Sounds like that could be useful once your customers are comparing you to your direct competitors (especially if they're making similar value claims).
Though even then, the features would have to be things people actually expect to get better value from. E.g. "snooze emails for later" vs "our server runs on golang"...though if your audience is super core golang fanboys then maybe the latter would be useful as well :)
I have a similar rule of thumb: if it's not part of any culture's traditional cuisine, it's probably unhealthy.
Long shelf life is not necessarily an issue; I've eaten home-made canned cherries & plums that were 10 years old. Wine can also have a long shelf life (though most don't).
But your point stands with the varietals optimized for appearance and tolerance to shipping as opposed to flavor. I've come to realize why many consider fruits and vegetables not very appealing is that almost all of what is available is tasteless.
Northern Europeans used the same techniques that many other cultures used across the globe: remove as much water content as possible, use herbs that have certain bacteria-inhibiting properties that also taste good, apply liberal salt. Everything is some evolution of this.
You may wish to provide an example as to what you mean, because I suspect whatever you are referring to is more modern (ie, in the past 300 or so years).
Are you talking about sausage? Because herbs aren't for preservation in sausages. The 'natural' preservative in sausages is celery, which has nitrate, which is then converted to nitrite during curing. 'Biological' sausage makers still do that, because this way they don't have to disclose nitrite additives, althougj their final product has more nitrite than properly dosed regular sausages.
I still think there's no real problem with eating preserved meat, but the misguided worship of ye good old times needs to stop.
The way sausage is made now is most certainly a modern invention, but nitrates and nitrites are not bad for you, nor toxic, in of itself as a family of chemicals.
The problem in the modern industrial world is the use of artificial nitrates and nitrites present outside of plain sodium or potassium nitrite, which thankfully is starting to become more rare again.
Also, there is no scientific link between nitrate consumption and cancer, only really awfully designed papers that somehow, and very unreasonably so, got published in journals.
Salt is definitely bad for your if you have high blood pressure (can dig up refs if required) and high blood pressure is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease.
Btween 35% and 40% of people have high blood pressure. For them, the consumption of "liberally salted" products is something to be avoided.
Salt is one of those weird things. The salt studies were years ago, mostly, and haven't fully been redone with modern standards.
It isn't that they were fully wrong, but it doesn't always have the ills one is warned about and the amounts of "healthy" salt might vary. Some of those folks with high blood pressure will be helped by a lower salt diet: Some will not and I'm not sure if there are consistent links saying it causes high blood pressure in healthy folks with normal blood pressure. The rest of the folks with high blood pressure aren't always helped - probably because there is more than one path to high blood pressure. Genetics, medicines, smoking, diet, lack of exercise, weight, and so on.
Even in this subset, these meats aren't universally bad. If your salted meat is a smallish portion of your diet and you use comparatively little salt in the rest of your food, you might be just fine. It isn't that one thing is salty, but that the overall diet isn't too high in salt.
And reducing salt has a devious unintended consequence: encouraging a diet higher in carbohydrates and fructose specifically—almost certainly worse than the salt for most people.
Salt is one of the most effective ways to make healthy low carbohydrate foods (particularly fats and protein) palatable and compete with the sugar, corn and wheat that are so prevalent in unhealthy foods.
>> Salt is one of those weird things. The salt studies were years ago, mostly, and haven't fully been redone with modern standards.
That sounds very vague- what is "years ago" and what are "modern standards"? If "modern standards" are better for salt studies- are they also better for, e.g. drugs research, or physics or chemistry, etc?
I think probably not. What I understand the big difference is between now and the past (let's say the 1950's), in terms of scientific standards has more to do with ethical requirements, rather than methodology. More modern studies are also more likely to use more recent statistical tools, or to rely more on automated tools and software packages, but that doesn't meant the newer studies are more accurate.
I also don't know why you say that salt affects different people with high blood pressure differently. My understanding is that there is variability between _studies_, so some studies have found that hypertensives that reduce their salt intake see a reduction in their blood pressure, some have not, but that doesn't mean that hypertensives react to salt differently- it means that different studies had different results and that's all. And variability among studies' results is clearly expected, given the different methodologies etc.
Generally, I'd say it's hasty to discard data and results collected over many years because some -but not most- modern studies have different results. In such cases the prudent thing is to wait and see before making up your mind. Currently, the bulk of the data supports the mainstream view that salt consumption over some amount is associated with raised blood pressure. The wise thing to do is to take that into account and manage your consumption accordingly.
Another thing: how many people (say, under 30) know what their blood pressure is and how it's affected by salt? I know, because I have a relative with kidney disease and I often measure my blood pressure with them, and take notes. Most people though - they have no idea.
So again- don't be hasty. It's difficult to know how salt consumption affects the general population, but if anyone wants to know how it affects them, personally, they don't need to rely on studies, new or old. All they have to do is use a blood pressure monitor once or twice a day for a few weeks.
And I personally suggest everyone does, because what happened to my relative was downright scary. They had splitting headaches for a long time (years) and they only found out the reason when we visited a doctor for something unrelated. A nurse asked a question about general health and I replied that my relative has these splitting headaches (my relative would never bring up something so trivial themself!). It turned out those headaches were the result of 200/100 hypertensive episodes that were happening with regularity. Hypertension was likely either the root cause, or a contributing factor to the damage to my relative's kidneys (and also caused by that damage, in a real nasty feedback loop)- but we had no idea it was even there. And btw, my relative has definitely been able to control their blood pressure by cutting down drastically on their salt intake (they take drugs, of course, but salt still affects them very clearly).
Blood pressure is such a basic vital sign that's so easy to measure. It's so easy to know, studies or no studies, how salt affects you. And yet, most people never measure it and instead we end up having these arguments on the internets about what this study or that study says about salt, in the general population, in the abstract. I don't quite get it.
