Health Watch: The menace of toast -- and of French fries fried darker than "golden"

So you love toast, do you? But does toast love you? This toast is not only not golden, it is surely by any standard dark brown. Why not just swallow poison?

"Acrylamide [is] a chemical that causes cancer in animals. . . . The FDA suggests these steps to decrease your intake of acrylamide: . . .

"* Lightly toast your bread until it's a golden -- not dark -- brown."

-- from a "Johns Hopkins Health Alert,"
"The Risks of High-Temperature Cooking"

by Ken

What? You mean you're toasting your toast dark brown? I'll bet you're also the kind of person who fries your French fries darker than "a golden yellow color." Good grief, Sir or Madam, why don't you just swallow a healthy, or rather terminally unhealthy, dose of cyanide? Robert Benchley once wrote a piece called "The Menace of Buttered Toast"; now it turns out that the menace may be the toast itself!

So naturally I think of shmura matzo.

I've mentioned a couple of times the fascinating pre-Passover tour I took with the Wolfe Walkers in which Justin Ferate led us into the heart of Chassidic Brooklyn. From Justin's tour description it was clear that in negotiating our tour with our Lubavitcher hosts he had been trying urgently to secure a promise of one of the possible tour features: a visit to the Lubavitchers' shmura matzo factory.

You don't see Justin getting much bubblier -- and Justin is someone whose many great enthusiasms render him more than usually prone to bubbling -- than when he was able to inform us that the matzo-factory visit was confirmed.

Some other time we might wish to talk about matzo manufacture among avowedly observant Jews, in fulfillment of the requirement that, to qualify as unleavened bread as required for Passover consumption (in commemoration of the Exodus from Egypt, when the fleeing Jews were instructed, in the interest of all possible haste, to prepare bread without allowing the dough time to rise), the product has to be made completely, beginning at the moment the water hits the flour, in 18 minutes.

For now, though, let's just say that shmura matzo is made the old-fashioned way: entirely by hand, with lots of preparers on hand in the cramped space to roll out just-produced little chunks of dough into flat discs for immediate transfer to an excruciatingly hot oven. (I'm recalling something like 15 seconds at 1200 degrees. Rabbi Beryl Epstein, our tour guide from the Chassidic Discovery Center, explained that if the dough is left in the oven even a second too long, it will burst into flame. This must simply the quality-control operation.) When the person manning the oven paddle pulls a batch of completed matzos out and dumps them aside, they don't look exactly yummy.

And it's not cheap. We had the opportunity to buy the shmura product at the source, and considering that I had lived my life as long as I had without ever consuming this truly authentic product, and didn't expect to have a comparable opportunity to do so anytime soon, I fought back my native cheapness and paid the freight: $21.75 for a pound box.

Justin explained to us that basically the stuff tastes burnt, and that consequently his partner loves it because he loves foods with a charred flavor. I discovered with my first bite that Justin's description, as usual, was on the money. The stuff tastes burnt. Nevertheless, it didn't take me all that long to consume my pound's worth.

Now, however, I have to rethink the whole shmura-matzo issue, If this "Johns Hopkins Health Alert" is to be trusted -- and are we going to start mistrusting one of our leading medical centers, or anyway the commercial partner to which it lends its name? It looks like God is butting heads with the FDA.

Johns Hopkins Health Alert

The Risks of High-Temperature Cooking

You know that many fried foods pose a health risk because of their saturated fat content. Now the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) says that food fried -- and baked -- at high temperatures is cause for concern.

High-temperature frying, baking and toasting causes certain sugars and an amino acid in mainly plant-based foods like bread, potatoes, cereal, crackers, coffee and dried fruit to form acrylamide, a chemical that causes cancer in animals. Scientists suspect that acrylamide causes cancer in humans, too.

Although you can't eliminate acrylamide from your diet -- it's estimated to be in up to 40 percent of the calories Americans consume -- the FDA suggests taking these steps to decrease your intake of acrylamide:

* Lightly toast your bread until it's a golden -- not dark -- brown.

* Don't eat areas of food that are burned or dark from cooking.

* Don't overcook food like frozen French fries -- they should be a golden yellow color.

* Store potatoes in a dark, cool place, never in the refrigerator, which increases acrylamide during cooking.

The FDA has also issued a draft document advising food service operators, manufacturers and growers of strategies to reduce acrylamide amounts in foods.

Published in FDA Consumer Health Information.

Posted in Nutrition and Weight Control on April 30, 2014

Medical Disclaimer: This information is not intended to substitute for the advice of a physician. Click here for additional information: Johns Hopkins Health Alerts Disclaimer

What can I tell you? I am a person who has frequently been known to toast my toast to full brownness -- maybe not "dark brown," but incontestably darker than "golden." I have close friends who routinely specify that theiir French fries be fully cooked, by which they don't mean "golden."

