Mmm… Food

Swindled: The Dark Hisotry of Food Fraud, From Poisoned Candy to Counterfeit Coffee.  By Bee Wilson

What a read. Nowadays in the the U.S. some of the biggest “swindles” seem to focus on organic food as an escape from the “adulteration” of our foods with pesticides. (There are of course all the additives, flavourings, colorings and preservatives in processed foods, but that’s a whole other story) The book talks about this kind of adulteration but also gives us a rich background of adulterations of food with things like arsenic, plaster of paris, bark and clay. Things that have no nutritional value and some things that will kill you. While they don’t occur very often in the US they aren’t completely gone. but there are still food scares that happen nowadays that are more like some of the historic examples in the book. Panics like the melamine in milk coming from China being one of the most recent.

The book gives a great history of the swindles that have been carried out over the histories of England and the US. Bee Wilson argues that worries about swindles arose as societies moved from an agrarian to an industrial culture. As people became further and further distanced from their food stuffs they were more and more and liable to be given something false, of lower quality, substitutions in general crappier products. Really to be living in this day and age in the US where food Nutrition labels are on most everything, detailing out ingredients, calories, fats, proteins, sugars. It really is amazing. You used to get something and have no idea what they might be putting in it. Coffee laced with chicory, bark and acorns. Bread made with alum (to make it whiter and more desirable). Candies coated with lead and copper compounds which gave them bright green yellow and red colors.

After reading this book the drive to eat more “whole foods”, things that come from nature and have an easy name like chicken, peppers, apples, asparagus, eggs and milk is even stronger. (These items still have the ability to be swindled in the way they are grown and raised but they still rate much higher than any processed foods). We have been doing this quite well for a while now, and it just makes so much more sense to me. Eating this way makes grocery trips so much easier, and reasons out why I like small markets like Devon Market and Harvesttime foods. When you eat more “whole foods” you end up doing most of your shopping in the produce and meat and dairy sections. The exceptions for other aisles include getting items like olive oils, beans, pasta and rice. But really that’s only 2 additional aisles I need to travel down. In general when you buy and eat this way you know what you’re getting. There is of course processing for milk and yogurt and there are additives in these foods, but the lists are much shorter than what you might find on the side of a box of oreos. I mean really, what is in an Oreo?? You would be hardpressed to make something like it at home, although, as the book points out, there is a website where people try to make giant at home versions of processed foods. The results are strange and kind of mystifying. Check this one of giant Oreo at www.pimpthatsnack.com.

Four Stars. Read this Book!!!

Diet For a Small Planet : Frances Moore Lappe

One of the first things to know (which may be obvious by the look of the cover) is that this book is not a current title. Originally published in 1971, I read a 20th Anniversary Edition, which while still adds some updated and revised information via 1991, that’s still 18 years ago!!! I wanted to add this book to the list because it does feel like one of those pivotal food books that has ever been published, especially in recent memory. While trying to remain open minded, I admit I went into it thinking everything would sound outdated and not applicable to the world we currently live in where the new food push seems to be all about organic and local. I thought this book would be all about vegetarianism. While some of my preconceived notions were true, I was more surprised at the things that weren’t true, and those things that felt like they could have been published now! It doesn’t feel like an old outmoded movement as a way of eating. Kind of scary.

First, she isn’t trying to promote vegetarianism. She wants a return to a more “natural” way of eating, where the majority of our food consumed is plants and meat appears only briefly as a supplement. She wants people to eat whole grains and vegetables and fruits. Un-processed foods. The further we get away from the initial starting ingredients the worse our food becomes and it become less and less about food, and more about profit margins for corporations and power over the food supply and therefore the people. The return to natural grains echoed what I had read in the South Beach Diet. The thing that continually gets me, is it seems so obvious! Whole grains have all the fiber and nutrients that your body needs. You feel full. And there are so many different kinds of foods to eat you can hardly believe it at first.

So much of the book actually seems to focus on power. And the lack of power by many people to control the foods available to them. Why are there starving people when there is so much food? We feed so much grain to livestock to provide meat for an elite world class while millions starve and don’t have enough sustenance to live. Lappe argues people to do starve because there is not enough food. The solution is not ramping up our production. The solutions lie in what food gets to what people. Can we forget the masses and only think of ourselves?? Lappe feels that choosing to eat in the reduced meat way that she provides is responsible and a start to addressing the real problems involving the needs of the powerless. Starting here will you get you interested there, learning more, becoming informed, no longer turning a blind eye, doing something about it. Change can happen. She wants it to happen. We can make it happen.

