Author Thomas Harris' superb character, Hannibal Lecter, is a superb gourmet-gourmand. As brilliantly portrayed by Anthony Hopkins and equally so by Mads Mikkelsen, the astonishing Hannibal thrives on preparing, serving and consuming food with magnificent presentation and magnificent tastes that are almost impossible to find outside of his dining room because, as you should know, Hannibal prepares, serves and consumes human food made from humans. So who or rather what are you eating lately? And more important, why? No, I don’t want to hear about your allergic reaction to the bubble of fat around your midriff, or your neurotic teeth-grinding at every diabetic noise that goes plphatt in the night. I want to know what you’re doing for gastronomic kicks in your life. You see… when the preparation and consumption of food journeys beyond survival nutrition, it lands at the gate of entertainment as the art of cooking and it’s as indexing, revealing, and self-defining as any art form. Impressionistic, expressionistic, cubist and in some windowless chambers, even abstract (commonly referred to as “tasteless”) We call it… Cuisine. Journeying into a cuisine is an addiction, seldom a curse, mostly a delight. I’ve had as many addictions as you’ve had, probably more. My most recent addiction was Thai cuisine. It is a food wonderland based on fresh vegetables and fruit, with an emphasis on spices, fresh seafood, and less emphasis on meats and desserts. It is an overwhelmingly sensual cuisine with its soups, salads, entrees and its touching, mingling, shared-way of eating. But no more. Since the Covid epidemic, Thai cuisine has been invaded by the circus of home delivery and with it the intrusion of excess salt and sugar. I've no way to defend against that. America has no cuisine... it has Walmart. But it also has, in its vast, chaotic geography and culture, layered by waves of immigration, the joy of tastes of cuisines from almost every cooking culture in the world—primarily in its metropolitan centers. Pull a curtain over New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Miami, and you’re left with the reality of America—its true politics, its morality, its hypocrisy, and its cuisine… and Walmart. My lingering near-addiction is Vietnamese food. It is somewhat similar to Thai food but with a pervasive French overlay that makes it unique. The story of the delivery of this cuisine to America and its evolution is a study in art nouveau. When Vietnamese refugees were allowed to flood into the U.S. as a reaction to the guilt of the 1975 American war that nearly destroyed their country, they immediately created restaurants, primarily in California. Many of them offered menus that included dishes that were only prepared at home and seldom offered in restaurants in Vietnam—so called, maison food. These same restaurants usually had dishes “off” menu for the Vietnamese palate. There was motivation. Their customers were refugees, not immigrants, and they needed the taste from home. Unlike the Thai, they supported it. They still do, even their next generations. And so dear consumer, to complete this brief musing journey, I leave you with a cautionary tale. When the wave of Vietnamese refugees came ashore in the U.S., medical researchers, particularly at UCSF, realized they had a rare opportunity to study and perhaps define a dilemma: the origin and nature of colon cancer and other gastric maladies. Fifty years ago, colon cancer displayed low numbers in a large part of Asia as opposed to its much higher incidence in Europe and the U.S. The prevailing focus singled out diet. Now came a large, rather homogeneous group of people from Vietnam from that low-incidence geography. Testing revealed the low incidence of colon cancer, et al, among a substantial cross-section of the refugees. Ten years later, follow-through research revealed a rise in colon cancer among that Vietnamese group that matched the incidence among the general American population. Though the Vietnamese cooked Vietnamese at home and ate in Vietnamese restaurants, the natural course of assimilation added substantial quantities of other “cusine” foodstuffs to their diet. It was stunning and deadly. It was diet. The same with obesity. Thai people are generally slim. It’s not necessarily genetic, it has a lot to do with what they eat and their activity. When I first traveled to Thailand, I was hard-pressed to see an obese person. Today, I see many more and much more of them. In America, obesity is epidemic. When you strip away all of the fad-diets, the disinformation on the internet, the “miracle drugs”, you’re left with this simple fact about the quantity and quality of the food in your cuisine: What goes in minus what goes out leaves you with what becomes… fat. So what are you eating lately… and how much?