Schadenfood

Ingredients Yield: One 9-inch loaf ½ cup/115 grams unsalted butter 2 tablespoons/6 grams chamomile tea (from 4 to 6 tea bags), crushed fine if coarse 1 cup/240 milliliters whole milk Nonstick cooking spray 1 cup/200 grams granulated sugar ½ teaspoon coarse kosher salt 2 large eggs 1 large lemon 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract 1½ cups/192 grams all-purpose flour 1 cup/124 grams confectioners’ sugar ½ cup/8 grams freeze-dried strawberries

I may not work at Starbucks anymore but that doesn't mean I'm gonna stop bitching about secret menus.

(and before someone asks, the TERFs threatening me over the TERF dog whistle post didn't get me fired, I quit during the union busting and when they cancelled my insurance long before that)

Anyways, Secret Menus.

They're dogshit.

rhys assured him it wasn't a mistake, i just REALLY like mushroom, so he put the extra on and finished it up

this week i ordered it again, rhys went to pick it up and pizza guy is like "i assumed since she ordered it again it wasn't too much mushroom so i actually put a little EXTRA on this time"

i can still see bits of the base, good sir, but a valiant effort

The lawsuit also alleges that the chemicals in LaCroix "include limonene, which can cause kidney toxicity and tumors; linalool propionate, which is used to treat cancer; and linalool, which is used in cockroach insecticide.”

Okay so let's get more information about these "scary" chemicals:

Limonene: it comes from citrus peels

Linalool: it comes from a lot of chemicals, including citrus peels, lavender, and cinnamon

Propionate: it comes from literally every organic process

this shit is so tiring, y'all.

EVERYTHING IS MADE OF CHEMICALS

CHEMICALS ARE NATURALLY OCCURING IN NATURE

IF YOU SAW THE CHEMICAL BREAKDOWN OF A COMPLETELY NATURALLY OCCURRING FRUIT YOU WOULD SEE A LOT OF SCARY SOUNDING WORDS AND SOME CHEMICALS WHICH ARE INDEED TOXIC FOR CERTAIN THINGS ESPECIALLY IN HIGH CONCENTRATIONS AND QUANTITIES

Do I think food safety is important? Yeah. Do I think it's good that beverage manufacturers are being held to a high standard? yeah.

Do I think La Croix should be put out of business for using naturally-occurring chemicals that come from fruit? fuck no

I just saw yet another debate over MSG sensitivity online.

The way I see it, the problem with MSG usage in processed food isn’t that it has MSG, just that it has a metric shit-ton of it.

I’m sensitive to MSG but I’m fine with it in the lower quantities that it occurs naturally in many foods - it’s just that the amount in, say, a bag of Doritos, or in the flavor packet in instant ramen, is enough to give me a very bad time. (And I was experiencing these bad times long before I ever heard of MSG sensitivity or knew that MSG was a thing, so I don’t think it’s a placebo effect.)

I have done some experiments to find where my threshold is and it’s kind of annoying to do; all I know is that it’s higher than nothing and lower than the amount used in a single-serving bag of Chili Cheese Fritos. (Plain Fritos don’t cause me a problem.)

[ID: Tumblr reply from qwertystop asking, "found this and showed an acquaintance when MSG sensitivities came up in conversatoin - do you get problems from soy sauce, parmigiano-reggiano cheese, vegemite, boullion cubes, meat stocks, etc? Things which contain similarly extremely high levels of glutamic acid, but not as something isolated and added back in?]

Soy sauce, Parmesan cheese, no. Boullion cubes and meat stocks, it depends on whether they've had MSG added in or if they're just full of the natural glutamates. Vegemite, I have no idea, I can't stand the flavor of it.

I had an interesting conversation with someone about this where it seems plausible that the problem isn't with the MSG itself but with the brain's response to being overwhelmed by the concentrated flavor. Like, apparently MSG kept in gelatin capsules and swallowed doesn't cause a problem, when the same amount tasted and spat out can.

Leather is good actually. Veganism isn’t the end all be all to morality and consumption. The issue isn’t that a chicken died for those nuggets, but that while the chicken was alive, it’s life fucking sucked. Vegan chocolate means little if the cocoa that made it was gathered by child slave labor.

Recipes from the 1910s and the Great Depression are great, and I suspect it’s because they were made by someone with limited resources. But they found a way to make something good, maybe even something fantastic with those limited resources, and they wanted to write it down and share with their friends so that they could also make something out of saltines and potatoes. Recipes from the 1910s and the Great Depression are written down and shared in love.

