Education/training

I was on the phone with SP the other night while she was trying to cook following a recipe, and cursing freely while she did so. I asked her a bunch of questions to find out why she was so frustrated, and ended up explaining why she was doing several of the steps the recipe specified. This (although I think it helped in the end) frustrated her even more. “Why doesn’t the recipe tell me that?” she fumed. “What would happen if I didn’t have someone around that I could ask?”

I think that this question touches upon a basic issue in cooking, which is that recipes don’t actually teach you how to cook. They will tell how you how to construct one particular item (training), but it’s a long process to extract from one recipe (or even a lot of recipes) how the principles of cooking work (education). I speak from experience, since that’s largely how I’ve learned to cook: I started knowing out how to make a couple of things, tried a lot of different recipes, and through trial and error and just cooking, day after day, week after week, started to connect the dots and understand the principles underlying all these seemingly unconnected sets of instructions. It took a long time before I felt like I was getting it. And I was interested in the process, and interested in learning more; I pored over cookbooks, read food blogs by the dozen, started my own eventually, and generally paid close attention to what was happening. I wasn’t fearless, but I wasn’t thoroughly intimidated either. I was also lucky enough to have some foundation to build on, from having grown up in a house where home-cooked food was provided on a daily basis. But what if I hadn’t been? How do people do it?

I think it must be like me trying to do any kind of home repair or maintenance. Neither of my parents is particularly handy, so anything of that sort was either attended to with a lot of cursing and stress, or else a professional was called in. That was the model I grew up with, and I haven’t had the inclination to change it much. I have figured out how to do some minor things by following instructions (ie training), but I’m chagrined to acknowledge sometimes how little I understand about how my house works as a system (ie education). But most of the time (touch wood) that doesn’t affect my daily life in the way that food does. I mean, everyone has to eat, and for most people, that is a three-times-a-day occurrence. Throw a few small children into the mix, and it’s more like five times. How frustrating must it be to be confronted, day after day, with something you don’t feel knowledgeable about, and yet need in order to survive and function? And that’s without even getting into the complicated emotional issues that are always, always tied up with food and eating.

So what’s the point of all this? I don’t know, but I think it ties in to a lot of bigger issues—to do with food, to do with education, to do with how things work generally. What do you think?

Wordless Wednesday

Where Do Americans Get Their Calories? (Infographic)

Wordless Wednesday

Paul Hawken: The High Cost of Cheap Food: Cooking for Solutions 2010

Tonic detox

If you don’t know me personally, here is an embarrassing fact about me you probably also don’t know: despite all the time I spend baking my own bread, making desserts from scratch, and buying one-ingredient food items, I can count on two hands the number of days I have gone in the past quarter-century plus without consuming tonic (aka soda, pop, fizzy drink—using “tonic” to describe a carbonated beverage is the linguistic stamp of an old-school Bostonian of a certain age, FYI). Specifically, Pepsi.

Food politics

I watched Food, Inc. the other night on PBS. Even though I didn’t learn much that I hadn’t already come across in other places, it was still pretty horrifying and depressing. And at the moment I feel revulsed by the idea of buying anything that can be classed as a product of the “food industry.” I’m not going to make any drastic pronouncements (yet). But I’ve been experimenting for a while with making things myself that I had previously only bought ready-made, and I feel more strongly than ever that that’s the direction in which I want to be going. There’s the health aspect of knowing what’s in my food, which is certainly important; but right now I feel as though the political statement I can make, by buying as many single-ingredient items as I can, is even more so. The filmmakers reminded me that we as food consumers send a message with every purchase that we make. They pointed out that Wal-Mart switched a while back to buying only hormone-free milk in response to customer demand—a significant decision considering both the size of Wal-Mart’s market share and its reputation as the premier outlet of industrially produced food.

Real food

Mark Scarbrough of Real Food Has Curves put up a thought-provoking post today on the topic of whether sugar is “real” food, and a valid part of our daily diet. I encourage you to read it; this post started out as a response to that. When I realized how long it was getting, I decided to move it over here and not hijack his comments section.

Reading Mark’s post reminded me of a New Yorker article I read some time ago, which cited research done on sugar and the effect it has on humans. If I remember correctly (I couldn't access the full article this time around) one of the findings was that humans really have no sense of satiety when it comes to sweetness. The researchers' theory was that because sweetness is so scarcely available in the natural world (fruit, honey), humans historically had no biological need to develop a cutoff for it. When you combine that with our predisposition for sweetness, which we need in order to survive as infants, and a readily available supply of sugar and sugary food, you've got a nutritional perfect storm.

Respecting tradition

We were back in Jervis Bay this weekend, this time to rent a cottage on the beach so that we could give our US visitors a glimpse of the Australian coast. The mild temperatures were a surprising and welcome change from frosty Canberra, and the water was warm enough to permit paddling—not bad for the middle of winter. We played on the beach, got close to some wildlife in its native habitat, and sampled the cottage’s extensive DVD library. I was in charge of organizing meals and showed great self-restraint (I thought) in bringing only two bags of food.

