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The Dirty Roots of Veg-phobia

Posted on June 14, 2010 by DebbieN

In one of my favorite Doonesbury cartoons, a very old one from the early 1970s when hippies still had a trace of hip about them, it’s Zonker’s turn to cook dinner, and he serves his housemates a big bowl of salad.

Mike Doonesbury peers into the bowl suspiciously and says, “Hey Zonker, the lettuce is dirty!”

“Yes, but it’s clean dirt! Ecologically pure dirt! No chemical additives–you’ll love it!”

Mike and Bernie opt for McDonald’s.

Somehow, though, the way they agree on it suggests the understanding of the early 1970s: McDonald’s was cheap, it was easy to find in your town, but it wasn’t really dinner, it was what you did when there was nothing decent in the fridge.

For decades now, government health agencies, the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association, and whole parades of morning talk show guests have been advocating that Americans eat at least five servings of fruits and vegetables a day, and juices don’t count. The studio audience members, mostly soccer mom-looking women, only with impeccable makeup and pristinely unwrinkled clothes, bob their heads on cue at this wisdom.

But nobody’s gotten serious about how veg-phobic most people suddenly become when they actually approach the vegetable aisle in the supermarket, and no one’s taking enough pictures of what’s really in the fridge or on the cutting board most nights in most houses. All I can say is that many, many of them, if they buy vegetables at all, buy prepared or precut vegetables instead of bulk. Why?

Bulk vegetables–a whole head of cabbage or lettuce or broccoli or cauliflower, a bunch of celery or carrots–are bulky. Heavy. Hard to lift and hard to maneuver into those thin plastic produce bags.

They’re also round. They take up a lot of space in the refrigerator. They don’t stack neatly and they don’t necessarily fit into the shallow, measly vegetable drawer that comes with today’s Lean Cuisine-friendly slimline refrigerators.

They require washing, and here I wonder if we’re getting to the part people are most squeamish about. There’s…there’s (I can’t say it) … there’s DIRT on them!

Why washing it off scares people so much these days I have no idea, but maybe it’s all that liquid hand sanitizer and overly perfumed liquid hand soap that have poisoned the atmosphere this past 10 years or so. When your soap company can convince you to buy watered-down soap in a decorator squirt bottle, your friendly produce-packing plant can probably sell you overpriced broccoli florets in a small plastic bag.

Filed under: Food Politics, frugality, unappetizing, Vegetabalia | Tagged: , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Dirty Roots of Veg-phobia

Bistro + Cartoons = Stephane Reynaud’s French Feasts

Posted on June 9, 2010 by DebbieN

French Feasts by Stephane ReynaudFrench Feasts: 299 Traditional Recipes for Family Meals and Gatherings by Stéphane Reynaud (2009 Stewart, Tabori & Chang, $40.00)

It’s a huge book. Daunting. Heavy as a couple of bricks. Padded cover, even, with a zillion miniphotos of intimidating French bistro classics in their raw and cooked forms (an octopus, a roasting tray of vegetables with leeks, a crème caramel, and several red-checked tablecloths, for that seemingly effortless retro chic, laid out under rustic-looking pot-au-feu types of stews. And a cutting board with six stuffed marrow bones stood on end.)

Flip open the front cover and you get a classic bistro menu with way too many choices (luckily it’s printed with a little English and page numbers, not handwritten on a chalkboard across the room, so you don’t have to squint). Read down the page (continue inside the back cover) and you start to dig up little puns and odd bits of humor here and there. They finally bubble up into something definite in the introduction, where the author, a medium-youngish guy seated in front of a casserole with a chef’s knife and a two-pronged barbecue fork, reminisces about a childhood stuffed with too much good food on family Sundays with his grandmère. Replete with escargot-burping uncles.

And from then on, you realize why this book is so fat: not only is there a heavy emphasis on meats and charcuterie (and six or seven different preparations for foie gras, 12 or so variations on soft-boiled eggs and omelets, etc.), but every other page is a photograph, or a profile of a couple who run one or another bistro, a venerable Lyonnaise sausage maker, vintner, baker, or cheese affineur…

Or — quite frequently — a cartoonist’s demonstration, only a little less improbable than Rube Goldberg’s, for making wine or cheese, or canning preserves (watch out for the orange tabby in the “catsup” jar). Check out the last chart, next to the Armagnac and Cognac page, which presents  increasing girths and grades of cigars appropriate for the increasing girths and ages of the smokers. Is it by way of including the classic end to a classic meal, never mind the known risks, or a subtle message the other way–that these days it’s more savvy to laugh at the cigar nostalgia die-hards than become one?

