Lots of cake, less sugar, and reducing ultra-processed foods
Why no, these topics aren't at all contradictory!
Birthday month and the best cake I have ever eaten in my entire life
In the area where I live, there have been a number of Ukrainian refugee families who have moved here in the past year and a bit. There has also been a lot of local support for these families, with the community providing the families with resources, goods, and also custom — we became friends with one family after we hired a photographer for a family photo shoot last year (the photographer was a Ukrainian refugee; her husband is a chef. I somehow manage to gravitate towards food people). We went to their son’s first birthday party, and his cake was something I had never eaten before: Ukrainian honey cake, or ‘medovyk’. It consists of a lot of thin layers of honey flavoured cake, interspersed with layers of a sour cream/cream icing, and it was delicious.
My husband and I both have birthdays in July, and I had heard through the local grapevine of another Ukrainian refugee, a baker who was making and selling various desserts to support her family. Including the honey cake. I ordered a cake from her for my husband’s birthday, but I’d requested it to be a chocolate one (‘spartak’). When we picked it up, it looked like a regular honey cake, not the chocolate one.
After we ate it, I asked her how chocolate-y it was meant to taste, because this didn’t seem to be chocolate at all, and she said she’d made a mistake, and that she owes us a chocolate one. I told her not to worry about it, and I’ll just buy a chocolate one from her when it was time for the next cake occasion.
What a great mistake that turned out to be! The regular honey cake was incredible. It was like the crust of a cheesecake (arguably the best part of a cheesecake) in cake form, with fantastic texture and flavour. I really, really liked the cake. We ate the cake in about four days, and I had initially thought that the next cake occasion where we tried the chocolate one would be in October, for my daughter’s birthday. Two of them in July seemed like a bit much. But when we finished the cake, I decided that trying the chocolate one for my birthday (which comes just eleven days after my husband’s birthday, and about five days after we finished his cake) would be a great idea.
So, I ordered the chocolate honey cake for my birthday, and it too was fantastic. Great chocolate flavour, delicious cream layers, and a joy to eat. We ate the last of it last night, and now I’m wondering if I really need a birthday for it to be a cake occasion. Could we just celebrate a day ending in a ‘Y’? When can I eat this cake again?
Unintentionally retraining my taste buds
In either a terrible or a wonderful segue, I seem to have retrained my taste buds to be less tolerant of sugar. Yep, I ate delicious cake every day for over a week this month, and I find myself less enthused about sweet foods now than I was a couple of years ago. I first noticed this last Christmas, when I ate one of my father-in-law’s homemade cinnamon rolls and had enough after one. The year before, I could have eaten three of them and it was only politeness and social etiquette stopping me.
Then, this year on the Fourth of July, I ate one s’more and by the last bite it was too sweet. My first year in the US, I could have eaten at least four of those things. I’ve noticed this with many other desserts too — cookies, cakes, and bars that I loved a couple of years ago are now too sweet and I will have had enough after a few bites.
This made the enthusiasm with which we ate the honey cakes surprising, because I expected them to be sweet (how could they not be, with honey in the name of the cake?). Actually, as we were driving home with the first cake, my husband commented that he was a little worried we wouldn’t like it because of the sweetness. After we ate the cake, I looked up a recipe and compared it with an American recipe for vanilla cake (a King Arthur recipe, so you know it’s a good one), and an American recipe for cream cheese frosting. And realised that despite being called a honey cake, it had about a third of the amount of sugar as the American recipes. So that’s why I could eat so much more of that cake compared with other home-made desserts. It tasted like honey, or chocolate, and not just sweet.
I never set out to retrain my taste buds. In the past few years, as we’ve moved towards ever-more cooking from scratch and reducing the amounts of ultra-processed foods we eat, I guess this was the unintended outcome. I noticed it one dessert or baked good at a time over the past year and a half, that things were becoming too sweet (and I’m pretty sure that my in-laws weren’t changing the recipes they were using; the foods hadn’t changed but I had). It reminded me of the quote from The Fault in Our Stars by John Green: ‘I fell in love the way you fall asleep; slowly, and then all at once.’
