Eater - All |
- The Noom Paradox
- A Recipe for Lazos, the Best Puff Pastry You’ve Never Had
- The Labor Disputes at Amy’s Kitchen, Explained
- How 100 Tons of Oysters Are Farmed Off the Coast of France
- This Story Stinks
- Eater Wins 2022 National Magazine Award
- These Vegetable Cutters Make Work-From-Home Lunches So Much Cuter
| Posted: 07 Apr 2022 08:11 AM PDT |
| A Recipe for Lazos, the Best Puff Pastry You’ve Never Had Posted: 07 Apr 2022 07:30 AM PDT  In the little Spanish town of Pradoluengo, Ramon Alarcia bakes bowtie-shaped puff pastry worth crossing an ocean to eat If you take Spain's curvy A-1 highway a full three hours northeast of Madrid you might end up in Pradoluengo. But, then again, you might not, since this is probably the first time you're hearing about it. I try to get to Pradoluengo as often as I can. It's where my dad was born and where a lot of my family still lives. My most recent trip, which I counted as number 11, was last November, and like the seven or so trips before it that I've taken alone as an adult, the route was the same. It always goes like this: I take a six-hour flight from New York to Madrid, after which I fall asleep on a two-hour bus ride from the airport to Burgos, the stunning city in Castilla y León and my closest point of reference when people unfailingly tell me they haven't heard of Prado. At the Burgos bus station I tear up instantly as I catch a glimpse of whichever aunt, uncle, cousin, or some combination of the three is waiting for me. From there, we catch up over the 45-minute, sunflower-field-lined drive to Prado. My visits are typically spaced a little over a year apart, but little about Prado changes while I'm gone. (During that November visit, the elders in town were a bit pissed about a new camping lodge that opened up with an attached restaurant and boutique, while the younger generation was pleased to welcome a business that's doing what it can to put Prado on the map.) All of which is to say, Pradoluengo is a small town. How small? Its most recent headcount clocked in at around 1,151, and my family will be the first to tell you that that number is only getting smaller. Pradoluengo sits at the bottom of a green valley, its name, meaning "long meadow," an attempt to describe its long and narrow shape. Here, buildings are no taller than five stories; there are no stop lights; and there's only one major intersection, a fork in the road anchored by Regoluna, one of Pradoluengo's few but very beloved bars. Still, there is plenty of room for two panaderías. One is Panadería Pastelería Alarcia, a bread and sweets bakery well into its fifth generation of ownership. Its current owner, Ramon Alarcia, took over the shop in 1994 after studying confectionery in Valencia and apprenticing at a Madrid pastry shop. Before Ramon came along, the tiny storefront was known as Panadería Alarcia and sold only fresh bread to the town and its neighbors. Ramon runs the shop with his sister, Maria, and mother, Amparo, and the trio only closes each year from December 25 to January 1. One of the early additions to Alarcia's sweeter offerings after Ramon took over? Lazos, or lacitos, meaning "ties'' and "little ties," respectively. Pieces of puff pastry are twisted to look like bows, baked, and then soaked in honey and powdered sugar. Imagine your favorite turnover or tart drenched in honey and sugar, and that's the genius of a lazo. On my last trip, Ramon was kind enough to show me around his kitchen, a short walk from the bakery, which smells of fresh loaves and pastry cream. He confirmed for me what I've known since I first tried lazos and attempted to find anything online about them: Little is known about the confection's history. I did find a few Spanish cooking blogs that aligned with Ramon's recipe, though his version notably (and proudly) uses flour from Briviesca, a town known for its flour mills about 30 minutes away, and honey from Burgos. (If you're trying to learn about the history of puff pastry, the Internet is generally no help: There's a lot of insistence that puff pastry was invented by a French dude, when in truth the Arab influence on Spain can't be discounted when you're discussing who made the first puff pastry.) Needless to say, lazos are largely unheard of in the States, even among my food media colleagues. I bring a box from Panadería Pastelería Alarcia back with me after each trip, and so far no one has seemed to notice that the lazos took a car ride, a two-hour bus trip, and a six-hour flight to get to them. They might even taste better that way. But even if you can't make it to Pradoluengo, you can make Ramon's lazos from his recipe, printed below. Lazos RecipeMakes approximately 30-36 pastries Ingredients:For the puff pastry: 800 grams flour, divided For the syrup: 800 grams sugar Powdered sugar, for serving Instructions:Step 1: First, make the lean dough. Using a stand mixer with a dough paddle, combine 600 grams flour, eggs, and salt. Mix together until a dough forms. If the dough is too dry, add 1 tablespoon of water at a time and continue to mix until the dough comes together. Step 2: Pat the lean dough into a square and wrap in plastic. Let the dough rest in the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes. Step 3: Combine the cold butter and 200 grams flour in a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment. Cream the butter and flour together until well combined: The mixture should be pliable, but still cold. Transfer the mixture onto a floured surface and pat into a square roughly the same size as the lean dough, wrap with plastic, and rest in the refrigerator until well chilled. Step 4: Place the lean dough on an evenly floured surface and put the chilled butter mixture in the center at a 45-degree angle so it looks like a diamond in a square. Roll out the corners of the dough just so there's enough to cover the butter when you fold the dough over it (like an envelope). Roll out to a 10-inch by 15-inch rectangle about 1/4-inch thick. Make sure your rolling pin and counter are well-dusted with flour. Step 5: Facing the long side of the rectangle, brush off the excess flour. Brush the entire surface of the dough with cold water. Fold the right third of the dough towards the middle, then fold the left third of dough over it, enclosing it like a letter. This is the first "turn." Step 6: Wrap the dough in