He never arrived at Sinmalite and failed to make the trip home that day either. Instead, he ended up in the Burmese army at the age of 17.

Thu Zin Oo’s story is all too common in Burma, which the UN has repeatedly cited as one of the world’s worst perpetrators of child recruitment to its army. Human Rights Watch (HRW) estimated that Burma had “enlisted” 70,000 child soldiers in 2002. The rights watchdog has yet to report a drop in this figure, despite the regime’s purported attempts to curb underage recruitment. On that ominous day in December, Thu Zin Oo became another statistic.

His bus trip required a transfer at Bayintnaung Junction. As Thu Zin Oo waited for his connection he noticed a man beckoning him from a distance. Curious, he went to him.

The man asked how he was earning his wage and Thu Zin Oo told him he made 1,500 Kyats a day selling pork rinds. The mystery man suggested he could make more as a mechanic and that he would help him get a job.

“I was really interested in what he’d said and agreed to follow him,” Thu Zin Oo said. “At that time I was thinking I would be able to make a better life for my parents.”

The State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), Burma’s self-styled ruling clique of generals, has repeatedly stated that its policy prohibits recruitment of anyone under the age of 18 but the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers names Burma as the only Asian country where government armed forces forcibly recruit and use children as young as 12 years old.

The US State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report released this month, also listed Burma as a top offender. The report said: “The regime’s widespread use of and lack of accountability in forced labour and recruitment of child soldiers is particularly worrying and represents the top causal factor for Burma’s significant trafficking problem.”

It also chided Burma’s leaders for failing to not making significant efforts to eliminate the problem.

Under international pressure, Burma’s government officials agreed to comply with international standards and publicly vowed to crack down on the recruitment of children to the army, especially after the Security Council’s adoption of Resolution 1612 in 2005 to monitor the use of child soldiers. Working with the UN workers’ right body, the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the government created a complaint system in 2007 to provide a way for victims to seek redress.

Yet reports of forced child recruitment, mostly of boys aged between 14 and 16, remain.

“The army at the senior level has passed military orders saying that no child under the age of 18 should be recruited,” ILO liaison officer in Rangoon, Steve Marshall, said. “I think the problem exists at a lower level where there are some conflicting pressures placed on personnel in the military.”

Marshall said senior level commanders had required battalion commanders to meet ambitious recruitment quotas amid high-desertion and low-enlistment rates.

There is also a disparity between the penalties for failing to meet the quota and the crime of underage recruitment. The UN reported in 2008 that punishments for recruiting a child included official reprimands and monetary fines, whereas battalion commanders faced loss of rank if they failed to meet recruitment quotas.

The quota in turn made recruitment a profitable business in which brokers or police are compensated for new recruits. Marshall estimates that recruiters pay around 30,000 Kyats (about US$4,700) for each boy.

According to HRW, unaccompanied and poor children are often targeted because they are easily lured with the promise of compensation, food or shelter. The ILO estimates that roughly one-third of child soldiers are recruited in this manner. If they refuse, recruiters use force or threaten to arrest them on some frivolous charge. One-third volunteer for the army and another third are simply abducted.

“Often a broker will say to a kid, ‘Hey, I can find you a job that pays money’,” said Marshall. “They think they’ll get a job in a tea shop or something and the next thing they know they’re in the army.”

With the promise of a good job, Thu Zin Oo went with the man from the train station but realised his grave mistake when they arrived the Danyingone Soldier Collection Centre. It all happened so quickly, he said, and before he could process what was going on, he  was branded “Soldier Number TA/427438”. Later that night he was loaded into a locked train car with other boys in the same situation.

“In that carriage I saw about 100 young guys like me,” Thu Zin Oo said. “We were never allowed to use the toilet so the guy next to me urinated on the floor. As punishment he was badly beaten by some sergeants.”

Through the night the train transported the boys north to Pegu (Bago) Division. The camp was in the Yaytashay Township of Taungoo District.

During his 18 weeks of basic training, Thu Zin Oo was forced to cut and carry sugar cane while bullied by superiors. He recalled one instance of a group of trainees being beaten about the head with wooden poles for singing the national anthem too softly.

The Coalition reports that child soldiers are forced to perform tasks that include combat, portering, scouting, spying, guarding camps and cooking. Escape attempts are punishable with up to five years in prison for “desertion”.

