Don't Kill the Birthday Girl (8 page)

I pledged the not-so-secret Jefferson Literary and Debating Society, whose history includes having had Woodrow Wilson as our president and Edgar Allan Poe as our secretary—not at the same time—and having sponsored one of the foundation stones of the Washington Monument. The “Jeff” has any number of rituals. Some have the briefest of heydays, such as the two years when a meeting could not be gaveled in until a Twinkie had been tossed up in the chandelier of the hall where we gathered on the Lawn's west range. One tradition that has endured is
our official drink, the Whiskey Sour, which would be served at the five o'clock “Sippers,” hosted by the Room Seven Resident before every Friday Society meeting.

The Sour recipe is handed down from one Room Seven Resident to another, and it is secret. Top secret. For my first few years of Society membership, I didn't ask about the recipe. But I was dying to stand around with everyone else sipping the official Society drink, rather than making do with Stingrays of Aristocrat gin and flat ginger ale. Going into my fourth year, a friend was named Room Seven Resident. I saw my chance.

“So, Eston. Any chance I could find out what's in the Whiskey Sours?”

“Nope.”

I should have known that any student who was also an army reservist would be strict about following orders.

“Eston, I've gone three years without a Whiskey Sour.”

“If I told you, I'd have to kill you.”

Eventually we came to a compromise. Eston would send me a list that included the ingredients of the Whiskey Sours, as well as a number of red herrings. That way I could size up any potential dangers without actually learning the recipe. The list, when it arrived in my email, looked something like this:

Lime

Sprite

Spearmint

Worcestershire sauce

Cornstarch

7UP

Zima

Club soda

Orange juice

Cinnamon

Xanthan gum

Bitters

Sugar

Jalapeño

Grapefruit juice

Lemonade

Carbolic acid

Kosher salt

Basil

Fresca

There it was. Grapefruit juice. A few years earlier, I'd been on the road with my parents and, while going for orange juice at the continental breakfast bar, had accidentally poured a glass of grapefruit juice. One sip made me feel like a giant had reached into my chest, grabbed my heart, and squeezed tight. I dumped the glass out and took a deep draw on my inhaler. It might not have been a proper oral food challenge, but it was enough to make me avoid grapefruit from that day forward.

But did that mean I was allergic? At the time of that reaction, I was on Hismanal—a second-generation antihistamine that would later be pulled from the market when it was discovered it triggered potentially fatal interactions with CYP3A4 enzyme inhibitors, such as those found in … grapefruit juice.

With the Hismanal cleared from my system, knowing I didn't have any other citrus sensitivity, there was no reason not to try it again. That was the rational stance. And yet, knowing
how it had made me feel that one time, I avoided it as carefully as any allergen. Once, a friend asked point-blank if I could have grapefruit.

“No,” I said.

“So you're allergic?”

“Uh,” I said. “Kinda. It gives me heart attacks.”

Not only was grapefruit juice on the list, but it also seemed—unlike carbolic acid or Fresca—likely to be an actual ingredient. Perhaps it was time to try again. I pictured that first, hesitant sip. I pictured passing out on the floor of Room 7 West Lawn. No. Grapefruit would stay in limbo; I'd stick with my Stingrays. If I felt left out, I could try, extra hard, to be the one to lodge the Twinkie in the chandelier at 7:29 p.m. that Friday.

Though secret recipes will never be allergy friendly, I'm drawn to them—from the good (barbecue) to the gross (Tofutti). But their era, I suspect, is coming to an end.

Take Kentucky Fried Chicken. Eleven unknown herbs and spices, concocted by Colonel Sanders himself, supposedly give the chicken its unique flavor. What experience do I have with Kentucky Fried Chicken? The answer should be “none.” In a perfect world my parents would never risk feeding me chicken dipped in a mystery mix, fried in who knows what oil, and dished in the same bag as butter-laced mashed potatoes.

But like most people, I am at the mercy of extended family. During visits to the sprawling horse farm in West Virginia once owned by my aunt and uncle, mealtime sometimes centered on buckets of KFC, which is a good quick fix when you've got five kids in the house. While everyone was grabbing pieces of chicken, I would assure my mom it was worth a shot.

