Morning walk to get the juices flowing
Month: August 2017
Checkin 76
Fill’er up
🎧 Jam Tomorrow | Eat This Podcast
What is jam? “A preserve made from whole fruit boiled to a pulp with sugar.” Lots of opportunities to quibble with that, most especially, if you’re planning to sell the stuff in the UK and label it “jam,” the precise amount of sugar. More than 60% and you’re fine calling it jam. Less than 50% and you need to call it reduced-sugar jam. Lower still, and it becomes a fruit spread. All that is about to change though, thanks to a UK Goverment regulation that will allow products with less than 60% sugar to be labelled jam. There’s nothing like a threat to the traditional British way of life to motivate the masses, although as an expat, I had no idea of the kerfuffle this had raised until I read about it on the website of the Campaign for Real Farming.
I realize that I’m probably ruined by eating soft set American jams and jellies all my life, aside from a half a dozen or so homemade versions I’ve made myself over the years. Here in the states, we’ve slipped even further–most jams are comprised of high fructose corn syrup instead of sugar. If only that revolution had happened after the 1920s instead of the 1770s perhaps things would be different.
I’m curious what’s become of this issue four years on? Did the “hard”-liners win out, or did the regulations turn to (soft set) jelly?
👓 This 1972 photo of women in miniskirts helped persuade Trump to commit to war in Afghanistan | Quartz
Trump's national security advisor used the photo to show how "western" Kabul had been in the past.
👓 Is Anybody Home at HUD? | ProPublica
A long-harbored conservative dream — the “dismantling of the administrative state” — is taking place under Secretary Ben Carson.
I was just thinking yesterday, HUD has been awfully quiet. What has Ben Carson been up to?
The answer is appallingly painful, but seemingly par for the course, for the current administration.
While certainly having a particular point of view, this article is well reported with some great history/background, and specific examples. Sadly, it appears that the people Trump specifically said he was out to help are going to get the shaft even worse than I would have expected.
🎧 It’s putrid, it’s paleo, and it’s good for you | Eat This Podcast
How do you get your vitamin C where no fruit and veg will grow? As our ancestors moved north out of Africa, and especially as they found themselves in climates that supported less gathering and more hunting, they were faced with an acute nutritional problem: scurvy. Humans are one of the few mammals that cannot manufacture this vital little chemical compound (others being the guinea pig and fruit bats). If there are no fruit and veg around, where will that vitamin C come from? That’s a question that puzzled John Speth, an archaeologist and Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He found clues in the accounts of sailors and explorers shipwrecked in the Arctic. Those who, often literally, turned their noses up at the “disgusting” diet of the locals sometimes paid with their lives. Those who ate what the locals ate lived to tell the tale. John Speth told me the tale of how he came to propose the idea that putrid meat and fish may have been a key part of Neanderthal and modern human diet during the Palaeolithic.
As always a brilliant episode from Jeremy.
There’s quite a lot to unpack here and I’m sure there’s a few days of research papers to read to even begin to scratch the surface of some of what’s going on here with regard to the disgust portion of the program.
One of the things that strikes me offhand within the conversation of botulism and its increase when Arctic peoples went from traditional life ways to more modern ones are related stories I’ve heard, even recently, from researchers who are looking for replacement antibiotics for evolving superbugs. Often their go-to place for searching for them is in the dirt which can be found all around us. I’m curious if there’s not only specific chemistry (perhaps anaerobic or even affected by temperature) but even antibiotics found in the ground which are killing microbes which could cause these types of sickness? Of course, with extreme cold usually comes frozen ground and permafrost which may make burying foods for fermenting more difficult. I’m curious how and were native peoples were doing their burying to give an idea for what may have been happening to protect them.
Another piece which dovetails with this one is a story I heard yesterday morning on NPR as I woke up. Entitled To Get Calcium, Navajos Burn Juniper Branches To Eat The Ash, it also covered the similar idea that native peoples had methods for fulfilling their dietary needs in unique ways.
Checkin Inter Valley Escrow
Signing escrow documents.