And speaking of nostalgia…There are even songsheets for Moulin Rouge classics so you can join in with your French friends after dinner. You kind of need those. You definitely need those.

Just what kind of cookbook have we lugged home?

Actually, Stéphane Reynaud is a well-regarded restaurateur on the outskirts of Paris and the well-trained son and grandson of a line of pork butchers. His previous book, Pork & Sons, arrived in the US a couple of years ago, and this one was published here in English sometime last fall. Despite the fact that I don’t eat pork and don’t think it’s a glorious profession to “break down a pig” or any other large animal, as glamorized on adventure cooking shows, French Feasts is well worth the read. Because Reynaud clearly knows his stuff, and not just about meat.

I’m not sure whether he got a translator to help, or he’s just really fluent in English–if so, my hat’s off to him, because his sense of humor really comes through fairly naturally, and it probably meant rewriting a fair amount of the text to come up with accurate and still funny equivalents for English speakers. Translating (and having to explain!) puns from French to English would be a job and a half for just about anyone. Most people would rather scrub dishes than have to explain a joke. Even me.

The recipes themselves are classics–untrammeled and unfutzed-with–and unexpectedly instructive in their simplicity.

Most have fewer than 10 ingredients, and often fewer than six. Here there are no dishes calling for 20 different special vinegars or sweeteners, as in American food-glam magazines and cookbooks. Not too many luxury ingredients, other than that many of the “proteins”–shellfish, goose, duck, game, foie gras–are hard to find in the US and kind of chi-chi expensive these days outside of Europe, but you could probably substitute with some success. And the titles are simple too–English translations of the classic French names, not mile-long lists of every special new “twist” ingredient it’s been tweaked with to up its audience appeal. Or advertiser appeal.

And the food photos. Nice photography but no attempt to make restaurant-pretty “tall food” plates with lots of garnishes. These are stews and soups and unsliced terrines–unstyled, many of them, or at least not overstyled with voguish background blur and enhanced color and gloss on every dish. Cooked cabbage looks like cooked cabbage. Turnips look like turnips, not like  flaming purple orchids turned suddenly solid. The stews look like stews you’d make at home–well, except for the lobster one, or the terrine with the crossed strips of fatback over it, or the baked fish in a glossy brown flake pastry crust. That’s just showing off, right there.

But really, most of these dishes are photographed while still in the cooking pots–which aren’t the bright shiny brand-new brand-name items you can order directly by clicking on the picture. They’re well-used, old, blackened, ugly even. Not glamorous. They don’t go with the brushed steel decorator kitchens we’re used to seeing in all the glossy cookbooks on our shelves. They have a bit of grime and wear about them, and make us feel better about our own dowdy day-to-day kitchenware that we’ve been using since we got out of school umpty-nine years ago and haven’t replaced because it’s reliable.

And now what I thought at first was a detour:

To my great surprise, given the author’s “slow food” cred, Reynaud’s recipes don’t contain any of the rote “1 teaspoon of salt” in each recipe that most recent American cookbooks have fallen into. Few of his recipes are seasoned more than once if at all, and usually just the sauce, or just the surface, right before serving. He doesn’t dictate how much, but from the context it’s obviously closer to a pinch than a spoonful, and often he skips it altogether.

He also doesn’t boil his vegetables in salted water, which is very chic right now in the US just because Thomas Keller said he does it and Michael Ruhlman trumpeted it as gospel. With only one exception–in fact, the only recipe in the book with a specified teaspoon of salt–even the desserts in French Feasts, including all of the pastry doughs from shortbread to puff pastry, are almost entirely free of added salt. The sheet cakes have baking powder, and a handful of the pastries call for salted butter rather than plain, but neither comes anywhere close to a contemporary American version’s salt content.

It’s not that Reynaud never uses salt or salted ingredients like capers or sausage or parmesan. But unlike American recipe developers, he doesn’t throw extra salt on top of them, and in fact he warns against it in one of the smoked pork-plus-sausage-plus-three-other-preserved-meats kinds of dishes.

