Friday, December 22, 2006
The Curious Cook
If you are remotely interested in the science of food and cooking, then you need to acquaint yourself at once with the work of Harold McGee. Acquire his book On Food and Cooking at once. Then navigate your way over to his Curious Cook blog. I guarantee delight and enlightenment.
Monday, December 18, 2006
A snippet from Kirkus Reviews:
Of all the cultivatable ingredients, why have we chosen certain of them and rejected others? McNamee evaluates 30 of the most important ingredients, organized alphabetically, from almonds to wheat. He looks at their scientific makeup and nutritional value, as well as their social and culinary history and cultural relevance.... The author’s research is exhaustive, his pages packed with fascinating detail, and he does an excellent job of marrying the historical and scientific aspects of each ingredient.
Truffle cops
I'm not particularly proud of it, but I don't much care for truffles. The taste is too rich and, well, damp socks-ish to pass muster with my palate, and though I am a great fan of mushrooms, I pass when the tartufi come around. Still, it's comforting to know that someone is watching out for those who love the things, as this Washington Post story about truffle cops assures us. Qu'est-ce que vous ferez? What ya gonna do?
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
A note on Moveable Feasts
Michael Ableman, author and organic farmer, offers this kind note on Moveable Feasts:
Everything we eat has a story. Knowing that story not only enhances the pleasure of the table, it also helps us regain a relationship to food---no longer as anonymous commodity, but as a critical part of our history, our culture, and the natural world we all come from. From almonds to wheat, Gregory McNamee tells us these stories with humor and intelligence in an engaging style that is both entertaining and enlightening.
Plant Consciousness
Do plants have consciousness? Could be. Here's a little piece I wrote on the question for the new Encyclopaedia Britannica blog.
Thursday, August 31, 2006
Just What Does Organic Mean, Anyway?
If you were an environmentally conscious shopper in 1980 and lived outside the orbit of health-food stores and coops, you had to search high and low for goods that would pass muster as “organic.” A quarter-century later, with heightened awareness of the health-enhancing or health-damaging effects of food, a visit to even the smallest and remotest of groceries can turn up plenty of goods bearing that moniker.
One person’s “organic,” though, is another’s industrial. It’s only been in the very recent past that manufacturers and regulatory agencies have been able to agree on just what that term means. Even so, there’s some variation: the National Organic Standards Board, a trade association, considers organic agriculture to be “an ecological production management system that promotes and enhances biodiversity, biological cycles and soil biological activity. It is based on minimal use of off-farm inputs and on management practices that restore, maintain and enhance ecological harmony.”
This ecological definition sidesteps, ever so gently, the meaning most people associate with the term--namely, the use of nonchemical fertilizers and pesticides as the food is growing. And that’s a tough definition to follow, too, for again, one person’s chemical brew is another’s organic compound.
It’s most useful for consumers to understand organic as a label with a very particular, and quite legal, meaning. In 1980 branding foods and other consumer items as organic was an act of goodwill based on an informal honor system: if I didn’t spray a beehive with antibiotic to control foulbrood but instead supplied it with a new queen once a year, that was good enough to brand my honey “organic.” Today, however, the label is more rigorously controlled, and organic certification requires that the grower or processor indeed not use synthetic chemicals (including food additives) or genetically modified materials; that the farmland of origin have been kept free of such chemicals for at least three years; and that the producer be open to regular inspection to assure that standards are maintained.
The United States Department of Agriculture puts it this way: “Organic crops are raised without using most conventional pesticides, petroleum-based fertilizers, or sewage sludge-based fertilizers. Animals raised on an organic operation must be fed organic feed and given access to the outdoors. They are given no antibiotics or growth hormones.”
But there’s a rub, at least in the United States. Whereas European governments tend to be stricter with their terms, the USDA allows a sliding scale: as of October 2002, only goods that are made entirely of certified organic materials and methods are labeled “100 percent organic,” while those whose makeup is only 85 percent pure, so to speak, are labeled “organic.” Both categories can bear a USDA seal of approval.
Somewhat less straightforward is another category, though, which permits the use of up to 30 percent nonorganic materials and methods in a product, which may then be legally labeled “made with organic ingredients.” Products that are less than 70 percent organic may not use the label “organic” at all, unless it is to identify particular ingredients. A beef stew, for example, made with 100 percent organic peas may advertise that fact without branding the whole product organic.
