I took a tomato salad to one of them with tomatoes from my own garden, and a Safeway pie to another. I enjoyed a lot of the food, but turned up my nose at a supermarket bakery chocolate chip cookie. I was already full of good food, including several desserts, and it looked really unappetizing. I knew how it would taste. Flat, chewy, sweet, and slightly stale. I think the slightly stale flavor must come from all the preservatives they add! (If you are reading this and you brought those cookies, I'm sorry! I would scarf them down if I were hungry....but they don't stand up well next to home-made cake...I brought a store pie myself.)
I used one of the worst insults in my food vocabulary when turning it down. I called it an edible food-like substance. My son tried to force it on me because he had picked it up and decided he didn't really want it. He pointed out that I had already eaten several other edibile food-like substances at the dinner, including Cheetos, which I use to as a classic example.
This is a phrase I like to throw around the house when I'm talking about food, or when I'm shopping. What's real food, and what isn't?
"Edible food-like substance."
In my own food world, I understand this to mean:
Cheddar cheese on wheat bread: real food.
Cheetos: edible food-like substance.
The author of this little gem is Michael Pollan, who wrote "In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto" and "The Omnivore's Dilemma."
He also said:
"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."Nice and simple. I've got the first part down. Need to work on the second two.
You can hear a great interview with him at Cooking up a Story. It's broken into four parts (each section fits YouTube's length limits). I'm a cheapskate, so I watched this video and never bought the book.
The first part is here, and the next three sections can be found in links at the bottom of the page.
http://cookingupastory.com/michael-pollan-in-defense-of-food/
