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my grandad died a couple of years ago aged 100. I grew up with him and as a kid remember him frying his breakfast of sausage, egg and bacon (sometimes with fried mushrooms/tomatoes/potatoes/bread) and then pouring the cooking (pork) fat over the food on the plate like a sauce!
When my mum cooked it for him he didn't get the "sauce", and towards the end on doctors advice he switched from the fry up to boiled eggs for breakfast. We also had a cow he used to milk when I was young, and he used to eat the cream warm straight off the top of the bucket. He spread his butter nearly as thick as the bread, and everything he ate was either coated in a crust of salt or sugar.
He always drank, beer and/or whisky, though in his last few years he switched to a bottle of Blue Nun a night.
In his later years I moved back to spend some time with him, I used to take him out to pubs and junk auctions, and he used to amaze the old guys in their seventies who thought he was their age, when he was in fact twenty years older than them.
I always thought he lived to that age in spite of his eating/drinking habits not because of them, but used to freely dispense his advice for longevity; "Get plenty of pork fat!"
my grandad died a couple of years ago aged 100. I grew up with him and as a kid remember him frying his breakfast of sausage, egg and bacon (sometimes with fried mushrooms/tomatoes/potatoes/bread) and then pouring the cooking (pork) fat over the food on the plate like a sauce!
He's come up with a remarkable idea... says that most coffee is terribly bad for you, essentially because it's rotten. He is selling this coffee that supposedly is fresh and doesn't have the nasty chemicals. He recommends drinking the coffee with a big hunk of butter dissolved in it. Bizzaro-world health food, no!? :)
I don't subscribe to the 'magic bullet' philosophy of dieting.
In the sixties cyclists took 'vitamins' to help their performance. Turns out it was amphetamine for aggression and alcohol and heroin for pain control.
Some people still believe that this is how vitamins work, that they make you superhuman in high doses. The industry does everything in its power to encourage this view.
But that is not how vitamins work. You need a very small amount to ensure normal body function. Certainly people with conditions like pernicious enema cannot absorb some vitamins. And they are helped back to normal levels with injections. Lack of sunlight (essential for vitamin D production ) is also linked to MS and SAD. But it must be remembered that normal is as good as it gets when it comes to vitamins. Extra is irrelevant.
I prefer to work out regularly and eat food that I can wholeheartedly enjoy. The idea that a different brand of food will improve me is just absurd.
These days increasingly expensive foods are being 'discovered' and we are told that they will 'fix' us. This kind of marketing hogwash is disgusting to me. It encourages people to blame everything and everyone for their unhappiness. And the 'science'........... good grief,'come all ye pseudo scientists and comitee wh@res.... all aboard the gravy train.....tickets just one human soul.'
Patent medicine will always be with us. And the people who are so willingly the victims of it transform themselves into advocates rather than admit to their initial foolishness. Because it is too easy to believe that to buy is to learn.
After thirty years of obfuscation it was admitted recently that vitamins do nothing to improve health.
Admitted by whom?
So I suppose the scurvy that killed off English sailors before they started sucking limes was totally psychosomatic?
I think I just cleared that up Paul. You are certainly right that the phrase was unwise. I should have said 'high doses of vitamins have no proven benefit over RDA.'
Thank you for your sharp eyes. I typed a lot yesterday and not all of what I said will have been exactly what I meant.
Lard is unhealthy (in the same way as all fats which are solid at room temperature) because once absorbed into the bloodstream it will coat arterial walls.
So your body is at room temperature? Have you considered auditioning for Twilight?
Lard is unhealthy (in the same way as all fats which are solid at room temperature) because once absorbed into the bloodstream it will coat arterial walls.
Here’s a video on the subject from the British government, with some comments from Tom Naughton:
Desperate to know exactly which foods won’t clog my arteries, I decided to subject a number of them to the experiment featured in the video, employing the same rigorously scientific methods. My wife was out running errands, so my daughters assisted – partly out of intellectual curiosity, and partly because they were concerned I’d introduce a plunger as an uncontrolled variable and skew the results.
We began simply enough, taking turns stuffing slices of bread down the drain. Since the British government’s experiment specified a month’s worth of saturated fat, we didn’t stop until the drainpipe held a total of 120 slices of bread – half of them toasted.
After the plumber packed up his wrenches and left, we incorporated his expert opinion into our conclusion: bread definitely clogs your arteries, especially when consumed with milk. Or, to use the expert’s jargon, “What the @#$%?! You guys clogged the $#@& out of this pipe!”
