Eating Schedule 5/9-5/11

Thursday 5/9

5:30 AM- Handful of peanuts

8:15AM- 3 scoops of peanut butter, banana, yogurt, mozzarella stick

12:00 PM- Turkey/bacon/lettuce/tomato wrap, orange, Ritz crackers

c. 4:00 PM- Several (4?) Oreos

5:00 PM- Chicken breast, green beans, lettuce salad

Friday 5/10

5:30 AM- Handful of peanuts

8:00 AM- Several scoops of peanut butter, banana

11:30 AM- Roasted chicken sandwich, salt and vinegar chips

7:00 PM- Grilled steak, tortilla chips with guacamole, toasted break with cheese, grilled artichokes

Saturday 5/11

c. 9:20 AM- Banana

12:30 PM- Three Fish tacos

4:00 PM- Burger, pulled pork, baked beans, potato salad, carrots/broccoli/cauliflower, small salted pretzels

c. 10:00 PM- Leftover steak, chips

Defining Ingredients: Peanut Butter

When considering this prompt, I decided that as opposed to choosing a food item with which I had little exposure, or some item that “stood out” to me, why not choose one that is very universal? How about an item that was a mainstay of most elementary-school lunches and afternoon summer snacks? With the exception of those with that pesky peanut allergy, I think we all have had at least tasted the sweet, nutritious yet calorie packed spread, peanut butter.

In the grand scheme of human history, we haven’t spent much time with the now-famous buttery spread. Peanuts were ground up into a much grainier paste than we are used to now for centuries by the inhabitants of their native countries of Brazil, Mexico, Peru, and the Caribbean (Katz). Peanuts were then transported by explorers to parts of Africa and Asia, still many years before they came to the United States. Finally, it was the British slave trade from the Caribbean that brought the illustrious legume into North American (ibid).

Peanuts were a cheap, easy to grow plant that slaves primarily grew in their own gardens and eventually the planting expanded into the fields. Ironically it was George Washington Carver, the offspring of a former slave, who was familiar with it in his own family and noted the economical value of farming the plant on a much larger scale. The production of peanuts increased, but not much beyond their intended use of cooking and finger food (Katz).

Then, in 1894, a Seventh-Day Adventist camp director (SDAs are vegetarian) named John Harvey Kellogg came up with the idea of finely grinding up the nuts into a paste. The texture of peanuts and the heavy oil content within allowed them to mix into a very smooth paste, and acted as a substitute for the dairy-heavy butter of the time. He decided not to patent the design, but started the first company dedicated to the production of Peanut Butter called Sanitas Nut Food Company, named after the SDA sanitarium where it was discovered (Katz).

The new Peanut Butter received nearly immediate praise and was picked by vegetarians especially, as it was a calorie and protein filled substitute to meat that could be enjoyed guiltlessly. It was even considered a mild delicacy to some, a simple product that had gone over a seemingly extensive process to turn into this sweet, sticky butter. In actuality, there is little else in peanut butter than the peanuts themselves, just a whole lot of nuts for their proportional amount of butter.

Today, peanut butter has become an almost exclusively American icon. It is made in some places around the world, but its history is so deeply ingrained in American history that it is one of the few items that is truly American, unlike the purported American icons like hamburgers and apple pie. The 1920s were the second “big wave” for peanut butter with the invention of sliced bread. At this same time, candy manufacturers realized the whole new market they could open up by putting the sticky, sweet butter inside chocolate and combined with nougat. Nowadays Americans eat (by the jar alone, not including cooking or candy) 857 million pounds of peanut butter annually, and can be found in 83% of American households (Katz).

Now, to the health aspects of peanut butter. Nuts are superpacked for their size with calories, protein, saturated fat, and sodium. Peanut butter it little more than nuts and some sugar, but there are about 850 peanuts in your average sized, 18 oz. jar of peanut butter (Enserink). The USDA determines that 2 tablespoons are a serving size, and that represents 20% of your DAILY fat intake. That’s a lot of peanuts.

This is where the community has become split on peanut butter. The American appetite has taken one of the most efficient ways to get your daily fat and calories and made it seem like one of the worst things available (Enserink). A few bites is great for you, but when you sit down in front of the TV eating out of a jar of peanut butter with a spoon like a bowl of soup, it is like eating pure saturated fat and all nutritional value is lost. Some people are doing it right, just not in America. Brilliant researchers came up with idea of bringing peanut butter to impoverished and undernourished parts of the world. A few spoonfuls can substitute an entire meal for some people and provide more nutrients in one scoop than most other single substances, especially to an impoverished baby that could not chew or digest many other foods (Enserink).

