'Beverages' Archive
This is taking the bacon meme a few steps too far — like over a cliff. Seattle-based Black Rock Spirits has introduced bacon-flavored vodka.
Premium vodkas have been a big deal for a while. Absolut, Grey Goose, Tito’s Handmade Vodka, and other brands have made a splash as the cocktail makes a comeback. These changes, along with changes in state liquor laws (see my post on Utah, previously), are combining to create a sort of boutique culture. Forget 30-year-0ld Scotch or expensive wine beloved of Baby Boomers — distillers are marketing to a younger demographic with kicky new flavors that combine hipness with sophistication.
I think a large part of this has to do with the success of the craft brew industry. Jim Koch’s Samuel Adams set off the craze for beer-flavored beer (as opposed to the big, bland brews from Anheuser-Busch, Miller, and Coors). First came the bocks, the stouts, the ales, the old-fashioned lagers, the IPAs, then they started with the real crazy stuff. Pumpkin beer, anyone?
The interesting thing is that the trend seems to be slightly less crass than the alco-pops of a few years ago. Whereas those concoctions were definitely aimed at the novice drinker, these spirits are aiming for an older crowd, one that is college-educated, professional, and — let’s face it — still employed.
Back to the vodka. Apparently bacon-flavored vodka is good in cocktails like a bacon-bloody Mary or a bacon-chocolate martini. I will reserve judgment except to say, rarely has it been so clearly demonstrated that I am not the target market for a product.
Bacon — it’s not just for breakfast anymore.
In a change from decades of state alcohol policy, Utah has changed its arcane liquor laws to be more in line with the rest of the country. Gone is the so-called “Zion Curtain,” behind which a mixologist had to hide his or her mad skills. So I guess the Coyote Ugly chain of tourist bars plans to open its next location in the ski resort town of Park City. This is an example of the law of unintended consequences. I’m sorry, Utah. This is now what you have to look forward to.
The law was a result of the Mormon-dominant culture in Utah. The barrier was meant to foil temptation, of course, the idea being that if a hapless patron saw a drink being mixed right before his eyes, he would fall upon it as with the thirst of a dying man crossing the Utah wastelands. The thing is, as implemented, the curtains were kind of, well, screwy. As this NPR story reveals, in at least one Salt Lake City bar, Faustina, the curtain was glass. So you could actually see the naughty bartender at his forbidden work. Hmmm.
Utah’s famed private clubs — their version of bars — are also falling by the wayside, but that’s not until July 1.
There are a couple of quirky restrictions. Among them: New restaurants will have to build a separate mixing area to hide alcohol from minors. (Are people really that at risk of temptation just because they catch sight of a bartender pouring gin and tonic together and squeezing in some lime?) That one came from the Utah chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which also unsuccessfully lobbied for surveillance cameras in every bar, keeping records of bar patrons, and selling beer, liquor, and wine in state liquor stores at room temperature. The national MADD organization was quick to disavow the local chapter as overzealous; the chairman pointed out that MADD has no interest in re-establishing Prohibition, it just doesn’t want people to drive drunk.
Utahans will have some adjusting to do (see Coyote Ugly, above). Tourists on the other hand will not. And tourism and business travel both are a big part of the state’s economy. Come on, admit it — when you think of Utah, only three things come to mind: Mormonism (and polygamy), that big Salt Lake, and its weird liquor laws. By updating the last, Utah and the rest of us can move on to other things.
Consider: E. coli in green onions, spinach, and ground beef; melamine in infant formula and powdered milk; and salmonella in peanut butter and the myriad of other food products peanuts are added to.
What’s next — steel shavings in apple pie? America’s food-safety net isn’t a net at all. It’s a large-holed sieve that allows dangerous, sometimes fatal, contaminants to enter our food supply. The Chinese, in an ironic turn of events, have banned the importation of American products containing peanuts. (Cautionary aside, to whomever needs cautioning: The Chinese punish food-safety offenses with hanging.)
Who’s in charge of our food anyway? The answer reveals a chink in our food armor. Two huge governmental agencies, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), split the duties of overseeing what happens at our food producers’ facilities. The USDA monitors meat, poultry, and some egg products, while the FDA is in charge of most other foods.
