I caught this in a recent Times story on quick meals that immigrants make:
“She also makes a tangy lentil dish spiced with mustard and sweetened with brown sugar that she serves with fried eggs. ”
In this case, a Hungarian immigrant. Any ideas?
Posts Tagged ‘nutrition’
Recipe Please?
In various on February 12, 2009 at 12:45 amCan’t You See I’m Busy?
In various on September 3, 2008 at 6:59 pmBetween work, @fakejohnmccain and @fakesarahpalin I so do not have time to be reading about GM Foods, but the kid brother says these are worth a looksee:
AB 541 could mean that farmers can’t be sued by Monsanto when GM seeds blow into their fields and end up in their harvest. No word on whether farmers can sue Monsanto for contamination. And, a District Court judge in San Francisco actually stood up to Monsanto.
So things aren’t all hopeless, even if we are looking down the nose of an anti-choice veep who is nonetheless proud of the choice her own daughter has made. Not the one to throw years of abstinence-only education down the tubes, mind you. A friend of mine was, recently, talking about her grandmother’s abortions (several, each in a regular old hospital) and how profoundly those compared with her mother’s abortion (for which she had to leave the country). At the risk of restating an obvious point, I’d love to be able to say that everyone should just leave Bristol and Levi alone to live their lives except that I would really like Commander of the Alaska National Guard Palin to go out on a limb and tell us all whether she has any new insights on the general effectiveness of abstinence-only education.
Back to work, though.
Pickles, politics, unfinished thoughts.
In various on August 9, 2008 at 2:15 pmMy Korean turnip pickles came out (Salt, garlic, onions, jalapeno, turnips and some beets for pinky goodness. That and a week of fermentation.) delightfully tart and garlicky. Madhur Jaffrey still kind of rocks.
So that is one thing. Another is that I need a ladies bike for the next few weeks since our smaller guest bike is in no shape to be taken to a shop and we managed to put off taking it in for far too long anyway.
And, I had a dream about a girl in a cage last night. Somewhere between finally seeing Persepolis this week and reading Reading Lolita in Tehran I shouldn’t be surprised. Both, though, have me thinking about revolution, faith and tyranny. I keep comparing it to a student production of A Bright Room Called Day that I saw with Adam a decade ago (which reminds me of the fact that somehow someone had convinced one of us who convinced the other that Tony Kushner is an african american woman and a heterosexual to boot, which was a source of incredible confusion and is also totally not true) and also of When the War Was Over. I need to get out into this sunny Saturday, so if you want to talk about the fall of Weimar, the Shah and Lon Nol or about a politically engaged middle class welcoming a revolution that will destroy them, about denial, about power, about faith and disbelief and unspeakable horrors you can find me at summer streets.
I Don’t Like to Think of it as Ranting (that is, my thoughts on Monsanto and general support for the hypothesis that they are evil)
In various on July 14, 2008 at 3:03 pmA little bird forwarded me this today with a note about my Monsanto rantings. Note to Monsanto: if you don’t want to be the poster child for unadulterated corporate evil, you could just be less evil.
So let’s see if we’ve got this straight: the Monsanto company produces a synthetic growth hormone called Posilac, used by some dairy farmers, which juices cows to produce more milk. Lots of people don’t want this in their milk, for compelling reasons. Dairy farmers that do not use the recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) almost invariably state that on their milk carton labels. You, the consumer, get useful info. But since the FDA would not allow Monsanto to ban rBGH labeling nationally, the dirtbags have been going state-by-state to pass legislation that would ban the labeling. They’re now trying to do it in New York; they need to be stopped.
Okay fine, you say there is no evidence that rBGH is bad for you. Or me. So if you have nothing to hide, dearies, why are you so afraid of being searched? I want to know what is in my milk. I’ll decide whether or not it is good for me or the rivers.
For the Red Wine Files
In various on June 5, 2008 at 3:14 pmIn a surprising scientific development, it seems that red wine may be good for you in small quantities.
Or, I’m sorry, is that not surprising at all?
Making Up For It
In various on June 4, 2008 at 6:54 pmMy knee hurts, my neck hurts, there’s no milk for my tea and the quiche I bought for lunch because my lunch date canceled was just so-so. However, between this (via Jenna) and that, I think I’ll live.
Also, I’ve joined Arif’s food writing cabal.
Forever, and other Loose Ends
In various on May 18, 2008 at 10:44 pmLouisa said that when she starts making lists she’s trying to make the best of not loving what is all around her. So then I stopped making lists, too. I’ve always been easily swayed.
