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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

Pack your own lunch

Posted on September 5, 2009 by DebbieN

It’s almost time to head back to school, and my daughter’s finally old enough to pack her own lunch. Not that she wasn’t actually old enough last year. But now she wants to.

When I was nine, I’d been making my own school lunches for at least a year, if only to save my sandwiches from my mother’s clutches and keep her from adding butter to the jam–something that did, and still does, make me absolutely nauseous. Emergency grossout prevention is the mother of lunch-making independence.

As many of my friends with same-age kids do, I worry that I haven’t been pushing my daughter hard enough toward independence by having her fix her own lunch. Is it too late to impart the mysteries of the toaster oven? But all is not lost–the other morning she figured out how to cut up her own apples (she has braces and our orthodontist “charges extra for stupidity-related bracket repairs”). She doesn’t appear to have lost any fingers. So we’re good to go!

Which is fortunate because lately I’ve been seeing a slew of new books on how to pack your kid’s lunch–they range from “here are all the vegan-friendly brand-names that look just like everyone else’s school lunch, only cooler” to Alice Waters insisting that the first step is growing your own school garden (which I’m actually in favor of, but not if it means waiting 6-8 weeks for your lunch to germinate).

Few of these fabulously sophisticated new books even consider the things I took to school every day as a kid–peanut butter and jelly, apple, carrots and celery. Or peanut butter and jelly, orange, carrots and celery. My mother was dull. My sister and I had no cool foods like Ho-Hos or Cheetos to distract us, and we usually ate at least some of the vegetables and the apple. Actually, so did most of the other kids in our school. It was that or suffer the cafeteria kale. And almost no one was fat. I’d like to point that out.

Hip mamas today (mostly those still in their 30s) look horrified at my daughter’s lunches because out there in hipland PBJ on whole wheat is so…so ’70s. It doesn’t contain any of the seventy-two essential nutritional supplement buzzwords (like selenium and phytoestrogens and antioxidant) they’re convinced all healthy food has to have (well, it’s true you have to have those things on the label to compete in the ads). And it has fat. And sugar!

But you know what? A decent peanut butter and jelly sandwich on whole wheat is a lot better deal nutritionally than most of the prepackaged, often self-righteously labeled, crap the hip kids bring to school these days. Much of it is along the lines of Kraft Foods’ “Lunchables”–a processed meat and cheese cracker kind of thing packed with some ersatz juice and faky side items like jello and  candies (not even, as I check belatedly, a tiny tin of applesauce–and check out the Lunchables nutrition and ingredient stats!). But you know how popular these things are–because they’re a kit. Buy five boxes, throw one  in your kid’s backpack each day. They stack neatly in the pantry.

Very few of these children ever bring a substantial serving of fresh vegetables or actual fruit–not even apples. Those require washing, peeling–maybe even cutting up. And sometimes the apples turn a little brown on the cut sides. Organic fair-trade labeling aside, any remotely fruit-like substances in the hip-kids’ lunch bags arrive in a rectangular cardboard box with a plastic overwrap, a plastic straw attached, and a sanitized-for-your-protection seal. No wonder they stare.

Anatomy of a PBJ:

Straight-up peanuts-only butter (no salt, no sugars, no mono- and diglycerides, no emulsifiers or BHT or “natural flavoring” or any of the rest of it) has about 16 grams of fat per 2 T (1 oz) serving. True. Absolutely true. But it’s not the same as the heart-stopping blubber you find on a piece of meat, so stop shrieking. Most of the oil in natural peanut butter is polyunsaturated (the “good fat” kind of fat). And it separates (because of the lack of fakery and emulsifiers) so you can pour off a good bit of it if you want to when you first open the jar.

Furthermore, the same peanuts-only peanut butter contains 8 g protein, 3 g fiber, almost no sodium, and about 210 mg potassium. And a little iron. It’s a pretty good deal for a kid’s lunch item at about 200 calories.

Two slices of whole wheat bread without too much sodium or garbage ingredients gives you another 200 calories–we’re up to 400, but only 3 g. saturated fat, another 3-7 g fiber, another 4-6 g protein, and with a little care preferably less than 400 mg sodium (all from the bread). Add a spoonful of all-fruit jam with 8 g sugar, at about 35 calories, and you have something that will get your kid through school without tears or big sugar highs and lows.

It doesn’t have big vitamin- and calcium-fortified labeling. It doesn’t have a label. It’s not supposed to do it all on its own. Your kid will eat about half, maybe the whole thing if he or she is growing fast or running around a lot that week. But he or she will get the vitamins and calcium from the other things in the lunchbox–some crunchy raw vegetables and an apple or orange and a thermos or carton of plain unsweetened milk. That’s it and that’s enough.

Do your kid a huge favor and leave out all the chips, chocolate, go-gurt (real milk-and-cultures yogurt is ok, not the fake tapioca- and gelatin-stretched stuff), cookies, jello, sorta-applesauce, and fluorescent boxes of juice. School is hard enough without sugar crashes or cavities, and they don’t need any of it to have a good day.

Oh yeah. And for crying out loud, please skip the sushi. Your kid does NOT need to be that hip in the school cafeteria. Or that sick, if the sushi doesn’t stay cold enough.

(Why yes, I live in Southern California. What gave it away?)

Filed under: Beans and legumes, cooking, DASH Diet, Eating out, fruits, kid food, Vegetabalia | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Pack your own lunch