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Sorry, Starbucks, no doughnut

Posted on May 3, 2010 by DebbieN

On Sunday mornings, my daughter likes to drag her father out around the corner without me to the local Starbucks so he can buy himself coffee and get her some kind of small baked good that I’m not supposed to know about. Because I am, in fact, generally opposed to “doughnuts for breakfast” and both of them know it. It’s a ritual that had to be suspended for a while this spring, until we could figure out what kind of treat had how many grams of carbohydrate and how much of it she could eat and still eat something else more nutritious as the majority of breakfast.

Most of the pastries will never be what I consider top baking, but it’s not me who’s going to eat them. And my daughter wanted a doughnut, or part of a doughnut, if she could make it work out.

So–I went online to the Starbucks web site to try and hash out the vagaries of “petite” mini scones, mini doughnuts, coffee cake slices, and all the rest of it. Starbucks markets itself to the upscale, the midscale, and the would-be midscale of my town with all kinds of brochures about fair trade and global responsibility, and their web site is not much different. The do-right message is right up there with the latte of the week, and you’d expect the nutrition info to be present and helpful without the usual twisty chain-restaurant disguises and trickery.

Or would you? Starbucks got its tail caught several years ago when numerous commentators, among them its own employees, let the public know that some of the lattes and other mixed coffee drinks were topping out at over 700 calories per, with more fat than some burger chain offerings. Since then Starbucks has offered more health-conscious choices below the pastry case and taken a pro-active posture on nutrition and informing the customer and so on. But how do they really feel?

The nutrition info page falls under the “menus” navigation item at the top. OK. It’s readable, not a shrunken PDF file–good. You find a long scrolling list of each of the bakery items with calories, fat, carbs, and proteins. Doughnut, doughnut–old-fashioned glazed doughnut…440 calories, 21 grams of fat (10 saturated), 57 grams of carb…Ouch. Well, she could have half of one, I suppose, with a small bowl of oatmeal and some milk, and eat something better at lunch…but wait a minute. Where’s the sodium info?

All I could find about sodium was a little note about “healthy choices”, in which the Starbucks nutrition page asserts that such items have fewer than 10 grams of fat and fewer than 600 mg sodium. A stunner–that’s more than the classic 500-mg bowl of Campbell’s Tomato Soup that caused all the corporate protests against the NIH dietary salt guidelines in the 1980s. Who on earth would claim 600 mg sodium for a single snack or breakfast item was “healthy”–especially with the growing public and government concern over excessive salt in restaurant food?

And I still couldn’t find any specific sodium stats for doughnuts or mini scones or the other things my daughter was hoping for, much less an ingredients list. So I searched a variety of diet and nutrition web sites that catalog such things. The closest I could get to a current verified  standard nutrition label was from livestrong.com (accessed 5/3/10):

Starbucks Top Pot Old-Fashioned Glazed Doughnut

Serving Size: 1 Pastry (113g) Calories 480 Calories from Fat 210

  • Total Fat 23g 35%
  • Saturated Fat 9g 45%
  • Trans Fat 0g
  • Cholesterol 20mg 7%
  • Sodium 410mg 17%
  • Total Carbohydrate 64g 21%
  • Dietary Fiber 0.5g 2%
  • Sugars 39g
  • Protein 4g 8%
  • Vitamin A0%
  • Vitamin C 0%
  • Calcium 2%
  • Iron 10%

Est. Percent of Calories from: Fat 43.1% Carbs 53.3% Protein 3.3%

These stats are higher than what’s stated at the Starbucks page (see below). And the sodium in a single doughnut is pretty high. So’s the carb. So’s the fat. So’s the increase in size and calorie stats and so on from the glazed doughnuts they were offering in 2006, according to archived nutrition labels on a number of older diet web sites. Continue reading →

Filed under: Desserts, Eating out, kid food, nutrition, unappetizing | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Sorry, Starbucks, no doughnut