I am on the rowing team here at DU, which means I have practice very early every morning during the week. Between getting up at 5:20 AM, driving to Cherry Creek Reservoir, having practice, driving back, showering and getting ready for class at 9 AM, I have very little time for breakfast. Here, I discovered the magic of peanut butter. Just one scoop before and a few scoops afterwards can get me through my 9 AM class to when I get out at 2 PM or 3 PM, depending on the day. My parents are both extremely active and shared this trick with me years ago. Now that I have so little time in the mornings, it has become even more necessary to stay on top of my day. Hopefully this has been informative to all of you and shown how just a little of a good thing really can go a long way.

Katz, Solomon. “Encyclopedia of Food and Culture.” New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2003. 57-57. Print

Enserink, Martin. “The Peanut Butter Debate.” AAAS: Science 322.5898 (2008): 36-38. Online.

Caging The Hand That Feeds: Estabrook, Cook, and Pollan

These three articles (including the infographic) expose the disturbing underbelly of the food industry. Each of them generally focuses on one particular food item: Estabrook on tomatoes, Cook on chickens, and Pollan on the consumption of meat in general. All three of them unveil details that most of are not aware of in the food industry, and hope not necessarily to turn us off of eating those products, but to notify us of the places from which they came and describe why others may or may not have chosen to boycott those goods.

Estabrook: Estabrook became curious about the process involved in tomatoes getting from the field to our plate when he witnessed a green, unripened tomato fly out of a moving truck and bounce along unharmed. His interest piqued, he began researching the commercially produced tomato and learning its differences from the tiny, misshapen, delicately soft tomatoes he grew in his own Vermont garden. What he found was an astonishing expose of the forced labor of migrant workers in slave-like conditions, and chemical process to make the identical, enormous red tomatoes that have become the second largest item of produce Americans consume.

(Estabrook). The appearance should be scarier that it is appealing, they are picked from the ground looking like a granny smith apple and then sprayed with ethylene gas to gain their striking red hue. This is after they are sprayed with any number of pesticides, and picked by horrendously underpaid migrant workers who live in near slum conditions right by the fields. After all this, the tomatoes are genetically designed to look beautiful and have the ability to be hurled off a truck on the highway and stay intact, but they don’t even have the taste of real tomatoes.

Cook: The infographic is a picture of a chicken with some blurbs around it about chickens, but it is succinct and to the point with the hard hitting information. Not only are the chickens virtually tortured to death before they even get to the part of the assembly line that is meant to kill them, but the workers handling the chickens and the equipment on which they are processed are nearly as much at risk as the chickens are. It goes through the different positions in the assembly line, and the dangers associated with each, from the occasionally poisonous gases floating around in the air, or slipping a dull knife, or slipping in the accumulation of waste on the floor, or getting sick from the accumulation of filth the workers are surrounded in. Apparently chickens are not the only casualties in the cramped, hyper mechanized chicken meat factories.

Pollan: The Pollan article was by far the lengthiest and most philosophical of them all. Pollan goes to great lengths to describe the particularities of one’s decision to eat meat regularly, regardless of where it came from, or to only eat meat farmed humanely, or to forgo the consumption of meat entirely. Pollan’s main line of thinking goes along the line of similarities/dissimilarities between animals and humans. Mainly, that of sentience and an overall conscience. It is obvious that animals can feel pain just as humans can, but is it still wrong to kill them since they don’t have a soul, or a personality, or any perceivable values like a human might have? He points out that we are most likely to make these judgments when we are aware of the suffering the animals have gone through, but what if we are witness to the fact that they were taken care of and appeared to be happy when they died? Pollan noted “In the same way that we can probably recognize animal suffering when we see it, animal happiness is unmistakable, too” when he visited an open-pasture farm where the animals were basically free to roam and then were slaughtered in the most humanely way possible. Still, abstinence from meat entirely brings about the fact that animals die in many of the processes involved in harvesting organic, vegetarian fare, like combines that harvest wheat constantly killing field mice under their rotors. Maybe, as Pollan cites yet another whose has given thought to this issue, “…Davis contends that if our goal is to kill as few animals as possible, then people should eat the largest possible animal that can live on the least intensively cultivated land: grass-fed beef for everybody.”

