Sunday, February 20, 2005

A couple of weeks ago I lent my flat in Hamburg to a colleague. He left some food in the fridge, which I have mainly eaten up until now. With this food there was a bar of low fat butter. What is the idea of low fat butter? Butter is sheer fat. It includes still a bit of other stuff like water, that is why you can still clarify it to Ghee, that is also why it turns rancid after some time.

OK, so low fat butter. Take fat out of the butter. Leaves you mainly water. Which you cannot sell in bars (actually, you can sell it in frozen cubes, which had an amazing success in Portugal when they sold Agua de Luso in ice cubes for real high prizes...). So, you need to substitute the fat in the low fat butter with something else. And, as this is supposed to be a healthy product, what comes first in mind? Yes, gelatine. Finely ground animal bones and stuff you cannot even put into sausages. Yummy. And the result: something which looks like butter, tastes like water and if you try to fry something in it (which I unfortunately tried...) you get burned gelatine rests in your pan, which not only smell horribly (and ruin everything you fry in it) but also are really hard to get off the pan afterwards. Great success of food industry.

Today I saw during zapping an advertisement for Spaghetti made out of Tofu. Spaghetti normally are made out of wheat. No need to substitute that by Tofu. It's already vegetarian. So, why?

All this health stuff is turning really crazy now. We do not want to eat fat anymore. Meat is sold completely fat free. But fat is the stuff which has the most taste in it; if you get fat less meat, it tastes like nothing (even tofu sausages have more taste than fat free chicken sausages...). Most vitamins are only soluble in fat. We also eat stuff because it is advertised as healthy. Why do I want to eat Tofu spaghettis? Because Soy is so good for me. As, strangely enough, would be wheat. Or any other grain.

We will be left with design food, which is treated to contain nothing. No fat, no taste, no vitamins, nothing. So that we can then buy functional food. Like the flour I found in the supermarket the other day. Added five types of vitamins. Or pseudo-ecological food with garantueed origin, like flour which was only made out of grains from one farm (which is stated on a sticker on the package!). The supermarkets here in HH are full of that stuff. But, if you just want to buy some apples which were grown in that region (close to Hamburg is one of the best apple growing regions in germany), you can't. Half of the apples which used to grow here are no longer sellable, as they do not comply the european union regulations on apples (too small, too big, too red, too green, too tasty...). You only get New Zealand Granny Smith and stuff like that. Great. I go and get some vitamin pills instead...

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Also food related, quite on the list of things you do not whant to hear *after* eating parts of leftover chicken from the day before: No, I don't want any, the cat already nibbled on that yesterday.

Unknown said...

I feel fairly certain that soya spaghetti is because more and more people are declaring themselves to be wheat-intolerant (there is a fancy word, I forget what).

Also, fat-less meat can be a good thing. Try venison steaks, for example. No 'rind' or 'marble-ing' needed to induce taste in those. It's merely the boring stuff thaty you need the fat with. No-one ever served fatty fish, but it still tastes....

Unknown said...

Fatty fish? Oily fish, surely? The difference being that there is no 'piece' of fat or gristle that is half-inedible - the 'fat' melts away... :o)

0% fat milk is surely for people who are calcium deficient?

I also know some people allergic to meat, so I can understand the reason for beef-flavoured tofu.

The only food pet-hate I have is people who don't eat things because "they're cuddly". Usually cuddly=pampered=tender. Other than this, I can live and let live.

What pisses me off most of all is someone else deciding that I can't eat something because it's bad for me. In my home town, you can buy a deep-fried kebab. Yes, a deep-fried kebab, you read that correctly. However, the local council have asked the shop to limit them to being sold only twice a week, for fear that people will eat them every night and collapse with ehart disease at the age of 24. Personally, I reckon that if someone is stupid enough to do this, then they should be allowed to do so.

Oh, and incidently, as regards the blog post - you can sell fruit that doesn't meet EU regs. You just can't refer to it as a 'standard' fruit i.e bananas that are too small are called 'baby bananas' and apples that are too small could be called 'authentic apples'. They usually go with some kind of alliteration...