Fast Food Goes Green?

A "salad" at Wendy's

Is That Even Possible?

Nearing the tenth anniversary of the first “fast food made me obese” lawsuits, marketers are busy crafting a new “healthier” image for McIndustry. Most fast food chains have reduced calories, fats, trans fats and sodium in their fare. Marketers for industry whipping boy McDonald’s now point out that their signature Big Mac has fewer fats, half as many carbs, and only 38 % as much sodium as a burrito from Chipotle - the Oprah-approved, green darling of the food media. Most fast food giants promote salads now, some with recently reduced calories, and sodium. Press releases for Wendy’s “apple pecan chicken salad with pomegranate vinaigrette” enticed me into the brave new world of fast food greens.

I began with McDonald’s “premium bacon ranch salad with crispy chicken.” Its greens impressed me with their freshness and generous ratio of mesclun to iceberg. Grape tomatoes were crisp but carrots were pale with age. A chicken filet was served hot on top of cold ingredients. A light Paul Newman dressing tasted like buttermilk. A fistful of shredded cheeses plus swarms of bacon bits challenged the claim that this salad has only 370 calories, 200 grams of fat, and 970 mg of sodium. All those numbers are down significantly from similar reports on the same salad a couple years ago.

I found the best presentation of the week at Taco Bell (TB).

“Chipotle steak taco salad” was served in a crisp tortilla bowl with beans and rice on the bottom. Lettuce and tomato topped that, covered with tender seasoned beef, cheddar cheese, sour cream, salty chipotle dressing, and multi colored tortilla strips. TB made no health claims for this salad’s 900 calories, 57 grams of fat, and 1700 mg. of sodium - numbers unchanged from a couple years ago. The lettuce was iceberg and TB’s condiment bar had no fresh salsas at all.

At the KFC by Drake, the company-promoted “zero trans fats KFC crispy chicken caesar salad” was not available. No specialty salads were. Does the company think college kids don’t eat salads? This was not the first time that KFC innovations have been withheld from the Des Moines market.

At Wendy’s, the new salad that had inspired my quest was not available either. In my mind, franchisees should not be the last people to know about a company‘s new products.

I tried a “Mandarin chicken salad” that had similar nutritional numbers to the one that had teased me. It included a good mix of greens, including mizuna and tango. Roasted almonds tasted strangely like peanuts. Crispy noodles tasted like salt. Mandarin oranges tasted like sugar. Chicken was bland with just a trace of paprika and garlic salt. White sugar, brown sugar, corn syrup, and pineapple juice dominated the sesame and ginger flavors in the sweet dressing. At 570 calories, 25 grams from fat and 1370 mg. of sodium, nutritional numbers were second to McDonald‘s.

Burger King’s (BK) “TenderCrisp chicken garden salad with Ken’s caesar dressing” defied the trend toward “healthier” salads. Its 1070 calories, 86 grams of fat and 2900 mg. of sodium (almost double the CDC recommended daily allotment) were up from numbers on a previous nutritional check of the same salad. The difference might result from three kinds of cheeses not included in the previous count. BK’s packaging was true to their motto “Have it your way.”

Tired lettuce was packed in a salad bowl with baby carrots, tomatoes, and shredded cheeses compartmentalized in a different bowl. Additional packets included dressing, croutons and a chicken breast. That created a lot of personal plastic and paper to rip open. This salad was named one of six “diet destroyers” by business travelers’ web site Divine Caroline.
Bottom line. Costing around $5, most of these salads are not bargains. Less costly burgers were actually “healthier” choices than most too.

Beautiful Buglers of Henry County

Elk’s story is an All American tale. They are descendents of fearless explorers who migrated, like most native Americans, across the Bering land bridge from Asia during the late Ice Ages. Once in North America they became indomitable pioneers, adapting to all ecosystems except tundra, deserts and the gulf coast. They lived symbiotically with American Indians of the west where Kootenai, Cree, Blackfoot and Ojibwas fashioned blankets, footwear, clothing and housing from their hides. Plains Indians considered elk holy. Their teeth symbolized the life force to the Lakota.

