Power eating care of Slim with the gold toothBourdain takes aim at food Nazis
29 September 2005If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Big strong men have big strong appetites and I love unabashed heartfelt praise for the joys of really good eating. The book Ive enjoyed most in recent months was Tony Bourdains A Cooks Tour and this recent post from Zeb John put me so much in mind of Bourdains (and my own) love of great eating that I thought it appropriate to quote from both. Already I hear the sneers from the food Nazis and the taste need be suppressed food is fuel crowd. As John Riggins famously said to Justice Sandra Day OConnor as he lay drunk under the table at a National Press Club banquet, Lighten up Sandy Baby! Lighten up food zealots and nutrient Ayatollahs! Man cannot live by steamed plain food aloneListen to this manly powerlifter describing the joys of really good plain American food.
Ha! Well, today is Wednesday and the tall gold- toothed cook we have here at the Farm Bureau cafeteria always fries 1/2 chicken pieces on Wednesdaya personal favorite…so when I wake up on Wednesday mornings I do vertical leap out of the bed just knowing that there is a piece of perfect fried chicken at the end of the tunnel for me on that day…. Ha! I am usually at the gate of the cafeteria at 11:20 and they call me Chicken Man…. The cook, Slim, puts me back the biggest piece… Ha! Next week and the week of the competition I will probably be grumpy since I will be eating his baked chicken instead of the fried… no damn wonder I haven’t leaned out eh ? Ha!
You may not have leaned out but damn it man you know the unabashed joy of consuming perfectly prepared food handled by experts. Contrast this with Bourdains stern warning about the food Nazis (theyre not coming theyre already here!) when he riffs rhapsodic in Dark clouds of processed foods gathering over Europe.
The enemy wants your cheese, they want you never again to risk the possibility of pleasure with unpasteurized Stilton, an artisan wine, oysters on the half shellThey want to take away your sausage. They want you to feel the same level of discomfort approaching a plate of food so many used to feel about sex. Do I overstate the case? Go to Wisconsin. Spend an hour in any airport or food court and watch the pale, doughy masses of pasty-faced, Pringles-fattened, morbidly obese teenagers and then tell me Im worried about nothing. These kids are the end product of the Masterminds of Safety and Ethics bulked up on cheese that contains no cheese, chips fried in oil that is not oil, overcooked grey disks of what once upon a time might have been meat fed a steady diet of ho-hos and processed low-cal muffins, butterless popcorn, sugarless soda, flavorless lite beer, the docile uncomprehending herd is led slowly to a dumb, lingering, joyless slaughter.
Processed foods is the real enemy and as a Proud Purposeful Primitive Ill take a perfectly fried piece of chicken over a trans-fatty acid laden frozen diet meal any damned day of the week. If Im allotted 500-calories let it be from food that grew in the ground or lived and breathed in the neighborhood and not food (even diet food) created in a factory. The first order of business when trimming overweight folks down is elimination of all the processed foods in the diet. Do you know what the number one health problem for people living below the poverty level is in modern America? Obesity! 100-years ago it was starvation. Compared to a dinner of frozen Pita Pockets, Pringles, soda and low-fat ice cream for desert, an occasional piece of perfect fried real food is positively beneficial.
PS food perfectly fried, i.e. when the oil is at 350 to 375-degrees DOES NOT become grease-laden as the moisture inside the food seeks to escape and keeps the hit oil from entering. The food becomes greasy if the oil is not hot enough or the food is fried too long, exhausting the interior moisture. Thanks to food scientist Alton Brown for this great bit of information. To prove his contention Alton measured the amount of oil before and after deep frying chicken for the correct length of time and at the proper temperature: afterwards he measured the oil once more and determined that despite frying six pieces only two tablespoons of oil were missing. Not much spread among 3.5 pounds of meat. Am I recommending frying? Not all the time and certainly not in the final throes of a serious diet set in a periodization framework - but an occasional piece of cod or chicken fried in a perfect non-greasy fashion with olive or safflower oil makes a superb taste treat. Nutritional heresy? Could be construed that way but if 95% of your nutritional house is in continual order and only 5% is off the strictness reservation, then youll be a winner. Confine fried food to occasional status and enjoy; perhaps youll be lucky enough to have Slim with the Gold Tooth making that amazing taste treat for you
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