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About the gefilte fish crisis: Doesn't somebody have to answer for the Passover whitefish shortage? (Maybe cast a glance upward?)

by Ken

You can read the shocking headline for yourself below: "Gefilte Fish Supply is Scarce This Passover Due to Bad Winter, Shops Say."

Now my mother took religion very seriously, though perhaps a tad idiosyncratically. For her it entailed, in roughly ascending order of importance:

(1) Lighting of Shabas candles

(2) Preparation of the designated foods for the appropriate holidays

(3) Hadassah, and all things relating to it

As regards (2), the rite of worship most relevant to today's story, my mother regarded those holiday food preparations with only slightly more worshipful seriousness than, say, that of Abraham preparing to sacrifice Isaac. And before Passover that included -- especially once my grandmother was involved in the operation -- the annual moaning about the price of fish this year. But, that it should have come to, well . . . this?

Gefilte Fish Supply is Scarce This Passover Due to Bad Winter, Shops Say

By Rachel Holliday Smith on April 15, 2014 9:03am

CROWN HEIGHTS — Why is this night different from all other nights? Because there's a shortage of gefilte fish!

A harsh winter in the Great Lakes region has sparked a shortage of fresh whitefish, the main ingredient for the Passover dish gefilte fish — in a development that could put a damper on this year's Jewish holiday, according to suppliers of a local Kosher fish market.

Raskin’s Fish Market in Crown Heights has been scrambling to come up with enough whitefish to keep up with demand for Passover, after frozen conditions in the lakes that produce much of the whitefish supply sent fish populations dwindling.

“It’s very bad,” said Schlomo Raskin, who opened the market in 1961 and said he can’t remember a shortage like this in the past 30 years. “You feel very badly when a customer comes in and she wants to buy 30 pounds and you only have five.”

Workers at Raskin’s said they usually get dozens of pounds of whitefish a day during the busy season, but now they’re lucky to get a few. While the problem has lingered for months, they said, it's most extreme this holiday week. The whitefish is ground and made into patties often served in two meals a day during the Passover holidays.

Customers filed in and out of the shop on Kingston Avenue near Union Street to prepare for the holiday, in search of a portion of the remaining fish.

“It’s gold,” said manager Yossi Hayward, 28, “It’s first come, first serve.”

While the whitefish remains scarce, Raskin’s said they’ll make their gefilte with a different mixture of ground fish, including halibut and carp. And for those doing last minute Passover shopping, the shop has pre-packaged gefilte fish for sale, which is made at a kitchen they run in Brownsville.

Speaking with the theological authority of someone who watched my mother make gefilte fish many a year (including several years with my grandmother, after we moved to NYC); who has eaten a fair pile of the stuff over the years; who saw a free-to-members preview screening of Darren Aronofsky's Noah at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria; and, as I mentioned yesterday, only a week and a half ago actually visited Brooklyn's Crown Heights -- and, yes, Kingston Avenue -- I can say that this is an outrage, and that fingers should be pointing.

And it seems clear that the direction in which those fingers should be pointing is upwards, since as I understand God's famous covenant, He is covenantially obligated to maintain a proper supply of whitefish for Passover. I shudder to think what my mother would have said. And my grandmother? Forget about it!

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At last, NYC has drug dealers God doesn't have to be ashamed of

Not so fast, gents. You aren't by chance transacting this transaction on the Sabbath, are you? For shame!

by Ken

You've probably heard this story, but I wanted to make sure. It's about the observant Jewish drug dealers in Brighton Beach who warned their customers via text that their business shut down every Friday evening and daytime Saturday.

I pointed out to the friend who passed along another version of this story (before I saw Al Kamen's washingtonpost.com "In the Loop" version, below): "You have to feel for drug consumers in Sheepshead Bay, being forced to rely on either less-observant-Jewish or goyish dealers for that entire day." He countered that "those drug dealers willing to sacrifice the Shabbat business deserve our respect!" And I don't see how you can quarrel with that. I trust that God noticed too, and has made a notation on these guys' permanent record.

Even drug dealers observe the Sabbath

The New York City cops must have suspected something wasn't quite kosher with the text messages being sent by some apparently observant Jews in Brooklyn.

During their five-month investigation, the police kept seeing mass text messages from the five men urging customers to get their orders in before sundown Friday or else wait until after sundown Saturday.

The men obviously couldn't do business during the Sabbath. Well, that's certainly laudable.
And what were they selling? Well, allegedly prescription painkillers, heroin, cocaine and the like, the city's Special Narcotics Prosecutor's Office said Tuesday, according a report by the Associated Press.

