Adventures in gastronomy

Hardee's has a buy one, get one free deal going for the Beyond Meat Thickburger so the S.O. and I tried it today. It's been a while since my last trip to a Hardee's, but I'd swear the faux meat tasted better than what they claimed in the past was the real thing. Then again, there is a reason it had been quite awhile since our last visit to a Hardee's.

They're doing a sausage patty with faux meat, too, but I have no desire to ever try that. I figure one fake meat patty in the interest of research is enough not just for now but indefinitely.

The S.O. said that to him the Beyond Meat patty was rather flavorless. I didn't see the problem. So are the real beef ones Hardee's serves so flavor is kind of irrelevant. I was more interested in texture and how close the patty came to masquerading as a regular fast food burger. It passed that test, but considering just how bad the typical fast food burger is that's not saying much. Damned with faint praise?

In the good news part of the experience, the fries were better than I remembered.

Life goes on

I violated one of my personal rules yesterday. I shopped at Walmart, aka The Evil Empire. We needed some cup hooks and a couple other nonfood items that Dollar General didn't have when we walked over there the other day. Dollar General is maybe two blocks walking distance from the Guppy.

Walmart is also walking distance, the equivalent of maybe 4 blocks away, but we decided to drive. I'm not sure that was a good idea. One of the drawbacks to the Guppy is it has a typical RV refrigerator. It's about the same size as the ones you find in motels that stand about waist high and have a freezer big enough to hold one ice cube tray if you put it in sideways. In the Guppy's case, the freezer is actually a decent size, but even so cold food storage space in general is rather limited. I came really close to buying more stuff that required refrigeration than the 'fridge would have held if I hadn't caught myself. Given the general lack of storage space in the Guppy, I think I may revert to behaving as though I'm walking whenever I shop. I learned years ago that the trick to not buying too much when you're on foot is to either use one of those small baskets you carry or to just put stuff in the child seat area on a shopping cart. When either one is full, you're done. Unless, of course, you have one of those little personal shopping carts. I had one in Atlanta that I used when taking the bus to Kroger; the trick then was to use my own cart in the store so I'd never exceed its capacity.

I normally do not shop at Walmart. Ever. Way too many of their corporate policies have been detrimental to the American economy. People complain about outsourcing, jobs going overseas, and then cheerfully shop at Walmart for the low prices. But you know why many of the jobs went overseas? Pressure from Walmart on vendors to provide goods cheaper. At one time they were bragging about all the stuff they sold that was "Made in the USA." They had to stop doing that a long time ago because they got nailed for false advertising.

They're also notorious for screwing over their employees, e.g., bragging about a health plan that's actually pretty good but does require a minimum of 30 hours of work per week to qualify for. Most employees end up scheduled so they never meet that 30 hour requirement. And when workers ask for more hours because they need to make more money what do Walmart managers tell them? They give them information on how to apply for Food Stamps and Medicaid. Walmart is the country's biggest welfare queen. They keep wages low and expect the rest of us to prevent their workers from ending up homeless and malnourished.

I will concede Walmart as a corporation has done some good, innovative stuff. You know why juice bottles, margerine tubs, and other food containers have lost or are losing their round shapes? Walmart pushed for it. Square or rectangular containers don't waste shelf space. Remember when deodorant and other toiletries came with a lot of cardboard packaging? Walmart pushed for getting rid of it because it ate up shelf space. Quite a few Walmarts have solar panels on their roofs and LED lighting in the stores -- they figured out a long time ago that going green could save them money. They have an amazing Just-in-Time centralized inventory system that set a standard for retail everywhere. But I digress.

We shopped at Walmart. Once again I was struck by just how huge those Super Center stores are. The one here in Safford even has benches placed in random locations around the store, maybe so the retirees that flock here in the winter have a place to collapse and catch their breath before continuing the trek from the hardware (light bulbs, cup hooks, etc.) side of the store over to the grocery section. After you've been walking for what feels like a couple miles, you start thinking that maybe next time you should arrange for a guide and a couple Sherpas to carry your gear.

