How Crisco Made Americans Believers in Industrial Food

Salt is one of those weird things. The salt studies were years ago, mostly, and haven't fully been redone with modern standards.

It isn't that they were fully wrong, but it doesn't always have the ills one is warned about and the amounts of "healthy" salt might vary. Some of those folks with high blood pressure will be helped by a lower salt diet: Some will not and I'm not sure if there are consistent links saying it causes high blood pressure in healthy folks with normal blood pressure. The rest of the folks with high blood pressure aren't always helped - probably because there is more than one path to high blood pressure. Genetics, medicines, smoking, diet, lack of exercise, weight, and so on.

Even in this subset, these meats aren't universally bad. If your salted meat is a smallish portion of your diet and you use comparatively little salt in the rest of your food, you might be just fine. It isn't that one thing is salty, but that the overall diet isn't too high in salt.

>> You'll learn pretty quick when a fat burns quickly. Olive oil and bacon grease burn at really low temperatures and will create a thick cloud of smoke as it burns.

I was wondering about that because it's mentioned in the article also: I don't understand why people say that olive oil burns easily.

Look at the table you posted: the smoking point of two qualities of olive oil ("virgin" and "extra virgin, low acidity, high quality") is above 400°F (204°C) at 410°F and 405°F respectively. This is close to the 400°F you cite as the temperature necessary for the Maillard reaction, but the wikipedia article on the Maillard reaction states that: "The reaction is a form of non-enzymatic browning which typically proceeds rapidly from around 140 to 165 °C (280 to 330 °F)." In which case, even "extra virgin" olive oil, the olive oil quality listed as having the lowest smoking point of 160°C, can withstand the heat necessary for food to undergo the Maillard reaction.

It makes even less sense that the Maillard reaction needs 400°F to get going. If you look at the wikipedia article for "Smoking point", where the table you link to comes from, it lists the average temperatures of frying and baking:

   Pan frying (sauté) on stove top heat: 120 °C (248 °F)
   Deep frying: 160 - 180 °C (320 °F - 356 °F)
   Oven baking: Average of 180 °C (356 °F)

It wouldn't make sense for the Maillard reaction to need more than the average _baking_ temperature to occur!

Finally, I'm the third generation of women in my family to cook with olive oil, to always cook with olive oil and to cook everything with olive oil. I fry, deep fry, boil, stir-fry, bake, sear, and so on everything with olive oil. I have never seen olive oil burning (emitting a blue flame and smoke) and I've never heard of anyone in my family, or in my broad circle of friends and acquaintances who has seen that. I have never heard it in the news either and if it was something that happens to olive oil when the food you're cooking with it is about to get tasty- it should be happening all the time [Edit: note that I've burned plenty of food in olive oil- but still not the olive oil].

Small point to note: I'm Greek and we do have good quality olive oil (and wine; and feta; and yoghurt; and nothing else).

So my conclusion is: it's only cheap, low quality and most likely adulterated olive oil that catches fire in low temperatures.

(See the wikipedia article on olive oil about adulteration. It's a big thing in some other oil-producing countries, and I don't mean Saudi Arabia).

Close- wikipedia says 280°F to 330°F - see my comment above.

But in that case, like I say in my longer comment, it doesn't make sense for olive oil to catch fire "easily", like you say in your previous comment.

What olive oil are you using, if I'm not being too nosey?

Sorry if I sound defensive- I'm just really surprised. olive oil is very common where I come from :)

>> Curd Process - Boil whole milk, let it cool down a bit, and add some older curd, let it sit overnight in your oven with the light on.

I learned recently that curdling milk can be achieved in many different ways: the easiest way is to leave it out of the fridge overnight (unless it's long-life). Especially in a warm environment the lactobacili in the milk itself and in the air will do their job and you'll have curdled milk in the morning. I'm guessing that's probably how the first dairy products were made, though I wouldn't want to speculate about the tastes of the first person to try curdled milk.

Another way is to add some acid like vinegar or lemon. Lactobacili that curdle the milk naturally actually release lactic acid: fermentation is the same kind of anaerobic respiration that happens in our muscles when they're not getting enough energy from oxygen alone. In our case, it's our body burning the sugars in our fat to create lactic acid. The lactobacili in the milk eat lactose and turn it into lactic acid. It seems that this acid production is at least partly responsible for the curdling of milk.

Another common way is to use, er, whey- the byproduct of milk fermentation. Some traditional cheeses (e.g. Greek mizithra and anthotyros) are made by keeping some of the whey in previous batches to ferment new batches.

Yet another way is to use a bacterial culture especially meant to ferment milk, like kefir (please: it's pronounced keh-FEER; not like Donald Sutherland's son). In fact, I learned all this because I started making kefir at home and I got to the point I'm making cheese. It turns out- you can use kefir to make butter also, although I haen't tried it and I don't know the process well enough to describe it.

Finally, there is of course the use of rennet, which is an enzyme found in the er, I think fourth stomach of ruminants, and that's used mainly in cheese making (especially for hard cheeses, it's the stuff that gives yellow cheese curds their texture).

Anyway, fermentation -as in milk curdling, wine brewing, sourdough making etc- is cool.

Wouldn't that sort of counter your argument that traditional foods would have discovered the dangers over the ages? Traditional foods could have caused cancer and not been detected, according to your own argument.