Transplanting a Seattleite

I’ve been making pizza-sandwiches lately. Basically, take a piece or two of bread, put some tomato paste on it, sprinkle some basil, oregano, black pepper, layer it with pepperoni, mushrooms, (in my case fake — cashew mozz) cheese. Put it in the countertop oven until it’s cooked, eat it with sprinkled red pepper flakes.

I’d had been looking at the dates thinking, hmmmm. Today, I sliced one up and added it as a layer. Holy crap that’s good. That’s going on every pizza ever from now on that I possibly can.

Also!

https://www.feministsurvivalproject.com/episodes/episode-08-the-monitor

The Nagoskis have stuff on frustration! Yay!

Also, definitely hits different knowing that surviving 2020 only gets you to 2021 and we probably all remember more about 2021 than we are exactly comfortable with.

ETA:

OK, did a 3 mile walk with R. and talked about some stuff including this. I’m increasingly focusing on A.’s perseverance / autism rage loop / high-stakes affect when “working” as the problem that may persist when she is in classes again. I’ve talked to A. about frustration and what it feels like, and she says she often has a list of, say, 3 things, to try to do something, and when she has tried all 3, she is already depleted and has no energy to think of more things to try. My immediate reaction was, oh, yeah, no, don’t do a list of three things. Do one thing, and then the next task is to figure out what to do after that, based on whatever you learned from the one thing. If you have a list of three, you might learn something from the results of round one that will make the others irrelevant. This was interesting, but I wasn’t necessarily satisfied with my explanation.

The Nagoskis have this:

“We've got three different targets for solutions, right? So option number one is going to be changing the kind of effort you're investing. Solution number two is going to be just making a decision to change your brain's assessment of how hard it's going to be. And then our third option is going to be changing the goal.”

They are working with a model of approach / avoidance (discrepancy decreasing or increasing), and frustration is the affect that arises when the criterion velocity is too low. I have some very real issues with this model, but we’re going to play along at least for a paragraph or two.

The “kind of effort” turned into a discussion of what I have as the Basic Needs Theory. It’s less developed than my theory but basically same same. Get enough sleep, eat better food, etc.

The “how hard it’s going to be” is basically a redo the schedule to be more realistic.

The “change the goal” is super weird, and I’m not 100% certain I even understood much less agree with that make Andrew experience joy thing.

“ The new goal has to be soon, certain, specific, concrete, positive and personal.”

No explanation on this. In my world, the absolutely crucial element of any goal is that it be attainable. Which is not on this list. Which I find extremely worrisome, because an unattainable goal is going to bring us right back to frustration. It’s easy to think, but how do you _know_ it is attainable? Well, it has to be something that you know to be fully within your control. So, “drive to the mall” is kind of a sucky goal, but “try to drive to the mall” is a great goal. You try, and if it turns out someone else already took the car, well, you tried! You met the goal, even if you didn’t make it to the mall. Let’s say the car is there, and you drive partway there, car breaks down, resolving the car breakdown takes the rest of the day / money. You still tried! You didn’t make it to the mall, but you tried! If you get stuck in traffic, and by the time you get there you would have to turn around and go right back home for some other part of the day’s plan, oh well! You turn around right away, because you tried!

Yoda’s there is no try is absolute bullshit. Try is a great goal, and a great way to reduce frustration.

Another change-the-goal is “do a bad job quickly”. Then you can decide whether the bad job is good enough (now you have extra time!) or you can decide whether it’s worth spending any remaining time allocated to the task to improving the the work.

“Do a bad job quickly” for “go to the mall” might be, well, I wanted to look for a pair of shoes or a sweater, and I can do that online and maybe you find good enough shoes and/or sweater online, place the order and the amount of time spent on the task is a tiny fraction of the time it might take to drive to the mall. Or maybe you go look in your closet and discover a pair of shoes or a sweater you forgot you owned that is kinda cool and because it had been forgotten for a while, it feels like new. Fastest solution ever!

