I have a Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan, and am currently teaching as a lecturer in American Culture and the University Courses Division. My primary research and teaching interests are food, mass media, and popular culture. I started this blog to have a place to put recipes, thoughts on current food news, and casual research outside the scope of my formal academic writing.

I'm not a photographer, a nutritionist, or a food industry professional. The former will be obvious. In regards to both of the latter, I'll try not to make claims that are beyond my ken. However, just like everyone else who eats, I have to make decisions about what to eat every day based on the best information I have about how that will affect my health and well-being, the environment, the economy, labor conditions, animal welfare, how other people perceive me, and all the other things that are tied up in the material production and cultural significance of food. Rather than pontificating about or trying to prescribe rules about how anyone "should" eat, I try to apply a critical lens to popular wisdom, scientific research, and my own assumptions about what it means to eat well. I'll do my best to cite the sources of the recipes and information I use and provide links when possible. All opinions represented here are my own, and all content is free and may be reproduced with proper attribution for non-commercial purposes.

As I explained in one of the early entries, the title of the blog isn't meant to perpetuate the myth of four tastes but to invoke the tastes most often used metaphorically. This blog will often be about the literal and practical acts of cooking and eating, but I also hope to at least gesture towards the broader social, cultural, and political significance of eating, to sort of loop and swirl around the question of why it should make any sense at all to describe life itself as bitter or sweet, or of course, both at the same time.

This may seem like a strange thing to argue about, because the popular consensus still seems to be that juice is healthy. Jamba Juice markets itself as "the category-defining leader in healthy blended beverages, juices, and good-for-you snacks." They even use Jamba as an adjective to mean the opposite of high fructose corn syrup and trans-fats (adding those things to juice ""just wouldn't be Jamba"), which again, constructs the brand as healthy vs. the demon poisons that make people fat. Even if it's foolish to go looking for truths in advertising, I don't think Jamba Juice's branding generally occurs to people as a massive irony or lie. Advocates of banning or restricting soda vending machines in schools often claim that the soda should be replaced with 100% fruit juice with no added sugars, and for many people, a glass of orange juice still represents "part of a nutritious breakfast" strongly with desirable nutrients like Vitamin C.

The Case Against Juice

But a number of health trends have begun cast suspicion on juice, especially the (impartial and incomplete) shift from primarily low-fat to primarily low-calorie and low-carb dieting in mainstream weight-loss culture, and the growing concern about the role sugars (especially fructose) play in personal and national obesity.

On the low-calorie front, people who believe that losing weight or maintaining a healthy weight is all about the basic algebra of calories-in vs. calories-out often end up axing all caloric beverages from their diets because they have a bad satiety-to-calorie ratio—I mean, obviously, right? Fruit juice is just fruit with some or all of the filling fiber removed. If the goal is maximum satiety on minimum calories, you're better off eating whole fruit and drinking water or artificially sweetened beverages.

On the low-carb front, people who believe that what's important is not how many calories you eat but what kind are also going to see juice (and sometimes most fruits and vegetables as well) as "unhealthy." It does seem to be true that diets high in carbohydrates drive up insulin levels, slowing metabolism and encouraging the body to store fat. And the overwhelming majority of the calories in most fruit juices are in the form of carbohydrates. Some green vegetable juices have protein content approaching 50% of the carbohydrate content, but that just makes it 75% bad rather than 100% bad, at least as true carbophobes are concerned.

And finally, there are some non-carbophobes who might avoid juice because they're wary of sugar qua sugar, rather than sugar qua carbohydrate. The carbohydrates in fruit juice primarily take the form of fructose—wikipedia has a handy chart of the kinds of sugars in common plant foods. It doesn't seem like there's a true consensus yet about whether or not fructose is especially bad—despite recent studies linking fructose to obesity, even within the medical community, some people still advocate fructose as a "low glycemic" sugar that's better for diabetics. It basically all comes down to whether you think the fact that fructose is digested in the liver and doesn't trigger insulin production is a good thing or a bad thing. To link it to other sugar purveyors: pro-agave nectar people should also think that fruit juice is healthy and people who think hfcs is bad because they think it's "high fructose" compared to other sugars are, well, a) wrong, but b) should also be advocating hfcs-sweetened sodas over fruit juices, which are even richer in sugar.