Careful shoppers will want to understand the meaning of those labels, which could be a little easier to follow. We wonder why a pure product shouldn’t be labeled “100 percent organic,” while a less pure product shouldn’t be labeled more accurately: “50 percent organic,” “10 percent organic,” “Absolutely no organic whatever.” It’s also worth noting that “organic” does not necessarily mean “natural” and vice versa; food that is labeled as “organic” means that it has met USDA standards, which are among the toughest in the world, while food labeled “natural” requires no such rigorous measure and can, in point of fact, be very unnatural indeed--think margarine.
The requirements are tough, but it’s proven worth the trouble for most producers who have chosen to go the organic route. Consumers have proven to be more than willing to pay higher prices for certified organic products, which are gaining more and more market share. It’s a far cry from the bad old days of 1980, and greater gains are still to come.
One person’s “organic,” though, is another’s industrial. It’s only been in the very recent past that manufacturers and regulatory agencies have been able to agree on just what that term means. Even so, there’s some variation: the National Organic Standards Board, a trade association, considers organic agriculture to be “an ecological production management system that promotes and enhances biodiversity, biological cycles and soil biological activity. It is based on minimal use of off-farm inputs and on management practices that restore, maintain and enhance ecological harmony.”
This ecological definition sidesteps, ever so gently, the meaning most people associate with the term--namely, the use of nonchemical fertilizers and pesticides as the food is growing. And that’s a tough definition to follow, too, for again, one person’s chemical brew is another’s organic compound.
It’s most useful for consumers to understand organic as a label with a very particular, and quite legal, meaning. In 1980 branding foods and other consumer items as organic was an act of goodwill based on an informal honor system: if I didn’t spray a beehive with antibiotic to control foulbrood but instead supplied it with a new queen once a year, that was good enough to brand my honey “organic.” Today, however, the label is more rigorously controlled, and organic certification requires that the grower or processor indeed not use synthetic chemicals (including food additives) or genetically modified materials; that the farmland of origin have been kept free of such chemicals for at least three years; and that the producer be open to regular inspection to assure that standards are maintained.
The United States Department of Agriculture puts it this way: “Organic crops are raised without using most conventional pesticides, petroleum-based fertilizers, or sewage sludge-based fertilizers. Animals raised on an organic operation must be fed organic feed and given access to the outdoors. They are given no antibiotics or growth hormones.”
But there’s a rub, at least in the United States. Whereas European governments tend to be stricter with their terms, the USDA allows a sliding scale: as of October 2002, only goods that are made entirely of certified organic materials and methods are labeled “100 percent organic,” while those whose makeup is only 85 percent pure, so to speak, are labeled “organic.” Both categories can bear a USDA seal of approval.
Somewhat less straightforward is another category, though, which permits the use of up to 30 percent nonorganic materials and methods in a product, which may then be legally labeled “made with organic ingredients.” Products that are less than 70 percent organic may not use the label “organic” at all, unless it is to identify particular ingredients. A beef stew, for example, made with 100 percent organic peas may advertise that fact without branding the whole product organic.
Careful shoppers will want to understand the meaning of those labels, which could be a little easier to follow. We wonder why a pure product shouldn’t be labeled “100 percent organic,” while a less pure product shouldn’t be labeled more accurately: “50 percent organic,” “10 percent organic,” “Absolutely no organic whatever.” It’s also worth noting that “organic” does not necessarily mean “natural” and vice versa; food that is labeled as “organic” means that it has met USDA standards, which are among the toughest in the world, while food labeled “natural” requires no such rigorous measure and can, in point of fact, be very unnatural indeed--think margarine.
The requirements are tough, but it’s proven worth the trouble for most producers who have chosen to go the organic route. Consumers have proven to be more than willing to pay higher prices for certified organic products, which are gaining more and more market share. It’s a far cry from the bad old days of 1980, and greater gains are still to come.
Monday, August 21, 2006
Pesto Famine
Hailstorms have destroyed 80 percent of Genoa's famed basil crop, according to a story in the Guardian UK dated Thursday, August 17. The event portends a pesto shortage throughout Italy and, by extension, the world--so pesto lovers in temperate climates had better start growing their own basil, which is a good thing to do in any event, particularly if you loathe mosquitoes.
More in the basil chapter in Moveable Feasts.
Sunday, March 05, 2006
Carrot
The famed animator Chuck Jones had no intention of changing America’s food habits when, half a century ago, he stuck a carrot in Bugs Bunny’s hand as talisman, protector, and object of desire. Rabbits like carrots, Jones must have figured: after all, didn’t Peter Cottontail always head first for Farmer Brown’s carrot patch when out raiding for food?
