Here’s an interesting little article on the link between home cooking and health by NPR’s Melissa McEwen that illustrates how we have to be careful about the assumptions we make. There is a tendency with science reporting in the media to simplify complex ideas. This, of course, is necessary when you have to contend with word limits. But that same simplification can bleed over into policy statements, as illustrated in this article. It has been taken as a truism that cooking and eating more frequently at home will lead to overall better health, especially in terms of conditions like metabolic syndrome, a precursor to type 2 diabetes. New research indicates that this may not actually be the case – but importantly, the article also points out that more research needs to be done to see exactly what the connections really are. This is the scientific method and critical thinking in a nutshell and shows how important it is to be skeptical of broad claims.
Tag: food
-
Shifting Perspective: The Economics of Privilege
Just over a year ago, I decided to start indulging my creative side by crafting objects like lamps, clocks, and even furniture out of vintage, found, and second-hand objects. I even turned my little projects into a business of sorts, and started a website to showcase and write about my creations. As I learned how easy it is to make things that I thought would be difficult – like wiring lamp sockets, cutting, sanding, and finishing wood, and drilling through glass and metal – I started experimenting with other things I realized might be easier than they seem. This led to experiments with making food from scratch. As it turns out, ice cream, fruit jams and preserves, soda, and nut butters are easy to make and generally taste better than what you can buy at the store.
At first, I felt smug about my new-found insights into the relative ease of the DIY lifestyle. It made me wonder how consumers got so easily fooled into believing that paying full price at the store was better than making their own bread and jam and peanut butter and ice cream and soda. But then, when I was sifting flour into my bread machine one evening, I suddenly thought about my Grandma G. Grandma G. made bread for her six kids and her husband every day. She did it by hand, and though by my father’s account Grandma’s cooking wasn’t great, it was serviceable. I pondered the innovation of the bread machine that allowed me to spend five minutes measuring ingredients into a pan so the machine could spend three hours mixing, kneading, and raising the dough which I would then transfer to the oven. I didn’t have three hours to spend mixing my own dough on a regular basis, which is why I had the bread machine. Bread making from scratch has become a luxury, and as such, it has also become a marker of status. In other words, it is a privilege. That is, if you are making your own bread, that probably means you have the luxury of time and resources – ironically, resources Grandma G., who was raising a large family on Grandpa G.’s meager salary, didn’t have. Her bread making was a necessity, not a luxury. She didn’t have a bread machine and access to hundreds of fancy bread recipes; she just had flour, yeast, salt, water, and her own efforts.
This line of thinking shouldn’t have startled me, but it did. I had to admit that I am privileged to indulge in DIY cooking of the staples most people buy at the store. I have the resources to buy organic produce, free-range chicken, hormone-free milk from pasture-raised cows, and the myriad tools that make it easy to bake your own bread and make your own nut butters and jam. I own a fancy, high-powered food processor that whirs nuts into butter in just a few minutes. I have giant stock pots that I can use to boil fruit and sugar into jam, and tools for canning it. I have a fancy ice cream attachment for my expensive countertop mixer. I spent hundreds of dollars on bottles, caps, strainers, and funnels, and roots, herbs, and special yeast for making soda. Somehow in all that frenzy of DIY activity, I lost sight of the fact that what people used to have to do has become what most people can’t afford to do.
How did we come to this state of affairs? Why is it now a privilege to get back to the basics that my Grandma G. practiced in her daily life? These are not rhetorical questions, but as of yet I’m not ready to dig too deep into some of the possible answers. At their core, these are questions related to the stratification that is inherent in the structure of capitalism, but they also have a lot to do with our individual pursuits of a better, faster, easier way to get things done. Our pursuit of ease in the interests of freeing up time to do more things has ironically led to us having less time than we used to. Grandma G. made bread for her family every day because she had to, but she undoubtedly would have loved to buy loaves at the store instead. Now, the daily treadmill of making ends meet, especially for those in the lower economic strata, makes buying loaves at the store the necessity, and having the time to make bread from scratch becomes the privilege.
