By the Skin of Your Bean

Chickpeas, AKA Ceci beans, Bengal gram, Indian pea and garbanzos have a skin. Well first there is a shell, like a sweet pea, where 2 to 3 beans grow in each pod. Inside the pod, individual beans, which are actually the seeds of leguminous plants, are surrounded by a thin, nearly transparent skin.

For the most part, the skin stays. Canned beans have them. The skins are ground up with the rest of the dried garbanzo to make falafel. Humus is a puree, who can tell if there is a skin or not? But at home, where details get noticed, a cook, if so inclined could par cook the bean, place them in cool running water and rub the beans together to remove the bean hull.

Why bother? Is there any difference in the taste? Is the extra labor worth the effort? These are really good questions to ask when assessing a new kitchen trick. While scrounging cookbooks, looking for something new with the pound and a half of dried legumes in my cupboard, Alice Waters in her book, Chez Panisse Vegetables, taught me about existence of the garbanzo skin. I did notice the difference - the beans were noticeably softer and evenly cooked. But skinning of the bean took a deal of work, many changes of water and although I husked about 1 cup of garbanzo peels, I am not sure if the work to result ratio was enough to claim victory.

I do know enough about legume physiology to know that removing the skin did not help the dried bean absorb moisture. Even without a skin, the outside of the bean/seed is not porous, water can only enter through the hilum – the small opening in the curved edge of a legume. Although the seed coat does not allow water through, soaking does hydrate and expand the coat allowing water into the bean at a greater rate. Depending on the type of bean, it can take up to 10 hours at room temp to fully hydrate.

Salt also increases the ability of a bean/seed to absorb water. Sodium displaces the minerals calcium and magnesium in the cell wall allowing for a greater absorption rate – 2 teaspoons of salt per quart/liter of soaking liquid will cut the cooking time in half. But there is a price to pay for convenience – pre-salting does change the texture, producing a grainer bean.

In an era of slow cookers and pressure cookers - salting the soaking liquid is a bit of an overkill – with the former you’re in no hurry with the latter, a couple of minutes isn’t going make that much of a difference in pretty quick process. The creamy texture is worth the time saved. As to the arguably improved texture that comes from hulling garbanzos, all I can recommend is to try it once and find out for yourself.


Share

Hot Potato (Soup)

Saucyman – I’m hungry for soup. Any ideas?

Roasted Garlic Potato soup is just the type of soup that you’ll never see in a can or carton on Market shelves, it is easy to make and economical – its cost is basically a few items from the pantry, a half-dozen or so heads of garlic and a sack of potatoes. On a more personal note, if cooking is occasionally autobiographical, this recipe is my memoir.

I’d like claim that it is because the soup extracts surprisingly complex flavors from quotidian ingredients. Well, that exegesis is preferable to the explanation that like me, the soup is cheap and easy. Making this soup does more than carefully chosen words to explain how to manage the wintry days of the Pacific Northwest when the damp is ubiquitous and gray sky is oppressive with its relentless monotone – you can hide in bed with a book or you can get up and realize you can make it through with a warm pair of socks and big bowl of soup.

5-8 Heads Garlic
Olive oil

2 Onions finely diced
4 T Olive Oil

3# Potatoes - gold and/or russets - peeled and quartered

1 qt stock or water*
1 qt half and half
*If using water, add 1cup cream

Balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper

Preheat oven to 375. Leave the head of garlic in tact and lop off the top ¼ of the garlic, arrange heads in roasting pan, drizzle 1 teaspoon of olive oil over the exposed heads of garlic, cover pan with foil or a tight lid and bake for 30 minutes. Remove lid and bake for an additional 15-30 minutes, until the garlic squishy soft and golden in color. The baking can be done up to 3 days in advance.

After the garlic goes in the oven, caramelize the onions by heating 2 T of olive oil in a skillet over medium-low heat. Add finely onions and cook, stirring frequently – the goal is to develop color without scorching the onions. Depending on gas/electric/conductivity of the pan, this should take 30-45 minutes.

While garlic is baking, peel and quarter the potatoes. Add to cold, salted water and bring to a boil. Reduce heat by 1/3 and continue cooking for 10-15 minutes until potatoes become very soft. Drain water from pan and puree the mashed potatoes with stock or water/cream- it is like making mashed potatoes – use blender, food processor or your favorite masher to smooth the soup out.

The garlic cloves can be extracted from the bulb’s papery skin by squeezing the base of the garlic. Puree cooked garlic cloves, caramelized onions and ½ & ½ together. Add to potatoes and adjust seasonings. Not only salt and pepper but balance out the flavor palate by adding balsamic vinegar.

