kottke.org posts about food
In the spirit of I, Pencil, here’s how a can of Coke makes its way from the bauxite mines of Australia and the forests of Sri Lanka to your local grocery store shelf.
Coca-Cola is made from a syrup produced by the Coca-Cola Company of Atlanta. The main ingredient in the formula used in the United States is a type of sugar substitute called high-fructose corn syrup 55, so named because it is 55 per cent fructose or “fruit sugar”, and 42 per cent glucose or “simple sugar” — the same ratio of fructose to glucose as natural honey. HFCS is made by grinding wet corn until it becomes cornstarch. The cornstarch is mixed with an enzyme secreted by a rod-shaped bacterium called Bacillus and an enzyme secreted by a mold called Aspergillus. This process creates the glucose. A third enzyme, also derived from bacteria, is then used to turn some of the glucose into fructose.
In case you missed it a few months ago on PBS, the excellent The Mind of a Chef is out in downloadable form on iTunes and at Amazon. The first episode is available for free on the PBS site for try-before-you-buy purposes.
Michael Moss is a Pulitzer-winning investigative journalist for the NY Times and he’s written a book called Salt Sugar Fat.
From a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter at The New York Times comes the explosive story of the rise of the processed food industry and its link to the emerging obesity epidemic. Michael Moss reveals how companies use salt, sugar, and fat to addict us and, more important, how we can fight back.
Every year, the average American eats thirty-three pounds of cheese (triple what we ate in 1970) and seventy pounds of sugar (about twenty-two teaspoons a day). We ingest 8,500 milligrams of salt a day, double the recommended amount, and almost none of that comes from the shakers on our table. It comes from processed food. It’s no wonder, then, that one in three adults, and one in five kids, is clinically obese. It’s no wonder that twenty-six million Americans have diabetes, the processed food industry in the U.S. accounts for $1 trillion a year in sales, and the total economic cost of this health crisis is approaching $300 billion a year.
Moss researched the book for four years, interviewing hundreds of current and former processed-food industry employees and reviewing thousands of pages of industry memos. This weekend’s NY Times Magazine has a lengthy excerpt from the book that’s well worth a read.
Eventually, a line of the [Lunchables] trays, appropriately called Maxed Out, was released that had as many as nine grams of saturated fat, or nearly an entire day’s recommended maximum for kids, with up to two-thirds of the max for sodium and 13 teaspoons of sugar.
When I asked Geoffrey Bible, former C.E.O. of Philip Morris, about this shift toward more salt, sugar and fat in meals for kids, he smiled and noted that even in its earliest incarnation, Lunchables was held up for criticism. “One article said something like, ‘If you take Lunchables apart, the most healthy item in it is the napkin.’ “
Well, they did have a good bit of fat, I offered. “You bet,” he said. “Plus cookies.”
The prevailing attitude among the company’s food managers - through the 1990s, at least, before obesity became a more pressing concern - was one of supply and demand. “People could point to these things and say, ‘They’ve got too much sugar, they’ve got too much salt,’ ” Bible said. “Well, that’s what the consumer wants, and we’re not putting a gun to their head to eat it. That’s what they want. If we give them less, they’ll buy less, and the competitor will get our market. So you’re sort of trapped.” (Bible would later press Kraft to reconsider its reliance on salt, sugar and fat.)
And this is classic processed food as molecular gastronomy right here:
I brought him two shopping bags filled with a variety of chips to taste. He zeroed right in on the Cheetos. “This,” Witherly said, “is one of the most marvelously constructed foods on the planet, in terms of pure pleasure.” He ticked off a dozen attributes of the Cheetos that make the brain say more. But the one he focused on most was the puff’s uncanny ability to melt in the mouth. “It’s called vanishing caloric density,” Witherly said. “If something melts down quickly, your brain thinks that there’s no calories in it… you can just keep eating it forever.”
