10.06.08
Posted in cooking, culture, domesticity, food, kitchen learning at 7:46 am by Hanne Blank
“Well, it’s easy for you to say it’s easy to go vegan,” the e-mail said. “You are obviously very skilled in the kitchen. It isn’t so easy for the rest of us who… can’t cook like you do. Especially not all the exotic stuff you make.”
This e-mail that greeted me this morning wasn’t the first time I’ve had someone respond in this manner to my cookery reports, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. But I thought it deserved some comment here, because in most cases, I honestly think that wails of “but I can’t cook like you do! it’s too hard!” are untrue, and unnecessarily limiting to the people who are stuck in the rut of believing that they cannot, for whatever reason, cook.
I draw a sharp distinction between not being able to cook and not wanting to cook, for one thing. It may be that you just don’t really like to cook. I think that’s perfectly fine. There are many things I don’t really like to do, including but not limited to driving in heavy traffic, going to the dentist, and sweeping floors. Just as I have managed to arrange my life so that I rarely am compelled to drive during rush hour, many people manage to arrange their lives so that they are rarely compelled to cook. I think that arranging not to have to do something is an intensely smart solution to the problem of hating to do it.
On the other hand, sometimes I have to be somewhere at such time as makes it necessary that I drive during rush hour. And sometimes people who don’t like to cook need to eat when they can’t afford, or simply don’t have physical access to, other folks’ cooking in whatever form. Sometimes my kitchen floor is a grotty mess and I can’t stand it one more minute and I sweep it whether I want to or not. Sometimes people who don’t like to cook can’t stand eating prepared food one more minute, either, and they end up in the kitchen glaring at their pot, screwing up their courage to attack the problem personally. Life’s like that.
That’s where both skill and guilt enter the picture. Many people who do not like to cook feel a lot of guilt about not liking to cook. They know that eating prepared food gives you less control about what you eat not just in terms of nutrition but also in terms of things like knowing whether or not those eggs were from battery-farmed chickens, or knowing whether or not those salad bar veggies were doused in sulfites to keep them looking fresh. They also know that when you don’t cook your own food, you’re stuck with what you can get instead of necessarily being able to get exactly what you want. And they know that there’s a whole huge social and emotional thing connected to cooking: food is love, food is culture, food is art, and all that. It can feel like, and sometimes be, a big hairy deal to not like cooking. It can feel like, and sometimes be, an even bigger, hairier deal to not know how.
Here’s the thing: there is nothing that can be cooked that you cannot cook. Yes, I mean you, the one who doesn’t know how to boil an egg.
Kitchen skill is, yes, skill. I won’t deny that. But skill can be acquired. That’s the whole point of it being a skill. You can learn a skill.
Kitchen talent is a different story. I won’t deny that either. Talent cannot be acquired, and having talent does make it easier and faster to learn skills, and makes it possible to learn them at a higher level than might be feasible for someone without the same talent. But even if you have zilch in the way of talent, you can still learn enough skills in the kitchen to turn out decent and tasty meals if you are so inclined.
It’s a bit like playing the piano. Few of us will ever be a Sviatoslav Richter or an Anthony de Mare or even a Tori Amos. But virtually anyone, if sufficiently motivated to learn the skills, can learn to play scales, bang their way through a Scarlatti sonatina, or thump out “Heart And Soul” or, Heaven help us, the power-chord opening to Van Halen’s “Jump.” And an awful lot of people can learn to play well enough to entertain themselves and their families and friends, or sightread Christmas carols at a party, fill in for their church’s organist when she’s sick, or even be part of a band or an amateur chamber music group.
Skill and talent, taken together, form a continuum. It would be cruel as well as inaccurate of me to suggest that any random passer-by could, given sufficient time and tutelage, become a Julia Child. But that does not by any means detract from the fact that Julia Child herself spent the first thirty or so years of her life as a committed, happy non-cook. She learned, and in the process discovered that she had a rare talent. You may or may not have a rare talent. But learning you can do.
But I digress. You will recall that I said above that there is nothing that can be cooked that you cannot cook. I meant it.
