Piano teacher came in person today! Weather and health of all parties allowed delightful human interaction! I offered him a cookie, and he says it is good.
T. went to martial arts. He’s apparently in the process of asking his extensive social network at school and restaurants and so forth for opinions about Fitchburg State. He’s busy figuring out how he can live on campus, continue to go to martial arts, do his job at the movie theater, etc. while also attending college. Obviously, I would kinda prefer he be okay with commuter school to start. OTOH, I don’t care very much. He says he’ll want his own car and one with more range than the i3. While this is a _solid_ thought process, I am also feeling mildly overwhelmed. He is still on board with doing a super senior year in part or in whole. I _am_ really glad that he’s liking one of the possibilities I came up with. I have no idea how to calibrate this choice on the safe/stretch scale (I think it’s a stretch, but I don’t have any fucking clue how the disability-included part of the application process works anywhere, much less at Fitchburg. It’s possible that with disability factored in, this isn’t a stretch.), but at least no one is saying, that is never gonna work find a different school.
[ETA: T. and I got him registered for Lovelane 5K and for Team Verge spring Sundays only. That’s fine, but then we also talked through his availability for his job. Then he wanted to know whether he’d be doing summer school / ESY this year. And I legit started laughing. ESY generally starts after July 4, operates T, W, Th only, fewer hours than the regular school year, and wraps up a little over a week into August. I went over his summer plans. There are literally no days of ESY that he will be able to go. Made that decision simple!]
Theme of the day is “Ultraprocessed Foods”, so this could be a heavily edited post. I have been thinking about the nut-sugar-egg-plus cookies, and wondering what happens if, just as a for instance, one were to food processor dates or raisins in place of the sugar. Obviously, we are moving into no-bake territory (lots of easy things to find there) and also into the Nutrition Bar category (but those are just cookies, we know that!). I have been able to find some people doing what I propose to do (using flax seed as egg replacer but acknowledging that a “chicken egg” works, too), so that’s promising.
As I was thinking about the cookies, and What Are Cookies (Special, and a category of Special which includes some fat and some sweet and is small and attractive and quite probably round and typically baked but served cool and held in the hand to eat and not expected to generate so many crumbs that a plate or even a napkin is required and can be stored at room temperature and so forth. None of these are mandatory, but they are all generally expected so violations have to respect the expectations and justify themselves in terms of the framework) and why is the flour/sugar/butter thing so dominant when the nut-sugar is a super effective replacement and the many, many, many other thoughts, I realized that cookies are very much an “ultraprocessed food” in the sense used by Ashley Gearhardt in the Speaking of Psychology podcast I gave up on (https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/food-addiction ) and which caused me to abandon “ultraprocessed food” as a category, because I Hate Purity exercises.
I’ve never been especially good at making cookies, and there are so many problems with so many of the vegan butters, not least of which is the sodium present in so many of them, but mostly because people really _love_ the taste of butter and I sure don’t _love_ any vegan butter the way people love butter. This may be more about me than about the vegan butter, but if the major appeal of a cookie is butter, then I am just not that interested.
I also get fairly annoyed at people who condemn commercial food products, then turn right around and try to recreate them at home and don’t see the irony or weirdness of the whole exercise. I’m completely fine with people having a hobby of making an ersatz whatever at home (honestly, I sometimes benefit from their efforts, if it helps me get enough of a running start to make a whatever without milk products that I can eat, when I cannot eat the commercial whatever because it doesn’t exist in a dairy-free form). But some of the things being condemned in the commercial food product are just replicated in the home product. There is nothing magical about “home” cooking per se; if you reproduce an industrial process at home, then …
So that brought up the obvious question: how do people concerned with “ultraprocessed foods” (however defined) relate to things made at homes with “food processor” or similar item that reduces particle size, or a juice that makes smoothies or whatever.
Early on in this search, I stumbled across this:
https://www.aarp.org/health/healthy-living/info-2019/ultraprocessed-food-healthy-recipes.html
Which is pretty standard replace this with that, and has all the problems of making a bunch of work for _someone_ to create an expensive one or a few of something that you can buy for super cheap in large quantities. But the comments thread also included these:
“2Papa
SEPTEMBER 27, 2019
![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
norlisowski. That’s what wives are for. I’ll be out cutting the lawn.
JonathanM526377
NOVEMBER 4, 2022
Reply to 2Papa
Thatsounds like a rude post. I guess I’ll go in and help warm up her oven. Take some extra time on that lawn…
2Papa
NOVEMBER 5, 2022
Reply to JonathanM526377
Dream on, and on, and………
That says _so much_ about what it is like to be 50 and above in 2019 and later. I mean, the original comment is from 2019, the initial response from 2022, _and the offending commenter_ replies _a day after_ the years later response. It all feels like exactly the kind of shit we watched these characters do in college, at bars, at company parties and so forth over the decades. And now, they’re doing it in a comments thread on AARP, on a post about eat-this-not-that.
