Alex Renton

6 years old and fat!

alexanderrenton — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 07:50:08 +0000

The Times 23 February 2012

There’s been a panic at our primary school: somebody has been putting the F word about. And so the girls — just 6 and 7 — have been asking us if we think they’re fat. Some have refused to eat sausages on health grounds.

Who can have started it, we’re wondering? A mum moaning about her new year diet? Some lunatic show on CBBC? Or is this a by-product of the education system’s daft dithering over how to teach a healthy diet? The inquest is ongoing. Needless to say, none of the children worrying is fat.

There are a few in the school who look a bit chubby, but what do you expect? This is an inner-city primary: if you believe the statistics, a third of children leave them unhealthily overweight, 25 per cent of them technically obese.

Worrying about our children being fat, or that they’re worrying about being fat, is the head-clutching parental paradox of our times. I’m amazed that more of our kids aren’t obese. They eat an unbelievable amount of sugar, three times as much as their grandparents did. It sneaks in everywhere, because it is the cheapest way to make manufactured food addictive.

And added sugar is becoming unavoidable. It’s in things that you wouldn’t expect. On Shrove Tuesday we tested some pre-cooked frozen pancakes: “You’ll prefer them to home-made”, the company said. We didn’t, of course, though my 7-year-old daughter said she would eat them if stuck, pancake-less, on a desert island.

I had a look at the ingredients — each of Aunt Bessie’s Perfect Pancakes, made from “the simplest ingredients”, had half a teaspoon of sugar in it. Why?

No home pancake recipe puts sugar in the mix. Aunt Bessie’s adds the sugar to capture the kids. Grand old corporations such as Kellogg’s have been peddling excessive sugar to our children for decades. Frosties, Honey Cheerios (from Nestlé) and Coco Pops have three to four teaspoons of sugar in one small serving.

Last time I wrote about this, the Association of Cereal Food Manufacturers informed me that “no proven link” had ever been found between sugar consumption and obesity. But there is an interesting link between cereal manufacturers under pressure over sugar content and empty promises. Kellogg’s made a lot of noise 18 months ago with a promise to lower the sugar content of Coco Pops by 15 per cent. They haven’t — they are still 35 per cent sugar. The reduced-sugar Frosties the company trumpeted a few years back have disappeared from the shelves.

Of course, a parent like me wouldn’t let their children eat such things. Instead we’ll dish up healthy, middle-class stuff: fruit yoghurt (20g of sugar), a glass of orange or apple juice (17g), a fruit smoothie (30g), and a low-fat snack bar (as much as 20g). Add a sweet biscuit or a banana and the child will have eaten more than an adult woman’s guideline daily amount of sugar. You’d have thought all of this is obvious. But people are shockingly ignorant about sugar.

We think, for a start, that “natural” or fruit sugar is better. But fructose may be more fattening than glucose. And we’ve been seduced by “five a day” as a cure-all. Of course we should eat fruit and veg, but it’s bonkers that fruit juice can count as part of it. Growing children need animal fats just as much as they need fruit. What a confusion. To tackle the problem, I’d start with taxing manufacturers per gram of sugar they use.

In love with Lebanese again

alexanderrenton — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 07:43:26 +0000

The Times, March 8 2012

A few days in Beirut and I’ve successfully revived a love for Lebanese cuisine. It starts at breakfast: dipping a “croissant au thym” into labneh yoghurt laced with the salty, herby spice mix called za’atar. Then a gorgeous omelette made of some Alpine cheese and parsley. Sitting in a café in Hamra Street enjoying this, I bowed my head to the French colonialists. They left a big mess in a lot of countries: but from Vietnam to North Africa their former servants can put great bread and a decent cup of coffee on the table.

The breakfast finished with a tangerine from the South Lebanon hills, just in season, sweet and piquant. I smoked a cigarette — that’s pretty much required here — and watched the people on this street notorious for intrigue and trouble.

Paunchy businessmen with grand moustaches, shoe-shine boys and hawkers, beautiful, confident women, dodgy blokes in wraparound shades. Good fun, a breakfast with a view. Some times you need to get up and go to a country to de-jade your love of its food.

