Since When Is Cane Sugar A Health Food? Zak sent me a link to an extremely interesting NY Times article where I learned that since consumers have decided that high fructose corn syrup is the devil that has caused rampant obesity in the United States (and yes, it may be -one- factor among -many- involved in the obesity problem–but by no means should anyone believe it is the sole cause), cane sugar is being used as an ingredient in many processed foods, and this fact is being used as a marketing tool.

Which is fine–there are people who want to avoid HFCS, and that is great, so labeling the absence of it and the presence of cane sugar is fine. However, calling cane sugar a “healthy alternative” to HFCS is stretching the truth just a wee bit.

Oh, hell, let’s just say it is patent bull crap. Sugar is still not good for you in large quantities, no matter whether it comes from sugar cane, beets or corn. Cane sugar may be more cleanly metabolized by our bodies, but it is still sugar, and frankly, I don’t think it needs to be in every brand of spaghetti sauce, salad dressing and bread in copious amounts on the grocery store shelf.

Mark Bittman Says: Eat Better Food, Don’t Worry About Organic I like Mark Bittman. Even when I disagree with him, I like him–he just has such a sensible, no-nonsense way of putting his opinions that I respect and enjoy. In his recent article in the NY Times, Eating Food That’s Better For You, Organic Or Not, he points out that he would rather see Americans eating more conventionally or organically grown fruits and vegetables and other whole, minimally processed foods than have them get the idea that an organic Oreo cookie is somehow healthier than a regular Oreo cookie.

And that is a point that I have found over and over in talking with people who are not in my immediate circle of friends. A lot of people in this country have the idea that the USDA Organic label on a package of cookies, crackers or cereal instantly imbues that particular food with immediate healthy to eat status, which is just not true. “Organic” does not necessarily equate with “healthy,” “sustainable,” or “local,” when it comes to food. All it means is that the food is grown without chemical fertilizers and pesticides, that it has not been treated with sewage sludge and that it has been processed with minimal artificial ingredients and chemicals. That’s it.

As Bittman points out, it can be organically grown in China, then shipped to the United States, which is still not very sustainable. And as he quotes author and nutritionist Marion Nestle, “Organic junk food is still junk food.”

So, as he says, let’s all get off our duffs and eat more vegetables and fruits and leave the organic Oreos to themselves.

Will The Food Revolution Be Televised? If you get the reference to the subhead for this bit, you get a cookie, because you win extra points for obscure cultural awareness. Zak, you don’t count, because I know you know what I am talking about.

Once again, we come to a NY Times article, Is a Food Revolution Now In Season? to see that all of those foodie activists and authors I have been reading and writing about for years: Alice Waters, Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser and Marion Nestle, thrilled to finally have their voices heard by the new presidential administration. So thrilled in fact, that they are pushing their agenda for a better, healthier food system for the United States, that they are heading to Washington, writing letters, meeting with Tom Vilsack, our new Secretary of Agriculture, and First Lady Michelle Obama, armed with copies of the film, Food, Inc.

Of course, the change these activists want will not come as fast as they want, but it appears that even among farm-state Senators, copies of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma are being seen tucked in briefcases and under arms.

That leads me to think that change is coming–faster than I expected, but still slowly.

And that is fine–as any ecologist or gardener will tell you, slow, steady change is the way natural systems work.

Fast change is what is likely to be unsustainable and not stick. Slow change is the way to work toward long-term goals.

I know I just wrote about soup.

Actually, I wrote about a specific soup, and gave a recipe.

Now, I am just writing about soup in general, because in one of the comments about the Broccoli-Cheese and Kale Soup, a reader told me about something a cookbook author said that just got me all riled up and gave me the twitches.I could feel the indignant Depression-era farm wife who was my Grandma rising up from the grave and urging me to write a harangue worthy of Gram, my city-dwelling other grandmother, whose razor-edged tongue was known to often wither any damned fool ignoramus who dared utter a silly idea in her presence.