Speaking of reducing ultra-processed foods…
I listened to a podcast yesterday from the BBC Food Programme, about ultra-processed foods: UPF WTF? And there was another podcast I’d listened to a few weeks back, on NPR’s Life Kit, about ultra-processed foods and how to avoid them. And there was an article in The Guardian a couple of weeks ago, about America’s addiction to ultra-processed foods.
It seems like the conversation about ultra-processed foods is reaching a peak, and the effects of these foods are at the forefront of public consciousness. Or maybe it’s just the stuff I choose to read and listen to, who knows. But either way, I’m finding it encouraging to hear more people talk about this, and that maybe there might even be some political willpower to do something about labelling and food marketing.
I haven’t been on the anti-UPF train for very long, and for a long time I would happily eat packets of crisps with my lunches, get a chocolate bar in the afternoon from the uni shop, and regularly eat foods that were UPFs without thinking.
But then I read a few* books.
Food Politics by Marion Nestle, about the impact and power of the food industry on legislation, Congress, and how nutritional information is communicated to the public
Appetite for Profit by Michele Simon, about how large food corporations do not have our best interests at heart but are entities that exist to grow and generate profit for their shareholders, and to do that they need to sell more and more and more
Kid Food by Bettina Elias Siegel, about the industry that has grown around ‘kid food’, and the ways the food industry works to convince kids and parents that kids need their own special food (that naturally the industry can provide)
Salt Sugar Fat and Hooked by Michael Moss, both about how large food companies engineer and design their products to get us to keep eating their products
Metabolical by Robert Lustig, about how it’s not just the nutritional content of the food that we need to be concerned about, but the actual processing that it goes through
The Way We Eat Now by Bee Wilson, which was the book that introduced me to the NOVA food classification scale
Ultra-Processed People by Chris Van Tulleken, which I’ve written about before — a new book that kind of summarises many things explored in the other books on this list, with the most recent information about the effects of these foodlike products on our bodies
And slowly, then all at once, I didn’t want to eat these foods anymore. I didn’t want to feel like I was being tricked by large food corporations, unwitting prey in their desire for profits. I didn’t want to be consuming food-like substances that according to a shit tonne of research (this is an official measure of research output) was not beneficial to my health and body and was arguably actually quite detrimental. And I wanted to raise my kids in a way so that they knew what real food tasted like, and they would prefer real food. I wanted food to be a social and cultural event, family meals where conversation flowed. I wanted them to know where their food came from, how dishes were made, and that food is important. I want their taste buds to be used to real food, with natural levels of sweetness.
So I have been gradually reducing the UPFs that we eat, and the UPFs that I buy for the kids as snacks and to pack in their lunch bags. We’re not perfect and UPFs are not entirely eliminated, but we’re eating a lot less of it now than we were a couple of years ago. The hardest moments are where I have less control, like when we go to kids’ birthday parties, or we eat at someone else’s house. Or when we have no kitchen, and I can’t easily cook from scratch.
One final note on UPFs: I am not judging people who do eat UPFs as a significant part of their diet, or parents who feed their kids UPFs. My ire against UPFs is not so much for the consumers of UPFs but the immensely powerful food industry who engineer their food to make it hyper palatable, and who use their money, power, and influence to make it hard to eat well, especially for more socio-economically disadvantaged groups. There are many rational reasons someone might have for feeding their families UPFs, and many reasons why it might be impractical or even impossible to eat a mostly whole food or cooked-from-scratch diet — How The Other Half Eats by Priya Fielding-Singh is an excellent exploration of how people from different socio-economic classes eat, and touches on many of these reasons.
*This is not a comprehensive list, and by ‘few’ I actually mean it feels like I’ve read a lot of books about food but these are some of the specific ones that sparked this whole anti-UPF thing.