Slavery and War are the reasons.

Okay. Maybe that’s a little too harsh to not explain… Let’s start with Slavery.

Back in the first 400 years of America being populated by white colonizers and  enslaved black folks it was mostly black people doing the cooking. Particularly in the South. Oh, for sure you’d have poor white folks cooking for themselves and their families, using traditional recipes handed down. Or making things with New World foods like Potatoes and that newfangled Corn stuff.

But particularly in the South, Slaves did the majority of cooking. And when they were freed in the 1860s and 70s, you suddenly had a mess of wealthy white folks who didn’t have a -damn- clue how to cook. You know how Tiana’s Dad started up a restaurant in The Princess and the Frog? Yeah. LOTS of former slaves did that. Used the skills they learned working for white slavers to cook banging meals they knew the white folks couldn’t cook for themselves.

It took -decades- for white folks to start getting their culinary feet back. To really understand how to cook and make recipes work.

And then you know what happened? WW1. Food shortages before the Dust Bowl happened caused people to tighten their belts and try and figure stuff out. Know what the most popular meat was on the dinner table? MUTTON. Sheep. Lamb. Delicious and flavorful and just -so- good for you with it’s healthy amounts of fats and all the luscious goodness in that nummy snackiness.

Recipes expanded. Exploded. Got shared.

Then WW2 hit. And this is where shit went sideways again… but this time? Not because of Shortages. See, Mutton was cheap. Cheap for the people, Cheap for the Government. And that made it the premier Ration for American GIs… but.

Tinned mutton is a slimy gross paste. 

And soldiers were eating it two to three times a day. No MRE packs with variety menus. Just straight up canned mutton over and over and over and over. And when they got home? They BANNED it from the dinner table. The sheep industry in the US went from top dog to bottom of the barrel. 

So once again you’ve got American Culinary Understanding flailing and reaching out for anything it can to replace a -staple- of the American Diet.

“Beef, it’s What’s for Dinner”. “Pork, the Other White Meat” “Chicken of the Sea”

Folks knew how to prepare -Mutton- and -Lamb- and maybe Chicken. And now they’re slapped with these other foods? Add in the massive changes in availability of new products (Again that are largely untested) and marketing pushes for things like Crisco or Gelatin…

See, Jell-O between WWI and the late 40s was largely used by women who had tea in the afternoons. Gelatin already featured heavily in cookbooks intended for Ladies Who Lunch.

But then you hit the late 40s and you have these harried women who were trying to put A Nice Dinner on the table for their husbands, and their husbands remember dinners where their mom had like 6 or 7 daughters to help her while the men were out in the fields, and aunties and grandmothers to hand to take the baby for a minute but their mother made two pies for supper and two for dinner, every day!*

And so these women, who now have refrigerators instead of iceboxes and have far less support in caring for their children than previous generations, are trying to put together a Nice Dinner 7 days a week. And here’s this miracle substance that can turn out these jewel-tone dinners and desserts, and they make it in savory flavors now, and it’s very modern and there are lots of recipes!

Basically, Jell-O was the Instant Pot of the post-war period. 🤷🏻‍♂️ Yeah, people didn’t know what they were doing to some extent, but a lot of people who did really needed a quick way to do things alone for which they’d had community support before.

In beef, what you worry about is e. coli.  In healthy live cattle (and they must be healthy to be butchered for consumption) e. coli is only in the digestive tract but it can escape and contaminate the outside of the beef during slaughter and butchering.  The bacteria does not migrate to the interior of the meat as there is no circulation to take it there.  So you can eat beef where the inside is less cooked as long as the outside is well seared to kill any bacteria that may be on it.  Hamburger should always be thoroughly cooked because it is all “outside”.

With chicken, the concern is salmonella, which is found through out the body of the chicken.  Chickens can tolerate it, it doesn’t make them noticeably sick, but humans can not, so the entire meat must be cooked enough to kill any bacteria present in the meat.  As a note, it used to be believed that salmonella was not passed on to the eggs and in fact in the 1950′s, when my dad was in Vet school, studies showed it was not present in the eggs even if it was present in the hen.  That’s why there used to be a lot of recipes that used raw eggs, it was safe then.  However due to some change in the bacteria, or changes in egg-farming practices, it is now found in eggs as well.  The amounts are small, and if you are eating eggs within a couple days of being laid it’s probably not a problem, but store eggs are old enough for bacteria to have reproduced to dangerous levels and the liquid interior allows it to spread all through the egg.

