If the food is the best thing about a dinner party, then something's gone wrong. In my view, people spend too long preparing the meal and not enough time making the conversation interesting. Good conversation is when people make themselves vulnerable and reveal things about themselves that could be taken against them in the future. It won't happen, though, unless the host takes things by the horns and they can afford to be quite forceful. I like to say things like: "What's everyone afraid of at the moment?" or "Why have you come out tonight?" or "What's the point in your life?" If you leave it to chance, the conversation will be boring. We've been brought up to think that being polite is being bland, whereas real politeness is opening up. A dinner party should be a place where you say things you wouldn't anywhere else. I like the idea of singing for your supper. Sometimes in life you have to be prepared to give something of yourself.
I tend to invite about eight guests. It's fun to invite some people you don't know. I like to set people up, but I haven't had much success - normally one person takes advantage of the other for a quick relationship. But there's a vicarious pleasure in that.
There are lots of areas where I like to compete but I've opted out of cooking. I'm a great fan of the ready meal. It doesn't take that long to eat something, so it shouldn't take you four hours to prepare it. This is embarrassing because it's so simple, but my starter would be something like avocado and prosciutto and olives, with some nice bread. That would be followed by grilled salmon with mashed potatoes bought ready made from M&S or Tesco, some salad and some tomatoes put in the oven.
I don't drink much so I'm a bad host in that sense, but my dear wife Charlotte would take care of that with a bottle of red and a bottle of white. Dessert would be chocolate broken into pieces and put into bowls with a mixture of raspberries and blueberries and if you're lucky some chocolate ice cream.
I think the ideal note a dinner party should end on is everyone feeling that we should all live in a commune, or couples going away thinking: "It's so much better to be in a big group than just us." If you want a great meal, go to a restaurant.
Cooking Changes Calories
When I was studying the feeding behavior of wild chimpanzees in the early 1970s, I tried surviving on chimpanzee foods for a day at a time. I learned that nothing that chimpanzees ate (at Gombe, in Tanzania, at least) was so poisonous that it would make you ill, but nothing was so palatable that one could easily fill one's stomach. Having eaten nothing but chimpanzee foods all day, I fell upon regular cooked food in the evenings with relief and delight.
About 25 years later, it occurred to me that my experience in Gombe of being unable to thrive on wild foods likely reflected a general problem for humans that was somehow overcome at some point, possibly through the development of cooking. (Various of our ancestors would have eaten more roots and meat than chimpanzees do, but I had plenty of experience of seeing chimpanzees working very hard to chew their way through tough raw meat - and had even myself tried chewing monkeys killed and discarded by chimpanzees.) In 1999, I published a paper [pdf] with colleagues that argued that the advent of cooking would have marked a turning point in how much energy our ancestors were able to reap from food.
To my surprise, some of the peer commentaries were dismissive of the idea that cooked food provides more energy than raw. The amazing fact is that no experiments had been published directly testing the effects of cooking on net energy gained. It was remarkable, given the abiding interest in calories, that there was a pronounced lack of studies of the effects of cooking on energy gain, even though there were thousands of studies on the effects of cooking on vitamin concentration, and a fair number on its effects on the physical properties of food such as tenderness. But more than a decade later, thanks particularly to the work of Rachel Carmody, a grad student in my lab, we now have a series of experiments that provide a solid base of evidence showing that the skeptics were wrong.
Whether we are talking about plants or meat, eating cooked food provides more calories than eating the same food raw. And that means that the calorie counts we've grown so used to consulting are routinely wrong.
Part of the reason this had never been addressed before was that several areas of research had been overlooked, even by nutritionists. Especially fascinating were the physiological studies on people who subsist only on raw foods. I was impressed to learn that raw-foodists are thin compared to those eating cooked diets, given that in most cases they are eating domesticated foods with lots of nutrients, are processing them in machines like electric blenders, and of course, living as most do in the developed world, never suffering through seasonal food shortage. Yet despite all these advantages over anyone who might try eating wild foods raw, the average woman on a 100% raw diet did not have a functioning menstrual cycle. About 50% of women entirely stopped menstruating! When a raw-foodist's reproductive system does not allow her to have a baby even when her diet is composed of processed, high-quality, agricultural foods, the obvious explanation is that she is not getting enough calories.
