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MaxH

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  1. There are quite a few contemporary ones (Escoffier's is historic rather than modern, anyway no one seems to make Sauce Nantua any more, alas ...) They just don't surface in pop media. Janericco's series on soups, hors d'euvres and catering, etc. Institional recipe cookbooks (one of my favorites tipped me off on how to make "grilled" sandwiches in bulk, in an oven. Recipe starts, of course, with ten loaves of sliced bread, for a basic batch of 180 sandwiches ...)
  2. Also, "weight-based" being an issue is a US peculiarity, not a professional vs home cooks difference. Most of my home cookbooks from other countries have always used weight measures when appropriate and when a volume measure fundamentally makes no sense (like ingredients of widely varying density -- chopped ingredients, different grain flours, pastas, etc.) I hope (since we exhausted the topic a few years back, it seems) everyone here has heard about the modern generation of inexpensive, accurate, compact digital scales. For US $20 or so in any specialty cookware shop you can get a mass-produced European digital gram/ounce scale that's conveniently flat. When not using mine, I put it in a light plastic bag to keep off any dust, and file it on a shelf, sideways, just like a book.
  3. I'm also with Mjx on this, I've known a lot of them, in fact I'm wondering what _john had in mind in the comments about stereotypes. A few are even synthetic marketing icons. "Boyardee" is a stylized artificial character. The original, Boyardi, ran a successful restaurant (ca. 1900? I don't remember offhand) and sold kits with uncooked spaghetti and prepared sauce. (From my recollection of Mariani's classic American Heritage essay "Everybody Loves Italian Food.") Nothing to do with canned pre-cooked pasta. The kits established his name, later converted to something artificial that could be milked -- what MBAs like to call a "brand."
  4. Mainly a little experience, I think, is the requirement. The essence of "home" cookbooks IMO is that they try to be explicit instead of allusive -- for the recipes to be self-contained. For many years I've consulted both the Guide Culinaire, Escoffier's professional reference cookbook, and Mastering the Art of French Cooking (Child, Bertholle, and Beck). The latter (I think counting its sequel, "Vol. 2") has about one-tenth of the former's 5012 recipes, expanded and explained so that anyone can do them without knowing a lot of context like "from another duck of any age prepare a generous deciliter of greaseless stock for later use" or "finish with a very rich Sauce Nantua." To its credit, I sometimes find useful experience tips in Mastering, especially of the "we tried X, which seemed obvious, but didn't work, so do Y" practicality.
  5. I have problems with premises, or assumptions, here too. Not just in the opening question. 1. "Blah-blah-blah" doesn't speak about Alice Waters. Not only is she constantly mischaracterized these days (by people who don't know the place) as "chef" of the rest't she founded 40 years ago this year, but certainly most of the chefs there in recent decades were men. I saw no one here cite exceptions. 2. It's a telltale of growing mythology (i.e., departure from history) when people mischaracterize, even worse, Julia Child as a "chef," rationalize as they may. JC was a cookbook author (skillfully adapting 10% of the Guide Culinaire repertoire to US kitchens) who made 3? appearances on WGBH-TV specifically to promote the 1961 cookbook. She was entertaining, popular, and eventually did a regular program, The French Chef. That is why everyone knows her name. She was, of course, as everyone knows who is acquainted with her work, neither French nor a chef. She never ran a restaurant kitchen professionally, to my knowledge. "She is not a cook," as someone put it to the Hesses,"but she plays one on TV." That opens their famous or notorious 1997 review in The Nation, "Icon Flambé," of Fitch's JC biography. People with notions of JC as chef need very very badly to read it. (It's an appendix in the paperback reissue of The Taste of America.) Known by whom? Europe has ample examples, surprising no one aware that (Hesses again!) cooking's overall history consisted chiefly of women at home inventing something interesting from ingredients the gentry wouldn't touch. Fiction of course has plenty of female chef heroines. Who is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe, Babette's Feast, and Tampopo, each the must-see food movie of its time, all had impressive chef-heroines. Some regions have famous traditions of high-profile kitchens run by women. Burgundy comes right to mind. It has more of a hearty than a "high" cuisine culture, but Wechsberg, the popular food writer of the time, went around interviewing Michelin-starred women chefs there, around 1950. Specialties like Bresse fowls “demi-deuil, which means `half-mourning’ because of the black-and-white effect of the black truffles under the white skin” at Mother Brazier’s near Lyon. Watt, one of the later of the 150 years of both male and female French-cooking popularizers to the US public before JC, wrote a book on the Paris bistros, all of which seemed to have a capable Madame calling the shots in the kitchen, and furnishing the book's exquisite recipes. See also the end of the quirky "Restaurant" article, disdaining the pretense of naming mediocre restaurants after renowned female cooks, in the original English Larousse Gastronomique (Crown, 1961). Next question, please?