Personally, I think the evidence that fructose in large amounts causes equivalent blood sugar spikes to other sugar, increased "bad" cholesterol and triglycerides and signs of insulin resistance compared to glucose, and can cause non-alcoholic fatty liver disease consumed in vast quantities suggests that it is certainly no better and possibly much worse for human health than glucose or sucrose. But "worse for human health" is relative, not absolute, and depends a lot on amount, kind, and context.  Read more

Lesson 1: If you leave a tiny, innocent-looking baby zucchini alone for a day or two, it turns into a giant, bitter, watery monster. The penguin is there for the crazed expression,not for scale. The wine bottle is for scale:

I think, salted and drained, it might make its way into some bread or soup, or both? I thought about asking my advisor if I could take a picture of it with his baby (again, for scale) and then thought perhaps I could offer the squash as a trade for the photo op, but as Brian pointed out, that much squash is a burden, not a gift or a valuable commodity to be traded.

Too bad I missed "Sneak Some Squash Onto Your Neighbor's Porch Night".

Another illustration of its might and girth:

Lesson 2: If you wish to harvest your squash blossoms, perhaps under the mistaken impression that you can prevent the inevitable glut of giant bitter watery monster squash even a single plant will produce if you're not vigilant, try to pluck them when the flowers are open. Fortunately, I was too busy trying to corral the bee that flew out of one into the kitchen window to worry much about the spider that was crawling out of another one. The spider was gone by the time I got the bee taken care of and the remaining two only contained innocuous-seeming little beetles, but it was still a hectic few minutes. And the goat cheese-filled, tempura-battered result was good, but not quite good enough to inspire me to try it again.

Lesson 3: Cilantro is the herb equivalent of that one girl in high school who couldn't wait to have babies and doesn't seem to have any other ambitions, which might be more media cliche than real-life personality type, but either way is an easy target since working outside the home has become so conflated with women's "liberation" and gender equality that some people have actually hailed the disproportionately high job loss men have experienced in the current recession as a victory for feminism. I'm sure the Institute for Women's Policy Research president's quote, "It was a long historical slog to get to this point," was completely taken out of context, but the really insane thing is that I'm sure the journalist isn't the only one to think this can be construed as progress for women. As if being a primary breadwinner because your male co-breadwinner is out of work is every little girl's dream. Anyhow, what was I saying? Oh, cilantro goes to seed faster than anything else I've ever planted, and then it just dies. Fortunately, I do use coriander seed in curries and such, and I get a vague kick out of having my spice jar filled with "home grown coriander," but if you're not part of the doomed 15% of the population who think it tastes like soap and you relish the thought of having cilantro leaves to complement the great tomato glut of August, you should plant a second bunch after the first stuff comes up.

But I did discover something lovely about the seeds: they crackle like Rice Krispies if you get them wet

Lesson 4: Mulch is fantastic, and scattering it around your plants once they've come up is a great way of preventing weeds from growing (apparently lawn clippings also work). However, it also seems to attract ants when left in a semi-moist bag against the side of the house. Probably shouldn't have been a surprise. Fortunately, there is a solution: if you pump the half-full bag of ant-mulch full of water and then leave it in the sun for a day or so, the ants either die or go elsewhere and the mulch becomes much more pleasant to use again.

Lesson 5: Heirloom tomatoes are pretty and delicious, but they just don't seem to produce as much fruit as the standard varieties. "Mr. Stripey" only yielded three tomatoes this year, and just seemed to struggle all summer despite being fertilized and kept in a self-watering planter. Ditto for the "Mortgage Lifter," and I think I've gotten four or five plum-sized "Green Zebra" tomatoes off that plant. Compared to pints and pints of unbelievably sweet cherry tomatoes on the non-heirloom sungold plants and perhaps as many as a dozen beefsteak tomatoes, with many more green ones still to ripen. Like so many heirloom things, they must need special care or simply not be designed for everyday tomato needs.

