisite curries, chillies, flavours from South-East Asia and noodles from China. It was an exciting time of discovery for young Jimmy.

Jim’s Dad, Andrew Shu, started his restaurant in Sri Lanka in 1946, just in time for Jimmy’s birth in 1949.

With Chinese parents, he was raised in this restaurant on tantalising curry and noodle dishes.  Jimmy watched his dad accumulate a large “food family,” members of which regularly went on a tantalizing food journey.  Menus were changed regularly to prevent boredom and customers appreciated it.

Years later, Jimmy found it easy to gather his own food family and impress them with variety and flavor from all parts of the continent, Asia and the Pacific.

Andrew Shu taught Jimmy how to be passionate about ingredients and condiments, tempting palates of patrons by romancing the chili, the noodle and curry pot.

He is proud to have been a part of changing the way people view curries and noodles in several countries, including Sri Lanka and Australia.

“I watched Dad pioneer soy bean manufacturing and noodle making, going on to operate one of the country’s most successful restaurants,” said Jimmy.

Mr Shu imported the first noodle machine into Sri Lanka.

Making 20kg of egg noodles each morning

Customers got a liking for noodle dishes and before long, the lad’s  morning work included making 20 kg of real egg noodles for their restaurant, Modern Chinese Café, that was fast becoming a trend-setter.

The secret was to use just the right amount of eggs to bind the noodles, otherwise it would break apart.  This daily noodle grind, far from putting the lad off food, delivered the Shu family a wide circle of friends, based on conversation and love of good food.

Jim expresses it this way: “Food has no restrictive borders. It breaks down barriers and makes people decent and tolerant. We should call this business, chefs without frontiers.”

Jimmy came to learn that the Shu family had suffered privations and economic hardships.  It apparently made them innovative and people oriented, not unlike many Chinese cooks the world over.

So what hardships influenced the trainee cook?

In between cooking, his dad worked as a silk merchant for a couple of years, push-biking his cloth wares around Sri Lanka.  Jimmy has memories of the gent pedalling behind the coke delivery truck, collecting the fuel that fell to the roadway when it was being unloaded to customers.  This coke fuelled his restaurant at night.  Andrew became well known for pioneering the manufacture of soy bean sauce, noodle manufacturing and a new dish featuring crab meat.  He had the “midas touch” according to Jimmy, and deserved his success, becoming like a “food-father,” the head of a giant “food-family.”  Getting opinions from customers became mandatory. Jimmy learnt to ask for feedback at an early age.

It was an excellent grounding and inspires the grateful son to this day.

Working at one of his early restaurants in Malaysia, a customer raved about a fish curry cooked by someone else, many kilometers away.  Fully curious, Jimmy traveled six hours to get a taste of this dish that he described as “truly divine.” It gave him more menu ideas.

Many Chinese chefs seem innovative and we think we have discovered the reason why.

Jimmy thinks it is because they were nomads for centuries, being prepared to try anything in case it made money, which it often did.

He has a theory on this. The Chinese had influences that recent British and others missed out on.

Cruel dynasties and centuries of suffering, made nomadic and wandering Chinese very versatile. They dug deep, invented gunpowder and fireworks and made explosively hot curries.

In the food department, wandering Chinese learned to be versatile and make do with what they had. Often misunderstood, they tackled the problem by being cooking innovators, tempting with spiced dishes.

Passion with a ladle and a pot on an open fire became passion and experimentation in the kitchen.  They dug deep into the world of cooking and condiments.

Excited by raw materials

Jim excitedly talks of his raw materials: “Lemongrass used to grow wild at my home in Sri Lanka but in Melbourne in 1980, lemon grass was a rare herb. I used to grab it whenever I saw it but today we have the luxury of bulk lemongrass.

“Australian lemongrass is so prolific and superior as a product that I expect the day to come when we export it back to Asia.  “Then we began using another ingredient called galangal, a type of ginger.”

“I felt like a tradesmen looking for the best materials.  “I discovered that migrants were prepared to grow the rice and herbs I needed to get authentic flavors,” said Jimmy.

It wasn’t always that easy however.

Passion for herbs resulted in Jimmy breaking the law while heading through Melbourne airport on a flight from Singapore 20 years ago.

Customs officers sniffed out some galangal (a type of ginger, a rhizome from the tuber family), stuffed in a pair of sneakers that Jimmy was trying to sneak through.

He was scolded and walked off with his head bowed, feeling like a food criminal.

Discovering galangal

Shortly thereafter Jimmy discovered Vietnamese gardeners with boxes of galangal they had grown in the suburb of Richmond. The  herb had almost brought him undone but thanks to Vietnamese migrants, he would no longer take crazy risks.

Before Jimmy Shu migrated down under in 1974, an Australian immigration official advised: “Don’t start your restaurant until you have worked for someone else.”

It proved invaluable. For four years he followed this advice while learning the trade from the bottom to the top.

“You learn best by washing dishes. It allows you to see everything that is going on. I washed, cooked and cleaned up, always looking over my shoulder to learn how things were done,” explained Jimmy.

He worked very hard, doing three jobs and saved up enough money to start a restaurant joint partnership called Shakahari, in Lygon Street, Carlton in 1982.

After a short time they opened a second restaurant, then a third, and a fourth, until Jim had a total of eight under his belt.

Four were in Melbourne, one in Alice Springs, one in Darwin, with two in Malaysia.

People quickly voted with their feet, knives and forks

Take Melbourne’s very popular, first-ever noodle shop in Claredon Street, South Melbourne. It is not surprising that Jimmy worked there back in 1984. He developed new ideas and put them to work for patrons at his next eight restaurants.

“I was grateful that migrants are quick to come on my food journey but it doesn’t take long for the rest of the population to catch on and make our menus very popular.

Avoiding boredom in Darwin and the Alice

Darwin and Alice Springs are apparently easy places in which to get innovative. Both have large migrant populations with Asians always prepared to go on a food journey.

Jimmy named both restaurants Hanuman, with each specializing in Thai and Tandoori cuisines.  Inner Brisbane has 166 food outlets offering curry and many also feature noodles. Sydney by comparison has 447 and Melbourne has reached 475.

Migrants and yuppies have helped make Australian foodies very cosmopolitan. They’ve been spoilt and now they come to expect it.

It’s not surprising that Jimmy Shu has been appointed as one of two food ambassadors for the Northern Territory.

The other official NT foodie is Athol Wark, of South African background, a bush tucker expert and senior lecturer at the Charles Darwin University in Alice Springs.

He recently returned from the USA where role of food ambassador had him promoting Australian and definitively Northern Territory produce such as barramundi fish and lobster.

Jimmy did similarly back in 2005. Exquisitely presented food gives tourists an additional reason to flock to the NT and the Government recognizes this.

Hence, tourists are getting their taste buds tantalized at the instigation of Territory officials.

Countless chefs and restaurants recycle ideas but not everyone sets the food agenda. Aussies are very welcoming of restaurants that set the agenda and refuse to blend with the furniture.

It brings palates alive and sets the tongues wagging, very necessary if you are to have food without frontiers and many overlapping food-families.