SO—If these are the classics and the methods American chefs and recipe test kitchens have been aping and trying to bring to the table in our best restaurants for decades, French Feasts makes it clear there’s been more than a little “tweaking” or “drift” going on, particularly for the increasingly popular baked goods. Almost every American version of the classic French desserts, from mousse to napoleon to baba to charlotte and crêpes and on to cannelés, has had an automatic teaspoon or worse of salt dumped into it before it went to press. In comparison with the traditional style of French Feasts, we seem to be pickling ourselves. You have to wonder who put it there and why, and what our sorta-French desserts are really supposed to taste like when you skip the commercial interest that seems to be behind all the routine, mindless oversalting.

And you have to ask–in romanticizing Slow Food but presenting commercially tainted, overly fussy, overly expensive and oversalted versions of traditional European dishes, how far has American foodieism drifted away from reality? How badly have we lost the thread?

In contrast to the younger wave of foodie restaurant chefs and specialty purveyors in the US, most of the folks profiled in French Feasts are not sporting extensive surfer tattoos or orange clogs to proclaim their indy cred. They’re also not Glamorous-Looking French People With Scarves ™, except Continue reading →

Filed under: baking, books, cooking, Desserts, Food Politics, frugality, haute cuisine, holiday cooking, meat and poultry, nutrition | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Bistro + Cartoons = Stephane Reynaud’s French Feasts

Selling salt, one con at a time

Posted on May 30, 2010 by DebbieN

Michael Moss’s new investigative piece,   “The Hard Sell on Salt” at the New York Times, traces the strategies used by the processed food industry over the past 30 years or more to fight any regulation on the amount of salt they dump into everything.

I have wondered for years why TV chefs (Moss ticks Alton Brown on this for having shilled in an ad for Cargill, a major salt producer), the Culinary Institute of America, big-name restaurant chefs and their fans (prominently Michael Ruhlman), and the food processing industry have all pushed salt so hard and why the discussion about reducing salt always, always turns to “what can we substitute” rather than “why not just leave it out.”

It’s not as if any of these players, other than the actual salt production companies, have an intrinsic mission that requires them to sell salt.

Moss turns up a few of the answers. Not surprisingly, products like low-salt tomato sauce require actual fresh ingredients (vine-ripened tomatoes, fresh herbs) to make up the difference in flavor from the current formulas for salted jar sauces, which contain dried herbs and low-grade tomatoes and range from 450-700+ mg. sodium per serving.The low-salt sauces are more expensive to produce. On the other hand, they’re higher quality and they do actually taste good.

But that’s about the simplest case. Tomato sauce actually is made from tomatoes, whether high- or low-grade, and is therefore (if you discount the addition of starch or gum thickeners, sugar or corn syrup, spice “extractives” and preservatives in so many brands) about as close to the actual homemade product as processed food gets. Most of the major processed foods aren’t so recognizable.

Peanut butter should be in the same category as tomato sauce–something with a simple real main ingredient that tastes like what it is. And a number of smaller companies do offer unsalted natural peanut butter–peanuts-only, and it tastes just fine. But the major brands insist that if you take out any of the salt (notably, not “all”) from their formulations, you “have to” add sugar or something else to compensate for the loss of flavor. Read the major brand labels and you realize why: their peanut butters are already mixed with corn syrup sweeteners and solids, gums and emulsifiers and mono- and diglycerides and starches and fillers. The salt is there not so much to highlight the peanuts but to cover all of that extra gunk. You have to wonder whether the nutrition is reduced as well–something like the case of bologna vs. actual meat.

Particularly telling (and entertaining, from my point of view), are the taste consequences of cutting salt in some very popular products:

Even as it was moving from one line of defense to another, the processed food industry’s own dependence on salt deepened, interviews with company scientists show. Beyond its own taste, salt also masks bitter flavors and counters a side effect of processed food production called “warmed-over flavor,” which, the scientists said, can make meat taste like “cardboard” or “damp dog hair.”

I have to admit I really adored that one. My general reaction to things like Lean Cuisine, South Beach Diet, etc microwave meals-for-one is that, with so much sodium per serving (up to 1200 mg or worse) you’d be better off tossing out the “meal” and eating the box. Tastes about the same, salt’s gotta be lower, and at least you’d get some fiber. Now we know it’s true.

As a demonstration, Kellogg prepared some of its biggest sellers with most of the salt removed. The Cheez-It fell apart in surprising ways. The golden yellow hue faded. The crackers became sticky when chewed, and the mash packed onto the teeth. The taste was not merely bland but medicinal.

“I really get the bitter on that,” the company’s spokeswoman, J. Adaire Putnam, said with a wince as she watched Mr. Kepplinger struggle to swallow.

