I have long said there’s nothing you can’t buy on the Internet. This is what I love about it. When a friend was getting married, and everyone in our office had chipped in to buy her a Kitchen Aid mixer and sausage making attachment, someone speculated about how the friend was going to make sausages: where on earth would she find sausage casings? Testing my theory, I did a quick search and found sausagesupplies.com. Synthetic, or natural?
One of the reasons I love that you can buy anything on the Internet is because I do buy all sorts of weird things on the Internet. Beyond Christmas and birthdays—for which I naturally do all of my shopping on the web—I buy all sorts of ingredients and food products online. I don’t mean premade food products from places like Williams-Sonoma, or Fruit of the Month Club offerings from Harry and David. It’s a little stranger than that.
First of all, I mail order eggs. Because I make mayonnaise from scratch, and I don’t want to be afraid to let my children lick the spoon when I make cookies, I used to buy pasteurized eggs at the grocery store. When we moved, I found that they didn’t carry them at any of the grocery stores near us. It is possible to make mayonnaise with egg substitute, which was a suggestion I read in a cookbook, but it really doesn’t taste very good. I found the company that sells the eggs online, and discovered that they would mail order them to me. I pay almost as much in shipping as I do for the eggs, but it’s worth it. I also have to buy five dozen at a time, but since they last pretty much forever, that’s not such an issue.
The first question that most people ask (after “Are you nuts?”) is “Don’t they arrive all broken?” The answer is, once. I had placed two orders with the company, and both had arrived with nary a shell cracked. Then this past Christmas, I realized I was running low, and should order a new box. My word of advice to anyone thinking of buying eggs via mail order is to avoid the holiday season. More than half of the eggs were broken when I opened the box. I emailed their customer service, and they sent me out a new shipment of eggs at no charge (which meant I had seven dozen eggs). While one or two of the second batch were broken, it was certainly not an unreasonable state of affairs. I happen to know from a college professor I once had, who worked in a UPS warehouse during grad school, that the people at UPS treat packages atrociously and it gets worse over the holidays. Evidently they’re hostile and angry because they get paid peanuts, but rather than buying assault rifles, they take out their aggressions on a bunch of innocent corrugated cardboard boxes full of My Little Pony dolls, Matchbox cars, and (in my case) pasteurized eggs.
Over the years I’ve bought one-off oddball things via mail. The King Arthur Flour Company sells all kinds of useful, hard-to-find items in their Baker’s Catalog. One year my husband decided he wanted a Malted Milk Ball cake for his birthday. I had seen the recipe and offered him a choice of several cakes, and he picked that one. The only problem was that the recipe called for malted milk powder, and I couldn’t find that at any of the specialty shops near me. Something sent me to the King Arthur Flour Company website and there, lo and behold, along with things like pretzel salt and cheese powder, was malted milk powder. I ordered it (again, the shipping was outrageous—this is the only drawback to mail order, I’ve found), and it arrived in time for me to make the birthday cake. I did learn a lesson, though: if you’re going to put crushed malted milk balls on top of a cake as a garnish, do so just before it’s served. They’ll melt if they’re scattered over the moist frosting and sit there overnight.
Once upon a time when I believed that Dr. Atkins held the solution to my weight loss problems, I ate bunless hot dogs by the pound (along with bacon and chicken salad). Normally I eat my hot dogs with yellow mustard, but for some reason this just didn’t cut it with the bunless version. Somehow I found champagne mustard. It made my hot dogs wonderful, and I soon went through a whole jar. I don’t remember where I got it, but for some reason I couldn’t get any more at any of the stores near me. In my protein-induced insanity, I was desperate. Enter the Mount Horeb Mustard Museum. This place sells every kind of mustard you’ve ever heard of (and about nine thousand kinds you haven’t heard of). Sure enough, my champagne mustard was one of their offerings. I promptly ordered several jars. Although my experience with Atkins was a bust (let’s face it—there is no silver bullet for weight loss), the mustard was a success. I don’t order it on a regular basis anymore, but I have ordered people gifts from the Mount Horeb Mustard Museum.
Then there are things that I’ve often considered buying, but haven’t yet got around to it. The one that I think of most often is Pierce’s Pit Bar-b-que. Pierce’s is a little dive outside of Williamsburg, VA, where my husband went to college. Actually, it’s in a town called Toano, which is just about as charming as its name makes it sound. In order to get there, you drive for about fifteen minutes along an access road that parallels the highway before you come to a yellow and orange building with lots of picnic tables and lots of cars in the parking lot. “What’s this?” you think the first time you see it, “And why are all these people at this dumpy place?” I’d add that you might even be able to say that to the person who brought you there and get your questions answered, because the likelihood that you’re going to find Pierce’s on your own is pretty slim. There are a couple of highway signs directing you to it, but unless you’ve heard that it’s great and you’re dying to try it, you’re going to give up your quest after the first mile or two and just go for the McDonald’s at the interchange.
Now that I no longer live anywhere near Pierce’s, the only way for me to get it is via mail order. And they do take orders. You can get their great bar-b-que by the pound, and you used to be able to buy packages of their squishy rolls, sent to you overnight. If only all the places I loved that I was no longer close to would ship me their food. The only downside is that you can’t get their coleslaw shipped too. Their coleslaw is too sweet on its own, but you need that sugar to cut the heat of the sauce they use. It’s not excessive, but it’s hot enough that it needs a little tempering. In fact, my husband may get Pierce’s for his birthday in a couple of months.
These days I also buy kind of strange food items as gifts. This past Christmas one of my uncles, who also happens to have a taste for oddball food products, almost got Steen’s Pure Cane Syrup as a present. He didn’t because the shipping to get it in time would have cost me too much (I didn’t think to get it for him until pretty late in the game), but he’ll probably get something like that next year. I found a book called “Food Finds” that breaks out by category all kinds of small producers of usual and unusual foods. Whatever kind of jam, beverage, cookie, bread, meat, or vegetable you’re looking for, someone somewhere makes it. You can get things like Nut Goodies shipped to your door (these are a marshmallow, caramel, chocolate and peanut candybar-ish thing sold in the South), you can buy Cherry Wine soda, Cajun flavored potato chips, and frozen grouse. Whatever you crave, it’s all there on the Internet. What a wonderful country this is.
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Friday, February 16, 2007
Alpha-Beta Cooking
“Men have gotten better at cooking, and that’s all positive. But men can’t share. If you can find a man who’s OK with a woman being in charge in the kitchen, tell any woman to marry him immediately.”
So says Alan Richman, the well-known food writer, in an article for the New York Times on alpha and beta cooks. The alpha cook is usually the woman, or used to be back in the days when he was the breadwinner and she the bread maker. These days, as men are cooking more and more, they now feel themselves in charge in the kitchen, and there’s a struggle. Many women (including Richman’s own wife, from whom he is now separated, although she says the kitchen struggles had nothing to do with it, and it was an amicable parting) are now taking a backseat to their male partners, who are more and more often responsible for whipping up dinner, either on Tuesday night, or Thanksgiving night.
In our house, we have the problem of dual alpha cooks. We’re each inclined to watch the other and think “You’re doing that wrong.” God help us if I plan the menu, and let him execute it. He’ll put dinner on the table and I’ll say, “Well, this is very nice. Thank you. Of course, I was planning to roast the green beans with shallots, instead of sautéing them with bacon, but its’ still nice…and I was going to make a béarnaise sauce for the filet mignon, instead of a mustard sauce…but it’s OK…and I was going to run these mashed potatoes through the ricer…but it’s fine.”
Ungrateful, you say? It’s part of being an alpha cook. It’s not that I’m ungrateful, it’s just that I had a meal planned and when, for one reason or another, he winds up being the one to cook it, he doesn’t always do it the way I would have. Even if I tell him how I was planning to do it.
That’s where the “This is nice but…” comments come into play. I say “Here’s what we’re having and I’m thinking this, this, and this.” He says “OK” and then proceeds to do what he wants, regardless of my instruction.
Don’t think the reverse never happens either. I’ll be making cookies, and he’ll come out and say “I was going to make Toll House bars.” I’ll say “Well, you’re getting oatmeal chocolate chip cookies.” I can see the thought as though it was in a bubble over his head, “But I wanted Toll House bars.” The bubble over my head is smaller: “Tough.”
We’ve known from the beginning that we were both alpha cooks, and that things were not going to be sunshine and roses as far as our cooking together went. I knew it as soon as I tasted his white sauce (I have no idea when he figured it out; maybe when I opened my mouth and criticized his white sauce). He didn’t salt it. Do you know what white sauce with no salt tastes like? It tastes like flour and butter with some kind of liquid in it. It tastes like hell, that’s what it tastes like.
This put me in a position of superiority in my mind (arrogant, you say? Maybe, but I can make good white sauce). You can’t make sauces, I thought. I can. In this way, if no other, my cooking skills are superior to yours. Why did I feel the neurotic need to assure myself that my cooking skills were at least as good as, if not superior to, his? Because he’s very critical, that’s why. If something burns, sticks, or otherwise doesn’t turn out, he’ll say “I thought that might happen. I noticed you weren't stirring it frequently enough.” Well, thanks.
His feeling of superiority comes from his belief that his methods are more professional than mine. “I clean as I go,” he insists, “I learned how working in restaurants.” His tone, I might add, is smug. I too learned to cook in a commercial kitchen, and I know how to clean as I go. I admit I don’t always, but then in a commercial kitchen, you have 40 gallon sinks in which to put dirty pots and pans. We don’t yet have these at home. Also, the kitchens we’ve been working in for the past 13 years have all been atrociously designed, which makes cleaning as you go a challenge (our next kitchen will be designed by us, so if the design is poor, at least we have no one to blame but ourselves). Still, he feels that his process is superior to mine, therefore he must be a better cook.
Then too, we constantly fight over how much salt goes in our food. He barely salts. I salt to a degree that he sometimes finds overwhelming. We argue about this. Salt, I say, needs to be added while you’re cooking, not afterwards. In some cases, salting after the fact is useless. He maintains that everything can have salt added to it at the table and be fine. So when I cook I salt my way, and when I ask how it is, he responds, “A little salty, but it’s good.” When he cooks he salts his way and I add extra salt at the table. He notices.
I’ve read articles in cooking magazines that give menus that couples can make together. Most of these offer both organizational structures: one person is in charge, while the other is a prep or sous chef, or each person takes a dish or two and is solely responsible for preparing those components. Really we work better with the latter model. If one of us is in charge, s/he is just too bossy and the other person winds up either pissed off or with hurt feelings (or sometimes both).
Part of my problem is that I feel like I really “own” the kitchen. I make the menus, I make the grocery lists, when we move into a new kitchen I’m the one who dictates the organization of the space. Therefore I must be in charge, right? Not as he sees it. I think he feels like I’m the kitchen manager, and he’s the executive chef. I’m responsible for making sure he has everything he needs to work his magic. I do the drudge work of deciding that we’ll have chicken, buying the chicken, making sure we have ingredients for turning the chicken into something delicious (including having all utensils and cooking implements in convenient locations), and then he steps in with his expertise and, voila! Dinner.
Despite all this, we actually do pretty well together in the kitchen, provided we have our own workstations and don’t have to cross paths too often. We’re building a new house, and the kitchen is quite large, and I will see to it that we have things like measuring cups, measuring spoons, and knives on both sides of the kitchen. The truth is that I like that he can (and will) cook. I have a friend whose significant other wouldn’t make himself a peanut butter sandwich if he was starving, but feels free to criticize anything she makes. My husband is OK with me being in charge in the kitchen, just so long as he doesn’t have to be in there at the same time. Or if he is in there, he can sit there with a drink and kibbutz my process and technique. It’s only fair—I do the same to him. I always remind him to add salt. He always ignores me.
So says Alan Richman, the well-known food writer, in an article for the New York Times on alpha and beta cooks. The alpha cook is usually the woman, or used to be back in the days when he was the breadwinner and she the bread maker. These days, as men are cooking more and more, they now feel themselves in charge in the kitchen, and there’s a struggle. Many women (including Richman’s own wife, from whom he is now separated, although she says the kitchen struggles had nothing to do with it, and it was an amicable parting) are now taking a backseat to their male partners, who are more and more often responsible for whipping up dinner, either on Tuesday night, or Thanksgiving night.
In our house, we have the problem of dual alpha cooks. We’re each inclined to watch the other and think “You’re doing that wrong.” God help us if I plan the menu, and let him execute it. He’ll put dinner on the table and I’ll say, “Well, this is very nice. Thank you. Of course, I was planning to roast the green beans with shallots, instead of sautéing them with bacon, but its’ still nice…and I was going to make a béarnaise sauce for the filet mignon, instead of a mustard sauce…but it’s OK…and I was going to run these mashed potatoes through the ricer…but it’s fine.”
Ungrateful, you say? It’s part of being an alpha cook. It’s not that I’m ungrateful, it’s just that I had a meal planned and when, for one reason or another, he winds up being the one to cook it, he doesn’t always do it the way I would have. Even if I tell him how I was planning to do it.
That’s where the “This is nice but…” comments come into play. I say “Here’s what we’re having and I’m thinking this, this, and this.” He says “OK” and then proceeds to do what he wants, regardless of my instruction.
Don’t think the reverse never happens either. I’ll be making cookies, and he’ll come out and say “I was going to make Toll House bars.” I’ll say “Well, you’re getting oatmeal chocolate chip cookies.” I can see the thought as though it was in a bubble over his head, “But I wanted Toll House bars.” The bubble over my head is smaller: “Tough.”
We’ve known from the beginning that we were both alpha cooks, and that things were not going to be sunshine and roses as far as our cooking together went. I knew it as soon as I tasted his white sauce (I have no idea when he figured it out; maybe when I opened my mouth and criticized his white sauce). He didn’t salt it. Do you know what white sauce with no salt tastes like? It tastes like flour and butter with some kind of liquid in it. It tastes like hell, that’s what it tastes like.
This put me in a position of superiority in my mind (arrogant, you say? Maybe, but I can make good white sauce). You can’t make sauces, I thought. I can. In this way, if no other, my cooking skills are superior to yours. Why did I feel the neurotic need to assure myself that my cooking skills were at least as good as, if not superior to, his? Because he’s very critical, that’s why. If something burns, sticks, or otherwise doesn’t turn out, he’ll say “I thought that might happen. I noticed you weren't stirring it frequently enough.” Well, thanks.
His feeling of superiority comes from his belief that his methods are more professional than mine. “I clean as I go,” he insists, “I learned how working in restaurants.” His tone, I might add, is smug. I too learned to cook in a commercial kitchen, and I know how to clean as I go. I admit I don’t always, but then in a commercial kitchen, you have 40 gallon sinks in which to put dirty pots and pans. We don’t yet have these at home. Also, the kitchens we’ve been working in for the past 13 years have all been atrociously designed, which makes cleaning as you go a challenge (our next kitchen will be designed by us, so if the design is poor, at least we have no one to blame but ourselves). Still, he feels that his process is superior to mine, therefore he must be a better cook.
Then too, we constantly fight over how much salt goes in our food. He barely salts. I salt to a degree that he sometimes finds overwhelming. We argue about this. Salt, I say, needs to be added while you’re cooking, not afterwards. In some cases, salting after the fact is useless. He maintains that everything can have salt added to it at the table and be fine. So when I cook I salt my way, and when I ask how it is, he responds, “A little salty, but it’s good.” When he cooks he salts his way and I add extra salt at the table. He notices.
I’ve read articles in cooking magazines that give menus that couples can make together. Most of these offer both organizational structures: one person is in charge, while the other is a prep or sous chef, or each person takes a dish or two and is solely responsible for preparing those components. Really we work better with the latter model. If one of us is in charge, s/he is just too bossy and the other person winds up either pissed off or with hurt feelings (or sometimes both).
Part of my problem is that I feel like I really “own” the kitchen. I make the menus, I make the grocery lists, when we move into a new kitchen I’m the one who dictates the organization of the space. Therefore I must be in charge, right? Not as he sees it. I think he feels like I’m the kitchen manager, and he’s the executive chef. I’m responsible for making sure he has everything he needs to work his magic. I do the drudge work of deciding that we’ll have chicken, buying the chicken, making sure we have ingredients for turning the chicken into something delicious (including having all utensils and cooking implements in convenient locations), and then he steps in with his expertise and, voila! Dinner.
Despite all this, we actually do pretty well together in the kitchen, provided we have our own workstations and don’t have to cross paths too often. We’re building a new house, and the kitchen is quite large, and I will see to it that we have things like measuring cups, measuring spoons, and knives on both sides of the kitchen. The truth is that I like that he can (and will) cook. I have a friend whose significant other wouldn’t make himself a peanut butter sandwich if he was starving, but feels free to criticize anything she makes. My husband is OK with me being in charge in the kitchen, just so long as he doesn’t have to be in there at the same time. Or if he is in there, he can sit there with a drink and kibbutz my process and technique. It’s only fair—I do the same to him. I always remind him to add salt. He always ignores me.
Thursday, February 15, 2007
Candy Fix
I didn’t get a box of candy for Valentine’s Day. That’s OK—I don’t really need it. This candy- and flower-centric holiday got me thinking about candy in general. I love candy. I have a serious sweet tooth and have even been known to eat brown sugar straight. Not directly from the bag off a spoon or anything, but if a little clump happens to fall on the counter while I’m making cookies, I don’t have any hesitation about blotting it up with a finger and eating it. My husband cringes.
I’m mostly a milk chocolate gal, although I’ve been slowly converting to dark chocolate of late years. Right now I can go either way. I’ve tried that oft-recommended dieters’ tip to eat a single piece of very high quality dark chocolate and savor it slowly. I frankly think it’s bull. I’ve done it, but all it does is make me think “That was fine. Now, what’s for dessert?”
As with all children, I started eating candy as a pretty young kid (except some people I knew who were the neighbors of a family friend, who never gave their kids refined sugar—my friend’s son came home from an afternoon spent there one time and, when asked if he had fun, replied in a tone of painful disdain “Mom, she gave us granola for a snack.” I had to agree with him that that pretty well summed up his experience). I got my candy bars at Higger’s Drug Store up the street from my house. They cost a dime. Having heard repeatedly to my disgust and boredom as a kid about when candy bars cost a nickel, I always swore I wouldn’t use that line: “They cost a dime.” How great the divide sometimes between theory and practice.
For some reason when I was younger, I always bought Chunky bars. Except that they weren’t bars. They were cubes of chocolate. Really more of a bizarre trapezoid shape. They looked like pyramids that had had their top two-thirds whacked off. I’m not sure why, because I was perfectly adept at reading, but I could never manage to remember which one did, and which one did not have the raisins in it—the silver wrapper or some other color wrapper. I hate raisins in chocolate bars. It’s an outrage.
