Have you by chance heard the strange news that the New York Health Department is considering imposing a ban on trans fats?  Read about it HERE, then continue reading...  Don't worry, I'll wait for you.  You done yet?  No, no, take your time, I'm not going anywhere.  Through yet?  Okay then...

There's a lot of press about this right now, so if CNN's not your thing, google NYC trans fats and see what comes up.   If you don't google, then I can't help you.

So the article barely covers trans fats, what they are, and what they do.  Thanks to my girl Nina Planck, I got the skinny on all that, and it ain't pretty.  It's a lurid tale of politics, commerce, and bad press, and it cuts to the core of crazy American industrialized agriculture.  Consider for a moment the roughly 10,000 years of mostly-recorded human history... then consider that trans fats have been part of the human diet for about 1% of that time.

No Mesopotamian ever ate a trans fat, nor did any Ancient Roman.  Trans fats arrived on the global dinner table somewhere in the 19th century, when chemists (not, mind you, chefs) found that animal fat could be solidified by simply bombarding it with hydrogen atoms (hydrogenating).  Thanks to the sponsorship of Napolean III, someone in the 1870s figured out that the same process works on vegetable fats (which until then had only been liquid), and thus, courtesy of the FRENCH, margarine was born.

The history and politics behind this fat is fascinating without even bothering to ponder NYC's recent efforts to sully its reputation.  As early as 1873, the US government heavily regulated margarine's sale, basically just to protect the US dairy farmers from some upstart French margarine onslought.  By the 1880s, an expensive tax was put on every tub of margarine.  And all this was instituted long before there was any evidence that trans fats cause heart disease.

When in the early 20th century the US department of agriculture started promoting margarine, it certainly wasn't for health reasons- it was to promote farms in the face of the slowly growing industrialized agriculture sector.  This of course kicked into high gear around WWII, but the dairy industry in the US and abroad had some interesting ways to fight the fake fat front- they made sure that margarine stayed ugly!

Sounds weird, I know, but when vegetable oils are hydrogenated, they turn a pale white color typically associated with the skintones of certain zombies.  It's unflattering, and clearly chemical.  To assuage the flinching eyes of doubting consumers, margarine manufacturers started adding yellow dyes to make their goop look more like butter.  But the dairy cabals all over the world fought to make such dyes illegal.  They only became legal in Australia in 1980.  In Quebec, they're STILL illegal, and accordingly, the Quebecoise eat a lot of butter.

Round about the 1980s, as industrialized agriculture in the US insured that, as an employer, agriculture accounted for less than 1% of the workforce (down from 50% in 1861) , the margarine boosters out there tried to ridea health kick and position of margarine as a HEALTHIER alternative to butter.  I recall floods of commercials from back in those days as "I can't believe it's not butter" tried to demonize what it wasn't, and cholesteral was zoomed in as the future end of civilization lest something were done about it.

Flash forward to today, when the tables have been turned, and now margarine is being given treatment as cruel as cigarettes garnered in the late 90s.  Health and food trends flow a buck, and us poor consumers find it ever more difficult to know what to eat, much less who to trust.  But this legislation of diets seems rather extreme, whatever the health implications of eating margarine.  More on this next week, because there's so much to cover...

Margarine, butter...

My biscuit needs moistening.

Better go with jam.

 

Hydrogenate me.

Bombard me with your atoms.

Soon, I'll nuke your heart.

 

Time was, health made sense.

Once men ate meat, and loved it.

Now, each bite is fear.

 

EN "Peel'en" K 

Posted by iankusc at 08:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Truth be told, I wasn't always a purveyor of healthy snacks.  There was a time, oh, a long time ago, when I was in fact a provider of UN-healthy snacks.  My very first job, besides mowing suburban lawns, was selling ice-cream in my hometown's local, homemade ice cream store.  The store was called "Temptations," and we mixed all of our own flavors, including some doozies like "Chocolate Chocolate Chip A'la Orange", "Black Raspberry", and the heaven sent "Chocolate Peanut Butter Coconut."