"We are closing at 7:30 on the dot and will reopen on Saturday at 8:15 so if u need anything you have 45 mins. to get what you want," one text said. An indictment charged them with using stolen prescription sheets and other methods to obtain 23,000 oxycodone pills with a street value of $460,000.

And they were allegedly using code names like DOB for heroin and "white girl" for cocaine. A text in April to 50 people allegedly said: "Awesome batch of D.O.B. just came in!!! Open now till 7:30."

Sounds like someone's go to do some serious atoning this weekend on Yom Kippur.

In their New York Daily News account, Erik Badia and Tina Moore add some pertinent detail:

The indictment names David Gerowitz, 38, Philip Mandel, 26, Eduard Sorin, 38, Jack Zaibak, 25, and Jack Zibak, 28.

A previous indictment charged them and Aaron Dombroff, 30, with criminal sale of a controlled substance. Sorin, Zaibak and Gerowitz, live at the Bedford Ave. apartment.

Texts also included specific windows of time during which sales would take place on a specific day, such as the first 15 minutes of the hour, as well as rules on where customers should wait if there was a bottleneck at the apartment.

Sorin was arraigned Tuesday and entered a not guilty plea, prosecutors said. Mandell has not posted bail and is in jail, officials said. The others are out on bail and will be arraigned over the next several weeks.

They could not be reached for contact.

Andrew Katz, 29 who lives a couple of doors down from the alleged dealers said he wasn’t surprised.

"I kind of figured that was going on with the all people in and out of the apartment,” he said. “What else could they be doing in there?”

He was surprised to hear about their no-sabbath dealing policy.

"Wow, how nice of them to observe," Katz said.

You said it, Katz.

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For a "Sunday Classics" fix anytime, visit the stand-alone "Sunday Classics with Ken."

For Erev Rosh Hashanah, in case you missed out on those $1.8M front-row Miami synagogue seats, here's a rap video to get you in the holiday spirit!

The season creeps up on a person. Or at least this season has crept up on this person. A couple of weeks ago I was speaking to one of my mother's doctors in Florida--a fancy specialist who has taken a touching personal interest in her--and at the end of the conversation he wished me a happy new year. I honestly don't remember what I said; I just hope I didn't communicate my gut feeling that he'd been in surgery too long and lost his grip a bit. It wasn't till we hung up that I realized what he meant. Oh, that new year.

Somehow, the way Labor Day fell has left me playing catchup all month. Everything is happening anywhere from a couple of days to a week sooner than I expected.

In the elevators in my office building we have little TV screens that bring us exciting news and feature bulletins--along with exciting commercials, of course. Last week there was an AP report about somebody selling (or trying to sell?), on eBay, a pair of lifetime front-row seats for the High Holy Days at some synagogue in Miami--for $1.8 million!

So here it is, already coming up on Erev Rosh Hashanah, and as of this morning I hadn't even let "my people" at work know that I won't be in tomorrow. When I started working, I didn't in fact take the Jewish High Holy Days off, since Jews don't hardly come less observant than me. It was my mother who eventually persuaded me that it's important for us to take those days off--"so they respect us."

That's one possibility. Another is the response a friend of mine got when he informed the viscerally anti-Semitic boss who'd only recently hired him that he was taking the Jewish holidays off: "You're Jewish?! I thought you were Polish!" That too, my friend explained. In an instant he went from being his new boss's best friend to being . . . well, you know what.

Now, I'm mostly grateful for the excuse to take the days off, even though they come out of my PTO allotment.

I thought I could score a double here: circulating one memo and getting one PTO form signed for both Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. (Getting the PTO form signed is a tad tricky, you see. The closest I've ever come to having a conversation with my department head is the time I went in his office and introduced myself--by way of having him sign my last PTO form, which I see was on March 1.) Then I noticed that Yom Kippur falls on a Saturday. So no "holiday double."

Actually, this is pretty exciting in some ways. As everyone knows, when Yom Kippur--the Day of Atonement, also known to friends as "The Sabbath of Sabbaths"--falls on the actual Sabbath, the holiness quotient goes, like, through the roof. It lends a special tone to your traditional Yom Kippur apple bob and suckling-pig roast. Surf 'n' turf is good for the holiday too. Or if you've got a really, really giant pot, you could try one of those indoor clambakes with lots of shellfish. (On the atoning business, I've offered God a special arrangement. I try to do mine in real time, and He's free to start anytime He's ready.)

Meanwhile, if you're still trying to get yourself in the holiday spirit, my friend Mike passes on this note of celebration, "a Jewish rap video" (which I had to have him tell me he directed), with the greeting: "Hope you enjoy. If you do, feel free to send it to everyone you know. We're trying to make it the Rosh Hashanah sensation."


(As this is my first attempt at embedding--though Howie keeps pestering me to try it, assuring me how easy it is--the link is www.chozinn.com.)