markk
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The word Brasserie means "brewery", and when used (properly) in France as a type of restaurant, it always connotes the type of 'brew pub' found in Alsace, with foods that go with beer on tap.
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$60 for a $10 wine
, I'm tempt to pay the $70 and bring my own. At first I thought you meant bring your own ten-dollar wine and pay the corkage fee, but I don't think you mean that. But...
There's a restaurant that I go to frequently on vacation that's upscale for sure, but whose wine list is just horrible, to my taste. The white wines are undrinkable to me. The California whites are all so incredibly oaky that I can't find one I can swallow, not at any point in the list. The Loire wines are green and just harshly unpleasant, even in the $90 range. Perhaps one of their $480 White Burgundies would be acceptable, but I'm not going to experiment with it.
But, there's a wine that's way under ten dollars that I enjoy and buy by the case and ship to myself on vacation. Sure, it's a simple, unassuming wine, but it's delicious. For sure, for very sure, it'd be much more enjoyable drinking than I can get at this place. But as nervy a guy as I am, I don't have the guts to walk into a high-end expensive restaurant with a way-less than ten dollar wine and pay the corkage fee. Not even I can do that, though I'm tempted.
But if you know that a restaurant's not going to have anything enjoyable, and you know that for the price of the corkage fee you can drink something you will enjoy, it's your right to pay the fee and enjoy your wine. In the case I gave above, I think it'd just be inappropriate, as they say.
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And would you really want to go to your grave never having popped a can of Pringles?
No, I wouldn't want to go to my grave having never had Pringles (which I don't like the taste of anyway), or a Triple Quarter Pounder with Cheese, or a bucket of KFC Extra-Crispy all dark meat
.But I wouldn't want to go to my grave thinking that I had eaten those things every night of my life as dinner, or eaten Stouffer's Lean Cuisine and Hamburger Helper as my primary source of "nutrition" either.
And I wouldn't want to go to my grave thinking that I'd fed those to my kids every night either, instead of dinner made from whole, as-close-to-natural food sources as I could have.
You just restated Pollan's argument.
Which I've been in agreement with since the beginning of the thread, notwithstanding having been called a Communist and a Religious Fanatic by some.
The only two pieces of advice he gives that I don't follow are "eat less", and "eat less meat". My 'portion size' is quite large, by any standards. As far as the "less meat", that's only something that I've recently started to do; carnivorism is a hard habit to break!
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And would you really want to go to your grave never having popped a can of Pringles?
No, I wouldn't want to go to my grave having never had Pringles (which I don't like the taste of anyway), or a Triple Quarter Pounder with Cheese, or a bucket of KFC Extra-Crispy all dark meat
.But I wouldn't want to go to my grave thinking that I had eaten those things every night of my life as dinner, or eaten Stouffer's Lean Cuisine and Hamburger Helper as my primary source of "nutrition" either.
And I wouldn't want to go to my grave thinking that I'd fed those to my kids every night either, instead of dinner made from whole, as-close-to-natural food sources as I could have.
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Given that there's no compelling evidence either way, where do we look for answers? To Pollan's personal opinions? To Mark's? To the fact that we're living longer even though we're eating this stuff? Why assume we'd live longer without it, when we can just as easily assume we're living longer because of it?
Well, we may actually be living longer. But I'm claiming that we're living longer because we're being kept alive by pharmaceutical advances and the latest advances in medical technology. My first wintess may not be a scientific presentation, but I'm thinking of all the pharmacies that are saying that in order to keep up filling the record number of prescriptions presented by the baby boomers, they need to stay open 24 hours a day with pharmacists on duty at all times. Is it that there are more people now in general, or is it the case that everybody over 50 or 60 is having their lives prolonged by medicines to treat diabetes, heart conditions, coronary artery disease, and the like, and that lifespans are also extended by all the various interventional and minimally-invasive medical procedures that we didn't have a generation ago.