Cooking was not handed down from on high by a jealous and capricious Deity who liked to see humans fail. Cooking, by the very fact that it is a practice evolved to help feed people and thus keep them alive, is something that has to be able to be done with success by virtually any member of any society or culture anywhere. Everywhere in the world, people cook, and many of them with the most rudimentary equipment and ingredients and under the most challenging conditions. Cooking does not require the ability to read, count, or precisely measure, for if it did, a huge swath of the globe would have starved to death by now. The same thing would’ve happened if it required precision equipment or exact temperatures. Pretty much all you need to cook is fire, a vessel you can put in the fire that will hold food while it cooks, a stick to stir it with, and a knife to cut things up with.
It is not, as they say, rocket science, and you should trust no one who tries to tell you that cookery is a mystical magical secret science that only the most talented and educated adept can pull off. That’s horseshit. Billions of people would starve if that were true. Yes, sure, cookery can be an art, and in some cases, also a science. But most of the time it’s just cooking, and it’s a set of interrelated skills, and you can learn how to do it too.
Once you have acquired some basic skills, you can figure out where your talents lie, or perhaps more importantly, where your talents do not lie.
Probably 80% of what I cook, and maybe more, comes under the general heading of Peasant Food. I do this because while there are modes of cooking that require split-second timing, refined technique, and consummate artistry, these are honestly not my strengths. I have neither the compulsivity nor the finickiness, to say nothing of any knack whatsoever for a lot of the techniques that veer heavily into the territory of the visual arts.
The beauty of Peasant Food is that it requires none of this. If it is a food that poor people eat (or have historically eaten), regardless of where in the world it comes from, you can pretty much rest assured that it is both a) reasonably easy to make and b) almost invariably forgiving. It may take a long time to cook, as some Peasant Food dishes do–because it was both easy and pleasant to leave a covered pot nestled in the embers of a fire all day while you worked doing other things and come back to find that dinner was hot and ready–but for the most part it doesn’t take all that long to put Peasant Food dishes together.
For a great many years, my cookery relied essentially on two techniques: pan-frying and simmering. This was because that is all you need to know how to do for a positively gargantuan percentage of the world’s Peasant Food cooking. If you can fry and simmer, you can make virtually any soup, stew, or gumbo. You can make pasta sauces and fricasees. You can make a huge swath of dishes in the Indian cuisine vocabulary, another huge swath of Italian ones, a giant wodge of North African and east Asian, and not a small percentage of European foods besides. (”Exotic” just means something unfamiliar in your home culture. It does not, at all, mean “difficult.”) You can make eggs several ways, and pancakes, and even, if you are ambitious, homemade English muffins. You can eat rice and noodles and potatoes and oats and barley and millet and Jell-O Pudding. If you can fry and simmer, you can also saute, braise, poach, and steam. Among other things. Sure, you can branch out if you want to. But you don’t have to. If you can fry and simmer, you can eat like a king, or at least like a very well-fed peasant.
That’s the thing about cooking, from where I sit. You may not have the talent or desire to do the difficult stuff, but almost everyone can learn to do the easy stuff. At least sometimes. And so much of the difficult stuff is not stuff you really have to know how to do very often, or even at all, especially if you stick to Peasant Cooking. So I do encourage people who have even the slightest interest in cooking to try it. It’s a good Life Skill to have, like knowing how to swim.
Truly, the worst possible thing that can happen is that you screw up and something comes out inedible. When this happens, and it will, you will not be alone. Trust me when I say that all of us screw up sometimes, even those of us who have a lot of skills and talent as cooks. (It’s the other reason people order takeout.)
I suppose basically, my answer to the “but I can’t cook like you do!” people is that I haven’t always been able to cook like I do, either. I did not spring from the womb knowing how to make good home fries, or knowing what the difference is between a sauce bearnaise and a sauce hollandaise. (In fact, I’m not sure I know that even now, without looking it up. I am not much for French haute cuisine.) I have screwed up my fair share of dishes. (My first attempt at scrambled eggs was memorably crusty, and my first attempt at baking bread produced something that I could literally have used to wedge under truck tires to keep them from rolling backwards.) Doubtless I will screw up more.
I had to learn how to do this stuff. As it turns out I am also moderately talented at it. But I had to learn.
If you want to, so can you.
And if you don’t want to? That’s okay. I’m not the one judging you. And if you’re nice to me, I might even invite you over for dinner.
