So I'll spare you the photos. But: I went to the local "asian grocery," and I bought this pan. A wok, actually. It looked nice and wasn't completely the 'cheap choice.' The food and service in this place were good, all the times I'd been there. I live in a university town; lots of Asian seeming folks were shopping there, and all the stuff sold there was labeled in a different language than English. So my thought was: this could be a good place to shop for "asian" cooking supplies.

I wanted to make a beef and water chestnut dish tonight. I used the new wok. It had been oiled, gently washed clean from store-born ick, and heated for the first time to a reasonable temp. I even used a plastic spatula.

Just as the meat cooking was getting done, I noticed something. A long, shiny, two-inch scrape on the floor of the wok. One that left edges of paint, turned back and ready to work into the meat or food cooking in the wok. I was horrified. All I could think of was "poisoned lead paint" and dying children. I also hated myself for the racist reaction I had to pans and kitchen stuff made abroad; I confess that I had one.

What should I do? I'm taking the wok back to the grocer from whom I bought it tomorrow. Should I report it? Them? To whom? How? Again, I keep thinking, "how many of these were sold to the unsuspecting?" What creeped me out was that I realized, had I not been closely paying attention, I could've cooked the scraped paint right into the meat and veggies and never noticed (you know how sometimes you only put half the pan of food onto the serving bowl for the table; the rest covers the cooking pan bottom) that the paint had mixed and flaked into the food, and was almost invisible in the dark sauce.

This, by the way, is life in the post-strong dollar economy. A friend of mine who is fluent in the languages of modern China, and who does regular biz in Sh and Bg, told me thusly: "they are keeping the good stuff for sale at home now; America gets the crap." That seems more or less true to me. You?

Hell, we thought we ran recipes just for fun. Fun is good. If you can't have fun during your revolution why the fuck bother?

Little did we know....from today's (Jan. 1 2008 that is) Guardian: relaying a question posed to a number of prominent scientists asking "What have you changed your mind about recently?":

What was the turning point in human evolution?

Richard Wrangham, British anthropologist who studied under Jane Goodall. Now at Harvard University, his research includes primate behaviour and human evolution.

"I used to think that human origins were explained by meat-eating. After all, the idea that meat-eating launched humanity has been the textbook evolutionary story for decades, mooted even before Darwin was born.

"But in a rethinking of conventional wisdom I now think that cooking was the major advance that turned ape into human ... Cooked food is the signature feature of human diet. It not only makes our food safe and easy to eat, but it also grants us large amounts of energy compared to a raw diet,