Seth’s blog

I found some natto not made in Japan. It is from Japanese Traditional Foods, in Sebastopol, California. It comes in one-serving containers with tiny shoyu and mustard packets, just like frozen natto. It costs more – 50% more — than the frozen stuff, to my surprise. Since Japanese Traditional Foods was founded in 2006, and the Japanese natto makers are huge, I suppose it makes sense. It tastes almost the same as frozen natto, although I plan to do side by side comparisons just for fun.

The package had a curious statement:

Natto is a fermented food product, so it is best to consume it as soon as possible.

Huh? I think this is basically false: the fermented bacteria prevent other bacteria from growing. Sure, you can overferment but that won’t happen soon. Just as you can leave cheese at room temperature for quite a while, nothing bad will happen.

Tyler Cowen is the only person I know who talks about the great value of travel. Schools should teach it, he says. I agree. If you’ve read The Shangri-La Diet, you may remember the turning point was a visit to Paris when I inexplicably lost my appetite. You don’t know that my belief in fermented food — to be healthy, we need to eat lots of fermented food — also began with foreign travel: A trip to Japan.

When I got back to Berkeley from Beijing a few months ago, I looked around my kitchen: What should I make? I came up blank. Huh? I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t think of anything. (In Beijing I had never cooked.) The first few days back in Berkeley I made grilled fish. The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis. Then I went to the Fancy Food Show in San Francisco. At a Japanese food booth, including miso soup packets, I suddenly remembered: For my last nine months in Berkeley, after a trip to Japan in January 2008, I’d been eating a lot of miso soup. Every day. Which I’d never done before. Nine months was long enough to block out what I’d cooked before January 2008 yet short enough to be forgotten after three months in China.

Why did I start eating so much miso soup? In a Tokyo supermarket I had noticed they sold a lot of miso paste. Maybe there were ten types for sale. When I got home from Japan, that experience inspired me to buy a tub of miso paste. I’d add one or two tablespoons to a few cups of water, along with vegetables and thinly-sliced meat (plus vinegar and hot sauce). It was so delicious and easy that I started making miso soup every day. I went through five or six tubs of miso.

The miracle was how easy it was — that one ingredient (miso) should so easily produce such a delicious result. No one spice will do that. Garlic alone won’t do that. Ginger alone won’t do that. One ingredient was so compelling, pulled me so far from my previous cooking that I completely forgot about it after a three-month absence. During those nine months, while I was eating all that miso soup, I didn’t wonder why miso made such a difference. But when I finally thought of the umami hypothesis — we like umami, sour, and complex flavors so that we will eat more bacteria-laden food; bacteria tend to produce those flavors — all of sudden it made sense. Miso was so tasty because it was fermented. It was so tasty because it was so missing.

A year ago I wrote how the website I Got Uggs! began. Since then it has done well. I interviewed the proprietor recently.

Since our previous conversation about I Got Uggs! (April 2008), what’s happened with the site?

A lot more page views. On average, approximately 6,000 more. I’ve also increased revenue greatly by adding some revenue producing advertising. When we last spoke I was only using Google Adsense, but now I’m using three more sources.

How did you increase page views?

The first thing I did was change some keywords in my heading. For example, I added the words “Buy UGG Boots on Sale”. By doing that alone I got an increase of almost 2,000 hits overnight. The second thing I did was join three affiliate programs: Amazon Associates, Chitika, and ShareaSale. When someone buys a pair of UGG boots from the site, I get between 7 and 10% commission. Furthermore, I get money from other websites that want to place an advertisement on the site, and I charge them a monthly fee based on the number of page views using a formula I found on the ‘net. Now since, I changed the keywords, if you type “uggs” or “ugg boots” into Google, I Got UGGs! is on the first page or number 1.

What were page views before the increases?

I was getting an average of 1,800 page views per day in September and early October. That number went to close to 4,000 page views per day on October 4, and then to averaging 6,000 page views per day beginning October 5.

You get significant income from both I Got Uggs! and I Got Converse!?

I’m getting more from I Got Uggs, but it’s going down as the weather gets  warmer, but I Got Converse is going up everyday. I Got Uggs is showing some seasonal changes in terms of the income stream, but I’m praying that I Got Converse will eventually pick up the full slack.

You hired an assistant so you would have time to write a book. What does your assistant do? What do you pay him/her? How did you hire him/her?

She currently scans pictures, looks for pictures in the tabloids, and proofreads for me, in addition to other things like going to the post office and make 99 cent latte runs to the Dunkin’ Donuts on 8th avenue. More importantly, I’m training her to do the postings for both sites.

I pay her $10 per hour and she works about ten hours per week. She’s actually a Landmark [High School] student [where he teaches]. Despite being a straight A student, she wrote a paper on wanting to be a personal assistant as a career goal. Another teacher told me about her, so I offered her the opportunity to try it out. Thank God, she’s awesome and she loves it! She’s actually my 5th assistant. The others didn’t work out for various reasons.

You still have your teaching job, right?

Yes, I’m still teaching, but I’m looking to do the blogs and writing full-time after this school year ends. At the most, I plan on teaching part-time at a college, but not full-time anymore.

From a post about life in Taiwan:

Don’t they eat dogs and other odd stuff like snakes?
No.  They don’t eat dogs.

I think a small fraction of restaurants in Beijing serve dog, but I never encountered one and I never saw dog meat for sale. In Seoul, however, they obviously eat dogs. I saw dog meat for sale in a traditional market. The dogs were alive (as many animals are in Asian “wet markets”). I later saw a booklet aimed at visitors to Korea that dismissed dog-eating as some sort of urban legend.

After re-reading this post, written before my current fermented-food craze, I decided to see if I could buy natto (fermented soybeans) in Berkeley. At Whole Foods, they didn’t know what it was. Nor did they sell it. At Berkeley Bowl, which Saveur magazine recently seemed to say was the best food market in America, they told me it was in Aisle 3. I looked and looked and couldn’t find it. Okay, frozen natto is in Aisle 7, I was told. There was a surprisingly large selection, maybe 10 choices. Frozen natto comes in one-serving plastic containers bundled into packages of two or three that look like this:

That’s a two-container bundle. One serving is about $1.
Introduction to natto.