food museum blog

Packing It In in Nebraska

Eight meat packers at a ConAgra ham processing plant in Nebraska are sharing the recent  record $365 million dollar lottery prize. Meat packers--people who slaughter and cut up animals--  evidently have the most dangerous jobs in the United States. Word has it, a few of these folks have quit their jobs, having garnered about $15 million each, after taxes.

( Illustration from www.hsl.creighton.edu.)

High Tea Ruled OK by Supremes, in Sacramental Settings

The Supremes have spoken unanimously in favor of allowing followers of a tiny religious sect to continue to use hallucinogenic tea called hoasca in their ceremonies.  And as the Brazilian-origin sect known as O Centro Espirita Beneficente Uniao do Vegetal exists right here in Foodie's territory of New Mexico, this is indeed pertinent news. The Washington Post reports this , Feb 22:

"In his opinion, ( Supreme Court Chief Justice John) Roberts wrote that everything the government said about the DMT ( dimethyltryptamine)  in hoasca also applies to the mescaline in peyote, which Native Americans have been allowed to use in religious ceremonies for 35 years.

"If such use is permitted . . . for hundreds of thousands of Native Americans practicing their faith, it is difficult to see how those same findings alone can preclude any consideration of a similar exception for the 130 or so American members of the UDV who want to practice theirs," Roberts wrote."

Known more commonly by the Quechua word ayahuasca, hoasca refers both to the Amazonian rainforest vine itself and the brew made from it. Wikipedia provides an exhaustive look at this sacramental tea often tied to shamanic ceremonies.  It is listed as a Schedule I drug under the U.S. Controlled Substances Act of 1970.

(Photo of hoasca from www.gameshout.com.)

Whole Grains Giant Mystery to Americans

"... nearly half of Americans never eat a whole grain, according to the Eric Hentges, executive director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion. The government's 2005 dietary guidelines recommend that most adults eat three, one-ounce servings of whole grains daily." 

A citizenry raised on flaccid white bread and ketchup as a vegetable probably cannot be expected to know a whole grain unless it were lodged as a huge mote in their tv-viewing eyeballs.    (Now, Foodie...tsk...)

Anyway---The Washington Post's nutrition reporter, Sally Squires, relates today ( Feb. 21) that the FDA's whole grain definition guidelines may be of help--but she doesn't give us the definition. She does say that people who eat 3 slices of real whole grain bread a day ( or the equivalent) are likely to have smaller waistlines and lower weight.

Squires does mention that popcorn and oatmeal are "whole grains."   So that fabulous stuff sold at bandit prices in movie theatres is healthy?? YAY!   Foodie needs to seek calm and fresh air as she pictures the popcorn inhalers wolfing down more of that garbage.   OK--so Foodie is the last human on earth to use a metal cage on her burner at home to make popcorn, and one of the few to add olive oil and salt to the popped white corn result.  ( She has also been known to smuggle this stuff into her local $1 flick house.)

Squires also expresses astonishment at the protein content of whole grains. ( Sheesh. Maybe she was merely doing that on behalf of her readers, who knows.)

Anyway, folks--should you be in the whole grain dark, rest assured that the Whole Grains Council is starting to place their Gold Labels on products that meet whatever the Council's standards are. Herewith is a list of their members, some of whom are purveyors of decent products.

( Grainy photo from www.getwiththeprogram.org.)

Gas the Meat and Fire up the Bar-B!

There's a flap going on currently about some in the meat industry adding carbon monoxide to meat in order to turn it reddish pink, seemingly forever--the purpose?  To appeal to that everyday average consumer who needs his/her meat pink, even though a brown piece would still be fully edible, evidently. ( Is this the same consumer who requires bright orange oranges, and plastic-looking huge assembly line apples?!)  Opponents claim that using carbon monoxide in this way means that the customer cannot tell when the meat in question has "gone bad."

According to a piece in The Washington Post ( Feb.20, 2006,)  the FDA has gone along with the practice, calling it "generally regarded as safe," or GRAS, a category that does not require full approval from the agency.

How can Americans dub this GRAS, when the European Union banned carbon monoxide's use as a "color stabilizer"  in 2001?  Does the FDA really have a handle on this? (!!)

The article cited above does not clearly explain how the carbon monoxide is used. The reporter , Rick Weiss, implies the packaging is imbued with the stuff, rather than the meat itself. But a quoted source calls it "carbon-monoxide-treated meat."

Utah Mormons Weigh More, But Less Than Before

OK, so they weigh less more than they did in 1996.  More than non-Mormon Utahans. True. Foodie really should focus on the improvement--according to a Brigham Young University study reported by AP February 14, back in 1996 Mormon adults were on average 5.7 pounds heavier than their non-believing fellow citizens in Utah, with a 34 % chance of being obese.

Today Mormon adults only weigh 4.6 pounds more than those other Utahans and have a 14 % likelihood of being obese.