Near the end of his basic training, Thu Zin Oo was allowed to call his parents. “I told them I wanted to go home as I wasn’t happy,” he said.

His parents, relieved to find their son, contacted the ILO for help. The ILO investigated Thu Zin Oo’s case and compiled proof-of-age documentation. He was discharged from the army on June 8.

The ILO received 128 child soldier complaints between last April last and this April – a dramatic increase on previous years, with 50 complaints between 2007 and last year.

“The number of complaints that we have received has definitely increased,” Marshall said. “However, we believe it is a reflection of people’s understanding of the law and awareness of their right to lodge a complaint.”

Marshall said the government and the ILO had been working to increase awareness in Burma. The government has undertaken awareness workshops for military personnel, and the ILO with the Ministry of Labour have started conducting awareness-raising programmes targeted at local authorities. The former started distributing government-approved flyers this month that detail people’s legal rights and how to file a complaint.

“Progressively, we have been in a position where we’re in agreement with the government and an increased number of children have been discharged from the military,” he said.

The ILO had been able to aid in the release of all but three children whose parents had filed complaints. One has yet to be found and two claimed they wanted to stay in the military, Marshall said.

“The reality is that if the parents lodge a complaint and we’re able to obtain their proof of age, the success rate is extremely high,” he said. “The government, I must say, is very co-operative when the evidence is placed in front of them.”

On the other hand, obtaining the evidence can be difficult. It is a process that can take anywhere from a few weeks to several months. To prove that the person was recruited at an age below 18, the ILO must find official proof-of-age documentation.

“In Myanmar [Burma] that is not always easy. A lot of families do not have birth certificates and in many poorer families the kids are not in the formal schooling system,” Marshall said.

Before the ILO, Marshall said a lot of citizens thought child recruitment was a fact of life and did nothing. Others knew it was wrong but were too scared to raise the issue.

Advocacy group Human Rights Education Institute of Burma (HREIB) director Aung Myo Min said that this fear of reprisal was still deeply rooted, which was why the number of cases reported to the ILO failed to reflect the true extent of the problem. He recalled instances in which individuals were arrested, harassed or intimidated by officials for reporting the existence of child soldiers in the past.

“The ILO’s rate is successful but think about the hundreds of cases that are never reported to the ILO,” Aung Myo Min said.

He added his concern that the military regime’s newfound enlightenment on the issue may be disingenuous.

“They just want to save face because of international attention on the use of child soldiers by the army,” he said. “If they really wanted to change it, blaming their own army is not enough. They have the power and the responsibility to actually stop the use of child soldiers, prevent the children from entering into the camps and take legal action against those who recruit the children into the army.”

Caroline Smialek dreams of cheese.

That is, she dreams of one day running her own dairy farm where she and her husband would make and sell cheese.

So last year, Smialek signed up for Farm Beginnings, a new business course in sustainable farming. Every other week for six months she and 14 students gathered at Hawthorne Valley Farm in Ghent, New York to piece together their business plans.

Caroline Smialek (seated) with Rachel Schneider

“It was a little overwhelming at times and frightening because you actually have to take these lofty dreams and put them on paper,” said Smialek, 47. “It made me realize that my husband and I were going to need a little more time to get there, but this was a great step to help push us in that direction.”

Sustainable agriculture, which is defined as farming that can be maintained without harming the environment, is a growing business with a wave of people itching to start their own small family farms. The trend didn’t come out of nowhere – local food has gained much popularity and recognition over the years as consumers become more discerning about the quality of their food and where it comes from. The market research firm, Packaged Facts, estimates that the demand for local food will increase to $7 billion in 2011, up from around $4 billion in 2002.

Farm Beginnings is all about business, but Hawthorne Valley Farm offers an array of learning opportunities. It has been an educational farm since its inception in 1972, with apprenticeships from the very start. Today, neighbors still refer to it as “the farm school.”

Hawthorne Valley Farm has also been a mainstay at the Union Square Greenmarket for the past 30 years. It remains one of the only all-inclusive purveyors that process and sell locally milled bread, dairy, meat and produce. In short, Hawthorne Valley Farm knows farming. Which is why beginning farmers come from all over the country to learn on its 400-acre site.

