Across the Great Divide

Snow, Go and Almost Being Snowed.

Heading  down Franklin Avenue yesterday, I noticed that uncleared snow isn't just a problem for cyclists in the bike lanes (Franklin had nicely bikeable snow-free edges).

Parking is another matter, as the new fixtures for locking bikes disappear under the snow in the zone between sidewalk and street.

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Here's the perfect stocking stuffer for the active woman. It's the GoGirl female urinary device. We just gave one to friend heading off for a bike tour through India, but it's also for more mundane locales, including ice fishing, walks in the woods or music festival port-a-johns.

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I ran across this news report about a UC Davis study that looked at health complications related to consumption of high fructose corn syrup. If you relied on the London Times article, you'd think:

Scientists have proved for the first time that a cheap form of sugar used in thousands of food products and soft drinks can damage human metabolism and is fuelling the obesity crisis.

Beware of statements that limited studies have "proved" anything. Beware also of stories that don't link to the actual research. And beware especially of unfamiliar news sources, especially those owned by Rupert Murdoch.

So I tried to locate the study, and guess what? The news story is riddled with all kinds of errors and misstatements. Bottom line, the biggest problem is we Americans consume too much sugar.

[anti-hat tip to change.org for almost suckering me on this one]

The American Diet: Wings and a Prayer.

In Bicycle Diaries, David Byrne's folding bicycle ramble through world music, culture and urban design, Byrne agrees with Jared Diamond's claim that

people develop cultural affinities for certain foods, ways of getting around, clothes and habits of being that become so ingrained that they will, in his telling, persist in maintaining their habits even to the point of driving themselves and sometimes their whole civilization to extinction. He gives a lot of historical evidence — for example an eleventh-century Norse settlement in Greenland where the settlers persisted in farming cattle, as impractical as it was there. The cuisine or habits of the local Inuit were never adopted or adapted — their diet and ways were just not culturally acceptable — and eventually the settlers all died. This was not a quick settlement, either — it lasted for over four hundred years — long enough for them to convince themselves that they were doing okay.

Diet may not be what kills America, but it's in the running. 

The New York Times reports that chicken wings are commanding a higher price per pound than skinless, boneless chicken breasts, prompting restaurants and bars to switch to "boneless chicken wings." The movement is not because, in the words of Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner David Kessler Buffalo wings are "fat on fat on fat on sugar on fat and salt" and the ersatz wings are marginally more healthy.

The recession is the cause of the price flip-flop.

Restaurants, normally big buyers of breast meat, slashed orders as millions of people cut back on eating out, and breast prices slumped. But demand for wings has remained strong, partly because people perceived them as a cheap luxury.

A serving of 12 Buffalo Wild Wings Chicken Wings contains 600 calories and provides 62% of your daily recommended fat intake, 120% of cholesterol and 150% of sodium! Adding the Blazin'\u2122 Sauce gives 30 more calories and bumps up the grams of fat by 20%. A serving (8) of their boneless wings has 500 calories, one-fourth the fat and no sodium — but also less of that fat and salt-lover's flavor.

While most restaurants are still coy about the nutritional content of their offerings, there are abundant online tools that unmask the cheap and dangerous menu items. The Livestrong.com site linked above is pretty good. It suggests better alternatives and allows you to track what you've eaten.

I like my info with a little more attitude. The Men's Health Eat This, Not That site fills that bill. For example, its assessment of the 2,010-calorie Cold Stone Creamery PB&C Shake Gotta Have It size, the Worst Drink in America 2009:

The PB&C is intended to denote peanut butter and chocolate, but the more accurate translation might be potbellies and cardiovascular disease. After all, this one drink does pack more calories than a dozen ice cream sandwiches and more saturated fat than nearly 20 large orders of McDonald's French fries.

I attended a marathon training camp years ago, where one of the Pike's Peak runners said he trained on that many calories per day. Today, nutritionists estimate sweetened beverages now account for almost 25 percent of daily calories in young adults in America, including things like the Worst Holiday Coffee Drink:

Between the candies and the casseroles, we already have plenty of temptations to deal with during the holidays. We certainly don't need Starbucks' surreptitious sugar overload thrown into the mix. The name implies indulgence, sure, but the fact that this cup holds more sugar than 9 Krispy Kreme doughnuts is pretty appalling. Settle for a candy cane in your coffee or find a different drink.