Elk population in America grew to 10 million before the coming of the first Europeans, who misidentified them and named after German-Scandinavian words (elch, elg) for moose. With bulls weighing 700 pounds and sporting antlers four feet long, elk came to represent all the Europeans thought brave and fearsome in the wild. Males would fight, sometimes the death, during the rut, or mating season. Females would kill anything that threatened their young. Their bugle, or mating cry, became the mighty music of the frontier.

Elk were so successful adapting, they became a threat to more domestic livestock. Farmers and ranchers feared their fierceness and their susceptibility to infectious diseases. Unlike the Native Americans, Europeans hunted them to near extinction. Less than 1 million exist today and of the six subspecies that inhabited North America in historical times, only four remain. The others have been gone for over a century.

“Elk flourished in Iowa but the last wild elk here was believed to have been killed in Kossuth County in the mid 1880’s, though one stray was seen in Marshall and Jasper counties in 2006,” explained Richard Garrrels, a past president of the Iowa Elk Association.

Today, Garrels is one of about 30 Iowa ranchers have re-introduced elk to the state. A retired schoolteacher/farmer from Henry County, he decided to convert some corn and bean fields into an open range for elk in 1995.

“I had arranged to go elk hunting out west and that didn’t work out. So I decided to raise my own right here. I had raised quarter horses for years, so this wasn’t anything too new. Elk have breeders associations and pedigrees just like other livestock,” Garrels stated matter of factly, adding that elk are a transitional step into full retirement.

“I rent most of my acreage for cash crop farming and save this section for the elk. And I don’t ever have get up before dawn for chores. The elk are pretty independent and low maintenance,” he explained.

Garrels’ 30 head of elk are all Rocky Mountain sub species. He’s never had a problem with diseases.

“I have never had a veterinarian visit other than for calving,” he said.

Garrels thinks that’s a result from the measures he takes to keep his elk up to safety standards for meat sales. He tests his herd regularly for brucelosis, TB and chronic waste disease. That also facilitates sales of live elk across state lines. Meat sales weren’t the main motivation for most elk ranchers.

“Lots of people got into elk in the 1990’s when velvet was going for $60 a pound,” Garrels explained.

Male elk bulls grow and shed their antlers each year. Growing antlers are covered by a soft layer of vascularized skin known as velvet. Velvet is shed in the summer when the antlers have fully developed and is medicinally valued, particularly by Asians, for is aphrodisiac and mood elevation properties. A male elk can produce 25 pounds of antler velvet annually.
“This decade, the price went down to $10 to $15, after Asians backed out of the market after the mad cow scare. I don’t even bother with it. There’s more value in selling whole antlers without the hassle. I just sold a bull for $5000,” he explained.

“I can cover my costs selling elk meat to four restaurants and a few private consumers, plus selling at my concession stand at the Old Threshers Reunion (Labor Day weekend in Mount Pleasant). What I can’t cover of course is the lost income from prime farm land that could otherwise being earning with cash crops. The people making real money are the ones with low overhead, meaning cheaper land than this, who raise elk to sell for hunting,” Garrels explained.

Garrels keeps his bulls separated by a system of double fencing he developed over the years.

“If I leave the animals in one pen, the dominant bull will wear himself out keeping the others away from his cows. If I separate them with a fence, bugling will go on 24 - 7 during rutting season and the fence will come down. I lost one bull that way, gored to death by another. I don’t keep a bull who’s too aggressive.

Both Richard and his wife Liz described bugling as “beautiful sound” - the males whistle and the females chirp, “sort of like a cat’s meow.” They said they have never heard a complaint from neighbors.

