School Lunch

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/12003515@N05/8087959278/" title="IMG_1224 by mesander2000, on Flickr"><img alt="IMG_1224" height="375" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8331/8087959278_899c213c1e.jpg" width="500" /></a><br /><br />School lunches are much in the news this fall, as recently-enacted nutritional standards are mandating changes. The public schools in St. Paul, Minnesota, have been experimenting with new programs for a few years, so I was very pleased to receive an invitation to have lunch at the Horace Mann Elementary School barbecue while visiting Miriam and Alice this week. I ate with Alice and several of her friends.<br /><br />"Sometimes they have completely gross foods," says Alice, "but others are the best. I like the veggie pizza, but the chicken teriyaki and other meat items are gross."<br /><br />As is evident in the photo, there are lots of vegetables -- and the classroom teachers discussed this with the children earlier in the year. Each child is required to try some veggies, which at least on the special family barbecue day were served on a sort of buffet in the cafeteria (which is also the gymnasium), after the line where the cafeteria ladies put the hot dog and baked beans on our foam trays. I gathered that there used to be things like chips on the menu which have disappeared this year.<br /><br />The hot dog came on a whole-grain bun, baked in the central food prep kitchen according to the various articles I read earlier this fall. Alice ate the bun but not the hot dog. The children separate the food from the foam trays after lunch, and the edible rejects go to feed pigs at a special farm.<br /><br />The "breakfast cookie" had lots of healthy ingredients, but didn't taste bad -- a tiny bit salty, I thought. Beverage choices: milk or chocolate milk. I doubt that I've tasted chocolate milk since I was eating in school cafeterias myself -- this was not as sweet and creamy as the chocolate milk of my childhood, if my memory serves.<br /><br />During lunch Alice and her friends normally play a game called "Hello, Bob." Someone starts by saying, "Hello, Bob. Say hello to Bob, Bob." The response is to say "Hello Bob," and turn to the next person and say the same thing. Everyone has to talk in a sort of British or Australian accent. Eventually they also say "Hello, Sheila," or "Hello, Steve Owen." Hard to describe this one, but a couple of other visiting fathers and mothers and I played along with the group.<br /><br />"The school lunches are better than our old school lunches," says Miriam, who ate lunch with Evelyn and Lenny and some of her friends elsewhere in the lunch room. "But home made lunches are still better."<br /><br />

School Lunch

School lunches are much in the news this fall, as recently-enacted nutritional standards are mandating changes. The public schools in St. Pa...

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Disorder as art in food photos

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_UB1eLSK53uNnjSS-6TqrlPpBqNMhlgv20h-vJ1hwFI_BXAmJhb-4R3Ygr0nSOTNXQlwdMqwz6ytxkaOLfeiHFa5FbLJiv2x8KiNKbYInNlFsN_TBFm53oyrZDsuZzDdk1Iz85hF0H2T8/s1600/Screen+shot+2012-10-10+at+6.12.27+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_UB1eLSK53uNnjSS-6TqrlPpBqNMhlgv20h-vJ1hwFI_BXAmJhb-4R3Ygr0nSOTNXQlwdMqwz6ytxkaOLfeiHFa5FbLJiv2x8KiNKbYInNlFsN_TBFm53oyrZDsuZzDdk1Iz85hF0H2T8/s320/Screen+shot+2012-10-10+at+6.12.27+PM.png" width="258" /></a></div><br />Not all food in art is perfect, as many Renaissance artists illustrated. In a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/10/arts/design/laura-letinskys-food-photography.html">current New York times article,</a> photographer Laura Letinsky's work demonstrates the same principles. Both in her fine-art work and in her magazine illustrations she uses chaotic or at least very informal tables with the remains of a meal, a cup of tea, or a party.<br /><br />According to the article:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">"Dirty spoons, empty cantaloupe rinds, half-eaten lollipops and clumsily cut slices of bread are her trade. Her pieces, she said, explore 'the problem of the illusion of perfection.' ...  </blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">"Even Brides, a magazine that would presumably want to present images of serenity and order, ran in its July issue Ms. Letinsky’s photographs of table settings. In these pictures macaroons are half-eaten and abandoned. Teacups and bowls are askew, and party organizers have hastily tied together a mishmash of silverware. The associates who work with Ms. Letinsky on these magazine pieces seem tickled by her chaos." </blockquote><br /> Several slick food magazines have used her work -- but evidently there are still quite a few editors who think their readers aren't ready for such realism.

