Recently in Food News Category

Watch out, Carrie Nation: a new generation of prohibitionists is dawning. And they're not wasting any time on alcohol, either (you hear that, OLCC? Give up, already.). No, the new demon drink is: soda pop.

Yep, you heard right.

This Herald Sun article presents a mounting tide of research that seems to show that drinking soda is a leading cause of obesity.

It sites numerous studies, many coming from prestigious institutions like Harvard and Yale, showing what they believe is a correlation between soda (and other sweetened drinks) and obesity:

• One study of of 548 Massachusetts schoolchildren found that for each additional sweet drink consumed per day, the odds of obesity increased 60 percent.
• Another gave 44 women water, diet soda, regular soda, orange juice, milk or no drink before lunch. Total intake was 104 calories greater for those given caloric beverages than those given diet soda, water or no beverage. Caloric drinks didn't help women feel any fuller either.
• Then there is the "jelly bean study." Purdue University researchers gave 15 men and women 450 calories a day of either soda or jelly beans for a month, then switched them for the next month and kept track of total consumption. Candy eaters ate less food to compensate for the extra calories. Soda drinkers did not.

Why would drinking soda have a different effect than consuming other sweet things such as fruit or candy? One probable culprit is the primary sweetener in sodas, high-fructose corn syrup. America's subsidized farming production of corn has resulted in a thriving industry designed to use this low-cost raw ingredient for ever more food industry uses.

That means that animals, from fish to cows, are being fed corn even when their bodies aren't able to break it down properly. It also means that high-fructose corn syrup, produced through chemical manipulation, has replaced other sugars in most processed foods. Industrial corn crops are also used to produce tires, explosives, plastics, and more. And "of the 37 ingredients in chicken nuggets, something like 30 are made, directly or indirectly, from corn," according to Michael Pollan.

Without going into the dramatic ecological impact of industrial corn overfarming (but I encourage you to read more in the linked editorial and article by Pollan; it's fascinating), I can tell you that the business of using up our subsidized corn overproduction is serious stuff. As Pollan says, "The USDA is not thinking about public health. The USDA is thinking about getting rid of corn."

Unfortunately, it is increasingly clear that even though high-fructose corn syrup is being used in place of sugar as if they were identical, our bodies don't process it the same way. HFCS can increase heart-disease-causing triglycerides in the blood, and it doesn't cause the body to generate insulin or leptin, substances that help break down calories and depress our appetites.

The very profitable soda industry, unsurprisingly, defends itself with suspicious self-funded research, but it looks to me like the handwriting's on the wall.

For the consumer it's not clear what will happen. Will we have to pay sin taxes on our Big Gulps? Buy your Snapple at a state-owned store with bars on the window? Trade grubby hand-written copies to make your own bathtub Pepsi?

Or maybe, just maybe, the industry can go back to plain old sugar and spare us from having to drink gallons of unnatural, unhealthy high-fructose corn syrup.

At the annual July 4th Nathan's Hotdog Contest (the superbowl of eating competitions) Takeru Kobayashi won for the fifth straight year! The black widow took second.

CNN: Champ a top dog again with 49 wieners

Nathan's Press Release: A New Dynasty?.

Kobayashi is RIPPED in the CNN video. Huge arms! And Sonya seems like the nicest Burger King manager ever!

Here's a good article about the legendary 1976 article that rocked the wine and food world in which French judges agreed to a blind wine tasting and chose two California wines as superior to French wines. "Before the Paris tasting, France was on a pedestal and everybody else was making plonk," [the original reporter] Taber says. Taber was only able to write the story because he spoke fluent French; the judges never released their comments. And as one California vintner says, "even at this late date, the French still find it too painful to write about."

Then here's a useful MetaFilter thread about how to learn to like to cook if you currently hate it. And a complementary article on inspiring, instructive cookbooks for beginners (you'll have to ignore the annoying "husband-proof" focus, though).

Finally, can you take on the challenge to only eat food grown, harvested and raised within 100 miles of your house? The people issuing the challenge say that eating locally is the best thing you can do to support the environment. " 'Our food now travels an average of 1,500 miles before ending up on our tables,' says one of the Locavores, Sage Van Wing, of Point Reyes. The process imperils 'our environment, our health, our communities and our taste buds.' " This article focuses on the San Francisco bay area, but we're lucky enough to live in another great microclimate for food.

How depressing: a new study shows that most Americans get the majority of their calories from soda and other sweet drinks. We used to get the bulk of our calories from bread, but now we've decided bread isn't sweet or fizzy enough, and besides, it doesn't fit into a Big Gulp cup. Unsurprisingly, researchers found that people who consume more soft drinks and other sugary drinks (Snapple, anyone?) are more likely to be obese. Or, as they put it, people who drink less sweet drinks are "less overweight." Ha!

I recommend this New York Times article about avant-garde cuisine. You may be just starting to hear about this trend, but it's been the hot thing in international cuisine for some time now. It's postmodern cuisine, where food is not just cooked but deconstructed and transformed. As an example of the kind of thing we're talking about, consider a "riff on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich: a peeled, heated grape, still on a sprig, that had been dipped in a peanut puree and encased in a thin layer of brioche."

The founder and darling of this mad-scientist cuisine is Barcelona's Ferran Adrià, whose restaurant El Bulli is only open 6 months of the year so he can spend the rest of the year in his culinary laboratory. Want to eat there? So does everyone else; it's booked up a year in advance. Adrià's most famous innovation is the culinary foam, which brings your food down to a concentrated, ephemeral form.

