Category: food

Fruitcake Pr0n – Assume the Missionary Position

Every year there’s at least one of them. The fruitcake-hater. They’re a timid lot. Someone, at some point in time, has put “the fear” in them. In many cases, it was years ago; some manufactured atrocity handed out at the office, or Great-Aunt Bertha’s dry stale creation that’s been handed back and forth from branch to branch of the family for a dozen years or more.

I take my work as a fruitcake missionary very seriously. The thrill of the challenge of fightin’ words laid down with a combination of stubbornness and trepidation; it must have been what brought the religious zealots back to the south seas islands again and again for the chance to convince the heathen natives that clothes really were better than running around naked. Fruitcake really *is* better than no fruitcake, you just have to trust me.

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Fat Politics – You’re Not as Fat as You Think You Are

Fat Politics: the Real Story behind America’s Obesity Epidemic

I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, “If you see it in The Sun, it’s so.” Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?
Virginia O’Hanlon

Virginia O’Hanlon’s father instilled in his daughter a respect and expectation of integrity in the fourth estate. If you read it in the newspaper, it must certainly be true. As a society, we continue to follow this philosophy. The Weekly World News and related tabloids aside, we expect our news media to report the facts, and to have done the research required to support those facts.

Which is why I’ve got some shocking news. Despite what every news channel, radio station, newspaper and magazine in the western world would have us all believe, there is no obesity epidemic. I know that we’ve been told that, over and over again – it shows up in the media at least once a week – but the truth behind the reasons why will astound you.

Author Eric Oliver started out with the intention of creating yet another tome of hand-wringing despair about how super-sizing and corn syrup were making us all fat. Yet when he dug deeper into the research, when he searched deep down into all of the sources at his disposal, he discovered that America’s Obesity Epidemic is nothing but a huge sham.

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When Was the Last Time You Ate a Shirt?

I want you to find the nearest bag of potato chips. Hint – if you can reach it without leaving your computer chair, that’s a bad thing. Now, read the ingredients list. Unless your potato chips are the super-swank high-end organic kind, I’d bet dollars to donuts that somewhere in that list is either vegetable oil or cottonseed oil. Hint #2 – if it says “vegetable oil”, then quite likely it’s cottonseed oil, at least in part.

Next step, think about this, and it’s not a trick question – when was the last time you ate a shirt?

You’ve probably eaten cottonseed oil a great deal, though, without even realizing it. It’s now one of the standards for frying potato chips because of its high smoke point, mild flavour, long shelf life and low price. If you’ve eaten pastry made with Crisco shortening, you’ve eaten cottonseed oil, although the packaging only lists vegetable oil, and you have to dig hard and deep on the Crisco website to find an ingredients list.

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Food Fight

Food Fight – The Inside Story of the Food Industry, America’s Obesity Crisis and What We Can Do About It by Dr. Kelly Brownell and Katherine Battle Horgen

The number one rule to remember when reading studies, works of non-fiction, even the news, is that everyone approaches a piece with a bias. When it comes to nutrition studies, the bias often reflects who is paying for the study; in the news, whether the network or paper has a right or left-wing slant. In non-fiction, it comes down to why you’re writing the book and the point you want to get across.

Thus, no matter how much I want to like a book, and to take it seriously, I have to account for the fact that Food Fight was written in part by the Director of the Yale Centre for Eating and Weight Disorders.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – certainly Dr. Kelly Brownell is going to know more about the surging obesity epidemic than the average person. But his bias against the evils of obesity shows up early on, and I can’t help but begin to be skeptical.

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Grocery Store Musings

How very sad is it that the local supermarket had cans of cooked pumpkin (for piemaking) priced at $2.09, yet a pre-made pie was going for $1.97?? No wonder people are more inclined to buy the pre-made crap. Even if you use the excuse of a lack of time and skill (and really, pumpkin is the easiest of pies to make, seeing as it tastes better with a graham crust and you just have to mix the can of pumpkin with an egg and some spices), there’s no way you can argue with the fact that a pre-made pie is going to run at half the cost of a from-scratch pie once you calculate all the ingredient costs.

Taste should be a factor, of course, and one look at the ingredients label should convince anyone with a brain to go for the homemade version, but even the day after Thanksgiving, those pies were flying out the door.