Knowing that the cottage would come equipped, as you’d expect from any self-respecting Australian beach house, with a grill, I was determined to cook at least one meal on it. I mean, you couldn’t really call it a beach weekend otherwise, right? I have minimal experience with grills of any kind; we used to have a Weber when we lived in the US, but DP was always in charge of that. This one was a gas grill, as most grills I’ve encountered here have been, so I figured it would be like a bigger and better gas stove, and that this would be a good opportunity to try grilling myself.

Well, we had a little trouble getting it going, and we almost gave up, which would likely have meant a spell of sulking by yours truly. Luckily, I double-checked the instructions, figured out where we had missed a step, and got it going in time to cook a beachified version of one of our regular dinners: Italian-style bangers and mash. Spicy Italian sausages (brought down from our butcher in Canberra) cooked on the grill (a little bit scorched on one side before I figured out how to regulate the heat); potatoes with oil; and a warm salad built on a big pile of grilled zucchini.

Beach house grilled zucchini salad
2-3 Tbsp olive oil
7 medium zucchini, quartered lengthwise and cut into 1 in/2 cm chunks
1 punnet cherry tomatoes, halved
3 scallions, sliced
salt & freshly ground black pepper
½ cup vinaigrette dressing

Toss zucchini with olive oil, then cook on a hot grill until tender but still a bit al dente, about 15-20 minutes, turning frequently. When cooked, remove to a large salad bowl. Immediately add tomatoes and scallions, season with salt and pepper, and toss to combine.* Add dressing and mix thoroughly. Serve hot, warm, or at room temperature.

Serves 3 adults and 2 children, with leftovers.

* I took out portions for the kids at this stage, before I added the dressing, since they both like vegetables but dressing not so much.

Feast? Famine?

Embarrassed as I am to admit how behind I am on my reading (as the dates below will show), it’s almost worth it once in a while for the interesting juxtapositions of information that result.

Recently I was reading an article from a May 2006 issue of the New Yorker, “Paradise Sold: What are you buying when you buy organic?”, which, as part of a broader exploration of organic agribusiness, describes “how to feed the world’s population” as “the most urgent problem with the organic ideal”. To support this, the author cites a statement made in 1971 by Earl Butz, Richard Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture (and apparently "despised by organic farmers"), that “if America returned to organic methods ‘someone must decide which fifty million of our people will starve!’”

Wow, that’s some hair-raising rhetoric, right? It certainly stuck in my mind, especially when, a few days later, I came across this statistic in Marion Nestle’s Food Politics (2007):

“The greater efficiency, specialization, and size of agriculture and food product manufacture have led to one of the great unspoken secrets about the American food system: overabundance….The US food supply—plus imports less exports—provides a daily average of 3,900 calories per capita. This level is nearly twice the amount needed to meet the energy requirements of most women, one-third more than needed by most men, and much higher than that needed by babies, young children, and the sedentary elderly.”

What to make of these totally contradictory statements? Yes, the one by Butz is almost forty years old, and the food industry has undoubtedly changed a lot since then; but the author of the article included it to support the argument that this is a present problem, and relevant to the debate over organic versus conventional/industrialized agriculture.

So who to believe? My inclination is to assume that Nestle is accurate and that Butz represented the interests of Big Agribusiness, who didn’t (and don't) want to deal with the costs and headaches and smaller profits that switching (back) to organic farming would involve. But I admit I’m biased.

Who do you believe?

How sweet

A couple of years ago, back when people were just starting to raise questions about high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), my sister C. sent out an email highlighting some of the concerns about the correlation between HFCS and obesity, and about the quantities of HFCS found in soft drinks. I was living in the UK at the time. I remember sitting at my desk in Oxford and reading it, and then looking guiltily at the can of Pepsi sitting on the desk next to my computer. I picked up the can to read the ingredients list and found…sugar as the sweetening ingredient. I went home and checked our stash of processed foods (ketchup, store-bought cookies, cereal); all of them said the same: sugar.

The drumbeat of concern about HFCS has gotten steadily louder since then, and just over the last few weeks I’ve lost count of how many times it’s popped up on food blogs and newspaper feeds that I read regularly. Prompting me to do another check on my recently-established stash of Australian processed foods (as above). Only to find the same thing: sugar as the sweetening ingredient in everything I checked.

I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing the reason for this is that neither the UK nor Australia has enough of a corn industry to make HFCS a cheap and easily available alternative to other sugar sources. The UK has a domestic beet sugar industry (as do most other European countries), and Australia produces cane sugar. Wikipedia says that "HFCS is somewhat cheaper in the United States due to a combination of corn subsidies and sugar tariffs", and also says that its greatest use is in the US and Canada.

I have mixed feelings about this information. On the one hand, I’m just as happy not to be finding HFCS in every packaged food I buy. On the other hand is the fact that obesity rates are going up not just in the US, but also in the UK and Australia, and, apparently, everyplace else other than sub-Saharan Africa. If only the US and Canada are consuming this stuff in any quantity, then clearly there is more to the problem.

Lately it seems as though we have a new nutritional scapegoat every year or so: the thing to eliminate from humanity’s diet that will "cure" the worldwide obesity epidemic. This year looks like HFCS’s turn. Before that it was trans fats. And let’s not forget carbs.

If science and medicine don't know the answer, then I certainly don’t. But, given that pretty much everything to do with food is a complicated tangle of nutrition and emotion, I’m betting it’s not as simple as that.