Mmmm.... Sugar

Check out National Geographic's fascinating article on sugar. Along with an analysis of the history of the sugar trade (involving, unfortunately, lots and lots of slaves and subjugated colonies), it's surprising just how many doctors assign blame for Americans' continued poor health on too much of the sweet stuff:

"fat makes up a smaller portion of the American diet than it did 20 years ago. Yet the portion of America that is obese has only grown larger. The primary reason, says Johnson, along with other experts, is sugar, and in particular fructose.
According to [Richard Johnson, a nephrologist at the University of Colorado Denver] and his colleagues... excessive sugar isn’t just empty calories; it’s toxic.
“It has nothing to do with its calories,” says endocrinologist Robert Lustig of the University of California, San Francisco. “Sugar is a poison by itself when consumed at high doses.”
Johnson summed up the conventional wisdom this way: Americans are fat because they eat too much and exercise too little. But they eat too much and exercise too little because they’re addicted to sugar, which not only makes them fatter but, after the initial sugar rush, also saps their energy, beaching them on the couch. “The reason you’re watching TV is not because TV is so good,” he said, “but because you have no energy to exercise, because you’re eating too much sugar.”

Tough Times

I knew the economy was bad for people that aren't as fortunate as me, but these numbers are astounding:

Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.
Survey data exclusive to The Associated Press points to an increasingly globalized U.S. economy, the widening gap between rich and poor, and the loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs as reasons for the trend.

That's a huge majority of the country! It's amazing that that this fact isn't the single-most reported story in the media, not manufactured deficit-alarm or other esoteric beltway "news". Regardless, the story continues:

Economic insecurity among whites also is more pervasive than is shown in the government’s poverty data, engulfing more than 76 percent of white adults by the time they turn 60, according to a new economic gauge being published next year by the Oxford University Press.
The gauge defines “economic insecurity” as a year or more of periodic joblessness, reliance on government aid such as food stamps or income below 150 percent of the poverty line. Measured across all races, the risk of economic insecurity rises to 79 percent.  

This is essential context when considering recent events like the recent GOP efforts to continue big Agriculture subsidies via the Farm Bill without funding food assistance (the SNAP program).

Quinoa Dilemma, Cont.

The Dish has posted some reactions to the article I linked to yesterday with some excellent points, disparaging the knock on vegans (I agree) and also making the excellent point that

"Nowhere in the article does she even mention that farmers become wealthier when the price of their crop increases. I am not an expert in the industrial organization of Bolivian quinoa farmers, but presumably they could choose to continue consuming quinoa, instead of exporting it, if they felt that was best. For Bolivian farmers, at least, the rising price of quinoa only increased their set of options."

Quinoa Dilemma

The Guardian alerts us to the fact that Bolivians can't afford their once-ubiquitous quinoa because of price increases driven by high demand. Money quote:

The appetite of countries such as ours for this grain has pushed up prices to such an extent that poorer people in Peru and Bolivia, for whom it was once a nourishing staple food, can no longer afford to eat it. Imported junk food is cheaper. In Lima, quinoa now costs more than chicken. Outside the cities, and fueled by overseas demand, the pressure is on to turn land that once produced a portfolio of diverse crops into quinoa monoculture.

In fact, the quinoa trade is yet another troubling example of a damaging north-south exchange, with well-intentioned health and ethics-led consumers here unwittingly driving poverty there. It's beginning to look like a cautionary tale of how a focus on exporting premium foods can damage the producer country's food security

I'm torn about this one. On one hand, it would be hard to give up quinoa, mainly because it's awesome. As this and many other articles states, it's extra tasty and "...has a high protein content (between 14%-18%), and it contains all those pesky, yet essential, amino acids needed for good health." On the other hand, the picture that this article paints is not a pretty one for the farmers of the grain (although I might add, it's a bit too judgmental on "self-obsessed vegans" for it's own good). I'm afraid that I don't know much about growing quinoa, but the article implies that it's only grown successfully in South America:

"Three years ago, the pioneering Fife Diet, Europe's biggest local food-eating project, sowed an experimental crop of quinoa. It failed, and the experiment has not been repeated. But the attempt at least recognized the need to strengthen our own food security by lessening our reliance on imported foods, and looking first and foremost to what can be grown, or reared, on our doorstep."