I’m not sure if this is going to help with A.’s frustration, especially when it comes to words or concepts that she does not understand and wants to understand. I use these techniques. Like, why does Germany / German have so many terms in different languages (Alemanni derived, German, Deutsch). We talked about migration, and terms from outside vs. inside a group, and concluded that Deutsch, like so many terms used by a group of people to refer to themselves, just means “of the people” (I predicted that, actually, and was pleased that that turned out to be the case.) Alemanni was a reference to a confederation, so probably it means something close to what it sounds like (all the tribes). We still don’t know what’s up with the German/Germany one, tho. So I tried to answer, told her it would be harder than expected (reset expectations), and punted on a complete answer after getting answers to parts of it (reset success criteria / abandoned part of it). And she’s mostly been okay with me using these techniques. But it’s less clear how successful I will be at teaching techniques like this to her.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2024/01/02/ultra-processed-foods-identification/

I like WaPo. I really do. I just hate New Years Resolution Lose Weight / Eat Healthier clickbait, and I have low self control so I am gonna Lay Waste to this garbage.

I’m going to start at the end, with the quote from Marion Nestle, who I often think I like, altho I’m starting to really revisit that.

“If you choose to buy ultra-processed foods, avoid “family size” and choose single serving items. Large packages are designed to make you overeat, said Marion Nestle, an emeritus professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University and the author of “Soda Politics.” “If you can’t stop eating from big packages, don’t buy them,” she added.”

The reason everyone buys the “family size” is because it is cheaper. So this advice is basically, spend more money, with a little side helping of Probably Worse for the Environment, too. Nestle is focused on self-control / portion perception and package sizing, which was a Go To for Brian Wansink and his coterie. But we all know not to believe anything that Brian Wansink told us, because _he had to fake the science to get an outcome we all were pre-disposed to believe_. So the Nestle advice has multiple forms of bad advice:

Advice that is even worse for the planet than what someone is already doing
Advice that is gratuitously more expensive than what the person was already spending.
Advice based on an idea that is extremely plausible, but which a very well-known and popular scientist had to repeatedly fake science in order to support — so, very bad scientific advice.

What might be better advice to someone who chooses to buy ultra-processed foods? Maybe, “Eat slowly and savor what you have bought, and stop when you feel you feel like it is not enjoyable any more.”

How hard is that really?

Next paragraph back:

“Most ultra-processed foods are found in the middle aisles of a grocery store. Shop the perimeter where stores stock fresh, whole foods, said Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, a professor at Northeastern University and a lecturer at Harvard Medical School who studies ultra-processed foods. “Most of the foods that are fresh are good for you,” he said.”

The perimeter of the grocery store is populated by a lot of food that is labor intensive to prepare, is more expensive per calorie, and requires significant culinary skills in order to prepare. I think we can all see that those are problematic assumptions, but I would also like to point out that identifying a person in a family unit to develop that expertise and support that person in deploying that expertise on behalf of the rest of the family unit also strongly reinforces some real negative human interactions. Some of those interactions are obviously patriarchal. The rest of those interactions are just more subtle patriarchal.

Kinds of bad advice here:

Probably worse for the planet, because waste of fresh fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, dairy, eggs, etc. Is legendary, and shelf stable stuff doesn’t go bad quickly and is very often consumed in its entirety eventually, unless someone comes in and makes the person throw it all away in a fit of Eat Healthy that will last for about two weeks, six tops.
Gratuitously more expensive.
Probably patriarchal, definitely exploitative and/or an opportunity to blame people for being too poor in money, time and/or training to “properly” “prepare” “food”.

What might have been good advice here?

If you like to snack on fruit, try to buy it in season, when it tastes best and costs the least.
There are often partially prepared vegetables that you can either snack on, or incorporate into a quick and tasty meal — not just “baby carrots” but various vegetable mixes and salads as well. Buy only what you are sure you will use in a few days, and supplement with items from the freezer section if you have space in your freezer, or canned/tetra pak options if you do not.

Next paragraph back!