Yum.

Beer and Karma.

After going on a field trip with the shelter kids to Underwater World at Mall of America this morning and knocking off some work for a nonprofit all afternoon, tonight I enjoyed a beer tasting sponsored by my favorite retailer comparing Oktoberfest brews. (My choices: Surlyfest, Avery The Kaiser Imperial Oktoberfest, Summit Oktoberfest, New Belgium Hoptoberfest and Flying Dog Dogtoberfest.)

In a raffle that benefited the local food shelf, we avoided winning all the beer paraphernalia and came home with the $40 liquor store gift certificate, thus indicating my karma is still in force. Of course, it helps to have purchased a fistful of tickets.

I ran into an old business acquaintance there who I hadn't seen for about five years. When we owned our businesses, we served as board members for each other's companies. He had recently returned from three years in India with his family, where his wife made India safe for Target, and he worked as a volunteer with India's marginal non-profits, trying to help them get funding.

We also learned they had a fecund pear tree in the yard that was disgorging fruit at an alarming rate. We were invited to stop by later and take home one of several five-gallon buckets  sitting on their porch, filled with water to keep away the wasps.

So we did. Reaching home, I made the rounds of the neighbors. It says something about our neighborhood that everyone answered the door on a dark Thursday night and welcomed a man in a windbreaker with a plastic bucket in one hand and Oktoberfest fumes on his breath.

Earlier this week, I made a beet, pear and feta salad that required me to purchase one Bartlett pear at the grocery store. Out of the hundreds of regular shaped pears, I found one that was almost suitably ripe.

Tonight, I came home with half a bucket of less perfectly formed fruit. In fact, you couldn't sell a one of them.

The photo shows less than half a bucket because some have already been devoured before bedtime. Had I tasted them first, I'm not sure I would have made the neighborhood circuit.

I suspect there are many lessons embedded in all this, and I am confident my readers are capable of extracting them. However, you will have to do it without tasting any of my pears.

Sipping Serendipity.

Riding to a late lunch meeting along the Midtown Greenway today, I ran through a group of kids passing out cups of water near the Kix soccer fields. There was a supervising adult and a big water jug, so it looked like an organized activity — but to what purpose?

Was it a city troop of Cub Scouts doing a good deed or young volunteers practicing how to dispense water on the fly for some upcoming event? To the kids' shouted delight, I snatched a cup as I spun by. Stopping to ask questions would've ruined the effect.

At the Birchwood Cafe, I tried to order a Diet Coke, forgetting they went natural in the soda department. The guy offered some froufy alternatives, but I confessed I was just trying not to order a Surly Furious for lunch.

I took the lack of Coke products as God's will directing me back toward my original path and the man behind the counter shouted amen.

And then it happened, the person I was meeting is a friend and neighbor of the guy who started Surly. There's good news. New tanks have arrived,  which will mean more good beer.

I wound home with the ingredients for laab gai* in my pocket and decided on a route that would take me past a Thai grocery. Working my way through the unfamiliar layout, I passed a cooler full of exotic canned beverages, including the intriguingly named Hello Boss iced coffee. Instead, I went for my first-ever coconut juice, manufactured by the equally inscrutable Thep Padung Porn Coconut Co.

Let's just say I won't be rushing out tonight to find my next can.

The detour to the grocery led me on a non-standard route across Minneapolis on 27th Street, up a closed-to-traffic Lake of the Isles Boulevard to the top of Lowry Hill, then down a smidgen to catch a sidewalk that runs along the 394 sound wall to Penn Avenue.

And there it was, except for a flattened plastic water bottle, the only piece of litter along the entire route  — a coconut juice can!

Another echo from the cosmos.

I can't imagine America's byways have always been sprinkled with coconut juice cans tossed from the cars of Asian gangsters and lying in wait for my altered consciousness to finally notice them. So I can only conclude that there is a God who is slowly letting me in on the joke.

How else to explain this SUV with its fishing boat pulling up to the entrance of a funeral home at Plymouth and Penn this afternoon?

Almost too much to drink in today. 

Almost.

* The laab was excellent, though I substituted pork and tinkered with all the proportions in the recipe.

