The Man Who Ate Everything (28 page)

Does white sugar give you cavities? Sure it does. But no more than any other fermentable carbohydrate. More important is the form the carbohydrate takes. Sticky carbohydrates like syrups, honeys, and raisins cling to your teeth and have more time to do their damage. Children and adults with a proclivity to cavities should vigorously rinse out their mouths after eating any kind of sticky carbohydrate.

It was the nutritionists of the 1970s who sent America into a panic about white sugar. As a consequence, we consume vast amounts of artificial sweeteners (even though several brands carry warning labels that they cause cancer in laboratory animals). More damaging to American gastronomy, we eat distasteful “sugarless” desserts and jams sweetened with concentrated apple or grape juice or pulverized dried apples, all of which contain just as many sugar molecules as sucrose but taste of boiled fruit juice instead of the pure, crystalline clarity we hunger for. Many nutritionists today are worried that people get so distracted by their irrational fear of sugar that they forget the really serious problems in our diets, especially our prodigal consumption of animal fat. That’s what I call sweet revenge.

October 1992

High over Cincinnati, heading back to New York, I writhed in my procrustean airline seat and reflected upon the Second Age of Man. For that is precisely what we embarked upon, you and I, on January 24, 1996—the day the FDA approved Olestra.

The First Age of Man, the Material Age, ran from 100,000
b.c.
until the evening of January 23,
a.d.
1996. It was called the Material Age because, while it lasted, human consciousness was trapped in its primitive physical housing, the body, and pleasure was inevitably followed by painful and expensive consequences. And then, on January 24, everything changed. The Second Age of Man, the Virtual Age, began with the legalization of the first nearly successful virtual pleasure—a virtual food, as it turns out—Olestra. The invention of birth control, coming near the end of the Material Age, was only a halfway step.

Olestra is the fat that passes unchanged, unchallenged, and unabsorbed through the human body. It is the fat without calories, without cholesterol, without heart disease, without cancer. Olestra is the fat without consequence. It is a molecular imitation, almost a parody, of fat.

All the fats and oils we eat are called triglycerides, because they consist of three fatty acid chains, each attached at one end to the same glycerol molecule. Olestra is quite similar, except that it has six or eight fatty acid chains on the outside, with a sucrose molecule, table sugar, in the middle. (That’s why the generic name for Olestra is sucrose polyester.) The fat-slicing enzymes in our intestines, accustomed to taking apart triglycerides for easy absorption into the bloodstream, cannot figure out what to do with this Medusa, and so Olestra keeps traveling down the digestive tract and out of the body, fatty acids and all. This smooth and easy transit can also cause problems, but we will get to them later. Compared with Olestra, fat substitutes like Simplesse are impostors. They are not like fats at all but are carbohydrates or proteins mechanically whirled up to look like fat or feel like fat on the tongue. But eat them or heat them, and the illusion breaks down. Olestra is different. It looks like a fat and it acts like a fat in cooking, and it tastes like a fat — greasy and good. But once it has done its magic in the frying pan and on our palate, it simply disappears down the drain. Have you ever tasted a dish of fake ice cream made with Simplesse? Whoever invented this stuff should be taken out and forced to eat a dish of fake ice cream made with Simplesse.

I had followed the Olestra story practically since I learned to read. The molecule was first dreamed up in 1959; the idea was that all those extra fatty acids and sucrose could supply intense nourishment for premature babies. Somebody must have been extremely disappointed to discover that the new substance supplied no nutrition at all because it could not be broken down and absorbed. And so years passed before Olestra’s fabulous potential was understood.

I had read the scientific and medical papers on Olestra and followed the volleys of charges and countercharges about its efficacy and safety. I had spoken with officials who participated in the FDA hearings, and I had obtained all the transcripts, several thousand pages on four floppy disks. I was up to speed. And there
is
a good reason for worrying about Olestra: eating it can bring on side effects, mild to severe gastrointestinal discomfort and problems with absorbing nutrients. But before getting hot and bothered about all this, I desperately needed to cook with Olestra, using meat and seafood and fruit and bread, in sauces and in sweets—sautéed, panfried, deep-fried, roasted, and baked—in all its boundless forms and incarnations. The FDA has approved Olestra only for making savory snack foods, and I yield to no one in my admiration for a fine potato chip. But it is not snack foods that have made me fall in love with the concept of Olestra.

