Save the Planet: Have dessert for dinner.

Posted on April 26, 2012 by jll

The Fabulous Pastry Chef Emily Luchetti graciously entertains her Facebook followers with a weekly “What’s This” pastry quiz. Being blessed/cursed with a ferocious sweet tooth, I participate.

A recent picture of a Blintz/Blini set me off on a long explanation that Blintzes are considered Ashkenazim fare, but that they are part of a larger Jewish / Balkan / German cuisine called Eierspeisen and Mehlspeisen (egg dishes and flour dishes) which extend from the Balkan states through Germany, more popular in Southern Germany, and reaching what I have always assumed to be their acme in Austria, the one time capital of the “Danube Monarchy”. Blintzes  may or may not have begun in Hungary.  Their German name, Palatschinke, comes from Rumania and has nothing to do with “Schinken” or ham, but rather is derived from the Latin word for Placenta. Fair enough, if you can escape the visual image. It’s the sort of things mothers use to keep their sons close.

Balkan/Germanic flour and egg cookery encompasses a wide variety of magnificent foods from omelettes to Knoedel (dumplings) to a kind of cinnamon, sugar and butter  smothered French Toast jumble called “Arme Ritter”, or “Poor Knights”.  The Germans have figured out how to spoil Knoedel by filling them with liver, but the most pervasive of the Eierspeisen tend to be slightly sweet, or if not, have a lot of cheese in them, which means they are “Lecker”*, at least to sweet tooth sufferers.

Germ Knoedel are only slightly sweet steamed dumplings, soft and mushy spungy, filled and covered with  poppy seeds and butter. Blini/Blintzes/Palatschinke are crepe like pancakes filled with Quark or “Topfen”, a low acid farm cheese and a little egg yolk sugar, and usually served with apricot jam. The Swiss “Weihe” is tart on flaky pastry filled with fruit and custard, and baked until the top is golden brown.

What I loved and still love about these dishes is that they are considered dinner.  They are poor people’s food, and poor people don’t eat a lot of meat, but milk, eggs and cheese are good protein sources and cheap.

When I first lived in German territory not that long after the war, poverty or at least lack of wealth was a lot more common than it is today (except Switzerland, whose recent declaration of the Happiest State in Europe definitely replaces the stupid saying that money doesn’t but happiness with the fact that a lot of money buys a lot of happiness),  meat was a luxury item enjoyed by most on Sunday, if at all, and then mostly by the bread winner.  The rest of the week was filled with cold cuts (considered cheap back then, how times have changed) or cheese or “Auflauf” dishes – baked casseroles – plus a salad. Swiss housewives traditionally made their Weihe on Friday because it was fast, and they could get the house cleaned in the morning, knock off a fruit tart for dinner, then head out for a “Kaffele” and maybe a town stroll with their friends.

Eating dessert first was the done thing, as it probably still is. I liked it. A lot. There’s nothing like Apfelauflauf”  (apple casserole) to top off a rotten, cold, rainy grey day, and the German speaking countries have more than their share of rotten, cold, rainy grey days.

On my return visits  I have seen the nightly cheese plate, cold cut plate, salad, casserole or Weihe replaced by more  meat dishes. In Germany, as a friend noted, the three main choices are still pig meat, pig meat and pig meat, but beef has gained popularity.  Veal, once a small luxury, has become a staple.  Europe, after recovering from our bombing the stuffing out of them and their bombing each other has taken to our form of culinary profligacy with a passion.

If you agree with the voices identifying livestock, particularly cattle, as a source of greenhouse gasses equal to automobile emissions, then the international drift to the American meat centric diet poses a problem. It’s all right it we eat half pound steaks or big, juicy pork chops every night, but the Europeans and now Asians doing the same thing should simply not be permitted – They are ruining the world’s balance of protein.

Since we’re hardly going to be able to deter them, the best answer to lessening the environmental peril is for us to turn the tables and adopt the post war European diet of dessert for dinner, as in, “No, I am not eating like a six year old’s dream. I am suffering for the environment. Please pass me another piece of that peach souffle.”

Health? Don’t worry. Considering that the dishes generally contain fruit and protein (apricot jam is a fruit, ja?) it’s also a moderately balanced diet. Most of these dishes are low sodium and surely no more onerous than a plate of prime rib or Mac and Cheese. Live a little. Feel virtuous.

So try this one:

Apfel Auflauf (apple casserole, also known a bread pudding)

You will need a couple of apples. A bag of Zwieback, milk, five eggs, sugar, butter, a pinch of salt and cinnamon, raisins, nutmeg or lemon peel if you want.

Peel the apples. Preheat the oven to 375. Butter a form – it can be a soufflé form or a lasagna form – whatever you have. Souffle is deeper and takes a bit longer to cook.

Beat 3 eggs with about 3 cups milk and ¼ cup of sugar.

Cover the bottom of the form with Zweibeck, breaking off corners to fill in holes. There should be only a single layer.

Cover the Zwieback with the custard mix. Layer on the apples, add raisins, peel spice if you like. Carefully cover with the custard. Repeat layering. A pyrex bowl will hold about 2 layers of apples between three layers of Zwieback. You can end with either Zwieback or apples. If your final layer is Zweiback, they should be soaked in the custard. (If you run out of custard, make a little more). Let it sit for a few minutes, then put in the oven. Let bake for 15 minutes to 30, depending on how deep the form is (If you let it back longer, cover it for the first fifteen).

Weihe:

Swiss "Weihe" or apricot custard tart.

Swiss "Weihe" or apricot custard tart.

Cover the bottom of a low rimmed quiche pan with flaky or short crust pastry of your choice (In Europe it is sold by the pound, so nobody makes it). Pierce the crust with a fork to let the steam escape.

Cover the crust with thinly sliced apples, berries (blackberry or raspberry), apricot or Italian plum halves or quarters. If using half or quarter fruit, place the skin side down, so the moisture does not soak the crust. Put in the oven until the fruit begins to bubble a bit and some  moisture is gone..about 7 minutes.

Mix 5 eggs with ¼ to ½ cup of milk and ½ cup to 1 cup of sugar.  Pull the (hot!) form from the oven and gently pour on the custard mix. Return and bake for about 12 to 15 minutes, until the crust begins to darken. When the crust is set, you can sprinkle sugar on the top, which will caramelize nicely.

Put the form on the bottom rack of a 400 F oven and cook for about 7 minutes or until the fruit is a bit dried out.

Serve salad first, then the egg dish. Fruity whites work just fine with  Eierspeisen. The Swiss usually drink cider or tea. Can be followed with cheese. I rarely have room.


Linguistic aside: * “Lecker” is the precise German word for “Yummy”, equally insipid and annoying. If one has nothing better to say about food than “Yum”, one should concentrate on chewing.

 

 

 

 

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The problem with fish:

Posted on April 10, 2012 by jll

Prompted by the Australian government’s plan to create a $14.5 million dollar fishery certification process, a recent article in the Australian Hospitality Magazine tackles the question of Seafood Sustainability in that country. According to the article there is no need for sustainability certification there, as only fishing of sustainable seafood is permitted in Australian waters.  “According to the Magazine, Sydney Fish Market managing director Grahame Turk has come out criticizing the “multitudes of self-appointed arbiters of sustainability” saying they are more about “clever marketing” than fact.”

But not all Australian seafood is fished by legitimate Australian fisheries or in Australian marine territory. Australia, like the US, imports considerable amounts of seafood, and foreign trawlers do manage to enter Australian waters, which mean that non endangered species are still under threat. Australian, American and Japanese marine critters, furthermore, with the exception of limpets and the like, are not homebodies. They do not necessarily stay within boundaries. The problem is not local or national. It’s global.

We here in the US  have been dealing with the issue admirably.  American chefs and increasingly American grocers have been sensitive to the question of seafood sustainability. Michael Cimarusti states in an Eater.com interview: “Sustainability is really important. That’s the first decision that we make. We wait to ask if something is fresh or consistently available. The first question we ask is, “Is it sustainable?” If it doesn’t meet that first criterion, it’s not on the menu.”  Not only elite retail food corporations like Whole Foods have committed to sustainability, but national grocery chains like Safeway  and a growing number of fast food and quick serve groups have pledged to maintain sustainability in their seafood departments.

