– In which Dorn demonstrates the power of the post.
Maybe it’s just a coincidence. Modesty prevents me from claiming it must have been my mention of coconut aminos in a post less than a month ago that brought it such instant acclaim, but the facts speak for themselves. In today’s Washington Post, food columnist Ellie Krieger wrote that “Two formerly fringe ingredients go mainstream: Nutritional yeast and coconut aminos” (Washington Post Food Section, 7/18/19).
Her story concentrates on coconut aminos’s composition, flavor, and uses, mainly casting it as a substitute for soy sauce when the latter’s saltiness, gluten content or lack of Paleo-credentials disqualify it from the menu (you blog readers knew of these qualities of aminos already!). While generally positive about its place in the kitchen, Ms Krieger is skeptical about the health claims made by some coconut-aminophiles:
People are also buying into coconut aminos because they believe the many false and misleading claims they read about the ingredient online… though fresh coconut sap contains vitamins, minerals, fiber and antioxidants, scant — if any — are retained in the processing of the sap into coconut aminos, and there are no studies to back up any disease prevention benefits.
In other news (specifically, other news on the same Washington Post online page), food and culture reporter Maura Judkis reports that “KFC’s Cheetos chicken sandwich looks toxic and tastes like a missed opportunity” . (Washington Post online, 7/17/19). She allows that eating the sandwich did not kill her, and in fact it actually tastes better than it looks (which recall from the article title is “toxic”), and she reminisces about the food she enjoyed when she was young: “In the early part of this decade, stunt food used to be stuntier.”
To be fair, Cheetos is a notoriously difficult ingredient to work into a recipe, compared to, say, Twinkies. My grandson K— showed me Good Mythical Morning, a YouTube show that subjected several ingredients to the same culinary test: each ingredient was substituted, one at a time, for almonds in the process used to make almond milk (basically, soaking in water). Twinkies made a passable twinkie-milk beverage; so did fried chicken. But cheetos-milk just didn’t cut it (“too greasy”).
I’ll bet two successful Cheetos substitutions are: (1) for Rice Krispies in rice krispy treats, and (2) for cornmeal in corn dogs. I haven’t tried either of these, but if I do, I’ll let you know.
– In which Dorn free associates on condiments and cleansers, rock musicals and the psychology of morality.
Coconut Liquid Aminos. How come in all my years I never came across Coconut Liquid Aminos? The fact that I know of it now is merest serendipity. Kathleen herself doesn’t know what whim prompted her to pick up a bottle of “Bragg Coconut Liquid Aminos” at the local deli with our olives and Italian sausage.
The first ingredient in Bragg Aminos (the nice lady on the Bragg customer service line told me it’s pronounced Ah-MEE-noze, named after amino acids), “organic coconut blossom nectar”, is intriguing–I thought only bees turned flower nectar into human food. But the “Coconut Secret” brand of coconut aminos says that theirs is made from coconut tree sap. Is that a different product? Sap and nectar are two completely different plant substances, at least according to the Lehigh Valley (PA) sports page. But from the Coconut Secret website, the process that collects the coconut plant liquid used in aminos seems to have elements of both sap and nectar extraction. So I don’t know.
Coconut Liquid Aminos is brown and slippery with a tangy, fermenty bouquet reminiscent of soy sauce, so I tried it on things one might put soy sauce on, like meat, and salad, and rice. It’s really good! It’s salty, but not as salty as soy sauce, and is sweeter, with light teriyaki notes. Pert, I would say, but not impertinent. And it’s gluten-free!
Paul Bragg. The information about the Bragg Healthy Lifestyle on the label and on their website is as interesting as the flavor. The product seems to be part of a health food dynastic family that stretches back, well, to the dawn of health food dynasties. It says Paul Bragg created the first health food store, introduced pineapple juice and tomato juice to America, and his message of health and fitness was credited with “getting women out of bloomers and into shorts, and men into bathing trunks”.