Anne Bohl, an second-year apprentice, milks a cow

Many start as apprentices, of which the farm accepts six at a time, to build farming skills. The year-long training involves nine-hour workdays on the farm, milking, herding and gardening. Farm Beginnings is what comes after that.

“We don’t force it on our apprentices but we make it available,” said Rachel Schneider, who heads up the Farm Beginnings program. “The way I see it is it’s the next step; they go hand in hand. You can’t farm without either one, you need both.”

Schneider. 59, said she wants to start a pre-Farm Beginnings three-day workshop where beginners could find out what it means to be a farmer and whether they’re cut out for it.

A start-up farm takes more than hard work alone. It takes a lot of capital. Schneider said a six-acre farm, which can farm vegetables intensively, would cost $90,000 to $120,000 just for the land. Then the farmer would need to build buildings, develop the farm and purchase equipment. One tractor would already cost $20,000.

The Farm Beginnings curriculum is supposed to break these daunting operations into smaller digestible bites. In addition to the finance and marketing classes, the students also have mentoring sessions with established local farmers who explain their own business operations in depth.

“I think the first year went pretty well but I think that I might end up doing a Farm Beginnings part one and two so we don’t overwhelm people in the beginning,” Schneider said. “There’s two phases you go through in planning an enterprise and I might be working on that curriculum so that we can get students like Caroline to an even more advanced place.

The Farm Beginnings program is the only one of its kind in the Northeast, but is part of an initiative under the same name that began in Minnesota in 1997 and has since spread to six other regions in the Midwest. Across the board, the program has over 500 graduates, and says that 60 percent of them are farming today.

Schneider said she hopes Hawthorne Valley Farm will continue to produce 15 new farmers every year to supply the demand for local food. She said she envisions the area developing a Hudson Valley foodshed, which is a local system of sustainable food, from production to consumption. The community could track food from the land it grows on, through the route it travels, at the market it’s sold at, to the table it’s served on.

A Hudson Valley foodshed will mean more farmers, more processors, more distributors and of course, more consumers clamoring for more local food. And yes, that includes cheese.

“There is a lot of room for more farmers and we have the largest city in the world that needs food,” Schneider said optimistically. “We have quite a market down there in New York City.”

Fifty children in yellow t-shirts from the Originals of Jamaica Day Care Center trekked across the Brooklyn Bridge toward City Hall this morning. They clutched colorful balloons from District Council 1707, a union for social services employees, and around their necks hung signs that read, “Parents and Children Need Daycare.”

Alongside them marched 1,500 protestors, including educators, daycare workers, parents and other daycare children. District Council 1707 organized the rally in response to the city’s planned citywide closure of 16 childcare centers.

“How could you deprive a child of a basic human right?” said Nina Beskire, 40, a single mother. “If the day care shuts down, my son and I are going to be in trouble because I’ll have to quit my job to stay home with him.”

Beskire’s 3-year-old son attends the Originals of Jamaica from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. five days a week. She said it’s affordable because it’s one of the city’s subsidized childcare centers. Eligible parents pay a weekly fee of $5 to $150 based on income. But because of proposed budget cuts by the Administration for Children’s Services, the day care will either be privatized or close its doors.

The Administration for Children’s Services said that all displaced children will be rerouted to other day care centers, but Linda Bissoondath, a teacher at the Helen Owen Carey Child Development Center in Park Slope, said that is unrealistic.

“We have 120 kids ages 2 to 5 from low-income families,” said Bissoondath at the rally. “The only other center around is at capacity and the others are private. We can turn into a private center but these families can’t afford to pay $150 a week.”

City officials said that most of the centers slated to close are in gentrifying neighborhoods such as Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill, Prospect Heights and Park Slope, that no longer require as many slots for low-income families. The 16 childcare centers currently hold 1,212 slots – with 1,100 children and 320 staff. The slots lost would represent five percent of the city’s total slots for subsidized day care. There are 324 other centers in the city.

These centers are all run by nonprofit organizations that receive contracts from the city. Many of those leases expired three years ago and would cost the city $17 million to renew them. Because of the rising cost, the administration has cut over 3,000 slots over the past six years. In the past four years, several kindergarten classrooms and after-school programs have also disappeared. This year’s budget cut will shut down an additional 31 classrooms.