She'd pick out a breast for me, the biggest she could find,
and make it Sandra-friendly. That meant peeling off the batter; then the creamy layer of fat swaddling the skin; then the top layer of the chicken itself. What remained—shreds of flesh clinging to bone—I happily accepted on my plate, like a baby robin taking regurgitated food from the mouth of her mama.

The idea for KFC goes all the way back to 1930, when Harland Sanders began serving fried chicken at a gas station he owned in Corbin, Kentucky. Sanders Court & Café earned a steady following, and in 1936, when Governor Ruby Laffoon stopped in for a bite, he rewarded the proprietor with the title of “Kentucky Colonel” in recognition of his mastery of the iron skillet.

Colonel Sanders was frying chicken by his own hand, which took about thirty minutes per piece. But as the operation grew—he annexed a nearby motel and turned it into a sit-down restaurant—he looked to streamline his operation. By 1939, he was using a pressure fryer, and by 1940, the secret Original Recipe was born. In 1952, the Colonel had acquired a co-owner from South Salt Lake, Utah, and the first Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet opened. Over the next decade, the franchise spread across the country.

Colonel Sanders left the company after a buyout in 1964. His disavowal of the KFC gravy, made in some exit interviews, was a key sign that his hold on the franchise's menu had weakened as its geographic reach had increased. Journalist George Ritzer described how Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald's and Sanders's friend, remembered the Colonel declaring, “I had the greatest gravy in the world, and those sons of bitches—they dragged it out and extended it and watered it down.…”

Theoretically, his secret recipe endured. A single sheet of
yellowing paper recording ingredients and amounts, scribbled in the Colonel's own hand, was kept first in a filing cabinet with two combination locks, and later in a computerized vault. Company leaders claim that portions of the spice mix are assembled in several different locations around the country, to prevent the line workers from transcribing the complete process.

Ironically, the success of the Original Recipe is what has contributed to its downfall. As KFC became popular enough to open in more than eighty-five countries, they began modifying their core cuisine to suit wider audiences. They offer a “grilled” chicken option, in which the Original Recipe is treated as a spice rub, and an “extra-crispy” variation that double-dips in flour. I'm especially intrigued by the testing of a Famous Bowl, a modified shepherd's pie consisting of layers of mashed potatoes, gravy, corn, popcorn chicken, and cheese. The Famous Bowl would kill me at least four different ways. In India, the “hot and spicy” chicken flavor has proven more popular with the South Asian palate. In Taiwan, you can order a side of egg tarts or lotus root salad.

Moans can be heard emanating from the grave of Sanders, who died in 1980.

The integrity of the Colonel's secret recipe is gone for good, as is the ritual of its preparation. Some say that the nuance of his frying technique, which included a controlled shift in temperature after the first minute, cannot be replicated in the age of automatic deep fryers. Surely some of the flavor was lost when a class action lawsuit filed by Ralph Nader's Center for Science in the Public Interest (alleging that the use of partially hydrogenated cooking oils posed a flagrant and reckless threat
to public health) forced KFC to switch to trans-fat-free soybean oil for use throughout the restaurant chain by April 2007.

In 1983, William Poundstone published
Big Secrets
, in which he set out to expose America's greatest “mysteries”—and assert, along the way, that many were nothing more than market-driven hoopla. He submitted an off-the-street sample of KFC for chemical analysis that revealed the batter's ingredient list to be no more complicated than flour, salt, black pepper, and MSG. MSG, monosodium glutamate, is the Chinese-food additive that enhances flavor and, people joke, makes you hungry for more within the half hour. Whatever the Original Recipe was, it has been traded in (at least at the street level, by managers of individual franchises) for cheap ingredients and simpler proportions.

Poundstone also publicized the secret ingredients of Coca-Cola Classic, which include vanilla extract, citrus oils, and lime juice. Part of me knows that if I had a lime allergy and could never figure out why Coca-Cola made my throat itch, I would be grateful to him. Yet when I picture Harland Sanders in his kitchen apron, adding a pinch of this, a pinch of that, I can't help but mourn the death of the secret-recipe ritual. The problem is, I am the problem. Those with food allergies are the patron saints of the fight against secret ingredients, and Congress has acted in our name.