Serve with warm bread, maybe, if you are really hungry, a grilled cheese.


Share

Bibliodiet

Surprisingly the last few books I read haven’t been about food, cooking or any tangentially related subject – nutrition, farming, etc. Mary Karr’s Lit and yesterday’s reading marathon polished off Steig Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy with The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest – who knew Swedes could be so exciting, so dangerous, so resourceful – well who knew anything at all about Swedes. I hope the three novels get an episodic HBO Wire like treatment rather than a Brett Ratner directing Ben Affleck as Callie Blomkvist.

Although I am on a bibliodiet, I have been keeping up with the food world on an article-by-article basis – British superstore Sainsbury’s is shelving its tomatoes in cartons. Apparently, cartons are the wave of the future, easier to display, less space wasted in shipping + lower shipping weight. According to the report called “Beverage Packaging Market Assessment - A Benchmark Study”, single serving pouches are the wave of the future for beverages. An ice-cold lager from can is very nice on a hot day but I cannot wait to drink a beer out of a juice box during a backyard cookout.

Also from the UK, the multinational Kraft is set to buy chocolatier Cadbury despite Warren Buffet's warnings. People are really, really upset over this sale – fearing loss of British jobs, diminished quality of Cadbury products – Can milk chocolate get worse? I suppose Kraft taking over Cadbury is the equivalent of Brett Ratner directing Angelina Jolie in a remake of Chocolat.

Another worrisome story about international takeovers, Asian Carp are poised to takeover the Great Lakes. You can sign an online petition here.

Finally, Caitlin Flanagan takes on Alice Waters Edible Schoolyard’s initiative in her column on the pages of this month’s liberal Atlantic Magazine. The opinion piece can be read here. Basically, arch-conservative Flanagan is very concerned about the rights of illegal immigrants and first generation Americans being forced to work for their lunch:

If this patronizing agenda were promulgated in the Jim Crow South by a white man who was   espousing a sharecropping curriculum for African American students, we would see it for what it is: a way of bestowing field work and low expectations on a giant population of students who might become troublesome if they actually got an education.

If politics, policies and perspectives are to be argued, hopefully they can be discussed without going for some of the outrageous opinions that are presented as facts in her case against school based gardening. There is so much wrong with this article: The Dave Barry/Jay Leno quality ‘zingers’, little mention of how mostly large corporations provide occasionally unsafe and decidedly unhealthy food to students in a form of government welfare, the abandonment of the conservative principle of local schools make local choices, the unvarnished assertion that the only people who count in society are the university educated and that the only way to learn is in a classroom – a single monk breeding sweet peas is the foundation of modern genetics, just sayin. 

What is under attack is the ability to make improvements in the status quo, what I call the Power of No - Ms. Flanagan blasts the belief that a person and by extension collectively together through the institution known as the government -  can’t improve anything at all ever through the power of doing. Ms. Waters set out to make an improvement by planting a garden – a single individual making a difference through action and vision. It is a shame that someone as smart as Ms. Flanagan makes specious intellectual constructs to win an argument instead of using that formidable brain to improve a situation.


Share

Poetic Injustice

Our friend and contributor, Charlie Seluzicki takes a look back, way through the joys of food and words.

In THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH, the world's oldest epic, we read early on that Enkidu, the wild man who was the original wild boy growing up among the beasts, had hair "thick as barley" and "with the gazelles he grazed on grasses." Of course, as in 5000 years of stories ever since, Shamhat the harlot sees this bad boy and sets out to make him hers. It takes seven days and seven nights in the sack at which point she tells him that it is time to go to the temple Eanna where "like a man, [Enkidu] will find a place for yourself" with other men become "engaged in labors of skill." No more grazing either. Arriving at their destination, bread and ale are set before him. The harlot teaches him to eat and drink, at which point he consumes seven goblets of ale. In what surely one of the earliest accounts of inebriation in world literature: "His mood became free, he started to sing,/ his heart grew merry, his face lit up." Did I mention that Shamhat then arranges for a barber and gets Enkidu cleaned up and "oiled"? You cannot, as they say, make this stuff up.

