The modern world has given us many wonders including flushable toilets† and antibiotics but why has it produced such food travesties?
Unsurprisingly many are American, and a direct outgrowth of its Puritanical approach to anything sensual. Sensuality is pleasurable and hence must be deeply suspect or some such garbage.
The rest is an outgrowth of the loonie vegan movement and its deep disregard for history, common-sense, and nutrition.
Here's the list of Culinary Hindenburgs:
- cheese in a can ("the CC fuckin' kids you not!")
- decaffeinated coffee
- non-alcoholic beer
- "white" chocolate
- tofurkey ("kill me, kill me now!")
- fat-free frittata
- low-carb bread
- gluten-free bread ("how? bread = gluten, quite literally!")
- "vegetarian" Thai food
- "flavored" martinis ("gin, gin, gin!")
† Every time you flush, remember that you are enjoying a luxury that Marie Antoinette never had. Don't trust the CC? Go check out the Palace at Versailles!
4 comments:
I commiserate with your disdain about 1,3,4 (why not call it candy?), 5, 6, 7, 9 and 10. However! I understand the logic that gave birth to 2 and 8: decaf will never taste as good as caf, but some people have a very strong response to caffeine (it's genetic) and I don't see how denying them even the adulterated taste of decaf is fair; gluten-free bread was developed for people with celiac disease. That it has now been embraced by every fool with a fear of real food and no intestinal biochemistry to base it on is sad, but it does not change the fact that gluten free bread, a wonder of chemistry, is the only way celiacs will ever get to eat bread. (I've translated cookbooks for celiac patients, so I consider myself the resident expert on this teeny topic...)
The CC knew someone would call him on it.
However, the CC just has a moderately different version take on the subject -- don't call it "bread".
That works, yeah?
The CC has made more meals than the commentator on the celiac-disease folk but this is as much about reclaiming territory as it is about calling a spade a spade.
Just don't call it bread!
My intuition was to say the same thing when first presented with this quandary of non-bread bread, but it was explained to me that the appropriation of the name (which causes us psychological discomfort) is precisely to ease the psychological discomfort of celiacs. They are often diagnosed in late childhood, and so have a notion of what "normal" food is. Then all of a sudden nearly everything is prohibited. There's two ways to present what's still allowed, a) "but, look! here's all this new stuff you *can* eat", or b) "but you can modify all your beloved foods in such and such ways to make it safe". It turned out (b) was associated with better compliance with the celiac diet than (a).
Aah yes! the all-American, "Everyone's a winner syndrome"!
Why does everyone assume that kids are idiots?
Surely you are better off seating them down and explaining what just happened rather than pretend that something that did actually happen didn't happen, and the whole world will just rename everything after you.
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