Does This Taste Funny? A Half-Baked Look at Food and Foodies (11 page)

Recently, the USDA
replaced the Food Pyramid with the even more remedial ‘Choose My Plate.’ But you
know there will still be confused people wondering, “Do I
have
to
have dairy with grains?” and “Is this part of the socialist takeover of the
government Fox News mentioned?”

Other
countries have tried to get creative with the whole “If we draw a
picture
of what they should eat maybe they won’t get fat like Americans” thing.

In France they have
twenty-five
separate
nutrition guides, NONE of which are followed by the
French. And Canada has a Food Rainbow. Of course they do.

The Chinese use a Food
Pagoda, whereas in Japan, it’s a spinning top. Too bad the Japanese couldn’t
find a way to use anime, because a hot alien chick with a machine gun could get
a lot of teenage boys on the right nutritional path.

Forget foods you
should
eat — I’m just glad there aren’t many foods I
can’t
eat. It’s true that I
don’t
eat a lot of dairy, but I refuse to be called ‘lactose intolerant,’
because I’m a liberal, and I feel I should fight intolerance. See—food choices
really are political choices.

The intersection of
politics and food has given us the ‘locavore’ movement, which, if I understand
it correctly, means I can only eat Chilean sea bass at
local
restaurants.

If there are
‘locavores,’ why not ‘
loco
vores,’ who only buy their food from crazy
people? Or maybe we could call people who only eat bland, boring foods
‘bori-vores.’ And, if you keep strictly kosher, you’re a ‘Torahvore!’ I got a
million of ‘em!

Of course, in addition
to vegetarians, there are vegans and then there are ‘
fruit
arians,’ who I
can only imagine are even
more
 judgmental than vegans.

And if the only animals
you eat are seafood, I believe that makes you a ‘pesceterian,’ although maybe
the ‘Pescetarians’ are a religious cult devoted to annoying people. Or a
fanatical group that worships Joe Pesci.

I have trouble keeping
track of what I’m supposed to eat. There’s always some new healthy grain or
super-fruit or must-have amino acid. Then we hear that something that was
healthy suddenly has been declared borderline toxic.

I think, decades from
now, the scientific community is going to make the following announcement:

“Since
everybody
is different, our recommendation is that you eat you want. If
it smells good, and tastes good, and you don’t know anyone who’s gotten sick
from it, then by all means have some. Try not to have not too much of one
thing.”

At this point, I figure
I’m as qualified as anyone to toss out diet suggestions. So, if the either of
the following diets work for you, great!

THE LEXICOGRAVORE DIET

First, assign a letter,
in order, to each day of the month. You only are allowed on a given date to eat
foods that start with that date’s letter. So, on the first of the month, you
can eat apricots, artichokes, avocado . . . for day two you’ve got your bacon,
maybe some blueberries, even brisket!

After day twenty-six,
you can eat what you want until the first of the month, when it’s back to
arugula, or maybe alligator. Also, on day twenty-four, you can eat what you
want because no foods start with ‘x.’

THE CARTOGRAVORE DIET

Get out your placemat
with the big map of the U.S. on it, because, on this diet, you will only be
able to eat official state foods, and you’ll be eating them in the order the
states were admitted to the Union!

On day one, how about
carving up Delaware’s state bird and enjoying some blue hen? Sure, it’s their
state
bird
, not their state food, but if you cook it right . . . Day two
is cheesesteak, and you might want to fill up on it, because for New Jersey’s
day, all you get is a tomato.

The rest of your first week includes Georgia grits
(technically their official state ‘prepared dish’), but plan ahead, because
Connecticut has no state food, so on day five, you don’t eat at all. Just be
careful on day seventeen, because too much Ohio pawpaw probably isn’t good for anybody.

The creepily named
‘Center for Science in the Public Interest’ recently put together a list of the
ten healthiest foods.

Sadly, none of them are
pastries. Fans of butternut squash, though (you know who you are) should feel
vindicated.

