A Record of Sticking Places

In September, Lauren Berlant wrote the following description of writing on her blog, Supervalent Thought: 

Most of the writing we do is actually a performance of stuckness.  It is a record of where we got stuck on a question for long enough to do some research and write out the whole knot until the original passion and curiosity that made us want to try to say something about something got so detailed, buried, encrypted, and diluted that the energetic and risk-taking impulse became sealed and delivered in the form of a defense against thinking any more about it. Along the way, something might have happened to the scene the question stood for:  or not.

At first, I thought of that as something that applied only to “serious” writing—to articles or book chapters that unfold over months or years. But in retrospect, I think it’s actually one of the reasons I started this blog: to have a place to delve (even if only shallowly) into the kinds of questions that were distracting me from writing my dissertation and then seal them up so they’d stop cluttering my thought process. At some point in the process of writing most of the longer, essayish posts, I get sick of the topic and just want to be done with it. So I finish it, and even if I haven’t entirely resolved the question I started with, I feel released from thinking about it at least for a while.

However, the blog hasn’t quite had the intended effect of freeing me up to write the dissertation because, unsurprisingly, getting mentally “free” takes up a lot of the time and energy I ought to be spending on that other, more important “performance of stuckness.” And the whole idea of having a mentally “clean slate” before I deal with my dissertation was probably always a hopeless ambition.

So this part of the retrospective on the year is also a sort of penitent offering to anyone who’s come to appreciate or even maybe expect this kind of content. In the next six months, I need to finish and defend and submit my dissertation. Also, I’m getting married. Between the two, I’m probably not going to have the time to do a lot of longer posts on culture/history/politics. I’m toying with the idea of taking excerpts from the dissertation and editing them into blog-friendly essays on the weekends. But in case I don’t end up having the time to post much of anything substantial for at least the first half of 2011 and that makes you sad, maybe there will be something here that you missed or might be interested in revisiting.

Special Series

Hipsters on Food Stamps—A three-part look at the bogus “trend” piece published last March in Salon about college-educated people using food stamps to buy organic, ethnic, and otherwise non-subsistence-diet foods and what it says about food & social class in America:

Part I: The New Generation of Welfare Queens—A critique of the article that places it in the longer history of concern about how the poor eat

Part II: Who Deserves Public Assistance?—An analysis of the comments and some of the myths about social class and poverty in America they reflect

Part III: Damned If You Do-ritos and Damned If You Don’t—An attempt to explain the contradictory trends of patronizing vs. romanticizing the poor and how they eat and what kinds of contemporary anxieties the bogus trend of hipsters on food stamps might be a response to

Responses to Food, Inc.—Posts related to the film (and the broader agendas it gave voice to) and how they distort the picture of the American food system and confused their audience.

Part I: No Bones in the Supermarket—An interrogation of the film’s premise that “looking” at the food system will lead everyone to the same conclusion

Part II: Is the Food More Dangerous?—The film suggests that industrial animal agriculture is responsible for the deadly strain of e coli that killed at least one innocent child, but it turns out that’s not true. Grass-fed cattle have less generic, harmless e coli but the same prevalence of 0157:H7.

Price, Sacrifice, and the Food Movement’s “Virtue” Problem—Why a food “movement” predicated on spending more or making sacrifices is necessarily limited to the privileged few.

The Myth of the Grass-Fed Pig—Why not every farm animal can or should be “grass fed,” and the ecological argument for vegetarianism.

The Myth of the Grass-Fed Pig, Part II: Cornphobia—On the epidemic of irrational fears about corn inspired by Michael Pollan’s books and the documentaries he has appeared in.

Don’t Drink the Agave-Sweetened Kool-Aid—Why agave nectar isn’t “natural,” healthy, or (probably) more delicious than other sweeteners.

Part I: Natural, My Foot—Agave nectar isn’t an “ancient sweetener” used by Native Americans, it was invented in the 1990s and involves a process almost identical to the one used to make High Fructose Corn Syrup.

Part II: What’s Wrong With Any High-Fructose Sweetener—Why agave nectar, with up to 90% fructose, isn’t a healthier substitute for sugar.