One of the under reported elements of the global food explosion, to me, has been the unintended consequences of the appetites of the first world. In some instances, like the importance of shade-grown and fair trade coffee, the effects are well-known. Others, like the effect of cheap US-grown corn on the Mexican  farmer, or apparently the quinoa issue, are much less so.

Pumpkin Beer

Was at a party this Saturday that served up a bunch of Pumpkin beers. Here's what I tried:

• The Shipyard Pumpkinhead Ale smelled and tasted a bit like cinnamon at first, but finished just like a regular lager. I liked it but it was a bit thin.
• Cisco Brewing Pumple Drumkin. Way too much going on in this beer - the  nutmeg and pumpkin overwhelmed everything else. Tasted like a candy bar to me.
• Harpoon UFO Pumpkin. Meh.

Comprehensive review of the sub-genre at boston.com here. I'm not impressed.

Banana Fungus, Go Away

I've known for some time now that there's a potential threat to my favorite food: the bannana. Boing Boing gives us a quick run-down of why this is:

Bananas, as we know them, cannot reproduce. The ones we eat are sterile hybrids. Like mules. The only way that there are more bananas is that humans take offshoots from the stems of existing banana trees, transplant them, and allow them to grow into a tree of their own. It's basically a cheap, low-tech version of cloning, and it has a long history in agriculture. ...

The downside to this is that clones are, shall we say, not terribly genetically diverse. Turns out, a lack of genetic diversity is a great way to make yourself vulnerable to disease. Back in the 1950s, a fungus all but wiped out a variety of banana called the Gros Michael. Up until then, the Gros Michel had been the top-selling banana in the world. It was the banana your grandparents ate. You eat the Cavendish, a different variety that replaced Gros Michael largely on the strength of its resistance to the killer fungus.

According to the article, a fungus called Black Sigatoka can kill banana trees and reduce yields in the survivors, and so efforts are underway to develop a replacement strain of banana just in case the Black Sigatoka is successful: the Goldfinger. Click through to see a picture.

Here's hoping that the Goldfinger tastes as good as the Cavendish!

Genetically-Modified Wheat?

I did not know that the wheat we're eating today is a relatively modern invention:

Modern wheat remained essentially the same until the mid-twentieth century, when the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (IMWIC) and other wheat research centers set out to combat world hunger. Over the following decades, thousands of new varieties were created to dramatically increase yields. ...
[William Davis, author of Wheat Belly] writes, “The oversight in the flurry of breeding activity, such as that conducted at IMWIC, was that, despite dramatic changes in the genetic makeup of wheat and other crops, no animal or human safety testing was conducted on the new genetic strains that were created. So intent were the efforts to increase yield, so confident were plant geneticists that hybridization yielded safe products for human consumption, so urgent was the cause of world hunger, that these products of agricultural research were released into the food supply without human safety concerns being part of the equation.”

Coming Soon: the Ashland Farmers Market

My lovely wife, despite being 9 months pregnant, has been hard at work organizing the inagural season of the Ashland Farmers Market. It sounds like it's going to be a great opportunity to buy local! Details from the Ashland Tab:

The Ashland Farmers Market will officially open on Saturday, June 9, and will be open on Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. until Oct. 20. The market will be set up at 125 Front St., on the grassy stretch of land diagonally across the street from the library.
The market is a “grow it or make it” market. Among the produce vendors that will be participating are Sunshine Farm, in Sherborn, Arcadian Farm, in Holliston, and Long Life Farm, in Hopkinton. A list of participating vendors will be available online at www.ashlandfarmersmarket.org.
Besides produce, there will be meat, fish, honey and bakery vendors. Organizers have also lined up specialty and artisan vendors, and there are plans for a children’s tent, a community organization tent and entertainment.
The goal is to provide a fun place where families can purchase locally grown, fresh produce, grass-fed beef, and other healthy food choices. People are encouraged to sign up at info@ashlandfarmersmarket.org to be included in email blasts for vendor specials and other updates.

