Best Food Writing 2013 (18 page)

Instead, I pathetically contemplated actually adding the extra McRib to my order.
It's only one dollar,
I reasoned.
I deserve it.

I shook my head and snapped out of the disgusting food-as-reward mindset I fall into far too often—a mindset, I might add, that's once again encouraged by deals such as these at fast food chains such as this one. (Besides, the brownie bites I'd added onto my 1 a.m. Jack in the Box order the night before had been woeful. And those were only $1 too.)

Back at the office after nearly an hour on the road, I actually tore into my McRib with a voracity that both appalled and astonished me. A growling stomach was making all of my decisions suddenly, but even after the first few hunger-blinded bites I could tell it had been a mistake.

Here's the thing: The McRib does not taste terrible, except for the fiddly, fleshy little nubbins extruding from the sides that are meant to represent “ribs.” In fact—full disclosure—I ate the entire thing.

I felt so hollow afterwards that it was as if my stomach had shifted entirely outside my body, as though my abdominal cavity was rejecting it in shame. This was a terrible thing to have eaten and I had no real excuse to do so. It contained no nutritional value whatsoever and unlike the questionable tacos and other junk food fare I occasionally consume, it didn't even have the benefit of being so delicious as to excuse its negligible health benefits.

The “pork” inside the McRib tastes quite obviously fake. It has a curious spongy texture that allows your teeth to slide into the meat with almost no give whatsoever. It's not like you're eating real meat at all, but something materialized on the Holodeck of the Starship Enterprise or a piece of food that's fast-fading in some airport during the course of the
Langoliers.
It's just . . . weird.

The pickles and onions, with their very real and very appropriate crunch, absolved the meat somewhat of its off-putting texture. But the bread suffered the same fate as the meat, falling apart in my mouth like dust, as if it had never been real in the first place. I spent the next hour trying and failing to understand how there can be any
passion around such a dull, lifeless thing. How is there a clamor for the McRib? In what way is it “epic” or “legendary”?

I am left today with the disappointing knowledge that there is a huge segment of my fellow Americans who look forward to this creepy fake meat every year with a hunger that borders on the pathological. I am not judging their taste—taste, after all, is subjective—but rather judging the quality of the food that people have come to revere. This silly, false thing. This vague improvement over potted meat.

I cringe as much as the next person when I hear words like “organic,” “artisan,” or “craft” overused or, worse, misapplied. But I'd far rather suffer a surfeit of foods in our nation that are leaning towards the
real
end of the spectrum than the fake. Because there is really no excuse for the McRib, and my life is poorer for having tasted it.

 

 

B
ACK
W
HEN A
C
HOCOLATE
P
UCK
T
ASTED
, G
UILTILY
, L
IKE
A
MERICA

By Dan Barry

From
The New York Times

In November 2012, when snack food giant Hostess Bakeries shut down its ovens, junk food mavens nationwide went into a tailspin. (Not to worry—new owners revived the brand in July 2013.) Leave it to
Times
columnist Dan Barry to catch the guilty spirit of America's Twinkie addiction just right.

T
here was a time; admit it. There was a time when, if given a choice between a warm pastry fresh from a baker's oven and an ageless package of Ring Dings fresh from the 7-Eleven, you would have chosen those Ring Dings. Not even close.

After opening the tinfoil or cellophane wrapping with curatorial care, so as not to disturb the faux-chocolate frosting, you would have gently removed the puck-shaped treat and taken a bite deep enough to reveal crème—not cream, but crème—so precious that a cow's participation was incidental to its making.

You did not care that this processed food product in your trembling hand was an industrial step or two removed from becoming the heel of a shoe. You already knew that not everything is good for you, and this was never truer than with a Twinkie, a Sno Ball, or a Ring Ding—the Ding Dong equivalent in the Northeast.

To you, they all tasted like, like: America.

Now, from Irving, Texas, comes word of the closing of Hostess Brands, your friendly neighborhood baking conglomerate, the maker
of Ring Dings, Ho Hos, Funny Bones and other treats whose names conjure a troupe of third-rate clowns.

“We ceased baking this morning,” Anita-Marie Laurie, a Hostess spokeswoman, said Friday morning. This means Hostess, and Drake's, and Dolly Madison, oh my.

Though the bankrupt company attributes its closing to a strike by a union with a mouthful of a name—the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International—the truth is that the bad-snack market has been in decline for years. All of a sudden, it seems, nosy consumers want to know what it is that they are ingesting, and that's not good if you manufacture edible curiosities like SuzyQs and Raspberry Zingers.