From time immemorial food imagery has fueled both the metaphoric life of poetry and helped define character and personal taste, what we like and dislike and that to which we aspire. Flash forward to 17th century England and poet Robert Herrick. Herrick, apparently quite the character in real life, frequently charged his epigrams and secular poems with the language of food. "Love Palatable" describes a kiss that joins body and soul. He gets practical with his wit in "Diet": "If wholesome Diet can re-cure a man,/ What need of Physick, or Physitian?" Poems that extol his beloved Julia are sensual and playfully erotic. In "Upon the Nipples of Julia's Breast," we are asked:

Have ye beheld (with much delight)
A red-Rose peeping through a white?
Or else a Cherrie (double grac't)
Within a Lillie? Center plac't?
Or ever marked the pretty beam,
A Strawberry shewes halfe drowned in Creame?

And Julia's leg is extolled with a Monty Python-ish excess of silliness: "Fain would I kiss my Julia's dainty Leg,/ Which is white and hair-less as an egg." What else would one expect from a fellow who spent part of his brief time in the countryside purportedly teaching a pig to drink from a tankard?

American Ogden Nash delighted readers with his eccentric and singular muse from the late 20's to the time of his death in Baltimore in 1971. Everyone knows his "Reflections on Ice-Breaking": "Candy/ Is dandy/But liquor/Is quicker." In 1989, his food poems were collected into a volume simply titled FOOD and illustrated by Etienne Delessert. I love this book and have giggled through it dozens of times. If left to my own devices I would quote it complete. In lieu of that, a short poem, "The Pioneer":

I seek in anonymity's cloister
Not him who ate the first raw oyster,
But one, who braving spikes and prickles,
The spine that stabs, the leaf that tickles,
With infinite patience and fortitude
Unveiled the artichoke as a food.

And a tidbit from "The Parsnip": "Some people call the parsnip edible;/ Myself, I find this claim incredible." Seek these poems out in your local used bookstore or the library and then you can be the person chuckling to himself in front of the shelves from whom everyone else in the place is slowly backing away from.


Charles Seluzicki

Absolutely Frozen

The vodka in my freezer has partially frozen. Does this mean I am mixing really strong drinks now with the slushy part or is all the alcohol trapped in the frozen icy parts? Chilly

I too keep vodka in door of my freezer and despite what the internets tell me, the contents appear to be frozen, well somewhat frozen. Due to some previous frost issues, I also keep a thermometer in the freezer and even when the bottle is most crystallized, the temp is never close to the minus teens, so what gives?

Alcohol freezes as at negative 173°f/114°C. Domestic freezers keep items at about 0° to negative 10°f. Even accounting for the fact that vodka isn’t pure alcohol and can freeze solid at -20°f, so unless you have some crazy, liquid nitrogen cooled place to store your Ben & Jerry’s odds are your vodka isn’t really frozen.

If you were to stick cider, roughly 3-8% alcohol by volume in your freezer, it would appear to ice over. Lacking distilling technologies, various New England tribes made concentrated applejack by freezing hard cider in snow banks and removing the ice from the top of the cider – this ice isn’t water, solids or impurities but a dilute of alcohol – still containing alcohol, just a lower % than what remains. This method, called freeze distillation or progressive freezing has limits… it will produce a very strong cider, around 20% alcohol (40 proof), but even in the worst Northeast winter, accounting for wind chill, the temp isn’t ever going to drop low enough to make Everclear or freeze the alcohol solid.  

But vodka isn’t made by separating solids from alcohol, it is made by concentrating the alcohol through distillation. A process that pretty much homogenizes the alcohol into the great mass – much in the same way that milk doesn’t turn into solids and whey after sitting for a week in the fridge, at 40% alcohol (80 proof, the benchmark for most bottled liquor), the alcohol is in a stable solution and acts differently than it does with beer, wine or cider.

Alcohol’s inability to freeze is actually maddening to those who make their own ice cream and sorbets – you’d think just a little grappa in lemon sorbet would add flavor but as little as 2% total alcohol in a recipe will turn what you thought would be a good idea into a slush the consistency of something from a Margarita machine. I’m not bitter, years later and I am still willing to experiment in the kitchen, maybe a little bitter.

As great as science and mathematical truths are, the vodka still looks frozen when I pull it out of the freezer. Two things, your vodka is to viscous to pour – the ketchup effect and less likely but still somewhat probable, it is possible that at the neck of the bottle, the thinnest past, some of the liquid has frozen blocking the vodka’s exit. Even when my bottle appears the most frozen and least cooperative when I want a drink, it takes about 3-5 minutes at room temperature to turn this ‘frozen’ mass into something pourable – ice won’t turn to ice water that quickly.

I Don’t Know How to Glaze You

Any ideas for a wintertime vegetable? Nothing is in season and I am getting tired of the frozen food section.