Every few years we find
out something is bad for you that we thought was just fine. It was easier to be
healthy when I was younger, because we didn’t know as much!

“Why,
when I was your age we only had ONE kind of cholesterol, and we weren’t sure
whether it was good or bad for you!”

Let’s be honest. We all
have a vague idea of what ‘healthy’ is, but we crave the crap. And to me,
that’s part of a balanced diet, too.

But if I’m gonna eat
something I KNOW is bad for me, I don’t need to find out HOW bad. I’ve never
understood why, for example, Hostess would bother to list ‘nutritional
information’ for their ‘fruit’ pies.

I
guess it’s useful to know that if you eat one, you’ll get two percent of the
calcium and four percent of the phosphorus you should be getting in your daily diet.

Hey,
if my math is correct, that means that if you eat twenty-five pies a day,
you’ll get all the phosphorus you need!

What
I love most about that picture is that it refers to “real fruit pie” (there’s
even a picture of real fruit to prove it).

Yet, if you look
closely at the wrapper, the food wizards at Hostess realized it still needed to
be “artificially flavored.” I picture one of the product guys at a meeting
saying,

“Yeah,
I’m on board with the real fruit, but here’s another direction we could go: we
take the fruit and whatever boring ‘real’ flavor it has and we add more flavor
artificially
!”

By contrast, the label
on this organic pasta may be the ultimate example of truth in labeling. Much
more than the nit-picky specifics of
what
the ingredients are, I just
want to know that they’re ‘real.’

Nothing ruins a nice
dinner like finding out that your food contains fictional ingredients. “I can’t
eat this! It’s eight percent Flubber!”

Given the American
psyche, I’m sure there will be the inevitable backlash, when it becomes hip and
trendy to eat as badly as possible. Americans will be all over it.

After all, people bought
Jolt Cola (“All the sugar, twice the caffeine!”). Who’s to say you won’t start
seeing chips advertised with
extra
salt?

Or maybe Dunkin’ Donuts
will start
adding
trans-fats to their pastries. You’ll be able to order
a hot dog and say, “Heavy on the nitrites, please!”

In my first couple
years of cooking, I’ve been willing to experiment with almost anything on the
shelf. Granted, my relationship with coriander isn’t as close as we’d like, and
I’ve only flirted with bay leaves, but in general, I’ve tried to be even-handed
in my spice-ifying.

I once used sage in a
dish
simply
because I
hadn’t
used it for a few weeks (turns out
it doesn’t work very well on ice cream).

My point is that a cook
should stay on good terms with
all
the herbs and spices in the pantry,
and not become too attached to any of them.

Which is why I was
taken aback the other day, while reaching for the rosemary.
Behind
the
rosemary, in the back, with no label and a cap that had never been removed, I
saw a container of marjoram.

And then I was hit by
the realization that, over the last two years, in preparing hundreds of dishes,
I have
never
used marjoram.

While I was fawning
over flashier jars, I was ignoring something that was considered downright
medicinal
by Hippocrates.

And according to
some
historical botanists (botanical historians?) the ‘hyssop’ referred to in the
Passover story was actually marjoram!

Not impressed yet?
Well, marjoram was also name-dropped by Shakespeare in Sonnet 99: “
And buds of
marjoram had stol'n thy hair . . . 
(o
ut
of context,
that
makes
it sound like
marjoram
is
some sort of depilatory
, which
I’m fairly sure it isn’t).

looking at this, i realize i may have

smoked a lot of marjoram in college

I couldn’t call myself a
cook until I had used everything on my rack at least a few times.
On
the other hand,
I need to feel comfortable with a
new ingredient, so we arranged to meet.

At the start of the
interview, I must say that marjoram was a bit defensive, but as we talked more,
she loosened up.

Unfortunately, all audio
from the interview was lost, so I’ve had to reconstru
ct
the conversation from memory, but I assure you, this was
an actual conversation.