Because Someone Has to Go There…

...The inevitable musical storm open thread.

The original for what has to be our theme song for the next couple of days seems to be breaking the front page, but here’s my favorite cover.

...I’ve also long been partial to Willie’s version:

And while, Bay Area born and bred, and old Dead fan that I am, I still can’t entirely warm to  this rendition, that old fella sure can play guitar:

And speaking of someone who can play a little lead…enjoy the tasty little slow(ish) solo at about 2:30 of this one:

Well, thanks a lot ladies and gentlemen—don’t forget to tip your servers, and come on back,  ya’ hear—I’ll be here all week.  Let’s go out with just one more.  If you want to check out one approach to production, this from Ole Blue Eyes will set your back fillings aching, though Frankie’s voice is as it ever was.

But for pure old country spare singing, the Man in Black can’t be beat:

Oh—and that hurricane?  Take care, everyone.  We’re looking for a fair amount of wind where I am, but nothing truly outlandish.  I’ve got my eye on some big trees around my house, though there’s nothing much I can do about them (we took out some real home threats this summer, for which I’m grateful).  We’ve got some water stored up, and food for the next couple of days, and lamps and lamp oil—but things don’t look to be too apocalyptic where we are, so mostly we’re gearing up for a wet, wild day and keeping an eye out for our older neighbors.

And as for tonight—eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we sump-pump.  Our plans are for a pomegranate juice and green peppercorn marinaded skirt steak (under the broiler; the Weber is already tucked into the garage), tomatoes from the in-laws’ garden, and more of the spouse’s chocolate short bread cookies from yesterday’s oven.

You?

 

 

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Pull Up the Drawbridge, Stockpile Now

You don’t have to watch squirrels’ acorn-gathering efforts or measure wooly-bear caterpillar bands to predict an ongoing cranky, isolationist, get-away-from-MY-stuff season:

Consumers can expect to see a jump in prices for pasta, meat, vegetable oil and many other grocery items in the coming months as a pair of new government reports forecast on [Aug. 11] that a brutal mixture of heat, drought or flooding has taken a toll on the corn, soybeans and wheat grown on American farms.

Futures prices for those important crops jumped on [Aug. 11], and commodities experts said that would lead to higher prices for manufacturers and consumers.

“The message, based on today’s report, is these higher costs should not be expected to abate any time soon,” said Bill G. Lapp, president of Advanced Economic Solutions, a commodity consulting firm that works with restaurant companies and food manufacturers. “It implies higher cost forthcoming and subsequent margin pressure, and at some point the need to increase prices at the retail level or on the menus.” ...

The geeks at Wired chip in to explain how “Food Prices Could Hit Tipping Point for Global Unrest“:

“When you have food prices peak, you have all these riots. But look under the peaks, at the background trend. That’s increasing quite rapidly, too,” said Yaneer Bar-Yam, president of the New England Complex Systems Institute. “In one to two years, the background trend runs into the place where all hell breaks loose.”...

The researchers are hardly the first to portray food problems as a spark that inflames social inequality and stokes individual desperation, unleashing and amplifying impulses of rebellion. The role of food prices in triggering the Arab Spring has been widely described. Their innovation is a pair of price points on the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s food price index: about 215 in current prices, or 190 when corrected for inflation.

It’s at those points where, on a graph of food prices and social unrest between 2004 and 2011, unrest breaks out. But whereas they were crossed by price jumps in 2008, Bar-Yam and colleagues calculate that the underlying, steady trend — driven primarily by commodity speculation, agricultural crop-to-fuel conversion and rising prices of fertilizer and oil — crosses those points between 2012 and 2013.

“Once we get there, the peaks aren’t the problem anymore. Instead it’s the trend. And that’s harder to correct,” said Bar-Yam. At that point, widespread political unrest and instability can be expected, even in countries less troubled than those in North Africa and the Middle East.
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The Mexican Truffle

Things I learned from the Internet: corn smut, called huitlacoche, is considered a delicacy. The Wikipedia etymology section is worth a read, too.