“Compared to peacocks, it’s musical,” said Liz, who has raised both.
Richards feeds grain to the elk grain for a few months before rutting. Otherwise, their diet consists of grasses in warm weather and leaves after grass goes dormant. The fall and winter diet has a particularly Iowa adaptation.

“They love oak leaves but they seem really disappointed when I throw out a bag of maple leaves. They also prefer leafy alfalfa to grasses. It works out well, I get leaves from the city.

Elk ranching is seasonal. During the summer, elk eat almost constantly, consuming between 10 to 15 pounds daily. Fall brings rutting season and since gestation periods are 240 to 262 days, all Garrels’s calves are born between mid May and June.

Richard has won blue ribbons for his elk recipes at the Iowa State Fair, Taste of Iowa, Farm Bureau’s cook-offs “Wine & Tuxedo” and “Buckskinner.” He divides his elk meat into backstraps, which include tenderloins and ribeyes, and burger trim. Elk has a very healthy profile for a read meat, with only about 40% the calories, 20 % of the fat and 80 % of the cholesterol of lean ground beef. Tasting somewhere between beef and venison, elk is also higher in protein than either beef or chicken, and it’s a good source of iron phosphorous and zinc. So burgers are guilt free for dieters.

Four restaurants use Garrels’ elk burger. Jerry’s, Keo’s Bar & Grill, and Butch’s River Rock Café in Mount Pleasant, plus Short Stop in New London. The BrownStone in Mount Pleasant uses his steaks.

“I sell the elk burgers like crazy,” explained Kim Butch Bittle, who owns both the River Rock and the BrownStone.

Both Bittle’s restaurants have an pioneer spirit in which elk fits well. On a Skunk River park site, the River Rock building was built as a railroad depot in the mid-1800s. It has been a restaurant since the late 1940s.

The Brownstone has the look of Victorian hotel, with a lobby and different dining rooms. Bittle named one Edison, the other Carlyle, and there is the ballroom which is intended for banquets. Bittle said the building's history includes being a stop on the Underground Railroad, a vocational school and an elementary school.Bittle was chef at the Iris, an icon itself. After closing of Iris, after more than 50 years, Butch opened Brownstone for a test run one Sunday last fall and 175 guests showed up.

Richard Garrels’ Elk Ribeye

4 rib eye elk steaks
For marinade
Fourth cup honey
Three fourths cup vegetable oil
Fourth cup soy sauce
Clove garlic, minced
1 T. dried minced onion
2 T. white vinegar
Half t. ginger

Marinate steaks overnight.
Sear both sides of steaks. Grill to desired doneness. 140 degrees (rare) is recommended for flavor.

Hydrocodone King

He wanted customers to have a really ahppy meal.

News 4 in Jacksonville FL reports a Burgeer King employee who pled guilty to slipping painkillers into customers' food has been sentenced to five years in prison.

Woody Duclos was initially charged with poisoning food with intent to kill or injure a person. He was facing up to 30 years in prison.

Duclos was arrested in February after one woman got sick from eating a sandwich from Burger King. Another man said he found a blue pill in his burger at the same restaurant.

Police said the 21-year-old woman spit up a pill of the painkiller hydrocodone out when she took a bite of her sandwich, and she ended up having a seizure.

Duclos and another Burger King employee accused of selling him the pills were each fired.

Some people have been asking what could possess Duclos to do this. I doubt they ever worked at a Burger King in Florida.

FDA Wimps Out Shamefully

In response to public health concerns, on Monday the Food and Drug Administration urged meat producers to limit the amount of antibiotics they give animals. The FDA admitted that antibiotics in meat pose a "serious public health threat" because the drugs create antibiotic-resistant bacteria that can infect humans who eat it. But the agency only “is recommending that producers use the drugs judiciously, limiting their use unless they are medically necessary and only using them with the oversight of a veterinarian.”

"Developing strategies for reducing (antibiotic) resistance is critically important for protecting both public and animal health," the agency said in draft guidelines printed in the Federal Register.

