Food Rules #3: Avoid Food Products Containing Ingredients that No Ordinary Human would Keep in the Pantry

Ah, yes the 15-letter ingredient. No one's ever waxed poetic about a food memory where calcium propionate (the perservative used to keep bread & baked goods from molding) was involved, have they? I may have gotten a little ahead of myself in yesterday's entry re: Rule #2 with the "foreign" ingredient stuff, but a lot of Pollan's rules overlap and you may find me repeating (or contradicting!) myself.

So, with regard to industrialized ingredients that I can barely pronounce and whether to eat them: ask yourself if you'd rather have a strawberry milkshake from some fast food place that is essentially a laundry list of ingredients that are thrown together to TASTE like strawberry, or if you'd rather wait until those first tiny strawberries are ready at your local farmer's market and eat those? Sure, you can't have them year round, but won't that make eating them that much more special and enjoyable? I think about walking around the farmer's market and getting really excited about the first berries, or tomatoes, or asparagus and how they are going to taste and what to do with them. I love that feeling and thought process!

I just opened by signed copy of the Alinea Cookbook and there is actually a section devoted to the special (industrial, to be fair) ingredients that Grant Achatz and his team use in the kitchen to create their works of art. (and I believe I'm not exaggerating when I call them works of art. I've had the extreme fortune of eating there, courtesy of my good friend Colleen and it's pretty mind blowing). Ironically enough, Alinea lists 30 ingredients in the book that allow them to heighten your culinary experience there, to create a "pure" explosion of flavor, that are mostly really chemicals. Voted one of the top 10 restaurants in the WORLD, and they're using "Pure-Cote B790" and "Ultra-Tex 3"? Hmmm. But I would argue that there is a difference between going to Alinea and eating a dish of white beans with Guiness foam, possibly the best beans I've ever tasted (because of the Ultra-Tex?) and a large factory processing beans that have been genetically modified to taste like beans, sprayed and stuffed with chemicals to keep them tasting good and stockable for months - no, years!- on the grocery store shelves that will NEVER have that same texture no matter how long I cook them or puree them. And, dining at Alinea is not how I eat on a regular basis, or how most Americans eat at all. But we DO eat food that comes from that factory pretty much every day and probably would not choose to eat it if we knew what those chemicals are or do to our health.

There are so many ways to look at it; I could argue in either direction all day. But instead what I'll do is look at labels more closely and try to make an informed decision about what I will and won't put in my body that day. This weekend it MIGHT be canned beans to mix up with the Cedar Valley ground beef for chili. But I will surely think through it before I do.