Food of the Month Club - March

Here are my notes for this month at Trinity.

In addition, I'm challening the congregation to donate 40 bottles of oil (pints or larger) - a much asked for and rarely available item at the food pantry. 

The Food of the Month for March is

Cooking Oil

Many of the FISH food pantry’s clients ask for it, but it’s rarely donated and unavailable for inexpensive purchase from the Redwood Empire Food Bank. So usually the answer to requests is “Sorry.”

For the billion or more food insecure people in the world, two of the staples we take for granted and often have too much of, sugar and oil, are luxuries. Prices for oil will continue to rise as more of the crops from which it is sourced are diverted to bio-fuels, and more land is devoted to raising bio-fuel and animal feed crops.

Here are some FAQs about purchasing oils.
Are there local choices?
Local oils - olive, actually - are usually too expensive for most of our budgets. (But a wonderful treat when used to dress salads or other vegetables.)

Which oils are from genetically engineered crops? Any corn, soy or canola oil which is not labeled organic, or any “vegetable” oil, which may also contain cottonseed oil, will be from GM crops. Words like “natural” and “real” on labels are meaningless.
Whole Foods’ 365 store brand, Safeway O-organics, and Trader Joe’s own label are all good choices of value for money. Google the “True Foods Shopper’s Guide” http://truefoodnow.org/shoppers-guide/ if you want more information on GMO free products.

What about other environmental concerns? Avoid palm oil unless it’s certified organic. Since regulations regarding trans fats went into effect, palm oil, which is solid at room temperature without hydrogenation, has been used more and more, resulting in the destruction of tropical forest habitat. Orangutans and many other species which are less conspicuous are endangered because of this trend.

What are the best choices for health? Advice on which fats to choose seems like the shifting sands. One thing that’s been consistent for some decades is the recommendation to choose cooking oils high in mono-unsaturated fats. Common ones are sunflower, safflower, peanut and olive. Did you know that coconut and palm oils are higher in saturated fat than butter?

Americans can do anything

There are stacks of little notes to self on my desk and my desktop - things to post or write about that have been delayed. Travel in early February with iffy internet access followed by a doozy of a headcold and then the catching up with work and life have not been conducive to reflection.

Now it's Lent and I'm air travel free for almost two months. I'll be devoting some time to thinking and writing.

But let's start with the latest thing to catch my imagination:
Baconnaise.

Jon Stewart's response to Bobby Jindal's response to the President's Tuesday address focused on Jindal's account of a childhood trip to a Louisiana super market with his India-born father. There Jindal pere opined that American's can do anything.

Indeed they can, as this recently introduced product, from a company whose slogan is Everything Should Taste Like Bacon, proves.

Baconnaise is more than a sandwich spread. It's a dip for potato chips and french fries. Thinking about this would trigger my gag reflex even if I hadn't seen Stewart's shennanigans last evening.

But wait - there's more - that good old American can-do - Baconnaise comes in lite - with 1/3 fewer calories.

And - hold on - there's still more - Baconnaise doesn't actually contain any bacon - no CAFOs were involved in the production of this product. It is certified Kosher and vegetarian!

A quick internet search revealed all this - but not a detailed list of ingredients, or what is meant by "bacon flavoring". I guess I will have to go shopping just to read the label.

The Food Police

Last week I was reading an article about trans fats (trans fatty acids) which suggested there may be problems with eliminating all trans fats from our diets. The ones we are going after are synthetic trans fats, produced by partially hydrogenating vegetable oils so that they are solid or semi-solid at room temperature. Trans fats also occur naturally in butter, other fatty dairy products, beef and lamb - and there is some suggestion that these natural trans fats may not have the negative effect on "good" cholesterol that the manufactured ones do.

All of this started me thinking about when I first became aware of the food police. Of course, I had been on and off diets since puberty - that's not what I mean. The food police are people who focus on single foods or nutrients or chemical components and condemn them.

In the late eighties I was underemployed, and earning some extra money by temping for the Reno-Sparks convention and visitors' bureau. One of the events we worked was the California Grocers' Association - so, of course our conversation during slow times at the registration booth turned to food. I remember one of my co-workers saying, "I love custard, but it is so BAD." I tried to imagine being condemned to a world where custard did not exist. I tried to imagine childhood without custard, and particularly my childhood without my mother's cup custards with a little maple syrup in the bottom. I tried to imagine life without the other homey desserts based on custard, like squash pie and bread pudding, or without custards for breakfast like french toast and leftover bread pudding. I made up my mind not to listen to the food police.

But they seem to be always with us, at least in our land of plenty, whether to condemn some foods or food components to oblivion, or to promote the nutrient du jour. And rarely if ever do they consider the big picture, taking into account the impact of what we eat on our planet, not just on our own bodies.

Let's consider the fat dilemma.

I know to eat less saturated fat, but I also know you just can't make that occasional pie crust without it. My favorite pie crust combines vegetable shortening (where synthetic trans fats got their start) and butter.

I suppose I could do what a neighbor does and use vegetable oil, but I really don't like the results. And besides, I can't imagine olive oil in a fruit pie crust, and many of the others are made from genetically modified crops.

So I'll hang on to the butter (using the kind without bovine growth hormone from a local dairy) and figure out what to do for the shortening. Actually when shortening prices got higher and higher I just used hard margarine, but that is now the ultimate no-no.

So I began looking for a shortening made from a plant oil that was solid at room temperature naturally, and there are a couple: coconut oil and palm oil. They, of course, are also the plant oils highest in saturated fats. (Lard is actually lower in saturated fats than butter, but even if I did eat meat where's the sustainably grown pork around here from which I could render it? I'm not going near the factory-farmed stuff, laced with preservatives, which you can buy ready made.) But I thought, well, I'll look for some palm oil shortening - after all I am just using it for the occasional pie crust.

But then I learned that most palm oil comes from plantations which are destroying the habitat of orangutans. This is something the food police who want to get rid of trans fats won't tell you - that many commercial establishments and processed food manufacturers are substituting palm shortening from half way around the world. And in the process our dear relatives are being driven close to extinction. Wouldn't it be a shame if the species that so inspired Charles Darwin were wiped out because Americans couldn't live without cheap solid fat?

The only solution I did come up with was some organic shortening from Whole Foods, Spectrum brand, from plantations in Columbia being established as an alternative crop to coca and costing about as much. Actually, I'm kidding here, as I have no idea of the price of cocaine. Better to say this shortening was priced a little higher than a comparable weight of butter.

That's quite a saga for arriving at a politically correct pie.

It seems that rather than focusing on the thou-shalt-not's, we need to spend more time looking at the big picture and the basic goals of a diet that is good for us and good for life which shares our planet. As far as possible eat fresh, local and seasonal. Make sure things that aren't are conscious choices. Choose sustainably grown when you can. Eat as low on the food chain as possible. And follow some manageable guidelines for eating, like the food pyramid. (Yes, I know - it's probably not p.c. - and it doesn't consider planetary health - but it's a whole lot better than it used to be. Check it out if you haven't.)

And once in a while have a little custard or a piece of pie.