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Another Reason to Make Your Own Salad Dressings

Posted on November 4, 2009 by DebbieN

My husband came home this weekend loaded down with leftovers from a brunch he’d helped set up. Among the cartons of pasta salad and regular salad and dubious mass-market hummus and two–two? really?–homemade onion pies was a jug of something reddish. It turned out to be more than a quart of prepared raspberry vinaigrette, the kind of thing a caterer would pick up at a bulk commodities store. More than we would ever use in a year, but let it pass. He meant well.

So we found space for most of the stuff in the fridge, threw out the hummus because we didn’t know if it had been dipped into or not, and then there was this jug of vinaigrette hanging out on the counter. I took a look at the ingredients. Canola oil (boring but expected), sugar (enhhh–not a fan of sweet salad dressings, personally), salt, distilled vinegar, raspberry extract was somewhere down in the lower middle, more for color than flavor no doubt, paprika extractives (so much easier than actual paprika?)…yada yada yada…some kind of starch and emulsifiers to keep the oil and vinegar more or less together…polyethylene glycol…

Bleagggh. PEG? As my college lab partner once remarked, in a toney City Line (Philadelphia) accent, “It smells so….bio-laahhhgical.” And it does.

Not to mention the “nutrition” counts–and here I mean the sodium count per serving, which alone, minus any actual salad fixings, comes to 240 mg. It’s not so hard to see why chain restaurant salads typically hover above 500 mg sodium and frequently up to 900 mg.

So a couple of suggestions:

1. Make your own salad dressings–it’s quick and they’ll be fresher. You don’t need exact recipes, do you? Try a few of these.

2. Don’t automatically add salt–get the majority of your dressing flavors from the real ingredients. The satisfaction of a salad dressing comes from a combination of tart and savory ingredients to startle and intrigue the palate and make the freshness of the salad itself more apparent, so start with that. Flavor your dressing with garlic or shallots, lemon juice or vinegar, mustard or sharp cheese, olive or walnut oil, maybe yogurt or buttermilk, herbs, etc., but flavor it, don’t salt it. Real ingredients are also less likely to suffer flavor fatigue–salt’s a moving target that most people stop being able to taste when they eat a lot of it habitually (see the Salt Rant).

2b. If you’re following a recent cookbook or food magazine recipe, there’s sure to be a routine, unthinkingly added teaspoon of salt called for in just about every recipe. That’s much more than you really need to enhance a salad or make the dressing piquant. But those recipes are based on restaurant think, where salt is the cheap substitute for the expensive ingredients that need to be stretched. You don’t have that problem–you’re not making vats of bleu cheese dressing on a shoestring budget, you’re making dinner.

So leave out the salt, mix everything else together, and taste.

3. Time is your friend. You can make a basic vinaigrette right at the table–a dollop of mustard, a few spoonfuls of red wine vinegar or lemon juice, a pinch of salt if you must, and a couple or so spoonfuls of olive oil whisked in. Maybe a few herbs or a clove of garlic to boost it, and cracked black peppercorns over the top. Or nasturtiums.

But if the dressing–a yogurt or buttermilk-based one, say– is mostly about herbs, garlic, onion, shallot, scallions, bleu cheese or the like, let the dressing sit awhile to develop. If you make a yogurt/buttermilk/herb and garlic ranch-style dressing a day ahead, it’ll be much stronger and also more integrated after a night in the fridge. Right before serving, taste a bit of lettuce in the dressing and see what you think. If you still feel like salt is genuinely missing after you taste it in action, add a pinch or two. Not more. You can always add more to your own serving at the table if you’re craving salt for its own sake, and you’ll have the advantage of being able to taste it because the crystals will be on the surface of the food, where your tastebuds can get to them easily.

4. Unless it’s just olive oil and red wine vinegar, don’t toss the dressing in before serving, let people dress their own. Not everybody likes or can tolerate every dressing, and everyone’s got their own right amount. If you have to dress the salad ahead for a banquet setup, do it lightly. Less is more.

