Chiang Mai: Thai cooking = brain damage or diabetes?

While Nolan was still occupied with Thai massage (and doing very well according to his teachers!), my mother, Maureen, and I set out to learn how to cook some Thai meals.  We were picked up late (Thai time) in an open air pick-up truck that made us feel like day laborers heading to a job.  Our first stop was the market where we learned about the different sauces used in Thai cooking - mushroom, oyster, fish, and soy  various seasonings - sugar, salt, MSG, curry pastes, and then walked around to look at the various vegetables and meat.  We were astonished and disturbed to learn that most Thai restaurants use MSG in their food.  Apparently, the only way to avoid it is to claim that you are allergic and if you eat it you will die.  Of course, the owners don’t want their guests dying on the spot, so they’ll substitute sugar for MSG.  Another disturbing sight at the market were the giant toads that I accidentally saw being clobbered to death.  It reminded me of the meat section of a market in Sapa, Vietnam where tables were heaped full of horses legs and other unimaginable items…or the fried bugs (crickets, silk worms, and cockroaches) in Chiang Mai’s night bazaar.

Leaving the market, we headed to the farm where we would be cooking.  We had a walk around and looked at all the fruit trees and vegetables growing before settling down to make our curry pastes in a mortar and pestle.  The pastes - red, green, and yellow - are surprisingly simple to make and what's better than FRESH curry paste?!  After this we set to work making tom yum soup, papaya salad, pad thai, spring rolls, desserts and our curry dishes.  All were made with fresh ingredients, most with coconut milk, and all with palm sugar or regular sugar.  Despite the delicious factor of every dish being near a ten, you have to wonder, with the main flavor enhancers in Thai cooking being MSG or sugar, how come the country isn't brimming with diabetics or worse from MSG chemicals?  Or maybe there is a problem?  Curious, I googled it and came up with this article.

Really, there's no need for all this sugar in their food.  With ingredients like galangal (Thai ginger), garlic, lemongrass, who needs this overload of sugar?!

Health rant aside, the cooking experience was rewarding.  Perhaps overly so.  Most of us only ate a third of our meals, and we took one complete meal home in Thai tupperware (aka a plastic bag).  I was delighted to discover that Thai cooking is much easier than I'd thought, which means anyone coming over for dinner will most likely get a taste of my new skills as it happens to be my favorite food!  You an be sure the take-away in NYC uses MSG!.

We left the farm exhausted from standing around a hot stove all day, but with bellies full, and lungs clear from the fresh countryside air.