In other words, my grandmothers, if they were alive to hear such a thing would be set off on a tizzy of combined laughter and scorn such that I feel moved to speak for them, and stand up for the ideals which I was taught in childhood, ideals which could serve many people well in this desperate economy. Ideals that have made me loathe to throw any morsel of edible food away, because I was raised by people who lived through the Great Depression, and who worked with their hands to grow and produce the food they ate. Such folk do not look too kindly upon the waste of food. Rather, these folk tend to see it as sacrilege, and I most heartily agree.

So, what got me all het up?

Laura said, “I am glad to hear you say all that about older veggies and aromatics. One of my cookbooks, which I like otherwise, makes this big deal about how it is passe or some such nonsense to make soup out of anything less than perfect onions, etc, and every time I throw an older onion into a soup (there’s one in the chicken stock simmering away for the soup I am cooking right now with the older sweet potato) I think well good lord if I listened to that book I’d be throwing away a perfectly edible onion. After all before mass transit those onions would be looking pretty sad by now in the north but people still used them!”

I hear you, sister! Preach on, can I get an amen?

Amen.

Passe?

Since when is frugality passe? I mean, really. That is just such utter nonsense, I am half-tempted to just guffaw and walk away, but no, I think that opinions like this need to be confronted and answered because they are so wrong it isn’t even funny.

I mean, I once had a commenter on one of my recipes where I had used dried thyme leaves say, and I am not making this up, “No one uses dried herbs anymore–it is just so passe.”

Well pardon me, Mr. Passepants. That is what I wanted to say, but I refrained, since it was a cheap shot, and I didn’t feel like being a twitchy twit that day. But now, I will say it, not just to that guy, but to the unknown cookbook author and to the one chef in culinary school who saw me use a rubbery carrot to flavor and color a court bouillon for poaching salmon and said, “Garbage in, garbage out.”

(What is it about American’s quest for “the perfect—-fill in the blank with the name of a fruit or vegetable?” This quest for perfect produce is what has led us to beautiful but tasteless Red Delicious apples, huge, perfectly smooth skinned pumpkins with watery, tasteless flesh and giant, sweet-smelling strawberries that taste like styrofoam. It is all a passel of aberrant behavior on the part of food marketers and people who eat with their eyes, not their mouths–in other words, they want food that is pretty rather than food that tastes good.)

So, here I am, saying it, loud and proud–Pardon me, all you passepants-wearing elitist food snobs in the world, but when you go on about how using less than perfectly fresh vegetables and herbs in food is passe, you are making asses of yourselves and are just showing the rest of us how out of touch you are with the fact that food is not just art–it is meant to satisfy and sustain the souls and bodies of human beings.

And lots of those human beings whose souls and bodies need sustenance just as much as the passeposse cannot afford to just use the freshest and best of every little thing in every little dish they cook.

But that doesn’t mean that their food is less able to incite gustatory delight as the food made by the “food is art” nose-in-the-air crowd.

Oh, no, no, no.

In fact, I will tell you that I -know- for a fact that food made with less than perfect vegetables and dried herbs can knock the socks off of any diner, and contains just as much soul-stirring goodness as the rarefied tidbits eaten by the trend-setting wealthy folks. In fact, I might have to say that the food of the proletariat, made from humble ingredients, prepared in a frugal manner might just have a bit more soul in them than the finest dishes from the most fancified restaurants in the world.

And frankly, having dined on both, I have to admit that I prefer the foods of the peasantry to the foods of kings.

So, now you know where I stand on the issue.

Now that we have the rant out of the way, I can take a breath and talk about what this post is really about–avoiding food waste, and making something amazingly delicious out of truly humble ingredients–meaning lesser cuts of meat, dried beans and herbs and vegetables that are a bit past their prime.

And this is a great time of year to talk about it, because we are at the end of winter and the beginning of spring, which is prime soup making season, not just because we have warm days with still cool to cold nights, but because all of the vegetables that have been in storage all winter are starting to show their age a bit. Even the ones from the grocery stores, which have been in climate-controlled facilities for months, where ethylene gas is vented away, and the humidity and temperature are controlled perfectly, are starting to succumb to the hand of time and are losing their crisp nature.