Disorder as art in food photos

Not all food in art is perfect, as many Renaissance artists illustrated. In a current New York times article, photographer Laura Letinsky&#...

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McDonald's Everywhere

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjlqsIYZckwkEKUS2EteEihb7syhM9Xh-uLLl4Rn33KXY6qOdSY3BFKme_AOJgz8zC-gKE0IriyN2s0q_krXKMwJNYZKnqwo2Y47E304pywPVxZp22ExBgNUgDs6YIvChIg4hQDxMXhgnh/s1600/Mc-Arabia-Chicken.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:right; float:right; margin-left:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjlqsIYZckwkEKUS2EteEihb7syhM9Xh-uLLl4Rn33KXY6qOdSY3BFKme_AOJgz8zC-gKE0IriyN2s0q_krXKMwJNYZKnqwo2Y47E304pywPVxZp22ExBgNUgDs6YIvChIg4hQDxMXhgnh/s400/Mc-Arabia-Chicken.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><br /><a href="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/10/08/10_best_mcdonalds_meals_you_wont_find_in_the_us?page=full">Here: a wonderful illustrated round-up</a> of McDonald's adaptations in other lands. I would love to try some of them, like the Moroccan McArabia -- a cumin-spiced flatbread chicken sandwich (the article says it's beef but the photo is titled chicken). <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDM4Wh5eFmzQbZ0fWsIxJaPGs1xunClTqbMp4KujnhaK2_mPurqyvWPf9BMlg8HhVMjjFmZjrXHqU_YRI7a3_jXY8YxVSwyrhTmlak9yNsj5AldsDRAtSDlKeognVv-YSXsgzM-x71LK4I/s1600/kofte_burger.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDM4Wh5eFmzQbZ0fWsIxJaPGs1xunClTqbMp4KujnhaK2_mPurqyvWPf9BMlg8HhVMjjFmZjrXHqU_YRI7a3_jXY8YxVSwyrhTmlak9yNsj5AldsDRAtSDlKeognVv-YSXsgzM-x71LK4I/s400/kofte_burger.jpg" width="300" /></a></div> <br />Or like the Turkish <b>Kofteburger</b> -- "the McDonaldization of kofte, a type of Turkish kebab made with mint and parsley." The photo looks pretty much like any McD's sandwich, but it includes a lot of parsley. In China there's even a special McD's for the Chinese New Year.

McDonald's Everywhere

Here: a wonderful illustrated round-up of McDonald's adaptations in other lands. I would love to try some of them, like the Moroccan M...

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What makes us human?

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjUH43OG9dyIJ5_MLsH-c_avBomn8ewzThldpBNZe28i2uPFBfmJoyyXQe0JvDFElyoect6uqXElxiLzLfhzsV0aECIOp0qo198pvMDt5GiNNnA6_ky_rx7m2EFiAehRrw1xkBpYZ3MWUb/s1600/wrangham.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjUH43OG9dyIJ5_MLsH-c_avBomn8ewzThldpBNZe28i2uPFBfmJoyyXQe0JvDFElyoect6uqXElxiLzLfhzsV0aECIOp0qo198pvMDt5GiNNnA6_ky_rx7m2EFiAehRrw1xkBpYZ3MWUb/s400/wrangham.jpg" width="300" /></a></div>Very early hominids at some point learned to eat cooked food. This allowed evolution of "smaller guts, bigger brains, bigger bodies, and reduced body hair; more running; more hunting; longer lives; calmer temperaments; and a new emphasis on bonding between females and males. The softness of their cooked plant foods selected for smaller teeth, the protection fire provided at night enabled them to sleep on the ground and lose their climbing ability, and females likely began cooking for male, whose time was increasingly free to search for more meat and honey. .... one lucky group became <i>Homo erectus</i> -- and humanity began."<br /><br />So ends the last chapter of<i> Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human</i> by Richard Wrangham (quotes from p. 194). The book is a wide-ranging compendium of the scientific evidence for each of the points made in this summary -- not a collection of speculations or just-so stories, but hard research-supported data. The evidence is overwhelming. And as a bonus, in the Epilogue, he observes some of the consequences of his conclusions as they apply to the modern tendency towards obesity, and has a really interesting overview of the deficits in currently available nutrition and calorie information.<br /><br />Wrangham's study of evolution and of the chemistry, physics, and nutritional value of cooked vs. raw foods has rapidly become a classic. From the time of first reviews, which I read shortly after its publication in 2009, until now, when it's referenced by a wide variety works on food and evolution, I've been meaning to read it. Finally I have done so.

