Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Michael Ruhlman, a journalist, decided he wanted to write about what it was like to become a chef. So he went and enrolled himself in the Culinary Institute of America (CIA). The Making of a Chef is about his experience going through the institutes classes, working at it’s restaurants, and not only learning the skills one needs to cook, but actually the mentality that is required to become a successful one.

We first go through basic skills classes with Ruhlman and learn many basics with him. What is roux? What is Béchamel? How do you make a perfect consume from scratch? We then go onto to classes on bread-making, “garde manger” and many others. We pick up a few tidbits here and there about what these classes are about, what it’s like to actually be in them, and a few of the skills and information that is actually taught. Ruhlman also does a great job simply narrating his own experience not only learning the skills, but relating to the varied teacher chefs and fellow students. We get to know some of his fellow students quite well.

Ruhlman went through these classes in 1996, so I sometimes wonder how things have changed since with the advent of the internet. Listening to the book (I bought it through Audible.com), one can’t help to get excited about the CIA. Here you can go in a complete novice cook and within weeks you should have a mastery of at least many of the basics of cooking. In less than two years, you are ready to actually be on the line in a respectable restaurant. This is definitely boot camp for cooks, and from someone who has a very uneven knowledge of cooking it is enticing to think you could just go there and become a master… or at least proficient.

As tempting as this is, you also learn in this book (as I’ve heard elsewhere) how hard a job it is to be a chef. It is long hours of very physical work, on your feet most of this time. You work every holiday – in fact holidays are the only days you can’t take off – unless you are in the rare restaurant that doesn’t serve. You also have to keep up a relentless pace in order to keep customers from leaving due to impatience, and you have to do this and still put out a product that is basically perfect or very close to it in quality. The CIA, as Ruhlman describes it, prepares its students for this by the intensity of its classes, which give time limits for preparing everything and deducts points for the smallest imperfections. To want to become a chef, Ruhlman suggests (and I would tend to agree with him), one has to have it in ones bones. A dilettante like myself who gets excited by the IDEA of being a chef would probably very quickly end up bowing out due to these overwhelming pressures involved.

One word of caution about the Audio version of this book. It originally comes from Blackstone Audio Books, so they are most likely at fault, but I have complained to Audible who provide the book to its subscribers as well. There are some pretty bad problems with the audio. Nothing that makes in unlistenable, but still distracting enough to be annoying. The main issue one notes almost immediately is that somehow there is a lot of repeating of a sentence or part of a sentence. When I say a lot I don’t mean it’s constant, but it might be enough, if edited to knock 10-20 minutes off of the 12+ hour audio book. The narrator’s voice, which is not bad, keeps getting clipped off, only to start again after a pause. It’s almost as if they took a steady tape of the guy and chopped it at various points and inserted pauses intentionally. This also ads more time to it, and while distracting, also doesn’t make it unlistenable. Finally, it almost seems as if they recorded each few chapters with different equipment. The narrators voice gets louder and then softer and then higher and the lower, and then less treble, and then more treble. It’s pretty uneven, and yet another distraction. Hopefully Blackstone and Audible will clean up this recording and make it a much more polished product. Even given these inadequacies, though, I would still recommend it to any foodie, gourmand, or gourmet out there, or just someone who likes a good story and a look into a subculture that one would normally never get to see.

I’ve been looking for something to fight for quite a while. I sign up a lot of places online and give out my email address, so I get a ton. I am talking hundreds of messages per day! I am not too hopeful about the national anti-spam legislation that mimics the recent do-not-call list. Even if it does go into law, spammers will just go overseas. Unless there is some international treaties on the stuff, I’m not sure much is going to change. I use Outlook for email and have been looking for something that not only filters spam but also lets you report it and/or bounce it.

