Casual Fearmongering

This story makes me grind my teeth. The front-page HuffPo¹ link that led me to it screamed “Why You Should Never, Ever Put a Lemon Wedge in Your Water Glass,” implicitly suggesting some truly dire consequences: Has lemon been found to be carcinogenic? Does some chemical in lemon peel combine with water to produce a deadly toxin?

No, of course not: It's germs. "Restaurant patrons should be aware that lemon slices added to beverages may include potentially pathogenic microbes," the story tells us, based on a study that showed swabs from "the rinds and flesh of 76 lemons from 21 restaurants collected during 43 visits" produced "microbial growth" 70 percent of the time.

Oooh, yuck! Germs! Right? And not just germs, but a dizzying array of microbes and contaminants, some associated with presumptively yucky bodily regions. The article gives us every reason to be frightened and disgusted.

You know what it doesn't give us? Any reason whatsoever to believe that lemon wedges in the water glass actually make anyone sick. To begin with, the proposed mechanisms of contamination — inadequate washing of the lemons and kitchen workers' hands — are hardly unique to lemons, and could just as easily apply to any food item that passes through the kitchen and is served raw. Why pick on lemons, which "have known antimicrobial properties," as opposed to other produce? Neither the HuffPo article nor either of the sources it links to suggests even a correlation, much less a causal relationship, between lemon wedges and increased rates of illness.

A much more likely conclusion from the facts presented here is that germs, far from being uniquely harbored by lemons, are found pretty much everywhere, and even "potentially pathogenic" organisms most often do no harm, as even the researcher, Dr. Philip Tierno, seems to admit: "The usual course will probably result in no infection, but there is a possibility.... You can't live in a bubble. Your immune system is usually pretty good." Personally, I plan to continue asking for lemon in my drink, and I encourage you to do the same.

Stories like this one aren't designed to answer legitimate questions or solve actual problems; they're designed to disgust you and scare the crap out of you for no better reason than sensationalism. Food safety is serious business, of course, but stories like this that decouple our sense of risk from any realistic evaluation of actual harm contribute to our already skewed and irrational perceptions about what is and is not worth worrying about.

It's because of casual fearmongering like this that so many of us feel like we can't have properly cooked pork or enjoy runny egg yolks or eat raw cookie dough.

Beyond the world of food, it's also why we're more afraid of vaccinations than of the measles, why some folks are terrified of their cellphones, and why we can't have shampoo or shaving lotion in our carry-on bags. It's simply easier, not to mention sexier, to present armwaving stories about scary, scary risks than it is to rationally and realistically link causes to their actual effects.

And that makes me grind my teeth

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¹ HuffPo being HuffPo, I make no warranty as to what link text or headline you'll find when you click through; they seem to change somewhat capriciously

I Knew It!

When this story hit the headlines and all my feminist friends (which is to say, all my friends) reacted with outrage, I saw something other than a normative, male-dependent, self-loathing woman: I saw an ambitious stunt-blogger who was looking to parlay a self-consciously provocative story into a book deal and a shot at being the next Julie Powell.

Sure 'nuff!

Mind you, the feminist critique is warranted: The tale of Stephanie Smith's 300-sandwich race to a diamond finish line with her boyfriend Eric Schulte pings every invidious stereotype of the ring-seeking "gal" trying to prove she's "wife material."

But I saw more than just "make me a sammich, bitch" misogyny in their schtick all along: Maybe Schulte really is an unreconstructed bro, and maybe Smith is every bit the husband-hungry "chick" their tale suggests... but it has seemed more calculated than that to me since I first heard of it: I think it was a deliberate book proposal from the very beginning.

I loved the Julie & Julia film, and I entirely bought Powell's story as authentic. The sheer rawness and vulnerability of her second book, Cleaving (which I loved, though critical reactions were mixed), betrays not the slightest hint of calculation or pretense. Love her or hate her, it's hard to doubt that Powell's memoirs — even the "stunt" of cooking her way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year — grew organically out of her own life.

On the other hand, I strongly suspect Smith's tale grew organically out of... watching Powell go from blog to bestseller to the big screen, and wanting to replicate that path. It needed a food-related challenge; it needed the right mix of romance and romantic tension; it needed a Hollywood finish line.

There's nothing inherently wrong with basing a book on an artificial stunt: A.J. Jacobs has practically made a career of it, and George Plimpton essentially invented the form with his participatory sports writing. But Smith's project just seems too canned, too derivative, too self-consciously media savvy to be compelling.

And that's before you even get to the project's reliance on outdated and unwanted concepts around gender roles and relationships.

If Smith had simply blogged about trying to invent 300 (or some suitably challenging number) of unique gourmet sandwiches, I'd happily have read that blog, and bought that cookbook; as it is, I think I'll make my own damn sammich!

Are Pastry Chefs Getting Their Just Desserts?

I have a meeting this evening, so I'll probably have to watch tonight's Top Chef: Just Desserts Season 1 finale via the magic of DVR. Before it even starts, though, allow me one small rant?

If I were a pastry chef, I think I'd be more than a little bit ticked off at the way the profession has been represented during the Just Desserts inaugural season: Surely dessert chefs can't really be as petulant, flakey (no pun intended), mentally unstable, and emotionally fragile as this crowd has consistently been, starting with the multi-episode emotional implosion that ended with Seth Caro leaving the show in an ambulance and continuing through various chefs' teary moments, the agonies of the Heathers, and finalist Morgan's spot-on impression of a middle-school bully, which reached its apex last week at Judges' Table when he responded to Zac's admittedly unprovoked attack with borderline homophobic (to this viewer's ears, anyway) comments about Zac "jumping around like a little girl." By contrast, Danielle's face-pulling weirdness and Yigit's buttoned-down snark seem positively refreshing.

I suppose the producers think drama is what the viewers care about, but I don't think so: What I care about is the food, and the craft that goes into making it. There's drama enough anyway; I would've like to see from these dessert chefs the same sort of tough-minded, serious approach to the food that we typically get from their counterparts on the Top Chef mothership.

All that said, though, I will be watching.

Where Have All the Peppers Gone?

Just a brief rant about a food pet peeve of mine that I was reminded of the other night: In the middle of an otherwise hectic evening of errands, my Lovely Bride® and I stopped off at the local iteration of Wood 'n' Tap, a small Connecticut chain of bar-and-grill restaurants featuring nice pub food and a pretty decent selection of import and craft beers. I'll likely have more to say about W-n-T in a future post, but on this occasion I was seduced away from trying anything new by my favorite dish there, their four-cheese Mac-n-Cheese.

Now, it's a perfectly fine mac and cheese, but the main reason I like it so much is that it's spicy. Except the other night it... wasn't. Still tasty; the same cheesy crust, creamy sauce, perfectly cooked short tubes of pasta... but no bite. Something tickled at the back of my mind, and I rechecked the menu description. Hmmm... I don't recall it saying "a hint of chipotle..." before. Sure enough, our server confirmed that the recipe had recently been changed to make it less spicy, because customers had complained about the pepper.

Damn! Now, I don't want anyone else to have a (by their lights) bad meal, but... this is why we can't have nice things! Time after time I've seen chain restaurants — whether fast food or table service — introduce tasty spicy dishes, only to immediately start blanding them down for the masses. Back in the day, the original Popeyes Chicken spicy recipe was really spicy, and their Cajun rice would blow the top of your head off; nowadays... meh, not so much.

I recognize businesses have to cater to their customers, but we pepperheads (say that carefully if you're reading aloud!) are customers, too! Can't we have just one spicy dish on the menu? Can't the people who think it's too spicy just order something else?