“Processed foods include items such as canned vegetables, bacon, cheeses, smoked fish, canned tuna and freshly made breads. Most processed foods are things you can make in your own kitchen. They typically contain two or three ingredients, but they’re still recognizable as versions of things found in nature. Some examples would be a jar of unsweetened apple sauce, tofu, hummus, tomato sauce, and frozen fruits and vegetables.”

This is not advice; it’s just risible. First, Ashley Gearhardt, an expert in the space of ultra-high processed foods and food addiction, explicitly categorized all white bread made at home as ultra-high processed food in an episode of “Speaking of Psychology” podcast. So, these “okay” processed foods are “not okay” if you ask other experts in this area. Even if you made them at home. You can tell that there is genuine disagreement, because scientists back-calculated processed food consumption based on the Nurses Health data categorized homemade pie (contents unspecified) as the “best” category, but it almost certainly contained all the stuff that gets things marked the worst category. At the same time, olive oil — about as unprocessed an item as you are ever going to find — gets dumped into the vegetable oil category, which is definitely not the best category.

Nothing here makes sense, and also, I would like to meet the person who could make in their own kitchen all of smoked fish, canned tuna, freshly made bread, canned vegetables, bacon, cheeses, and tofu. I mean, that is a _lot_ of skill and quite a lot of equipment as well. I’m not saying that paragraph suggests that any one person _could_. I just want to meet that person, because the language summons that level of culinary capability in my mind and it made me laugh, but _an actual person_ who could do all that would inspire awe. The laughter is because that person does not exist.

What other description might have been better here?

If you have any food sensitivities or intolerances, or you are buying food for people with food sensitivities and intolerances, longer ingredient lists are a chore to get through. Also, we should give thanks every day that we live in an age of plentiful food that is unlikely to kill us through adulteration or contamination, thanks to food regulation and modern food processing. If you can find a processed food or whatever that you can eat without feeling ill, and especially if it is easier for you than making it yourself, please take your time to truly enjoy that food and express your gratitude that we live in an amazing time.

Skipping a bit back:

“ Yogurt should have just two ingredients: Milk and cultures (i.e. probiotics).”

Basically, you’re not allowed to have the highest fat Fage, then? I mean, it has cream in it. Also, why doesn’t it count as processing to use “skimmed” milk? Please do not respond to this. I’m obviously snarking. I don’t care what kind of yogurt you buy and eat. Buying Fage in the two lower fat options is clearly a flex; mixing in your own fruit is going to open up a discussion with the other person doing this flex about whether you should be eating that fruit that was flown in from elsewhere on the planet because it is out of season. Or that it traveled more than 100 miles to get to you, so you shouldn’t be eating it for that reason. Or because Fage is sold in plastic containers, so you shouldn’t be eating it for that reason. You’ll find yourself talking to someone spooning yogurt out of a mason jar that they made themselves _and that’s fine that they made their own yogurt_, as long as they don’t drop the mason jar and leave glass shards everywhere.

OK, I’m going to stop now. The rest of the article is an entirely unsupported set of recommendations that amount to don’t eat anything. If you comply with them, someone _will_ come up to you and add some more things that amount to, or that either. You can _endlessly_ tell people not to eat things _because we live in a culture of wild abundance_. People who try to “eat healthier” at the beginning of the year are attempting to recreate an environment of scarcity within the larger environment of abundance in hopes that this will result in them getting thin. Or whatever.

What is better advice?

If you are driving through a rural area in the green time of the year, and you see some place selling fresh eggs or peaches or green beans or squash, and you have a flash of loving a particular egg dish, or peaches with the fuzz still on them, or green bean casserole or squash pie, please pull over and get that good stuff and bring those memories to life again.

If you are hungry, you should eat something.

If you can, you should establish a routine to ensure you eat at regular intervals, because if you don’t, it’s hard to emotionally regulate and if you have substance abuse problems, it’s harder to manage them.

If you can share your food with someone else, without being pushy about it, offer. It can bring joy and community back to a polarized and anxious world.