  6. Also re gfweb's disappointment about inconsistency, it turned out for me it was not a bug, but a feature! I'd almost written off pricey chain steakhouses in general, after RC in San Francisco in the early '90s. If I'd judged from that, I would never have considered the places I mentioned around Palm Springs, never discovered that some of those not only were very well run, with classy kitchens, but even could be amazingly good values, if you were around enough to learn about their deals that catered to locals. "Outback" prices with high-end food and edgy live jazz. Another of them there, to bring in trade on one night of the week that's usually slow, gave out quality filet-mignon sandwiches as "snacks" if you stopped at the bar for a drink. Who needed dinner after that?
  7. Of course not. But I see people constantly surprised by realities they didn't know about when they extrapolate from part of a restaurant (or a chain) that they know about, to parts they don't. On the other hand you can speak from experience of the particular RC's you've visited, and that's valuable info for other folk. Ideals of chainwide uniformity notwithstanding, real chain steakhouse sites have different personnel, markets, even types of ownership, as I wrote of RC. The most common weakness I see in online (or in-person) restaurant reports is extrapolation beyond what people know. It's partly how we all intuit reality (which tends to estimate unknown details automatically). You can see it any time you know a restaurant well (from many visits under diverse circumstances), and a customer new to the place, with very narrow experience, comments confidently with generalizations that they likely would never use if they knew the restaurant better. Yet their specific experiences and observations have value, if they would stick to those... Occasionally I try to point out such a generalization, or that something they reported, good or bad, is atypical, as any experienced customer could tell them; but they reply defensively (as if it were about them, not the restaurant), like "if the place had any standards, every experience would be identical." Maybe, but that's off the point. And again, occasionally negative comments reflect situations the customer clearly created, and even admits! On eG, two threads appeared once from diners who complained of mildly negative experiences at different high-end restaurants -- and admitted having created the problems, with clearly obnoxious behavior. And many readers sympathized! It's a window into some of the psychology.
  8. Not quite sure I follow Mjx's point about people who do speak French using the "former" (i.e. English) pronunciation, but anyway what I've explained to Chris and Liuzhou is that I've been hearing about absinthe for, literally, about 40 years (it was an extremely uncommon word in US for the first 35 of those) and only ever heard the French pronunc. (in the US) most of that time, so I was basically innocent of other factors. I also hang out with a lot of US food and wine enthusiasts and professionals and they, and local absinthe hobbyists, and two absinthe makers and several merchants and restaurant F&B people I've conversed with about it, all use the French form very naturally and, by the way, unaffectedly; I guess it's because like me, that's all they heard for years. Some years ago on a New Orleans online food forum, I saw postings from people who saw others swirling wine in glasses, didn't know what it was about, and assumed (I think more technically the behavior word is projected) that it was some kind of affectation or pretense. I suppose there may actually be people who do it for that reason, but it's amazing to see someone interpret wine-swirling that way, if you like wine and regularly taste, and just want to get a good solid smell impression, which is why everyone I know swirls it in glasses.
  9. But gf, as you, popsicletoze, and I already pointed out here, you can't judge a chain from one or two sites. RC has something like 120 restaurants. I recall the Del Frisco parent firm having even more, and Sullivan's was one of their higher-tier "brands." I've eaten at multiple RCs each in Louisiana, Texas, California, and I think at least one other state in between. They varied in style and experience. I mentioned an unusual one in the Palm Springs area. That is a big steakhouse market with many chains and independents. The Morton' and RC in that competitive market have been impressive, but not quite up to the Sullivan's there, widely considered one of the very best of many competitors; it may be the best chain steakhouse location I've ever tried. (LG's Prime, a small local chain, had the best beef, but Sullivan's had classy live jazz, a good regular clientele, and among the most attractive "happy-hour" food deals in the area.) You can't generalize unless you've eaten at a good fraction of the chain's locations.