The FDA also admitted that antibiotics are given continuously through feed or water to entire herds or flocks of animals. Then the agency said it is expecting to issue more specific guidelines soon, but FDA Principal Deputy Commissioner of Food and Drugs Joshua Sharfstein was not sure when that might be. He would not say whether the agency eventually plans to issue stricter regulations. He said patheticalaly that the agency will be watching industry response and also patterns of antibiotic resistance.

Goodstewarding’s bottom line - The FDA could not have been any wimpier if it were a lamb going to Smithfield for slaughter. MRSA has been killing more people than AIDS-HIV now for many years and the FDA is still “watching” the industry respond to their "urgings." Grow some balls FDA if you are able to after all these years of eating the crap that Big Ag has been feeding you.

Chicken leg bailout

USDA announced that it will purchase $14 million in dark meat chicken products for federal food assistance programs such as food banks. This IS likely the same bulging inventory of chicken legs that have been piling up since Russia banned US chicken legs imports from plants that use chlorinated water in processing.

So, once again, the Europeans will not eat the shit that our governement feeds to our chicldren with our tax dollars.

Old Skills & Sneak Previews

Cochon 555

Last month, Cochon555 brought its Midwest Regional championship to Des Moines for the second straight year. This Taste Network national tour puts our city in the select company of serious culinary destinations - New York, Napa, San Francisco, Boston, Atlanta, Portland, Seattle, Stillwater and Washington D.C. Cochon is an elite event hosted by several of America‘s most famous hotels and resorts. Chefs come from the country’s best restaurants (Boulud and Blue Hill in New York, The French Laundry in Napa). Time magazine and the New York Times cover the tour. In prestige, it’s the culinary equivalence of hosting an NCAA men’s basketball tournament. It might not return to Des Moines though. Ticket sales slipped and the event hasn’t interested any civic or state group that promotes this city’s image.

Five chefs competed by utilizing five heritage hogs, snout to tail. Guest-voters sampled pork while being treated to excellent wines from five boutique vineyards. Mike LaValle (Embassy Club) said that Chase Family Cellars’ Zinfandels were the best he’s ever seen in Iowa. This year’s competition included local chefs George Formaro and Hal Jasa, defending champion Matt Steigerwald from Mount Vernon, and two chefs from Kansas City - Cody Hogan and Howard Hanna.

Formaro and Jasa debuted some new applications for future restaurants. Using a Farmers Cross/Berkshire hog, Formaro premiered an all Mexican menu he’ll selling at the Downtown Farmer’s Market, and hopefully in a new East Village café soon.

His pozole was the best I ever tasted.

He fried carnitas in duck fat and coated Milanese style cutlets in pumpkin seeds. His huevos motuleños were a poached, Yucatan variation on bacon and eggs. His chiccarones were tender enough to pass for shoulder meat.

Jasa, who’s also hoping to open an East Village café this summer, presented ten dishes made from a Duroc. A deeply flavored consommé with pork cheeks and goat cheese tortellini stood out.

So did a fried ear salad of watercress with quail egg, and his corned tongue with pickled ramps. Jasa fried his rillletes, served his trotters with blinis, and presented a liver/heart pâté with a pistachio puree.

He served belly with poached grapes, cassoulet with orange gremolata, and sausage with parsnip puree and a pâté of roasted dates.

Recreating personal pan-served pasta from Lidia’s, Hogan kept things simpler with his Berkshire hog.

Ravioli were stuffed with braised whole hog and served with roast pork and headcheese. His ravioli were the most popular single item of the night with the public.

At Hanna’s River Club, members pay dues to support things that Cochon advocates - preserving heritage breeds, and utilizing whole hogs. Like Steigerwald, Hanna brought a staff familiar with butchering, brining, rendering, smoking and pickling. Using an endangered Glouscestershire Old Spots hog, they executed five familiar dishes exquisitely: headcheese; trotter garlic soup with fresh nettles pesto; a Cuban sandwich made with sous vide of shoulder, ham and organ pâté; pork & beans made with legs, heirloom beans, sausage and “KC salt” (crushed cracklings).