plastic and chill in the refrigerator for 30 minutes. Then roll the dough out again and repeat the folding steps for a second turn and chill in the refrigerator to rest. Repeat these steps for a total of 4 turns, resting in the refrigerator for at least 15 minutes after each turn so that the dough stays cold. Step 7: Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Step 8: After the 4 turns, roll out the puff pastry into a 1/8 inch-thick rectangle measuring roughly 10 inches by 24 inches. Using a pizza wheel, divide the large sheet of puff pastry in the middle. Brush one side of the dough with water and layer the second sheet on top. Use a rolling pin to firmly press the two sides together. Step 9: Trim the sides of the puff pastry to straighten the edges. Cut the puff pastry into 1-inch-wide vertical strips using the pizza wheel. Then cut the strips horizontally along the middle. Step 10: Form the lazos by taking one strip of puff pastry and twisting it at the center to form a bow. Place the puff pastry sheets on top of a baking pan lined with parchment, about 1 to 2 inches apart. Step 11: Bake the lazos for 15-20 minutes, until golden brown. Step 12: While the lazos are baking, make the syrup by combining the sugar, water, and honey in a sauce pot. Heat until the sugar dissolves and a syrup is formed. Remove from the heat and allow to cool. Step 13: Take the lazos out of the oven and cool until they can be handled. Step 14: Once they've cooled, soak each lazo in the syrup for no more than 30 seconds and place on a wire rack over a baking sheet to drip. Serve with powdered sugar. Ramon Alarcia is the owner of Panadería Pastelería Alarcia, a bakery in Pradoluengo, Spain. |
| The Labor Disputes at Amy’s Kitchen, Explained Posted: 07 Apr 2022 06:19 AM PDT  Amy's Kitchen prides itself on being a "positive impact" company. Its workers say they have a long way to go. "We're now proudly B Corp certified!" chirps a green banner on the homepage of Amy's Kitchen, the organic packaged and prepared-foods giant. It's positioned above an image of the company's founders, the Berliner family — Andy, who is currently the CEO of Amy's Kitchen, with his wife Rachel and their daughter, Amy, after whom the company is named — dressed in down vests and worn-in scarves, smiling and windswept in front of a blue sky. "B Corp certification is awarded to businesses that use profits and growth as a means to a greater end: Positive impact for their employees, communities, and the environment," Amy's explains in a blog post from March 2021. "The B Corp community works toward reducing inequality, lower levels of poverty, a healthier environment, stronger communities, and the creation of more high-quality jobs with dignity and purpose." Amy's Kitchen positions itself publicly as a conscientious, feel-good choice for consumers. Since 1987, it has been stocking freezers and pantry shelves around the country with organic burritos, bowls, soups, and pizzas, catering to people with vegetarian, vegan, and gluten-free diets (or just anyone who likes breakfast burritos in a convenient frozen form), with branding and imagery that evokes rustic farms and hippie sensibilities. The company remains family-owned, and reported anticipating $600 million in revenue in 2020, bolstered by consumers into the company's natural, "fiercely independent" ethos. However, workers at Amy's allege that the conditions at the company's plants are antithetical to its stated core value to "take care of people" and "treat our employees like family, with honestly, inclusiveness, and compassion." On January 17, NBC News published an investigation into workplace conditions at Amy's Santa Rosa, California, plant. Three days later, representatives at Teamsters Local 665 filed a complaint to Cal/OSHA on behalf of some of the same workers quoted in the NBC piece. And earlier this month, the Teamsters filed an additional complaint to B Corp, the organization that provides certifications to for-profit businesses regarding their "social and environmental performance." The latest complaint calls for B Corp to investigate Amy's and, if necessary, revoke its certification. "Amy's Kitchen has demonstrated a callous disregard for workers' health, safety, and human rights in violation of the B Corp Declaration of Interdependence," Teamsters Local 665 principal officer Tony Delorio said in a statement. In a statement to Eater, Amy's Kitchen said it "continues to meet B Corp standards and since the allegations, we have proactively invited B Corp to review recent findings. We will continue to work directly with B Corp to ensure the organization has all the facts and transparency it needs." While the OSHA complaint challenges the working conditions at Amy's and may result in a fine, the B Corp complaint is an attempt to challenge Amy's Kitchen in a more public manner. If a B Corp certification — which is granted based on a self-reported questionnaire from the company — is a promise that this company treats its workers and the environment with care, having it revoked would be a blow to Amy's brand. Already, independent organizations like the Food Empowerment Project and Veggie Mijas have called for boycotts of Amy's products, and some co-ops — like the People's Food Co-op and the Alberta Co-op, both in Portland, Oregon — pulled Amy's products off their shelves, sometimes with notes explaining why they won't be ordering more Amy's products until the workers' demands are met. Workers are using every tool at their disposal to fight for, first and foremost, workplace safety: These complaints are being filed as some of Amy's employees also attempt to form a union. Workers say that Amy's built its brand on being an ethical choice. Now, they're trying to hold it to that promise. "The primary issue for every worker is workplace injuries," says Ricardo Hidalgo, the Western Region organizing coordinator for the Teamsters, which is behind the union effort at the Santa Rosa facility. According to the Cal/OSHA complaint, Amy's employs around 2,000 people at its four production facilities, which, according to the company's 2019 fact sheet, cook up to 1 million meals a day (160,000 hand-rolled burritos among them). The complaint also says around 550 employees work at its Santa Rosa plant — the company's first, opened in 1987 — though Hidalgo says the number is now around 700, making it the