Make no mistake: the motivation behind these decisions is most likely not one of social responsibility, but rather a highly intelligent business decision based on prudent product management for the future and a solid understanding of the fast growing customer sentiments regarding food ethics.

That customers have embraced the need for maintaining sustainability much faster and more broadly, it seems, than they have adopted other ethical food concerns is understandable. The question of running out of tuna is a more immediate threat than the issue of local food or organic turnips, and with celebrity chefs like Blue Hill/Stone Barn’s Dan Barber on sustainable seafood and Barton Seaver’s Ted Talk on Sustainable Seafood, the general public is on board, possibly in time.

So what’s the problem?

Supply and demand. There are more of us than there were three or four decades ago, when abalone was not just a distant memory, and more of us like and demand fish. Enriching the third world and sophisticating the second (those of  you over thirty will remember a time when the majority of American households would not think of eating seafood for dinner except in fish sticks and tuna sandwiches) has expanded the market beyond what the oceans seem capable of providing.  There are tens of millions more people demanding more of a decreasing resource, creating incentives to deplete it even more, often illegally.

The rising price of meat and the increasing uncomfortable sense of the environmental impact of red meat combined with the growing awareness of the health benefits of seafood makes fish an oddly ethical choice of protein for the world’s increasing omnivore population. In other words, demand is quickly outpacing supply.

There’s an app for that: Farmed seafood, which, at least theoretically, would solve the world’s seafood needs. Unfortunately, the practice is not without its detractors and probably valid objections:  Antibiotics required an a captive population, pollution of surrounding land (just like livestock), genetic threats to wild populations by escaping farmed fish. The new trend is “responsibly” farmed seafood, and perhaps it will provide for our needs. When you come to think about it you have to admit that we no longer chase our beef around open woods with bows and arrows, so what not apply the same principal to fish. Or no?

The free market place will soon, as a matter of fact is currently, provide one solution as prices rise in direct proportion to restricted availability.  Seafood will be available to those who can afford it, which, in fact, will make it just like other food.

Crime works, or course, but only as long as there is a product to be criminal with. Seafood Fraud, once revealed in most major dining areas considered a cavalier’s sin – if they can’t taste the difference, who cares?  - is now being revealed frequently.

The real challenge, we all understand,  is one of population – too many of us and growing want too much of a finite product.  A word here to the religious right: If you keep obstructing birth control distribution in the third world – or here –  no Tilapia for you. As soon as they are weaned, the 210 million babies born this year are going to eat your wild salmon lunch. If China had not administered its admittedly detestable One Child Only policy, your skin-on Bass would likely be nothing more than a memory.  Population control has ceased to be the media cause celebre, but that is the ground floor of the seafood issue.

Rationing: If you believe, however, that fish is good for people and should not become privilege of the elite, the inevitable answer to the too little fish too many mouths problem has to be rationing and the black market that generally follows. Of course, Seaver’s admonition to eat smaller portions of fish (or beef or anything that bleeds alive) is wise and advisable, but we all know that a nation accustomed to large protein portions and other nations just achieving the means and desire to demand them will not voluntarily submit to tidbits instead of full sized fillets. Rationing, at least, would give the poor something to sell on the black market to the well off. Perhaps not the worst idea, that.

“But,” you say, “you were going to give us your wing-nut theory on how to solve this.” Hell, no. Wherever did you get that idea?  I was just going to say we had a problem wrapped around a few paradoxes and neatly tied with a conundrum. If you figure it out, you tell me.

 I have a yen for squid. Actually abalone, but squid will have to do. The **** otters and poachers got all the abalone. I miss abalone.

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Guilty (?) Pleasures

Posted on March 28, 2012 by jll

Ways to take the fun out of brunch:

What are your guilty pleasures? I bet you can conjure up half a dozen or so in a few seconds – corn chips, Ding Dongs, PBJ’s on Wonder Bread, root beer floats? You betcha. There’s hardly a chef or a starlet, who couldn’t list a culinary foible or two one would not wish to own to in public.

Why on earth, though, do we think of them as guilty? When did eating become a moral challenge?

What part of America’s puritan heritage grabbed our sense of food and fun by the short hairs, turning lunch into an ethics exercise and a battle of social one-upmanship?

Obviously, part of this is stuffiness – we are too cool for pop corn,  and tuna melts are not sophisticated. Botarga on points is so much more hip, but the uncoolness of classic American snacking is only half of the matter.

Guilty pleasures have been assigned increasingly profound ethical contexts in the past couple of decades. The ideal of a growing number of purist food advocates is an ever socially mindful eating public with constant awareness of the impact of every nosh on everything. When you sit down for a meal at a restaurant and order tuna, the question of sustainability is more likely to arise than not. Somehow learning that our steak walked grassy knolls on a  small farm has become part of our dining ceremony, and you are probably as likely to choose your wine because it is local and organic as you are because it takes you to a higher plane and recalls your summer in Burgundy with that beautiful French boy/girl. We’ve been brainwashed.

Figures with better moral compasses than our own have been able to get inside our heads and convince us that our simple pleasures are in fact sinful and destructive incursions on society and the planet. How did we let them do that?

So you’re a highly engaged foodie, right? You have two walls of cookbooks and can quote Craig Claiborne, MFK Fisher and Julia Child, have touched the robe of Rene Redzepi and kissed Alice’s ring, and stuff like pig skins is too schlocky  for you, too unhealthy, too industrial for your liberal gustatory sentiments? Oh, piffle. We need to get over ourselves.

Not even The Church (you choose which one) considers food a transgression. It is after all, the one carnal pleasure you would never consider confessing, because it’s not a sin. If you insist on being spiritual about food, then consider the blessed  joy of MFK Fisher, Claiborne, Beard and Julia
Child, all of whom licked their fingers and ate whatever pleased them without shame or apology, generally accompanied with several martinis. Tony Bourdain got it right, when he said, your body is not a temple, but an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.”

“Guilty Pleasures, unfortunately, are only a small aspect of the nutrition/guilt complex that hangs over our mealtimes and snacks.  There is a vast network of concerned citizens, public advocates and experts afoot whose self appointed goal is to make sure that you understand the ethics,  morals and politics of food,  follow the principles of healthy eating, and feel bad if you do not.

The various culinary busybodies and public advocates of our days have developed a litany of rules and admonitions to assure that we  do not spoil the planet, degrade the sacredness of  our bodies,  or have unreflective fun with our food.

They are doing good work in their own minds and the minds of their equally meddling circles, godbless’em. Unfortunately they are a batch of gustatory busy bodies, who in an earlier epoch would have been dunking witches to save their souls or looking for communists in the local book clubs.

The culinary spoil sports’ list of  food issues for the mindful diner is a long one:

Water Footprint. The water footprint fanatics claim that two pounds of steak is 15,000 liters  (400 gallons) and suggest that your profligate use of H2O deprives Sudanese babies. The idea seems to be that the water stays inside the cow. It doesn’t.

Carbon footprint:  Carbon is an element. It is part of fossil fuel. It does not have feet and it does not leave footprints. To be a little more precise, fossil fuel burdens the environment with greenhouse gases. The idea of the food carbon footprint proponents is that anything you eat stresses the environment, and the suggestion is that you calculate just how much carbon was used in producing, harvesting, processing and transfporting your burger or Twinkie, because you will destroy the planet if you don’t calculate it. You probably won’t, but if masochism is your thing, this is the sweet spot. They also oppose bottled water on ethical grounds and support locovorism.

Non human animal treatment and murder of non human animals.  Surely a valid concern, Nobody wants bunnies or furry things to suffer. Some people don’t want us to eat meat at all. The animal rights discussion of what you should feel bad about occasionally slips its moorings.  France has recently accused some farmers mistreating pigs by withholding toys from them. KFC has just announced their policy to stun chickens in hyperbaric chambers . It’s odd that we treat our poultry better than we treat our prisoners.

“Food Justice” issues – a newer term to cover everything from low wages paid to servers,  Walmart shelf stockers and farm workers. The concept of green staffing means that everyone should be earning a “living wage”, which means a comfortable wage. This is just a catalogue of things you can feel guilty about, so we won’t go into the economics of food work, except to suggest that one take with a grain of salt anything written about it with passion. (all passion should be taken with a grain of salt..it is the opposite of rational thinking.)