Anti salt advice from heath organizations has persisted despite a lot of evidence. Even the basic osmotic argument around blood pressure ignores lymph outside of blood vessels containing salt resulting in zero net forces. At most there is a minuscule change in viscosity.
Advice from health organisations is generally not "anti salt". Rather, it's "pro health", that is, those organisations are not telling you to eat less salt because they don't want you to enjoy life, or because they are idiots who don't know how to read the data. In fact, public health organisations have people who are specifically paid to read and interpret the literature, so it's very unlikely they'll be the last ones to catch up on the new information.
If public health advice hasn't changed with "recent data" the reason for that -other than the experts being stupid and not knowing their shit- is that recent studies are recent. You can't overturn a few decades of evidence with a few studies- not even a few meta-analyses etc.
And one should always remember that a study is a study, and not the word of the God of Science. And studies are flawed.
Take for example the study quoted in your linked article:
In May European researchers publishing in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that the less sodium that study subjects excreted in their urine—an excellent measure of prior consumption—the greater their risk was of dying from heart disease.
Such surprising results have also been found for wine, for example, and the methodological error that produces them is as insidious as it is now well understood. In particular, studies on the effect of this or that on cardiovascular health often don't control for people with _pre-existing_ heart disease. People who already have heart disease are very likely to have reduced their salt or alcohol etc consumption _before_ the study, as a result of medical advice - but of course, they will still suffer from heart disease. If they later die of their pre-existing condition, the study will show an association between low sodium or alcohol etc consumption and death from heart disease.
That's very likely what happened in the study quoted by the article you link to- but of course we can't know for sure because bloody "Scientific" American never cites the studies it quotes.
Anyway, from my perspective (I have a relative with kidney disease and I've been eating a low-sodium diet with them for years now) the first I heard about salt being OK for you after all was a few years ago when a heart doctor published a book that caused a hell of a controversy - between expets, no less. Here's an article about it:
My hunch is - if there's a controversy about it between experts, better stick with the advice that is _not_ controversial among experts, until things clear up.
And don't be prepared to celebrate overturned scientific orthodoxies so easily. If you have 100 studies that say A and 10 studies that say B, you trust the 100 studies that say A. See the green jellie beans XKCD etc.
It’s far more than the last decade, here is an example from 1983.
“Rigorous sodium deprivation can lower the blood pressure of some patients with essential hypertension (at best, 30% to 50% of patients). In the rest, sodium depletion is ineffective and, in some instances, can raise the blood pressure and cause adverse clinical effects. In normal persons, it is difficult to affect blood pressure even with drastic changes in salt intake; for the blood pressure to rise even slightly, it may be necessary to consume more than 800 meq/d. There is no evidence to indicate that a widely applied, moderate reduction of salt intake could prevent the development of hypertension. The evidence suggesting that such moderate salt intake would significantly lower blood pressure in the patients with sodium-sensitive essential hypertension is weak. Human hypertension comprises a heterogeneous spectrum of abnormal vasoconstriction-volume interactions. Sodium deprivation, like other forms of therapy, should be applied only to those patients in whom its effectiveness has been established.”
Abnormal sodium metabolism may be critical in the causation of certain forms of hypertension, particularly salt-sensitive hypertension. Long-term restriction of sodium intake in patients at high risk for the development of hypertension may reduce the chances of established hypertension occurring later. These high-risk patients in whom subsequent hypertension may be prevented include normotensive patients with family histories of hypertension, elderly patients, black patients, and those with low-renin hypertension. Treatment of hypertension with moderate sodium restriction to 70 mEq/day will significantly reduce blood pressure in a large percentage of patients, particularly known salt-sensitive hypertensive patients. This degree of restriction is also an effective adjunctive therapy for patients receiving antihypertensive medications. There is convincing experimental, epidemiologic, and clinical evidence that moderate sodium restriction helps prevent and assists in the treatment of hypertension in those patients who are genetically predisposed to develop primary hypertension or who already have hypertension. There is no evidence that this degree of sodium restriction is harmful.
My hunch is that for every study we could find in the bibliography reporting that there is no correlation between high salt consumption and high blood pressure, we would find another 10 that say the opposite. Personally, I don't have the time, or the background, to figure out how to evaluate the quality of an epidemiological study. So I base my assumptions on the current expert opinion that continues to be that too much salt is bad for you especially if you have high blood pressure (or are at risk for it, like the review above says).
Edit: also, remember the basic rule that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". But _presence_ of evidence _is_ evidence of presence. If 10 studies find "no evidence" that lowering salt intake reduces hypertension risk and one study finds that it does, then we have "evidence that lowering salt intake reduces hypertension" and we do not have "no evidence that lowering salt intake reduces hypertension". How we interpet the evidence we do have is another matter, of course.
Btw, since I'm idly browsing ncbi org, the following is a 2013 Cochrane meta-analysis of thirty-four randomised trials with 3230 participants.
I'm quoting the conclusions section but as usual the abstract has multiple sections including a Results section that's a bit large to post (but interesting to read):
Effect of longer term modest salt reduction on blood pressure: Cochrane systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised trials.
CONCLUSIONS:
A modest reduction in salt intake for four or more weeks causes significant and, from a population viewpoint, important falls in blood pressure in both hypertensive and normotensive individuals, irrespective of sex and ethnic group. Salt reduction is associated with a small physiological increase in plasma renin activity, aldosterone, and noradrenaline and no significant change in lipid concentrations. These results support a reduction in population salt intake, which will lower population blood pressure and thereby reduce cardiovascular disease. The observed significant association between the reduction in 24 hour urinary sodium and the fall in systolic blood pressure, indicates that larger reductions in salt intake will lead to larger falls in systolic blood pressure. The current recommendations to reduce salt intake from 9-12 to 5-6 g/day will have a major effect on blood pressure, but a further reduction to 3 g/day will have a greater effect and should become the long term target for population salt intake.