Daycare Kids At Rally

“The reduction of early childhood programs is now a legacy of this administration,” said Raglan George Jr., the executive director of District Council 1707. “Since in office the Mayor has closed 30 centers and we’re out here today to dramatize how we feel about this.”

“We’re going to ramble today!” George hollered at the crowd in City Hall Park to rile them up.

The last time he led a rally was six years ago when the union’s day care workers went on strike for city contracts – and got them.

“The money’s there, we just have to grab it,” said GL Tyler, District Council 1707’s political director, who helped organize the event. “City council needs to fight for it. They did it once, they can do it again.”

Charles Rosa, the director of Leake and Watts Nursery School in the Bronx, said he was relieved that his day care wasn’t selected to close, but there’s still a fight to be fought.

“The Mayor is not negotiating in good faith for contracts,” said Rosa. “The city has a habit of letting contracts expire.”

That is why every four to six years daycare workers rally again for contracts. The only thing that seems to change are the children.

“Not much has changed over the years with the way the administration handles day care contracts,” Rosa said. “In four more years you’ll see us back here for another rally.”

Amy King, 41, a Victorianist and author of Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel, is one of few who are still versed in the language of flowers. Here, she decodes some common flowers, just in time for mother’s day.

Q. Explain the “language of flowers” and what role it played in the Victorian Era.

The language of flowers is exactly what its name suggests: the way flowers can be a non-verbal language or a means of expression between the sender and recipient. The language of flowers stays with us today in the widely understood meaning, for instance, of the red rose. We still know that sending red roses to someone is a declaration of romantic love.

If we take as evidence the number of language of flower books, which were often small gift books that proliferated in the Victorian period, then it seems safe to say that the Victorians were more conversant in the language of flowers than we are today.  In the preface to The Illustrated Language of Flowers, a small book first published by Routledge in 1865, the editor is clear that the most important thing is that the language itself be straightforward. These books suggest that the Victorians thought they could send very clear messages by giving particular flowers, shrubs, or trees.

Q. Can you give some common examples of flowers and their meanings?

In the language of flower books that I own, the daisy connotes innocence; the orange flower, often placed in bridal bouquets in the Victorian era, connotes chastity; a red tulip is a declaration of love; foxglove connotes insincerity; while a cedar leaf says ‘I live for thee.’

Q. Is it just flower type, or do color and arrangement add to the overall message?

I’m not entirely sure about this. One would think combining a few flowers with individual extant meanings would form a more complex message, but I don’t know if floriography was practiced that way in the 19^th century.  I do know that the few language of flower books I own have some flower combinations in them with specific meanings. For instance, a white rose by itself connotes ‘I am worthy of you,’ while red and white roses combined means unity. A full-blown rose, placed over two buds, suggests secrecy.

Q. Who participated in it?  Was it just young lovers or everybody?

The kinds of meanings associated with the various flowers would suggest that it could include all sorts of relationships, and not just romantic love. The American elm, for instance, connotes patriotism.

Q. Are there any flowers that reflect a hateful message?

Definitely. In the Illustrated Language of Flowers, the frontispiece has a picture with the following unattributed quote underneath it, “The flowers in silence seem to breathe. Such thought as language cannot tell.”  In other words, you can say things with flowers that you cannot speak.  Many of the floral messages in that book suggest unpleasant emotions at least, and sometimes even hateful messages. For example, dead leaves connote sadness; scotch thistle, retaliation; striped carnations, refusal; French marigold, jealousy; lotus flower, estranged love; and basil, hatred.

Q. Can these language of flowers books still be relevant in today’s culture?

Floral emblem books are reprinted today and I’ve found them in popular bookstores – there seems to be some revival of interest in them. And certainly when I’ve spoken about them to students they’re fascinated by the idea of being able to communicate without speaking. In our age of seemingly constant and authentically transparent communication through Facebook, Twitter, etcetera, I think there is something attractive in the subtlety of this language that people respond to.  Whether that means it will become widely understood again, which is essential for the language to have meaning, is not clear to me.

Q. With mother’s day coming up, what flowers would you suggest someone give his or her mother?

Moss! In several of the books that I own moss seems to be the plant that connotes maternal love. A live flowering plant surrounded by moss would be a lovely gift for mother’s day.

