Thursday, March 13, 2008

mayonnaise dilemma

I've been reading the Omnivore's Dilemma, both for personal interest and for school, and the book is blowing my mind. It's really well written and thoughtful, and is examining all aspects of the food industry.

As a result of the part of the book about corn and how it is broken down and reconstructed into everything from oils and sweeteners to adhesives and building materials, I've decided to try my best to stay away from processed foods. I never considered myself to be someone who consumed a lot of processed foods, and I guess I figured that as a vegetarian I was probably eating more or less good food most of the time. I definitely have an Yves addiction that needs to be dealt with, and the list of ingredients on my favourite vegetarian chick'n nuggets is making me cry. Corn, corn, corn.

Don't get me wrong, I love corn, corn is not the enemy. USDA polices forcing so called commodity crop (corn and soy mainly) farmers to grow more and more for less and less money, and at an increasing cost to our eco system (turning crude oil into fertilizers and pesticides isn't a good idea?) are the bad fellas. Corn grown sustainably for eating (rather than being processed) is awesome.

So I've been replacing my more processed than I had ever imagined sandwich slices with organic smoked tofu, making edamame salads with organic non GMO soy beans, eating nuts, beans, and organic free range eggs for protein. I'm trying to eat my food as whole as possible as often as possible. On Sunday, which in our house is dessert night, I made an angel food cake from scratch. This was previously the only cake I'd ever make from a mix, and now with a little help from Martha Stewart, I've learned that it is only marginally more time consuming to make one from scratch, and way more tasty. I'm not saying I'll never eat processed foods, hello, a veggie pepperoni pizza on a treat night, and I'm not going to throw away the ground round and nuggets in my deep freeze, but I'm doing my best.

So mayonnaise. I don't eat a lot of it, but sometimes I like a thin scraping in my sandwich or in my egg salad sandwich. It's also a dang tasty fry dip, and you know it. Yesterday I was telling this lady in one of my classes that I had to get home to attend to my yoghurt culture - I've been making my own yoghurt for over a year now. It has 2 ingredients; milk and some starter from the last batch of yoghurt. It's sooooo much better than commercial yoghurt with their yucky thickeners and shiz. Anyway, she says to me that she's never made yoghurt, but she makes her own mayo. I told her that I'd be open to making my own mayo except for my phobia of raw eggs, and she pointed out that there was raw eggs in the store bought stuff, plus a gazillion other processed ingredients. Somehow coming from a jar made me feel better about the rawness of the eggs, and I figured they must have been heat processed in some way to make them safe to eat. I don't know. Making it myself using local organic free range eggs is obviously going to be better for both my body and the planet than buying it in a jar. But there will be raw eggs. Yuck. I guess if I want to eat mayo occasionally I had better get my head around this thing.

Sigh.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I must admit your knowledge and interest in the food we eat, the food you eat and how to encorporate your ever growing new knowledge into your lifestyle is quite something.

I can make the bestest Guacomole from scratch..and other things that you wouldnt eat due to the fact that there are some dead animals present :( Sorry.

The Mayonaise recipe though..you can keep..i think im going off mayo.

If you ever do a cookbook, which by now, you MUST have plenty of stuff to go in it, you must include a section on asian and indian cuisine.

I suck at that stuff. French, Italian etc etc i can hold my own.

Just thoughts...im off to work.

Anonymous said...

One of my coworkers is vegan - she uses this stuff called vegenaise. You might want to look into the that or the ingredients for that - you might be able to throw your own together.

http://www.followyourheart.com/vegenaise_nutrition.php

Katie said...

I'll have to give that a try. The ingredients list looks good - all things that are what they are, and specifically says no GMO ingredients. They must have this shiz at Capers, and by Capers I mean Whole Foods, since they've "merged".

Anonymous said...

Yeah, not sure where she gets it, but I expect Capers/Whole Foods has it.

If you have problems locating it, let me know and I'll hit Roots out in Maple Ridge - I think I saw it there too.

HT said...

they even have organic veganaise. i think it's the only veganaise product that is non-GMO for sure -- they would very, very likely have it at whole foods.

i can also send you a good tofu mayo recipe from the juice for life cookbook if you want, plus a few others from other cookbooks so you can compare.

i have been meaning to read the omnivore's dilemna -- i hear it is amazing.

xo.h