Filed under: DASH Diet, Dips, frugality, nutrition, Revised recipes, salads, sauces and condiments, Vegetabalia | Tagged: , , , | Comments Off on Another Reason to Make Your Own Salad Dressings

Smart Choices Labeling Program Falls Apart

Posted on October 28, 2009 by DebbieN

The FDA’s recent and surprisingly bold scrutiny of the Smart Choices food labeling program, coupled with wide public indignation over the program’s obviously inappropriate awards of healthy food status to processed foods without much actual merit, has left the industry-led nutrition rating effort in shreds.  In a recent followup to his initial article in the New York Times, William Neumann reports that the Smart Choices program has been suspended only about two months after going live, and participants like PepsiCo have pulled out altogether.  Kellogg’s, on the other hand, is “phasing out” its green checkmarked cereal boxes and announced that global marketing officer Celeste Clark  is staying on in good standing after what has amounted to a PR fiasco over Froot Loops. Makes you think they were the ones with the highest investment in the program to begin with, or that perhaps they were the company least likely to admit how transparently flimsy the program’s nutrition criteria had become to the rest of the country.

It’s the first time in quite a while that the FDA has taken on a big household-name food industry target in public without a lot of hemming and hawing and backpedaling and dealmaking. It gives me hope that at least some of the federal government is shifting gears to start serving the public again.

The great surprise for me is how little real effort it took to shut down the food industry’s program. Three or four years ago it might well have prevailed, and the processed food industry might have been able to keep inserting its priorities into the debates over nutrition without any effective logical check. But at a time when the nation’s gotten sick of being lied to so brazenly for so long about so many things–many of them more serious–corporate food tampering and misrepresentation of food quality are becoming hair-trigger topics. Not least because food is the easiest  for ordinary people to judge and to protest safely in the streets.

We can’t organize effectively enough to protect ourselves against the invasive, petty and obscene wastefulness of the Patriot Act as it has actually been applied. We can’t organize effectively enough to demand and get a proper, timely accounting of Guantanamo and the government’s use of torture there and abroad.

But we can talk food and nutrition and sustainability and corporate manipulation until the cows come home.

How else to explain the cult status of Michael Pollan? The rise of Fast Food Nation and Food, Inc.? The fights over school cafeteria vending machines and chain restaurant nutritional stats? The Smart Choices checkmark for Froot Loops, which people buy specifically for the artificial colors and know perfectly well is not really food, touched the match to a very big pile of sawdust.

And now the FDA is also on its way to strengthened oversight powers from Congress, including mandatory food recalls, not just recommendations for recall, to go after contamination of the food supply, and with any luck some extra funding to cover the actual field investigations needed.

It’s long overdue, but somehow it seems to me the FDA is being tasked with something the USDA should have been doing all these years and hasn’t. The USDA has more tools and resources at its disposal for doing food safety checks at the agricultural and manufacturing levels but because part of its mission is to boost agriculture, it has often dismissed these checks as unnecessary and even obstructed them, as in the case of routine meat testing for BSE and other infections.

The FDA is still supposed to protect the nation against food and nutritional claims fraud, though some of its targets appear to be of diminishing significance in comparison with preventing widespread salmonella and E. coli in the food supply. Smart Choices is obviously a big and publicly important target, but on the other hand, it seems to have been exposed and skewered satisfactorily already by public reporting of the Froot Loops fiasco. The FDA can ride the crest and put the final, perhaps critical, touch on it, but the agency’s gotten a huge boost this time around from public opinion.

Maybe that’s saved the FDA and the public some time and taxpayer dollars that won’t have to be spent going to court over it. Maybe it’s given them the nerve to work on the public’s behalf more daringly, knowing that the public actually does give a damn about its own well-being? Maybe things are really going to be different enough that they’ll go after the big offenders even when the public isn’t way ahead of them? We can only hope.

But frankly, I still want to see the USDA fulfill its responsibilities to protect the public and the food supply, and not abandon or subvert them in service to big agriculture and processed food firms. The FDA shouldn’t have to pick up after them.

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The Case Against Bologna

Posted on October 10, 2009 by DebbieN

(Beside the fact that I’ve never actually liked it, not even as a kid. Too flabby and bland.)

It would be so nice if once in a while, just occasionally–every other Thursday would probably be enough–the processed food industry judged nutritional value the way the CDC or NIH public health guidelines do. (The USDA and its Food Pyramid scheme, all versions, are too compromised toward the food industry for me to include.)

Take a small health column in today’s Washington Post—Jennifer LaRue Huget comments on Oscar Meyer’s claim that a classic peanut butter and jelly sandwich has nothing on a classic bologna sandwich for health. Their contention is that the bologna sandwich is healthier because it has only 4 grams of sugar, and somewhat less total fat than a sandwich’s worth of peanut butter, about 2 tablespoons.

