Half Foods

Behold the mighty Triscuit: Symbol of Whole Food. Mostly unchanged for 100 years. Ingredients: whole wheat, soybean oil, salt. Compare that to heavily processed, science-fair, "home-style" monstrosities like anything from Pepperidge Farm. I know ... delicious. But read the ingredients of their cookies with a Tylenol chaser. Interesterified Oil? Huh? Wow ... uh, how interest-ing. How terrify-ing.

Of course I recognize that Triscuits are a processed food: Triscuits don't occur in nature. At least with the Triscuit it's pretty easy to imagine the steps between harvest and your snack cabinet. And I'm ok with certain, low-tech processing: when we pull a fresh-baked loaf of bread out of the oven, we are eating a processed food. I don't have any qualms about saying that cooking technology improves on nature. After all, when God visited Abraham and Sarah, they didn't just pour a handful of wheat into the hands of the Holy One. They kneaded it into dough and baked fresh bread, and my guess is that God said something to the effect of "it was good". Fresh bread is a benefit of technology. If fire isn't a technology, then the oven that harnesses it to make bread is.

But there are processed foods, and then there are processed foods.

Recently, I did some writing for a friend who is importing natural mediterranean-style snacks for sale in the U.S.. He's going to be selling to retailers, so to get a line on the language and concerns in the marketplace, I did a little investigoogling on snacks. Yummy? Not so much.

It's always a little disorienting when entering a completely foreign culture, and this was no exception. There are risks to peeking behind the curtain that separates the food on our table from it's origins.

My first stop was the Snack Food Association web site (sfa.org) where I was tempted by such mouth-watering foodie writing as The Essence of Quality Potato Chips ... the authoritative 3rd edition of the Pretzel Quality Manual, and the SFA/AOCS Edible Oils Manual, 2nd edition. It is not only not appetizing to listen in on the corporate back-room talk about foods I share with my family: it's creepy. It's a little bit like suddenly realizing there's a one-way mirror in your dining room hiding lab-coat-wearing technicians who watch how you chew. You say, "Mm. I love these chips, they taste great." ... they say, "optimized mouth feel and end-flavor target-mix".

It gets weirder. The Snack Food Association has a magazine: Snack World.

In the August 2009 issue of Snack World, I found an news-item for J.R. Short, A family business that wants a seat at the dinner table as your "maker of extruded intermediate pellets". What is an extruded intermediate pellet, you ask? Extruded intermediate pellets are known in the business as half-products, because they still need to be cooked, or as J.R. Short so appetizingly puts it, expanded. Extruded Intermediate Pellets, says their web site, "deliver on whole-grain/multigrain and fiber nutritional content claims with a great tasting crunch ... available in a variety of pellet shapes that can deliver great bag fill and perceived value". Pellet shapes?? Bag fill?? Did I just click through to the UPS store?

Maybe we should just take a step back. Deep breath. See, here in America, we're trying to end a decades-old addiction to refined grains in our diets. We're learning that too much white bread is bad for us in the same way that too much sugar is. We know we need to eat more whole grains. Easy to say, but how do we do that? I don't know about you, but I have never in my life been in the same room as a whole grain ... not that was still whole anyway. For the majority of us, if the supermarket doesn't feed us whole grains, we will likely die in our wonder-bread sins. So in order to satisfy our new passion for whole foods (and for living more 'naturally' in general), the food companies must provide products that contain mostly whole grains (mostly, because all that's required for the food to be labeled "whole" is for the first ingredient to be a whole grain of some kind ... the rest of it can be sawdust and saccharine. Most people do not know or care if the thing is really 'whole', only that the package speaks authoritativly to the problem). A company that provides whole grain snack foods is church-like in our pseudo-enlightened world. We secretly imagine them to be providing food for the body and soul.

The J.R. Short company is not actually that company. They are the company that provides the extruded pellets to the company that provides your whole grain snacks. J.R. Short takes powdered grains, seeds, and vegetables--any kind you want, in any combination--and processes them into a paste. And then they sqeeze that paste into whatever shape is required by the food company, which then expands them and tosses them with some powdered flavor. When you browse the products on the J.R. Short company web site, with a little imagination you will recognize things you've eaten out of a bag recently. These are not your father's cheeze puffs.

You may have noticed that what used to be trashy snack food is now yuppie feel-good health food. What's the difference? Simply that processors like the J.R. Short company have replaced whatever was in the cheeze puffs with sexier raw materials. Now, grains or legumes like lentils, flax, barley, and soy join the old standbys-- corn, wheat and rice. Add in vegetable powders from seaweed, carrot, beet, or broccoli and various other "complimentary" ingredients, and J.R. Short will squeeze your custom easy-bake play-do into twists, tubes, shells, ribbons, chips, little balls and beads, even a custom logo-shape ... all of which they call pellets. Hungry yet?

I've got to admit I find this kind of cool in a dial-a-product sort of way. We're not just living in the age of easy information, but the age of easy productization. I can dream up a design and be wearing it on a t-shirt within the week, then sell it in my online store, where you can get the same brilliant design on a teddy bear or a coffee mug. I can write a book and be reading my own first-edition hardcover within a week of uploading the content. Buy my album on MySpace ... watch my movie on YouTube.