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With my mind on my money and my money on my mind

Yesterday Matt Yglesias flagged a survey showing that people who spend longer in school tend to spend more on alcohol.

Kevin Drum and James Joyner both pointed out that educated people drink more expensive alcohol (e.g., mixers or craft beer rather than schlitz).

When I saw Matt’s chart, my first reaction was that the amount that people spend on alcohol probably has a lot to do with the amount of money they make. High school graduates would probably not turn up their nose at Laphroaig, but they also want to drink more often than once a month. With that in mind I combined the chart with comparable data from a 2008 Department of Commerce survey on income by education level*.

From this I can conclude that graduating high school alone does not change drinking habits much. You earn a little more, you spend a little more on booze. A few college credits also has little effect. The most surprising result is that although people with a college degree make significantly more money, they spend significantly more on booze and then some. If you stay in school for another degree the effect flips; you make quite a bit more still but the amount that you spend on drinking changes hardly at all.

The last two data points make sense to me. The burden of doing well enough in college to meet my goals (in my case, getting into grad school) still left plenty of time to work on pickup lines, learn to mountain bike and climb and so on, and especially to refine the hell out of my drinking habits. If I hit the job market at that time, I am sure that most jobs that I could get in 1999 would have left me plenty of time to do it.

Grad school hardly killed my interest in booze, in fact just the reverse. Most Fridays the students in my cohort would hit a dive bar for margaritas and epic, cathartic grousing sessions about our advisors, our research, our teaching and any other indignities the universe thought up that week. As often as not I needed beer like I never did in college. There just wasn’t time.

Needless to say there are a million reasons to qualify a direct income-to-booze-money comparison. But hey, it agrees with my experience so it’s good enough for me.

(*) To make comparisons easier I multiplied the amount spent per year by a constant so that income and booze expenditures are equal for high school dropouts. When categories did not precisely overlap it was usually because the DoC data contained extra sub-categories (e.g., Master’s versus PhD), so when necessary I averaged those together along with the separate (and still disturbing) numbers for male and female.

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Canned Tomatoes Are Looking Better & Better

Hat tip to commentor dj spellchecka for the link to NPR’s interview transcript on “The Troubled History of the Supermarket Tomato“:

GUY RAZ: I’m speaking with Barry Estabrook. His new book is called “Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit.” Barry, a big part of this book is not just about the taste of tomatoes but about the process of getting them to market. And you describe this world, and I’m using your words, you describe a world where slave labor is employed.

BARRY ESTABROOK: Let me run down a few little items here: people being bought and sold like animals, people being shackled in chains, people being beaten for either not working hard enough, fast enough or being too weak or sick to work, people actually being shot and killed for trying to escape. That sounds like 1850’s slavery to me. And that, in fact, is going on or has gone on. They were – in the last 15 years, there have been seven successful prosecutions, slavery prosecutions in the State of Florida. Even, you know, the ones that are not being held as slaves probably work at the very, very bottom of the American workforce… They’re paid basically per pound that they pick. If it rains, they don’t make a cent that day.[...]

RAZ: A few years ago, some of these farm workers in Florida started to organize, actually. And there was a campaign backed by some labor unions and student groups and their conditions apparently improved. What happened?

ESTABROOK: In the last seven or eight months, there’s just been a sea change in labor relations in the Florida tomato industry. What had happened was this small group of grassroots people called the Coalition of Immokalee Workers had been lobbying since the early ‘90s to get a raise and to have some basic primitive workers’ rights put in place.

What they started concentrating on was the end customers of these farmers. They started with – actually with the Taco Bell restaurant chain. And after four years, Taco Bell said, okay, we’ve had enough. I mean, four years of boycotts, demonstrations, they signed a board. And then gradually, all the other fast food chains in the country, one by one, often kicking and screaming, signed onto this agreement. The sad thing is that not a single supermarket chain in the country, with the exception of Whole Foods, has agreed.
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OG

The tremendous power of chain restaurants was demonstrated once again in my part of the world yesterday, when one of our area bloggers decided to pack it in after a single visit to Olive Garden. That’s a shame, because her blog was quite good.