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08.24.08
Posted in Cantonese cuisine, chinese, cooking, culture, food, non-casein, non-dairy at 2:27 pm by Hanne Blank
To celebrate my Belovedary’s recent birthday, as well as our 12th anniversary, and additionally to roll in the belated birthday celebration of a good friend of ours, I decided to make a Chinese-style feast for the four of us. Four is, to be honest, too small a number for a real banquet, as far as Chinese cookery goes. Chinese banquets usually run into the double digits in terms of numbers of courses, and are intended for large groups of friends or family.
Nonetheless, one can still have an awfully nice feast by following the general principles of Chinese banqueting, which is basically that one pulls out all the stops and acquires large quantities of meat, seafood, and poultry — sometimes very exotic things, or in very exotic preparations, depending on how impressive the banquet is to be. Meat is a traditional food for feasts and celebrations all over the world, and always has been, and it is surely the case in China. In fact, the focus of Chinese banqueting is so much directed toward the meat-fish-poultry end of the spectrum that in many cases, rice is not served at banquets despite its centrality to Chinese eating and culture, unless possibly at the end of the meal as a near-formality.
The message encoded in the absence of rice from the table is quite alien to a culture like ours where we are both very affluent and very fond of large slabs of meat as a central part of our eating (and don’t kid yourself that these aren’t related things), and unlikely to be perceived by Westerners who rarely eat rice anyway and for whom it does not occupy the same mental space as it does for most Asians and certainly for the Chinese. In China, you don’t ask a visitor if they are hungry, or if they have had lunch or dinner already, you ask “hee ca fan mai?” (Cantonese; the Mandarin is ni chi fan le ma?), which means, quite literally “have you eaten rice yet?” The same sentiment is a common greeting in other places too, notably Thailand. Like the word “bread” in the phrase “give us this day our daily bread,” rice is not just a food, rice is food.
When rice is absent from the table at a Chinese meal, it means that you are, at least temporarily, so prosperous and that you don’t have to think about the stuff — rice — that the common people use to fill their bellies. You can and in fact you are encouraged to do something that under normal circumstances has been almost unthinkable, both culturally and economically, for everyone but the highest of elites. You can eat your fill of meat.
(Yes, there are Buddhist banquets that are 100% vegetarian. Most are in fact vegan. And other Buddhist banquets that are vegetarian except for four or five types of seafood that are considered permissible. But even they are remarkably concerned with, and centered around, meat… albeit in the form of mock meats made from seitan, tofu, and various kinds of mushrooms and fungus. The symbolism of meat and prosperity, and meat and largesse, is insistent.)
It should thus come as no surprise that our four-person feast was a fiesta of animal protein.
Clockwise from upper middle: ginger-scallion oil for dipping, boiled dumplings with pork filling, white cut chicken, ginger-soy dipping sauce, roasted chili oil (in center), ginger-scallion explosion shrimp.
The least glamorous looking of these dishes is actually one of my favorites, white cut chicken. It is a Cantonese favorite, and the method of preparing it is one that makes many Western cooks look very worried indeed, although I have made it dozens of times without mishap. It is essentially a boiled whole chicken (you cut it into chopstickable pieces, with or without the bones still in as you prefer, to serve it), cooked with ginger and green onion. But what makes it special is that it is boiled only very briefly, so that it remains juicy and sweet and firm, rather than getting the stringy, cooked-to-death texture that is so common to boiled poultry otherwise.
I take mine off the bone, removing the meat in the largest pieces possible and then cutting them into chopstickable chunks, because I dislike the inevitable bone fragments that chopping through the bones (more traditional) generates. It is served with ginger-scallion oil and usually with soy sauce as well, for diners to dip the meat into as they like. It is a subtle and very pleasing dish, very treasured, and one of those traditionally served at ancestor worship rituals like Ching Ming and the Feast of the Hungry Ghosts.
Method for White Cut Chicken:
Take a small to medium-sized whole chicken, very fresh and of very good quality, plucked, drawn, cleaned, and well washed in plenty of cold water, and put it in a large pot. Fill the pot with cold water until the chicken is submerged to the depth of about 2 inches. Add a large bunch of green onions, cleaned and pared, and a three-inch chunk of peeled fresh gingerroot cut into thick coins. Place the pot over a brisk flame and bring to a full rolling boil. Let boil for about 5 minutes, then remove the pot from the heat, cover, and let cool until the chicken is cool enough to handle.