I also remember buying Marathon bars. I seem to be the only person who ever did because 1) they no longer make them and 2) I’ve never found anyone else who even remembers them, much less also ate them. They were long braids of caramel covered with milk chocolate. The ads on TV had an image of the “braid” going past and past and past….clearly intending to convey the message that the “Marathon” bar lasted a long time. This characteristic of lasting a long time seems to have been a big feature to promote in candy bars during the late 70s and 80s. The Charleston Chew and, I think, Sugar Daddies and Sugar Mamas, made the same claim. In the 90s they seemed to move to more of almost a “meal replacement” strategy. Snickers bars, as I recall, ran a campaign promoting a Snickers bar as a way to fill you up, and carry you until your next meal.
I always wanted stuff in my candy bars. Peanut butter, peanuts, caramel, nougat (whatever the hell that is), or that fluff in a Three Musketeers bar (whatever the hell that is). I went to Dublin on business once and spent about 50 bucks in a newsagents buying candy bars that we didn’t have in America. I noticed that they had an awful lot of offerings with raisins (ugh), but an equal number with caramel. Fortunately none of them seemed to sully the glorious caramel with the vile raisins. Caramel is my favorite candy bar filling, followed by peanut butter as a close second. Actually, hazelnut anything is my favorite candy filling, but very few of the “big” candy makers offer a candy bar with hazelnuts in it. Too expensive, I would guess.
In high school I went to Australia and was there introduced to three kinds of candy bars that I’d never had before, two of which are now available at my local grocery store. There was the Violet Crumble, which was kind of a grainy sugar, flavored with essence of violet (which sounds gross and weird, but was actually OK). The Flake bar was nothing more than very, very thin leaves of milk chocolate that would have been pretty good, except that they were so delicate that what you wound up with was a candy wrapper full of chocolate shards. You just kind of “drank” the chocolate out of the wrapper, which you opened at one end to form a tube. Then there was a honeycomb concoction the name of which escapes me. I’ve since seen this in Australian cooking magazines called generically “honeycomb” and recommended as being used to top ice cream when smashed to smithereens. It was very crunchy, and did have a distinct honey flavor. Its disadvantage was that it really stuck in your teeth. All three of these, if I’m not mistaken, were manufactured by the Cadbury company.
Cadbury is much bigger overseas than it is in this country. In this country we have Hershey’s, and M&M Mars to pretty much own the candy market. I remember reading that in the 1940s Hershey’s representatives used to go to elementary schools and hand out candy bars to all the kids. The taste of chocolate is (as you no doubt have read), like so many food products, subject to its recipe. A little more of this, a little less of that, and you’ve got a completely different taste, even though it’s still “milk chocolate.” Hershey’s idea was that kids would get hooked on Hershey bars at a young age and would come to think that the flavor of Hershey’s milk chocolate was what chocolate was “supposed” to taste like. Any other recipe would taste odd to them, and they would (in theory) find it to be inferior to the flavor of Hershey’s.
Now we also have Godiva chocolates, which used to have an air of exclusivity about them, but are now sold in every possible outlet, including gas stations and nail salons. I still think they’re good chocolates, but they’re mainstream now. This move in America to make mainstream what used to be luxury items I think is a large part of what contributes to our dietary problems. Things that used to be special occasion dishes—Fettuccini Alfredo, elaborate desserts made with pastry cream, rack of lamb—are now so commonplace that they’ve lost their impact and we don’t appreciate them anymore. As a result, we consume them too casually. Of course, the antidote for that may well be a return to the days when we ate Hamburger Helper (which of course comes in an Alfredo flavor in the form of Chicken and Tuna Helpers) and Betty Crocker Au Gratin Potatoes for dinner, which I really can’t see as a win-win situation for anyone (except maybe General Foods). Sure, it would make “special” meals much more appealing by contrast, but it would mean we’d be eating dehydrated potatoes three hundred plus days a year, and I don’t know if I could handle that, myself.
As usual, I digress. So instead of Godiva as our exclusive chocolates, we now have “artisanal” chocolates made in small batches by hand. Often these chocolate makers have an unfortunate tendency to try jazz up (as I’m sure they see it) plain old boring chocolate, and they mix in just plain weird stuff like chili powder, black pepper, paprika, and (yes, I’ve seen this) curry powder. I really don’t think that I can think of a more disgusting thing to do to perfectly good chocolate than stick curry powder in it. I love curry powder, but it doesn’t belong in chocolate.
The big candy manufacturers have their own tricks to try to lure us into buying more candy. They’ve created countless variations on old favorites. Where we used to buy Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Crunch bars, and M&Ms, we can now buy Caramel or White Chocolate Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Crunch bars filled with caramel, and M&Ms filled with peanut butter. All of these are perfectly fine, but we’re spoiled with choices. I kind of wish we could go back to the days when my most perplexing candy problem was remembering which color Chunky wrapper had the raisins, and which did not.
I’ve always had a kind of affection for the niche candy bars. I went through phases as a kid (in the post-Chunky era) when I was attracted to Zero bars, Fifth Avenue, Zagnut, and Clark bars. With the exception of Zero bars, all of these are variations on peanut butter flavored candy. The Zero bar is a chocolate nougat, covered with something that I wasn’t clear on—it was white, but it wasn’t really white chocolate. White chocolate is an abomination, and should be outlawed. It’s not chocolate, and it just tastes like very sweet wax. In fact, I’ve found by checking the Hershey’s website (thank you, Internet) that the coating is “white fudge.” Maybe that’s just a fancy way of saying white chocolate, but in any event, there’s so little of it in a Zero bar that it manages not to offend.
In the 80s, when we all became so ludicrously afraid of fat in anything, several companies introduced reduced fat chocolate. For some time I was a devotee of Sweet Escapes candy bars, and we all started buying Three Musketeers because they were “low fat” (which translated, really, to “high air content” but that concept seemed to either elude us or not matter, so keen were we to be able to have our cake and eat it too, or in this case, to have our chocolate but not the fat). Most of these reduced fat offerings seem to no longer be available, as many people have come to their senses. Or at least switched to low carb candy bars, which I think must be pretty disgusting, so I’ve never bothered to try one. Now you can also buy chocolate bars that are enhanced with “nutrients.” This seems the most ridiculous concept of all to me. The idea of eating chocolate and soothing the guilt by reminding oneself that the candy contains calcium, or vitamin A, or something. I say, if you want vitamin A, eat a carrot. If you want chocolate, eat chocolate.
The chocolate I eat these days tends to be mostly in things, rather than just solo. I make things like chocolate chip cookies (with Toll House morsels—no overpriced Sharffen Berger shards for me, thanks). Although I love chocolate, I don’t really like chocolate ice cream, as I think the aftertaste is too strong, and if they put chocolate bits of any kind in ice cream, the effect of freezing on chocolate makes it waxy, which I loathe. I’ve also just discovered chocolate covered Altoids, which they’ve been handing out as free samples as I walk to work every morning. Doubtless these are just Altoids that are in some way deficient—chipped or otherwise deformed—that they coat with dark chocolate, but they’re really not bad. Four of them are a little mouthful, they give me a quick chocolate fix, and offer a little breath freshening bonus. The chocolate softens the usually overpowering peppermint of the mint itself.
Of course, the health reporters of the world keep assuring me that chocolate (dark chocolate, anyway) is good for my heart, and that a little bit won’t hurt me and may even be good for me. While I find this interesting information, I’m not eating chocolate because it might be good for me. I’m eating it because I like it. Even though I didn’t get any for Valentine’s Day.
P.S. For those who live close to a Godiva store, or a Barnes & Noble, and want to stock up, the day after a “chocolate” holiday (Valentine’s Day, Easter, Christmas), Godiva stores and BN sell the boxes of chocolates that have holiday-themed decorations at half price. My husband and I used to go and buy twice as much candy as we could have bought two days earlier, and then hang on to it, eating it a piece or two at a time over the next few months. In fact, I think we still have a box up on a high shelf from one of these buying binges. If you like Godiva chocolates, but are squeamish about the idea of paying 25 bucks a pound for it, this is the way to go.
I’m mostly a milk chocolate gal, although I’ve been slowly converting to dark chocolate of late years. Right now I can go either way. I’ve tried that oft-recommended dieters’ tip to eat a single piece of very high quality dark chocolate and savor it slowly. I frankly think it’s bull. I’ve done it, but all it does is make me think “That was fine. Now, what’s for dessert?”
As with all children, I started eating candy as a pretty young kid (except some people I knew who were the neighbors of a family friend, who never gave their kids refined sugar—my friend’s son came home from an afternoon spent there one time and, when asked if he had fun, replied in a tone of painful disdain “Mom, she gave us granola for a snack.” I had to agree with him that that pretty well summed up his experience). I got my candy bars at Higger’s Drug Store up the street from my house. They cost a dime. Having heard repeatedly to my disgust and boredom as a kid about when candy bars cost a nickel, I always swore I wouldn’t use that line: “They cost a dime.” How great the divide sometimes between theory and practice.
For some reason when I was younger, I always bought Chunky bars. Except that they weren’t bars. They were cubes of chocolate. Really more of a bizarre trapezoid shape. They looked like pyramids that had had their top two-thirds whacked off. I’m not sure why, because I was perfectly adept at reading, but I could never manage to remember which one did, and which one did not have the raisins in it—the silver wrapper or some other color wrapper. I hate raisins in chocolate bars. It’s an outrage.
I also remember buying Marathon bars. I seem to be the only person who ever did because 1) they no longer make them and 2) I’ve never found anyone else who even remembers them, much less also ate them. They were long braids of caramel covered with milk chocolate. The ads on TV had an image of the “braid” going past and past and past….clearly intending to convey the message that the “Marathon” bar lasted a long time. This characteristic of lasting a long time seems to have been a big feature to promote in candy bars during the late 70s and 80s. The Charleston Chew and, I think, Sugar Daddies and Sugar Mamas, made the same claim. In the 90s they seemed to move to more of almost a “meal replacement” strategy. Snickers bars, as I recall, ran a campaign promoting a Snickers bar as a way to fill you up, and carry you until your next meal.
I always wanted stuff in my candy bars. Peanut butter, peanuts, caramel, nougat (whatever the hell that is), or that fluff in a Three Musketeers bar (whatever the hell that is). I went to Dublin on business once and spent about 50 bucks in a newsagents buying candy bars that we didn’t have in America. I noticed that they had an awful lot of offerings with raisins (ugh), but an equal number with caramel. Fortunately none of them seemed to sully the glorious caramel with the vile raisins. Caramel is my favorite candy bar filling, followed by peanut butter as a close second. Actually, hazelnut anything is my favorite candy filling, but very few of the “big” candy makers offer a candy bar with hazelnuts in it. Too expensive, I would guess.
In high school I went to Australia and was there introduced to three kinds of candy bars that I’d never had before, two of which are now available at my local grocery store. There was the Violet Crumble, which was kind of a grainy sugar, flavored with essence of violet (which sounds gross and weird, but was actually OK). The Flake bar was nothing more than very, very thin leaves of milk chocolate that would have been pretty good, except that they were so delicate that what you wound up with was a candy wrapper full of chocolate shards. You just kind of “drank” the chocolate out of the wrapper, which you opened at one end to form a tube. Then there was a honeycomb concoction the name of which escapes me. I’ve since seen this in Australian cooking magazines called generically “honeycomb” and recommended as being used to top ice cream when smashed to smithereens. It was very crunchy, and did have a distinct honey flavor. Its disadvantage was that it really stuck in your teeth. All three of these, if I’m not mistaken, were manufactured by the Cadbury company.
Cadbury is much bigger overseas than it is in this country. In this country we have Hershey’s, and M&M Mars to pretty much own the candy market. I remember reading that in the 1940s Hershey’s representatives used to go to elementary schools and hand out candy bars to all the kids. The taste of chocolate is (as you no doubt have read), like so many food products, subject to its recipe. A little more of this, a little less of that, and you’ve got a completely different taste, even though it’s still “milk chocolate.” Hershey’s idea was that kids would get hooked on Hershey bars at a young age and would come to think that the flavor of Hershey’s milk chocolate was what chocolate was “supposed” to taste like. Any other recipe would taste odd to them, and they would (in theory) find it to be inferior to the flavor of Hershey’s.
Now we also have Godiva chocolates, which used to have an air of exclusivity about them, but are now sold in every possible outlet, including gas stations and nail salons. I still think they’re good chocolates, but they’re mainstream now. This move in America to make mainstream what used to be luxury items I think is a large part of what contributes to our dietary problems. Things that used to be special occasion dishes—Fettuccini Alfredo, elaborate desserts made with pastry cream, rack of lamb—are now so commonplace that they’ve lost their impact and we don’t appreciate them anymore. As a result, we consume them too casually. Of course, the antidote for that may well be a return to the days when we ate Hamburger Helper (which of course comes in an Alfredo flavor in the form of Chicken and Tuna Helpers) and Betty Crocker Au Gratin Potatoes for dinner, which I really can’t see as a win-win situation for anyone (except maybe General Foods). Sure, it would make “special” meals much more appealing by contrast, but it would mean we’d be eating dehydrated potatoes three hundred plus days a year, and I don’t know if I could handle that, myself.
As usual, I digress. So instead of Godiva as our exclusive chocolates, we now have “artisanal” chocolates made in small batches by hand. Often these chocolate makers have an unfortunate tendency to try jazz up (as I’m sure they see it) plain old boring chocolate, and they mix in just plain weird stuff like chili powder, black pepper, paprika, and (yes, I’ve seen this) curry powder. I really don’t think that I can think of a more disgusting thing to do to perfectly good chocolate than stick curry powder in it. I love curry powder, but it doesn’t belong in chocolate.
The big candy manufacturers have their own tricks to try to lure us into buying more candy. They’ve created countless variations on old favorites. Where we used to buy Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Crunch bars, and M&Ms, we can now buy Caramel or White Chocolate Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Crunch bars filled with caramel, and M&Ms filled with peanut butter. All of these are perfectly fine, but we’re spoiled with choices. I kind of wish we could go back to the days when my most perplexing candy problem was remembering which color Chunky wrapper had the raisins, and which did not.
I’ve always had a kind of affection for the niche candy bars. I went through phases as a kid (in the post-Chunky era) when I was attracted to Zero bars, Fifth Avenue, Zagnut, and Clark bars. With the exception of Zero bars, all of these are variations on peanut butter flavored candy. The Zero bar is a chocolate nougat, covered with something that I wasn’t clear on—it was white, but it wasn’t really white chocolate. White chocolate is an abomination, and should be outlawed. It’s not chocolate, and it just tastes like very sweet wax. In fact, I’ve found by checking the Hershey’s website (thank you, Internet) that the coating is “white fudge.” Maybe that’s just a fancy way of saying white chocolate, but in any event, there’s so little of it in a Zero bar that it manages not to offend.
In the 80s, when we all became so ludicrously afraid of fat in anything, several companies introduced reduced fat chocolate. For some time I was a devotee of Sweet Escapes candy bars, and we all started buying Three Musketeers because they were “low fat” (which translated, really, to “high air content” but that concept seemed to either elude us or not matter, so keen were we to be able to have our cake and eat it too, or in this case, to have our chocolate but not the fat). Most of these reduced fat offerings seem to no longer be available, as many people have come to their senses. Or at least switched to low carb candy bars, which I think must be pretty disgusting, so I’ve never bothered to try one. Now you can also buy chocolate bars that are enhanced with “nutrients.” This seems the most ridiculous concept of all to me. The idea of eating chocolate and soothing the guilt by reminding oneself that the candy contains calcium, or vitamin A, or something. I say, if you want vitamin A, eat a carrot. If you want chocolate, eat chocolate.
The chocolate I eat these days tends to be mostly in things, rather than just solo. I make things like chocolate chip cookies (with Toll House morsels—no overpriced Sharffen Berger shards for me, thanks). Although I love chocolate, I don’t really like chocolate ice cream, as I think the aftertaste is too strong, and if they put chocolate bits of any kind in ice cream, the effect of freezing on chocolate makes it waxy, which I loathe. I’ve also just discovered chocolate covered Altoids, which they’ve been handing out as free samples as I walk to work every morning. Doubtless these are just Altoids that are in some way deficient—chipped or otherwise deformed—that they coat with dark chocolate, but they’re really not bad. Four of them are a little mouthful, they give me a quick chocolate fix, and offer a little breath freshening bonus. The chocolate softens the usually overpowering peppermint of the mint itself.
Of course, the health reporters of the world keep assuring me that chocolate (dark chocolate, anyway) is good for my heart, and that a little bit won’t hurt me and may even be good for me. While I find this interesting information, I’m not eating chocolate because it might be good for me. I’m eating it because I like it. Even though I didn’t get any for Valentine’s Day.
P.S. For those who live close to a Godiva store, or a Barnes & Noble, and want to stock up, the day after a “chocolate” holiday (Valentine’s Day, Easter, Christmas), Godiva stores and BN sell the boxes of chocolates that have holiday-themed decorations at half price. My husband and I used to go and buy twice as much candy as we could have bought two days earlier, and then hang on to it, eating it a piece or two at a time over the next few months. In fact, I think we still have a box up on a high shelf from one of these buying binges. If you like Godiva chocolates, but are squeamish about the idea of paying 25 bucks a pound for it, this is the way to go.
Saturday, February 03, 2007
Just Plain Yucky Food
Something got me to thinking about unappealing food tonight, and I started thinking about the worst foods or meals I’ve ever had or heard about. Thankfully, most of them are just things I’ve heard about, rather than actually been forced to eat and be polite about. Most of them seem to be the creations of relatives. I’m not sure if this is because I eat more of my relatives’ food than I do of other peoples’, or if it says something about my relatives’ cooking.
The only unappealing food that I thought of that I’d actually eaten was pre-cooked bacon that had been microwaved. I don’t mean the packaged stuff from the grocery store that’s intended to be heated up in the microwave. I mean bacon that has been cooked by conventional means, put into a baggie in the refrigerator for a day or two (or more—I don’t even want to know), and then reheated in the microwave.
Interestingly, I’ve not only heard of this being done, but actually been forced to eat it. My friend’s mother in law does this and she told me about it. My own mother in law did it, as does my grandmother (or did—I’m not sure she really makes bacon anymore, since she really only cooks for herself now). The thing about bacon that has been subjected to this treatment is that it becomes bacon bits. On both occasions I was served it, it was really more a pile of dark brown crumbs than anything resembling strips of bacon. I can understand if this is the way you serve bacon occasionally, but in all three cases, this was their standard. They would cook off a package of bacon one day, then store it until they needed it, and reheat it in the microwave, whereupon it would dissolve into the aforementioned crumbs.
