Food culture

[Rotonen]

Hysteria about fat -> less fat.
Food tastes like cardboard -> more salt.
Food too salty -> compensate with sugar.
More sugar -> more fructose.

Here is a rather nice lecture about the biochemistry of fructose.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

So, if you still live in a country where you still primarily actually make food, good for you. In Finland it's getting increasingly hard to get for example proper meat because everything is being produced with industrial efficiency.

What do I mean by proper meat?

1) The animal is slaughtered in a way the blood is properly drained.
2) The meat is cut by a qualified professional.
3) The meat is hanged (essentially rotted in a controlled way) enough and properly to get it tender.

This way I'd be guaranteed to get my meat fresh and proper since it goes bad easily in this process and hence it is not possible to sell crap to me, since I'm quite picky with what I'm taking at the meat counter.

Industrial processing goes as follows:

1) The animal is killed by a hit to the back of the neck and hanged on a conveyor belt for some period of time.
2) The animal gets cut and drained fast enough with varying success.
3) The carcass is cut essentially with a chainsaw.
4) The carcass is frozen for transport.
5) The thawed carcass is cut on-site at the shop or at a meat packaging company.

Eco food is nice for me for the following reason: I know what I'm getting due to only simple "natural" methods of processing are available. Industrial food has a very wide array of tricks at their disposal which are beyond me.

How are things where you live?

[enchilado]

I live in a place regarded by non-inhabitants as a 'hippy village'. And they're right. Most people here eat primarily naturally-produced, organic stuff. At least, some of them do. There are no shops here, but about 25km away there's a town with a couple of supermarkets and some shops. It's still quite 'alternative *cough*hippy*cough' though.

Readily available there are organic vegetables and afaik meats, though I'm a vegetarian so I don't really pay much attention to that.

Out in the country, in a hippy region, and a vegetarian, I can't say much about how meat is around here. There are lots of cows around, but I think they're mainly dairy cattle.

And as for the topic title - 'food culture' - I don't think there's much of that in Australia. We just eat whatever.

[Crush]

While the organic food movement is a good idea it is not a flawless system either. Organic food does not necessarily mean healthy food. Agriculture companies are becomming more and more creative in finding loopholes in the organic food regulations which allow them to use disputed productivity-enhancing techniques and still label their product as organic.


Regarding meat: I prefer to buy meat from our local butcher who buys life animals from local farmers and slaughters and butchers the animals himself. It's a bit more expensive than the supermarket but you can tell the difference between mass-processing of meat optimized for low cost and hand-processing optimized for quality.


By the way, last weekend we had a scout camp. We had a celebration and roasted a whole pig for dinner. It was delicious. For most of the children it was the first time they saw how a dead pig looks before it is hacked to pieces and sold shrink-wrapped in the supermarket. The reactions were... interesting.

[Alons]

Haha, nice topic!

I cant complain because the food on here (Spain) is good enough. I think we have ballanced meals. Lots of fruit, and mediterranian diet .

Even so, we seem kinda strange cos all the european countries do their meals hours before... I wonder what's wrong with us, huh?

Regards,

Alons

[Rotonen]

While the organic food movement is a good idea it is not a flawless system either. Organic food does not necessarily mean healthy food. Agriculture companies are becomming more and more creative in finding loopholes in the organic food regulations which allow them to use disputed productivity-enhancing techniques and still label their product as organic.

Regarding meat: I prefer to buy meat from our local butcher who buys life animals from local farmers and slaughters and butchers the animals himself. It's a bit more expensive than the supermarket but you can tell the difference between mass-processing of meat optimized for low cost and hand-processing optimized for quality.

By the way, last weekend we had a scout camp. We had a celebration and roasted a whole pig for dinner. It was delicious. For most of the children it was the first time they saw how a dead pig looks before it is hacked to pieces and sold shrink-wrapped in the supermarket. The reactions were... interesting.