Before commenting on that, let me get this out of the way: chain restaurants suck most of the time. For some reason, they don’t take reservations, so the popular dinner hour begins with a cattle-call lineup that often stretches out the door. Then there’s the food, which is often either too salty or too greasy, and the drinks, which are either weak, overpriced cocktails or draft beer that tastes like the tap hasn’t been cleaned in a month.

That all said, a lot of locally-owned restaurants also suck a great deal of the time. They pawn off food that was cooked and frozen somewhere else as their own, they are probably more likely to violate health codes, and they’re less predictable over time than a chain.

What I don’t get about chains is the extremity of reaction to them. There’s the “Applebees salad bar”, “real Americans eat here” response, which ignores the fact that a lot of the people eating at chains are doing so because it’s the least worst alternative, or just didn’t want to drive a few more miles, or because the chain offers up cheap food for kids. And there’s the “index of the apocalypse” response, where the chain is a symbol of all that’s bad with our suburban/corporate car culture. I’m more in the latter group, but I’ll fess up that I’ve eaten at Olive Garden without having an existential crisis, and see no reason to go all emo about the popularity of chain restaurants. Almost everything that’s popular is at best mediocre, and the sooner you understand that, the more likely you are to go find something less popular but better.

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Food News: Slightly Less Poison in Your Chicken!

If we can stop talking about virtual weiners for a while, how about some news on the stuff that actually goes in your mouth? Because I admire professional insouciance, I’ve been saving this article from the NYTimes “Business Day” section:

Pfizer Suspends Sales of Chicken Drug With Arsenic

WASHINGTON — Farmers have for decades fed chickens an arsenic-containing drug that promotes growth, but after a government study found trace amounts of this poisonous carcinogen in chickens, its maker will suspend its sales.

Officials at the Food and Drug Administration said the amounts found were so low that chickens treated with the drug, called 3-Nitro, do not pose a serious health risk and will continue to be sold. Perdue and organic chicken producers do not use the drug…

Business section, not food or health. What’s important is the possible effect on stock prices of a major pharmaceutical firm, not what mere consumers are putting in their mouths.

Pfizer, which makes 3-Nitro, also known as roxarsone, will suspend the drug’s sales in 30 days, giving producers time to find alternatives. The drug, first approved in 1944, kills intestinal parasites, promotes growth and makes meat look pinker. And since 3-Nitro contains organic arsenic, which is far less toxic than its inorganic counterpart, producers assumed that it would have no effect on people who ate the animals.

But there has been growing evidence that organic arsenic can change into its more toxic cousin. So F.D.A. researchers developed a way to measure inorganic arsenic in meat. They got 100 chickens, fed roxarsone to about half of them and measured levels of inorganic arsenic in their livers. Chickens fed roxarsone had consistently higher levels of inorganic arsenic, a known carcinogen…

We didn’t have to worry as long as we thought we were only ingesting organic arsenic!

Each year, the United States produces $45 billion worth of broiler chickens, the kind used for meat — about 37 billion pounds in 2010, according to the Agriculture Department. That equals about 80 pounds a year for each American, according to the National Chicken Council, which represents major companies like Perdue and Tyson. Georgia, Arkansas and Alabama are the biggest producers.

Richard Lobb, a spokesman for the chicken council, said 3-Nitro was used widely “but certainly not universally” by the industry. Mr. Lobb said that questions about roxarsone’s safety had been raised in the past but “we’ve always been able to show that there’s really no reason to be concerned about human health.”...

