stlbites.com – st. louis food blog of bill burge

Roger Ebert on Food, Inc.

Jun 30, 2009 events, farmers' markets, farming, general food, groceries, health, sustainable agriculture

Last Friday, Food, Inc. was released to an additional 90 theaters across America including Landmark’s local Plaza Frontenac location.  As my saying the movie is a must-see is as biased an opinion as they come, how about a snip of what Roger Ebert had to say about his viewing of the film?

This review doesn’t read one thing like a movie review. But most of the stuff I discuss in it, I learned from the new documentary “Food, Inc.,” directed by Robert Kenner and based on the recent book An Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan. I figured it wasn’t important for me to go into detail about the photography and the editing. I just wanted to scare the bejesus out of you, which is what “Food, Inc.” did to me.

Tags: Food, Inc., Roger Ebert

Free Food, Inc. Screening Tuesday, April 14

Apr 10, 2009 events, farming, groceries, health, sustainable agriculture

How much do we really know about the food we buy at our local supermarkets and serve to our families?

Slow Food St. Louis is pleased to announce our participation in a special screening of the new documentary, Food, Inc.

The makers of the film, Magnolia Pictures, and Participant Media, have graciously donated 130 tickets to the Tuesday, April 14^th viewing of the film at the Tivoli Theatre.  Officially due out June 12^th, this is your chance to not only see what is sure to be a moving film months before opening, but also for free!

Those interested in attending can RSVP at http://sites.google.com/site/foodincrsvp/

Once there, click on the link for St. Louis and enter in your information. It’s first come, first serve, and people will be contacted by the film company – not Slow Food St. Louis – about their tickets.

For more information, continue reading after the jump or visit director Robert Kenner’s website for a complete trailer and reviews of the film.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Food, Inc., Robert Kenner, slow food

Can you label one and not the other?

Mar 14, 2008 general food, health, restaurants

Yes it’s restaurants like McDonald’s and their super-smiley I’m Loving It campaigns that lure in the masses and fatten them up, but is making them slap up calorie counts and nutritional information just because they’re large, easy to hit targets, fair?

Certainly I’m no fan of large scale chain restaurants but these types of menu labeling laws really annoy me. It’s an unfair tipping of the scales and especially so considering that any one of the multi-course meals you or I might eat at our favorite restaurants gives a #2 Extra Value Meal the nutritional win on virtually every level.

After chain restaurants have spent millions on new menus courtesy of an influx of legislation nationwide as these laws filter inland from San Francisco, Seattle, and New York, it will be interesting to see the wide-gaping jaws of starry-eyed dietitians like, Elizabeth Bailey, when they see that obesity more than likely continued to rise anyway.

Sure “behavior change takes awhile,” as she said in the article, but it’s not good enough to put up calorie counts, fat contents, and sodium information on menus under the misguided assumption that it is the panacea to the obesity epidemic.
She can offer up stellar sound-bytes like:

“If you get that information about a hamburger, it might not change your choice then. But the next time you’ll remember, three months later you might not get the hamburger,”

…and she can even choose to believe them, but we’ve all seen the guy that thinks a salad is healthy just because it’s a salad before dousing it with 4 tablespoons of a creamy buttermilk blue.

The truth is that the majority of Americans have absolutely no idea what those numbers mean in the first place or how they fit into a balanced diet. Until proper education and a ballpark figure for what a person should be consuming are given to Americans the menu information is basically useless, and even if someday those obstacles have been cleared, no matter how much people might hate restaurants like McDonald’s and all that they represent, it’s still not fair to single out one menu over another strictly based on the cash flow of a multi-unit operation.

I don’t even see how it’s legal.

Tags: cheeseburger, foie gras, McDonald's, New York, nutritional information, obesity epidemic, San Francisco, Seattle

Cooking Light Best Cities Award

Feb 21, 2008 health

I don’t know if anyone really commented on this previously, but I just noticed Cooking Light had an article in their January issue where they ranked “the 20 American cities that best fit our philosophy to eat smart, be fit, and live well.”

We, ladies and gentleman, were 14th…which must mean St. Louis totally and completely rocks!

How else would we turn it around from being “rated the eighth unhealthiest city in the country” in 2002 to the 14th healthiest?

