The Man Who Ate Everything (13 page)
Read The Man Who Ate Everything Online
Authors: Jeffrey Steingarten
Tags: #Humor, #Non-Fiction, #Autobiography, #Memoir
· A&P Tomato Ketchup, 14 ounces for $.77. Good, often seemed Better Than Heinz, with a deeper taste. But overly assertive clove flavor.
· Beyond Catsup, Jasmine & Bread, 9 ounces for $6.00. The V-8 juice of ketchups, with assertive celery notes. But not bad.
· Blanchard & Blanchard New England Chunky Ketchup (Extra Spicy), 12 ounces for $2.49. Very tasty, but more like the dreaded salsa, chunky and thick. Does nothing for French fries.
· Busha Browne’s Spicy Tomato Love-Apple Sauce, 6.5 ounces for $4.50 at Balducci’s. Tiny little chunks with a fermented, almost fetid, flavor, like the ancestral Asian ketchup: more like a roughly pureed chutney, my least favorite flavor in the whole world.
· Del Monte Ketchup, 17 ounces for $.99 at Sloan’s. Sometimes Better Than Heinz, sometimes not; less sticky, less tendency to coat the teeth. But slightly overcooked, caramelized taste.
· Fancy Tomato Catsup, from the Food Emporium, 14 ounces for $.77. Seems identical to A&P’s house brand, above.
· Featherweight Catsup Reduced Calorie, from Infiniti Health Food, 13 ounces for $2.35. Anybody who would choose a brand of ketchup to save calories is crazy. But this one has a nice, bright taste, though too much vinegar.
· Foodtown Catsup, 14 ounces for $.73 at D’Agostino’s. Tastes like A&P’s; see above.
· Hain Natural Catsup, 14 ounces for $2.85 at Infiniti Health Food. Naturally and simply awful. Sweetened with the bitterness of honey, foolishly unsalted.
· Heinz Hot Ketchup, 14 ounces for $1.29 at Gristede’s. Slightly tangy. Sometimes seemed Better Than Heinz, though the official contest rules do not allow this.
· Heinz Lite Ketchup, 13.25 ounces for $1.29 at Gristede’s. Who needs lite ketchup with half the calories and one-third less salt? Identical to Weight Watchers, below, but priced lite-r, at 25 percent less.
· Heinz Tomato Ketchup, 28 ounces for $2.19 at D’Agostino’s. The one and only. Bright color, thick but a bit sticky, quite sweet; less taste than homemade but with a good, fruity acidity, some tomato taste: unassertive and uninteresting spices. With French fries, a marriage made in heaven.
· Hunt’s Tomato Ketchup, 32 ounces for $1.69 at Sloan’s. Occasionally seemed Better Than Heinz. Thick and spicy, but excessive flavor of onion powder or garlic powder. Too salty.
· Jardine’s Jalapeno Texas Ketchup, from Mo Hotta Mo Betta, 11 ounces for $5.25. Not much tomato taste. The powerful flavor of cumin belongs in chili powder or Tex-Mex cuisine but never ever in ketchup.
· Krasdale Fancy Tomato Catsup, from Sloan’s, 14 ounces for $.89. Seems identical to A&P’s house brand; see above.
· Mcllhenny Farms Spicy Ketchup, 14 ounces for $3.95 at Dean & DeLuca. Good, deep taste of the Tabasco sauce for which Mcllhenny is famous, but does nothing for French fries and tends to pall in ketchup-sized servings. Slightly runny.
· Napa Valley Mustard Co. Country Catsup, 14 ounces for $4.25 at Dean & DeLuca. Very good, balanced taste, but a little
t
oo much like barbecue sauce: more texture than classic, modern ketchup should have.
·
Nervous Nellie’s Jams & Jellies Hot Tomato Sweet Sauce, 6 ounces for $3.50. Delicious but more like a tomato jam than a ketchup. The only specimen with more sugar than tomatoes on the list of ingredients.
· Tassa Scotch Bonnet Catsup, from Mo Hotta Mo Betta, 5 ounces for $3.75. More a hot sauce than a ketchup. In fact, one of the hottest things I’ve tasted in months. Slightly musty flavor. My mouth won’t stop burning.