I think my grandmother did this because she bought a microwave back in the early 80s when they were still novel and interesting, and she was testing out its capabilities. When she discovered that she could have bacon in 15 seconds, well, she was thrilled. My mother in law did it out of a need to eat quickly. When hunger overtook my mother in law, there was no waiting. She was going to eat the first thing that came to hand, and if that was microwaved bacon, fine. If it was a box of graham cracker crumbs, or a raw onion, fine.
I think my friend’s mother in law was motivated by a total lack of caring about food quality. She was the type of woman who claimed that she’d provided meals for her family for twenty or thirty years or whatever it was, and she was “retiring.” Hanging up her apron, thanks. I’ve found that most women who claim they’re going to stop cooking because they’ve been doing it for so many years were never very good cooks to begin with. They turned out barely edible, largely uninteresting and unmemorable meals for all those years. Generally their families applaud (if silently) when they announce their retirement from culinary responsibilities.
Beyond that, I’ve mostly been treated to descriptions of unappetizing meals.
My husband came home from a visit to his cousin/godmother’s house one year with a horror story. First let me say that his cousin knows she’s a dreadful cook, and doesn’t try to do it often. They eat out every night. They’re an interesting combination: non-cookers, but cheap. As a result, they only eat at restaurants that are all-you-can-eat buffets, or for which they have a buy-one-get-one-free, or early bird coupon. On the occasion of my husband’s visit to their house, she decided to try to cook.
She served ham left over from Easter (it was only a week or so after Easter, so that’s not as bad as it might sound). It was a purchased ham, so there wasn’t much she could do to screw it up. The side dishes she made were Au Gratin Potatoes from a box (actually OK with my husband, because he kind of likes those), and green beans. It was the green beans that were notable. She made them in the pressure cooker. They were, according to my husband, grey. She couldn’t figure out why he didn’t want seconds.
My father in law has a stock of revolting recipes that he pulls out every now and then. He’s since moved to a small condo, but we used to go visit him when he lived in a larger house, and for some reason our visit always inspired him to have a “cookout” or a “family dinner” (depending on the season, and despite the fact that we’d already seen everyone who was invited at least two other times on any trip there). My husband and I always cooked for these gatherings, with superfluous menu input by my father in law. We’d set the menu, and he’d spend the 24 hours leading up to the event trying to add things that were unnecessary, unappetizing, and unwelcome.
“What about a cake?” he’d suggest at breakfast the morning of the party, “I have one downstairs in the freezer.” What he failed to mention was that the cake was a fully frosted cake (generally not the sort of thing that freezes well) that had been frozen since my mother in law had passed away two years earlier. We’d decline.
Always, without fail, he would suggest the addition that I found most vile, and to which we responded in the negative most vehemently. This was canned ham cooked in the slow cooker with pineapple juice. It seems this was kind of a specialty of his. Canned ham is disgusting to start with, but cook it in the slow cooker with pineapple juice and I think you really would have the most revolting concoction known to man.
My family has come up with a few winners too, most memorably a meal my grandmother offered to cook my husband when I was in the hospital after the birth of my first son. She’d come to stay and help out, and she offered to make my husband something along the lines of oriental tuna served over a baked potato. I’m not sure he how, but he managed to decline politely and without offending her.
As I say, somehow I managed to dodge most of these bullets one way or another. I’m sure when my children grow up and get married, their spouses will complain about my cooking for one reason or another. However, it won’t be because I’ve served them canned ham or microwaved bacon. They’ll have to find something else to complain about, I guess.
The only unappealing food that I thought of that I’d actually eaten was pre-cooked bacon that had been microwaved. I don’t mean the packaged stuff from the grocery store that’s intended to be heated up in the microwave. I mean bacon that has been cooked by conventional means, put into a baggie in the refrigerator for a day or two (or more—I don’t even want to know), and then reheated in the microwave.
Interestingly, I’ve not only heard of this being done, but actually been forced to eat it. My friend’s mother in law does this and she told me about it. My own mother in law did it, as does my grandmother (or did—I’m not sure she really makes bacon anymore, since she really only cooks for herself now). The thing about bacon that has been subjected to this treatment is that it becomes bacon bits. On both occasions I was served it, it was really more a pile of dark brown crumbs than anything resembling strips of bacon. I can understand if this is the way you serve bacon occasionally, but in all three cases, this was their standard. They would cook off a package of bacon one day, then store it until they needed it, and reheat it in the microwave, whereupon it would dissolve into the aforementioned crumbs.
I think my grandmother did this because she bought a microwave back in the early 80s when they were still novel and interesting, and she was testing out its capabilities. When she discovered that she could have bacon in 15 seconds, well, she was thrilled. My mother in law did it out of a need to eat quickly. When hunger overtook my mother in law, there was no waiting. She was going to eat the first thing that came to hand, and if that was microwaved bacon, fine. If it was a box of graham cracker crumbs, or a raw onion, fine.
I think my friend’s mother in law was motivated by a total lack of caring about food quality. She was the type of woman who claimed that she’d provided meals for her family for twenty or thirty years or whatever it was, and she was “retiring.” Hanging up her apron, thanks. I’ve found that most women who claim they’re going to stop cooking because they’ve been doing it for so many years were never very good cooks to begin with. They turned out barely edible, largely uninteresting and unmemorable meals for all those years. Generally their families applaud (if silently) when they announce their retirement from culinary responsibilities.
Beyond that, I’ve mostly been treated to descriptions of unappetizing meals.
My husband came home from a visit to his cousin/godmother’s house one year with a horror story. First let me say that his cousin knows she’s a dreadful cook, and doesn’t try to do it often. They eat out every night. They’re an interesting combination: non-cookers, but cheap. As a result, they only eat at restaurants that are all-you-can-eat buffets, or for which they have a buy-one-get-one-free, or early bird coupon. On the occasion of my husband’s visit to their house, she decided to try to cook.
She served ham left over from Easter (it was only a week or so after Easter, so that’s not as bad as it might sound). It was a purchased ham, so there wasn’t much she could do to screw it up. The side dishes she made were Au Gratin Potatoes from a box (actually OK with my husband, because he kind of likes those), and green beans. It was the green beans that were notable. She made them in the pressure cooker. They were, according to my husband, grey. She couldn’t figure out why he didn’t want seconds.
My father in law has a stock of revolting recipes that he pulls out every now and then. He’s since moved to a small condo, but we used to go visit him when he lived in a larger house, and for some reason our visit always inspired him to have a “cookout” or a “family dinner” (depending on the season, and despite the fact that we’d already seen everyone who was invited at least two other times on any trip there). My husband and I always cooked for these gatherings, with superfluous menu input by my father in law. We’d set the menu, and he’d spend the 24 hours leading up to the event trying to add things that were unnecessary, unappetizing, and unwelcome.
“What about a cake?” he’d suggest at breakfast the morning of the party, “I have one downstairs in the freezer.” What he failed to mention was that the cake was a fully frosted cake (generally not the sort of thing that freezes well) that had been frozen since my mother in law had passed away two years earlier. We’d decline.
Always, without fail, he would suggest the addition that I found most vile, and to which we responded in the negative most vehemently. This was canned ham cooked in the slow cooker with pineapple juice. It seems this was kind of a specialty of his. Canned ham is disgusting to start with, but cook it in the slow cooker with pineapple juice and I think you really would have the most revolting concoction known to man.
My family has come up with a few winners too, most memorably a meal my grandmother offered to cook my husband when I was in the hospital after the birth of my first son. She’d come to stay and help out, and she offered to make my husband something along the lines of oriental tuna served over a baked potato. I’m not sure he how, but he managed to decline politely and without offending her.
As I say, somehow I managed to dodge most of these bullets one way or another. I’m sure when my children grow up and get married, their spouses will complain about my cooking for one reason or another. However, it won’t be because I’ve served them canned ham or microwaved bacon. They’ll have to find something else to complain about, I guess.
Friday, February 02, 2007
Status Update
Ho-kay. Here we go again. I got a job offer, and the job starts Monday. SO. Once again, I may be a little quiet until I can get into a regular groove and start posting one to two times a week, as I had always intended.
The job, btw, is with my husband's company, so that'll be convenient. For the most part we can commute together, which is kind of nice.
I'll try to get something posted in the next three days, and then see what I can do from there.
Happy Groundhog Day!
The job, btw, is with my husband's company, so that'll be convenient. For the most part we can commute together, which is kind of nice.
I'll try to get something posted in the next three days, and then see what I can do from there.
Happy Groundhog Day!
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Advice for the Diet Dilemma (A Bit Lengthy, I'm Afraid)
Once again the New York Times has provided me with my topic du jour. In the Times magazine on Sunday, January 28, there was an article about food science and eating by Michael Pollan, author of the book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma." He talks about how scientists have broken “food” down in to “nutrients” to the point where we, the American public, don’t have a clue what we should be eating. As a result, we subsist on Diet Coke and Lean Cuisines.
Pollan offers a few “rules” for eating, which I’ve been thinking about. This is a little stream of consciousness, but here are his rules, along with my thoughts. It’s worth noting that I’m not setting out to answer any questions here; I’m just asking them. If I answer them through my thought processes, well, bonus.
1. Eat food. Though in our current state of confusion, this is much easier said than done. So try this: Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. (Sorry, but at this point Moms are as confused as the rest of us, which is why we have to go back a couple of generations, to a time before the advent of modern food products.) There are a great many foodlike items in the supermarket your ancestors wouldn’t recognize as food (Go-Gurt? Breakfast-cereal bars? Nondairy creamer?); stay away from these.
My great-great-grandmother was a woman we call Grandmother Henley (well, one of them was…I’m picking the one I’m actually familiar with, although of course I never met her, but my great-grandmother told me about her, and my grandmother always speaks of her as Grandmother Henley). Going back to her is smart, because I know for a fact that my great-grandmother ate things like Wise Potato Chips, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and other Evil Processed Foods. Grandmother Henley would not, it’s true, recognize Go-Gurt as a food (I barely do, in spite of the fact that my son likes them; blue yogurt—how vile!), but I’ve got some questions and hesitations about other things.
Chocolate graham crackers spring to mind. Graham crackers have been around for a long time. Doubtless Grandmother Henley would recognize them as “food,” but what about the chocolate part? Making graham crackers chocolate involves nothing more than adding some cocoa powder to the dough, and she would also recognize cocoa powder as food. Does that mean chocolate graham crackers are OK? Of course, according to some of the later guidelines, the answer is pretty much no, but there’s more.
I eat egg and cheese English muffins from McDonald’s (you order an Egg McMuffin and tell them to hold the Canadian bacon). Based on this guideline, this is food, but I quite doubt Grandmother Henley would recognize it as such. There was no such thing as a “breakfast sandwich” in her day. Even if I make this at home (since we all know that the McDonald’s cheese and English muffins are loaded with Evil Preservatives and other naughty ingredients), would it still count as food according to this rule? I suppose so, but I don’t really know.
OK, moving on.
2. Avoid even those food products that come bearing health claims. They’re apt to be heavily processed, and the claims are often dubious at best. Don’t forget that margarine, one of the first industrial foods to claim that it was more healthful than the traditional food it replaced, turned out to give people heart attacks. When Kellogg’s can boast about its Healthy Heart Strawberry Vanilla cereal bars, health claims have become hopelessly compromised. (The American Heart Association charges food makers for their endorsement.) Don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about health.
I’ve heard this before and it gives me pause every time. Quaker Oats, probably the most benign food in the free world, carries a health claim about reduction of the risk of heart disease. Am I to avoid Quaker Oats? And what about Bush’s Black Beans: “May Reduce Your Risk of Heart Disease”; or Libby’s Pumpkin: “Excellent Source of Vitamin A & Fiber”; or Del Monte Sliced Carrots: “Only 5g of Net Carbs Per Serving”? Or my Fresh Express Baby Spinach: “Packed with Nutrition! Vitamins A, K & C! Folic Acid! Iron! Lutein!” (If you think I spend a lot of time wandering around my kitchen reading food labels, well, that’s where you’re right.) I can see that Mr. Pollan is talking about something like a plain old leek from the produce department, which bears no label at all, but this particular piece of advice could prove confusing to the average idiot (of which there seem to be a frightening number in this world, alas, alas).
Of course Kellogg’s Healthy Heart Strawberry Vanilla cereal bars are something on which I’d take a pass. Besides sounding downright revolting, they’re clearly processed within an inch of their lives, and the fact that the person who dreamed these up had a Strawberry Shortcake doll as a kid is the closest they ever got to anything even vaguely resembling a strawberry.
3. Especially avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable c) more than five in number — or that contain high-fructose corn syrup. None of these characteristics are necessarily harmful in and of themselves, but all of them are reliable markers for foods that have been highly processed.
Here we have a slight problem with the deluge of food and nutrition reporting interfering with the recommended course of action. Thanks to Better Living Through Chemistry, I can pronounce Aspartame, guar gum, titanim dioxide, and ascorbic acid, and worse, I know what they all are (respectively: an artificial sweetener whose arrangement of molecules closely mimics that of real sugar, a thickener from the guar bean shrub, a chemical used as a “brightener” in products such as white toothpaste and canned frosting, and the formal name for vitamin C. I got a D- in high school Chemistry. Pathetic, isn’t it?)
More than five in number is tricky, because sometimes perfectly healthy products have more than five ingredients. I’ve never heard of anyone slamming Worcestershire sauce (except my friend E, who hates it—but then, she’s not deriding its health properties, only its taste), and yet my bottle of Worcestershire sauce lists 13 ingredients, including the much-dreaded high-fructose corn syrup.
High-fructose corn syrup is the next trans fat. Or maybe it’s just a companion evil to trans fat. It’s said to be in just about everything (a claim I won’t dispute, since it’s bloody true), and it’s said that the human body does not need that crap. Again, no argument. But if we can’t eat ANYthing with high-fructose corn syrup in it, what ARE we to eat? Are we expected to sit around and gnaw on raw, unseasoned carrots and celery sticks? Or am I to comb natural foods stores for Worcestershire sauce that doesn’t have HFCS in it? With four kids, I frankly don’t have that kind of time.
So maybe we go with the last sentence here and assume that none of the characteristics mentioned is harmful in and of themselves, use the Worcestershire sauce (except E) and get over it.
4. Get out of the supermarket whenever possible. You won’t find any high-fructose corn syrup at the farmer’s market; you also won’t find food harvested long ago and far away. What you will find are fresh whole foods picked at the peak of nutritional quality. Precisely the kind of food your great-great-grandmother would have recognized as food.
I’ve whined about the inconvenience (timing) and availability (seasonality and location) of farmers' markets before. I will not again.
5. Pay more, eat less. The American food system has for a century devoted its energies and policies to increasing quantity and reducing price, not to improving quality. There’s no escaping the fact that better food — measured by taste or nutritional quality (which often correspond) — costs more, because it has been grown or raised less intensively and with more care. Not everyone can afford to eat well in America, which is shameful, but most of us can: Americans spend, on average, less than 10 percent of their income on food, down from 24 percent in 1947, and less than the citizens of any other nation. And those of us who can afford to eat well should. Paying more for food well grown in good soils — whether certified organic or not — will contribute not only to your health (by reducing exposure to pesticides) but also to the health of others who might not themselves be able to afford that sort of food: the people who grow it and the people who live downstream, and downwind, of the farms where it is grown.
“Eat less” is the most unwelcome advice of all, but in fact the scientific case for eating a lot less than we currently do is compelling. “Calorie restriction” has repeatedly been shown to slow aging in animals, and many researchers (including Walter Willett, the Harvard epidemiologist) believe it offers the single strongest link between diet and cancer prevention. Food abundance is a problem, but culture has helped here, too, by promoting the idea of moderation. Once one of the longest-lived people on earth, the Okinawans practiced a principle they called “Hara Hachi Bu”: eat until you are 80 percent full. To make the “eat less” message a bit more palatable, consider that quality may have a bearing on quantity: I don’t know about you, but the better the quality of the food I eat, the less of it I need to feel satisfied. All tomatoes are not created equal.
Ah, this is an interesting argument, and one that really got me started thinking about this article. Eat Less. As Americans we eat an enormous amount of food. This morning alone I’ve probably eaten more food than some inhabitants of the Third World eat in a week. It was all, I might point out, pretty much crap.
I completely agree that if the food is of a really high quality, I need far less of it to be satisfied. The caveat is that if I spend a lot of money on it, I feel like I should bloody well eat it all, instead of tossing it when I’m full. In my home I can, of course, better control portion sizes. In restaurants it’s a different story.
Yesterday I had lunch at a local pub that serves pretty decent food. Since this article was still on my mind, I ordered something that I felt pretty closely adhered to the guidelines set forth here. It was a spinach salad (see #6 about eating more leaves), with bleu cheese, sautéed red onions and apples, walnuts, and a balsamic dressing. I asked for sautéed shrimp to get a little protein as well. The salad was $8.95. The added shrimp were $5.95 (roughly a buck a shrimp). You can bet that at that price, there was no Hara Hachi Bu-ing for me. I ate it all. I could probably have stopped about two thirds of the way through—maybe even half way through--but that would have meant leaving about three shrimp, and I just couldn’t stand to do that. Yes, better in the trash than on my tush, I suppose, but I just couldn’t do it. I wasn’t brought up as a member of the now-cliched “Clean Plate Club,” but something in me (years of my grandmother’s frugality finally wearing off on me? Sheer guilt?) just wouldn’t let me send that plate to the kitchen with two or three uneaten shrimp, and a pile of other salad ingredients, on it.
We Americans seem to have an interesting problem of our own devising. We’ve forced restaurants to provide huge, huge portions in response to our insistence that we “get what we pay for,” and yet we feel guilty wasting the money if we don’t eat every bite of food, no matter how overfull it makes us feel. Personally, I would have been just as happy with a $5 salad, and $3 worth of shrimp, and been able to eat it all without feeling too full or too guilty. The restaurant didn’t offer $5 worth of that salad, because their patrons want a bigger salad, something more filling.
I’m happy eating at home most of the time, but what’s a pig to do when she goes out to eat? Try to control myself, I guess, and see if I can get half orders of things, or maybe doggie bags (however, salad does not lend itself to a doggie bag).
6. Eat mostly plants, especially leaves. Scientists may disagree on what’s so good about plants — the antioxidants? Fiber? Omega-3s? — but they do agree that they’re probably really good for you and certainly can’t hurt. Also, by eating a plant-based diet, you’ll be consuming far fewer calories, since plant foods (except seeds) are typically less “energy dense” than the other things you might eat. Vegetarians are healthier than carnivores, but near vegetarians (“flexitarians”) are as healthy as vegetarians. Thomas Jefferson was on to something when he advised treating meat more as a flavoring than a food.