Now, insofar as rabbit culinary preferences go, any old weed would have done nicely for Bugs. Put a carrot in a pile of assorted vegetables and greens and set it before a hungry bunny, and the cute rodent will show no special preference for Daucus carota sativa. But Bugs Bunny is a more influential rabbit than most. Call it the purest of coincidence, but Bugs’s lifespan has coincided very nicely with a marked upsurge in the last few decades of carrot consumption in this country.
That it took a cartoon to make the carrot popular is a strange matter. Still, you can’t really blame Americans for not valuing the bright-orange vegetable more highly than they do. As a food item, it is notably limited: you can’t do much more with a carrot that boil it or gnaw on it raw, and most cookbooks skip by it with only a nod. Although it was one of the first food plants brought from England to North America by the colonists, the carrot remained almost an afterthought for centuries, something to add to stews and casseroles—but more often to animal fodder. Strange to say, but one of the carrot’s most popular manifestations—that is, in the form of cake—seems to be an innovation that dates only to the early 1960s, traced to a bake sale in Texas. Indeed, in the American culinary past, its closest relatives enjoyed wider use than the carrot itself, they being plants used almost exclusively as spices: anise, cumin, caraway, dill, chervil, parsley, coriander, and fennel. Just so, even today we do not much use an even closer relative, the plant known as Queen Anne’s lace, which is in fact a carrot that escaped from some New England garden long ago and reverted to wild form.
Even with the influence of Bugs, American consumption of carrots falls far short of that in Europe, where purple, white, and red varieties of carrots are sold alongside the carrot we know. That bright-orange vegetable is a hybrid cultivated in Holland—governed by the House of Orange, which makes the carrot a patriotic thing—in the seventeenth century from varieties common in Europe since ancient times, brought there from the carrot’s original home of Afghanistan. Although there is no clear chronology on which to draw, historians suppose that trade by way of Mesopotamia brought the carrot first to Egypt, where it is depicted in papyrus scrolls. The expansion of international trade networks under the Roman empire introduced the Egyptian carrot, a purple variety, to Europe; it was reintroduced, now in yellow form, to southern Europe by Muslim invaders in the 1100s, and a century later it was being cultivated extensively in Germany and the Low Countries.
The carrot has long been a staple in the British Isles as well, where it has been associated with the diet of poverty. As the actress Joyce Green recalls in her 1947 memoir Salmagundi, her well-to-do mother was horror-stricken at the thought of having to endure a nightly meal of cooked carrots with a little boiled cabbage during World War II, although such a diet kept millions of Britons from starving.
Two decades before, the American automobile maker Henry Ford tried to impress upon his business associates the value of a vegetable-based diet. He held a banquet in a Detroit hotel that highlighted carrots in all their splendor, complete with a master of ceremonies dressed in a carrot suit who proclaimed, “I am King Carrota! I am full of vitamins, full of iron, full of iodine, full of bottled sunshine. I have no enemy but a bad cook. I am a friend of flappers and the bald-headed, the spindly baby and three-chinned monsters, but who shall mix me with canned peas shall be consigned to outer darkness.” After a twelve-course meal consisting entirely of carrots—carrot soup, carrot loaf, carrot au gratin, carrot torte—washed down with carrot juice, a doctor remarked that he had seen children who ate too many carrots turn yellow, which certainly dampened the festivities, at least at his table.
Eat a few dozen carrots a day, indeed, and you run the risk of developing jaundice, for the body can take only so much of a good thing. And—every child knows the horrifying phrase—carrots are surely a good thing, good for a person. Low in calories (about 50 to a cup of raw carrots, and 70 to a cup of cooked carrots), fat free, and high in fiber, they make for a nutritional and filling side dish or snack; if you eat only a couple a day, you can do much to reduce your blood cholesterol. They are also rich in potassium, a mineral in which too many Americans are deficient. Carrots contain other metallic minerals as well, such as iron, magnesium, and selenium, which explains why sparks sometimes fly when they’re cooked in a microwave. As the microwaves deflect from the metals, they produce an arc. Whole carrots can be difficult to cook evenly in a microwave, and they have a strange tendency to burn at their tips. [More follows in Moveable Feasts...]
Now, insofar as rabbit culinary preferences go, any old weed would have done nicely for Bugs. Put a carrot in a pile of assorted vegetables and greens and set it before a hungry bunny, and the cute rodent will show no special preference for Daucus carota sativa. But Bugs Bunny is a more influential rabbit than most. Call it the purest of coincidence, but Bugs’s lifespan has coincided very nicely with a marked upsurge in the last few decades of carrot consumption in this country.