  10. You do have to be very specific in these discussions about which location (of the hundreds of them) you're referring to. 20 years ago when Ruth Fertel was still alive, I recall the original in N'Awlins or Metairie was not half bad, as were some others in the US South; at that time the one in San Francisco (closer to my usual haunts) was cruelly disappointing for a dinner party: although the steaks were of reasonably good quality, the vegetables might have been from a school lunch steam table, overcooked, flavorless, drizzled with something suspiciously like Margerine. Fertel* later died and the chain expanded and as of a few years ago (before the Flood) I didn't find any natives in New Orleans who thought much of them even in their home city. Tourist stuff, they said. Other local, independent, sometimes funky steakhouses were more respected. I recall RC being perceived in the chain steakouse world in recent years as a mid-priced brand (other chains like the vast Del Frisco have as many as three tiers under different names) and I recall from a couple of years ago that some RC's were repurchasd by the chain after independent ownership, and subsequently more carefully run. One such, where I had several meals in recent years, is in the Palm Springs area -- one of the adjacent towns -- extremely well managed and rather creative; its manager even started the local Restaurant Week program to promote the local restaurants, in 2008 or 2009, with good success. So (I find this true of most of the respectable midprice chain restaurants), much depends on the individual site, its people, its ownership, maybe the standards of its customers. That makes it useless to generalize any such chain, as when for example a Zagat guide uses one location in Los Angeles to characterize other locations all over Southern CA, covering hundreds of miles, as it did with one smaller moderately upscale restaurant chain (Daily Grill). *If anyone dosn't know the history, Ruth Fertel, a divorced chemist, originally bought a local restaurant called Chris Steak House under proviso to retain the name Chris, hence Ruth's Chris.
  11. After digging into WikiGullet Beta and doing some writing, I noticed a few broad questions or "loose ends." I'll pose one here for manager comment. Its charter models WG on Wikipedia's "Five Pillars." Over the years, reading good Wikipedia food/drink articles that reflect diverse or conflicting contributor visions, I often noticed a custom to propose or discuss edits first, or concurrently, on the article's Talk page, addressing controversy there, rather than just editing or reverting someone's contribution with a perfunctory note in the Changes box. Not essays or long debates; but a point that seems controversial, yet has compelling rationale or references, may achieve consensus or compromise this way with less wasted back-and-forth editing. In my WG experience so far, that custom has been absent. On the contrary, early I proposed one edit in this manner, but the previous editor replied "you don't need my permission," as if such a proposal were surprising. I've assumed that WG's creators would encourage good-faith "Talk" discussion before or with edits, among the other courtesies that Wikipedia's Five Pillars promote (see below). If not, it'd be helpful to spell that out, lest the Five Pillars mislead some of us into thinking so. [From sub-points under Wikipedia's Five Pillars, small text to save space:] Work towards agreement. Do not ignore questions. If another disagrees with your edit, provide good reasons why you think that it is appropriate. Amend, edit, discuss. Avoid reverts whenever possible. When reverting other people's edits, give a rationale for the revert (on the article's talk page, if necessary), and be prepared to enter into an extended discussion over the edits in question. Calmly explaining your thinking to others can often result in their agreeing with you; being dogmatic or uncommunicative evokes the same behavior in others, Avoiding "faux pas" including: Deleting useful content... Consider what a sentence or paragraph tries to say. Clarify it instead of throwing it away. If the material seems mis-categorized or out of place, consider moving the wayward material to another page... If all else fails, and you can't resist removing a good chunk of content, it's usually best to move it to the article's Talk page, which can be accessed using the "discussion" button at the top of each page. The author of the text once thought it valuable, so it is polite to preserve it for later discussion. Deleting without explanation. Deleting anything that isn't trivial requires some justification, or else other users who care about the article's development will be caught unaware, and may think you're being intentionally sneaky.
