I’ve been making my own home-made corn tortillas for a while now. It’s quite easy — corn flour (*not* corn meal, different product), water, flatten a ball into a disk, toss onto a hot griddle for 30 seconds per side. They’re good hot, they’re lousy cold. I suppose you could call this “bread”, but that’s sort of stretching it.
But anyhow, spices have been used in different ways by different people, it wasn’t always to cover up the taste of rotting meats, often it was as a method of preservation. Salted cod, pickled vegetables, smoked sausages, etc. all arose as methods of preserving foods, not of covering up the taste of rotted food. My great-grandparents grew most of the food they ate for most of their lives, and salt pork and black pepper were common ingredients used in their cooking, it made boiled cabbage or turnip greens or purple-hull peas or whatever taste good and so on and so forth. They also had a smokehouse and when they slaughtered one of their hogs they used it to make sausage as well, substituting smoking and spices for some of the salt they’d otherwise have to use to preserve the meat. The notion that spices are a recent innovation, or that modern processed foods somehow use them in a way that kills our taste for real food, just doesn’t work for me, because as a child I ate at my great-grandmother and grandmother’s table, and there wasn’t a processed food to be found — even the biscuits were baked from scratch using flour and baking powder.
I actually asked a Bigelow rep about the soy lecithin thingy, and their response was basically that actual lemon juice wouldn’t work unless it were mixed with the soy lecithin to turn it into something that had actual body to it. In other words, it simply was physically impossible for them to include real actual lemon juice as part of their tea bags so they were faking it because that was the only way to do it. In the end, processed foods are attempting to taste like real foods — and not really succeeding, I can definitely tell the difference between the soy lecithin “lemon flavoring” and putting actual lemon into my tea. The problem is that actual lemon is rarely available in the settings where I drink tea (primarily at the office and on the trail)…
– Badtux the Foodie Penguin
]]>The manufacturers overdue “flavors” and people lose the ability to taste real food. People are missing out on great things, like real bread, things that we have love for most of the existence of the species. They miss the point that spices were introduced to overcome the flavors of rotting food, not to enhance anything.
]]>Reading the side labels of processed foods is a trip. They seem to have everything in them other than, well, actual food. And they love the word “natural”. Well, salmonella, arsenic, and cyanide are all natural. But I’m not interested in having them in my food, thank you very much!
– Badtux the Foodie Penguin
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