Sure cookbooks, magazines and the internets are full of ideas about pureed rutabagas, cardoon fritters and whipped parsnips but even the most adventurous eater will often want something familiar, an item that doesn’t take a lot of brain space or prep time for the nightly meal.

Carrots are inexpensive, easy to make and they really fit well in that meat-starch-veg trinity that many home cooked meals are engineered around. Carrots and potatoes roasted in an oven are practically a lobotomized preparation. Slightly more challenging than turning the oven on and scrubbing root vegetables are glazed carrots.

There are 2 obstacles in glazing carrots: First is cutting the tapered veg into pieces that will cook at same rate. Second and a little more difficult to control - Adding the right amount of liquid – too little and the carrots don’t cook properly – too much and you are boiling carrots, which is about as delicious as hospital food.

Cutting requires some thought. There needs to be enough surface area so the carrot cooks evenly. Thick slices will work but for to score style points, try the cut oblique. Here, the carrot is cut on the bias (45º) into 1-1½ inch segments. The oblique part is that between each cut, the carrot is rolled 1/3, producing irregular but uniform sized pieces that will all cook at the same pace.

This would be an easier preparation if the recipe called for X cups of water for each pound of peeled and cut carrots but the size of the pan complicates the equation. You want a pan big enough so that carrots cover the bottom in a single layer and you want just enough water to cover the carrots halfway.

There is one final degree of difficultly - the heat. Which really shouldn’t be an issue, because the only time you should use the highest setting on your stove is when you are boiling water, but it ends up being an issue because no one really cooks that way. Medium heat, you want to cook the carrots before the water evaporates, but you don’t want to evaporate the water before the carrots are done.

#2 lbs Carrots – peeled and cut into uniformly-sized pieces
2 Tablespoons butter
2 teaspoons brown sugar
Salt & pepper (Ground caraway seeds, chopped cilantro/parsley/rosemary or 2 T of brown liquor are optional flavorings. Scotch and caraway are surprisingly good, but not any better than apple brandy and the combination of rye and brown sugar is classic).

Add carrots to an appropriately sized pan – one that has enough room so the carrots cover the bottom of the pan in a single layer.

Fill pan with enough water to come halfway up the sides of the carrots

Add butter and spice/seasonings and place a piece of foil or parchment paper over the top of the carrots – not the pan – this controls how quickly the water evaporates. Turn heat on to medium.

Since medium heat is a nebulous concept with the variables of gas/electric/type of pan/age of appliance, check the veg after ten minutes by poking the carrots. The tip of a knife should go in and come out. If the carrots still resist, continue to cook adding water ¼ cup at a time as necessary. If the carrots are ready but water still remains, remove foil/parchment and turn heat up to high – TO BOIL WATER - until it is evaporated.

Serve.

Dairy Thing

Saucy, Is Half & Half actually 50/50?

About. Milk comes in non-fat, 1%, 2%, or Whole (at least 3.25% butterfat by law, but usually no more than 5%). Cream is 30-40% butterfat. Half & Half is 10.5-18% fat by volume depending on where you purchase it; laws and regulations vary from state to state. Even on the low end of butterfat, the equation 1 + 30 ÷ 2 = 15.5%, makes the label Half & Half true enough.

But it isn’t like there are giant cartons, tanks or trucks of milk and cream that get mixed together at the dairy, all incoming milk is put through a centrifuge that separates the cream from the milk. All denominations of milk, Half & Half, coffee cream, light cream, whipping cream and heavy cream are mixed to exact specifications. For centuries leading up to the mid-19th century cream was only cream and was obtained by placing milk in shallow pans and waiting 19 to 24 hours for the cream to rise, a process called creaming.

In the 1860s Antonin Prandtl invented the first dairy centrifuge but it wasn’t until 1877 that Swedish engineer Carl Gustaf Patrik de Laval perfected a continuous centrifuge that made it economically affordable for smaller dairies to mechanically separate the cream from the milk. Less time spent on separating the milk, means more time can be spent milking, herds can be larger. Danes, Dutch and Wisconsinites quickly adapt this new technology and quickly dominate the butter industry, an advantage that lasts over 100 years. Modern centrifuges spin at 5400 revolutions per minute, making it possible to concoct a cream that contains more butterfat than Bossie herself put into her milk.