5 Packaged Foods You Shouldn't Buy

Grist tells us that there are five packaged foods we should never buy: soup, soup stock, canned beans, hummus and cereal. Noble ideas, but tough to implement in practice. For instance, I love Cheerios, and there's no way that I'm going to be making my own Cheerios. Now, I suspect that this point was made for those people that eat "sugar cereals" and not those with whole grains - the article specifically mentions sugared wheat cereals. On the other hand, I already make my own granola and combine the Cheerios with the granola, so i'm basically already meeting the Gristers halfway.

The other points are intriguing and I may take them up on this challenge. In fact, I bought a bag of beans this weekend rather than canned beans so we'll see how this works - so far, I've been forgetting to soak the beans so there hasn't been any chili on my table for the last few days. It all comes down to planning and priorities, which can be tough to do for two working parents with two children.

What do you think? Any processed foods that you make a point to avoid?

What's Not For Dinner?

Mark Bittman in the New York Times provides a staggering statistic: “Americans eat more meat than any other population in the world; about one-sixth of the total, though we’re less than one-twentieth of the population.”

I wasn't aware of this, but over the last year I've been doing my part to reduce this figure. For a number of reasons, I've been cutting back on the animal flesh, including:

• Reading Michael Pollian’s In Defense of Food. This book taught me not only just how bad too much meat is for you but also how resource intensive it is to produce meat. For example, The Telegraph points to a study that concluded that “Producing 2.2lb of beef generates as much greenhouse gas as driving a car non-stop for three hours." Damn. And don't get me started on the U.S.'s damaging addiction to corn subsidies.
• Acid reflux. Eating less meat results in less intense reflux, an unexpected but very welcome side effect.
• CSA meat. For a year or so, I was getting all my meat from a CSA which taught me just how much better locally-produced, organic meat tastes than the mass-produced stuff you buy in the supermarket. Seriously, if you haven't tried a good steak from a local farm, you don't know what you're missing.

It's not that I dislike meat: quite the contrary. I just don't eat as much of it any more. And it turns out that i'm not alone. In the same article, Bittman  writes that

The Values Institute at DGWB Advertising and Communications just named the rise of “flexitarianism” — an eating style that reduces the amount of meat without “going vegetarian” — as one of its top five consumer health trends for 2012. In an Allrecipes.com survey of 1,400 members, more than one-third of home cooks said they ate less meat in 2011 than in 2010. Back in June, a survey found that 50 percent of American adults said they were aware of the Meatless Monday campaign, with 27 percent of those aware reporting that they were actively reducing their meat consumption.

Nice to be on the cutting edge of a trend for a change!

Where Art Thou, Organic Bourbon?

Grist points out that not only is organic burbon whiskey hard to find, there’s a reason for that:

Bourbon gives us an interesting window into GMO grain, because the spirit must by definition be made with at least 51 percent corn. Consider the fact that 85 percent of the corn grown in the U.S. is now genetically engineered, and you can guess why organic bourbon won't be appearing in a liquor store near you any time soon.

Supply and demand. The only consistent demand for  bourbon without GMO corn are the overseas markets. Domestically, the consumer apparently doesn't care (to be honest with you, I look for this stuff and whiskey just slipped through the cracks). In addition, the GMO corn is cheaper, mainly due (I suspect) to government subsidies, making the end product more inexpensive as well.

The end result? Most of the suppliers of non-GMO corn are fading away. And those that are holding on may not be around for much longer; as Jim Rutledge, the 45-year veteran distiller at Four Roses, says, “due to cross-pollination, even the farmers not using GMO corn will end up with it eventually.”