Anyway, we eventually made it from the cup hooks (the extreme southern end of the store) to the food stuffs (the north end) without even having to pause at one of the rest stops. (The S.O. said he could understand the benches by the changing rooms in the clothing section; they give husbands a place to sit and nap while wives are trying on clothes, but the others baffled him.) The Kid has been complaining that food prices here in Arizona seem high compared with Missouri, but I don't know. The prices at the House of Satan struck me as much, much better than what I was used to spending at Larry's in Baraga. Then again, it was Walmart. Maybe the other nicer markets like Safeway and Basha's run higher, something I'll learn soon enough.

I did find one thing at Walmart that was for sure made in USA: gulf shrimp. I've been wanting to make shrimp and grits for ages but could not find any frozen shrimp in the UP that did not come from southeast Asia. I have absolutely no desire to ever eat shrimp that came from a fish farm in Vietnam, or, for that matter fish or shellfish of any kind that has China as a country of origin. As for why frozen instead of fresh, I think the answer is obvious when the closest ocean is over 1,000 miles away.

Shrimp and grits, incidentally, is one of the few things I can thank the state of Georgia for. Never had them before we moved to Atlanta but then discovered (a) I like them and (b) it's a really easy dish to make. Here's the recipe I use:

Smoky Shrimp & Grits

1 cup grits
2 oz. chorizo, thinly sliced, or an equivalent amount of bacon
1 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
1-1/2 lb medium shrimp, peeled and deveined
salt and pepper
1 lb plum tomatoes, chopped
Fresh parsley for garnish (optional, obviously)

Cook the grits according to the package directions. (I prefer using the old-fashioned slow-cooked ones, but instant would work if you want to save a few minutes.)

Meanwhile, heat a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add the sausage or bacon and cook, stirring for 2 minutes. Add the onion and cook, stirring often, for 4 minutes. Stir in the garlic.

Season the shrimp with salt and pepper, Add to the skillet, tossing occasionally, until opaque throughout, about 3 minutes.

Add the tomatoes and toss to combine. Spoon the shrimp and tomato mixture over the grits and sprinkle with chopped parsley, if desired.

The recipe came from a Woman's Day Month of Menus, a feature the magazine discontined last year and the reason I'll probably never buy a Woman's Day magazine again. Ever. But that's a subject for a different post. 

Multiculturalism on the dinner table

Curried Lentil Soup; photo from Woman's Day

Back in the 1970s when I was much, much younger and spent a good part of my day dealing with a couple of little barracudas, figuring out what to have for various meals was a definite annoyance. You know, it's bad enough that a person  has to cook 7 days a week, but meal planning on top of the kitchen drudgery? Not fun. Just about every cookbook aimed at novices (which I was) includes some sample menus but doing the same half dozen dishes over and over gets old fast. Then I discovered this wonderful feature in Woman's Day magazine: the month of menus. Something different for every day of the month. It wasn't always something I particularly wanted to cook and on a fairly regular basis I'd get annoyed by the food editor's assumption that every reader was going to easily find the same ingredients in their small town IGA that someone living in New York City could track down, but the menu at least presented possibilities. If the menu said something about fresh fish, it was easy enough to substitute some frozen cod.
Fast forward forty years. I'm still using the Month of Menus, and I still regularly curse the food editor for some odd ingredients -- farro? What the hell is farro?! -- but the menu still serves as a handy way to provide more variety on the dinner table. It has changed over the decades, of course. Back in the '70s it would include basics like meat loaf. It also included a suggestion for a simple dessert. A suggested Sunday dinner might be fried chicken with gravy, mashed potatoes, salad, and sliced bananas in orange juice. They had no problem including stuff like frozen fish sticks or canned fruit cocktail as ideas.