Here’s another little — you should pardon the expression — tasty tidbit: The FDA gets about 20% of the food-safety budget to protect some 80% of the food supply and, as a result, it has only about one-tenth the number of inspectors that the USDA does. So, under the current US food-safety system, cheese pizza gets far fewer inspections than pepperoni pizza does. The current peanut butter recall is another example of our leaking sieve of a system. The last time an FDA inspector looked at the Peanut Corporation of America’s Blakely, Georgia, plant was about eight years ago. And if ever a company needed watching, it’s PCA, which knowingly sold contaminated products.
Another problem is that the FDA is charged with overseeing both food and drugs, and a vast majority of time and money it spends is directed at drug safety, and rightly so. But I feel a dope-slap moment of insight coming on … maybe we should put the FDA in charge of drugs only and the USDA in charge of food? Duh.
Bureaucracies, however, are really, really averse to change. Long-time employees dig in their heels. “But we’ve always done it that way,” is the prime directive. Shoulder-shrugging of the, “it’s not our problem,” variety are all too common. Governing agencies have entrenched rules and regulations, protocols and procedures. The inability to say, “We screwed up,” is rampant. (Fortunately, our new President is able to fess up to a screw-up.)
Territoriality is the survival concept of all civil servants. (Those of you who watched SEC officials squirm under questioning by members of congress wanting to know why the that agency didn’t shut down Bernie Madoff and his sinister too-good-to-be-true Ponzi scheme sooner know what I mean.)
Furthermore, government entities are notoriously unable or unwilling to talk to one another. (The two houses of Congress can’t even agree on a stimulus package to save our faltering economy.) It’s time to stop the non-communication.
We need to have a single food inspection system where pizza is pizza no matter its toppings. There needs to be one set of rules, one agency. We need to get rid of our failing, fragmented regulatory system, which has the lives of American citizens in its hands, and replace it with one agency that is generously funded. One that puts the consumer, not its own self-interest, first. Perhaps then the only three-eyed fish around will be Blinky on The Simpsons.
Let’s give a cheer for Rusty Coho. Mr. Coho is the co-founder and co-owner of Jason’s Deli , a chain of some 200 US sandwich shops. Surely you’ve dined there. Or at least driven by.
The enterprise, which was founded by Coho and Joe Tortorice Jr. in 1976 in Beaumont, Texas, serves a fine sandwich. Better, in my palette’s opinion, than those you get at, say, the country’s chief sandwich seller, Subway. But this epistle is not a restaurant review.
Instead, cheers are suggested for Coho because Jason’s Deli has removed high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) from all the food items on its menu. In fact, Jason’s is, as you read this, in the process of deciding whether or not to do the same with their soda offerings. (To help the company make a decision, cast your vote, yay or nay, here.)
Why should you vote for or against HFCS at Jason’s or even care if you ingest HFCS? Let’s use the full name once again for a second or two here — “high fructose corn syrup.” That’s what the food industry uses on its consumer labeling — the full name, not the acronym. I wouldn’t be surprised if companies do this because “HFCS” sounds like some nasty chemical. (Like, maybe HFCs — anyone a fan of hydrofluorocarbons, those nasty greenhouse gasses killing the planet? Of course not.) On the other hand, “high fructose corn syrup” sounds so innocuous … “How can corn syrup be bad for me?,” you think, scanning a product’s ingredients label. “Mom puts corn syrup in her Christmas cookies.”
Well, as you pull on your “fat pants” — you know, the super baggy ones with the frayed elastic at the waist — consider: Some scientists say that high fructose corn syrup is contributing to the obesity epidemic.