I’m tired of hearing this “meat more as a flavoring” line, even from Thomas Jefferson. How about if I just eat less meat and more vegetables?
7. Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks. Confounding factors aside, people who eat according to the rules of a traditional food culture are generally healthier than we are. Any traditional diet will do: if it weren’t a healthy diet, the people who follow it wouldn’t still be around. True, food cultures are embedded in societies and economies and ecologies, and some of them travel better than others: Inuit not so well as Italian. In borrowing from a food culture, pay attention to how a culture eats, as well as to what it eats. In the case of the French paradox, it may not be the dietary nutrients that keep the French healthy (lots of saturated fat and alcohol?!) so much as the dietary habits: small portions, no seconds or snacking, communal meals — and the serious pleasure taken in eating. (Worrying about diet can’t possibly be good for you.) Let culture be your guide, not science.
Oh dear. What about mixing the eating habits of different cultures? What if I want to eat like the French AND the Italians? And the Chinese? And the Indians? And the Thais? I like all those different kinds of food, and I don’t want to limit myself to just one. Maybe there are some similarities in all those cultures that can be incorporated into our own eating habits. The small portions, and no seconds or snacking ideas sound like they might bridge all of the healthy non-American styles of eating. Is that the way to go? So many questions.
8. Cook. And if you can, plant a garden. To take part in the intricate and endlessly interesting processes of providing for our sustenance is the surest way to escape the culture of fast food and the values implicit in it: that food should be cheap and easy; that food is fuel and not communion. The culture of the kitchen, as embodied in those enduring traditions we call cuisines, contains more wisdom about diet and health than you are apt to find in any nutrition journal or journalism. Plus, the food you grow yourself contributes to your health long before you sit down to eat it. So you might want to think about putting down this article now and picking up a spatula or hoe.
I do cook, so problem solved there. Right now I can’t plant a garden, but when I can, I will. Case closed on that one.
9. Eat like an omnivore. Try to add new species, not just new foods, to your diet. The greater the diversity of species you eat, the more likely you are to cover all your nutritional bases. That of course is an argument from nutritionism, but there is a better one, one that takes a broader view of “health.” Biodiversity in the diet means less monoculture in the fields. What does that have to do with your health? Everything. The vast monocultures that now feed us require tremendous amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to keep from collapsing. Diversifying those fields will mean fewer chemicals, healthier soils, healthier plants and animals and, in turn, healthier people. It’s all connected, which is another way of saying that your health isn’t bordered by your body and that what’s good for the soil is probably good for you, too.
Earlier in this article, Pollan mentions that four crops account for two-thirds of the calories humans eat: wheat, soybeans, corn, and rice. So adding new species…hm. That’s kind of a tricky one, because really, what’s available to us? Fish, chicken (I’ll lump duck and turkey in here too), pork, beef, lamb. Various fruits and vegetables. The Grains (and things like seeds and legumes).
I think his statement about adding new “species” as opposed to new “foods” to one’s diet is confusing. The dictionary definition of a species is “…the smallest group of classification. A species generally consists of all the individual organisms of a natural population which are able to interbreed, generally sharing similar appearance, characteristics and genetics due to having relatively recent common ancestors.” So Brassica oleracea is a species, but I’m sure Pollan would say that we shouldn’t just add cabbage alone to our diets, but also add brussels sprouts, cauliflower and broccoli, all of which fall into the species B. oleracea. I think the advice “add more different foods” is sufficient. It ought to be followed by the statement “Try everything you can find that’s edible.”
What I find to be a problem about this is that often some fruits and vegetables just aren’t good in their natural state. Ever eaten raw broccoli rabe (or rapini, as it’s sometimes called)? Or raw quince? Yuck. Yet cooked, those two things are wonderful, and I love them. The problem is twofold, it seems to me—first, people don’t eat enough of a variety of fruits and vegetables, and second, we don’t know how to prepare them to make them tasty. If we just follow the “add more” rule, stroll into the grocery store and buy the first unfamiliar vegetable that comes to hand, and eat it as is, more likley than not we’re going to be turned way off. What’s a would-be adventerous eater to do?
My solution, as always, is to buy more cookbooks. I’m not recommending this for everyone, necessarily, but based on the advice above to cook more, I’d say it would work for those truly dedicated to trying to eat better. I have several vegetable and vegetarian cookbooks, and I like “regular” cookbooks that have big sections on ways to cook different vegetables. In fact, say what you will about the “low carb” craze, it has produced a few very good cookbooks that focus on vegetable preparations.
At the beginning of this article, Mr. Pollan gives the solution to our diet and nutrition problems in 7 words (with a couple of sentences of clarification): Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. A little meat won’t kill you, though it’s better approached as a side dish than as a main. And you’re much better off eating whole fresh foods than processed food products.
And buy more cookbooks. He forgot that.
Pollan offers a few “rules” for eating, which I’ve been thinking about. This is a little stream of consciousness, but here are his rules, along with my thoughts. It’s worth noting that I’m not setting out to answer any questions here; I’m just asking them. If I answer them through my thought processes, well, bonus.
1. Eat food. Though in our current state of confusion, this is much easier said than done. So try this: Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. (Sorry, but at this point Moms are as confused as the rest of us, which is why we have to go back a couple of generations, to a time before the advent of modern food products.) There are a great many foodlike items in the supermarket your ancestors wouldn’t recognize as food (Go-Gurt? Breakfast-cereal bars? Nondairy creamer?); stay away from these.
My great-great-grandmother was a woman we call Grandmother Henley (well, one of them was…I’m picking the one I’m actually familiar with, although of course I never met her, but my great-grandmother told me about her, and my grandmother always speaks of her as Grandmother Henley). Going back to her is smart, because I know for a fact that my great-grandmother ate things like Wise Potato Chips, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and other Evil Processed Foods. Grandmother Henley would not, it’s true, recognize Go-Gurt as a food (I barely do, in spite of the fact that my son likes them; blue yogurt—how vile!), but I’ve got some questions and hesitations about other things.
Chocolate graham crackers spring to mind. Graham crackers have been around for a long time. Doubtless Grandmother Henley would recognize them as “food,” but what about the chocolate part? Making graham crackers chocolate involves nothing more than adding some cocoa powder to the dough, and she would also recognize cocoa powder as food. Does that mean chocolate graham crackers are OK? Of course, according to some of the later guidelines, the answer is pretty much no, but there’s more.
I eat egg and cheese English muffins from McDonald’s (you order an Egg McMuffin and tell them to hold the Canadian bacon). Based on this guideline, this is food, but I quite doubt Grandmother Henley would recognize it as such. There was no such thing as a “breakfast sandwich” in her day. Even if I make this at home (since we all know that the McDonald’s cheese and English muffins are loaded with Evil Preservatives and other naughty ingredients), would it still count as food according to this rule? I suppose so, but I don’t really know.
OK, moving on.
2. Avoid even those food products that come bearing health claims. They’re apt to be heavily processed, and the claims are often dubious at best. Don’t forget that margarine, one of the first industrial foods to claim that it was more healthful than the traditional food it replaced, turned out to give people heart attacks. When Kellogg’s can boast about its Healthy Heart Strawberry Vanilla cereal bars, health claims have become hopelessly compromised. (The American Heart Association charges food makers for their endorsement.) Don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about health.
I’ve heard this before and it gives me pause every time. Quaker Oats, probably the most benign food in the free world, carries a health claim about reduction of the risk of heart disease. Am I to avoid Quaker Oats? And what about Bush’s Black Beans: “May Reduce Your Risk of Heart Disease”; or Libby’s Pumpkin: “Excellent Source of Vitamin A & Fiber”; or Del Monte Sliced Carrots: “Only 5g of Net Carbs Per Serving”? Or my Fresh Express Baby Spinach: “Packed with Nutrition! Vitamins A, K & C! Folic Acid! Iron! Lutein!” (If you think I spend a lot of time wandering around my kitchen reading food labels, well, that’s where you’re right.) I can see that Mr. Pollan is talking about something like a plain old leek from the produce department, which bears no label at all, but this particular piece of advice could prove confusing to the average idiot (of which there seem to be a frightening number in this world, alas, alas).
Of course Kellogg’s Healthy Heart Strawberry Vanilla cereal bars are something on which I’d take a pass. Besides sounding downright revolting, they’re clearly processed within an inch of their lives, and the fact that the person who dreamed these up had a Strawberry Shortcake doll as a kid is the closest they ever got to anything even vaguely resembling a strawberry.
3. Especially avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable c) more than five in number — or that contain high-fructose corn syrup. None of these characteristics are necessarily harmful in and of themselves, but all of them are reliable markers for foods that have been highly processed.
Here we have a slight problem with the deluge of food and nutrition reporting interfering with the recommended course of action. Thanks to Better Living Through Chemistry, I can pronounce Aspartame, guar gum, titanim dioxide, and ascorbic acid, and worse, I know what they all are (respectively: an artificial sweetener whose arrangement of molecules closely mimics that of real sugar, a thickener from the guar bean shrub, a chemical used as a “brightener” in products such as white toothpaste and canned frosting, and the formal name for vitamin C. I got a D- in high school Chemistry. Pathetic, isn’t it?)
More than five in number is tricky, because sometimes perfectly healthy products have more than five ingredients. I’ve never heard of anyone slamming Worcestershire sauce (except my friend E, who hates it—but then, she’s not deriding its health properties, only its taste), and yet my bottle of Worcestershire sauce lists 13 ingredients, including the much-dreaded high-fructose corn syrup.
High-fructose corn syrup is the next trans fat. Or maybe it’s just a companion evil to trans fat. It’s said to be in just about everything (a claim I won’t dispute, since it’s bloody true), and it’s said that the human body does not need that crap. Again, no argument. But if we can’t eat ANYthing with high-fructose corn syrup in it, what ARE we to eat? Are we expected to sit around and gnaw on raw, unseasoned carrots and celery sticks? Or am I to comb natural foods stores for Worcestershire sauce that doesn’t have HFCS in it? With four kids, I frankly don’t have that kind of time.
So maybe we go with the last sentence here and assume that none of the characteristics mentioned is harmful in and of themselves, use the Worcestershire sauce (except E) and get over it.
4. Get out of the supermarket whenever possible. You won’t find any high-fructose corn syrup at the farmer’s market; you also won’t find food harvested long ago and far away. What you will find are fresh whole foods picked at the peak of nutritional quality. Precisely the kind of food your great-great-grandmother would have recognized as food.
I’ve whined about the inconvenience (timing) and availability (seasonality and location) of farmers' markets before. I will not again.
5. Pay more, eat less. The American food system has for a century devoted its energies and policies to increasing quantity and reducing price, not to improving quality. There’s no escaping the fact that better food — measured by taste or nutritional quality (which often correspond) — costs more, because it has been grown or raised less intensively and with more care. Not everyone can afford to eat well in America, which is shameful, but most of us can: Americans spend, on average, less than 10 percent of their income on food, down from 24 percent in 1947, and less than the citizens of any other nation. And those of us who can afford to eat well should. Paying more for food well grown in good soils — whether certified organic or not — will contribute not only to your health (by reducing exposure to pesticides) but also to the health of others who might not themselves be able to afford that sort of food: the people who grow it and the people who live downstream, and downwind, of the farms where it is grown.
“Eat less” is the most unwelcome advice of all, but in fact the scientific case for eating a lot less than we currently do is compelling. “Calorie restriction” has repeatedly been shown to slow aging in animals, and many researchers (including Walter Willett, the Harvard epidemiologist) believe it offers the single strongest link between diet and cancer prevention. Food abundance is a problem, but culture has helped here, too, by promoting the idea of moderation. Once one of the longest-lived people on earth, the Okinawans practiced a principle they called “Hara Hachi Bu”: eat until you are 80 percent full. To make the “eat less” message a bit more palatable, consider that quality may have a bearing on quantity: I don’t know about you, but the better the quality of the food I eat, the less of it I need to feel satisfied. All tomatoes are not created equal.
Ah, this is an interesting argument, and one that really got me started thinking about this article. Eat Less. As Americans we eat an enormous amount of food. This morning alone I’ve probably eaten more food than some inhabitants of the Third World eat in a week. It was all, I might point out, pretty much crap.
I completely agree that if the food is of a really high quality, I need far less of it to be satisfied. The caveat is that if I spend a lot of money on it, I feel like I should bloody well eat it all, instead of tossing it when I’m full. In my home I can, of course, better control portion sizes. In restaurants it’s a different story.
Yesterday I had lunch at a local pub that serves pretty decent food. Since this article was still on my mind, I ordered something that I felt pretty closely adhered to the guidelines set forth here. It was a spinach salad (see #6 about eating more leaves), with bleu cheese, sautéed red onions and apples, walnuts, and a balsamic dressing. I asked for sautéed shrimp to get a little protein as well. The salad was $8.95. The added shrimp were $5.95 (roughly a buck a shrimp). You can bet that at that price, there was no Hara Hachi Bu-ing for me. I ate it all. I could probably have stopped about two thirds of the way through—maybe even half way through--but that would have meant leaving about three shrimp, and I just couldn’t stand to do that. Yes, better in the trash than on my tush, I suppose, but I just couldn’t do it. I wasn’t brought up as a member of the now-cliched “Clean Plate Club,” but something in me (years of my grandmother’s frugality finally wearing off on me? Sheer guilt?) just wouldn’t let me send that plate to the kitchen with two or three uneaten shrimp, and a pile of other salad ingredients, on it.
We Americans seem to have an interesting problem of our own devising. We’ve forced restaurants to provide huge, huge portions in response to our insistence that we “get what we pay for,” and yet we feel guilty wasting the money if we don’t eat every bite of food, no matter how overfull it makes us feel. Personally, I would have been just as happy with a $5 salad, and $3 worth of shrimp, and been able to eat it all without feeling too full or too guilty. The restaurant didn’t offer $5 worth of that salad, because their patrons want a bigger salad, something more filling.
I’m happy eating at home most of the time, but what’s a pig to do when she goes out to eat? Try to control myself, I guess, and see if I can get half orders of things, or maybe doggie bags (however, salad does not lend itself to a doggie bag).
6. Eat mostly plants, especially leaves. Scientists may disagree on what’s so good about plants — the antioxidants? Fiber? Omega-3s? — but they do agree that they’re probably really good for you and certainly can’t hurt. Also, by eating a plant-based diet, you’ll be consuming far fewer calories, since plant foods (except seeds) are typically less “energy dense” than the other things you might eat. Vegetarians are healthier than carnivores, but near vegetarians (“flexitarians”) are as healthy as vegetarians. Thomas Jefferson was on to something when he advised treating meat more as a flavoring than a food.
I’m tired of hearing this “meat more as a flavoring” line, even from Thomas Jefferson. How about if I just eat less meat and more vegetables?
7. Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks. Confounding factors aside, people who eat according to the rules of a traditional food culture are generally healthier than we are. Any traditional diet will do: if it weren’t a healthy diet, the people who follow it wouldn’t still be around. True, food cultures are embedded in societies and economies and ecologies, and some of them travel better than others: Inuit not so well as Italian. In borrowing from a food culture, pay attention to how a culture eats, as well as to what it eats. In the case of the French paradox, it may not be the dietary nutrients that keep the French healthy (lots of saturated fat and alcohol?!) so much as the dietary habits: small portions, no seconds or snacking, communal meals — and the serious pleasure taken in eating. (Worrying about diet can’t possibly be good for you.) Let culture be your guide, not science.
Oh dear. What about mixing the eating habits of different cultures? What if I want to eat like the French AND the Italians? And the Chinese? And the Indians? And the Thais? I like all those different kinds of food, and I don’t want to limit myself to just one. Maybe there are some similarities in all those cultures that can be incorporated into our own eating habits. The small portions, and no seconds or snacking ideas sound like they might bridge all of the healthy non-American styles of eating. Is that the way to go? So many questions.
8. Cook. And if you can, plant a garden. To take part in the intricate and endlessly interesting processes of providing for our sustenance is the surest way to escape the culture of fast food and the values implicit in it: that food should be cheap and easy; that food is fuel and not communion. The culture of the kitchen, as embodied in those enduring traditions we call cuisines, contains more wisdom about diet and health than you are apt to find in any nutrition journal or journalism. Plus, the food you grow yourself contributes to your health long before you sit down to eat it. So you might want to think about putting down this article now and picking up a spatula or hoe.
I do cook, so problem solved there. Right now I can’t plant a garden, but when I can, I will. Case closed on that one.
9. Eat like an omnivore. Try to add new species, not just new foods, to your diet. The greater the diversity of species you eat, the more likely you are to cover all your nutritional bases. That of course is an argument from nutritionism, but there is a better one, one that takes a broader view of “health.” Biodiversity in the diet means less monoculture in the fields. What does that have to do with your health? Everything. The vast monocultures that now feed us require tremendous amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to keep from collapsing. Diversifying those fields will mean fewer chemicals, healthier soils, healthier plants and animals and, in turn, healthier people. It’s all connected, which is another way of saying that your health isn’t bordered by your body and that what’s good for the soil is probably good for you, too.
Earlier in this article, Pollan mentions that four crops account for two-thirds of the calories humans eat: wheat, soybeans, corn, and rice. So adding new species…hm. That’s kind of a tricky one, because really, what’s available to us? Fish, chicken (I’ll lump duck and turkey in here too), pork, beef, lamb. Various fruits and vegetables. The Grains (and things like seeds and legumes).
I think his statement about adding new “species” as opposed to new “foods” to one’s diet is confusing. The dictionary definition of a species is “…the smallest group of classification. A species generally consists of all the individual organisms of a natural population which are able to interbreed, generally sharing similar appearance, characteristics and genetics due to having relatively recent common ancestors.” So Brassica oleracea is a species, but I’m sure Pollan would say that we shouldn’t just add cabbage alone to our diets, but also add brussels sprouts, cauliflower and broccoli, all of which fall into the species B. oleracea. I think the advice “add more different foods” is sufficient. It ought to be followed by the statement “Try everything you can find that’s edible.”
What I find to be a problem about this is that often some fruits and vegetables just aren’t good in their natural state. Ever eaten raw broccoli rabe (or rapini, as it’s sometimes called)? Or raw quince? Yuck. Yet cooked, those two things are wonderful, and I love them. The problem is twofold, it seems to me—first, people don’t eat enough of a variety of fruits and vegetables, and second, we don’t know how to prepare them to make them tasty. If we just follow the “add more” rule, stroll into the grocery store and buy the first unfamiliar vegetable that comes to hand, and eat it as is, more likley than not we’re going to be turned way off. What’s a would-be adventerous eater to do?