The wikipedia entry for ultraprocessed foods, unlike Gearhardt in Speaking of Psychology, is focused on commercially produced foods. I kind of like the NOVA categorization schema, and this description:
“The term ultra-processing refers to the processing of industrial ingredients derived from foods, for example by extruding, moulding, re-shaping, hydrogenation, and hydrolysis. Ultra-processed foods generally also include additives such as preservatives, sweeteners, sensory enhancers, colourants, flavours, and processing aids, but little or no whole food. They may be fortified with micronutrients. The aim is to create durable, convenient and palatable ready-to-eat or ready-to-heat food products suitable to be consumed as snacks or to replace freshly-prepared food-based dishes and meals.”
Homemade white bread really isn’t this. In the NOVA schema, it would be 2:
Unprocessed or minimally processed foods
Processed culinary ingredients
Processed foods
Ultra processed food and drink products
If I chop up a bell pepper and some carrots and celery, those are minimally processed foods. If I squeeze a lemon over it for my dressing, still minimally processed food. If you ask google if olive oil is a minimally processed food, the resulting hits are deeply hilarious. But if you know what “processed culinary ingredients” means, and you know how EVOO is made, then you know EVOO for sure (and some other categories of olive oil) are absolutely 2: processed culinary ingredients. And YES, there are a bunch of people making their own olive oil at home, in an effort to back their way into category 1, or to at least convince themselves they have done so.
I mill my own wheat, and more recently, I’ve started bolting or sifting it as well. Bolted flour gets me more oven spring, and I put the bran plus that is sifted out into my sourdough crock and it becomes part of my english muffins. I know _damn well_ that grinding and sifting are processing. It’s annoying work. Annoying work that you look around for power tools to do for you is _definitely_ processing. And at the same time, this is all very much “processed culinary ingredients” type processing. What I’m a lot less clear on is the Cuisinart food processor I also use. I can make mayo in the blender, or with the immersion blender, or in the food processor — or I could get a bowl out and use a whisk and accomplish the same task and be a lot more tired afterwards. Mayo can absolutely fit into category 2. And also, the stuff you buy in a jar or squeeze plastic bottle (whether it is Kewpie or Hellman’s or whatever) can absolutely cross well over into 3 (but probably not 4).
If you eat peanuts out of a bag, that are roasted, that is probably still within category 1. But if you put them through some kind of a grinder, mill, food processor, blender, whatever, you’ve definitely moved into category 2. And you are still in category 2 if you did that all with a mortar and pestle. You’re just a lot more tired and will therefore make a lot less of it.
Dates: category 1. If I put them in the food processor with the nuts and egg and then bake little balls of the result, absolutely category 2.
One thing is super clear here: Category 1 ain’t cheap. It’s going to cost in money, in time, in ability to be there to tend the garden if you are growing it yourself. If I’m sitting around congratulating myself on sticking to category 1 and category 2 in the NOVA processing scheme, well, it’s a bad look and honestly it’s missing the point of the original scheme. The scheme was not there to be used to judge on an individual basis. It was an observation about our food system, and the negative impacts it was having on groups of people. Opting out of it with a bunch of machines at home is no solution.
I’ll probably be back. And I’m sure I’ll regret some of this.
I read a bunch more about NOVA, and things are not improving! I was wrong to think this thing would be better than that psychologist on Speaking of Psychology.
Here is someone using NOVA to extract some data from the Nurses Health study. They categorize Pie, Home-baked as a G1. !!!
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8453454/
_Even if_ the 1970s era Pie, Home-baked in one of the 11 most populous states, probably a woman who also had a job as a nurse, was an apple pie, she surely used wheat flour in the crust, and some kind of fat and very likely sugar. Sugar is a G3. If that crust used Crisco, Crisco is _absolutely_ (in the 1970s formulation) a G4. If it was a cherry pie, the filling likely came out of a can and had just an amazing load of dyes and whatnot in it. But even if Pie, Home-baked is a G1, it is difficult to reconcile the pie as a G1 (because it was Home-baked) and Home-baked bread as a G4 (what the interviewee said). If nothing else, the system is difficult to apply consistently for study purposes, and as a guide to individual choices, guaranteed to devolve into a purity test.
Someone is trying to crowd-source Nova grouping here: https://world.openfoodfacts.org/nova (found via link on wikipedia entry for ultraprocessed foods). In this assignment, fats which are _named_ as examples of G3 and G4 in other schema are in G2, and _virgin olive oil_ is a in G3 with all the other vegetable oils. No distinction is made between types of olive oil (which the most fractionated is less processed than the least processed canola oil) and canola oil.