(via @bryce)
Some enterprising genius has registered the domain for Guy Fieri’s (famously panned) restaurant in Times Square and put up a fake menu chock full of hilarious foodstuffs. For instance, the Hobo Lobo Bordello Slam Jam Appetizer:
We take 38 oz of super-saddened, Cheez-gutted wolf meat, lambast it with honey pickle wasabi and pile drive it into an Ed Hardy-designed bucket. Sprayed with Axe and finished with a demiglaze of thick & funky Mushroom Dribblins.
Also, “Add a Cinnabon and two more Cinnabons $4.95”. Also, “superbanged”. Also, “ranch hose”.
Update: Copy for parts of the menu were crowdsourced from Twitter. Which doesn’t make it any less funny…just that the person who made it is not an “enterprising genius”. (via everyone)
For the NY Times, Ben Schott compiles an extensive list of wine-related jargon.
WHALE . PLAYER . BALLER . DEEP OCEAN
A serious drinker who will regularly DROP more than $1,000 on a single bottle. When on a furious spending spree, a WHALE is said to be DROPPING THE HAMMER. BIG WALES — or EXTRA BIG BALLERS (E.B.B.) — can spend more than $100,000 on wine during a meal.
Schott expanded on this list in a companion blog post:
But, vocabulary aside, the central thing I learned from these talented people is that if you are dining in a restaurant which employs a Sommelier, you should never, ever order your own wine.
If you know little or nothing about wine, they will guide you to a bottle far more interesting and suited to your food than you could possibly pluck from the list.
And if you are a wine aficionado, you will not know more than the Somm about their list - or what they are hiding off-list in the cellar.
See also What Restaurants Know (About You)
On Edible Geography, Nicola Twilley looks at what used to be a common process in Japan but is now only done on a boutique basis: apple tattooing.
As they are finally exposed to the elements for the final few weeks before harvest, the most perfect of these already perfect apples are then decorated with a sticker that blocks sunlight to stencil an image onto the fruit. This “fruit mark” might be the Japanese kanji for “good health,” as Susan Brown mentioned. Others have brand logos (most notably that of Apple, the company), and some, according to Stevens, are “negatives with pictures. One Japanese pop star put his picture on apples to give his entourage for presents.”
The marked fruit of the Montreuillois first won renown at the 1894 Saint Petersburg exhibition, where they presented the czar of Russia with an apple stenciled with his own portrait. King Leopold of Belgium, Edward VII of England, and Teddy Roosevelt received similar fruits.
(via @stewart)
Simply Orange juice is actually not all that simple. The taste of the the Coca-Cola-owned brand is governed by a complex algorithm that allows for the 600+ juice flavors to be tweaked throughout the year to ensure consistency. I liked The Atlantic Wire’s take on the news:
The explanation behind Coke’s complicated new orange juice scheme is nothing short of ironic. Basically, all of their customers are realizing the soda is really bad for you, so demand is shifting to healthy — or at least healthy-seeming — alternatives like juice. Coke also figured out that people are willing to pay 25 percent more for juice that’s not processed, that is, not made from concentrate. Enter Simply Orange. It is indeed just oranges, but boy have those oranges been through hell and back.
This is like White Zombie’s More Human Than Human except More Orange Juice Than Orange Juice.
Note: Illustration by Chris Piascik…prints & more are available.
Update: I updated the post above to point to Businessweek’s original report on Coke’s OJ business.
For their Big Mac index (a way to look at currency exchange using global Big Mac pricing) this year, the Economist has released an interactive tool for exploring the data.
The Big Mac index was invented by The Economist in 1986 as a lighthearted guide to whether currencies are at their “correct” level. It is based on the theory of purchasing-power parity (PPP), the notion that in the long run exchange rates should move towards the rate that would equalise the prices of an identical basket of goods and services (in this case, a burger) in any two countries. For example, the average price of a Big Mac in America at the start of 2013 was $4.37; in China it was only $2.57 at market exchange rates. So the “raw” Big Mac index says that the yuan was undervalued by 41% at that time.