Remember that this is a meta-analysis and quite recent (6 years ago). I think my hunch above that we'd find many more studies supporting the mainstream view is not off.
> I have a similar rule of thumb: if it's not part of any culture's traditional cuisine, it's probably unhealthy.
A similar thing I heard often is "don't eat anything your grandma wouldn't recognize as food", and it seems sensible, but the problem with this reasoning is the blurry definition of "traditional" and our general ignorance of food history.
For example, MSG is a fairly traditional ingredient in Japan, being used since 1909 (older than my grandma). Crisco would be considered the same in the US.
But hydrogenated fats have known unhealthy effects, while MSG has been proven to be mostly innocuous.
At the same time, candied fruit is super traditional in the mediterranean, and something like cassata siciliana[0] is candied fruit, marzipan etc.. basically sugar coated with sugar. Definitely unhealthy, though delicious and traditional.
I wouldn't describe Crisco as part of any culture's traditional cuisine. Paula Deen once led me to believe that American grandmas use butter.
Or was it lard?
I don't know any grandmas from Japan, but I doubt they would consider MSG to be a traditional food. Rather, it is an additive that tastes like seaweed. To call it "traditional" in Japanese cuisine would be akin to calling maple flavoring "traditional" in Canadian cuisine.
They shouldn’t even get optimized for taste. Otherwise you end up with super sweet apples that have less nutritional value than they used to have. It will probably be hard to define what nutritional value is but otherwise we end up fruits and veggies being bred to be fast food.
Even many of those exceptions sacrifice taste in the name of shelf life and consistency: Mass-market olive oil has much less flavor than fresher, smaller-batch olive oil. Fresh pasta tastes better than dried pasta. Flours made from heritage grains are making a comeback in gourmet baking. Red delicious/golden delicious/granny smith apples taste far worse than many of the less mass-market alternatives. Etc.
"if product has long shelf life and does not require refrigeration - it is probably unhealthy"
There are a lot of exceptions though: dried lentils and pulses, pasta, ground spices (and to a less extent whole spices). Tinned fruit, vegetables, beans and pulses are often fine too. Some vegetables, like onions and potatoes, can be stored for many weeks in a cool environment (not in the refrigerator).
Also, UHT milk has a long shelf life and is not unhealthy, although it tastes awful.
> Also, UHT milk has a long shelf life and is not unhealthy, although it tastes awful.
Sure you're not getting it confused with evaporated milk? UHT milk doesn't taste much different at all, maybe the slightest caramel flavor.
I swapped to it when I got tired of running out of milk at random, now I can just stock the pantry and always grab a spare when I kick the one in the fridge.
You’re probably in an area where the dairies have consolidated and milk tastes like crap.
UHT milk is not at all tasty compared to normal milk and has a different consistency. I like it as an alternative beverage or coffee creamer, especially for camping.
>if product has long shelf life and does not require refrigeration - it is probably unhealthy.
Beef Jerky, dried chiles beans and legumes, as well as canned vegetables would beg to differ. steel cut Oats, carefully stored, will easily survive close to a decade. naturally fermented pickles can last months on end as well.
In the US, canned beans and frozen vegetables are among the most opulent excesses of the boomer era that ushered in among other things, the tv dinner and immortal confection we know to be a twinkie. Most of a grocery store is structured to completely disregard seasonal produce and function on an almost comical dependence on low diesel prices in order to truck fruits, vegetables, and meats thousands of miles cross country.
The trucking industry depends on comically low driver wages not low fuel prices, although fuel costs are a factor. An over the road trucker used to be able to support a family easily, making 80k in todays money in the 70s and 80s. Today they can expect to make an average of 40k working for a trucking company.
There is a severe shortage of over the road drivers and I believe this is the major reason. It's a tough and unhealthy life and the money incentive is gone.
Frozen vegetables are no heavier than fresh vegetables, and there is far less spoilage. They are, IMO, to be celebrated. Especially frozen peas & blueberries.
Really? It'd be hard to give up miso, or fish sauce, or chocolate. Or beer. Or gochujang. Cheese. Baking powder. Mustard... I could make some of these things myself, but that's a pretty tall order.
Not being American and unfamiliar with both Crisco (1) and Ram Dass (2), I thought two unrelated but top stories on HN were connected. I somehow thought Chrisco Church (3) that was founded in Kenya by a certain Harry Das was international and what the unconnected stories were about. Poor me.
I think it’s probably because the comment is a bit off-topic. But the only-slightly-related comments on HN are sometimes the best and most interesting.
If you want to find out much more about the history of Crisco and its modern-day incarnation, here is an excellent and informative 10 min video about it:
As far as I can tell Crisco, while popular in the US, doesn't appear to be widespread or common outside the US.
Yeah, after looking up many Spanish Christmas cookie recipes, I was surprised that almost all of them use lard. I have too many vegetarian friends for lard to be an option for me. I generally sub butter for lard, but maybe I'll make a private batch of polvorones with lard for myself some time to see if there's a difference in taste.
A lot of traditional cooking and recipes are based on systems. They interconnect with other cooking. So you make one dish or you slaughter one animal or whatever, end up with fat or lard or something as a byproduct, use that to make other dishes. A bunch of stuff ends up in soups or stews, which you don't so much make intentionally as as an accident of other cooking, to stretch out ingredients and use up parts that otherwise aren't so great.