Lebanese cooking in Britain has become generic and tedious. Factory hoummos, slimy baba ghanoush, nasty vine leaves and indifferent meats flame-grilled and dumped into pitta bread. But just a few hours in the war-battered, hungry city and I’d got Lebanese cuisine again. And I came home clutching ideas, ingredients — including an amazing new risotto grain, frekeh, that I’d never heard of.

Za’atar is a seasoning used this end of the Mediterranean. It is much subtler than harissa, the fiery spice-mix from the other end of the middle of the earth. Made from pounding together thyme, oregano, sesame and salt, I’ve eaten it dry with bread in Gaza, but in Lebanon it comes packed in a jar filled with olive oil. You can just eat the oil.

At breakfast, the Lebanese like to serve their thick, yoghurty cheese, labneh, with a crater in the top filled with oil-za’atar, and dip in fresh bread.

You can eat very badly in Beirut, of course. With some Lebanese friends I ended by mistake in a pompous tourist place in one of the great empty edifices built, amid scandal, in the centre of the city where the worst destruction happened. Gruesome bread in a plastic packet, chicken kebabs painted with some bottled sauce and acidic hoummos — we could have been in London. One well-travelled Lebanese told me that when she’s in Beirut she pines for the nutty hoummos they sell at Sainsbury’s.

I searched the city without success for convincint evidence of the the “Lebanese fusion” the in-flight magazine promised. But there is an exciting genre of modern Lebanese, twisting traditional recipes, using the herbs and fruits such as pomegranate and cherry, and championing good, local produce. The guru of this is Walid Ataya, who has enlarged his famous Hamra bakery into a bar and restaurant with a wine cellar. Walid also has a pizzeria doing Lebanese flatbreads adorned with, variously, pine nuts, feta, watercress pesto and almond paste: “The Italians stole this from us Phoenicians and called it pizza,” he growls.

I enjoyed his beef and walnut sausages in cherry sauce, but the finest thing at Bread Republic was a frekeh risotto — smoked green wheatgrains, usually served with chicken or vegetables. But at Bread Republic this came with exquisite grilled baby octopus — it was delicious, nutty and full of caramelised flavour. Along with a sack of za’atar, I brought a bag of frekeh home (it split in-flight): when I’ve recovered the grains from the bottom of my suitcase I’ll cook a risotto with it according to Walid’s recipe and report back.

Bread Republic is at Nehme Yafet Street, Hamra, Beirut, open 7.30am–11pm or later. There’s a great breakfast to be found under the orange trees at nearby Café Younes, round the corner from the Commodore Hotel

Olive oil – 5000 years of fraud and poisoning

alexanderrenton — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 23:10:36 +0000

The olive harvest: the money in olives has always been an enemy of tradition and quality Photograph: David Silverman/Getty Images

Book review: The Observer, Sunday 15 January, 2012

Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil by Tom Mueller

Is there any foodstuff as dodgy as olive oil? Human beings have been defrauding and occasionally poisoning one another with the stuff – or simulacra of it – since the beginning of cooking. You may fairly picture a Sumerian house-spouse 5,000 years ago frowning at an amphora and saying: “The guy said he actually cold-presses extra virgin olives in his own kitchen. Funny taste, though…” Luckily, according to the cuneiform tablets discovered at Ebla, the Sumerians had a royally appointed olive oil fraud brigade.

That’s the sort of thing we need now, when the profits in olive oil crime are, as one EU official puts it, “comparable to cocaine trafficking, with none of the risks”, and the regulations less effective than at any time in the last two millennia.

Tom Mueller, in this eye-popping investigation, makes a convincing case that the fraudsters are busier and richer now than ever before. Key to their success is the confusion, snobbery and ignorance that shroud the product. I have a little experience of this: I conducted a blind tasting of extra virgin olive oils a few years ago for a national newspaper that wanted “the truth on expensive olive oil”.

We had a dozen oils, and a panel consisting of an importer, an Italian deli owner and a couple of eminent foodies: the results were so embarrassing and confusing the piece was never published. The importer went into a fugue after he was informed that he’d pronounced his own premium product “disgusting”; the deli owner chose a bottle of highly dubious “Italian extra virgin” as his favourite (it had cost £1.99 at the discount store TK Maxx); and both the foodies gave a thumbs-up to Unilever‘s much-derided Bertolli brand.