Here’s a little video she’s got on the website http://www.smallplanet.org

2.5 stars. Interesting informationt that helped push me more to think about where the food movement has been and where it is now to where it is going. But no revolutionary new information that you can’t find in something newer and perhaps more relevant to today’s food systems (such as “The Omnivores Dilemna” which I read a couple years ago, or what I am guessing will be “In Defense of Food“. (which I plan on reading soon) Michael Pollan seems to be the new mass media published voice for a new way of thinking about our food).

Ooh, this quick articleMichael Pollan published in 2008 in Newsweek sums up a lot of the ideas from this book which are still a problem today!!!

How We Eat: Appetite, Culture and the Psychology of Food. 
By Leon Rappoport 

I was on a roll.  Enjoying all the food reading I was doing.  And now there’s this.  I finished, I didn’t give up (in past years, some of my entries for books start out as such… “Tried.  Tried Again.  This book just sucks!!! Made it to page 54.” Followed by a list of reasons why I couldn’t even make it through.) but I didn’t really enjoy.  I will attribute part of it to the fact that the book is shelved in the Social Sciences Division.  Perhaps it is the lack of pop culture focus that left me wanting more.  But no, I will take that back immediately.  This book wanted to be so much better than it was.  It wasn’t trying to be shelved in the Social Science Division.  Just look at the cover.  Look at the Headings “A Half-Baked Notion”, “From Myths to MacAttacks”, “The McDonaldization of Taste” and “The Road to Wellville”  It was trying to be the next informative guide to eating.  It tried and it failed.  I found myself lost amidst paragraphs that drifted from topic to topic so frequently I found it hard to remember just what it was he was talking about the page before.  And I found myself disagreeing with the book.  It just seemed out of touch.  Yet…  I found myself marking pages with items of note.  True that many of these tags were for items I strongly disagreed with, but there were some ideas of note.  The major concern is the lack to bring all these ideas together into a cohesive whole.  The author acknowledges that when he started the research he was looking for an answer and found a mess of information and no distinctly defined answers.  He almost tries to use this lack of easily defined reasons for people to eat the way they do as an excuse for why the book seems so disjointed.  My opinion?  He just didn’t find a good way to pull together his information. 

Don’t bother with this one.  It’s not worth the time.

This is not a diet blog.  This is a food blog.  A Mmm… Food Blog.  So while I have read the South Beach Diet and am following the plan, the food I’m eating is no less tasty or satisfying than it was before.  In fact we’ve been doing more cooking than ever!!  Which totally works out in favor both tastiness wise, health-wise and budget wise.    I wont’ go into all the details, but South Beach is a 3 Phase Diet.  Phase 1 lasts two weeks.  The first two weeks you start you are stabilizing your glycemic index by not eating sugar in the form of soda, candy, ice cream, fruits, bread, pasta or most carbohydrates.  Phase 2 lasts from after the first two weeks until you are at your goal weight.  Here you get to add some carbohydrates back in.  Good carbs only though.  Fruits, whole wheat pastas, brown and wild rice, whole grain breads.  No french bread, white flour or cookies.  But you get to eat almost everything else.  Phase 3 adds most things back in, in moderation such that you maintain.  But really what I think is cool about the whole thing is that while it is labelled a diet, it doesn’t especially feel like one.  Sure cutting out things like my morning Coke, and a bag of chips from the vending machine, as well as deep-dish pizza when we get home late and don’t want to cook isn’t easy, but anybody, even those not on a “diet” know eating too much of that stuff isn’t good for you.  Eating by the South Beach plan means planning our meals out.  Knowing what we are going to eat on a weekly basis, and executing meals to make sure we have the food we want to eat available to us when we’re hungry. 

I was laughing at the New Year’s Resolution to cook at least 1 new recipe a week.  We’ve made at least 5 new recipes every week so far.  It hasn’t been hard.  Just the opposite, there are so many things we want to try, we haven’t been repeating.  April did voice the concern that she would like to repeat some of the things we’ve made, and this would certainly make planning easier, but it’s still fun to go through and pick out all sorts of new things. 

