It’s ugly. A burgeoning bureaucracy threatens to take command of our menus.
In an editorial that appeared in my local paper, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Traci Flood and George “Chip” Morris wrote, “Obesity’s effect on the country is epidemic, meaning forceful and immediate action is essential.” Flood is pediatric research fellow at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Medicine and Public Health. Morris is a past president of the Milwaukee County Medical Society. [Full Text]
Their mission is to save ourselves from ourselves.
They say: “This intervention is not a “nanny state” issue. It’s a “take the gun out of their hands” issue and a “systematic attack of obesity with American Leadership” issue.”
Food production, processing and distribution are all highly regulated industries. This is supply side regulation to ensure that our food is wholesome. What Morris and Flood are calling for is something new – consumption side regulation, to ensure we eat balanced healthy meals. Healthy is defined by regulatory code and municipal ordinances. We are calling upon regulators so save us from ourselves, to as they say “take the guns out of our hands.”
On this New York’s Mayor Mike Bloomberg is leading the way. He’s not alone. The First Lady, Michelle Obama, successfully shepherded the 2110 Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act through congress. [Full Text News Story] The unhappy legislation imposed controversial rules that set rigid dietary guidelines on our school lunch programs. [USDA Healthy, Hunger-Free Web Page] It should be noted, in an ironic Orwellian twist to this story, that the dietary guidelines implementing this law have been suspended until the food processors develop “products” that comply to the new law. [Full Text]
White bread, whole milk and French fries are out. Tofu, skim milk, oven roasted sweet potato “fries,” whole wheat bread and raw vegetables with a low calorie ranch dressing are in. Some schools have banned the brown bag lunch. This oversight is needed because as Morris and Flood tell us, one out of six kids is obese.
Substituting the enriched white bread with whole wheat will change nothing other than satisfy the elitist notion that whole wheat bread is significantly more nutritious than the white. Not true. [Full Text] (This same group turns its nose to iceberg lettuce despite the fact that it made year round green salads a staple on American tables.)
The problem isn’t the bread. We’ve changed how we eat, and mostly not to the good.
Stewed chicken and dumplings were once an everyman’s Sunday dinner, but not so much anymore.
It’s a dish that might show up as an entrée on the menu at neighbor café or a decent truck stop, alongside the open faced hot roasted turkey or pork sandwiches served with mashed potatoes and gravy. These places too, are being pushed aside by franchise America. Over the past fifty years our food culture has dramatically changed. That which we once knew as everyday home cooking is fading into the past. Maybe it’s time to go retro.
It’s easy enough to bemoan the decline and fall of our food culture. To do so however, is short sighted and foolish. Set before us is bountiful table, unprecedented in human history. Rather than moaning about it, it should be celebrated.
A Hot Lunch for America on the Go
Even the often maligned McDonald’s burger chain often viewed as nothing short of the culinary anti-Christ is anything but. Ray Kroc unleashed nothing short of a small miracle upon America. His franchise set the benchmark for quickly serving a consistently tasty, inexpensive hot lunch that could be eaten on the go.
Kroc didn’t change our food culture. Our life styles and culture changed. Kroc was simply riding the crest of that wave. TV dinners were called TV dinners for a reason. To an alarming degree we’ve turned our backs to our culinary past.
While our bellies are full, we’re not necessarily well fed. It seems God did not intend that we live on burgers, fries and soft drinks alone, but he certainly programmed us to prefer them. Human evolution coupled with abundance finally culminated into an ironic “social welfare” crisis. Hunger is no longer an overwhelming social concern. Obesity is.
Food Nazis to the Rescue and the Elephant in the Room
The same food industry, stocking our grocery stores with frozen TV dinners, is processing lower cost, less appealing and high volume versions of the same for our school lunches. It’s a somewhat more institutional version of the institutional foods kids grow up with. At that point the, unlike McDonald’s chicken McNugget, the generic chicken nugget is very little chicken. It’s mostly fill and fat. The deference in flavor is made up by labs in the business of whipping up chemical flavorings.
Animals are fed a scientific blend of meat protein, corn and soy feed. Our kids are fed about the same.
Those who are in charge of the kids’ lunches are forced pick and choose from what these industrial mega-commissaries offer. Those who manage school cafeterias in fact do not know a whit about cooking, and are much less expert banquet chefs. They are managers who can control costs within a budget, efficiently manage labor and are expert regulatory compliance clerks. Nevertheless, they do want to serve foods that kids will eat – often that’s third and fourth rate chicken nuggets and similar delights.
In an industrial food economy, bureaucratic dietary food police make good sense. In a home food economy, not so much.
In an odd way, we are seeking an institutional (legislative/regulatory) solution for a problem that is wholly institutional (legislative/regulatory policies that favor industrial food production and processing).
A Women’s Church Guild Conscription Act
In our cooking we need to look back. In rural America the good women cook up beautiful banquets for weddings, and at the drop of a hat for funerals too. In North Dakota and Minnesota the organizing force behind these feasts are the various Lutheran Women Church Guilds. Elsewhere it’s probably much the same but not necessarily Lutheran. The bounty that spilled from their kitchens included delicious casseroles and “hot dishes,” delightful home canned pickles and relishes, salads, and an abundance of home baked goods.
Before centralized school districts and institutional food service managers, these women were put in charge of school hot lunches. This was before what the kids despairingly now refer to as “mystery meat” began turning up on their lunch plates.
Maybe these good women should be conscripted and pressed into duty, running our school cafeterias.
The Stewed Chicken Solution
In that context, those home cooked “comfort foods” should be reintroduced to our tables in a way that fits our time pressed and overly busy lives. Call it retro home cooking for the Twenty-first Century. Often the problem is not the preparation time but the cooking time. That is problem that is neatly solved with a little forethought and timed-bake feature on our ovens or a crock pot. In the stewed chicken and dumpling dinner pictured, the preparation time was less than thirty minutes, in less time than it takes to preheat an oven and bake a frozen pizza.
The chicken, on the other hand, took two and one-half hours to bake. That’s a problem that can be solved by cooking them the night before or cooking them in a timed oven. I would think about four hours at 300o would do fine – covered and baked in low sodium chicken broth.
Dumplings
The dumplings are quick. These ones fall more to biscuit side of the spectrum between noodles and biscuits. They are like spätzle but with much more baking powder. They poof up more than spätzle. To serve four you will need.
¼ cup milk
1 egg
1 cup flour
2 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
In a mixing bowl dissolve the salt and baking powder into the milk, then whisk in the egg and finally add the flour to mix. Drop tablespoons of the batter into slow boiling water or stock. Allow the dumplings to continue boiling, for about five minutes, after they have risen to surface of the boiling liquid. Transfer to a 200 o oven to keep warm while making the gravy.
Stewed Chicken
4 Chicken Legs
32 Ounces Low Sodium Chicken Broth
Salt, Pepper and Garlic to taste
3 Tablespoons flour
This would be better with a stewing hen. These however no long show up in the grocery. They are ground up for more profitable chicken nuggets. Chicken legs, however, are normally stocked and often very favorably priced in five pound bulk packages.
Oven brown the legs in a skillet, with a cup of stock, for an hour in a 350 – 375o oven. Add the remaining stock and continue baking the chicken covered at 3000 for an hour or until the meat is falling from the bones.
Season the pan dripping with salt, pepper and garlic to taste then thicken into pan gravy with a whitewash of flour and water.
Serve with dumplings with both swimming in gravy. A mix of boiled root vegetables such as carrots, rutabaga and parsnips is a wonderful complement to this plate. So there you have it – a simple every man’s Sunday dinner fit for a peasant king.