There is no way either of those items would make it on to the Month of Menus now. The menu makes concessions to people's hectic lifestyles but you're still going to do a lot of from scratch cooking. And the suggested desserts vanished in the '90s. Woman's Day still publishes a lot of dessert and snack recipes but apparently you're eating that stuff at other times of the day, not when dinner ends.

All of which brings me to the thing that caught my eye this month. Two things, actually, although the multiculturalism has been creeping in for a long time. Fusion cooking is nothing new to anyone who reads Woman's Day. They've been pushing stir fries of various types for decades, doing various Latin dishes, and introducing readers to the use of fresh ginger root, lemongrass, and other spices for a long, long time. The February menu includes a couple of curries, tofu tacos, feta salsa verde, and a number of other goodies that show just how far we've traveled since the 1970s fried chicken or basic spaghetti with a hamburger meat sauce. There is no hamburger, no ground beef in any form, on the February 2016 menu.

Granted, there are burgers. Turkey burgers. (I shudder at the thought, to be honest. Had we done burgers on that particular day, they would have come from a shredded cow.) In any case, red meat in the form of beef is almost nonexistent on the menu. It turns up about once a week. Pork, chicken, and fish make appearances more often. But what struck me was the number of vegan dishes. Yep, vegan. No messing around with halfway measures and simply going meatless -- the menu includes several dinners that I could serve to vegan friends with no worries. Like the tofu tacos, which actually sound pretty good. The way the tofu is prepared it might actually be edible. If I can managed to track down some tofu (Larry's doesn't carry it; apparently there aren't many tofu eaters in Baraga County), we'll test drive the recipe.

Woman's Day used to do Meatless Mondays as part of the menu. That feature has vanished; they've switched to a stealth approach. Which is fine with me. An occasional vegetarian or vegan recipe strikes me as a good idea, a sensible thing to do when beef can be a real budget-buster, especially when the resulting dishes don't make a person feel like they're sacrificing anything. We did a curried lentil soup (a soup that I'd be inclined to call dhal, but if Woman's Day doesn't want to be explicitly ethnic, that's their call) yesterday that is really good. I'm clipping the recipe; we're going to do it again. I have a hunch we'll probably save and repeat the other vegan curry, too. It uses chickpeas. I'm not quite as optimistic about those tofu tacos, but you never know.

Curried Lentil Soup

1-1/2 tbsp olive oil

1 large onion, chopped

2 cloves garlic, finely chopped

1-1/2 tsp cumin

6 cups low sodium vegetable broth

1-1/2 cups red lentils

2 large carrots, grated

4 sprigs fresh thyme

1 tsp curry powder

1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

2 bay leaves (optional)

1 cup light coconut milk

Kosher salt and pepper

Cilantro, for garnish when serving

Heat the oil in a large pot over medium heat. Add the onion and cook, covered, stirring occasionally for 6 minutes. Stir in the garlic and cumin and cook, stirring, for 1 minute.

Add the borth, lentils, carrots, thyme, curry powder, cinnamon, and bay leaves (if using); bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer, stirring occasionally, until the lentils are just tender, 12 to 15 minutes.

Add the coconut milk and 1/2 tsp each salt and pepper; simmer for 5 minutes. Serve with cilantro if desired. Makes 6 servings.

I didn't have fresh thyme so skipped it (I was afraid powdered might be too intense) and used only one bay leaf (it was big). We also skipped the cilantro; I'm one of those people who thinks cilantro tastes really nasty and can't understand why other people like it. I really liked this soup. It was fast and easy to make, it's low cost, and it's a nice, hardy soup for a winter day. Best of all, because there's just me and the S.O., it made enough that I was able to put two containers into the freezer so we're getting three meals out of prepping for one.

As for farro, thanks to the magic of Google I now know that farro is a type of primitive wheat. It is being touted as a substitute for quinoa as it is equally nutritious. If it's showing up in Woman's Day recipes, one can only assume that it can be found at Whole Foods or Trader Joe's. I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for it to make it to Larry's.

