Entries Tagged 'Food' ↓

We’ve been talking about the price of wheat. Here is what is going on with corn and how the ethanol-fueled prices are affecting nearly every other kind of food:

People who use corn to feed cattle, hogs and chickens are being squeezed by high corn prices. On Monday, Tyson Foods reported its first loss in six quarters and said that its corn and soybean costs would increase by $600 million this year. Those who are able, such as egg producers, are passing those high corn costs along to consumers. The wholesale price of eggs in the first quarter soared 40 percent from a year earlier, according to the Agriculture Department. Meanwhile, retail prices of countless food items, from cereal to sodas to salad dressing, are being nudged upward by more expensive ingredients such as corn syrup and cornstarch.

Rising food prices have given Congress and the White House a sudden case of legislative indigestion. In 2005, the Republican-led Congress and President Bush backed a bill that required widespread ethanol use in motor fuels. Just four months ago, the Democratic-led Congress passed and Bush signed energy legislation that boosted the mandate for minimum corn-based ethanol use to 15 billion gallons, about 10 percent of motor fuel, by 2015. It was one of the most popular parts of the bill, appealing to farm-state lawmakers and to those worried about energy security and eager to substitute a home-grown energy source for a portion of U.S. petroleum imports. To help things along, motor-fuel blenders receive a 51 cent subsidy for every gallon of corn-based ethanol used through the end of 2010; this year, production could reach 8 billion gallons. . . .

Although ethanol was once promoted as a way to slow climate change [so says the Post, tODD!], a study published in Science magazine Feb. 29 concluded that greenhouse-gas emissions from corn and even cellulosic ethanol “exceed or match those from fossil fuels and therefore produce no greenhouse benefits.”

More on the price explosion in food, which I think is much more serious than the high price of oil. See Emptying the Breadbasket. Here are some sample facts:

Last year, wheat cost $6 per bushel; this year, it’s $20. Farmers still don’t want to grow it, though, because it is riskier, subject to disease. Research to develop disease-resistance wheat has all but halted, since the public is irrationally scared of genetic alterations. And farmers can make even more money from soybeans (from the Chinese) and corn (from government-subsidized ethanol plants). Besides, the way the farm bill works, farmers can still get wheat subsidies even when they switch their acreages to corn! In the 1980s, half of the nation’s fields grew wheat. Now, only 10% do. Because of the low dollar and desperate foreign governments, our reserves are getting bought out. We now have the lowest amount of grain in storage since World War II, enough to last the world for 4 days.

Thanks to whatever reader it was who urged me to watchRamsay’s Kitchen Nightmares . I had praised Gordon Ramsey’s “Hell’s Kitchen,” which had probably been pitched as an American Idol for cooks combined with a Marine bootcamp. In “Kitchen Nightmares,” on the other hand, Gordon slaps dysfunctional restaurants into shape.

In a recent episode, the problem was the obnoxious husband in the kitchen and wife who handled the front. They constantly sniped and yelled at each other, and even threw out customers! Gordon had to play marriage counselor, as well as getting rid of the pretension and revamping the menu–getting the owner to cook what he was really good at rather than all of these fancy recipes. Gordon is harsh and brutally honest, but he does have a heart. And there are lots of lessons here, even for non-restauranteurs, about customer service, quality, and VOCATION, VOCATION, VOCATION.

What a good show was the premiere of the new season of “Hell’s Kitchen”! Gordon Ramsey this time takes a whole crew of incompetents. How can he pick any of them to run one of his restaurants at a salary of a quarter of a million dollars? The contestants had to prepare their “signature dishes,” one of which was a scallop and venison tartare (a.k.a. raw shellfish chopped up with raw deer) mixed up with white chocolate! An awful-sounding concoction that actually made Chef Ramsey throw up! And when they had to do the restaurant, no one took leadership, everybody kept botching the recipes, and the service was so slow that the customers all left before any of the entrees were served!

And yet the contestants were SO full of themselves, so prideful and diva-like. They were full of self-esteem. This show has the virtues of the early episodes of “American Idol,” to show the world that there ARE standards of excellence and that a narcissistic ego is no substitute for a work ethic. The wretched singers and cooks are all full of themselves, rather than concerned to love and serve their neighbors outside of themselves.