Lesson 6: Baby cucumber plants are apparently the very most delicious thing I grew to whatever eats the plants in my garden, probably rabbits. No doubt eager to dispel years of speciesist stereotypes, they avoid the carrots entirely and chewed every cucumber seedling I managed to grow down to a tiny leafless nub. I had even scattered used kitty litter around, which is supposed to be a rabbit repellent. So it seems like if cucumbers are on the planting agenda, it might be best to cover them with chicken wire until they're no longer quite as tender and sweet.

And finally, a few more monster zucchini pictures and a tiny Dr. Seuss tribute:

Confession: I not only avoided high-fructose corn syrup (hfcs) until about a year ago, I was actually skittish about fresh corn for a while after my first encounter with Michael Pollan in The New York Times Magazine (or it might have been this article). I stopped eating corn tortillas and frozen corn kernels and felt vaguely panicky about the possibility that I was consuming hfcs in condiments and sandwich bread when I ate out, even if it would have only been tiny amounts.

Now that I'm over it, I sometimes have a hard time remembering what was so scary about the idea that there was corn in everything I was eating, an idea that was obviously ludicrous anyway because I was a vegetarian who mostly ate food prepared at home from whole, fresh, non-corn ingredients. But looking back at the articles linked above, they are pretty ominous. Even though Pollan notes that a corn-based diet has been the norm in Mexico for centuries without any apparent ill effects, and the story he tells about the "cornification" of the American diet is too complex to be a nefarious plot designed to kill us all, it's clear that he thinks the amount of corn Americans eat on average is a Bad Thing. Sure, it may rely on innocent accidents of nature, like the uniquely efficient way corn fixes carbon during photosynthesis and and the great distance corn pollen has to travel to reach the style, but it's also reliant on much more insidious developments: synthetic pesticides and fertilizers, an arcane federal farm subsidy systems that turned corn into "a welfare queen," agribusiness giants with seed patents on genetically-modified strains, giant livestock feeding operations that use antibiotics to keep cows alive because eating corn makes them sick, and food manufacturers who profit from getting people to buy cheap food in ever-increasing quantities. Eating corn in any form may seem like a way of giving in to all of that or even supporting it.

So although I did a fair bit of eye-rolling when I read about people avoiding sweet corn at their farmer's markets this summer or feeling "corn guilt" when they eat popcorn, it's worth remembering that I was one of them not so long ago.

HFCS paranoia is not primarily an issue of ethical consumption

It's not that many of those concerns are invalid—it's true that most corn relies on a lot of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, that much of it is grown using genetically modified seeds with patents held by huge corporations that have been known to sue farmers when corn with their patented genes end up in their fields, that cows fed diets of corn get sick and are more susceptible to diseases like e coli that can threaten humans. But it's also far from clear that refusing to eat ketchup containing high fructose corn syrup is an effective means of changing any of that or even primarily motivated by the desire to change those things.

Although people like Pollan have made a big deal about corn sweeteners being artificially cheap due to farm subsidies, the actual farm cost of hfcs in the food products we buy is so minimal that even if subsidies were eliminated entirely, it might not affect portion sizes or consumer demand at all. Even in soft drinks, which are by far the most demonized hfcs delivery system, hfcs represents just 3.5% of the total cost of manufacturing. The corn content, the only part actually affected by farm subsidies, is only 1.6 percent of the price (based on US Department of Commerce data). A comparison between the U.S., Australia, the UK, and France, all of which have different sugar policies but similar consumer prices, show no pattern in the relationships between how cheap sugar is, how much of it people eat, or how fat on average they are (which most people wrongly assume is a reliable measure of health outcomes, but I'll tackle some other time).

Pollan's formal case against hfcs relies primarily on arguments about price and prevalence, but that doesn't really explain the kind of paranoia his books and articles have helped inspire about eating corn and/or hfcs. Not buying and eating something because it's too cheap just isn't the kind of consumer behavior that spreads the way hfcs-phobia has. Nor is this some sort of mass avoidance of all added or refined sugars, or brands like Snapple and Pepsi wouldn't be running huge campaigns to advertise soft drinks containing only "natural sugar."