The latest in the ongoing saga of what to put in my coffee

The giant jug of Sysco honey is now gone, which means I have an excuse to buy a normal-sized bottle from a local apiary. It also means that as part of the cupboard-clearing-out exercise I have moved to the next bottle of liquid sweetener in the cabinet: a 22-ounce jar of something called "Grand-Paw's Moonshine Syrup" from Helm Farms, the same source as the pure cane syrup I used a few months back.

Grand-Paw's Moonshine Syrup consists, or so the label tells me, of a mix of cane syrup and corn syrup. It is a much lighter color than the cane syrup and is also much smoother. There is, in essence, no discernible taste. It is sweet, in a very mellow, unobtrusive way, but other than that? It has less flavor than Karo syrup, if one can imagine such a thing. I have absolutely no idea what the calorie count might be on this stuff, although one would assume that it's similar to the calorie count for honey, i.e., higher than the calorie count for granulated sugar but not by much. Not that I care much; if I worried about calories, I wouldn't be using sweetener at all.

The one thing I have noticed that makes this syrup a tad different from the last two sweeteners I used as part of the cupboard-emptying exercise is it's really, really thick. I have no idea if that's a function of age (it has been in the cabinet for several years now) or if it's the way Helm Farms refined it. It's just obvious that compared to the honey and the cane syrup, it's got a high viscosity. It makes molasses look fast.

And what else might I have learned from using this stuff? If we're in Texas and I see it on a farm stand or in a local market, ignore it. We do need to keep some syrup around as a just-in-case for my diabetic cat (if she starts acting more lethargic than usual or has a seizure following an insulin injection it'll supposedly be a sign that her blood sugar has dropped too low and I'll have to dump some syrup down her throat), but ordinary Karo will do just fine for that -- and it too has a shelf life of "forever."

The Moonshine Syrup is, incidentally, lighter in color than the photo renders it. 

Adventures in cookery

I am not noted for my culinary skills. The S.O. jokes about the smoke alarm serving as a dinner bell with good reason. I have a bad habit of getting distracted and allowing things to become a tad crispier than they were meant to be. Despite that, I do like trying out new recipes occasionally.

Yesterday I decided to try a recipe for a Rhubarb Strawberry Jello pie. I've heard of people using strawberry jello in rhubarb pie, but I had never attempted it myself. My fallback recipe for rhubarb pie is the one my mom used -- it's the three ingredients one (rhubarb, sugar, eggs) that's so simple that after a person had made it once they never need to consult the recipe again. Still, I'm trying to use up last year's rhubarb before this year's gets big enough to be picked and frozen. Much as I like that pie recipe, doing the same thing over and over does get a little old. It seemed like a good time to try something different. So I did.

The recipe for the Rhubarb Strawberry Jello pie came from a community cookbook sold by the Aura Volunteer Fire Department a few years ago. The fact each recipe has a person's name associated with it sort of serves as some reassurance -- surely no one will contribute recipes that don't work when people will be thinking of that recipe as Martha Harju's Shoo Fly Pie or Jennifer Tikkanen's Killer Brownies. I'll be nice. I won't mention the name associated with this particular rhubarb recipe.

The recipe itself looked intriguingly simple. You dump the rhubarb into an unbaked pie shell and then sprinkle a package of strawberry jello over it. This gets topped with a mix of flour, butter, and sugar. I got the impression the topping would be a sort of streusel type of topping, kind of like what you find on some apple pies. Nope. It was more like a form of concrete. You shouldn't have to get out a chisel to cut a pie. It was definitely one of the stranger outcomes I've had in baking. The pie itself tastes fine, but that topping is really, really odd.

There are several other rhubarb pie recipes in that cookbook, including another strawberry Jello one, so next time I may try one of them. They're all over the map, though, on how much sugar is appropriate for a rhubarb pie. They all use the same amount of fruit (4 cups) but the sweetener? Anywhere from 3/4 cup to 2 full cups. I'll probably pass on that last one. Rhubarb is tart, but there's no way it needs that much sugar to take the edge off.