Now--brave new world--I can decide that I want a snack chip in the shape of my face made of organic beets, buckwheat, defatted soy, triticale, and sea salt, choose between a "hearty crunch" or a "light and airy crisp" and in no time take delivery of little plasticized extrusions--ready for me to "expand" into a finished food product by frying, hot air popping, or microwaving--in 20 or 50lb bags. Got a party coming up this weekend? Choose the "2,200 pound capacity super sack". Woo.

I should have known that the warm feeling couldn't last. You know what I'm talking about: I'm eating whole grain foods! I'm in touch with the earth! I'm living an authentic life! My foods are crafted by flour-dusted artisans who shuffle around a kitchen warmed by a wood-fired brick oven! Innocence dies hard.

As an antidote to this unappetizing and slightly callous peek behind the food processing curtain, I offer this video of a real flour-dusted bread-making superhero.

warning: contains some language, appropriate to the subject but maybe not to your dining room. To which of these two enterprises would you rather give a seat at the dinner table?



from SkeeterNYC on Vimeo.

Priceless

Mini R/C Helicopter: 22 dollars

AA batteries: 5 dollars

The following mang-lish instructions: priceless

"This remote control has already installed to protect the device, if want the flight, please open the switch, the indicator would be shining, after operating the pole to the motive to heading up to push then pull to go to most next, the indicator is often Bright, at this time remote control normal usage of ability."


I should probably leave well enough alone, but I ran this English through Google's translator, then took the resulting Chinese and ran it back, just to see if two wrongs might make a right. Strangely, some of the instructions sound better, but with flashes of what sounds like political propaganda.

"The remote control has been installed protection devices, if you want to fly, please turn on the switch, indicator light flashes, it will operate under the motivation, leadership of promoting, and then evacuated to the most, this indicator is often a bright future, at this time, normal use of the remote control"

100 Catalogs

We started stacking catalogs on Thanksgiving day. The pile didn't get as high as we thought it might, but today (December 24) my daughter and I counted 100 catalogs. These catalogs are filled with clothes (by far the majority), shoes, books, toys, food (popcorn, spices, english muffins, fruit), snowboards, computers, cameras, fleece jackets, jewelry, GPS-enabled golf rangefinders, exercise machines, and endless pages of cheap branded trinkets that will self-destruct 15 seconds after you tear off the wrapping. Our bank sent us a catalog (that's where you can get the GPS-enabled golf rangefinder). There are even catalogs selling sheep and other livestock to give (in someone's name) as charitable gifts to poor families--these catalogs are among the smallest, and that seems good to me, though I'm not entirely sure why.

There are 26.6 pounds of paper here. Zoe looked up the number of households in the U.S. and did a little math for me. In America, we're close to 15 million households. 26.6 pounds times the number of households in this country gives us roughly 3 billion pounds of catalogs. In one month! Be sure to check out our new eco-sensitive clothing line ....

Imagine how big our pile would be if we actually bought stuff from catalogs.

The Old Fashioned Way

Remember when new jeans came in one style and that style was "new"? (What an OLD man thing to say.) I can remember weeks of chafing and mailing tube stiffness when breaking in a new pair of jeans--only slightly less painful then breaking in a new pair of leather hiking boots. And when you'd really worked those denims for a good long time (like, years), they acquired a beautiful, velvety-soft, sky-blue, wonderfulness. Today, thanks to the wonder of whatever dark magic happens in jean factories, we never have to break in clothes again.

I like soft pants. Who doesn't? I admit it: I'd choose faded jeans off the rack and leave behind the dark blue cardboard that is a fresh pair of 501s. But it's kind of sad to me that I'm paying equal or more to buy clothes that have been washed with rocks and will therefore have a shorter lifespan. Aged cheese? Good. Aged wine? Mmm. Aged pants? Wha? Where can I get me a brand-new car with a thousand miles on it, covered with dents and scratches? Rockin!

Now. I think the jeans pictured here are pretty good in a combat-boot-goes-to-the-prom sort of way, and I think the girl in them is pretty great in that kind of way, and in many other ways too. But wow.

Every now and then, me and the kids (this one, who's 16, and the boy, who's 13) get a little punchy and end up wrestling on the floor, which is getting more and more dangerous ... for me: I've broken parts of myself ... and the 13 year-old recently took me down in the kitchen with one move. I can't count all the times these kids cracked skulls while wrestling on the bed in the early years. We all know the risks! And I thought we shared an equally casual attitude towards our wardrobes: I mean, look at those pants. But what do you think happens at the first sound of tearing? She shrieks: "You're tearing my jeans!" Oh really.


Then there's me. This old pair of Levis has finally reach the point of structural failure. It's possible these jeans are 20+ years old. I should be happy that I now have holes. No more of the shame that attends those whose pants are unventilated. I should feel different, but all I feel is a draft on my left knee. I tell my daughter with desperate pride that I put tears in my jeans the old fashioned way ... I earn them. What an old man thing to say.