Looking on the very helpful site spam.abuse.net, I found the name of an application that looked like it would fit my requirements. Giant Company Software makes Spam Inspector, a program that is kind of a plug-in in your Outlook inbox (actually, though, Spam Inspector is supposed to work within Eudora and even with Hotmail accounts – as well as something I’m unfamiliar with called Incredimail). It will filter suspected spam into a separate directory. You can tag messages as either spam or not spam (it learns this way and after using it for a week or so, it’s about 99.9% accurate – the only missteps I’ve seen have been just mass mail notes from various sites I’ve signed up with). You can bounce messages back to the sender in an effort to make it look like your address is invalid. This probably has no affect most of the time, but maybe in a few cases it might get you off a list? And you can report spam. It analyzes the headers of your message and generates a standard email to get sent to spam.abuse.net as well as any isp who’s address is referenced in the headers. A lot of times spammers spoof such addresses, so it doesn’t matter, but can’t I be hopeful that at least by reporting some spammers are getting kicked off of their ISP faster than they would have otherwise?

Maybe it is a losing battle, but this is a heck of a lot better than having to look at the subject and sender of each message to try to figure out if I should just delete it or actually take a chance and open it!

I love to read, but I’ve been cursed with this lack of ability to read at any reasonable pace. I’ve tried speed-reading on my own and through a class but without extreme dedication to the program, it’s just not worked. The fact that it takes so long to read for me (generally in the vicinity of 10-20 pages per hour) makes it much harder to pick up a book in the first place. After all, if it takes you forever to read a book, you can spend that time a lot more efficiently elsewhere.

Back in college I got addicted to talk radio. I’m not talking about Howard Stern or Dr. Laura. Rather I was an NPR junky and even listened to short-wave stations from around the world. This was when the USSR was first starting to open up a little with Gorbachev’s Glasnost and listening to the state-run propaganda while they were trying to muddle their way to more open discussion of at least domestic matters was fascinating. Anyway, I began to see that one could listen and learn stuff and not have to be tied to one spot (vis-à-vis a walkman), or even have one’s full attention one thing. After grad school when I got a car and started commuting to work (some of these commutes could be long), I would listen to the radio all the time. Although I still enjoy NPR, especially in the last few years, much of the news has been rather depressing. I would rather glance at Washingtonpost.com or CNN.com when I get to work, then to be drowned in very in depth coverage of a rather depressing issue. So audio books seem to be the best solution. You can pick the topic and it can be a serious look at history, a language lesson, a travel narrative, a mystery, or really anything you’re in the mood for. You’re not at the mercy of others for what you will hear.

Many of you may have read my previous book reviews here, most of which have actually been reviews of books I listened to as opposed to “reading.” I use a service called Audible.com. It’s been around now for several years and they have quite a nice selection of books, a lot of them being unabridged and read by the authors or by skilled narrators. You can buy books ala carte, and even in this way you save a good amount over what you would pay for, say a book on tape or CD in a bookstore. But the real savings comes when you subscribe to one of their “listener” plans. I am on one that gives you two books a month for $20. $10 for a recent best seller in print is a steal, let alone an audio version of it. They also have tons of magazines, radio shows, and newspapers in their catalog that you can either subscribe to or just buy individual editions. Many of these are even on a daily basis like the New York Times digest or various public radio shows.

Because of Audible I’ve probably read 60+ books in the last few years, probably a 10-fold increase in what I was doing before that with standard printed books. This brings me to the part of the blog-entry that is hardest. It’s the one where I grovel for financial support. Actually, not quite that bad, but just a request that if you’ve found my reviews and info about Audible helpful and you happen to then subscribe to them, I would be grateful if when asked you entered my audible id (‘leviwallach’) when asked who referred you. I get a couple of free books when people do this, not cash, and you can in turn recommend them to others and get the same thanks in return. Grovel, grovel.

For our family, food always took a central place. Perhaps it was the fact that we ate out at least once a week, but often more, and that my parents always took the kids with them to restaurants, but I developed a great taste for delicious foods. Fortunately and unfortunately my mother was also a health nut. Fortunately because we didn’t have soda and sweets in the house, but unfortunately because for most of my childhood we used margarine because that was supposed to be better – at least the reduced fat kind. All along we were consuming tons of trans fats. I was at least somewhat overweight from the time my dad died when I was nine.