They’re also made the data set available in .xls format for at-home analysis.
The Perennial Plate videos always make me jealous, and this beautiful cut of a “day” in India is no exception. This is gorgeous and you should watch it on full screen.
From back in August, Atul Gawande visits a Cheesecake Factory and wonders if the combination of “quality control, cost control, and innovation” achieved by chain restaurants can offer lessons to hospitals and other health care organizations.
The company’s target last year was at least 97.5-per-cent efficiency: the managers aimed at throwing away no more than 2.5 per cent of the groceries they bought, without running out. This seemed to me an absurd target. Achieving it would require knowing in advance almost exactly how many customers would be coming in and what they were going to want, then insuring that the cooks didn’t spill or toss or waste anything. Yet this is precisely what the organization has learned to do. The chain-restaurant industry has produced a field of computer analytics known as “guest forecasting.”
“We have forecasting models based on historical data-the trend of the past six weeks and also the trend of the previous year,” Gordon told me. “The predictability of the business has become astounding.” The company has even learned how to make adjustments for the weather or for scheduled events like playoff games that keep people at home.
A computer program known as Net Chef showed Luz that for this one restaurant food costs accounted for 28.73 per cent of expenses the previous week. It also showed exactly how many chicken breasts were ordered that week ($1,614 worth), the volume sold, the volume on hand, and how much of last week’s order had been wasted (three dollars’ worth). Chain production requires control, and they’d figured out how to achieve it on a mass scale.
As a doctor, I found such control alien-possibly from a hostile planet. We don’t have patient forecasting in my office, push-button waste monitoring, or such stringent, hour-by-hour oversight of the work we do, and we don’t want to. I asked Luz if he had ever thought about the contrast when he went to see a doctor. We were standing amid the bustle of the kitchen, and the look on his face shifted before he answered.
“I have,” he said. His mother was seventy-eight. She had early Alzheimer’s disease, and required a caretaker at home. Getting her adequate medical care was, he said, a constant battle.
This piece was on several best-of-the-year longreads lists and deservedly so. But the Factory’s 3000-calorie plate of pasta will probably not help the state of American health care.
Speaking of haute fast food, Jessica Saia creates the finest in bodega-to-table cuisine with the likes of Fritos and SPAM.
Seared Spam with Tostitos queso-dip mashed potatoes and canned green beans. Topped with a Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and Corn Nut salsa verde.
I want that into my mouth. Look at the sear marks on that SPAM! (via @mmpackeatwrite)
A truck carrying 27 tons of brunost, a Norwegian brown cheese, caught fire in a tunnel in Narvik on Thursday and burned with gooey rage until Monday. Closed during the fire, because who likes driving through tunnels of flame, the tunnel will take about a week to repair.
“This high concentration of fat and sugar is almost like petrol if it gets hot enough,” said Viggo Berg, a policeman.
Brown cheese is made from whey, contains up to 30 percent fat and has a caramel taste.
“I didn’t know that brown cheese burns so well,” said Kjell Bjoern Vinje at the Norwegian Public Roads Administration.
He added that in his 15 years in the administration, this was the first time cheese had caught fire on Norwegian roads.
(via @aaron_foster)
Note: Illustration by Chris Piascik…prints & more are available.
Writing for The Awl, Jeb Boniakowski shares his vision for a massive McDonald’s complex in Times Square that serves food from McDonald’s restaurants from around the world, offers discontinued food items (McLean Deluxe anyone?), and contains a food lab not unlike David Chang’s Momofuku test kitchen.
