Food

What Is It Like to Fast for One Week?

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Writing for Aeon Magazine, S Abbas Raza and his wife decided to fast for one week. What ensued was a rollercoaster of boredom, increased energy, and diminished mental ability.

First of all, every single one of the seven days felt exactly the same: mornings were completely fine and I felt pretty much as I normally do until about lunchtime. I tried to pack in any work, especially work that required mental concentration, into this period of each day. After midday, I became a little fidgety and found it hard to concentrate on anything. I had much more than usual amounts of physical energy and did all kinds of household chores happily, such as defrosting and cleaning the refrigerator one afternoon (anyone who knows me will testify that this is highly unusual behaviour). But my mind flitted from one thing to the next, and my reactions were slowed down very noticeably by evening. If my wife asked me a question, it took about five seconds for it to register and another five before I could formulate and deliver a reply. In fact, I became decidedly cognitively impaired: one day after taking a shower and shaving, I applied aftershave lotion to my face and noticed that it didn’t have the mild sting it usually does. That is when I realised I had not actually shaved. I just thought I had.

A thoughtful conclusion: meals provide the much-needed punctuation throughout the day:

In fact, the biggest surprise was just how much more time we had on our hands. I was struck by how much of the day I normally spend attending to my digestive needs: thinking about what I would have for lunch or dinner; shopping for groceries (which we do almost daily); cooking — in my case, elaborate Pakistani meals most evenings; then actually eating, washing dishes, cleaning up, even moving one’s bowels. Eliminating the simple act of eating frees up much more time than you’d think. In addition to the couple of hours of daily exercise we kept up throughout, we took long walks in the mountains (we live in the Alps), did crosswords (rather slowly), surfed the net and fooled around on Facebook, and we still always had more time to fill. I realised that meals provide needed punctuation to the day, and without them our days seemed strangely lacking in structure.

It was an interesting experiment, but a fair warning: don’t try this at home.

I’ve done intermittent fasting before (for one day at a time), and I agree that one’s energy can (surprisingly) spike; however, I also became more mentally sluggish.

Mark Bittman’s New Column: The Flexitarian

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In this column, Mark Bittman introduces The Flexitarian. I look forward to reading it. As he puts it:

The moderate, conscious eater — the flexitarian — knows where the goal lies: a diet that’s higher in plants and lower in both animal products and hyperprocessed foods, the stuff that makes up something like three-quarters of what’s sold in supermarkets. That’s the kind of cooking and eating I’ll be exploring in this monthly column.

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I hope these recipes demonstrate the general goal of The Flexitarian, which will be to marry the burning question “What should I be eating?” with another: “How do I cook it?” And just as it will describe the latter with the most flexibility and the greatest possible sense of ease and relaxation, it will recommend the former with as little dogma as an advice-giver can muster.

It’ll also be about personal experience: I’m just another guy trying to figure out what to eat. (Everyone is. And I’ve no intention of abandoning the occasional rib-eye, nor of seeing that as a betrayal of anything.) I might be able to cook nearly anything decently, but I can be slow to figure things out (it took me a long time to realize that popcorn with a little oil and salt was the closest you could get to healthy junk food), and I certainly struggle with cravings.

That makes the primary challenge to discover how to satisfy those cravings while staying as best as I can within the boundaries of what we know to be sane, or conscious, or well-informed — call it what you will — eating.

Is the Gourmet Cupcake Business in Decline?

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The Wall Street Journal, using Crumbs as an example, explains the decline in the gourmet cupcake business:

As a business, making cupcakes has a relatively low barrier to entry and the field has become saturated with competitors, including individual bakeries, chains and grocery stores. Gigi’s Cupcakes USA, based in Nashville, Tenn., has opened 85 stores in 23 states since 2008 through its franchising system.

Crumbs rivals include people like Cynthia Hankerson, owner of the three-year-old Cupcake Salon in Jersey City, N.J. Sales at her bakery cafe are slipping and she said she suspects the cupcake fad may be waning. Last year, a typical Saturday brought in an average of $600 to $700 in sales for her signature cupcakes, which come in flavors like pistachio, amaretto vanilla and strawberry banana. But now “we’re lucky if we get $300,” she says. “People get tired of things,” the 42-year-old adds.