These sources all have similar things to say about the food industry. There is a serious disconnect in the food item in its “natural state,” and when it is on our plate in front of us. Ignorance is apparently bliss, so if we read about tomatoes or cows in their ideal, native state, then blink a few times and they appear on our plate, our conscience is no worse for the wear. However, if the veil is lifted and we have full transparency on the worker trimming the beak off a live chicken with a hot wire long before it is actually going to be slaughtered, suddenly we have this guilt that this animal which we previously considered to be some inanimate object in a biology book is now being tortured and expressing pain. Suddenly we feel as if this chicken is important, the saddest chicken in the world which we have to singlehandedly save. Pollan concludes “were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to do it [the processing of food] this way.” Wherever your sentiments may lie in the processing and handling of meat, produce, or anything that takes more than a few steps to get to you the consumer, the people in charge want you to know as little of it as possible so you get the food in your stomach, not nagging at the back of your mind.

My Ingredient of Interest

One item that has interested me, and was a staple ingredient of our PB & Js throughout our childhoods is peanut butter. There are a lot of varieties, and has sparked a trend of a long list of ___-butter variations. It has an interesting history, and I think would be interesting item to research.

http://jc3th3db7e.search.serialssolutions.com/?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&ctx_enc=info%3Aofi%2Fenc%3AUTF-8&rfr_id=info:sid/summon.serialssolutions.com&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:book&rft.genre=book%20item&rft.title=Encyclopedia+of+Food+and+Culture&rft.atitle=Peanut+Butter&rft.date=2003-01-01&rft.pub=The+Gale+Group+Inc&rft.isbn=9780684314167&rft.volume=3&rft.spage=56&rft.epage=57&rft.externalDocID=3403400469

Our National Eating Disorder

I really liked this article by Michael Pollan. In his article “Our National Eating Disorder,” he discusses the notable afflictions of American eaters in comparison to the eating habits of others around the world. Ultimately, he discovered that there was a deeply seeded paradox. Americans are the “guiltiest” eaters, but still eat the most. In other words, we are fully conscious of the bad eating decisions that we make, but we continue to make them, and make them, and make them until our stomachs cant fit any more bad decisions. This sentiment is manifested in any number of the ridiculous “fad diets.” Pollan notes that the turn of the 20^th century “marked the first golden age of American food faddism,” a beloved marketing trend that has extended well into the present date.

“Carbophobia,” “lipophobia,” and “carnivory,” to name a few, are some of the pseudo-scientific fads that focus on the elimination or gross addition of any given element of the food we eat. The over-scientification of food is something that has come to haunt the American appetite. As Americans, “we've learned to choose our foods by the numbers (calories, carbs, fats, R.D.A.'s, price, whatever), relying more heavily on our reading and computational skills than upon our senses.” When you give someone a number, all other measures hold a negative or positive relative position to that one number. Suddenly, when you know that X food item has Y calories, you know that you are only supposed to have Z calories per meal and thus you feel guilty. Pollan notes that upon discovering this dreaded information, some people half-heartedly attempt to alleviate this guilt by exercising, trying to whittle down the overall intake of calories. Abstinence from these calorie-heavy foods does not deem to appear as even a blip on the American palate’s radar.

Possibly the most interesting observation that Pollan makes concerns what he calls “the omnivore’s dilemma.” Humans are nature’s ultimate omnivores. We can eat plants, fruits, grains, and even other animals, and as such we have the most difficult time deciding what to eat. Most animals have it so easy, they get a few items, and as much as they want of it, and get all of their nutrition from it. Koalas and eucalyptus are one of the examples he mentions, but he adds a clever theory. Some research has been done on koalas, and it would appear that koalas at one time ate a much greater variety of substances to receive their nutrition. Over time, as their diet devolved, their brains gradually shrank. “Food faddists take note,” indeed.

I consider myself very lucky. I have naturally been blessed with a very small appetite and a very fast metabolism for as long as I can remember. Because of this, I have been able to generally eat whatever I want. My parents are very similar, but have always emphasized to me that even if you don’t get fat from eating unhealthy foods, they can have a long-term negative impact on your body internally even if you can’t see any problems at first. Still, I rarely feel guilty eating unhealthy foods but I think most of it comes from my appetite stopping me before I can eat too much. Pollan’s example of Italians and French styles of eating is something I can sympathize with, having a large Italian family on my father’s side virtually force food on you as an expression of love, but they always make it themselves and every meal is exactly proportional to the number of guests. More importantly, I think, is the fact that meals take hours and hours, and I wouldn’t be surprised if my family actually burns calories with all the talking and laughing going on in that time. Still, everyone enjoys eating, and the guilt of eating comes from the portions, not the item itself. Pollan concludes “…what a wonderful prospect, to discover that the relationship of pleasure and health in eating is not, as we've been hearing for a hundred years, necessarily one of strife, but that the two might again be married at the table.”

