Culinary revelation

I recently read Michael Pollan's new book, In Defense of Food, and have since been hyper-aware of how much of our diets consist of "edible food-like substances" as opposed to real food. I've tried to be more conscious about eating processed, fortified, manufactured items, and this led to a revelation for me this weekend.

The entire time I was growing up, we used Country Crock margarine. It is just something that is a standard part of every refrigerator, when I moved out on my own it never crossed my mind to purchase any alternative. Margarine is just what you use, end of story, never really gave it much thought.

Well, like all good books, In Defense of Food made me give more thought to things I usually take for granted, and so when I went on my weekly grocery run this Saturday I decided to be adventurous and buy real butter! What a concept! I bought the whipped version because it was the one with equivalent calories per serving size (yes, I know it's just fluffed up!) to margarine, without those sinister trans fats.

So I tried to make toast this morning: got my bread ready, pulled the butter out of the fridge, eager to experiment with my new savvy fat source...and it was rock hard. The stuff in the tub was SOLID. I was completely taken aback. I double checked the expiration date, and confirmed that the package did say to "keep refrigerated", and the stuff didn't smell bad or curdled...

Then I had my light-bulb moment of the week: ah ha, THAT'S what the point of margarine is in the first place, real butter isn't spreadable when cold. Somewhere in my brain I remembered my grandmother keeping butter on the table for a couple of hours before holiday dinners to soften, but I had just never processed the fact as a requirement before, it was just something Nana did, it seemed to make as much sense as other traditions such as putting stuffing into the turkey's nether regions only to take it back out afterwards.

So, much to my chagrin, I had to resort to chiseling out some butter with a knife, kind of packing it into a tablespoon, and zapping it in the microwave so I could use it right away. This hasn't turned me off of using real butter, it really does taste better, as long as I don't find out that microwaving it creates some new health problem even worse than trans fats I should be fine...;)

Anyway, that was my revelation of the week, I'm slightly embarrassed that, despite countless biology and chemistry classes that have covered the difference between saturated and unsaturated fats, it took me until the ripe old age of 21 to apply that knowledge to recognize and understand how to use the contents of my own refrigerator.

My main point in posting this is that it made me realize that I appear to be a case study for Pollan's message: our culture is so removed from "real foods" that we don't always even recognize what is and is not normal for things that we put into our bodies. My entire life, "butter product" was yellow and spread smoothly out of its refrigerated tub. Paradigms are overturned every day, my friends, never underestimate what you can learn preparing toast.