Curb your enthusiasms

A recipe for rice pudding (don’t gag)

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Food fashions propel us back to the culture of the playground. Like schoolkids desperate for possession of a ‘sick’ hoodie because a mother doesn’t know what’s ‘GOAT’ (Google these, parents), foodies fear not being on trend. Not in the desperate position of having to worry where their next meal is coming from, they fret over whether the photo of their dish discovery will attract any Likes.

Food biz marketing departments harness Fear Of Missing Out to provoke us into swallowing every new product. But they struggle against the advances of food science.

Too much salt, the boffins once declared, would contribute to high blood pressure so we should cut it out. Then they told us salt is an important nutrient balancing blood fluids and essential to nerve and muscle function.

There was a time when butter was Demon and margarine the healthy fat. Not much later, horror of trans fats provoked its fall from favour and a return to the purity of butter. 

Soy was once the ubiquitous protein, added to hamburger patties, infant formula, and a variety of ready meals. It was promoted as reducing the risk of heart disease and certain types of breast and prostate cancer, and lowering cholesterol. 

Then Scientific American reported, in 2009, that research had shown that eating large quantities of soy products could trigger premature puberty and the menopause and reduce fertility. And it was consigned to the back of the class.

Credit Getty Images

Eventually, questions over soy faded though science reviews remain undecided over soy’s effects on the body. Now soy’s popularity as a milk substitute has soared.

Alt milk is the new food trend.

Sales of Oatly, an alt milk brand made from oats, are growing so fast it recently began work on a flotation in New York that could be valued at $10bn/£7.1bn. Its first plant in the UK is due for completion by 2023. 

Oatly’s success has been propelled as much as anything by its eco credentials. Its carbon footprint, the company says, produces 70% less CO₂ than British cow’s milk production. Yet UK milk accounts for only 2.8% of the UK carbon footprint while costing less than alt-milk. 

Crucially, cow’s milk contains more protein, as well as all nine amino acids essential to building proteins in the body. Oat milk does not. One cup of oat milk contains around 3 grams of protein compared to 8 grams in cow’s milk, and 7 to 8 in soy milk. All nine amino acids are also contained in soy milk. (See how soy is on the rebound?).

Oatly, according to Almanack, has the same impact on blood sugar levels as (go on, guess)... a can of Coke. Buy it because you like drinking it. It’s a good reason.

In non-dairy, almond milk, not oat milk, tops the market, at $1.3 billion in 2019, with soy milk next at $194 million. Any objections to almond milk concern the amount of water required to develop the nut. 

It takes 1.1 gallon to produce one single almond. For 500g/1lb of them, it takes 1,900 gallons. (All varieties of nut require an equal amount.) 

The US is the world’s largest producer of almonds, at over 2 million tonnes a year. Spain follows, with just over a modest 200,000 tonnes. In California, almond production consumes 10% of the state’s water supply. Farmers growing almonds and represented by the Almond Board of California dispute that figure, asserting the reality is “considerably smaller” by as much, possibly, as 25%. Nevertheless, still an amount worth consideration.

This is not an argument for abandoning alt milk. It’s an argument for exercising curiosity. We’ve come to accept so much in our lives as real. Once we were shocked to learn that models in ads and fashion spreads had been photo-shopped. Now Deepfake synthetic media gives us Tom Cruise going doolally over lollipops and doing turtle impressions and Barack Obama calling Donald Trump a “complete dipshit” - 8,400,000 views and counting.

While you may want to make consumer decisions that benefit your health or the health of the planet, if the profit health of a product is shaky, it just won’t get manufactured, even if it would benefit you and the planet. 

Before you swallow anything, do your research. Just as you should with everything you follow on social media. Make your shopping list choices on the basis of how satisfied you are with the facts you’ve been fed by the food business. Or just because you like the product. Not because it’s sick. Sorry… ‘on (foodie) trend’. 

It’s a shame that milk puddings came out of the era not so long ago when British food was disgusting, and sponge puddings given names like Spotted Dick. Made properly, rice pudding is a glory. Even if all you want to eat is its gooey vanilla-caramel skin.

Serves 4

2 level tablespoons Arborio, short grain or Carolina rice
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla essence or the seeds scraped out of a vanilla pod
565ml/1 pint whole milk or your favourite alt milk
1 tablespoon softened butter + more for greasing

Preheat oven to 160C/320F.

Put all the ingredients except the butter into a 565ml/1 pint greased baking dish. Dot with the butter and bake uncovered for an hour or more, until there’s a nice caramel coloured crust on top and the rice has become creamy. Eat with cream and sugar. So comforting. 

If you want to leave the house, set the oven at its lowest heat. Bring all the ingredients to the boil in a pan then pour them into a buttered baking dish and bake the rice pudding for 5 hours.