I also wanted to mention that apart from the salmonella risk (which is a freakin’ big “apart from”), you also have the risk of Campylobacter infections. Not only can these lead to really really horrible gastro-intestinal problems, a small number of infections also cause an auto-immune response that leads to the body destroying its own myelin (the stuff around your nerves that makes them good at carrying electrical signals). Basically, your nerves stop working and even if you survive, you’ll be hooked up to an iron lung for… a long time. I don’t know how long it takes to regrow myelin, I’m not a neurologist. 

I'm aware of that, and in fact said so just after the first picture. In that same paragraph you'll see something which had nothing to do with US vs UK power.

According to the American review of American kettles running on American voltage, one kettle (OXO Brew Adjustable Temperature Electric Pour-Over Kettle, $105-135) boiled water much faster than another (Fellow Corvo EKG Electric Kettle, $150-200).

How much faster? A few seconds? Nope, a full three-and-a-half minutes: 4 min 12 sec compared to 7 min 42 sec. Come on!

Waiting for nearly eight minutes - though the review states that this is "still faster than most stovetops", that's no compliment - defeats the reason for buying an electric kettle in the first place, and that electric kettle in particular.

and then one of a 120V induction cooktop vs. the same electric kettle:

Basically, if you want fast tea, and can afford/have the ability to do it, get an induction stove; otherwise, get an induction hotplate. Either of those will work with a traditional stovetop kettle and be significantly faster than a dedicated electric kettle. Induction cooktops also have a lot to offer in other respects, like fast, even heating, way better temperature control than gas or traditional electric, being a lot safer (especially in homes with curious hands and paws), and just plain being cool. Although there’s downsides as well (some folks can’t stand the vibration noise, you have to get ferromagnetic cookware, etc.) so the choice isn’t necessarily right for everyone.

INGREDIENTS:

4 hamburger buns, split

1 head green leaf lettuce, leaves separated

1 beefsteak tomato, sliced

20 dill pickle slices

FOR THE CHICKEN

2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts

1 cup dill pickle juice

1 ½ cups milk, divided

1 cup peanut oil

1 large egg

½ cup all-purpose flour

1 tablespoon confectioners’ sugar

Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

DIRECTIONS:

Place a chicken breast on a cutting board. With your hand flat on top of it, carefully slice the chicken in half horizontally. Trim excess fat as needed.

In a large shallow baking dish, combine chicken, pickle juice and ½ cup milk; marinate for at least 30 minutes. Drain well.

Heat peanut oil in a large skillet over medium high heat.

In another large shallow baking dish, whisk together remaining 1 cup milk and egg. Stir in chicken to coat and drain excess milk mixture.

In a gallon size Ziploc bag or large bowl, combine chicken, flour and confectioners’ sugar; season with salt and pepper, to taste.

Working in batches, add chicken to the skillet and cook until evenly golden and crispy, about 4-5 minutes. Transfer to a paper towel-lined plate.

https://www.tablespoon.com/recipes/copycat-chick-fil-a-nuggets/2b483ee0-a13e-4a3f-bf0b-9b26099c6e24

Here also is a link for their famed sauce. Gonna start making it myself.

“And this is really how capitalism usually works. It creates a problem, and rather than fix the problem, it creates a new business to solve the problem.”

For about ~10,000 years bread was a fucking staple of the human diet. we evolved to eat this food, our bodies, our societies were built on this food, but all of a sudden we’re seeing a rise in gluten sensitivity* (distinct from celiac disease). Aka our bodies are rejecting this food we’ve spent 100 centuries eating. Where is this coming from?

Well, a big part of it is probably that less than 100 years ago corporations changed the definition of bread. (Like, figuratively and literally, they petitioned the FDA to change the legal definition of bread so they could put in additives.) In fact, industrialization has changed the process and the ingredients used to make bread, to the point manufactured bread is a profoundly different product from what our ancestors knew as bread. Let’s start with:

1) The Process: For thousands of years, humans relied on naturally occurring wild yeast and bacteria found in the air to make (leavened) bread and bread starters (fermented dough used to “start” new loaves. hence the term “sourdough”). you can still do this at home–all it involves is leaving a mixture of water and flour lying around for a few days. notice something missing? that’s right, YEAST. this process of making bread involves yeast–yeast from the air around you–but it doesn’t involve concentrated baker’s yeast. Baker’s yeast refers to various strains of yeast that are added directly to flour & water mixtures as a leavening agent. This allows the bread to rise more quickly and cuts down on the overall production time. Convenient, right?