Part III: The Mint Julep Taste Test and Calorie Comparison—The results of a comparison between agave and simple syrup-sweetened mint juleps and some number crunching that shows you could theoretically cut a small number of calories by substituting agave for sugar, but not if you use the recommended amount, which is calorically identical.

Why Posting Calorie Counts Won’t Work—Calorie counts are already appearing on menus across the country, and will soon be required for most chains. This series explores why they won’t make Americans thinner or healthier. 

Introduction—A brief run-down of the reasons I don’t think the policy will work as intended.

Part I: The Number Posted is Often Wrong—What you see on the label is not always what you get, and the difference isn’t entirely random. 

Part II: Most People Don’t Know How Many Calories They Burn—The problem of calorie ignorance isn’t one that can be fixed with an educational campaign—people don’t know how many calories they burn because they can’t know, because it changes, especially if they change their diets.

Part III: Calorie-restriction Dieting Doesn’t Work Long Term—A meta-literature review of three decades of research on calorie-restriction weight loss that shows again and again that by far the most common result of dieting is weight loss followed by regain. And an explanation of why the National Weight Loss Control Registry isn’t a representative sample. Read more »

The Year is Dead, Long Live the Year

Is it just me, or does it seems like it’s been ages since the last winter Olympics? Trying to remember watching the U.S. curling team choke until they finally benched Shuster is like trying to remember a dream. But at the same time, it feels like only yesterday that I was trying to figure out why artichokes make everything else taste sweet or cursing the marshmallow fluff I was trying to shape into Peeps before it turned into one big marshmallow in the shape of a piping bag. How can we possibly be knocking on 2011’s door? 

There should be a word for this sense of time simultaneously collapsing and expanding and the slightly dizzy feeling of trying to look backwards and forwards at the same time. The first time I remember feeling it was about a week before my family went to Disney World when I was seven or eight. I was sitting in the passenger seat of our sedan and watching the minutes tick by as I waited for my mom to finish an errand or something. I was itchy with anticipation about the trip and amazed at how slowly time could pass, but I also had this sort of flash of realization that in almost no time at all, we’d be packing and getting on the plane and that everything would be a warm, colorful, exciting blur, and then we’d be home again. That while the minutes now seemed endless, in what would seem like the blink of an eye, I’d be back in that car, watching time crawl again as my memories of Disney World began to fade away.

End of year retrospectives always seem like a futile attempt to hold on to what will not stay. Or maybe they’re a way of paring an unwieldy mass down to something that can be cupped in one hand. But I thought in lieu of a better indexing system, this might serve as a reference for anyone who wants to revisit an old post or who started reading regularly midway through the year and might be curious about what they missed.

I’ve divided the Year in Review into two parts: recipes and non-recipes. I apparently posted 69 recipes in the last year, although many of them were clustered two or three to a post. I’ve unclustered them, shoved them into some typical cookbook categories, and briefly annotated them below. Also, since 69 is kind of a lot, I singled out the ones I liked best—these are recipes I make habitually, the ones I know by heart, the ones I can’t wait to make again next year:

#10 Spiced Nuts, #9 Buttermilk Biscuits and Vegetarian Gravy, #8 Crusty Multigrain Bread, #7 Sour Cherry Pie, #6 Turkey & Leek Risotto with Homemade Turkey Stock, #5 Taffy Apple Cream Dip, #4 Lemon and Herb Chicken Drumsticks, #3 Whole-wheat Bagels, #2 Alain’s Winter Squash Soup with Homemade Croutons 

And the #1 Recipe of 2010 is…. Read more »

Santa baby, just slip sustainable aquaculture
under the tree, for me.
Been an awful good girl, Santa baby,
So hurry down the chimney tonight.

From flickr user duluoz cats

Dear Santa,

I know I can be a bit of a “negative Nancy.” I spend a lot more time criticizing existing policy and reform efforts than offering alternatives or solutions. Of course, that’s partially due to the fact that not all policies need alternatives—the flip side of a lot of my apparent negativity is that I have a much sunnier outlook on the U.S. food system than many self-identified foodies and people associated with the “food revolution.”