Note: this takes some time, usually several hours, but it depends on how warm or cool the room is. However, this is part of the cooking process! Residual heat helps ensure that your chicken is completely cooked. Don’t try to rush the cooling artificially, in other words. Just let it happen.
When the chicken is cool enough to handle, lift it out of the broth (this cooking liquid makes a wonderful base stock for many soups, as well as for congee, so don’t throw it away!) in a large wire scoop, or using two large slotted spoons. Put it in a shallow pan to let the liquid drain off. When it is no longer dripping wet, either cut it into manageable-sized pieces bones and all using a cleaver (remove the wings and legs, chop them crosswise into chunks, then cut along either side of the spine and flatten the torso, then cut it up), or else remove the meat from the bones in large pieces, then cut the large pieces into chopstick-ready ones. Generally, if you cut the bird up bones and all, you should leave the skin on. This is not possible when you are removing the meat from the bones.
Serve at room temperature or chilled.
A note about the above method: some cookbooks will tell you to place the chicken into a pot of already-boiling water, return it to a boil, and proceed from there. Sometimes they will not only do this but will also tell you to remove the chicken from the pot before it has cooled down as much as it should. I have tried this method and have never ended up with satisfactory results. All too often, plunging a raw bird into boiling water merely means that the outer margins of the bird get cooked instantaneously and come up to heat quickly, and the boiling water thus returns to a boil rapidly, but the water does not get hot enough for long enough to thoroughly cook the bird. It is very discouraging to start to cut up the chicken for serving only to find that it is still raw at the thickest bit of thigh or breast, and recooking, while possible, tends to dry out the meat. Putting the chicken into cold water and bringing it up to a boil ensures that the whole contents of the pot, including every cubic centimeter of that chicken, will come up to boiling temperature together. Likewise, having it stand in the hot water until the water and the chicken are cool enough to handle is part of the cooking process. This is not a dish to attempt if you don’t plan to be knocking around the house most of the day. The actual time you spend doing hands-on cooking is minimal, but the cooking time, strictly speaking, is extensive.
You serve white cut chicken with plain soy sauce, but also with what I think of as “mad scientist” or “magic” oil made with lots of ginger and green onion to complement the perfume of green onion and ginger from the cooking liquid.
Method for Ginger-Scallion Oil:
Combine 1/3 cup minced fresh raw ginger and 1/2 cup thinly sliced fresh raw green onions or scallions in a largish heatproof nonreactive bowl (ceramic or stainless steel are usually best). Heat 1 cup peanut, canola, corn, or other neutral-flavored oil (not olive oil) until it is just at the smoke point. Pour the
hot oil over the ginger and green onion: it will foam up and seethe and billows of fragrant steam will erupt from the bowl like the stereotypical mad scientist’s lab flasks or witch’s cauldron. Give it a gentle stir with a chopstick or a spoon and let it stand until it cools to room temperature, after which it should be covered. Leftovers should be refrigerated.
Leftover ginger-scallion oil can be used in a variety of ways, not least to flavor congee, plain rice, eggs, or tofu.
Tomorrow, if I get a chance, I will post again and write out my recipe for these:
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08.18.08
Posted in Uncategorized, cooking, culture, food, food allergies, non-casein, non-dairy, politics, salad dressings, salads, vegan, writing at 2:00 pm by Hanne Blank
Upon discovering my dairy allergy, one of the categories of things that immediately vanished from my food options was the category of the creamy dip or dressing. Mayonnaise, of course, was still an option, as were creamy-textured dips and dressings that had a mayonnaise base, since mayonnaise is an egg emulsion and not made with dairy products. But since it is frequently impossible to tell visually whether a dressing or dip that one is served at a restaurant or party is exclusively mayonnaise-based or whether it is dairy-based or as is often the case, made of some combination of dairy and mayonnaise, I quickly learned to just avoid anything that looked creamy.
This wasn’t a huge problem. I’d never been devoted to creamy dressings and dips. Then again I certainly had been known to enjoy roquefort or ranch salad dressings now and then, and once or twice a year would get a horrifyingly intense jones for the Lipton onion soup sour-cream-and-onion chip dip and would eat a whole pint of it over the course of a couple of days. It didn’t seem like so much to give up. Still, not having the creamy-dip/dressing option got annoying after a while, particularly after I started to realize just how many vinaigrette-style prepared salad dressings also contained ingredients I couldn’t eat, most commonly in the form of small amounts of cheese.
