Kruse Company president Nancy Kruse says we may be creating a culture of culinary haves and have-nots.
I’ve been thinking about José Andrés a lot lately.
The Spanish chef is successful and influential, and his many restaurants in this country do turn-away business. A few years back I saw him on the program at the CIA’s annual Worlds of Flavor conference. I recall that his demo was engaging and his food was delicious, but the thing I remember most was his straightforward espousal of the use of canned goods in the kitchen. He asserted that high-quality food in cans is routinely used in Spanish restaurants, and his matter-of-factness evoked no arguments from the audience, though I think many were a bit surprised.
He’s been top of mind with me because of the recent release of a major study conducted by Michigan State University that found that canned goods remain a highly nutritious option for consumers looking to increase their consumption of fruits and vegetables. Besides posting similar nutrition scores to fresh produce, they are considerably lower in cost and accessible to those who may not reside in neighborhoods serviced by farmers markets or even by decent supermarkets.
This research happened to coincide with an announcement by the American Frozen Food Institute of its major initiative in support of frozen foods, whose place in our hearts and stomachs has also been largely co-opted by trendier fresh foods. The association is looking to pull off a major makeover of its category, and its multi-year campaign is meant to inform consumers that freezing essentially locks in the nutrients of fresh foods, making them a convenient, readily available equivalent all year round.
You and I have already debated the impact of the burgeoning farm-to-fork movement at restaurants, and there’s no need to reopen that discussion. But I wonder if there may be a bigger issue on the table and if it’s time to hit the reset button on this whole conversation.
When I read about the waning fortunes of the frozen and canned foods industries, it concerns me that we may be creating a culture of culinary haves and have-nots, where the elite reap the bounty of fresh, local, organic, sustainable and artisanal foods, and the rest suffer with the stuff found in cartons and cans, the inferiority of which we suddenly and erroneously take for granted. It’s a let-them-eat-cake attitude that is really disturbing.
How did we get to this point? Cooking in season makes sense, of course, but whether the artichoke was plucked from the back garden or extracted from a can is not the essential indicator of the quality of the finished dish. How the chef or at-home cook treats whatever ingredients are at hand and the creativity that he or she applies are the keys to a memorable meal. But the steadily rising chorus of support for fresh, local products threatens to obscure the advantages to both consumers and operators of foods that are high quality, readily available, cost effective and that also happen to be canned or frozen.
How do you view this issue, Bret? Should we concede that frozen and canned foods are becoming relics of the past, to be consumed only by those too poor or unenlightened to eat fresh? And in our celebration of fresh and seasonal foods, have we inadvertently laid the groundwork for a culinary caste system?
Revamping the image of preserved foods
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The following is NRN senior food editor Bret Thorn’s response to Kruse Company president Nancy Kruse’s take on canned food.
Nancy, canned, frozen and other foods not considered fresh have definitely taken hits to their reputations over the past couple of decades, but most reasonable people with knowledge about where our food really comes from will concede that preserved and — dare I say it? — processed foods have a place in our bellies.
They, too, have seen the evidence showing that frozen and canned foods are actually good for you, provided the sodium levels in the canned goods aren’t too high. Indeed, frozen food scored a victory in the trendy New York City food scene when management at Danny Meyer’s burger chain Shake Shack admitted defeat in their attempt to make hand-cut, never-frozen French fries and returned to the frozen crinkle-cut variety that had so many fans.
As the chain’s chief executive Randy Garutti explained in an open letter on Shake Shack’s website, “No matter how hard we tried, inconsistency remained and we found ourselves unable, 100% of the time, to deliver what our guests loved most about our crinkle cuts.”
The news was greeted with enthusiasm by much of local media, including social media, although New York Times food writer Julia Moskin sniffed in a tweet: “Crinkle schminkle: they’re FROZEN.”
Well, you can’t please everybody.
Canned food, too, as you point out, has its fans. Beside José Andrés, Associazione Vera Pizza Napoletana, the arbiters of what makes Neapolitan pizza authentic, allows the use of a variety of canned tomatoes in the pizza-making process.
Then there are restaurants like Maiden Lane, a charming spot in New York’s East Village that opened last year with a menu inspired by, and comprised mostly of, canned seafood, including 11 different varieties of sardines packed in oil from France, Spain and Portugal ranging in price from $9 to $20.
A tin of Spanish cockles preserved in brine goes for $39 — an indication that canned food can appeal to high-caste people as well.
Maiden Lane serves those items as is, in the can, and their staff also make salads and spreads out of them, often accompanied by vegetables from the farmers market.
Fish for sushi is pretty much always frozen. In fact at the famous Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo, where pre-dawn bluefin tuna auctions are held — I witnessed one once a few years ago — the tuna carcasses are frozen solid and would-be buyers poke at them and extract core samples to examine their quality.
And preservation is all the rage at independent restaurants, where chefs have learned to pickle, ferment and, yes, even can the local bounty at harvest time so they can use it throughout the year.
Still, although the food cognoscenti are coming around to understand the place for preserved foods, to educate the public at large, I think the American Frozen Food Institute is on the right track: they need to change the conversation and explain that their food is wholesome, nutritious and delicious.
They might take a look at a recent Domino’s Pizza ad about its cheese, which isn’t frozen or canned, but arrives at its restaurants shredded in a plastic bag, something Domino’s readily admits.
“You probably think Domino’s pizza cheese comes out of a big plastic bag, and it does,” the commercial starts. But then it traces it back to where it comes from: “crafted to perfection by an award-winning mozzarella maker, using milk from family-owned dairy farms, and we got help from a cheese technologist and a National Cheese Institute laureate award winner, which is really a thing.”
American consumers love knowing where their food comes from, and if those producers simply explain that their individual quick-frozen produce comes from farms (of course they do, where else would they come from?) and then all the flavor and nutrients are instantly locked in using the latest technology, I think consumers would accept that.
Nancy Kruse, president of the Kruse Company, is a menu trends analyst based in Atlanta and a regular contributor to Nation’s Restaurant News. E-mail her at [email protected].
Contact Bret Thorn at [email protected].
Follow him on Twitter: @foodwriterdiary