On Learning

This webcomic is always a favorite, but today I found it particularly amusing.

One of the reasons I found it so amusing is that its true: cooking, well baking, is mostly about following directions. Oh sure, you should eventually develop a knowledge of things like heat management, basic needed equipment, knife skills, cooking terms, and some basic skills. You should probably also, especially if baking, know a little about the chemistry of how all those things work. My favorite example of this occurred several Thanksgivings ago, when my husband's family discovered I could make pie. I used a crust recipe known as "never fail" in the family cookbook, and my husband's grandmother spent a lot of her conversation with me over the next day asking me to recite the recipe and nodded along, saying things like, "The vinegar activates the gluten." Of course, I know so little about kitchen chemistry, that I have no idea if that statement makes any sense.

The reason it is mostly okay that I'm not an expert in activating gluten etc... is twofold: most cooks work by trial and error, and most cooking knowledge is handed down. If I don't know something, I rarely go to the internet first; instead, I call my mother, whom I regard as a bastion of culinary knowledge. The other reason is that there are plenty of people out there who know this stuff and make a good living teaching it to others, like this man, pictured below.



Point being that when I started cooking on my own in my teens, I experimented. I did brownies with all kinds of added calories. I did very spicy chicken. I did some pretty damn good baked beans. And if it didn't work out... well, it mostly worked out. There's a learning process with cooking, and a huge part of that process is the ability to admit what you don't know, and to seek that knowledge.

As I moved onward and upward, I started with the basic things: spaghetti, chicken and pasta, hamburgers etc... I can remember being bothered by the fact that there were people who were better at cooking than I. I can't remember when I started to list cooking as a hobby - perhaps when I figured out that I was good at it. I also remember that as I started to want to know more - as I began to admit what I didn't know - I started to love the company of those who knew more about food and cooking than I did. And that openness started to form into richer, more evolved opinions, which evolve into more openness, more desire for knowledge.

In a lot of ways, the cooking I do is both looking forward and back. Forward toward new things I haven't tried. And back toward trying old things in improved ways. Because really, no matter what level of cooking expertise you have, you're going to mess up sometimes. And really, the ability to make good brownies, or good chicken and rice casserole in a pinch more than makes up for the mess ups.

On HFCS

I saw this series of commercials today while watching the Food Network and reading Vogue on the treadmill.


I've discussed HFCS before, but I'll excerpt it for you here:
One of the reasons I have such a bread preference has to do with my fear and loathing for high fructose corn syrup. While it is impossible to completely avoid if you want the occasional soda or hot dog bun, I figure I can do without the extra calories (some sources claim that HFCS provides the average American with most of his or her daily calories), and that I'd like to be able to taste subtle sweetness again. Also, the shit is in everything. Seriously. Check out the labels in your kitchen. I once picked up a can of kidney beans. Plain old kidney beans: no sauce, nothing. The first ingredient was water. The second ingredient was high fructose corn syrup. As you may know, the order in which ingredients are listed on food items depends on how much of one particular ingredient is present in the food. So, most foods will have water as the first ingredient, but one would expect kidney beans to have more beans than highly processed corn by-product sweetener. While I wish I was dedicated and patient enough to bake my own bread (I can do it, as anyone who has enjoyed my winter sourdough baking frenzy can attest), I find that, in a pinch, Pepperidge Farm and Sara Lee produce whole grain (yummy and healthy) breads that do not have HFCS in the ingredient list.

If you go to the original post, you'll see I've got links to some sources there, but my main issue with the commercials above is the "in moderation" part. I would like to emphasize the shit is in everything. It's in the tonic water you use with your gin. It may also be in the juice you use with your gin, should you prefer that cocktail. I've seen it in cans of beans; it's in jelly, peanut butter, cereal, tomato sauce. I've seen foods that have both it and sugar. There are two issues here First, only obsessive and anal people like myself really examine food labels. Most of us would grab the can of cheap, generic kidney beans because they're just beans, and in the process we would add more calories than needed or expected. Think about it. How many Cokes did you have today? Most of the sugar in Coke is HFCS. Add up those grams of sugar. Gross, isn't it? Second, it is in these foods because it is cheap. It is cheap because it is highly processed. For a brief intro into how it is produced, go here. For a longer discussion, check out Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma. That long production time uses a lot of resources, particularly compared to beet sugars, especially for a product that only serves to sweeten things that don't necessarily need to be sweet.

We're attracted to sweet things because of how nutritionally complex and desirable fruits were to our ancestors. But now, many of us, especially in America, are loosing the ability to taste subtle sweetness, or even to taste at all. I'm no scientist, but I'm a reader, and most of the things I've read indicate that cheaper, sweeter, omnipresent sweeteners, like HFCS are causing this.

I rarely eat candy bars, or sweets that I don't make at home. Even restaurant deserts are rare for me. Candy to me is so sweet that it makes my teeth hurt, which can be attributed to sensitive teeth, but candy wasn't always so painful. I'm more sensitive to sweet because I rarely have a soft drink or eat foods that have been artificially sweetened. I'm proud of that, perhaps excessively so. But I'm more easily satisfied by sweet flavors. I also enjoy more fruit. Part of this food experiment is to open myself up to new flavors, and new knowledge. But how can I, or anyone else, do so if heavily processed sweeteners are in far too many of our foods?

We can eat cheaply by accepting HFCS, and believing that it's "just fine." We probably won't make ourselves too ill (excluding the currently historical high rates of obesity and diabetes), at lease in the short term. But cheap by-products are still cheap, and still not whole foods. If we are what we eat, do we really want to be a cheap, oozing mess of chemicals and corn?