Between the cancer causing chemicals that have been sprayed on crops, or added to food, and between the processes of hydrogenating fats to add to shelf life, how do we know that we're not playing the game of killng ourselves via scientific mingling in what we eat, and extending our lives via scientific mingling in the drug labs and operating rooms? How do we know that if we hadn't played one from column A and one from column B in a different comination, and eaten unadulterated and unprocessed foods while availing ourselves of modern medical science as well that we wouldn't have lived both longer, and healthier?
I'm only questioning the "living longer" part of the argument.
I liked Pollan's advice, because it's largely how I eat anyway. I avoid processed foods, and try to eat foods in the state that, if my great grandmother saw them, would recognize them. I think she'd know what a melon is, even if it was one from a country that she'd never encountered in her lifetime. I don't think she'd know what half the things on the Lean Cuisine ingredients are.
Yes, it's a personal decision. And while I'm horrified by the kids whose nightly dinner comes from McDonald's and Stouffers and who've never eaten a fresh vegetable or piece of fruit, that's their parents' decision as well.
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I'm curious what the availability of not mere take-out, but delivery of dinner is where various Gulletteers live. I've been thinking of this because I see lots of discussions of people who cook ahead for nights when they won't be able to, and most of those times, I know I'll just go through the stack of takeout menus in my kitchen drawer and call one of them up and order dinner to be delivered. (It isn't great, trust me, but it's convenient.) Yet I'm told by friends in various places that this just is not an option in a lot of locales.
So I'm asking if where you live, there are places you can call and they will deliver dinner. Where I live is Northern NJ, not a mile from Manhattan as the crow flies, and while nobody will deliver from there, we still have a ton of options locally. Not just pizza and pizzeria "Italian" food, but no end of Chinese restaurants, Thai restaurants, Japanese restaurants, BBQ joints, Greek places, Middle Eastern places, Cuban/Spanish restaurants, Hamburger joints, and Diners that will deliver dinner 20-30 minutes after we call.
So my question is, where you live, do you have the option of "you ring, we bring"? I'm hoping to hear from Gulletteers in the USA and around the globe.
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I have a Kitchen Aid electronic convection oven, and while I love to broil, I don't find that it gets hot enough. I've used other electric ovens whose broilers were fabulous, but I'm disappointed in mine. I love it for convection roasting, but in the time that something small would cook like a steak or scallops, I think I prefer searing both sides in a pan and then sliding a cake cooling rack (pre-heated) under them to let them finish cooking if necessary.
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Actually, the round one above the "white square sampling plates" IS the one he's looking for!
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The ingredients in Pringles are:INGREDIENTS: DRIED POTATOES, VEGETABLE OIL (CONTAINS ONE OR MORE OF THE FOLLOWING: CORN OIL, COTTONSEED OIL, SOYBEAN OIL, AND/OR SUNFLOWER OIL), RICE FLOUR, WHEAT STARCH, MALTODEXTRIN, SALT AND DEXTROSE.
They must've snuck in and changed them since last I looked
. Where are the hydrogenated fats and the MSG? Maybe I'm just having terrible luck with the examples I'm citing. Had I seen those ingredients, I'd never have used Pringles as my example. Nor would I have thought they're so bad.Probably not, but my agreement with you is no more scientifically valid than your quasi-religious belief in the first place!Quasi-religious ?!?!? For eating organic?
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If possible, I'd like everything the way mother nature planned it originally.
It's not possible. The corn used to make those corn chips, even if grown organically, is a human-engineered product, hybridized and industrialized over the centuries. There wasn't a kernel of it growing in the wild at any time in history. I don't even know what "minimally processed vegetable oil" means, but I assure you it's another human-engineered product: the crops are bred by us, and the process of extracting oil from vegetables doesn't involve some sort of grindstone and bucket arrangement; it's a highly scientific process. Maybe the sea salt is relatively natural, though you'd be eating it in quantities unknown to anybody on a truly natural diet.
