The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [104]
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
*For more details, please turn back to the chapter “Pain Without Gain,” but only after you have finished reading this one.
PART FOUR
Journey of a Thousand Meals
True Choucroute
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 à l’Alsacienne. 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