  12. IndyRob, I've explained some of it already, but since you asked, will elaborate (I already offered upthread to do so privately). This isn't about "my dataset is bigger than yours" (though I can imagine various other defenses or rationalizations of Google Books -- I've been discussing online source limitations for many years). I agree it's interesting, and very easy, to search phrases mechanistically from a large blind text corpus (whose coverage, and subject and source weighting, you don't know; where in-copyright owners, i.e. of material from about the last 75 years, have been suing Google, creating various obstacles, and gotten various opt-out means from Google books) than to check actual cookbooks and food writing, including in-copyright. I took the second approach, as more certain to hit the nail on the head. The published record includes such standard British food overviews as André Simon's Encyclopedia (1952) and Davidson's massive Oxford Companion to Food (1999). The first doesn't mention "French fry" or "French fried" in any form, the second, in 1999, cites "chips [uS French fries]" which is fairly definitive. Meanwhile in the US, "French fried potatoes" appeared in the original (1896) Boston Cooking-School Cookbook by Fannie Farmer, recurring in later editions; likewise with the subsequent cookbook Joy of Cooking. Those two are the best-known US 20th-century cookbook titles. 115 years after Fannie Farmer, can still buy canned "French-fried" onions in US groceries. There's more, but that illustrates the relevant published record I cited. The very famous food references clearly show French frying to be something other than "a Brit term, adopted by America for a brief time but then discarded." (Who knows what source mix Google's phrase statistics reflects.) Someone who disagrees should logically take it up with Davidson, not me. Incidentally, by mid-19th-century, major cookbooks in both US and UK use phrases like frying potatoes "in the French manner" though not the exact form "French fried." And there's other enlightening history about both deep-frying itself and potatoes, but this post is long already.
  13. I agree emphatically in general, gfweb. (Misunderstood, out-of-context online upshots have even replaced fat wallets full of clippings to yank out and "prove" things in barroom discussions. One of Paul Fussell's figurations in the 1980s.) However in specific, Google does reveal serious critiques of Lustig's road show, and no specialized background is necessary to interpret the sugar compositions in fresh produce, or what becomes of sucrose after you eat it. Those two points then raise basic logical challenges that I never see examined by "fructose is poison" advocates. (Because issues of similar complexity have been discussed publicly on the Internet since long before eGullet existed, I learned to at least try to post upshots that others can check independently if they are interested.)
  14. Mjx, depite its title, this thread's genesis has further context which surfaces in some postings including mine. (The thread arose after I mentioned in a WikiGullet discussion with Chris that in the US, other things besides potatoes are sometimes "French fried," and he reported he hadn't seen the phrase except with potatoes. That was the original issue, another is my own point that "French-fried potatoes" means solely deep-fried, another is the historical background of "French-fried," a spin-off subject I later looked into.) "French fry" as a verb usually appears indirectly, in its past-tense or adjective form "French fried" ("French-fried onions" are currently available in US supermarkets.) These variants are inseparable, being different grammatic forms of the same base meaning. Here's the totality of relevant entries in the current American Heritage Dictionary I cited earlier. The second, verb sense, is the one of interest: French fry n. A thin strip of potato fried in deep fat. Often used in the plural. French-fry tr. v. -fried, -frying, -fries. To fry (potato strips, for example) in deep fat. In writing here, I haven't distinguished (as much as some people) the pure transitive verb from its other grammatical forms. They're different sides of the same meaning. Besides "French-fried" foods in US writing, I've seen only occasional uses of the verb "to French fry," as I mentioned upthread. And of the gerund/participial form "French frying." And so far, zero second-person verb uses (the last form listed above -- "this place French-fries all its vegetables!").
  15. Lacking further cues I can't tell if that's an ironic quip in good humor or a serious question. But if serious -- ooh, wrong question! One observation Mary-Claire van Leunen made in her great reference book on scholarly writing (I mention this because it's so contrary to pop-media culture) is that among serious scholars it's the writing that validates the credentials, never vice versa. In this case (far from serious scholarship!) I reported personal experiences, upshots of some public criticism of Lusting's pitch, and basic biochemical and botanical background information that's readily available, including online. Anyone interested can and should confirm, and read more about, the latter points for themselves.