The cabbages are starting to wilt.

The carrots, parsnips and turnips are turning a bit rubbery.

And the potatoes, once crisp and snappy, all know ’tis the season to sprout, so they are getting soft as they start sending forth long-tentacle-like shoots which make me think of B-movie science fiction monsters from the outer darkness of the space-time continuum.

(The onions and the garlic are in the same boat with the potatoes. They know it is time they got planted, so they are going soft and sending out green shoots in an attempt to propagate themselves right there in your pantry.)

What is a poor, frugal householder to do when faced with a bin full of guishy potatoes, pathetic onions, flubbery carrots, rubbery rutabagas, wizened beets and flaccid cabbages?

You all know what I am going to say, so why not join in?

Make soup!

Make soup with a glad heart, because the truth is this–once you have simmered your vegetables for hours, perhaps with some dried herbs–which by the way, have a more concentrated flavor because the water, which dilutes flavor, is removed–(this is only true if your dried herbs have not been handed down from the time of Moses–if they are that old, please compost them) and some old, tough cuts of meat or maybe some bones left over from a roast–you will neither know or care what condition they were in before they were cooked. Their texture will not suffer, nor will their flavor. You may have lost some nutritive value, but not that much, really.

What you have done, however, by using these unfortunate foundlings of your pantry, however, is saved yourself some money by not throwing them out and buying new stuff all over again. You have saved money, you have helped out the environment by not wasting all of the resources that were used to grow them in the first place, and you made something delicious and nutritious to eat.

How can that be a bad thing?

Now, here are a few pointers on how to determine which vegetables are safe to use because they are just a little bedraggled and which ones are just plain old nasty and need to go very far away from your kitchen.

One: Follow your nose–it always knows.

If it smells bad, throw it out. If it makes you gag after one tentative sniff, then it has gone well beyond past its prime and travelled into the realm of “Oh, dear God, no!” Once it stinks, it is a candidate only for a toss into the compost pile.

Two: Let your fingers do the walking.

Your less than optimal, yet still usable vegetables will be softer than perfect vegetables, but, they should not give way under a nice, firm squeeze. If this happens, and your fingers sink into vegetative flesh that has deliquesced into primordial ooze, then bury the slimy remnants of a once proud foodstuff into the compost heap at the back of your garden. Say a few nice words over it and move along to washing your hands. The texture of a properly useful yet less than fresh vegetable is lightly soft, perhaps somewhat spongy, but the integrity of the skin should hold. You may find some bruised spots, and those can be cut away and composted, while the rest of the vegetable is then a candidate for the soup-pot, but overall, the flesh should be firmish, yet yielding. Trust me–your fingers will know that texture when they feel it.

Three: Seeing is believing.

Your eyes can finish telling you what your nose and fingers cannot. They will tell you if the onion is spotted with powdery black mildew, or if the wizened skin of a moldy potato has cracked and let the rotting agent inside the flesh. Surface mold and mildew can be cut away–in the case of the powdery black stuff on onions, it is usually only skin deep, and can be removed with the papery skin and perhaps one layer of flesh which has started to go slimy. Those bits, just like a moldy bit of potato, go into the compost, while the rest can be saved, rinsed and used. Your eyes will also warn you of potatoes what have been exposed to the light and have gone green–those can be used, but the green parts need to be completely removed and discarded, because they contain a mild alkaloid which will make you sick if you eat it. (The green part also tastes bitter–which is your tongues way of telling you not to eat something.)

Which brings us to–

Four: Taste the difference.

Yes, give your subjects a cautious taste. You will find that sometimes rubbery carrots have gone a bit bitter, or mushy apples taste a little alcoholic. (That would be because they are fermenting in their skins a bit. That won’t hurt you if you cook the apples, the alcohol will be boiled off, but still it is nice to know.) Sometimes the taste is too radically icky to be useful and away the comestible in question goes, but sometimes, you may find that there is just a slight to no discernible flavor difference between the perfectly fresh specimens and the ones you are trying to save from the landfill. Often, the only difference is in texture, not flavor.