Because here is the Big Point: Olestra is not just some alternate kind of fat, like a bottle of peanut oil or a can of Crisco. Olestra is a
process
for turning any fat—
any fat!!—
into a sucrose polyester that passes right through the body. They can make Olestra butter and bake golden croissants with the fat calories of a piece of dry toast. They can make beef-tallow Olestra (or goose-fat Olestra) for cooking truly perfect French fries, savory and crunchy but with the zero-fat level of a naked baked potato. They can make lard Olestra and roll out piecrust so light and flaky that you will have to nail it to the kitchen table to keep it from floating away. They can make cocoa-butter Olestra and mold bars of smooth, rich, dark chocolate with the three or four fat grams found in a quarter cup of dry cocoa powder. At least I think they can.

I also knew that it was politically incorrect to love Olestra, at least in the world of nutrition. Procter & Gamble had sent hundreds of shiny foil bags of Olestra potato chips to food editors and writers around the country. Some of them—my friends!—had actually refused to open the packages. Me, I tore the samples open before the courier had left my house. I knew that these silver pouches contained crisp little chips of history. And they tasted just fine.

I have to admit it: one of the most delectable reasons for loving Olestra is that it makes most nutritionists squirm. For nearly a decade they have earned a fine living frightening us into believing that consumption of any fat will bring on heart disease, stroke, diabetes, obesity, and various cancers. The scientific truth is that not all fat is bad for us, only saturated fat—mainly animal fat.*

*For more details, please turn back to the chapter “Pain Without Gain,” but only after you have finished reading this one.

But either out of ignorance or from the sheer thrill they get from controlling the rest of us, the antifat forces have tried to convince us that every fat is a poison. And now they are in a pickle. For if fat is poison, then anything that can keep us from consuming fat, even a diet composed entirely of fat-free junk food made with Olestra, will be a godsend. Olestra calls the nutritionists’ bluff!

If Olestra lives up to its potential, the unemployment rate among antifat nutritionists and food writers will soon reach 100 percent.

What were you doing on January 24, 1996? Me, I was thinking about fat. Actually, I was thinking about food, which is the same as thinking about fat, unless you regard thinking about lettuce as thinking about food. Early that morning, as if by psychic awareness, I had placed a call to Procter & Gamble’s public relations department to request a bathtubful of Olestra to experiment with. They didn’t say no, and they didn’t say yes. They forgot to return my call.

For it was that very afternoon that the FDA announced its favorable decision, and all hell broke loose around the Procter & Gamble publicity shop. A few days later, a P & G voice offered to come by my kitchen in New York City and demonstrate Olestra. Two PR people and an excellent culinary consultant named Marilyn Harris were traveling to New York City and making the rounds of the most powerful and influential food writers and magazines. When they had finished with that, they would come and see me. I angrily replied that I would accept nothing less than complete and free access to Olestra, not a rehearsed demonstration available to any Fleet Street hack. When they refused, I grumpily gave in.

The day arrived and so did the three people from P & G. They were in a terrible hurry, late for me and due in only a half hour at
Allure,
some kind of beauty magazine. They set up two tiny deep-fat fryers on my kitchen counter; poured soybean oil into one and Olestra, a very thick and golden liquid, into the other; plugged them in; fried
a
few corn chips; and unplugged the machines. The results were good to eat, both those done in Olestra and those done in soybean oil. When I asked to keep the Olestra oil, the answer was a peremptory no. I asked if I might fry some potato chips and French fries I had earlier cut up. Again, the answer was no. But when the two P & G public relations staffers went off to the telephone, Marilyn Harris and I surreptitiously plugged in the little fryers and cooked the potatoes. Though the PR people were furious, the resulting French fries and chips were delicious and fat free as a glass of water, and my appetite for Olestra increased a thousandfold. I was frantic to cook with it.