And who better to trust on the issue of chicken safety than the people whose job is to sell us more chicken? Look, they voluntarily “suspended” sales—or will, in a month or so…

Environmentalists have long been concerned that the waste from chickens treated with roxarsone, when used as fertilizer on crops, causes arsenic to leach into water supplies and estuaries. Even cattle are exposed, since chicken litter is sometimes included in feed…

Just in case you thought a burger might be a safer choice. Yep, they feed chicken manure to cows. When I took a dairy-science course thirty years ago, one of the standard elements of the nutrition-calculation equations was a commercial supplement made by mixing poultry-barn waste with ground-up telephone directories (urea plus fiber), but I’m sure that’s been supplanted by now… there probably aren’t enough phone directories printed to make it economical these days. Don’t look so nauseated, just think of it as recycling, ya DFH!

Of course, you vegans can’t afford to laugh at us carnivores right now. I was a little surprised that the European (drug resistant) E. coli O104 outbreak that has killed 31 people (so far) and hospitalized a couple thousand didn’t get more attention in the American press…. if only because the European Commission agreed to spend 200 million euros compensating farmers for “up to half” of the cost of hundreds of tons of produce (cucumbers, lettuce, tomatoes) dumped from the supply chain or left to rot in the fields. Not to mention the slanging matches between the Germans, Dutch, and Spaniards about whose filthy shite-encrusted veggies were to blame…

It was the sprouts, of course. I’m from the generation of 1970s-era DFHs who decided, after one too many “mild” food-poisoning incidents, that eating any vegetable product nurtured in petri dishes and served raw was bound to be a crap shoot—if I want to add a peppery crunch to my salad, I look for the croutons. If you’re more stubborn about your dietary habits, Matthew E. Kahn (via RBC) has an interesting post on Risk Tradeoffs and Bean Sprouts. As he says: “Tradeoffs lurk“.

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Going Galt (Cooking open thread edition)

There are days, kiddies, when I tire of politics and the heady whirl, and the thought of suffering through another fifteen pages of Kathryn Jean Lopez whining about young girls wearing makeup is enough to make me want to remove my own hand so I can’t operate the mouse any more.

There are days when I can’t muster the strength to tell you the story of the time when Chris Christie got stuck on the Tilt-A-Whirl at the Convent of St. Fidelis of Sigmaringen’s Annual Fair and ended up vomiting on Ann Coulter’s head during the ceremonial stoning of the adulteresses in the carpark out the back, despite the pleasure I know such a story would bring to you all.

Today is one such day. The final straw this morning was Jonah Goldberg offering congratulations to Ben Fucking Shapiro at the Corner on that basis that Ben has apparently:

gotten a whole bunch of liberal Hollywood muckety mucks to confess their very liberal agenda

in his new book, in addition to not soiling himself in public for five whole days. The Hollywood Reporter quotes several of the more shocking revelations from Ben’s book, including that:

MASH had a pacifist agenda, says co-creator and director Gene Reynolds. “We wanted to point out the wastefulness of war,” he says in the book.

Be still, my barely beating heart – a fine piece of investigative journalism that surely rivals the time Peggy Noonan photocopied her own vomit and sold it to the Washington Post as a hard-hitting expose of alcoholism in the news-media.

Peggy, by the way, is channelling Andrew Sullivan:

Democrats, on the other hand, should be forced to answer a question. If you oppose the highly specific Ryan plan, fine, but tell us your specific proposal. How will you save Medicare? Will you let it die?

questions to which my considered and carefully expressed response is “Screw you, you drunken asshole”.

On days like this, I like to bake, and I hope you won’t mind me sharing a recipe with you. You may need the distraction as much as I do.

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Staphylococcus aureus: It’s What’s for Dinner!

Remember the story earlier this week about Big Agribusiness trying to make it a crime “to produce, distribute or possess photos and video taken without permission at an agricultural facility”? Another manure-caked workboot just dropped (into the industrial hamburger grinder):

Half the meat and poultry sold in the supermarket may be tainted with the staph germ, a new report suggests. The new estimate is based on just 136 samples of beef, chicken, pork and turkey purchased from grocery stores in Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Flagstaff, Ariz. and Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

Proper cooking kills the germs, and federal health officials estimate staph accounts for less than 3 percent of foodborne illnesses, far less than more common bugs like salmonella and E. coli.