Q. Would the bouquet be different for a child giving their mother a bouquet versus a husband giving his wife one?

If a husband sent a dwarf sunflower, which signifies adoration, that’d be nice.  A flower called “virgin’s bower”, I understand, signifies filial love.  As a mother myself I’d be happy receiving a bouquet chosen simply by my child for me, no matter what the meaning.

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Dustin Wayne Harris likes cakes.  And he likes women to bake them for him.  This is evident in his new exhibition, Cake Mixx, at Heist Gallery.  Nine large photographs lined up around a tiny room on the Lower East Side, each one a different cake, each cake a different woman.

The inspiration behind this project came several years back when Harris received a cake for his birthday.  It was unsolicited, store-bought and he had no intention of eating it.  It languished in his fridge for months before Harris, now 28, decided to snap a photograph one day.  Although the cake was no longer its perky self, the picture turned out beautifully and sparked what became an obsession over the years.

In early 2009, Harris asked the woman he was dating to bake him a cake.  She made him a purple frosted square that oozed green foam from a corner.  Harris said he liked it, but it was also the most ridiculous thing he had ever seen.

“It was not even a cake you’d have on a table,” said Harris.  “You’d never show or serve anybody that cake.”

Lindsey Kremkau, its baker, said the cake was a representation of Harris.

“It’s fun to look at and tastes good but it’s not very appealing or perfect in any way,” said Kremkau.  “It’s like a mess on the inside, a mess on the outside but you still want to be near it, touch it and look at it because it’s interesting.”

It was the first of 20 cakes that she made him.  He just kept asking for more and she kept making them without question.

“It kind of made me feel like he needed me for something, so I was happy to do it,” said Kremkau, 24.

She also made a heart-shaped cake with licorice swirls and wrapped it really tight in Saran wrap to distort and squish the bright red frosting.  This one, she said, was more a representation of her.

After that, Kremkau left.  She moved to Seattle and left Harris with his cakes.

Harris then went to Chloe, an on-again-off-again relationship, to bake for him.  It was then that he realized the cakes were metaphors for his relationships.

Chloe’s cake, a lopsided sloppy cake with a jumble of mismanaged toppings, revealed to him that the relationship would end badly, which it did.

“Chloe turned out to be a hot mess and a perpetual victim,” said Harris.  “Her cake was absolutely insane.”

After Chloe, Harris was convinced he had stumbled on a valuable tool in the arsenal of psychoanalysis – cake reading.  He discovered that a lover’s cake offered great insight into the woman and how the relationship would turn out.

From that point on, at the beginning of a relationship, he would ask the woman to bake him a cake without any instruction or explanation.

“None of them did,” said Harris.  “Except Gianca.  She made me one but the picture didn’t work out.  But we worked out, she’s still around.”

Desperate for new cakes, Harris dug into his archive of past lovers – some of whom he hadn’t spoken to in years.

“Some people were hostile,” said Harris.  “Some were confused or refused.”

Many of them didn’t bake, which explains the eccentric looking ones in the show, like Kremkau’s green foam cake.  She said she had no idea how to bake a cake and in a way Harris forced her to be domestic.

Harris admits he liked the idea of forcing domesticity and femininity on these women who weren’t any good at traditional female roles.

Some of them didn’t take well to that.  He remembers one ex’s response to his request, “Are you fucking kidding me?  Are you high?”

Teresa Baker, Heist Gallery’s director, said she thinks Harris’s project re-examines what it means to “bake your man a cake.”

“For women, now we tend to be careful about falling back into traditional roles,” said Baker.  “If a man asks for one, she may be apprehensive.”

Nevertheless, Dani O’Terry, a longtime girl friend but never a girlfriend, took the task seriously, and baked an elaborate organic chocolate cake with almond whipped cream that she said took a lot of time and money to make.

“It was my way of putting attention and love into this project,” said O’Terry, 26.  “I wanted to show him that I cared about this.”

However, it didn’t make the cut into Cake Mixx because Harris thought it was too boring.  He said she felt duped when she found out what it was for.

“She said, ‘Why was I stupid?  Why would I think you’d want to eat my cake? You don’t care, you only care how it looks,” Harris recalled.