-
Additive Outrage
Rat poison saved my life. I know how strange that sounds, but it’s true. In July 2003 I was hospitalized with a pulmonary embolism – a blood clot in my lung. The treatment is blood thinners – IV heparin while in the hospital for a week, then oral warfarin – brand name Coumadin – for six months afterwards to keep dissolving the clot and to prevent a recurrence. Warfarin is an anti-coagulant, and it happens to be very effective as a rodenticide by causing fatal internal bleeding in rats that ingest it in the form of poison baits. So what’s the takeaway? It’s really quite simple: the dose makes the poison.
I bring this up because I have noticed that it doesn’t take much to frighten people by telling them about “disgusting” or “scary” or “poisonous” stuff that shows up in food. This absolutely, positively requires a great deal of skepticism and critical thinking. Case in point: I ran across an article in the Huffington Post that capitalizes directly on this sort of fear-mongering. Titled “9 Disgusting Things You Didn’t Know You’ve Been Eating Your Whole Life,” the article runs through a list of food additives that are apparently supposed to make us feel like the food industry is bent on poisoning its customers. Now, I’m not stupid; I’m well aware that there is all sorts of stuff in our food that is not exactly healthy, and even some stuff that could be dangerous. I am concerned about modern eating habits (my own included!) and think it’s rather frightening how removed we are from the process of providing food for millions of people. In fact, when I teach the section on subsistence in my cultural anthropology classes, I ask my students to think about what they would eat if the world as we know it came to an end. Do they have the remotest inkling of what they would eat if there were no grocery stores or restaurants? And even if they talk about hunting, I ask them, when the bullets run out, how will you kill animals? Do you know how to prepare them? How will you keep that food from spoiling? What plant foods will you eat? I have no doubt that when the shit hits the fan for humanity, those few cultural groups that still forage or practice horticulture and pastoralism will be the only survivors, with a few exceptions for those who have learned skills for living off the land in nations like the United States (although even these few won’t survive as long-term populations unless they meet other people and are able to form larger groups that can sustain population growth).
So what does any of this have to do with the HuffPo article? My real point is that people get unreasonably frightened or disgusted by things without thinking through why they are frightened or disgusted. The first thing on the list in the article is castoreum. This is a substance that is produced in the anal sacs of beavers, and even I have to admit that it sounds pretty disgusting. It is used as a flavoring similar to vanilla, although according to Wikipedia the food industry in the US only uses about 300 pounds of it a year. My problem with this is the automatic reaction that some parts of the animal are not acceptable for food use and others are. The way we use animal parts is culturally determined and completely arbitrary. Why is castoreum any more disgusting than drinking the liquid that shoots out of a cow teat? Some people eat tongue – why is that body part any worse than eating the ground up flesh from a pig’s side? What about eggs, which are essentially the menstrual flow of a chicken contained in a shell? Disgust, again, is culturally determined and therefore ultimately arbitrary from an objective standpoint.
Other things listed in the article include L-cysteine, which is one of the amino acids that is found in human hair; sand; coal tar; anti-freeze; and a few others. The human hair bit is similar to the beaver anal secretions bit – we just knee-jerk find it disgusting, but it’s not as if there is actual human hair in your food! Every single living thing is made of amino acids, so you could make the argument that any food that contains an amino acid is part, I don’t know, semen? Bile? Blood? In other words, without the full background of the chemical all you read is that human hair has a component that is processed into a food additive and the implication is that you are directly consuming hair. As for the things like anti-freeze and coal tar, reference back to the dose making the poison. Once again, it’s not like food companies are pouring Prestone into your food. The ingredient in question is called propylene glycol, which has many of the same properties as ethylene glycol, which is what is actually used in automobile antifreeze. Propylene glycol is not only used in food but in medications that are not soluble in water – so much like warfarin, propylene glycol in the right dose and formulation has important medical applications.