The new study found more than half the samples contained Staphylococcus aureus, a bacteria that can make people sick. Worse, half of those contaminated samples had a form of staph that’s resistant to at least three kinds of antibiotics.

“This study shows that much of our meat and poultry is contaminated with multidrug-resistant staph,” Paul Keim, one of the study’s authors, said in a statement. “Now we need to determine what this means in terms of risk to the consumer.”

Keim and his co-authors work at the nonprofit Translational Genomics Research Institute in Arizona. Their study is to be published in the journal Clinical infectious Diseases, an institute spokesman said.

Hope that wasn’t a rare burger you just ate, folks…

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For Our New Gilded Age, ‘The Jungle’ Will Not Be Televised

When Upton Sinclair serialized The Jungle during the early part of the last century, he “wrote the novel to portray the life of the immigrant in America, but readers were more concerned with the large portion pertaining to the corruption of the American meatpacking industry during the early-20th century, and the book is now often interpreted and taught as only an exposure of the industry of meatpacking.” Modern anti-factory-farming activists, would-be inheritors of Sinclair’s mantle, have used our own century’s version of street-level communications technology—undercover videos—as their most potent weapon. According to the NYTimes, state legislators in debt to Big Agribusiness are trying to make this illegal:

Undercover videos showing grainy, sometimes shocking images of sick or injured livestock have become a favorite tool of animal rights organizations to expose what they consider illegal or inhumane treatment of animals.

Made by animal rights advocates posing as farm workers, such videos have prompted meat recalls, slaughterhouse closings, criminal convictions of employees and apologies from corporate executives assuring that the offending images are an aberration.

In Iowa, where agriculture is a dominant force both economically and politically, such undercover investigations could soon be illegal.

A bill before the Iowa legislature would make it a crime to produce, distribute or possess photos and video taken without permission at an agricultural facility. It would also criminalize lying on an application to work at an agriculture facility “with an intent to commit an act not authorized by the owner.”

Similar legislation is being considered in Florida and Minnesota, part of a broader effort by large agricultural companies to pre-emptively block the kind of investigations that have left their operations uncomfortably — and unpredictably — open to scrutiny…

Talk about gilding the budget-priced, salmonella-tainted egg. Don’t stop the criminal behavior, just make it illegal to demonstrate that such criminal behavior ever happened!

Read the whole article (not while you’re eating, though), because the details are appalling and damning. And, yes, it does give Mr. Sinclair his due.

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Type II Diabetes Here I Come

Does anyone else gorge on these damn things during Easter? If they weren’t a limited-edition candy, I’d be attached to an insulin pump already. This is an open thread.

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Chow Thread

I’m not a big sports fan but I do like to cook. Here’s what I’m making: a slow-roasted pork shoulder for pulled pork sandwiches, chili (pork and beef with no beans, though I’m not religious on that point), baked ziti for the non-pig/meat eaters, the usual chips, dip and veggie platters, and a chocolate cake with ice cream. To make it a real American meal, I’m serving it with a side of Lipitor, and I’ve painted a few Monoject insulin syringes with Steeler and Packer colors, all to celebrate our proud tradition of STEMIs and type II diabetes.

How about you?

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Diet Open Thread

I’ve been on a diet since the day after Christmas because I am trying to stop being so much of a disgusting fatbody, and I am really finding it so much easier this year than in previous years. One reason, of course, is that I am not thinking of this as a diet this time around, but rather just changing my lifestyle habits. I’ve cut diet soda out of my life and now basically only drink coffee (in the morning) and water or Pellegrino with water. I’m not acting like I need to lose the weight and then can switch back to old habits, I’m reorganizing how I shop, eat, and live.

