FLOG: The Foodiness Blog

Guess who’s back? It’s Wendy’s and their “Where’s the Beef?” campaign, from the 80’s. Yup, they’re bringing the slogan back, this time to promote their single, double and triple “hot and juicy” burgers. Along with their classic “You Know When it’s Real” jingle, “Where’s the Beef?” returns to the airwaves, minus Clara Pell, the little old lady who made the slogan famous.

But before you take Wendy’s at their word, consider this: The USDA standard for minimum percentage of actual beef in a burger patty is only 40%. That means the rest can be fillers, like soy protein, or oat fiber, and flavors and msg and yeast extracts and all the other things that can fill up the other 66% of the patty. And, 10-12% of that meat can come from “ammoniated beef products”. What is that? Well that is scraps of putrid meat left after processing, that used to be sent to the pet food industry. But the meat industry now treats those scraps with ammonia to bring down the bacterial load enough to make it acceptable for human food processing. So that ammoniated beef product can be added to your burger patty too.

That’s not the beef you thought you were eating. And it’s not real beef. That’s foodiness in your beef.

So you might ask Wendy’s where the beef is, and exactly how real it is.

So last weekend, I hung out with two of my cousins, neither of whom can cook. And neither of whom are in the lower-income category, nor are parents, or living in rural or urban food deserts. In fact, they both are highly educated, very successful media people, one in documentary film producing, and one a national-level news anchor. Both live very comfortably, can afford the highest quality food, and live in Brooklyn/ Los Angeles and Washington DC, and had nice middle-class upbringings. Did I mention, neither of them can cook? Like really not at all…

I’ve looked in their cabinets of their respective houses, and its Foodiness, Foodiness, Foodiness! Trader Joe’s packaged instant Indian food, (which isn’t terrible on the foodiness meter, but bad enough) gluten free snacks of all sorts (for the fiancée with Celiac’s disease) and other bits and pieces of Foodiness that make up the modern American household pantry. Those bachelors didn’t learn a thing about cooking from their moms, who are both PhD’s and one’s an MD too, so they were kinda too busy…and one has an ex-wife who wears a size zero and served spa food at her wedding. They both live on Foodiness, takeout, and restaurants.

So my Brooklyn/LA cousin, aware of the detriment of his non-cooking life and recently engaged, proposed that we get DC cousin up to NY for a weekend, during which we could hang-out, catch-up, and I could teach them how to cook. So on Saturday, we headed off to the farmers market at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn to shop for dinner. When I asked them what they wanted to learn, they both kind of shrugged and said, “you know, the basics?”. DC added, ”maybe something green?” So I decided it would be an excellent teachable moment in seasonality vs Foodiness, and took the matter into my own hands. I bought a bunch of different stuff, very specifically late summer/early fall produce. A few bunches of mixed color heirloom carrots, some red swiss chard that sparkled, it was so fresh, some sweet mixed baby tomatoes, a fat little kabocha squash, and for the protein, a some fresh fluke, caught hours earlier off of Montauk. Really real-food stuff, lucky urban food-smugster food. Brooklyn and Berkeley food. Or is it? maybe its just food, the way food was before Foodiness jacked it?

We took it all back to Brooklyn/LA’s apt, and I showed them really simple ways to cook it all. Mostly roasting, the carrots, tomatoes, squash, they all just gor a little toss of olive oil and some salt, and a nap in a hot oven until everything caramelized and got all soft and creamy. The chard got a good bath in the sink then a sauté in olive oil with a crushed clove of garlic. Just cook it until all the water in the pan is gone, that’s how it tastes best. And fluke filets? we gave them a dusting of salt and flour, threw them into a hot sauté pan with some canola oil, and cooked them until they were golden. Then the roasted baby tomatoes went on top as a quickie sauce. It was easy, it was pretty quick, and it was all in season at that moment. Even the fish.

And all of it could have been bought in the supermarket too. Nothing was unusual or exotic, And everything was delicious, like really freaking delicious, and that’s what REAL food is about. Taste. Real tastes better. Once you get the foodiness taste out of your mouth and wake up the buds in there. It just tastes better. And isn’t that what we want from our food? Conveniently, seasonal food tends to taste better too, and that’s what this week’s show is about.

On an historical Foodiness note, the inventor of the Dorito just died. Arch West was 97 years old, and invented the Dorito after seeing fried tortilla chips at a stall in Southern California while on vacation. His family has said that they will sprinkle Doritos on his casket at the burial.

Doritos may be one of the seminal Foodiness foods ever invented. You take a basic, staple food for millions of Mexicans, the corn tortilla. Corn tortillas are made of cornmeal, lard and water. Food. cut them up and fry them in oil, still technically food. You take a major American snack-food company, take the corn tortilla, reproduce it in a factory using a slurry of salted, sweetened cornmeal and flavored powders and colors, extrude it from a giant machine and seal it up in bags, Foodiness.

Its funny, I just looked up the ingredients for “Toasted Corn” flavor Doritos, the original flavor. Ingredients? Corn, oil and salt. Hmmm, almost food. These were considered junk food when I was a kid.

Then I looked up the ingredients for “Late-Night All-Nighter Cheeseburger Flavor”, and it had 19 ingredients, including 5 different artificial colors. ‘Nuff said.

I want to start out this Flog post with a new product report. Now this product is a food, I count it as food, I eat it and actually really love it, and its not a food I have any real issues with, especially now that the corn syrup has been removed from most brands. And, if you are old enough to remember the Reagan years, it counts as a vegetable, too. And you know I support vegetable consumption wholeheartedly.

But this product report is really more about convenience, and how we are totally motivated and driven by it. This week’s show is called an Inconvenient Food.  Food is inconvenient. Real food, not the easy-to-grab thing, the pre-made thing, but food. It’s inconvenient because you have to make an effort for it. An effort we’ve made quite valiantly for 100,000 years, but now seem to be stymied by.

What is the product? Well, it’s the newly designed ketchup packet introduced today by you-know-who the biggest ketchup producer. I don’t want to get sued or anything, but you know who I mean. We are all familiar with the 9 gram ketchup packet. Did you know its 9 grams? Me either. So, the ketchup packet engineers started to get reports from the fast-food chains that their drive-thru French fry orders were starting to decrease. And fewer French fries eaten means fewer ketchup packets sold to the chains.  Hmm, a problem for sure.

So in step the packet engineers, or packeteers, as I like to call them, to do some research. Turns out that most people weren’t ordering fries in their cars, because the opening of the packets and subsequent applying of ketchup to fries created too much of a mess and was too difficult and inconvenient to do while driving, which is when the majority of the French-fry eating is done. Driving in a car, whilst eating fries, one cannot apparently apply ketchup successfully. Very inconvenient.

So, the packeteers engineered a new packet. First change in the design since the introduction of the ketchup packet in 1963. It is 3x the size, and has two application choices. One end can be torn off and the ketchup squeezed out, like the classic packet, but now, the other end can be peeled off, and the packet becomes a little dipping cup. So now you can dip and drive, as you cram fries into your mouth while driving. Very convenient. no more drippy mess, no more squirting the ketchup into your mouth then adding fries. Just peel it back, and dip between texts. Life really gets better and better every day, doesn’t it? Oh, and remember, if you don’t want to eat shit…