Oh, I know from vinaigrettes and egg-based dressings, don’t get me wrong. I’ve been making my own salad dressings on a fairly regular basis for years. I can coddle an egg or two for a Caesar salad with the best of them (I just leave out the parmesan, and add extra anchovies). But… well… sometimes you want something with a nice creamy mouthfeel. And you don’t necessarily feel like being bothered to coddle eggs to get it.
Enter Hollyhock Dressing. The recipe was given to me by my wonderful friend and darned good cook, Liza, who warned me, not a bit hyperbolically as it turns out, that the stuff is addictive. It really is. Hollyhock dressing is fantastic stuff. It’s garlicky. It’s savory. It’s vegan. It keeps well. It’s easy to make, providing you’ve got a blender. And it’s creamy.
Seriously, this stuff is so good that I rarely make less than a double batch at a time. Often, I make a triple batch.
The ingredients are simple and few.
For a single batch, you will require:
- 1/3 cup water
- 1/3 cup tamari (you can use soy sauce but the flavor isn’t as good)
- 1/3 cup balsamic vinegar (you can use red wine vinegar or cider vinegar or whatever vinegar you like, but the flavor will be accordingly different, and balsamic is so yummy I rarely mess with anything else)
- 1 cup olive oil
- approximately 1 bulb worth of peeled raw garlic cloves (I usually just use 15 cloves because I peel large quantities of garlic ahead of time)
- 1 cup nutritional yeast
The method, likewise, is a complete and utter cakewalk:
Whiz the liquid ingredients together in your blender with the garlic until the mixture is as smooth as you can get it. Add the nutritional yeast in thirds, whizzing it together in the blender each time, and scraping down the walls of the blender jar after each blending. At the end, blend the mixture for an additional minute or so, just to make sure everything is completely combined and completely smooth.
Note: if you make a double or triple batch, make each batch separately in the blender, to avoid overloading your blender jar. Pour them out into a large bowl and stir them together as you finish blending the batches, to ensure a uniform consistency and taste.
Store, refrigerated and covered, for 3-4 hours before serving, or preferably overnight. Let come back up to room temperature before you serve it, as the olive oil will thicken quite a bit when it’s cold.
One of the best things about Hollyhock Dressing is how versatile it is. It’s great on salad, of course, and brilliant as a dip for crudites. But it’s also a wonderful dip for hard-boiled eggs, and anything you might be prone to dip into aioli or anchoiade you can certainly dip into this, a list which very much includes good crusty bread. Additionally, Hollyhock Dressing has an amazing affinity for potatoes. Pour it over your baked potatoes, or, if you want your mouth to think it died and went to heaven, use it instead of butter/margarine/milk/faux-milk in your mashed potatoes.
Try it. You can thank me later. Or better yet, thank Liza, who gave me the recipe and thus brought great joy into my culinary life… and made it commonplace for my Belovedary, not normally much given to salad-eating, to request a big plate of salad with his supper.
I told you it was good.
(Full disclosure: This photo is of the salad I had for lunch… mixed greens (several lettuces, rocket, parsley, a couple kinds of basil) plus Corno di Toro pepper and two sliced Brandywine tomatoes. My Belovedary, poor thing, is allergic to raw tomatoes, so this is categorically Not His Salad.)
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07.12.07
Posted in cooking, culture, domesticity, food, how to at 8:01 am by Hanne Blank
When got back to Maryland on Monday night from Ohio and my mother’s house, I had several of her old cookbooks in tow. I am very happy about this, because I have been sort of hinting to my mom for years now that when she was ready to give up her old cookbooks, I was ready to give them shelf space. Finally, after many years of my hinting, it was time.
I am nowhere near proud enough not to admit that my favorite of these older cookbooks, and the ones I wanted most for her to give me, are the sorta trashy ones. Parent-Teacher Association cookbooks from my grade school, for instance, the kind with recipes for s’mores and play-doh on adjacent pages. A totally cheeseball but fantastico cookbook that is a compilation of recipes from 1970s-era Deep Southern charity, Hadassah, League of Women Voters, and Junior League cookbooks, and which has the hands-down Intergalactic Blue Ribbon best recipe, ever, for hush puppies. (I note that this is also a cookbook in which there are a few recipes which include the instruction “advise your cook” of such-and-so, suggesting that the ladies to whom the recipes were attributed likely did not always actually cook them themselves. O tempora! O mores!)