Fair Trade: Assumes that all Third World  producers are exploiting their suppliers, who are exploiting their laborers, unless their products are certified “Fair Trade”, making distant politics and trade issues the responsibility of the diner. Smart companies like Starbucks, Pete’s and numerous chocolate producers have been able to monetize this concept extremely well.

The environment, pollution, global warming:.  Nutritional environmentalists point out that not eating mindfully will destroy the planet. That’s doubtful, and the impact of what you may think is virtuous can cause collateral damage – the rush to soy has prompted Chinese and American producers to  clear vast stretches of third world forests and indigenous crops for monoculture, for instance. Since there is really no way to assess accurately the impact of your burger, you might just as well give up trying and feel awful about it.

Monocultures, loss of diversity, depletion of species.  You may not yet feel guilty about this one, but it’s an easy target for self flagellation. GM practices, genetic patents, maritime depletion, seed company monopolies and many other factors are endangering the vast diversity of produce in the world. The single commercially raised species of banana is threatened by a slowly spreading endemic which is projected to wipe it out in a few decades. Mindful eating would thus dictate rejection of granny smith apples and Chiquita bananas. God bless seed banks.

World Hunger:  How do you reconcile your fabulous $250 dinner at Coi (and it is fabulous) with pictures of pinch cheeked babies in the Sudan? Is this your responsibility?  Go get your hair shirt.

World obesity: What do you mean it’s not your responsibility? Of course it it. If you drink Coca Cola,  you support the mega national corporation that is causing type 2 diabetes  in ten  year-olds.  You should be ashamed.

Your own body: There’s the temple thing again. It’s a sin to debase what you were given. Salt, trans fats, HFC.. the stuff that makes food taste good will kill you. (so will living longer, but that’s not the issue here.)  You owe it to the world to keep away from sugar and eat your spinach, have five healthy meals of fruits and vegetables a day, avoid junk food, no matter how much you want a Snicker’s bar.  Non whole grain pleasures are guilty. Shame again.

Other people’s bodies: Michael Bloomberg is so concerned with the effects of salt on health that he has forbidden certain donations to food banks. Center for Science in the Public Interest and other public advocacy groups would have the government tax or forbid “unhealthy” food. Nutritional meddling has become a national sport, affording all who participate great rewards in the form of self satisfaction.

Waste: The newest scream in the field of virtuous food concerns is the accusation that we Americans throw away up to/over 50% of our  food. The math on this is unclear to me, as is the argument that our waste takes food from the mouths of the third world. I didn’t buy it when my  mother told me that Children in China wanted my spinach, either.

Loss of small industry. Was your food grown by a subsistence farmer, or by big AG. Big Ag is another guilting point. The best thing to do is ask your server or your grocery counter person for the product’s pedigree, because destroying local business is reprehensible. Feel bad. Very bad.

Beef is bad: Mark Bittman’s recent Tedd commentary dealt with the meat issue much more cogently than I can. The Readers’ Digest version is that we eat too much of it, and it messes up the environment and plays  havoc with International economies. Since I personally don’t eat a lot of it, this is a comfortable philosophy. Should you feel bad about the next burger? Your call.

That’s not all of the baggage you can schlepp to the dinner table, but it will do for our purposes. The problem is that some of these issues are real, so how do you keep your moral compass while not profaning the communion of dinner?

I wish I knew. For my part  I seem to be able to block out the noise when it comes to eating and really nearly never feel abashed about what I like. My own policies are neither to tell others what to eat or to let them tell me, or even approach something approaching a sermon. My dining friends, many of the best met during a stint as a Slow Food leader, are gracious and non judgemental – a surprising blessing, considering the fact that Slow Food not only has a mission but a manifesto.

The hanging question is really what is one’s social responsibility, and how does one reconcile it with one’s eating habits, an extremely personal decision. I believe that the missionary ideologues and Coolaid drinkers of the new food consciousness are not peddling responsibility but guilt, and that they should be, for the most part, subjected to highly critical analysis or  just blocked out.

Perhaps, too, what we unfortunately term “guilty pleasure” is, in fact, visceral pleasure. Something more rooted in our genes or our childhoods, as disassociated from our intellectual processes as breathing or sleep. We in America have always had a troubled relationship with our bodies and our urges.  Pity really. If Fig Newtons transport you to the thrill of your 2nd grade lunchbox, or you just love to sit eating only the green M&M’s, that’s just ducky. Nobody else’s hang-ups should spoil the tiny bits of hedonism that brighten our lives.

My often slightly schlocky pleasures are guiltless (your’s should be too).: They may be junk food, but they’re  my junk food.

High end Cheese Doodles: Microwave a little piles  of  really good hard cheese on a Silpat for about thirty minutes. They are great.

Toast:  I like mine white with good texture, Keep your benighted sprouts. Possibly potato bread. Spread with salted butter and jam or honey.  Eat with hot chocolate. Forget dinner.

Orange Julius: Throw about a cup of orange juice, a little sugar or sweetener and vanilla into a blender, give it a whirl and voila, close enough.

Honey (Jam/Nutella) Spoon. Basta.

Candied Orange and lemon peel. Put in heavy simple syrup and simmer until soft. Drain. Use syrup in tea. Eat peel. Easy. Good. Melt some chocolate and pour over peel. Break off pieces and eat whenever.

Emmentaler crackers: Put Emmentaler on crackers and microwave. Or Gruyere. Or Manchego. Those oblong crackers with sesame seeds on top from Trader Joe’s are especially suited. Eat.

Bacon: Crisp. BLT if you must justify your food with a vegetable.

Lemon Chicken: The irresistible combination of fat and sweet and meat and salt, plus the tang of vinegar and garlic shows that white trash food has crossed all ethnic demarcations. I have no idea  how to cook it. You find it at really cheap Chinese restaurants. It wants steamed rice, not fried. Requires chopsticks. Forks won’t work.

Gas burner s’mores. The chocolate must be Hershey’s. At least I assume that’s real chocolate. It’s like Wonder Bread for Bar B Que and Jiffy peanut butter for PBJ’s.

PBJ’s.

Gelato. Any kind except pistachio.

Cinnamon Toast. The ultimate cure for the duldrums. Possibly with tea with a few mardarin orange peels thrown in. (Toast, butter, sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon. I guarantee it works.)

Pate on anything. Ditto smoked salmon. Lacking anything, use a fork. Or the tip of a knife.

A roll of salami, a knife, bread and cornichons.

Vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce made from the huge bar of Trader Joe’s cooking chocolate, milk and sugar on the stove top. Licking the bowl.

Tortillas heated in a pan or microwave or steamed then rolled up and dripping with salted butter.

Toaster oven raclette with baby potatoes.

The occasional Oreo. Don’t we all?

French Toast in an ocean of real maple syrup.

Tiny egg/flour/milk pancakes with lemon juice and sugar.

Figs and Gorgonzola

Cheerios for dinner

There are, really , no rules.

If you are still burdened with the weight of an unsustainable world, just forget the ethical conundrums and ideologues  and channel the greats for the length of a snack or a meal or a vacation and bask in the benediction of your food, simple or fancy. What would Julia say?

If you read this, pleas feel free to add your own visceral addiction..I have a chef friend who would kill for Nutter Butter. I haven’t got a clue what it is, but it’s on my list of things to try.

 

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Dining Single – Single Diners

Posted on March 24, 2012 by jll

When I put my only child on a plane to adulthood about twenty years ago, my sense of freedom and relief of having brought him up successfully, alive, healthy, well educated and free of a criminal record or addiction was so overwhelming, that I decided to go celebrate – alone – just with my sense of power. I chose Stars Café, Jeremiah Tower’s casual one off restaurant, which was exciting without being oppressing. It was early, and when I walked in, it was empty. A girl of barely drinking age  chatting up someone on the phone didn’t turn around when I entered the empty restaurant, so I pulled up a chair at a corner table.