The cupboard cleaning continues

The cane syrup is gone. I've moved on to the Sysco honey. It looks remarkably dark, so dark in fact that the S.O. wondered what it was after I'd transferred some to a squeeze bottle, but it's really honey.

I have heard people claim that they can tell the difference in flavors with honey, that the honey from bees that have gorged themselves on one type of flower produce a honey that tastes different than bees that have indulged in others. I don't know. I've had commercially produced honey (the national brand names like Sue Bee) and honey from backyard hives and can't tell the difference. To me honey always just tastes like . . .honey. The Sysco "light amber" (which makes me wonder just how black "dark amber" would be) Grade A honey is no exception. It may be almost as dark as molasses, but it still tastes like honey.

I think I may have idiosyncratic taste buds, though, because when I went looking for the usual calorie comparison information the text said that although honey has more calories than sugar (23 per teaspoon opposed to 16) it's sweeter so you don't have to use as much. I've never found that to be true. To me honey isn't particularly sweet at all. It's not a bad taste, but it's also definitely not as sweet as either sugar or cane syrup.

The honey was a gift, too, an unopened jug that was among leftover supplies from a girls' camp in northern Wisconsin. I think I've mentioned before that an acquaintance works there as a maintenance person and ends up with a ton of various edibles every fall when they clear out anything and everything that might tempt raccoons or other varmints.

Speaking of sweeteners

This what I'm using in my coffee now. The post about agave nectar reminded me this can of pure cane syrup was sitting in the cabinet. The Younger Daughter gave it to us while she was living in Texas. I've had old-fashioned cane syrup before -- I bought a pint jar at the Jarrell Plantation in Georgia (a really nifty state park, incidentally) a few years ago -- and knew that it had a stronger flavor than most commercial syrups. Cane syrup is what you get when you crush sugar cane and boil down the juice. In commercial sugar production, the juice is centrifuged -- the lighter-colored sugar rises to the top and eventually becomes refined sugar. The darker solids that sink end up as molasses. Cane syrup is what happens when you boil cane juice to evaporate liquids and stabilize the sugars without using a centrifuge. You end up with a product that tastes vaguely like molasses, but is lighter in color and doesn't have as strong a taste. The Jarrell Plantation, incidentally, does living history demonstrations of how sugar cane was crushed and processed in the antebellum South. I'm not sure if that's the source of the bottled cane syrup in their gift shop, but it could be. The process for making cane syrup is remarkably simple: you need something to crush the cane, something to catch the juice as it runs off, and a huge cast iron kettle in which to boil that juice down.

Mule-powered cane crusher

In any case, we'd been gifted with the can of cane syrup, it had migrated to the back of the cabinet and forgotten, and then I had the agave experience. So now I'm using cane syrup in my morning coffee. How does it compare with other sweeteners? Not surprisingly, the calorie count is about the same. The Helm Farms syrup does have a vague molasses-like flavor, but it's just a hint. It's not as strong as the flavor of the Jarrell syrup.

When I was Googling cane syrup, I found a New York Times article that quoted cane syrup aficionados who claimed old-fashioned ribbon cane syrup was much, much better than refined sugar. According to one person, sugar has a bitter taste compared to cane syrup. He also claimed to be able to tell exactly which field sugar cane had been harvested from by the taste of the syrup, kind of like wine snobs who swear they can tell which hillside in Burgundy produced a certain vintage. Apparently, if you want to use an authentic sweetener down South, you should be using cane syrup in your tea, your baking, and anything else that requires a form of sugar. I don't know if I'd go that far. At this point, I'm feeling the same way about the cane syrup as I did about the agave: it's working in the coffee, but am I going to actively seek more out once the current supply runs out? Probably not. I know there are still commercial cane mills out there that produce ribbon cane syrup -- you can buy Steen's cane syrup through Amazon if you don't live in the South -- but why bother, especially once the cane syrup is gone, I've got an industrial size jug of Sysco honey the Older Daughter gave us a few months ago.*

Although what I should probably work on is eliminating both the sweetener and the coffee from my diet. I don't need the empty calories and the caffeine is not good for my SVT. Oh well. I managed to break my Dr. Pepper addiction. Maybe someday I'll manage to step away from caffeine completely. (And the proverbial pigs will fly.)