But then I realized that I just want to let you know, just a thing or two. That I’m mesmerized by the things strangers wear. Muddy carrots and too many spring onions, Miranda July.
Also, after a few run-ins with rechargeable batteries that don’t, I do finally have pictures of the bodum cozy. They’re on Flickr, first, but I’m installing gallery. Flickr is cooler, for sure, but I started feeling wiggly after the Yahoo buyout, and then, this last week, the talk of Microsoft … I need to start weening myself.
A Wee Run Down
In Stating the Obvious on March 24, 2008 at 4:48 amI was telling some lovely people, just this afternoon, about how my original purpose here was to keep track of just how many times scientists can possibly re-discover that red wine and chocolate are good for you in moderation. I was telling them this because I just read two articles (both in Harpers) that speak to a piece of the thesis.
- Tasmanian devils afflicted with a contagious cancer. Moral of the story: lack of biodiversity can really fuck with your immune system. Or, rather, your immune system can only function if you are a little bit different from the people you share germs (or viruses or cancerous cells) with. Industrial agriculture might be damn efficient when it works, but we’re inviting famine by basing a nation’s diet on a corn monocrop. Meanwhile, most news outlets seem to miss the point altogether. The story they tell is that there is new evidence that cancer could be contagious. They skip the whole part about the tiny gene pool among Tasmanian devils. Biodiversity.
- Also in Harper’s this month, a story about raw milk, pasteurization and replacing health with sterilization. About how healthy cows fed on grass aren’t nearly as prodigious as cows fed on protein slurry and shot full of antibiotics, and about how people who live antibacterial worlds have higher incidence of auto immune disorders. About how on a small scale, the sort of scale where dairy farming is truly sustainable, raw milk isn’t really so risky. About how on commercial dairy scales, we rely entirely on pasteurization to clean milk that is foul when it leaves the cow. Foul. Morals of the story: biodiversity is good for our guts, too. And a healthy immune system is one that is in balance, not one that has been scrubbed clean. We’re complicated ecosystems. One thing engineering won’t cut it.
- We rode out to Steve’s Authentic Key Lime Pies yesterday. Highly recommended, even if the limes do kind of fail the food shed test. Cooked up a fantasy that we could stop for a drink at LaNell’s. You can’t. You can buy a whole bottle of rye and take it with you to a quiet alley (we didn’t) but LaNell’s is a shop. I think we even knew that, and yet we persuaded ourselves.
I’m looking forward to Edible Manhattan. Will it hold the keys to midtown?
Also, I love that I know a secret handshake. When you meet a librarian, you can say things like “oh? you are a librarian? Why, Jenna Freedman is a friend of mine.” Try it. Jenna is more famous than I’d realized. Today I met someone who wrote a thesis on Jessamyn West. Thinking back, I wish I’d gotten more details. We did have a good conversation about my latest big question, which is something fascinating about how to do substantive things with data and databases instead of laying a bunch of shiny baubles out for the magpies.
Looking for Dinner in Midtown
In various on March 12, 2008 at 2:16 amThis is a puzzle that I have wished I’d solved before, one I know I’ll have to solve it again, so I’m looking for suggestions.
It goes about like this: our family is coming to town, and we’re to join them for dinner someplace not too terribly far from their Broadway matinée. Or, a variation on that theme, they’re staying someplace in the 30s on the East Side.
Since this is our town, we’re supposed to know where to eat, even if I can go weeks without traveling north of no Rio. My repertoire doesn’t include much north of 14th street.
I am hoping you can help. Here I am in a city famous for food. This shouldn’t be anywhere near as hard as it seems to be.
Local produce is great. Menus where the sole vegetarian option is not cheese+starch or fish. Because, I don’t know if you’ve noticed this but fishes, they are not like carrots.
And, if you know more than I about this sort of thing … what time does a proper matinée let out? Is it fair to say I’ll be waiting for them in the line outside Grimaldi’s?
Also, actually, I do eat fish. And beef and lamb and pork and pretty much anything once in a while when it is local and sustainably raised. Most fish, however, is neither. Most fish are either loaded with mercury or farmed, which can be profoundly damaging to the environment.
I once was lost …
In various on February 4, 2008 at 10:59 pmOctober 2006. I can’t find my winter coat so I just wear an extra sweatshirt. December 2006 I take everything out of the coat closet. January 2007, I cave and buy a new coat. This has driven me mad, though. Almost as mad as the pair of slacks (brown, a lovely blend of silk and wool) that disappeared from my apartment in Greenpoint sometime in 2001. How does a pair of pants just walk away? I don’t get it.