one of the town's largest and most reliable employers. "I have never, in my career, seen the level of workplace injuries that I'm seeing now," Hidalgo says. The Teamsters filed the OSHA complaint outlining ergonomic hazards of working the line, understaffed lines leading to an increased pace of work, and hostility toward workers when they speak up about safety hazards, and asked Cal/OSHA to make an inspection. According to the complaint, workplace design and worn-out equipment are both factors in workers sustaining repetitive injuries. It also alleges at full staffing levels, each line is expected to roll 50 burritos per minute, however, "the standard currently is to assemble 66 plates per minute," and workers are "often expected to assemble up to 72 plates per minute." According to the complaint, workers also don't have regular access to water or bathroom breaks. "Workers are ignored, shamed, and retaliated against when they do use the restroom," reads the complaint. "One worker was asked by a supervisor to provide a doctor's note if they wanted to use the bathroom during their shift." The Teamsters Local 665 filed the complaint on behalf of Cecilia Luna Ojeda, who has worked for Amy's Kitchen for 17 years. According to Ojeda, these issues have existed nearly as long as she's been there: Ojeda first reported an injury in 2006, after she says she hurt her hand working as a line lead, moving bins of up to 600 cans that she says often had broken wheels. "My wrist was hurting a lot on my right hand. I couldn't grasp or grip anything because my hand got swollen," she says. At the time, she was three months pregnant with her second daughter. She kept working until her daughter was born. But the pain didn't go away, so Ojeda insisted on getting an MRI. "They found out that my tendon was holding on just by very little, by a string," she says. She had surgery in October 2008, and was put in a cast for five months, during which she stayed home, unable to hold her young children. Ojeda, who still works as a line lead, has been injured twice more since then, and her hand still often hurts years after her tendon surgery. Maricruz Meza, who began working at Amy's Santa Rosa plant eight years ago, also says she got injured on the job. While working as a line lead in the freezer, she says a rack fell back toward her and her hand was caught between the rack and the freezer door. "That day, I couldn't feel my hand because my hand got so swollen," she says, and eventually a doctor told her she wasn't to lift more than 5 pounds. Meza says the job given to injured workers back then was cutting frozen broccoli with a knife by hand, but she was asked to carry the 50-pound box of frozen broccoli to the rest of the workers. It felt no less taxing, so she thought, "I might as well tell them nothing hurts so they can put me back to my regular job." She told managers she was okay, and went back to her regular job. Cal/OSHA conducted an inspection of the Santa Rosa plant a few weeks after the Teamsters filed the complaint. Findings from that inspection have yet to be published. The pandemic, employees say, exacerbated the culture of injury. In 2020, demand for Amy's products skyrocketed, as more people stayed home and stocked up on things like frozen meals and canned soups instead of going out to eat. "2020 and 2021 have been extraordinary for Amy's," chief customer and consumer officer Karen Jobb told FoodNavigator in August 2021. Jobb noted Amy's "explosive, unprecedented growth; we're talking hundreds of millions in terms of growth," and that the company is poised to continue growing in 2022. At the production facilities, this has often looked like speeding up the line with fewer workers, employees allege. Ojeda told NBC News that production has ramped up from 21,000 plates of food a shift to 25,716 plates. In a statement to Eater, Amy's Kitchen said, "Line speeds are created with safety in mind. They depend on multiple factors, including the meal, type of equipment used, level of automation, number of people staffed, and the number of lanes used on a particular shift. It is not permitted to exceed the maximum line speed." Amy's did not specify what the maximum line speed is. The company has also regularly denied that workplace injury is a systemic problem. In a statement to NBC News, which outlined allegations of mistreatment from five workers who say they sustained injuries on the job, chief people officer Mike Resch said that "if an occupational or personal injury does occur, we are committed to finding safe, reasonable accommodation for everyone and do all that we can to make employees feel supported from the onset of injury or illness to and through recovery." But according to Ojeda and Meza, many people don't report injuries because they worry it will jeopardize their potential bonuses. (Amy's Kitchen did not comment on the specifics of the bonus structure, but noted, "As common in many manufacturing companies, we have a bonus program that takes into account safety performance and attendance.") If the choice is speaking up about an injury or ensuring you and your colleagues can take home extra pay, many choose to stay silent. Last summer, workers at the Santa Rosa plant began organizing with Teamsters Local 665, joining a growing push in the restaurant and food industry toward unionization: Tartine Bakery, Starbucks, Dandelion Chocolate, as well as Mars Wrigley and Pilgrim's Pride poultry workers have all unionized in the past few years. "What we are fighting for is for safety for all," says Ojeda. "We want to become a union and have something in black and white, in a contract." Meza emphasizes workers are fishing for a contract that would ensure workplace safety protections in writing, and promises that line speeds or insurance costs won't go up at a moment's notice. However, she says, as soon as the organization push became public, the company began pressuring and intimidating workers. Amy's Kitchen has retained Quest Consulting — the same group Tartine Bakery retained in its union-busting efforts — to "persuade employees to exercise or not to exercise, or persuade employees as to the manner of exercising, the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing." When asked why Amy's Kitchen retained these services, the company said, "We believe it is important that our employees have access to information