Chinese Food

Who among us doesn't like Chinese food? I, for one, have always been a fan. My favorite kind of Chinese food, however, is not the kind that you can get at a semi-nice sit down restaurant. No, the best kind of Chinese food to be had, especially here in New York City, is of the take-out-only variety.

I'm talking about the kind of Chinese food where 9 bucks (in NYC no less!) will buy you an entree, an eggroll, a soda and a fortune cookie. The kind of food where you recognize the ridiculously high MSG and sodium content, but love it anyway. From the kind of place where you can barely understand the person taking your order, and they can barely understand you.

When our favorite Chinese take-out place, conveniently located across the street from our apartment, closed down unexpectedly about a month ago, we roomates panicked. Where would we get our belovedly awful Chinese food?! We tried a few other local places, but the quality was too high; the order-takers too fluent in English.

Finally, about a week ago, my roomate Alex discovered, via MenuPages.com, a sufficiently hole-in-the-wall Chinese takeout place where the MSG content is high, the English skills are low, and the prices are just right. If you ever visit, we'll have to get some.


Ah, Chinese food in its rightful habitat: plastic bags and cheap takeout boxes.

High Fructorse Corn Syrup: "The Facts"

My girlfriend sent me a link to this website - http://www.hfcsfacts.com/ - which purports to "correct the record" regarding high fructorse corn syrup's bad reputation. The website looked a bit too slick, so I looked into who owns the site, and it turns out that it's run by the Corn Refiners Association, which is a corn industry trade association that represents, among other companies, Archer Daniels Midland.

A Wikipedia search says this about ADM:

"Archer Daniels Midland has been the subject of several major federal lawsuits related to air pollution. In 2001 the company agreed to pay a $1.46 million fine for violating federal and Illinois clean-air regulations at its Decatur feed plant and to spend $1.6 million to reduce air pollution there. [6] Based on year 2000 data,[7] ADM was listed as the tenth largest air polluter in the USA by the Political Economy Research Institute.[8] In 2003, ADM settled federal air pollution complaints related to the company's efforts to avoid New Source Review provisions of the Clean Air Act that require pollution control upgrades when a plant is modernized."

The Corn Refiners Association also represents Cargill, which is the largest privately held company in the world and, also according to Wiki, is responsible for 25% of all US grain exports. Michael Pollan mentions the company frequently, and not in a good way, in Omnivore's Dilemma because it refuses to divulge information about its foodmaking processes.

An interesting website, nonetheless. But I hesitate to trust "facts" that are coming from a source with such a clear bias.

Obama on Food

I've written before about my thoughts on the food industry in this country. Lots of others have also expressed hope that Obama might begin to do something about our over-reliance on King Corn. Alas, according to the New York Times:

Although Mr. Obama has proposed changes in the nation’s farm and rural policies and emphasizes the connection between diet and health, there is nothing to indicate he has a special interest in a radical makeover of the way food is grown and sold.

You can't really blame the guy. The economy's in the crapper and we're fighting two wars, after all. I suppose food policy can wait. For now.

The Other Side

Another weekend, another family reunion. Once again I nabbed a train down to the parents’ house on Friday after work and headed out the next morning to Bedford County, PA for a family reunion. This time we’d be hanging out with my mom’s side.

Whereas most of my dad’s side of the family is from the suburbs around New York and Philadelphia, my mom’s side is firmly rooted in rural, central Pennsylvania. I don’t have a very firm grasp on the ancestry, but from what I gather the Nunamaker family has been located in the same general vicinity for at least the greater part of the twentieth century.

I’ve been going to these annual gatherings for as long as I remember. The things that stick out when I think of them are really good, really unhealthy food, and lots of it; corny games; and lots of country accents. In the most recent incarnation, all of those things held true.

The food was once again spectacular. There was a zucchini dish that was out of this world. And the fried chicken, brownies, scalloped potatoes, sausage, and other assorted bits and pieces of country flavor weren’t so bad either.

And yes, once again there were corny games. There was one where you throw a hand-sized sandbag into a hole in a wooden platform. It was sort of like horseshoes. In another game you threw two golf balls tied by a string onto a series of poles set up about 25 feet away from you. I’m happy to report my dominance in both of these events. In reality, my main competitors were a 7 year old girl and her 11 year old brother.

One family who had brought a lot of games to the picnic explained that they had so many because they “always took them to church camp.” That’s the sort of vibe that you get when you go to family reunions in Bible Country, Pennsylvania. There’s church camp, there’s grace, there’s the money collected to send Bibles to Africa.