They moved on to Corn Flakes. Without salt the cereal tasted metallic. The Eggo waffles evoked stale straw. The butter flavor in the Keebler Light Buttery Crackers, which have no actual butter, simply disappeared.

Perhaps there’s a lesson here. Kellogg’s certainly not the only company that’s been selling Americans the food equivalent of the Emperor’s New Clothes. Perhaps all the food execs should be required to eat their own products, without “benefit” of salt, and preferably in front of an FDA regulatory panel or a Congressional committee?

Filed under: Eating out, Food Politics, nutrition, shopping, unappetizing | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

FDA Regulation–Too Slow on Salt?

Posted on April 20, 2010 by DebbieN

The Washington Post carried a story today that the FDA is finally getting a move on and planning how to regulate salt in processed foods–after numerous and repeated failures of laissez-faire voluntary self-regulation attempts. It’s been a long time coming; the FDA has been petitioned repeatedly by the American Heart Association, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, and many other organizations, both private and governmental, and has always maintained up to this administration that salt was a “generally recognized as safe” ingredient.

So I’m glad that the FDA is finally making some effort to regulate sodium in food and drop the “generally recognized as safe” status. I’m unfortunately not amazed at all that they’re trying to drag it out to a 10-year process. People’s taste for salt can be downshifted significantly in two or three weeks on average, so there’s really no excuse for such a gradual decrease except for the manufacturer’s cost of reformulation. They seem to be pacifying the processed food manufacturers–all the classic  prechewed food industry claims about reduced customer satisfaction appear to be overtaking discussion and usurping the issue of health risk.

But what really gets me is the last quote in the article:

“Historically, consumers have found low-sodium products haven’t been of the quality that’s expected,” said Todd Abraham, senior vice president of research and nutrition for Kraft Foods. “We’re all trying to maintain the delicious quality of the product but one that consumers recognize as healthier.”

Tell the truth: Those foods aren’t really all that delicious now. It’s like admitting that heavy salt is the predominant flavoring (the other being cardboard).

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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

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.

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Gastropodiatry

Posted on December 24, 2009 by DebbieN

Puzzling out the personal life of a famous food critic can be hazardous to your cherished impressions. I’ve just tripped over (I’m still not technically savvy enough to have “Stumbled Upon”) Regina Schrambling’s blog gastropoda.com, and it’s a little too revealing. Schrambling recently ended a five-year stint writing a food column for the LA Times, probably (though I’m not certain) in the aftermath of the newspaper gutting its departments and letting scores of award-winning journalists go.  If Schrambling’s column was adamantly butter-laden (and it was), it was also thought-provoking, ecumenical and wide-ranging. Civil in an intelligent way about all kinds of food.

She’s more famous than that, of course–a former editor of the more prestigious NY Times Dining section, and now a guest blogger for epicurious.com’s The Epi Log, with a focus on frugality. But the LA Times articles are where I knew her from.

So Gastropoda is a bit of a shock. It’s a blog with book reviews, short restaurant reviews, all the usual authory showcase kinds of links. But most of all, it’s a blog with quite a run of very short, very pungent entries that are almost too personal in their thinly cloaked vitriol. The editor of the Epi Log introduced Schrambling by calling Gastropoda witty and “famously acerbic”, but I think that’s putting it mildly, and perhaps even charitably. Targets include celebrity chefs who not only don’t write their own cookbooks but don’t ever even test the recipes that have been packaged into them by committee. News publishers who’ve sacked their veteran columnists in favor of wet-behind-the-ears food reviewers with no sense of journalistic ethics. Government officials who can be bought at an astonishingly low and low-class price.

It’s not that I don’t frequently agree with the basic points she’s making on Gastropoda. But in large part I’m embarrassed. The nicknames she provides her targets to avoid direct libel are childish in the extreme (e.g., “Chimpie” for George W. Bush, “The Drivelist” for a popular and successful NY Times food writer). Sometimes they’re too veiled and cryptic and make it hard to figure out who exactly she’s lambasting in these convoluted attacks. Not that I’m curious, of course.

But the tone–I wonder if she’s obsessing sincerely about the sorry state of food journalism today, or bitter toward those who still have solid writing gigs at the major newspapers (I know I am), or whether she just hasn’t noticed how far she’s gone in the direction of the classic rant blog. Throughout, you can discern the deep frustration of someone who does her own homework and legwork, and sees less and less of that career dedication in a field she regards as intellectually worth the effort as the times roll on.  Continue reading →

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