Knives at Dawn: Bringing Heat to the Kitchen

Posted on March 18, 2010 by DebbieN

"Knives at Dawn" by Andrew FriedmanSo much of TV-chefery these days has to do with blood sport that it’s inevitable someone would start covering cooking competitions by following underdog contestants as though they were Olympic figure skating hopefuls. And although it’s been done before, both on Top Chef and in many, many of the star chef bios of the past 5 years, Knives at Dawn by Andrew Friedman gives one of the most detailed personal and critical inside views yet of the strange pursuit of haute cuisine for haute cuisine’s sake. Part sports dramalogue, part Judgment of Paris, Knives at Dawn trails a handful of American chefs attempting to compete for one of the highest honors in European cooking.

The Bocuse d’Or is one of the most prestigious cook-offs in the world and garners contestants from all over Europe and a few of the US’s top restaurants. The costs of training run the price of a small house, and the US team has had no government or corporate sponsorship, unlike many of the European competitors.

Throughout three months of preparation which Thomas Keller and Daniel Boulud oversaw in 2008-9, a team (1 chef, Timothy Hollingsworth, and 1 commis or prep chef assistant, Adina Guest) from Keller’s French Laundry are coached to represent the US in Lyon. They have to cover the training and travel bills at their own expense, and continue working their day jobs for more of the time than their European opponents.

As Hollingsworth designs and revises his competition entries, suggested garnishes get more and more elaborate–sometimes without anything that’s likely to make them taste better. Onion tuiles. Things wrapped in Swiss chard leaves or carrot ribbons. Savoy cabbage as a “fun” garnish for beef cheeks (here I confess I pictured cafeteria kale as a “fun” accompaniment to the legendary dish, chair mystère–Mystery Meat). And lots of things made with mandoline-sliced potatoes crisped to perfection between silpats. In fact, the word perfection, followed by perfectionistic and culture of perfectionism, keep repeating throughout the section on Hollingsworth and Guest’s training period. It’s a bit unglamorous, to tell you the truth.

The exactitude of discussion over details like garnish, plating, and the like for one fish dish and one meat dish is the kind of technical overdose patter that puts people to sleep at any time other than the actual routine that will count for scoring. Something like the perennial Dick Button and whichever female commentator could be roped in to join him,  talking rinkside about the difference in a triple-lutz made by putting pressure on the inside versus the outside edges of the blade.

Comes the week of competition and things start to take on the frenetic tone of a typical Top Chef episode, but Friedman has a knack of lifting the description Continue reading →

Filed under: books, cooking, Eating out, haute cuisine, Odd food, sauces and condiments | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Knives at Dawn: Bringing Heat to the Kitchen

Getting Sensitive to Snacks

Posted on March 2, 2010 by DebbieN

In the past two weeks since my daughter returned to school as a newly diagnosed diabetic, we’ve started finding out just how many times a week students are presented with treat foods as extra snacks, even outside of what they bring from home. Happens at least twice a week. Why? They’re not in kindergarten.

I know I kind of “got into this” in my post two days ago about making hamantaschen lower in carbs. But my lingering amazement at the automatic and frequent food handouts in class, between snack and lunch even, got a boost this morning when I read the New York Times article by Tara Parker-Pope on the big rise in kids’ snacking over the past 30 years.

Barry Popkin, a nutrition researcher at UNC-Chapel Hill, and one of his students have just published an analysis of American kids’ snacking over the past 3o years. They compiled data from four national diet and health surveys and found that kids are now snacking an average of 3 times a day, mostly on cookies, chips, candy, sodas etc., not vegetables or whole fruits. They’re taking in more than a quarter of their daily energy, about 600 calories, from these low-nutrition processed foods. That’s 168 more calories on average than 30 years ago, and kids 2-6 seemed to be in even worse shape.

The percentage of kids who snacked at least once a day in 1977 was about 75%, but now it’s up to about 98%. About half the kids today snack 4 times or more per day. Some snack 10 times a day. What on earth?