· Tree of Life Ketchup, 13.5 ounces for $2.40 at Infiniti Health Food. Brownish color, slightly chunky, too much taste of tomato skins and maybe seeds, doesn’t last in the mouth, unaccountably sweetened with brown-rice syrup. Inaccurate drivel on the label regarding the history of ketchup.
· Uncle Dave’s Ketchup, 14 ounces for $4.50 at Infiniti Health Food. Tiny chunks with good tomato taste. But why sweeten ketchup with maple syrup and leave out most of the salt?
· Uncle Dave’s Kickin’ Ketchup, from Mo Hotta Mo Betta, 16 ounces for $6.50. Too much like barbecue or chili sauce, with strong taste of cumin and, I’ll bet, celery seed.
· Weight Watchers Tomato Ketchup, from Gristede’s, 13.25 ounces for $1.69. Another unnecessary product from an organization that victimizes chubby people like me by charging 33 percent more than the identical Heinz Lite.
· Westbrae Natural Catsup, Fruit-Sweetened, 11.5 ounces for $2.60 from Infiniti Health Food. “Fruit” means grape juice, which does not belong in the same bottle with catsup.
· Westbrae Natural Un-Ketchup, Unsweetened, 11.5 ounces for $2.45. The only brand whose label lists water before tomatoes among the ingredients. Caramelized taste indicates overcooking. And don’t they know that “catsup” is synonymous with “ketchup”?
· Westbrae Natural Catsup, Fruit-Sweetened, No Salt Added, H.5 ounces for $2.60. The most distasteful of the three Westbrae offerings.
· White Rose Tomato Ketchup, 28 ounces for $1.49 at Gristede’s. Medium thick, smooth, properly sweet and salty, but not enough piquancy or astringency. Could this be identical to A&P’s?
· Wine Country Zinfandel Catsup, from Cuisine Perel, 12 ounces for $6.72. Overwhelming taste of ginger, no apparent taste of Zinfandel. A wine-country rip-off.
August 1992
Help Yourself
Day One.
Thoroughly disrobed, bone-dry, and advantageously evacuated, I step onto my rusty old Detecto Doctor’s Scale, the kind with the balance beam and the little weights that you nudge back and forth. The numbers are chest high and easily legible, meaning that you can leave your eyeglasses on the sink and save two ounces. No need to peer five feet down to the floor over a pile of sullied flesh.
Let us say that I weigh 160 pounds. No, let us say I weigh 170; 160 would create a credibility gap. Neither is accurate, of course, but I want to tell you all about my new diet without revealing my precise weight, which is an embarrassment—170 is embarrassing enough.
Let us say that I weigh 170 pounds and need to lose 35 of them. This means that I weigh 25.93 percent more than I should. According to the government, people who weigh at least 20 percent more than they should are legally obese. I prefer to think of
m
yself as corporeally challenged, and so do the thirty-four million Americans with whom I share this condition.
The diet is La Methode Montignac, and it is all the rage in France. Everybody there is on the Montignac diet. It was named after Michel Montignac, who invented the diet ten years ago, lost twenty-eight pounds, and to this day has gained none of it back. Montignac has written four books about it, all of them best-sellers
in France; has opened a restaurant and two boutiques in Paris whose products embody La Methode Montignac; publishes a bimonthly magazine called
Montignac
with a circulation of fifty thousand; and plans to open a Montignac spa in the Paris suburbs by early 1995.
I will skip breakfast today because I have read only three pages of Montignac’s book, and I want to avoid making even the teensiest mistake. The book, translated from the French, is called
Dine Out and Lose Weight: The French Way to Culinary “Savoir Vivre.”
Its original title was
Comment maigrir en faisant des repas d’affaires,
or
How to Lose Weight While Making the Business Lunches.
Calories don’t count in the Montignac diet. You can eat as much as you like. This is what attracts me, because I enjoy eating large quantities of delicious food as often as possible. I am also excited by reports that you can drink wine and eat cheese and chocolate and foie gras. Montignac’s is a diet for gastronomes.
I spend the morning reading Montignac. It seems that I have already made a ruinous error. “Never skip a meal,” writes Montignac. “It is the biggest mistake you could possibly make, and the best way to upset your metabolism.” When you miss a meal, your body panics and stores away the energy from your next meal in the form of repulsive fat. This also explains why conventional, low-calorie dieting rarely works for very long. Exercise is irrelevant, he says; “sport has never caused anyone to slim.”