That it took a cartoon to make the carrot popular is a strange matter. Still, you can’t really blame Americans for not valuing the bright-orange vegetable more highly than they do. As a food item, it is notably limited: you can’t do much more with a carrot that boil it or gnaw on it raw, and most cookbooks skip by it with only a nod. Although it was one of the first food plants brought from England to North America by the colonists, the carrot remained almost an afterthought for centuries, something to add to stews and casseroles—but more often to animal fodder. Strange to say, but one of the carrot’s most popular manifestations—that is, in the form of cake—seems to be an innovation that dates only to the early 1960s, traced to a bake sale in Texas. Indeed, in the American culinary past, its closest relatives enjoyed wider use than the carrot itself, they being plants used almost exclusively as spices: anise, cumin, caraway, dill, chervil, parsley, coriander, and fennel. Just so, even today we do not much use an even closer relative, the plant known as Queen Anne’s lace, which is in fact a carrot that escaped from some New England garden long ago and reverted to wild form.
Even with the influence of Bugs, American consumption of carrots falls far short of that in Europe, where purple, white, and red varieties of carrots are sold alongside the carrot we know. That bright-orange vegetable is a hybrid cultivated in Holland—governed by the House of Orange, which makes the carrot a patriotic thing—in the seventeenth century from varieties common in Europe since ancient times, brought there from the carrot’s original home of Afghanistan. Although there is no clear chronology on which to draw, historians suppose that trade by way of Mesopotamia brought the carrot first to Egypt, where it is depicted in papyrus scrolls. The expansion of international trade networks under the Roman empire introduced the Egyptian carrot, a purple variety, to Europe; it was reintroduced, now in yellow form, to southern Europe by Muslim invaders in the 1100s, and a century later it was being cultivated extensively in Germany and the Low Countries.
The carrot has long been a staple in the British Isles as well, where it has been associated with the diet of poverty. As the actress Joyce Green recalls in her 1947 memoir Salmagundi, her well-to-do mother was horror-stricken at the thought of having to endure a nightly meal of cooked carrots with a little boiled cabbage during World War II, although such a diet kept millions of Britons from starving.
Two decades before, the American automobile maker Henry Ford tried to impress upon his business associates the value of a vegetable-based diet. He held a banquet in a Detroit hotel that highlighted carrots in all their splendor, complete with a master of ceremonies dressed in a carrot suit who proclaimed, “I am King Carrota! I am full of vitamins, full of iron, full of iodine, full of bottled sunshine. I have no enemy but a bad cook. I am a friend of flappers and the bald-headed, the spindly baby and three-chinned monsters, but who shall mix me with canned peas shall be consigned to outer darkness.” After a twelve-course meal consisting entirely of carrots—carrot soup, carrot loaf, carrot au gratin, carrot torte—washed down with carrot juice, a doctor remarked that he had seen children who ate too many carrots turn yellow, which certainly dampened the festivities, at least at his table.
Eat a few dozen carrots a day, indeed, and you run the risk of developing jaundice, for the body can take only so much of a good thing. And—every child knows the horrifying phrase—carrots are surely a good thing, good for a person. Low in calories (about 50 to a cup of raw carrots, and 70 to a cup of cooked carrots), fat free, and high in fiber, they make for a nutritional and filling side dish or snack; if you eat only a couple a day, you can do much to reduce your blood cholesterol. They are also rich in potassium, a mineral in which too many Americans are deficient. Carrots contain other metallic minerals as well, such as iron, magnesium, and selenium, which explains why sparks sometimes fly when they’re cooked in a microwave. As the microwaves deflect from the metals, they produce an arc. Whole carrots can be difficult to cook evenly in a microwave, and they have a strange tendency to burn at their tips. [More follows in Moveable Feasts...]
Moveable Feasts
This blog is designed to be a meeting place and news front for my book Moveable Feasts, as it's now called, coming from Praeger in the fall of 2006. When the book is closer to being a reality, this page will heat up. In the meanwhile, please feel free to visit me at any of the links listed below my profile.
Moveable Feasts is a food history, treating the origins, science, and lore of thirty common foods, from almonds to wheat and good things between, all written in what I hope you'll find to be a lively and entertaining manner. A sample follows in the next posting.
Moveable Feasts is a food history, treating the origins, science, and lore of thirty common foods, from almonds to wheat and good things between, all written in what I hope you'll find to be a lively and entertaining manner. A sample follows in the next posting.
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