DIET | DETECTIVE^®

What's cooking in your restaurant's kitchen? Maybe nothing. High-maintenance meal preparation is out—factory foods are in.

These days much of the food we buy and serve at home comes from a factory. Entire meals from soup to nuts can be prepared by using only a can opener and microwave. That is one reason we eat in restaurants.

Restaurant food is cooked to order by a staff that spends hours chopping, dicing, rolling, braising, sautéing and garnishing the foods that end up on our plate. Or do they?

I spent an afternoon at a trade show for restaurants. The floor of an enormous exposition hall was filled with seemingly endless displays and samples of machine made foods that are sold "ready to serve." Pastas in the shape of butterflies or fish with gaudy stripes and filled with mixtures of lobster and mushrooms or artichokes, whimsical appetizers in the shape of tiny purses filled with smoked salmon, Italian wedding soup, Maryland corn and crab chowder, lobster bisque, crab cakes, Chinese spring rolls, Polish dumplings, Jamaican pasties, French sauces and elaborate cakes and pies. Plastic packaged vegetables already chopped, diced, sliced and cleaned were displayed next to a table containing pre-mixed salads in plastic: chicken, potato, egg, tuna, mock crab meat and pasta. Pizza manufacturers, bagel and muffin makers, and breaded clam mixtures were everywhere.

Restaurants buy commercially prepared foods to reduce labor costs, ensure consistent quality and food safety, and minimize waste. If no one orders the wild mushroom and asparagus ravioli or the iced mango soup, they are not thawed out or microwaved. Menus can be varied by calling up a food broker and ordering the entrees.

So when you go out to a restaurant for a "cooked to order" meal, assume that in most cases, the food was cooked to order but the order came off of a computer in a factory rather than your waitperson's order pad.

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