After chatting a bit further, the girl turned around and hissed: You can’t sit there. Single diners have to sit at the bar along the wall by the door.  Chic and probably a lot of fun when the restaurant was packed the deserted stretch of zinc (I think) was less than inviting. I would have felt like pole sticking up out of the ground. I said no.  She scowled but said I could sit upstairs. I agreed with relief, and she directed me what I remember as 14 inch table on the landing at the top of the stairs, in direct traffic. It was the dunce seat, or looked that way.

Picturing myself trying to make myself invisible by curling into an ever smaller ball as each new arriving party came straight at my lonesome profile as they topped the stairs,  I declined. She refused to do anything else. Feeling neither powerful, successful nor free, just alone and out of place, I left.   The restaurant was still empty. I think I cried a little.

I  mentioned it to a friend,  Joyce Goldstein, the owner of Square One, another great restaurant which changed San Francisco’s dining forever. “You have to tell Jeremiah,” she said. “He has to know.”  I hadn’t met Jeremiah yet,  having just taken over the family food business, and I wasn’t very positively inclined toward him, but I followed her advice. A fabulously horrified and charming letter arrived nearly the next day. “By Return,” as they say. I have loved the man ever since.

It was one of my early practical lessons in restaurant reality: Employers set policy, employees screw it up. Jeremiah’s policies, like Jeremiah, were gracious. The hostess was a snot. I’ve seen it enough times since, and so have you, but it rarely bothers me as much as it did that evening, probably because when it happens I am not alone.

Except today:  Thanks to the negligence of a neighbor’s irresponsible contractor my house has no walls, ceilings, or floors. I don’t have a dining room or a dining room table. I can’t have friends over for dinner, and I am not getting out a lot. It’s my birthday.

I hate birthdays. My  current mindset is somewhere between perpetual funk and junk yard dog mean, so I attempted an attitude tune up by getting out and playing hooky from work with nice scenery and lunch after the last contractor of the day told me how many thousand dollars more the upgrades would cost than my insurance pays.

Since I had something to deliver to the beach, I chose a restaurant with a heart stopping view of today’s breathtakingly blue ocean.  I entered the expansive, barely populated dining room at about 11:30 and asked to be seated by the window. The hostess warbled sweetly, “I have difficulty seating singles at the window.”   “But today,”  I snarled,  “you can, because it’s my birthday, you are empty, I am in a crappy mood, and I know the owners.” (I do, and they are wonderful people and exceptional restaurateurs,  but I am profoundly ashamed of saying it – How rude..) She did. I wrote the owner.

It’s been a while since I have felt uncomfortable eating alone, so  I am surprised that these thing still happen. Looking back I realize, though, that since the Stars Cafe event, I have avoided it. I’ll even take a sandwich to a hotel room and mope, rather than risking  the single diner slap in the face.  I also wonder if the fact that I am a woman no longer young played a part – A young man was sitting at a deuce at the window. Perhaps  he made the decision easier for the hostess by slipping her a tip, but then, most of the view tables were in fact four tops with small tables away from the windows, so perhaps she was thinking of the larger tips expected from a happily drinking group of four. or just logistics, if a rush occurred. It’s a nice place for lunch (or dinner or brunch).

When I left there were still window tables available.

There was a while when the press spoke about single business diners and single women in restaurants a lot. No longer. Perhaps it’s time to open a dialogue, or at least a monologue on the matter, so here are a few points in favor of seating the single diner in the prime locations.

1)      It’s a nice thing to do. The group of four are not going to be spending most of their time looking out the window or enjoying the dining room choreographies.  They will be laughing and chatting. The single diner will appreciate whatever you have to offer more.

2)      I, at least, feel exposed eating alone. I suspect it’s not just me. Looking out a window or sitting against a wall helps  for some reason.

3)      If the ambiance is a view, then a single diner is going to have to look past four or six people to see it. The group of four or six will be closer and have to look past only one, who probably won’t be blocking it much..

4)      You don’t know who that single diner is/you don’t know who  you are pissing off. You don’t know how many friends they might bring back with them.  They may be regulars (I had been at this restaurant many times).

5)      Singles tend to eat faster. You will have the table back soon enough.

6)       First come, first serve.

7)       It’s good Karma.

8)       Not treating single diners the same way you treat groups is discrimination. It’s not illegal, but it poses a few ethical questions.

7)      You do not raise the suspicion that you want your snotty palm crossed with green.

8)       People with a higher pique and lacking a blog are likely to vent against the restaurant rather than the practice both with their friends and on YELP. (I don’t). (Ever).

This incident made me feel rotten. That’s not world shaking – there are tragedies enough and a lesser table in a restaurant is at the worst a minor disappointment – but it made me feel bad about myself and who I am and how I am. It brought out what is unfortunately not the worst in me – the friend card – and it made me regret that. What I anticipated as a pleasant interlude became depressing. I really didn’t enjoy the hamburger.  Of course it’s my own fault – I should have left, but in my defense I was hungry. It made me not want to eat out alone, and I won’t for quite a while now.

I am sure that some best policy indicates that numbers rule and individuals need only to be adequately accommodated. The policy is wrong. If only limited seating for groups remains in a restaurant is empty, of course the staff needs to organize diners by group size, but If a restaurant is empty and does not have a full set of reservations, there is no excuse for seating singles in Siberia. The restaurant industry sails under the “hospitality” flag, and the person greeting the guest is a “host” or “hostess”, all of which would suggest being hospitable. Discriminatory seating is anything but.

The logistics question is fair, but what prevents a highly profitable, large restaurant with a view from placing two tops which can be adapted to groups of two, four or more at view positions? My guess is that the policy or practice is at worst an oversight by the management, and, as I said, it’s the job of the hostess to screw up what owners intend well. It’s too bad under any circumstances. I was really looking forward to it, It was my only birthday present.

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Posted on March 1, 2012 by jll

Nutritional Ethics Conundrums:

Food is politics. It used to be just nutrition with a hefty side of pleasure and perhaps a little guilt, but the entire eating process has morphed into a political morass.

You can’t just eat. You have to eat right: small farm, small market, farmers’ market,  heirloom, slow, heritage, GM free, fair trade, humanely raised, sustainable, earth friendly, non -corporate, trans fat and high fructose corn syrup free, non-endangered and low water and carbon footprint. Otherwise you are a terrible person, your friends will abandon you, and the coral reefs will die.

All of this is served with a whopping side of guilt by those who  have taken on the job of watching the civilized world’s culinary morals. Sanctimonious servers smugly deliver pre-ordering lectures in the guise of a rundown of restaurant’s food policies, while diners with culinary Stockholm Syndrome nod sycophantically  to the abuse.

Smart men like Mario Batali throw their toques into the ring by declaring meat free Mondays or banning foie gras from their menus, while self-proclaimed public interest organizations like CSPI,  the National Humane Society, the Sierra Club, The Physicians’ Committee for Responsible Medicine and Alice Waters try to guilt you by telling you that drinking Pepsi, eating a steak or drinking bottled water will destroy the economy by fattening children and spreading the obesity and diabetes epidemic, insult Gaia, cause barbaric wars in Africa and the deaths of untold South American berry pickers, torture Babe the Pig, and generally destroy the planet.

It’s time to take a deep breath and see a few things clearly.

First: You can’t do everything and get everything right. We all want to be good, but there’s an obvious disconnect between our desires for rectitude and our physical and emotional needs. God apparently goofed. We are meant to be an omnivore,  possibly closer to being a carnivore (canine teeth a clue there) and if you miss meat, it might just be because you need it. From a practical standpoint what you theoretically feel you can eat with virtue and what your body evolved to eat seem a bit at odds with each other. Imported coffee raises the planet’s carbon emissions, while not drinking deprives Bolivian coffee farmers of school money for their kids. If the righteous are successful in killing the bottled water market (fat chance), residents of disaster zones like New Orleans and Haiti will die of thirst until trucks can get through. Everything is a trade off, and there’s too much to consider to cover it all.

Second: With a few extremely notable exceptions, the people carrying the banners for the righteous in the crusade against the simple pleasures of food tend to be meddling wing nuts, who have appointed themselves to watch over you. You, probably an American citizen or resident who if not born free chose to be,  don’t have to be a Ron Paul libertarian to take great offense at those busy bodies who are trying to control your plate by getting into your head.

