Marketing

Food shopping is the contemporary equivalent of big game hunting and farming combined. Back in the day, the man of the house might throw a net over something or knock it on the head and drag it home for a meal. At the same time, the lady of the house might gather berries and nuts or cultivate a small plot of dirt; maybe pinch an egg or two from a nest. Over time the ladies prevailed as gardening and animal husbandry replaced hunting husbands and the associated carnage. No surprise here; hunting is a very erratic and tedious occupation, a waste of energy. The caloric return is poor and your family has to move a lot.

Indeed, as soon as primates managed to produce a surplus, we had the ingredients for Gotham, if not Lois Lane. The success of planting and herding begat civilization and modern supermarkets as we know them.

Yet, folks who dwell in cities do not like to be reminded of their primitive origins; they do not like to acknowledge that what we treasure as cookery is in fact dead mammals, birds, bugs (shrimp, crab and lobster), fishes or
plants. Even vegetarians get a little weepy when farmers buzz cut a wheat field. While we savor a juicy burger or a succulent Crème Brule, we don’t really want to know from whence they come.

You could argue that this urban neurosis is father to Archer Daniels Midland
and similar food giants. Not just food production, but more importantly for cliff dwellers, we are talking about processing and packaging. We like our cereal in boxes, our chicken in parts, our fish in filets and our cows in diaphanous plastic. Occasionally, a cute critter slips through the veil of euphemisms; baby lamb comes to mind. Yet for the most part, we don’t want to be reminded that what we eat was once alive. We do not want to see anything looking back at us from the plate – anything that might frown, wink or blink before we swallow it.

How food looks is important. Unfortunately, we tend to worry more about how food looks before it gets to the kitchen rather than after it leaves. Upon this peculiarity, great fortunes have been made. Movement, handling, processing or packaging all add to the cost of food; while not necessarily improving its quality. What follows here is a discussion of food by categories wherein we might learn to save rather than spend a fortune over a lifetime. Not only save, but improve the quality of what we eat; think of it as the new hunting where the trophy is value.

Seafood

Fruits de Mer comes in four varieties; saltwater fish, fresh water fish, crustaceans, and mollusks. Some fish like salmon and ells, spend time in both waters. Swordfish, tuna, halibut, cod and flounder are examples of saltwater fishes. Tilapia, trout, whitefish, walleye, catfish and goldfish are examples of freshwater fish. Crustaceans are seagoing insects; shrimp in the flea family, lobster and crawfish in the scorpion family and crabs in the crab family. Indeed, the blue, stone and Alaskan crab that we eat is cousin to the crab that will eat us – if we sit in the wrong place too long. Mollusks are true shellfish; clams, mussels and oysters and the like.

All of these can further be subdivided into free swimmers, not to be confused with free thinkers, and bottom dwellers. A shark is a free swimmer; an oyster pretty much stays in the same spot most of the time. Free swimmers in both salt and fresh waters are thought to be healthier to eat. Bottom dwellers like crab, catfish and ell are scavengers that will eat anything. These days, the higher and lower species on the waterborne food chain are contaminated with something or other. Swordfish, an apex predator, often contains heavy metals; channel catfish and shellfish are often contaminated by pesticides and PCB’s.

Still have your appetite? Let’s proceed. Finding a good fishmonger is almost as important as knowing a good bartender. If both get to know you, both will know what you like and how you like it. Good bartenders or fishmongers are not to be found at supermarkets. At chain markets you often find fish parts swimming in their own juices, too long after amateur surgery. Fishes are a delicate and fragile food; they require a specialist.

And you want to see the whole fish and look it in the eye. Eye clarity is a clue for freshness. Smell is also a key. Fresh seafood smells like the beach or the ocean not like a litter box. There’s a bonus here also. A whole fish will always be cheaper than the sum of the parts. A fish monger will clean and scale your fish and you can use the spine, skin and head for soup. Fish broth is necessary ingredient for those chowders and stews you are going to learn to make.

Stand alone fish markets usually make two or three trips to the wholesaler in a week or take delivery at the same frequency. While the market may be open on the weekend, Sunday and Monday are not the best days to buy fish.
Yet, if there is no fish retailer near you, find the local wholesaler. These days most wholesale fish markets have a retail section. They welcome walk-ins and going to the source of the source is a close as you can get to fresh - short of buying a rod and reel.

A final word about frozen fish. While fresh is best, frozen wild fish is a good second choice. We do not mean those breaded, stuffed or marinated concoctions. There are some chains that sell flash frozen wild fish in vacuum wrap, Trader Joes is an example. These are actually cheaper than fresh fish and if you thaw them out at room temperature, there isn’t much of a quality loss

Beef and Lamb

They say that knowledge is power; knowing also has a lot to do with what we are willing to eat. As a child, I lived up the street from a Jewish deli. For years I avoided brisket because I thought the adults were saying “bris cut”. As a teenager, I was astonished to learn that the only thing a good roast and a good circumcision had in common was a sharp knife.