The central attraction of the ground floor level is a huge mega-menu that lists every item from every McDonald’s in the world, because this McDonald’s serves ALL of them. There would probably have to be touch screen gadgets to help you navigate the menu. There would have to be whole screens just dedicated to the soda possibilities. A concierge would offer suggestions. Celebrities on the iPad menus would have their own “meals” combining favorites from home (“Manu Ginobili says ‘Try the medialunas!’”) with different stuff for a unique combination ONLY available at McWorld. You could get the India-specific Chicken Mexican Wrap (“A traditional Mexican soft flat bread that envelops crispy golden brown chicken encrusted with a Mexican Cajun coating, and a salad mix of iceberg lettuce, carrot, red cabbage and celery, served with eggless mayonnaise, tangy Mexican Salsa sauce and cheddar cheese.” Wherever possible, the menu items’ descriptions should reflect local English style). Maybe a bowl of Malaysian McDonald’s Chicken Porridge or The McArabia Grilled Kofta, available in Pakistan and parts of the Middle East. You should watch this McArabia ad for the Middle Eastern-flavored remix of the “I’m Lovin’ It” song if for nothing else.
And I loved his take on fast food as molecular gastronomy:
How much difference really is there between McDonald’s super-processed food and molecular gastronomy? I used to know this guy who was a great chef, like his restaurant was in the Relais & Châteaux association and everything, and he’d always talk about how there were intense flavors in McDonald’s food that he didn’t know how to make. I’ve often thought that a lot of what makes crazy restaurant food taste crazy is the solemn appreciation you lend to it. If you put a Cheeto on a big white plate in a formal restaurant and serve it with chopsticks and say something like “It is a cornmeal quenelle, extruded at a high speed, and so the extrusion heats the cornmeal ‘polenta’ and flash-cooks it, trapping air and giving it a crispy texture with a striking lightness. It is then dusted with an ‘umami powder’ glutamate and evaporated-dairy-solids blend.” People would go just nuts for that. I mean even a Coca-Cola is a pretty crazy taste.
I love both mass-produced processed foods and the cooking of chefs like Grant Achatz & Ferran Adrià. Why is the former so maligned while the latter gets accolades when they’re the same thing? (And simultaneously not the same thing at all, but you get my gist.) Cheetos are amazing. Oscar Meyer bologna is amazing. Hot Potato Cold Potato is amazing. Quarter Pounders with Cheese are amazing. Adrià’s olives are amazing. Coca-Cola is amazing. (Warhol: ” A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.”) WD50’s Everything Bagel is amazing. Cheerios are amazing. All have unique flavors that don’t exist in nature — you’ve got to take food apart and put it back together in a different way to find those new tastes.
Some of these fancy chefs even have an appreciation of mass produced processed foods. Eric Ripert of the 4-star Le Berdardin visited McDonald’s and Burger King to research a new burger for one of his restaurants. (Ripert also uses processed Swiss cheese as a baseline flavor at Le Bernardin.) David Chang loves instant ramen and named his restaurants after its inventor. Ferran Adrià had his own flavor of Lay’s potato chips in Spain. Thomas Keller loves In-N-Out burgers. Grant Achatz eats Little Caesars pizza.
One of Sean Wilson’s chicken laid a huge egg and when he cracked it open, it contained another egg.
Not even a hoax! As the curator of the egg collection at London’s Natural History Museum explains, the double egg is rare but real and results from a fully formed egg being pushed back into the ovary, where another egg forms around it. Here’s another double egg and a report of a Texan double egg. (via colossal)
This looks interesting: Our Global Kitchen: Food, Nature, Culture exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC.
In the new exhibition Our Global Kitchen: Food, Nature, Culture, the American Museum of Natural History explores the complex and intricate food system that brings what we eat from farm to fork. In sections devoted to growing, transporting, cooking, eating, tasting, and celebrating, the exhibition illuminates the myriad ways that food is produced and moved throughout the world. With opportunities to taste seasonal treats in the working kitchen, cook a virtual meal, see rare artifacts from the Museum’s collection, and peek into the dining rooms of famous figures throughout history, visitors will examine the intersection of food, nature, culture, health, and history — and consider some of the most challenging issues of our time.
The exhibition is on from November 17, 2012 to August 11, 2013.
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