With bread eliminated from the heart-healthy list, we moved on to other dietary staples. It turns out that rice and beans don’t totally clog your arteries, but can dramatically impede the flow. So do most vegetables, although the effects are somewhat mitigated by thorough boiling. (This may, in fact, explain the extremely low rate of heart disease in Scotland.) Clearly the theories espoused by the raw-foods advocates don’t hold up to actual scientific research.
On his return, the plumber agreed, noting, “If you’re gonna stick a coupla pounds of brussel sprouts down the drain, you gotta cook the @#$%ing things first!” I promised to include his opinion in the discussion section of our academic paper. Then, so my daughters would stop attempting to steer our research down a blind alley, I answered the question they’d been posing since the plumber’s initial visit: Yes, some men have hair on their buttocks. However, the association with heart disease is statistically insignificant.
As the experiment progressed, we were stunned to realize that a month’s worth of nearly all foods will clog your arteries: hamburgers, chicken wings, pork chops, lettuce, hard-boiled eggs, potatoes, cheese, cashews, pickles, bananas and apples, to name just a few. Chunky-style peanut butter appears to be the most artery-clogging of all.
When I called the plumber again, a pre-recorded voice that sounded very much like the plumber’s informed me that the number was no longer in service. I asked for the new number, but the pre-recorded voice replied that it was unlisted. Business must be good when you can rely exclusively on referrals.
When my wife returned home, we began to appreciate the true cost of high-quality scientific research. She spelled out, loudly and specifically, the size of the grant that would be required to re-stock the laboratory. Until we receive such a grant, I’m afraid we won’t be able to determine if the results are repeatable.
But as good scientists like to say, the drain doesn’t lie. We are confident in our preliminary conclusion: nearly all foods clog your arteries. The only exception seems to be ice cream, which apparently can be cleared from your arteries with a steady stream of warm water. If you want to avoid heart disease, we’d suggest injecting ice cream (and nothing but ice cream) into your arteries, followed by periodic injections of warm water.
Or you could try chewing and swallowing your food, thus allowing your digestive system to process it. The effects on your arteries could, at least in theory, be somewhat different.
Lard is unhealthy (in the same way as all fats which are solid at room temperature) because once absorbed into the bloodstream it will coat arterial walls.
Here’s a video on the subject from the British government, with some comments from Tom Naughton:
Desperate to know exactly which foods won’t clog my arteries, I decided to subject a number of them to the experiment featured in the video, employing the same rigorously scientific methods. My wife was out running errands, so my daughters assisted – partly out of intellectual curiosity, and partly because they were concerned I’d introduce a plunger as an uncontrolled variable and skew the results.
We began simply enough, taking turns stuffing slices of bread down the drain. Since the British government’s experiment specified a month’s worth of saturated fat, we didn’t stop until the drainpipe held a total of 120 slices of bread – half of them toasted.
After the plumber packed up his wrenches and left, we incorporated his expert opinion into our conclusion: bread definitely clogs your arteries, especially when consumed with milk. Or, to use the expert’s jargon, “What the @#$%?! You guys clogged the $#@& out of this pipe!”
With bread eliminated from the heart-healthy list, we moved on to other dietary staples. It turns out that rice and beans don’t totally clog your arteries, but can dramatically impede the flow. So do most vegetables, although the effects are somewhat mitigated by thorough boiling. (This may, in fact, explain the extremely low rate of heart disease in Scotland.) Clearly the theories espoused by the raw-foods advocates don’t hold up to actual scientific research.
On his return, the plumber agreed, noting, “If you’re gonna stick a coupla pounds of brussel sprouts down the drain, you gotta cook the @#$%ing things first!” I promised to include his opinion in the discussion section of our academic paper. Then, so my daughters would stop attempting to steer our research down a blind alley, I answered the question they’d been posing since the plumber’s initial visit: Yes, some men have hair on their buttocks. However, the association with heart disease is statistically insignificant.
As the experiment progressed, we were stunned to realize that a month’s worth of nearly all foods will clog your arteries: hamburgers, chicken wings, pork chops, lettuce, hard-boiled eggs, potatoes, cheese, cashews, pickles, bananas and apples, to name just a few. Chunky-style peanut butter appears to be the most artery-clogging of all.
When I called the plumber again, a pre-recorded voice that sounded very much like the plumber’s informed me that the number was no longer in service. I asked for the new number, but the pre-recorded voice replied that it was unlisted. Business must be good when you can rely exclusively on referrals.