I mention this because earlier this week, the entire Peeled Snacks sales team took a junket to our packing facility in quiet upstate New York where we found that after 8:30, the only place in town that was open was the Great Escapes ice cream shop.  The whole bunch of us got in line at a cute, family run, walk-up homemade ice cream joint, and after tasting this and that (Grape ice cream?  No thanks.  Cookie Dough?  YES!), we all ordered scoops...

Scoops that were fit for King Kong!!!!

This lovely, perfect little ice cream store scooped out TITANIC portions of their delicious ice cream, scoops so big that upon the first person receiving their "single" scoop, everyone else asked for a kiddie-cone instead.  And still, with cones supposedly fit for the pre-pubescent, most of us STILL didn't finish our desserts.  You could perhaps make the case that all this posh, svelte New Yorkers simply haven't developed their ice cream eating skills, and you'd be right, I suppose.  That doesn't change the fact that this ice cream joint was dishing half pounds of goodness for about $2.00.

Now what, pray tell, might this have to do with Peeled Snacks?  Ice cream can certainly be seen as a snack, and if most Americans might perhaps assume that it's best eaten in the summertime, that's because they haven't had a chocolate chocolate chip a'la orange milkshake during the dead of February (and they should adroitly change that). 

This fantastic pricing per pound makes me feel like Peeled Snacks has one tough battle winning over customers from the junk-food purveyors of the world.  Not to call ice cream junk (I love it, I Love it, I LOVE it), but it certainly isn't the most nutritional of bites to nibble. And yet, you can get about 5 times more of it for your dollar.  Simply speaking, for a lot of the public at large, that just makes dollars and sense.

 There's no easy reconciliation of this disparagement.  If the public recognizes the health benefits of Peeled Snacks (and, in all likelihood, their long-term implications upon the wallet), then dried fruit and nuts is king.  But the wallet is a fickle fan, and one quickly swayed by the simplest of measures.  Sure enough, after eating my pile of ice cream, my stomach was a mess... but my soul was happy, and my greedy inner gnome felt like it had gotten a great deal.

Hmm... Sounds like there's a poem in there...

Single ply, not double.  It only goes to the dumpster, for sure...

Generic butter only, the organic stuff probably gives ya gas.

Movies only before 6 pm, and only in that theater with the sticky floor,

Sure, it'd be NICE to take an ambulance, but we'll have to walk, alas...

Storm windows in the Spring?  I'll just put in plastic wrap... 

I don't know about that Honda, better get the Yugo...

I only fly AirTram, anyone who pays more is a Sap!

Capitolism's a crock- I'm voting for Hugo! 

 

Yours, EN 

Posted by iankusc at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Current Peeled Snacks president and founder-for-life Noha Waibsnaider has recently picked up a copy of Eric Schlosser's seminal book Fast Food Nation, and she's steadily toiling through it. I had picked it up about the time of its debut and, as an anti-fast-food crusader, I lapped up its tidbits hungrily.  Now, however, what with the impending release of Richard Linklater's filmic fictionalization of the book, it's time to pay it a little bit more attention.

Two confessions: I DO eat fast food, only in the particular forms of Subway sandwiches and/or Baja Fresh burritos.  As I admitted in an earlier entry, I have within the past couple of months eaten a McDonalds hamburger, and while I'm not proud of the fact, the subsequent stomach rumblings and such were sufficient penance to prevent that from happening again for a VERY long while.

Second, I'm a rather orthodox Linklater fan, having seen all of his films but one (last summer's Bad News Bears, I'll check it out some day) and relished both his personal pieces (Slacker, Before Sunset/Sunrise) and his Hollywood hat-tips (School of Rock, A Scanner Darkly, and the failed Newton Boys).

So that said, understand that I'm not going to be the most objective critic of the film when it comes out.  I may suffer from a bit of a "it's not as good as the book" complex, though that may be less like thanks to the novel touch of turning non-fiction into fiction.  I'll certainly be a convert to whom the preaching is directed, though most of the audience is likely to be in a similar position.  I somehow find it unlikely that the film will do gang-buster business in the director's home state of Texas, currently the fattest state in our fattest of nations.