Beer Taste, Barolo Budget, Tea Party Outrage.

The four of us were having late-night dinner after a play, the sort of repast more common in Europe's social democracies. We are in that early sunset career stage when we would rather give our wisdom and skills to someone who would put them to their highest use than sell them to the highest bidder.

Increasingly, that means we are disposing of disposable income that came in some years ago.

For my part, I was eyeing a certain Hendrick's martini to go with a steak tartare starter/finisher, but my friend across the table inquired about getting a bottle of wine. Not my first choice, or even my second, I agreed in the spirit of a convivial evening. He offered us a look at the wine list, but we deferred to him. (My palate is nortoriously non-discriminating once it moves into grape territory.)

Several hours later, the bill arrived, and we discovered the bottle cost nearly triple what any of us would have chosen to pay. (We'd mistakenly assumed he had discovered a relative bargain.) My friend was mortified and offered to pay for the whole thing. But we accepted it as a mistake in reading the list — one we ourselves had once made — and the cost, the price of a good, shared story.

In a different context, with some zeroes added to the bill, a similar event might have been cast as irresp0nsible, incompetent, wasteful, spending other people's money, etc. I'll leave it to you to tease out parallels with the current distress over state and national budgets, but let me suggest this one.

We had a relationship that was worth more to us than the money. So we paid up, laughed about the folly, and planned never to do it again.

Radio Snippet: Adult Baby Food.

Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner David Kessler was talking today about his book and America's problems with over-eating.

He calls much of what we eat "adult baby food." It's laced with sugars, fat, salt and other chemicals to make it extremely palatable, but there's no mom on the other end of the spoon deciding when we've had enough. So we happily keep noshing on this highly processed pleasure food.

Pick an appetizer. What's in Buffalo wings? You start with the fatty part of the chicken. Many times it's fried in the manufacturing plant first. It's fried again in the restaurant. That red sauce? Sugar and fat. That creamy sauce? Fat and salt.

So what are we eating? Fat on fat on fat on sugar on fat and salt.

Tonight it was spaghetti with sauce made from scratch — tomatoes on onions on garlic on olives, so some salt did creep in there.

Corned Beef, Burrito-Splitting and the Roadie Salute.

I had some time to kill while the old Subaru was getting its 90,000 mile service. I used to cycle over to a franchise cafe that was in mallville near the dealer, but it had outdoor seating, decent food ordered over the counter and brought to your table, beer, a nice ambience with a bunch of different seating options (including overstuffed chairs) and free wifi. It was a good option, too, when my home connection went down.

A few months ago, it went out of business.

There was another place with a similar name on the edge of mallville that I bike past a lot, so I decided to give them a shot. It's a "diner" with a few franchisy decorating touches that make it the kind of place that might be considered nice in Wasilla, and an extensive breakfast menu that looks calculated to hasten the demise of America via diabetes and cardiac disease.

All I can say is, the wrong bear concept went out of business in this town.

I figured breakfast was going to hold me for two meals, but I also wanted to pass on the coronary, so I ordered the Homemade Corned Beef Hash and Eggs*. It was described as "Our own corned beef hash served Black Bear's special way, with hash browns OR country potatoes! This isn't the canned stuff!"

Indeed, it wasn't. But we'll get to that. Ordering hash browns with corned beef hash seemed redundant, not to mention greasy, so I went with the country potatoes, prepared with onions and peppers, according to my waitress.

The wifi in the place was the ATT paid access from the Starbuck's next door, no thank you. And the corned beef hash proved to be a platter of diced potatoes concealing a tiny rasher of corned beef that, if it were a side order of bacon, you'd feel gulled. As the main course, it was preposterous.

No identifiable onions or peppers among the potato chunks, either.

Did I protest? No. I just wrote this about Black Bear Diner.

*90% of the entrees had an * but I couldn't find what it referred to. My hunch: * paramedic on duty or * this is a total ripoff, but if you order it, consider yourself warned.

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While I was waiting, I read this article about pill splitting in which United Healthcare comes off as the good guy. Other insurors apparently think their job is to get paid for everything possible, instead of to make sure their covered seniors receive affordable medications and stay healthy.