So Mormons in Utah are slugging down fewer Cokes than they did 10 years ago. Foodie can attest that her in-person gustatory encounters with Mormons have always included massive offerings of Coke--so she figures cutting back on the sugary syrupy stuff alone could account for this dramatic improvement.

"Danish" Redux

Following up on the Danish-renamed-Mohammed controversy, this report from Reuters confirms that Iran's official Islamic Republic News Agency says "Danish pastry," all made in Iran,  will henceforth be called "Roses of the Prophet Mohammad." 

Speaking of roses, they use rose water extensively in Iran as a sweetener, an ingredient Foodie came to dread as a Peace Corps volunteer there.  The real stuff is made from rose petals, and as such, Foodie thinks it should remain an ingredient in cosmetics, not food. ( Yes, Foodie knows that many fruit trees are related to the rose.)

         

In Search of Olympian Foodish Things

The Torino 2006 website features an earnest declaration that the Olympic Village eateries will cater to any and all food allergies/special diets but if you want to dine outside the village try the agnolotti and chocolate-based desserts.

Other than that, precious little of edible news appears to be surfacing from the Winter Games.

Except this:

Hannah Teter, the American snowboarder, calls her family's home-produced "all natural" maple syrup, "the bomb."  The syrup comes from trees on their land in Belmont, Vermont.

Her male colleague on the board, 19 year-old Shaun White, a redhead, was dubbed the Flying Tomato by someone who watched him leap over luggage in an airport lobby.

And American ice skater Johnny Weir claims not to eat at all...

Foodie tried to glean food-related bits about other country's athletes but, alas, failed.  Googling "Norwegian cross country skiers" she brought up a piece on "the search for speed," that zeroed in on everything except food.

Finally she  glimpsed a brief NBC report on  truffle hunting in Italy. Nothing new there, sorry.

That Pesky Low-Fat Diet Study

  Fellow Blogger and superlative foodie friend Kathy F, based outside London, covered the "low fat" issue so well recently Foodie got permission to cut and paste a portion of  her findings:

"A couple of articles on fat caught my attention, and as usual, the NY Times version has a misleading headline and even more misleading nutritional information inside: "Study Finds Low-Fat Diet Won't Stop Cancer or Heart Disease". The fact is, no one has been saying such a thing for quite a long time. The study was designed 20 years ago, when no one bothered to distinguish between good fats and bad fats, and when not as much was understood about cancer and heart disease.

The LA Times article on the same study is more informative. Small gains actually were reported on the low fat diet, likely due to the decreased consumption of saturated fats and the animal products that they're found in, though there seems to have been no effort to distinguish between types of fat in the low fat diet. Again, they make a false assumption:

Studies of women in countries with low-fat diets showed a lower incidence of breast cancer, which rose when the women migrated here and began consuming a Western diet. And red meats had been linked to colorectal cancer, presumably because of their high fat content.

No, nutritionists nowadays don't link colon cancer to high fat, but they do link the disease to low fibre intake and red meat consumption. Meat lingers in our long human intestines longer than it should, giving the carcinogens in meat more opportunity to provoke cancer cells. And then there's this recent study I linked to last week."

In the interests of full disclosure, we must reveal that Kathy F is a vegan, albeit one who cooks remarkably inventive and delicious food. So while we both use olive oil, only Foodie goes with dabs of butter from time to time--along with that full fat yogurt from Straus Family Creamery...

Call Me Mohammed??

  Foodie heard on the radio in passing this morning that Iran had asked its people to cease asking for a "Danish" when ordering Danish pastry. From now on one asks for a "Mohammed."
Strongly sensing this is apocryphal, Foodie nonetheless recalls that "Freedom Fries" in the United States did have a short run when sundry French Fry eaters were outraged by the French government's disinclination to join the Coalition of the Willing.

All this of course derives from the current tension in the Muslim world over publication of Danish cartoons of Mohammed.  Islam forbids any depiction, however flattering, of the Prophet. 

Put This in Your Super Bowl XL

Foodie reports (thanks to Sports Illustrated, Feb.6,2006):

The Pittsburgh Steelers' official song is performed by a band called, unpalatably,  Corned Beef & Curry.

Seattle Seahawks' fullback Matt Strong is pictured in SI holding a clammy cool fish at Seattle's Pike Place Market.

Seattle's "local delicacy" is sushi--according to SI, evidently a Japanese immigrant named Shiro Kashiba started the city's first sushi joint in 1967.

In Pittsburgh the locals favor Primanti's Sandwich: "a big hunk of grilled meat and chilly cole slaw and hot fried egg and fresh tomato and crisp French fries between two slabs of chewy Italian bread that you could hardly fit into your mouth.."    Why? Because when Primanti's Restaurant first opened as a hole-in-the-wall place during the Depression serving "lunch" to workers unloading fruits and vegeatbles at night the owners forgot to buy plates and utensils. Everything was piled onto the sandwich bread...

Sports Illustrated makes no mention whatsoever of what Detroit, the venue for SBXL, offers culinarily.

May the best fed team win.