I started my first official diet in college some 15 years ago and although I reached my goal, I continued to lose and gain the same 20-35 lbs of excess weight for many years. Of course all of this dieting was of the low-fat, low-calorie type up until a few years ago when being religious about what I ate and how much I exercised still would not push me below the +25lb mark.

That’s when I started low-carbing. I had actually read a bit of Atkins a few years earlier and was not impressed. I like to understand why something should work and Atkins was not very descriptive. His book seemed repetitive and ranting. But after a 9-month stint at extreme low-fat/low-cal/lots of exercise with little to show, I gave in to a suggestion to at least try the idea that I thought was opposite what I thought was healthy. I trudged through the Atkins book again and was still unimpressed. Then someone mentioned Protein Power as a better book, so I picked it up and I have been a low-fat to low-carb convert ever since. Protein Power gets into the details of why eating low-carb is actually healthier for you, not just why it helps you lose weight. Anyone who is a geek or a science nerd will enjoy reading about the technical details, but it is not written for people with scientific backgrounds, just laymen with a minimal ability to understand some basic scientific ideas.

When I started low-carbing back in the fall of 2000, it was still a vilified way of eating. Over the last three years there have been great strides, however. We continue to hear about short term and medium-term studies that indicate that restricting carbohydrates improve cholesterol level and are more effective in weight loss than other methods. To be sure there are still vehement critics, but anecdotally I hear of more and more doctors recommending low-carb to their overweight patients to lose weight and to their patients with high cholesterol as a stopgap to prevent having to resort to drug therapy. An article in the New York Times Magazine by Gary Taubes, What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie, in July of last year probably had the biggest effect. The expose by the award-winning science writer attacked the status quo and made some very lucid arguments about at least trying honestly to determine whether low-carb was the healthiest way to eat. A new book by Dr. Atkins and then even Dr. Atkins unfortunate and untimely death due to slipping on ice from a late-winter freak snow storm in New York earlier this year both added to the hype about low-carb.

With all this added attention and popularity, those of us stalwarts who have been doing it a while without the benefit of such popular support finally are experiencing some vindication from our peers. My family’s cries of warning that I would be killing myself with the evil fat have transformed into words of admiration for having “discovered” this way of eating before it was accepted by the mainstream. Last year when I came to my new job, I was the only person doing low-carb. Now most of my department is either doing this or considering it. I promise you that I have in no way pushed this on people, but of course I share my experiences when people ask.

The new popularity of low-carb has engendered a new push by the food industry to produce products for this growing market. It was only a matter of time, and in fact I think it’s even a bit late in coming, but nonetheless we are finally starting to see critical mass in this area. The first low-carb product from a major manufacturer to come out was the low-carb beer Michelob Ultra. Just recently Bryers has come out with a low-carb ice cream. Even the ultimate carb-fest that fast food restaurants are have been (with their sandwich buns, French fries, sodas, and shakes) are starting to jump on the bandwagon. McDonalds will soon be offering a “McDonald’s Real Life Choices menu” in their New York area stores where items low in fat, low in carbs, and low in calories will be highlighted on the menu. And others fast food chains or individual stores are experimenting with offering low-carb bread or even lettuce as an alternative to buns to hold the contents of a sandwich together.

However, I’ve also seen a troubling example of what may become common. KFC has a new commercial out touting the fact that their fried chicken is relatively low in carbs. While this may be technically true, I believe it is targeting the “dark side” of the low-carb lifestyle.