January 2008, a couple in Hawaii finds a message in a bottle that my brother tossed overboard in March of 2005. He made it sound like he might actually tell us more about where it started out and how he thinks it managed to avoid being ensnared in the Pacific’s famous texas sized flotsam mass. He’s still just promising that more is to come. Also, Brian and Betsy become betrothed (! congratulations!) and move in together.
February 2008, Germany and Brian clean out the last of the hall closets to make room for Jer’s new roommate.
My jacket is back.
Mornin’ Sunshine
In various on February 1, 2008 at 3:27 pmWhat I want to know today:
Where is worth eating near the Natural History Museum?
Where can I find a really good bran muffin near City Hall?
Why isn’t anyone pointing out that the only contender who actually had a halfway interesting urban agenda might have been forced out of the race by a whole lot of rural primaries? DMI is rocking their urban issues meme and GG is about to come out with a story, subject of: same, and no one seems to be pointing out that talking about cities won’t get you anywhere in Iowa or New Hampshire or Wyoming. Nevada, South Carolina, Florida, Michigan, Maine: not so much with the density. Granted, I’m actually lying about Florida and Michigan a little bit. They’ve got real cities, and Florida ranks pretty high when you rank states by urbanness. Still, the early race is a rural race.
I always bought into the convoluted fairness of the Iowa caucuses, it made a little of sense to me in a “if you don’t think about it too much” kind of way, and since electoral politics have never really captured my heart, I stopped about there. While I was home, though, my mother (who is pretty much always right. really.) said something offhand and I realized that there probably is something to the argument that the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries give undo clout to the needs of a pretty small minority of the American population. And that one of the repercussions is that the candidates who want to talk about cities don’t get much traction.
So that is what I’m thinking this morning. I’ll confess that the three (bran muffin, MNH, presidents) are taking up near abouts equal space.
Following the Corn Syrup
In various on January 21, 2008 at 10:37 pmTwo things I learned from Following the Bloom: One, migratory beekeepers aren’t particularly new. Two, honey bees are routinely fed corn syrup. Read the rest of this entry »
One Thing Engineering
In various on October 31, 2007 at 2:37 amThe other day I had a (virtual) conversation with Arif that went something like
Arif, to no one in particular: when did we become a nation that DIDN’T see the inherent problems with the practice of driving bees all over the country?
Me: Since forever, dude. Since we realized that Science can fix everything, one problem at a time. actually, as long as I’m quoting, what I said was really “Round about the time that we began routinely subscribing to one-size-fits-all solutions provided by experts, I think. ”
Arif: trucking bees all around the country to pollinate enormous farms.
insane. totally insane.
Me: it isn’t very articulate, but this shit always brings me back to memories of a trip to the Hoover Dam while I was in college. For some reason my friends and I decided to sit through the multimedia presentation in the Hoover Dam amphitheater thing. We sat there under portraits of Presidents past and listened to a recorded lecture and watched little lights go on and off on a scale model diorama of the Colorado River.
It was so simple and beautiful–the problem: floods are a pain in the ass for farmers. The solution? We built a dam. Now we control the Colorado River. Man 1, Nature 0. Thank you for listening and enjoy your visit to the Hoover Dam.
They didn’t talk about any of the massive ecological damage that the dam cost, both upstream and down. It was all about how we are so smart that we can apply our scientific and engineering prowess to any problem and it will be solved. Not enough bees? We’ll bring bees by truck. And so it was that Australia was overrun with jackrabbits, San Francisco with eucalyptus that turned out not to be any good for railroad ties anyhow.
All of which (the Hoover Dam part anyway) got me thinking about Megan and her blog that I had to swear off of (secret: that was my New Year’s resolution, swearing off of Megan’s blog. I don’t even know what to make of that.) because whenever she writes about relationships all hell breaks loose in the comments section and people start holding her up as this poster child for “if you don’t wear stockings, high heels and makeup and get your ass married by the time you are 22, you’ll live a life of pathetic sorrow, just look.” And, for reasons I can’t explain, I can’t not weigh in. I suddenly start imagining that it is worth my energy to persuade the random strangers on my friends’ old roommates’ blog. I stay up late thinking about it. It isn’t good. So I swore off, but like any good addict, the littlest things will send me back for more.
Today, I looked, and she has a whole post about One Thing Engineering, which is really what I meant. Not one size fits all, but one problem at a time. It is craziness and we perpetuate it.