I could go through the list one by one, but I’m hoping that these examples make my point that so much information and context is left out of articles like this. I really don’t understand the desire to frighten and disgust people by only focusing on shock value rather than useful information. Again, I want to stress that I realize there are bad things in our food, and I am firmly committed to the idea that most companies are more concerned about their bottom line than they are about the health and safety of consumers; but it’s also important to remember that if companies sicken or kill their customers they won’t be in business for long! And I know that plenty of people automatically distrust government agencies like the FDA, but again, what does the FDA gain by allowing truly dangerous chemicals to be part of the food supply? It behooves us to think very carefully about this sort of thing.
A final point: in reading the comments at the end of the HuffPo article, I was amazed at the self-righteousness and privilege of many of the contributors. So many bragged about only eating fresh food from the farmers’ market or making their own bread or only buying organically raised meat or making baby food from scratch or blah blah blah. Have these people ever been outside their privileged little bubble and considered how the real world works for so many people? Farmers’ markets are great – if there’s one in your neighborhood and you can afford to pay the premium prices. Organic meat? Only if there is a fancy grocery store nearby and you want to pay double the price. Food made from scratch? Sure, if you have the time and the tools and the money for the often pricey ingredients. It’s terrific that a lot of people are trying to get back to basics with food prep – I myself make bread from scratch – but it fails to recognize the deep inequality and lack of access to resources that so many people in the United States, and the world, have to contend with – but that’s a rant for another time.
-
The Evolution of Pink Slime
So-called pink slime has been all over the news lately. Friends have posted links and comments about it on Facebook, I have heard stories about it on NPR, and I’ve heard people talk about how they can’t believe our government would allow the meat industry to sell the stuff as food. Pink slime, known formally as lean, finely textured beef trimmings (LFTB), is certainly not a food product that is likely to provoke anticipatory salivation. The term pink slime is itself deliberately crafted to instead provoke a reaction of disgust. And, the associated news that the stuff is treated with ammonia to remove potentially harmful bacteria just adds insult to our collective sense of injury. But there’s a problem here: making decisions about what to eat based on a visceral reaction to something that has been uncritically dubbed with a description designed to elicit just that reaction is not a way to make choices about what we eat.
I find the whole uproar rather silly, myself. First let’s tackle the linguistic angle: the name pink slime. Some might argue that it’s misleading to relabel this edible meat substance with a name that does not reveal what it really is. The name “lean, finely textured beef trimmings” does not evoke the actual cow parts that are used to make it. The stuff is made by combining fatty trimmings and ligament material from the cow and spinning it in a centrifuge to separate the fats. It is pink and looks slimy; hence the media-friendly and consumer-alarming moniker “pink slime.” One thing to note is that this stuff is not sold as-is; it is combined with regular ground beef as a bulk additive, and can be up to 30% of the final ground beef product (whether raw, bulk meat or items such as hamburger patties). So we are not unwittingly consuming unadulterated pink slime; nor is it being fed as-is to kids in school. A second thing to note is that we use all manner of euphemisms to describe the things we eat, especially when it comes to meat products. Filet mignon sounds much more appetizing than “hunk of cow flank.” Bacon cheeseburger stimulates the appetite in a way that “salted fatty pig belly cheeseburger” does not. In fact, when raw, most meat is pretty slimy, so we might as well add that adjective to all our meats. The point is that these are subjective reactions. Call things what they really are and lots of people might think twice before eating them. It reminds me of the failed “toilet to tap” initiative that was proposed in San Diego several years ago. Once the descriptor “toilet to tap” caught on in the media, there was no way the public would abide this water treatment program, even though the reclaimed water from the sewer system was just as pure and clean as regular municipal tap water. The name killed it because people could not reconcile themselves to water that came from the toilet, no matter how much scientific evidence there was that the water was clean. I find this fascinating in light of the fact that municipal tap water is held in reservoirs before treatment, in which people drive boats, fish, and probably urinate, and which is filled with all sorts of animal and plant matter, both alive and decomposing.
