A beautiful egg salad sandwich is a triumph of household economy.
It’s tasty, think of a deviled egg sandwich because deviled eggs are really at the heart of making egg salad. Add to that a few crunchy, cold lettuce leafs and sandwich it all between two lightly toasted slices of good bread, the result is a beautiful sandwich for lunch. For a good egg salad per serving you will need:
2 Hardboiled eggs, coarsely chopped
1 Large tablespoon of minced onion
1 Large tablespoon of mayonnaise
1 Teaspoon of Dijon style mustard
1 Splash of Worchester Sauce
¼ Teaspoon of smoked Spanish paprika
1/8 Teaspoon of ground celery seed
½ Teaspoon of freeze dried chives
Thoroughly mix the above together and there you have it – egg salad, which I guess is something of a throwback to an earlier culinary age. That’s precisely the point. If you are like me, until I rediscovered the delicious beauty of an egg salad sandwich, most of us have to think a long way back to when we last ate one. Why should that be?
It’s economical. My sandwich, garnished with a dill pickle and few pickled beets, served up with a glass of milk and an orange for dessert cost less than $1.30.
It’s satisfying. This lunch will neatly tide you over until supper time.
And lastly, it’s quick. Aside from the time needed to boil the eggs, this simple lunch took less and 10 minutes to assemble. Should I have made this luncheon for four, it might have taken another 10 minutes, but probably less.
This is good household economy of time and of basic foods. And it is a good household economy we desperately need to return to. It’s one from which we are being pushed away.
A Flood of Fear Mongering Propaganda
Yet for all of this beauty, the food police of the industrial, consumer food economy would be quick to warn me of the perils of eating this sandwich. In the course of just two days I’ve been warned not to eat:
Bread and other foods made from wheat. It contributes to heart disease. [Full Text];
Bacon, sausage, ham and other ‘cured’ meats. These are associated with colon cancer and heart disease [Full Text];
Salads, chicken, ground beef, imported seafood, farmed salmon, raw oysters, raw milk, deli and buffet food (including deli egg salad which is not nearly as good as homemade). These are loaded with food poisoning pathogens [Full Text].
This is on top of the long warnings that I should not eat mayonnaise, dairy products, eggs and most dietary oil and fat on account of their artery clogging cholesterol. (The fact that possibly most of us are not physically active is only secondary the in consideration of the health our hearts and arteries, especially when statin drug therapy can reduce our blood cholesterol levels and leave us with a pleasant affirmation of good health.)
Cholesterol Laden Killers
You see, my delicious egg salad sandwich, from the view of the industrial food economy and the food regulators who oversee it, is an agent of early and untimely death. It’s an unhealthy combination of bread, iceberg lettuce, eggs and mayonnaise. Yet that’s not the case. Instead they should urge me to pack a delicious egg salad sandwich for lunch once or maybe twice a week. And they should not discourage a quick omelet for supper once in a while.
From about the late 1970s, as I recall, until about a dozen years ago, eggs were believed to be cholesterol laden killers. We were told it was best to avoid them. And if we must use them in cooking, then we were to use commercial egg substitutes or just the whites. The dietary science has advanced since then. Now an egg a day is generally considered a good thing. They pack a ton of protein relative to their calorie content, which means that if an egg is part of your breakfast you won’t be carving a junk food snack at 10:00 a.m. [Full Text]
Egg demonization demonstrates just how wide of a brush the protectors of health paint with in their constant propaganda war on the household economy. Hence the constant barrage of news stories on what I should not eat. The purpose of this is to make us fearful of our meals.
A Lunch of Boiled Bean Curd Stuffed Wantons for Crying Out Loud
These busybodies occupy our bureaucracies and our halls of higher learning. Their fingers nervously twitch at the prospect of micromanaging our affairs. They dream of the day when I lunch exclusively on boiled bean curd filled wantons.
Things get worse as soon as our meals are enveloped in the industrial economy. Once there our lunch is no longer in their realm of fantasy. It’s real. It’s regulated. It’s politicized.
Our nutritionists only see an industrial national diet where for breakfast it's a sausage, egg, cheese and muffin sandwich is eaten on the way to work, some sort of double cheeseburger with bacon, a large order of fries and a supersized sugary soft drink for lunch, and for dinner it’s fried chicken with sides of biscuits & gravy and macaroni & cheese. In their mind’s eye they see it, day in and day out, we are eating to die early and for our own good, and possibly restoring the solvency of the nation, something must be done about it. (Public “health care” costs are driving the nation’s deficits.)