In general there aren’t too many political discussions at these events. I think it’s because everyone agrees on the important political issues. They’re all very conservative, very religious, pro-gun, pro-life, pro-military, card-carrying Red Staters. I remember once during a hunting trip (I go hunting with this side of the family), one family member of mine said that if the government ever tried to take away his guns they’d have to “pry it out of my cold dead hands.” Another expressed incredulity when someone joked that he’d hold hands with another man for $1 million: “now that just ain’t right!”

This is crazy stuff for a decidedly Blue State liberal to be hearing from members of his own family. When I come to these types of gatherings I’m always reminding myself that these are the types of voters that drive me up the wall. They’re against progress, I say! They’re delusional and backwards! Why won’t they think outside of what their pastor tells them?!

And yet, here they are, and I’m playing this weirdly fun sandbag throwing game with their children. It doesn’t make sense. On the one hand, they’re my family. They’ve always been absolutely supportive and friendly to me. I very rarely hear them speak hatefully towards other people. They’re honest, good people. But on the other hand they spend their entire lives in these tiny towns and go to church camp where, presumably, they’re told that evolution isn’t the truth and that America always has God on its side. They’re the mythical evangelical voters.

Do I resent them or appreciate them? Do their political/social/religious views make more sense to me because I know them, or less? Are their small-town American views the best America has to offer, or a handicap as we move into the 21st century? I don’t know.

I’m not sure where I’m going with all this. It goes to show you the power of family, I suppose, for better and for worse.

Omnivore's Dilemma

I read Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma last week, and thought I’d write down some of the things that were particularly striking to me:

--At least a quarter of the food we eat is based on corn

--Most of the corn that’s grown in this country isn’t really edible in its “natural” form. It has to be heavily processed and broken down before we’ll eat it

--About half of the average corn farmer’s income comes in the form of government subsidies. This is because so much corn is grown that the price has fallen to a point where it’s impossible for farmers to make a profit. However, instead of restricting the amount of acreage dedicated to corn and thereby increasing its price, the government encourages farmers to devote more and more acreage to corn. The low cost of corn benefits the big food processing companies, who take the cheap corn and turn it into a million different things that we consumers buy.

The farmer is the one who loses in this deal. He loses money on the only product that food processing plants will buy. As a result, the government pays the farmer to produce a crop whose price is so low that without the payment, the farmer would go broke.

And who ends up footing the bill that pays farmers to sell corn cheaply to the food processors? The taxpayers. So even though we get cheap food on the shelves, we pay for it by financing the farmers’ subsidies. The only entity in this equation that benefits is the food processing plant.

--One popular argument that Pollan seeks to undermine is the one that goes something like “well, cheap food is in the best interests of everyone!” His counter is that while the up front cost of processed foods is definitely pretty low, there are tons of hidden costs that we’re paying for even if we don’t realize it.

It costs a TON of energy to produce food these days. For every one calorie of beef that we eat, for example, it takes 8 calories of energy (i.e. oil, water, natural gas). That’s just not a sustainable equation in the long run!

And, of course, the processed food that we’re eating is pretty unhealthy. A lot of those ingredients with weird names on the food labels are refined petroleum. We’re eating refined petroleum! The nation’s obesity epidemic began in the 70s, which is just about the time that the government really started funding big agribusiness and subsidizing farmers.

Food is the only major item that most Americans buy simply based on price. We refuse to pay $3.99 for a dozen eggs when we can get it for 99 cents. There are two reasons, Pollan says, that this is not such a good idea. First: we’ll pay $50,000 for a BMW when we can get a Focus for $17,000. The justification for the expensive car is that it’s a better product, and therefore we’re willing to pay more. But we don’t use that type of logic when buying food. We blindly assume that the 99 cent eggs are the exact same as the $3.99 eggs and therefore why would we want to pay four times as much? That would make sense if the eggs were of the same quality. But in study after study, time after time, Pollan demonstrates that processed food is of a decidedly lower grade than natural food. Shouldn’t that make us think twice about instinctively reaching for the cheaper eggs?

And secondly, the costs of the “cheaper” food are hidden, back end costs. Those costs include the energy requirements necessary to sustain our current food chain; the large costs to the environment; the costs to our own health, not to mention the questionable ethics of mass-produced and slaughtered animals. All of these things aren’t easily quantifiable, so they’re easier to ignore. But don’t they have real value nonetheless?

--Pollan describes certain types of farms that erase all of the back end costs. These types of farms are a combination of old fashioned and cutting edge farming techniques. They’re really cool to read about. The food is more expensive, $3.99 for a dozen eggs instead of $.99, but at least we pay everything up front. The animals are treated ethically, the environment isn’t harmed, and we’re eating better food. And there are lots of them around!

Anyway, the point is, read the book. If it doesn’t totally change your mind about our current processed food chain, it’ll at least make you think differently about what you put in your stomach.