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New York readies for big switch: No trans fats in foods

Healthy food from Chipotle in Medford, Massachusetts, are shown in a December 2006 photo. PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE

Say you are given a choice of two cookies. One is made with butter, the other with partially hydrogenated vegetable oil (PHVO). Both have the same amount of calories from fat. Which do you choose?

If you picked the butter cookie, you can keep eating. But the one made with PHVO, as it is known in the trade, is forbidden come July 1, when the final stage of the New York City health department’s ban of artificial (but not naturally occurring) trans fat in restaurant food goes into effect.

Such is the complicated — some say culturally biased — world of trans fat regulation. Old-fashioned Crisco has been outlawed in the interest of reducing heart disease because of its so-called industrial fat content (though there is a new replacement on the market), but many of the ingredients your grandmother warned you about — including butter, palm oil and lard — are back in style and completely legal.

New York City has officially embraced the mantra that natural is better, forcing restaurants and other commercial food purveyors to add baked goods to fried foods among those that must be free of trans fat or risk fines up to US$2,000.

To calm the fears of restaurateurs that their business may suffer, city officials have set up a veritable trans fat industrial complex in the 18 months since the ban was announced.

HELP CENTER

They created a Trans Fat Help Center, complete with telephone hotline and Web site, notransfatnyc.org, and hired a former senior editor for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Laura Stanley, to run it. Stanley, who is paid through a three-year US$650,000 contract with the hospitality management school at the Brooklyn-based New York City College of Technology, has conducted a series of workshops for food preparers on how to adapt.

The city’s health department has also enlisted the American Institute of Baking, based in Kansas, to perfect trans fat-free bulk recipes for chewy chocolate cookies (trans fat-free shortenings tended to make the cookies too crispy), durable pie crust and other comfort foods, to prove to skeptics that the textures and “mouth feel” they love can be accomplished without trans fats.

The institute tested oils, shortenings and margarines from six manufacturers to analyze the color, crumb, mouth feel and the way they cut and taste in recipes for pie crusts, croissants, Danish, layer cakes, pound cakes, cookies and sweet buns, until Stanley was satisfied that the results would convince restaurants that they could make the transition.

Since New York announced its trans fat ban, officials from about a dozen other cities, including Boston, Philadelphia and Seattle, have called the Trans Fat Help Center for advice in implementing their own bans.

Stanley, a trim, disarmingly frank woman in her 40s with a culinary degree and a pedagogic streak, is a tireless campaigner for her cause and has made a habit of dropping into restaurants as she travels around the city.

One recent day, after going to a nearby gym to work out, she dropped in on Paul and Jackie Haye, owners of Christie’s Jamaican Patties, a storefront shop in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. Haye said that when he received a health department bulletin about eight months ago outlining the impending ban and attendant penalties, he considered reverting to lard but was wary, because lard “has high cholesterol, so we try not to mess with it.”

Since he received the bulletin, Haye, 47, has converted his Jamaican beef patty dough, coco bread, rock cake and other recipes he inherited from his uncle — who began the business 40 years ago — from BBS shortening (it’s partially hydrogenated) to a trans fat-free shortening sold by Admiration Foods, which he found at Restaurant Depot, a popular food service supply company. He said in a recent interview that the transition has been easier than he expected: Customers seem not to have noticed any difference.

PSYCHOTHERAPIST

Executives at the city’s bigger bakeries and chains have also gotten to know Stanley personally. Stuart Zaro, president of Zaro’s New York Bakery, described her as a kind of kitchen psychotherapist to whom he could express a few good-natured gripes.

He recalls complaining to her about what he estimates as a 20 percent increase in cost to bake without trans fats and the clerical work involved in documenting his company’s conversion to the holy grail of trans fat-free baking.

Bakeries like his must now fill out “spec sheets” for each recipe, listing ingredients by weight from heaviest to lightest, along with the trans-fat content, for, say, German chocolate cake. Small amounts of PHVO, shortening or margarine, less than half a gram per serving, are permitted.

The ingredient lists are for city inspectors, not the public. For a bakery that makes as many items as Zaro’s, “it’s going to be like the size of War and Peace,” Zaro said.

Zaro said the toughest recipe to adapt to the new regime had been chocolate chip cookies, which were too hard at first, but “we got it done and it’s done.”
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