and be fully informed about their personal rights and freedoms." According to Ojeda and Meza, the consultants have engaged in textbook anti-union persuasion methods, telling workers the union was a third party there to take their money and keep them from communicating directly with management. Meza says her general manager compared the relationship between the workers and management to marriage. "He said, 'Why do we need a third party between us? The communication's really good between us.' But it's not true. There's no communication. If there was communication, or if they would've respected our decision [to unionize], they wouldn't have hired third-party legal consultants to come in here and tell us the union is not good." This is also why workers have targeted B Corp. "The reason we actually went through B Corp is because we've heard that B Corp is for companies that are transparent, that treat their employees right," says Ojeda. "And [Amy's Kitchen] has not been transparent... They are not socially responsible with their employees like they say they are." With the help of the Teamsters, workers continue to push for better conditions. A petition published by the Teamsters on February 21 that has, at publication time, more than 6,000 signatures asks Andy Berliner to "immediately dismiss the anti-union consultants you have hired," and "meet with workers in Santa Rosa and their chosen representatives, the Teamsters." Ojeda says in November, workers earned a $2 an hour raise after a work stoppage. But Hidalgo says that was quickly countered by rises in health care costs instituted in January. "Now some workers for a family of four have to pay close to $800 a month for very horrible medical insurance that's very restricted," he said. In the NBC report, Amy's Kitchen said that the company "has been able to pay for most of the increased costs directly, but we did need to pass a small part of the increased costs on to our employees." Meza noted that workers who live paycheck to paycheck "don't have the money or ability" to pay health care bills upfront. In response to allegations of mistreatment, calls to boycott Amy's Kitchen products have gone viral across the internet and at food co-ops across the country. Amy's Kitchen says, "We are disappointed the union is calling to boycott the very products that our employees cook with such care." However, calls for boycott have not come from Amy's workers, but from grassroots organizations like the Food Empowerment Project, More Perfect Union, and Veggie Mijas. "To be quite frank with you, it was organically done," says Hidalgo, who notes these organizations reached out and got the workers' blessings before making the calls. And according to Ojeda and Meza, the support is incredibly appreciated. "We feel elevated," Ojeda says. And she's confident this fight is just beginning. "Just the same way that they are putting pressure on everybody inside so that they don't form a union, we're going to do the same," Ojeda says. "We're not going to give up. We're going to put pressure on them too, because we're not going to give up. We need to form a union." Interviews with Cecilia Luna Ojeda and Maricruz Meza were conducted in Spanish through a translator. |
| How 100 Tons of Oysters Are Farmed Off the Coast of France Posted: 06 Apr 2022 07:30 AM PDT  A regional specialty is mass-produced by a small team of French oyster farmers On the Ile de Ré, off the western coast of France, oysters are a regional specialty because they are well-iodized and not too fleshy, making them ideal for restaurants and consumers. "You have the impression that you've eaten the ocean," says David Flores Prieto, the co-owner of oyster-harvesting company Huîtres Et Ma Ré. "It's cool." Pietro and his team of seven oversee six hectares of oyster parks that contain 36,000 pouches. The space allows them to produce 100 to 110 tons of oysters per year. He says they buy six million oyster seeds annually, but "at the end, it's about 25 percent that makes it to be eaten." It takes between three to four years for an oyster to be edible, according to Prieto. Throughout that time, the oysters will be moved in their pouches to different parts of the farm by Prieto and his team. For example, they may spend eight to ten months in the growing parks, feeding off of plankton. Prieto and the rest of the team know where exactly to put every size of oyster in the park because of the tides, waves, and the amount of food available. As the oysters grow, they get reallocated into different pouches based on their size, both by Prieto's team and a machine that helps them weigh and bag the oysters. Throughout the course of harvesting, an oyster will be handled between 10 and 15 times for flipping, grading, and sizing. Huîtres Et Ma Ré sells their oysters to distributors, large retailers, fishmongers, and local restaurants on the island, like the popular fine-dining restaurant Atalante. Watch the video to learn more about the Ile de Ré oyster harvest. |
| Posted: 06 Apr 2022 07:00 AM PDT  Food is sublime in part because of its transience. Funny, then, that we so rarely talk about where it goes A few years ago, I was courting Mason Hereford, the chef of Turkey and the Wolf in New Orleans. I help chefs write cookbooks, so part of my job is finding those willing to let me. He and I chatted. My friends and I feasted. And after we'd demolished and paid for the teetering bologna sandwiches and collard melts, I made my way to the restroom, where I did not rest. Instead I partook in the newly nostalgic pleasure of a leisurely, unmasked poop. Mason and his team might be able to handle the constant deluge of customers, but his restaurant's plumbing couldn't handle my business. Stricken, I fled and didn't speak a word of it to Mason — until a pandemic later, when I sent him a draft of the introduction to his cookbook, where I'd added something he hadn't said: "I'm happy I got to write this book with my pal JJ, who once ate so much at Turkey and the Wolf that he clogged our toilet and is only telling me this just now." That particular shit has been on my mind lately. Other shits have been on my floor. In other words, I have children, two daily reminders of the connection between what we ingest and what we evacuate: last night's dinner in today's diaper. After seven years submerged in the toilet bowl of parenthood, coauthoring