They must have asked the right 9 out of 10 dentists.

Here’s the complete Cooking Light Best Cities Awards list.

Tags: best cities, cooking light

Peanut, Peanut Butter. Jelly, Jelly, Jelly.

Jan 3, 2008 groceries, health

Another blog I read was talking about about Koeze Cream-Nut Peanut Butter recently. Koeze claims it is “the absolute finest natural peanut butter available.”

Lewd comments aside, I’m a big fan of peanut butter, and really, is there anything more simplistically delicious than a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?

Personally, my mom would set one out for me almost every day of high school for breakfast. I remember she would always cover it with a paper towel so that it wouldn’t dry out because, back then, there was no telling when I’d manage to finally drag myself out of bed. I don’t think I ever grew tired of it.

My mom, by the way, is a sure-thing if we’re taking bets on who makes it into heaven, but that’s a totally different non-food related topic for sure, and we’re here to talk about peanut butter.

Somewhere between then (Class of ‘95) and now, peanut butter is one of those foods that has been targeted by nutritionism as being bad for us. On one side the attacks are about the fat content of peanut butter, and on the other a different group is rallying against all the additives that go into what was once touted as a wholesome snack for children.

Without even getting into the nutritional lowlands of how many eat the PB&J (creamy peanut butter, jelly, white bread with crust cut off), look at what’s in a jar of (creamy) Jif:

MADE FROM ROASTED PEANUTS AND SUGAR. CONTAINS 2 PERCENT OR LESS OF: MOLASSES, PARTIALLY HYDROGENATED VEGETABLE OIL (SOYBEAN), FULLY HYDROGENATED VEGETABLE OILS (RAPESEED AND SOYBEAN), MONO- AND DIGLYCERIDES AND SALT.

Basically:

Peanuts and sweetener. 2% or less: sweetener, fat for creamy smoothness, fat for creamy smoothness, some stuff to keep it all bound together because people are afraid of real peanut butter which separates, and salt for flavor.

So while I clearly lean towards argument number two of the War on Peanut Butter, rather than just omitting it from my diet altogether, I decided the problem was the area between peanuts and salt (all that crap we’re throwing into the peanut butter) and not the peanut butter itself.

Of course the medical community now agrees (for now) because they say peanuts help prevent heart disease.

However, some people take research like that and spin it wildly out of control.

Using my own example, it reminds me of a diabetic guy I used to work with. Because his doctor had told him peanuts were a great snack, and a great source of protein, he’d hammer through jars week after week. When he didn’t drop the weight he’d been ordered to lose, try as I might to explain it to him, he couldn’t grasp that even with its heart benefits, and ignoring the fat content altogether, peanut butter is still a high calorie food at almost 100 per tablespoon.

Moderation ladies and gentleman; it is the key to your peanut butter love.

And so, as I’ve grown older, rather than eleviating the deliciousness of peanut butter from my diet all together, I opted instead to go the route of grinding my own; avoiding the bad: all that extra crap they mix in to make it shelf stable in the first place; and moderately enjoying the good: heart healthy fats.

While it’s not going to make it into cookie recipes any time soon–because it is, after all, peanut butter of the chunky variety–by the time you’ve taken the first bite, I dare you to tell me you notice the lack of added sweeteners because the jelly will have added plenty of that on its own.

Plus, with the newfound likes and dislikes of adulthood, jams and chunky preserves can now take the place of the gold standard: grape jelly; moving the whole production towards awesome new (simplistic) heights you never dreamed imaginable.

However, if you like your peanut butter wicked-smooth, I’m afraid you’re pretty much screwed.

I personally grind my peanut butter at Whole Foods, but Koeze says their Cream-Nut is available at Smokehouse Market, so I think I’ll give it a try and see if it really is “the absolute finest natural peanut butter available.”

For those of you outside of St. Louis you can find your local retailer on their website, or you can also buy it online here.

It’s Peanut Butter Jelly Time

Tags: nutritionism, PB&J, Peanut-Butter

Trans Fat vs. Palm Oil

Nov 6, 2007 general food, health

In the growing battle to remove trans fat from everything we eat, there is now a growing concern that the substitutions will be equally as bad.