Beyond the heart-aching loss of many, many jobs, a Hostess shutdown doesn't necessarily mean that consumers, particularly the dietetically tone-deaf, have eaten their last Twinkie. Some industry analysts express confidence that as Hostess sells off its assets in this saddest of bake sales, an iconic treat like the Twinkie will be snatched up by a savvy opportunist—perhaps one who might resume production using a novel application for the famously indestructible Twinkie (a loofah sponge you can eat!).

Speaking personally, the news sent me into a panic. A Hostess shutdown would mean an end to certain rare and delicious moments of guilty bliss, those few seconds that come right after devouring a Ring Ding and right before the stomach realizes what has happened.

It would also mean an end to measuring the passage of time by the color of Hostess Sno Balls, those marshmallow-y mounds of cake and gunk that appear to be some kind of confectionary prank. Normally the pinkish color and approximate texture of an eraser, they turn green for St. Patrick's Day, orange for Halloween and lavender for the Easter celebration of the death and resurrection of Christ. Or maybe the lavender just means springtime.

Hurrying to the nearest food store, I barreled past the fruit and fresh produce section, fully aware of the eyes of potatoes narrowing in disappointment, and the heads of lettuce turning away in judgment. I nursed dark, violent thoughts about making a salad, and kept going.

And there, in the supermarket equivalent of the timeout room, were the food chain's nutritional delinquents. Your Hostess cupcakes.
Your Funny Bones. Your Yodels. Your Yankee Doodles and Sunny Doodles, the ebony and ivory of cupcakes. And, yes, your Ring Dings. Make that my Ring Dings.

I held a package of two Ring Dings in my hands. Reading the nutrition facts, I took comfort in seeing that the word nutrition was not in quotation marks. I skipped past unimportant details—the 310 calories, the 13 grams of fat, the 37 grams of sugar—and found validation in the 2 grams of dietary fiber.

The package says that's 8 percent—count ‘em—8 percent of your “daily values.” Whatever that means.

Then I turned my eyes to the block of white type listing the ingredients that help to make the “devil's food cake” resilient enough to be enjoyed in whatever comes after the End of Days. Well, I thought, you can never have too much “sodium stearoyl lactylate,” and I headed to the checkout counter with my single item.

Here is the eat-your-broccoli part of the Hostess saga. According to Harvey Hartman, a food-industry researcher and consultant in Bellevue, Washington, the country's food culture is rapidly changing. Consumers want less processed foods, he says, and more information about “the story behind their food”—which might not be something that a Sno Ball would want told.

But Mr. Hartman understands the allure. The careful unfolding of a Yodel or Ho Ho, but only after the frosting has been nibbled away. The scraping of teeth against the piece of white cardboard for that last remnant of a SuzyQ. The connection in a Twinkie, or a Funny Bone, to what he calls the “soulful elements of our past.”

That is why, one night this fall, or maybe this winter, or perhaps in the spring—there's no rush—I will wait until the kids are asleep, their tummies content with kale chips and quinoa. Then, basked in the bluish glow of some black-and-white television show, I will eat my faux-chocolate, crème-filled, Bloomberg-infuriating, chemical-rich, bad-for-me, really-really-bad-for-me, all-but-extinct Ring Dings.

Both of them.

Farm to Table

 

 

F
ORGOTTEN
F
RUITS

By Rowan Jacobsen

From
Mother Jones

As his book titles suggest—
American Terroir, Shadows on the Gulf, The Living Shore, Fruitless Fall
—Rowan Jacobsen is a unique amalgam of science/nature/food writer, bent on a very particular quest: To underscore the connections between our food and our imperiled environment.

E
very fall at Maine's Common Ground Country Fair, the Lollapalooza of sustainable agriculture, John Bunker sets out a display of eccentric apples. Last September, once again, they covered every possible size, shape, and color in the wide world of appleness. There was a gnarled little yellow thing called a Westfield Seek-No-Further; a purplish plum impostor called a Black Oxford; a massive, red-streaked Wolf River; and one of Thomas Jefferson's go-to fruits, the Esopus Spitzenburg. Bunker is known in Maine as “The Apple Whisperer,” or simply “The Apple Guy,” and, after laboring for years in semiobscurity, he has never been in more demand. Through the catalog of Fedco Seeds, a mail-order company he founded in Maine 30 years ago, Bunker has sown the seeds of a grassroots apple revolution.

All weekend long, I watched people gravitate to what Bunker (“Bunk” to his friends, a category that seems to include half the population of Maine) calls “the vibrational pull” of a table laden with bright apples. “Baldwin!” said a tiny old man with white hair and intermittent teeth, pointing to a brick-red apple that was one of America's most important until the frigid winter of 1933–34 knocked it into obscurity. “That's the best!”