But I also think one of the main reasons is because there really are so many cheap healthy frozen foods out there that are really, really easy to prepare. The Birdseye steamfresh line is amazing, my local store, Kroger, has a line of food called Private Selection that has excellent frozen vegetables, and they aren’t the frozen vegetables you had as a kid. A couple minutes in the microwave, and they are fresh, crisp, and retain much of their taste. It isn’t the same as fresh, but it is pretty good. For lunch today I had a bag of green and yellow frozen beans with a little olive oil and some salt and pepper and a Fuji apple. It was delicious, very low calorie, but also very nutritious.

Just thinking out loud, I guess.

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Touchy, Touchy

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is divorced and has a girlfriend, Sandra Lee, who’s a TV celebrity cook specializing in “semi-homemade” cooking. Sandra was at a Rochester food bank the other day “to use her added notoriety as Governor Andrew Cuomo’s significant other to raise awareness of hunger in New York State.” Even though her boyfriend’s name was in the press release, her media people forbade any questions about Cuomo.

Even so, one of our good local reporters, Sean Carroll, decided to commit an act of journalism by asking this question:

You definitely seem like you want to detach your interests, professionally, personally, and obviously volunteer-wise from those of your boyfriend, can you tell us why? Because I know you laid low during the campaign understandably, can you tell folks why you’re drawing that firm line? Why you’re dodging little questions here and there when it comes to the Governor?

Sean was rewarded by her PR person cutting off the interview, and he was told that his photographer wasn’t welcome for the rest of the event. Here’s the video.

It’s weird that Lee, who appeared at Cuomo’s side during his inaguration, couldn’t even respond to a very gentle question about her role as first girlfriend. You’d think that someone who gets this kind of review from Anthony Bourdain would have toughened up by now:

Pure evil. This frightening Hell Spawn of Kathie Lee and Betty Crocker seems on a mission to kill her fans, one meal at a time. She Must Be Stopped. Her death-dealing can-opening ways will cut a swath of destruction through the world if not contained. I would likely be arrested if I suggested on television that any children watching should promptly go to a wooded area with a gun and harm themselves. What’s the difference between that and Sandra suggesting we fill our mouths with Ritz Crackers, jam a can of Cheez Wiz in after and press hard? None that I can see. This is simply irresponsible programming. Its only possible use might be as a psychological warfare strategy against the resurgent Taliban–or dangerous insurgent groups. A large-racked blonde repeatedly urging Afghans and angry Iraqis to stuff themseles with fatty, processed American foods might be just the weapon we need to win the war on terror.

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Open Thread: For the New Dieters

I will state for the record that black-eyed peas in a rice cooker make the kitchen smell amazing, and many thanks to commentor Stuckinred for recommending Camellia Brand, too also.

That taken care of, here’s an abstract from the Proceedings of the Royal Society on “Canaries in the coal mine: a cross-species analysis of the plurality of obesity epidemics“:

A dramatic rise in obesity has occurred among humans within the last several decades. Little is known about whether similar increases in obesity have occurred in animals inhabiting human-influenced environments. We examined samples collectively consisting of over 20,000 animals from 24 populations (12 divided separately into males and females) of animals representing eight species living with or around humans in industrialized societies. In all populations, the estimated coefficient for the trend of body weight over time was positive (i.e. increasing). The probability of all trends being in the same direction by chance is 1.2 × 10−7. Surprisingly, we find that over the past several decades, average mid-life body weights have risen among primates and rodents living in research colonies, as well as among feral rodents and domestic dogs and cats. The consistency of these findings among animals living in varying environments, suggests the intriguing possibility that the aetiology of increasing body weight may involve several as-of-yet unidentified and/or poorly understood factors (e.g. viral pathogens, epigenetic factors). This finding may eventually enhance the discovery and fuller elucidation of other factors that have contributed to the recent rise in obesity rates.

Full article in .pdf format at the link, and hat tip to Jezebel for it.

So, even our street rats are livin’ large( r ) in this modern world?

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