We all need a lift & a distraction. This calls for a recipe.

Chicken with Preserved Lemon and Olives

Few ingredients, easy to throw together, this flavorful dish tastes as good as it looks.

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Mini Hungarian language lesson: the secret dish.

"What's a dish universally known and eaten in your country but virtually unheard of outside it?" is a question that makes the rounds on Twitter every few months but I can't be bothered waiting for the next one.

It's "főzelék".

The word itself looks as simple as the dish: "főz" is "to cook" and "-elék" is a suffix roughly meaning "the result of", so "the result of cooking".

Thanks for nothing.

The official definition is "any kind of boiled or parboiled vegetable"; closer, but still a load of bollocks.

So here's mine: "főzelék is made of vegetables and it has a thick sauce".

What kind of vegetables?

Practically any: potato, cabbage, bean, pea, chickpea, spinach, squash, carrot, but usually only one veg at a time.

There is a mixed abomination called "finomfőzelék" but we don't talk about it.

Most of us have been scarred for life by school dinners featuring the pallid little harbingers of death suspended in a beige gel of doom.

In all honesty though, főzelék in general doesn't look very appetising: it has its roots in that old peasant staple of gruel and it has a serious image problem as a result.

Which is why, even in Hungary, you won't see many on restaurant menus, except in specialist outlets.

This lunch is 500 yen ($4.80) at Sukiya, a Japanese fast food restaurant which belongs to a category with about three big competitors.

I love the aesthetics of this category and they’re under remarked upon.

I think people underestimate QSRs in terms of social utility, but Sukiya et al describe themselves as mission-oriented enterprises. I believe this is largely sincere, and goes back to the 60s and 70s, when the clientele was primarily manual laborers who had migrated to work.

Japan was not a rich nation at the time, and day laborers in particular were both unlikely to be able to cook for themselves and unlikely to have much of a food budget, and so the chains sprung up offering an honest-to-goodness cooked meal delivered in under a minute for cheap.

This heritage continued over the years, even after Japan became a much more wealthy nation, and these chains function as social support and dignity for folks in diminished circumstances.

They also are a wee bit of a cartel, and I appreciate the aesthetics of the cartel:

Back when I was first in Japan, in the mid 2000s, there was an increase in the price of beef.

And the heads of the three chains got together, and decided that the price of the basic beef bowl needed to increase, but given the economic circumstances how could they hold the line.

THREAD 2 -LARGE INVESTORS

The #vegan option promises a new market horizon to a corporate system in need of expansion. In addition to novel product lines developed by transnational companies, business operations are launched as ambitious tech #startups.

#SiliconValley & other large investors are attracted in support of a model that will activate supply chains, market speculations, & trade wars over what are expected to be the resources of the future.

Financial #speculation has become key to overcome the stagnation tendencies of global markets. Global money management can be narrowed down to some 17 financial giants, collectively managing >$40 trillion in a self-invested network of interlocking capital.

This evolution is bound to come with geopolitical implications related to resource control & international trade, triggering interest of global power centers (e.g. @CFR_org). For instance, most of what goes into vegan burgers is now produced by #China.

Many wish to conquer that same space. The Canadian company Verdient is intending to become North America's largest organic pea protein plant.