trans Fatty Blog

Shredding for Pleasure

I have just made a purchase that gives me great pleasure: a shredder. (That's a paper shredder; no culinary implications.)

From tequila buzzes to home makeovers, most of life's perks are transitory. That new kitchen will eventually grow dated; your well-toned abs will soften or expand with age. But shredding the reams of unwanted documents that have taken over your closet is forever.

Fatty Adjectives

I have seen the future and it is dressed up with far too many adjectives.

At a recent James Beard Foundation Dinner, described in the Chicago Tribune as "culinary alchemy" and a "food revolution," items included a hollow sphere of watermelon and saffron frozen in liquid nitrogen (basically a hollow popsicle without the stick) and

Chino Farms Carrots and Venezuelan Chocolate with chocolate crepe, milk jam sauce, Indonesian long pepper ice cream, chocolate caramel sauce, cherry vinegar, and microbasil.

Is that a dish or a list of ingredients? It's not complexity I'm opposed to, but the flaunting of complexity itself as a feature. Indonesian long pepper ice cream is really just ice cream flavored with long Indonesian peppers, no more exotic in principle than vanilla. I'm not against naming your sources, but there are more subtle ways to do it. Chefs, like writers, need to learn the value of brevity. If anything, food should be more complicated than it looks rather than the other way around.

Dipping Sugar

My 2 year-old son uses a French fry as a utensil for eating ketchup. He dips a fry, sucks off the ketchup, then goes back to the well again with the same fry, repeating as needed until nothing is left but an inedible mess of slimed potato. Then he grabs a new fry and starts again.

And you thought food blogs were supposed to be appetizing.

I bring this up not to dissuade you from ever having children—that's your call—but to make a point. I'll give you a hint -- it's not the authentic tomato flavor he's after. Like most of us, what he really craves is sweet.

That's right, though cleverly disguised with just enough vinegar, ketchup is loaded with sugar, more dessert than dinner as far as nutrition is concerned. From barbecue sauce, to honey mustard dressing, to sweet and sour pork, to the French gastriche, the idea of mixing sugar and acid is not new. What is new is the habit of pouring it over everything we eat, made easier than ever by the introduction of the squeezable bottle. (Once upon a time you had to wait for your ketchup, but not anymore. Sales must have skyrocketed. )

So next time you pick up that red bottle, take a pause. It might not be your burger that's making you fat. It might be your ketchup.

Sweetened Toothpaste

Tonight when I finished brushing my 2-year old son's teeth in the usual way, he wasn't quite ready to quit.

"More toothpaste," he said.

Or Baby Tooth and Gum Cleanser, as the package calls it. His request came as a surprise, so I tasted the stuff. Big shocker: it tasted like candy. For some reason this reminded me of a passage from The Taste of America, by John and Karen Hess:

If she is a typical American... her very first mouthful of nourishment was a synthetic, sweetened bottle formula; she was weaned on starchy baby foods loaded with sugar and monosodium glutamate, and she grew up on soda pop, candy, corn flakes, ketchup-doused hamburgers, and instant coffee.

And later:

The switch from breast feeding to sugared formulas is known to have affected babies' teeth and to have promoted obesity; it is at least possible it has harmed the palate... There is no question, however, about their having been badly conditioned.

The kiddie toothpaste package doesn't list ingredients or nutrition information, aside from noting that it contains no flouride or saccharin. It doesn't say what is in there, but says that it is "completely safe if swallowed." For more information, you can go to http://www.oralb.com/products/toothpasterinse/. But you won't find ingredients listed there either.

Not being one to spread unsubstantiated rumors, let's assume the stuff is in fact harmless from a nutritional perspective. There's still the question of what it might do to his taste buds. Given the national epidemic of junk food and obesity, an early predisposition in favor of sweetened flavors might not be a good thing to encourage.