Third: Most of  the movements driving culinary guilt, although sprinkled with some solid ideas, are passing fads with little and questionable empirical substance to support their programs, unless they are preaching the absolutely obvious.  They suggest that your token sacrifices and life style changes will solve enormous problems, and that your continued hedonistic behavior (burgers and milkshakes) will have monumentally destructive consequences. They won’t. The trends and the noise will pass, hopefully sooner rather than later. Trust me: You can destroy a lot -  your sofa, a transmission or a friendship. You can save a cake from going bad, a child from running into traffic or a dog from the pound, but even imagining that you,  yourself, even incrementally, can destroy or save the world is a delusion of grandeur.

Finally, it’s futile.  Whatever you do, something will be wrong.  Unintended consequences lurk at every nutritional decision. You can’t win.

Example: Urban farming (or suburban or rooftop or vertical..just growing your own vegetables) is the obvious declaration of culinary virtue and commitment to fighting Big Food, raising your middle finger to ADM, Monsanto and Big  Agriculture and generally improving the planet while making wonderful food for low prices.

(Aside: As a well seasoned gardener I would like to disabuse you of the Low Prices conceit and possibly of the environmental issues, since there are recent reports that runoff from vegetable gardens is impacting the ocean and water supplies, but we digress.)

Gardening is God’s work: You turn your soil, start a compost pile, create a worm box, make beds and eh voila, you are ready to shake your fist at Safeway, Piggly Wiggly, ADM, Monsanto and the rest of the evil empire destroying our planet with food.

That’s what you think. NOT!  HAH! Fooled ya!

Aside from the fact that urban farming (what a pompous phrase – can’t we just call it gardening) is in fact a profoundly consumerist activity, it supports the DARK SIDE.  Let me explain.

A recently circulated urban myth states that Monsanto owns about every know food brand from Kellogs to Campbells  you can get on your supermarket shelves and admonishes against  purchasing their products.    The initiating blog and many like it are  speciously inaccurate  – Monsanto does not own these companies or any part of them (Their Board Members surely do), but they do own something else: (Drumroll, please)

1)      Most of the seeds and nursery products sold in the US, organic and heirloom varieties included.

2)      A substantial number of patents on heirloom varieties.

In 2007 Monsanto purchased Seminis,  a holding company which currently includes most if not all of  the most responsible seed groups in the US. This does not mean that the seeds are GM, but,   if you are going to be consequent about not supporting the forces of evil, of which Monsanto is considered the worst, you can’t buy their seeds.  In the effort to be totally virtuous you are scrod. You can’t buy from Big Food, you can’t plant Big Seed, and if you are buying heirloom, Monsanto probably holds the patent.

You might try going solitarian – attempting to gain your nutrients from the rays of the sun, as plants do – although the smart money says that won’t work. Making an about-turn and becoming omnivore would only cause further environmental damage and animal distress, so you are stuck in the middle.  A tofu diet is environmental poison, as the rainforests are being cut down to plant soy crops, and most tofu is gene modified, anyway.

We are left with two options, one of them mildly demonic.

1)      Monsanto’s patents preclude re-harvesting and re-sowing of seed. Re-harvest, replant and turn yourself in. If everyone does this, it will so overburden the company with demands on their legal department and their inspection system, they will have to give up..or

2)      Just say “to Hell with it” and go have a foie burger and a coke or Oreo Milkshake and enjoy it for all it’s worth.

I don’t know what your choice is, but I certainly know mine.

Life is really to short and too hard for any of us to be taking the weight of the nutrional, agricultural world on our shoulders. Food is supposed to make it easier.

 

Bon appetite.

Comments more than welcome. You don’t have to agree.

 

 

 

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The answer to the nutritional health crisis is not a repentant Paula Deen

Posted on January 19, 2012 by jll

The Party’s over, America. Get ready to be told to eat your spinach.

After suffering Jamie Oliver’s patronizing missionary swing through the American nutritional landscape (An Englishman is telling America how to eat? They eat canned spaghetti on toast, for the love of Gawd), we are about to be treated to a much less entertaining Paula Deen proselytizing healthy nutrition. In case you’ve just come out of hibernation, Deen has outed her type 2 diabetes and with the speed of a congressman caught in a threesome with a teenager and a high priced hooker come to Jesus with a full public mea culpa and a promise to do only good with a healthy food show in future. Her conversion outraged Tony Bourdain and saddened those of us whose pleasure was watching her stuff a week’s worth of fat, sugar and salt into a single appetizer serving without apologies.

Deen’s retreat from salt, sugar and trans fats is our loss – devil-may-care-and-don’t-spare-the- lard is at the very least highly entertaining, and whether or not her new focus on what’s good for us is well intended or just self serving, like Oliver’s warnings, Michelle Obama’s charming cajoling, the Center for Science for the  Public Interest’s incessant and self-serving nagging and all of the nation’s food political media sensationalism combined, it is not going have any substantial impact on the country’s obesity statistics or diabetes crisis. You  have to get to the root of the problem, which is us, to effect real improvement. And that is what? Are we simply culinary idiots?

Granted, American eaters are occasionally stupid, as evidenced by the increasing number of three hundred pounders zipping around on disability and Medicare paid My Little Buddy Scooters years after their doctors warned them, that their diet would take out their knees and hips. Our fellow eaters know that McDonald’s 1500 calorie burgers and Starbuck’s 500 calorie frozen coffees are going to make them fat, immobile and sooner dead – but neither Starbuck’s nor Domino’s is feeling the pinch of their logical conclusions. Apparently cause and effect thinking  (Big gulps yield inability to support your own mass) is not our strong point, but you can’t hold stupidity alone responsible for the current national nutritional health crisis.

So blame it on the manufacturers, who are putting cheaper corn syrup sweetener in things you wouldn’t consider dessert and marketing a bucket of calorie packed fried chicken as a healthy family meal. Soban toys in Happy meals or pass a soda tax,  Go to battle with the First Amendment and try to stop their advertising. Good luck.

The food industry is simply doing what businesses do and Paula Dean is about to do: Playing to their audiences.  They sell what  consumers demand. You can of course,  like Paul Kenny accuse food manufacturers of creating an addiction and attempt to resolve the problem with a war on Lardo or sugar, which promises the same success as the government’s war on drugs. Or we can fix it, at least in the long term.

If we as a nation want to solve out diabetes and obesity crisis, which means addressing what it costs us in health care and welfare programs, we can’t just scoff at “stupid” and blame the providers of food, Nutritional outrage and good intentions are ineffective. We need to look beyond the buzz words and the facile finger pointing of the media and identify the underlying causes of the country’s poor eating habits. Junk food’s ubiquitous availability (evil producers are selling it) and advertising bombardment are results, not causes. If our nation’s eaters were dying to have spinach snacks, Kraft would be producing them and running million dollar ad campaigns at the Super Bowl.

Is junk food addictive? Perhaps, but “habit forming” is perhaps a better description (things you like produce serotonin, whether it’s running or eating salt water toffee) and as tidy as the accusation that big agriculture and McDonald’s are pushing addictive products, It’s more probable that we, once we reach our mid-twenties, have formed habits that we are not  likely to break until we get our own diabetes diagnosis. The fact that we will change our habits then shows that we are not that stupid.

What we are, as a nation,  however, is ignorant, and there’s an app for that.

The real underlying problem is lack on knowledge aboout and understanding of the simplest facts about food – culinary and nutritional illiteracy. Americans for the most part know pitifully little about what they eat. They don’t know how to buy it. They don’t know how to cook it, and according to the statistics on food poisonings, they haven’t got a clue on  how to keep it. I suspect that most Americans don’t know what really good food tastes like. The continued existence of Velveta is proof of that.  We build our life long pitiful eating habits as children because nobody tells us any better. This wasn’t always the case..

How’d that happen? Two generations ago your grandmother, who may have been rolly polly and not a great cook, was serving your mother a balanced meal and sending her to school with something more or less appropriate, including celery sticks with peanut butter, a tuna fish sandwich or an apple. If you are under 40, own mother probably didn’t do that (if she did,  you are probably not obese). Nobody’s mother did. Blame it on feminism.

Our common food culture is in great  part collateral damage of the women’s liberation movement. James Beard as the spokesman for the Jolly Green Giant and Westinghouse with the first dishwashers led the way to the sea change in our eating conventions, creating conveniences which permitted Mad Men’s wives to toss away their aprons and enter the work force, but Gloria Steinem’s followers did in America’s healthy relationship with food by stripping Home Ec from our high schools.