These don't make sense anymore when we don't really stick to regional, seasonal, supply-dependent cooking and can decide to make any damn thing we like at any time, thanks to grocery stores, and simply toss most of the extra bits ("useless" parts of vegetables, bacon fat, et c.) if we don't feel like using it, because the time, space, and technique it takes to use them correctly's not worth it when we can buy a substitute from the store for very little money. Quite likely a well-proportioned substitute of butter for lard doesn't make much difference in the outcome of that recipe, but there was originally a supply-related or place-it-fits-in-a-cuisine-system reason that lard was preferred.
[EDIT] to be clear, the old way of cooking is probably still cheaper in general and certainly less wasteful, but the savings are so marginal relative to the skills, time, and space required that it's totally reasonable that even poorer folks largely don't bother. This kind of thing went beyond just cooking patterns and cuisines, too—animals commonly kept by anyone living even sort-of in the country had a role. Chickens? They'll eat waste, control pest insects, give you eggs, and if you're also breeding them you can slaughter one for food every now and then—the eggs and meat are damn near free, as far as dollars put in past an initial capital investment and some trivial upkeep are concerned, though they do take time & care. Pigs? Even better waste disposals than the chickens, turn garbage into meat and cooking fat. These got much cheaper and more common, but also were removed from their role in the broader food & home-economics ecosystem, when we started farming them on a mass scale and mostly feeding them stuff we grew specifically to feed them.
My mother (and thus me because I learned to cook from her) always used clarified butter (butterschmalz, or ghee if you source it from Indian stores). Once learning about the history of seed oils I am quite happy I stuck to this.
I don't know anyone who uses Crisco or Pam, and can't recall the last time I saw a can in someone's kitchen. The default cooking oil for many families is peanut, vegetable, or "olive" (very big problem with fake oils here). Butter is popular, too.
When I go to rural areas of the country, the supermarkets have very good selection of fresh foods and cooking ingredients, which indicates to me that there is a demand for them.
We render lard from bacon and save it for cooking. Works like a charm.
I was about to dig this link up so thanks for sharing. I enjoy his videos a lot since he's very thorough with the research. And his pan pizza was amazing when I made it.
We have other shortenings outside the US, such as Copha (coconut based) in Australia though it's rarely used these days. Crisco is available but not widely, and from what I can tell mostly used by people following American recipes and purchased from specialty importers.
For the last 5 years we have made our own lard and use as little processed oil as possible. Our health has improved, we have lost weight and generally been very healthy. We also add very little sugar to our diet. Processed foods are generally bad for health, its been quite difficult to find food that is free of these harmful oils
As a general statement about vegetable oils, that is super false. You can tell because the oils are liquid at room temperature and hydrogenated oils aren't. Maybe you meant vegetable shortenings?
If you’re referring to hexane being the extreme chemical, there is 0% chance of any amount of hexane remaining in the final product.
Everything else they mention, diatomaceous earth, clay, phosphoric acid, are all edible and pose no health risks.
Just a general comment about the dismissal of the idea of "real food" . . .
Just because people can't agree about where the grey areas are versus where the defined areas are does not mean that there are no areas worth defining or that we should avoid defining those areas for ourselves because other people disagree. It's sort of like driving speed. Some people believe that average faster speeds are safe, but people who drive faster than they drive are unsafe. Other people will think slower speeds are safe and anyone who drives faster than they drive are unsafe. This doesn't mean that there aren't "real" safe speeds or that the idea of a safe driving speed is meaningless. We can still get closer to real food or real safe driving speeds even if our targets vary.
So something I saw with shortening now (to include Crisco) is that it now is mainly palm oil, which has been fairly controversial due to deforestation:
0. Be from a family line that consumes gallons up gallons of curd/yogurt weekly.
1. Curd Process - Boil whole milk, let it cool down a bit, and add some older curd, let it sit overnight in your oven with the light on.
2. The next morning, put the container in the refrigerator.
3. At night, you'll notice a think layer of creamy butter on top of the curd. Scrape that layer off the curd and transfer it into a container that you will store in your freezer. Enjoy the curd.
4. Repeat steps 0-3 over a few days, which will cause you to have a container full of creamy butter.
5. When you need ghee, melt the contents at medium heat while continuing to stir to maximize the ghee you'll make out of it. You will start seeing some particulate forming at the bottom
6. Filter and transfer the melted contents into your ghee container.
7. Turn off the stove but continue stirring the particulate matter with some added sugar for a tasty sweet.
Do people really need Ghee specifically? Or do people need "clarified butter"
If you just want "butter that doesn't burn", here's what I do.
1. Melt butter in a pot. This separates butter into its three fundamental parts: solids (floating at the top), oil (in the middle), and water.
2. Heat until all the water at the bottom vaporizes.
3. Pour remaining mixture through a coffee filter. This removes the solids (which easily burn).
Milk Solids burn at 350F, making raw butter unsuitable for frying. The goal of clarified butter (and Ghee is a type of clarified butter), is to raise the smoke-point to roughly 450F (roughly equivalent to canola oil).
Normal butter will burn before the mallard reaction (Mallard is roughly 400F). But clarified butter burns AFTER the mallard reaction. The mallard reaction is what makes the slightly-sweet nicely cooked meat taste.
Similar reactions occur in vegetables, meats, breads, etc. etc. So its very important to use oils which burn at higher temperatures (450F+: Clarified Butter, Canola Oil, Soy Oil, Peanut Oil).
Some fats, such as normal-butter, bacon fat, or olive oil burn at 350F. So you end up with a "burnt" taste from the burning fat before the mallard reaction even takes place.
--------
Ghee is a particular "cooked butter" taste. Its a bit more difficult to make (and more expensive than) simple clarified butter.
If you're sauteing, frying, or whatever with butter, its important to know how to clarify it. Or I guess use Ghee (but that's more expensive / time consuming).