My second issue with this uproar has to do with food supply in general. There are seven billion people on this planet. They all need to be fed. In many places people subsist on foods that we here in the US would find appalling, and not merely because of cultural differences, but because some people are so poor that they will eat whatever they can. Our objection to LFTB is a beautiful example of a first-world problem. I know many people are rethinking where their food comes from and signing on to local food and slow food movements, and that’s all well and good, but within a country like the US, that is (for the most part) an upper-middle class movement. Poor people in this country do not have the luxury to worry about where the food comes from, much less exactly what is in it. For a poor family, knowing the kids will at least get lunch at school is a bigger concern than whether or not that lunch may contain pink slime.
When agriculture arose 10,000 years ago, humanity began the evolutionary road towards pink slime. Agriculture allowed previously nomadic people to become sedentary. Sedentism led to expansions in technology and booms in population. Ultimately, agriculture allowed for centralized cities ruled by top-down leaders, supplanting the egalitarian cultures of hunting-gathering and small-scale agricultural groups. Technological innovations continued to abound and populations continued to boom, and to feed all those people, intensive, factory-driven, and mechanized industrial agriculture became necessary. Can we really turn back that process now, and all start growing our own gardens and raising and slaughtering our own livestock? I’m not talking a fancy herb garden, heirloom tomatoes, and hobby chickens; I’m talking feeding yourself and your entire family by the products of your own labor. We do not live in that world any more. We live in a world where a beef supplier will use every part of the cow. Our industrial food complex has grown so efficient that almost nothing goes to waste.
I’m not blind to the fact that the beef producer is also trying to turn as much profit as possible; this is capitalism, after all. But I have no objection to seeing otherwise wasted parts of the cow get turned into an edible substance. As for the ammonia gas issue, it is simply a way to make the stuff safe. A chemical like ammonia is certain to provoke another knee-jerk: it’s in glass cleaner! It’s a poison! Well, yes; but without understanding how the process works people somehow conjure a picture of the pink slime getting dipped in a bright-blue Windex bath, which is far from the case. I can see the other side of the coin if the stuff didn’t go through this process: how dare the government allow us to eat beef that has not been treated for bacterial contamination! (Which reminds me of another rant I have against what I see as a massively over-reacting food safety process in this country; I think it’s ludicrous to destroy thousands or even millions of pounds of a food because a few people got food poisoning – but that’s a rant for another day). In fact, much of our food goes through similar sanitizing processes to prevent illness. As far as I can tell, no one has ever died from eating ammonia-treated LFTB, but they have died from food poisoning caused by the very bacteria the ammonia treatment is designed to prevent.
I can understand, to a degree, the people who argue that we have a right to know what is in our food so we can make an informed decision about whether to consume it, and I don’t object to the idea of more comprehensive food labeling. However, I still think this is a first-world and middle-class problem. How many people actually read food labels? Yes, the information should be there, but then the consumer does have some responsibility to think critically about what they see on the label if they decide to read it. I would bet that many of the people upset about pink slime have never bothered to really research what is in the other foods they buy at the store. Some people make it a point to not buy food products with lots of chemical additives and unnatural ingredients, but that is a tiny minority. Most of us are happy with the “ignorance is bliss” approach; and I would argue that if we didn’t take that approach then we might be paralyzed with largely unnecessary worry. Does anybody ever really stop to think about how many other people’s mouths have been on the fork they use at a restaurant? Wow, that’s gross, isn’t it? Of course the dishes at the restaurant are cleaned between uses, but to me, pink slime is no more dangerous than using a cleaned fork that has been in 1,000 different mouths. It’s gross if you think about it – so, don’t think about it!
This controversy will fade as other things grab people’s attention, but what I fear is that whatever the next issue is, people will still have the same knee-jerk, uncritical reactions. Sometimes those reactions turn out to be completely justified, but that is irrelevant to the initial reaction. People need to come to conclusions that rely on more than a sound bite and an unappetizing label or picture that is designed to grab attention. Thinking critically means gathering facts and forming a provisional opinion that may be modified in light of future information. Being grossed out is not a good reason for objecting to a food product.