When I lived in Pasadena, my favorite cupcake place was Sprinkles. My friend Fiona introduced me to the chain. She says Sprinkles is still thriving: they even have special cupcake ATM in Beverly Hills!

Mark Bittman on a Healthy Fast Food Joint

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From a good Mark Bittman piece in The New York Times, who shares his vision for an all-healthy fast-food joint:

I’m not talking about token gestures, like McDonald’s fruit-and-yogurt parfait, whose calories are more than 50 percent sugar. And I don’t expect the prices to match those of Taco Bell or McDonald’s, where economies of scale and inexpensive ingredients make meals dirt cheap. What I’d like is a place that serves only good options, where you don’t have to resist the junk food to order well, and where the food is real — by which I mean dishes that generally contain few ingredients and are recognizable to everyone, not just food technologists. It’s a place where something like a black-bean burger piled with vegetables and baked sweet potato fries — and, hell, maybe even a vegan shake — is less than 10 bucks and 800 calories (and way fewer without the shake). If I could order and eat that in 15 minutes, I’d be happy, and I think a lot of others would be, too.

Some statistics:

In recent years, the fast-food industry has started to heed these new demands. Billions of dollars have been invested in more healthful fast-food options, and the financial incentives justify these expenditures. About half of all the money spent on food in the United States is for meals eaten outside the home. And last year McDonald’s earned $5.5 billion in profits on $88 billion in sales. If a competitor offered a more healthful option that was able to capture just a single percent of that market share, it would make $55 million. Chipotle, the best newcomer of the last generation, has beaten that 1 percent handily. Last year, sales approached $3 billion. In the fourth quarter, they grew by 17 percent over the same period in the previous year.

Close to where I live I have discovered one food joint that has tasty food that’s inexpensive: Zoe’s Kitchen. Here’s their menu of entries under 500 calories, for example.

Your Chewing Pattern: The Fingerprint of the Mouth

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From the department of “did you know?” comes this interesting piece from Mary Roach in The New York Times:

The way you chew, for example, is as unique and consistent as the way you walk or fold your shirts. There are fast chewers and slow chewers, long chewers and short chewers, right-chewing people and left-chewing people. Some of us chew straight up and down, and others chew side-to-side, like cows. Your oral processing habits are a physiological fingerprint.

This was interesting too:

Round foods are particularly treacherous because they match the shape of the trachea. If a grape goes down the wrong way, it blocks the tube so completely that no breath can be drawn around it. Hot dogs, grapes and round candies take the top three slots in a list of killer foods published in the July 2008 issue of The International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology (itself a calamitous mouthful). A candy called Lychee Mini Fruity Gels has killed enough times for the Food and Drug Administration to have banned its import.

If you’re a foodie, you’ll like the article. Mary Roach’s upcoming book, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal looks enticing.

Michael Wolff on New York City Dining

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Michael Wolff opines on the dining scene in New York City for the British GQ. As the commenters note, it’s not clear whether this is meant as parody:

Of course the ultimate status is not to know someone, but to be known, for the restaurant to want you. This is naturally true for all celebrities, but this is also often true for people merely associated with celebrities. I once had a breakfast meeting at one of the new breakfast places in my neighbourhood with someone of reasonable renown, and now can no longer return because of the unctuousness and obsequiousness and close-in touching with which I am greeted.

It must be said, finally, that there is little pleasure in restaurants of the new restaurant culture. The experience may seem precious, because it might so easily be lost, or necessary, because there is no other alternative, and beyond questioning, because the world is as it is, but on any purely empirical basis it is gruelling time served.

Only in the most expensive, ritualised and ceremonial establishments (we’re talking thousands per table) is there any attention to physical comfort and the basic science of acoustics. This is not only because the people in these restaurants are very rich, but also because they are very old. One of the points about restaurants is to feel young, or to be among the young, or, that is, the right young – the young who can afford expensive restaurants, albeit not as expensive as the restaurants for the very old and rich. (Almost everybody on the Upper East Side, where, in New York, the expensive and quiet restaurants are located, now travels great distances to eat among the young and loud.)

