The Man Who Ate Everything (29 page)

And now for the gastronomic verdict: The Olestra apple pie was universally judged to be superior to the Crisco version—it was considerably flakier and just as tender. Marilyn’s Olestra biscuits seemed flakier than her Crisco biscuits, though also greasier. Pooris made from Madhur Jaffrey’s recipe puffed just as well in Olestra as in peanut oil, and the taste was similar. Marilyn’s fat-free brownies were fine, but I much prefer the chocolate-and-egg taste of real brownies.

There was, in taste and texture, little to distinguish the foods deep-fried in Olestra from the foods fried in peanut oil as long as they were eaten very warm. If anything, the Olestra versions seemed crispier and their flavor more neutral, which allowed the taste of the underlying foods to come through, often in unexpected ways.

But as they cooled down, many Olestra-fried delicacies left the roof of my mouth repulsively greasy, especially when we had failed to blot the food with meticulous care. The reason is that the current version of Olestra has been manufactured to stay quite thick at room temperature—it looks something like Vaseline until it is heated—which is why P & G always demonstrates Olestra melted.

Why did they formulate Olestra this way? Because the early, more liquid versions caused gastrointestinal problems. One of these—“anal seepage,” or, in my preference, “passive oil loss”— occurs when fully liquid Olestra separates from the food with which it was cooked and slips along the inner walls of people’s intestines, bypassing everything else in its way. Drops of Olestra show up on their underwear or floating in their toilets. (The FDA actually abbreviates this as OIT, “oil in toilet.”)

Procter & Gamble discovered that passive oil loss and some— but not all—of the other gastrointestinal effects (cramps and diarrhea, for example) could nearly be eliminated by making Olestra about as thick as mayonnaise at room temperature, which prevents it from separating from food in the intestines. This is the only form of Olestra the FDA has approved. But potato chips with a greasy coating the consistency of mayonnaise are not going to walk out of the supermarkets. So the Olestra potato chips that P & G experimentally produces, in a perfect one-twentieth-scale model of a complete potato chip factory it has constructed in another part of the Food Building, are carefully dried by “steam stripping.” That’s why in some of the informal taste tests run by several national newspaper food sections Olestra potato chips did not taste greasy enough.

Before Olestra can be used for home cooking, something drastic must be done. Actually, something drastic has been done. I was the first outsider ever shown an experimental form of Olestra that is wonderfully liquid at both room and frying temperatures, but which somehow stiffens within the body. The people at P & G were annoyingly laconic about this apparently perfect, light golden Olestra because they are afraid, they said, of tipping off their competitors. (They obviously wanted me to write about it or they would not have shown it to me—I did not discover it in some broom closet.) But I was allowed to fry with it for hours on end, and the results were excellent—nearly as crisp and much less greasy, with a light, translucent taste. P & G has no immediate plans to petition the FDA because, I suspect, approval will require a massive series of additional animal and human tests. Otherwise, P & G would rush it to market.

Flying back from Cincinnati, still intoxicated by the promise of Olestra, I grew preoccupied with some of the darker questions.

Will Olestra make you too skinny? The FDA did not even consider, officially at least, whether Olestra will make you skinny at all. When somebody applies for permission to introduce a novel substance into the American food supply, the FDA has only one legal responsibility: to find out whether the new food is safe to eat, not whether it is effective or delicious or desirable.
(Drugs
are evaluated also for their effectiveness.) P & G’s weight-loss research is promising but very short-term.

As for the gastrointestinal effects, I can testify that after a solid day of cooking with Olestra, munching on the results, consuming five times the amount the FDA ever envisioned, and dipping regularly into the bags of Olestra corn and potato chips that now sit next to my computer, I did not have the slightest trouble. My wife, who always claims to have a more delicate stomach than mine, had no problems either, and loved the taste and crunchy texture. There is no doubt that some people, apparently a small number, do suffer from cramps, diarrhea, or passive oil loss. But the FDA assures us that any GI symptoms disappear as soon as you stop eating the stuff—with no lasting discomfort.

There is one very serious potential consequence of eating Olestra, and the FDA sidestepped the issue in a way that may come back to haunt it.

Some of the vitamins in the foods we eat are fat soluble— principally vitamins A, D, E, and K. When they are eaten at about the same time we eat Olestra, some of them dissolve in the Olestra and pass from our bodies unabsorbed. The press has inaccurately described this as “flushing” or “vacuuming” or “sweeping” the vitamins right out of our systems. Olestra carries off only a portion of the fat-soluble vitamins that you consume within two hours on either side of the Olestra. If you eat Olestra potato chips in the afternoon, the vitamins in your dinner will be unaffected.

Procter & Gamble and the FDA have calculated the amount of replacement vitamins that need to be added to Olestra itself or into the foods made with it to set everything right, even for heavy snackers, and this is what P & G has done. The results seem sensible to me. If you are still concerned, read the FDA’s research summary in the
Federal Register
(vol. 61, no. 20, January 30, 1996,
Rules and Regulations).
What level of vitamin supplementation will be needed when we consume Olestra all day, every day, in every snack and at every meal, as the main added fat in our diets—as I have hopes we will? The easy answer is to take a vitamin pill every morning, an hour or two before or after slathering your Olestra-lard biscuits with golden Olestra butter.

But there is a much thornier problem: How can we replace all those nutrients we don’t yet know enough about? The carotenoids are a group of more than five hundred related compounds found in fruits and vegetables, among which the most famous are beta-carotene and lycopene (in tomatoes). There are fifty respectable epidemiological studies showing that populations consuming large amounts of fruits and vegetables have lower rates of cancer, and that low levels of carotenoids in the bloodstream are associated with heart disease, stroke, and certain eye diseases among the elderly.

