I am a faithful person. Once I commit myself into doing something, I keep that commitment no matter what.

That is why after several months of committing to a lifestyle of eating only local, whole, organic, beyond organic, fresh foods, I found myself enjoying a Big Mac and an extra large order of fries.

Just kidding.

But in the two weeks that I haven’t been posting here (I was busy with guests the whole time), I have been subjected to several questionable food choices. First among many is commercial cake.

In those two weeks, after my French food cooking adventure, I attended lots of breakfasts, lunches, and dinners with my guests and in most of these occasions there were cakes.

Though it is easy to pinpoint the bad foods in a restaurant menu or a dinning table, there is no way of telling if cakes are on my side or the devil’s. In the case of Devil’s Food Cake, there’s no question.

But how about Angel’s Food Cake? Is it really as pure and angelic as it sounds? If so, why are people often use words like guilt and sinful whenever they have this cake in their mouths?

New York Cheese Cake: Is it really that local?

Pound Cake: a pound gained for every box eaten?

The truth is, in those two weeks, I have eaten cake. Now I feel like going to confession.

How bad is commercial cake? Sure, when you buy a box, the ingredients are there. But it doesn’t say what actual sweetener they used, or what kind of eggs they included, or if the milk is laden with hormones and antibiotics. There’s really no way to find out unless I bug the store or the baker about it – a move I won’t do unless I want spit or other body fluids in my Black Forest.

In itself, cake is processed food.  It is a combination of whole ingredients that dissolve and into one another to form one product that has been a regular in almost every table on earth. From royal palaces to peasant tables, cake is the ultimate symbol of celebration. Try having a birthday bash without a cake see how it feels. I’ve had one such birthday party. It was every bit like having a bachelor’s party with your fiancée present. No sense at all.

Most good cakes come from non-organic sources. Whole Foods Market sells a wide array of cakes made from, they claim, organic ingredients. With this, should I shun the other bakeshops that use conventional things? The Carnegie Deli NY Cheesecake, should I forever say no to that? Magnolia Bakery? Crumbs?

Or if my hardcore paranoia even suspects Whole Foods, should I start making my own cake like I make my own bread? What course to take, I don’t know yet, but let me have my cake!

It is snow day today and I am working from home while listening to the complete discography of the Beatles and making Honey Oat Nut Wheat Bread.

Currently my bread still needs 35 minutes in the oven and my turntable is spinning The Magical Mystery Tour (I started this morning with The Beatles’ Decca Tapes and plans to finish with Abbey Road).

A while back I posted a link about Whole Foods selling organic items from China and it made me look at the organic superstore with renewed suspicion.

I mean, Whole Foods is okay in the sense that they sell local and mostly organic items, which supports the local farmers. But to participate in the global free-trade racket by selling products from who knows where and pricing these products cheaper than the local products is beyond me.

This practice only makes Whole Foods a rich man’s Walmart.

Yes, Walmart sells organic as well as products from any other place reachable by a cargo plane, but cheaper than any store in the country.

Likewise, I cannot explain why Whole Foods is selling foods that aren’t whole at all. Chips? Yuppie Health Bars?

PS: Google appears to be crashing down in this bad weather. Can’t access any of their sites: Youtube, Google Search, Google Mail. Etc. Or could it be my Internet provider?

What do you want to eat, something clean or something delicious?

I have been asked this question many times and very often my answers were non-committal shrugs. It is a trick question–and a discriminating one too.

If I opt for the clean option, then I am pretty sure that the questioner would, in no time, reduce me to a breathing stereotype like clockwork: A well-groomed guy with Republican leanings, who proposes love on first dates hoping to quickly level up from the realm of virgins to the plateau of sex studs; listens to John Denver and thinks that General Tso’s chicken is an actual recipe concocted by Chairman Mao himself that’s why it sucks; eats wonder bread, finds joy in acid wash comfort fit jeans, and sports a bouncy flaming mullet.

On the other hand, if I go for the delicious option, I might turn up more exciting: A rebel who eats risk for lunch and fancies himself as a sex machine who has the gift of contorting the human body to angles even a protractor would find difficulty to measure; a foodie who appreciates world cultures, eats anything in sight regardless of dirt or odor, dabbles in painting and poetry, finds revelation in the lyrics of a 14^th street subway folk singer, and bald as Telly Savalas.

This is why I shrug. I am neither of those types. I am just a caveman who wants a real meal.

So when I am presented with something believed to be delicious but obviously unclean and foul smelling, I think. Hard.

Enter, cheese.

There are two kinds of cheese in this world: The smelly and the clean.

The clean cheeses are packaged in nice yellow boxes with nutritional claims adorning the labels. Other clean cheeses are in re-sealable plastic containers of different forms and sizes: long sticks, big balls, flat squares, and shredded. These dairy products are industry clean and have passed all the required food safety tests with high marks. Most of these cheeses are soft and wholesome smelling. They go by monikers such as cheese sticks, cheez wiz, cheese food, processed cheese etc.

The other kind of cheese is from a different universe: The smelly ones. These seem like coming straight from the damp socks of the cheese makers. Putrid, hard, crumbly, and teeming with bacteria, these dairy products can scare off even malnourished rats.

Plus, the thoughtless thin cellophane packaging of these goodies doesn’t make it more appealing. The marketing doesn’t pull you in and the smell pushes you out.

The odd thing, though, is that these olfactory dilemmas are thrice more expensive than their clean cheese food cousins.

As I am writing this blog, I am actually confronted by this.

I am packing lunch and I have a bag of salad greens, some oil and vinegar, and a choice of these two kinds of cheese for toppings. On one side I have a grated cheese product that came straight from the refrigerated isle of my local Shoprite. On the other is a Gruyere from a nearby Whole Foods Market.

Under careful scrutiny, the cheaper grated cheese food has more ingredients than the Gruyere. It has milk, enzymes, cultures, color, dry milk, whey solids, anhydrous milkfat, polysaccharide, xanthan gum, carrageenan, potato starch, powdered cellulose, and natamycin.

The stinky cheese has four ingredients: raw cow’s milk, milk cultures, enzymes, and salt.

So, what I’m going to do is make two sets so I would know which one of the two dairy products is tastier in a salad. Of course, at the back my mind, I am thinking, well, aren’t they just the same with the other one being a signature version of the other? Well, I would know later. Also, I will share my lunch to my co-workers and ask for their opinion. I will blog the results later. Certainly I won’t tell them which salad has the more expensive cheese.

Would they be able to tell by how my food smells? Or would they look at my feet instead?