The Man Who Ate Everything (25 page)

Obesity and alcohol intake are strongly associated with high blood pressure; you can do yourself a great favor by losing weight and drinking less if blood pressure is a problem. And Intersalt did show that the more salt people eat, on average, the more likely it is that their blood pressure will increase as they grow older. But the numbers are unimpressive. If everybody in America slashed his or her salt consumption from eight grams a day to two, the average blood pressure would go down by only 2 percent.

Some people are extremely sensitive to salt; their blood pressure goes way up when they eat it and down when they don’t. Of the 20 percent of Americans who develop hypertension, about one-third of them are salt sensitive—about 8 percent of the population. They should avoid it, as should people with congestive heart failure, liver disease, or kidney disease. If you have high blood pressure, you probably know it already; ask your doctor to help you find out whether you are salt sensitive.

But the other 92 percent of us can handle just about all the salt we feel like eating. Why public-health officials would want the entire population to act as if we were allergic to salt is beyond me, especially since nobody has ever been able to demonstrate that moderate salt restriction makes much of a difference to anyone. It’s like making everybody wear eyeglasses just because a few of us need them. Yet that’s what most government health authorities urge. They never bother to calculate the profound benefits that scrumptious food can bring to our otherwise desperate lives. In a thousand-plus pages of federal nutrition reports I unable to locate any instance of the words “delicious,”
“delectable,” “savory,” or “yummy.” And the committees writing the reports did not include one noted chef, even though they are devoted to telling America, in the most heartbreaking detail, how we should eat.

The Yanomami may win popularity contests in the blood pressure industry, but they really have nothing to tell us about how to live. Their hormone systems are in a constant and unusual state of alertness against the loss of any sodium at all, almost as though their condition were an illness; injury and bleeding can be disastrous for them. And you would be appalled to read anthropologists’ accounts of how the Yanomami behave when they’re not having their blood pressure taken: almost half of all Yanomamo men have killed somebody, and a third of Yanomamo deaths are the result of violence! Most of these homicides are part of an endless cycle of revenge between warring villages. Killers enjoy high social status and get many more wives than men who have not killed. (I think the Yanomami consider more wives a good thing.) All Yanomami live in constant terror of violent death. They also take psychedelic drugs.

By all accounts, the Yanomami are a bunch of bloodthirsty maniacs who make Abu Nidal look like a scoutmaster. Personally, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if their tasteless behavior were due entirely to salt deficiency. I doubt that the blood pressure industry is looking into this.

Growing up in a hysterical antisalt environment, a whole generation of America’s future homemakers lack the slightest notion of how to cook with it and how the various types of salt taste and behave. Here are some hints: Water for pasta should be vigorously salted before the pasta goes in (a tablespoon for each quart and four quarts of water for a pound of pasta) or the noodles themselves will taste bland no matter how well you salt the sauce. The same goes for potatoes. But dried peas and legumes should be salted at the end of their cooking; otherwise their skins will harden and split. Usually, salt added at the table becomes the dominant flavor, doesn’t bind the other tastes together, and leaves you with a salty aftertaste. But sometimes you love the
f
eeling of salt crystals against your tongue, as on pretzels, crackers, and chips.

Don’t salt fried foods before you cook them or they will become soggy in the fryer, but be sure to salt them immediately before eating. Food eaten cold needs more salt in cooking than food served hot. Add salt to your salad at the very last minute or the greens will wilt; tossing coarse salt into a salad immediately before serving it (not into the dressing) will add a sparkle and a crunch.

If you feel a bit less anxious now about salt and are ready to begin exploring the wonderful world of salt, I have a terrific high-salt dish for you to try, which I discovered at a restaurant in New York’s Chinatown.

Salt-and-Pepper Shrimp

The Yun Luk Rice Shoppe on Doyers Street in Chinatown was among the best Cantonese restaurants in New York ten years ago when Henry Hugh was chef, and I recently tracked Henry down to see if he would part with the recipe for his delicious shrimp. Salt is the main flavoring, and it seems to bind the sweet juices of the shrimp to the surface of the shells, where they caramelize and take on the smoke-and-iron taste of the wok. The dish uses three teaspoons of salt, about 15,000 milligrams, which is the average salt ration of a Yanomamo family of four, if they have families of four, for six weeks. (But unless you swallow all the shells, you will consume only a fraction of the salt.)

