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Tag: food history

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Published on 4 Comments on You Gotta Start Somewhere

I've written a little bit previously about what inspired my current writing project. I'd like to fill in a few blanks today. To recap, it's a YA trilogy. Here's my logline:

An unsuspecting teen is drawn into a resistance movement determined to expose a powerful but secretive group that is controlling the public through the food supply.

I guess I should clarify that it is fiction. But the more research I do, the more I wonder if I should also include an 'inspired by true events' line in the front matter of the books. Because it certainly is.

For the past few years, I've been on a processed food intellectual journey of sorts. I started at Curious, then quickly transitioned to Informed. Eventually I got to a level of Angry, which almost immediately morphed into Fury Of A Thousand Suns. Today I guess I would describe my present state as Inspired. Sorta in the same way that a blast furnace inspires coal to become steel.

Here's how I got to now.

Curious

Several years ago, I watched Morgan Spurlock's now-infamous 2004 documentary, Super Size Me. If you haven't seen it, you should (watch here now for free). Spurlock pledged to eat nothing but McDonald's food every day for thirty days. He could order whatever he wanted, as long as he ate each item on the menu at least once. I won't spoil it for you. But let's just say, I found it inspiring.

At the time, I was still a fan of fast food. I knew in my heart that McDonald's made the best french fries. I frequented drive-throughs often enough that I had 'my usual' at Taco Bell (Burrito Supreme Combo), Whataburger (#7 with jalapenos), and Sonic (#1 with jalapenos and tots). And yes, I agree Whataburger has better burgers than Sonic, but until Whataburger goes nationwide, Sonic's tots make them a perfectly acceptable substitute IMO. It's probably no surprise that at that time, I was also 15-20 pounds overweight and on the verge of needing medication to treat high cholesterol.

Super Size Me spelled the end of my McDonald's trips. I mourned their fries, but their other food was always mediocre IMO. My kids had long outgrown the Happy Meals marketing juggernaut. So it wasn't too hard for me to slam that door shut.

Next up, a copy of Skinny Bitch entered my orbit. I found it hilarious in parts, if a little extreme. If animal cruelty is a trigger for you (and if it's not, what the heck is wrong with you?), you have been warned.

Informed

Clearly there was more to this business model than charming old-school marketing strategies like venting fast food kitchens in such a way that the aroma of burger patties and fries lures customers in like grizzlies to a salmon run. In Eric Schlosser's eye-opening Fast Food Nation, I learned much about the industry, not the least of which is that we wouldn't even be able to stomach their mediocre fare, if it weren't for a handful of chemical factories located off the New Jersey turnpike working their asses off to improve the taste of low quality food.

Angry

In Michael Pollan's most excellent The Omnivore's Dilemma, I learned about the political shenanigans in the 1970s that drove thousands of small farmers out of business (and caused more than a few to commit suicide); and the (very obvious in hindsight) link between today's processed food behemoth and the obesity epidemic currently overburdening our health care system.

Can you tell I was building up a head of steam?

Fury of A Thousand Suns

By the time I discovered Michael Moss' Salt Sugar Fat, I was ready to go to war. It is truly despicable the lengths the processed food industry goes to to addict and entrap us into unnatural consumption patterns. From Moss, I learned that many food industry execs migrated from the cigarette industry. Is it any wonder they are all about addiction, and value their bottom line over the health of the consumer? And the hypocritical icing on this very unhealthy cake: I learned many food industry executives will not even consume their own products. Oh, the infuriating irony.

And here we are today, in the midst of a global pandemic that is especially devastating to folks who are already in poor health, perhaps because of poor diet. A poor diet often foisted upon us by greedy corporations more than willing to sacrifice consumer health at the altar of the almighty dollar.

So I crushed my fury into a tiny, tiny ball and compressed all that mad energy into determination to do something about this wretched state of affairs. But what can one person do against an army of corporate and political will?

Not much, I guess. I stopped drinking soda. I stopped eating fast food.

I started writing a book.

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Published on Leave a comment on Organic Opposition

This post originally appeared during my participation in the 2016 A to Z Blog Challenge. Affiliate links included below.

Man, that's a lotta corn

I'm currently working on a YA trilogy one could describe as Dystopia Lite. It takes place in a society that relies heavily on processed food (see what I did there?). Non-processed foodstuffs are illegal and are classified as controlled substances. It's an adventure/quest/conspiracy tale, very tongue-in-cheek, and I'm having a ball writing it.