What makes us human?

Very early hominids at some point learned to eat cooked food. This allowed evolution of "smaller guts, bigger brains, bigger bodies, an...

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A Judgement of Foodies

"Let's start the foodie backlash" by Steven Poole, <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/sep/28/lets-start-foodie-backlash?CMP=twt_gu">a very long and ranting article</a> in <i>The Guardian</i>, condemns many things about the modern interest in food, in food TV, in exotic and excessively innovative cooking experiments, and in a wide variety of what he sees as a new version of gluttony.<br /><br />Straight out of primitive Christianity: medieval gluttony, he says, "wasn't necessarily a matter of eating too much; it was the problem of being excessively interested in food, whatever one's actual intake of it." He cites definitions by various authors:<br /><ul><li>Francine Prose -- gluttony is the "inordinate desire" for food, which makes us "depart from the path of reason."</li><li>Spenser's <i>The Faerie Queene</i> -- "loathsome Gluttony ... Whose mind in meat and drinke was drowned so." </li><li> Thomas Aquinas and Pope Gregory -- "gluttony can be committed in five different ways, among which are seeking more 'sumptuous foods' or wanting foods that are 'prepared more meticulously.'"</li></ul><div>Wow!<br /><br />Poole criticizes those who claim their love of food is spiritual; he condemns those who title their cookbooks Bibles; he sneers at those who say that their fine cooking is an art form. He delves into the  history of words like "foodie" and "foodist," finding nothing to like I would say.<br /><br />He summarizes his indictment: <br /><blockquote>Western industrial civilisation is eating itself stupid. We are living in the Age of Food. Cookery programmes bloat the television schedules, cookbooks strain the bookshop tables, celebrity chefs hawk their own brands of weird mince pies (Heston Blumenthal) or bronze-moulded pasta (Jamie Oliver) in the supermarkets, and cooks in super-expensive restaurants from Chicago to Copenhagen are the subject of hagiographic profiles in serious magazines and newspapers.</blockquote>Normal people would normally hate the foods they are made to love, he says. They are being psyched out by hype and fancy menu descriptions:<br /><blockquote>In an experiment, two psychologists gave different groups of people Heston Blumenthal's "Crab Ice-Cream" while describing it differently: one group was told it was about to eat a "savoury mousse", the other was expecting "ice-cream". The people given savoury mousse liked it, but the people thinking they were eating ice-cream found it "digusting" and even "the most unpleasant food they had ever tasted". The psychologists add that most food tastes "blander" without the "expectation of flavour caused by the visual appearance or verbal description of what is going to be eaten".</blockquote>I have my suspicions of the foodie trends that reach my little town Ann Arbor in attenuated and rather absurd (and unappetizing) ways, but I'm overawed by the vigor of the charges in this screed! </div>

A Judgement of Foodies

"Let's start the foodie backlash" by Steven Poole, a very long and ranting article  in The Guardian , condemns many things abo...

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Artichoke ice cream and other surprises