cookbooks by day and wiping butts by night, it began to strike me as somehow both perfectly sensible and utterly strange that a product of ordinary bodily function remains a societal third rail, that for almost two decades I've written about eating and never even considered acknowledging the aftermath. I'm certainly not alone. Food sites, sections, and magazines are as clean of poop as a bidet devotee. While we all fawn and fuss over dinner, we ignore the elephant dung in the room. Because whether it's hand-harvested scallops with sea-buckthorn jam or a Popeyes chicken sandwich, what's on our plate will soon be ground by the teeth, transported via peristalsis through the esophagus, macerated in stomach acid, metamorphosed by its journey through two dozen feet of intestinal tubing, and then deposited into the toilet. Food is sublime in part because of its transience, each plate of it the edible equivalent of a sand mandala, destined to disappear, once there and then gone. Funny, then, that we so rarely talk about where it goes. On its face, our denial makes sense: Since the delights of the table animate us, anything that detracts from them is unwelcome. We eat up Best New lists to sell us on how that latest Korean hot spot sizzles, not how the maeuntang sizzled on the way out. We want to hear Paul Hollywood whinge about a disappointing showstopper, not about how an underbaked custard tart sent him to the loo. And so publications devoted to what goes in uphold an unspoken rule to eschew what goes out. "When I worked at Saveur, we had a running joke about doing the 'Six Hours Later Issue,'" Helen Rosner, now a staff writer at The New Yorker, said via email. When Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo were working on their cookbook, they allegedly joked about pairing the photo of each dish with one of its post-colonic counterparts. They didn't, though I can't help but notice that their 2008 book's title, Two Dudes, One Pan, recalls that of a certain viral scat-fetish flick that came out the year before. ["We are going to hold off on commenting on this," said a spokesperson for Shook and Dotolo's restaurant group when asked to confirm whether such a joke was actually made.] Perhaps the ultimate expression of our denial can be found in the high-end restaurant bathroom, where every aspect, from the marbled toilet seat to the vintage tiles, seems curated to maintain the illusion that you're not here to debase yourself. As Anna Polonsky, a restaurant design consultant, told me, her clients often bring up the bathroom right away, though their focus is more about identifying "the Instagram moment" than selecting seat warmers and bidets. "It's a place people go and hang out on their phones," she said. Pete Wells essentially agrees. "I don't know if I've ever found a stall occupied by a pooper," he said. As the chief restaurant critic of The New York Times, he has visited his fair share of posh water closets for the purposes of surreptitious note-taking and urination, though supposedly never for the production of dark masses. For a man of good gut health, he told me, that would suggest poor planning. As a man of Jewish gut health, I can't relate. /cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23315236/spot_01_copy.png) The people behind our favorite food, it should be said, are perfectly aware that their work induces more than just financial discharge. "We got a lot of notes that said, 'My stomach was really rumbly that night,'" said David Zilber, Noma's former fermentation guru, though it wasn't his lacto-fermented gooseberries or squirrel garum causing the disturbance, but the sheer variety on the plate. "The vegetable season menu included 150 different ingredients — most people don't eat more than 60 in a decade." And that can shock our systems. When I asked if that meant Noma had precipitated some legendary loads, he smiled. "You said it, not me." Once, not too long ago, our collective prudishness seemed unremarkable. But now, here we are, two grisly years into a global pandemic that has forced us to reconsider ourselves and those around us as purveyors of respiratory droplets and sentient sacks of hijackable cells. Given this pageantry of bodily horror, the absurdity of our evasion feels especially stark, the line between what we do and don't discuss glaringly arbitrary. It brings to mind the scene in Luis Buñuel's 1974 surrealist comedy The Phantom of Liberty where two couples gather at a table, the men dropping their trousers and the women hiking up their skirts as they take their seats on open commodes. Later, one of the men excuses himself to use the dining room, where he privately scarfs bread and meat. How strange that we will publicly masticate but not defecate. Perhaps our collective performance ends now. After all, we all do it. It unites us, Democrats and Republicans, heroes and villains. Poop makes no pretense, emerging from us all in the same horrible form. You'd be mistaken, for example, if you assumed that Padma Lakshmi releases only powder pink quenelles that have the rip entry of an Olympic diver. Her digestive tract embattled by 17 seasons of Top Chef judgments and stage-4 endometriosis, Lakshmi finds elation in a healthy poop. "Because of my constipation, I feel really accomplished, like I organized a sock drawer," she told me. During filming, she sometimes forgets to turn off her mic. "No one is a hero to their sound guy," she said. "It's like a symphony in there." I'm not saying I want to see a new sort of selfie colonize the grids of food Instagram (#ThePoo), but suddenly I find myself begrudging Food & Wine's Holiday Gift Guide for excluding the Toto Washlet C200. Food publications will take on almost anything else — the science of lactobacillus, the history of the tea sandwich — except for this. If you poop and I poop and Padma poops, why shouldn't we talk about it? The omission of emission doesn't serve us, because while poop is gross, it is also engrossing. Our denial, for example, robs us of an appreciation for the food-to-feces transmogrification, which is as compelling as any walk in the woods or trip through a lost continent. In fact, you can learn a great deal about food's journey along the alimentary trail from your father's favorite travel writer, Bill Bryson. His 2019 book, The Body: A Guide for Occupants, devotes an illuminating chapter to "The