On the question of technology and food, the train left the station a few thousand years ago. It's now all just an exercise in line drawing: how much technology are you willing to accept, and what kind? To me, it seems arbitrary to accept coffee but not Crisco, tofu but not Triscuits. Indeed the whole distinction between natural and artificial products doesn't survive even casual scrutiny.
Okay, but you're not addressing the spirit of my question. You got me on the corn chips on a good technicality, but I meant to say that I think they're a healthier snack than the Pringles. I'm not against technology, just a lot of what they choose to make with it. (I don't seem to have a problem with technology that makes me never need to leave my desk, though
) The minimally processed oil means that it was extracted by a mechanical press, not with chemical solvents, and that it wasn't hydrogenated afterwards.I already conceded the point that I don't want to eat the same diet that your great grandparents ate. But I'd prefer to eat the Celentano ravioli that I mentioned above over the Hamburger Helper and Stouffer's Lean Cuisine mentioned in the same post.
And can you really tell me (I'm sure you will, and I'm half looking forward to your answer
) that I'm wrong because I think I'm getting better nutrition from eating a diet organic yams and broccoli (and fruits and vegetables, I mean) and unmilled brown rice and organic fish than if I lived on Chicken McNuggets, Lean Cuisine, and vitamin supplements? -
Brad beat me to it: wines are a lot less fragile than people think.
If you're not heating them up at one time of year and then chilling them down at another, they'll survive a surprisingly long time in ordinary home conditions. Longer periods than you're concerned with for sure.
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I live in Coral Gables
Can you comment on Chispa? Has the original chef left? Is it still good? Did you like it to begin with?
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Is a prewashed salad in a bag processed or convenience food?
What do the ingredients say? Is there anything in there besides lettuce? Has the lettuce been processed or just washed? Has anthing been added to it?
It may be a convenience. In places that keep their salad mixes loose in a bin, there's always the great chance that somebody's reaching in there with a hand that just touced a piece of fruit or vegatable with a seriously dangerous "bug", (or a dripping package of chicken), and as there are a lot of salad greens that don't get washed, this may be a giant convenience after all.
Don't get me wrong. I don't eat processed foods at all, in any way, shape, or form. But I do distinguish them from all-natural foods that have been packaged with some convenience to them.
I've given the example above of corn chips. I'm really not likely to make my own. But if the ingredients say that they're made from organic corn, minimally processed vegetable oil, and sea salt, I think of them as a convenience as well. If you make something just as I'd make it from whole, natural ingredients and freeze it as in the case of the ravioli I cited above, that too is okay. I draw the line at anything whose ingredients have had anything removed (refined) or added (stabilized for shelf-life), and which has ingredients that are manufactured in a lab. Those are my definitions of processed versus convenient.
The same is true regarding what you feed the animals or plants I eat. If possible, I'd like everything the way mother nature planned it originally.
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Yes, I think that everybody actually can figure out what he means by 'processed'.
If there's anybody who can't, try this exercise the next time you're in the supermarket. Pick up a package of Hamburger Helper, or Stouffer's Lean Cuisine, and then find a bag of Celentano Cheese Ravioli and compare the ingredients list. The cheese ravioli are made with normal pasta dough, with a filling of cheese and eggs, the same as you'd make at home and freeze ahead in batches. They have only natural ingredients, and no preservatives, which is why they're frozen. The Hamburger Helper and Lean Cuisine look like something you could only make in a chemistry lab.
I think that the working definition of 'processed' foods and that of 'convenience' foods is easy to grasp.
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I haven't posted much lately because I haven't cooked (or shopped) much lately, and to make a long story short I'm recovering from knee surgery and hopefully I'll soon be able to go out and shop the markets to my heart's content and stand as long as I want and cook. But I've been watching every day here and I love it!