When my wife returned home, we began to appreciate the true cost of high-quality scientific research. She spelled out, loudly and specifically, the size of the grant that would be required to re-stock the laboratory. Until we receive such a grant, I’m afraid we won’t be able to determine if the results are repeatable.
But as good scientists like to say, the drain doesn’t lie. We are confident in our preliminary conclusion: nearly all foods clog your arteries. The only exception seems to be ice cream, which apparently can be cleared from your arteries with a steady stream of warm water. If you want to avoid heart disease, we’d suggest injecting ice cream (and nothing but ice cream) into your arteries, followed by periodic injections of warm water.
Or you could try chewing and swallowing your food, thus allowing your digestive system to process it. The effects on your arteries could, at least in theory, be somewhat different.
Well done Paul !!!!!
I will make a point of oversimplifying more more arguments in the future.
Feel free to have at them.
Why not in limerick though ? Or, even better, a one liner ? It would save me the trouble of skimming.
But if you do decide to keep going with the long form please focus more on character. Or make your twists less obvious.
Remember Julia Child herself liked a Mc Donalds fry every now and then.
To each his own.
When I first came out here in 1974, hired as one of a dozen English computer programmers, our manager asked us “Have you ever eaten at McDonald’s?”
When we replied in the negative (it hadn’t reached Britain yet), he said “You haven’t experienced America yet, then”. And he took us.
It was so horrible that I swore an oath never to set foot in a McDonald’s again. And I never have.
_____________________________
You probably did the right thing, but as kids our parents and baby sitters fed us that stuff because it was easy. Maybe a few hippie back to the Earth parents or those who lived in communes never gave their kids Mc Donalds, but pretty much everyone else did on occasion. At the same time in the late 60's and early 70's fast food culture was growing, and dry mix prepared foods were becoming more a daily staple, Julia Child had a cooking show on PBS ( Public TV) called "The French Chef " and taught the country about French food and ways of cooking classic American dishes that were informed by her knowledge of classical French cuisine.
Julia Child indulged in a few Mc Donald's fries now and then because she was not a Foodie Nazi, she encouraged people to learn to evaluate food on their own and make judgments about how it tasted and nourished, she was a true hero in the sense; she was a revolutionary who carried out a clandestine popular agenda of showing people how to cook from scratch in a time when corporate made boxed food mixes from the 1950's were supplanting grandmas kitchen knowledge.
Child was heavy into using lard, butter, wine and creams in the cooking. I used to watch her show ever since I can remember, often right before Mutual of Omaha's "Wild Kingdom" with Marlin Perkins or the Disney hour at 7:30 pm on Sunday night. Usually after my mom had made enchiladas....or we ate fish & chips take out. The chips, not very different from Mc Donalds fries honestly in those days were fried in the same cooking oil as the fries.
Morbid fascination led me to try the fries on the road in Japan because being a functional illiterate in this culture, I can't read a word of kanji yet, I feel a bit insecure. Maybe I needed a something from my childhood to bolster my confidence. I also wondered if the frying oil here would be different as this is an island and the supply chain to an island is different then the supply chain in the continental US. My reasoning was that the fries may still be like the un-Baudlerized fries that Child spoke of in the early 70's which were cooked in the same vegetable oil as the chips from the fish shop. The way Mc Donald's in the US makes fries now is a different recipe/method than when they first began and over the years people have noted the difference with dissatisfaction and grumbling bowels.
I suppose, in the name of M.F.K Fisher, it's time to mount a class action law suit against our childhood baby sitters and our parents for feeding us those Julia approved fries.
I am by no means a food Nazi. I have always subscribed to Julia Child's policy of evaluating food for yourself.
I have been inside a McDonald's twice. The first time was the party when my 12-year old son's team won the Austin soccer championship. I ordered something described as a hamburger. It was tiny. It was barely lukewarm. Everything about it, bread, "meat", garnish were limp and spongy. It was not a hamburger.
The next time was in the San Bernardino area. A group of us attended a meeting at Norton Air Force Base, then the home of the Air Force Ballistic Missile Office. The program manager for the project I was supporting at that moment, when he traveled alone, stayed at luxury accommodations and ate high on the hog. When traveling with a group whose travel expenses came out of his budget, we stayed at really cheap ass hotels.
He convened a breakfast meeting at McDonald's. I showed up, told him I didn't eat at McDonald's, and if he had another breakfast meeting at one, I wouldn't even show up. Then I left.
There are lots of places in the USA where you can get a great hamburger and fries. In my experience, none are franchise chains.