*A slight digression: I know people who would freak if they heard me talk about using cane syrup that was more than a year or two old or honey that's been sitting in a cabinet for god knows how long. News flash, people, sugar doesn't rot. Neither does honey. They're what gets used to preserve other things. Honey is the only food that for sure never rots. Archeologists have found jars in Egyptian tombs where the honey was 3,000 years old and still good. I'm not sure if pure sugar falls into that same category, but I'm willing to bet that it does. If archeologists someday find a sugar canister that's thousands of years old, the sugar in it may have turned into a rock from absorbing moisture, but it's still going to be perfectly edible sugar. 

Food fads and the gullible

I have written before about food fads, things that are promoted as being better than whatever it is we're used to eating and of course cost a whole lot more. I've found another one. Agave nectar.

Back when I still worked at the Centers for Disease Control, one of my colleagues began pushing agave nectar as a substitute for sugar. I'm not sure why. Supposedly because the agave nectar is sweeter than sugar, you'll use less of it. If the reason for using agave nectar is to cut back on calories, you'd better hope that to your taste buds it seems a whole lot sweeter because when you start comparing calories on a teaspoon to teaspoon basis sugar wins. Sugar has 16 calories in a teaspoon; agave nectar has 20. Anyway, at the time the agave nectar was being pushed by my colleague, I humored her, used it in my coffee, and thought to myself, "Okay. Not bad." So the next time I was at Publix I looked for agave nectar.

Remember the quinoa experience? Well, agave wasn't quite as much of a sticker shock eye opener, but at the time it struck me as fairly pricey for the amount the bottle contained. However, back then (this was about five years ago), agave was a recent arrival on supermarket shelves and Dr. Oz (who's apparently never met a food fad he didn't love) was pushing it on his show. He has since back peddled. For various reasons (market forces? economy of scale?) the price has dropped; it is now cheaper ounce for ounce than honey. It is, of course, still a lot more expensive than cane sugar.

Like the quinoa, the agave nectar was a gift. I have a friend who works at a summer camp that caters to rich kids from Chicago; every year when the camp shuts down at the end of the season the staff have to completely empty the kitchen. Anything that is perishable, might attract varmints (e.g., raccoons), or would be ruined by freezing is removed. Some of it goes to area food pantries and some goes home with the maintenance guys who in turn pass some on to friends and family. Last year I was the recipient of several boxes of quinoa, probably because I actually knew what the stuff was (or was the only one who was willing to try it). This year it was a bottle of agave nectar.*

Unlike the quinoa, the agave nectar is actually edible. It's nicely innocuous. When I dump it in my coffee or tea, I can't tell the difference between using it and using ordinary sugar. Am I using less in terms of total amounts than I would if it was the usual teaspoon of sugar? Who knows. It's hard to do a side by side comparison when agave is a liquid and sugar is a solid. Is there an advantage to using agave instead of sugar? I'm not sure. I've heard some people tout it as being more "natural," but from what I've read the process most commonly used for extracting it from the agave plant is as highly industrialized as the process involved in making high fructose corn syrup. There's a lot more involved than just crushing the plant and boiling the resulting sap. There is a type of traditional agave nectar that comes much closer to the type of processing used for traditional cane syrup, but that's not the agave nectar you're going to find on the shelves at a typical Kroger.

In any case, whether traditionally produced or cranked out in an industrial refinery, the sugars in agave are primarily fructose, which, as other writers have pointed out, puts agave a whole lot closer to being just another form of high fructose corn syrup than it does to anything that's actually good for you. High fructose corn syrup has gotten a bad reputation for a reason: research has shown that the human body does process fructose differently than it does sucrose. High amounts of fructose in a person's diet can contribute to the development of metabolic syndrome, i.e., that lethal combination of weight gain and type II diabetes. So why on earth would anyone think agave nectar would be a healthy alternative to ordinary sugar?