But, alas, Schlosser's book, for those unfamiliar or not recently acquainted, begins with several words about the origins of the fast food giants, and in particular their giant creators- the Ray Krocs, the Carl Karchers, the Colonel Sanders.  Schlosser details their tales through a surprisingly flattering lens, and gives them all credit for being passionate, creative, progressive entrepreneurs.  Schlosser's writing in these sections portrays a changing America (thanks in large part to the Highway system being put in place), and a bunch of guys trying to change business accordingly.

Well that doesn't sound so unreasonable, does it?  Frankly, I feel substantial affinity to the spirit of those gents, as I suppose our Supreme Leader, Ms. Waibsnaider, is likewise feeling as she reads.  We here are, after all, doing our best to adapt to changing eating habits and agricultural practices, and crafting our product accordingly.  For us these are spirited times requiring adaptability, entrepreneurialism, and LOTS of hard work.  I suppose Pete Harman, the guy who made KFC what it is, felt similarly.

I'm going to have to touch on this a few times over the next few weeks as we build up to the movie.  It's worth paying the topic attention, not just because the film might rock, but because of the cultural force that fast-food has become in our culture, and what Peeled Snacks is trying to do about it.

A Poem...

in 1848 there was gold found in them California hills,

Gold rushing down like pennies from heaven,

really expensive pennies.

Folks set their eyes on them shiny nuggets and saddled up.

Some made it, trotting all the way from Boston to San Fran.

Some didn't make it, and founded Fargo instead.

Everyone wants gold, everyone hopes to find it

in whatever hills they confuse for California

But everyone sure would find gold a hekuva lot faster

If those wide open highways went everywhere.

None of them 1848ers made it to Cali in 48,

So they all became 49ers, and now we got yon football team.

But how'd it look today if gold was found in, say, Maine,

and all people'd have to do was jump on 95,

and head north for a few hours?

Sure, the traffic might delay the gold rush of September 06

to October, or so,

but those roads'd get people there, quick as quitters,

and line the pockets of today's prospectors

with shiny shine, with igneous pearls. 

Posted by iankusc at 11:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So yesterday Peeled Snacks' new chic, sexy t-shirt made its debut at New York's sensational, somewhat slightly ridiculous Fashion Week, where all the glitterati and fashionistas were on display to applaud our simple yet essential new statement, marvel at the beauty of our runway model (thank you Laura), and then go back to looking for Lindsey Lohan.  We had a small crew on hand to record some of the goings on, and hopefully we'll post some footage from the event in the next couple of days.

Unfortunately, the crew wasn't recording the actual runway debut of the shirt.  If anyone, perhaps, recorded in hi-def digital in the main auditorium yesterday from 1:30 to 1:50, I'd pay good money for your footage.  Or, well, I'd send you a lot of free t-shirts.  Would you prefer to be paid in snacks, perhaps?

There's been a great deal of buildup to the release of these tees.  Starting back in June, we had a designer put together some baseball tees to show off at a food expo (see the Peel Me blog entry from July).  At that point we elected to use the catchy, sexy slogan Peel Me.  That of course made quite am impression, sometimes though a bit too much of one.  Peel Me certainly garnered attention, though too often it led to off comments by VERY excited conventioneers.

One very unexpected yet pleasant reaction to those shirts heard from many was "where can I get one?"  I loved hearing that- it meant that I could finally start transitioning from my dream job as a snack magnate to my other dream job as a fashion maven.  But as we'd only printed 10 Peel Me shirts, we didn't have any way to spread the love.

Over the next month or so, our most worthy intern Rachel (or, as we like to call her, Rachelcalafrajalistic) put together a plan to get more T-shirts out there, and with the help of our great base of customers, we came up, via a submission competition, a new t-shirt slogan to replace the not-ready-for-primetime Peel Me.  Courtesy of Stephen Lahey, a customer from upstate New York, we chose a-peeling.  And the ball started to roll...

So when these goodies arrived last week, we weren't sure just how to debut them.  We considered donating a bunch of them to the New York Yankees, but it turned out that they already had baseball shirts of their own, go figure.  We thought about stapling them to the hull of Space Shuttle Atlantis, but cooler minds prevailed.  For a while we were in negotiations with the George Dubya Bush posse, and there was a moment there when it looked like he'd wear one for his fear mongering, er, 9/11 memorial speech last night, but as he insisted upon wearing the shirt and nothing else, we had to back out.