Although low-carb as a principle to losing weight has been around since Banting came out with his “Letter on Corpulence” some 134 years ago, and up until about 30 years ago it was a common to restrict “starches” (as opposed to carbs) if one wanted to lose weight or prevent gaining, it was really Atkins who pioneered the modern low-carb mindset. He was one of the first to vehemently attack carbs as the culprit for excess weight and health issues back in the 60’s and through his books became overwhelmingly the most popular low-carb guru. By the 90’s, other doctors as well as non-MDs latched onto the low-carb philosophy but with different approaches. The Eadeses, authors of Protein Power, for example, came at it from a very scientific standpoint. They of course saw the positive results it was having in their patients, but they wanted to understand why this was happening so they could determine whether it was healthy in the long run. Their preoccupation with health motivated them to incorporate other aspects into their plan that was not simply low-carb. So they warned against eating trans fats, and promoted eating foods high in omega-3 fatty acids and low in omega-6, as well as urging people to eat a variety of high quality whole foods including lots of vegetables and even fruits that are high in antioxidants. And of course their cornerstone that they put at an even higher priority than restricting carbs is that of making sure one is eating enough protein.

The “dark side,” however, refers to a very simplistic view of low-carb way of eating. This one is only concerned with restricting carbs. As long as carbs are restricted to a certain amount, according to this thinking it really doesn’t matter what you are eating. So you could be eating McDonalds hamburgers without the bun for every meal, no vegetables and low-carb candy, ice cream, or protein bars for snacks. I will not say that the Atkins diet promotes this kind of diet. It certainly doesn’t anymore. However, its emphasis on being able to eat the “forbidden” foods that are high in fat and in particular saturated fat created an impression that one didn’t really need to eat anything else. This probably did the most initial damage to the repution of the Atkins plan and low-carb plans in general as critics picked up immediately on this and attacked the most controversial aspects of the diet because that was what Atkins was hyping in his books. Lots of Atkins followers picked up on it too, but in this case embracing these forbidden items was more of a way to thumb their nose at health nuts while still losing weight.

My main fear is that with the popularization of low-carb, the main emphasis that we will see is that put on by the mainstream press of a dumbed-down version of Atkins that’s only about carb counts and nothing else. One that hypes eating all the meat you can stand without concern for getting any other healthful foods which are also low in carbs, like fruits and veggies, fish, etc. KFC and McDonalds will promote their “low-carb” options while frying them in dangerous concoctions of trans-fats and pumbing them with all kinds of preservatives, artificial colors, flavors, and preservatives. The masses looking to lose will read a blurb in People magazine, then maybe eat this way for a few weeks or months then wonder why they either aren’t losing or their health issues aren’t getting better and then determine that somehow eating low carb doesn’t work for them, or doesn’t work at all.

What I propose is a marriage. The radical health nuts of the 60’s and 70’s need to lose their fear and loathing of fat (even saturated) and even meat. They at least knew that sugar was bad for you and that processing food adds questionable chemicals to your system. What they didn’t understand was how some of the starches they used to replace the politically incorrect meat were wreaking havoc on their insulin levels. The Atkins for Dummies set and the Good ol’ Boys Meat and Potatoes set need to look at food in a different way. Not just as a recreation, but as a way to stay healthy, a way to feel good and live long. They know that meat tastes good, but they need to think in more detail about what KIND is good. It’s not just about meat vs. the stereotypical “rabit food” salad, but rather the mass-produced hormone and antibiotic-pumped meat vs. a grass-fed or free-range alternative. Wild game and fish of course will fit well into this mentality. But the veggies and fruit shouldn’t be banished just because they’re not meat, but rather as a good way to add extra nutrition without too many carbs.

The marriage is already visible in some forms of low-carb plans like Protein Power and those that follow them. One can only hope that if the US swings to the low-carb dark side given it’s new fascination with it and the natural tendency to go to an extreme when trying something new, that eventually we will see the pendulum turn back a bit to a point where people think about what they are eating more, but don’t do so in a dogmatic way. So much of the low-fat movement was about a guideline that was practically mandated by the government and doctors that it was doomed to fail. No one wants to be forced to eat something even if it is supposed to be good for you, and especially if it tastes horrible. Low-carb has finally broke through, but it took a very long and pitched battle due to the entrenched financial interests behind low-fat as well as the egos of those who promoted it for so long that to now recant would be too much of an embarrassment. Lets hope that low-carb remains an open methodology and mindset and one which can be combined with other not specifically low-carb ideas to create a diet that is the healthiest one for all of us.