My solution, as always, is to buy more cookbooks. I’m not recommending this for everyone, necessarily, but based on the advice above to cook more, I’d say it would work for those truly dedicated to trying to eat better. I have several vegetable and vegetarian cookbooks, and I like “regular” cookbooks that have big sections on ways to cook different vegetables. In fact, say what you will about the “low carb” craze, it has produced a few very good cookbooks that focus on vegetable preparations.
At the beginning of this article, Mr. Pollan gives the solution to our diet and nutrition problems in 7 words (with a couple of sentences of clarification): Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. A little meat won’t kill you, though it’s better approached as a side dish than as a main. And you’re much better off eating whole fresh foods than processed food products.
And buy more cookbooks. He forgot that.
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
What a Crock
Here we are smack dab in the middle of Crock Pot weather, and I have yet to use mine. Interestingly, I’m in a position where the complaints I have with how Crock Pots (or I should correctly say “slow cookers” since Crock Pot is actually a name trademarked by Rival for their brand of slow cooker) function shouldn’t really be an issue. Right now I’m home all day, so I’d be able to put things in a slow cooker and have it cook for just 6 or 8 hours, the way most recipes recommend.
In general, I don’t think slow cookers work the way they’re supposed to. The idea is that you put a bunch of stuff in the pot, plug the pot in, leave for work, return home and find dinner waiting. That’s the theory. When slow cookers first seemed to hit their stride, back in the 1970s (at least, that’s when I remember my mother most using a slow cooker) that was probably fine. People in general didn’t rush out of the house at 6 a.m. and come tearing back in at 6:30 at night, or later. My mother used to leave for work at a very civilized 8:30 a.m. She was generally home by 6.
Today, when I’m working, I leave my house at 6:15 and return home just about 12 hours later. That’s approximately three hours longer than my mother’s absence from the house in the 1970s. Most slow cooker recipes—at least the ones that I have—all seem to call for food to be cooked for 8 hours, give or take. That’s four hours less than I’m gone from home. I could see if my mother put something in to cook at 8 a.m., and came back home at 6 that it might be OK; slow cookers are, after all, a very low heat, so an extra hour or two really shouldn’t make too much difference. However, I have trouble believing that an extra four hours wouldn’t impact the quality of the food. Unless, of course, all you make is beef stew.
Those who develop recipes for slow cookers would have you believe that you can make just about anything short of chocolate éclairs or ice cream in a slow cooker. Yeah, maybe in their slow cooker, with them standing around developing recipes next to it all day long, available to turn if off when the cooking time is over.
Additionally, many recipes (even those for beef stew) call for a fairly significant amount of prep work prior to the actual pot-plugging-in. Slicing vegetables, dredging with flour, browning meat. This is too much work for me to undertake at 5:45 a.m., even assuming I did have the time to do it then. I’m just not that highly functional at that hour. I’d slice off a finger, or the baby would wind up dredged in flour. It would be hard to explain that to daycare.
So ideally, I should be able to prep everything the night before, put it in the pot part and refrigerate it overnight, then drop the pot into the heating element and turn it on as I head out the door. Again, however, we have that 8 hour cook time versus 12 hour “away” time issue. The obvious solution is a pot that has a timer built into it.
They make this. I was so excited when I found it. It’s called a Smart Pot and it’s made by Rival (so it’s a Crock Pot). I told my husband, “This is what we need!” and he bought it for me then and there. Smart man. Dumb me. I should have looked more carefully to see how the thing actually worked. They did almost what they needed to do, but they missed the mark in a very critical way.
The Smart Pot allows you to set the cooker to cook for two, four, six, or eight hours. After that amount of time, it shifts to a “low” or “hold” setting. The catch is that as soon as you plug the pot in and select the number of hours you want it to cook, it starts cooking. Well, duh, you say. Yes, but what it needs to do is turn itself on 8 hours before I arrive home. Assuming that’s 6 p.m., that means the pot needs to turn on at 10 a.m. The Smart Pot doesn’t do this. It needs a clock that can be set for “On: 10 a.m.” and the length of the cooking time set to 8 hours.
I see the problem the slow cooker manufacturers face. If I took a pot of food out of the refrigerator (or even just put the ingredients into the pot cold) at 6 a.m., and then it didn’t start cooking until 10 a.m., the food would be sitting unrefrigerated, growing bacteria and god knows what else, for four hours before it started cooking. Here in Litigation Land, that would be a field day for people who felt a little queasy after Mom’s Slow Cooker Spam Loaf or whatever it was. Clearly the fact that the Spam Loaf ingredients sat out for four hours before starting to cook caused bacterial growth that led to food poisoning (and never mind that the idea of Spam Loaf is, in itself, pretty nauseating). Let’s sue!
At the same time, what they’ve got now simply doesn’t work. Don’t tell me that the hold setting it uses is really, really low heat. Any heat is going to continue to cook the food. I just do not believe that four-plus hours at even the lowest of heat settings isn’t going to compromise the quality of the food produced (unless, as I said earlier, it’s beef stew—but then why do I need a single appliance just to make beef stew?).
I know I’m going to be driven to what my husband’s mother finally did. She had this same complaint about slow cookers years ago (it's not just whiny me). She went out and bought one of those timers you plug your lamps into when you go on vacation so the lights will go on at dark and back off again a couple of hours later, so it looks like someone turned off the lamp to go to bed. She plugged her slow cooker into it, set it for the correct time to begin cooking to ensure that dinner would be ready when she got home, and went off to work. None of her family ever got food poisoning that way. They got to eat more than beef stew from the slow cooker, too.
In general, I don’t think slow cookers work the way they’re supposed to. The idea is that you put a bunch of stuff in the pot, plug the pot in, leave for work, return home and find dinner waiting. That’s the theory. When slow cookers first seemed to hit their stride, back in the 1970s (at least, that’s when I remember my mother most using a slow cooker) that was probably fine. People in general didn’t rush out of the house at 6 a.m. and come tearing back in at 6:30 at night, or later. My mother used to leave for work at a very civilized 8:30 a.m. She was generally home by 6.
Today, when I’m working, I leave my house at 6:15 and return home just about 12 hours later. That’s approximately three hours longer than my mother’s absence from the house in the 1970s. Most slow cooker recipes—at least the ones that I have—all seem to call for food to be cooked for 8 hours, give or take. That’s four hours less than I’m gone from home. I could see if my mother put something in to cook at 8 a.m., and came back home at 6 that it might be OK; slow cookers are, after all, a very low heat, so an extra hour or two really shouldn’t make too much difference. However, I have trouble believing that an extra four hours wouldn’t impact the quality of the food. Unless, of course, all you make is beef stew.
Those who develop recipes for slow cookers would have you believe that you can make just about anything short of chocolate éclairs or ice cream in a slow cooker. Yeah, maybe in their slow cooker, with them standing around developing recipes next to it all day long, available to turn if off when the cooking time is over.
Additionally, many recipes (even those for beef stew) call for a fairly significant amount of prep work prior to the actual pot-plugging-in. Slicing vegetables, dredging with flour, browning meat. This is too much work for me to undertake at 5:45 a.m., even assuming I did have the time to do it then. I’m just not that highly functional at that hour. I’d slice off a finger, or the baby would wind up dredged in flour. It would be hard to explain that to daycare.
So ideally, I should be able to prep everything the night before, put it in the pot part and refrigerate it overnight, then drop the pot into the heating element and turn it on as I head out the door. Again, however, we have that 8 hour cook time versus 12 hour “away” time issue. The obvious solution is a pot that has a timer built into it.
They make this. I was so excited when I found it. It’s called a Smart Pot and it’s made by Rival (so it’s a Crock Pot). I told my husband, “This is what we need!” and he bought it for me then and there. Smart man. Dumb me. I should have looked more carefully to see how the thing actually worked. They did almost what they needed to do, but they missed the mark in a very critical way.
The Smart Pot allows you to set the cooker to cook for two, four, six, or eight hours. After that amount of time, it shifts to a “low” or “hold” setting. The catch is that as soon as you plug the pot in and select the number of hours you want it to cook, it starts cooking. Well, duh, you say. Yes, but what it needs to do is turn itself on 8 hours before I arrive home. Assuming that’s 6 p.m., that means the pot needs to turn on at 10 a.m. The Smart Pot doesn’t do this. It needs a clock that can be set for “On: 10 a.m.” and the length of the cooking time set to 8 hours.
I see the problem the slow cooker manufacturers face. If I took a pot of food out of the refrigerator (or even just put the ingredients into the pot cold) at 6 a.m., and then it didn’t start cooking until 10 a.m., the food would be sitting unrefrigerated, growing bacteria and god knows what else, for four hours before it started cooking. Here in Litigation Land, that would be a field day for people who felt a little queasy after Mom’s Slow Cooker Spam Loaf or whatever it was. Clearly the fact that the Spam Loaf ingredients sat out for four hours before starting to cook caused bacterial growth that led to food poisoning (and never mind that the idea of Spam Loaf is, in itself, pretty nauseating). Let’s sue!
At the same time, what they’ve got now simply doesn’t work. Don’t tell me that the hold setting it uses is really, really low heat. Any heat is going to continue to cook the food. I just do not believe that four-plus hours at even the lowest of heat settings isn’t going to compromise the quality of the food produced (unless, as I said earlier, it’s beef stew—but then why do I need a single appliance just to make beef stew?).
I know I’m going to be driven to what my husband’s mother finally did. She had this same complaint about slow cookers years ago (it's not just whiny me). She went out and bought one of those timers you plug your lamps into when you go on vacation so the lights will go on at dark and back off again a couple of hours later, so it looks like someone turned off the lamp to go to bed. She plugged her slow cooker into it, set it for the correct time to begin cooking to ensure that dinner would be ready when she got home, and went off to work. None of her family ever got food poisoning that way. They got to eat more than beef stew from the slow cooker, too.
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Obsession (A Mostly Non-Food Entry)
Ever since I was a small child, I've found myself obsessed with the printed word. I'll read just about anything. Of course, I have my preferences, but when the chips are down and there's nothing around that I want to read, I'll read what I can get my hands on. I've read the user's manual for our car on many occasions when my husband has run into some store for "just a minute." I have to read.
There's a blog out there called Whatever, which is authored by the friend of a friend. In addition to being a blogger, the guy also writes science fiction books, so his blog is pretty well visited. Once in awhile he holds a sort of open forum, where he'll answer questions submitted by his blog readers. Someone once asked him about his early life, or something like that, and one of the things he mentioned was that he doesn't recall how or when he learned to read. It just seems, he said, as though he'd always known how. Me too.
My parents tell me I learned to read at age three, but I have no recollection of the process. I just remember sitting in the classroom of the Montessori school/daycare I attended as a small child with a Dick and Jane book reading aloud (to myself) "Dick likes sweats. Jane likes sweats. You like sweats." I should clarify that the book was not titled "Dick and Jane Go to the Gym"; it was just that I read the word "sweet" and pronounced it "sweat." (I said I learned to read at age three; I didn't say I learned to read well at age three.) In later years my Montessori school teachers were frustrated with me because I didn't want to do any of the other activities available to me; I just wanted to read.
I spent a lot of my childhood with a book. My mother didn't exactly hinder me--every Saturday we used to go to McDonald's for lunch and we'd each take a book to read. We'd sit there together, eating and reading. She had a policy that at the bookstore, I could buy as many books as I wanted. I recall staggering out of Crown Books under the weight of all the juvenile paperbacks I'd bought. Even now I complain about having been an only child, but I suppose those book buying free-for-alls were one of the advantages of being an only. Of course, if I'd had siblings, I might not have had to find companionship in books. I can remember sitting at the dinner table by myself, eating and reading a book. Even now I read while I eat if I'm alone. Sometimes I even like to eat alone, just so I can read.
In college I tried majoring in interior design and business at different times. After being completely disgusted by the vapid fixy girls that filled the interior design program, and flunking economics, I broke down and majored in English, as I should have all along. I stuck pretty close to the DWEMs and Classics (that's Dead White European Males, for those not familiar with the acronym). I was well served by this course of study--my DWEM-opposing husband took a Dickens class (doubtless under protest, or maybe because it was the only thing that fit into his schedule that semester) and that's where I met him.
Over the years I've found myself having to swerve to correct my course while driving, as my eyes are drawn to the wording painted on the side of a truck going the opposite direction on the highway. I hate bumper stickers, because I so long to read them, but I can't do so safely most of the time. I don't want to read them in the way most people do--to see what amusing or irritating sentiment someone has been dopey enough to slap on their vehicle--I long to read them so my eye can pore over the printed word. I am sometimes amused or irritated by bumper stickers (let's face it, generally the latter), but I don't read them for content.
I've spent one or two nights in hospital emergency rooms, and I have to give them the award for the environment most barren of reading material. There was one night I had been checked in, and was waiting for a room to be ready (it had to have been 11:30 at night before I finally got into a room--I couldn't figure out why the room was occupied until that time; who the hell leaves a hospital at 11:30 p.m.?) and was casting around for something to read.
Absolutely the only thing (after the labels on the packages of gauze) was a copy of People magazine. I read every article in it, and even started the crossword puzzle at the end. I couldn't finish it because I don't watch TV, so I didn't know a lot of the actors' names that were answers to the clues. It was clearly a puzzle for people of the intelligence level that you would expect to be reading such a fine, intellectual publication. I think one of the clues was actually a four letter word for "Accessory used to hold up pants." By the time I got done my IQ had dropped 20 points, and my brains were leaking out my ears.
I think this obsession with the printed word is one of the reasons I love grocery stores so much. I was thinking about this as I was picking up a couple of things the other day. The grocery store is just papered with things to read. Obviously there are all the labels on the products that scream for your attention. Even beyond that, though, is all sorts of wonderful printing to catch the eye. It doesn't matter if it's a food product or cleaning supplies, there's always plenty to read.
There's all that great marketing text on every item that tells you how superior the product is, gives the history of the company, talks about the purity of the ingredients, or describes the outstanding results that can be obtained using the product. There are instructions for use, nutritional information, government warnings, and sometimes recipes.
This isn't necessarily true of every store. Hardware stores and clothing stores, to offer two examples, are pretty deficient in the incidental things-to-read department. Hardware stores do have some good stuff--paint can labels and things like fertilizer and weed killer have fairly interesting text (all those instructions for use, and dire threats about the hazardousness of the fumes, and "keep out of reach of children" warnings accompanied by a skull and crossbones).
So often, however, they're lacking. Wrenches, for example, are purchased loose. They don't come in a blister pack with a cardboard backer that some marketing person looked at and thought "What an outstanding place to put some self-promoting drivel about our company!" This is true of many of the findings in hardware stores.
Clothing stores are really just hopeless. In clothing stores, once you get past the care instructions on the Orlon garment, you're pretty much done. Although I will read the fine print on their credit card offers in a pinch, it's mostly just boilerplate text, with the only variation being the APR. This may explain why I have literally hundreds of books, but very few store credit cards.
Fortunately my husband enjoys reading as much as I do. He reads different genres of books, and I've never caught him reading the recipe for Mock Apple Pie on the back of a box of Ritz crackers, but we do exchange magazines, and we both read select sections of the Sunday New York Times. Our evenings are often spent sitting on various comfortable chairs, reading different varieties of books, newspapers, or magazines.
I'm hoping my children will inherit our love of reading (although perhaps not to the same extreme--I'd hate to have one of my kids wreck a car just so they can read "East Side Plumbing Supplies" on the side of a truck). So far my older son loves being read to, and is now starting to like looking at books by himself, although he can't actually read yet. The twins like to look at books, but they seem to have an uncanny ability to hold them upside down, and shriek objection if you try to turn them right side up. I have high hopes for the baby, although she's just getting to the point where she can bat at a toy by herself, so actual recognition of letters may be a little way off.
A friend once asked me somewhat jokingly, prior to the birth of my first son, "What if he doesn't like to read much? Will you send him back?" (it's probably worth noting that this was a friend who didn't like to read all that much) and I said "No, of course not!" In reality I was thinking, "Yes, I will." I can't send them back where they came from, naturally, but I can't believe that children who have such easy access to all manner of books, who get books from their relatives for every gift-giving holiday and birthday, who see their parents reading as a form of relaxation, and who are surrounded by a family that contains avid readers, a used book collector, and a writer or two wouldn't come to like reading. They may not read road signs out loud on long car trips (as I used to do when my husband and I were first married, earning me the joking nickname of "Sign Girl"), but I'd like to think they'll always have an answer when someone asks "So, what are you reading these days?"
There's a blog out there called Whatever, which is authored by the friend of a friend. In addition to being a blogger, the guy also writes science fiction books, so his blog is pretty well visited. Once in awhile he holds a sort of open forum, where he'll answer questions submitted by his blog readers. Someone once asked him about his early life, or something like that, and one of the things he mentioned was that he doesn't recall how or when he learned to read. It just seems, he said, as though he'd always known how. Me too.
My parents tell me I learned to read at age three, but I have no recollection of the process. I just remember sitting in the classroom of the Montessori school/daycare I attended as a small child with a Dick and Jane book reading aloud (to myself) "Dick likes sweats. Jane likes sweats. You like sweats." I should clarify that the book was not titled "Dick and Jane Go to the Gym"; it was just that I read the word "sweet" and pronounced it "sweat." (I said I learned to read at age three; I didn't say I learned to read well at age three.) In later years my Montessori school teachers were frustrated with me because I didn't want to do any of the other activities available to me; I just wanted to read.
I spent a lot of my childhood with a book. My mother didn't exactly hinder me--every Saturday we used to go to McDonald's for lunch and we'd each take a book to read. We'd sit there together, eating and reading. She had a policy that at the bookstore, I could buy as many books as I wanted. I recall staggering out of Crown Books under the weight of all the juvenile paperbacks I'd bought. Even now I complain about having been an only child, but I suppose those book buying free-for-alls were one of the advantages of being an only. Of course, if I'd had siblings, I might not have had to find companionship in books. I can remember sitting at the dinner table by myself, eating and reading a book. Even now I read while I eat if I'm alone. Sometimes I even like to eat alone, just so I can read.
In college I tried majoring in interior design and business at different times. After being completely disgusted by the vapid fixy girls that filled the interior design program, and flunking economics, I broke down and majored in English, as I should have all along. I stuck pretty close to the DWEMs and Classics (that's Dead White European Males, for those not familiar with the acronym). I was well served by this course of study--my DWEM-opposing husband took a Dickens class (doubtless under protest, or maybe because it was the only thing that fit into his schedule that semester) and that's where I met him.
