trans Fatty Blog

Journey to Baalbek

With the supporters of Hezbollah demonstrating in the streets of downtown Beirut, I am reminded of my own encounter with Hezbollah. It happened during a visit to Lebanon in 1999, at a place called Baalbek, site of the some of the grandest Roman temples of all antiquity. Far from what you might expect, the scene was idyllic. On a moonlit summer's eve, my wife and I joined the cream of Beirut society for a performance by a visiting troupe of Spanish dancers. On a broad stage set beneath the temple ruins, dancers surged to the rhythm of Flamenco guitar.  The air was crisp, the sky timeless, the crowd impeccably dressed. During breaks in the performance, people mingled over cups of Arabic coffee scented with cardamom, conversing in Arabic, French, and English. As the sun disappeared behind the mountains to the west, the confluence of people, culture, fashion, and history was nothing short of sublime.

Above the dancers, however, armed soldiers patrolled the temple walls. This is because Baalbek is also home base for Hezbollah, or Party of God, the militant Shiite Muslim party long notorious for hostage-taking, embassy-bombing, and radical anti-western politics. In recent years they have toned down their act, and now hold 13 seats in the Lebanese Parliament. But they still maintain a formidable militia, which explains the lines of Syrian tanks we drove past on our way in.

So what the heck was I doing there? Visiting my in-laws.

Burning Sugar

As grill geeks may know, charcoal is made by heating wood (or wood chips) to about 1000° F in an airless environment. If you want to press them into briquettes, you can add sand, lime, and a bit of cornstarch as a binder, but all you really need, aside from the wood, is enough fuel to generate all that heat. Grain alcohol or petroleum works nicely if you can get it.

Or, take sugar cane fibers (left over after the valuable cane juice is extracted), seal them inside a 55-gallon drum, leave them there until they carbonize from lack of oxygen -- who knew? -- and bind them with a bit of cassava-root porridge. The resulting charcoal may be not quite the equal of your brand-name briquette, but if you live in Haiti, where both trees and rocket fuel are in short supply, this approach has some distinct advantages.

This method, developed by mechanical engineer Amy Smith at MIT, helped win her a $500,000 MacArthur fellowship for her work finding low-tech solutions to community problems using whatever materials are available.

Now that's what I call cooking with local ingredients.

Farewell Julia

Just heard on the radio that Julia Child has died. She was a giant, as anybody who cares enough about food to read this blog certainly knows. I'll leave the eulogies to those who knew her but wanted to pay my respects. Eat well (in moderation) and prosper.

Looking for a Few Good Farmers

Most chefs are happy to sing the praises of locally-grown produce, but through the Frontera Farmer Association, Rick and Deann Bayless, founders of Frontera Grill and Topolobampo restaurants in Chicago, are actively working to promote this ideal. The Foundation was established in 2003 to attract support for small Midwestern farms as a vital cog in Chicago's culinary culture. The Foundation has announced the availability of grants up to $12,000 to small and medium-sized, individually owned farms that sell their products to customers in the Chicago area. For more information, see the Frontera Website, or contact Jennifer Fite at 312-661-0498.

Low-Carb Wine

If the future of wine is in a box, the box may be drier than expected, at least in terms of residual sugars (read carbohydrates).

Given the recent success of low-carb beer, it should be no surprise that winemakers are jumping on the bandwagon. As written up in the Good Eating section of this week's Tribune, a number of wineries are now providing carbohydrate and calorie information through Web pages, labels, and other promotional materials. One winemaker has even worked the carb count into the product name, selling One.6 chardonnay and One.9 merlot, named for the number of grams of carbohydrates in a 5 oz serving. The French, who have their own obscure system for naming wines that nobody else can pronounce, let alone understand, would not be amused.

There seems to be no escaping carb counting these days, but do we really need the nutrition information right in the name? Wine is naturally low in carbohydrates, so a brand promoted as low-carb may or may not actually have fewer carbohydrates or calories than other comparable wines.

Right or wrong, the problem with the whole low-carb frenzy is that it's an oversimplification. The one thing nutritionists all seem to agree on is that metabolism is complicated, but the message that filters through to the masses is that as long as you count carbs, the rest will take care of itself. Time will tell, but if you're skeptical, at least you can relax over a glass of low-carb wine in the meantime.

Micro-Size My Dessert

In the face of bigger and better everything, the micro-sundae takes off. Fountain and restaurant owners, take note. Sometimes less really is more.

Move Over Atkins

Move over Dr. Atkins, yours may not have been the first or the fattiest diet of them all. Before there was South Beach, there was... lard?

As reported in today's Tribune, an estimated 2,000 Polish Chicagoans, and 2 million people worldwide, currently follow the so-called Optimal Diet, a plan developed in Poland by Dr. Jan Kwasniewski some 40 years ago. Rather than focus on low-carb, the diet fixates on fat, and lots of it, recommending 250 grams per day, about four times what the FDA recommends. Any type of fat will do, but lard seems to be a favorite. Lech Walesa himself is reported to have lost 44 pounds. For more information see http://homodiet.netfirms.com.