The fact that these studies weren't generally known may have been because cooking seems to fall into a gap between research fields. For instance, there has been a journal called Meat Science for more than 70 years and textbooks and multi-volume books called Meat Science, which study the production of meat all the way to the consumer's mouth. But there the science stops. As a meat scientist wrote to me, "The problem of how cooking affects the caloric value of meat does not seem have been of much interest to meat scientists."
Yet there were signs that cooking did affect the calorie counts of some foods. Starches, for instance, like those in wheat, barley, potatoes, and so on, are composed mostly of two sugar-based molecules, amylopectin and amylose, which, when raw, are tightly packed and inaccessible to digestive enzymes. Studies have found that cooking gelatinizes starch, which means that amylopectin and amylose are released and exposed to enzymes. Thus, cooked starches yield more energy than raw ones.
To study how cooking (and processing, like pounding or chopping) affected calories, we turned to mice. They are a good species for this because their diet choices are rather similar to human food preferences. They like grains, roots, fruits and even meat; in the wild, there are populations of mice that get most of their food by eating live albatrosses [video]. Rachel Carmody led a study in which mice were given regular mouse pellets for six days at a time, interrupted by four days of eating sweet potatoes or beef. Half the time the sweet potato or meat was presented raw, and half the time cooked; half the time it was also pounded and half the time unpounded. She and Gil Weintraub carefully measured the exact amount of food eaten by the mice, and then calculated the animals' gain or loss of weight over four days as a function of the weight of food eaten, using both wet weights and dry weights of food to check the results. For both meat and sweet potato, Rachel found that when the food was cooked the mice gained more weight (or lost less weight) than when it was raw. Pounding had very little effect.
We suspect that there are two major reasons for cooked beef providing more calories than raw beef. In cooked beef, the muscle proteins, like the sugars in cooked starch, have opened up and allowed digestive enzymes to attack their amino acid chains. Cooking also does this for collagen, a protein that makes meat difficult to chew because it forms the connective tissue wrapped around muscle fibers. However, we do not know the exact mechanisms. What we do know, though, is that the mice had a spontaneous preference for eating cooked meat over raw meat, and their choice made sense, given that they fared better on it.
Mechanism aside, though, what the experiments indicated was some serious discrepancies in how calorie counts are measured. The USA uses the Atwater Convention for assessing calories in food, a century-old system that treats food as being composed of a certain number of components, each of which has a fixed calorie value - such as 4 kcals for a gram of protein, 4 kcals for a gram of sugars, 9 kcals for fats [ed: kcals are popularly called "calories"]. Modifications to the original convention allow advances in nutritional knowledge to be incorporated, such as better estimates for some specific types of carbohydrate. The system gives a good approximation for foods that are highly digestible and demand very little work by the digestive system, such as candy bars. It is convenient because it produces standardized numbers that everyone can agree on.
But the Atwater Convention has two big flaws. First, it pays no attention to the extent to which food has been processed. For example, it treats grain as the same calorie value whether it is eaten whole or as highly milled flour. But smaller particles are less work to digest, and therefore provide more net energy. Second, it treats foods as equally digestible (meaning, having the same proportion digested) regardless of processing. But cooked foods, as we've seen, are more digestible than raw foods.
These flaws matter. According to the Atwater Convention raw foods have equal calorie content to cooked foods. So people can be deluded into thinking that feeding their children on 100% raw foods is a healthy practice, whereas I believe it would be dangerous for them.
The more highly processed our foods, the more calories we get out of them. If you want to gain weight, make sure you eat highly processed and well-cooked meals. If you want to lose weight, do the opposite. You can eat the same number of measured calories, but if the foods vary in how finely they have been ground or whether they have been cooked, the calorie counts will not tell you what you want to know.
The next wave of research will decide how profound the effects of cooking are. My best guess, based on studies of the increased digestibility of starch or eggs eaten cooked compared to raw, is that the increase in net calorie gain from cooking will prove to be in the region of 25 - 50%. That is only a guess, but I am confident it will be much higher than 10%. It is going to be exciting to find out.
TARTS AFIRE
DAVE BARRY Herald Columnist
The thing I like best about being a journalist, aside from being able to clip my toenails while working, is that sometimes, through hard work and perseverance and opening my mail, I come across a story that can really help you, the consumer, gain a better understanding of how you can be killed by breakfast snack food.