Instead, people have latched on to the implication, which isn't supported by any data I can find, that hfcs is nutritionally worse than other sugars. The hfcs paranoia isn't caused by the idea that hfcs might be unwisely or unfairly subsidized or that pesticides used to produce corn are poisoning waterways or anything related to feeding corn to cows. The fear is that hfcs might be some kind of demon poison that makes people fat.

The confusing part: "high fructose" isn't actually high fructose

The idea that hfcs is worse than other sugars seems to be primarily reinforced by research about how fructose is metabolized. Just last April, an article about a study comparing drinks sweetened with fructose and  glucose in the New York Times began:

Some research has suggested that consumption of high-fructose corn syrup, used as a sweetener in a wide variety of foods, may increase the risk of obesity and heart disease. Now, a controlled and randomized study has found that drinks sweetened with fructose led to higher blood levels of L.D.L, or "bad" cholesterol, and triglycerides in overweight test subjects, while drinks sweetened with another sugar, glucose, did not.

Things like this get reported all the time. However, the very last sentence of the article quotes another biochemist:

The study did not test high-fructose corn syrup, he said, and judgments should not be made about it from the findings.

Not that that stopped the author from leading with the useless, ambiguous claim about a supposed link between hfcs and obesity, but surely this deserves a little more attention: yes, fructose alone seems to cause more insulin resistance and weight gain in both rats and people than glucose alone. But high fructose corn syrup is only "high fructose" relative to normal corn syrup, which is 100% glucose.

The kind of hfcs used in most food processing, including soft drinks, is hfcs-55, which is approximately 55% fructose and 45% glucose, or almost identical to sucrose, which is about 50/50. Another kind, hfcs-42, is used in the manufacture of some baked goods, and if fructose is really worse, that would make that kind of hfcs healthier than cane sugar. Indeed, studies comparing the consumption of hfcs to sucrose have shown no differences in metabolic responses (or energy or macronutrient intake) at all.

The argument that hfcs is somehow responsible for the obesity epidemic relies entirely on correlations between the rise of hfcs in food manufacturing in the 1980s and the rise in national rates of overweight/obesity (and the exponential rise in concern about fatness). Pollan's case against hfcs amounts to a gut suspicion that:

It's probably no coincidence that the wholesale switch to corn sweeteners in the 1980's marks the beginning of the epidemic of obesity and Type 2 diabetes in this country.

Of course, this fails to account for the simultaneous increases in obesity in many other countries, perhaps most notably Australia, where obesity rates rival or even exceed those in the U.S., but sugar is the primary sweetener. It's not that he's totally wrong; it does seem probable that U.S. farm subsidies and the cheap price of highly-palatable, nutrient-poor, calorie-rich, primarily carbohydrate-based foods is one factor driving the relatively small increases in the average American's weight since the 1970s. And the history of corn cultivation and agricultural policy has something to do with that. But there's no reason to think that hfcs is uniquely responsible for the "obesity epidemic." After all, if it weren't for subsidies and tariffs that keep the price of sugar artificially inflated, which are the result of a different set of biological, historical, and political contingencies, it would be just as cheap. 

Ultimately, hfcs is just another source of sugar, nutritionally no different from cane sugar, and way better than agave nectar if you're concerned about fructose. It might be slightly worse than things like honey (esp. raw) and maple syrup (esp. grade B or lower) if you're interested in vitamins and minerals. (This is all assuming the hfcs in question contains mercury, but that's sort of another story altogether).

That doesn't mean hfcs is  "natural," a word which has virtually no meaning when it comes to food labeling anyhow, but then, if "natural" is the alternative to "processed," no sweeteners are. Agave nectar must be filtered, hydrolyzed, re-filtered, and concentrated before it can be used as a sweetener. Refined cane sugar is purified with phosphoric acid and calcium hydroxide, and sometimes whitened using bone char which is why some vegetarians and vegans refuse to eat it.

The upshot is there's no reason to believe that hfcs is any worse for you than sugar or much worse for you than any other sweeteners, and there's certainly no reason to believe that a little bit here and there in a favorite condiment or even the occasional soda is going to hurt you.

Later in this series: I've gotten a request to weigh in on fruit juice, and will try to do that soon. And someday I'll get around to msg, as promised before.