Guts," from which you contract the disturbing news that we're just an epithelium's breadth from being devoured from the inside by our own gastric juices. And you learn how your 25 feet or so of small intestine spends six to eight hours extracting nutrients from Sweetgreen salads and omakases through so-called chemical digestion — that is, not the mechanical grinding and macerating, but the enzymatic action brought about by bile and pancreatic juices, which convert food for the mouth into food for the body. What remains enters the large intestine, six feet of tubing that Bryson describes as a fermentation tank. There, for up to three days, the gruesome sludge is sapped of liquid (thereby becoming more turdlike) and feasted upon by our microflora — the trillions of bacteria from at least 160 species that reside in our colons. (Silly me, I thought only I was eating my food.) The health of these hungry inhabitants, incidentally, is vital. It's associated, for reasons not yet well understood, with lower risk of heart diseases, diabetes, colorectal cancers, and COVID-19 severity. It's why fecal transplantation, which delivers happy microbiota via endoscope, nasoenteric tube, or capsule, is more effective at treating recurrent C. diff infection than antibiotics. And it explains why consuming fiber is so important, not just because it encourages regularity but because it nourishes your gut pals. What ultimately passes through your rectum and exits your anus then is not, as I had naively assumed, just the churned, consolidated food for which the body didn't find use. It is a far more disturbing concoction of, among other things, fat, mucus, dead cells, trillions of bacteria (living and deceased), and sure, some insoluble fiber. It's typically brown, not because, as I imagined, all the colors mixed together make brown, but because of a pigment called stercobilin, an end product of catabolized red blood cells. We don't all need to become experts on our machinery, but our inhibitions can create an epistemic vacuum that leads to imprudent behavior. This might mean an open-lid flush in a public restroom because you're ignorant of toilet plume; engaging in questionable hygiene protocol because no one taught you differently (see Wax Kyng's gobsmacking admission that he uses toilet paper to catch his turds); or shrugging off frequent floaters (call your doctor). "People are still reluctant to talk about the subject," says gastroenterologist Anish Sheth, explaining that patients will self-treat for years rather than initiate discourse on discharge. The consequences are what led Sheth to write What's Your Poo Telling You? with Josh Richman. The 2007 book chronicles its muse's tantalizing variability — the myriad shapes, textures, buoyancies, and colors. It's a vivid update of the stodgy Bristol Stool Scale, the crude diagnostic tool developed in the late 1990s and currently available printed on both t-shirts and coffee mugs, which classifies poop into a trifling seven categories ranging from little pellets reminiscent of rabbit droppings and indicative of constipation to an amorphous puddle reminiscent and indicative of diarrhea. Sheth's book also explores the ways that the contents of the porcelain bowl can be a snapshot of your health, albeit a blurry one. Deviances from the ideal turd, which the Bristol Scale describes as a smooth, soft sausage, with a chocolatey resemblance and an effortless arrival, can reflect anything from mere dietary imperfection to chronic conditions (when, say, diarrhea is more climate than weather) to imminent danger (beware the pathological hues). Yet while we're typically too shy to share the finer points of our feces with doctors, dinner companions, and readers, we are also beguiled by the subject of our revulsion, the strength of our loathing fueling a paradoxical fascination. No other elimination function, Sheth points out, "can cause pleasure and pain." On the other hand, he says, "pee is pee — there's no cachet." And he should know: That first book sold over 700,000 copies, while his follow up, What's My Pee Telling Me?, didn't come close. We're not born with a prejudice against poop — when my kids were two, for instance, they didn't seem to know it from a pancake — but by toilet-training age, we all find the stuff disgusting. Disgust is a much-studied basic emotion with its own set of associated facial expressions — the raised upper lip, the wrinkled nose, the gape with tongue extension — designed, in the Richard Dawkins' blind watchmaker sense, to keep certain dangerous substances from entering our bodies. However, that's where things get weird. According to Paul Rozin, professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and a leader in disgust research, the emotion is uniquely human. Most animals exhibit an aversion to feces — unless, like the many species of coprophagic creatures, they subsist on it (e.g. dung beetles) or consume it as a sort of homegrown fecal transplant (e.g. koalas) — but only humans are both materially and ideationally repelled. Rozin's subjects, for instance, evince disgust at apple juice served in a (brand new) bedpan and at what they know is chocolate fudge sculpted to resemble dog doo. Through the process of preadaptation, by which an adaptation evolved in one domain generalizes to others, disgust has morphed into a moral emotion, protecting not just the body but the soul. We're not necessarily disgusted by poop because we fear microbial contamination. We're disgusted because its presence evokes the mortal coil. The emotion's most haunting elicitors — carrion, shit, swarming bugs — remind us of our own beastly nature and impermanence. Or as Carolyn Korsmeyer puts it in her book Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics, "the nasty realization…that the exalted human will become one with the worm." Comedians understand this better than anyone, their gags hitting hardest when they expose the farce in which we all partake. "All day, every day, we're all pretending that we're not poopers," says Ilana Glazer, co-creator and co-star of Broad City along with Abbi Jacobson and now starring in The Afterparty. "It reminds humans that they're animals. When you poop, you're like, 'oh my god, I'm a bear.'" In their feces-filled paean to female friendship, the shit jokes have layers: In one of the show's final episodes, Abbi agrees to show