I have heard that hard core vegans like agave nectar because it doesn't involve animals in any way, shape, or form. They substitute it for honey because they apparently view honey as off limits because it's bee vomit and therefore an animal product. Well, cane sugar, beet sugar, maple syrup, and Karo syrup have always been 100% non-animal products, so why agave would suddenly look more appealing than any of the non-fructose loaded alternatives baffles me. It has to be yet another triumph of marketing cancelling out common sense.

Of maybe it's just that magic "organic" seal on the bottles. Who knows. It's a mystery.

*I get other stuff, too, but it's not as much fun to write about a giant unopened bag of Kellogg's Froot Loops or the institutional-size jug of stir fry sauce. Unlike the quinoa, the Froot loops did not end up in a bird feeder.  

Say Whoa to the meatballs?

Years ago, way back when we lived in Panorama City, right in the heart of the San Fernando valley, a scandal broke concerning a fast food chain that forever after we've referred to as "Jack in the Pouch." It turned out the hamburgers Jack was peddling were made from kangaroo meat. Not surprisingly, most Americans were thoroughly freaked out by the idea of eating Kanga and 'Roo; as a rule, we don't consider Disney* characters to be edible. The biggest scandal, of course, was that they'd snuck the kangaroo meat in for economic reasons. Ground kangaroo cost less pound per pound than ground beef.

Apparently the same thing is true of horse meat in Europe. Ground horse is cheaper than ground cow, so some meat processors have been stretching the bovine with equine. In a weird twist, it turns out horse meat is healthier for human consumption because it's leaner and less loaded with cholesterol and other bad stuff than beef. Nonetheless, when horse meat was found in ground meat sold by Tesco (a major supermarket chain in Great Britain), consumers were outraged. I can understand the dismay. People like to know just what it is they're grilling; adulteration is a bad thing, regardless of whether the product is being stretched with sea weed, textured soy protein, sawdust, or dead race horses.

Since the original scandal broke, I personally was rather taken aback to learn that one of my favorite food products, the Swedish meatballs served at IKEA (and sold frozen in the Swedish Food Market section of the stores), had been found to contain horse meat. Can I ever look at the 15-meatball plate again and not wonder just what the gravy is hiding? Is it possible to see whip marks from the jockey on a meatball? Can the lingonberry sauce compensate for a nagging sense that I'm chowing down on My Little Pony? How long will it take before someone discovers horse DNA in ground meat being sold as beef in this country?

From a purely pragmatic viewpoint, I don't see why some people are upset by the idea of eating horse meat. Dead animal flesh is dead animal flesh; livestock is livestock. It shouldn't make a difference that horses are more aesthetically pleasing to look at than cattle or that books like Black Beauty and My Friend Flicka were written about horses instead of cows. If it's okay to barbecue beef, than it should be okay to barbecue horses. I personally don't know if I'd ever eat horse meat**, but as long as it was clearly labeled as such, I'd have no problem seeing it sitting in the meat case at the local IGA. Who knows? Maybe if the price of beef and the price of hay both keep climbing, we will be seeing USDA-inspected Dobbin in butchers' cases in the not too distant future.

[*or A. E. Milne icons, if you're a purist.]

[**I didn't think I would be able to eat reindeer meat either but once it was on the plate in front of me Rudolph tasted just fine.]  

Is there any other type?

Have supermarkets started peddling potatoes grown in vats? Is there some new secret process for producing spuds that doesn't involve dirt?

And what unnatural oil might be like? WD-40 maybe? Or maybe 10W30?

I'm also mystified as to why any company feels like it has to include advertising on the bag the product is in. I'm pretty sure that anyone who's pulled a bag of chips off the shelf has already decided those chips are going in the shopping cart.