Assorted Afflatuses

Nigella Lawson — the slightly hipper, more down-to-earth British equivalent of our Martha Stewart — has long been mocked for using uncommon ingredients in her recipes, among other peculiarities. (This article from the Guardian does a particularly good job). Granted, I tend to watch Nigella Express more to hear how she communicates than anything else. Ms. Lawson has a preternatural ability to extemporaneously devise incredibly witty phrases. Or, perhaps, she simply has a very good team of writers and an excellent cue card holder.

But back to the ingredients. On this week's episode, for her ice cream cake, Ms. Lawson made use of some newfangled chocolate-peanut butter swirl chips from Nestlé's American Toll House subsidiary. According to her, the chocolate-peanut butter chips have come to market so recently that one cannot purchase them anywhere in the United Kingdom, save the Internet.

Something about that proclamation impelled me to do a little research and, after a few minutes of sleuthing, I stumbled upon VeryBestBaking.com, the online home of Nestlé's US food products branch. I clicked on the "Toll House" page and, lo and behold, there were the "all-new" swirled chocolate-peanut butter morsels.

Having tracked down the hybrid morsels, my curiosity led me to investigate Ms. Lawson's claim that the somewhat off-putting mixed chips could not be found in the UK. But before I managed to track down the Nestlé page for the UK, I stumbled upon the French food products, at nestle.fr.

The difference French and American websites speaks to what is wrong with American diets. Visitors to VeryBestBaking.com can select from a wide variety of absolutely revolting recipes, ranging from Tuna Casserole — complete with condensed cream of mushroom soup and a potato chip topping — to a baked Dijon Chicken that would make someone in Dijon very sick and very unhealthy. On the other hand, Nestle.fr features dishes like pan-seared salmon with potato gratin and hazelnut-pancetta-Mimolette risotto. Delicious!

Before people have liposuction or a gastric bypass, they might consider spending a little more time in the kitchen, preparing real food, instead of loafing on the couch and eating some disgusting pile of sludge that took five fewer minutes to prepare. Pharmaceutical and medical research dollars ought to go towards something that might make a real difference, like cancer research, not an effort to find a fix for a problem that already has a solution.