Checkin In-N-Out Burger
Double double with fries
🎧 Getting to know the cinta senese on its home turf | Eat This Podcast
In the town hall of Siena is a series of glorious frescoes that depict The Allegory of Good and Bad Government. In one of them is a pig, long snouted and thin legged, black with a white band around its back and down its front legs, being quietly chivied along by a swineherd. It is absolutely recognisable as a cinta senese, a Belted Sienese pig, today one the most favoured heritage breeds in Italy. But it wasn’t always so. Numbers dropped precipitously in the 1950s and 1960s, to the point that the herd studbook, recording the ancestry of all the animals, was abandoned. And then began the renaissance. One place that contributed to the revival of the cinta senese is Spannocchia, a large and ancient estate not far from Siena. I was lucky enough to visit earlier this summer, to see the pigs first hand and to learn about them from Sara Silvestri. Perhaps the biggest surprise, to me, was that not all cinta senese are blessed with the white belt that is deemed a characteristic of the breed. Some have white spots or stripes but not the full band, and some don’t seem to have any white at all. This could be flaky genetics – odd for a breed with a supposedly ancient lineage – or it could be the result of marauding male cinghiale, which are a problem in Spannocchia and elsewhere. Right now, all these visually defective animals (and most of the perfect specimens too) end up on a plate. I wonder how long before every piglet born is properly belted.
Oh, how I dream of pork… I’m beginning to wonder if there’s an Eat This Podcast 12 step program.
For a minute toward the end I though that Jeremy had slipped and let the audio quality of the episode go to pot. Took me a minute to realize that it had started to rain during the interview and the audio was really just supplementing the arc of the story–as always. I suppose I have to let go and trust his producerial sense.
I’d been away from podcasts for a chunk of the summer, so today was a great day to have the chance to catch up on one of my favorites.
👓 How Mic.com exploited social justice for clicks | The Outline
For about five years, Mic.com was a place where readers could go to get moral clarity. In the Mic universe, heroes fought for equality against villains who tried to take it away. Every day, there was someone, like plus-size model Ashley Graham, to cheer for, and someone else, like manspreaders, to excoriate. Kim Kardashian annihilated slut shamers, George Takei clapped back at transphobes. “In a Single Tweet, One Man Beautifully Destroys the Hypocrisy of Anti-Muslim Bigotry.” “This Brave Woman's Horrifying Photo Has Become a Viral Rallying Cry Against Sexual Harassment.” “Young Conservative Tries to Mansplain Hijab in Viral Olympic Photo, Gets It All Wrong.” “The Problematic Disney Body Image Trend We're Not Talking About.” “The Very Problematic Reason This Woman Is Taking a Stand Against Leggings.”
It’s disappointing to see such a huge disconnect between publishers and their journalistic staff. There’s also a business take away in that things typically won’t bode well in the long term when things like this happen. It’s going to be far more difficult for the publishers to find their way going forward.
👓 Breitbart editor: Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump will be ‘out by end of year’ | The Hill
An internet prankster posing as Stephen Bannon baited Breitbart Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow into saying he would assist Bannon with his "dirty work" and help push Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner out of the White House. The Breitbart News editor said Kushner and Ivanka Trump would be "out by end of year" from their roles as White House advisers, according to the emails provided to CNN by the anonymous web troll, who has the username @SINON_REBORN on Twitter. The fake account — designed to look like it was Bannon's — first messaged Marlow on Sunday in an apparent attempt to fool Marlow into talking about Trump and Kushner.
Packing day four: Johnny Walker Black 12
Instagram filter used: Clarendon
Photo taken at: Glendale, California
📺 Friday Night Lights Season 1, Episodes 11-13
What's high school football mean to this Texas town? Absolutely everything when the stakes are as high off the field as they are on.
We’ve now switched over on the football/drama scales, and football is just a passing interest to the show now. There is a reasonable balance between the plotlines of the teenagers and the adults though.
🎧 Containers Episode 6: And They Won, They Won Big
It started with a puzzle: why were people in West Oakland dying 12-15 years earlier than their counterparts in the wealthier hills? The people in the flatlands were dying of the same things as the people in the hills, just much younger. Meet the doctor who helped make the case that air pollution from cargo handling was one big part of the answer, and the smart-dressing, wise-cracking environmental activist who helped to clean up the air. This is an inside look at the problems that come with being a major node in the network of global trade—and the solutions that people have devoted their lives to implementing.
This episode has a great example of a negative externality. Our current administration would like to paper over such effects in society, particularly when they involve non-whites, and call fixing such problems “over regulation” instead of charging the businesses and corporations which cause them to fix or clean them up. I’m glad this particular one was managed to be dealt with, but I can’t help but think about all the others, many of which we simply don’t know about for lack of interest or data to measure them. Far better if we call them citizen protection measures and fix them.
https://soundcloud.com/containersfmg/episode-6-and-they-won-they-won-big
👓 60 seconds over Idaho | Jeremy Keith
I lived in Germany for the latter half of the nineties. On August 11th, 1999, parts of Germany were in the path of a total eclipse of the sun. Freiburg—the town where I was living—wasn’t in the path, so Jessica and I travelled north with some friends to Karlsruhe. The weather wasn’t great. There was quite a bit of cloud coverage, but at the moment of totality, the clouds had thinned out enough for us to experience the incredible sight of a black sun.