For example, I’m down on most anti-obesity initiatives because I don’t think obesity causes serious diseases or death. I’m open to evidence to the contrary, but in all the epidemiological studies I’ve seen (including the ones cited by the WHO and NIH when they redefined “obesity” to a lower BMI range) BMI isn’t even significantly correlated with an increased risk of mortality until you get into the territory of severe or morbid obesity (BMI 35+). The number of Americans in that category has been growing since 1980, but it still amounts to less than 5% of the U.S. population, far less than the 30-60% of overweight or obese Americans usually cited as the evidence that we’re in the midst of an obesity “epidemic.” Americans on average aren’t much fatter than they were 50 or 100 years ago. The “typical American diet” high in refined grains and sugar probably isn’t optimal for human health (for reasons other than that it makes most people fatter), but it nonetheless enables many people to live long, relatively healthy lives.

From Found in Mom’s Basement.

I think we’re doing somewhere between okay and great on several other fronts, too. Although imperfect in many ways, the industrial food production and distribution systems are sometimes more efficient in terms of total inputs and carbon emissions per calorie or pound than small, local farms—environmentalists should celebrate the spread of no-till farming and possibility of safe GMO crops that increase yields with reduced water, nitrogen, or phosphorus needs. Illnesses caused by food-borne pathogens are probably less common now than at any point in our country’s history (and new estimates about the incidence of food-borne illness are even lower). For anyone who’s interested in novel foods, there’s probably never been a better time or place to be an eater. The ever-increasing flows of people, goods, and information around the world have made everything from far-flung regional specialties to ancient recipes to innovative taste experiences more available to more consumers than ever.

Of course, that doesn’t mean things couldn’t be better. So here’s a list of seven changes I would like to see in how people produce, consume, regulate, and talk about food in the U.S. It’s a bit of a motley assortment—if there’s one thing people in the “food movement” seem to agree on it’s that food is implicated in our lives in a myriad of interconnected ways. I think there’s room for improvement in multiple realms. 

From flickr user HA! Designs Read more »

A Modern Tradition

This my mother’s sugar cookie recipe, from her mother before her. I don’t know who my grandma got it from or when it acquired the name “old fashioned.” It can’t be older than mid-19th C. because it calls for chemical leaveners. The whole point of the sour cream is to provide an acid to react with the alkali baking soda and produce a tender, puffy cookie. That makes them completely unlike really “old-fashioned” cookies, which were usually unleavened and baked until they were completely hard and dry (for more on cookie history, see foodtimeline.com). However, now that chemical leaveners have been around long long enough to be part of recipes handed down for three generations or more, I suppose they can be “modern” and “old-fashioned” at the same time.

I like this particular recipe for Christmas cookies because it’s not as sweet or rich as most sugar cookie recipes—the ratio of fat : sugar : flour in the dough is 1: 1: 3. Compare that to the “Classic Sugar Cookies” in Michael Ruhlman’s Ratio, which are 1: 1: 2, or Dorie Greenspan’s Sablés, which are 4: 3: 8. I’d go with one of the other recipes if I were going to leave them plain or just sprinkle them with colored sugar before baking, but I think the slightly less-sweet base makes them a better vehicle for frosting.

Frosting presents bakers with something of a dilemma: either you can make something gorgeous, sleek, and stylish, or you can make something delicious. In the cake world, that dilemma is primarily represented by fondant vs. buttercream. In the cookie world, it’s largely royal icing vs. buttercream. Behold Royal Icing: 

                           From the Kitchen of Olivia                                                  Chow.com

Even though those are really pretty, and royal icing also has the benefit of setting up hard enough to handle any amount of stacking or transport, when it’s a choice between butter or no butter, I’m almost always going to choose butter.

