Monkey Monday: Who’s down with OCD, raw milk mania and other stories, news and otherwise 12 February 2007 1:24 pm
Posted by Tracy in : America's Test Kitchen, Marion Nestle, Michael Pollan, cooking, eating, environment, health, milk, monkeys, news, sustainability, vegan , trackbackWho’s down with OCD? Yeah, you know me. But most of the time I’m pretty sure my obsessive attention to weird details isn’t a problem, even if I can’t quit any time I want. Allison Bechdel calls it “attention surfeit disorder,” and when it suits me, I call it a superpower. And sometimes (two weeks ago Monday night, for instance) it makes me organize the tea cabinet, because that’s just how I roll. That night I also tried a food storage trick I saw on America’s Test Kitchen awhile back (not that I’m a drooling fangirl or anything). I’d made my vegan variation of ATK’s Mulligatawny soup (currylicious!) but it’s one of those recipes that only uses one tablespoon of tomato paste, which I buy in 6-ounce cans when I can’t find the kind in handy dial-a-dose tubes. So I had some leftovers to store.
In case you’ve never tried to store an opened can of tomato product, just trust me and don’t. For the love of whatever you love, put them in a non-reactive container; citric acid knows no mercy and fears only your warm thoughts and affection. But I digress. I scooped the remainder of the tomato paste out of the can into more or less tablespoon-sized globs on a flexible cutting board, and stuck it in the freezer. A few hours later, when the globs had frozen solid, I took it out and peeled the globs off (that makes it sound much harder than it was; they came off very easily and I could’ve a baking sheet instead of hedging my bets with the flexible board) and put them in a tub in the freezer for storage. Now I can just grab a tablespoon of tomato paste the next 8 times I need one, and I’m already looking forward to those times! Yay!
But enough about me, or at least I’ll switch to talking to myself indirectly as I share part of the collection of news stories that caught my mind’s eye for the past month or so (I want to make this a weekly feature but I keep getting distracted). Three weeks ago or so there was a cover story over at Salon (site pass required) all about raw milk and how it may or may not be the best thing since peanut butter. As I noted when I copied a link to my del.icio.us bookmarks, when I read the long list of ailments people claimed they cured by drinking unpasteurized milk, even I, worst vegan ever, was forced to wonder: wouldn’t it have been easier to just quit the freakin’ dairy stuff than become a raw milk maniac? Especially if the regular milk is making you so sick?
Don’t get me wrong. I love raw milk cheeses, and I think the U.S. rules about them are all kinds of annoying, since good cheesemaking kills bacteria at least as well as pasteurization (one of the big reasons cheese stuck around as a food invention was that it’s a delicious way to keep milk edible for longer than a day, doncha know) but whenever I see people obsessing about a specific food (or food preparation technique or lack thereof) to the degree described in this article, I get a little twitchy. Nutritionism, blah blah blah (and more on Slate.com’s response to Michael Pollan in just a bit). Furthermore, the raw milk afficionados profiled in this article are obsessed with a very specific luxury product: the unpasteurized milk of grass-fed cows. If it were not available, would they drink milk from less privileged, conventionally-raised animals? I’m not so sure about that. Forgive me for my cynicism, but what I’m really hearing here is a bunch of people complaining that they don’t want to drink the same nasty pasteurized factory-farmed milk as the rest of us proles. Cry me a river.
In much better news, The E.U. and Japan have agreed to cut their tuna fishing rates in an effort to ensure that the fish won’t become freaking extinct. I will be a cranky old lady indeed if there is no more tuna in 50 years, so here’s to continued attempts at delicious sustainability.
And I may be way behind the curve on this whole food blogging thing, but at least I’m not one of the jerks profiled in this article. It almost makes me glad we left the digital camera in Davis back in October, so I can’t be tempted to take it out to dinner. (And speaking of going out to dinner, I did give in and let Peter drag me to Laughing Planet on Friday night when I was too stupid to think about even food. I am happy to report that LP’s Che Guevara burrito is still a delicious source of plantain goodness. And mmm, crème brulée at Sweet Life for dessert. But no pictures!) I have a whole huge rant about the yuppie-scum aspects of a lot of food writing, but it can wait (and slowly grow to book lengths, not unlike this entry).
Where was I? Um, I promised to say something about Slate.com’s reply to Michael Pollan’s “Unhappy Meals”, which I wrote about a few weeks ago. As usual, Slate has a few good points but takes them a little too far: unlike Daniel Engber, I don’t think Pollan says we should disregard everything science has to tell us about nutrition and stick exclusively to old-fashioned, traditional foods (he’s certainly plenty in favor of all the modern kitchen technology that brings him the meals he cooks in The Omnivore’s Dilemma). Nor do I think Pollan is arguing against even trying to understand nutrition, which is why I think Engber might be rocking one of them there straw man arguments. However, I appreciate the hell out of the Slate.com article’s snarkiness about the idea that we understand human evolution well enough to really know what humans evolved to eat, let alone base our diets around it. In my experience, arguments about what people evolved to do are usually thinly-veiled justifications of the status quo at best and at worst self-delusion about a past that never existed. As my favorite nutritionist Marion Nestle points out in her criticism of the Paleolithic diet (academic comedy gold, that one), it’s hard enough to get people to remember what they ate a day ago, let alone determine prehistoric diets based on the fossil record, and furthermore (Engber echoes this as well) none of us are particularly likely to revert to the highly active prehistoric hunter-gatherer lifestyle supported by ancient human eating habits, whatever those may have been. So, grains of salt all around, and gratitude that we live in times that make that salt relatively easy to come by. And speaking of Marion Nestle, I’m going to see her speak on Friday night at OSU and again on Saturday at the Small Farms Conference, yay! Here’s to collecting some autographs like the food groupie I am.
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It must say something about my advanced procrastination techniques that I was thinking, “It’s Monkey Monday….I wonder if a new TracyFood entry is up.” (Well, alright, I think that daily. Several times daily.) I’d love to hear about cast iron cookware - what are its fabulous uses and disappointing limitations? My cast iron skillet is cornbread-alicious, but too new for tofu. If I kept at it, though, could I just replace all my old pans with cast iron, if only to get buff arms?
Forgive me for my cynicism, but what I’m really hearing here is a bunch of people complaining that they don’t want to drink the same nasty pasteurized factory-farmed milk as the rest of us proles.
While I think complaints against factory-farmed or otherwise cruel foods are entirely legitimate, the whole “oh, I don’t want to drink that because of who else does” thing is sickening on a whole new level, and all the more so since there’s no reason not to just quit.