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Dairy-Free Coconut Cream Pie

It’s hard to be allergic to dairy and have your favourite foods be dairy based; cheese, ice cream, cheese cake, banana splits. It’s sad and lonely to stand by on a hot summer day while your husband eats one of those soft-serve cones from the ice cream truck and you can only live vicariously through him. It’s especially hard when your most favourite dessert ever happens to be coconut cream pie.

Thanks to the good folks at Tofutti, however, I can now make a variety of formerly dairy-based desserts with their soy cheese products.

Setting aside the controversy regarding whether soy is as virtuous as it seems (and that really depends on who pays for the study; studies paid for by the soy industry indicate that soy is a complete miracle food, studies paid for by the dairy industry tend to skew in the other direction), there are still some pros and cons, and the idea that soy sour cream is healthier than regular sour cream is not license to eat the whole pie.

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Book Review – What To Eat

What to Eat – An Aisle by Aisle Guide to Savvy Food Choices and Good Eating by Marion Nestle

The supermarket can be an intimidating place if you’re trying to eat healthy. Figuring out good food choices can require an advanced education in math, science and possibly even advertising. It’s enough to send one running to the pastry aisle to drown your sorrows in a bag of donuts. But wait – do you know what’s in those donuts? Marion Nestle does.

What to Eat is an aisle by aisle synopsis of the good, the bad and the ugly of your average supermarket. And although I might be accused of spoiling the plot, I’ve gotta tell you, most of it is bad and ugly. Nestle explains everything you need to know about every category of item in the grocery store; from eggs to bottled water, from produce to packaged cereals. She explains how to read a label, how to calculate serving sizes, and how to talk to the staff at your supermarket to get the information the labels don’t tell you – such as the origin of fresh fish or produce.

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Dumb and Dumber

One of my first posts when I started up this journal was about how I hated the Food Network, about how I thought it was becoming insipid and fluffy and annoying.

Turns out I’m not alone. Bill Burford of the New Yorker has written a piece for the latest issue on the dumbing down of the Food Network.

What’s really sad is that genuinely talented chefs with information and skills and techniques to share, chefs such as Sara Moulton, Anthony Bourdain and David Rosengarten, are being pushed out by talentless hacks with a schtick. There should be no comparison whatsoever between Moulton ands someone like Rachael Ray, yet the viewing audience would rather watch Ray unwrap packages of cooked ham and pound skinless bonelss chicken breasts into tasteless goop. I don’t get it.

That’s not true, actually, I do. Because the world of cooking is a lot like the world of fashion.

Bear with me for an explanation.

Both are necessities – we have to eat and, in most cases, we have to wear clothes. Just as there are fashionistas who buy designer gear or spend hours or even days creating an outfit, the same goes for foodies. Some of us will hunt for the perfect purse, some of us will hunt for the perfect cheese.

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Bug Juice

We’ve known for years that the term “natural” when it comes to food is a dubious one. Technically, everything is “natural”, even chemical additives – hey, they started as something found in nature. Any savvy food shopper knows that “natural” as a marketing term is meaningless.

But what about when it comes to the ingredient list? “Natural” flavours and colours don’t necessarily mean that they’ve come naturally from the product at hand, and synthetic colors haven’t necessarily been cooked up in a lab – strawberry candies don’t contain any actual strawberries. But what makes those candy strawberries red?

Bugs. Pretty little red bugs. C’mon. Bugs are natural. Although on ingredients lists, you’ll often find cochineal extract listed simply as “synthetic color”, the product itself is made from dried female cochineal beetles, a tiny insect that lives on cactus plants in Central and South America.

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Granola Bars – Not For Breakfast Anymore

Remember in the 70s when the humble granola bar resembled a stick of particle board and tasted about the same? We found them in our lunchboxes because they were supposed to be a healthy treat that wouldn’t rot our teeth. Then in the 80s, someone came up with the idea to make those granola bars chewy. With the addition of corn syrup to both sweeten and hold the cereal bits together, the hard nasty granola bar was a thing of the past and the cuts on the roofs of our mouths from the sharp granola corners healed up quite nicely.

Somehow, in the past twenty years when I wasn’t paying attention, the once lauded granola bar went from a healthy nutritious snack to well… candy. First came the chocolate chips, then the chocolate coating, then peanut butter, and finally caramel and even frosting. The scary part is, there are people out there buying these things for their kids (or themselves) believing them to be a reasonable treat, or even a good replacement for a meal.

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