Mexican Radio

Funny thing about governments; they're all keen on prohibition right up until the moment they aren't. Take, for example, the US appetite for Mexican food:

As long as Mexican food has existed in this country, government has tried to legislate it out of existence. This is partly because of stereotypes but mostly because government is government. The resulting underground Mexican food economy, meanwhile, has birthed some of the cuisine’s most innovative trends. 

It's this same US racist leanings that first saw cannabis prohibition in the 1920's, seeing how the blacks and Hispanics preferred reefer madness to whiskey tremens. Ironic really, considering that you will never find the perfect taco in a franchise store. Only that Yank diet of orange gloop they call cheese, and unfeasibly large cups of lolly water.

Recipe for Zippy's Nachos El Grandes soon ( a la Che Tibby). It's mouth-wateringly good and eye-wateringly bad, but it's more work putting a RastaChef post together than you might think. The lens keeps fogging up and the lighting budget is Lilliputian. But the Slow Cooking movement is like the civil service. In the fullness of time and all.

Food Fight

Anyone who grows or eats food should have a listen to food activist Raj Patel's Feeding Ten Billion. It's about 45 minutes long and covers the myth of the Green Revolution, Mathus, Food Sovereignty, Feminism and the Malawi Food Crisis. Stay tuned til the end, where a question is answered with a Time Bandits reference.

Or you can read Patel's essay in Foreign Policy here.

And now, here's various post-WWII conflicts played out by national dishes of their combatants:

Adiós CC's

Food manufacturers continue to consolidate their supply lines. The latest casualty in this right-sizing is Bluebird's CC's and Aztec Corn Chips. They have been replaced by a locally-made version of the Americana trash Doritos. As a fond nacho lover (you should try my Nacho Grando el Gonzo plate), Zippy Gonzales is not amused. Fortunately, there's still Mexican Supplies. Just as Whitaker's chocolate is to Cadbury, Mexicano Corn Chips is now my preferred supplier.

 
Kiss my kidney beans, Big Food!

Branded Food Fights

Cadbury has been causing all sorts of badwill in NZ, from screwing with the size and recipe of its chocolate bars, to offshoring and screwing with the formula for its Creme Eggs, Minties and Wine Gums.

Nestle is learning a similar lesson over in Oz, after the food giant had a Greenpeace ad critical of palm plantations removed from YouTube. Negative comments on Nestle's Facebook page have been deleted, as well as threats not to take the brand's logo in vain:

When Nestle's company Facebook page was flooded with negative posts from 'unfans' the company moved to delete them and any altered logos that appeared on the social networking site.

"To repeat: we welcome your comments, but please don't post using an altered version of any of our logos as your profile pic - they will be deleted," Nestle's moderator wrote. 

Incidentally, one of the free speech tragedies of the Top Secret ACTA treaty will be to make criticism and mockery of these superbrands punishable by disconnection from the internet. Thou shalt not make graven images of brand names. Yeah right.

Milking it

There's a certain amount of caveat emptor involved with buying stuff. Take Fiji Water, for example. But there is a reasonable limit. Hot on the heels of a study saying all that added crap in milk is at best useless, there's some signs that added crap in a water solution can be downright harmful.

Whole water, manufactured by Fonterra, contains fibre and milk protein and it says so where it has to. More fool Kristy Oxenham if she was to give her toddler lolly water without reading the ingredients. You'd get as much sympathy from me on your plight by feeding your daughter Coca Cola or Gatorade.

But, but but... if consumers are stupid enough to buy bottled water containing weird shit because it is packaged in opaque bright colours, what marketing ideas were also considered before this one rose to the top of the To Do List? Here's a few guesses:

Pongo Milk - Milk with added suphur, for authentic Rotorua experience.
Beef Flavoured Primo - Not a winner in NZ, but the USA market loves it.
Calci Stick - Condensed milk calcium in solid form. Dismissed when chalk discovered as main competitor.
H2J - bottled water with added gelatine. Aimed at weaning toddlers off eating paste or mud.

Folatio

Truth be told, folic acid is not my favourite low pH chemical. Lysergic acid would probably come tops on that league table, followed by acetic (on the Fush n Chups), citric (for vodka), and hydrochloric (all-purpose). Folic acid would sit somewhere way beneath even sulphuric acid, so useless is it to me on a personal utility basis. However, folic acid is integral in maintaining good DNA, like rust-proofing a car or tarring a hull. Important as it is, I still don't care. I get my share of this nerd of acids regardless due to a jar of Marmite in the pantry.