Also, since I’m rambling a little here, I want to point out that a study came up this week that does indeed uphold my hypothesis. I just tried to search for it and found another study. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. A varied diet rich in whole grains, fruits and vegetables with a bit of fat, chocolate and red wine on the side, a moderate amount of exercise. That is all. You can call of your scientists, I’ve got it covered. I’m calling a vibrating platform the closest thing engineering can get to a moderate amount of exercise. We already knew this: the more active you are into your dotage, the less likely your poor bones are to succumb to osteoporosis. Break a sweat a few times a week, walk even though you’d get there faster by car. It is really simple.
PS, Megan, did I ever tell you that I seriously considered dropping PEIS for civil engineering? I did.
for the red wine files
In Stating the Obvious on October 23, 2006 at 8:56 pmred wine can help prevent stroke damage: study (Reuters, Oct 15, 06)
In which mice respond well to wine. Roughly, strokes hurt less.
Red wine, in moderation, is good for you. Where ever have I heard this before?
One day I’ll figure out how to explain that moderation to my mind comes out to a lot less than two glasses a day. I know that is the standard for moderation.
Feed Me
In various on August 16, 2006 at 8:04 pmI started this blog thinking I was going to write a lot more about food and diet and the basic theory that groundbreaking study upon earthshattering discovery seems to consistently confirm: that a balanced diet and some decadences in moderation are good for you. This shocking study has found that unsaturated fat is better for you than saturated fat. Whoah! Okay, so the big discovery is that small amounts of saturated fat have an impact quickly, but the big picture remains. Don’t eat processed food. Got it. It turns out that MSNBC is rife with this stuff. Another study has revealed that people who eat more vegetables get more vitamins, and that (I’m paraphrasing here) if you don’t eat a lot of rich food, but rather eat a lot of fruits and vegetables and whole grains, you can eat more with out getting fat. Whoah again! Vegetables have vitamins? Rich food is more filling? I’m shocked.
Meanwhile, I think I have Tracie McMillan to thank for the recent appearance of 2% milk at the New Millenium Grocery and Deli. She’ll say she only writes about it, but the truth is that without reporters who actually follow nutrition access nothing will ever change. Bodegas will continue to stock only whole milk. Now that she’s got a bit of a blog herself, on the Huffington Post, I am hoping that lettuce is just around the corner. Okay, that might take a while. but I’m ready.
For those who missed it the first ten times I told this story (I’m not even sure it isn’t lurking on the blog someplace), one of the most shocking awakenings I’ve every had in NYC came one day in the laundromat, where a young boy, not more than six, was sobbing hysterically and getting snot all over himself. I don’t remember what set it off. I was having a hard time ignoring the scene, and it was clear that he wasn’t stopping anytime soon so I sat down next to him and asked how he was doing. He looked at me bewildered and hiccuped. I asked if he was into pokemon (it was on his shirt) and he said no. I asked what he had for lunch today, since he seemed to be easily distracted from crying, I figured I’d just keep asking him questions until he calmed down. For lunch today, he told me that he’d had a cookie and a chocolate milk. And his friend? Fritos. For lunch. Granted I’m sure the caloric intake was more than adequate, but WTF? No wonder he couldn’t stop crying. He was having a big ole sugar crash. This is why nutrition access is a problem.
The Ecologist ran a great story a few months back about the role of sugar and nutritional deficits in violent crime. One study they looked at, from 1983(!) found that when incarcerated teens were given healthier snacks (primary feature: less refined sugar), there was a 75% reduction in the use of restraints and a 100% reduction in suicides; another study found a 77% drop in assaults among incarcerated teens put on a better diet. This stuff isn’t even news. 1983?
I don’t have a good solution for you. In prisons, okay. I do: feed prisoners healthier food. But beyond prisons? I’m not so sure. You’ll have to look to Tracie for the answers.
nobody’s that busy
In various on June 6, 2006 at 1:21 pmI started this blog thinking I’d use it to gather my thoughts about food, nutrition, open space, urban health. You may have noticed that I write about none of those things. I think about them, a lot. I stumble upon articles that state the obvious (eat a variety of fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains and legumes …) in new and different ways. Juvenile detention centers in the UK saw remarkable drops in assaults on staff, fights, escape attempts and suicide attempts when they variously experimented with giving each inmate a multi vitamin every day or taking the refined sugar out of the kids diets. The article isn’t online, but it is a good read (much of the ecologist is) and if I were a more devoted blogger I’d pull out some facts.