1 pound medium-large shrimp (14 to 16 per pound), shells on

1 tablespoon salt (15,000 mg)

4 cups peanut oil

2 teaspoons cornstarch

1 garlic clove, minced

1 fresh red hot pepper (an inch or two long if very hot, longer if mild), chopped fine without removing the seeds or internal membranes

1 teaspoon dry sherry

3 scallions, white part only, finely shredded

With a heavy scissors, cut all along the back of each shrimp through the shell and halfway down into the flesh; devein and rinse well under cold water, but do not remove the shell. Soak the shrimp for 10 minutes in 1 teaspoon of the salt dissolved in 1 cup of cold water. Drain and pat dry in paper towels without rinsing.

In a wok slowly bring the oil to about 400°
F
, just before it begins to smoke. (If you prefer, use 2 cups of oil instead of 4 and fry the shrimp in two batches.) As the oil nears this point, dust the shrimp with cornstarch through a sieve and toss to coat evenly. Fry the shrimp for 1 minute, tumbling them in the oil. Empty the contents of the wok into a large strainer set over a bowl to collect the oil.

Return
1/
2
tablespoon of oil to the wok, heat, add the garlic and chopped pepper, cook for 10 seconds without browning, add the shrimp and the remaining 2 teaspoons of salt, toss a few times, sprinkle with the dry sherry, toss, cover for 10 seconds, uncover, toss a few more times for about 10 seconds, remove to a serving plate, and garnish with the scallions. Eat the shrimp with your fingers or with chopsticks, sucking the burnished salt and juices from the shells before discarding them. Or you can eat the shells too. Serves 2 as a main course or 4 as an appetizer.

August 1990

Last night I played the neatest trick on my wife. I grilled a slice of my best homemade French country bread, spread it thick with Promise Ultra Fat-Free nonfat margarine, set it on the counter, sat back, and waited. Soon the toasty aroma drew my wife into the kitchen. Seeing the bread, she smiled broadly and took a bite. I’ll never forget the way her smile froze, as she gagged, stumbled over to the kitchen sink, and gave up her mouthful of bread covered with Promise Ultra Fat-Free nonfat margarine. What fun we have together!

I learned about Promise Ultra Fat-Free nonfat margarine— which is made from water, vegetable mono- and diglycerides, gelatin, salt, rice starch, and lactose, plus a bouquet of chemicals and artificial flavors—from
Butter Busters
(Warner Books), an extremely popular low-fat cookbook. I have been living with low-fat cookbooks for the past month or so—not because it makes any medical sense, as I will explain, but because the low-fat cookbook business has become a bloated and distended juggernaut that threatens to crush everything else on the market. Susan Arnold of Waldenbooks kindly sent me a printout of their best-selling cookbooks, and there, proudly occupying first and second place, were
In the Kitchen with Rosie
(Knopf) and
Butter Busters.
Rosie’s book has just gone into its thirty-second printing in eight months, bringing its grand total to 5.8 million copies in
print and making it not only the number one best-seller of 1994 in all book categories but also the fastest-selling book since Gutenberg may or may not have invented movable type.
Butter Busters,
with well over a million copies in print, has nothing to be shy about either. And Susan Powter’s completely incoherent
Food
(Simon & Schuster) soared onto the best-seller list immediately upon publication.

Most low-fat cookbooks contain long self-congratulatory passages claiming that the author’s revolutionary new way of cooking actually tastes better than real food. This is only rarely true. Sure, many traditional dishes should have been lightened years ago. But the vast majority of low-fat and nonfat makeovers sacrifice at least something in texture, taste, and satisfaction. That is indisputable. The key questions are: What do you give up for what advantage? What do you gain for how much pain?
Butter Busters,
America’s second most popular cookbook, gives up more than a bit of taste and texture. It gives up food itself.