Over the years I've found myself having to swerve to correct my course while driving, as my eyes are drawn to the wording painted on the side of a truck going the opposite direction on the highway. I hate bumper stickers, because I so long to read them, but I can't do so safely most of the time. I don't want to read them in the way most people do--to see what amusing or irritating sentiment someone has been dopey enough to slap on their vehicle--I long to read them so my eye can pore over the printed word. I am sometimes amused or irritated by bumper stickers (let's face it, generally the latter), but I don't read them for content.
I've spent one or two nights in hospital emergency rooms, and I have to give them the award for the environment most barren of reading material. There was one night I had been checked in, and was waiting for a room to be ready (it had to have been 11:30 at night before I finally got into a room--I couldn't figure out why the room was occupied until that time; who the hell leaves a hospital at 11:30 p.m.?) and was casting around for something to read.
Absolutely the only thing (after the labels on the packages of gauze) was a copy of People magazine. I read every article in it, and even started the crossword puzzle at the end. I couldn't finish it because I don't watch TV, so I didn't know a lot of the actors' names that were answers to the clues. It was clearly a puzzle for people of the intelligence level that you would expect to be reading such a fine, intellectual publication. I think one of the clues was actually a four letter word for "Accessory used to hold up pants." By the time I got done my IQ had dropped 20 points, and my brains were leaking out my ears.
I think this obsession with the printed word is one of the reasons I love grocery stores so much. I was thinking about this as I was picking up a couple of things the other day. The grocery store is just papered with things to read. Obviously there are all the labels on the products that scream for your attention. Even beyond that, though, is all sorts of wonderful printing to catch the eye. It doesn't matter if it's a food product or cleaning supplies, there's always plenty to read.
There's all that great marketing text on every item that tells you how superior the product is, gives the history of the company, talks about the purity of the ingredients, or describes the outstanding results that can be obtained using the product. There are instructions for use, nutritional information, government warnings, and sometimes recipes.
This isn't necessarily true of every store. Hardware stores and clothing stores, to offer two examples, are pretty deficient in the incidental things-to-read department. Hardware stores do have some good stuff--paint can labels and things like fertilizer and weed killer have fairly interesting text (all those instructions for use, and dire threats about the hazardousness of the fumes, and "keep out of reach of children" warnings accompanied by a skull and crossbones).
So often, however, they're lacking. Wrenches, for example, are purchased loose. They don't come in a blister pack with a cardboard backer that some marketing person looked at and thought "What an outstanding place to put some self-promoting drivel about our company!" This is true of many of the findings in hardware stores.
Clothing stores are really just hopeless. In clothing stores, once you get past the care instructions on the Orlon garment, you're pretty much done. Although I will read the fine print on their credit card offers in a pinch, it's mostly just boilerplate text, with the only variation being the APR. This may explain why I have literally hundreds of books, but very few store credit cards.
Fortunately my husband enjoys reading as much as I do. He reads different genres of books, and I've never caught him reading the recipe for Mock Apple Pie on the back of a box of Ritz crackers, but we do exchange magazines, and we both read select sections of the Sunday New York Times. Our evenings are often spent sitting on various comfortable chairs, reading different varieties of books, newspapers, or magazines.
I'm hoping my children will inherit our love of reading (although perhaps not to the same extreme--I'd hate to have one of my kids wreck a car just so they can read "East Side Plumbing Supplies" on the side of a truck). So far my older son loves being read to, and is now starting to like looking at books by himself, although he can't actually read yet. The twins like to look at books, but they seem to have an uncanny ability to hold them upside down, and shriek objection if you try to turn them right side up. I have high hopes for the baby, although she's just getting to the point where she can bat at a toy by herself, so actual recognition of letters may be a little way off.
A friend once asked me somewhat jokingly, prior to the birth of my first son, "What if he doesn't like to read much? Will you send him back?" (it's probably worth noting that this was a friend who didn't like to read all that much) and I said "No, of course not!" In reality I was thinking, "Yes, I will." I can't send them back where they came from, naturally, but I can't believe that children who have such easy access to all manner of books, who get books from their relatives for every gift-giving holiday and birthday, who see their parents reading as a form of relaxation, and who are surrounded by a family that contains avid readers, a used book collector, and a writer or two wouldn't come to like reading. They may not read road signs out loud on long car trips (as I used to do when my husband and I were first married, earning me the joking nickname of "Sign Girl"), but I'd like to think they'll always have an answer when someone asks "So, what are you reading these days?"
Monday, January 22, 2007
You'll Eat It and You'll Like It
As I think I’ve made pretty clear, I was a picky child who would eat only hamburgers and junk food for about the first fifteen years of my life. I was thinking about this when I was trying to coax my own children into eating something other than chicken nuggets and hot dogs the other day. While trying to get the tunnel to open so the choo choo could go in, I was remembering how I came to be won over by certain foods. I realized the process of learning to like new foods can be pretty odd. I don’t remember when I discovered that pizza was tasty, or learning to like steak or lettuce, but my first experiences with some foods are so distinctive that I remember them with startling clarity.
I tried broccoli, for example, in an effort to get a child to eat it. I was babysitting a little girl, and her mother had made her dinner to use as a distraction while they were leaving. It worked, but the child was dead set against eating the steamed broccoli her mom had served. In a trick that would never work with my own kids, I said, “How about if I eat a little, and then you eat a little?” Clearly I was desperate, because I loathed broccoli at the time. Talk about making sacrifices for your work. I took the tiniest bit of a stalk and put it in my mouth. I breathed through my mouth the whole time I was chewing, to avoid tasting it. Once it was chewed up and swallowed, I breathed normally and of course I could taste a little of the “aftertaste.” It wasn’t too bad, really. I ate a slightly larger piece to get her to try a little more. This time I let myself taste it. It was pretty good. I liked it! I liked broccoli!
This discovery led to my tasting cream of broccoli soup. I loved this too. Somehow a high school friend and I stumbled on a place in The Shops and National Place in downtown Washington, DC that sold what I considered to be the best cream of broccoli soup there was. We’d make special trips downtown to get it after school let out for the day.
The same friend was also responsible for my introduction to Ethiopian food. This was before “When Harry Met Sally…” came out, so I couldn't back out of it using Billy Crystal’s joke “I didn’t know they had food in Ethiopia…this should be easy: I’ll order two empty plates and we’ll leave.” My friend talked me into going to a place called Zed’s in Adams Morgan. We ordered a sort of sampler platter that came with the bread (which immediately struck me as looking exactly like a Nerf ball that had gotten into an unfortunate situation with a steam roller). The restaurant was dark, and my friend gave me a quick rundown of what everything was that I didn’t really take in. In this case I did the culinary equivalent of holding my nose and walking off the high dive (which, for the record, I’ve done only twice, and both times it was under protest—I don’t like heights). I tore off a piece of bread, scooped something up, and ate it. I don’t remember now much of what I ate, except that there were potatoes involved, and red lentils, and that I was surprised to find that I liked it all.
Those red lentils on that Ethiopian food platter led to another revelation. Lentils were good. From that day on I was no longer averse to pulses, and this led me to a willingness to try various legumes as well. I now love white beans, both in soup, and as the puree that is the low carb fad replacement for mashed potatoes. I tolerate kidney beans (they’re so big and coarse-looking that they intimidate me sometimes, but I can handle them in chili). I really don’t care for chick peas much. Maybe it’s their name. Peas aren’t my favorite vegetable. Also, I find them to be sort of grainy.
There are other foods I’ve learned to like by forcing myself to try them. One year we spent the New Year’s holiday with my in-laws in Northwestern Massachusetts. After two days with my father-in-law, both my husband and I felt the need to get out of the house (indeed, out of the state) and spend some time alone. On New Year’s Day we drove into Vermont to a little town called Manchester. There we went to lunch at a tavern, in a hotel called The Equinox. On the menu that day was cream of mushroom soup. Maybe I was subconsciously reminded of my experience many years earlier with cream of broccoli soup, or maybe I just figured that anything made with butter, flour, and cream couldn’t be bad. In any event, I remember saying to myself “THIS year I’m going to learn to like mushrooms. I’m an adult now—I need to stop shying away from them.” I ordered the soup. My rationale didn’t fail me—anything made with butter, flour, and cream is worth taking a chance on, and I liked the soup. Now I can eat mushrooms cooked, but I still have difficulty with them in their raw state. The resolution was largely a success.
Somehow a restaurant environment is safe for trying new things. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to eat it, and no one is offended. Restaurants were my introduction to a number of things, including more exotic Chinese foods (Mongolian Lamb that I had at a Chinese restaurant in Sydney, Australia, which so far is the best Chinese dish I’ve ever had in my whole life; I’m guessing the quality of the lamb had something to do with it, although the restaurant itself was a total dive), and olive tapenade that I tried at a restaurant in Georgetown with the same friend who turned me on to Ethiopian food (clearly this friend has been responsible for a lot of my culinary awakenings—thank you, Reese).
A restaurant was also where I learned to like calamari, about five years before the deep fried rubber bands started showing up in every restaurant in North America that had a deep fryer in the kitchen. On my way to Australia, I stopped for a day or two to visit my uncle in San Francisco. The first night he took me to a tapas bar he liked. This was also before the “little plates” craze hit this country; my uncle had spent a number of years in Spain and had stumbled on this tapas bar near his house. He ordered for us, and among other things, they brought out a little basket of deep fried cone things. I started eating, and the cone things weren’t bad. I ate a few more. He asked me if I knew what they were. I shook my head. He told me they were calamari; did I know what calamari was? Again, a response in the negative from me. “They’re squid,” he said. I remember pausing for a moment, teetering between OK with it, and grossed out beyond belief. After a minute, I went with OK. Hey, they were pretty tasty, and since at the time I wasn’t 100% sure what a squid looked like, I let it go. It was just that word. Squid. It sounded so ooky—like something slimy and slithery. Since then I’ve come to believe that if you want Americans to eat something, you deep fry it and give it a slightly exotic sounding name and you’re in business.
An old boss and I used to get to work very early, and spend an hour or more just talking before everyone else got into the office. At one point we were talking about food we liked, and food we didn’t. We had both heard or read that the human palate changes every seven years or so. What you tasted at seven or ten years old and hated, you might try again at twenty or twenty five and find you loved. I had this experience myself with cream cheese. I must have been about four when my mother took me to a baby shower for one of her coworkers. They had something on the food table that looked like slices of chocolate cake with white icing on them. Right up my alley, of course. I asked my mother if I could have one. She responded with a sentence that I’ve sworn never to say to my children: “Yes, but you probably won’t like it.” Talk about self-fulfilling prophecies. I’m not saying that I would have liked the pumpernickel bread with cream cheese on it if she hadn’t said that (I’m fairly sure I wouldn’t have—when you’re counting on chocolate cake and you get pumpernickel bread, you’re bound to have a moment of disappointment, and are probably more inclined than not to hold a grudge), but I refuse to automatically assume that my kids will dislike something just because I don’t think it’s something a juvenile palate will appreciate.
As a result of this experience, I actively disliked cream cheese for many, many years. Finally at age twenty, I was working in a catering kitchen. On a whim, I tried something that we made as an hors d’oeuvre—it was called a mascarpone torta, and it was supposed to be made with mascarpone cheese. We made it with equal parts butter and cream cheese (clearly, a low fat offering), whirled in a food processor. This was then spread into a mold in two layers, with a layer of pesto and chopped walnuts in between, and served with slices of French bread. I have no idea what actually inspired me to taste this, unless I didn’t realize it was made with cream cheese (probably the case). I loved it, and when I was told how it was made, I thought that maybe cream cheese was worth giving another chance. I’ve been eating it ever since in every state known to man—cheesecake, on bagels, in dips, you name it.
There are still things I really don’t like: eggplant, pomegranates, avocado, okra, grapefruit. Maybe one day I’ll try some or all of those things (well, probably not the pomegranates—sorry, Reese) and discover that I do in fact like them. After all, my palate will keep changing, albeit more slowly as I get older. As my old boss and I used to say to each other, “When was the last time you tried it?”
I tried broccoli, for example, in an effort to get a child to eat it. I was babysitting a little girl, and her mother had made her dinner to use as a distraction while they were leaving. It worked, but the child was dead set against eating the steamed broccoli her mom had served. In a trick that would never work with my own kids, I said, “How about if I eat a little, and then you eat a little?” Clearly I was desperate, because I loathed broccoli at the time. Talk about making sacrifices for your work. I took the tiniest bit of a stalk and put it in my mouth. I breathed through my mouth the whole time I was chewing, to avoid tasting it. Once it was chewed up and swallowed, I breathed normally and of course I could taste a little of the “aftertaste.” It wasn’t too bad, really. I ate a slightly larger piece to get her to try a little more. This time I let myself taste it. It was pretty good. I liked it! I liked broccoli!
This discovery led to my tasting cream of broccoli soup. I loved this too. Somehow a high school friend and I stumbled on a place in The Shops and National Place in downtown Washington, DC that sold what I considered to be the best cream of broccoli soup there was. We’d make special trips downtown to get it after school let out for the day.
The same friend was also responsible for my introduction to Ethiopian food. This was before “When Harry Met Sally…” came out, so I couldn't back out of it using Billy Crystal’s joke “I didn’t know they had food in Ethiopia…this should be easy: I’ll order two empty plates and we’ll leave.” My friend talked me into going to a place called Zed’s in Adams Morgan. We ordered a sort of sampler platter that came with the bread (which immediately struck me as looking exactly like a Nerf ball that had gotten into an unfortunate situation with a steam roller). The restaurant was dark, and my friend gave me a quick rundown of what everything was that I didn’t really take in. In this case I did the culinary equivalent of holding my nose and walking off the high dive (which, for the record, I’ve done only twice, and both times it was under protest—I don’t like heights). I tore off a piece of bread, scooped something up, and ate it. I don’t remember now much of what I ate, except that there were potatoes involved, and red lentils, and that I was surprised to find that I liked it all.
Those red lentils on that Ethiopian food platter led to another revelation. Lentils were good. From that day on I was no longer averse to pulses, and this led me to a willingness to try various legumes as well. I now love white beans, both in soup, and as the puree that is the low carb fad replacement for mashed potatoes. I tolerate kidney beans (they’re so big and coarse-looking that they intimidate me sometimes, but I can handle them in chili). I really don’t care for chick peas much. Maybe it’s their name. Peas aren’t my favorite vegetable. Also, I find them to be sort of grainy.
There are other foods I’ve learned to like by forcing myself to try them. One year we spent the New Year’s holiday with my in-laws in Northwestern Massachusetts. After two days with my father-in-law, both my husband and I felt the need to get out of the house (indeed, out of the state) and spend some time alone. On New Year’s Day we drove into Vermont to a little town called Manchester. There we went to lunch at a tavern, in a hotel called The Equinox. On the menu that day was cream of mushroom soup. Maybe I was subconsciously reminded of my experience many years earlier with cream of broccoli soup, or maybe I just figured that anything made with butter, flour, and cream couldn’t be bad. In any event, I remember saying to myself “THIS year I’m going to learn to like mushrooms. I’m an adult now—I need to stop shying away from them.” I ordered the soup. My rationale didn’t fail me—anything made with butter, flour, and cream is worth taking a chance on, and I liked the soup. Now I can eat mushrooms cooked, but I still have difficulty with them in their raw state. The resolution was largely a success.
Somehow a restaurant environment is safe for trying new things. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to eat it, and no one is offended. Restaurants were my introduction to a number of things, including more exotic Chinese foods (Mongolian Lamb that I had at a Chinese restaurant in Sydney, Australia, which so far is the best Chinese dish I’ve ever had in my whole life; I’m guessing the quality of the lamb had something to do with it, although the restaurant itself was a total dive), and olive tapenade that I tried at a restaurant in Georgetown with the same friend who turned me on to Ethiopian food (clearly this friend has been responsible for a lot of my culinary awakenings—thank you, Reese).
A restaurant was also where I learned to like calamari, about five years before the deep fried rubber bands started showing up in every restaurant in North America that had a deep fryer in the kitchen. On my way to Australia, I stopped for a day or two to visit my uncle in San Francisco. The first night he took me to a tapas bar he liked. This was also before the “little plates” craze hit this country; my uncle had spent a number of years in Spain and had stumbled on this tapas bar near his house. He ordered for us, and among other things, they brought out a little basket of deep fried cone things. I started eating, and the cone things weren’t bad. I ate a few more. He asked me if I knew what they were. I shook my head. He told me they were calamari; did I know what calamari was? Again, a response in the negative from me. “They’re squid,” he said. I remember pausing for a moment, teetering between OK with it, and grossed out beyond belief. After a minute, I went with OK. Hey, they were pretty tasty, and since at the time I wasn’t 100% sure what a squid looked like, I let it go. It was just that word. Squid. It sounded so ooky—like something slimy and slithery. Since then I’ve come to believe that if you want Americans to eat something, you deep fry it and give it a slightly exotic sounding name and you’re in business.
An old boss and I used to get to work very early, and spend an hour or more just talking before everyone else got into the office. At one point we were talking about food we liked, and food we didn’t. We had both heard or read that the human palate changes every seven years or so. What you tasted at seven or ten years old and hated, you might try again at twenty or twenty five and find you loved. I had this experience myself with cream cheese. I must have been about four when my mother took me to a baby shower for one of her coworkers. They had something on the food table that looked like slices of chocolate cake with white icing on them. Right up my alley, of course. I asked my mother if I could have one. She responded with a sentence that I’ve sworn never to say to my children: “Yes, but you probably won’t like it.” Talk about self-fulfilling prophecies. I’m not saying that I would have liked the pumpernickel bread with cream cheese on it if she hadn’t said that (I’m fairly sure I wouldn’t have—when you’re counting on chocolate cake and you get pumpernickel bread, you’re bound to have a moment of disappointment, and are probably more inclined than not to hold a grudge), but I refuse to automatically assume that my kids will dislike something just because I don’t think it’s something a juvenile palate will appreciate.
As a result of this experience, I actively disliked cream cheese for many, many years. Finally at age twenty, I was working in a catering kitchen. On a whim, I tried something that we made as an hors d’oeuvre—it was called a mascarpone torta, and it was supposed to be made with mascarpone cheese. We made it with equal parts butter and cream cheese (clearly, a low fat offering), whirled in a food processor. This was then spread into a mold in two layers, with a layer of pesto and chopped walnuts in between, and served with slices of French bread. I have no idea what actually inspired me to taste this, unless I didn’t realize it was made with cream cheese (probably the case). I loved it, and when I was told how it was made, I thought that maybe cream cheese was worth giving another chance. I’ve been eating it ever since in every state known to man—cheesecake, on bagels, in dips, you name it.