There isn’t an exact date for the invention of Half & Half. Nor does there seem to be a specific inventor/innovator. And it appears to be a product made distinctly for coffee. Heavy cream has a way of clotting in acidic coffee. Despite our agrarian beginnings, milk was not always available in urban markets until Gail Borden (a dude) invented sweetened condensed milk in the mid 1800s, at about 8-10% butterfat and sweetened, shelf-stable and pasteurized, the dairy product was a favorite addition to coffee for decades. Half & Half is a similar less sweet, pourable beverage for coffee.

There is no real reason to make your own Half & Half at home: A quick survey of cookbooks finds almost all recipes will list Half & Half as an ingredient - instead of ½ cup cream, ½ cup milk. Well that and buying a carton of Half & Half is cheaper. You can save about a buck a quart, most likely because there is less of the expensive butterfat in the grocery store versions than buying milk and cream and mixing your own.

Stalemeate

I am making bread pudding -- The question concerns the bread: I don't have any stale bread, just the fresh kind. Should I leave it out overnight to dry? - Amateur Dessert Maker

Bread Puddings (BP) have been popular in English cooking since medieval times. Originally made of leftover pieces of bread that were moistened and sweetened – not always with milk, cream or eggs – water and suet were the commonly used in the olden days. In the era before ramekins, stale loaves were occasionally hollowed and used as vessels to bake/steam the puddings. Modernity has lost touch with the frugal nature of the dessert, today BP’s are made with extravagant breads like panettone, brioche, challah, biscotti, croissant or leftover pieces of cake. Coupled with fancypants brandies/aged brown liquors, dried fruits, nuts and exotic spices; the 21st century dessert bares little resemblance to its parsimonious beginnings.

Even if BP has evolved into something that is only titularly connected to its begetter, BP’s are still a great way to use leftover bread. In the Saucykitchen, heels, ends and odd pieces of bread get combined in a giant Ziploc bag in the freezer - kept for the sole purpose of making a Bread Pudding at some point in the future. Even living a lifestyle where I am constantly thinking of/planning for my next bread pudding, I have to occasionally buy a loaf of bread for the sole purpose of turning it into a BP; this is done without guilt or concern – the bread goes from the bag and into the pudding. 

Whether the bread needs to be stale or not is not a universal conclusion, it’s a matter of opinion. Most, but not all, cookbooks ask for day old or stale bread, but they do so without explaining why, leading me tobelieve it is thoughtless repition rather than thoughtful instruction. Of my two most knowledgeable and esteemed book sources - Dorie Greenspan’s recipes call for bread that is “preferably stale”. Bo Friberg writing in The Professional Pastry Chef comments the bread should be dried is so that it can absorb the maximum amount of liquid. Mr. Friberg advises how to dry fresh bread by buttering and lightly toasting in an oven – A technique that technically produces bread and butter pudding. (BTW: Soft butter, 400 oven, 10 for minutes.)

People are emphatic about how to make a true Bread Pudding. Choices like stale or fresh bread - cubed or sliced – bready or pudding like consistency – whiskey sauce/sabayon/ice cream - include the crust or don’t include the crust - French or white bread – raisins or don’t put a freakin’ raisin near anything I am going to eat, choices that are needlessly contentious. Considering you really can’t go wrong with bread, sugar, cream and eggs, I wouldn’t worry about artificially staling the bread, just use what you have.

SYNCHOPATED FEASTINGS

Welcome to the new year. I heard the kids (people under 30) referring to the new calendar year as Twenty-dime. I feel old when I hear things like that. What is wrong with ought-ten? The Saucyblog will have a few new features and contributors in the upcoming year, but for the time being - FOB - Friend of the Blog, Charles Seluzicki, shares thoughts on holiday feasts. Thank you, Charlie and enjoy.

The other day my friend Kirsten was describing her traditional Christmas Eve dinner: cheese fondue. Well, "describing" isn't wholly accurate. She was complaining that they had run short and now, a full five days later, she was still hungry for fondue. Kirsten and I frequently talk about food, so the plaintive rift on the ritual piercing of hunks of bread and coating them in the melty blend of three cheeses that followed was hardly uncharacteristic. And it got me thinking about about the rituals of eating and particularly those forms of eating which require interactions with food beyond the usual mechanics of the fork, the knife and the spoon. I think of these forms of feasting as syncopated because they shift from the emphasis of everyday eating, a quality that in itself is a great part of its appeal. They are commonly communal in nature and their ritual nature is particularly pronounced. Eating, quite literally, occurs in a whole new key.