Huget proceeds to tear that argument down with a simple look at the nutrition label stats for both and a smidgen of common sense–why would bologna have sugar in it anyway? The bologna has less total fat but somewhat more saturated fat and cholesterol, and it has only 3 grams of protein for peanut butter’s 8. And what about the salt–800 mg for a sandwich with a single slice of bologna, compared with a PBJ at 490 mg–which is still high by my standards, but I guess it’s salted peanut butter, and quite a bit of the salt is probably in the bread itself (incidentally, did Oscar Meyer include bread in its sodium count for the bologna sandwich? did it use the same kind of bread in the PBJ comparison? Hmmm….)

Well anyway, Huget doesn’t need to work too hard to make her case. Still, there are issues she doesn’t even scratch. Obviously Oscar Meyer is trying to play up its few nutritional points and hide its glaring weaknesses–most of the processed food players have been doing this aggressively for years now. We’re mostly inured to it, and frankly we expect bologna to be high-salt and kind of fatty. No big surprises there.

So let’s get back to the main strangeness of this comparison and ask the key questions: How could peanut butter possibly have more protein than bologna? Isn’t bologna meat? What’s going on?

I headed for the USDA Nutrient Database to find out. As much as I distrust the USDA’s dietary advice and its Food Pyramid, the nutrient database is pretty vast and pretty consistent, and its holdings aren’t branded.

The protein in bologna and most other processed sandwich meats–not just Oscar Meyer brand but others as well–is considerably lower than in the same amount of plain unprocessed cooked meat. We’re talking 3 grams of protein in a 28-gram (1-oz) slice.

Oscar Meyer’s bologna is made in descending order of “mechanically separated” chicken and pork bits and then a variety of corn derivatives, both syrup and starch, plus gelatin and other fillers.

Normally you look at the top two ingredients and think “Meat! That’s the main ingredient! It’s chock-full of protein!” Actual chicken and pork–the solid meat, not the skin or fat of the chicken, and not bacon–contain about 25 grams of protein per 100 grams of meat, according to the USDA nutrient database, or about 7 grams of protein per 28 grams of meat. Not 3 grams per 28. By the time you get to bologna, you’ve got less than half the protein of actual meat.

You have two possibilities here for how that happens:

1. The company’s definition of “chicken” and “pork” includes a hefty proportion of skin and solid fat most people trim away and throw out rather than eat when they buy actual chicken or pork. Fat doesn’t have protein in it but it does weigh something. Should it be allowed to qualify as “meat”?

2. The percentages of the chicken and pork bits in the bologna are just enough higher than those of each of the filler ingredients to qualify as leading ingredients on the label, but the actual proportion of chicken-plus-pork to the total filler is something under half.

So bologna leaves a lot to be desired even compared to an old standard like PBJ, especially today when you can get peanuts-only peanut butter without fillers, and fruit-only fruit spreads without added sugars or corn syrup. And you can look on the nutrition label to find out what’s in it and what it’s worth nutritionally.

But what disturbs me, even more than the clear and present need for Huget’s column to point out Oscar Meyer’s casual sophistry in this over-informed day and age, are some of the comments her column generated. The Washington Post has a pretty liberal comment policy on just about every opinion article.

I expected some type of Food Police accusations to crop up. I’m not sure they didn’t, eventually, but when I read the piece this morning, what struck me was just how many of the commenters waxed nostalgic about how much they loved bologna. How, even with all its and Oscar Meyer’s obvious flaws, they still craved bologna when they saw the word in print. Even when they’d actually read the whole article. Brought them right back to the good old days of the elementary school cafeteria. Worse, it brought them a specific craving for bologna with mayonnaise on white bread. That plus Velveeta to cap things off.  I ask you, is there any hope?

Filed under: Food Politics, kid food, nutrition | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Case Against Bologna

Food as Barometer

Posted on October 7, 2009 by DebbieN

The past week has seen a number of shock waves go through the food world.

Gourmet magazine’s announced closing yesterday is the latest and the one with the best PR. Gourmet‘s editor, Ruth Reichl, has turned what was once the flagship publication of foodie-ism into something more like Vogue for food–high-gloss, decorator restaurant food (the focus of her previous career) with recipes that ranged from routine to fanciful, from decadent but enticing to over-the-top, impractical, even wasteful and ridiculous, particularly in the last couple of years. A few memorable examples of the latter–lamb cooked with a stewing sauce that included something like a cup of whole coffee beans in an ingredient list some 20 or so items long, a chicken liver paté with a ton of added butter to simulate foie gras when that dish was outlawed in Chicago, and a chocolate and sesame butter tart with so many elaborate steps and so much extra fat in each layer–with nearly obvious clashes of flavor–you could practically choke.

