My quest to stop eating Cadbury Snack
In the interests of food politics blogger transparency I confess that I am writing this grazing on poor quality cooking chocolate and drinking penang kopi putih, a super sweet Malaysian instant coffee. Sometimes when I get stressed or it is the day before payday I get caught in the bodgy eating feedback loop. At the moment I’m house-sitting and am surrounded by Asian sweets that don’t even make sense to me. Tomorrow I will buy an unprecedented quantity of kale and will get back on the wagon.
Last night before I went to the Wheeler Centre to hear Michael Pollan speak about food politics I had a Berocca. In the talk Pollan used a bag of groceries from Woolworths to illustrate the points he was making, and at one point he pulled Berocca out of it.
Pollan is a Professor of Science Journalism and the author of several food politics books. The talk drew on the ideas contained in his books. In The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2007) Pollan visits Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm[1], (a self-regulating, small-scale farm that doesn’t use chemicals or antibiotics), and traces the industrialisation of the food supply to Earl Butz, Nixon’s secretary of agriculture, who encouraged large-scale farming. Before Butz America had a New Deal farm policy that limited crop surplus and maintained a good price for farmers. Butz dismantled the New Deal farm and installed a new system to subsidise farmers. The policies were “rewritten to encourage farmers to plant crops like corn, soy, and wheat fencerow to fencerow.”
Won’t You Live On Sugar Mountain?[1]
I’m having difficulty typing this because I’m holding an ice cream, specifically a Bulla Crunch Vanilla ice cream: Ingredients for which include the numbers 476, 412, 407, 322, 500 and 160b. This ice cream contains 16.4 grams of sugar.
Since 2008 every month or so my friend and I quit sugar. We get out a packet of textas and draw up elaborately illustrated contracts; fuelled by optimism we draw broccoli florets punching out cupcakes or write in block letters ‘Sugar is the devil’ and then we find his sister and force her to sign as witness. ‘You guys are doing this again huh…[2]’ The sugar contracts are legal documents and feature promises such as: We the undersigned will quit sugar for the next three months. Through trial and error we have arrived at a system of realistic loopholes; clauses allowing for the moderate consumption of dried fruit (Lynden) or red wine with dinner (me).
At the time of writing my friend and I are writing a concept album about our battle to quit sugar, the lyrics of which we plan to send to Prince. We have spent years grappling with our contracts. Occasionally we worry that honey is like methadone. Sometimes a mutual friend alerts us to the fact that agave syrup is pure fructose or a naysayer sledges honey. Or I will wonder if I am consuming too much fat to fill the void that sugar left. I question the health implications of dropping kilograms by eating as much blue cheese as I want (read: a great deal of blue cheese) but ultimately we know it is the right thing because it leads to emotional clarity and an excellent complexion. When you cut out sugar you cut out the food Michael Pollan was warning about when he wrote ‘Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.[3]’
The latest contract I lasted for over a month and was feeling like a legend and then I felt anxious about something and ate a block of Top Deck. My friends know this side of me: the side that turns to sugar in times of stress. Last year I woke up groggy to find traces of last night’s Cadbury Snack on my phone. (see: snack texting) My friend’s plead with me to at least eat Lindt 85% Cocoa but I am insanely drawn to the synthetic pineapple flavour of Snack. My Snack habit undermines my role as food politics writer.
Last week I fell off the wagon and Lynden sent me a text: Hey how’s the sugar contracts going? I’m struggling. Not that I’ve eaten any refined sugar its just that I’m caning all the loopholes like dried fruit and honey…I think I need to tighten it up.
I wanted to lie. I wanted to write back about how I had been reading studies of agave syrup being just as bad as HFCS. About how I had quit honey. About how sweet broadbeans were beginning to taste. But I decided to be honest about being a sugar junky and wrote back: I have been eating a lot of sugar! I need to start over. I was eating sugar to avoid emotional truths again!
This week it was Lynden’s birthday and I got a text that read: I blew the sugar contracts big time. Lets resign. Holy Moley.
But I figure if I make a public pledge on Dolphin Lettuce Tomato to quit sugar it will happen. So, without further ado…
I, Sarah Coles, hereby quit sugar from today until 15 September 2012. [Loopholes include: maple syrup to get through the first week, the occasional red wine, and minimal honey]
I phone Lynden to celebrate and he tells me he has decided to quit sugar completely. No honey. No sweet stuff. ‘But what about red wine?’ I plead. ‘No’, he says, ‘I’m going no loopholes. Uncharted territory.’ I decide that I am not allowed to have maple syrup or honey. But I’m reading Slow Food Revolution Carlo Petrini In Conversation with Gigi Padovani. It is winter. I am a Leo. There is no way in hell that I am giving up red wine.
The following is a list of politically incorrect things I have eaten lately:
Nutrageous Bar
Can of Root Beer
Conventionally farmed chicken
Frosty Fruit (Nestle)
Nescafe Blend 43
I am transitioning from an asshole to a legend…
I don’t have any interviews this week because I am busy reading:
TUNA – A LOVE STORY by Richard Ellis 2008
I am only one chapter in but the topic is interesting and the writing incredible.
“Catching fish to feed fish is an ecologically unsound concept, but tuna are carnivores (more accurately, piscivores), and they would not eat food made from grain.”
“In his 1996 book Tuna and the Japanese, Takeaki Hori claims that the idea for “tuna ranching” originated with a Japanese tuna auctioneer named Hideo Hirahara, who went to Australia to find people to catch tuna and put them in some sort of “fish tank”, where they would be fattened for three to six months, killed, frozen, and shipped to Japan.”
“Because they have never been frozen, these thirty-hour fish are probably the most desirable at the Tsukiji tuna auctions, but even frozen fish from Port Lincoln’s tuna farms, pampered and virtually hand-fed, also demand particularly high prices. So far the record price for a single fish at the Tsujiki tuna auctions is $173 000”
The book mentions a doco from 2004 called Tuna Cowboys that I am keen to get my mitts on. I will write a full review soon. Stay tuna-ed.
Where Black Humour and Food Politics Collide
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Where Black Humour and Food Politics Collide
Where Black Humour and Food Politics Collide
Celebrating seasonal, homegrown, and wild food
Where Black Humour and Food Politics Collide
DOLPHIN LETTUCE TOMATO 