Now a question, and I hope this is allowed because it's specifically to the participants in the Dinner thread. I notice that many people shop and cook meals ahead, and I realized that when I know I'll need to do that, I frequently turn to having food delivered from one takeout menu or another. But I've been told that that's not an option in lots of places (I live in Northern NJ about a mile from midtown Manhattan as the crow flies, and we have no end of places that will deliver just about every cuisine you can think of, same as across the river.)
So my question is, where you live, is having dinner delivered an option?
And since I hate not to post any photos, here's a video I dug out (having to do with another thread) of me cooking in France.
It's a Tarte Flambée, and it's not last night but rather a few years ago, and I hope it's allowed. This is a pizza-like tart that's made on an unleavened bread dough rolled as thin as possible, spread with a well blended mixture of crème fraîche and fromage frais, topped with chunks of bacon (lardons) and slivered onions, and baked for less than a minute in a blistering hot (literally, you'll see the tart buckle instantly) oven with roaring flames. And as I say, they let me "make" one - well, on a technicality, but I hope this allowed and I hope everybody enjoys this as much as I've been enjoying living vicariously through all your photos the last few months.
It's the same short video posted in 2 different video formats in case one or the other doesn't play:
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I think the baby boomers, who are slightly younger than my parents, are a generation we can examine to see the effects of the modern American diet -- and the news seems to be good. The boomers are incredibly vital as they approach retirement age. If current statistical projections hold, they will push the life expectancy average farther than it has ever been pushed before.
Wow, I would have come to exactly the opposite conclusion. I think that what's pushing the life expectancy of the boomers is medical science. What's coinciding with the boomers approaching retirement age is the fact that pharmacies now stay open 24/7 with pharmacists on duty round the clock because they otherwise wouldn't have enough time in the day to fill all the prescriptions that the aging boomers live on, and what's also coinciding is the larger and larger number of hospitals who have cath labs to pry open (via angioplasty) the arteries of the boomers which clogged up with saturated fats and triglycerides that proliferated in their diets when they were booming. I think that the advances in medical treatment, not only for diseases easily attributable to diet, but others as well, has simply outpaced the rate at which we've jeopardized lives with advances in "food science". And don't forget as welll those things that were discovered, added to and subsequently removed from our modern-process foods, when it was discovered that they were carcinogenic that medical science has tried to reverse.
Perhaps it's a romantic, and over-simplified notion that it may have been the physical energy that we had to expend tending the fields and hauling things to market that characterized the lifestyle invoked in the term "foods that your great grandparents would recognize", as well as the "natural" provenance of those foods themselves (grown in soils that were replenished by rotating crops and animal droppings, rather than by chemicals from bags, spread by machines that don't promote physical energy either, and protected by natural predators rather than chemical pesticides) - versus the notion that today's foodstuffs can sit on store shelves and the storage racks and freezers of the fast-food establishment's distribution centers for years at a time, because anything nutritious in them has been 'reifined' out by mechanical and chemical refinement, (and then packaged in capsules and tablets and sold in vitamin stores) - but I like the romantic notion that my nightly dose of nutritional values comes from a roasted, naturally raised chicken instead of a portion of "McNuggets" (which are made from... what, actually?), and a portion of natrual brown rice instead of a bun made from what little starchy byproduct was left (that Elmer's didn't need for glue) after the wheat berry was refined and had all its nutritional components sent off for use in bran, and vitamin supplements) - I like to eat my roast chicken and brown rice, instead of having the McChicken meal and combining it with a vitamin pill. To my mind, those two halves do not equal the whole, because, for one thing, we don't know what else in the original food sources that existed in synergistic relationships with the other compounds that Mother Nature put there, makes them work for us, and of course, we only know those components that we have isolated, which is exatly one of Pollan's main points. For me, it makes more sense to eat an apple, rather than a portion of "apple fiber" from one package and a tablet of multi vitamins and a capsule of multi minerals from another package.