Carotenoids are fat soluble, and there is little doubt that eating Olestra sharply decreases the levels of some carotenoids. But are carotenoids the crucial nutrient in fruits and vegetables, or is it something else? (Other possibilities—flavonoids and polyphenols—are not fat soluble.) And is the level of carotenoids in the bloodstream the important thing to measure? Or is it simply a marker for other processes going on in the body? Nobody knows, and so the government has never established a standard—an RDA—for carotenoid consumption. As a result, the FDA did not require Olestra to be enriched with any of the five hundred carotenoids. This is the dilemma: How can we replace nutrients that are beyond our ability to name and to measure?

Is Olestra worth the risk? If fat is poison, sure it is. But if not…?

If Olestra has the epochal effect I am hoping for, if Olestra truly ushers in the Second Age of Man, it could make up 30 percent of our diets. Would it be possible to engineer a form of Olestra that does not allow nutrients to become dissolved in it? This may be our only hope. I trust that the people at Procter & Gamble are working on this problem night and day. For otherwise the Age of Virtual Pleasure will be postponed until further notice. And we will have but a few shiny bags of savory snack foods to play with.

May 1996

Journey

of a

Thousand Meals

When I awoke, the morning air was as crisp as bacon and as sweet as liver sausage. I was lashed to the passenger seat of an unfamiliar European automobile, alone and abandoned by the side of a deserted mountain road. The keys were gone from the ignition. Had I been outwitted once again by my very own wife?

I unbuckled and squeezed out of the car. In other circumstances, the scene around me would have seemed altogether sublime. Yellow-green vineyards climbed the steep hillsides, and flashes of autumn color showed through the silvery pines. In the wide valley far below I could make out a tiny farmer on a tiny tractor lugging a tiny wagon bursting with
quintal d’Alsace,
huge white cabbages that would soon be finely shredded, layered with salt and juniper berries, and fermented into choucroute, which is French for “sauerkraut,” which is German for “bitter herb.” Simmered with wine and spices and everything an Alsatian pig can contribute to man’s well-being—its sturdy knuckles and shanks, its dainty feet and meaty jowls, its mirthful belly and brawny shoulders—
quintal
is raised to the dizzying, almost inconceivable gastronomic summit known as
choucroute
garnie a I’Alsadenne.
The dream of unearthing a perfect choucroute had plagued me for a decade. But now, alone and deserted in Alsace, my goal seemed as remote as the tiny farmer toiling on the valley floor.

A journey of a thousand meals begins with a single bite. My choucroute obsession had taken hold with the very first version I
had tasted, a recipe of Julia Child’s. It was sweet with chicken broth, onions, and carrots, aromatic with cloves and juniper berries. The meats were roast pork and sausages, bacon and ham all luxurious and familiar. I had relished every morsel and imagined that a thoroughly authentic choucroute would be the same only more so. And thus my quest began.

Years later in Paris on a particularly warm June day, I lunched at one of the Baumann chain of brasseries, thought by some to have the best choucroute in the city. It was the most demoralizing meal of a lifetime, not because the choucroute was poor, which it was, nor because my wife forced me to eat outside in the broiling sun and a pigeon soiled my suit, which they did, but because it dawned on me for the first time that an authentic
choucroute garnie a l’Alsacienne
was not what I was after. The cabbage was tough and acrid and greasy; some of the pork was so amply streaked with soft white fat that it seemed morally wrong to eat more than a bite or two of it; two pieces were so lean and dry that my knife buckled as I tried to cut them. Meals the next day at the Brasserie Flo and at Chez Jenny restored my confidence a bit. I vowed then and there that someday I would voyage to Alsace and uncover the truth.

Whenever I travel to France, I like to hit the ground eating, but my urgency on this trip was even more intense than usual— a brief week in Alsace was barely long enough to sample fourteen authentic choucroutes. I had passed a sleepless night and morning on the trip to Strasbourg—two plane flights and an endless wait for airport connections—while my wife slumbered beside me like a puppy. Anticipating that I would lose consciousness as soon as we rented our car, my instructions to her had been the model of clarity: Drive directly from the airport to Ittenheim on the forlorn outskirts of Strasbourg, avoiding the twofold snare of ineffable scenery and medieval churches. Park at the Hotel-Restaurant au Boeuf and make a reservation for lunch. Enjoy yourself very quietly for the next two hours. Wake me at 1:00 p.m. for our first steaming plate of true choucroute.

Hard as I tried, I could not find a loophole in these instructions. Yet here I was, alone and immobilized, deep in the Vosges Mountains and their adorable little towns of medieval houses, lofty church spires, narrow spotless streets, and ferocious dogs on flimsy tethers.

I fished around in the glove compartment for a dictionary, a long roll of graph paper, and a stack of postcards. In France as in no other country they sell postcards with photographs of regional dishes on one side and recipes on the reverse. I had located five at the Strasbourg airport while my wife, by division of labor, took care of the baggage. Three cards featured
choucroute garnie a I’Alsacienne.
I sat down on a tree stump and resumed my master-work—a chart analyzing every authentic recipe for choucroute I could get my hands on.

Just then a shadowy figure emerged from the forest into the bright sunlight. It was my wife, wearing the look she gets when she believes she has been ennobled by proximity to nature. Too proud to betray the slightest concern at her absence, guessing that interrogation would be pointless, and recalling that she still had the car keys, I smiled carelessly, rolled up my chart, and said, “To Ittenheim!”