My housemate Ellery created these mac ‘n’ cheese cupcakes for dinner the other night. The frosting is mashed potatoes, and they’re topped with a cherry tomato. Inside is a meatless meaty macaroni and cheese combination surrounded by a savory dough. They were super fun and tasty.

I can take very little credit for these beyond the photo. And helping to consume them. But it’s a great example of why I love living with fun creative people! I’ve heard many requests for the recipe — stay tuned! It’s not mine to share, but when Ellery writes it down I’ll be sure to let you know. (And update this page.)

Open your fridge.  If you’ve lived with that fridge for a while, there’s a good chance it looks something like mine does.  Shelf upon shelf of half-used bottles and jars of long-lasting meta-foods.  Condiments, salad dressings, jellies, beverages, chutneys, nut butters, salsas, pickled vegetables, etc.  We expect our fridges to be full of food, so this doesn’t in itself challenge the evolutionary principal of selection.  But taking an inventory shows that there is a strong bias towards foods we don’t actually like.  In fact, the typical selection process for foods in our refrigerators tends to concentrate foods we don’t like, thus running backwards to what should intuitively evolve towards a selection of our favorite foodstuffs.  But for a couple very understandable reasons, that just doesn’t happen.

Consider salad dressings.  Most of us like to have some choices when we’re topping our raw vegetables.  So when we’re at the store, we don’t just buy the one salad dressing we like, but will often try a new variety.  There’s a documented psychological principal called Variety Seeking that encourages diversity in buying because people want to explore different choices.  But what happens when we buy a variety we don’t particularly enjoy?  Like that orange blossom vinaigrette or the honey mustard that’s just a bit too thick and sweet.  We try it once, form an opinion, and the next time we have salad we go for the old-reliable Goddess dressing.  So it lingers.  But we don’t throw it away.  Because there’s nothing WRONG with it.  Besides, one day when we have guests over they might prefer a syrupy honey-mustard dressing.  Or maybe we could dip chicken knuckles into it or something.  Plus the combination of preservatives, low-temperature and food that doesn’t promote bacterial growth in the first place means it can stay edible for years.  So their continued presence provides some small marginal benefit of choice.  The only real alternative is throwing them away  (which makes us feel guilty) since there’s no secondary market for used condiments.

Beyond choice, they do provide marginal benefit in terms of ballast for heat capacity.  Refrigerators run more efficiently when they’re full since there’s a larger thermal mass which is more stable.  But this assumes the fridge has ample space for the food that is being cycled through and consumed.  In many households the need to find space for food you’re actually going to eat creates a selection pressure to remove such undesirable foods.  But the door of the fridge is a niche environment that isn’t very well suited to large, short-lived main courses and thus things like eleven different varieties of mustard tend to thrive.

What’s the take-home lesson here?  How do we fight this scourge on our pallets?  Actually I don’t think it’s that big of a problem.  When we need space in the fridge, we find it.  But otherwise we collect things like Mang Thomas All Purpose Sauce, and pickled cherry peppers.   If clutter bothers you, resist the temptation to try something new and stick with something you know you’ll use.  Heck, get a really big bottle.  Or look for similar reverse-evolutionary processes in your medicine cabinet, liquor shelf, or office supplies, and be conscious that you have the power to change things.  Or just accept that sometimes human nature tends to concentrate our surroundings with things we don’t actually like.

There’s an evolutionary advantage to cooking food — it kills parasites, bacteria and other food-borne diseases while doing little to decrease the nutritional value of the food.  So it makes sense that we would have evolved a predisposition to eating cooked food, and it seems likely this happened in the form of liking the taste of smoked food.  The genome helped to encourage food-safety rules for us that our brains hadn’t yet worked out.  The fact that smoky food is carcinogenic is a little sad.  I’m guessing it points to the fact that we’ve been subtly encouraged to eat this food for maybe only a couple hundred of thousands of years, which isn’t long enough for our digestive systems to learn how to render safe the multitude of different compounds found in smoke.  That and the fact that most cancers like this happen so late in life as to be essentially irrelevant from an evolutionary standpoint — once you’ve had your kids and raised them, it doesn’t much matter what happens to your body.

This also hearkens back to a time when humans knew how to use fire, but had not fully mastered it.  I’m convinced this is why we love to stare at a fire for hours on end. It is pacifying in a lizard-brain kind of way.  (How many times have you watched that chicken go around just now?) There almost certainly was a time when humans knew how to use fire, but not make it.  They gained benefits from it through cooking or heating, but had to get very lucky to capture it from the wild say  after a natural lightning strike.  As such, it was extremely important to the whole tribe that somebody was always watching the fire to make sure it didn’t go out.