I found that to be the point of Pollan's article.
To respond to another issue discussed above, do I enjoy a snack of McNuggets or a Whopper sometimes? I sure do! How can anybody who likes food not crave something that's salty and greasy and which you can get anytime you like without leaving your car! But I don't eat them thinking that they're a source of nutrition, and I don't eat them that often because of their salt and saturated fat content.
As far as the trend towards agribusiness, I don't think for a minute that they have any concern whatsoever for nutrition. My objection is not political, just that when they make it so appealing economically to be part of the agribusiness foodchain, they make it harder and harder for me to find and buy the foods I want to be eating. (That they don't stop the grinding machinery when human beings fall into the vat, and that we've all probably eaten ground human in our fast food burgers, well, how did they get the belt buckles and jewelry ground that fine is my wonderment?)
I'm currently reading Thomas Pawlick's "The End of Food", and learning more about what Pollan mentions briefly in his article: that item by item, the foodstuffs grown commercially in the US (tomatoes, potatoes, etc.) have been found in regular testing by the USDA to contain approximately 25-30% less nutrition (vitamins, minerals, fiber) than when they were tested at each previous ten-year interval.
So even if my great grandmother looked at a tomato today and said "I recognize that", her digestive system wouldn't after it finished with it. It's not just how much less would be left when the food processors got done processing it - it's how little nutrition it's going to provide when I buy it whole and take it home to cook as an alternative.
That's what's really frightening me.
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It may very well be that even if we eliminated all cardiac surgery, diabetes medications and things along those lines, people would still be living much, much longer. Indeed, many of those medical procedures, like bypass surgery and the stent procedure, have been called into question -- there's plenty of information arguing that they may be overused and in many or most cases unnecessary or counterproductive.
But with all due respect, Counselor (and I think much is due), you didn't answer my question - since you brought your "kid" into the discussion, are you going to raise him on a steady diet of Pop Tarts and Coke for breakfast, and McDonald's Value Meals for dinner, with rarely a piece of fruit or a salad? Are you going to set the example for him that food is something that comes from a box with a list of ingredients longer than his arm, or will he grow up eating foods that your great grandparents would have recognized as food?
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Yet there are millions of strong, healthy young adults who grew up eating just that. I know plenty of families -- I mean, middle class people I went to law school with -- whose kids eat almost exclusively processed foods, starting with things like Pop Tarts in the morning, moving on to awful public school lunches, to various convenience foods for dinner, with chips, cookies and other snacks in between. They rarely eat a piece of fruit or a salad. And they're in great shape.
Are they truly in 'great shape', or are they way too young to tell? A lot of the dangers from the saturated and trans fats and corn sweetner that they will have eaten are things that catch up with you (such as coronary artery disease, adult-onset diabetes, etc.) when you get a little older, you know. I don't know that kids are diagnosed with high cholesterol, or artery disease, because I don't even think they're tested for it. To say that they're in 'great shape' as opposed to the fact that they're still alive and not showing outward sympoms of these things may not be the same thing, unless you're looking in their arteries and reading stress-test results.
Now, please don't get me wrong. I do of course see your point, and I hope that I made it very clear in my posts that my own repulsion at processed foods is a very personal issue, and a "gut feeling". And I'll admit that I can't really argue the point scientifically that these things will kill you soon after fifty, because people in earlier times also died young, although whether they died from the same things as we do may be unknown. Their hearts may just have given out from all the strenuous physical activity in their lifestyles. But you haven't convinced me that the diet that these kids are eating isn't dangerous, for what it contains and doesn't, and that it won't catch up with them by the time they're forty, in the same way that kids who smoke will seem to be in great shape when they're young as well before that catches up with them.
And for what it's worth, I know one pre-teen with horrible eating habits who suffers from medical problems that she and her parents have been told come entirely from malnutrition, eating junk instead of real food. She's simply not getting the nutrition she needs from what she eats instead of what she should, and her body is suffering badly because of it. Of course, this is only one kid, ststistically insignificant, but instead of it catching up with her at forty as I'm suggesting it may with the kids you mention, it got her at 13.