It could have been called
How to Shop for and Throw Together the Trashiest Food on Your Supermarket Shelves into a Low-Fat, Low-Sodium, and Low-Sugar Imitation of High-Fat Junk Food
(Warner Books). Pam Mycoskie, who wrote and published the book all by herself in 1992 and then sold it to Warner Books in 1994, leaves nothing to chance. Forty pages are taken up by a shopping guide to the many artificial, chemical-laden, low-fat supermarket ingredients demanded by her recipes. (The guide is divided up according to which stores in the vicinity of Arlington, Texas—her hometown—carry which brands. As this information is of passing interest to most Americans, Warner Books must have been in a great hurry to reach a public voracious for junk food, or was loath, for scholarly reasons, to tamper with the original manuscript.) Pam’s picks include Butter Buds, Egg Beaters, Egg Mates, Better’N Eggs, Pillsbury Lovin’ Lites cake mixes and frostings, Old El Paso fat-free refried beans (doesn’t
“refried”
mean anything anymore?), ENER-G egg replacer, Texas B-B-Q Seasoned chicken strips, Peter Eckrich Deli “Lite” roast beef slices, Sea Pak Cooked
Artificial Crab, Auburn Farms fat-free toaster pastries, and nonfat cheeses from Alpine Lace, Borden, Kraft, Polly-O, and Healthy Choice. There must be a law against calling them cheese. Have you ever tasted this stuff?

With these and other ingredients you can make Sloppy Joe Casserole, Mashed Potato Shell Taco Pie, and Pam’s Sweet Trash. Her Pineapple Salad Surprise contains ketchup, fat-free Miracle Whip, lobster tails, and Cointreau. I baked Pam’s Rich Fudge Brownies because the more opulent Easy Fudge Brownies on the facing page began with a box of Lovin’ Lites fudge brownie mix, which I deemed a form of cheating. As it was, the Rich Fudge Brownies included Sweet ‘n Low, Sweet ‘n Low brown sugar substitute, Egg Beaters, our old friend Promise Ultra Fat-Free nonfat margarine, and Braum’s Lite fudge topping. Finding most of these ingredients proved tricky for somebody residing so far from Arlington, Texas, and required a tour of nearly every supermarket in lower Manhattan. In the end, the brownies turned out sticky and rubbery and would have had no chocolate taste without the lite fudge topping. Even mediocre brownies have a brief half-life in my house; five days on, the pan of Pam Mycoskie’s Rich Fudge Brownies sits lonely on the kitchen table, nearly intact. These brownies are infinitely shelf-and-table-stable.

I did learn a handy trick from Pam, though it is apparently common in microwave cookbooks: you can cook an entire head of cauliflower in one piece by wrapping it in plastic and micro-waving on high power for just six to eight minutes. The results were perfect, ready to
sauté
in plenty of real olive oil with a little real garlic, not part of Pam’s recipe. Her Egg Beaters Benedict was completely inedible, and her Cherry Cheesecake Delight suffered both from a crust made by crushing one and a half boxes of SnackWell’s Fat-Free Cinnamon Snacks and from a thick layer of Philadelphia fat-free cream cheese, one of the gummiest affronts to the name of cheese ever concocted. Pam’s Potato Pancakes are made from nearly all real food—potatoes, onions, flour, pepper— and were delectable if slightly undersalted when I fried them in
olive oil. But
sautéed
in liquid Butter Buds as the recipe instructs, they are blotchy and grossly undercooked, lacking the fat that would evenly convey the heat to the pancake’s surface, crisping them deliciously. Pam Mycoskie cannot resist fake food; her recipe for sourdough bread, which is nearly always made without a trace of fat, bafflingly includes Butter Buds.

Why would anybody in America want to humiliate, degrade, and befoul themselves by eating these dishes or any of the hundreds of fat-free packaged foods that Pam recommends to her million readers? Why did a million of us buy her book?

Because we have become mortally and irrationally afraid that eating fat will make us fat, bring on heart attacks, give us cancer. Fearful of both death and unsightly bulges, we are no longer able to distinguish right from wrong. In the ignorant grip of a national fat phobia, we recoil from the flesh of the velvet green avocado, the benign and perfumed olive, and the golden oil of the crunchy peanut as though these were the moral equivalent of the thick carpet of solid white fat surrounding a slab of beef. “A low-fat lifestyle is as important to you as stopping smoking,” Pam opines. This is dangerous nonsense.