Food Falsificationism vs. Real Food
Posted on 4 January 2008 under Food In The News, Ingredients
Yesterday the CBC posted an article titled, “Something’s fishy: Restaurant customers in Florida being served fake grouper”:
The Florida Department of Business & Professional Regulation, which regulates restaurants, found 139 cases of something other than grouper being sold as the fish between January 2006 through the end of last October … In the Miami area, inspectors walked into a food processing plant and found workers taking 2,722 kilograms of Vietnamese catfish that sells wholesale for about $2.50 per 500 grams and repackaging it as grouper, which goes for about $6 wholesale.
Are you appalled? Disgusted? Confused as to how this could happen?
Well, lemme tell ya’, this is nothing new. It’s an old problem that just seems to be getting worse. Not only that, it’s getting closer to home as well and in all the wrong ways.
I recall first hearing about this issue back in the mid-1970s. If you’re as old as I am you may remember a little novel and a subsequent movie about a shark. The film didn’t include a subplot from the novel detailing a steamy affair between Richard Dreyfuss’ character of marine biologist Matt Hooper, and Ellen Brody, the Chief’s wife, played by Lorraine Gary. Within this subplot in the novel, the two characters are having dinner at a restaurant when Hooper mentions the scallops are actually cod cut with a cookie cutter.
Imitation crab is usually pollock that’s been made into a surimi prior to cooking. While these packages of imitation crab are labeled as such in grocery stores, there’s no such labeling when your kids eat it in that cheese-covered Seafood Delight at a Chinese buffet. Surimi can also be used to make imitation shrimp, along with salmon burgers containing no salmon whatsoever, and even imitation ham and lunchmeats.
City Chicken Legs is a forgivable sin, known to be chunks of pork arranged on a wooden skewer so they look like chicken legs. Mary grew up on the ones from Lee Williams’ House of Meats, which we still enjoy on occasion. Even Chicken-Fried Steak is alright in this area, not having any chicken in it whatsoever, known to be steak that’s fried like, and subsequently looks like, fried chicken.
In the video on this page about making Individual Beef Wellingtons, Chef Tad of the Frog Leg Inn in Erie, Michigan explained for my camera how Jaccards are illegal in France. Apparently other kinds of meat tenderizers may be illegal there as well. As Chef Tad explains in the video, this is because someone could use these items to pass one cut of meat off as a better cut. When he said that, it made me wonder how often that might be happening in kitchens across the country.
Unfortunately, this issue of making one food to look like another has taken a nasty turn. Two cookbooks are out now, Deceptively Delicious and The Sneaky Chef. Both of these books advocate making “kid-friendly” foods that hide nutritious ingredients so your kids will eat them. Slate.com’s Mimi Sheraton explored the wrong messages sent by these authors:
The twin major flaws in this faulty reasoning, are that, first, children get the wrong message that sweets and starches are good for them … ultimately, and more seriously perhaps, lying to children via trickery—even “for their own good”—can feed a lifetime of distrust, as it should. I wonder how these undercover mothers keep their secrets … A second problem raised by this hide-the-veggies duo is the invisibility of vegetables in their own recognizable forms. As a result, children are not afforded the opportunity to get used to the idea of trying and learning about them. Nor will they consider them necessary for good health.
Foods are best when they’re treated with respect, when they’re given the opportunity to really shine. This is part of why my Traditional Chicken Noodle Soup is so popular. (Mary just took the last of that batch to work for her lunch.) Made right, you can taste the individual ingredients in this soup, each one also showing its own texture. There are no secret ingredients … eating this soup, anyone could figure out how it was made.
Shortly after my moving to Luna Pier in 2004, Mary got me hooked on simple roasted potatoes. She would cube some potatoes, coat them in a bit of olive oil, add a few herbs and spices, and oven-roast them in single layers on baking sheets, turning them occasionally, until they were crispy and golden-brown. These roasted potato cubes became the basis for my German-Polish Oven-Roasted Potato Salad, which a certain local ABC reporter can eat by the pound. (I understand he used to take it to the studio in the morning and have it for breakfast!) I haven’t made this for him in a while … maybe it’s about time I did this again …
Last night at the Olive Garden at Monroe and Talmadge in Toledo I had their Steak Gorgonzola Alfredo. If I were to make this, the beef tenderloin would have been grilled medium-rare first, then sliced into the medallions to be placed on top of the pasta alfredo. That they’d sliced the tenderloin and then grilled it to medium-rare turned out to be alright. The beef was still moist and tender. This simple dish was incredibly good, especially for a chain restaurant.
I don’t talk much about my ex-wife’s cooking, but one dish she does extremely well is fried beef livers. She simply dredges the livers in flour and gently fries them in a shallow bit of melted shortening. Even the kids like this dish. It’s tender, moist and very flavorful, unlike beef livers they may have pushed aside somewhere else.
What’s my 10-year-old’s favorite vegetable? Raw broccoli. Do my kids like oysters? Absolutely … ice cold, on the half-shell. Do they know how to shell crab legs? Yup. What about rabbits? They help breed them and sometimes assist in the butchering. What do they like to ask for, for their birthday dinners? Grilled stuffed whole pork loin. Fresh steamed shrimp from The Fish Market? Deep-fried alligator from the Frog Leg Inn? They eat these things like candy. And they really like Bob’s handmade turtle soup from his Chateau Louise here in Luna Pier.
Please … don’t lie to your kids when you make them something. My rule is that they’re to try something once. If they’re iffy about it, maybe they should try it twice. But then they can make their own decision about whether or not they like something. If they don’t like it, that’s fine.
For example, Briahna doesn’t like corn bread. She loves corn otherwise, even pickled baby corn (which she used to eat like the larger cobs, one little row at a time). But she’ll even eat corn dogs with the coating removed.
Sure, that’s fine. Of course, that’s ammo for teasing her. She just glares when a box of Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix shows up in her stocking at Christmas …
Treat yourself and your friends and family to real food. Real crab meat. Real vanilla extract. Real beef with no soy fillers. Real ham in an omelet made with real eggs. Real sauerkraut with no vinegar to quicken fermentation, just cabbage and salt.
And real chocolate ice cream, made with real milk.
Your taste buds will thank you.
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4 January 2008 @ 11:07 am Posted by What is normal? » Blog Archive » Whatcha cooking for dinner?
[…] Luna Pier Cook AKA Dave is ALWAYS cookin up some good stuff! His post talks about “Fake food Vs. Real Food…I wonder what he say about this? It’s a special dish I’d like names “Knoah ALA Lobster” […]
4 January 2008 @ 11:17 am Posted by Tonya
Fake food? How about some….homegrown food? LOL
4 January 2008 @ 11:49 am Posted by Dave
Tonya, Tonya, Tonya … turkey’s such as that one need to be roasted!
5 January 2008 @ 6:17 pm Posted by Rebecca Regnier
Sorry I’m late on this one. I loved this entry of yours LPC! This was inspired. I just made Beer in the Rear chicken and I’m thinkin’ a little of Mary’s roasted potato might be just the ticket on the side.
RR
6 January 2008 @ 8:46 am Posted by Dave
For breakfasts we go with the Ore Ida frozen potato cubes and crisp them up on the stove over medium-high heat in a little olive oil. But her roasted potatoes are certainly like none other. Did you ever get to try my potato salad? Or did Zack keep it all for himself?