In Baltimore, going to a crab house on a warm summer night is just such a seasonal ritual. Families sit around picnic tables covered with newspaper, mallets, claw crackers and picks. Pitchers of cold beer and iced tea come and then a couple dozen steamed blue crabs covered with a thick layer of red spice. Everyone will talk about how work intensive the process is but they will also proudly display great intact sweet lumps of claw or back fin like a prize, lovingly devoured as just the right seasoning is added, licked directly from the fingertips. In winter, my father and my uncles would take us boys with them into the back yard in the middle of December with a couple bushels of oysters. Yes, the men were shucking for the oyster stew but their prize was the oysters on the half shell. They would show my cousin Johnny and I how to pop the shell of those beautiful Chincoteagues; it was a magic trick, learning how to open a stone.  I did not cry when the spring steel blade of my first oyster knife broke two years ago. Sometimes I still feel like it though. I own a dozen oyster knives but I have yet to find another with just that perfect feel.

In New Orleans, they have their spicy shrimp and crawdad boils, in New England, lobsters and clams steam under layers of seaweed and wet burlap. The young and newcomers learn how to suck head, pinch tail, unlock secret cavities in crustaceans and marvel at troves of tasty roe. Great discussions about spice mixes, steaming liquids, sauces and various accompaniments ensue. Specialities in different places inspire genuine surprise. I still remember a visit to a crab house in Baltimore where crabs were dipped in a spicy batter and deep fried. What emerged was a monstrous piece of golden sculpture, three or four times the size of the original crab and roughly retaining its form. The outside was crispy, the dough fluffy and perfectly flavored. And, of course, the crab finally emerged, a crabcake packed into the top shell, the succulent body and legs ready to be cracked and picked. The best of all worlds. This was a great favorite of my mother's.

My son Adam suggests that even toasting marshmallows over an open fire qualifies. Preparing a righteous stick, finding that spot over the embers to perfectly toast your confection, even the occasional pyrotechnics, all speak to the marvelous "difference" that characterize these forms of eating.


Charles Seluzicki

Tax Your Thirst

Saucy – Any bold predictions about food for the new decade?

States will enact some sort of so called fat-tax before partying like it is 2019. In 2009 the fat-tax was kind of a non-story, except that Food Industry trade groups spent an estimated 8 million US dollars lobbying against proposed taxes – Despite the fact no state or federal laws were being drafted to tax snack foods.

And because sometimes throwing money at a problem isn’t enough to fully combat it, the CEO of Coca-Cola Muhtar Kent, decided to engage in a little his-teria: Commenting on the proposed fat tax to the Atlanta Rotary Club, Kent was quoted saying, “I’ve never seen it work where a government tells people what to eat and what to drink…If it worked, the Soviet Union would still be around.” Which is odd considering Coke sold its products in the Soviet Union beginning in the Reagan Era through the demise of the evil empire, currently sells its products in communist China and the familiar red can be found in the free and open societies of Saudi Arabia, Iran and Cambodia. Considering their record with dealing with repressive regimes, I think Coke’s only true objection to government dictated soda pop consumption would be if Pepsi got that contract.

Big Snack is likely correct to believe that their products will be singled out for a value-added tax in the near future. Proponents of the sin taxes like to point out what cigarette taxes did to reduce smoking. While the public was willing to accept that nicotine, an addictive drug, as a category worthy of government purview, transferring that regulatory spirit to household items like sugar and salt might not as easy a making a Vulcan-like rational argument.

For all the hurdles in constructing a value-added fat-tax, there are the dollars at the end of the finish line, an estimated trillion of them. Along with the increased revenue for a deficit saddled nation - enticing people to lose weight, there is an anticipated trillion dollars in healthcare savings – enough to motivate insurance providers to endorse a fat tax.

You don’t have to be Ayn Rand to be wary of big governments involvement. Federal crop subsidies for corn help make high fructose corn syrup cheaper than fresh produce. Fairness questions abound - What will Big Brother choose to tax - calories or products? Will it be the 1600-calorie fatachino or just the 300-calorie soda? Likewise, donuts and Fritos get slapped with the fat-tax but not fair trade chocolate and organic almonds, right?

4/5 of states already posses the ability to collect a fat tax through sales tax mechanisms, I would look for state governments to levy a tax on soda and chips before the Federales get involved. California will lead the way: Being desperately broke, body-image conscious and having a tax code that is impossible to reform will spur the Golden state into action. The size and power of California’s consumer economy is too big for snack food manufacturers to boycott the market over a tax. Once Callie goes, other states will follow suit. Like the Carolinas protecting smoking, Coke’s home state of Georgia might not enact a fat tax until the ought 20s roll around.