  Read more »

Previously in DIY gift ideas: Chocolate buttercreams

I. The end of semester/holiday season is a busy time, so here’s a photo essay:

II. Briefly: what, why, and how

Mulled cider and wine is popular all over Europe and North America during the winter holiday season—in the Nordic countries it’s called glögg, in Germany it’s glühwein (glow wine), in France vin chaud (hot wine), in Poland grzane wino (heated wine), in Italy vin brulé (boiled wine) (Wikipedia can tell you all about these and more). In English, we also have “wassail,” which usually refers to mulled cider. However, the word is contraction of the Middle English wæs hæil, meaning “good health” or literally “be you healthy,” a toast and a testament to the inherently celebratory and social nature of drinking warm, spiced fruit juice (Wikipedia can tell you all about that, too). Read more »

Or is it the NYTimes “Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie” in the style of the Momofuku Compost Cookie?

A Brilliant Idea, A Broken Recipe

Almost a year ago, Regis and Kathy Lee Gifford posted the recipe for Momofuku Milk Bar’s semi-famous “compost cookie” after featuring pastry chef Christina Tosi on their show. The Amateur Gourmet and The Bitten Word  sang the recipe’s praises, but the comments were full of disappointed bakers whose cookies had spread too thin and sometimes burned at the edges before baking through in the centers, even though they’d followed the recipe to the letter.

Rather than risk wasting all that butter and time on an uncertain result, I decided to add the mix of sweet, salty, and chewy additions that give the “compost” cookie its name to the recipe for the “perfect chocolate chip cookie,” adapted from pastry chef and chocolatier Jacques Torres by the NYTimes in 2008. In place of the 1 1/4 lbs of 60-percent-cacao couverture fèves (i.e. really fancy chocolate chips), I used 1/3 cup butterscotch chips, 1/2 cup peanut butter chips, 2/3 cup chopped up Rolos, 1/2 cup animal cracker crumbs, 3/4 cup crushed pretzels, and 3/4 cup crushed potato chips. I also threw in 2 tablespoons of used coffee grounds, as recommended by Rainy Day Gal, which is the only thing actually compostable in the recipe, although it wasn’t in the version posted on Regis & Kathy’s site. Perhaps Tosi was trying not to reveal all her secrets? Or maybe it’s a borrowing from one of the other dozens of similar “(everything but the) kitchen sink” cookies.

Further Modifications, Belabored. Skip Ahead for the Recipe.

I refrigerated the dough for two days before baking the cookies, which the NYTimes recipe calls for on the recommendation of City Bakery owner Maury Rubin. That lets the flour fully absorb the moisture from the egg, which evidently produces a more even texture and better browning. I was a little worried it would also soften the potato chips and pretzels, but they still seemed pretty crisp when I was shaping them and then sort of melded into the texture of the baked cookies. 

I also made a few changes—the NYTimes recipe calls for half cake flour and half bread flour, and the article  doesn’t explain why. That flour mixture should have approximately the same gluten content as all-purpose flour, so I just used that instead. I also substituted 1/2 cup rolled oats for 1/2 cup of the flour because I like the chewiness and the flavor. I also used 1 T. corn syrup in place of 2 T. of the white sugar because that promotes better browning (and was part of Tosi’s recipe). I cut the amount of salt in the dough to 1 t. and omitted the extra sprinkle on top because I figured the pretzels and potato chips would already make them plenty salty, which they did.

The salty-sweet combination is their primary appeal, although there’s also something to be said for their novelty and flexibility. You could add anything you’ve (n)ever dreamed of putting in a cookie—Capt’n Crunch, Oreos, malted milk balls, peanut butter cups, Butterfinger, Honey Nut Cheerios, etc. On the Regis & Kathy show, Tosi used mini chocolate chips, Raisinettes, Rolos, Cocoa Krispies, Goldfish, Ritz, and Fritos. I’m kind of liking the idea of a holiday version with crushed candy canes, Christmas M&Ms, and white chocolate or mint chips. Since they usually involve pre-made snack foods—often national brands—but they’ve been popularized by one of NYC’s hottest restauranteurs, they can be playful and pretentious at the same time.

Anyhow, if for any of those reasons you want to make the “Momofuku Compost Cookie” but you don’t want to risk trying a recipe that has failed other people, the version below worked pretty well for me. Read more »