One of my favorites, maybe my most favorite, is the 1965 Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book. I learned to cook many things, particularly cookies, from this cook book, and most of the recipes are still pretty sturdy. It also has some excellent simple recipes for “variety meats,” as organ meats were known back in the day before Fergus Henderson made “nose-to-tail eating” a matter of some preoccupation for foodie trendsters, which could be revived to considerable benefit.
Then again, some of its recipes have not, shall we say, aged well. I present to you:
Bologna-Rice Skillet
(Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book, 1965)
One four-and-five-eighths-ounce package precooked rice (1 1/3 cups)
1/2 pound big Bologna, cut in 1/2-inch cubes (about 1 2/3 cups)
1/2 cup extra-spicy catsup
2/3 cup hot water
One 3-ounce can (2/3 cup) broiled sliced mushrooms
1/4 cup finely chopped onion
2 Tablespoons chopped green pepper
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 Tablespoons butter
Combine all ingredients in skillet. Cook over medium heat, stirring frequently, till hot. Cover tightly, reduce heat, an let stand about 5 minutes or till done. Serves 4.
Mmmm, mmm, good, what? To make it up to you, though, here’s one of my favorite recipes from this cookbook from when I was a kid:
Apple Fritters
(Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book, 1965)
1 1/3 cups sifted all-purpose flour
1 Tablespoon sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 beaten eggs
2/3 cup milk
1 Tablespoon salad oil
3 cups small matchstick strips of apple [emphasis in original]
Sift dry ingredients together. Blend eggs, milk, and salad oil; add dry ingredients all at once and mix until just moistened. Stir in apple strips. Drop from tablespoon into deep hot fat (375 degrees F). Fry until puffy and golden, 3 to 4 minutes; turn once. Drain on paper towels. While warm, sprinkle with confectioner’s sugar. Serve at once. Makes 3 dozen.
For the record, these are kind of addictive, and you should save this recipe to make them in the fall when the first really good firm tart apples come in. I usually add some cinnamon and allspice and a tiny pinch of ground cloves, too. Oh, and substituting soy milk for milk works fine, though I haven’t tried them with egg replacer so I can’t say whether that works.
When I have time, I may root through some of the other cookbooks and share some of the more amusing recipes from those, too.
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03.01.07
Posted in cooking, culture, food, health, politics at 10:34 am by Hanne Blank
I’ve been reading, here and there, about various efforts to force restaurants — primarily of the quasi-fast-food inexpensive chain eatery sort, like Pizzeria Uno or TGIFriday’s or The Cheesecake Factory — to identify the calorie counts and other nutritional information of their menu items in their menus. Citing items which contain whopping numbers of calories per restaurant serving, and enough fat to make the ghost of my gallbladder scream like a banshee just reading about it, these dietary watchdogs seem convinced that if only the nutritional information were more readily available, Americans would “make better nutritional choices,” for which we are meant to read “choose not to eat these things.”
The dual bogeymen of obesity and heart disease, natch, are the poster children for these campaigns. Clearly, just as all lung disease is caused by smoking cigarettes (and has nothing to do with, say, industrial or automotive air pollution, toxic chemicals used in household furnishings and surfaces, or even genetic predisposition), all obesity and heart disease are due to crappy, greasy, oversalted, oversugared, deepfried platefuls of Generic USAian Processed Food Substances. And not, say, to some combination of what people eat, how people incorporate their eating lives into the rest of their lives, what sorts of physical activities they engage in and how much, the tastes and other eating sensations they’ve been enculturated to find pleasing, their particular genetics, and simple luck of the draw.
I’m not saying this to defend the TGIRubyAppleUnoCheesecakeTuccis of the world, or dump on the folks who happily eat their food. I’m not even saying this to criticize the aims of the people — many of them with medical affiliations to the billion-dollar bariatrics (obesity) market — who want to improve the availability of nutritional information in these places. I’m all for people knowing what they’re eating, and I am all for people eating whatever the hell they want.