This article in the NY Times “The Well” section was quickly followed by another in which Parker-Pope reviews countering arguments about the real harm a single cookie a day may or may not be doing. Studies cited a bit more vaguely than the Popkin study may suggest a lack of consistent benefit to insisting that everyone cut out a cookie a day to lose weight.

Will cutting out a cookie a day help if you’re eating other extras instead or not exercising? Maybe not–in fact, probably not. But I have to wonder why this hedging, wishy-washy kind of article followed so quickly on the heels of the report on the bigger study with hard numbers.  Does Parker-Pope’s second piece negate what Popkin and his student Carmen Pierna have reported on snacking trends? Not legitimately.

My daughter actually needs to eat a snack between meals these days. But she’s an exception, not only for needing it at age 9 but for eating a specific and limited snack with some nutrition to it in a timely, coordinated way rather than grabbing up unlimited treat foods without regard to the regular meal plan.

Automatic, constant, reason-free snacking–now not even limited to snack time!–is just not a necessity. It’s a habit that’s snowballed until it seems so normal people don’t even realize they’re doing it anymore or why it’s not a good idea.

All I can say is, it shouldn’t take having to be diabetic to notice the excess snack habit and steer clear. Is it time for the Great American Snack-Out?

Filed under: Eating out, Food Politics, history, kid food, nutrition | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Getting Sensitive to Snacks

Rethinking everything

Posted on February 21, 2010 by DebbieN

I’ve been away from my desk, my notebooks, this blog for two weeks now. I never expected to be–it’s become a weekly adventure to seek out new topics in food, food politics, nutrition, and alternate methods for cooking real food faster. And then last week my daughter was diagnosed with Type I diabetes.

Diabetes is one hell of a verdict when you think your kid is just growing, and then just has a simple stomach virus, and it turns out to be neither of those things. It was also one of those strange fairytale paradoxes by which a cursed or poisoned feather turns out to save the princess in rags. She’d come home from school three weeks ago with what seemed like a routine stomach bug, but it wasn’t. Instead of a bit of fever, antsy impatience at having to rest and then bouncing back, she was cool, sleeping around the clock, drinking a lot even when she couldn’t stand to eat, and losing weight fast. Taking her back to the doctor the second week, we were thinking anemia, mono–afraid to think anything worse. Thank god our doctor threw in a glucose test along with the usual suspects. By afternoon he’d called and told us to get her down to the ER.

A night in the hospital is no picnic, even if all they’re doing to your kid is putting her on an i.v. and pricking her fingers with a lancet for testing once in a while. The second night is no fun either–everything the doctors have been telling you goes in one ear and slides right out the other as you wonder what your kid will ever be able to do normally again, and how much you’ll have to worry for her the rest of her life, and how you’re going to keep from laying those worries on her. And yet–at some point in the middle of the second night, unable to sleep much between nurse interruptions–I started to realize my daughter’s legs and arms and face were already filling back out, and in fact she had spent a good part of the second day sitting up reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for all she was worth, reading me her favorite bits in a silly voice  and cackling every once  in a while. More energy than I’d seen in three weeks. Whatever they’d done to lower her sugars and balance her electrolytes again was really working. She was reappearing before my eyes. I had no idea how to feel anymore except shocked, grateful and slightly absurd.

Furthermore, every time the orderly came by to pick up a menu or leave a meal, my daughter tucked into the food as though it had been catered by Daniel Boulud. (Of course, most of the meals featured meat, which she loves but I don’t make very often.) It is fairly humiliating to have your kid announce that the hospital meals are better than those at home…

Then she started talking about which kinds of potatoes she likes or doesn’t, whether and how soon she can have pizza, how will she ever be able to go to a birthday party and stand not having cake or candy or ice cream without having to figure out the carbs and the insulin beforehand, what about Valentine’s Day and on and on.  Somehow oatmeal raisin cookies became the benchmark of whether she was going to be able to eat like a person or not–and she hasn’t even had a taste for them in at least six months.