Researching it has also been very enjoyable. Lord knows there's plenty of material out there. One of the most intriguing research threads has been about what I think of as The Rise of the Agricultural Machine, and why a huge percentage of what we consume, either to eat or to use, is made of corn or a corn product.

But I digress.

The term 'organic' as it refers to food emerged in the counterculture era of the 1960s. It had been used earlier to encompass a feeling of more general opposition to the changes technology rained down on society during the Industrial Revolution in the early twentieth century.

Health food guru J. I. Rodale was more directly responsible for using the word 'organic' as it relates to food cultivation. If you're familiar with the magazine Prevention, the surname Rodale may ring a bell with you.  He championed the growth and consumption of what we now think of as organic food all the way back in the 1940s. Twenty years later, his teachings caught on with the hippies. Flower children co-opted the term and the philosophy, combining it with what they were trying to achieve living in communes. Today we would call that living off the grid. Theirs was a sort of back-to-nature movement with the additional goal of sticking it to the military-industrial complex

  • The bounty available at the Dallas Farmers Market

One of the things I love about writing fiction is that while doing the research, I inevitably turn up stuff from real life that is way crazier than anything I could ever make up. For example: the notion that organic food was considered by some as something to be avoided in the 1960s and 1970s, like we avoid letting our mouths touch the spout on a water fountain. Big government and scientists in the pocket of Big Ag was very concerned that this new movement would erode their efforts in maximizing the industrialization of agriculture. They had spent a lot of money and scratched a lot of backs in Washington, D. C. to restructure government aid to farmers and reinvigorate foreign trade in commodities (mainly corn). They didn't want any disruptions and were probably mindful of the antiwar protests that had rattled the government bureaucracy and ended the Vietnam War. So they discredited the organic movement at every opportunity:

- In 1974 a kangaroo court of food 'experts' convened a panel on 'The Food Supply and the Organic Food Myth', branding the movement as 'dangerous nonsense'.

- Quoting from Michael J. Pollan's most excellent book The Omnivore's Dilemma:

"Henry J. Heinz, Jr. branded the organic movement 'food faddism', and he wrote that its advocates 'are persuading thousands to adopt foolish and costly eating habits'."

- and from the equally excellent Eat Your Heart Out by Jim Hightower, written contemporaneously (1975):

"Agriculture Secretary [Earl] Butz . . . became almost wild-eyed in his assertion that the specter of organic food production promises starvation for 50 million Americans."

Why all the panties in a twist over a micro movement that had little or no impact on the bottom line of the 1970s era food business? Because billions were being spent on marketing as well as production. Butz's Machiavellian machinations were restructuring farm subsidies as part of a grander scheme to change the way the agriculture sector worked. This new strategy depended on farmers flooding the supply of food to get the price to consumers down to absolute minimum. And BTW the consumers they were trying to please weren't you and me - they were mega corporations like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland.  The food biz was very mindful of the effects of the Vietnam War protests and how powerful the voting public could be if properly motivated. They didn't want a repeat wrecking the demand side if the organic food movement managed to generate a 'mistrust' of the food supply.

by Sidney Harris as seen in Eat Your Heart Out by Jim Hightower

It is a great comfort to me, reading Hightower's book with forty years of perspective, that the organic movement has survived and indeed thrived since that time. There haven't been any food sit-ins or demonstrations or protests that I'm aware of. But people are voting with their pocketbook, and it's having an effect. Organic food still needs to overcome the stigma of being too pricey, too hipster-buying-kale. But the big food companies are taking pains to offer choices that appear to be healthier. Food co-ops and community gardens and farmer's markets are all the rage.  If you're not sure that's true, take a look at the financials for Whole Foods, Earth Fare, and Trader Joe's. The wheel is turning slowly, but it is turning.

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Published on 1 Comment on There’s No Substitute For A Good Substitute

A version of this post originally appeared in December 2015.

My latest book, The Dala Horse, is set in post-Civil War Texas. As I was researching that era, I came across an amusing compilation of recipes for coffee substitutes. The Union/Yankees/Northerners included the port of Galveston as part of their naval blockade to cut off supplies to the South. Many items, not just coffee, were unavailable for years.

The blockade was called the 'Anaconda Plan' because it was supposed to squeeze the life out of the South. The 'Scott' referenced on the map was General Winfield Scott, U.S. Army. At 6'-5" and 300 pounds, when people say he was the inspiration for the term 'Great Scott!', I believe it.