Reichl, whose memoirs I have nonetheless enjoyed a great deal, seems to have been in on the official food world’s migration to recipe titles–and restaurant menu listings–so long they owe more to Proust, or perhaps Balzac, than to James Beard. Then again, Proust called madeleines madeleines, not “little ridged pure butter genoise microcakes with microplaned lime rind, baked in the shape of elongated shallow clamshells”. Goodness knows what today’s foodie superstar chefs would come up with for a title.

And yet Gourmet, with its glossy ads for show kitchens and olive oils and edible vacations in exotic locales, has tried to broaden readers’ ideas and ideals on occasion, and that’s Reichl’s influence too. If the cover one month showed coveted seating at a prestigious Paris restaurant, the tablecloth and glassware sternly hushed in preparation for the pre-theater crowd, or the cliffside view of an Italian trattoria table with a glass bowl in the foreground brimming voluptuously with prawns, greens, oysters and a coral-hued or purplish octopus, other issues sent staff into the mountainous inner reaches of China to report on the poverty and generosity of villagers there.

It’s hard to imagine how Reichl and her staff pictured reconciling the ultra-affluent with the world-conscious, and perhaps their attempts failed to convince either luxe advertisers or Condé Nast this year in particular. But I can see how Gourmet‘s underlying spirit of foodie-ism has led to the explosion of adventurous, hands-on food blogs of a younger working generation as they discover both real food and the desire to learn to cook it.

But Gourmet isn’t the most important food barometer, particularly because it represents a shrinking target audience at the top of the food chain, as it were. Rumbles farther down the scale have been quieter but with any luck perhaps one hopeful sign will be more lasting and more influential.

Last Thursday, the L.A. Times reported that the federal WIC  (Women, Infants and Children) food supplement program will now allow participants to spend their vouchers on fresh produce and whole grains. The allowance isn’t really big– $6/month per eligible child, $8 per pregnant woman or mother of a child under 5, and $10 per nursing mother, or about $14/month on average for a typical family, but it’s a start.

More promising is that the changes would push stores that want to accept WIC vouchers to stock fresh produce and whole grains. That might put at least modest quantities of decent foods within reach in lots of inner city neighborhoods, and it means farmers’ markets can also start qualifying to accept vouchers.

In the Los Angeles area and Orange County, the WIC program is especially important–out of more than 12 million people, something like 316,000 low-income people are enrolled in WIC. More than 8 million people are enrolled nationwide at a cost of slightly under $7 billion per year, with vouchers of about $60 total per family per month. Less than $1000 per family per year even counting the administrative costs of the program. It makes the Food Stamp program seem generous by comparison.

The new shift toward allowing fruits, vegetables, and whole grains under WIC isn’t adding anything to the total Congress allots–the cost for these vouchers has been taken from some of the dairy and juice allowance. But local WIC officers are still grateful and think it’ll make a big difference to their clients, some of whose children have never tasted fresh broccoli.

It’s a far cry from the fuss over the blight on homegrown heirloom tomatoes in the northeastern states this summer.

Filed under: cooking, Eating out, Food Blogs, Food Politics, frugality, nutrition, Vegetabalia | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Food as Barometer

Can Better Nutrition Curb Violence?

Posted on September 25, 2009 by DebbieN

In the news section of the journal Science this week comes word of a new UK diet study that may have significance for the general population. Researchers have set up a large double-blind study at a prison in Scotland to test the possible effect of nutritional supplementation — vitamins, minerals, and essential fatty acids — on lowering the frequency of violence. Listen to Science news correspondent John Bohannon’s podcast.

It’s not the first study of its kind–about 30 years of studies in both prisons and schools suggest that diet can affect antisocial behavior–but it’s the biggest and best-designed one to date. Because the study is double-blind, neither the researchers nor the prisoners participating know which ones are getting vitamin supplements and which are getting placebos.  The researchers are also conducting cognitive and behavioral tests and taking blood samples in the subjects both before and after the study so they can try to trace which of 12 essential vitamins, minerals, and essential fatty acids make some kind of a difference to behavior.

The researchers say that, at least anecdotally, incidents at the prison seem to have dropped from two per day to one per day in the few months since the study began, but it’s too soon to tell why or whether the new nutritional supplementation or the study as a whole has anything to do with it. Solid results from the study itself won’t be in until 2012.