And try to get a good night’s sleep. I’d suggest you eat your vegetables, but after reading that WaPo article, I can’t. I just can’t. Please take good care.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5852789/

Particle size of almond meal has effects on how it behaves in your gut.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7026359/

Particle size of I think it’s ground cactus has measurable impact on water absorption and bioavailability and so forth.

http://extension.msstate.edu/content/particle-size-important-for-swine-diets

Yes, it is about feeding pigs, and yet, still feels relevant.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnut.2022.951821/full

Arabinoxylan makes an appearance! I don’t have a lot of opinions about corn, because I’ve read that sourdough doesn’t work on corn (altho reading this, I am wondering a bit, now) so I haven’t made any meaningful attempt to culture it and mess with it. All that aside, did you notice they used 300mesh!?!? I’ll be watching for corn bran in highly processed food products in the future, and I will not be assigning a positive value to corn bran, either.

Hold up here! I have a new game! Find instances of recognizable kitchen equipment being used by scientists in studies listed in PubMed. Here are 2!

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36357208/

KitchenAid blender the Pro 5 Plus.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/4025803/

This is actually the first one I found. Cuisinart DLC 7 Pro.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33721304/

This one has several items listed in it as they were trying to figure out if you could improvise sterilization in an “expeditionary environment” using pressure cookers. Nice example of, duh, yes.

It is now shortly after the Fall Equinox, and I have been meaning to post something about our current food patterns, because it’s changed a lot in unanticipated ways and I’ve been thinking about it and that usually means it is time to write some of it down.

Still Using Trad Food System For Many Items

We continue to use traditional food sourcing like Roche Bros., Costco and Amazon. Amazon is mostly for bulk purchases of household goods / prepared foods. Our dish soap, for example, or tetrapaks of Organic Pomi tomato product, also bulk spices, baking potassium, tea. Costco is another source of similar — the oils, tomato paste and pasta come from there, and sometimes peanut butter. I prefer Trader Joe’s unsalted creamy, but my husband goes to Costco more frequently than I go to TJ’s, and I’m just not prepared to fight that hard. I get PB at TJ’s when I’m there to buy chocolate chips when my stock for making blondies runs out. Roche Bros. is where we buy beverages (milk, chocolate milk, apple juice, orange juice), yogurt, bread for my daughter, american cheese for my daughter, english muffins for my son, mandarins, and baby carrots for the kids when the farm share is not providing (ditto for apples). I also buy spread from Roche Bros. I try to keep some fake cheese in the house for my pizzas (not necessary, but tasty!), usually from TJ’s, but sometimes from elsewhere.

Delivery, But From (Closer to) the Producer

We also continue to have food delivered. Imperfect Foods stopped serving our address, and I eventually canceled SunBasket. I’d been meaning to do that for a long time, but I felt a lot of gratitude to both for introducing us to awesome products we had not previously known about and recipes that we hadn’t tried before. I also felt tremendous gratitude to them and to Walden for delivering very high quality food to our home during the pandemic. But one went away, and the other was no longer really introducing us to new things. Also, they never really did provide any support for people avoiding allium.

We do still use Walden, altho there, I’m also ordering from Lilac Hedge and may switch over completely, or change to an entirely different provider such as North of Boston Farm. We get eggs, bacon, sausage, beef, pork, chicken, fish, seafood, bread, charcuterie, occasionally cheese from Walden Meats. Lilac Hedge supplies duck, lamb, goose, bison, hot dogs, versions of everything that Walden Meats supplies and a variety of other items as well. I’ve ordered condiments and occasionally prepared foods from each of them. I would switch in a heartbeat, except again, I feel so much gratitude for Walden being there for us through the pandemic. I first ordered from them in February of 2020, I think, and I expected to overfill our freezer and for things to go bad. That did not happen.