There are still things I really don’t like: eggplant, pomegranates, avocado, okra, grapefruit. Maybe one day I’ll try some or all of those things (well, probably not the pomegranates—sorry, Reese) and discover that I do in fact like them. After all, my palate will keep changing, albeit more slowly as I get older. As my old boss and I used to say to each other, “When was the last time you tried it?”
Status Update
My hard drive is still dead, and I haven't bought a new one. I'm using my husband's crappy laptop on which the "u" key sticks. You never know how many times you use a letter until the key doesn't work and you have to keep going back to put the letter in where the key failed while you were typing. Argh.
Then, on the day I started back to work from maternity leave, I got laid off.
Bad things happen in threes, don't they? Uh oh.
In answer to the first question everyone asks me about the layoff, yes, they can do that. It was a reduction in force, not a performance-based dismissal. The company laid off 14 people that day. They had over-hired in anticipation of work that then failed to materialize. I fell victim to the "last in-first out" rule of layoffs. I'm not thrilled, naturally, but I'm looking for another job and I have some solid leads. As a result, I hope not to be out of work for much more than another month. According to my husband, I'd better not be.
Thus, although I am not working, I still may not be posting with the frequency which I had hoped. If my husband finds out I'm blogging instead of searching job boards (which he could only do if he reads my blog, which he does not), I'll be in big trouble.
More updates as they become available...
Then, on the day I started back to work from maternity leave, I got laid off.
Bad things happen in threes, don't they? Uh oh.
In answer to the first question everyone asks me about the layoff, yes, they can do that. It was a reduction in force, not a performance-based dismissal. The company laid off 14 people that day. They had over-hired in anticipation of work that then failed to materialize. I fell victim to the "last in-first out" rule of layoffs. I'm not thrilled, naturally, but I'm looking for another job and I have some solid leads. As a result, I hope not to be out of work for much more than another month. According to my husband, I'd better not be.
Thus, although I am not working, I still may not be posting with the frequency which I had hoped. If my husband finds out I'm blogging instead of searching job boards (which he could only do if he reads my blog, which he does not), I'll be in big trouble.
More updates as they become available...
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Stock Text
As I read through the multitude of food magazines I receive each month, I notice that there are words and phrases that they use over and over to describe food, and actions involving food (mostly they have to do with food, although there are others that don’t exactly refer to food, but that still show up in food magazines for one reason or another). Some of them have been around for quite a long time, while others are fairly new to the vocabulary. In every case, I notice that they’re things I simply refuse to do, or have anything to do with.
For instance, the newest buzzword, particularly in quotes from restaurateurs is “provision.” Not a month goes by that I don’t read an interview with some new restaurant owner who insists that “…we provision only the finest organic products to use in creating our menus.” This usually is followed by the tired spiel about using only fresh, seasonal ingredients (and, if it’s a healthy cooking magazine, how they use herbs and spices to enhance flavor, instead of added fat and salt). Personally, I do not “provision.” I buy, I purchase, I get at the store, but I do not provision.
Often articles suggest various items to eat between meals, more commonly referred to as snacks. These, the magazines urge, are perfect when I want a “nosh.” Or they offer suggestions for things I can “nosh” on. Noshing is something else I refuse to do. Primarily, I have a snack. Occasionally I’ll have a little something to tide me over. I can safely say that I have never intentionally noshed.
I can also safely say that I have never “jonesed.” We’re often assured that such-and-such a substitute can stand in successfully as a treat when we’re “jonesing” for something less healthy. Usually this is something patently ridiculous, like eating baby carrots when one is “jonesing” for potato chips, but that’s another story. I myself want, or may on rare occasions crave, but never do I jones for anything.
When deciding what to have with an entrée, I do not “round out the meal” with either a “green salad” or a “crusty loaf of bread.” I may have a salad for a vegetable, or choose to have bread with a meal, but rounding out the meal is not part of my planning. Recipe headers for entrees are always urging us to round out the meal, generally with the aforementioned green salad and/or a crusty loaf of bread. Occasionally they’ll suggest a dessert (very often some form of fresh fruit, or ice cream and cookies) to “complete the menu.”
A suggestion that’s often made, particularly in recipes for casseroles, is to “double the recipe and freeze half for later.” I find that if I do this, what I do is freeze half to throw out later. Somehow I never like the texture of prepared foods when they’re thawed and reheated. I’m really only talking about homemade food here, not frozen dinners, which can occasionally be OK and sometimes even tasty. Commercial quick freezing techniques are far superior to the job done by my Kenmore refrigerator.
Although I understand the need to find verbs other than choose and pick, which certainly can become repetitive, I almost never find myself in a position to “opt.” Frequently we’re encouraged to “opt for a whole grain bagel over a muffin” and things of that nature. I’m more one to pick, choose, or select, as opposed to opt. I really never opt if I can help it.
Then there are cutesy words that fill in for the more staid nouns—spuds instead of potatoes, kicks instead of sneakers, mitts instead of hands, tresses or locks instead of hair, peepers instead of eyes. You get the general idea. Probably the most abused of these words these days is bling. I had never heard this term before to describe that which is bright, eye-catching, and generally somewhat ostentatious. A friend commented in an email that she was sick of seeing this word everywhere. This always happens to me, particularly with this friend—I’ve never seen or heard of a word, phrase, product, or person before until she mentions it. Once she does, it’s everywhere and of course it promptly begins to annoy the crap out of me. Thus it was with bling. (I got back at her—she’d never heard of the Lee Brothers from Charleston, South Carolina. These two men moved to New York City, so missed some of the various foods they could get “back home” that they started a mail order company, and now they’ve written a cookbook and are everywhere you turn. Needless to say they’re irritating as hell, primarily because they let on to be good ol’ south’n’ boys from a long line of good ol’ south’n’ boys, when in fact they merely moved to Charleston at some point in their earlier lives. I think they’re originally from Nebraska or something.)
I’m sure there are dozens of other examples of this sort of thing I could dig up, but not without becoming more tiresome than I already have been. Magazine copy writers seem to read each other’s work and seize on the clever turn of phrase (or what’s clever once, anyway) and reuse it until it sounds like they use one of those refrigerator poetry kits full of stock magazine phrases and just rearrange them to suit the story they’re writing. That’s probably what they do, in fact. If I could provision one of those kits, I could use my mitts to do some copywriting of my own and opt for some bling with the money I'd make doing it.
For instance, the newest buzzword, particularly in quotes from restaurateurs is “provision.” Not a month goes by that I don’t read an interview with some new restaurant owner who insists that “…we provision only the finest organic products to use in creating our menus.” This usually is followed by the tired spiel about using only fresh, seasonal ingredients (and, if it’s a healthy cooking magazine, how they use herbs and spices to enhance flavor, instead of added fat and salt). Personally, I do not “provision.” I buy, I purchase, I get at the store, but I do not provision.
Often articles suggest various items to eat between meals, more commonly referred to as snacks. These, the magazines urge, are perfect when I want a “nosh.” Or they offer suggestions for things I can “nosh” on. Noshing is something else I refuse to do. Primarily, I have a snack. Occasionally I’ll have a little something to tide me over. I can safely say that I have never intentionally noshed.
I can also safely say that I have never “jonesed.” We’re often assured that such-and-such a substitute can stand in successfully as a treat when we’re “jonesing” for something less healthy. Usually this is something patently ridiculous, like eating baby carrots when one is “jonesing” for potato chips, but that’s another story. I myself want, or may on rare occasions crave, but never do I jones for anything.
When deciding what to have with an entrée, I do not “round out the meal” with either a “green salad” or a “crusty loaf of bread.” I may have a salad for a vegetable, or choose to have bread with a meal, but rounding out the meal is not part of my planning. Recipe headers for entrees are always urging us to round out the meal, generally with the aforementioned green salad and/or a crusty loaf of bread. Occasionally they’ll suggest a dessert (very often some form of fresh fruit, or ice cream and cookies) to “complete the menu.”
A suggestion that’s often made, particularly in recipes for casseroles, is to “double the recipe and freeze half for later.” I find that if I do this, what I do is freeze half to throw out later. Somehow I never like the texture of prepared foods when they’re thawed and reheated. I’m really only talking about homemade food here, not frozen dinners, which can occasionally be OK and sometimes even tasty. Commercial quick freezing techniques are far superior to the job done by my Kenmore refrigerator.
Although I understand the need to find verbs other than choose and pick, which certainly can become repetitive, I almost never find myself in a position to “opt.” Frequently we’re encouraged to “opt for a whole grain bagel over a muffin” and things of that nature. I’m more one to pick, choose, or select, as opposed to opt. I really never opt if I can help it.
Then there are cutesy words that fill in for the more staid nouns—spuds instead of potatoes, kicks instead of sneakers, mitts instead of hands, tresses or locks instead of hair, peepers instead of eyes. You get the general idea. Probably the most abused of these words these days is bling. I had never heard this term before to describe that which is bright, eye-catching, and generally somewhat ostentatious. A friend commented in an email that she was sick of seeing this word everywhere. This always happens to me, particularly with this friend—I’ve never seen or heard of a word, phrase, product, or person before until she mentions it. Once she does, it’s everywhere and of course it promptly begins to annoy the crap out of me. Thus it was with bling. (I got back at her—she’d never heard of the Lee Brothers from Charleston, South Carolina. These two men moved to New York City, so missed some of the various foods they could get “back home” that they started a mail order company, and now they’ve written a cookbook and are everywhere you turn. Needless to say they’re irritating as hell, primarily because they let on to be good ol’ south’n’ boys from a long line of good ol’ south’n’ boys, when in fact they merely moved to Charleston at some point in their earlier lives. I think they’re originally from Nebraska or something.)
I’m sure there are dozens of other examples of this sort of thing I could dig up, but not without becoming more tiresome than I already have been. Magazine copy writers seem to read each other’s work and seize on the clever turn of phrase (or what’s clever once, anyway) and reuse it until it sounds like they use one of those refrigerator poetry kits full of stock magazine phrases and just rearrange them to suit the story they’re writing. That’s probably what they do, in fact. If I could provision one of those kits, I could use my mitts to do some copywriting of my own and opt for some bling with the money I'd make doing it.
Tuesday, January 09, 2007
CRASH!!!!!!!!
My hard drive crashed. Hard. As in "no bootable devices found" hard (bootable? Is that even a word?). As in "replace me now" hard. This means that not only am I using a backup laptop (a work one that--if you can believe it--I'm not the administrator on, so I can't actually add any software to it...so much for Instant Messaging!), but that all the drafts of posts that I had saved on my old hard drive are history. Bye-bye!
I've got paper-and-pen notes of lots of topics, but all the drafts are gone, so I'm starting over from scratch.
In addition to that, I start back to work on the 22nd, and I have quite a bit to do to get ready for that (such as looking up the address of my office, and finding some clothes that aren't sweatpants).
Check back with me now and then--I'll try to put up a couple of posts between now and the 22nd. When I'm back in the groove, I'll put up a post to that effect, and start posting more on the one- to two-times-per-week schedule that I always intended to maintain.
I've got paper-and-pen notes of lots of topics, but all the drafts are gone, so I'm starting over from scratch.
In addition to that, I start back to work on the 22nd, and I have quite a bit to do to get ready for that (such as looking up the address of my office, and finding some clothes that aren't sweatpants).
Check back with me now and then--I'll try to put up a couple of posts between now and the 22nd. When I'm back in the groove, I'll put up a post to that effect, and start posting more on the one- to two-times-per-week schedule that I always intended to maintain.
Wednesday, January 03, 2007
The Internal Debate Rages
This organic thing is still an issue for me. I promise not to do many more (or maybe even any more) entries on this subject, lest my two readers become bored and abandon me, but I’m still mulling this whole thing over. Some reading I’ve been doing on the subject, along with some detective work I did this morning, have raised some questions for me.
There’s an article in the New York Times this morning about a phenomenon called “greenwashing.” (I’d provide the link, but I think the Times requires registration—that opportunity for you to protect your privacy by giving phony information so it looks like a male World War I veteran in Toledo, OH is reading the Times Online; that’s what I do at least, but I’m kind of evil that way, and can’t understand why the Times needs to know my birthday. Should I expect a card? Age range I can handle, actual date of birth is none of their business.) “Greenwashing” is the practice employed by food companies to make their products look wholesome, environmentally friendly, and socially correct. They may use images of rolling fields, huge dew-wet vegetables or fruits, perhaps a barn in the background, and maybe a tractor to convey the impression that the product has a strong connection with the land. Anthropomorphic animals may also play a role—dancing cows, instrument playing insects, and what have you.
The text on such packages may also perpetuate the myth. It often uses the word “organic,” frequently talks about the company’s philanthropic efforts, and uses the recognized catchphrases we’ve all come to associate with “green” products. Words like wholesome, all natural, earth friendly, responsible.
This whole movement is not unlike the use of green packages to convey “fat free” or “reduced fat.” Back in the late 80s and early 90s, when Nabisco introduced the Snackwell’s line, they used a kelly green box. Go to the grocery store today, and many of the fat-altered products are in green packaging. Healthy Choice is the other obvious example. Even products like Sara Lee pound cake will have a green banner or ribbon with the fat reduction indicator. That bright green is a form of shorthand for consumers—“I am low fat: pick me, pick me!”
So the first question is, without actually calling, or looking up on the Internet, all these companies that make allegedly organic and healthy foods, how can one sort them all out? Even if I were to do all that research, there’s no assurance that the information I’d get would be completely reliable, provided as it would be by the company’s own marketing people, who obviously have a vested interest in my thinking highly of them. There’s the USDA Organic seal, but that doesn’t mean whatever it is will actually be good for you. I mentioned organic tortilla chips and cookies in my last rant on this subject.
Then there’s the question of organic versus local. Again, I refer to my previous driveling regarding “organic” foods that are hauled into my local grocery store from faraway places. I checked out the organic section of my local Safeway this morning (because I didn’t have much else critical to do at 7 a.m.) and found a wide range of origins. The closest items came from Oregon, with some coming from California. That’s tolerable, I suppose. However, when I got to the (out of season) blueberries and raspberries and saw “Product of Mexico,” I had to cringe. That was only the products that listed origins. Most did not. Those carried under the Safeway O Organics label merely designated themselves as being “Distributed by Safeway, Inc.” and had the company’s address in California.
So I ask myself again, what’s better? The advice I’ve read is local organic is best, imported organic is second, local conventional is next, and imported conventional is the least desirable. I’m not sure I’d agree—I think I’d put local conventional ahead of imported organic. I guess that’s my choice to make.
Lastly, I’m noticing all these bogus health claims on food labels more and more now. Frankly, they’re starting to piss me off. It kind of goes hand-in-hand with the food labels showing the little red tractor and the dancing chicken, but the fact that the food industry thinks I’m such a dope that I’ll fall for the “No Cholesterol!” banner on every single thing I buy is starting to grate on my nerves. Of course olive oil has no cholesterol. Cholesterol comes from two sources—animal meat, and the human body. Therefore big letters proclaiming that my olive oil has no cholesterol in it (or is “sin colesterol” as my package actually says, since it’s a product of Spain) is kind of an insult to my intelligence. Unless a cow fell into the olive oil processing equipment, it’s physically impossible for olive oil to have cholesterol.
Cholesterol is the big offender, but trans fats are close behind, along with things being a “good source” of this or that. I checked out a bunch of stuff in my kitchen—peanut butter, bread, olive oil, cereals, crackers, applesauce, Hostess donettes (don't ask). With the exception of the donettes, every single product made some health claim or other. When I read the nutritional information and ingredients on the donettes, I began to realize why they kept quiet. Partially hydrogenated this, enriched that (which of course means that the healthy stuff was stripped out and then put back in using chemical versions), genetically modified this other thing. I’m just waiting for the day when Hostess pumps donettes full of powdered milk and is allowed by the government to announce that they’re “A Good Source of Calcium!”
Once again, how do I weed through all these health claims and find what’s actually healthy? I suppose following the advice of a million diet magazines and nutritionists and “shopping the perimeter” of the store is the way to go. This advice, in case you haven’t heard it, recommends that most of what goes in your grocery cart come from the outer edge of the store—in most store layouts, this includes the produce, dairy, meat and bakery sections. Reasonable advice, but now there are more and more ways to trip up, even there. Organic milk? What brand? Evidently there’s quite a bit of debate over the claims that Horizon, one of the largest suppliers of organic milk, makes regarding the treatment of its cows. Free range eggs? Cage free eggs? Is there a difference? As a matter of fact, yes—free range means the chickens do get to go outside and scratch, whereas cage free just means they’re not confined in cages with nine birds in a tiny cage; they may never see the light of day, but they’re not as inhumanely confined, either. Free range chicken? Kosher chicken? Don’t even get me started on cheeses.
So I continue to mull all this over, and I’m starting to actually get tired of thinking about it. I’m not going to throw in the towel and go buy a box of Twinkies and a frozen pizza. I’ll come to some kind of a conclusion. I think, however, that that conclusion is going to primarily consist of my resolving to just do the best I can, and let it all come out in the wash. I think that’s about the only way I’m not going to send myself (and everyone around me) completely up a wall on this subject.
There’s an article in the New York Times this morning about a phenomenon called “greenwashing.” (I’d provide the link, but I think the Times requires registration—that opportunity for you to protect your privacy by giving phony information so it looks like a male World War I veteran in Toledo, OH is reading the Times Online; that’s what I do at least, but I’m kind of evil that way, and can’t understand why the Times needs to know my birthday. Should I expect a card? Age range I can handle, actual date of birth is none of their business.) “Greenwashing” is the practice employed by food companies to make their products look wholesome, environmentally friendly, and socially correct. They may use images of rolling fields, huge dew-wet vegetables or fruits, perhaps a barn in the background, and maybe a tractor to convey the impression that the product has a strong connection with the land. Anthropomorphic animals may also play a role—dancing cows, instrument playing insects, and what have you.
The text on such packages may also perpetuate the myth. It often uses the word “organic,” frequently talks about the company’s philanthropic efforts, and uses the recognized catchphrases we’ve all come to associate with “green” products. Words like wholesome, all natural, earth friendly, responsible.
This whole movement is not unlike the use of green packages to convey “fat free” or “reduced fat.” Back in the late 80s and early 90s, when Nabisco introduced the Snackwell’s line, they used a kelly green box. Go to the grocery store today, and many of the fat-altered products are in green packaging. Healthy Choice is the other obvious example. Even products like Sara Lee pound cake will have a green banner or ribbon with the fat reduction indicator. That bright green is a form of shorthand for consumers—“I am low fat: pick me, pick me!”