So you see that your senses, paired with a bit of common sense from your brain, can combine to tell you which vegetables are safe to eat but less than pretty, and which ones are possibly hazardous to your health and should be discarded. The only sense left out is your sense of hearing, which is because it is pretty worthless in this exercise. So as to keep your ears from feeling left out, how about putting on some nice music while you engage in your pantry-gleaning, vegetable-saving and soup-making?

For more tips on keeping food waste down in your kitchen, take a look at these posts from Jonathan Bloom’s excellent blog, Wasted Food.

And please, whatever you do, don’t tell him, or me, for that matter, that worrying about wasting food is passe.

Because it bloody well isn’t.

And I suspect that the folks who thought it was passe a few years ago to use less than splendid carrots in a soup may just be changing their tunes in the coming months, and perhaps people will return to an appreciation for the frugal ways of the plebeian kitchen.

With a title like that, of course I had to read the thing, but after I did, I ended up shrugging my shoulders and saying, “So what?”

Which is definitely not the reaction that a writer wants when he or she writes an opinion piece. Editorial writing by its nature wants to inspire a response, preferably a strong one; the last thing the author of an opinion essay wants is for someone to finish reading it and say, “So, uh, dude–what’s your point?”

Because the point of an opinion essay is to have a point and to drive it home, skillfully, with carefully honed arguments and beautifully constructed spires of logic and reason.

Unfortunately for, E. J. Levy, the author of “The Maggots in Your Mushrooms,” the point of her essay is rather dull, and while it is factually based, her arguments, if you can call them that, are, on the whole, insipid.

What is the point of the essay?

As near as I can tell, Ms. Levy apparently just found out that the FDA allows a certain level of naturally occurring foreign matter in both processed and unprocessed foods, and it disturbed her.

At least I think it disturbed her, but I can’t be certain because she never states an opinion one way or another on what should be done about this policy. She never agrees nor disagrees with the FDA’s acceptance of a certain level of ““insect filth,” “rodent filth” (both hair and excreta pellets), “mold,” “insects,” “mammalian excreta,” “rot,” “insects and larvae” (which is to say, maggots), “insects and mites,” “insects and insect eggs,” “drosophila fly,” “sand and grit,” “parasites,” “mildew” and “foreign matter” (which includes “objectionable” items like “sticks, stones, burlap bagging, cigarette butts, etc.”)” in our food.Instead, Levy merely states facts gleaned directly from the FDA publication, The Food Defect Action Levels: Levels of Natural or Unavoidable Defects in Foods That Present No Health Hazards for Humans, without stating her objections to or support for the FDA’s policies regarding these unappetizing yet unavoidable food contaminants.

It is almost as if she is trying to scare her readers, without coming out and taking responsibility for scaring them by simply using the FDA’s own facts against them while at the same time never giving a solution to what I suspect she considers to be problematic, lax rules concerning food purity.

It is damned sloppy writing for an award-winning, nationally acclaimed essayist.

And, as someone who spent much of her childhood on a farm, I have to say that this essay displays the kind of silliness I have come to expect from many city folks who are shocked, yes, shocked, to find out that farmers fertilize their fields with composted cow, pig and chicken manure, and who freak out at the thought that they may find a slug on the underside of a lettuce leaf. You know the kind of folks I mean–the ones who seem to fear dirt and all of the unsavory critters it contains, never realizing that without dirt, aka soil, we would bloody well have nothing to eat.

This sort of attitude irritates the crap out of me. I mean, after I read the essay I was ready to drive off to Missouri and shake some bugs over this lady’s lunch, which is really childish of me, but still–the whole thing just sounds so immature that I couldn’t help but want to respond in kind. It all seemed to come down to, “Oooh, scary–there are bugs in our food–icky-poo! And the evil, nasty FDA knows all about it and does nothing–grody to the max!

