Save Your Fork… There’s Pie

A strange thing happened to me in 1991. All of a sudden my peanut butter cookies started coming out hard - like rocks.

I have no idea where the recipe came from. It was the one my Mom always used, so it likely came from my Grandmother, a cookbook, or perhaps a Home Ec course when she was a teenager. It is exactly like the majority of recipes for peanut butter cookies found on the internet today, where creators of “original” recipes try to differentiate themselves by an extra quarter cup of peanut butter or by sticking a chocolate kiss on top.

In all likelihood, however, every peanut butter recipe in use can be traced back to an original recipe, which first appeared some time in the 1930s, possibly 1936.

Which never really explained why my cookies had started turning out hard.

At first, I blamed myself. I must have screwed it up somehow. But subsequent batches were also hard. I adjusted quantities and techniques, even considered that the oven might be acting up. Then I thought to consider the peanut butter itself.

In the early ’90s, the western world was going through a bit of a phase of environmental activism, much as we are today. I took these concerns to heart and started to change my purchasing habits, switching to all-natural or organic ingredients where I could find them. I was also, at the time, dating a guy whose relatives lived next door to a peanut farm, so all-natural peanut butter because a fixture in our house.

It was then that I realized what had happened. In switching to a freshly-ground, all-natural peanut butter, I had drastically altered the recipe without even knowing. The all-natural brands tout the inclusion of nothing but peanuts, while the grocery store brands are loaded with fun stuff such as corn syrup, shortening and icing sugar to keep it from separating.

In 1922, peanut butter was commercially-born when J. L. Rosefield of Rosefield Packing Company of Alameda, California perfected a process to keep the oil from separating in the peanut butter along with spoilage prevention methods. He marketed this commercial peanut butter under the name Skippy® as “churned” peanut butter, which was a smoother, creamier version of the coarse-textured original.

So, since 1922, most peanut butter available commercially has been “processed” in this manner. Which means that the original peanut butter cookie recipe was undoubtedly made with processed peanut butter, not the happy, healthy natural stuff. And without the added corn syrup, shortening and icing sugar, no version of the recipe works!

Which is, by all means, a eureka moment to figure that out, but also a disappointing one, for anyone who wants to avoid the added crap, not to mention transfats (shortening is hydrogenated), regular peanut butter is off the list. And so are peanut butter cookies.

Given that peanut butter cookies are one of those comfort foods that bring back sweet childhood memories of working in the kitchen with my Mom, I get cravings for them now and then. I usually head to a store or bakery and buy a couple, and that seems to satisfy the need for the things. But for home cooks, part of the experience of comfort food is in the making, and just eating ones that someone else has made isn’t enough. I need to roll the dough in my hands and then oh so carefully press those distinctive marks on the top with a fork. This was my job in the process as a little girl, and it brings back definite feelings of happiness and delight.

After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, I started keeping a pantry stocked with canned goods. Just in case. Toronto had also experienced the Blackout of ‘03, so having some stuff on hand just in case couldn’t hurt. For some reason, while buying stuff to stock that pantry, I grabbed a jar of regular peanut butter. Not sure why. Maybe under the theory that it would keep longer than the natural stuff. But I came across it a week or so ago, and have had peanut butter cookies on the brain ever since. I finally caved and made a batch last night, for the first time in probably 15 years or more.

I know they’re full of corn syrup and transfatty shortening and extra sugar. I don’t care. They’re that perfect combination of sweet and salty, with a crunchy bite on the outside that gives away to a soft tender interior. I know I lose all of my organic-local-sustainable food cred, but it doesn’t matter. Sometimes food is emotional and emotions transcend nutrition.

There has never been any debate that yogurt is a healthy food. Yogurt adds calcium and protein to the diet; can positively affect other health issues such as cholesterol, immunity and colon health; and is easier to digest than milk. Plain yogurt contains live bacteria that can regulate digestive issues and restore balance to a system thrown off by things like yeast infections or anti-biotics.

These good bacteria are known as pro-biotics, and occur naturally in plain yogurt made with live bacteria. However, once you get into sweetened or flavoured yogurt of any kind, the sugars kill off the live bacteria and the nutritional benefit is thought to be negligible.

Because food companies are always working to keep and increase their market share, and because our society seems to work on the theory that if a little of something can be helpful then a lot of something must be really, really great, processed foods have been popping up on the shelves of the dairy case touting the inclusion of pro and pre biotic bacteria.

The problem is - no one seems to have any proof that the added pro-biotics are doing anything.  In California, a lawsuit has been launched against yogurt maker Dannon (Danone in Canada):

The lawsuit contends Dannon’s own studies failed to support its advertised claims that its Activia, Activia Lite and DanActive were “clinically” and “scientifically” “proven” to have health benefits that other yogurts did not.

Based on that lawsuit, Health Canada is now looking into the health claims as well. But the claims are worded so vaguely that it might be tough:

Danone claims its Activia yogurt with the bacteria B.L. regularis will “naturally regulate your slow intestinal transit,” while Kraft’s Liveactive brands are said to ”help you with your healthy lifestyle.”