A more recent article observed that the recent outbreaks of Avian Flu in S.E. Asia are all tied to giant factory farms: if the birds weren’t on factory farms they’d come from them recently. Confirming, once again, that the push to destroy small scale poultry farming is really just industry opportunism, and that factory farming is grossly unsafe and our increasing reliance on monoculture is eventually going to lead to a massive ecological disaster that Monsanto can’t hope to resolve. Nature is smarter than us, biodiversity is more efficient than all the agrochemical labs money can buy. These aren’t footnoted facts, and I apologize for that. They aren’t even very well formed thoughts, and I apologize for that, too. The problem is that I still think this is all altogether obvious. “All I need to know I learned in Kindergarten” obvious. And I can’t quite get my head around making sense of these issues, of nutrition and biodiversity and their impact on urban life for people who haven’t already made sense of them.
In case you were wondering, I’m really not going anywhere at all with this, and I’m going to post it without going anywhere in particular with it. I set out this morning to introduce the Harmony Farms CSA, announcement of which was accompanied to my inbox by a clip from Michael Pollan’s blog on the NY Times Website (which you need a premium paid account to read, but which you can find cached on Google if you are sneaky). Michael Pollan does a much better job of arranging food and sustainability questions on the table, though he doesn’t every quite connect them to cars and noise and children who can’t focus. Grist, and Tom Philpott (formerly of Brooklyn, briefly of my acquaintance via the notorious ABW) also does a much better job of talking about rural sustainability. Read those things, yes, and if you want vegetables, talk to Hubert:
the real reason i am writing all of you is to ask if you
would like to join the CSA
(Community Supported Agriculture)
I work on in upstate ny
(60 miles from brooklyn)…
(you should come for a visit)[*]
(really)
here’s the deal:
every friday i will deliver to your house
(or any other predetermined destination)
a box of fresh,
morning picked produce.
it will consist of whatever is available that very
morning
maybe some arugala,
perhaps some beets,
probably a bunch of really cool heirloom tomatoes that
you will find only in a friend’s back yard…
we use no chemicals at all,
though we are not certified organic
(cost).
we grow a bagillion types of stuff
and
of the bagillion types of stuff we grow
we grow a bagillion different varieties of that stuff
(technically speaking)
so
what does this cost…?
600$ for a full share for the year
this breaks down to 37.50 per week…
(if you only count july-october though we go well into december and June is covered to…)
chump change once you taste these tomatoes…
(and beets, garlic scapes, a bunch of different
lettuces and my money is on sugar peas inside of a
week)
so what do you think?
if you think its a little high, or confusing, or
complex
read the blog…
nobody’s that busy.
[*] if you want to visit, and help (they ask guests to put in three hours a day, which goes by fast if you start in the cool morning hours) get in touch and I’ll see what I can do. It is easy by bike from the Metro North. Seven miles.
[**] Yeah, yeah, I noticed the error. I’m not fixing it right now because I don’t have time. I upgraded WordPress and that broke the tagging plugin.
Bike to School?
In various on April 7, 2006 at 2:23 pmDuring the transit strike, I spent some time looking for information on biking to school and discovered that the Department of Education, which has already eviscerated school sports does not allow schools to bring student bicycles indoors. One teacher friend, who’ll remain anonymous for now, reports having to sneak kids’ bicycles in a back entrance when they showed up on the first day of the transit strike with inadequate locks. He is at a New Visions school, which means kids were coming from across the city to get to class, and were supposed to leave their bike to be stolen? I had to really dig to find any information on riding to school, and no where does the Board of Ed actually encourage kids to ride. Considering that my own alma mater recently completed a study which found that sixty-seven percent of students say they have a very difficult time managing stress …
This is a post that has been lingering for nearly a year. I’m loathe to toss it because I think we should be talking about this stuff, but I also don’t have a good way to finish it off the top of my head. The point is that we’re busily destroying opportunities for physical activity because they takes time away from studying, and in the process, we’re making a terrible mess of things.
Stop the Presses
In various on February 6, 2006 at 10:26 amHere is my shocking hypothesis: generally speaking good health is a matter of balance. Decadence (fat, liquor) in moderation, a variety of fruits, vegetables and whole grains. Excercise in moderation, not in excess. Sleep enough, drink water. Drastic weight changes are hard on your body.
This isn’t news, and yet for a time it seemed that once a year, maybe once every 18 months, NPR would let loose with a report from the Journal of the American Medical Association: study finds that drinking one or two glasses of wine a day is good for you. More, not so good. Once I started listening for the headlines, they were everywhere. But then when I started listening for purposes of taking note, they disappeared. Or I stopped hearing them.
There was one headline, in USA Today, that I caught in Cincinatti. Something to the effect of New Study Finds Fat People are Less Healthy– turns out that even if your cholesterol is fine, your blood pressure normal, just being overweight takes a toll on your heart.
