Day 21 – And Now For Something Completely Different

“An athlete with disordered eating doesn’t see food as fuel that helps build her body, but as calories and fat. In their world, food has become a four letter word. When they start asking if ketchup has sugar in it, I know we are in trouble“

~ Lisa Dorfman

216.4 lbs

This is new… today I discovered that I don’t really want to eat. When I imagined doing this project I pictured myself pacing the living room, conjuring images of succulent feasts in my head as I waited for the 100 days to be over. But here I am, 3 weeks into it, and I found myself sitting on the couch with a bowl of stew in front of me…. tasty, nice texture, nutritious, and all that… thinking that the idea of eating it was as appealing as a book on parenting by Michael Jackson (…what … too soon?)

The food in my cupboard and fridge now looks like functional, necessary stuff rather than a collection of appetizing delights. I started to think about how weird it is that we consider certain things food, and how they ended up as such.

Take ketchup, f’rinstance. Did someone just think one day “hey, I’ll mash a bunch of tomatoes into paste, add a buttload of salt and sugar, and pour it onto meaty things!”

Well, no.

Ketchup (or catsup, if your name starts with M and rhymes with Montgomery Burns) was, back in the late 17th century, ke tsiap; a Chinese concoction bearing absofrigginlutely no resemblance to modern ketchup. It was made with pickled fish and spices. Hey – they’d already invented clocks, gunpowder, and paper… not all their inventions could be winners.

For some reason people found this spicy pickled fish stuff so appetizing it spread to Malaysia, where British sailors started eating this interesting kechap stuff. They began bringing it back to merry olde England and by the early 18th century the sauce – now called ketchup – was a staple. Elizabeth Smith’s The Compleat Housewife (© 1727) called for anchovies, shallots, vinegar, white wine, cloves, ginger, mace, nutmeg, pepper, and lemon peel.

Notice tomatoes aren’t on that list. It was another 63 years before someone thought “you know what this pickled fish and spice stuff could use? Some tomatoes.” See, tomatoes happen to be related to belladonna and nightshade plants, and those two happen to be toxic. So In the past, people had thought eating tomatoes would be like eating rat poison pie with cyanide sprinkles. Even when tomatoes started appearing in ketchup, some folks must’ve still been wary because mushroom ketchup began showing up around that same time. (That must have been interesting: “Tomatoes are poisonous! Unlike mushrooms, which we know are all perfectly safe…”) You can still find mushroom ketchup through specialty retailers, rumour has it.

Of course making tomato ketchup at home, as with mayonnaise and other condiments we now assume just magically appear on grocery store shelves, was a major pain in the arse. So in 1875 a chap called Henry J. Heinz started manufacturing a bottled version. It was thin. It was salty. But not having to make ketchup from scratch was so appealing that Henry J whats-his-name got away with the slogan “Blessed relief for Mother and the other women of the household”. Catchy.

By the 1980s, Heinz ketchup was in 1 of every 2 households in the US. No word on whether that includes a fish and spice kind.