All fats can substitute for each other depending on recipe. It will taste different but it's really fun to replace fats with other fats.
Ex, bacon grease works in more recipes than you'd expect.
Just memorize their smoke points, the point where a fat begins to burn. Shortening has a very high smoke point, but that is only relevant if you expect the temperature to go above 400F, such as the mallard reaction (aka the taste of fried / saute food).
You'll learn pretty quick when a fat burns quickly. Olive oil and bacon grease burn at really low temperatures and will create a thick cloud of smoke as it burns.
Look up the smoke points of fats if you are worried.
>> You'll learn pretty quick when a fat burns quickly. Olive oil and bacon grease burn at really low temperatures and will create a thick cloud of smoke as it burns.
I was wondering about that because it's mentioned in the article also: I don't understand why people say that olive oil burns easily.
Look at the table you posted: the smoking point of two qualities of olive oil ("virgin" and "extra virgin, low acidity, high quality") is above 400°F (204°C) at 410°F and 405°F respectively. This is close to the 400°F you cite as the temperature necessary for the Maillard reaction, but the wikipedia article on the Maillard reaction states that: "The reaction is a form of non-enzymatic browning which typically proceeds rapidly from around 140 to 165 °C (280 to 330 °F)." In which case, even "extra virgin" olive oil, the olive oil quality listed as having the lowest smoking point of 160°C, can withstand the heat necessary for food to undergo the Maillard reaction.
It makes even less sense that the Maillard reaction needs 400°F to get going. If you look at the wikipedia article for "Smoking point", where the table you link to comes from, it lists the average temperatures of frying and baking:
Pan frying (sauté) on stove top heat: 120 °C (248 °F)
Deep frying: 160 - 180 °C (320 °F - 356 °F)
Oven baking: Average of 180 °C (356 °F)
It wouldn't make sense for the Maillard reaction to need more than the average _baking_ temperature to occur!
Finally, I'm the third generation of women in my family to cook with olive oil, to always cook with olive oil and to cook everything with olive oil. I fry, deep fry, boil, stir-fry, bake, sear, and so on everything with olive oil. I have never seen olive oil burning (emitting a blue flame and smoke) and I've never heard of anyone in my family, or in my broad circle of friends and acquaintances who has seen that. I have never heard it in the news either and if it was something that happens to olive oil when the food you're cooking with it is about to get tasty- it should be happening all the time [Edit: note that I've burned plenty of food in olive oil- but still not the olive oil].
Small point to note: I'm Greek and we do have good quality olive oil (and wine; and feta; and yoghurt; and nothing else).
So my conclusion is: it's only cheap, low quality and most likely adulterated olive oil that catches fire in low temperatures.
(See the wikipedia article on olive oil about adulteration. It's a big thing in some other oil-producing countries, and I don't mean Saudi Arabia).
Avocado oil has a 520 degree smoke point and a neutral taste. I have completely switched to it (I buy it at Costco) and use olive oil only for salads or tomato/mozzarela combinations and things like that.
I have a lot of bacon grease, but I have only used it in cornbread. I'll have to see where I can substitute it (per my earlier comment, bacon fat flour tortillas now sound very good).
Really interesting, thanks for the brain dump! What do you look for to know when your pan is preheated enough to eg sear meat well if you don't wait for a little smoke?
Well, certainly not "catch on fire". Just emitting enough smoke to maybe set off a smoke alarm (but otherwise not really harmful in my experience). Light smoking is fine (and is good for gauging temperature), but heavy smoke will have a burnt taste and is an indicator that you were "cooking too hot".
I don't cook with olive oil too often, so I can't say I remember the brand. I looked a few things up, and it seems like different olive-oils have different smoke points.
According to this, some olive oil has a smoke point of 320F / 160C, but other olive-oils can have a smoke point as high as 468F. I don't know why olive oil has such a different range.
I guess I'll experiment with olive oil more. It is quite possible that olive oil here in the USA is of lower-quality perhaps?
You're right, the wikipedia article about smoke points says that it's the temperature at which oil begins to emit a bluish smoke, not flame. Well, I'm confused about that because I've never seen oil smoking, either. So I couldn't understand what it means for olive oil to "burn", even. Except if you deliberately set it on fire of course.
Olive oil quality can depend on many things: where it comes from, how it is made, who makes it, etc.
The one that's considered best is olive oil produced only from olives (i.e. no kernels) and only by mechanical means (specifically: no heat and no chemical treatments; so it's called "cold-extracted"). That's the quality that's sold as "extra virgin olive oil" though from what I understand there is no strict standard for what that means exactly.
Then there's provenance. Generally, Spanish olive oil is considered best with Greek second (unless you ask a Greek of course) and Italian a distant third. Other countries in the Med also make it, e.g. Morocco etc. Italian olive oil has often been found to be adulterated, substituted for lower quality olive oils or just to be a mix of non-Italian olive oils (primarily Greek, apparently) so it's a case of not knowing what you eat.
Anyway, I live in the UK where olive oil is imported and the good stuff tends to be expensive (£30ish for 25lt of Greek extra virgin but of course most people will buy smaller bottles that are more expensive). So my guess is that most olive oil consumed outside the Med tends to be of inferior quality, just because people don't know it well enough to justify spending the price.
So if you experiment with it- get the good stuff. To be honest, I just get the stuff I always do and I have never had to think about quality or smoke points, so my advice is probably a little vague.
Er. You won't set your house on fire just because some crazy Greek person on the internets said it's safe to cook with olive oil, eh? :)
Ah ok good to know, I’ll keep looking for a little smoke. Thought that might mean the taste was getting a little warped. Also might look into making some clarified butter. Great thread.