Beef and lamb are the bad boys on the carnivorous side of our diets. Red meats are thought to be less salutary than pork or fowl. I’m not so sure. The gastronomic qualities of both seem more than adequate to compensate for any health hazards. There isn’t any protein like a good roast or steak with a side or horse radish, except maybe a rack of lamb spiked with garlic and sauced with mint. Moderation in all things; especially moderation.

Red meats require artful shopping as either can be expensive. Take the prince of steaks, the rib eye; aka Delmonico. This cut is simply a medallion slice of rib roast with the bone removed. Per pound, a roast is half the price of individual steaks. Buy the whole roast, slice your own steaks and use the rib bones and trim to make that home made beef broth, consume or stew. A rack of lamb is the sheep side equivalent of a beef rib roast. Many markets sell packages of lamb “bones” or rib trim for as little a $.99 a pound. These are ideal for kabob, stew, stock or puppy pleasers.

Don’t ignore the cheaper cuts of beef either. Hamburger is always on sale. For kids, cheese burgers, chili or baked chopped “steak”, are sure bets; as are pasta sauce and meat loaf for adults. Chuck steak or roast can be bought whole and cut up for shish kabob or stew – or dog treats. One of the best and most remarkable cuts is the now infamous brisket, which can be slow roasted or marinated and boiled for corned beef. Indeed, all those years ago, when Leon and Jill Uris compared the common experience of Jews and Irishmen; it’s a wonder they never mentioned brisket. Any of the cheaper roast cuts can be used also for a pot roast, a hands down favorite among serious carnivores.

Pork

Pork is the other white meat. The premier pork producers are the great state of Iowa and Washington, DC. Unfortunately, in the past 50 years the larger pig wranglers have created a porcine oxymoron – the low fat hog. About 50% of the fat has been bred out of your average supermarket pork. While at the nation’s capitol, hog lard is off the charts.

With four legged swine, the first casualty was fat and the second was taste. Iowa pork now tastes like chicken breast. If you have a yen to savor an old school porker, find a local farmer and get on his list. Small farmers slaughter on irregular schedules and you might want to buy enough to freeze. Buying pork from a farm is worth the trouble especially if you are serious about bar-b-que.

The best cuts for bar-b-que are ribs and shoulder. The shoulder roast is also one of the cheapest cuts. The best cured ham comes from Spain (Serrano and Iberico) and the best smoked bacon and salt ham comes from Virginia. All three can be mail ordered.

Fowl

A chicken should be called something else; maybe peacock or phoenix or something with a similar mystique. As a dietary staple, we enjoy the chicken twice; before and after it’s born. What a bird! But let’s get ducks out of the way first.

Duck is the favorite fowl that we like to eat but usually will not cook at home. A Chinese restaurant near me sells a whole roasted duck to go for less than $20. At my regular super market, a raw duck costs that much and often more. I don’t cook duck at home. It’s a waste of time and money.
Most home kitchens are not equipped anyway to slow roast and hang dry a Peking style duck. If you like duck, let Andrew Jackson fix it; take him to you local Chinese, take the credit, and then lie to your friends and neighbors.

Back to chicken. A whole bird is always cheaper than a bird in parts. Buy a small rather than a large bird, young is tender; this is true for most kitchen critters. Ignore all that broiler, roaster and fryer crap. The thigh and the pope’s nose are the tastiest parts of the chicken and about a third of the price of breasts. Hard as it is to overcome our fixation with all things mammary, bird boobs are tasteless, a fact which may explain why breast meat is ubiquitous in all junk food restaurants.

If you can’t look a whole chicken in the cavity, under no circumstances should you buy skinless parts. Skinless is not only the most expensive way to buy chicken, but literally and figuratively the most tasteless. Trying to cook a skinless chicken is like shoveling snow in the buff. Tacky, indeed!

Cook with the skin on, and then take it off if you must. Speaking of parts, did you know that, given the same weight, you can usually get three to five times as much meat from thighs as you can get from wings at a half to a third of the price? The tastiest part of the bird is also the best value. The thigh is to chickens what the ham is to hogs.

Big shout out to all the Hasidim who are migrating from Brooklyn to Iowa to build chicken coops. There is something to Kosher that does make for a juicy and tender bird; albeit a more expensive meal. Kosher chicken is usually brined in salt water of some sort. More on brining in our dinner section.