The shrinkage, the re-blossoming, and the total fixation on treats and sweets, all within a few days in a hospital bed–suddenly Charlie Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, cooking, Desserts, Eating out, Grains, kid food, nutrition, Odd food, Pasta, Revised recipes | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Rethinking everything

Not Your Parents’ Mom & Pop

Posted on February 3, 2010 by DebbieN

Mom & pop stores–the little independent family-run corner grocery, hardware store, café, bakery, or barber shop–are, like local farmers’ markets, neighborhood gems just waiting to be rediscovered by a new generation. Some are the old-fashioned kind, limping along in the recession but fostering a friendly atmosphere and clientèle. Others mix old-fashioned personal service with cutting-edge specialties. Within five minutes of my house are five worth spending time in.

The bike shop at the other end of my block sells and fixes everything from used kids’ bikes with training wheels (which they’ll adjust for you) to the fancy $4000-plus professional racing bikes (ditto). Around the corner, beyond the Starbuck’s, is a young-chic type all-day café with arty rectangular plates, pretty good coffee–and outlets for every patron’s laptop. Down the street is a British pub owned by the chef and his wife, with the world’s crispest, most astonishing fish & chips and dozens of artisan beers on tap. No outlets here, but you can play darts on the bar side of the pub. The coffee shop across from my daughter’s school hosts tutoring sessions and keeps a frequent customer card file for regulars as well as a shelf of books  you can buy or just borrow while catching a break. And the fifth, my personal favorite, is an Armenian corner grocery with great deals, lots of unusual ingredients and spices, actual ripe tomatoes and one or another family member always willing to discuss the best way to cook something–or debate the merits of the latest Rose Parade.

These businesses are always under siege from the chain restaurants and big box price cutters, which pop up and then close suddenly whenever something better comes along for the long-distance investors, undercut the locals while they’re here, and leave a trail of mistreated minimum-wage employees and other forms of exploitation in their wake.  And yet often the mom & pop stores offer a better deal, unique merchandise, and certainly better service.

Most important is the way local shops change the way we interact when we come in to buy something. The owners treat everyone like a neighbor or a member of their congregation (in the case of the corner grocery, they usually are). The staff are usually the sons and daughters and grandchildren of the owners. Even shy customers come in ready to say hello, ask questions, compliment the new light fixtures, complain about the state budget cuts or the new parking meters near the center of town and generally catch up on the latest. They don’t ignore or avoid the staff the way everyone does at the big box stores, and they don’t feel ignored or pestered either. Kibbitzing and schmoozing are almost lost arts everywhere else, but the better mom & pop businesses have a way of restoring that sense of belonging to neighborhood shoppers.

So it’s with pleasure that I recommend two fairly recent books on the mom & pop phenomenon, with a side dish of a newly released French film.

Dough (2006), by Mort Zachter, is a well-told cautionary tale about working for family, especially if that family’s roots are in the Great Depression. Zachter, a former tax lawyer, learned the hard way that his uncles’ family bread business wasn’t exactly what he’d assumed as a kid. One day a phone call from his uncles’ stockbroker revealed that while his uncles almost never closed the shop, lived together like paupers in a dingy run-down tenement apartment, and certainly never paid Zachter’s mother anything for helping out, they had been sitting on a multimillion dollar account balance for decades. How they came by such wealth and why they never used it to better their lives or anyone else’s in the family is the riddle Zachter works to solve. Although there’s a bitter line of frustration Continue reading →

Filed under: books, Eating out, Food Politics, frugality, history, movies, shopping | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Not Your Parents’ Mom & Pop

Salt reduction vs. hypertension meds–which would you choose?