I inundated Procter & Gamble with telephone calls. At first they ignored me, but with the assistance of Marilyn Harris, who had become my ally, I finally received an invitation to Cincinnati to cook for as long as I pleased with any form of Olestra they had on hand. I would soon become the first journalist of the Virtual Age, the only one ever allowed to play with Olestra to his heart’s content and tell the world about it, flaws and all. And thus I was to step into the pages of history.

Why choose me over all other writers? I do not know, but I would not discount raw animal magnetism as a major factor.

The days flew by like minutes. I assembled a bundle of fine recipes—no savory snack foods here—and faxed Marilyn Harris a shopping list: apples, lemons, vanilla, flour, sugar, milk, potatoes, garlic, fresh rosemary, thyme, sage, and oregano, a dozen shucked oysters, okra, zucchini, two chickens, a pound of shrimp, and several pints of Graeter’s ice cream in assorted flavors. Cincinnatians always tell you that Graeter’s ice cream is the best in the world, and I have long wondered if they were correct.

I boarded the plane carrying several frying thermometers, which set off the metal detector, a few extra pairs of tongs, and a bag of chapati flour for making puffy pooris. A few rainy hours later, Marilyn and I pulled into the parking lot of Procter & Gamble’s Winton Hill Technical Center on the outskirts of Cincinnati. The P & G Culinary Center consists of four kitchens and several hundred cookbooks on the ground floor of a modest tan brick structure called the Food Building. Three of the kitchens are small home models fitted with standard equipment, and one is a large, professional demonstration kitchen, where we spent most of the day. Ivorydale is a mile or two away, and on rainy days when the wind is right, the air is sickly sweet with
a
soapy perfume.

First I had to sign a legal release. The FDA’s reason for restricting Olestra to the production of salty, savory snack foods is to limit the likely amount of Olestra that people will actually eat, while it studies the long-term effects. The FDA has decidedly not approved Olestra for the kind of home cooking in which I was about to engage. I quickly set up two large, heavy pots on adjoining burners, filled one with peanut oil and the other with the standard FDA-approved form of Olestra made from soybean or cottonseed oil; immersed one of my frying thermometers in each; and fired them up. Soon our memories of Ivory Snow were driven away by the joyous aroma of deep-fried beignets (we cooked these first and dusted them with confectioners’ sugar to go with the morning’s coffee), zucchini sticks (first dipped into Marcella Hazan’s excellent flour-and-water batter), okra fried in cornmeal (Marilyn’s crispy recipe), French fries, and my very own excellent potato chips.

Meanwhile, I prepared two versions of the miraculous, to be perfectly frank, piecrust dough from last November’s
Vogue
(see page 481), one made with Crisco and the other with a hydro -genated form of Olestra manufactured some time ago in the laboratory and stashed away by Marilyn for a moment just like this. Marilyn peeled ten pounds of apples with only the mildest complaint, and our talented helper Cindy Young rolled out my dough and constructed two handsome pies—which only she could tell apart. And somewhere along the way, Marilyn made her favorite fatless Olestra brownies, southern biscuits, and deep-fried chunks of chicken breast in a Cajun-style recipe.

I was shown many types of Olestra during my visit, including the Crisco-like version and the beef-tallow version for making French fries. This is where mankind truly needs Olestra—as a completely satisfactory replacement for those dietary fats that really do cause us harm, the fully saturated or hydrogenated fats people should avoid but that make many traditional foods so delicious. I was especially keen to lay my hands on some Olestra butter, but I could find none in the entire Cincinnati metropolitan area. I know they’ve made some. There could be a Nobel Prize in store for someone.

We three cooks were never alone. Every few seconds some P & G executive or scientist or engineer wandered in to have a snack, generously share their cooking advice, answer my probing scientific questions, or talk about New York restaurants. These people have been nibbling on Olestra every day for five years. None, apparently, has suffered any ill effects—or lived to tell about it.