The story of the latter, a market leader here and in the United States, provides a good tour of the rottenness in the trade. The Bertollis were bankers and traders who never actually owned an olive tree, despite the bucolic Tuscan scenes depicted on their labels. They got rich on the back of the incomprehensible twist in European law that, until 2001, allowed any olive oil bottled in Italy to be sold as “Italian olive oil”, which, absurdly, is what we all pay most for. In fact, even now 80% of the oil Bertolli uses comes from Spain, North Africa and the Middle East. It it is still flogged in bottles with “Lucca” and “Passione Italiana” on the label. Today, Italy still sells three times as much oil as it produces.

More serious – for aficionados and olive farmers – Bertolli and its supermarket rivals corrupted the meaning of extra virginity, a controlled definition of high-quality oil since 1960. “Gentle”, “smooth” and “not peppery on the throat” are the sort of words Bertolli and its rivals used in ads promoting their generic extra virgin oil. But true extra virgin oil is peppery – it bites the back of the throat so fiercely it can make you cough. The flavours are vivid. “Peppery” is an official, positive attribute of “extra virgin” whereas smoothness will reliably indicate a low-quality oil.

So Bertolli and the other brands came to need low-quality oils in order to produce an expensive one. That suits them, naturally, but it is ruinous to people trying to make and sell the proper stuff. And it suits the fraudsters, who, for millennia, have been passing off oil from all sorts of plants as that of olives. The deodorising and cleaning techniques that are used to render seed oil or even oil chemically extracted from the stones and twigs of olives produce a very bland oil.

It has become almost impossible for the processors to tell when they’re being sold fake oil and, as one sadly tells Mueller, even harder for them to sell good oil for a reasonable price: “When a customer tries a robust oil, they say, ‘Oh no, this is a bad oil!’ He’s become used to the flat taste of the deodorato.” As a result, 70% of cheaper extra virgin oil sold is a fraud, according to Mueller – though that doesn’t harm the big guys. And so the Bertolli family sold up to Unilever, a company that got rich turning waste animal fats and whale oil into margarine. (Unilever has now sold Bertolli to Spain’s biggest oil corporation.)

It is an appalling and comical mess, which Mueller sees largely in terms of honest, hard-working farmers versus slippery businessmen. He interviews prime examples of both. But you could tell the same story of almost any artisan’s product we put in our mouths, from bacon to cheddar cheese or smoked salmon. Industrial production techniques and the supermarket’s tendency to strip out quality in order to give “value” will debase any foodstuff once it becomes popular to the point where the producer has to abuse his animals, sin against tradition or commit fraud in order to stay afloat.

It is a depressing story, without any obvious remedy, but it is only half this greatly entertaining book. Mueller, an American who set up home in Liguria, tells a gripping story of the rise of olive oil to the point where it symbolises civilisation – whether in the minds of a Roman legionary miserable in the lard-eating German outposts of the Empire, or on an aspirational dinner table in middle-class northern Europe or America today.

Olive oil runs through Mediterranean culture. It had a place in religious rituals, cooking, lighting, cleaning, medicine and, of course, economics. Mueller makes a case – or at least he finds an academic who will – for olive oil’s central role in pederasty in ancient Athens. Across the ages, the cool green oil flows, past an unchanging cast of cranks, crooks and fanatics. The Romans, says Mueller from the top of Monte Testaccio, a hill by the Tiber made of discarded oil amphorae, policed olive oil better than we do. They probably used it more sensibly, too: most of what we eat today on the cheap is actually lampante – oil of a grade they deemed suitable only for lighting their houses.

Original article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/13/extra-virginity-tom-mueller-review

Disgusting airline food and eating cheap in NYC

alexanderrenton — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 10:49:31 +0000

It looked a bit like this

The Times, 24 November 2011

I was so hungry on a flight to the US, I did something I haven’t since I was poisoned in-flight — I ate the food

Last week I did something really stupid: I got on an plane without having had breakfast. And the flight was seven and a half hours in economy. And I had one piece of chewing gum on me. So, over the mid-Atlantic, the hunger pangs became too much and I did something I haven’t since I was poisoned in-flight three years ago by Alitalia — I ate the food.

Nearly everyone was doing it; this being a flight to the US, they were clearly people who knew food. Many knew it in such quantity they needed two seats. Though most people guzzled from the plastic trays, my neighbours and I agreed that Continental Airlines serve the most revolting food we had ever encountered one mile up.