Here in Chicago, we have Calma Optimal Foods on Milwauke Avenue, reportedly the only store in North America dedicated to the Optimal Diet.

Trans Fatty Blog remains skeptical.

Beyond Frankenfood

Like many people, I've always viewed genetically-modified products (GMOs) with a certain amount of skepticism. Do we really need tomatoes engineered to have a longer shelf life than Miracle Whip, or corn bred for its resistance to weed killer rather than flavor? What could be better than an organically-grown heirloom tomato harvested at the peak of ripeness? Why mess with nature?

If you live in a rich country where the stores are overflowing with produce, this is an easy attitude to take. But if you're from India, population well over a billion and rising fast, it's harder to be complacent. On current estimates, India needs to double its agricultural output by 2025 in order to meet demand, in a country where resources are already stretched. And that's to say nothing of Africa. The population genie is out of the bottle; modern problems need modern solutions.

Advocates of biotechnology argue that genetic engineering can help, by providing crops more resistant to drought, pests, and spoilage. But whatever the potential of GMOs, the backlash from foodies and environmentalists -- the "frankenfood" lobby -- has had a chilling impact. Many European countries have outlawed transgenic organisms (those that insert a gene from one species into another, mixing DNA fron wheat into corn, say), setting off major trade disputes with the U.S. Factor in the interests of biotech firms enforcing their patents and you have a recipe for stalemate.

Happily, these controversies may soon be a thing of the past. As reported in Wired Magazine (Super Organics, May 2004) the science has moved on, as a growing body of researchers are bypassing genetic engineering in favor of "smart breeding" techniques that are both less controversial, and -- crucially -- difficult or impossible to patent. Call it conventional breeding informed by modern genetic research.

To sum up, it turns out nature already has plenty of genetic variety, without inventing new species. Existing wheat strains, for example, may already possess genes to confer drought resistance -- all you have to do is figure out how to turn them on. This is what conventional breeders have done for hundreds of years, through trial-and-error, but progress traditionally took generations. New understanding of how genes work, however, combined with the data-crunching power of computers, make it possible to pinpoint genes with far greater precision, and achieve results in a fraction of the time. The result may be "superorganics," foods tailored to meet the needs of human populations by harvesting the latent potential in nature.

Very very cool stuff.

Real Calories

Ever since God created the modern supermarket, people have been looking for a way to eat their cake and not have it, too. (Around their waistline, that is.) Dr. Atkins and other proponents of the low-carbohydrate diet now tell us that this miracle is finally in reach, as long is the cake doesn't have any carbs in it.

Unfortunately cakes made without carbs don't generally taste like much, and that, it turns out, may be the real secret behind the Atkins diet.

As reported in Consumer Reports ("The truth about low-carb foods," June 2004), a six month study that compared two diet plans -- low carb versus low fat -- showed that those on the low-carb diet lost more weight by an average of 8.4 pounds. However, they also ate fewer total calories, by an average of 189 per day. Pound for pound, fats contain lots more calories than carbs. So how is this possible?

The answer seems to be that they got bored. Even steak and eggs can get old if you eat it every day, and until recently, alternative low-carb foods were lacking. People stuck to the diet because nothing else was available. The low-fat dieters, meanwhile, could spend their days happily munching on low-fat cookies and fat-free sour cream (even though that's an oxymoron). But fat-free doesn't mean calorie-free.

This is now changing, as the market for "low-carb" foods is now booming, with expected sales of $30 billion this year. From cookies to ice cream to tortilla chips, many of these products have as many calories as the traditional versions they replace.

Whatever the finer points of net carbs, fermentable carbohydrates, sugar alcohols, ketosis, and all the rest, metabolism comes down to a pretty simple formula:

number of calories you eat — number of calories you burn = number left on your butt

So if you're going to count anything, count total calories. In the meantime, I find it hard to believe the national weight-gain epedimic will be reduced by more people spending more of their money on prepared foods, whether low-fat, low-carb, or otherwise. Make it fast, make it easy, and people will eat more of it, period.

Fair Food

Speaking of knowing where you food comes from, Fair Trade certification campaigns, as written up in today's New York Times, are a step in the right direction. The goal is to improve the lot of third-world farmers by offering "trade, not aid," on terms that send more of the profits back to the growers. Producers get more direct access to markets; consumers in rich countries get more information about their food, and can choose accordingly. Nobody is forced to buy, and nobody gets to dictate what "fair" is. (The terms are defined for each certification campaign, but you can choose whether you agree, and vote with your wallet.) The largest campaigns have targeted coffee and chocolate, but other types of produce such as bananas are pineapples are now becoming available.

This approach has the potential to actually boost trade rather than hinder it, and stands in stark contrast to the current wave of protests against the WTO, NAFTA, and globalization in general, which will benefit nobody. Without trade, poor countries will stay poor. As for the benefit that trade can bring to rich countries, anybody who ever drank what passed for coffee in the former Soviet bloc should not need further convincing.