Sweeter (55 times sweeter) and cheaper than table sugar (they’re using bloody great masses of the corn crop for ethanol, so the price of good old sucrose has risen), high fructose corn syrup is not a natural product. It has undergone enzymatic processing. Here’s a partial explanation of how HFCS is made, courtesy of Wikipedia, for the chemically literate among us (even if you’re not, the following sure doesn’t seem to describe the tiny, twinkling, white crystals grandma spoons daintily into her Earl Grey, baby finger extended):
High-fructose corn syrup is produced by milling corn to produce corn starch, then processing that corn starch to yield corn syrup which is almost entirely glucose, and then adding enzymes which change the glucose into fructose. The resulting syrup (after enzyme conversion) contains approximately 90% fructose and is HFCS 90. To make the other common forms of HFCS (HFCS 55 and HFCS 42) the HFCS 90 is mixed with 100% glucose corn syrup in the appropriate ratios to form the desired HFCS. The enzyme process which changes the 100% glucose corn syrup into HFCS 90 is as follows:
- Cornstarch is treated with alpha-amylase to produce shorter chains of sugars called oligosaccharides.
- Glucoamylase breaks the sugar chains down even further to yield the simple sugar glucose.
- Xylose isomerase (aka glucose isomerase) converts glucose to a mixture of about 42% fructose and 50–52% glucose with some other sugars mixed in.
While inexpensive alpha-amylase and glucoamylase are added directly to the slurry and used only once, the more costly glucose-isomerase is packed into columns and the sugar mixture is then passed over it, allowing it to be used repeatedly until it loses its activity. This 42–43% fructose glucose mixture is then subjected to a liquid chromatography step where the fructose is enriched to approximately 90%. The 90% fructose is then back-blended with 42% fructose to achieve a 55% fructose final product. Most manufacturers use carbon absorption for impurity removal. Numerous filtration, ion-exchange and evaporation steps are also part of the overall process.
OK, enough with the chemistry class. But there is the matter of quantity. Even if the scientific connections between HFCS and obesity are weak (and there are lots of scientists who say it is weak; not to mention the HFCS manufacturers such as Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, and Corn Products International, who say nothing is added to the corn syrup during processing, not even coloring), understand that you eat a lot of the stuff.
High fructose corn syrup is used by virtually every food and beverage maker in the US (and Europe; heaven only knows about the Chinese). And it’s used in foods not normally thought of as sweet foods, things like ketchup and bread. It’s in Coke, Pepsi, Snapple iced tea, Dannon yogurt, Chips Ahoy cookies, Ritz crackers, Wonder Bread, Wish-Bone salad dressings, and Campbell’s tomato soup. ‘Nuff said?
Suffice it to say, it’s is really hard to avoid high fructose corn syrup, unless you shop at food co-ops and even then, the going is tough. As for dining out, forget it. Except at Jason’s Deli … the home of HFCS-less (try saying that out loud three times) foods.
I don’t know about you, but, to be on the safe (and maybe even, as per one of my New Year’s resolutions, thin) side, I’m heading out for a Jason’s Ciabatta ‘Bello and maybe a cup of their tomato basil soup.
Brand loyalty. It’s a company’s dream, its never-ending aim, and, until recently, pretty standard in the food biz. But we, the hungry and thirsty — but auto-loan-denied, company-Christmas-party-lacking, auto-maker-and-bank-bailing-out, waiting-for-the-new-presidential-administration, hoping-to-heaven-we-don’t-get-laid-off consumers — are passing up Green Giant canned peas, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, Dannon yogurt, and Evian water for private-label products.
Food retailers including the biggies such as Wal-Mart, Kroger, and Publix report recent spikes in sales for their store brands. And why is this? Well, duh, it’s the recession, stupid.
The Nielsen Company reports that US sales of private-label products have increased 10% so far this year compared to a 3.5% increase for name-brand goods. Even in the carbonated soft drinks sector, which usually has brand loyalty firmly boosting its mega-producers’ bottom lines, the name-brand sodas are losing ground to store brands. Nielsen data released November 1 for the previous four weeks shows that private-label carbonated beverages sales were up 6.5%, as opposed to branded carbonated beverages, sales of which fell about 1% for the same time period.
It seems we’re passing up the cheery red-and-white logoed Coke (or the red, white, and blue can if you’re a fan of #2) for brown cans of unbranded brown soda. Mac & cheese the only thing your kids will eat without grumbling? Moms are passing up the bright blue-and-gold box of the Kraft Foods staple for a dull yellow box with plain-fonted black letters that read “Macaroni and Cheese Mix.” Just don’t let the kids see the box, because although you’re buying the stuff in order to keep your wallet full, it will be their plates that remain so.