And since she starts out her essay referencing the current salmonella in peanut butter fiasco, it isn’t like Levy doesn’t know that there are legitimate concerns to be had regarding the safety of our food supply, and that there are honest-to-God gripes to be leveled at the federal agencies we entrust with overseeing food safety.

But bringing up the fact that there are a certain small number of nearly microscopic bug bits and vermin hairs in our canned goods and some stones in our dried beans which are allowed by the FDA trivializes the seriousness of the salmonella outbreak which has resulted in hundreds becoming ill and quite a few deaths. In heaping scorn upon the FDA for these realistic policies regarding harmless natural contaminants, I think that Levy is missing the point and muddying the water when it comes to the very real issue of foods contaminated by illness-causing pathogens, and is doing nothing to help the FDA do a better job of protecting consumer health.

But that’s just me. I grew up in the country where I was party to growing food in close contact with dirt, poop, insects, field mice, cats, slugs, snails, rocks, sticks and all sorts of other unsavory things.

So, I just don’t get it.

Food comes from dirt, and insects and rodents eat the same food that we do, and so they track dirt onto the food. All of it can’t be removed and it doesn’t hurt us (because really, if it was harmful, we wouldn’t be sitting here having this conversation at all–we’d have all died out long ago from overdoses of bugs, mouse droppings and blowfly maggots), so why freak out and divert attention from real problems with our food supply which can kill us?

But I am asking a serious question–how many of us know, really know, how to do the life-saving Heimlich maneuver?

Have you had training?

Have you ever done it, if not on a person, on a practice dummy?

Have you ever, god forbid, ever had to use that knowledge, or had that knowledge used upon yourself?

I am asking, because Zak sent me this NY Times Op-Ed piece about how few restaurant professionals know how to do the Heimlich Maneuver, and it made me think.

I was certified in it, back when I was certified in CPR, when I was a Girl Scout, but my certification has lapsed long ago. (Duh–I am a bit old to be a Girl Scout these days!) And while I watched a video the night before we took Kat home from the NICU on the subject of infant and toddler Heimlich and CPR, I don’t know that I would be able to perform it on a kid without practice, much less on an adult.

Which leads me to say I am going to be calling the Red Cross to see if they do training courses here in Heimlich and CPR both for adults and kids. It is just something that I think parents, food professionals, and hell–everyone–should know.

Now that I think on it, maybe I should call up Johnson & Wales, my old culinary school, and see if they currently include the Heimlich in their curriculum (they didn’t when I was there), and if not, see if I can convince them to do so.

I know how crucial CPR can be–back when I was a Girl Scout, my Mom and I actually had to use our CPR skills on a street person who had a heart attack in Charleston, West Virginia. Other folks passed him by, but we stopped and the EMTs who came after the guy at the paint store–my Sunday school teacher–called, said we made a difference.

So–these things are important–for everyone.

So, I ask again, how many of us know these life-saving techniques?

New York Times health blogger, Tara Parker-Pope, posted about a new two-year study to be undertaken at the University of North Carolina to determine the public health impact of consumers moving toward a diet composed of more locally grown and produced foods.

This study will be the first to look at the health implications of eating locally grown fruits and vegetables, and I look forward to the results, since I am pretty certain already that the locally grown food we eat at our house has made us all healthier. I do remember in my nutrition classes learning that after a fruit or vegetable is picked, pulled, cut or otherwise removed from the parent plant, it begins to lose vitamins and other phytochemicals which are necessary for proper health. And, unfortunately, the “fresh” vegetables and fruits you see in supermarkets, no matter how beautiful, are not particularly fresh. Many of them were picked two weeks or more ago.

Some vegetables, such as winter squash, potatoes, onions and apples can all be stored for a long period of time without a noticeable loss of nutrient value, but other vegetables like leafy greens, or broccoli, or sugar snap peas, all lose their nutrients pretty quickly. And vegetables like tomatoes, which are picked green and then are forced to ripen in transit by the application of ethylene gas, never even get the full compliment of nutrients they would have had if they had ripened on the vine. (Not to mention that they taste like water and plastic.)