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All this reminded me about how Chipotle Grill is offering some downsized, lower-price  menu items in response to a depressed dining-out market. While Chipotle should really be downsizing everything to keep from depressing and killing people, some health plans now recommend burrito-splitting as a safe alternative to eating one meal that includes all your daily calories, 140% of your recommended fat intake and 167% of your daily sodium.

You can go to this site to calculate the nutritional value of your Chipotle meal and here to calculate how much it exceeds your caloric requirements.

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Finally, I was doing some research on ways national acts recognize (or don't) their roadies in order to construct an allusive (or labored and convoluted, take your pick) piece about how the RNC should pay tribute to Norm Coleman for loyally supporting the recount tour.

However, in the process I discovered that featured strippers have roadies. Forget Norm. Now I have only one question: Why does she say her favorite is a Batman costume?

More Value for the Way We Live.

I spent the morning at the Day Center and then at the Food Pantry. Highlight of the first shift was listening to three women discussing the various fine points of double jeopardy, then providing two of the women envelopes, paper and stamps for correspondence to men in detention facilities.

One woman returned the sheet of paper to me as if I were an idiot. "I want lined paper. I'm writing a letter, not drawing a picture!"

Good to have that one for future reference.

I've also been acquainting myself with low cost foodstuffs during time between filling orders. Our Beef and Chicken Rice Mix packages come from Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. The Beef Ravioli comes from Second Harvest of Middle Tennessee, with the catchy slogan on the back: "Non-Profit Serving Non-Profit Serving Hungry People."

The vegetable soup comes from the Church of Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints in Salt Lake City. The label advises our guests can visit www.providentliving.org for advice on self-reliant living, which I'm sure many would do if the wireless connection just reached down to their camp by the river.

Guests come in for various types of assistance, and my job is putting together three meals each for three days for those who the counselors determine need help with food. For one or two people, it's a pretty simple process, heavy on rice, canned goods, tuna, generic Cheerios (No Cap'n Crunch!), peanut butter and assorted other items to fill out the order.

Things can get a bit complicated when an extended family is getting help, since you're trying to integrate nutrition, variety, ages and larger quantities with the stock available. We always have peanut butter, but not always bread, for example. And some guests have no cooking facilities, or they're walking and can't carry a lot of canned goods.

All we had for non-canned meat product today were the same two frozen containers (chicken livers and tripe) that were there last week. Midmorning, someone cleaning out their freezer brought in a reasonable stock of roasts, steak and stew meat. I forgot to take a picture of the elk steak from 2003. The newest package was dated February 2007.

I suppose some person went home feeling good and maybe planned to claim a charitable deduction. No one got the meat, unless there are some brave dumpster divers out there.

Speaking of unsafe food, the top photo is from the supermarket today, where they were having a special on pistachios.

The Outreach Center is church affiliated, though not all volunteers and staff belong to the Catholic Church. They do not push religion in any way on the people coming through the doors. They do pray before they start work, but it's about humility and serving people and seeing Jesus in the faces they meet during the day. 

It's an aspect of religious faith in action that would be good for us non-believers to see once awhile, to remind us that the religious are not all the same, either.

 

Talk to the Animals: Diet and Obesity.

Over the past several months, we changed the feeding regimen for our two cats so the younger, larger male could not take any of the female's food. We also cut out virtually all dry food, except for an occasional treat, and measured what we were giving them daily.

Last week, the cats came out to Colorado, flying in the cabin. A year ago, as I was wrestling both cats and some carry-on bags, I tore a bicep. I'm convinced snatching up 18+ pounds of the big boy's dead weight and carrying him through three airports was partially responsible.

Now he weighs 12 pounds — normal for a cat of his size — and seems like a different animal. He can jump on kitchen counters to search for food, not a possibility before, which is a bit of a negative. But overall, losing one-third of his body weight was a positive for all — most of all him.

His improvement reminded me of this item in High Country News that compared the health of black bears in the Lake Tahoe region.

The average urban male weighed one-third more (325 pounds) than his country counterpart (250). Females had a similar proportional difference and typically had their first litter at age 4-5 instead of 7-8, with one more cub per litter. Life expectancies were shorter from a third to a half in the urban population.

Of course, the two groups had different diets. The less-healthy bears ate a lot of what we eat and what we feed our pets.