When someone in the room proposed debuting the shirt at New York's ultra-cool Fashion Week, the seven other people in the room simultaneously all slapped ourselves in the forehead, and immediately afterwards all simultaneously groaned "DOH!"  Considering that designers spend months planning the show, and spends thousands of dollars (if not millions) getting everything worked out, with 2 days to go and a budget consisting of pocket change, we put our plan in motion...

In a few days you'll see the amazing results.  I have about a zillion people to thank, but as I bribed most of them, I'll just give my sincerest thanks out to the LOVELY and talented Laura Valpey and my SUPER-cool, ultra-cunning cousin Andrew Maloney.  Without their help, we'd never have been able to drug the security guards and take those incriminating photos of the judges...

Poem for the day:

No, seriously Mr. security guard sir,

Ms. Lopez-Anthony NEEDS her snacks.

She called me personally,

not even using ONE of her 18 surly assistants,

because she had grown peckish,

and knew that if she went through her usual channels,

she'd have to ruin someone's life.

PLEASE, Mr. security guard, sir,

this is a matter of national security,

as one of our national treasures,

and her heavily insured posterior,

require nourishment that only I can provide.

I'd say it's a matter of life or death,

but considering that several members of Ms. Lopez's staff

have lost their heads over a similar, previous incident,

I have to assume that by now

it's a matter of life AND death.

I'm just here to prevent

any more horror from happening.

No?

Would you let me in if I gave you a dried apricot?

Here, try one.  Tasty, huh?  Have it with chocolate... 

Oh.  Thanks so much, Mr. Security Guard, sir.

(SCORE!)

 

Peace and happiness, and don't believe a word that Dubya says...

EN "Peel-en" K 

Posted by iankusc at 09:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

People have since the very conception of Peeled Snacks asked, "so why aren't they Organic"?  Notice how I wrote the "O" word with a capitol "O"?  These days, "Organic" food is treated with the utmost respect, so it feels only natural to appoint it, you know, a wider letter.  Wiser people than I have written much larger volumes than I'll ever attempt about the virtues of "Organic" food, and I won't question their insights in my little entry.

I will, however, put forth a theory that people in the Organic world are nicer than, say, your average Joe (who is nice enough to begin with, if perhaps occasionally a little crusty around the edges).  I say this because I have just moments ago received in the mail a tin of my favorite, my Favorite, my FAVORITE organic tea from my favorite organic tea company, Ineeka (shameless plug, check out www.ineeka.com for BANG up tea, and then write me and thank me).

They sent me this tin of tea because of some minor favor that I did for them, and in fact they were the ones who told me that Organic food producers are nicer.  They therefore not only pepper my thoughts with new ideas, but also back up those ideas with action, creating in me a conviction, thus forcing me to actions of my own, like telling you all about them.

But in this little shameless plug I must confess I find a terrible fault, at least in terms of Peeled Snacks' own Organic aspirations.  Some of you may know this already, and most the rest hopefully already assume, but we have our eyes on creating an Organic (there goes the O again) line of Peeled Snacks, and have been pursing this goal in many ways, several of them involving sampling a lot, a Lot, a LOT of Organic fruit (see the blog entry A Delicate Sound of Puget for more details).

Ah, and here we have the challenge before us- we aspire to make a nicer product with the help of nicer people, and we have found many great orchards and farms that are eager to get on board... yet this darn Organic food costs twice, Twice, TWICE as much!  That HURTS!

It doesn't just hurt- it nearly negates the whole idea.  Peeled Snacks is obviously a new, up and coming company, and we're just getting our bearings in several aspects of our business.  Our margins are thinner than we'd like, though understandably so given that we're building our brand and our client base and our, uh, blog.  The idea of doubling (DOUBLING) the cost of our ingredients seems like pure insanity, however good the cause.

Quite a pickle this all is- the clear, worthy goal of going organic (or, rather, Organic) is quickly met by the cold, hard slap of the hand of reality- Organic food costs more to produce.  That's one of the curses of industrialization- it cheapens THINGS, which inevitably cheapens PEOPLE.  One of the MANY, Many, many curses.