•  •  •

As food sellers increased their investment in prepackaged products during the twentienth century, we lost the ability to
run down the street and double-check whether the baker had brushed his breads with egg that morning. Bread went from having four to fourteen ingredients, including any number of chemical derivatives designed to increase its shelf life. The markers of a modern kitchen included the pull-tab soda, the TV dinner, and other containers designed to rob foods of their organic shape and provenance.

In Ralph Nader's introduction to
The Chemical Feast
, a 1970 critique of the Food and Drug Administration authored by regulatory affairs attorney Jim Turner, Nader issued a clarion call for transparency in the labeling of commercial foods. “Food is the most intimate consumer product,” Nader observed. So why is it, he asked, that we know more about what goes into a can of dog food than about what goes into our own bellies?

By the mid-1970s, the FDA provided suggested guidelines for labels describing products in terms of basic nutritional values: protein, fats, carbohydrates, and so on. Some companies chose to obey these guidelines in response to an increasing popular interest in good health. After all, this was the beginning of the era of Richard Simmons (real name: Milton Teagle Simmons), whose rise to fitness guru fame was preceded by stints as a New Orleans pralines vendor, a New York advertising executive, and a Beverly Hills maître d'. Take that unholy combination of vocational skills, add a costume of candy-striped dolphin shorts and Swarovski-crystal-dotted tank tops, and voilà! A nation was inspired to run like hell. And count calories as they ran.

Labels that we take for granted today were not institutionalized until the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990, the year I turned ten. What had been voluntary became
mandatory: disclosure of nutritional values, including saturated and unsaturated fat, sugar, and sodium, on all manufactured foods and the top-twenty selling fruits, vegetables, fish, and shellfish at any given grocery store. Meat, poultry, and egg products were addressed in 1993 with legislation coauthored by the Department of Agriculture.

Because much of the consumer activism was driven by concerns over scams related to the burgeoning diet-food market, the act focused on standardizing definitions for terms such as
low, lean, lite
, and
reduced
. Some notable exemptions to the labeling requirements were made for foods that weren't seen as contributing to the rapidly expanding waistlines of the masses. These included some infant formulas, mom-and-pop products with less than $500,000 in retail sales each year, and “spices, flavorings, and colors.”

This last exception did not raise much objection at the time. Making collective declarations of something like “Cajun spice” seemed like a pragmatic nod toward minor ingredients. A set of measuring spoons doesn't include the measurements for a pinch, a dash, or a smidge. Similarly, an exception was made for incidental additives and processing aids. These loopholes would soon become troublesome.

By 1996, the FDA issued an “Allergy Warning Letter” after receiving a number of reports “concerning consumers who experienced adverse reactions following exposure to allergenic substances in foods.” The culprits? Just to name a few: “natural flavorings” wherein the flavors included butter; a “processing aid” of margarine used to grease a baking sheet; tiny flakes of egg or shrimp in Japanese spice mixes.

The letter, authored by Fred Shank, director of the Center
for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, declared that manufacturers had “incorrectly interpreted what constitutes an insignificant level of a substance.” Although it was true that unlisted incidental additives could include subingredients, any additives serving a functional purpose in the final product should be listed. So if the breading on a frozen fish filet uses egg as a binder, it is not sufficient to list “bread crumbs” on the ingredients; “egg whites” needs to appear as well. Shank urged manufacturers to declare within its ingredient list any color, flavor, or spice known to be a common allergen.

In the case of Communion wafers, ritualized ingestion places religious leaders and those with allergies on opposite sides of the food fight. But in the fight for accurate food labeling, those with allergies have recognized allies among those religions that require avoidance of foods such as pork (for kosher Jews or Muslims) and beef (for Hindus). Long before ingredient lists were brought up to today's standard of specificity, my mother would remind me to look for the pareve symbol as shorthand for “dairy-free,” and to beware packaged boxes marked
D
.