The book and diet plan seem sound.  I was very skeptical at first, but I like that Dr. Agatston talks about only looking at this eating plan as a therapeutic way to improve the lives of his heart patients.  He wasn’t trying to create a diet to make people skinnier.  However, as he says in the intro to his book “I see now that the cosmetic benefits of losing weight are extremely important because they so effectively motivate the young and the old-even more than the promise of healthy hear, it often seems.” (The South Beach Diet, p7)  I for one agree.

I zoomed through Garlic and Sapphiresby Ruth Reichl.  Three days on the train to and from work and I had polished off this fun book. Ruth Reichl is currently the Editor in Chief at Gourmet magazine joining the staff in 1999. What’s interesting then about this book, which details her time spent from 1993-1999 as the Restaurant Critic for the New York Times, is that it was published in 2005, after she had left the job behind. It’s interesting to get a hindsight account of her activities. As the books subtitle “The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise” tells us, the stories about her adventures in eating at and reviewing restaurants had her donning disguises to try and get a more “honest” tasting of the food and service at any given restaurant. Any time Ruth was spotted as herself she would be catered to. Waiters fawning on her every need, course after course streaming from the kitchen, the best table in the house. She had to come up with a way to get around that, and so she invented characters to go out and dine in the establishments. This of course is probably a great reason why this book had to be written after she was done being the food critic, even when people would have loved to know about it as it was going on. You don’t reveal your tricks when you still are using them. You wait until the shows over and done and then you let people in on your scheme.  That and I’m sure writing about your coworkers when your coworkers are staff at the New York Times may also not be such a good idea.  You want to keep your job after all.

The book was laid out in a wonderful fashion.  Chapters detailing each new “character” Ruth invented followed them to a restaurant and let you in on her dining experiences.  Many of these chapters ended with the printed Times review of whatever restaurant she had been extolling, both the good and the bad.  And if it wasn’t the review that you were finding, you were getting one of Ruth Reichl’s own recipes.  I for one will be trying her recipe for Pasta Carbonara, which looked quite simple and easy.  The book just flowed so easily.  What could have seemed incredibly choppy flowed together without fault.  I was left constantly wondering, how would she top herself now!  

Ilana once again gets the props for pointing me towards this book.  Loved it, want to read more, although it will have to wait.  I am trying to venture all over the board, and only read one book by each author this year.  There are so many books to choose from, I don’t want to limit myself to just a handful of authors, even if I love their writing.  So… until next week.

Oh Kitchen Confidential. How I enjoyed you. Props to the Shabanov for making sure I added this one to my list. I’ve watched Anthony Bourdain’s show “No Reservations” plenty of times, and perhaps that what gave this book the extra kick that made me love it so. It was as if Tony himself was reading it to me, or rather he was sitting in the back room of the Edgewater Lounge, (by their newly added fireplace, love it!!!) telling me about the adventures he has had in the restaurant biz. He’s got such an air, an authority, a tell it like it is showmanship, that is really just honesty. He tells it like he feels it. Sometimes he may be bullshitting, but it’s because he knows he can get away with it. And we’ll let him. We want him to. Perhaps that’s what makes this even more pleasureable. I don’t think he is BS. In fact, I think there are plenty of things he toned down to spare the innocent. For those of us who haven’t worked in the restaurant industry (I briefly worked at a hotdog stand after high school taking orders and bussing table, so my experience is limited) he gives us the inside view. The long hours, the lack of sleep, the drugs, the alcohol, the debauchary. He lets us in on all of it. And he ends in a way I just love. He says not to believe a word he says. After he goes to visit a fellow chef and observes the calm and cool kitchen. The drama free air. He takes it all back. It’s just his experience after all. And that’s why it’s great. It’s his and he owns it.

I highly recommend Kitchen Confidential to anybody looking for a good read. Foodie or not, you’ll love this book. It draws you in. You wonder, will he make it? Will he be able to deliver? Will he survive this hell? Well I suppose we know he survives. He wrote the book after all, but pick it up, check it out, borrow it from a friend. Just read it.

star star star star