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I think he was okay (technically, but not morally) in avoiding the issue of exercise.
The problem with avoiding the issue of physical activity (and one might ask, along the same lines as Pollan asks with respect to food, when physical activity became "exercise") is that whatever supposed success traditional diets had surely didn't occur in a vacuum. Whatever it is that peasants ate in Europe was part of a matrix that included the fact that those peasants were out working the fields. It's nonsensical to recommend their diet without recommending the other essential components of their lifestyle.
You are correct, indeed; physical activity is an essential component to good health. (And I think that as industrial modernization, and then high-technology removed the necessity of any real physical activity from our lives, people who felt its lack then turned to treadmills and stairmaster "exercise" to add that component back into their lifestyles.)
But more than I felt that the article was at fault for not stressing the need for exercise, I applaud the fact that from beginning to end, it was a condemnation of "processed food", especially as it pertains to nutrition, meaning that processed food is as bad for what it doesn't contain as what it does. Believe me, I like Chicken McNuggets (although not so much now that they've reformulated them), but I'm horrified to think that in the place of a real dinner, a lot of parents are feeding their kids a Value Meal of nuggets and a glass of Coke. I just don't believe that the nuggets supply any of the nutrition that growing kids (or people, for that matter) need. And I do believe that the corn sweetner in a daily glass of Coke (not that I think for a minute that a kid today who's being fed fast food is even limited in how much soda he drinks) is going to kill him.
Would we be better off living on today's processed junk food and corn-sweetened everything, and getting the amount of physical exercise our great grandparents did, or would we be better off eliminating processed foods from our diet, living on naturally grown and raised "whole" ingredients that we cooked ourselves, and having a sedentary lifestyle? Well, I don't know, and I don't know that it's come down to that. Separate from whether we have any physical activity in our lives, I think the processing-out of nutriton from our foods in favor of shelf-life is a serious problem for a lot of the population.
Personally, I'd go for the whole, unprocessed food scenario if I had to choose, but that's just my gut feeling, because as a cook and a glutton, I'm thoroughly grossed out by processed food.
(And for what it's worth, I'm a carnivore, and it's an addiction that I have to deal with. I just comfort myself by thinking that (a) steak is a "whole" food, and (b) that at least I'm getting positive nutritional values from all the whole grains, and fresh fruits and vegetables - including tons of leaves, just because I love them - that I eat as well. And I spend a lot of time on the treadmill, because the only other physical activity I get in my day is pushing the mouse around a pad.)
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For all I know, if I feed my kid a diet mostly of leaves he'll grow up to be a weakling straight out of the 19th Century. So, forgive me if I stick to the diet rich in animal protein, white flour and corn that has coincided with historically unprecedented improvements in quality and quantity of life.
Yes, a lot of what he said was obvious to a lot of us who think a lot about food. And since his stated premise for the article was a tirade against "nutritionalism", and not a compendium on healthy living, I think he was okay (technically, but not morally) in avoiding the issue of exercise.
But, the question as I saw it was, instead of a diet of mostly leaves, are you going to feed your kid Coca Cola and Pop Tarts and call it a meal?
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In that vein, and, perhaps, because I'm nosy, I often sneak peeks at the carts of various shoppers in Whole Foods type markets. The very name of the store indicates that there is a rejection of processed foods, yet a great deal of what I see in carts (there are, of course, exceptions), is boxed, packaged, processed food, albeit "organic" and "whole grain." I leave stores, in contrast, with a bag full of "ingredients." Based upon much of what I read on these boards, most eGulleteers are in that category.
So therein lies the interesting issue for me. There seems to be a backlash against processed foods, particularly among people of the middle and upper classes. Yet there also seems to be a need, perceived or otherwise, for "convenience" above and beyond, for example, freshness or home cooked meals, things that I hold in high esteem.