He did only care how it looked.  And that the cake was organic was completely wasted on him because he doesn’t eat cake.  He just collects them.  He has a huge refrigerator from the 70s in his Astoria apartment that is packed full of cakes.   When asked to explain them, Harris reached up to rub his temple, struggling to summon his memory.

“It’s hard to keep track,” he said.  “So many cakes.  So many girls.”

O’Terry said she wasn’t surprised to hear Harris had received so many cakes.

“His relationships are very charged and really passionate,” she said.  “That all these people who he’s been with did this for him says a lot.”

Some even shipped them all the way from California, where Harris grew up before moving to New York to attend the School of Visual Arts.

“Some of them did it because I think they felt guilty, like Meera,” said Harris.

“He certainly pegged me on that one,” said Meera Rangachar, who dated Harris for a brief period after she suffered the sudden death of her previous boyfriend.

She moved to New York from Los Angeles to escape it, but quickly learned she’d made a mistake and returned to the west coast just as abruptly as she had left it.  Harris said she emotionally shut down and just disappeared, but he doesn’t blame her.

“I felt so bad about the way I ended things,” said Rangachar, 27.  “It was abrupt and I didn’t give him the explanation he deserved.”

She said the cake she made is much like their relationship – messy and unfinished.  It was a round chocolate cake that Harris photographed in front of a pale green wall that casted a somber tone to it.  The sides of the cake were peeling off to reveal white cream in between the dark layers.

“Meera’s cake is very sad,” said Harris.  “And Meera’s kind of a sad girl.”

Though Rangachar concedes that her cake was baked out of guilt, she said she made it because she cared for him – enough to feel guilty.

As for the volume of women who went out of their way to bake for him, Rangachar chalks it up to his charm.

“There’s something kind of irresistible about him, as completely obnoxious as he can be, he’s very difficult to say no to.”

Cake Mixx, while a mere sample of all the cakes Harris photographed, is indeed a mix.  The images exhibit a varied group of women connected through one man.  Each photo has a relative story behind it, but no answers are given upfront.  Yet every cake, a result of an endearing gesture, speaks of the woman’s character.

Harris’s close friend and curator of Cake Mixx, Colin Huerter, said he thinks the cakes are portraits of their makers.

“By inviting his lovers to make him a cake, they inevitably reveal some essence of themselves in the process,” said Huerter.

Talia Eisenberg, the owner of Heist Gallery, said she loves how each piece exudes so much personality.

“You look at them and they don’t even look like cakes anymore after awhile,” said Eisenberg.

While setting up for the show, which goes on until April 18, she pointed out her favorite – Chloe’s doomsday cake.

“It’s pretty torn up, looks like it’s been through a lot, but in a way it’s still beautiful,” said Eisenberg.

“She has been through a lot,” Harris responded.  “She is pretty torn up.”

But while offal may be new and exciting for many Americans who grew up in the homogenized grocery store culture, a lot of people in ethnic communities simply consider it every day fare. Whether it’s because offal cuts are cheaper or because the texture is prized, nearly every culture – aside from traditional American – loves its blood and guts.

Walk into any hole-in-the-wall joint in Chinatown or Flushing where offal isn’t a buzzword and you’ll find congee with cubes of blood, hand-pulled noodles in beef broth made of tendon, tripe and tail, or fish head soup.

Xi'an Famous Foods in Chinatown

Considered an offal paradise among enthusiasts, Xi’an Famous Foods serves its liang pi noodles with every imaginable variety of offal cuts, from gizzards to ears. The cold, juicy Chinese noodles at the restaurant’s locations in Flushing and Chinatown are the perfect example of a long-held tradition in nose-to-tail eating.

For Chichi Wang, a weekly patron of Xi’an Famous Foods on East Broadway, offal is comfort food.

“My mother would always have gizzards on hand and she would simmer them in a classic Chinese braise of soy sauce, sugar, star anise and cinnamon sticks,” said Wang, 25. “To this day all I need is just one whiff of that aroma and it brings me back home.”

Now Wang, a food writer and offal expert, is working on a cookbook that will explore in depth what she calls the “fifth quarter.” She said the nose-to-tail eating she was exposed to while growing up fundamentally shaped the way she cooks and eats today.

“I have one tiny advantage, which is that I grew up eating these things,” said Wang. “So for me it’s very much a part of who I am and not a trendy thing that I fell in love with.”