Ilana a picture of her own foul movement, a poignant consummation of their intimacy. They're also transgressive in their unflinching silliness and plentiful application to the bodily functions of women. Because despite rumors to the contrary, and the unexplained additional 17 hours food spends in the female gut, women poop too. While comedy is the main social refuge for our fascination — from Caddyshack's pool-clearing Baby Ruth to the suitcase scene in the first-season finale of The White Lotus — our complex relationship takes many forms, including a peculiar sort of tourism, where we (sort of) confront the charade. Visitors to Tasmania's Museum of Old and New Art can watch fecal matter take shape in a digestion-simulation machine called Cloaca, Latin for "sewer," that takes in actual food and, after 13 hours, spits out a highly realistic turd, complete with stink. South Korea has several options for the indecorous traveler, including a toilet-themed (and shaped) museum called Haewoojae (translated as "a house to satisfy anxiety") and a multifloor exhibit slash amusement park called Poopoo Land. And there are many establishments where an intrepid diner may, if so moved, eat from a toy toilet bowl, from Moscow's Crazy Toilet Café to Toronto's Poop Cafe — each one a capitalist's wager on a Paul Rozin experiment. Of course, the appeal only goes so far. We might triumph over our hardwiring when we eat the "turd sub sandwich" at Modern Toilet, in Taipei, a log of ground meat studded with corn kernels and served on a split bun. We don't, however, eat poop, which seems both too obvious to mention and also not entirely true. Humans consume poop for reasons of pathology (the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, in the throes of dementia, is widely believed to have consumed his own), sexual desire, medicine (see fecal transplants), and lax slaughterhouse regulation. The carnivorous eat poop virtually every time they eat a hamburger. In 2015, Consumer Reports tested 300 samples of ground beef and found a bit of business in every single one. About this, we are not sufficiently disgusted. Vegetarians aren't safe either, thanks to leafy greens fouled by run off from animal agriculture operations and food handlers untroubled by the sign above the restaurant bathroom sink. Not all poop is harmful to consume. Lazy cooks like this one, for instance, pay no mind to the shrimp "vein," which, as many frantic Googlers can attest, is just a family-friendly way of referring to the intestinal tract and is often filled with crustacean crap. Whenever we eat a creature like an oyster or a mussel, we consume the contents of the stomach, intestines, rectum, and anus. Among scholars of the gastrointestinal tract, there exists a quiet consensus that, were you so inclined, you could safely eat your own poop. It's far from sterile (urine comes closer), but as gastroenterology professor Parul Agarwal told Gawker's Hamilton Nolan, "they are your own bugs." Someday, after the climate apocalypse forces us to take refuge in space, we may even look to human waste for sustenance. In 2017, a research team at Penn State announced a promising breakthrough that could allow them to use microbes to transform astronaut doodies into a nutritious Marmite-like foodstuff, prompting Noma chef and bacteria buff René Redzepi to tweet, "To the people that say fermentation is a fad, eat shit." /cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23315253/spot_02_copy.png) Even in the dystopian present, some people intentionally consume shit. Naturally, culinary swashbucklers have explored fecal delights. Andrew Zimmern ate dung beetles and a maguey worm's freshly extruded turd. The late Anthony Bourdain dined on what he described as the "lightly charred poop chute" of a warthog that had been only cursorily cleaned. He pronounced it "sweet." In southwest China, there is tea made from insect frass, the leaves alchemized by the bowels before being steeped in water. Similar in concept to the famous civet coffee and its kin, this is just one of many examples of the digestive tract's service as a culinary tool. Incidental and conspicuous consumption aside, many of us seek out foods that feature the pleasures of poop. Sometimes, their attributes can be attributed to an ingredient's anatomical purpose. Namely, the intestines, which despite rigorous cleaning and long simmering never quite surrender their odor of ordure. Still, they have plenty of fans. Whether it's Chinese zhūchàng (translated occasionally as "pork bung"), andouillette (the notorious French sausage that's basically chitlin-stuffed chitlins), or the fragrant South American street treat chunchullo (the small intestine of a cow dunked in hot oil, which a Colombian friend affectionately refers to as mierda frita, or fried shit), these preparations can conjure what they once contained. Often, though, there is no anatomical connection between so-called barnyard flavors and actual bowels. Certain pleasingly rank cheeses are less evocative of the grass and hay the cow ingests than what the cow expels. In explaining why she adores the romanesco variety of zucchini, April Bloomfield once described its flavor to me as "manure-y." While some fans of low-intervention vinification consider the association of natural wines with flavors of the barnyard overblown, Alice Feiring, author of Natural Wine for the People, finds it insufficiently precise to boot. "Not all guano is created equal," she told me, before taking me through the aromatic distinctions between bovine and porcine output, a distant fertilized field, a freshly filled diaper, and shit on your shoe. Of course, adventurous eaters know that the horsey stench of a spontaneously fermented Dolcetto, bodily funk of ripe durian, putrescence of so-called stinky tofu, and gym-sock pong of Époisses coincide with relatively mild-mannered flavors and also, contra the insistence of our olfaction, won't actually hurt you. And this might be part of the appeal. The pain-to-pleasure conversion comes from a sort of mind-over-body mastery, a phenomenon Rozin has dubbed "benign masochism" and can apply to everything from the burn of exercise to the burn of the chile pepper, from the thrill of a scary movie to the gruesome gratification of a Dr. Pimple Popper TikTok. This mastery is, ultimately, a sham, because the truth is, we are not safe. Look