Eating Not So Funions and Wonderbread

This week’s food article in the Wall Street Journal struck me as particularly bizarre. “Gourmet Canned Cuisine” read the headline. Captions showed gourmet dishes made at fancy New York and California restaurants with canned goods beside them, apparently headlining in the dish’s recipe. The article reviews David Bouley’s usage of Heinz ketchup and Jean Georges Vongerichten’s sweet shrimp that have Hellman’s mayonnaise to thank. More shocking is the Kraft singles used by a Seattle restaurateur and the Gravy Master that the head chef at Toqueville puts on his $75 Kobe beef. The list of restaurateurs and canned foods spanned an entire page.

The article doesn’t glorify these chefs usage of lowbrow ingredients; however, it doesn’t completely put it down either. This, I think, is absurd. The very reason one attends one of these haute restaurants is to enjoy fine cuisine. And, the expectation is that this food will be unprocessed, preservative-free gastronomy. Of course, there is a place for ketchup, mayonnaise, and sugar (sugar, see left) in our diets in small amounts, but in this day and age when we are becoming more and more aware of the dangers and repercussions of a diet saturated in chemical-laden food and unnatural substitutes found in many canned and bottled goods, do we want these shortcuts sneaking into our starred restaurants?

It is an atrocity that these chefs would cook in this fashion. Of course there is the pressure of creating buzz around one’s restaurant. And, certainly, fresh, seasonal food is no longer anything new. However, to revert to high fructose ingredients for this attention will certainly not fare well with our arteries, our hearts, or our belt buckles.

When Wonderbread is a main ingredient in crab cakes, it should make us think twice about throwing down $12 for the golf ball-sized delicacy, right? What happened to all that progress that Alice Waters made in the 1990’s? Was fresh food just a fad? Does anyone really care about health? About the ills of a sugary diet and the detrimental effects of preservative-infused food? In a time when trans fat at MacDonald’s is written about and fought against daily, what makes a $23 Funion-encrusted halibut filet any different?