But then, I avoid the franchise chains, so maybe some of them have great hamburgers, with quality beef cooked to order, fresh buns with a nice texture, crisp lettuce, onions and tomato---yeah, right.
Of course if you were in San Bernardino you could go over to Mt. Vernon St. on the south side of town near the Santa Fe roundhouse and get a paper bag full of fresh handmade corn tortillas. Mc Who?
Ok Richard I have a perverse complex for checking out Mc Donalds' in other countries. I confess, I hope my sickness is not construed as actually being pro Mc Donalds. After all Mc Donalds began in Scam Bernardino. I was going to great lengths to only point out that at one time the fries were ok-ish.
Everyone must remember Eddie Murphy's hilarious description of asking for MacDonalds and getting his mum's homemade instead.
Am I the only one who listened to that description who thought 'Dammit that's the burger I want...' ?
I sometimes watch young mothers at the supermarket asking their two year old children which cereal to buy. Given that two year olds are both notorious for their knowledge of nutrition and immune to brightly coloured packaging this seems wise.
Anything which was considered a 'special treat' in childhood seems to remain so indefinitely. No matter how our tastebuds develop in the meantime.
Did you have 'Sweetie Tobacco' in America ? This was candied carrots fried in lard (well at least in my fond recollection it was lard) and sold at a loss in packaging very similar to Marlboro. I hadn't thought about it for years until in Asda/Walmart I was searching for a cheap pocket video game to give my nephew as a gift. All of those for sale (and in the childrens toy section) were poker consoles.
One of my all-time favourite moments of television came in an old tongue-in-cheek series called Adam Adamant Lives! about an Edwardian gentleman who goes into suspended animation in 1902 and wakes up in the ’60s.
He goes into McDonald’s, looks at the menu and asks the waitress “May I see your wine-list, please?”
Unfortunately I think that was the pilot episode, which is now lost.
Of course if you were in San Bernardino you could go over to Mt. Vernon St. on the south side of town near the Santa Fe roundhouse and get a paper bag full of fresh handmade corn tortillas. Mc Who?
Ok Richard I have a perverse complex for checking out Mc Donalds' in other countries. I confess, I hope my sickness is not construed as actually being pro Mc Donalds. After all Mc Donalds began in Scam Bernardino. I was going to great lengths to only point out that at one time the fries were ok-ish.
One of my best friends finished up his PhD at UC Riverside. He worked for Aerospace Corporation at Norton Air Force Base at the same time. On a visit he and his wife took me to a hole-in-the-wall Mexican cafe in Riverside.
"What should I order?" I asked.
"Get the chimichanga."
"OK." This was unknown territory to me. No chimichangas in Texas.
It was delicious. There were maybe eight tables. Mama ran the kitchen by herself, as you could see through the ample window. The two grown sons ran the front. One of them asked me how I liked my meal.
"I enjoyed it, really good."
"How does it compare to Texas?"
"Umm...well, we don't have chimichangas in Texas."
"What would you like, to make a comparison?"
"Ask your Mom to make me a plate of refried beans and some tortillas."
She did. I praised them so enthusiastically that Mama came out of the kitchen smiling and thanked me. I stood up and asked for a hug. There used to be a photo somewhere of the two of us beaming.
In July, 1991 I was in Madrid. An American told me that the joint across the Gran Via from my hotel had good hamburgers. An American expatriate had decided to try his luck with a hamburger joint in the Spanish capital. I checked it out.
The burgers were great. I was sitting at the front window, chowing down on a burger and fries when a teenager in a school uniform and her mother walked up on the sidewalk and looked inside. Clearly the girl was trying to persuade her mother to try this exotic cuisine. The mother listened politely, peered in the window dubiously, then shook her head and moved on, daughter in tow.
At the time there was a huge McDonalds on the Champs Elysee in Paris. In the winter it was practically deserted. Walking by in the summertime, it was packed, mostly by Americans. There are plenty of reasonably priced places in Paris where you can get really great food, prepared and served by actual humans who will converse and make you feel welcome. WTF Americans ? ? ? ?
I should make it clear: I have no objection whatsoever to anybody else eating at McDonalds. As Brother Dave said, "Ever'body's got his own kick goin'." I respectfully decline to participate.