Hanna said he harvested the main ingredient for his stunning blood pudding “by squeezing every vein and artery.” It also included chocolate, hazelnuts, cinnamon and shortbread.

Steigerwald, whose Lincoln Café purchases whole hogs exclusively, won the competition again with a Red Wattle hog a breed that would become infamous three weeks later when it was again the pig of a winning Cochon chef, in Portland, Oregon. That so incensed another Oregon chef that he attacked both a winery representative and Cochon organizer Brady Lowe, sending the latter to the hospital with a broken leg and concussion.

His menu began with pork belly spring rolls with kimchii and an avocado/yuzu puree. It progressed to a “wattle head slick” with boiled peanuts and greens. He served a white sausage that included innards with fennel kraut. His hickory smoked shoulder was served on corn masa with turtle beans and pickled chilies. His ciccioli (compressed, dried fat) was treated to pickled ramps. He also served charcuterie that included ham and capicola. I have been dreaming of them ever since.

Andrew Zimmern

Believe It or Not - There Is Something He Won't Eat

“I am riveted, I am nauseated, I have anxiety attacks. I am obsessed with this show.” Kelly Ripa on Andrew Zimmern‘s ‘Bizarre Food’
　
Andrew Zimmern has staked a brand all his own within food and travel journalism. His popular show “Bizarre Foods” visit’s remote corners of the world where the host enthusiastically consumes things that most USA viewers would probably never dream of eating. Because of that, many consider him extreme, “the Quentin Tarantino of the food media.” Yet, the New York Times thinks that his restraint defines him, calling Zimmern “less dangerous than Anthony Bourdain, less annoying than Rachel Ray and less cloying than Paula Dean.”

Everyone agrees though that he’s no ordinary food journalist. One of the first male students to graduate from Vassar, the New Yorker pursued an art history career on the East Coast before moving to Minnesota in 1991.
Today, he says that he was more of a fish-out-of-water at Vassar than he is today, even as the only white rodent and bug hunter in Equatorial jungles.

“No question, Vassar was the stranger experience and it was good training for what I do now,” he said laughing.

Besides his busy TV schedule, today he’s the spokesman for Target, where his title is “Meal Adventure Guide,” Pepto Bismol and Carson Wagonlit Travel and writes a regular column for Minneapolis - St. Paul magazine. His move to the Twin Cities changed his life in many another way though.
“Like everyone else I came to Hazelden (addiction treatment center in Center City, Minnesota) for treatment. Life got good, so I stayed and I’ve been sober for 17 years now.,” he explained.

Now he applies his risk taking behavior toward the pursuit of strange things to eat. His taste buds and gag mechanisms are not ordinary either though. He wolfs down putrefied flesh, guts and sex organs regularly in his travels, but can’t stomach a couple things that many people find easy to swallow.

“The only thing I do not eat is walnuts. I just can’t stand that pungent, acrid after taste and (Asian fruit) durian is more of that same thing. I’ve tried it a dozen times and none were palatable to me. I can get it down now, but the texture is something else. I know there’s a nature vs. nurture issue here but I have spent a lot of time wondering what it is about durian that makes it a seeming waste of my time, while eating the next odd jungle rodent gets my juices flowing,” he explained.

Of all the worldly preparations for sex organs, Zimmern said that the Chileans are the hands down masters.

“Fresh really maters in testicles and those in Chile were harvested, peeled, sliced, laid on a plough share over a wood fire and pan fried with onions, garlic, chilies. They were extraordinary,” he recalled.
He’s also learned to discriminate amongst rotten forms of flesh.

