But “pho” is such a fun word to say!
I think the issue wasn’t that they didn’t have the necessary nutrients back then, but rather, large sections of the country didn’t eat those things.
Unless you lived on the coast, seafood was a real rare treat, and unless you were from an ethnic group who ate pasta regularly, you probably hadn’t even heard of “pasta” and might know about macaroni or noodles, but they probably weren’t a staple of your diet.
Milk was common, I’m sure, but how many adults actually drank milk back then?
People really did eat meat & potatoes in large part; chicken wasn’t as common, and neither were many vegetables that we take for granted year-round, unless they were in season.
At that time in the US, wouldn’t pasta have been made from the same wheat as everyday bread, which was commonly consumed? If so, shouldn’t they both have had the same iodine content, or lack thereof?
Does pasta have iodine because it is made with enriched flour, or is iodine a natural component of wheat flour? When did they start enriching flour?
The 40s, but I don’t think iodine is one of the things they add to flour to make it enriched.
I was about to say the same thing, but you beat me to it. Not all bartenders are created equal, and though I’m not wild about the term “mixologist”, it would be nice to have a way to differentiate between the college student who knows how to open a bottle of generic Margarita mix and slop it into a glass with some tequila and the guy who meticulously juices the limes, can speak to the differences in the various tequilas, and who gives a damn about what he’s doing beyond his paycheck/tip.
Had some last night. Like the old Vietnamese folk saying goes: “phở today, diarrhea tomorrow.”
Actually, the problem was that in large sections of the country there was little iodine in the soil. From the Great Lakes region out to Washington and Oregon was an area particularly lacking. And now, with the farm-to-table movement (meaning more people are eating locally-grown produce), and the switch from iodized salt to various sea salts, dedicated foodies in that section of the country particularly are returning to conditions that led to goiter epidemics in decades past.
Oh, and as to enriched flour, from wiki:
Iodine is not on the list.
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I’m not convinced that a large number of people are successfully avoiding commercially produced flour.
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As you noted, the iodine content in wheat flour doesn’t come from enrichment.
Perhaps I’m weird but I eat muffins and cupcakes the same way: remove the wrapper and flatten it. Pry the top of the cake off and lay it on the wrapper. Eat the gross bottom half. Savor the delicious caramelized and crusty top half. When I make cupcakes, obviously I don’t overfrost them. Whatever amount I use is necessarily how much frosting I think is appropriate. As for storebought, well, I’m not in the habit of buying food that doesn’t appeal to me.
Beats me. I was never educated by Benedictines.
Here’s another column on the iodine issue:
To bring it back around to the OP, this is why the gourmet salts fad is silly (and beyond silly, dangerous). It ignores the need for iodine in the diet, and the fact that iodized salt is the single most reliable source.
No, it doesn’t.
I think of “foodie” as a pejorative term for food snobs; a stupid fucking word to describe stupid fucking people. Bear in mind that I wouldn’t call bump or someone like him a foodie; I would call him a gourmand. In my lexicon, a gourmand often enjoys fine food, but is fully capable of appreciating lowbrow fare; a glutton or trencherman enjoys large quantities of (not necessarily fancy) food; a foodie chases trends and defines his palate largely by what he refuses to eat.
In my world, foodies are the people who are always into trying new dishes and foodsters are the ones who get into slapfights about whether chili has beans in it or not.
For me it’s the obsession with locally produced foods. While I have no problems with supporting local farmers and growers, I live in a largely rural food production area with a fairly wide variety of crops grown. It’s entirely unrealistic for anyone in a major urban area to expect that more than a tiny minority of their foodstuffs can be sourced from within an arbitrary mile limit. Quite apart from foods that just can’t be grown in your local area - eg, good luck finding locally grown chocolate, bananas or sugar cane outside of the sub tropics.
Moreover the obsession with ‘foodmiles’ as a way of reducing ones environmental impact completely ignores all the other inputs into food production. In many cases the food sourced from the highly efficient production area takes less energy to produce than the locally grown variety that needs to be grown indoors. So while it might seem counter-intuitive, often the product shipped from thousands of miles away is actually a better choice conservation wise than the locally produced but inefficient alternative.
I know…I was kidding around. I’ve made and created some pretty frau frau drinks myself in some high end places I worked in the past.
No, they don’t. But most people aren’t eating just stuff they made at home or fast/processed foods. They’re going to restaurants that use regular table salt, or eating at the homes of friends or family who use it, or chucking some extra salt on something from the shaker in the break room. Combined with a reasonable wide-ranging diet, that’s generally plenty of iodine to avoid goiter.
And I threw it up there because it’s just such a softball on a message board like this one. I’m not much of a cocktail guy (I like my liquors straight), but the few places I’ve been to where “mixology” was taken quite seriously have been incredible.
Before a good highway system, refrigerated trucks, and reasonably-priced shipping by air, seafood was a very rare treat for most people. Ocean fish also has much higher iodine content than freshwater fish cites, so people not living near a coastline had fewer opportunities to get fish. The great abundance of cheap fresh or fresh frozen seafood we have now was uninmaginable even a few decades ago.
I rip the top off, eat the bottom then eat the tops on the rare occasion I do a dessert.
Well, I do know a guy who works in a bar in Key West that specializes in 150ish different rums ranging from the bottom of the list rums all the way to some specialty ones that run around $300 a bottle. he doesn’t make a mojito using a premix 