Nova grouping is opinion laundering.
T. went to martial arts. He’s apparently in the process of asking his extensive social network at school and restaurants and so forth for opinions about Fitchburg State. He’s busy figuring out how he can live on campus, continue to go to martial arts, do his job at the movie theater, etc. while also attending college. Obviously, I would kinda prefer he be okay with commuter school to start. OTOH, I don’t care very much. He says he’ll want his own car and one with more range than the i3. While this is a _solid_ thought process, I am also feeling mildly overwhelmed. He is still on board with doing a super senior year in part or in whole. I _am_ really glad that he’s liking one of the possibilities I came up with. I have no idea how to calibrate this choice on the safe/stretch scale (I think it’s a stretch, but I don’t have any fucking clue how the disability-included part of the application process works anywhere, much less at Fitchburg. It’s possible that with disability factored in, this isn’t a stretch.), but at least no one is saying, that is never gonna work find a different school.
[ETA: T. and I got him registered for Lovelane 5K and for Team Verge spring Sundays only. That’s fine, but then we also talked through his availability for his job. Then he wanted to know whether he’d be doing summer school / ESY this year. And I legit started laughing. ESY generally starts after July 4, operates T, W, Th only, fewer hours than the regular school year, and wraps up a little over a week into August. I went over his summer plans. There are literally no days of ESY that he will be able to go. Made that decision simple!]
Theme of the day is “Ultraprocessed Foods”, so this could be a heavily edited post. I have been thinking about the nut-sugar-egg-plus cookies, and wondering what happens if, just as a for instance, one were to food processor dates or raisins in place of the sugar. Obviously, we are moving into no-bake territory (lots of easy things to find there) and also into the Nutrition Bar category (but those are just cookies, we know that!). I have been able to find some people doing what I propose to do (using flax seed as egg replacer but acknowledging that a “chicken egg” works, too), so that’s promising.
As I was thinking about the cookies, and What Are Cookies (Special, and a category of Special which includes some fat and some sweet and is small and attractive and quite probably round and typically baked but served cool and held in the hand to eat and not expected to generate so many crumbs that a plate or even a napkin is required and can be stored at room temperature and so forth. None of these are mandatory, but they are all generally expected so violations have to respect the expectations and justify themselves in terms of the framework) and why is the flour/sugar/butter thing so dominant when the nut-sugar is a super effective replacement and the many, many, many other thoughts, I realized that cookies are very much an “ultraprocessed food” in the sense used by Ashley Gearhardt in the Speaking of Psychology podcast I gave up on (https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/food-addiction ) and which caused me to abandon “ultraprocessed food” as a category, because I Hate Purity exercises.
I’ve never been especially good at making cookies, and there are so many problems with so many of the vegan butters, not least of which is the sodium present in so many of them, but mostly because people really _love_ the taste of butter and I sure don’t _love_ any vegan butter the way people love butter. This may be more about me than about the vegan butter, but if the major appeal of a cookie is butter, then I am just not that interested.
I also get fairly annoyed at people who condemn commercial food products, then turn right around and try to recreate them at home and don’t see the irony or weirdness of the whole exercise. I’m completely fine with people having a hobby of making an ersatz whatever at home (honestly, I sometimes benefit from their efforts, if it helps me get enough of a running start to make a whatever without milk products that I can eat, when I cannot eat the commercial whatever because it doesn’t exist in a dairy-free form). But some of the things being condemned in the commercial food product are just replicated in the home product. There is nothing magical about “home” cooking per se; if you reproduce an industrial process at home, then …
So that brought up the obvious question: how do people concerned with “ultraprocessed foods” (however defined) relate to things made at homes with “food processor” or similar item that reduces particle size, or a juice that makes smoothies or whatever.
Early on in this search, I stumbled across this:
https://www.aarp.org/health/healthy-living/info-2019/ultraprocessed-food-healthy-recipes.html
Which is pretty standard replace this with that, and has all the problems of making a bunch of work for _someone_ to create an expensive one or a few of something that you can buy for super cheap in large quantities. But the comments thread also included these:
“2Papa
SEPTEMBER 27, 2019
norlisowski. That’s what wives are for. I’ll be out cutting the lawn.JonathanM526377
NOVEMBER 4, 2022
Reply to 2Papa
Thatsounds like a rude post. I guess I’ll go in and help warm up her oven. Take some extra time on that lawn…
2Papa
NOVEMBER 5, 2022
Reply to JonathanM526377
Dream on, and on, and………
That says _so much_ about what it is like to be 50 and above in 2019 and later. I mean, the original comment is from 2019, the initial response from 2022, _and the offending commenter_ replies _a day after_ the years later response. It all feels like exactly the kind of shit we watched these characters do in college, at bars, at company parties and so forth over the decades. And now, they’re doing it in a comments thread on AARP, on a post about eat-this-not-that.