Food Decisions

I consider a number of different factors whenever I decide what to eat. First and foremost, I assess what I have readily available to me. This availability can be within the confines of whatever is in front of me, what I have in my fridge back home, whether the caterer has a meal at my Fraternity house which I have already paid for, or whether I can eat at the school on a meal plan which I have also paid for previously. Of course this is all circumstantial to being a college student, but the thought process is the same wherever I am. First and foremost, I want to get the most "bang for my buck." If I have several options that cost me no money, I will pick the healthiest or most fulfilling option. If I have to go out and buy something, I will get whatever option provides me the most food for the most reasonable price. I typically have a very small appetite, so this mentality usually gets me pretty far in terms of food and for a small amount of money. Taste is not as much of a concern when I have to pick an option to go out and buy. In the scenario where I might have a huge table with lots of different options in front of me, I would probably weigh a balance of quantity versus health benefit, and pick whichever option was the happiest medium of those two.

How We Eat Now (Rough)

Arthur Heaton

EE1: How we eat now

Food is a very interesting thing to us as humans. We need only a minimal portion to survive, but our bodies can physically take in much more than just that. There are only a few basic elements in food that are useful to us, but it is often the part that is unhealthy or simply not valuable that appeals to our taste the most. Our eating defines us, whether it is the quantity, quality, or frequency with which we eat, it varies based on geographical location, social/economic status, and whoever may be around us. Why is it that something which is so basic, yet remains a necessity, can have such an impact on us beyond merely filling our stomachs? I would like to look into the role of food as its own being, the character and personality that we have anthropomorphized into food in a sense.

Food has become its own character in our lives, like the star of a movie we watch or a part of our family with which we can share memories and funny experiences. Our tastes don’t let us discriminate in some ways, maybe your mom overcooked brussel sprouts once and in addition to hating their taste, you will always remember them because of the terrible smell that haunted your kitchen for days. Any inanimate objects can bring back memories, but there is a certain multi-sensual tangibility that I think food offers in a way that many others cannot. Food can encompass all five senses (yes, we’ve all heard popcorn popping of chips being crunched) and any one of them can have an impact on us, even if it isn’t on your own plate.

This is where the independent nature of food really comes to light, particularly in the hyper-commercialized world we live in. Food is no longer just “food”. It is a social setting, a lifestyle, a fashion good we can show off to our friends, a means of expression. Have you ever decided to try a restaurant because a friend recommended it? There was probably another restaurant you had been to before, and that food did an adequate job of keeping your body functioning. Have you ever bragged about a kind of food you ate to a friend? They have eaten food before, your stories don’t dissolve the hunger in their stomach. Have you ever been bored with a group of friends? What is typically the first suggestion for an activity? “Let’s go get something to eat!” In all likelihood none of you were on the verge of death, maybe you weren’t even hungry! Vegetarianism and veganism are fairly recent cultural trends, and I’m sure we have all encountered someone who just could not make it clear enough to you how wonderful it is and how much better they think it is for them and the environment. There might even be people who care less for their children than they do about their eating habits.

What is another thing that in its most basic form is crucial to survival as human beings, but has become grossly inflated and become a huge cultural topic and its own hyper-commercialized industry? Maybe it’s not what you think it is. No, you were right. It’s sex.

We have seen that sex is one of the most over-used marketing tools in advertising, and even in food advertising. Carl’s Jr. is probably the most famous of these brands to use sex appeal with their food, having sexy, oiled up models messily eating their burgers. While someone thinking logically would first feel sorry that no one taught that poor, sexy young lady general table etiquette, all the rest of us are thinking “Woman! Sex! Burger! Carl’s Jr.!” and somewhere in that tidal wave of emotions we find ourselves holding a burger at Carl’s Jr. Once the emotions subside, and after a quick mental recap, we realize that we just bought that burger, and Carl’s Jr.’s marketing department just got a raise.

