Food Choices

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Sauce Is Everything

Today at the supermarket, I couldn’t find my favorite brand of dark soy sauce. As a replacement, I bought Lee Kum Kee’s Brown Braising Sauce, which I had never tried before. And so coming home, I made braised tofu by pouring the sauce on a plate of cubed tofu and cooking it for five minutes in a microwave. It is so easy and it is delicious.

When it comes to food, sauce is everything. Or almost everything. I am thinking of buying eggplants next week and making braised eggplants with this amazing sauce, provided I can get hold of some fresh ones. The problem is that those purple elongated eggplants in Asian stores here are usually half wilted. I am sure that these eggplants, while fresh and plump, have been on display on the shelves of New York stores for two weeks. When they eventually stop being marketable in NYC but still eatable by desperate people in New Jersey, they are shipped here in withered and shriveled forms.

Now I think I can try different sauces from Lee Kum Kee to see which one I like most. Alternative, I can also try Trader Joe’s sauces. I think vegetables and tofu taste really good with good quality sauce. So my search for better vegan recipes has evolved into the phase of trying different sauces, which can save time and make life much easier.

Emulsifier

It is said food emulsifiers are bad for you, especially bad for your gut. I just googled it and google says almost all pre-processed foods will have emulsifier, like biscuits, crackers, bread, cake, ice cream. Almost everything. So now I am thinking of getting rid of processed food as much as possible from my diet. If I can’t make yogurt myself, I will eat yogurt altogether since it has emulsifiers in it. Bread too. If the nutritional panel includes more than two or three ingredients for the bread, I should consider it as too heavily processed.

Sweetener

It is said that sweeteners can increase the risk of cancer, especially the two common sweeteners like aspartame or sucralose.

Since it is impossible to avoid sweetener in diet soda, I have to give up on all diet drinks. However I can’t give up completely right now. So it will be a slow process of reducing the amount of intake gradually. An alternative will be to use stevia as sweetener, which is more expensive, but seems to have the least amount of side effects.

Rice Products and Bubble Tea

I don’t know why I think this way, but I just can’t get it out of my mind. I think most of the rice snacks have emulsifiers and sweeteners and other industrialized non-food ingredients in them. And the tapioca pearls inside bubble tea are the same. Although some of these packages have very scarce nutritional panels, the information on the packages are not really faithful to the underlying reality of the ingredient, for the simple reasons that most of these rice packages are imported from Asia somewhere, and the nutritional panels are more like a decoration than an accurate reflection. Just taking a look at the box of delicious Japanese mochi with various fillings, I have to say every bite is laced with emulsifiers and sweetener. And most likely the emulsifiers have contributed to the delicious flavor and the sweetener have assisted with the powerful sweetness of the red bean or green tea fillings.

Breast Cancer

I have been afraid of breast cancer for years ever since I heard the first case of breast cancer around me when I was a saleswoman. I have read articles online and watched videos, all claiming in unison that in America, Asian women have the same rate of breast cancer, like 13%, as women from other regions. I feel that every year, I hear about a case of breast cancer around me or a breast cancer scare, which eventually turns out to be benign rather than malignant on further testing.

We all think that food choices are the reason for breast cancer. I don’t know why we think this way but we do since our parents and grandparents never had breast cancer before. So ruling out the genetic reason, we concentrate on food. And more often than not, we have scared ourselves so much that we tend to think that almost everything is cancerogenic. Milk and meat–since they are so delicious and enticing, they can be nature’s ways of seducing us into the cancer pitfall; additives, emulsifiers, sweeteners or preservatives are no doubt harmful to health; monosodium glutamate sounds suspicious–even its name is a suspect since real food usually have short names; sausages, hot dogs, frozen dumplings, and even those meatless paddies are made of heavily processed meat or soy ingredients or isolates.

“You are all scare crows. I am going to eat a mochi donut right now.” One of us says. We are sitting in the food court area of HMart, the local Korean grocery store.

To demonstrate that we are not scare crows, we all follow her into the bakery area and each of us buy several mochi donuts–they are so delicious that they worth the risk of sickness or death.