Mmm Mmm Good

Everyone has a guilty pleasure. Some are more common like Sex & the City or Gossip Girl, others are stranger and less heard about, keeping the definition of the word intact. Guilty pleasures can come in a plethora of categories, from trashy TV shows, to silly hobbies, to Harry Potter. My food guilty pleasure would have to be Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup. Everyone to whom I confess my love for this canned wonder has the same immediate response: the real thing is so much better! It's true, I can appreciate the homemade kind, with the stock created from the chicken carcass and the vegetables slowly cooked and softened over a period of several hours, but the good stuff ultimately can't stand up to the 7 line ingredient list of Campbells. I know, here I am, writing a blog about the ethics of eating and I'm confessing that one of the things I love most in the world isn't organic or local, and is so processed it should have a different category other than food. But I'm allowed.

Why do I like it? This was something we tried to figure out in class today when we had an activity in which we slowly and thoughtfully sampled top ramen and diet coke. We had a free write about what it tasted like, our reactions to it, and so on. There were a few grimaces at the sight of the coke and a lot more with the ramen, so I felt a little out of place when I had to pay attention to keep my mouth from watering. Who could blame me? Here we go again, the whole food connected to memory thing. How can I not love ramen, when it is the first warm thing that is introduced to my body after hours of freezing my butt off at the start of a ski race? Anyways, the taste of the coke surprised me, because in drinking it slowly I realized that all I was tasting was corn syrup. Count me out. And the ramen, although liquid based, did make me more thirsty after tasting it than I was before, but I've got a soft spot for the sucker. The Campbell's has the same way of creating a warm oily film over my mouth, keeping the fatty taste lingering and leaving me wanting more.

I'm not usually one to advocate severely processed food, especially after this class, and in most cases I try to stick to the shorter ingredient lists. Alison Leitch talked about the importance in reconstructing the palate to appreciate "slow cooking" in her article Slow Food and the Politics of Pork Fat, because in our society we have become so used to recognizing fatty and salty flavors as tasty. At the same time, because of our fast food nation we have developed a fear of any fat, even good fat, such as lardo, which in Italy is used as "an essential daily source of calorific energy in the quarry worker's diet." The problem in the United States is our fast food is made with fat to taste good and not for nutritional value. It's definitely important for us as a society to attempt to connect what tastes good to what feels good and is good for us. But, remember. Everything in moderation. I can still have my guilty pleasure over the real thing every once in a while.