The best thing on the tray was the packlet of Kerrygold butter. The “salad” was shredded iceberg lettuce, one miserable rabbit’s poo of an olive and an eighth of a small tomato. There was a pasta dish — “chicken marinara” — whose pasta was so overcooked it turned to mush on your tongue, and the tomato sauce so acid and sweet you thought you’d already been sick. I didn’t eat the chicken because I have young children.

I won’t go on, but it was interesting that airline food has got worse since I gave it up (and this was no budget ticket). There was of course a reason, apparent when you opened the in-flight magazine. It listed dishes available in business class that you could buy to eat in economy. So Continental’s strategy — new to the world of catering — seemed to be to serve disgusting food free to persuade people to pay for slightly better food. I wonder if it’ll take off.

In any case, I arrived in Manhattan incredibly hungry. That I dealt with straight out of the airport taxi: an absolutely gorgeous falafel, salad and hot sauce, wrapped in hot pitta, from a stall on Union Square. Bliss it was. But there weren’t many meals much more memorable in the next four days.

I ate posh, I ate in bars, I ate in delis and I ate in Pret A Manger. The posh was a let-down: pompous, with that endless litany of specials delivered by grave waiters at your table. The dishes when they arrived were the opposite of the US norm: small, fussy and surprisingly expensive.

My best New York experiences, as ever, were ethnic — melting Southern barbecue pork in a Union Square sports bar, a good spicy time at the Grand Sichuan on St Mark’s Place. The lower down the food price chain you went, the more fun and friendly the service. Best of all was a takeout from the highly recommended Vietnamese-inspired Midtown Num Pang Sandwich Shop (numpangnyc.com): I had five-spiced glazed pork belly with pickled pear in a roll, and a corn-on-the cob chargrilled with chilli and coconut mayo smeared on it. Fantastic and delivered steaming hot in 20 minutes. Why don’t British cities do things like that?

Tesco and Asda have had their dubious price-war bargains exposed in The Times recently. Many discounts turn out to be either puny or based on just a week or so at the higher price. Now reader Clare Stanton finds dodgy goings on at Marks & Spencer. Its Milk Chocolate Balls, aimed at Christmas tables, can’t decide if they’re “three for the price of two” or “half-price deal of the week”. And they haven’t been sold at their “real” price, £10, since October. Which is nearer Harvest Festival than Christmas. Tut.

alex.renton@thetimes.co.uk

Jamie’s great – or simply good?

alexanderrenton — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 16:23:25 +0000

3rd November 2011, The Times

His new book is tipped to be No 1 and a TV show (his 21st) is under way. Is Jamie Oliver the Elizabeth David of our time?

Jamie Oliver

When Jamie Oliver addressed the United Nations last month — not words I thought I’d ever write — I went to the end of the kitchen bookshelf and pulled out a battered, rather sticky volume called The Naked Chef. It might contain, I thought, some clues to explain one of the most extraordinary — and high-speed — career paths of our times.

Published just 12 years ago, The Naked Chef has a tousle-haired bloke on the front with a sweet grin and a Hawaiian shirt. Inside he lays out a range of simple, smiley dishes with the message: “Go on, get stuck in!”

Food, hunger and happiness in Armenia

alexanderrenton — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 09:48:34 +0000

I went to Armenia in April 2011 for Oxfam, the Times and the BBC. On The Culture Show BBC2, 28 October I told how that story was done, in words and pictures. Here’s more from the trip:

Food foraging in Armenia: an Audio Slideshow

June 2011, BBC Online

Churchill and Armenian brandy

BBC Radio 4, From Our Own Correspondent, July 2011

Is this the worst dish in the world?

May 28, 2011, The Times.

Khash must be stewed for 32 hours

Recipe: Take 4 cow’s hooves and ankles and 1 brain (optional); boil for 32 hours (without seasoning); remove scum; gnaw bones with salt and pickles. Drink a shot of vodka with each mouthful.

KHASH, “the masterpiece of Armenian cuisine”, is always eaten early in the morning. “It is not wise to eat it late,” says our host, Shirak. “Khash is so rich, you need all day to digest it.” He takes us to visit the kitchen the night before the feast; we inspect the great pot where four cow’s feet and ankles and one bovine brain are bubbling. “It started cooking last night, because khash must be stewed for 32 hours,” says Shirak. We agree to meet when that time is up: at 7am.

