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Food and drink

To nuke - or not to nuke, that is the question

Every time you travel, your mind opens up to something new, right? At least mine did on a recent whirlwind trip to England - more than once the old synapses were pop-pop-popping.

Lucky me, I got to stay with old friend, bon vivant and former long-time Whistlerite, Jan Gavin, at her charming home surrounded by an even more charming garden in Hampshire. It was fascinating to meander through Jane Eyre's house nearby, explore the white three-storey cocoon of the new Darwin Centre in London - and discover no nukes, at least in the kitchens I visited.

What's this?, I said the second morning at Jan's house as I spied the porridge pot sitting on the back of the stove with the remainders of the previous day's brekkie inside, waiting to be re-warmed. No microwave?

Having lived half her life in Canada and half in Europe, Jan was less incredulous and more gracious than many in her position would have otherwise been, for she well knows that one wouldn't dream of building a new house here in North America without the de rigueur microwave oven installed.

Heck, even old houses have them. Our 1926 special was renovated in 1973, complete with what must have been one of the first microwave ovens in B.C. - a shiny black and chrome Amana Radarange that looked like something from a Buck Rogers space mobile when we moved in nearly 30 years later. It still had the original owner's manual with it.

But a microwave oven for reheating porridge - or anything food-like - in Jan's equally old but renovated home? No way, she explained, no one in England or for that matter in Europe has them, at least very few, ever since Russia reported on their negative impacts, including how they interfere with the nutritional value of food.

Another old friend, bon vivant but current long-time Whistlerite, Joan Richoz, confirms same. The family regularly visit Marcel's friends and relatives in Switzerland, where nary a microwave oven is in sight.

"Not that I've been in all the kitchens in Switzerland," Joan says with a laugh. "But they're all off anything like that (microwaves).

"Plus have you have you ever seen how tiny their kitchens are?"

Of course, Joan and I realize such reportage is purely anecdotal, but its veracity lies in other considerations, not the least of which is lifestyle and custom.

To whit Joan doesn't have a microwave oven either - mainly because, like those darned Europeans, she doesn't have all this frozen food she's heating up all the time. (How well I remember one Parisian hotel manager passionately warning my friend and I to steer clear of all those, what he dubbed, tourist restaurants - every single one of them - in the Latin Quarter because they all served - quelle horreur - frozen food.)

Not that any of us gauche Canadians really cook in our microwave ovens. I don't think we know how. Most of us use them to heat up our coffee, our leftovers, our leftover porridge.

Meats turn out grey and soggy. And cooking veggies remains a mysterious challenge, as Joan learned when staying in a condo-hotel: don't try to microwave a beet to speed up its cooking time - it turns into a shriveled, dried-up lump, a shadowy husk of its former garden-fresh self, she warns.

So why do these things happen? First you have to understand how a microwave oven cooks. Essentially, says Harold McGee in On Food and Cooking , it transfers heat through electromagnetic radiation, with one ten-thousandth of the energy produced by the infrared radiation from a source like a conventional stove or those glowing embers from long-ago cooking fires.

Cooking, after all, is simply the transfer of energy from a heat source into the food so that the food molecules move faster and faster and collide harder and harder. The reaction forms new structures and flavours. While infrared rays pack enough energy to increase the vibratory movement of all the molecules, microwaves tend to impact only what are called polar molecules - molecules that are electrically unsymmetrical, like water molecules.

We humans are 60 per cent water, raw meat is about 75 per cent water and fruits and veggies are up to 95 per cent water.

Foods that contain water are heated directly and rapidly by microwaves. Foods that don't contain as much water have a whole other reaction.

As for that meat that never browns in a microwave oven, it's because the air in the microwave oven and the surface of that cooking utensil you placed the meat on are not polar molecules and so they are unaffected by the microwaves. If your dish in the microwave gets hot, it's because the food touching it has heated it up, not the radiation itself.

Microwaves cannot brown foods unless they essentially dehydrate them because the food surface gets no warmer than the interior. As well, since microwaves can penetrate the food to a depth of about an inch, while infrared energy is just absorbed at the surface, the speedier heating that usually takes place causes greater fluid loss, and so a drier texture. Ergo the shriveled beet - and sometimes shriveled meats, too.

As for that Russian study on how bad microwave ovens are, I could find many a reference on Google, but none of the sources seemed reliable. In fact, the vast majority of them circulated the same text over and over, verbatim, which always raises my eyebrow, especially when they contain blatant errors, such as citing the Nazi Germans for inventing microwave ovens, when the patent is held by a U.S. doctor, who first used microwaves to pop corn in 1945. And here you thought Orville Redenbacher's' stuff was a relatively new thing.

Still, I have to confess, I've warmed up to new food warming habits lately. Now I keep my porridge pot on the back burner to reheat the next day and I barely find a leftover I can't warm in a pot on the stove or in my toaster oven. It all feels very Euro, and satisfying.

 

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who still won't stand beside a microwave oven when it's on. (Did you hear the one about the poodle...?)