However, the circumstances of fertile women are somewhat different from mine. A deficiency of folic acid in women who become pregnant is a leading cause of spina bifida. Spina bifida is a bone fide bloody awful thing to have. A mate of mine, Madame Guru, once worked for a charity fundraising arm of a Spina Bifida NGO and she filled me in on all the misery that goes with it. A lifespan lucky to reach into one's twenties, the contorted bones, etc. It's a goddamned shame to risk such affliction unnecessarily.

So I can sort of see where Nanny Labour Five was coming from when Oz offered an easy out in their trans-Tasman accord. Only thing is, there's a significant minority around this land that already have doubts on the fluorodation of public water supplies. Throwing folic acid indiscriminately in everyone's bread to save, what, 3 lives a year?, was bound to stir up a hassle. C'mon, look how the public reacted to the shower nozzle hosing. Turning food into medicine was always going to be a problem.

It says a lot by how Kate Wilkinson and National have been so completely blindsided by this thing. The Nanny State antogonism was a large part of National's election platform not one year ago and here they are crunching the gears over the adulterated bread.

It's not as if we export bread to the Lucky Country. Why should Oz care how we make our staple? Can't be arsed looking, but how much of NZ's wheat is sourced from Oz? I'm assuming it's quite a bit. Maybe it's because it might be easier just to folate all our flour along with the rest of Oz's, seeing how their populace wouldn't know how to make a tortilla from scratch if their life depended on it, what with all the processed crap on their menu. That would save the wheat producers a bit of hassle at their end. So this is not just a matter of three lives a year. The folate thing lowers an export barrier to the Oz suppliers, seeing as how they won't need to differentiate our product from their own.

As for the folate cancer link, who knows? I do know that kids eat a craptonne more bread than the fickle fertile chicks. Best source of folate for them is their predilection for spinach and feta cannelloni. Mind you, folate is not the only thing these chicks lack. It's iron. By far the easiest way to solve the spina bifida problem without favouring the Ozzies is simple. Make chicks eat Marmite. That way you can leave the bread alone.

OK, because I'm a pluralist, I'll plug Vegemite too. And if you're looking for an experiment in excess folic acid consumption, see what happens to the consumers of their new Vegemite Cream Cheese concoction, which I call Vegecrack. I bet Kraft Inc. are hoping it works out better for their bottom line than their last Cheese with Vegemite experiment.

P.S. Vegemite - Fuck your EULA.

Interesting Times

More weekend links:

#NZonScreen has posted up the first full period of Mr Gormsby and an old documentary on Ralph Hotere and the evolution of one of his commissioned works.

#I'm glad I grew up when it was OK for an eight year old to have his own pocket knife. It was a time when it was still considered a tool not a weapon. These days kids are so goddamn high maintenance. Movie critic Roger Ebert blogs on Free Range Kids:

We live in a reign of terror. Outside the home, molesters and drug pushers lurk. Children drown, are hit by cars, shot, electrocuted, bullied, burned, stabbed, attacked by pit bulls, or kidnapped and end up with their photos on milk cartons. When they play, they make "play dates." They can ride their bikes outside--but don't leave the block. They can shoot baskets, but in the driveway, or at a supervised playground. If some kid tells you to go f*** yourself and you whoop him, you'll be seeing his parents in court. If he comes over to play and falls down your basement stairs, you'll get sued for the house.

#Mother Jones has a big dig on the US military budget. With chapters such as Where is My Flying Tank? and The Axis of Pork, it goes to show one more flavour of financial shit that the US is in.

#Property rights to the ends of the earth - One of the few delights on acquiring my old mortgaged shoebox apartment in Auckland some years ago was reading how my land was actually an airspace and 1/26th share of the stairwell that lead back down to the earth. I, or more precisely the bank, owned a concrete and fibreboard tethered zeppelin.

Things are a bit different in Britain, where they consider property based along Roman precedent: "[C]uius est solum eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos” (“for whoever owns the soil, it is theirs up to the sky and down to the depths”) You can see reflections of these things from a Maori perspective on the Foreshore and Seabed matter.

#Last week's 60 Minutes programme looked a lot more interesting on the ads than the programme actually was. In an attempt to replicate the findings of a very rigorous overseas study, the reporter set up their own little experiment. This was supposed to show off the dangers of artificial food colourings in processed foods, a serious and deserving matter judging by some of the research findings. Instead, we got kids ODing on sugar and saying that it's actually the food colourings. The only conclusion I reached halfway through was clear. Current affairs reporting teams don't know shit about science.

One group of kids was fed only natural food and another bunch with only junk food. Afterwards, the ones who ate the party food were bouncing off the walls. One little show-off in particular caught the cameraman's attention. His Mum admits that little X doesn't normally eat any junk food in his diet, let alone sit don't to such a deliquent banquet as the one served up by 60 Minutes.

