The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [100]
I had read the scientific and medical papers on Olestra and followed the volleys of charges and countercharges about its efficacy and safety. I had spoken with officials who participated in the FDA hearings, and I had obtained all the transcripts, several thousand pages on four floppy disks. I was up to speed. And there is a good reason for worrying about Olestra: eating it can bring on side effects, mild to severe gastrointestinal discomfort and problems with absorbing nutrients. But before getting hot and bothered about all this, I desperately needed to cook with Olestra, using meat and seafood and fruit and bread, in sauces and in sweets—sautéed, panfried, deep-fried, roasted, and baked—in all its boundless forms and incarnations. The FDA has approved Olestra only for making savory snack foods, and I yield to no one in my admiration for a fine potato chip. But it is not snack foods that have made me fall in love with the concept of Olestra.
Because here is the Big Point: Olestra is not just some alternate kind of fat, like a bottle of peanut oil or a can of Crisco. Olestra is a process for turning any fat—any fat!!—into a sucrose polyester that passes right through the body. They can make Olestra butter and bake golden croissants with the fat calories of a piece of dry toast. They can make beef-tallow Olestra (or goose-fat Olestra) for cooking truly perfect French fries, savory and crunchy but with the zero-fat level of a naked baked potato. They can make lard Olestra and roll out piecrust so light and flaky that you will have to nail it to the kitchen table to keep it from floating away. They can make cocoa-butter Olestra and mold bars of smooth, rich, dark chocolate with the three or four fat grams found in a quarter cup of dry cocoa powder. At least I think they can.
I also knew that it was politically incorrect to love Olestra, at least in the world of nutrition. Procter & Gamble had sent hundreds of shiny foil bags of Olestra potato chips to food editors and writers around the country. Some of them—my friends!—had actually refused to open the packages. Me, I tore the samples open before the courier had left my house. I knew that these silver pouches contained crisp little chips of history. And they tasted just fine.
I have to admit it: one of the most delectable reasons for loving Olestra is that it makes most nutritionists squirm. For nearly a decade they have earned a fine living frightening us into believing that consumption of any fat will bring on heart disease, stroke, diabetes, obesity, and various cancers. The scientific truth is that not all fat is bad for us, only saturated fat—mainly animal fat.* But either out of ignorance or from the sheer thrill they get from controlling the rest of us, the antifat forces have tried to convince us that every fat is a poison. And now they are in a pickle. For if fat is poison, then anything that can keep us from consuming fat, even a diet composed entirely of fat-free junk food made with Olestra, will be a godsend. Olestra calls the nutritionists’ bluff!
If Olestra lives up to its potential, the unemployment rate among antifat nutritionists and food writers will soon reach 100 percent.
What were you doing on January 24, 1996? Me, I was thinking about fat. Actually, I was thinking about food, which is the same as thinking about fat, unless you regard thinking about lettuce as thinking about food. Early that morning, as if by psychic awareness, I had placed a call to Procter & Gamble’s public relations department to request a bathtubful of Olestra to experiment with. They didn’t say no, and they didn’t say yes. They forgot to return my call.
For it was that very afternoon that the FDA announced its favorable decision, and all hell broke loose around the Procter & Gamble publicity shop. A few days later, a P & G voice