>> Curd Process - Boil whole milk, let it cool down a bit, and add some older curd, let it sit overnight in your oven with the light on.
I learned recently that curdling milk can be achieved in many different ways: the easiest way is to leave it out of the fridge overnight (unless it's long-life). Especially in a warm environment the lactobacili in the milk itself and in the air will do their job and you'll have curdled milk in the morning. I'm guessing that's probably how the first dairy products were made, though I wouldn't want to speculate about the tastes of the first person to try curdled milk.
Another way is to add some acid like vinegar or lemon. Lactobacili that curdle the milk naturally actually release lactic acid: fermentation is the same kind of anaerobic respiration that happens in our muscles when they're not getting enough energy from oxygen alone. In our case, it's our body burning the sugars in our fat to create lactic acid. The lactobacili in the milk eat lactose and turn it into lactic acid. It seems that this acid production is at least partly responsible for the curdling of milk.
Another common way is to use, er, whey- the byproduct of milk fermentation. Some traditional cheeses (e.g. Greek mizithra and anthotyros) are made by keeping some of the whey in previous batches to ferment new batches.
Yet another way is to use a bacterial culture especially meant to ferment milk, like kefir (please: it's pronounced keh-FEER; not like Donald Sutherland's son). In fact, I learned all this because I started making kefir at home and I got to the point I'm making cheese. It turns out- you can use kefir to make butter also, although I haen't tried it and I don't know the process well enough to describe it.
Finally, there is of course the use of rennet, which is an enzyme found in the er, I think fourth stomach of ruminants, and that's used mainly in cheese making (especially for hard cheeses, it's the stuff that gives yellow cheese curds their texture).
Anyway, fermentation -as in milk curdling, wine brewing, sourdough making etc- is cool.
why do you need such shortenings, can't you use the original version of all the shortening... butter? I have never seen "shortenings" in france. pastries is done with butter and that's all.
Depends on the recipe I want to use. Tortillas call for lard, and I don't think butter would be a good substitute on that. (Actually, I think the only reason I have lard/shortening is to make flour tortillas)
But you are correct, I would prefer to use butter when I can!
EDIT: My parents are also vegan, and I like to cook with them. So I also use it then.
Lard is also good for frying potatoes, though no where near the tastiest (beef fat used to be used for McD's fries, duck fat is amazing... probably goose fat though I've never actually had that one).
The original reason for many was that it was believed that saturated fats were uniquely unhealthy, although it turns out that hydrogenated oils were even worse, so, whoops. Cost is also a factor in commercial preparations.
It's not entirely wrong but it kind of started with an industry having a surplus of vegetable oils and looking for other markets that they could sell it on (it was used for soaps till then).
So they started finding out how to make it food-ready and introduced additional processing so the oil wouldn't go rancid as fast and closer to fats that people were accustomed to (lard, butter).
They were cheaper than the traditional fats, which opened a market.
Then, traditional fats were pushed out due to health concerns.
Nina teichholz has written about the history and offers a dissenting opinion to the recommendations of unsaturated oils if you are interested https://thebigfatsurprise.com/
Not only that, but fully hydrogenated oils are supposed to be quite bad for you. I think. It’s really hard to keep current on nutrition debates and “healthy” is a fairly nebulous concept when it comes to food.
You can read the ingredients on their website[1]. While it's not the healthiest fat for a typical Western diet, it contains zero trans fat(partially hydrogenated), which is the only truly harmful fat. Trans fat is pretty much dangerous in any quantity and directly correlates to an increase in cardiovascular events.
Artificially added Trans fat was banned in the US in 2018.
> The primary dietary source for trans fats in processed food is “partially hydrogenated oils." Look for them on the ingredient list on food packages.
Crisco ~removed (FDA lets you state 0 trans fat if it's less than .5g per serving) trans fats, and partially hydrogenated vegetable oil is no longer an ingredient.
Hydrogenating oils saturates them. According to Wikipedia,
> Partial hydrogenation of the unsaturated fat converts some of the cis double bonds into trans double bonds by an isomerization reaction with the catalyst used for the hydrogenation, which yields a trans fat.
So apparently fully hydrogenating an oil won't produce trans fat.
It's insane. Crisco was basically an industrial product disguised as food. It took almost ninety years for science to figure out that trans fats caused heart disease. Whenever somebody tells me how safe a new food product is, I think about how many people were killed by trans fats before anyone knew how bad they were.
The history of crisco is also eye-opening. It was a waste product from cotton production - chemists were given the task of finding ways to extract money out of left over cotton seeds. Cottonseed oil was previously used to make lamp oil and candles, but that business was dying out. They came up with partial hydrogenation to make it look close enough to lard, and then marketed it as a food product even though very little was known about it at the time. It was also shortly after Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, so people were excited about a vegetarian alternative to potentially contaminated animal products.
> It was also shortly after Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, so people were excited about a vegetarian alternative to potentially contaminated animal products.
History just keeps on repeating itself. The same kind of anti-animal product fashion trend right now is making industrially processed vegetarian and vegan 'meat'-like products viable.
Sucralose a potent sweetener in sugar free drinks but was apparently discovered while developing insecticide. The legend goes that the head guy says 'test it' and the assistant thinks he said 'taste it'. Too much sucralose can start to kill gut bacteria for some people. (Take all this with a grain of salt, I don't remember where I got this from)
Until you have modern approach to health science, you would not notify such long-term effect for any food, so there is no reason to assume any traditional food is more safe w.r.t. such kind of effects.
Nope, pretty sure millions of years of evolution have better equipped humans to eat the wild plants in their environment better than whatever they came up with in a lab yesterday.
Based on what? The Chinese used to chew on cinnabar which they believed to be healthy and give longevity but was toxic, since it is actually mercury sulfide.