Bless’em for that. Home Ec, frequently boring and generally run by bossy and intolerably opinionated teachers, was obligatory for girls, who usually gave up Geometry of beginning algebra in order to graduate from junior high school. Eliminating first the requirement and then the class entirely put girls on equal educational footing with boys and provided women the academic foundations to transcend the nurse, teacher, stewardess and teacher futures available to them.

Eliminating home economics also saved the schools a lot of money. Lab courses are enormously expensive to run, and insurance was just beginning its parabolic climb to astronomically expensive,  when the courses disappeared, and the cost of insurance for classes using knives and hot liquids would have destroyed school budgets.

Education equality with men also means that women know as much as their male classmates about food: Squat, a knowledge void passed on to their children. The problem was compounded by the time limitations set by women’s initial liberty then need to participate in the work force, reducing the time spent providing cooking experiences to their children. . Balanced sit down meals and brown bags began to disappear in the seventies, creating a population that not only did not know how to cook or understand nutritional basics, but doesn’t know what good food can and should taste like.

If you want to change America’s eating habits, you have to educate our children: Return Home Economics classes to the schools. Make them obligatory for all students in their food formative years – that would be about the seventh grade. Make them accessible and interesting and not preachy. Keep it simple and don’t insist on organic or sustainable product. Teach your children how to make basic foods – forget Alice Waters and the ideologues and stick with an American menu adolescents will like. Just do the basics. Explain vitamins and calories, flavors and technique.

Other courses won’t lose ground. Good food preparation involves math and science. It’s fascinating stuff. Show kids who have had nothing but Tortino Pizza Rolls and Pop tarts why bread has holes in  it and how absolutely awesome a little orange and cheese can taste, how much fun watching a sauce firm up can be. Make jam. Fry eggs, mix salad dressing (colloidal suspensions), make lemonade from fruit.  Cook up a BLT or a croque monsieur. Mash potatoes. Run a food budget and make a banana smoothie. Explain why steel needs to be sharpened and milk is homogenized. Let them cook bugs and make a pie or cookies without a mix. .

Children, being the insufferable know it alls they are, will carry their nutritional literacy beyond the classroom. Parents are going to get an earful when they put another batch of Kraft Mac ‘N Cheese on the table. That’s good. They will cook at home.

Still Better: In only eight or so years the first batch of nutritionally literate adults will be opinion makers and trend setters, and their demands will be met. The fast and convenience food providers are using mass media to educate. So, Educate Back. The schools have them as a captive audience, face to face for at least an hour three times a week. Sarah Lee would die for that exposure. Why aren’t we using it.

What speaks against return Home Economy to the schools:

The Money Problem.

Food classes aren’t expensive. They are exorbitant.  They require equipment, product, and insurance. But then good education does cost something, and it is our general mandate, all of ours, to educate our children for the important things in life. We are failing here. Just as important is what an educated eating public  will save. Congress is belly aching about the cost of Medicare. What if the next generation of adults didn’t need Scooter Buddies to haul their four hundred pound carcasses around the sidewalks? What if they didn’t need insulin and knee replacements?  Would that offset the cost of teaching the most basic component of our lives to people who  need the education? You betcha. After all, we have sex education, don’t we?

Oxen being gored:

And there are the unions.  An attempt I once participated in to set up a good culinary program at John O’Connell high school ran aground at the shoals of the hairnet lady’s union. The plan was to let the students cook lunch twice a week. The hairnet ladies said no, and the class was re-conceived as a special needs solution. We need to get our priorities straighter, if we want to resolve really large problems.

Big Food Industry: While Big Food can’t be held as the sole culprit in the American nutritional crisis, they enjoy great profits from it, which they won’t give up gladly. An early attempt by Slow food San Francisco to introduce apples as snacks twice monthly was foiled by the contracted suppliers of potato chips and Snickers bars. Big Food lobbies, and they are not going to lie back and allow the educational system to market carrots as snacks to their prime audience. They had, furthermore, effectively undermined Home Economics classes before they were dropped with donations of their products (Mac ‘n Cheese, mixes, Jello) to Home Ec programs,

You can do something. Take this immodest proposal to heart, then take it to your congress person, then take it to your school board. Michelle Obama – stop finger wagging and start lobbying for hands on food education. Just the basics. It will work.

 

 

 

 

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Trends: Keeping track.

Posted on January 12, 2012 by jll

Two weeks ago Culinary Promiscuity lampooned trend predictors and set up our own trends. One of the postulates was that you an say whatever you want in trends, because nobody remembers them ten minutes after they read them, unless the trend comes true. In that case they say, “Oh, yes. I read about that in The FoodSnob. My, aren’t they on the money!!??).

Since we now have our own list of Trends for 2012, we can’t really forget them. In fact, we keep being reminded of them, so it seems like a good idea to keep track. My scientific examination of the comparative accuracy of trend lists shows them to right less than fifty percent of the time, and generally about 20%. (The method involved Googling “trend lists and asking friends if these really were trends). If Culinary Promiscuity’s List of Trends, then, reaches 50% we beat the odds and should be nominated for something. If it is only 40%, we are still the best of a bad lot. What have we got to lose?

For fairness. let’s identify trend: A trend is something that is either new or dormant in the field where it trends and in a short period of time gains awareness and a following. a trend is hardly a trend unless it gets TV play, at least twelve blogs and one glossy cover. Food trends need to be copied, often mindlessly, by chefs and restaurants aspiring to hitch their stars to the latest star. Examples are Cajun in the eighties, when every restaurant started burning their now endangered redfish, California Cuisine and the mesquite grills which polluted the Beverly Hills air in the 90′s, Fusion Cuisine, later claimed by the French, who apparently discovered lemon grass about five years after the US got sick of it, and Locovorism in our current millennium.

Some trends, like the Northern Italian frenzy kicked off by brilliant restaurateur Larry Mendel, settle from their trendiness into part of our culinary canon, while  others  eventually reach a saturation point of vomitus proportions. (How tempted are you, for instance, to smack every waiter who rolls out pedigree of your salad?

Something that was popular and still is, possibly a little more, or a spotty appearance of some ethnic cuisine does not a trend make.

Having set the parameters for our trend success, here our first victory.

Weeds are definitely trending according to the New York Post.  December Food Arts, furthermore, features an article on foraging chefs.

The public profiles of the Middle Eastern Cuisine are also rising, concurrent with increased tourist interest in the area.November’s Food Arts features an Article on Moroccan food,  And Paula Wolfert is re releasing her Moroccan Cook Book.

Our score thus far is therefor:

MIddle Eastern Food:   1

Weeds:                          2

Everything else:             0

That’s 20k%. We’re up there with the big boys, but the year’s still young.

 

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Tarians and Vores

Posted on January 5, 2012 by jll

What kind of Tarian are you?

When I was a kid everyone ate about everything unless you happened to have the misfortune of being Catholic with Lent or Vatican imposed meatless Fridays, Seventh Day  Adventist or Orthodox Jewish and had to adhere to theologically imposed dietary restrictions. Or poor, of course, which came with its own set of limitations.

As Episcopalians we were theologically/nutritionally unencumbered. My mother, who railed at people who came to dinner then disclosed their dietary restrictions (there were fewer back then), never invited the one Seventh Day Adventist she knew and invited our Catholic friends on Saturdays rather than Fridays unless she happened to expect bluefish or crab off my uncle’s boat on a Friday.

A Friday dinner invitation from Catholic neighbors was cause for some nose wrinkling, but then most of the Catholics we knew back then were Irish, who, apologies to the sons and daughters of the Green Isle, are far from the best ambassadors for Catholic cuisine. Had we known Josephine Gasparro, things surely would have been different. Josephine cooked a mean salmon.  Kosher was never an issue..the only Jews we hung out with were reformed and were lavish eaters and phenomenal cooks.

Times have changed.