Posted on January 21, 2010 by DebbieN

One of the big complaints processed food companies, physicians in clinical practice, and the great gourmet media all have in common is that cutting back on salt would make food taste flat, and you as an individual wouldn’t necessarily get a big drop in your personal blood pressure from doing it. They argue that only “salt-sensitive” people have to worry about their intake, and anyway, a few points lower, they all say, isn’t really impressive enough to give up your 300-mg serving of sodium in a bowl of Kellogg’s raisin bran or 390 in a slice of La Brea sourdough. And don’t, for g-d’s sake, ask your favorite name brand celebrity chefs to stop salting early and often in each dish!

A big statistical modeling study in the New England Journal of Medicine this week knocks all this wishful thinking on the head, and does it very nicely. The study looked not at individual blood pressure drops but the health and cost benefit of dropping average salt intake by 3 grams a day over the entire U.S. population.

The researchers found that if everyone drops their salt intake back down, the benefits start to look like the ones from quitting smoking, cutting cholesterol and saturated fat, and losing weight to get to a normal BMI.

That’s because even when individual blood pressures drop by only a few points, they’re not going up (as they are today), and when a small average drop happens in a very large group, the big bell curve of disease shifts toward lower risk of consequences and later starts for developing heart disease and high blood pressure. After the first national cholesterol lowering guidelines were issued in the late 1960s, the nation’s heart disease and stroke risk dropped by about a third, and at least until obesity and blood pressure started to cause a back-reaction, the average age for a first heart attack went from 50 to 60 in men. That’s a huge kind of benefit.

The combined drop in heart disease and stroke deaths from cutting salt would be something like 200-400,000 people per year, a lot more than can be saved by simply putting everyone on blood pressure medications–the study made that comparison directly.

Altogether, a solid recommendation for dropping sodium levels in processed and restaurant foods, which make up about 80% of today’s sodium intake. And for not imitating processed food and chain restaurant thinking in your professional or home cooking, as Francis Lam seems to in his Salon.com commentary on the new NYC Department of Health initiative. And if there was any doubt that the Culinary Institute of America has been training Continue reading →

Filed under: breads, cooking, DASH Diet, Eating out, Food Blogs, Food Politics, kid food, nutrition | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Salt reduction vs. hypertension meds–which would you choose?

Getting the Salt Out: NSRI and Voluntary Compliance, Again

Posted on January 16, 2010 by DebbieN

In the wake of its city-wide diabetes reduction and restaurant nutrition labeling initiatives, the New York City Department of Health is leading yet another dietary health campaign, this time one that involves a national coalition of cities, states, and medical organizations. My hat’s off to them, even though I think the demands they intend to make of the food industry are much too light and much too toothless.

The National Salt Reduction Initiative, announced on Monday, will  encourage “voluntary compliance” from the processed food and restaurant industries to lower their sodium content by about 20% over the next 5 years. That’s pretty modest considering that both industries have doubled the standard sodium content of many common foods in the past 20-30 years, and that the national obesity epidemic seems to have coincided pretty nearly with that trend.

The UK’s national salt reduction campaign, which started in 2003 and serves as a model for NSRI, has government backing and its goal is 40% reduction of sodium in processed foods within 5 years, not 20%. They seem to be getting there, too.

NSRI’s coalition includes the Los Angeles Department of Health and a variety of medical organizations like the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology. What it doesn’t include this year, to my surprise–and, frankly, dismay–is involvement, funding or guidance from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute at NIH.

Ten years ago the NHLBI would have participated one way or another in encouraging this sort of initiative, but that was before the Bush years. NHLBI has been reorganized several times in the last decade. Two of its key diet-related outreach and education programs–the National Cholesterol Education Program and the National High Blood Pressure Education Program, which would have been the leading outreach proponent for NSRI–have receded from view, with perfunctory descriptions on the agency web site, no functioning links to current activities if there are any or to updated program pages, and no clear leadership or place in the agency’s organizational chart. But the need for them certainly hasn’t ended.

Voluntary compliance programs don’t have a great track record in the processed food industry. Look at the recent Smart Choices nutrition labeling program fiasco (see under, Froot Loops) from October.

