Dude Loves Food

An alert friend spotted this article in the New York Times about one woman’s effort to introduce fortune cookies to China.  You read correctly.  Apparently, fortune cookies are an American creation, and have never realized much success in China largely due to their being ‘too American’.  The article is a great read, and has a cool video.

So, as a first step in eating locally, I tried preparing Sunday dinner solely from locally sourced food.  This forced all sorts of research.  First, when I plan a dinner, I like to start with protein.  Since me and my gang are carnivores, I went searching for localally grown beasties.  I found a farmer in Greenland, NH that raises chikens, for meat and eggs.  So, I got me a chicken, a dozen eggs, and a pound of ground pork that I am saving for another day.

Summer in New England brings a lot of options for vegetables, and so I headed for the farm stand that is less than 2 miles from my house.  I built a salad out of iceberg, romaine, cucumber, carrots, radishes, and green pepper.  While putting together the salad, I grabbed a pile of fresh corn on the cob.

So, I was feeling pretty good about my locally sourced meal until I started to put it together.  I was roasting the chicken, and like to season the skin a bit, and so I sprinkled on some rosemary.  Now, I know I can get that if I look for it, but I was cooking to a schedule.  Also, as I was prepping the salad, I did not give consideration to the dressing.  The butter for the corn came from Vermont, so I was okay there, but my first experience doing this put a find point on things that you normally take for granted.  Salt, seasonings, cooking oil.

After dinner, I went digging and found that I could get prohibitively expensive sea salt from the Maine seacoast.  I could also get a variety of fresh herbs.  Cooking oil, however, is just nowhere to be found here in Northern New England.  Do some reading of blogs on this topic, and you find that those who take on eating locally will sometimes make exceptions.  The ones that I have seen the most are coffee, chocolate, spices, grains, and cooking oil.  I dont drink coffee and I tend to not eat much chololate anyway, so that is not a big deal for me.  Oil and spices are, however, a very big deal for me.  As I thought of it more, so are breads.  I am a bread hound, and while I could certainly do with a lot less bread and pasta in my diet, I would really miss these things.  More on this later when I discuss purely local vs locally made from non-local ingredients.

I finished Sunday dinner with some amazing local blueberries, and have to say that the dinner was a general success.  It was satisfying from a culinary point of view, and it was also satisfying from an economic point of view as well.  Additionally, the meal (roasted chicken, corn, salad, blueberries) was actually pretty healthy.

I’ve been away for a bit, and am now back.  I have been reading about the local eating challenge.  The short of it is that you commit to sourcing all of your food from within 100 miles of your house for 100 days.  I live in the south of New Hampshire, and have access to some great options, but the growing season is short up here.  So, I am keen to know about your experiences if you have tried this.  As I learn more, I am going to go through the decision process ‘outloud’ here.

My beloved first tipped me off to this developing story when she was reading up on all natural ingredients. Diacetyl is a natural chemical that is formed during fermentation, and is present in alcohol and in butter.  It is one of the components of butter that makes butter taste like, well, butter.

Armed with this information, the people that make artificial food additives (like Clark Griswold from the Vacation series of moves) use diacetyl to make artifical butter flavor.  So far so good.  There is, however, a problem.  Recently, it has been observed that heating diacetyl, and inhaling gaseous diacetyl is toxic, and can lead to Popcorn Lung.

As bizzarre as this story may seem, it is very serious.  Some popcorn factory workers have died, and recently, a consumer has developed the disease after making two bags of microwave popcorn in his small kiktchen daily for an extended period of time.

So, enter the FDA to fix this, right?  Wrong.  The FDA only regulates diacetyl as it is eaten.  The FDA could care less if you heat it and inhale it.  That is OSHA.  The Seattle Post Intelligencier has a great article on the politics of this that is well worth the read.

What is a syntheic-butter-loving-popcorn-nut to do?  Well, if you must microwave your popcorn, get the all-natural stuff without any flavoring, and add the butter after the fact yourself.  This was you can choose a good quality butter (from as local a source as you can get!!), and put even more on your popcorn if you are so moved.  Better yet, get the popcorn kernels and practice popping it yourself on the stovetop with a deep coverd pan.  Air popping also works well, and saves some calories that you can put back on with some real butter.