She eats offal nearly every day and writes about it in her Serious Eats column called “The Nasty Bits” and her own blog, The Offal Cook.

Always on the hunt for great offal, Wang has a few observations on the differences between the new chefs and old chefs who come from a culinary tradition of using it.

Chefs at Xi'an Famous Foods

First is presentation. She said chefs at upscale eateries have to present offal so that it no longer looks like offal, otherwise people won’t buy it.

“If they’re going to have to confit a whole tongue, they can’t just plop a tongue on a plate. They’re going to have to burnish it and make it look appealing,” said Wang. “Whereas if you go to a Cantonese restaurant and you order chicken feet, you’re going to get a bowl with tiny hands inside – and they don’t care that it looks like hands.”

The second difference is that most of the newer chefs working with offal are still based in French and Italian cuisine, so they often prepare dishes like confited innards and pate terrines. Although that is changing.

“More and more chefs are starting to borrow from other cuisines that have been preparing offal for a really long time,” said Wang.

Her primary example is David Chang, the Korean-American chef of the acclaimed Momofuku restaurants, who has become somewhat of a liaison between the established Western cuisine and traditional Korean cuisine.

“David Chang is probably one of the first chefs to be able to stand up for Asian cuisine as it is and to really be able to communicate why it’s so good,” said Wang.

But even Chang has to tame his flavors to suit the Western palate. For example, he’ll use new kimchi rather than kimchi that’s been fermented for months, which is what Koreans typically use because it’s more pungent, sour and spicy.

“But cuisines are always adapting and I don’t buy the argument that it’s not as good because it’s not traditional,” she said. “Taste doesn’t lie – if it’s good, it’s good.”

The third difference between newcomer and long-time offal cooks is that chefs in high-end restaurants get their offal from sustainable and local farms like Fleisher’s in Kingston, where Wang recently took a butchery apprenticeship. When she tasted the tongue of a grass-fed and grain-finished cow, she said she immediately noticed its superiority over the tongue she would buy from Assi, a Korean market in Flushing.

“The quality of the tongue was just so high that very little had to be done to make it taste delicious,” said Wang. “That’s one thing that these newer chefs definitely have to their advantage. They’re able to get those animals and their customers are willing to pay the prices for that offal.”

She added, however, that in Asian restaurants, the preparation is sometimes so masterful that it tastes really good even though the animals they use aren’t nearly as well raised.

Beef tongue at Craftbar [Photo by Chichi Wang]

Uptown from Xi’an Famous Foods is Craftbar, the little sis to Tom Colicchio’s Craft, and one of the high-end restaurants that get offal from local sustainable farms. Craftbar offers an entire section completely devoted to offal. Lauren Hirschberg, the chef de cuisine, introduced it in 2009 with a modest three items but the selection quickly grew over the year. The staples have been chicken liver pate, sweetbreads, beef tongue and pig head terrine. Then he would place and pull items as they became available, such as his personal favorite – tripe, which he prepares in the Italian Florentine style with sofrito, herbs and Parmesan.

Hirschberg said he thinks the rise of offal in American culture is partly due to its increased exposure on television via chefs like Gordon Ramsay, Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain, famous for his adventures in extreme cuisines. But it was the enthusiasm of chefs like Chris Cosentino of San Francisco’s Incanto that elevated offal’s stature among their brethren and paved the way for a new niche in fine dining.

These days, the humble scraps are no longer the poor man’s leftovers because more and more chefs, like Cosentino, extol the virtues of eating all parts of an animal. Many now buy their animals whole from sustainable farms and have recovered traditional techniques in butchery that tend to be more economical, both in dollars and usage of the animal.

Hirschberg orders one 200-pound pig each week from Van Wie Farms or Fossil Farms, which costs around $800. In addition he also orders five beef tongues, 20 pounds of sweetbreads and 20 pounds of chicken livers a week from other farms such as J.T. Jobbagy, Debragga and Spitler.

And it sells every week. He recalled a recent week when he put a beef tongue ravioli on the menu, cooked with black truffles and fava shoots, which sold 15 to 20 orders a night – nearly 90 percent of the stock.

Though Hirschberg, 30, has been cooking with offal for six years because of a sincere love for it, he can think of another reason that may compel other chefs to take the plunge.