The reason I raise the issue at all is because it strikes me that everyone concerned, restaurant chains, chain-restaurant diners, dietary activists, and all, are both suffering from, and failing to take into account the potency of, sheer willful American-style denial.
You know what I’m talking about.
I’m talking about the denial that lets restaurant chain management claim that because they offer salads, they’re in the clear as far as offering “healthy” eating options, even though your average restaurant-chain salad, laden with cheese and/or meat and/or the heavy creamy dressings so beloved of such places, is about as “healthy,” by the standards typically used to assess what constitutes a “healthy” dish, as a Snickers bar and some shredded carrots wrapped in a lettuce leaf.
Yes, this denial is partly willful failure to perceive the distance between genuinely healthy eating and the stuff these restaurants exist to sell. It’s also calculated marketing of things that these restaurants know will sell, the “but we’re only selling the stuff our customers want!” cliche. Handwaving, and the careful use of words like “fresh” on menus and images of crisp, dewy vegetables and fruits on advertisements, go a long way, marketing-wise, to making sure that the people at the customer end, as well as the customers themselves, buy into the corporate management’s assertions that their products are “healthy.”
And as far as the corporate folks are concerned, that’s just fine. The customer ultimately chooses what to eat, or not. They’re just trying to offer choices. It’s not their fault if what the customer seems to enjoy is stuff that isn’t very good for you if you eat too much of it too often.
Which is, of course, the next level of denial. Most Americans — myself sometimes included, although for reasons having partly to do with health issues like allergies and partly to do with economics and partly to do with food snobbery, I have become a lot more aware and careful about this — eat less well than they could.
By “eating well” here I don’t mean being a crazy food Nazi and monitoring your every mouthful for maximal nutrition or minimal calories or carbs or fat grams or whatever the hell it is this week that you’re not supposed to eat. I mean eating good, nutritious, wholesome, tasty food that gives your body all the things it needs and not too much of the stuff it doesn’t, and while that’s different for everyone, for the human animal generally it seems to mean a fairly large amount of vegetable matter and grain food, with some high-protein food in there on a regular basis, and some sweet things now and then for the fun that’s in them. (Now-obligatory shout-out to Michael Pollan’s recent “Unhappy Meals” piece in the NYT Magazine, which if you haven’t read, you should.)
However. We tell ourselves, assisted ably by our national mythos of America as Land of Plenty, by “eat your dinner, children are starving in Bangladesh,” by the reassuring presence of fortified foods on the shelves and governmentally-mandated nutritional information boxes on packages and innumerable articles and books and TV shows about things most of us haven’t got the training to understand like amino acids and vitamins and antioxidants and phytoestrogens, that of course we eat well… we’re Americans. And indeed, we are fortunate that we have the luxury to have this mythos be so operational in our lives. Worrying about whether you have enough of the right kind of antioxidants in your food is a pretty darn cushy problem compared to worrying about whether or not you’ve got enough food so that you don’t starve to death.
Speaking of starving, too, there is that portion of our makeup to contend with. Because we are animals, on some level our brains believe that as long as we have a plentiful supply of food, we are eating well. This is particularly true with high-fat food: if you look at the foods traditionally eaten by peoples living north of the Arctic Circle, you will find that above all, high-fat foods are prized, for the simple reason that calories equal body heat and body heat equals survival. Our lives are, for the most part, nowhere near so physically demanding as those of, say, seal hunters or reindeer herders. Or, indeed, of even our fairly recent ancestors, who did not have nifty modern conveniences like cars, central heating, and household appliances, all of which substantially reduce the caloric burden we require to survive. Thing is, you can’t simply rewire an organism that has for millennia regarded high-fat, high-calorie food as a desirable advantage. Neither my DNA nor yours, neither my backbrain nor yours, give a sweet goddamn that they don’t really have to worry about keeping themselves warm through the body’s own thermogenetic capabilities all winter long. It doesn’t matter to that part of us that thanks to the wonders of the technologies our big sexy monkey brains have come up with, the job of keeping us alive until suppertime can be accomplished quite nicely on a handful of granola and a banana. They’d like a nice juicy cheeseburger, thanks just the same.