Starting a national  program like this with voluntary compliance as a key component means the designers don’t think there’s much way to enforce the changes other than persuasion. It also means the government doesn’t have the tools, the money, or–and here is the crux of it–the will to enforce even modest limits on sodium content. Both the AHA and the AMA have been working on the FDA for years to get salt off the “generally harmless Continue reading →

Filed under: DASH Diet, Eating out, Food Politics, nutrition | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Getting the Salt Out: NSRI and Voluntary Compliance, Again

Not a shock: Nutrition labels understate calories

Posted on January 7, 2010 by DebbieN

Not a shock: According to diet researchers from Tufts who did calorie calculations and direct caloric measurements,

Nutrition labels for common restaurant menu items and supermarket frozen meals consistently understate calories by up to 18 percent.

Filed under: cooking, Eating out, Food Politics, nutrition | Comments Off on Not a shock: Nutrition labels understate calories

Lentil Stew with…Pineapple?

Posted on December 6, 2009 by DebbieN

Fresh pineapples are just coming on the market at a good price this week or so–$2 or $3 apiece. Meanwhile, tomatoes are…well, let’s say they’re not at their finest in December. So, some added incentive for trying something new.

Pineapple is the last thing that belongs in anything subtle or savory–or is it? Hawaiian pizza is practically a classic by now, despite the culinary clash of a pineapple-ham topping on the one hand and garlicky tomato sauce, mozzarella and oregano on the other. Of course, that (and all other glazed pineapple/pork product classics) seems more brash than subtle.

Given the usual culinary partners–ham, chicken, cottage cheese, spam and more spam–you’d think the rule for making pineapple work in something savory would be that the other main item has to be pretty salty to stand up to all that acidic tropical sweetness. But that’s not the only way to deal with it. Good thing too, since ham, ham, spam and ham are off my grocery list. (So’s spam.)

This curried lentil and vegetable stew, which I’ve based on a dish from my much-missed Lebanese former-restaurant-turned-lunch-spot, takes advantage of pineapple’s tang while mellowing out its jarring sweetness. It took me a couple of tries to achieve the taste I remembered from the restaurant, but I think this version works pretty well, even though it contains no salt at all.

Depending on the sweetness of your pineapple, you may need more or less to balance the flavors. The pineapple should be a subtle but surprising bite among the other vegetables and the rich lentil base. Don’t be afraid to tinker with the (rather loose) amounts of the various ingredients and taste as you go.

Curried Lentil Stew with Pineapple

  • 3-4 c. fully cooked green/brown lentils or half a pound dry (see step 1)
  • 1 T. curry powder
  • 1/2 t. ground cumin
  • 1/2 t. ground coriander seed if you have it
  • 1/2 t. brown mustard seeds if you have them
  • 2 medium onions, chopped
  • 1-2 medium tomatoes if you have them
  • juice of a lemon–plus another half to adjust taste as needed
  • 2  large or one really fat clove garlic, minced/mashed/grated
  • 2-3 half-inch rounds of fresh unsweetened pineapple in smallish chunks
  • 2-3 big carrots, peeled and chopped
  • 2-3 stalks celery, chopped
  • a good glug of dry red wine, cheap but decent, about 1/4 c.
  • olive oil

1. To cook the lentils in case you haven’t, wash and pick over half a pound of green/brown lentils and put them in a big pyrex bowl (2.5 qt/l) with enough water to cover by 2 inches. Put a microwaveable lid or dinner plate on top and microwave on HIGH for 7-8 minutes. Let sit in the closed oven another 20-30 minutes to soak up, add more water if there’s less than an inch above the lentils, then microwave again for another 7-8 minutes. Wait another 10-15 minutes and test for doneness. The lentils should be soft.

2. Meanwhile, sauté one of the onions with the spices in a little olive oil for a few minutes, add the chopped tomato and half the garlic and cook a few minutes, adding a drizzle of water if it starts to dry out.

