Years ago, I got a reputation at work for being a lover of hot and spicy food. It was somewhat falsely deserved, however. I do indeed enjoy a dish with a little kick to it once in a while, and I am not one to pass up a dish because it is spicy, but I’m not one of those people who feels compelled to slather everything I eat with hot sauce or to engage in competitive throat-burning by always trying to go “one hotter”. That way madness lies. Anyway, you might very well wonder how chile peppers came to grow in such a wide range of concentrations of capsaicin, the chemical that makes peppers hot. This article in the latest Smithsonian Magazine goes with a University of Washington biologist to the wilds of Bolivia, which is the origin point for all the peppers we know today, to look for environmental/evolutionary explanations for capsaicin concentration and comes up with an answer that hadn’t been considered before: capsaicin is a fungicide, and peppers that grow in moister conditions develop more capsaicin to retard molds and other fungi.
The BBC reports that the champagne maker Perrier-Jouet recently held a special event to uncork one of the world’s oldest extant bottle of champagne. The champagne was bottled in 1825, and was one of three bottles remaining from that vintage. To the surprise and delight of the wine tasters on hand, it was still drinkable, if no longer all that bubbly. The remarks of the tasters in the BBC story are tactful and well-considered, to be sure, though I’m not too sure about the ones who professed that the ancient wine was better than a modern bottle. The guests also sampled champagnes from the 1840s and 1870s at the same event.
News From Home — Jonathan Bloom, who writes the Wasted Food blog, reports that he visited St. Joseph’s College in Standish, ME yesterday to observe the college’s effort to reduce food waste in their cafeteria by going trayless. The idea is that if students don’t have trays that they can pile up with lots of food, they will take less and thus waste less by not leaving food uneaten. The program has been in use since 2007, and it sounds like the on-campus students have come to accept it, if not openly embrace it. (Note: I taught as an adjunct at St. Joseph’s College about 15 years ago.) Americans in particular have a very long way to go in terms of recognizing how much food we waste, and a social engineering method like this is relatively painless and effective.
In a similar vein of learning to rethink our food habits, more and more people are beginning to take interest in CSA’s (“Community Supported Agriculture”). Not all of us have a green thumb like Michelle Obama, and many urban dwellers don’t have anyplace to grown their own veggies, so the idea of a CSA is that you pay a share to some folks who ARE working a vegetable garden, and in return they give you some of the produce they harvest. It’s a good system, but, as people who have been on the receiving end will tell you, sometimes you get too much of one thing, or not enough of something else, or you might end up with veggies you don’t normally eat. At Slate today, food write Catherine Price talks about learning how to deal with getting 30 pound of turnips in your CSA box or what to do with kale.
That’s just one of the several “locavorian dilemmas” one might have to learn to face. Another is food safety. Doug Powell, who writes the evocatively-named BarfBlog, points out that there is a tendency to associate locally-grown food with greater food safety, but that in reality locally-produced food products may even pose greater risks of contamination for the very reason we prize them: because they’re fresher and more likely not to contain preservatives, the chance of spoilage either from age or improper storage is greater. Locality is not a guarantee of safety.
While we’re talking about paying attention to what you put in your mouth, did you see this Boston Globe story a few weeks ago about how commercially-produced orange juice is made? It’s an interview with author Alissa Hamilton, who has just published a book called “Squeezed: What You Don’t Know About Orange Juice”, which may do to the orange juice business what “Fast Food Nation” did to McDonald’s. It certainly does make commercial orange juice (yes, even the “pure premium” stuff) sound like just one more crud-laden, over-processed, junk item you can live without.
And that brings me to the last link for this post: trying to cash in on the success of Pepsi “Raw” in Europe, Pepsi is planning to roll out three varieties of Pepsi sweetened with good old fashioned cane sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup. They’re going to call it “Pepsi Natural” here in the U.S.. It’s supposedly available right now in selected markets (Boston is not one of them, unfortunately) and is not intended to be a “limited-edition” product like some of the flavored varieties but instead a permanent addition to the product line. I suppose that means those of us who don’t live in the test markets will have to wait six months or so. It’s also worth noting that this product is NOT the same as the “Kosher-for-Passover” version of Pepsi, due to some of the other ingredients.
This is clearly the thin edge of the wedge in the coming backlash against HFCS. I’m sure you’ve seen the insulting “HFCS is good for you” commercials that have been running since last fall that suggest that just because you’re too stupid to remember why high-fructose corn syrup is bad for you, it must be perfectly OKAY. Cadbury-Schweppes, which owns Snapple, has also announced that they are replacing HFCS in their products with cane/beet sugar. But, as this activist website points out, it’s necessary to keep in mind that too much sugar is just as bad for you as too much HFCS, just in different ways.