Entertaining, to say the least.

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(via Tyler Cowen)

Practical Tips for Traveling the World

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Jodi Ettenberg, author of the Legal Nomads travel blog, offers some excellent travel tips in this blog post. She’s been traveling for more than four years, so she’s got some excellent tips/advice:

4. Everything else you can buy.

I didn’t believe it at first – “what if I forget to pack something!” But I’ve learned that most things can be bought abroad, from t-shirts to bras to new flip flops when a monkey throws yours over a cliff.

I like this tip about knowledgeable taxi drivers (my taxi story from my travels wasn’t nearly as pleasant):

6. Your taxi driver knows where to eat breakfast more than you do.

Swap this out for tuk-tuk driver, songthaew driver or rickshaw driver, where appropriate. When I go to a new place, I find the eldest cab driver possible and ask him where he ate breakfast.

And perhaps the best tip of all:

8. Oranges are the perfect public transportation snack.

I started bringing a bag of oranges with me for long bus rides, primarily because they quench thirst and smell delicious. I quickly learned that many Thai and Burmese busgoers sniff the peels to stave off nausea, and that kids love oranges. Really: kids LOVE oranges. So for those who want to bring something for the bus ride but rightfully worry about giving sweets to kids, oranges are your friend.

Read the rest of the tips here.

On another note: Jodi recently published The Food Traveler’s Handbook*, a guide on how to eat well (and safely) around the world (there is a strong emphasis on discovering great street food). I am about one third of the way through the book, and it is excellent so far.

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*Full disclosure: I helped Jodi with a few minor grammar edits of the book prior to publication.

On Buffalo Mozzarella

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I had no idea buffalo mozzarella existed, much less that it was virtually impossible to obtain in the United States. So I read this New York Times Magazine piece with interest:

Why, then, is it so impossible to get truly fresh buffalo mozzarella in the United States? Well, there are all kinds of reasons.

Consider, first off, the conditions in Italy, which are basically perfect. Water buffalo have lived in the hills around Naples for around 1,000 years. (To be clear: these are not the big, brown, wild, hairy bison of the American prairies; they’re the smooth, dark, curly-horned beasts you might expect to see in a documentary about rice farming in China.) One Italian cheesemaker told me that the animals first came to Italy when Hannibal used them to carry his war treasure back from Asia — a story that is historically dubious but does manage to capture the cheese’s almost mythic exoticism. After so many centuries of practice, modern Italians have buffalo dairying down to a science: animal genetics, human expertise, farming infrastructure — it’s all in place and perfectly integrated. If you walk into a shop in Naples and ask for mozzarella, you will get a ball of buffalo milk that probably congealed only hours before. (For the vastly inferior cow’s-milk version — the default in American stores — you have to ask by a whole different name: fior di latte.)

Italy is a quintessentially Old World country — a quilt of microregions, each fiercely loyal to its own traditions and cuisines — which means that it’s perfectly natural to expect your cheese to have been made locally that day. This expectation has been woven so deeply into the fabric of daily life, by so many generations of cheese eaters, that the market for it is guaranteed. And Italy is small enough that, if you do move a fresh product from one major city to the next, it takes only a couple of hours.

The conditions in the United States are the opposite of that. Our water-buffalo herds are sparse and, for the purposes of dairying, practically feral. They’re difficult to acquire and expensive to raise. They produce only a fraction of the milk you get from a typical dairy cow, and they are so psychologically fragile that it’s hard to even get that much out of them.

Read the rest of the piece to learn about Craig Ramini, “.the latest American adventurer hellbent on making fresh buffalo mozzarella.”