  16. The published record is somewhat different from that, IndyRob. I became curious about this topic after recently encountering differing perceptions about the phrase "French-fried" on eG. I've been checking hardcore printed modern and historical sources (no idea to what extent their upshots surface online -- in some cases very little certainly, because of active copyright covering the past 75 years or so -- with information like this, my experience is that sometimes you do get what you pay for). Certain landmark food books reveal the practice and thinking of the cultures they came from. (Incidentally if anyone reading this is doing related serious research, you are welcome to PM or email me to discuss.) This inquiry (as food history research often does!) led to surprising side information that I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere. I'll add upshots to WikiGullet soon and post at least a link here. This might become an example (I'm sure others exist) of useful reference information that's online exclusively on WikiGullet. But in a nutshell, on the terminology, the phrase "French-fried" and variants have been used by major US, British, and French cookbook writers; it was extensively current in mainstream US sources for most of the 20th century; it's one among alternative phrases, never used exclusively in the US (I mentioned that in post #26 upthread); and it seems to've been particularly common in the US, other cultures having their own preferred folk idioms. (Pommes frites is especially international: its European use is not limited to le monde francophone, and it also appears in print as one of the British alternative idioms.) Cooking potatoes this way in the US emerges as one example of a broader historical shift, which one brilliant food historian documented. US popular taste and food writing, after following English traditions closely during the colonial centuries, shifted visibly away from English and toward French cooking starting around 1800.
  17. FYI, nutshell forthright mainstream US medical view of DM2 ("adult-onset" diabetes mellitus) risks as summarized in the professional Merck Manual (a physicians' reference), 18th edition, ISBN 0911910182, 2006: Risk factors for type 2 DM include age over 45; obesity; sedentary lifestyle... Type 2 DM usually can be prevented with lifestyle modification. Weight loss of as little as 7% of baseline body weight, combined with moderate-intensity physical activity (e.g., walking 30 min/day), may reduce the incidence of DM in high-risk individuals by > 50%.
  18. Yep' date=' it's an Americanism. (You're referring to the singular noun.) As you can further see if you check some cookbooks, "French fried" is one of the US-traditional folk idioms for deep fried (and its most common usage -- the original, AFAIK -- is "French-fried potatoes," informally "French fries"). It has always been used interchangeably here with "deep-fat fried" and "deep fried" and, just as with broth/stock/bouillon in US, there seems no rhyme or reason, different people perhaps growing up knowing one or another (just like "skillet" and "frying pan"). I pay attention to details like that, and post them for people [i']not already acquainted with them. "Deep fried" seems to've been gradually replacing the alternatives over time. To literally "French fry" I've encountered much less, the verb sense surfaces typically via its adjective form "French fried." To repeat, the current American Heritage Dictionary, pictured Here, defines to "French fry" as only meaning deep fry, and "French fries" as only deep-fried potatoes, without alternative meanings. The sole point that got me onto this topic on eG, and not, to my knowledge, controversial.* However this thread has addressed wider matters and even become something of a forum among people who don't recall seeing the broader sense of "French fried" yet in cookbooks or restaurants (I assure you, you will, if you watch for it, and I also assure you that many millions of Americans are accustomed to that sense). That's somewhat separate from my own interest noted above. * Current (2006) AHD's usage panel included the likes of Julian Bond, Joan Didion, Esther Dyson, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., William Least Heat Moon, Erica Jong, Garrison Keillor, Tracy Kidder, Maxine Hong Kingston, Armistead Maupin, Alice Munro, Robert Reich, Richard Rodriguez, Nina Totenberg, Tobias Wolff, and William Zinsser. Should you wish to petition them that in the US to "French fry" is completely archaic, or "French fried" can mean something else than deep fried, you can reach the publisher via the link above. But I caution against too quickly extrapolating personal unfamiliarity to a whole nation.
  19. Jeez, a whole thread. Personal opinions aside, this came up in a very narrow context: I just mentioned that "to French-fry" is a well-established idiom in the US, found in cookbooks and restaurants ("French-fried parsley" as a plate garnish for example I still run into, even tho I think the garnish itself is kind of ridiculous) and that the full-size printed American Heritage Dictionary (beloved among professional writers I know for various reasons including pragmatism, it lists meanings by currency rather than history and has other unusual information) defines a "French fry" as a deep-fried potato and to "French-fry" as [sic] "To fry (potato strips, for example) in deep fat." Those are the sole meanings given for these two terms in both 3rd and 4th (2006) full-size print editions, both of which I have handy. In many business situations entailing nonfiction writing, that'd be fully the end of the issue and next question, please. Offhand I'd say I probably have at least 100 US cookbooks using the term for things beyond potatoes. My claim was never that it competes with "deep-fry" or that "deep-fry" is somehow exceptionable or means only "French fry," rather that "French-fry" is well established in the US in the sense of deep fry. Quod erat demonstrandum. It's also the kind of subject liable to present a distorted picture if you look into it just online, because online sources are so skewed toward self-selected and very recent content.