The Taste of America

Inspired by a post from Bakerina a few weeks back, I ordered The Taste of America by John L. Hess and Karen Hess. It took a few weeks to arrive but is now in hand. I've only read as far as the updated introduction, written for the 2000 edition. (The rest of the text hasn't changed since the 1970s). These people sound a bit like Cook's Illustrated magazine, out to single-handedly save cuisine, but I have to admit they've got me thinking. They've got me on the lookout for corn syrup in my bread--one place I hadn't thought to look for it--they've got me raising an eyebrow when the New York Times publishes a feature on the favorite takeout haunts of local celebrities, and they've got me wondering whether Ruth Reichl can really be all that bad (truth be told, I haven't read much of her stuff). Whatever the merits of slamming Julia Child and James Beard -- I haven't gotten to that part of the book -- thirty-odd years after publication, their comments on the triumph of fashion over food seem to hold up pretty well. I'll have to keep reading.

So What's a Canola?

There's no such thing as a canola. So what exactly is canola oil? And why is it so common in so many foods? I vaguely remembered hearing something about it coming from Canada (hence the name). So I did what any industrious, enquiring person would do in 2005. I went to my favorite search engine and typed "canola oil."

Three seconds later I had my answer: Hits 1 - 10 of about 375,000, sorted in some order that apparently favored the paranoid. On Yahoo! the top three hits read:

CANOLA OIL. Deadly for the Human Body!

Canola Oil - How Toxic Is It?

Canola oil, danger, health hazard.

And on it went. None of the "official" canola-boosting sites -- you know, the sites sponsored by the big conglomerates that are out to poison the rest of us -- even rated in the top 10. (I don't count the "shopping" links.) Google gave a more balanced result, but still plenty of fearmongering mixed in.

And some sites that torpedo the myths, and lots of other good information, if you have time to wade through 375,000 hits. But the overall result had me wondering less about the genetic manipulation of rapeseed oil than about where these people are spending their time.

According to my sister, who actually understands such things, the crux of postmodern philosophy can be summed up in the notion that discourse shapes events just as much as the reverse. Historians don't just record history, they shape it. The observer changes the thing being observed. The chattering classes have much more power than you thought. (With apologies to all postmodern philosophers, but that's how she explained it to me.)

If so, the universe is rapidly morphing, into a homogenized, processed, meat-like byproduct.

Once upon a time, conspiracies were hard work. But they were fun, too. If you were in the know, you got to show up for meetings, learn handshakes, pass notes in the hall. Now all you have to do is type W-A-C-K-O and hit GO. No wonder a growing number of U.S. high school students feel that more government censorship might not be a bad thing. With all the junk that's out there, can you blame them?

They're wrong. We don't need more censorship. But a healthy skepticism is in order. Just because a screed is laden with scientific terms doesn't make it science.  And just because a blog has a geeky technical name doesn't mean you should believe everything you read. Even here. Which is why I won't give you my opinion on the whole canola thing beyond what you've already gleaned thus far. You can do the search and judge for yourself.

High Fructose Corn

A reader asks:

How is high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) different from the regular kind, and why do we now see (and taste) the stuff in just about everything?

According to Wikipedia, high-fructose corn syrup is produced by incubating ordinary corn syrup with an enzyme called glucose isomerase, converting some of the glucose in ordinary corn syrup to fructose, which is much sweeter. The level of fructose in the final product may vary. At a fructose level of 55%, HFCS matches the sweetness of table sugar (sucrose), and higher concentrations are also available. In short, more sweetness per buck/bushel.

Why do we see HFCS in everything? Because America loves corn. It's one of our bumper crops. So the U.S. Government subsidizes its production, even to the point of overproduction, while taxing sugar imports, making corn syrup the cheapest sweetener around.

And making lots of people fat, according to writer Michael Pollan. In The (Agri)Cultural Contradictions of Obesity (New York Times, Oct 12, 2003), he argues that agricultural overproduction is the ultimate source of our national weight problem. All that cheap corn has to go somewhere, and the result is a glut of corn syrup, corn-fed beef and chicken, which is sold in ever-larger supersized packages at lower and lower prices, and ultimately ends up around our waistline. (A good deal of corn is also exported, or converted to ethanol for gasoline.)

