Perhaps it’s a futile attempt to understand how restaurant chefs think about food and nutrition, but lately I’ve been watching the very warped “Top Chef” episodes for the last couple of seasons–easy to do online. I can’t help wondering not only at the contestants, all of whom seem to display basic ignorance of what used to be called the “Four Food Groups,” but at some of the judges who fault them on nutritional challenges.
In this season there have been two, the School Lunch Challenge and–not that the judges even thought about it as a nutritional challenge, which they should have–the Baby Food Challenge. In both, the judges seemed at least as lacking in nutritional knowledge as the contestants, and in some aspects even worse.
The School Lunch Challenge brought out scathing comments on the show and on a number of blogs, particularly when the bottom-ranked chef, who went home for her gaffe, attempted to make a banana pudding palatable by adding sugar. Tom Colicchio made a big deal of her adding two pounds of sugar to the pudding–which was to feed 50 students.
And admittedly it’s not great for nutrition, but it was hardly the disaster he and the other judges made out. If anyone had bothered to whip out a calculator and known how to use it for pounds-to-kilos conversions, they’d have discovered that the two pounds of sugar amounts to 0.91 kilos. Or 909 grams, to be a little more precise (which we shouldn’t, the chef was eyeballing what she added). Divide by 50 and you get 18 grams per serving or about 4 teaspoons–not all that surprising an amount of sweetener in any prepared dessert. Add that to the starch already present as thickener and the sugars from the milk and bananas and you probably have 30-40 grams of carb or thereabouts per half cup of pudding.
It would be a lot for someone diabetic, like my daughter, but not disastrous as long as she knew how much carb was in it, and it certainly wouldn’t be disastrous for most school kids if the rest of the meal was balanced with low-fat protein and vegetables and not too much other starch.
But actually, most of the lunch entries were pretty starchy. The fact that they didn’t all have as much noticeable added sugar is almost immaterial–starches break down into sugars. You have to count them all.
What really stood out was the pathetic nature of the criterion “to include a vegetable.” One that was most-praised–a slab of caramelized (talking of sugar) sweet potato under a chocolate sorbet as a dessert–was mostly a starch, though in its favor it had vitamin A and fiber. Another team served celery (no vitamins and very low fiber, despite the stringiness) with a peanut-butter mousse (why, oh lord, not just peanut butter? chef-think at work?) piped out directly onto the celery, supposedly so kids would eat it. No one liked the mousse because it looked Continue reading
Filed under: cooking, DASH Diet, Food Politics, Food TV, fruits, kid food, nutrition, unappetizing, Vegetabalia | Tagged: baby food, carb counting, childhood nutrition, childood obesity, cooking shows, diabetes, high blood pressure, low-salt diet, Padma Lakshmi, Sam Kass, school cafeterias, school gardens, school lunch, Tom Colicchio, Top Chef | Comments Off on Unappetizing: Nutrition “Awareness” on Top Chef
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