If you’d like to follow along the antics of cooking large mammals over open flames, I’ll be posting regular updates to my food and recipe blog, Add Garlic.  There’s also a “recipe” for spit-roast chicken here.

My girlfriend’s condition has gotten worse in recent months, to the point where immuno-suppresents seem reasonable.  But instead, she’s opted to do something much more difficult and follow the advice of a naturopath.  She’s agreed to eliminate basically all tasty foods from her diet for some unreasonably long period of time.  After weeks of eating nothing but rice and steamed vegetables (I’m exaggerating, but not much) she’ll slowly start adding foods in one at a time to see what might be causing an negative reaction.  It’s an elimination diet — a fairly common practice which is pretty easy to visualize but takes care and dedication to do properly.

Why suffer through this process instead of just taking some pills and getting better?  Because it promises
to understand and solve the cause of the problem, rather than just cover up the symptoms.  I admire her strength and wisdom in this choice.  Until then, we’ll be making lots of use of the veggie steamer.  (My veggie steamer actually looks a lot more like this one, but mine has the fabulous retro-luddite feature of a knob to set how long to cook for instead of digital controls.)

I developed this salad as a way to avoid junk food when my evenings are booked solid with business school.  It’s really good for you — lots of veggies, protein, complex carbs and monounsaturated fats — and it’s made almost entirely from non-perishables that you can keep in your pantries.  In fact the version that has none of the fresh ingredients is a fantastic yummy meal — sometimes I’ll throw in marinated artichoke hearts or marinated mushrooms if I have nothing fresh.  It also means I can stop by the store on the way home, pick up an avocado and a cucumber and have a quick tasty dinner.

Reggae Salad

• 2 cans (14oz) garbanzo beans (I really prefer non-organic to be honest.  Organic beans always seem soft and mushy.)
• 6 oz sun dried tomatoes (julienned, oil packed)
• 1 ripe avocado, chunked
• 1 oz fresh basil, chopped
• 3 oz pine nuts
• 1 cucumber, peeled and cubed
• 1-3 T good olive oil (to taste)
• 2-3 T good balsamic vinegar (to taste)
• Touch of hot sauce (optional)

Mix all ingredients in a bowl.  Including some of the oil from the tomatoes gives it a nice flavor too.  Serve.  Yum!  If you do it right, you’ll see where the name comes from.

Serves 4 as a side dish, or 2 as a meal.

I find this amazing for a couple of reasons.  First, it drives home the artificial nature of trans-fats.  I’ve thought of them as similar to saturated fats in a lot of ways — things that are everywhere but should be avoided.  But thinking about what it would mean to not use them in a restaurant makes clear that they’re not so omnipresent.  No crisco vegetable shortening, and no margarine.  Other than that, what ingredients have trans fats in them?  Partially hydrogenated vegetable oil — I’ve never used that.  Have you?

I do want to mention olive oil a bit.  Olive oil is primarily a monounsaturated fat, which is a very healthy kind of oil.  Heating a monounsaturated oil like can turn it into a trans-fat.  Some have concluded from this that cooking with olive oil is unhealthy, and I admit I’ve spread this rumor too.  But from the little research I’ve managed to dig up (1, 2) this process doesn’t occur enough to be a real issue in traditional cooking settings.  I will say this research is thin and minds may change.

I’d like to say a bit about the chemistry involved here.  Trans-fats refers to the configuration of carbons on either side of a double-bond, or a place where the fat is unsaturated — it’s a trans rather than a cis configuration.  Cis fats have marked bends, while trans fats have kinks in otherwise straight chains. I’m guessing the reduced mobility of the unsaturated fats caused by
their bends are related to their health benefits, but I’m not sure.  Here are two monounsaturated fats, in cis and trans forms:

Cis fatty acid: oleic acid

Trans fatty acid: elaidic acid

Also, most of what I’ve been reading assumes that hydrogenation is the only way that trans fats can occur, which is wrong.  Industrial hydrogenation converts unsaturated double-bonds to single bonds, preferentially in the trans configuration.  But other chemical processes can do this too.  Cows naturally produce small quantities of trans fats.

This law is a great example the government taking a broader interest in society values than any individual constituent would.  The government pays for health care, so in this case they do have a direct interest in improving public health, and will likely see a benefit from this, so it’s not a perfect example of the principal I’m expounding.  In general, I think it’s the government’s responsibility to legislate things that are for the "long-term good of society" (in quotes because I recognize that it’s hard to define or agree upon).  This burden falls uniquely on the government when there’s nobody else who clearly benefits from this kind of legislation.  Environmental protection is a classic example of this — do things that won’t directly help us or our kids but rather our great grand-kids.  The Lorax spoke for the trees for the trees had tongues.  Today, NGOs tend to do that speaking, and sometimes the government listens.  I’m surprised, impressed and proud of New York for this bold move!