Well, you have to make a distinction between "processed" and "convenience" foods.
A lot of things in the WF-type markets aren't a lot different than what some of us would make at home from real ingredients if we had the time. I buy stocks (chicken, vegetable, beef) (made from organic ingredients, no less) that are what I would make, but that somebody else has made for me to my own specifications and standards (speaking 'nutritionally', that is) and that save me time without any sacrifice in nutritional quality (I hope). And there are some things I buy there that I simply wouldn't be able to make at home, for example, the corn chips I buy for snacking which are made from blue corn, minimally processed (I hope) vegetable oil, and sea salt. Anyway, those are things that I consider 'convenient', not necessarily 'processed'.
To me, processed food refers to the process of taking from the food any ingredients of nutritional value, which of course they do to improve the product's shelf life, and in which process they add unnatural ingredients for the same purpose (and for a while, they were subjecting so many poor things to hydrogenation as well). I haven't actually looked completely into what WF-like stores are selling in the way of 'processed' foods (I must do that next time), but the ones I buy are simply labor-saving as far as I can tell (hope).
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I would suggest that this article should be required reading for anyone interested in taking part in any of the debates/discussions on health and food currently taking place.
Doc, I would tell you (sadly, and ironically) that most people taking part in discussions of health, and who like to cook, probably already know what Pollan is saying; I would hope that his article would be required reading for all those people in the supermarket who are filling their carts with 12-packs of Coke, Stouffer's dinner entrees, and SnackWells !! I think what he says about people who take vitamins applies here as well:
"People who take supplements are healthier than the population at large, but their health probably has nothing whatsoever to do with the supplements they take — which recent studies have suggested are worthless. Supplement-takers are better-educated, more-affluent people who, almost by definition, take a greater-than-normal interest in personal health — confounding factors that probably account for their superior health."
I certainly like his advice that we not eat anything our great grandmothers wouldn't recognize as food, and that we avoid items with more than five ingredients or unpronouncable names. It astounds me to see people checking out with not one thing in their overflowing carts that isn't processed-food, and/or loaded with corn sweetners.
But I think his article would fall on deaf ears, and be incomprehensible to them. (I actually read the whole thing.)
Personally, I like the idea of natural foodstuffs that you buy in their "whole" state (vegetables, fruits, grains, fish, etc.) and transform into dinner yourself; it's how I've been living for many years, though I certainly do cheat and enjoy an occasional fast food item (in my own case, I don't allow it to substitute for "food" as so many people do, so it's just a needless source of extra calories for me). If his article helps enough people to think that this is a good way to eat, and things start to change away from the agribusiness mentality that has robbed our basic foods of nutrition over the years (as he points out as well), and forced real "food" to take a minor role in our supermarkets, it will be a good thing. Economically it doesn't seem realistic or likely, but things have a way of coming around, so there's always hope though.
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As promised, I posted the first video of the visit to the Tarte Flambée oven, and because I have several to post, I spun off a separate Tarte Flambée thread for it. I hope you enjoy the video.
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I've also seen "pre-fix" and "pre-fixed" on menus.
Eating "food" again
in Food Traditions & Culture
Posted
I was pondering this interesting thread, and I realized that my own dislike of processed foods has a lot to do with loving to cook - you know, ah, the joy of putting a chicken in the oven with an onion and some garlic strewn around, and seeing it come out all golden brown, with lovely goo in the pan for a sauce. Somewhere in that romantic notion is the idea that chemicals and additives have no place in food - but I do point out that that's a romantic ideal, and I'm saying that it's not just the desire for what I "feel" is better nutrition that fuels this feeling in me. As far as the studies that are showing that the fat in our diets makes no difference in our health, oh boy, if I could really get myself to believe that, (and I'd like to) I'd go back to eating rib steaks three nights a week!