“In a place like New York City where rent is high and overhead is high and food costs a lot of money – if you can make one or two awesome dishes out of something that is pretty cheap to kind of offset your cost, then why not do it?” he said.

Of course, that’s another thing his counterparts down in Chinatown knew all along.

Angela Friedman manipulates flesh. That is her business.
In a cramped Manhattan studio on the west side, she cheerfully toils away at a dying art – one that requires a mastery of intricate and technical elements, like what Friedman coins, “The Squish Factor.”

Friedman received her degree in costume technology from The University of Northern Carolina and currently manages the women’s costume department at the New York City Ballet. The price of her custom corsets start at $300.

Formed in 2004, Gotham City Synchro is New York City’s only adult synchronized ice skating team. These women all have successful professional careers but make time in their busy schedules for an activity that keeps them young at heart.  Aged from 24 to 60, the group is a diverse mix. There are two lawyers, a fashion designer, a high-school teacher, a mathematician, an architect and a nurse – just to name a few.  They initially came together because of their love for skating but continue to meet because of a special bond that has grown over the years.

Although synchro has yet to be included as a category in the Olympics, teams compete regionally 3-to-4 times a year. Last year, Gotham City Synchro placed in the top three in all competitions.  For the 2009-2010 season, they perform a four-minute routine inspired by The House of Flying Daggers, a Chinese martial arts film, which calls for kick lines, pinwheels, blocks and traveling circles.

Practice sessions last about an hour – it’s not much time, so they get right down to work. Banter and gossip is reserved for moments off the ice – like the subway ride into Manhattan, where many of them work and rush off to after practice.

The city’s graffiti removal crews came and went several times, painting over the scrawls on the side of Manolo’s Mexican Restaurant on Greenpoint Avenue with an even coat of beige. Once, Mayor Michael Bloomberg even came to the Sunnyside restaurant to tout the city’s new graffiti removal program.

Nevertheless, time and time again, the black scribble crawled back across the brick, like spiders immune to pesticide.

Now, the restaurant’s owner, Manuel Morocho, 33, is considering a different, more colorful approach to his problem by inviting graffiti artists to paint his wall.

“Designs drawn by pros would make the neighborhood look better and stop this kind of graffiti that is not good for business,” Morocho said.

Some business owners and community leaders in Sunnyside and Woodside, which combined have drawn nearly a graffiti-removal call a day to 3-1-1, hope to get on the same canvas as taggers. They have enlisted established graffiti writers to paint murals on walls that used to get incessantly “bombed” with everything from initials to pseudonyms to obscenities.

The result: graffiti vandals leave the murals alone.

“Graffiti writers keep away out of respect for other artists,” said Alyssa Bonilla, the executive director of Sunnyside Shines Business Improvement District.

Community centers, such as Woodside on the Move and Sunnyside Community Services, have commissioned graffiti artists to paint several walls that used to attract graffiti. Now business owners are catching on.

Steve Steele, the manager of Northern Auto Parts in Long Island City, said he got tired of the ongoing battle.

“We used to paint, and they’d be back a week later,” said Steele. “I painted that wall at least 10 times.”

Last summer, graffiti writer Anthony “Dyzm” Giglio approached Steele with a long-term solution to his graffiti problem. With Steele’s approval, Giglio and eight of his friends painted a giant mural of colorful cars alongside their intricately rendered five-foot-high tags.

Steele, 40, said he is pleased with the results, and the mural remains unblemished. “I guess the only way is to conform to their rules,” he said with a shrug.

Giglio, 39, said he and his crew, The Deadly4Mula, have been around a long time and are well respected, so younger graffiti writers do not deface their work. In graffiti culture, writing over another person’s work is considered disrespectful.

Giglio and his friends paint murals for free, he said, because painting with a property owner’s permission beats having to constantly look over your shoulder for cops.

“A lot of the guys I paint with, we’re all a little older,” he said. “We have families and stuff like that, good jobs. We do not run around the streets writing graffiti no more. You know, that’s ridiculous.”

Even the most vehement opponents of graffiti, such as octogenarian Frances Schmidt, who volunteers to paint over graffiti on mailboxes and light poles, see some merit in the owner-sanctioned murals.

“It kind of grows on you after a while,” said Schmidt, 81. “It at least has a purpose behind it.”