“When it comes to putrefied protein, fish beats mammal meat hands down. But the best single putrefied dish I ever tasted was the “dama mein” I had in Taiwan. The pork was cut in noodle-like strips, rolled in cooked rice and stuffed in a jar for 30 days. What you get is something like pork sauerkraut. Then it’s sliced thin and served over ice. The worst was in Morocco, I think because the putrefied meat was a confit - it was cooked in its own putrefied fat, multiplying all that is unpleasant about such things.

After 17 years in the Midwest, Zimmern says one local dish is as confounding bizarre as anything he’s discovered in desperate jungles or deserts.

“No question, lutefisk is the weirdest Midwestern food. I have never been given a reasonable answer as to why the Scandinavians do this. Why not just re-hydrate the (dried) cod without using lye? My own personal theory is that they were so penurious that that used lye to increase shelf life even longer,” he mused.

Beyond the shock factor of dining, Zimmern studies food cultures with urban and suburban application in mind = particularly in economically troubled times.

“A ton can be learned from the Third World‘s food. We’re an extremely selfish, results-oriented, destination-oriented, convenience-driven society and we’ve been eating high on the proverbial hog for too long. We gave up snout-to-tail eating over 100 years ago. We gave up eating whole vegetables long ago too and gave up eating a number of other vegetables in any form. We stopped eating a grain-oriented diet and switched to a high protein diet. We are the only country in the world where a 15 ounce serving of protein-rich food is the centerpiece of the dinner plate. No where else.

“And all that was driven by cheap food and easy living, which might be over for awhile. Change is coming. I know Des Moines folks won’t start foraging in the woods for grubs and bugs to augment the protein supply on the dinner table, but there’s a ton to learn.

“In Singapore last week I ate fish head curry, a classic there and one of the greatest dishes in the world. Two of my cameramen had never seen anything like it - that’s typical here. Waste is typical. Singaporeans get three great meals out the same portion of fish from which Americans just cut out a 12 ounce filet and throw away all the rest - and in the case of fish heads, they throw away the best food, in all aspects of what is best - taste, texture, nutritional value,” Zimmern said.

He says that valuations in foods may turn upside down.

“The last ten years, the hottest restaurant trend has been, to state it broadly - snout to tail, natural organic, farm to table fine dining. People pay a premium in fine restaurants to eat like their more frugal ancestors ate 100 years ago. At Blue Hill in New York City, they pay $100 for a plate of trotters and roasted farm vegetables. People all over America now pay a premium for fresh, seasonal menus that were a matter of necessity to our immediate ancestors. Yet, farmers markets and CSA’s are offering this kind of food at relatively deep values. Those kinds of options have been relatively ignored in the recent past, but I think people will begin paying far more attention to them now.

“I recently returned from Russia where I saw the remnants of Stalin’s dacha system - one aspect of which was that everyone produced a percentage of the food he consumed. That’s not going to happen here, but people will start considering such options as they look to cut their budgets. The era of conspicuous food waste is over. Six to eight companies control something like 78% of all food production in the USA, that’s over as people look to options closer to home.

“We forgot, as we urbanized, about the displaced animals that propagated the foods Native Americans used to forage and eat. Economic security requires diversity of crops as of other assets. One crop solutions are no solutions -because the failure of one crop can become total failure. Crisis could force us to farm and eat healthier. There are opportunities in the woods. In Minnesota and Maine I found a lot more people eating native American vegetables, ferns besides fiddlehead ferns, marvelous little shoots that taste like cucumber and look like radishes, ramps in more southern climates,” he said.

In His Pantry

“I have 300 kinds of mustard. I love salt fish so I have lots of that, at least five natural fish sauces. Malaysian are the best. I am always buying chilies, both fresh and dried and ground.”

“My four year old son eats everything except worms. He had a book that made him adverse to worms. I got to him before the books did with other foods.”

“If I spit, it’s shown on the show. We reveal all. I live my brand. They have to drag me out of the places I go to eat bizarre foods. I love my food life and I don’t think most people do. How can they when the only eat three kinds of fish, only eat the center cuts of meats?”

photos courtesy of Andrew Zimmern