The NYT wrote a while back that the most exciting cooking in the world is now found in Spain instead of France. That's almost a blasphemous thing to say, but by all accounts Adrià can back up the boast. Here's one convert's experience, while here are photos from one of his famous multi-hour 27 course tasting menus.

Here's an example of what he's up to: he created a potato skin consomme in which were floating a ball of pumpkin seed oil, a liquefied olive and pouches of softened butter, all of which were in special edible skins to keep them from melting. As the NYT reviewer says, "by remaining intact and independent, these pouches provided spikes of richness that would not have been possible if the butter had merely melted into the soup."

In New York, Wylie Dufresne is the most famous chef of this school. At his restaurant WD-50, he uses science to create "impossible" new food experiences such as "cubes of mayonnaise that can be deep-fried without melting...served beside pickled beef tongue in a deconstruction of a deli sandwich" or oysters pressed into papery flat rectangles before being deep-friend and served with granny smith apples, dried olives, and pistachios. His restaurant has gotten mixed reviews, but those who love it really love it.

The cuisine might be untraditional, but it's not stodgy, and often plays with lowbrow food references, such as using crushed corn nuts as a steak crust, or serving "crushed Altoids instead of mint jelly with lamb [and] lollipops of foie gras encrusted with Pop Rocks." In the words of one chef, "Why not go to the store and get the curiously strong mint? [It's more interesting than] that horribly boring quote, 'I love to use farm-fresh products and local ingredients and European technique.' "

Me, I love farm-fresh local ingredients and classic technique...but then, maybe it's just sour foam. Anyone want to be an Urban Honking research granter and send an investigative team to Spain???

I don't have that many rules about what to eat; in fact, I think it's pretty healthy to let yourself eat just about whatever you want, whenever you want, especially when you love vegetables as much as I do.

But I've come to realize that I do have some rules of thumb that I use when cooking and eating. It's funny how you develop these things without even realizing it.

• Heat the pan up thoroughly before you start to cook (most cooks don't do this nearly well enough)
• Most foods taste better with freshly-ground pepper, slightly more salt than you thought it needed, and a splash of something acidic (lemon juice, balsamic vinegar, white wine, etc.)
• Eggs and cheese and bread. If you have these in your house, you can always make a tasty meal.
• My parents raised us that you eat a cooked vegetable and a salad with every dinner. I still think that's a pretty good goal.
• Bread goes stale fastest in the refrigerator. It does really well in the freezer, though, defrosted a slice at a time by toasting in a toaster oven.
• Don't buy juice or soda; it's expensive and doesn't really bring you anything (and for those who care, they're fully of sugary, empty calories that add up quickly when you're always drinking something). And if you ask me, the same thing applies to breakfast cereals (expensive, sugary, nutritionally questionable), but I know better than to try to get between some people and their cereal.
• Many foods taste better with just a touch of alcohol, either white wine, vermouth, sherry, madeira, marsala...play around and see what you think! (E.g. cream of tomato soup with a splash of madeira)
• When it comes to cheese, you get what you pay for, and quality is more delicious than you know.
• Garlic shouldn't be overcooked. Add it at the end of the onion cooking time, for just 30 seconds or so, and then add your other ingredients. No more burnt, chewy garlic bits!
• Speaking of garlic, if your cloves have a green sprout, it should be removed before cooking; it's bitter.
• When potatoes go green, they are producing small quantities of a toxic substance in their skin. If it's not too far gone, you can still use them, but peel them well before cooking.
• If you have a food processor, you have instant carrot salad. Shred the carrots, then make a quick dressing of lemon juice, dijon, olive oil, and freshly-ground pepper.

By now you know about the French Paradox, right? The country with the lowest incidence of heart disease is Japan. Makes sense; their traditional diet is extremely low in red meat and dairy products and high in fish and vegetables. But the second country on the list is France, and the French have a very low incidence of obesity as well. How can this be, in a country full of foie gras, red meat, rich and elegant cream sauces, and everything, but everything monter a beurre ("mounted in butter," that is, finished off with butter right before serving)? The land of croissants, chocolate, and cheese?

Lots of people have come up with theories about why this could be. Maybe red wine has some magical heart-friendly properties, or maybe it's some chemical in the chocolate. Or maybe when you eat a lot of fat, your body stops producing its own cholesterol.

The heart thing is still up for debate, but as for the weight part? Turns out the French, for all their rich cuisine, just plain eat less:

"As a consequence of all these mighty meals, the average calorie consumption in the United States weighs in at 3,642 a day, against 3,551 in France - a small difference, but one that can add up to a five-pound weight gain in six months."

I observed this myself: during the 6 months I was doing my French cheese research project, I was buying extraordinarily delicious, extraordinarily expensive cheese, and enjoying every bite. But the richness and robust taste made me satisfied with a bite or two of each cheese, compared to an entire quesadilla filled with piles of shredded medium cheddar.

(One of the things I especially like about this article is that it is ripping on Britain, for the most part, and not the states. It's refreshing to get a break from American-bashing from time to time. And besides, then we get to read about things like marmite, Tandoori Doritos, Scotch-egg bars and 'Christmas-pudding Flavoured KitKat.' Flavoured! Love those wacky Brits!)