All that has been said about chicken applies to turkey and game hens although there is some difference in scale. Surely we do not find game hens in parts. Not yet at least. Cooking the bird is almost as much fun as getting the bird. Tune in to the dinner chapter when our feathered friends entertain us at the table.




Carbohydrates and Starches

Here we consider things like rice, potatoes, pastas and breads. Rice is probably the most varied and economical of grains. Combined with a rice cooker, it is also the easiest to prepare, especially for a large group. Rice is also the most versatile as a leftover. It has no peer as a bulk money saver. A pound box of flavored rice might go for as much $3; if you buy a 20lb sack of premium medium grain rice the price drops to less than $.50 a pound. If you can live with the long grain average grade usually served in Chinese restaurants, the price in bulk is closer to $.10 a pound. A 20lb sack of premium rice goes for less than $20 and provides nearly 250 servings when cooked; that is less than eight cents a serving!

When you have a yen for wild rice (not really rice), red or premium Arborio, you can treat your gang with all the money you save on everyday white rice.
Arborio is the standard for Italian rice dishes and a rough equivalent of Japanese premium medium grain (Nashiki). French red rice from the Camargue of Provence is unpolished medium grain rice with a wonderful nutty flavor.

Potatoes are probably the most nutritious starch and here again you save when you buy by the sack rather than by the potato. There are lots of choices among potatoes and the smaller varieties tend to be tastier. Potatoes can be steamed, boiled, baked, roasted or fried. Indeed, the potato is one of the few foods that will survive the micro wave oven ordeal.

Even when you have kept them too long and the eyes begin to sprout potatoes are still useful. Plant the sprouting eyes in the garden or in a large flower pot and in less than 90 days you will be harvesting your home grown crop. This is another great project for kids; see if they will care for a plant before you buy them a puppy.

Pasta is probably the most expensive carbohydrate option, but it is also the most amusing. Kids love noodles and the Italian variety comes in dozens of different shapes. Often when kids balk at all other options, they will savor a simple bowl of buttered pasta with grated cheese. The smaller shapes (stellini and orechetti for example) are perfect to put into that homemade chicken and beef broth you will be making. Noodles are now commonly available in a whole grain variety if that’s a concern. Any child that will not eat baked macaroni and cheese should be returned for another model.


Bread is the last but by no means least common category of carbohydrates.
It is also one of the oldest traditional uses for grain. As such, bread comes in stunning variety, most of them awful. Find a good baker, buy the whole multi-grain types and relapse on occasion for a French or Italian baguette which of course is only proper way to make a hoagie, submarine or hero.

Vegetables and Fruit

The fresh produce available to the American consumer is a wonder of modern logistics. At almost any time of the year we can have fruits and vegetables that were seasonal just a few years ago. There’s a literal and figurative price to pay for this abundance; in a word, that price is taste. Until the large producers solve the flavor dilemma, there will always be a market for local and seasonal produce. Either way, it’s a buyers market. Shoppers get to have their produce and eat it too.

Here again, if you have space for a modest garden, fruits and vegetables present another opportunity to bring your kids into the food chain. Poor is the child, indeed, who has never tasted a home grown, vine ripened tomato.
Tell them you’re raising the ingredients for pizza. If that doesn’t work, they are, just as you suspected, hopeless.

Home gardeners often complain about tomato surplus when the crop comes in faster than the household can consume it. All the options are great: gifts to neighbors who are not so blessed; put up or freeze a few jars of sauce; or dry the surplus.

Dried tomatoes have a unique flavor unlike the flavor of fresh. The price for store bought dried tomatoes alone could provide motivation to grow a few plants. Another option might be to buy some Plumb tomatoes on sale and dry them in your oven on the bread proof or low setting. You’ll need to store your dried tomatoes in meal or serving sized portions in double seal baggies. Like a barrel of apples, if there’s a problem with just one, you could lose the whole batch.

If the good news about fruits and vegetables is variety and availability, the bad news is price. There’s a lot of waste with fresh produce. The only solution here is to buy often and only in quantities your family will consume before things go bad. The second best option, albeit more expensive, to fresh fruits and vegetables is frozen. It’s probably not a bad idea to keep some frozen produce on hand for that time when getting to a market is a problem.

Natural and Organic?

There is no industry, except maybe women’s cosmetics, that makes more false or misleading promises than the food industry. The most egregious are the words natural and organic. The first has no useful meaning and the second is has more to do with ideology than nutrition.

The ‘natural’ train left the station when our ancestors turned from hunting and gathering to herding and farming. Since then we have been altering
plants and livestock to give us the most productive food economy in the history of history. The first requirement for any government is to create the conditions for the marketplace to feed the populace. This is the baseline definition of national security.

