Sauce People
An ode to taking it up a notch.
Apparently the FDA has decided to drop its regulations regarding French dressing. I did not know, but the ingredients allowed to enter a product labeled “French dressing” must adhere to strict specifications. Only certain vegetables, oils, and spices qualify, much to the chagrin of big salad. Lobbyists have long begged for this change, arguing that the antiquated guidelines, which date back many decades, fail to keep pace with the evolving preferences of French dressing consumers, whatever that means.
With the requirements taken away, I would venture we have entered the wild west era of French dressing. Now, nothing is stopping some company from slapping a French dressing label onto a bottle of ranch and putting it onto shelves. Let true unmitigated chaos reign. Mayonnaise, it appears, is one of the other few products regulated so intensely by the FDA, which I guess makes a little more sense. Mayo, although having its variations yes, largely should be the same product chemically regardless of who makes it. When we go to a store and buy a jar of mayo, or more realistically order a dab of mayo on a sandwich or as a dipping sauce, we have clearly defined expectations. Diverge too much, and you risk a skeptical “is this mayo?” coupled with a stuck out tongue. French dressing, on the other hand… An ambiguous brown liquid.
I don’t even like sauces, in general. “Who doesn’t like sauces?” you might ask. Fair question. To clarify, I wouldn’t say that I dislike sauces, but rather I am distinctly not a sauce person. And there definitely are sauce people. I remember them, in the middle school cafeteria, certain friends who who would pick up three or four of those little plastic cups and fill each one with a different sauce. Ketchup, mustard, mayo, BBQ, honey mustard. They would place them in a defensive armada on their garish green trays, in service to some central food item. A semicircle of condiments surrounding a mini tub of not quite crispy enough French fries. The USS Idaho, a spudly vessel. When the volume of sauces on a plate starts to outnumber that of the actual food items, I think you have a problem. I didn’t say anything though. Out of courtesy. Even then I knew, there are sauce people and non sauce people. I figured I should respect our differences.
More generally, I do tend to like plainly seasoned foods. The reason for this, though it may sound contradictory at first, is that plainly seasoned foods give you access to a wider spectrum of flavors. Sauces and spices, on one hand, do provide an added burst, and can make a bland dish more palatable. However, they also overpower the actual taste of the food in a lot of cases. Since the array of mass produced sauces available under most circumstances remains limited, if you come to rely on putting sauce on everything, your options for flavor contract to maybe a dozen different ones at most. Also, sauces have strong tastes, for the most part, which I think can make it harder to appreciate subtle ones which lots of foods have. Sauce people are constantly looking for the next level of kick. It’s like some people who have developed a preference for super spicy food, and, by elevating the level of spice they are capable of dealing with, they have lost the ability to enjoy lower levels of spice. I think a similar phenomenon holds true for sauces. No matter how many sauces you buy, the number of distinct flavors available in foods themselves will continue to outnumber the variety of sauce options.
“But what if I combine several sauces together?” you ask. Surely this makes the amount of possible flavors limitless. They multiply with the number of individual sauces you have, and quickly approach infinity. Let’s be real though. Sauce mixes most of the time fail miserably. Like mixing paints, they end up French dressing brown. Sure, there might be a few solid ones. Mayo, I think, notably mixes well with all sorts of things. However, the vast majority of combos probably should never happen. A large subset of those I am sure will taste actively gross. Aside from tending to like plainly seasoned foods, I also tend to like flaming hot takes, apparently.
Being a chef must be hard because your entire reputation can sink on one bad dish. A momentary lapse in attention can lead to a breakdown in quality, and before long the local health inspectors are breaking down your door. It must be stressful. I don’t think that this dynamic really applies to any other profession which creates things regularly. Maybe a construction worker, but that is more of a team effort, and all sorts of processes exist to test and ensure the stability of a building. We don’t leave those sorts of things to chance, since whether or not a building can stand has potentially life or death implications for those inside of it. Food, on the other hand, gets more slack. Most of the visible issues people will detect before they put it into their mouth. Contamination forms the major exception, I guess, since it’s hard to diagnose until someone gets food poisoning. Even then, assuming they ate several different things, it’s hard to pinpoint the contamination back to a certain dish. You can always blame it on bad salad greens. They issue recalls for those over salmonella all the time nowadays. Still, chefs have it rough. Take singers or musical artists for example. They can produce absolutely terrible songs, but, as long as they have one or two hits, people will continue to listen. A bad song just gets ignored or forgotten about. I would bet that 90% of an artist’s songs could be actively terrible, and nobody would care so long as the remaining 10% were great.
Something I find really funny is people’s conspiracy theories about how certain mass marketed food products have changed in subtle ways without the company ever announcing it. I don’t mean how McDonalds changed their fries from animal fat to vegetable oil, a well publicized yet controversial shift, but rather these suspicions that a food has changed under cover of darkness. For example, and I made this one up, someone might suggest that the cheese in Cheez-It®s became distinctly sharper in September of last year, and ever since then has just not tasted the same. They might call the company’s phone support line to ask, or start a Reddit thread in hopes of finding like-minded Cheez-It® fans aghast at the same thing.
Oreos used to be milk’s favorite cookie, but have become so aversive to milk that now they remain hard even minutes after being submerged in the cow liquid. But wouldn’t it depend on the milk itself too? Skim and 2% may well be water and oil. This is a complicated chemical interaction. We need to standardize the milk, to have some sort of control as we experiment by dipping different Oreos produced at different times. The older ones would probably have grown stale though, which would influence the findings. Wow, science is hard. If only we had a time machine to hop back in yearly intervals and pick up a box of Oreos at each stop. Only then could we hope to get to the bottom of this dastardly crime against humanity. Do surreptitious changes to the Oreo recipe fall under the purview of the International Criminal court? If not, well they should. Thank god for faceless internet forums users who surface issues like this. Such is the power of the internet and anonymity. This is why we need blockchain. Do we trust the deep state not to suppress the Oreo whistleblowers? Commercial atrocities like cost cutting changes to the recipes for our favorite snack staples would proliferate if not for the anonymous everyman. A crowd of faces in their Guy Fawkes mask, holding the powers at be to account until the Oreos go back to how they should be and all becomes right again in the world.
