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The power of prunes
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Nov. 5, 1999 |
Now it is the 90s, and the growers would give great amounts of prune profits to undo what their forebears have done. "The stigma has carried over to the point where we don't even want to talk about it any more," says Jim Degen, a food and beverage marketing consultant retained by the California Prune Board to spruce up the geriatric image of Prunus domesticus. It isn't so much that the growers are embarrassed. It's this: "Most eaters" -- Degen divides the world into prune "eaters" and "noneaters" -- "are 60-plus, and they're dying off. We have to go after the younger market." The Prune Board's first step was to move away from the ill-connoted word. Don't say prunes. Say dried plums. (Unless you are in a photo shoot. "Prunes" is what photographers tell models to say to make them have kissy-lips. Saying "dried plums" makes you look like a llama and is unlikely to advance your modeling career.) Mary Roach Mary Roach's column appears in Salon Health & Body every other Friday.
The Board's next step was to dream up new and non-bathroom-related uses for their product. What dried plums do well, or more specifically what the fiber in them does well, is absorb water. As in your intestines, so in food items: It makes the product moister. What kind of products need added moisture? Processed meats, for one. "Any food," said Degen, "that's precooked, frozen and reheated." This puts us squarely in the realm of institutionalized foods and makes prunes excellent fodder for the USDA Commodities Procurement Branch. This is the program that buys up enormous lots of surplus produce, meats and dairy goods, and distributes them free or cheap to the feeders of captive eaters: nursing homes, prisons, public schools, hospitals. (Last year the U.S. government bought 252,000 pounds of surplus pitted dry prunes.) To this end, Degen has contracted meat science professionals to come up with prototypes of prune-enhanced cafeteria entrees: prune meatloaf, prune sausages, prune turkey meatballs, prune hamburgers and frankfurters. The recipes for the bold new prune foods were formulated by a processed meats expert in the Texas A&M meat science program named Jim Keeton. I asked Keeton if he found the addition of prune puree to frankfurter and hamburgers to be a strange or distressing idea. He did not. "It's something that would not be harmful, but yet contributes a functional attribute to the product." Coming from a processed meats man, this is probably as close as you get to a gush. Keeton went on to say that you can't actually taste the prune puree, and that he found the prune meat products quite good. Mind you, this is a man who reads the Journal of Food Texture and who would, given the chance, try cow udder, one of the few "variety meats" forbidden from use in American sausages and processed meats. (Lungs are another no-no, though salivary glands are OK.)
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