Complementary Tastes

For you cooks out there, a ginormous graphic depicting all of the complementary cooking flavors. I think i'm going to use this as wallpaper for my kitchen.

Tab Dump

Some things I've read lately, most of them from the Daily Dish:

- This is your Brain on an Orgasm

- Musicians have Better Brains! Money quote: "...musicians’ brains are highly developed in a way that makes the musicians alert, interested in learning, disposed to see the whole picture, calm, and playful. The same traits have previously been found among world-class athletes, top-level managers, and individuals who practice transcendental meditation"

- This sounds like a fascinating book: Stealing Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Modern Western Magic by Nevill Drury The reviewer makes a good point that i've often pondered myself:

...humanity keeps clinging to its belief systems, its religious leaders, and its prayer. More than that, we’re dipping back into the magical realms — one would think that if superstition were to be eradicated through the power of reason and rationality, magic would be the first to go. It turns out our hunger for the irrational and the intuitive is more insatiable than previously assumed. [Examples of magickal belief systems popular today] And yet the atheists keep on, telling us that we don’t have to believe in God. It maybe never occurred to them that perhaps we want to.

- How to make yourself smarter in 20 days.

- Why it's okay for me to double salt my popcorn. As long as it's unrefined sea salt:

The differences between refined and unrefined salt are significant. (Make sure you use unrefined sea salt, as other sea salts can be just as processed as ordinary table salt.) Unrefined sea salt contains about 82 percent sodium chloride and the rest is comprised of essential minerals including magnesium and calcium; and trace elements, like iodine, potassium, and selenium. Not coincidentally, they help with maintaining fluid balance and replenishing electrolytes.
Refined, processed salt is actually an industrial leftover, according to Nina Planck's book Real Food. Planck describes how the chemical industry removes the valuable trace elements found in salt and heats it 1,200 degrees F. What's left is 100 percent sodium chloride, plus industrial additives including aluminum, anticaking agents, and dextrose, which stains the salt purple. To gain its pure-white sheen, the salt is then bleached. Thus refined salt is hardly a whole food; and consuming a jolt of sodium chloride upsets fluid balance and dehydrates cells, to say nothing of the harm the various additives and bleach residues may cause.

Diaper Mushrooms

As someone that tries very hard to be ecologically minded, my guiltiest fault is that I've been exclusively using disposable diapers for my kids. I did try using some cloth diapers when Hunter was young, but not only was it disgusting them, but it just added to the relentless mountains of laundry that fill my house.

The answer? According to Grist, mushrooms:

A team of researchers has come up with an excuse for switching back to disposable diapers. They found that within 2 months, oyster mushrooms will consume 90 percent of a disposable diaper. Within four months, the entire thing is gone.
Plus, the resulting mushrooms are safe to eat for anyone who can look past their origins. It's like a double sustainability rainbow.

Lunch

Just had an hour long lunch, with beer, at the Portsmouth Brewing Company. Loving the relaxed pace without the children!

Best Coffee in Portsmouth

Breaking New Grounds. Their Costa Rican blend is sublime.

Tapas Conclusion

Can't go wrong with the chef's selection. Esp. When it concludes with gourmet strawberry shortcake. While drinking sangria.

Tapas #3

Carrot walnut soup with a pork belly crouton. Most amazing course to date.

Life in Portsmouth

Kelly and I are enjoying a weekend away in wonderful Portsmouth, NH. What you'll read in the next few days are our adventures.

Started off with Prosecco in the hotel room. Now eating Tapas at Cava in an alley off of Hanover street.

Note to self: when on romantic evening, do not squeeze lime juice into your wife's eye. Early fail.

So. Much. Cheese.

Nearly every ounce of Kraft cheese product—from Velveeta to Kraft Singles—spends part of its life in a 680-pound container inside this 400,000-square-foot subterranean fridge.