If the study does show a real connection between malnutrition and violence in prisons, it may also have implications for school cafeteria food offerings and the fate of American civility under a massively processed diet (or am I reading in based on last week’s live and unscripted entertainments, all three or so, on national television?). It could also bolster current efforts to attract grocery stores to poor urban neighborhoods where fresh foods are scarce–such as the municipal zoning and tax incentives approved yesterday in New York City.

And that brings me to my reservation about this study–the researchers are studying improved nutrition, but they’re attempting to improve the prisoners’ nutrition with supplements–vitamin pills–and not with a better integrated diet.

The prison study is kind of bare-bones in that the outcome they’re looking to measure  is a drop in violent behavior. Certainly using vitamin supplements and placebo pills is a neat, controllable way to study nutritional supplementation–neater and more precise than testing whole-foods kinds of diets. I’m not saying it’s the wrong way to design this particular study, and if it’s a real improvement in nutrition over the usual prison diet, then it may actually work well enough. But it’s something that’s just begging for exploitation if it does work, because magic bullet-style remedies are so popular in the world of Big Food, government, and even the general public.

In poor neighborhoods, prisons, and other places where malnutrition is common, vitamin and other nutritional supplements may be the fastest, most efficient and inexpensive way to remedy the severe shortages of fresh unprocessed food. That’s what those pills were designed to do, back in the days when there wasn’t much junk food or fast food, and malnutrition walked with starvation, not obesity. And I would never begrudge anyone who needs them. But they shouldn’t become the end of the road.

I reject the idea that you can feed people any kind of processed slop, and as long as you dose it or them with vitamin pills, everything will be great. I know, I know, that’s partly because I like to cook actual food and think processed stuff tastes a lot more like the cardboard and styrofoam packaging it came in than the packaging itself.

I also know I’m out of step. The fact is that people have been eating this way for a generation or more. Vitamin pills have been around in both adult and children’s versions, heavily advertised on TV, since I was a kid. And they’re really cheap–cheaper than fresh food. And even so they’re very high-profit margin items.

In the larger context I would hope that for most people, the big take-home message from the study (if it proves a connection) doesn’t become, “Just add more processed vitamins to processed food–that’s eating twice as healthy!”

Outside of prison walls, I want to see vulnerable neighborhoods get grocery stores that sell fresh produce at affordable prices. Ironically, up to now, the only major grocery chain willing to take on America’s inner city neighborhoods (before the offer of zoning and tax incentives as far as I know) has been the UK’s Tesco, not an American chain.

Tesco has been trying to get its small-scale Fresh&Easy markets up to speed now for two years. In April, news tickers reported shortfalls for the Fresh&Easy stores, some of which were built, stocked, and then left shuttered–they’d expanded too quickly and US pundits at the time thought they hadn’t really tested their markets well enough ahead of opening.

But in fact since that time, most of the open ones have stayed open, and few have actually failed–maybe 15 percent. The new incentives should help attract American supermarkets, but so should the relative success of Tesco’s model in what everyone expects to be a high-fail zone. If they can hang on they might change the game and make inner city life more civilized and more livable. Who knows? Now Whole Foods is mulling it over.

Filed under: Food Politics, nutrition | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Can Better Nutrition Curb Violence?

Naked Lunch: Nutrition labeling law in effect for California Chain Restaurants

Posted on July 1, 2009 by DebbieN

California’s not the first state or municipality to require restaurants to declare their nutritional stats to customers, but as of today, the state will require chains with more than 20 in-state locations to post calories, carbs, sodium and fat information for each menu offering. The new law also bans sales of soda and junk foods to students at public schools–a big step toward reducing empty calories and sodium consumption among children and teens.

Patt Morrison of Pasadena-based public radio station KPCC interviewed the California Restaurant Association’s senior vice president for government affairs and the executive director of the California Center for Public Health Advocacy.

Surprisingly enough, the CRA’s representative said the association actually backs the legislation in its current form. When asked whether similar New York City legislation had had any effect so far, the CCPHA director said it had–chain restaurants had started reformulating popular high-calorie foods back downward. He also gave demographics: 89 percent of Democrats and 78 percent of Republicans polled said they were in favor of the new law. Most of the callers to the show also said they wanted or needed to know what was at the end of their forks.  A fascinating interview all the way around.

Filed under: DASH Diet, Eating out, Food Politics, kid food, nutrition | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Naked Lunch: Nutrition labeling law in effect for California Chain Restaurants

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