Help you with your healthy lifestyle? If probiotics work as medicine to offset the effects of things like anti-biotics, then if you already have a healthy lifestyle, you likely don’t need added pro-biotics in your food. It’s never wise to take medicine to cure an illness you don’t have.

Not to mention the fact that most of these products are sweetened (likely destroying a lot of the probiotic cultures before the consumer can actually benefit from them), and processed beyond recognition to make them more palatable, because most people just don’t like plain, unflavoured yogurt.

If your yogurt is more like pudding or mousse, comes with sprinkles or candy, or in flavours more typical of cake or pie, or worse, in a tube, then all the pre and pro biotic claims are nothing more than a marketing ploy. Notice that all the ads seem to focus on women, with pretty swirly graphics overtop a buff and toned abdomen? Or how everyone is lively and dancing and happy? That’s not just coincidence. That’s Madison Avenue and Bay Street selling a dream. “If I eat this pro-biotic yogurt, I’ll be slim and pretty, I’ll never fart again, and my co-workers and I will wear colour-co-ordinated outfits and will spontaneously break into dance!”

By all means, eat plain yogurt if you like it. Add some fresh fruit or granola, use it in place of mayonnaise or sour cream. But don’t get suckered into the unsubstantiated claims that these pro-biotic products will cure what ails you. More importantly, don’t spend the extra cash for these products when the plain basic stuff is likely to do a better job.

Remember the 80s and oat bran - there is no magic food bullet. Good health (and spontaneous dancing) will not be achieved from a tub of over-priced, over-marketed yogurt.

I was ready to dislike Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food before I even picked it up.

While I mostly enjoyed his previous book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, I felt that he did an awfully complicated song and dance in the steakhouse chapter to try and justify eating meat. Then I read a quote from In Defense of Food by another blogger which said “Don’t eat anything your grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food”, which riled me up excessively.

My own grandmother was all about baking fresh bread, canning tomatoes and picking blueberries, but she was also of a generation that fully embraced the new convenience foods. Not to mention that until 1973, she had never lived in a house with indoor plumbing - with four sons to feed, and then a handful of grandkids, can you blame her for throwing store-bought cupcakes and frozen pizza at us? The woman had to boil her dishwater on a kerosene stove!

Turns out Pollan’s quote is actually about GREAT-Grandmothers, which makes a heck of a lot more sense. Well, unless you factor in the lack of indoor plumbing (those great grannies would likely have been all over the Twinkies too!).

All of this is my round-about way of saying that the man makes truckloads of sense. If we set everything else aside, all the fad diets, politics, marketing pressures and health claims, and just ate real food similar to what previous generations consumed, we’d all be a lot healthier and happier.

Pollan seems to have a real bone to pick with nutritionists, dieticians and the like, pointing out that the ideology of nutritionism, that is, in choosing foods based on their presumed nutritional value and the theory that we eat only to maintain health, we are missing out on the many other aspects of food in our culture, and that our obsession with health and nutrition might actually be making us less healthy.

Pollan spends some time examining the industrial food complex including the bad science that causes us to jump on the “superfood” bandwagon. As a sufferer of Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, this section really hit home. One of the concerns of MCS is that the various chemicals in the everyday products we use have only been tested individually, not synergistically. That is, we know what effect sodium laurel sulphate will have on human skin by itself, but not what will happen when it is mixed into a product with, say, triclosan. And products have never been tested against other products to see if they might create either an adverse reaction or some new and improved, better product.

The same goes for the nutrients in food. Scientists study individual nutrients and the potential harm or benefits they might offer, but foods, like cosmetics, have so very many components that science just isn’t advanced enough to know exactly what components work together and which against each other. So while we know that the beta carotene from carrots is beneficial for human health, beta carotene from other sources doesn’t do as great. Which means there’s something else in carrots that helps us to better absorb and use that beta carotene present.

All of which, ultimately, boils down to the logical theory of eating a variety of foods in order to get the largest range of benefits, and taking the time to enjoy small quantities of all the foods we’re constantly being told are bad for us, but which we enjoy so much. Which makes a heck of a lot more sense than the common Western trend to treat food as medicine, eating pre-biotics and pro-biotics and fortified this and that, when everything we need is available in a varied diet of simple basic foodstuffs.

With chapters divided into sections such as “avoid foods that make health claims”, “regard non-traditional foods with scepticism” and advice to eat meals, cook, garden, and get a freezer, Pollan is encouraging his readers to not only rethink current food systems, but to take some small steps toward doing something about it.

Working on the theory that even scientists don’t have true concrete answers to our food issues, Pollan suggests that readers, and eaters, get back to basics. It’s good simple advice that is easy to follow. And it’s certainly got to be more enjoyable than eating all that low-fat, no-fat, sugar-free crap the supermarkets are filled with.