NOTICIAS de LATINO: Partisan politics creates fun food feature

It’s not every day that mofongo and chicharones get into the newspaper, and even then, it usually is a mere reference in some sort of feature story about the island culture of Puerto Rico.

So leave it to me to be surprised by the angle for a story that the Houston Chronicle newspaper came up with recently – what kind of food did Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor likely eat when growing up in the Bronx?

THE FEATURE (http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/life/main/6503117.html) RATTLES off some of the primary dishes that constitute Puerto Rican cuisine.

And while I will be the first to admit I don’t care much for the concept of mofongo, I am not about to dismiss it as some sort of disgusting concoction.

After all, I am a fan of the soup known as menudo (not the boy band), and I do realize how some people might think that soup with its use of tripe and pig feet might not sound all too appetizing – even though it is.

So for those who like the idea of seasoned plantains, then perhaps the idea of mofongo isn’t all that strange. In fact, I can’t help but wonder a couple of decades from now how commonplace such dishes will seem to the “All-American” diet.

FOR THAT IS the trend in our society. Those so-called foreign dishes wind up getting adapted into the U.S. diet (just like spaghetti, or much of what many of us think of as Chinese food).

In fact, it already has begun. Take chicharones, which is the skin of the pork fried up into crispy chips. In fact, they often are eaten the same way that some people down potato chips.

For years, I have even noticed chicharones packaged and for sale in the most conventional of grocery stores – only marketed under the name “pork rinds.” It’s too bad because you have to admit, “chicharones” is a much more colorful name.

What other issues of interest to the growing Latino population are cropping up in the news these days?

EL REY DE POP?: I stumbled across a website, Hissip (which purports to offer “Latino gossip like you’ve never read it before”) that tries to establish how influential Michael Jackson was – even among Latinos.

Its evidence amounts to several photographs of the one-time leader of the Jackson 5 taken with entertainers whose ethnic origins derive in Latin American countries.

I’d be inclined to dismiss it as pure trivia, but I must admit that a part of me found it to be a (http://hissip.com/rare-michael-jackson-photos-with-latino-celebrities/7687) bit humorous.

After all, where else is one going to get to see Michael Jackson at his career prime standing side by side with a youthful Ricky Martin (from back in the days when he was with the boy band Menudo – not the soup)?

CARNE ASADA A SUBSTITUTE FOR STEROIDS?: I’m going to steal a line from Gustavo Arellano, who writes the “Ask a Mexican” column that appears in several alternative weekly newspapers across the United States.

When asked about the significant number of Latin Americans and Latinos who are succeeding these days in professional baseball, he suggested that one reason may well be that we have an alternative to the steroids that so many ballplayers of the past decade appear to have used to bulk up.

He cites Fernando Valenzuela, the one-time Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher with the protruding gut (http://www.riverfronttimes.com/2009-07-01/news/home-run-why-latinos-are-baseball-all-stars/), as evidence of the benefits of a hearty diet of carne asada.

If only that were true. Then I’d have been the ballplayer who wracked up a couple of million dollars during the course of a career. Instead, all I have is the gut.

-30-