A Month of Gustatory Austerity - Not an April Fool's Joke

A year and a half ago, or so, I made an informal pledge to not bring non-aquatic meat in my house.  It was not an easy choice as I love to eat and cook meat, but the reasons were too overwhelming: ecological, dietary, ethical, food costs, pigs are cute, etc.  But I'm also a hypocrite, since I will eat meat at restaurants or friends' houses.

Initially, I felt healthier and smugger as I lost a bit of weight.  But that trend sort of plateaued and reversed itself as I made excuses to eat out at pork dumpling restaurants and taquerias and developed a habit of adding molten chunks of cheese to everything I cook.  Combine that with a steady stream of booze and an aging metabolism and suddenly I'm back up to here:

This puts my Body Mass Index (BMI) at 27.2, i.e., "overweight."  In order to be of "normal weight," I should be around 15 pounds lighter, according to the National Institutes of Health.

The problem is that I don't really think about what I put in my mouth.  When I make a meal, I instinctively go for hearty things like pastas and stews and greasy fried things accompanied by fistfuls of cheese and glasses of wine.  Salads never even cross my mind.

I need to break the habit.

According to self-help lore, habits can be broken in around 30 days, so that's what I'm going to try: train my body to crave healthier foods.  Here are the rules:

• this applies only for the month of April
• a completely vegan diet
• nothing deep fried
• no added sugar
• no booze
• no sugar substitutes (I'm talking to you, Crystal Light)
• no meat analogs (texurized vegetable protein, faux ground meats, etc.)
• no fake cheese (easily done since they all suck)
• no fast food, vegan or not

I'm not expecting miracles, but we'll see what happens.  This past weekend, I tried to prime my body to make it ready for a healthy change.  This process consisted of eating four pizzas, cooking a fantastic grass-fed filet mignon that had been sitting in my freezer for two years (and thus grandfathered past my no-meat pledge) and downing a few bottles of wine.  My liver wasn't happy, but the rest of me enjoyed it.

Next, I'll talk cooking strategies.

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Everybody’s been talking about the new KFC Double Down, the sandwich that epitomizes American deep-fried decadence. In lieu of bread, the sandwich uses two pieces of battered or grilled chicken breasts to hold together two slices of bacon, two slices of cheese and a mayonnaise-based sauce. Stephen Colbert called the concoction, “The warped creation of a syphilitic brain,” but then one bite later said, “Call me crazy but this is good.” It’s been getting huge press and I’m sure sales among carnivorous stoners have been brisk but how obscene is it really?

Fast food tester: my dream job
Consumer Reports said it was salty and with 1380 mg of sodium (half of your recommended daily intake), it is. But surprisingly – for the fast food world – it’s not off-the-charts fattening. It has the same number of calories as a Big Mac (540) and about the same amount of fat (32 grams vs. the Big Mac’s 29).
Leftover prop from a David Cronenberg film 
There’s a worse culprit I learned of thanks to snippets.com. The Claim Jumper franchise, whose 45 restaurants are scattered throughout the West Coast and some of the Midwest, offers Beef Back Ribs on their menu that pack in a stunning 4,301 calories and 7,623 mg of sodium. That’s without sides.
In-N-Out's chef d'oeuvre - 4x4 animal style (a mere 1,050 calories)
Even on the road trip where I ate an In-N-Out 4x4 and a Double Double (essentially 6 patties, 6 slices of cheese), I didn’t reach half the caloric value of those ribs. They must be awesome! (Yelp members have informed me that, in fact, they range from “good” and “better than average” to “underdone” and “dry…been on the desert floor for years”)
This is more fattening than the 4x4
But there are other items on the Claim Jumper menu if ribs aren’t your jam. There are 19 items that contain over 2,000 calories and 57 that have over 1,000. Feeling peckish? Just have the blue cheese wedge salad and the seared ahi appetizer. That’s 1,114 calories in the salad plus 562 for the app. The tuna has more calories than a KFC Double Down.
This + 400 calories = Claim Jumper appetizer
So the question is, would I go to the Claim Jumper? Would I have a Double Down? Nah. For me, there is no novelty in eating thousands of calories in one sitting. I do plenty of that at home.

Jamie Oliver: This Is Why You're Fat

Jamie Oliver apparently ate his $100,000 prize money

At the most recent TED Conference (technology, entertainment and design), celebrity chef, Jamie Oliver was given some kind of award for his work in food and obesity education. How that connects with technology, entertainment or design, I’m not quite sure, but he’s hip and telegenic so he fits right in.

To encapsulate his 18-minute talk: people are fat because they stopped cooking food and eat processed crap instead. Nothing groundbreaking, but the message is delivered with Oliver’s manic enthusiasm so it’s fairly watchable without being too sanctimonious. The presentation happens to coincide nicely with his upcoming TV show, “Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution,” where he goes to America’s most unhealthy city and tries to get them to eat a green vegetable. He is so sucking in his gut.

He makes a couple interesting points: At the 11:15 mark he plays a clip from his show where kids in a kindergarten class are unable to identify beets, cauliflower, eggplants and even tomatoes and potatoes. He believes that people won’t eat food that they can’t identify and will therefore never eat healthily unless they’re better educated. Fair enough. A companion to Michael Pollan’s rule, “Don’t eat anything that your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.”

an ABC promo for the show

Continuing, Oliver maintains that for the past three generations, the family tradition of cooking skills being passed down has ended. His goal as an educator is to get every child to learn 10 recipes so that they can live independently, healthily and economically as adults. Neat idea. As a kid, I learned to make soup from a can of V8 juice – add Worcestershire sauce and Parmesan cheese from a green tube et voilà! In high school, I took Independent Living where I made an apron and learned how to make (bad) bran muffins. So by the time I turned 18 I could make really salty soup and greasy baked rocks. Two recipes - 20% of the way to an independent life according to Jamie Oliver’s vision.

Obviously, he doesn’t mean a specific list of exactly 10 dishes, but these are what I would choose:

• Spaghetti sauce – that just seems like a gimme. It’s cheap and easy and everyone likes it.
• Chili – Again, cheap and easy. Feed a family of 4 for a few bucks.
• Stir fry – I suppose this is more of a technique than a recipe but it’s healthy and has infinite variations.
• Rice – This could accompany the above two recipes, I suppose. Billions of non-Americans subsist on rice. We can, too.
• Roasted chicken – I’m not a huge chicken eater, but I like a good roast chicken. Plus, you can scale this up for a turkey and be the star of every Thanksgiving.
• Pasta – Here, I specifically mean the Italian method of sautéing a few ingredients and then adding pasta and some pasta water in the last minute of cooking. It’s one of the first things I learned how to cook well. Essentially the Italian version of stir fry.
• Steak – This is technique more than recipe, but good to know for cookouts and hot dates.
• Meat stew – Knowing how to braise is a cheap way to live well.
• Chicken soup – So people don’t waste their roast chicken carcasses.
• Macaroni & cheese – Yes, this is a dish that contributes to American obesity, but, come on, can’t we live a little? We have Chef Jamie's blessing.

Did I miss any?