The Atlanta Food Truck Scene

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As part of their 2012 Fall Dining Guide, the Atlanta-Journal Constitution rounds up the dozen best food trucks in and around Atlanta. A lot of these names were new to me:

Grilldabeast

The owners of this relative newcomer to the truck scene got their start catering on movie sets, and then decided to bring their food to the rest of us with their truck, Grilldabeast. Dishes like the smoked-then-fried wings with mango Thai chili glaze or the panko-fried avocado with eel sauce are not to be missed. Regularly seen for dinner Thursdays and lunch Saturdays at the Atlanta Food Truck Park. 404-719-6563

Happy Belly Curbside Kitchen

With a strong focus on local ingredients, this “farm-to-street” truck is a great spot for distinctive sandwiches, salads, and pasta. Powering the kitchen is an on-board Big Green Egg, giving each of their dishes that fresh-from-the-backyard smokiness you can only get on a charcoal grill. Regularly seen at dinner Tuesdays at the Taylor Brawner Park in Smyrna (3180 Atlanta Road, 6-9 p.m.), lunch Thursdays at 12th and Peachtree streets in Midtown (11 a.m.-2 p.m.) and lunch Sundays at the Atlanta Food Truck Park. 404-719-3257

Honeysuckle Gelato

Combining his Southern roots with his training at the hands of legendary gelato maker Jon Snyder, Jackson Smith has crafted a dessert truck definitely worth checking out. With more than 100 flavors to date, like ginger molasses or mint julep, the prolific team at Honeysuckle constantly changes up the menu, but many of its staple flavors can also be found at restaurants like La Tavola, Atlanta Fish Market and STG Trattoria. Regularly seen for dinner Thursdays and Fridays at the Atlanta Food Truck Park. 404-228-7825

Ibiza Bites

This truck serves “SoLa” cuisine, a blend of Latin American and Southern food that shines through best with dishes like Lola’s coconut fried chicken, served with a mango chili glaze atop a bed of fresh jicama, pineapple, mango and basil slaw. Regularly seen for dinner Tuesdays at Taylor Brawner Park in Smyrna and Fridays for lunch at Atlantic Station in Midtown (17 1/2 St., 11 a.m.-2 p.m.). 404-857-9308

Mix’D UP

The mobile truck of the Cuzine Chef catering company, Mix’D UP is a rock-‘n’-roll inspired truck that serves up some pretty serious burgers. Go for the Rockin’ Hero, a lamb burger topped with tzatziki sauce, spinach, tomatoes and feta served on a ciabatta bun, or the super-sloppy open-faced Texan, an Angus patty topped with bacon, cheddar, pulled pork and slaw. Regularly seen for dinner on Tuesdays at Taylor Brawner Park in Smyrna, dinner on Wednesdays in Virginia Highlands in Atlanta (841 N. Highland Ave., 6-9 p.m.) and lunch on Thursdays at 12th and Peachtree streets in Midtown. 404-822-6758

I wish more of these trucks stationed near Buckhead rather than Midtown/Downtown.

Tastes Like Chicken

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Jackson Landers ponders why so many people claim something “tastes like chicken” when they try an exotic food. He goes into the evolutionary aspect of it, but first:

In order to answer this question, we need to start with chickens and work our way back through the evolutionary family tree.

Does chicken taste like chicken? Don’t laugh—this is an important question. Even lifelong chicken eaters usually have a very narrow experience because the birds sold in grocery stores are usually one of a very few breeds that have been designed to grow a lot of breast meat very quickly in factory-farm settings. A Plymouth roasting hen slaughtered for market at 7 weeks does not make for the same eating experience as a 2-year-old Rhode Island Red. I once ate a bantam rooster that tasted more like iguana than a grocery store chicken.

The most interesting paragraph was the explanation of why fish do not taste like chicken:

Several barriers prevent fish from tasting like chicken. A chemical called trimethylamine, which develops after a fish dies and creates that distinctly fishy flavor and odor, is a big one. Texture also plays a role: Fishes’ muscle structure is different from chickens’.  Fish muscles are typically arranged in bands along the sides of the body and are separated by relatively less connective tissue than what is found in the muscle of their evolutionary descendants. These bands of muscle are what make cooked fish flaky. Fish muscles are relatively simple because all they have to do to move through water is perform a sort of sideways flopping motion. The muscles of land-dwellers like chickens, lizards, and frogs are more specialized and are designed for the more varied movement of individual limbs.

The conclusion? About 350 million years ago is probably when life began to taste like chicken.