Then, probably not quite in a related sense, a journalist from the New York Times made the following stunning observation:

Now it cannot escape attention that there are curious parallels between manuals on sexual techniques and manuals on the preparation of food; the same studious emphasis on leisurely technique, the same apostrophes to the ultimate, heavenly delights. True gastro-porn heightens the excitement and also the sense of the unattainable by proffering colored photographs of various completed recipes.

- Alexander Cockburn

(McBride, 38)

Thus, the term gastro-porn was born. The more general term “food porn” became more commonly used but their definition remains the same (McBride). To further analogize the term, McBride describes “as with sex porn, we enjoy watching what we ourselves presumably cannot do (ibid).” A bit graphic, but the comparison is stunningly obvious. Gradually, people began writing more and more cookbooks with bright, enticing pictures of the food. Full pages were dedicated to the food itself with the recipe written on the other side (Krishnendu). Never mind that the food was propped up unseen by toothpicks, or it was covered in wax and touched up with nail polish (ibid), it was now the main reason that people were cooking the food. Previously, mother’s bought recipe books that were more like college textbooks to prepare food for their family (Paxson). Now, hip yuppies and young couples were making their own meals to entertain guests, picking cookbooks because of the picture on the cover like a magazine in a grocery store checkout.

This concept exploded as TV became more and more available and programming got more and more diverse. There were shows, entire shows, dedicated to one celebrity chef cooking a meal. Kids in the 50’s wouldn’t have sat at the counter and silently watched their mother make meatloaf for 30 minutes straight, but now people pay extra to get a channel with dozens of different chefs cooking different dishes 24 hours a day. There are even reality shows centered on cooking. Food has been a comfort, a palate-centered notebook of smells and tastes. Now it is a movie star, but it will not be signing autographs (Zimmerman).

I personally think that having food be so glamorous has cheapened some of the ways that food encompasses our senses. So often we hear people saying that something looks good that we have become numb to the essence of memories with which food can provide us. Some say a picture is worth a thousand words, but isn’t a smell, taste, or touch worth so much more? For example, imagine your grandmother. Yes, very good. Now imagine her holding a dish she used to make for you. Maybe it is meatloaf, or just a special salad. Now you have a mental picture of your grandmother, holding a brown rectangle or a bowl full of green leaves. That is not particularly appetizing, as best I can tell, nor does it send a flood of memories through my mind.

So, some genius in the marketing department decided that we could use pictures to sell food if we make the food really appetizing. But food always comes out of the oven differently each time, let’s try to make it look perfect. So, they started using household items and applicants to make the perfect specimen of a certain dish. Before you know it, your delicious ice cream sundae on an advertisement is mostly animal fat, glue, plastic, corn syrup, and sawdust. Now you have the most picturesque sundae known to man, but what is that actual sundae going to do for you if it is placed in front of you with a spoon?

If food really is like its own being, it is unique and has its own personality. Everyone is unique, no one is perfect, why should our food be any different? When something appears to be perfect, it is great from a distance but once you get a little more acquainted with it, it is just more of a disappointment when you find out that it is not how it appears. Diversity really is the spice of life; monotony just breeds contempt so if we eat the same thing over and over again, we are more likely to enjoy it less and less. So we experiment, and look for other foods that spread our tastes beyond our old standby meal. These experiments brings their own excitement. A messed up experimental-cooking fiasco might make a better story than the meal it otherwise could have been.

Perhaps I am overthinking the human-like attributes of food and its role in our lives, but I think anything that can remind us of family members, friends, places we have been, or certain moments in our lives deserves some recognition. Maybe we don’t remember what neighbor Jimmy gave us for our 10^th birthday, but we will probably remember if that was the year that our Mom made that special cake she promised she would make years before as soon as you turned 10. I think that cake is what made that birthday special, and maybe we can even taste it a little bit today.

           

Works Cited

Krishnendu, Ray. “Domesticating Cuisine: Food and Aesthetics on American Television.” Gastronomica: The Journal Of Food and Culture 7.1 (2007): 50-63. Web.

McBride, Anne. “Food Porn.” Gastronomica: The Journal Of Food and Culture 10.1 (2010): 38-46. Web.

Paxson, Heather. “Slow Food in a Fat Society: Satisfying Ethical Appetites.” Gastronomica: The Journal Of Food and Culture 5.1 (2005): 14-18. Web.

Zimmerman, Steve. “Food in Films: A Star is Born.” Gastronomica: The Journal Of Food and Culture 9.2 (2005): 25-34. Web.