I wake with a sense of dread. I dreamt I was back at school, faced with an important exam: Shirak was the invigilator. When I get downstairs, I think how much I would give for a cup of tea and no breakfast-time challenges. But on the table is a pile of crispy lavash flatbread, some radishes, a bowl of crushed garlic and salt. And a bottle of vodka.

Read on at The Times Online

The Truth about Tesco’s not-so-big price drop

alexanderrenton — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 09:41:11 +0000

The Truth about Tesco 2011: graphic from The Times

17th October 2011, The Times

Dozens of the savings offered by Tesco in its “Big Price Drop” — the £500 million campaign that started a supermarket price war three weeks ago — are on foods that were sold only briefly at the higher price, research by The Times has shown.

Huge advertising promotions this month have promised discounts on 3,000 items. “Sometimes you have to put aside just the pursuit of profit in order to get back in tune with the nation,” said Tesco chief executive Phil Clarke as Big Price Drop launched. But Tesco appears to have raised the price of hundreds of items in the weeks before the promotion, perhaps to make the subsequent offers look more attractive.

You can read the full article on Times Online

How will climate change affect Britain’s crops?

alexanderrenton — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 00:15:19 +0000

11th October 2009, The Observer

Olives, kiwi fruit, almonds – as the climate gets hotter in the UK, we may well be producing our own exotic crops

Far from the failed harvests, droughts and floods of Asia, Mark Diacono is expecting some good to come of climate change. On his 17-hectare farm beside the Otter river in north Devon, he is experimenting with the crops that might provide a living for farmers in the warmer, wetter Britain of the near future. So far the only thing he has really harvested is TV coverage – it only takes British agriculture, “food security” and climate change to be mentioned together for television news to be on the phone asking if they can send a crew to his orchards.

Nearly five years since he started his “climate change farm”, Diacono says results have been mixed. “Two olive species did well and two not. The almonds have not worked: there were two bad summers in a row. You have to take it on the chin if you’re going to try this stuff.”

Read the rest here at Guardian Online

Paying more for Fairtrade cocoa is key to ending child labour

alexanderrenton — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 19:26:03 +0000

30th September 2010 The Times

To eat chocolate is to enter a moral maze. It has been associated with indulgence and sex and more recently, justice

To eat chocolate is to enter a moral maze. It has always been associated with indulgence and sex — if you believe the advertising — and the newest selling point is justice: “fairly traded” chocolate that promises a decent livelihood for the cocoa farmers. In the past year this has become mainstream: Cadbury (with Dairy Milk) and Nestlé (with KitKat) have gone into Fairtrade, and some Mars products carry the less-exacting Rainforest Alliance label. You can have chocolate both sinful and worthy simultaneously: “Indulge your sweet tooth with this decadent collection of Fairtrade Belgian chocolates . . .” runs an ad on the Oxfam shop website.

Can you taste that goodness? At a party I handed round two plates of chocolate squares. They looked identical but I said one had Fairtrade chocolate on it, the other was conventional: I wanted to know which tasted better. My subjects voted in favour of the Fairtrade chocolate, and with a political bias: the more liberal-minded, the more they preferred the Fairtrade. I’d conned them, of course: the two chocolates were the same, which made everyone cross.

Read the rest via Times Online

My experience of London? Pride came before offal

alexanderrenton — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 16:43:41 +0000

On a trip to the capital, our writer feasts on oysters and damsons, and discovers a gem of a restaurant in the East End

15th September, 2011

The Times

I lived in London for half my life but I approach the city now with flutters in the stomach. A committed vegetarian I know who leaves the West Country twice a year for the Smoke says that, faced with the urban challenge, he lapses. He goes straight from Paddington Station to Burger King for a meat protein blast. Arriving last week from Scotland, I went — in the same spirit — directly to a Bayswater pub for a pint of much-missed southern bitter. Relieving me without a smile of almost £4, the barman asked me to take off my cap “for security reasons”. It isn’t Leith.

But there are joys. Fuller’s London Pride. A chilli-sauce-laden doner kebab stuffed into pitta bread in Shepherds Bush. Neal’s Yard’s organic Greek yoghurt. A stroll through Borough Market. And, of course, there are restaurants.

Read the rest here via Times Online