Abustling bistro, the waiters are in tuxedos and elegant tables are set. An old lady with a suspiciously square and masculine face, wearing a foppy black lace hat, gets constantly ignored. In a very high-pitched falsetto she softly and maniacally repeats, “Where is my mineral water?” as waiters keep parading glorious, over-the-top dishes to another table. The maître d’hotel is frantic; a reviewer for the Guide Duchemin is in the restaurant.
The joke’s on them as the old lady turns out to be the famous gastronome Charles Duchemin, director of the prestigious restaurant bible in disguise, as he doesn’t trust one of his assistants to be discreet enough to review a resto objectively. Duchemin is about to be elected to the Academie Française for his contribution to culinary and gustatory writing. In the days leading up to the ceremony he discovers a spy trying to steal his list of starred restaurants before they are printed. A wild goose chase and a half later on, after he is held at gunpoint and forced to eat piles of ultra-processed slop parading as food by a chef whose stars he revoked in a previous year, he loses all sense of appetite and (gasp) taste.
It turns out that the man behind the espionage and horrible dishes is none other than Tricatel: king of processed foods. Determined to expose this bane of the culinary world, he sneaks into the Tricatel factory only to discover the wildest things. Chicken skeletons hanging from a hook are covered in a thick white gloop and spray painted to look like roast chicken; a large bubbling vat of petrol from which a cacophony of tubes pump and bubble to turn it into a piece of beef; a flat, green piece of rubber is transformed into lettuce heads… the masterful changeling face of French comedian Louis de Funs with large eyes and bushy eyebrows makes your tummy hurt, squealing in laughter and yet when the calm settles in you wonder, how true is this today?
Idon’t know how I ever passed my foodie lifespan without seeing L’Aile ou La Cuisse (Wings or Thighs, 1976, directed by Claude Renoir) but after a long-overdue viewing it seems to put a lot of things in perspective. Not only is it hilarious but way before its time. This movie made over 30 years ago has preempted the fast-food and processed-food generation. How much of what we ingest is prefabricated or industrial, mixed with extenders, preservatives, flavor enhancers, chemicals and dyes? How much of the ingredients we use to cook at home come from these types of products? Forced by either financial necessity or time constraints, how much of what we eat can truly be called food?
Sometimes I think we forget. I know I do. When flavor takes priority and nutrition is a second-class citizen, we tend to forget that food is meant not just to fill our bellies or our mouths with a fleeting moment of pleasure but it is also meant to nourish you. That’s the wonder of it all — something that can both be an indulgence and a necessity. And as cheesy as it may sound, as Richard Gere whispered in that romantic Winona Ryder B-movie of the 1990s Autumn in New York, “Food is the only beautiful thing that truly nourishes.”
Not too long ago I was reading a book entitled In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan. He claimed that food needed to be defended because real food was slowly disappearing, rapidly being taken over by “wonder products” and highly commercialized foodstuffs that are full of strange compositions meant to resemble and taste like food. These low-fat items are just as bad because they have to treat the food chemically to remove the fat and replace it with other things like emulsifiers to get the same textures. He claims that even items that seem innocent and healthy enough, fortified with vitamins and nutrients, or even simple vitamin supplements, aren’t all that effective. The body doesn’t necessarily assimilate these vitamins because it’s not associated with other compounds that make it so. Eating carrots, he says, are more effective in giving you your vitamin B instead of taking supplement pills because the carrots contain other things such as enzymes that help your body assimilate the nutrients. He also found dairy products that have an extended, un-refrigerated shelf life suspicious. His point is that we should only eat food that our great-grandmothers would recognize with ingredients that sound like food. Real food doesn’t have E-numbers or strange long words that only a scientist can pronounce. While there is no globally accepted proof, studies have linked these artificial and chemical compounds with illnesses such as the dreaded Big C.
Iknow for a fact that one can of soda contains enough phosphorus to eat at your bones that you have to drink four glasses of milk or 500 milligrams of calcium supplements to compensate. Despite this, I still have a can once in a while. They also say that the diet versions with aspartame are even worse. Don’t believe me? Leave a coin in a glass of soda and watch what happens. It’s kind of scary to think it can do that to your body inside out. With all these food scares coming out like melamine in milk and exploding watermelons, it should be a call to consumer awareness.
I won’t be a hypocrite because I do love my fair share of junk food but I am aware that it is what it is: the operative word being “junk.” But how many people are? The problem is it is easy to get used to the flavor-enhanced taste of processed foods. Full of sodium and MSG, one can forget what real food tastes like and consider freshly made items bland. The worst part of it all is that processed food is easily accessible. In Manila it is nearly impossible to find something fast, cheap and healthy to eat. We need to start reading labels and cooking from scratch like our lolas used to. Let’s rise up to our own Tricatel and create a real demand for real food.
And when you’re tired of the leafy green stuff, why not make your own “junk food” at home? Because you are what you eat, why settle for French fries fried in frozen palm oil and coated in neon-orange cheese powder? I may as well be a homemade batch of hand-cut French fries crisped up in some gorgeous duck fat, drizzled with truffle oil and doused with some glittering bits of fleur de sel. This way, if in a sci-fi near-distant future some aliens invade the earth and decide to feed on us humans… well, I guess I’d be pretty yummy.