Growing up in Arizona with my mother, who had spent her first 16 years in Mexico before coming to the US, and who cooked Mexican food often, I remember her saying that the Chimichanga originated in Tucson very early on and spread to Mexico via Nogales. The point being that, somewhat analogous to Chicken Chow Mein being a US ripoff of Chinese food that was unheard of in China, Chimichangas were not of Mexican origin; rather, they were invented (if that is the correct term) in Arizona and spread to Sonora. Since then, I have heard several variations of the story, but all place the origin of the Chimichanga in Arizona, which then spread to Mexico. I imagine you can find Chimichangas in Texas today, Richard, as I think they have entered into the realm of "Tex-Mex" food as well.
Cheers,
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, With the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here, Who tried to hustle the East."
Bleck! I am glad I eat Halal, totally avoiding lard, ham, bacon or pork products of any kind. Makes it tough at times, especially when I so love Mexican food.
I'm not so much a fast food guy and the nearest in an out is 4000 miles away. I was just stating I have perverse fascination with Mc Donalds. I actually know better and know a little bit about food. I'm from the Bay Area in No. California and I like talking about Mc Donald's in front of vegans just to piss them off.
_______ And Vaquera got me going on all the Mexican food you can make without lard....just about everything except the things that almost absolutely need lard. Pinto beans should have lard or be made with a hamhock, IMO, but you don't have to.
Blacks beans don't taste good cooked with pig fat. And there all the ceviche you can make depending on whether you eat shellfish or not. Chili verde is obviously out, made with pork, but you don't need lard to make good carne asada taco.
There's also nopales, rices and all the moles you can make to give sauce where you need it. So the trouble comes in when you eat out Mexican food, you can make it at home an never have a scrap of pig in the house. A lot of Yucatan food can be made without pig.
But what I would give for a few bags of pinto beans.
People have this image of Mexican food being loaded with cheese and fat and being completely unhealthy. Sure there's a few things that have lard but the majority of the cooking is not so bad. The mexican food I grew up eating on a day to day basis was mostly boiled pintos which are pretty healthy. I only saw the refried manteca type beans on special occasions, they're a lot more work. My tacos never had cheese or ground beef either lol, boiled lengua, onion, cilantro, salsa, and a corn tortilla, what's unhealthy about that? I hardly ever saw cheese compared to the white families I knew.
That being said I will demolish a chimichanga from "El Torito" if it's in front of me, as unauthentic as it is, good is good. lol, I'll eat a dip fried boot for that matter......
People have this image of Mexican food being loaded with cheese and fat and being completely unhealthy.
Like the cartoon image of a Mexican leaning against a Sahuaro cactus wearing a big sombrero, many people think of Mexican food as you have noted, consisting of tacos, enchiladas, chimichangas, and frijoles refritos. It is that, of course (particularly in Northern Mexico), but Mexican food is much, much more. Along the Sea of Cortez, the Pacific coast, and the Gulf of Mexico, there is a whole array of seafood to be eaten, and it is just as much "Mexican" as the standard fare on everyone's list. Mexican food is as varied as any other ethnic (or non-ethnic) food. You don't need pork to fix a good Mexican dinner.
Cheers,
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, With the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here, Who tried to hustle the East."
I stayed at the Mansion Cupatitzio in Uruapan. Among other things, the breakfast was magnificent. The usual Mexican choices, with a great selection of fresh fruit. NAFTA has been good to Uruapan, which has prospered on agricultural exports. The hinterland extends from the 7,500 foot mountains to the north down into the tierra caliente to the south.
From Uruapan I drove to Morelia, and flew to the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport. The best hotel there is the Grand Hyatt. The next morning I ordered breakfast from room service. Fresh raspberries sounded good. The omelet was OK, the coffee was as dreadful as I had expected, but the raspberries had been picked before they were fully ripe, and mishandled so they were half dried, shrunken and utterly tasteless.
In Mexico, a guy was given a budget and told to go to the market and get fruit for breakfast. He visited his usual sources, tasted the samples, and used his judgement to find the best selection.
At Dallas, some anonymous and remote agency decided that raspberries would be seved for breakfast. There were no edible raspberries available from the suppliers, but they served the dismal trash anyhow, and lied about them being fresh on the menu. I'm sure that if I had brought this up to the management, it would have been corrected immediately, if only I could have broken the hypnotic spell that makes them act like robots.
Yesterday we were shopping at the grocery up in Izumi about 20 miles away, we had to go up there to buy an air conditioner for my shop. We picked up some pre-made sushi on a tray to take home for lunch. It cost $4.50- Salmon, Ika, good Mirugai, Ebi, Toro, Tuna, Tamago and a few other things. It was good quality and we figured sans biru (cerveza) that it was a $20.00 plate in a cheap sushi bar in CA.
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