The bigger question as consumers is would it perhaps not behoove us to just avoid eating this stuff in the first place? Should we not throw up a cautionary flag that if manufacturers are dodging a greasy bullet by substituting one lab manufactured food product for another, that perhaps they don’t have our best interests in mind?

And before you lay into me let me just say that I’m not claiming I don’t eat any of this stuff. In the war on trans fats I love public enemy number one. Oreos are absolutely delicious. But I don’t go buying big bags of them every time I go to the grocery store. Regardless of how they are made they are not a kitchen staple, which for me is the disconnect every time I read one of these articles.

Apparently a lot of Wheat Thins are sold because they’re always mentioned a few whispers after the Oreos. So I wonder who these people are that go to the store thinking that just because trans fats have been removed from Wheat Thins it’s time to start pounding them like broccoli?

The Wheat Thin is a great example too, because it leaves me doubley perplexed. Personally there are better processed crackers out there which taste significantly better than Wheat Thins, and never left you scrambling for the nutritional information in the first place.

Kashi crackers for instance. I’m not sure how the word Kashi brought terror to so many, but I swear to you, they do not taste like bark. And if you don’t believe me you could instead try Margaret’s Artisan Flatbreads. They make a Rosemary Sea Salt flatbread, which has become my go to cracker. It’s absolutely delicious, and a piece of it is as great with cheese or a dip as it is as a textural contrast for a salad.

Anyway…trans fats, yay!

Tags: crackers, Margarets-Artisan-Flatbreads, oreos, trans-fat, wheat-thins, yay!

How Much Foie Gras…

Nov 4, 2007 general food, health

This is completely random, but while I was out running today I was thinking about how horribly high in fat and as a result calories a lot of gourmet foods are. Specifically I was thinking of foie gras — something that has to be towards the top — and just how many pounds of foie I could consume if I went on the all foie gras diet.

When I got home I realized that my total yearly running mileage after today’s run is exactly 2200 miles — exactly 50 miles per week on average.

So with a convenient number to multiply by, I turned to this Runner’s World article which is generally considered to be one of the most accurate in regards to calories burned walking/running for my baseline.

It’s actually a great article and one worth mentioning. A lot of people think that the number of calories you burn running and walking are precisely the same, but that’s actually not the case. While walking a few miles is obviously better than nothing, studies show that effort does, in fact, matter.

I bring it up because people will see some astronomical figure when they use a treadmill, elliptical machine, etc. and think they’ve burned that many calories. The reality is that they didn’t burn as many calories as the machine said they did as the simple act of you just sitting their reading this burns some calories. What you see on those machines is gross calorie loss, and what you need to concern yourself with in weight loss, or simply maintaining weight, is net calorie loss.

Basically the article says you burn ~ .63 x weight per mile of running vs .30 x weight per mile of walking.

One of the most disappointing things in all of this is that the more you do any activity, the more efficient your body becomes, and as a result, you don’t actually burn as many calories as you once did — so you have to go even further or longer.

But anyway, at the end of the day, my personal net burn per mile is about 100 calories.

So, just how much foie gras will I get to consume on the all foie diet?

At 130 calories per ounce, I can eat 105 pounds. Awesome!

Tags: foie gras, running

Gas Taxes=Weight Loss?

Sep 13, 2007 general food, health

A Washington University researcher, Charles Courtemanche, suggests in a Washington University News Release that,

“An additional $1 in real gasoline prices would reduce obesity in the U.S. by 15 percent after three years.”

He believes people would drive less opting for walking or cycling instead, and also that the increase in food cost to restaurants would drive consumers to cook more meals at home. These meals, he seems to assume, would be more healthful.

Interestingly, the New York Times earlier in the year, had different statistics.

“Mr. Courtemanche says his findings support his hypothesis that when gas is expensive, people are more prone to walk rather than drive. A $1 increase per gallon, he estimates, would decrease the prevalence of obesity by 13 percent, prevent 15,000 deaths annually and save $16 billion a year in medical costs. He proposes that gas taxes be used to improve public health.”

This is the strangest way I’ve seen yet to fight obesity, and statistics aside, I think, for the vast majority of Americans, “home cooked” more often then not means “home reheated” and that’s often not a whole lot healthier then eating out.