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAT9HXgdC3RwVukbKIYNia0W27qAqyHqYz7cuhp0K1RF-2rc7kC2WblBXmLxi0kLZhm_rEify7EVa34JV8AIhO7RCG_BZHjjFkMvLmza-deMKdUgTkusuohSyhLbNtz3NUepok28yiQ-Jr/s1600/sugar-snow.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAT9HXgdC3RwVukbKIYNia0W27qAqyHqYz7cuhp0K1RF-2rc7kC2WblBXmLxi0kLZhm_rEify7EVa34JV8AIhO7RCG_BZHjjFkMvLmza-deMKdUgTkusuohSyhLbNtz3NUepok28yiQ-Jr/s320/sugar-snow.jpg" width="300" /></a></div>In the 18th century, ice cream was a novelty. Not new -- even the Romans had frozen desserts, and the transition to ice cream was gradual. It's another thing Marco Polo might have seen in China (but he didn't seem to have mentioned it). Books about ice cream were definitely new in the 18th century, though, and they offered a variety of flavors that would shame modern chefs who think of themselves as so ingenious. "Almost from the beginning, confectioners have pushed the ice cream envelope," writes Jeri Quinzio in her book <i>Sugar and Snow: A History of Ice Cream Making</i>. While her book includes many other subjects, I found her descriptions of ice cream flavors from the past to be the most fascinating part.<br /><br />Artichoke ice cream -- <i>neige d'artichaux</i> in the original -- seems to me one of the most exotic. A French chef made it from "pistachios and candied orange, along with artichokes, and quite probably the finished product tasted less like artichokes than like pistachios and oranges," she says. (p. 39)<br /><br />Another ice cream maker in France used truffles -- the fungus kind, not the chocolate kind. Vanilla at the time, however, was not yet a commonly used flavor -- favorites of the time included fruits, flowers, and spices like cinnamon, cloves, anise, saffron. Quinzio cites an author from that period who said no vegetable existed that couldn't be turned into ice cream. Slightly later flavors were pomegranate, jasmine, fennel with lemon, and nougat candy. Or a combination of cinnamon, lemon peel, and bay leaf. (p. 53, 142)<br /><br />Parmesan cheese flavored ice cream is mentioned twice in <i>Sugar and Snow</i>. An author named Frederick Nutt mentioned it in a work called <i>The Complete Confectioner </i>in England in the late 18th or early 19th century. When talking of famous chefs of the late 20th century, Quinzio mentions miniature cornets filled with salmon tartare and crème fraîche but looking like ice cream cones -- part of a trend that includes desserts with new flavors that the chefs of the 18th century "would have recognized, such as Parmesan, artichoke, and truffle." (p. 207)<br /><br />Even the creation of ice-cream-like savory dishes is not new. <i>The Virginia House-Wife</i> by Mary Randolph in 1824 had many recipes for dessert ices, but among them was "frozen oyster cream" which was oyster soup, strained and frozen; Quinzio says that Randolph gives no serving suggestion or explanation of this recipe. Similarly, she cites <i>Fanny Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book's</i> recipe for Clam Frappé: the liquid from steamed clams frozen "to a mush." Quisno gives the entire recipe for a Cucumber Sorbet, which actually sounds pretty refreshing to me. She also mentions rye-bread and brown-bread flavored ice creams. (p. 59, 79, 143, 151)<br /><br />I enjoyed the historic material, for example, about the invention of the ice cream cone, which  did not originate at the St.Louis World's Fair/Louisiana Exposition in 1904, but was the first place that made street food from what had been a fancy, table-served dish. I was amused to hear of one "bombe" made of ice cream that was really supposed to remind people of anarchists, and of Seabees creating an improvised ice cream maker from airplane parts and Japanese shell cases on a Pacific Island in World War II (p. 71 & 195). I was delighted to learn more about marshmallows -- how they were melted and used for frozen desserts in early home freezers (my mother did this -- her specialty was coffee mallow, which didn't work when she got a freezer that maintained a truly cold temperature). And how Rocky Road ice cream with marshmallows in it was supposedly invented by William Dreyer in Oakland, California, in 1929. But I most loved the lists of exotic flavors.<br /><br /><br /><br />

Artichoke ice cream and other surprises

In the 18th century, ice cream was a novelty. Not new -- even the Romans had frozen desserts, and the transition to ice cream was gradual. I...

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Sunkist Oranges and Birds Eye Peas