This is just such a time. I have received, from alert reader Richard Rilke, an alarming article from The New Philadelphia (Ohio) Times-Reporter headlined: OVERHEATED POP- TARTS CAUSE DOVER HOUSE FIRE, OFFICIALS SAY. The article states that fire officials investigating a house fire in Dover, Ohio, concluded that "when the toaster failed to eject the Pop- Tarts, they caught fire and set the kitchen ablaze."
According to the article, the investigators reached this conclusion after experimenting with Pop-Tarts and a toaster. They found that "strawberry Pop-Tarts, when left in a toaster that doesn't pop up, will send flames 'like a blowtorch' up to three feet high."
Like most Americans, I have long had a keen scientific interest in combustible breakfast foods, so I called up the Dover Fire Department and spoke to investigator Don Dunfee. He told me that he and some other investigators bought a used toaster, rigged it so it wouldn't pop up, put in some Kellogg's strawberry Pop-Tarts, then observed the results.
"At five minutes and 55 seconds," he said, "we had flames shooting out the top. I mean large flames. We also tried it with an off-brand tart. That one broke into flames in like 3 1/2 minutes, but it wasn't near as impressive as the Kellogg's Pop- Tart."
A quality you will find in top investigative journalists such as Woodward and Bernstein and myself is that before we publish a sensational story, we make every effort to verify the facts, unless this would be boring. So after speaking with Dunfee I proceeded to my local Kmart, where I consulted with an employee in the appliance sector.
ME: What kind of toaster do you recommend for outdoor use?
EMPLOYEE: A cheap one.
I got one for $8.96. I already had Kellogg's strawberry Pop-Tarts at home, because these are one of the three major food groups that my son eats, the other two being (1) pizza and (2) pizza with pepperoni.
Having assembled the equipment, I was ready to conduct the experiment.
WARNING: DO NOT ATTEMPT THE FOLLOWING EXPERIMENT YOURSELF. THIS IS A DANGEROUS EXPERIMENT CONDUCTED BY A TRAINED HUMOR COLUMNIST UNDER CAREFULLY CONTROLLED CONDITIONS, NAMELY, HIS WIFE WAS NOT HOME.
I conducted the experiment on a Saturday night. Assisting me was my neighbor, Steele Reeder, who is a Customs broker, which I believe is a mentally stressful occupation, because when I mentioned the experiment to Steele he became very excited, ran home, and came back wearing (this is true) a bright-yellow rubber rain suit, an enormous sun hat, and a rope around his waist holding a fire extinguisher on each hip, gunslinger-style. He also carried a first-aid kit containing, among other things, the largest tube of Preparation H I have ever seen.
Also on hand was Steele's wife, Bobette, who pointed out that we had become pathetic old people, inasmuch as our Saturday Night Action now consisted of hoping to see a toaster fire.
Using an extension cord, we set the toaster up a safe distance away from the house. I then inserted two Kellogg's strawberry Pop-Tarts ("With Smucker's Real Fruit") and Steele, wearing thick gloves, held the toaster lever down so it couldn't pop up. After about two minutes the toaster started to make a desperate rattling sound, which is how toasters in the wild signal to the rest of the herd that they are in distress. A minute later the Pop-Tarts started smoking, and at 5 minutes and 50 seconds, scary flames began shooting up 20 to 30 inches out of both toaster slots. It was a dramatic moment, very similar to the one that occurred in the New Mexico desert nearly 50 years ago, when the awestruck atomic scientists of the Manhattan Project witnessed the massive blast that erupted from their first crude experimental snack pastry.
We unplugged the extension cord, extinguished the blaze and determined that the toaster's career as a professional small appliance was over. It was time to draw conclusions. The obvious one involves missile defense. As you are aware, President Clinton has decided to cut way back on "Star Wars" research, so that there will be more money available for pressing domestic needs such as creating jobs and keeping airport runways clear for urgent presidential grooming. But by using currently available electronic and baking technology, we could build giant toasters and place them around the U.S., then load them with enormous Pop-Tarts. When we detected incoming missiles, we'd simply hold the toaster levers down via some method (possibly involving Tom and Roseanne Arnold) and within a few minutes WHOOM the country would be surrounded by a protective wall of flames, and the missiles would either burn up or get knocked off course and detonate harmlessly in some place like New Jersey.
Anyway, that's what I think we should do, and if you think the same thing, then you have inhaled way too many Smucker's fumes.