“For me, a handshake from a great chef is as sacred as a benediction from the Pope,” Montignac writes. “One does not gain weight from eating too much, but from eating badly.” Eat all you want but only the right foods and only in the right combinations.
No potatoes, no pasta, no white rice, no corn, no sugar, no sweets, no caffeine.
Ever. Just proteins and fats and lots of fiber from green vegetables. Fruits may be eaten in complete isolation from other foods, at least a half hour before a meal or three hours after. “The biggest mistake one can make is to eat fruit at the end of a meal,” Montignac explains. I could have sworn that skipping a meal was the biggest mistake one can make.
What about the wine, the chocolate, and the foie gras? They’re in Phase II, weight maintenance. This is Phase I, weight
loss.
At noon I take a taxi to the airport, an airplane to San Francisco, and a late lunch in seat 23-C. Today Delta has achieved a new low in comfort and gastronomy. Are the seats getting smaller and smaller, or am I getting bigger and bigger?
I finish half a bag of peanuts before reading in Montignac that nuts are a carbohydrate-lipid, a very bad thing. I eat an unidentifiable chicken part from which I scrape a thick, sodden layer of breading; some pale green broccoli; and a salad with light ranch dressing. The leatherette dinner roll and the Land O’Lakes Classic Blend, whatever that is, are no temptation, and it takes only the barest restraint to avoid a cold wedge of chocolate cake that has hundreds of tiny marshmallows forced onto its surface. There is no cheese, the only dessert that Montignac allows. “Get into the habit of carrying individually wrapped cheese wherever you go,” he advises.
By the time the beverage cart reaches row 23, Delta has run out of red wine, white wine, and beer. They do not even apologize or refund a portion of the ticket price or hand out free headsets. But this does not bother me, because wine is pretty much out of the question in Phase I, beer is the worst thing you can drink at any time, and I have already seen the movie.
My first successful Montignac meal is over.
By the time I reach San Francisco, I have finished
Dine Out and Lose Weight.
(You can order a copy by dialing (800) 932-3229.) This is not an easy book to love, brimming as it is with non sequiturs, pointless anecdotes, feeble humor, self-contradictions, and braggadocio. Considering the very competent prose in another of Montignac’s books, published in Britain, I do not know whether to blame Montignac or his American translator.
But the key idea is this: There are bad carbohydrates and good carbohydrates. Bad carbohydrates cause a sharp spike in the level of glucose in the bloodstream. Good carbohydrates cause a
much milder and slower rise in blood sugar. The extent to which a carbohydrate raises the level of glucose in the blood is expressed by its glycemic index.
When our blood sugar rises, the pancreas produces insulin which enables the body’s tissues to absorb glucose, removing
i
t from the bloodstream. But many of us have a problem. We have become insulin resistant, and so our pancreas needs to produce more insulin than normal to get the job done. The excess insulin has a disastrous effect on our waistlines: it causes our fat cells to store extra calories, whether from proteins, fats, or carbohydrates, in the form of body fat. Food is not turned into fat in the absence of insulin.
The essential trick is to eat only proteins and fats (these trigger very little insulin production) and good carbohydrates, those with a low glycemic index. Caffeine is forbidden because it stimulates the pancreas to secrete insulin.
The worst carbohydrate is maltose, found in beer; its glycemic index is 110, worse than drinking pure glucose, with a rating of 100. Then come white bread and instant mashed potatoes (95); honey and jam (90); cornflakes and popcorn (85); carrots (85); refined sugar (75); corn, beets, white rice, cookies, and boiled potatoes (70); white-flour pasta (65); and bananas and raisins (60). As you can see, white bread is even worse than sugar. All of these bad carbohydrates should be avoided at all times and under all circumstances.
The best of the good carbohydrates are green vegetables; with a rating below 15, they can be eaten freely with proteins and fats. The other good carbohydrates are not quite as harmless and should generally not be eaten with fats: fructose (20); dark chocolate (22); lentils, chickpeas, dried beans, and dried peas (30); fresh fruits (35); wild rice (35); dairy products and whole-grain cereals (35); whole rye bread, green peas, and fresh white beans (40); whole wheat pasta (45); oatmeal, whole wheat bread, and brown rice (50).