  20. What Moopheus said (thank you Moopheus!) There is some real science behind "lo-carb" regimens, regardless of fashionable diets and the dumbing-down of the subject in the media and in the inevitable food-industry marketing accommodations (low-carb ice cream and all the rest). The insulin response is real; foods can be assessed via their effect on blood sugar; many individuals, even if not all, have successfully and safely shed fat by following regimens reflecting the real science. Several years ago (before the media chatter and respondent low-carb marketing campaigns) I had to loose some unnecessary weight and my excellent, widely respected physician prescribed a supervised diet based on reasonably limiting total carb intake weighted by glycemic index. He and colleagues had printed a list of the data for many foods. This was consistently successful, and it has affected my habits since (especially towards moderation in food). One friend even went from morbidly obese to quite fit by similar regimen (literally releasing the athlete inside that had been struggling to get out -- now regularly does extreme sports). But this was all somewhat deeper and more detailed than what I later saw in sound-bite reductive media explanations and online "debates." And for us food obsessives it CAN be a challenge to suddenly do without potatoes, risottos, apples, hearty pasta meals, &c. To expand slightly on Moopheus's later remarks (echoes of Michael Pollan!) the natural sweetenings in plant foods (often essentially pure HFCS) are NOT consumed just with carbonated water, artificial colorings and flavorings as in synthetic soft drinks. Those sugars occur in balance with many other natural components -- vitamins, minerals, fiber, antioxidants that preserve the fruit itself, polyols (see recent WikiGullet Alcohol article, ahem), countless congener molecules (plants typically contain not just a single representative of a chemical class but rather a group of related ones that occur together) and this, not cola or Twinkies or Cheeze Wiz, is what we evolved to eat. (ETA link)
  21. Maybe. Seeing some consumers scapegoat HFCS for all human ills, utterly diverting their attention from other sugars,* it's struck to me that no deliberate whisper campaign engineered by sugar makers could possibly have succeeded better. But! In my other experience of demonstrable technical misconceptions, no such money motivation has been necessary. Lustig may get more talk-show invites now than if he stuck to pediatric endocrinology, but that is not a necessary motivation. People take ideas to heart and stop examining them before they know enough of the story to put their first concern into clearer perspective. It's like in the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, when the bad guys copy just one side of a medal showing directions to a treasure, but not the other side which then changes the directions. I'm familiar with several such cases, here are two offhand, where misconceptions take root without aid of money factors: Teflon cookware hazards. Teflon has one particular safety hazard, public since the 1960s for anyone interested; but other cookware has a variant of the same hazard; these are very rarely problems in practice despite heavy reliance on Teflon in even the most abusive commercial kitchens; and some of the public has so garbled the issue as to misperceive teflon itself as poisonous even in normal use -- a perverse notion since it is one of the most inert materials known, which is why things won't stick to it. Wireless equipment "radiation" concerns (fashionable now in situations like cellphone towers and wireless utility meters) among people who picked up just enough knowledge to be aware there are imperfectly-understood electromagnetic biological interactions, but not enough to understand why it's completely irrelevant in these cases. *USDA (that's our "Ag. Ministry," to those of you in other countries) now says we Americans consume around 145 pounds/year, up from 125 when I first saw that data in the 1970s -- we are gaining on the Scots, who consumed 175 when we did merely 125.