Marion Nestle, author of the weighty but useful tome, What To Eat, discusses these issues in her book and on her blog; I trust her works because she writes not from the perspective of a hippy-dippy idealist, (not that there is nothing wrong with being a hippy-dippy idealist–I have been one myself, and still am some days) but from the scientific point of view of a distinguished and well-respected professor of nutrition. She backs up her statements with the latest scientific studies, so when she tells you that the “fresh” foods in the grocery store produce department are lacking in vitamins and minerals because they really aren’t that fresh, you can trust her words are based on fact, not belief.

When you eat locally, buying from a local farmer, most often the food you purchase was picked that very morning. The foods at farmer’s markets generally are so much more fresh–in the truest sense of the word–than what you can find in grocery stores, that it stands to reason that when you eat them, you are getting more vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals which can help fight cancer, than you would be getting otherwise. At a farmer’s market, the only time a tomato is picked green is so you can take it home and make fried green tomatoes or green tomato pickle from it. Vine-ripened tomatoes are not only superior to grocery store tomatoes in vitamin content, they are worlds beyond them in taste and texture, so much so that you cannot really compare the two.

Large amounts of vitamins and minerals help boost human immune systems, and I have to say this–Kat has only had one major illness, no recurrent colds, no ear infections or other maladies common among infants and toddlers. Morganna still has allergies, but she doesn’t get colds or the flu very often, and neither Zak nor I have been sick in quite some time–I had one sinus infection a couple of months ago, but that was the first one in FIVE YEARS. This is astounding, since I used to have one ever six months when I was younger.

There is also the issue that it seems that once people start shopping at farmer’s markets, they seem to start eating a diet with more varied fruits and vegetables than before, in large part because they are exposed to interesting, different varieties of these foods than they see in grocery stores. And, I have anecdotal evidence from watching the eating and shopping patterns of some friends of mine who have been influenced by the foods they eat at my house to change their shopping patterns, that once you get a taste of really fresh produce, you will want more, and will eat more of it. (This also goes for high quality dairy products, eggs and meat as well.) Nothing compares to the sweet fragrance of just picked ripe local strawberries, and once you taste that, the cottony giants at the supermarket will never satisfy you again.

Frankly, anything that gets people to eat more fruits and vegetables and a little less meat is fine by me.

There is also the issue of food safety.

When you have food being shipped across our country and into our country from across the world, there is a significant risk of food contamination. Why?

Because other countries do not have to abide by the same safety standards in agriculture that farmers in the US do. When I was in culinary school, there was a local outbreak of e coli that was traced to raw scallions from Mexico, where they were irrigated with raw sewage. The usual washing procedures are not sufficient to safely remove all traces of any bacteria present in a scallion, because of the way they grow–in layers and concentric rings which can trap soil and more disturbingly, bacteria.

And, of course, there is the current outbreak of a rare form of salmonella that has been traced back to tomatoes grown either in the US southwest or Mexico.

This outbreak has caused local Texas health officials to state that it is perfectly safe to eat raw home grown tomatoes of any kind, but that full-sized and Roma tomatoes bought from grocery stores should not be eaten raw.

When you grow your own food, or when you buy it locally from a farmer you know and trust, you know exactly what went into growing it. When you grow it yourself, you know what was used to fertilize it, where the water came from that irrigated it, and who picked it. You know if it came into contact with possibly contaminated animal manures, you know how much or little it needs washed before eating and you know exactly how ripe or unripe it is.

I have been saying for a while now that for food security issues, that smaller, localized food production is safer. When you have huge farms growing one food and shipping it off to all corners of the country and globe, if there is ever anything wrong with that food, a hell of a lot more people are in danger of food-borne disease than would be otherwise. There is also the issue that tracing the source of illness is harder in a huge food system like this.

For these reasons and more, I am looking forward to the new study on the health impact of local food. While I believe that local food is healthier and I have a lot of circumstantial evidence to support my contention, there is a difference between believing something and knowing it for a fact.

Besides, there is nothing wrong with more knowledge in the world.