Being a plant has nothing to do with it being available to exposure for our evolutionary history as cinnabar certainly predates humanity. Selective pressure is neither quick nor perfect.
More like how marketing and PR in the 20th century made americans believers of the garbage we eat today.
The OJ industry funded PR tricked americans into thinking sugar laden orange juice was healthy and to be included in every breakfast. The same with cereal by Kellog. And PR somehow convinced us that the processed swill called microwavable dinners was actually food.
The rise of PR in the 1900s and its use by the food industry fundamentally altered americans' diet for the worse. Now the same PR machine is being slowly used by processed alt-meat/vegan industry. Profit rather than health is driving american's diet and it hasn't been good for the well being of the average american.
I am also a little nervous about the new alt-meat/vegan food. This stuff has to be super highly processed to emulate the taste of something else so I wouldn’t be too surprised if we learned about health problems later.
In general the food industry likes to take single factors and promote the hell out of them as being beneficial while often making things worse (see low fat for example).
I'm not convinced that there's a coherent concept of real food. Most real food advocates I've seen are happy to eat, say, tofu. They'll admit that technically it's processed, in the sense that it's industrially manufactured by pulverizing soybeans beyond recognition then adding chemicals to the big holding vats. But people say it's not highly processed, or it hasn't lost the natural essence of soy, or whatever. I just can't find a way to extract a meaning beyond "the kind of food that real food advocates like".
Tofu is processed but also incredibly ancient[1]. If it was bad for us, we'd probably have found out about it by now. Ditto for seitan[2], tempeh[3], various pickles and other types of preserved foods, and cheeses. "Traditionally" processed foods get a pass on the "real" food scale because they've (mostly, apart from smoked and cured meats and fish) passed the "is it harmful?" test.
Also true. But arguably it was only possible for those dangers to become known recently. Smoked meats cause cancer. Death by cancer was not so frequent in the past, because fewer people lived long enough to develop cancers that could kill them. Or in other words, they were safe enough at the timescales that people previously operated in.
Also, even though the link between smoked meats and cancer is now as incontrovertible as the link between say tobacco and cancer, the risk is far lower. So it's not like they're wildly unsafe, just kinda sorta of unsafe.
Wouldn't that sort of counter your argument that traditional foods would have discovered the dangers over the ages? Traditional foods could have caused cancer and not been detected, according to your own argument.
"they were safe enough at the timescales that people previously operated in."
If you were a peasant in the 1800s expecting to live till 50, sausages and smoked meat would probably _increase_ your life expectancy due to the additional protein. You would also not live long enough, or eat so much of it as to have a significantly higher likelihood of getting cancer.
The context in which those foods are consumed is different today than it used to be. People live longer and consume way more meat (of every kind) than they used to. If you eat smoked meats and fish (and really any other meats) at the same rates as peasants of 200 years ago, I doubt they'll increase your cancer risk by all that much.
Doesn't the point still stand, though, that you can't use historical usage to prove safety currently (given the change in how we eat food and how long we live)?
Safety is a spectrum really. To give a very binary example we are certain that eating rotten poisonous shark (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A1karl) won't kill you because of historical record in spite of eating rotten fish and eating toxic fish separately both being known lethal things.
It doesn't tell us if it is optimal health wise to do such a thing.
Really 'real food' is latter day religion/marketing based upon what sounds good and validates their emotions/sells the premium product.
The /actual/ ancient past was way more concerned about quantity and physiological performance in a 'can you get big on it' as a positive and 'how likely is it to kill you' as opposed to any high minded ideals.
Despite trying to sound like it 'real food' isn't a real goal or metric in the same way that dog breeds which don't have a purpose other than aesthetics defined by vapid breed standards rapidly become the canine counterpart to the Hapsburgs. Compare to a working dog breed's actual defacto requirements. "Smart enough to keep up with and herd livestock, mean enough to chase away predators but not so vicious it kills the livestock itself." is a real set of goals that constrains it into a functional space to optimize for and can even tolerate some wasteful vanity in appearance selection. Hell even something overspecialized like "Try to be the fastest on the race track without being so badly behaved that they are disqualified." is better.
I am convinced that the underlying issues be they dog breeds or food aren't the real problems but ways of thinking.
It's OK if there's not a universal definition of every concept. Some things in life are culturally subjective - especially cuisine. However, I think an intelligent person can look at string cheese and say that's fake food.
I've started realizing that there is very little space for nuance and subjectivity in discussing things on HN
String cheese is another great example. Most people would identify it as a clear example of "fake food", but it's literally just mozzarella stretched in a particular way.
I have no objection to nuance and subjectivity. There's nothing wrong with someone saying "I like fresh salads and fish and tofu, but string cheese and Big Macs aren't for me". Certainly I wouldn't say that you must eat string cheese unless you have an ironclad reason to avoid it. What I object to (and what I think HN is particularly sensitive to) is trying to sneak personal preferences under the guise of loaded terms like "real food".
Then I guess I'm guilty sneaking my personal preferences. I wanted to have a conversation about the industrial food supply and failed to ask the right questions
The ingredients for mozzarella are: buffalo milk, salt and rennet (and a bit of leftover whey for the bacteria). I’m sure there is far more in a packet of “cheese strings” than that
rennet = enzymes and the original list left out cultures, but there are undoubtedly cultures in their cheese, so the only difference in the lists is presentation.
Anything frozen & prepared seems to be taboo -- like a frozen pizza. But frozen peas and berries are fair game. Everything else seems to come down to branding.
I've seen premade refrigerated pizza fly off the shelf. I've seen drinks with all kinds of highly processed ingredients sell like hotcakes. I've seen condiments with a list of ingredients as long as a phone book purchase by plenty of people that eat only "real food".