The wikipedia entry for ultraprocessed foods, unlike Gearhardt in Speaking of Psychology, is focused on commercially produced foods. I kind of like the NOVA categorization schema, and this description:
“The term ultra-processing refers to the processing of industrial ingredients derived from foods, for example by extruding, moulding, re-shaping, hydrogenation, and hydrolysis. Ultra-processed foods generally also include additives such as preservatives, sweeteners, sensory enhancers, colourants, flavours, and processing aids, but little or no whole food. They may be fortified with micronutrients. The aim is to create durable, convenient and palatable ready-to-eat or ready-to-heat food products suitable to be consumed as snacks or to replace freshly-prepared food-based dishes and meals.”
Homemade white bread really isn’t this. In the NOVA schema, it would be 2:
Unprocessed or minimally processed foods
Processed culinary ingredients
Processed foods
Ultra processed food and drink products
If I chop up a bell pepper and some carrots and celery, those are minimally processed foods. If I squeeze a lemon over it for my dressing, still minimally processed food. If you ask google if olive oil is a minimally processed food, the resulting hits are deeply hilarious. But if you know what “processed culinary ingredients” means, and you know how EVOO is made, then you know EVOO for sure (and some other categories of olive oil) are absolutely 2: processed culinary ingredients. And YES, there are a bunch of people making their own olive oil at home, in an effort to back their way into category 1, or to at least convince themselves they have done so.
I mill my own wheat, and more recently, I’ve started bolting or sifting it as well. Bolted flour gets me more oven spring, and I put the bran plus that is sifted out into my sourdough crock and it becomes part of my english muffins. I know _damn well_ that grinding and sifting are processing. It’s annoying work. Annoying work that you look around for power tools to do for you is _definitely_ processing. And at the same time, this is all very much “processed culinary ingredients” type processing. What I’m a lot less clear on is the Cuisinart food processor I also use. I can make mayo in the blender, or with the immersion blender, or in the food processor — or I could get a bowl out and use a whisk and accomplish the same task and be a lot more tired afterwards. Mayo can absolutely fit into category 2. And also, the stuff you buy in a jar or squeeze plastic bottle (whether it is Kewpie or Hellman’s or whatever) can absolutely cross well over into 3 (but probably not 4).
If you eat peanuts out of a bag, that are roasted, that is probably still within category 1. But if you put them through some kind of a grinder, mill, food processor, blender, whatever, you’ve definitely moved into category 2. And you are still in category 2 if you did that all with a mortar and pestle. You’re just a lot more tired and will therefore make a lot less of it.
Dates: category 1. If I put them in the food processor with the nuts and egg and then bake little balls of the result, absolutely category 2.
One thing is super clear here: Category 1 ain’t cheap. It’s going to cost in money, in time, in ability to be there to tend the garden if you are growing it yourself. If I’m sitting around congratulating myself on sticking to category 1 and category 2 in the NOVA processing scheme, well, it’s a bad look and honestly it’s missing the point of the original scheme. The scheme was not there to be used to judge on an individual basis. It was an observation about our food system, and the negative impacts it was having on groups of people. Opting out of it with a bunch of machines at home is no solution.
I’ll probably be back. And I’m sure I’ll regret some of this.
I read a bunch more about NOVA, and things are not improving! I was wrong to think this thing would be better than that psychologist on Speaking of Psychology.
Here is someone using NOVA to extract some data from the Nurses Health study. They categorize Pie, Home-baked as a G1. !!!
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8453454/
_Even if_ the 1970s era Pie, Home-baked in one of the 11 most populous states, probably a woman who also had a job as a nurse, was an apple pie, she surely used wheat flour in the crust, and some kind of fat and very likely sugar. Sugar is a G3. If that crust used Crisco, Crisco is _absolutely_ (in the 1970s formulation) a G4. If it was a cherry pie, the filling likely came out of a can and had just an amazing load of dyes and whatnot in it. But even if Pie, Home-baked is a G1, it is difficult to reconcile the pie as a G1 (because it was Home-baked) and Home-baked bread as a G4 (what the interviewee said). If nothing else, the system is difficult to apply consistently for study purposes, and as a guide to individual choices, guaranteed to devolve into a purity test.
Someone is trying to crowd-source Nova grouping here: https://world.openfoodfacts.org/nova (found via link on wikipedia entry for ultraprocessed foods). In this assignment, fats which are _named_ as examples of G3 and G4 in other schema are in G2, and _virgin olive oil_ is a in G3 with all the other vegetable oils. No distinction is made between types of olive oil (which the most fractionated is less processed than the least processed canola oil) and canola oil.
Nova grouping is opinion laundering.