Jack LaLanne, a fitness guru from the fifties (sort of the Richard Simmons or, I don’t know, Jillian Michaels of his time) credits Paul Bragg with his success. He’s quoted as saying “Bragg saved my life at age 15 when I attended the Bragg Crusade in Oakland, California”.
The message laid out on the bottle and website is compelling, and sometimes a bit weird, being based partially on health theories that went out of vogue a half a century ago or more (like germs and viruses aren’t attacking youwhen you’re sick, they are scavenging the detritus left in your body after incomplete cleansing). Bragg’s healthy living promised a vital life to the ripe age of 120, a figure taken from Genesis 6:3. Paul Bragg himself died of a heart attack at age 81–but to be fair, my sources suggest that this may have been a complication following a surfing accident a few days before.
Dr Bonner. The blend of sciencey-sounding theory, humanist philosophy, religion and a bit of occult surrounding Bragg’s Coconut Liquid Aminos brought to mind a product I remember well from my youth: Dr Bonner’s “Magic” 18-in-1 Hemp Peppermint Pure-Castile Soap. The product is still available, and as near as I can tell, the message on this label hasn’t changed in the more than 50 years since I first saw it. The label spares a little space for required information like ingredients and a bar code (that must be new), but most is still devoted to the main message of “Dr Bonner’s Magic All-One-God-Faith”*.
The “message” comes in the form of a hundred or so small mini-sermons squeezed onto the label, sometimes so abbreviated as to lose all sentence structure–but the spirit of the messages shines brightly through.
My hippy youth. Dr Bonner’s is known as “the soap of campers and hippies everywhere”. I can’t claim to be a hippy, but I certainly knew about them in my formative years–I was 10, and paying attention, during the “summer of love”. Our house had Dr Bonner’s soap on the shelf (in my parents’ defense, we were also avid campers), a Whole Earth Catalog on the coffee table, Foxfire Books on our bookcase, and an LP of the soundtrack to the musical Hair in our record cabinet.
(An “LP” is a non-digital music recording medium shaped rather like an oversized DVD, for those of you old enough to remember DVDs.) I remember some of the lyrics from Hair better than I remember passwords I composed today. One was called “My Conviction”, and I think it stuck as one of the building blocks of my adult philosophy of life:
Do no harm. Interestingly (I sure hope!), I read a fascinating book recently about about “do no harm” as a basis of morality. The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt proposed that all human morality includes do no harm as one of its very few standard building blocks, along with (2) be fair, (3) respect authority, (4) be loyal to one’s group, and (5) recognize and respect the sacred.
The book also theorized why liberals and conservatives can’t ever seem to agree: liberals (like me!) make their moral decisions relying heavily on the do no harm and fairness building blocks, and less so on the other blocks. Conservatives, he posited, make heavier use of the other three blocks, in addition to do no harm and fairness. Each side sees the other as not living up to moral standards, but really their standards are built to different specifications.
Science and politics. Jonathan Haidt has a related project I stumbled on: a website called the Heterodox Academy. On this site he posts research results addressing political bias by academic community in the way they treat research results. I think he might be right.
Try this little thought experiment about bias: read the following two sentences, and think about how you feel about the research that Jonathan Haidt is posting on the Heterodox Academy website:
Jonathan Haidt, a politically liberal psychologist, posts research showing that academia is biased against conservative researchers and conservative research findings.
Jonathan Haidt, a politically conservative psychologist, posts research showing that academia is biased against conservative researchers and conservative research findings.
The above sentences differ by only one word, and I don’t know which is true. Knowing nothing about Haidt’s research other than what was in the two sentences, did you feel differently about whether you would trust that research? If so, are you biased?
Someday I’d like to explore how I, and other scientists, ex-scientists, and non-scientists feel about science, alternative science, scientists, and scientism, but this post has dragged on even longer than the last one, so I’ll quit. Thanks!