3. When the lentils are done, pour them in with some of the cooking water, stir up, heat, and add the lemon juice and the pineapple. Cook a few more minutes until it starts to thicken.

3. Put the cooked lentils back into the pyrex bowl, add the remaining vegetables and the rest of the garlic, a little water, maybe a little more lemon juice, the wine, and a drizzle of olive oil. Cover at least partway (maybe with a small gap to let alcohol from the wine boil off) and microwave 5 minutes more or until the vegetables are tender.

Filed under: Beans and legumes, cooking, DASH Diet, Eating out, frugality, fruits, Vegetabalia | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Lentil Stew with…Pineapple?

Thanksgiving Vegetariots, or, How Can You Have Any Pudding If You Won’t Eat the Meat?

Posted on November 17, 2009 by DebbieN

Newspapers all over the country are sweating to include vegetarian main dishes in their annual Thanksgiving features. But they’re not doing all that well. This week the LA Times food section proudly listed a whole bunch of Thanksgiving vegetable side dishes as if to say, “See how much there is for you vegetarians to eat without your hostess making any changes just for your special status?” Only, as readers quickly pointed out,  1) none of the dishes contained any noticeable protein, 2) most of them were overloaded with butter and salt and 3) two of them contained chicken broth or pancetta. Someone had forgotten to re-edit them for a vegetarian audience.

I pick on my local paper because we’re talking Los Angeles, with great produce available all year round and a very large vegetarian population–and a lot of ethnic groups with significant roles for vegetarian dishes in their traditional cuisines. We have less excuse for this kind of simple ignorance than most cities.

But it isn’t simple ignorance. Running very close to the surface of most food publications’ features on vegetarian fare at the big showdown holidays is a distinct tone of hysteria. How can anyone not want to eat meat? Nothing tastes like turkey, and nothing sells like it either! We don’t know anything about vegetarian proteins! they panic. Do vegetarians eat Durkee Fried Onions or Empress Yams? Do they eat marshmallows? They don’t even like pancetta! What’s wrong with them?

These are home questions for newspapers and food mags, because you know the real survival question is, “How are we going to sell advertising for chickpeas and lentils, for chrissakes?” That probably goes double or more for food shows on tv. If they don’t advertise, they don’t stay on the air.

It’s not like tofu has a big marketing presence in the nation’s newspapers or brand recognition outside of local markets. There are only so many brushed-steel and cherrywood designer kitchens anyone is willing to buy in a down economy, especially once they discover how badly brushed steel shows fingerprints. And cooking mags don’t get a lot of help from PepsiCo and CocaCola, Ralston-Purina or the many cigarette and pharmaceutical companies.

What’s left? Bacon, turkey, and processed food companies featuring starches and microwaveable tv dinners. This might not be such a problem for food pubs if they’d found a way to keep their features a little more independent of their ad base. Bacon is showing up these days as suddenly gourmet in so many inappropriate dishes–ice cream? chocolate bars? popcorn?–precisely because it’s relatively inexpensive, widely available in supermarkets, and sold by a few recognizable national namebrand companies that still advertise reliably in a down market. Young food bloggers who go for it think it’s something new and daring, but you have to wonder whether they realize how hard the commercial food media are pushing it and why.

In any case, the November and December issues or episodes really need to push meat for all they’re worth because American bacon is basically the same everywhere and straight-up turkey isn’t all that popular the rest of the year, and the companies know it. Meanwhile, vegetarianism in all its variations, and with a growing political undercurrent, is gaining ground among younger Americans, or at least those not too obsessed with bacon. What to do?

Apparently the answer is, panic and get mad at the vegetarians for wanting non-meat dishes that are worth something, but try hard not to admit it in front of the camera. Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, cooking, Dairy, Eating out, Food Blogs, Food Politics, Grains, Vegetabalia | Tagged: , , , , , , | Comments Off on Thanksgiving Vegetariots, or, How Can You Have Any Pudding If You Won’t Eat the Meat?

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