In short, it was crapulent reportage. And it's not just me. The Science Media Centre has called bullshit too:

"The experiment conducted by TV3 was probably one of the most biased you could ever hope to see and only showed that if you hype children up enough with expectations and make them very excited about unlimited treat food that they hardly ever have then they will behave badly."

#And talking about food, E. coli has been found in Nestlé cookie dough. So, you might say, shit happens. But consider:

Health officials still do not know how E. coli 0157, a bacterium that lives in cattle intestines, ended up in a product that seems so unlikely to contain it. The risk usually associated with cookie dough is salmonella, a bacterium that can be found in raw eggs. None of the ingredients in the dough -- eggs, milk, flour, chocolate, butter -- is known to host E. coli 0157.

#The Tao of Physics - Niels Bohr adopted the yinyang as his personal totem for a good reason. Hot on the heals of the Dalai Lama saying that democracy not theocracy should rule his homeland, the monks are learning physics. About time.

#And finally, what would the cast of Battlestar Gallactica look like on the Simpsons?

Food for thought

Y'know how you count 7 dog years for every human year? The way things are set up in the States (and probably Mexico) these days, one human year equals six chicken lifetimes. Hormones and crap that makes one yearn for the simplistic barbarity of fois gras. In order to bring you the best tasting product with the cheapest shittiest ingredients, check out the HD movie trailer for feature length documentary Food, Inc.

I'm a green banana:

Lost my lunch

Back when I did my Purgatory of Dilbert at Telecom's now-defunct call centre on the flood-prone riverbanks of Lower Hutt, the only viable food source apart from BYO and the onsite vending machine was a KFC. Years after walking out of that asylum, it's a rare thing for me to go to a KFC any more.

But following on from last week's Burger Wars post, I tripped over another franchise bunfight today, this time between KFC and the small but plucky El Pollo Loco. Read all about the new beef-flavoured chicken, or, more intriguingly, read what goes into KFC's secret recipe. It's not so much to prevent trademark infringement, but more to prevent customers from throwing up:

You can find the secret, though, by perusing the company's "ingredient statement" (pdf), where we learn that, besides chicken and beef, there are more than 20 other ingredients in the grilled chicken and its marinade. The top one: salt. Near the top: monosodium glutamate. KFC advertises the product as having "less sodium than our Original Recipe chicken," which is a little like saying that a donut has less sugar than a candy bar.

It gets worse. Here's the recipe for popcorn chicken, from that pdf:

Diced Chicken Breast Meat Fritters with Rib Meat, Seasoning (Soy Protein Concentrate, Salt, Modified Food Starch, Food Starch, Carrageenan, Onion Powder, Dehydrated Chicken Broth, Spice Extractive), Sodium Phosphates. Breaded With: Enriched Wheat Flour (Enriched with Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Salt, Rice Flour, Spices, Wheat Gluten, Leavening (Sodium Bicarbonate, Sodium Aluminum Phosphate, Monocalcium Phosphate), Monosodium Glutamate, Corn Starch (with Tapioca Dextrin), Garlic Powder, Citric Acid, Maltodextrin, Flavorings, Sugar, Corn Syrup Solids, Gum Arabic. Predusted With: Enriched Wheat Flour (Enriched with Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Modified Food Starch, Autolyzed Yeast Extract, Salt, Leavening (Sodium Bicarbonate, Sodium Aluminum Phosphate, Monocalcium Phosphate), Monosodium Glutarnate, Garlic Powder, Spices Dehydrated Chicken Broth, Maltodextrin, Citric Acid, Sugar, Flavorings, Corn Syrup Solids. Battered With: Water, Enriched Bleached Wheat Flour (Enriched with Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Modified Food Starch, Modified Wheat Starch, Rice Flour, Garlic Powder, Autolyzed Yeast Extract, Salt, Dextrin, Sodium Caseinate (with Soy Lecithin), Modified Cellulose Gum, Spices, Leavening (Sodium Bicarbonate, Sodium Aluminum Phosphate), Mono and Diglycerides (as emulsifiers). Breading set in Vegetable Oil. Contains Milk, Soy and Wheat.

Now I know why only poor people and teenagers eat that crap. Anyone literate would lose their lunch. Here's some more banned comics:

Burger Wars

There's a food fight brewing over the increasing role of attack ads in the franchises, according to The Economist. Pizza and sandwich makers are trading insults, Maccas is getting snarky with Starbucks. Take this example of soup stirring:

Campbell’s, for example, launched a campaign last autumn for a new line of ready-made soups. These asserted that a rival, Progresso, used monosodium glutamate (MSG). Progresso responded with an ad saying that Campbell’s also used MSG. In the end, many analysts say, both firms suffered.

And now, here's some old school banned comic strips:





Heh. One man's 2T-FRU-T is another's H1N1.