So the first question is, without actually calling, or looking up on the Internet, all these companies that make allegedly organic and healthy foods, how can one sort them all out? Even if I were to do all that research, there’s no assurance that the information I’d get would be completely reliable, provided as it would be by the company’s own marketing people, who obviously have a vested interest in my thinking highly of them. There’s the USDA Organic seal, but that doesn’t mean whatever it is will actually be good for you. I mentioned organic tortilla chips and cookies in my last rant on this subject.
Then there’s the question of organic versus local. Again, I refer to my previous driveling regarding “organic” foods that are hauled into my local grocery store from faraway places. I checked out the organic section of my local Safeway this morning (because I didn’t have much else critical to do at 7 a.m.) and found a wide range of origins. The closest items came from Oregon, with some coming from California. That’s tolerable, I suppose. However, when I got to the (out of season) blueberries and raspberries and saw “Product of Mexico,” I had to cringe. That was only the products that listed origins. Most did not. Those carried under the Safeway O Organics label merely designated themselves as being “Distributed by Safeway, Inc.” and had the company’s address in California.
So I ask myself again, what’s better? The advice I’ve read is local organic is best, imported organic is second, local conventional is next, and imported conventional is the least desirable. I’m not sure I’d agree—I think I’d put local conventional ahead of imported organic. I guess that’s my choice to make.
Lastly, I’m noticing all these bogus health claims on food labels more and more now. Frankly, they’re starting to piss me off. It kind of goes hand-in-hand with the food labels showing the little red tractor and the dancing chicken, but the fact that the food industry thinks I’m such a dope that I’ll fall for the “No Cholesterol!” banner on every single thing I buy is starting to grate on my nerves. Of course olive oil has no cholesterol. Cholesterol comes from two sources—animal meat, and the human body. Therefore big letters proclaiming that my olive oil has no cholesterol in it (or is “sin colesterol” as my package actually says, since it’s a product of Spain) is kind of an insult to my intelligence. Unless a cow fell into the olive oil processing equipment, it’s physically impossible for olive oil to have cholesterol.
Cholesterol is the big offender, but trans fats are close behind, along with things being a “good source” of this or that. I checked out a bunch of stuff in my kitchen—peanut butter, bread, olive oil, cereals, crackers, applesauce, Hostess donettes (don't ask). With the exception of the donettes, every single product made some health claim or other. When I read the nutritional information and ingredients on the donettes, I began to realize why they kept quiet. Partially hydrogenated this, enriched that (which of course means that the healthy stuff was stripped out and then put back in using chemical versions), genetically modified this other thing. I’m just waiting for the day when Hostess pumps donettes full of powdered milk and is allowed by the government to announce that they’re “A Good Source of Calcium!”
Once again, how do I weed through all these health claims and find what’s actually healthy? I suppose following the advice of a million diet magazines and nutritionists and “shopping the perimeter” of the store is the way to go. This advice, in case you haven’t heard it, recommends that most of what goes in your grocery cart come from the outer edge of the store—in most store layouts, this includes the produce, dairy, meat and bakery sections. Reasonable advice, but now there are more and more ways to trip up, even there. Organic milk? What brand? Evidently there’s quite a bit of debate over the claims that Horizon, one of the largest suppliers of organic milk, makes regarding the treatment of its cows. Free range eggs? Cage free eggs? Is there a difference? As a matter of fact, yes—free range means the chickens do get to go outside and scratch, whereas cage free just means they’re not confined in cages with nine birds in a tiny cage; they may never see the light of day, but they’re not as inhumanely confined, either. Free range chicken? Kosher chicken? Don’t even get me started on cheeses.
So I continue to mull all this over, and I’m starting to actually get tired of thinking about it. I’m not going to throw in the towel and go buy a box of Twinkies and a frozen pizza. I’ll come to some kind of a conclusion. I think, however, that that conclusion is going to primarily consist of my resolving to just do the best I can, and let it all come out in the wash. I think that’s about the only way I’m not going to send myself (and everyone around me) completely up a wall on this subject.
Monday, January 01, 2007
The Organic Debate
I’m facing a dilemma here. I’ve been doing a lot of reading about food in general, and more and more I’m feeling like I should be considering organic foods, in particular milk, meat and produce (I can’t see much benefit to things like organic steak sauce or corn chips). Oh yes, the organic food movement annoyed me excessively when it started. The fact that Safeway and Wal-Mart have both started marketing their own line of organic products is almost a strike against organics, in my opinion, but I’m starting to question my prejudice.
I have said, and I still believe, that organic will be to Americans in this decade what fat free was to Americans in the 1980s. Horror stories were famous of dieticians and nutritionists in the 80s whose clients weren’t losing weight, or were even gaining it, and, when asked what they’d eaten, would reply “An Entenmann’s Fat Free Danish.” The dietician would ask “One serving?” and the client would reply “No, one whole Danish” (meaning one whole 10” cake). Fat free, we were admonished, did not mean calorie free. I see organics headed in this direction. Every time I walk into my local Safeway, I see huge cardboard display cases with O Organics Tortilla Chips. I can just hear the puzzled client saying to his or her nutritionist “Yes, I did eat the whole bag, but they’re organic.”
Of course, as Americans we always go to extremes. A little is good, therefore more must be better. If organic produce, meat and dairy products are good for me, then I should also eat organic cookies, soy sauce, potato chips, and Pop Tarts! Surely if it says organic on it, it really can’t be that bad for me.
However, I’ve read several different books lately that talk about the growth hormones in milk and meat, and the pesticides used on crops. The idea of eating those chemicals, or letting my kids eat them, is starting to seem less and less appealing.
We have to use common sense, of course. An organic peach flown from South America someplace to my neighborhood grocery store is a lot less good for the environment than a peach grown using conventional methods (and in season) in a farm 200 miles from my house. The amount of pollution generated by the South American peach getting from the farm, onto an airplane, across a continent (or two), and from the airport to my local store is a lot greater than the amount of pollution generated by the truck that drives from the local peach farm 200 miles away. Although environmental health isn’t what’s making me think twice, it’s still a concern.
Cost is another fact that presents itself and bears consideration, and it concerns me how much of a price difference there is between conventional and organic products. Just for laughs, I looked up the prices Niman Ranch charges for their beef. Niman Ranch is a California cattle ranch that sells hormone free, antibiotic free, humanely raised beef, pork and lamb. It started as a single guy raising cattle and selling it to restaurants like Chez Panisse (which I have long called Chez Painintheass, and still find to be pretentious and annoying), and has grown to be a network of like-minded ranchers selling their meat under the single, recognizable Niman Ranch name. Niman Ranch charges $45.95 for two 7-oz filet mignons. That’s almost fifty bucks for under a pound of meat. I can’t justify that, I’m afraid. Vegetarianism beckons if that’s the price I’m going to have to pay.
The other alternative for meat is to find someone who raises their own cattle in a healthy way and buy directly from them. I used to have a friend back East who raised cattle. She couldn’t legally call them organic, but they were as close to organic as you can get without the actual label. The organic designation, she told me, requires all kinds of testing and paperwork. The grass the cows eat must be organic—no chemical pesticides used on it. Their feed must be certified organic. The water they drink must be tested regularly for various chemicals. I think she did qualify for a humanely raised designation, because her cows truly were (as she herself said) the happiest cows in Loudon County. I met them—they were happy. I ate them, and if flavor is in any way attributable to temperament, they were deliriously happy. They received no growth hormones, and very little in the way of antibiotics. Occasionally one of her calves would have a little illness in its early days, and she’d give it an antibiotic to clear it up. They received no antibiotics on a regular basis.
In any event, this woman would sell you a side of beef for about $2.50 a pound for everything. You paid that price for what was called the “hang weight” (meaning the weight of the animal after slaughter, but before any trimming or cutting had taken place). The hang weight on a side was about 300 pounds, give or take. You could specify what size roasts you wanted, how thick you wanted the steaks, and so on. Everything else was ground up into hamburger. The first year we wound up with about 60 pounds of hamburger. In case you can’t visualize 60 pounds of hamburger, let me help you: it’s a lot. We actually bought a quarter chest freezer to accommodate all our beef. This was the best beef I’d ever had, and the price was hard to beat.
That was back East though. Now I live out West, so I’m going to have to find someone to sell me a side of beef. I doubt I’m going to find that person the same way I did back East—hiring them as my replacement when I go out on maternity leave from a high tech company, and having them stay on when I return, become my friend, and sell me meat. Not a set of circumstances that’s likely to ever occur again, I’m afraid. So I’m looking through more conventional channels. I think I’ve found someone who does lamb, and possibly pork, so maybe that person knows someone who raises beef cattle.
Your objections, you may say, are somewhat vague. You just say “not good for you.” What do you mean? Well, without getting into endless details about how cattle are raised, post World War II munitions plant repurposing, and the chemistry of growth hormones, let’s just say that a “normal” cow (such as those happy ones raised by my friend in Loudon County) takes two years (or even three) to be ready for slaughter, and is grass fed and “grain finished,” as they say. The cattle that are sent to slaughter commercially in this country are about twelve to sixteen months old, and are grain fed for as long as possible (because grain is cheaper than grass—it costs less to buy grain feed than it does to buy grassland and put the cattle out to pasture). When the cattle are started on grain too early, it makes them sick (just as starting a human baby on solid food too early would make it sick). To combat these sicknesses, the cattle are given antibiotics aplenty, which don’t leave their system when they’re turned into Beef Wellington. They’re also given more chemicals in the form of growth hormones to make them bigger, faster, therefore providing the seller with more meat (more meat, as you may gather = more money). Again, these chemicals stick around in their flesh and go right along into the Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese.
[As an aside here, I should point out that although I refer to beef cattle as “cows” regularly, I am aware that those animals that are sent to slaughter are steers, not cows. Cows are the things that have the calves, steer are the things we eat.]
As far as produce goes, the best choice, of course, is local organic produce. Well, sure. You find it for me, and I’ll eat it. Oh and it has to be somewhat reasonably priced. My grocery store sells organic baby spinach. From California. That to me is not local. California is two states away. Two big states. I love the idea of farmers markets, but they’re not open all year long, and often they’re only open when I’m at work. When I lived back East there were a couple of farmers markets I could go to—with one exception, they operated at times like 9 to noon on Tuesdays. Hey! What a coincidence—I work then too! I believe I’ve ranted about this phenomenon before, so I’ll stop there.
There is a market that I could go to, and it’s about a mile from my office. When I go back to work (from my current maternity leave) I’ll arrange to leave work early and walk up there one day a week to buy produce. I’ll be somewhat limited to how much I can carry since I’ll be walking. I also have reservations about just how much of what I’ll be buying is truly “local.” This market caters to both “townies” and tourists, and in my experience when something caters to tourists, it tends to put appearances before ethics (if you will). I suspect that if they got a case of really gorgeous strawberries that weren’t local and weren’t organic, they’d put them front and center in the display, which kind of makes me wonder what else they’d readily sell without full disclosure. Of course, I can always ask, but really the whole idea behind farmers markets is that the products are local—to not say “Product of Argentina” on something is deceptive, letting the consumer assume that what they’re getting is locally grown when it’s not. The prices will probably be higher at this market too.
So as I say, all this reading I’m doing is making me think, but then the price comparisons I’m doing are making me think too. I also have a problem with the idea that I’m just jumping on a bandwagon for the sake of jumping. I don’t believe that I am, but I’ve been so scornful of organic food for so long that I have difficulty overcoming it. At the same time, however, I don’t want to let my stubborn prejudice affect mine or my children’s health. I don’t want to cut off my nose to spite my face, to employ a cliché. Or my kids’ faces either.
I have said, and I still believe, that organic will be to Americans in this decade what fat free was to Americans in the 1980s. Horror stories were famous of dieticians and nutritionists in the 80s whose clients weren’t losing weight, or were even gaining it, and, when asked what they’d eaten, would reply “An Entenmann’s Fat Free Danish.” The dietician would ask “One serving?” and the client would reply “No, one whole Danish” (meaning one whole 10” cake). Fat free, we were admonished, did not mean calorie free. I see organics headed in this direction. Every time I walk into my local Safeway, I see huge cardboard display cases with O Organics Tortilla Chips. I can just hear the puzzled client saying to his or her nutritionist “Yes, I did eat the whole bag, but they’re organic.”
Of course, as Americans we always go to extremes. A little is good, therefore more must be better. If organic produce, meat and dairy products are good for me, then I should also eat organic cookies, soy sauce, potato chips, and Pop Tarts! Surely if it says organic on it, it really can’t be that bad for me.
However, I’ve read several different books lately that talk about the growth hormones in milk and meat, and the pesticides used on crops. The idea of eating those chemicals, or letting my kids eat them, is starting to seem less and less appealing.
We have to use common sense, of course. An organic peach flown from South America someplace to my neighborhood grocery store is a lot less good for the environment than a peach grown using conventional methods (and in season) in a farm 200 miles from my house. The amount of pollution generated by the South American peach getting from the farm, onto an airplane, across a continent (or two), and from the airport to my local store is a lot greater than the amount of pollution generated by the truck that drives from the local peach farm 200 miles away. Although environmental health isn’t what’s making me think twice, it’s still a concern.
Cost is another fact that presents itself and bears consideration, and it concerns me how much of a price difference there is between conventional and organic products. Just for laughs, I looked up the prices Niman Ranch charges for their beef. Niman Ranch is a California cattle ranch that sells hormone free, antibiotic free, humanely raised beef, pork and lamb. It started as a single guy raising cattle and selling it to restaurants like Chez Panisse (which I have long called Chez Painintheass, and still find to be pretentious and annoying), and has grown to be a network of like-minded ranchers selling their meat under the single, recognizable Niman Ranch name. Niman Ranch charges $45.95 for two 7-oz filet mignons. That’s almost fifty bucks for under a pound of meat. I can’t justify that, I’m afraid. Vegetarianism beckons if that’s the price I’m going to have to pay.
The other alternative for meat is to find someone who raises their own cattle in a healthy way and buy directly from them. I used to have a friend back East who raised cattle. She couldn’t legally call them organic, but they were as close to organic as you can get without the actual label. The organic designation, she told me, requires all kinds of testing and paperwork. The grass the cows eat must be organic—no chemical pesticides used on it. Their feed must be certified organic. The water they drink must be tested regularly for various chemicals. I think she did qualify for a humanely raised designation, because her cows truly were (as she herself said) the happiest cows in Loudon County. I met them—they were happy. I ate them, and if flavor is in any way attributable to temperament, they were deliriously happy. They received no growth hormones, and very little in the way of antibiotics. Occasionally one of her calves would have a little illness in its early days, and she’d give it an antibiotic to clear it up. They received no antibiotics on a regular basis.
In any event, this woman would sell you a side of beef for about $2.50 a pound for everything. You paid that price for what was called the “hang weight” (meaning the weight of the animal after slaughter, but before any trimming or cutting had taken place). The hang weight on a side was about 300 pounds, give or take. You could specify what size roasts you wanted, how thick you wanted the steaks, and so on. Everything else was ground up into hamburger. The first year we wound up with about 60 pounds of hamburger. In case you can’t visualize 60 pounds of hamburger, let me help you: it’s a lot. We actually bought a quarter chest freezer to accommodate all our beef. This was the best beef I’d ever had, and the price was hard to beat.
That was back East though. Now I live out West, so I’m going to have to find someone to sell me a side of beef. I doubt I’m going to find that person the same way I did back East—hiring them as my replacement when I go out on maternity leave from a high tech company, and having them stay on when I return, become my friend, and sell me meat. Not a set of circumstances that’s likely to ever occur again, I’m afraid. So I’m looking through more conventional channels. I think I’ve found someone who does lamb, and possibly pork, so maybe that person knows someone who raises beef cattle.
Your objections, you may say, are somewhat vague. You just say “not good for you.” What do you mean? Well, without getting into endless details about how cattle are raised, post World War II munitions plant repurposing, and the chemistry of growth hormones, let’s just say that a “normal” cow (such as those happy ones raised by my friend in Loudon County) takes two years (or even three) to be ready for slaughter, and is grass fed and “grain finished,” as they say. The cattle that are sent to slaughter commercially in this country are about twelve to sixteen months old, and are grain fed for as long as possible (because grain is cheaper than grass—it costs less to buy grain feed than it does to buy grassland and put the cattle out to pasture). When the cattle are started on grain too early, it makes them sick (just as starting a human baby on solid food too early would make it sick). To combat these sicknesses, the cattle are given antibiotics aplenty, which don’t leave their system when they’re turned into Beef Wellington. They’re also given more chemicals in the form of growth hormones to make them bigger, faster, therefore providing the seller with more meat (more meat, as you may gather = more money). Again, these chemicals stick around in their flesh and go right along into the Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese.
[As an aside here, I should point out that although I refer to beef cattle as “cows” regularly, I am aware that those animals that are sent to slaughter are steers, not cows. Cows are the things that have the calves, steer are the things we eat.]
As far as produce goes, the best choice, of course, is local organic produce. Well, sure. You find it for me, and I’ll eat it. Oh and it has to be somewhat reasonably priced. My grocery store sells organic baby spinach. From California. That to me is not local. California is two states away. Two big states. I love the idea of farmers markets, but they’re not open all year long, and often they’re only open when I’m at work. When I lived back East there were a couple of farmers markets I could go to—with one exception, they operated at times like 9 to noon on Tuesdays. Hey! What a coincidence—I work then too! I believe I’ve ranted about this phenomenon before, so I’ll stop there.
There is a market that I could go to, and it’s about a mile from my office. When I go back to work (from my current maternity leave) I’ll arrange to leave work early and walk up there one day a week to buy produce. I’ll be somewhat limited to how much I can carry since I’ll be walking. I also have reservations about just how much of what I’ll be buying is truly “local.” This market caters to both “townies” and tourists, and in my experience when something caters to tourists, it tends to put appearances before ethics (if you will). I suspect that if they got a case of really gorgeous strawberries that weren’t local and weren’t organic, they’d put them front and center in the display, which kind of makes me wonder what else they’d readily sell without full disclosure. Of course, I can always ask, but really the whole idea behind farmers markets is that the products are local—to not say “Product of Argentina” on something is deceptive, letting the consumer assume that what they’re getting is locally grown when it’s not. The prices will probably be higher at this market too.
So as I say, all this reading I’m doing is making me think, but then the price comparisons I’m doing are making me think too. I also have a problem with the idea that I’m just jumping on a bandwagon for the sake of jumping. I don’t believe that I am, but I’ve been so scornful of organic food for so long that I have difficulty overcoming it. At the same time, however, I don’t want to let my stubborn prejudice affect mine or my children’s health. I don’t want to cut off my nose to spite my face, to employ a cliché. Or my kids’ faces either.
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