After Uncle puts a chicken in every pot then things like panty hose, public television, Viagra, U Tube and Sally Quinn are possible. There are many nouns that might be adorned with the adjective ‘natural’; rats, bubonic plague, ticks, lime disease, cockroaches, mosquitoes, yellow fever, poison ivy and snake bite - just to name a few.

‘Organic’ is pretty much an extension of the natural nonsense. The problem with the organic movement is twofold; there’s no way to prove or monitor what they claim; and then there’s the suspicion that ‘organic’ is just another word for higher price. Food chains have already jumped on this gambit. Yet, even with a home chemistry kit, there is no practical way for consumers to distinguish between that which is raised organically and that which is not. This food fad exploits our insecurities about pollution; the real science of organic is “trust me”.

At the moment the organic community is at war with itself; industrial organic (Whole Foods) versus boutique farmers and vendors. This is a classic “holier than thou” food fight.

By comparison, religious dietary law is a testament to experience and common sense – cause and effect, if you will. In the not too dismal past, pork and shellfish that fed and bred in an unsanitary environment were dangerous to eat. Long before modern science, pesticides, and sanitary hygiene; observant (pardon the pun) leaders recognized the threat. Rabbis and priests couldn’t alter the behavior of pigs or lobsters, but they could alter the law. The purpose of all law, after all, is to protect the flock.

Surely no sensible person who eats or drinks favors pollution. Yet, the idea that the world will be fed without genetic engineering, chemicals or pesticides is just as threatening if not nihilistic. A country with a free market and a free press tends to correct any excess; moderation in all things, including moderation.

The inference of the natural and organic movements is that somehow traditional food producers and processors have failed us. There is some truth to this; but their sins have more to do with taste than toxins. Indeed, food has been engineered to improve appearance and shelf life at the expense of flavor. Taste and nutrition are the only reasons to patronize local seasonal markets. All this blather about natural and organic is not helpful.

Food quality fights are just an extension of the quality of life debate. For most of us, this ship has sailed. Ignorance and indifference are soul mates; we don’t know much about food or how it’s produced and as long as enough is available; and we don’t care. Over time, this apathy became the divide between urban and country life styles.

Farmers don’t like arrogant urban yuppies; and city dwellers sneer at denim clad bumpkins. Urbanites who presume to lecture farmers about toxins and pollution are often the same folks who allow their children to graze at McDonald’s twice a week; all the while thinking that the odd foray to the farmer’s market or Whole Foods balances the scale.

Ironically, it was farmers who made cities possible. Agriculture was the death knell for hunters and gatherers. Some anthropologists also argue that when primates started eating meat and vegetables the die was cast. Omnivores don’t need as big a stomach as vegetarians, thereby clearing to way to a larger brain. Indeed, we might change the Cartesian adage “I think therefore I am” to “I eat therefore I think”. Unfortunately, over thinking is a bigger problem than over eating.



Strategy and Tactics

All shoppers should have a plan; that would be your list. There should a specific purpose for every shopping foray. If you are an impulse buyer, you might just as well give your wallet to a purse snatcher. Impulse shoppers rarely get rich but they make many others wealthy.

All customers should have an entrance and exit strategy. Always cruise in a counter clockwise direction, the periphery of a supermarket. The margins are where they keep all the fresh stuff; flowers, fruits, vegetables, dairy, eggs, baked goods, meat and fish. Do not drive your cart randomly in those middle aisles. That’s where they keep the junk food quicksand. Only traverse the middle of the store for emergencies, like when you’re low on lipstick, bug spray or diapers.

Random Thoughts

There are many other things to be said about shopping but this chapter has to end somewhere. So let’s close this discussion with a few random thoughts about the modern supermarket:

Iceberg lettuce is a product of the devil’s workshop. It has no nutritional value except shabby roughage – and it tastes like wet Styrofoam. The one virtue of iceberg is bulk; you could feed a platoon with one head. Buy any lettuce but iceberg.

Dried mushrooms are overpriced at most markets. If you fancy these gourmet delicacies, like loose tea, buy them at oriental markets. Korean supermarkets are popping up like crocus because their prices are better than competitive. This is also the place to buy peeled garlic and mackerel.

The king of lemons is the Meyer; thin shinned, juicy and snappy. This citrus is a little more expensive than run of the mill lemons but they more than compensate with volume of juice and flavor.

Those packages of “baby” carrots are a scam. These are merely ordinary adult carrots skinned and shaped to look like something they are not. Here again you pay a premium for unnecessary handling and packaging. Buy adult carrots, use a peeler and a knife and make your own babies – or any number of other things if you’re creative.