Protein powders and supplements intrigue me to no end. These are some of the most processed and unregulated things sold on shelves. But "real food" advocates literally eat them up.
One of my friends is making millions catering to this group. I've been trying to figure out how these shoppers think. To me, it doesn't seem like there's much in common. It seems to be mostly branding.
consider signaling. if you only eat "real food", you give off a vibe (not proof) that you're some mix of: educated, with disposable income, purveyor of quality
this is largely the same with other quasi-positive labels (esp. political ones). lots of $$ to be made here, as people generally want to reinforce both their own and others' perceptions of them.
This sort of thing always seems super american centric to me personally. It's common in chinese households to have a stash of frozen dumplings prepared in-kitchen, or frozen steamed buns, or various other frozen prepared foods that are kitchen staples. I get that if it's from a restaurant or big processing plant you might find things questionable, but if you prepare your own pizza and decide to freeze it for later I don't think anyone should besmirch you as suddenly less healthy compared to eating the pizza as soon as you made it.
I don't think anyone has a problem with food you cook and freeze. "Frozen foods" in this context are generally understood to mean "packaged frozen food, prepared by the seller" (which excludes the corner case of a local charcuterie preparing and freezing something).
I think many people do have a mistaken impression that frozen produce is less nutritious than fresh. Kind of an inverse version of the "health halo" that attaches itself unjustifiably to products like "pure, natural" cane sugar.
I had that mistaken impression until this very second, and I've been buying a lot less vegetables than I should for fear of fresh ones going to waste. Guess I have a good new years' resolution now.
> Anything frozen & prepared seems to be taboo -- like a frozen pizza
> I've seen premade refrigerated pizza fly off the shelf.
To be fair most frozen pizza is terrible - pre-baked bread that you're reheating, little better than frozen cheese toast. Whereas premade pizzas tend to be freshly made and you're baking the dough. So they taste a lot better.
You're giving the marketing department way too much credit in my opinion.
Pretty much all of these highly processed foods are highly processed in order to reduce cost in some way (e.g. increasing shelf life, decrease storage requirements, use a substitute ingredient, remove the need for some other product, etc). All the finicky bits of producing food (e.g handling ingredients that are much less shelf stable than the final product) and abstracts that away to some factory somewhere. All of this seems like you're getting something for nothing if you don't know it's unhealthy.
The technology and processes used to create stuff that is recognizable as "modern industrial food" were mostly developed and matured over the late 1800s and early 1900s. For reasons that should be immediately obvious cheap and shelf stable became highly sought after traits for ingredients in the 1930s and 1940s. Likewise a generation of people grew up seeing their parents shoe-horn products like Crisco into use cases formerly reserved for other more natural ingredients. Considering that they grew up on it it's no surprise they stocked their 1950s and 60s cupboards and pantries with the sorts of products that they were familiar with from their youth.
Of course marketing is icing on the cake but things, like cooking habits, that you generally learn from your parents are generally resistant to fast change without some sort of strong outside motivation.
I think Chris Kimball of America's test kitchen spoke on this, one of the other big reasons that American's went from lard to Vegetable shortening was because lard is used in ammunition, so in world war II, much of the production of lard went to the war effort, so folks started to use shortening instead.
Thank you for a detailed and nuanced history. No doubt the industrial processed food supply was necessary for the population growth in the latter half of 20th century. The agriculture industry will need some massive overhauls to survive the next century
All makes sense but I'd say that there is also the factor of trying to maximize particular nutritional traits for marketing purposes ("no saturated fat," "no fat," "no sugar added," "no nitrates," whatever).
I think it's a spectrum of realness rather than real or not real - I also really dislike the title of this article as it connotes stuff that isn't literally conveyed. Industrially produced food is what nearly all of us eat, our sausages, our kale, our milk... all produced on an industrial scale.
That said, I think I value food that has fewer steps in preparation as being "more real" so I'd prefer something like a meat and onion skillet to beef wellington or a clumped cream chicken pot pie.
Sorry to clarify - I'm not worried about industrially produced kale - but the kale you buy in the supermarket is industrially produced.
I think the title is terrible for choosing that specific word - I'd much prefer a title like "How Crisco Made Americans Believers in Artificial Food". And in actuality it's more of an issue of the government not preventing wholly unhealthy food from finding the wide markets they have.
If I buy them from the butcher at the end of my block who make them in house, they're not real food? If the butcher makes them at the store and takes them home, they're not real food?
What if I make them at my house and take them to someone else's home?
It isn't pedantry, though. People talk about 'real' food, but they don't really have an idea of what that means except that it 'feels' real. I think this goes a long way to show that 'real' food is a meaningless statement, and we should stop using it... it doesn't mean we are pedantic.
Apologies. My post was too harsh and impersonal—dealing in generalities when a human whose concerns and actions are particular was involved. Sorry about that. Have a nice holiday season.
It’s not semantics. I’m trying to understand what OP means by “real food,” because I suspect he’s peddling nature woo.[1] Heavily processed food, like sausages and cured meats, have been a basic part of the human diet for millennia.
Yes. They're also bad for you if eaten regularly. Not all "real food" is healthy. Not all "fake food" (whatever that means) is unhealthy. They're orthogonal concepts.
IMO any processed food that hasn't been around for a couple of generations should be treated with some suspicion.
If you want to define "processing" a loosey-goosey definition might be "anything that can't be done in the average kitchen using ingredients commonly found at a grocery store". By this definition, maybe breakfast cereals aren't processed - you could make Grape Nuts in your kitchen if you were sufficiently determined and masochistic. But it's a decent heuristic otherwise.
For example, say "We'll save you tens of man-hours a week" vs "we run on docker containers [etc]"