Not everybody agrees with Pollack's central argument—that cheap food is a bad thing—but his discussion of why it's so cheap makes interesting reading. Overproduction isn't a new problem for farmers, since supply and demand are hard to manage when you're dealing with Mother Nature (remember the 7 fat years in the Bible?). Farmers can be expected to grow as much as they can to maximize their profits. But the more food grown, the lower the price drops, negating any gain. This is where farm policy comes in. I don't claim to be an expert, but as near as I can understand, the goal of farm policy is to provide farmers with a stable income, and provide consumers with stable food prices. Beyond that, nothing is simple, but according to Pollack, the U.S. government has moved from a system that controls supply (by paying farmers to keep their grain off the market) to one that encourages production (by cutting them a check no matter how much they grow). Which brings us back to all that corn. (Pollack's article is still available from the New York Times (though it's no longer free), and there are plenty of references to it elsewhere on the Web.

This reminds me of a posting I wrote a while back (Do No Farm). While Michael Pollack takes on agricultural subsidies, Richard takes on agriculture as a whole. But perched here at my keyboard from my post-industrial vantage point, I'm not sure where that leads.

But I digress. All this talk of corn syrup has me thirsty for a cola...

New Year's Plans

Whatever you do, don't splurge on an expensive meal on New Year's Eve. This is the worst night of the year to eat out. The kitchen is slammed, the servers are stressed, and the lobby is packed with diners primed and pumped for their big night out. Everybody feels the pressure, and cuisine usually takes a back seat to ego and attitude.

Instead, have some friends over for a simple meal, visit a local tavern, or spend the evening slurping champagne with raw oysters. Or go to one of those ridiculous galas if you must, but do it for the scene, not the food.

If you plan to dine at a neighborhood place where you're already a regular, this advice may not apply. But this is not the night to try that hip new restaurant that everyone's been talking about.

Don't eat out on Valentine's Day, either, for similar reasons. With all those expectations, the best a guy is likely to do is break even anyhow, so keep it simple and stay in. Cooking at home can be just as romantic.

And finally, don't ever buy an expensive meal when you're in a hurry. Cuisine requires attention from the diner as well as the chef. No matter how good the food is, your money will be wasted if you're rushed.

DO eat out on your birthday, or your anniversary. This is your special day -- not everyone's -- so the server may even have time to care (or at least pretend). Don't forget to tip them if they do.

Let the Wine Flow

Bring up free trade nowadays, and people normally assume you're talking about "global" trade, meaning across national borders. But once upon a time protectionism was just as likely to apply to interstate commerce within the U.S. And as of 2004, there is still at least one class of widely-consumed product that doesn't move freely across state lines. I'm talking, of course, about alcohol.

That could change, however, depending on how the Supreme Court rules in a case that will determine whether consumers should be allowed to order wine directly from out-of-state wineries. If they can, then it might follow by logical extension that retailers should be able to do so too--bypassing the wholesale distributors who up to now have held most of the cards. Needless to say, the wholesale liquor industry will be paying careful attention.

I'm not an expert on this stuff, but it seems to me that while distributors should be allowed to distribute, producers should be allowed to sell their product as they see fit (provided customers are of legal age). And whatever you think about free trade on a global scale, it's hard to argue against it right here in the good ole' U.S.A.

Overproducing Espresso

Americans have taken a good idea and made it more trouble than it's worth.

I'm talking about espresso. In Italy, you walk up to bar in any corner cafe, order an espresso, and boom, there it is. It takes about a minute, and costs less than a buck, provided you don't want to sit down (exchange-rate Gods willing). Sitting costs more, but that's not what espresso is about. It's supposed to be a quick, flavorful, eye-opening jolt. Ordering a double seems like overkill, because espresso is about concentration, not volume. If one isn't enough, order another.

Compare that to the typical coffee chain here in America, where you line up behind the throng ordering grande this or triple that, then wait in another line where people pick up their drinks, most of which are more dairy than coffee. It's expensive, it's time-consuming, and it's not exactly slimming on the national waistline. I'm not complaining, I'm just saying we've missed the point, which is to reduce coffee to its concentrated essence. That's reduce, as in less, not more: your regular morning coffee minus most of the water. Here in the States we've turned that idea on its head, using espresso as an excuse to sell milkshakes and mochas for breakfast. If all you want is a simple espresso, it isn't worth the hassle.