The problem here in Finland is that we've taken the American route too far. As you said, an organic label mostly just means someone has found a hole in the definition. But as I said, I prefer to get food I can be fairly certain about how exactly it was produced. So mostly I'm making simple food with some compromise.

Also, the efficient food industry has essentially shut down every small thing around here and we're at the mercy of a duopoly of two big chains without any real competition on the market. The supply chain is all centralized and locked down. There are no private small butcheries near any bigger city. There might be around five or so in the entire country, who just provide for tourists who happen to come by for the sake of experiencing the countryside.

The industry lobbyists have made the regulation jungle so thick it is impossible for me to buy a whole pig to roast due to health regulation issues. Obviously, if you know a farmer, you can get around this, but not legally. I'm warning any country from taking any steps towards such a system: it majorly sucks. I hope we're now taking some steps back from this towards real food again.

[Leela]

Just watched the video about sugar. Very interesting!

As for the topic:
I come from germany. There is a movement atm about ecological food especially vegetables and fruits but also meat.
I used to be a vegetarian for a very long time, and at some things I really cared about what I get, even went to special shops.
BUT as for fruits and vegetables i don't care too much. I want it to look, and smell healthy (even if that sounds weird) and I want it to taste good. And I do not care if there is a stamp on it that says that it is pesticide-free. As there would be a big area with many fields. and one farmer uses pesticides and one doesn't. The fields are next to each other so who cares...

Where I live now you get many good things, and we don't eat fast food anyway, mostly drink water, cooking ourselves, the only really unhealthy stuff we have -> ketchup and mustard (rarely used) and every now and then chocolate.
But in this amount it can't be as unhealthy as told in the movie

About meat. I don't like it that much and would I be the one in this house who buys it i would go to a butcher. But for now I don't, we get the meat from the supermarket. Quality of course not the best...

Lately I had a discussion where I said, I would like that the meat is good, wich includes how the animals life until they get killed. And also the way of killing them. Rotonen explained that very good. If their environment is to stressfull (can't move, too crowded, too noisy, no sunlight, etc...) they sent out stresshormones (sorry don't know the name) all the time and the meat will taste different. Also the feeding, that is only made to grow them fat and fast, with medicine and stuff in it the animals would normally not eat.
The person I talked to just said over and over again, people can only survive when there is enough food and we (the people) found a way to produce much, which is not the best way but who cares if the pig was happy in it's life?
Actually I do, because the meat quality is connected to that. Less stress, better meat. Does that sound so stupid?

Leela

[Rotonen]

For tomatoes, I'm willing to pay about double the price for a properly ripe locally produced tomato in comparison to something which has been picked up while yellow in Spain and hauled here in a truck full of Ethene gas which makes it red-ish on the way. It's ridiculously hard to get a tomato which would actually taste of a tomato around here. Everything is picked up raw or semi-raw because this way it holds longer in storage and the producers can squeeze out that last percent of profit out of their products.

The only properly grown tomatoes here I've found are the "organic hippie ones". I want my quality.

Concerning meat production the American way: http://www.foodincmovie.com/

We're not that bad yet, but we're heading in that general direction. I've also seen the same in Germany a bit (the amount of frozen "just warm it up" food they sell is rather astonishing to me). For us it's even worse since premade microwave food has gained a lot of ground. I don't even own a microwave oven currently since I simply do not have any sort of a use for it.

It all started for us from our school cafeteria food production becoming centralized on a per city basis. They're currently spending around 0,40€ per person to mass produce the food. Technically it contains all the nutrients you need, but it does not have all that much to do with how food is supposed to taste like and everyone gets quite familiar and content with the taste from early on. It does not really help that students have a tendency to supplement their graving for actual food with fast food during lunch breaks in the cities where such facilities are accessible enough to reach during the day.

[hanlon]

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[Platyna]

People should be less about having and more about thinking. I like good food, but what I ate last week was any edible organic matter I could browse in the fridge within a minute, before cd /lib. ;-)

Regards.