The solution of course is dietary regulation. Strict dietary guidelines for school nutrition programs are a starting point. Nutritional labeling for fast food chains and other retail food outlets like grocery store delis is certainly a common sense requirement, enabling us to make healthy food choices. That no-brainer has been neatly tucked into the 2000 page Affordable Care Act. The regulatory code is being promulgated as I write this. [Federal Register Full Text. It’s worth a quick glance because it reveals just how absurd the federal regulatory environment has become.]
A Pizza Rebellion
The pizza chains have taken exception to this nonsense. The Washington Post reported that Domino’s says that there are no fewer than 34 million ways its pies can be customized and that labels are irrelevant. Industry wide 90% of pizzas sold are ordered by phone and most in store customers don’t pay attention to nutrition “boards” and labels when they order anyway. [Full Text]
The new labeling regulations will do little to improve American’s health, but that’s not point of it. It opens the door for more intrusive, or should I say more robust, regulation, such as regulating the ingredients in the dishes we are served and the size of the portion. On this score New York City leads the way. The city banned trans-fats a few years ago and is now limiting the size of containers in which soft drinks may be served. There is no reason this order of regulation couldn’t go national. New Yorkers are willing to put up with it. Why shouldn’t we all?
It’s not inconceivable that the U.S. food stamp program, now serving some 47 million of us, could adopt some sort of public health related rationing provisions. It’s being discussed.
The Truth Behind the Modern Diet
In terms of diet and disease, our diets have taken two huge turns in the past hundred years. The first began in the 1920s when gas and electric ranges became common, and refrigeration opened the door to an escape from seasonal eating. Processed food products entered the market. In the 1920s, Bird’s Eye frozen vegetables and Skippy Peanut Butter were born. And the curvy Coca-Cola bottle took its shape. The second happened in the late 1960s and progressed through the 1970s, franchise fast food and ready to eat convenience foods flourished.
Our meals moved from the household economy into the industrial economy and we got fat. Since the late 1800s the obesity rate in the 40 to 69 age cohort was about five percent. Today it’s 25 percent for those of us between 40 and 49 years-of-age, nearly 40 percent of us between 60 and 69. What’s changed is that our calorie intake has increased by 20% since the 1970s and since 1947 through 2005 our sugar consumption has increased fivefold. [Full Text] That’s most of the story on diet and health.
On the whole we are not quite as physically active. It’s not the saturated fats, or the eggs. We sit too much and then feast on our highly subsidized, FDA approved, industrial food economy. Think of corn syrup, refined polyunsaturated seed oils and Wonder Bread.
The solution of course is to return to our kitchens, to make our own meals and to avoid commercial soft drinks. Simple, but it’s more complicated than that.
Abdicating the Household Throne
Once something moves from the household economy into the industrial economy we suffer in innumerable ways. First, in one way or another we get sick, then we abdicate personal choice for the wisdom of the ‘collective;’ and finally we settle for something we otherwise would find absolutely unacceptable. It is happening to our meals now. Our schools have long been on this trajectory.
The more ‘federalized’ and divorced from the household economy they have become the more dismal they are. This is not to berate the women and men who teach. They are called upon to fill the void left by the collapse to household economy.
In the household, reading and literacy walk hand in hand with language acquisition. Infants and children who are read to, before and as they begin to speak and throughout their early childhood, do well. In the absence of that we hope Head Start will fill void. It doesn’t.
Today, 80% of the kids graduating from New York high schools are deficient in basic math and language skills. [Full Text] And worse, the federal government is busy creating a massive and intrusive database tracking our kids from preschool through the twelfth grade. [Full Text] With the proper data set, we can of course track outcomes and more neatly tailor our programs to achieve their desired results.
It’s all nonsense and dehumanizing claptrap.
In an age of federal micromanagement, Washington seems hell bent on a march toward bankruptcy. A handful of our largest states are already there. And even more of our cities are struggling to find a way out their insolvency. You would think politicians and public administrators would have more pressing obligations than regulating the size of soft drink containers and insisting fast food stores include on their menu boards a detailed nutritional profile of every item. Whatever.
G.K. Chesterton observed that when we lose our way it doesn’t make sense to keep marching forward until we tumble over a cliff in the darkness. It is better, he said, to wait for daylight and then backtrack some until we find the trail from which we’ve wandered. Upon finding and returning to the right path we will better find our way.