Now, adding yeast is not automatically a bad thing, and bakers have been doing it for a damn long time in interesting ways (such as using yeast from beer brewing). But lately we’ve taken it to extremes–we’ve gotten too good at creating more and more efficient forms of commercial Baker’s yeast, specifically for industrial use on a mass scale. Manufacturers want bread to rise as fast as possible, because that is how you get more product on the shelves. Making bread in factories now takes a small fraction of the time it used to.

And why is this a problem? Because it turns out a more traditional “long fermentation process allows bacteria to fully break down the carbohydrates and gluten in bread, making it easier to digest and releasing the nutrients within it, allowing our bodies to more easily absorb them.” [1] This (added to the fact that some commercial breads contain extra added gluten) has the unfortunate result that the product you buy from the grocery store is less digestible and nutritious than the bread human societies traditionally relied upon. Hence the rise of gluten intolerance–the gluten we are eating is simply more difficult to tolerate than gluten in properly fermented bread. (This is the reason many people with gluten sensitivity don’t experience symptoms when eating more traditionally made, longer-fermented sourdough.)

That’s not the only issue though. There’s also:

2) The Ingredients. not just the countless additives, but specifically: the flour. See, a grain of wheat is…incredibly nutritious, honestly. It has almost everything we need to sustain life and health. Civilizations did–and do–rely on bread as a fundamental dietary staple, to the point that you can track political instability with rising wheat prices. It’s essential. Look at this:

In a single grain, the essence of life.

So yeah, wheat is nutritional. We can build bodies and civilizations out of wheat. But it’s also, like…super difficult to access that nutrition. Well, more so than with most foods. If you eat a handful of wheat grains, a spoonful of flour–your body can’t digest that, you get basically nothing out of that (also raw flour isn’t safe to consume, don’t do that). Unlike many crops, wheat relies on being carefully and correctly processed in order for the final product to be as nutritional as possible. As stated above, part of that process is about fermentation. Another part is the quality of the flour, what it contains and how it has been milled and treated.

And that quality has changed a lot in just a century or two. Take white flour, for instance. White flour has been around for a long fucking time actually, but until the late 19th century it was considered a luxury item, a treat for the very wealthy. White flour was never considered a staple food–until industrialists learned how to manufacture it cheaply. [2] And then it was everywhere. And suddenly, surprise surprise, we started to see a rise in nutrition related illnesses. Because the bran and germ have been stripped away, white flour has only a fraction of the nutritional value of whole grain. But because this gives it a higher shelf life, it was more convenient (and profitable) for manufacturers. So when they learned about the health issues, what did they do? Go back to making healthier flour?

Pshaw. Of course not. No, instead they kept removing nutrients, then artificially adding them back in. And that is how we got enriched flour–flour which is still significantly less nutritious than whole wheat flour. [3] And this is what the previous quote about capitalism was referencing. The food industry created a problem, and rather than undoing the problem, they created a whole new business to “fix” it:

And thus came the mass rise of “enriched” foods.

Eat Wonder Bread! It has as much protein as roast beef! As much calcium as cottage cheese! As much iron as lamb chops! No need to eat real foods, when you can eat highly processed foods instead! Don’t cook your own meals, let trustworthy corporations feed you! Mass-produced factory foods are easy, are healthy! There will be literally no downsides or long-term repercussions to public health & wellness!

So yeah. Much of what we think of as “bread” is chemically and molecularly distinct from traditional bread, and is very different (and less nutritional) than what our ancestors were eating even just a century ago. (On an individual level, I’m not sure how to mitigate this, other than by purchasing the healthiest options available (e.g. whole wheat, sourdough), buying from small bakeries/farmer’s markets, or baking bread at home. Lately there has been a rise of small health-concious brands focusing on traditional fermentation and whole ingredients; some may be available in your area. But ultimately, it’s the entire wider system that needs to change.)

And there you have it! I have never been so incandescently furious about wonder bread. This documentary will do that to you–and will change your whole understanding of modern food. It’s a 4-part netflix series called Cooked (2016), based on Michael Pollan’s book of the same name. Most of the info above comes from the third episode, and is accurate to the best of my knowledge (but let me know if I got anything wrong).

*I want to be perfectly clear though, gluten itself is not inherently bad. It’s being demonized in the press on no scientific basis, just to push yet another diet fad. Unless your body has actual issues with gluten (e.g. celiac disease, gluten sensitivity) there are no proven benefits to eating gluten-free. There are, however, benefits to eating less processed, more nutritional (delicious delicious) bread.