The Vatican lifted it’s fiat on meat, thus removing its negative image of an imposed food and possibly contributing to the endangerment of hundreds of species, as seafood became not only interesting but hotly desired for any night you wanted to have it. The Adventists may still be meatless, although the two I know eat non garden burgers with gusto. My Jewish friends now are staunch proponents of all things porcine. Religion no longer rules the plate. Instead we have made our self imposed food limitations to our religions.

Vegetarianism has gone secular-mainstream and highly vocal and spawned a score of variations, some extreme, some simple variations, and we have named them all.

The equal and opposite reaction to the steady surge in demanding vegetarian diners sprung up in the form of testosterone laden carnivore movement under the name of the Whole Beast Movement or Snout to Ass, initially carried by chefs like Chris Cosentino, then picked up by butchery event planners like Big John Fink,  who creates butchering shows followed by orgies involving large pigs on spits.

There are nutritional crusades and tirades on both sides. Animal rights activists have effected bans of foie gras and shark fins in California and attempted to pass laws requiring that restaurants observe “Meatless Mondays”.  At a North Beach Pizzeria a young Swiss guest responded to the gorgeous Italian server’s suggestion of a porchetta spiked pie with, “I don’t eat meat,” spoken with the vehemence of a Jonathan Edwards holding out a cross and snarling, “Get the behind me, dead animal.”   Professed carnivores also have their obnoxiously vocal moments.

Most of us omnivores in the middle eat just about anything anyone sets down  in front of us, or at least it around our plates or feed it to the dog, so people think you liked it.

That was the Readers’ Digest version – our personal nutritional sects are considerably more complex.

The Administrative Director of the Culinary Institute of America told me years ago that the Institute had done a survey of eating habits. Among those who stated their diet as vegetarian a large number – I believe over half – also stated that they ate seafood and/or poultry frequently, and a smaller number occasionally meat. I eat vegetables, ergo I am vegetarian.

There is now a term for that:

Vegetarians remain vegetarians, at least in theory people who don’t eat meat, poultry or seafood.

Seafood eaters but not meat eaters, on the other hand, are either Pisquitarians or pescatarians, the word being so new that nobody has settled on a proper spelling.

Vegetarians who avoid eggs, honey and milk are vegans. Vegans believe in making life more challenging by foreswearing eggs, honey and cheese, which supposedly exploit chickens, bees and cows.

There’s more.

Vegans who don’t cook their food are Raw Foodists.

Vedic Vegans reduce their options by the entire nightshade family, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant and potatoes.

The most radical vegans are the fruitarians, who eat no live fruit – that is, eat nothing that is  picked from the tree on the theory that picking it would be killing a living thing.  In other words, they live from vegan road kill. One suspects that the pharmaceutical company is not producing sufficiently effective meds, but perhaps the fruitarians reject them because their production exploits some bacilli or fungi.

Omnivores don’t get away with a simple label, either.

Those of us who eat meat but not huge steaks have recently been dubbed “flexitarians”, which apparently means that we are not huge meat eaters. That would be in less pretentious food speak “omnivores”, or perhaps nothing, since we are still the people who generally eat what is put in front of us (or push it around the plate.)  Most of us still consider ourselves, probably irrationally, the default.

My son’s best friend’s mother is a socially conscious vegetarian with an irresistible taste for salami, which makes her a salmitarian (or salumitarian, if you include things like coppa and sopressata, which she probably does. )

My father’s second wife who actually ate mostly Cheetos and taco chips unless they went out  was a poultry eater and pronounced herself an “avitarian”. Actually she also ate some seafood, preferably fried, which would probably make her a pisqueavitarian.

And then there are the locovores, who, donning one of the rougher nutritional hair shirts of our times, swear never to eat anything grown more than a hundred miles from their homes. There aren’t many locovores in Minneapolis, and God bless the others. More bananas and Prosecco for the rest of us.

Fortunately the dining community, omnivore, flexitarian vegan et al, have not yet come to the point where we define ourselves by what we don’t eat – I am an antiglutenitariian or a non-lactositarian, but for an identity starved society who craves labels, it’s probably not far off.

The poor are still around, but they would probably just as soon renounce their dietary restrictions.

As for me, you can ask me to dinner any time. I’ll eat it if you’re a good cook. Unless it’s steamed spinach, in which case it will be neatly distributed around the plate.

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How to write food trends predictions (and why you shouldn’t bother reading them)

Posted on December 20, 2011 by jll

2011 is , and the one fail safe prediction that can be made about the crossroads of the food and media industries is that every media outlet and pundit is about to predict the trends for the coming year..

Bloggers, food shows, well paid consultancy firms and loose cannon freelance food writers alike will be punditting about our 2012 food and restaurant choices. They will name the next cupcake phenomenon, the new food, how restaurants will get your disposable income, celebrity nutritional  impact on the gourmet lemming masses, and where Alice Waters will plant her next turnip. For the most part they will be blowing sunshine up our snow suits, but we will listen anyway and possibly be complicit in making their predictions come true.

Oddly nobody ever says, “The Yummy Channel predicted that toasted sesame would replace chocolate, but I haven’t seen any at  whole foods yet. They must have been smoking the oregano again,”  and the general foodie public will be eagerly ingest another serving of food soothsaying in twelve months.

Take a look at Epicurious’s predictions for 2010:
Fried chicken was to replace burgers as the moving force in the casual side. Lamb was “the new pork”, pork being oh so 2009, and bacon would disappear from menus. Whoopie Pies were to be the new mini cupcakes (How many Whoopie Pie shops have sprung up in your mall). Butchers and homemade beer would be hot, while the drinking public would turn away from “mad scientist cocktails” and mixologists. Vancouver would replace Barcelona as culinary destiny (Next year Dallas will replace Paris) , potlucks were going to replace formal dinners as the hot social event, And Sam Kass (who?) would replace Curtis Stone (who?). Now honestly, Epicurious has set itself up as a knowledgeable resource, so how do they get away with this wing nut collection of wildly off center forecasts?

To be fair to Epicurious, the respected trade journal, Nation’s Restaurant News, hardly did any better, with only one home run prediction that honey would take on faddish proportions.

How do they get away with it?Here’s how.

1)      They make things up, probably after the office party. The sages predicting what you of the trend addicted masses will do with your disposable food dollars next year aren’t out for accuracy. They are out for entertainment. In other words, they make stuff up, so a lot of it is wrong. The staffer or intern set on the task knows that you won’t member any of it in a week, so why bother with research?

2)      The trending food fashions that do turn out to be right are hardly new, most of them already enjoying notable popularity and press coverage in the leading edges of the American food scene (San Francisco, New York, Chicago).   When Time Magazine correctly included foraging and salumi in  their 2011 trend predictions, the practices were already well entrenched in New York and San Francisco.  Rene Redzepi’s NOMA book tour had alerted the culinary Who’s Who of the value of weeds in fine dining, and Paul Bertoli’s decision to carry on his father’s salumi tradition at Fra Mani had long inspired a critical mass of chef salumi makers. The prediction was thus really, “these popular trends in the food Meccas will spread inland.”

3)      A substantial portion of trend prediction is really simply repetition of “street” and media noise, the selective rehashing of the constant exchange of information from the web and the last Meals on Wheels chatter.  With the right information it is possible to  make well educated guesses. This is the information advantage we expect from professionals in the food business. Unfortunately repeating does not necessarily indicate insight or research. It’s just more chatter. More unfortunate yet, there are plenty of PR firms and commodities boards paid well for creating and keeping such buzz alive – to make foods into trends.  Previous years’ predictions of a mass acceptance of pomegranate juice and functional foods like Activia Yoghurt are  highly suspect of processes which have little to do with news gathering.

4)      Self-fulfilling prophecies. If enough people read a claim and repeat it, it becomes truth. Journalism ain’t always what it used to be – it too frequently no longer reports but often predicts. You tell, tweet or share something predicted to enough of your friends, and it’s suddenly a fact rather than a prediction.  Cupcakes would have stayed a single storefront in New York, if the food press hadn’t obsessed about them.

5)      Citing past events as future trends. One of last year’s supposed trends was television stars starting food shows. One anorexic actress had a web site, and that, supposedly, would kick off an avalanche of women who don’t eat showing us how to cook. It didn’t. An event is not a trend. A trend happens when a food or style or ingredient finds a critical mass of followers, often mindless.  Gourmet hot dogs are a trend. Food carts are a trend. So is locovorism, although it is rapidly fading. (God bless locovores. More white truffles and Nero Diavolo for the rest of us.)