  22. Keep in mind I haven't read the recent article, but it's a technical subject (not the only such) with an epic record of fashionable misinformation (especially online) and scarcity of a few background facts (see below) that put, especially, HFCS into completely different light. What I mostly object to is frequent myopic focus on HFCS or fructose (without questioning the now-common gross consumption of other sugars). More about why, below. Dr Lustig at UCSF isn't news; one friend was taken with his fructose-is-poison pitch a year or two back until shown some of its unstated context. Other friends are heavyweight experts in relevant science (more so possibly than Lustig) and have helped to fill out the picture. Lustig's pitch has reported information selectively, omitted essential context, completely misstated some facts (Japanese diet DOES include fresh produce and desserts, therefore significant fructose, also sucrose), and compared liver damage from gross chronic alcohol excess to liver damage from gross chronic fructose excess to conclude glibly that fructose acted like "alcohol without the buzz." That constitutes pop-culture science (something I run into periodically). Frankly I cringe to see someone using their respectable-looking title to lend legitimacy to what's more dispassionately characterizable as an opinionated and emotional crusade. One repeated error of pundits has been to pull results of extreme-diet metabolic studies -- these studies occur for many nutrients and reasons -- and confidently infer conclusions from them about normal diets under conditions rendering the study irrelevant. Presence of other nutrients changes everything. For example, fructose indeed doesn't elicit the insulin-leptin response and can theoretically cause food cravings. But glucose has the exact opposite effect, completely changing the response if taken with fructose. There seems to be plenty of literature also demonstrating that moderate fructose intakes in diets induce no actual weight gain or serum triglyceride rise, contrary to one of Lustig's rhetorical points. Summary from an independent researcher (John White) who reviewed the biomedical literature: "Although examples of pure fructose causing metabolic upset at high concentrations abound, especially when fed as the sole carbohydrate source, there is no evidence that the common fructose-glucose sweeteners do the same. Thus, studies using extreme carbohydrate diets may be useful for probing biochemical pathways, but they have no relevance to the human diet or to current consumption." If fructose is "poison," we're all zombies; here's why, in a nutshell (you can readily verify this basic, non-controversial background if interested.) 1. Fructose and glucose are common or dominant natural sugars in our ancestral diet. Many natural foods (apples, bananas, grapes, pears, peppers, onions, etc.) contain 5-15% natural fructose-glucose mix -- more, sometimes, than percentages in soft drinks containing HFCS. Honey is almost completely fructose and glucose, a natural HFCS. Any concern over these sugars would logically consider their many natural sources and our long history of consuming them. 2. If you eat table sugar (sucrose), then before anything else happens to it, your body converts it to a fructose-glucose mix (sucrose itself is not directly usable). Sucrose's hydrolysis to fructose and glucose starts in your mouth, with salivary enzymes. This means your body cannot actually tell whether you ate table sugar or HFCS; and you get HFCS anyway in natural foods extensively demonstrated as healthy. I have found some people so convinced of simplistic evil associations of HFCS or fructose that they won't even try to think through the implications of this basic biochemistry. And, of course, many people are unwilling to examine shallow opinions when Google much more easily furnishes thousands of references that will seem to rationalize them.
  23. Yes, agreed; I think most of us have posted about food online for a while and know the difference. I myself have been contributing content to WikiGullet topics where I have good-quality sources available, in the hope that someone may find it useful. It sounds as if there is no current technical capability for annotation of the kind I described (as, for example, exists in Microsoft Word). Such a capability adds nothing visible to ordinary readers, therefore satisfies any preference against cluttering. It is just a mechanism for adding notes to future editors in occasional situations where everyone would consider it desirable to do so.
  24. I regret the passing references above to scholarly habits and personalization, evidently they were distracting. What about my main question in the last pph, irrespective of those side matters: Is there an annotation option, or can one be realistically added?
  25. Mary-Claire van Leunen in her now-classic Handbook for Scholars trenchantly showed that many characteristic weaknesses in scholarly writing arise when the writer, unskilled with narrative styles, either unconsciously backs into the story and then tries to hide (causing many of those needless passive-verb forms, "can be shown to be caused by ...") or, less often, fails to own up when it truly is appropriate -- when he or she truly IS part of the story, as when relating firsthand experience. (Incidentally I've found those, and MCVL's other tips, valuable in my own scholarly writing.) The second situation surfaced in my expansion of Tabasco sauce to an article. The big change in Tabasco's heat some years ago is occasionally discussed by people who experienced it, but lacking a good external reference yet, I acknowledged it as my own memory and added {{Citation needed}}. (Incidentally this also answered Chris's request in posting #69 here -- acknowledging relevant but unsourced info, an earlier discussion topic.) Then liuzhou (less familiar perhaps with van Leunen :-) removed my acknowledgment. (Side note to liuzhou: Personalization is occasionally essential in some writing like this, even if not there; more, privately, if you like.) Anyone wishing to track down the individual writer could (even now, for that matter) find me by checking who added that point to the article. This raises a new idea/request: Were it possible to annotate WikiGullet content so that the annotations are available but normally hidden -- a routine feature in other document preparation -- it would address that and other situations. E.g. where a little background explanation, too specialized to clutter the actual article, would aid later editors to understand phrasings they might otherwise ill-advisedly delete. Much like the "fact-checking" annotations that writers include in manuscripts to major magazines for the editors' benefit, but that don't appear in the printed version.
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