We’ve been getting a farm share and a mushroom share from Siena Farms for over a year (I think we’re just about at 18 months). This summer, I also got the tomato share, and we are about to finish up the corn and fruit share as well. For that first year with Siena, I was also getting a “Forest Share” through Clover. Starting this late spring, but stopping once the tomato and corn and fruit shares started, I was going to Pick Your Own (Verrill, Tougas, Carver Hill) to pick things like strawberries, blueberries and cherries. The avalanche of the seasonal shares and Covid in July put a stop to that. It was fun, though, and I’m not sure what I’ll do next summer.

Lilac Hedge arrives in a cardboard box and very little else. I think there’s one of those recycle-the-outside, pour-the-refreezable-into-the-garden freezer packs in there. Walden has a reusable cooler bag and dry ice bag. They both use mylar bags as well, and we try to return those.

Siena uses waxed carboard boxes that they will accept returned if you drive over to Sudbury. They will also take back the produce buckets.

Walden, Lilac Hedge and Siena are operations which sell some of their own production (I think even Walden, but less certain there), but also sell things from other, smaller farmers that are expanding beyond their own farm stands. They operate their own delivery network, so this is not going through third party shipping at all. This gives far better control over temperature and other things impacting food quality. Siena’s delivery partner, What Cheer, also supports an additional network of producers but I have not yet experimented with that as an add on. Lilac Hedge and Siena both support pickup at their locations, but I have not used those (yet?).

Grains

I continue to buy Turkey Red and soft red (Lily) wheat berries from Brian Severson, and have also ordered some popcorn, dent corn, oatmeal (steel cut and flake) and a few other things from them. I ordered popcorn from 1000 Springs Farm as well. The Severson heritage popcorn tastes better, altho does not pop quite as large; when the 25 pounds bag from 1000 Springs runs out, I’ll probably switch to Severson for the popcorn as well.

I had been buying soft white from Palouse Farms via Amazon; I’m not really sure whether I’ll be continuing with that as well. 3 different kinds of wheat seems excessive, and I have a big bag of King Arthur Special Patent that I bought during the pandemic because I am an asshole who feels compelled to prove that she knows better than other people, so I might just use that for a while.

The packaging on the wheat, obviously, is a massive reduction from buying loaves, rolls, etc. On the other hand, while I have completely replaced my own breakfast bread product with home produced english muffins, I have not been as successful in diverting all the rest of the bread product in the house. But I’m closer now than before. I was getting pizza crust from Essential Baking Company and also flatbreads from Atoria’s Naan from Imperfect Foods, and then direct to consumer mail order; now I’m just making my own pizza crust which is where I wanted to be anyway. While I had a bread proofer already, the proofing setting on the Breville really reduces the number of distinct steps in making pizza crust turn out reliably.

While _all_ of these items are _shipped_ rather than going through the producer’s own network, I don’t feel at all bad about that. It makes very little sense to grow grain in New England, and the packaging for 3rd party shipping is all recyclable and fairly minimal.

Cooking Fat / Oil

I’ve loved cooking with bacon fat since I was in my 20s. I didn’t usually have much of it around, so I didn’t use it very often. Eventually, as I read more about nutrition, I “learned” that cooking with bacon fat was terrible for one’s health and so I regretfully stopped. During the pandemic, since we weren’t getting much takeout, and weren’t eating out at all for a while, I felt like cooking with bacon fat was a reasonable way to reduce some of our demand on the food system and couldn’t really be that much worse than what we’d been doing while we were eating out. Also, it tastes so amazing.

I belatedly looked into what the current nutrition industry had to say about cooking with bacon fat, and realized that I honestly didn’t need to worry about it. I don’t use that much, and what I’m usually cooking in bacon fat is vegetables, and also to grease the pan and english muffin ring for my morning english muffin. So, you know. For what it’s worth, the primary use for the bacon in our household is a single strip a day in my daughter’s breakfast; the fat from that amount of bacon is relatively steady-state with the cooking I use it in. I will note that there’s an occasional added burst of bacon fat from cooking pork belly.

