07 March 2010

Double Cream

I love the stuff. I keep some at work for coffee. A woman the other day "caught" me using it and started chuckling and smiling and going on about how "naughty" I was being. Naughty? Like I was stealing spoonfuls of a coworker's soup, or doing something illicit in the supply cabinet? I wondered what she ate, since she was not obese but certainly not slim and probably in a near-constant state of neurosis about food choices that most women are socialized into now. What's for breakfast? But I didn't ask. I simply and truthfully stated, without apologizing, that I love double cream, leaving her envious.

I don't understand the "guilt" about food choices. While I believe that eating involves all kinds of moral choices (e.g. if my double-cream came from cows whipped with barb wire daily, milked by 5-yr-old slave labor, driven to market in a cart made of the bones of the elderly and fueled by distilled baby fat, I would feel really guilty), I don't see how or why macronutrient content would factor into it. "Guilt free" food usually means "low fat!" As if dietary palmitic acid were immoral.

My knowing colleague in the coffee room might do well to give up the guilt. I guarantee her grandmother had no qualms about using real butter or cream.

3 comments:

  1. in a restaurant yesterday, i actually used the phrase, "like, from a cow."

    not sure when it happened, but in the US anymore "cream" means "non-dairy creamer", and "butter" means "butter-flavored cooking oil".

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  2. Fortunately, cream as a dairy product hasn't yet been forgotten here in the UK. But a lot of greasy spoons will cook eggs by squirting some industrial oil onto the griddle from a squeeze bottle. Or use "flora" spread on sandwiches instead of butter.

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  3. you naughty, cheeky monkey! Perhaps your colleague has a long suppressed dairy fixation. A bath of buttermilk might help her to over-come it.

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