And of course, we have also evolved this distinctively American (or so it seems to me) tendency toward buy-now-pay-later eating: we have made eating, in our minds, into a sort of economic activity. If we “overspend” our budget of calories now we can “work it off” later on at the gym, or through some bout of insane (and thus almost inevitably short-lived) crash dieting. Or so we tell ourselves. Whether we do it or not is another matter entirely, and whether it actually works that way, in terms of our biology, is yet one more.
To put it another, shorter way, there are a lot of different forces — biological promptings, social cues, and psychological urges — that tend to make it very easy for many of us to eat less well than we might, and to eat meals that are very imbalanced in the direction of things that are not, in excess, all that good for us. (I’m not even going to get into the economic issues, or the history of the corporate food culture, or why and how things have gotten to the stage where eating well (as I define it) on a regular basis is now beyond the economic reach of many people. Another rant for another time.)
At the same time, we’re not stupid. We know full well, if we stop to think about it, that no, most of these meals are not healthy. You don’t need a professional nutritionist to know that a meal of, let’s say (looking idly at the T.G.I. Friday’s menus available online) Crispy Green Bean Fries, a bacon cheeseburger, fries, and a (full-sugar, full-caffeine, why not get your money’s worth if you’re paying for uppers?) Coke is probably not something you really want to think about in terms of its number of fat grams or calories.
Which is it, right there: people know this kind of food is high-calorie and high-fat. That’s not news. But they don’t want to have that be the deciding, or limiting, factor in whether they eat it. So it isn’t. It simply isn’t. It’s called denial.
There are excellent compelling reasons that it happens, and not too many that are nearly so compelling as to regularly cause people to override the denial. Clearly the fear of becoming fat isn’t enough to do it. Nor is the fear of heart disease. Hell, even the fear of feeling bloated, gassy, queasy, or getting diarrhea — all extremely common reactions to eating too much high-fat food — isn’t enough to keep people from doing it, and those sensations set in a whole heck of a lot quicker, relative to the moment of eating, than weight gain or a heart attack.
Sure, it’s counterintuitive. But human beings are perverse creatures and what we do is often that way. In all seriousness, I know a number of people with substantial allergies to cow’s milk who will, knowing full well that it will make them feel ill if they do it, eat ice cream with gay abandon right up until the moment that they have to run to the bathroom. I used to be one of them, before my dairy allergies got worse. Only when things got to the point that the negative repercussions created such misery that I wasn’t willing to put up with them any more to get to that sweet, sweet butterfat did I finally manage to break off what had been a lifelong love affair with ice cream.
This is where the other kind of denial comes in: the denial, on the part of the researchers and campaigners who are pushing for transparency in the menus of these table-service chains, that frankly, It’s Always More Complicated. Putting calorie and fat-gram counts in menus isn’t going to slow that many people down. They’re on packaged foods everywhere already. I honestly don’t see it putting a big dent in potato chip sales. The forces at play are a lot more complex, multivalent, and quirky than that.
Me, I wouldn’t mind seeing restaurants selling unitized, corporatized, pre-quantified meals having to list their ingredients and their nutritional information, if only because it might — and I emphasize might — make some of them come a little cleaner about what they’re feeding people, and be a little more honest about the quality of their ingredients and their emphasis on using ingredients that are actually food, and not the sometimes dubious products of food science on which such restaurants lean so heavily. I do think that some people would appreciate having the information. I know that I would, because finding out the hard way that I just ate something that contained a dairy product when I didn’t expect it to is really not so much fun. But in all honesty, I rather doubt, all other things being equal, that knowing how many calories are in that club sandwich is going to make me skinny or reprieve me from whatever heart disease may conceivably lurk in my future. Nor is it going to do so for anyone else.
On the other hand, not being in denial about the ways that what I indiviually eat might affect my individual biology and my own personal health? That’s done me quite a lot of good, thanks. Giving up dairy products for good was not easy for me, but without question it has produced an enormous improvement in my overall health. Learning to cook and eat a lot of Chinese and Middle Eastern dishes, with small amounts of meat and large amounts of vegetables, has similarly made me feel better and improved various aspects of my overall clinical health. These are things that I discovered, through trial and error and over time, were what this particular human animal requires in order to be the most efficient and happy troublemaker it can.
But, I hasten to note that I think that’s not a process that any amount of white-coated finger-waggling or posting calorie counts in recipes is ever going to produce. For me, or anyone.
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