too closely into the mirror or the toilet, and our illusions fade. Whatever the reason, there has, over the last several years, been less reluctance to look. Nowadays you can buy Facility magazine for its "rigorous study of toilets" and musings on bathroom culture, read a drinks writer's guide to pairing wine with analingus, or flip through Help Yourself, a colorful cookbook devoted to gut health that courageously includes a sidebar on poop. Rosner herself has gotten around to the subject in her meditation on edible gold. (Of the late designer and provocateur Tobias Wong's malleable-metal–filled gelatin capsules, she wrote, "The art is the act of selling the promise of golden shit, or maybe it's the act of producing it.") This modest shift was accelerated by the pandemic: witnessing its daily toll made words harder to mince. Social boundaries broke. In my own group of friends, there were confessions of childhood cancers, autoimmune diseases, and very early pregnancies. Work and home merged. Some days, my only reprieve from the monotony of Zoom "school"-work-sleep was an intriguing bit of effluent. And as society underwent seismic change, so did the food media, where many of us who got into this business to write about, say, the best burgers have realized, belatedly, that we should've been reporting on the impact of beef consumption on climate change, the rights of workers in meat packing plants, and the cesspool of kitchen culture responsible for turning out some of those very patties. Talking turds might seem silly, but maybe if we had accepted that our heroes shat, we wouldn't have been so blind to the ways our world is shit. And yet, at the same time, abstaining from potty talk is perfectly understandable. I don't know about you, but my mental stability depends on the strenuous denial of the fact that my heart pumps, my lungs respire, and my colon houses billions of microorganisms who feast on the remnants of Italian sandwiches and pad thai, and that when any of these organs quit their function, I cease to be. Psychologists even have a name for how the fear of death shapes us: Terror Management Theory, also known by its more common moniker "getting through the fucking day." We are animals. We eat, we shit, and then we die. And so we opt for obfuscation. God does the trick for some. For the rest of us, we eat. JJ Goode helps people write cookbooks. |
| Eater Wins 2022 National Magazine Award Posted: 06 Apr 2022 06:43 AM PDT  Filling Up, a celebration of food across America's gas stations, is recognized with an ASME trophy Eater took home the 2022 National Magazine Award for Lifestyle Journalism on Tuesday, at the annual awards ceremony put on by the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME). Eater was recognized for Filling Up, an editorial package that took readers on a nationwide tour of the most noteworthy, unexpected, and delicious foods to be had at gas stations across America. Helmed by special projects editor Lesley Suter, the 15-story package spanned cuisines from coast to coast, including local icons like Wawa hoagies, Buc-ee's Beaver Nuggets, and Spam musubi at Hawai'ian 7-Elevens and niche destinations like the gas stations of Breezewood, Pennsylvania, the "potato chip capital of America." Beyond the snacks and treats, Filling Up also delved into the vital role gas stations, convenience stores, and roadside stops often play in the lives of Americans, such as the Black-owned fill stations that offered safe harbor to Black motorists in the Jim Crow South. This was Eater's fourth National Magazine Award nomination and third win, having been recognized for the Eater Guide to Surviving Disney World in 2017 and the Eater Guide to Paris in 2016. |
| These Vegetable Cutters Make Work-From-Home Lunches So Much Cuter Posted: 05 Apr 2022 10:15 AM PDT  We're all sick of making lunch, but flower- and star-shaped vegetables make everything more fun It is impossible to see food shaped like a tiny flower, or a small bear, or a bunny, or a star, and not crack a smile. (I DARE YOU.) Which is exactly why, when I started seeing more and more vegetable roses and stars popping up on my Instagram feeds, I felt compelled to open my life up to the same possibilities. As I learned when I ordered some online, a basic pack of shaped vegetable cutters will run you just about $10 (maybe more depending on how many shapes you want). I'd argue their value is worth more than that though. The prospect of cute garnishes pushes me to buy more crunchy vegetables and gives me something to do with the carrots and cucumbers that would otherwise sit ignored in the fridge, waiting for inspiration. I'll admit that the thing about cutting your food into shapes is that there is no real reason why you'd ever need to do it. It takes barely any time to put butter and radishes on bread; it indeed takes time and effort to put star-shaped radishes and star-shaped butter on bread. And of course, once a bite hits your mouth, it doesn't matter in the slightest how the components were shaped. But I like cooking the best when I can spend time with it: when I can take a real lunch break, put an audiobook on in the background, and treat making a meal as an intentional pause from my to-do list. Lunch is another one of those daily drudgeries, but the act of stamping shapes out of my food requires taking a few more seconds to pause and breathe. Feeling a satisfying crunch as a cucumber gives in to its new form is especially enjoyable on stressful days, when my unwanted anxiety needs releasing, and I've found that this quick hit of mindfulness is easier for me to stick to than, say, following along with yoga videos on YouTube. Vegetable cutters of this sort have been popular for a while within the bento box community, in which creators treat their packed lunches like little works of art. Essentially, they can be a form of care for whomever is receiving the food, with the elaborate designs signifying the effort behind the meal. I don't have the energy to do this every day, but when I do take these extra steps with my own food, enjoying a side of Spam flowers with my rice and eggs, it's a reminder that I can treat myself with the care and thoughtfulness I often otherwise reserve for others. And yes, I eat all the scraps left behind — they just don't make it onto Instagram. |
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