Now we’ll see if Gordon Ramsey–who throws rubber-cooked chicken against the wall and squeezes the grease out of the noodles with his hands and rubs the noses of his charges into their own incompetence–can make something out of these characters.

Notice that this is not just about cooking or singing or these TV shows. It has to do with the consequences of relativism, weakness of character as encouraged by our culture of self-affirmation, and the loss of the doctrine of vocation.

My friend Rich Shipe proposes a topic: He writes, “Has anyone done anything on Modernism and Post-Modernism and their impact on the food we eat? For food are we still under Modernism or have we moved into post-modern food? Americans generally eat garbage and what we eat is certainly not classical!” He then offers some tasty quotes from Michael Pollan, author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “In Defense of Food”:

Michael Pollan: Food’s under attack from two quarters. It’s under attack from the food industry, which is taking, you know, perfectly good whole foods and tricking them up into highly processed edible foodlike substances, and from nutritional science, which has over the years convinced us that we shouldn’t be paying attention to food, it’s really the nutrients that matter. And they’re trying to replace foods with antioxidants, you know, cholesterol, saturated fat, omega-3s, and that whole way of looking at food as a collection of nutrients, I think, is very destructive.

and…

Pollan: Nutritionism is the prevailing ideology in the whole world of food. And it’s not a science. It is an ideology. And like most ideologies, it is a set of assumptions about how the world works that we’re totally unaware of. And nutritionism, there’s a few fundamental tenets to it. One is that food is a collection of nutrients, that basically the sum of — you know, food is the sum of the nutrients it contains. The other is that since the nutrient is the key unit and, as ordinary people, we can’t see or taste or feel nutrients, we need experts to help us design our foods and tell us how to eat.

Another assumption of nutritionism is that you can measure these nutrients and you know what they’re doing, that we know what cholesterol is and what it does in our body or what an antioxidant is. And that’s a dubious proposition.

And the last premise of nutritionism is that the whole point of eating is to advance your physical health and that that’s what we go to the store for, that’s what we’re buying. And that’s also a very dubious idea. If you go around the world, people eat for a great many reasons besides, you know, the medicinal reason. I mean, they eat for pleasure, they eat for community and family and identity and all these things. But we’ve put that aside with this obsession with nutrition.

And I basically think it’s a pernicious ideology. I mean, I don’t think it’s really helping us. If there was a trade-off, if looking at food this way made us so much healthier, great. But in fact, since we’ve been looking at food this way, our health has gotten worse and worse.

To shoehorn this into the modern/postmodern explanatory paradigm, this nutritionist mindset would be modernist with all of that scientific reductionism, reducing food to nutritional chemicals and the intangible pleasures of food to good health, as if a meal were really a medicine. There is a postmodern cuisine, which tries to be multicultural, unequally yoking traditional foods from different cultures (e.g., sushi tacos), but the true postmodernist cuisine I think is fast food: It offers a superficially pleasurable taste-sensation, but is bad for us, and is stripped of all family, traditional, and aesthetic meaning, but can be justified because “this is what people like.”

My wife’s school held its annual chili cook-off and talent show last Friday.  One of the judges got stuck in traffic, so I was enlisted to be one of the judges for the chili contest.  I had always wanted to do that!  There were nine different chilis.  There was general consensus about the top three (showing the principle of classical aesthetics that beauty is objective), though the various judges differed somewhat in their rankings (showing the principle of classical aesthetics that there are legitimate variations in taste–for example, one of the contenders was a Cincinnatti-style chili, which is sweet and flavored with cinnamon.  It was well-done and good in its way, but I prefer Western-style, with lots of cumin).  Points were rewarded and tabulated, and winners were declared.  (My top choice did come in second–the Cincinnatti-style prevailed–but my choice also won the People’s Choice Award, so I felt vindicated.)  The talent show was quite charming, showcasing some very talented grade-school kids, with vocal performances ranging from “A Mighty Fortress” to Hannah Montana, instrumental numbers to comedy skits.  It was a good night of fellowship and classical education. I have been a movie critic, but the really good gig is to be a food critic.  What I’d like to do, now that I’ve helped judge a chili contest, is to judge a BBQ competition!