Funny little secret: many of Peeled Snacks ingredients are actually Organic.  Often we find some O fruit or nut that we can afford, and we use it.  We don't make a stink about it, but I daresay that the pickiest of taste buds out there would pick them out, probably favorably.  Oh, if only Organic were always affordable, we'd only use it and never look back.  More on this before the month's out....

Three Haikus about Ineeka, though it would help if you looked at a picture of their tea bag on their website...

tear bag,  pull wings, steep.

drink tea after 5 minutes.

whipe leaves off your nose...

 

Afternoon tea's fun.

We push bags with our noses

Looks ridiculous.

 

This must be your first.

I can tell by your nose tip.

You've a bag stuck there.

 

I love that stuff, and I love you, whoever you are.

EN "Peel-en" K

Posted by iankusc at 11:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Weather's supposed to be a dull, but safe topic, but for the past few years it's been an ever more interesting one.  If you haven't caught Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth, he really shows just how wildly entertaining weather can be when in the hands of the right screenplay writers (Shane Black?  Steven E. DeSouza?  Joe Estherhaz??).  Of course, thanks to Katrina (and the Bush camp's review of that film, "I fell asleep during this movie") weather's not just blockbuster material, but Oscar worthy.

And in the category of best supporting actor, we have George W. Bush for Hurricane Katrina?  I think not...

Weather obviously affects more than just box-office results. Agriculture in the Midwest took a huge hit this summer, what with all those degrees going around, and the housing market in the New Mexico hills has been, shall we say, blackened a bit.  As I wrote in an earlier entry, we snack magnates compete with the seasons too, and this Summer has been punishing.  The big problem?  Chocolate!

Of course, I have no right to call chocolate a problem.  After all, were it not for chocolate, there'd be no Camp David Accord, and the builders of the Brooklyn Bridge ate chocolate EXCLUSIVELY.  But chocolate has its downsides, or rather, its downSIDE- it melts.  That's about as much bad-mouthing as I can lend chocolate, but this summer, that miserable trait alone has caused us terrible agony.

Imagine one of those classic, classy UPS vans- you know, the brown ones than seem as if they were imagined, designed, and engineered by a 1920s Quaker farmer from Iowa.  Now imagine them at high noon on a mid-July day, barreling through Dallas on their way to a Forth Worth suburb.  Imagine the temperature in the belly of that brown beast.  Now imagine what it does to chocolate.

Oh, how I wish I could steal a look at the Hershey playbook, or the Mars Bar Bible, and see just how they handle chocolate distribution in the summertime.  I remember that on a trip to India a couple of years ago, I was simply flabbergasted that chocolate could not be found anywhere but in the high hill stations.  Somehow I'd just never imagined a world without chocolate, but those worlds do exist.  Right there's reason enough to, with all our heart and political will, fight global warming.

We've compensated this summer by trying to ship our Shock-olate overnight, and/or with ice packs, but we've still lost a dreadful amount of chocolate to Helion/Ra/Imti/whatever you wanna call the sun.  But, at last, summer seems to be finally relenting a little, and allowing some cooling air, be it Canadian or Hurricanian air, to come down and spare our chocolate a little.  I love my summertime living- swim holes, camping, long days and big waves... but I like chocolate even more.

 An Ode to Chocolate

Pitty Buddha, for he never tasted a Mars Bar.

Jesus and Muhammed too- no Snickers for them either.

Maybe if they'd tasted Godiva, we'd never have invaded Iraq,

Or maybe Torquemada would've been a sweetheart.

Perhaps Caesar could have conquered Gaul,

If only he'd have had Hot Cocoa to tempt them out of the woods.

They say that Microwaves were invented by Chocolate

Melting in the shirt pocket of some engineer

standing too close to a microwave antenna.

Lucky shirt. 

Would that my fingers each had their own tongues,

for when I daudle, and my chocolate runneth over;

that my shirt could taste you the stains

of that last dropped dollop of chocolate ice cream.

Would that chocolate grew on trees,

not as gooey cocoa nuts, but, you know,

as Hershey's Kisses, or Almond Joy.

Yeah.  Yeah.

That'd be sweet. 

Posted by iankusc at 08:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)