Bones and Broth and Peels

In the past, I’ve thought of making broth or stock as a Big Project, involving a special shopping trip. Recently, however, I’ve been making mushroom stock from the trimmings from the mushroom share, corn cob stock from corn cobs, and chicken stock from bones that were cooked with the chicken on them. This is an easy and fast thing, that requires nothing special at all (water, the objects mentioned, possibly pepper or ginger). It has no added sodium. It doesn’t keep forever, but it is handy and tasty.

I’ve also saved the peel from the kids’ mandarins in the freezer and then periodically food processoring or chopping it fine and boiling it with sugar to make marmalade. I also made some fridge strawberry sauce / jam from the strawberries I picked at the PYO. My efforts to make fridge pickles from the deluge of cucumbers was not as successful — they didn’t last as long as the sweet products. I probably should learn how to make a fridge pickle that will keep. So far, I really only do summer pickles, and they deteriorate.

The seasonal shares have produced so much more than we could eat, that I have been making red sauce and freezing it (I got much better and faster at making red sauce from tomatoes). I also froze some corn that I removed from the cob, and some sliced peaches.

Other not completely successful efforts: baconnaise (too thick), various efforts at making bread and buns/rolls. I thought for a while that my technique with yeast breads might just be bad, however, I recently realized when I was using the Special Patent from King Arthur that my technique is _fine_; I’m trying to get home-ground whole grain to do things that you cannot do without removing and reprocessing the bran. I’ve ordered some Rosle strainers / sieves, and will be experimenting with those next. (Maybe I’ll start making bran muffins with the bran I remove.) (Altho there are some alternative options, like fully hydrating the bran and adding it back into the dough, or putting the bran on the outside of the dough before baking to make it crustier.)

Kitchen Equipment

I have been buying kitchen equipment again. I replaced our Breville toaster oven with a Breville countertop oven (the really nice air fryer pro one). I also replaced our electric kettle with one that heats to specific temperatures. This has helped us shift away from using our range. We have a gas range (cooktop and oven are both gas), and we can see from the air quality meter I bought during the pandemic the impact on air quality in the house from running burners on the range (and also from the furnace turning on in the basement). Finding energy efficient ways to cook using electric power without sacrificing resulting food quality is a priority for us. I have also bought an induction wok, but have not yet started using it.

I got the food processor out of the cabinet it was stored in, and now use it frequently, whereas before it would sit for months or years untouched. I still use the mill every day, and a blender occasionally. I haven’t really gotten back to using the standmixer. If the sieves I ordered let me start baking more effectively again, I probably will.

Recently, my husband got out the immersion blender, and I used that to make squash soup, and then squash pie. I am now storing that upstairs in the kitchen instead of in the basement, and may retrieve the other parts of the kit which allow it to be used to do small scale food processing as well.

We Are Doing All the Right Things!

Our new normal really maxes out a lot of food trends of my adult cooking life: local foods, minimally processed, whole foods, organic (or organic-ish), Know Your Grower, supporting local / small producers. Siena Farms is one town over in Sudbury. Lilac Hedge is in Rutland. The grains come from further, but I know my growers and they are very transparent about their process and choices. The meat we get through Walden and Lilac Hedge is pasture raised, humanely processed, their feeds are often organic or organic-ish (and also locally produced!). Siena, Lilac Hedge and Rutland all partner with smaller operations to help with their distribution. While not all the PYO’s I have been to are organic or even organic-ish, they are all local.

Some deliveries are through third party shipping (Amazon and grains in general), altho the packaging there is very minimal, especially compared to buying baked products whether in-person retail or shipped directly to me. As noted above, Walden and Siena will take some or all of their packaging back for reuse, and Lilac Hedge’s packaging is truly minimal. By taking waste (such as mushroom trim, bones from bone in chicken, citrus peel) and using it as input for other items I might otherwise by produced away from home (stock, marmalade), I am presumably also reducing waste in a variety of ways (since I’m not hard-canning anything, I reuse jars I already have).

OK, So I Am Absolutely NOT Evangelizing This At All

I’m going to take this in order.