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihUFTR_6NDH151xuTbcsAyaYMQ19pLMNaQfVeVCfpwjeHUWMBqpIvnr0Am2w0I0plUZgDSoh2JGnllJpLYMQXnhMD2HCBEaB2clf5NhXgoOywjRTBQMudhTHRrJsvbw2LcDjo1jbkTGBEX/s1600/Birdseye.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihUFTR_6NDH151xuTbcsAyaYMQ19pLMNaQfVeVCfpwjeHUWMBqpIvnr0Am2w0I0plUZgDSoh2JGnllJpLYMQXnhMD2HCBEaB2clf5NhXgoOywjRTBQMudhTHRrJsvbw2LcDjo1jbkTGBEX/s320/Birdseye.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Wednesday night I attended the regular meeting of the Culinary Book Club that I belong to. We read <i>Birdseye</i> by Mark Kurlansky, a biography of Clarence Birdseye. The subject of the bio developed processes for frozen food technology: how to freeze it quickly with a variety of huge devices, package it with new materials that survived freezing, and keep it frozen -- besides industrial freezing machines, he also developed less expensive refrigeration units for shipping and storing it in markets. Birdseye began with his own business, and then sold his idea to a company that could invest more in the project than he could raise. </div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><br /></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">That company became General Foods, and Birdseye, whose name became synonymous with frozen food (especially peas) ran a food lab for them for a number of years. I found him interesting both for having changed American food, including ideas for distribution to grocers and inventing freezers where they could store the foods he froze, and for his amazingly adventurous attitude towards eating and trying exotic foods and small game animals that most of his peers would not have accepted.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><br /></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Birdseye also invented a variety of other very practical things such as a reflector lightbulb. He traveled to a number of spots in the New World, like Labrador -- where he got the idea for frozen food, which in its time was a big improvement over canning. The discussion was fun; some of us talked about our memories of refrigerators, ice men, ice boxes, and home freezers. One woman described how she received an upright freezer for a wedding present when she had almost no money, but her family considered it essential. </div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhp6tldEpDzfD6YgMubkNIKCEw049Fs6bzQ1BmKfPyDX-e3WNeFKp0Hgq7xj9rOwgMmwFBqCR65P5re4139kezboeOW73keI7owpExWL7Ngu3EIN6ae3Yr67FHqFVaFrSpLGKPo0d3EGiR0/s1600/orange-empire.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhp6tldEpDzfD6YgMubkNIKCEw049Fs6bzQ1BmKfPyDX-e3WNeFKp0Hgq7xj9rOwgMmwFBqCR65P5re4139kezboeOW73keI7owpExWL7Ngu3EIN6ae3Yr67FHqFVaFrSpLGKPo0d3EGiR0/s320/orange-empire.jpg" width="237" /></a></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">This week also, I read another book, <i>Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden</i> by Douglas Cazaux Sackman. It's a more academic study but very well-written. It details the history of the orange industry in California -- and it was really an industry, allied with the Southern Pacific Railroad. Beginning around the turn of the 20th century, orange-grove owners figured out  how to mass-produce uniform fruits, which became a commodity. The growers' association united the rich owners of large groves, who marketed collectively under the still-well-known name Sunkist.<br /><br />The industry pioneered ways of advertising to create demand, including medical studies commissioned to show how important oranges were to health. Sound familiar? It was done again, perhaps more dishonestly, this decade by pomegranate producers in California, though the author doesn't mention that.<br /><br />The book answers one question I had wondered about in the past: when did oranges become common rather than a special treat to be eaten only at Christmas. I loved the description of a Sunkist ad where a woman asks a small grocer for oranges, and he says he stocks them only at Christmas -- but the point of the ad is that the bigger supermarkets, which were cooperating with the orange growers and railroads, were beginning to stock them all year. I believe this was in the 1920s, by which time piles of perfect oranges were on display in markets throughout the land, and people were becoming convinced to drink OJ for breakfast daily and feed it to babies.<br /><br />Further, the book documents how mass orange-growing was an industry with political implications for labor and unions, use of pesticides and other poisons, immigration, racism, exploitation of land and workers by rich growers, water rights, and a number of other issues that started 100 years ago and haven't been resolved in America. One radical critic of the terrible labor practices and union-busting efforts referred to the oranges as <i>Gunkist! </i>The conflicts involved a number of very famous Americans and famous books like <i>Grapes of Wrath</i> of course, as well as a fascinating governor's race in which the author Upton Sinclair almost won on a very radical platform. (The growers and railroads used a negative campaign to defeat him in the last 6 weeks: makes me shudder!)<br /><br />Most of the California groves have now been replaced by housing developments and urbanization; for example, Disneyland replaced orange groves. Both books are very very American stories that reveal interesting developments in American foodways.</div>

Sunkist Oranges and Birds Eye Peas

Wednesday night I attended the regular meeting of the Culinary Book Club that I belong to. We read  Birdseye  by Mark Kurlansky, a biography...

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