 

Knowing how to do it, let’s try a few of our own:
1) You will be seeing the resurgence of complex plates and finer dining establishments.
2) Restaurants will be offering more IPad and tablet based services including digital sommelier interfaces which allow candidates to pair menu items with a selection of the best suited wines without first speaking to a wine steward.
3) Waffles. Savory and sweet. Coming to every mall near you soon.
4) Cheese and ice cream gain recognition as healthy nutrition, starch becomes the bogeyman of the food chain.
5) Pop-ups<br/>6) Luxury knives become the ultimate kitchen status symbol.
7) Quick serve and fast food chains pimp their facilities to resemble fine dining.
8) Check payment by smart phone will become ubiquitous.
9) Exotic foods from India, Africa, the Middle East will spread in the main stream.
10) Justin Biber will have a cooking show.

These are, of course, the usual mixture of a little insight and a lot of pure  hooey. How did we choose them?

Nr 1: Street noise and a nascent blooming of some fancier restaurants. Actually a little insight, as a lot of the chefs I speak with are getting pretty tired of the Chez Panisse mantra and want to let out the throttle.

Nr 2: Already trending . Aps like Wine Valet http://yourwinevalet.com/interactive-wine-lists/  are in the pipeline.  Food dailies constantly report new adaptations of existing technology in established restaurants.<br/> Nr 3: is pure claptrap with slight factual basis.  Might happen. Might not. But you won’t remember it, so who cares?

Nr 4: A combination of noise and insight gained from recent research results claiming that starch may cause repeat breast cancer episodes and milk fat is less damaging to health than substitutes. May be influenced indirectly by industry spin.

Nr 5: Five star claptrap embellished with a good buzz word.  If anything pop ups are dying. They have been “in” so long they are a cliché. It’s a cheap and easy target, but  has no value as a prediction.

Nr  6: Self fulfilling prophecy and an unresearched educated guess based on  a June NYT article and some of the elegant offers recently pushed my way by various web sites.  That is, spin tainted. Remembering that the firms advertising luxury products frequently also pay for coverage (what?!! Paid mentions?? Who  knew??) the new luxury knife definitely has a fair chance of becoming the new Tickle Me Elmo of the kitchen ware consumer. If you read this and tell your friends, it will become a trend.

Nr 7:  Cheap and dirty conjecture based on the fact that. McD’s has opened a few locations with upscale designs. As McDonalds goes, so goes Fast Food in general. It it’s wrong, who cares.

Nr 8: More old news, and the prediction requires just a little more insight than breathing. Square, which allows businesses to take payment on their mobile phones, and aps which allow you to pay by yours are already here. Just out of the pipeline , they are being adapted at breakneck speed by small restaurant which couldn’t afford the standard credit card fees.  There is no way that this will not be a trend. Ergo, add it to the “no brainer” category

Nr 9:  More stale news combined with a wild guess. Now that San Francisco’s celebrated Iranian born Chef Hoss Zare http://zareflytrap.com/ has taken to promoting his heritage aggressively and Aziza http://aziza-sf.com/  has established itself as one of San Francisco’s top restaurants, you can expect imitators. India is a cheap add in, considering that there is a growing number of impressive young American born and trained Indian chefs ready to explore their culinary heritage. If they don’t do it now, they will soon. Africa? No clue. We’re after copy here, not truth.
Nr 10:  Don’t be ridiculous. Of course this is not a trend – it would be an event at best – but having a celebrity seems a requirement for any good trends list. It is pure  horse feathers.

To summarize:  Don’t look behind the curtain.  Or do. If you want to really enjoy culinary predictions, Google last year’s sure things on  your Ipad at your favorite watering hole, as your no longer hot mixologist pours you a no longer hip exotic drink. They offer some serious comedy.

By the way – there’s a rumor abroad that Tiki bars are back with a passion. Since it was on television, expect to see that one on all the lists.

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Research proves Food is bad for you. Or no, wait – maybe not.

Posted on December 16, 2011 by jll

When I was about sixteen a disgruntled taxi driver had the bad manners to shoot my father, shattering his  carotid artery, which had about the plasticity of a china cup. Research had just discovered that the arterial sclerosis affecting the artery was caused by beef, butter, milk, ice cream,  pork and baby lamb chops and just about anything else I like to eat. My mother, determined not to be widowed early, followed the cardiologist’s dire warnings and  changed our diet, which, considering my  mother’s voluptuous egg, cream and butter based cooking was like turning the Queen Mary on a dime.

Bacon and burgers were replaced with poached salmon and steamed spinach. Vegetables no longer dripped with butter and cheese, our milk went from creamy white to transparent blue, margarine and Wesson oil took the place of butter, and cottage cheese was dressed up to provide a thoroughly inadequate and mildly disgusting alternative to sour cream. We were among the zillions of families catapulted into anti cholesterol hysteria by a nutritional scientific community, which avowed longer and better lives for all if we just cut out red meat and took the skin off our chicken.

In the next few years Victoria Station, a rollicking beef restaurant group in yellow railway cars, folded because the management failed to see the anti-cholesterol writing on the wall, the chicken industry (no skin please) exploded from farms to batteries and the food factories of the world developed cholesterol free versions of anything that was any fun based on partially hydrogenated oils. Lard became an obscenity and pie crusts lost in the exchange.

The Mad Men generation of Americans spent their middle age eating gawdawful alternatives to real food, trusting their doctors and the nutritional voice of the Nation, the FDA. They died anyway, and possibly occasionally sooner than they otherwise would have. What a pity. No wonder they drank.

Shortly after my mother’s non coronary related death twenty five years after the shooting my father remarried. His second wife couldn’t cook for squat, not last because her hoarding had the stove covered three inches deep in shatskis and collectable jam jars. She seemed to believe that vodka and Cheesits were a pretty acceptable dinner substitute. Under her influence father’s preferences quickly morphed from boiled halibut to double cheeseburgers, Mexican omelets with bacon, and Linguini Alfredo. He lived another 26 years and died at 96 from strep. Perhaps if he’d lived another ten or so years, the cholesterol would have had a shot at him.

I so intensely disliked my mother’s nutritionally correct steamed spinach, simmered kale and faux cottage cheese sour cream, that once out of the nest I decided to die young, if necessary, but not to be miserable with healthy food. Every time one of my dinner mates whined, “My doctor won’t let me eat shellfish / chocolate /  peanuts / salumi because of cholesterol,” I suppressed the urge to say “Shut the fuck up and let me have my lobster bisque in peace,” and made a mental not to find another dinner companion.

My chances of dying young are dwindling, but despite a life of Epoisses, flans and duck breast, I have what my doctor describes as “divine cholesterol levels”. How come?

More recent studies indicate that not milk fat but trans fats , that is the products in all of the low fat baked goods, cool whip and anything else concerned eaters were making do with, were disastrous for coronary health, not lamb and vanilla ice cream. In other words, it really is not butter, whether you believe it or not, and it’s not better – in fact it’s worse for you than butter.

Better yet: According to new research by the Royal University of Copenhagen milk fat is good for you, or at least better than the alternative. They’ve been at this for a while, actually, and while all contemporary research should be suspect (Copenhagen does, after all,  have a lot of cows and export a lot of milk products, so what’s to keep his Highness the Danish King from suggesting to the scholarly researchers that their duty to their country was to do an empirical spin job on our Danish butter?)  it’s pretty hard to envision the University of Copenhagen carrying out studies funded by  Kraft or the Danish Dairy and adjusting their results to harmonize with the funders’ objectives. It’s more likely that they just know a heap more about milk and cream and the resulting products than, say the University of Beijing.

Food research is big and oddly enough widely believed despite continual retractions and opposing results. There’s a great deal of fun to be had with it, and Culinary Promiscuity looks forward to doing just that. Soon. For the moment, however, let us just gently propose that based on the scientific community’s long track record of contradiction and failure increased skepticism towards people telling us what will make us healthy is advisable.  Take their pronouncements with with a grain of salt, which, by the way, researchers tell us will lead to coronary disease. Or maybe not.  We are an excessively nutritionally gullible nation.

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