Newspapers went kaput because newsprint was no longer available. Although many folks were used to making their own clothing at that time, they had the additional fun of having to make their own fabric during the war as well, since bolts of woven fabrics were scarce. But of all the things on hiatus in the South during and for a time after the Civil War, coffee was the most missed and most celebrated upon its return.

When contemplating this post, I was sorely tempted to try out some of these substitutions and report on how they tasted compared to the real thing. There's just one problem: I don't drink coffee, mainly because I don't like coffee. I don't think I could have rendered a fair opinion. Roasted lug nuts would have probably tasted as good or better than actual coffee to me.

Then, as now, coffee was grown mostly in tropical hemispheres and imported for our consumption. So getting a crate of coffee beans delivered from Sao Paolo to San Antonio wasn't gonna happen with Great Scott's Anaconda snappishly guarding the door.

But lots of other things grew wild and rampantly in the warm American South and were quickly pressed into service. Anything that could be roasted, ground, and brewed with hot water, was. Everything from corn meal to beets, rye, asparagus (seeds, not spears - mercy, no!), acorns, chicory, turnips, barley, parsnips, wheat, field peas, okra seeds, sweet potatoes, popcorn, cotton seeds, and tree bark was put forth. I kid you not. Tree. Bark. I will quote the actual 'receipt', as they were wont to say for 'recipe' back then, lest you not believe me:

"Take tan bark, three parts; three old cigar stumps and a quart of water, mix well, and boil fifteen minutes in a dirty coffee pot."
Arkansas True Democrat, October 17, 1861

And you thought Starbucks had exhausted all possible coffee iterations. If this really was a thing, it goes a long way toward explaining coffee drinker halitosis.

Every substitute suggested was strongly backed by the person suggesting it, claiming it was as good or better than the real thing. This is utter nonsense, of course (except maybe for the chicory, which I understand is still popular as a coffee ingredient in certain parts of the south). People couldn't wait to get their coffee beans back in the pot after the war.

It's that tough stem that wound up in people's coffee pots

I wish the acorn recipe had panned out. I would be sitting on an acorn coffee goldmine thanks to the massive and prolific red oak tree in my back yard. Instead, I'm forced to rely on the local squirrel population to remove them from underfoot, bless their hearts. If they can learn to operate a wheelbarrow, they can use mine, no charge.

There have been many other instances food shortages since the 'unpleasantness' between the North and the South. Many items, including sugar and dairy products, were rationed during World War II. But that was before my time. More recent supply chain interruptions have not been war-related, thank goodness. We had the 2015 Blue Bell listeria scare. And the Cheesepocalypse (the 2014 rumors of a Velveeta shortage). And the temporary Twinkie extinction of 2013. All three products are restored or soon will be, and their consumers are ecstatic - even though their waistlines won't be. (Is anyone else worried that the most recent shortages have occurred not in an effort to conserve resources for a nobler effort, but because of faulty business or manufacturing models of over-processed, unhealthy junk food we shouldn't be eating anyway?)

That's not to say current generations haven't experienced sacrifice. They've come up with a way to inflict one upon themselves. It's called a 'diet'. Just talk to anyone who has voluntarily given up meat or pasta or sugar. Their behavior is eerily similar to the pioneers who longed for their coffee beans. Here's the modern version of the Five Stages Of Deprivation:

1) Reminiscing - stories of how things used to be 'before', when their metabolism was fully functioning or before they learned more than they wanted to know about the processed food industry.
2) Self-pity - The sad little tear quickly wiped away after fruitlessly perusing a menu at a chic new bistro for something they are willing to eat, and having to settle for a side salad.
3) Ingenuity - The bizarre formulations concocted in a desperate attempt at approximating the missing item. Google 'gluten-free brownie recipe'.
4) False Confidence - The insistence that their substitute food of choice is just as tasty as the original. For the best example of this, sit next to your vegan cousin next Thanksgiving.
5) Ecstasy - The rapturous expression at the inevitable slip when they allow themselves a nibble of the forbidden item.

I wish it weren't so, but I've learned these things from sad experience. Our coffee supply is fine. But the ice cream - well, that's another story. Here at my house, we're somewhere between Self-Pity and Ecstasy. At long last, the first Blue Bell delivery in months finally arrived at our local grocery store. But it's so dang expensive, we wait for it to go on sale. They better hurry. We're starting to run out of tree bark and cigar stumps.

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