First, and most difficult to address: most people have the opposite of desire to spend this amount of time preparing food. REVULSION. We used to assign this task to women. Women were unhappy about it. They lobbied for the right to get out of the house and do things they liked doing (or staying at home doing things they liked doing) and NOT spending hours a day acquiring, preserving, storing, preparing food for the family and probably others as well. To all my dear, dear, dear friends who are like, but I LOVE cooking. Feel free to do as I have done, and enjoy the hell out of it. Also, this is not something we should try to nag, persuade, shame or coerce other people into doing. As a public policy, this approach to food is a terrible one.

Second, and the next most difficult to address: even those people who DO want to spend TIME puttering around in the kitchen, it is quite difficult to find time to do this. It’s not necessarily a 12 hours nonstop sort of thing — that happens in commercial kitchens in institutions, restaurants, etc. But a fair amount of time scattered throughout the day / week / months / year is required to acquire food in this way, not waste it, and create meals that a family is interested in eating.

Third, if a lot of us devote a lot of time to artisanal whole food process and preparation, we will lose many of the economies of scale that allowed us to feed the population of workers that our planet relies upon. This will increase pressure on the economy at a time when it’s not in a great position to tolerate that pressure. Workers who leave paid employment to do food prep for a few at home are workers who are not available to hire in the general economy. Automation elsewhere might make this workable.

You will notice that at no point here do I mention money (which is fundamentally an accounting system, and accounting systems cannot do anything to address the above issues). Nor do I mention issues of equity. Even if we magically eliminated the money issue and magically made everyone equal in whatever ways people care about, that is NOT going to address the REVULSION many feel at the idea of spending so much of their time and energy in this particular activity, nor will it create the time to do that, nor will it replace the workers who are now doing food at home instead of productive activity in the larger economy. Money and Equity are tremendously important issues, and the lack of money and unjust distribution of everything in our world prevents people who WANT to do this and who may have the time and who maybe are not even working in the global economy, from doing this. We could make things better — meaningfully! — for lots of people and probably for the climate and our economy and generate new ways of doing things and so forth if we got money to people who are not employed and who do have time so that they could engage in this activity to their heart’s content.

But that isn’t going to move the needle by more than a very few percentage points.

Not Sustainable

It’s not sustainable for me, or for a lot of people in the organic(ish), local foods, know your grower, reduce food waste, etc. movements. Mission driven people are people who burn out. I am getting a lot faster at various specific activities. Maintaining and daily using sourdough is getting easier every week. I’m much faster at making specific, repeat things like red sauce and english muffins. It’s _possible_ that over time, I could adapt to this. But it would not be easy. And I think that no matter how fast one gets, you are not ever _really_ going to get this to be faster than picking up takeout or sitting down at a quick service restaurant. Even people who do clever things like the YouTuber who sends someone to get fast food and tries to replicate it at home before the person returns with it are not including in their calculations all the _other_ time that goes into stock and maintaining the facilities and equipment to do that.

I’m not sure what the right solution is at the household level. I do think that public policy should be primarily directed at regulating existing foodways to make them less damaging to soil, water, air, climate, people’s health (customers and workers), etc. And it’s great for people to experiment with new ways of doing things, to see if we can put together a package of strategies that make healthier foodways more accessible broadly.

Houseguests and Insights

Recently, my MIL came over for a few days. Her last visit was a year ago August. She generally speaking brings a small cooler and a variety of foods with her. This time, she brought absolutely nothing, other than her Java Burn supplement (her latest effort to lose weight or whatever — sometimes her efforts result in awesome food discoveries for me, like when she was doing a grade B maple syrup and lemon juice cleanse. I _love_ grade B. I know it is called something else now).

I had a couple of her tea bags leftover from last August, so that was something. She is not celiac, but she does not consume much if any grain because it upsets her digestion. After a day or so, my husband went to the store and bought her gluten-free bread (same brand as she buys at home, but that was an accident) and some chocolate granola. Until he did that, carbs were challenging. She won’t eat dried beans, for digestion reasons (fair, honestly). She will eat oatmeal, and I made her oatmeal in the microwave for the first breakfast, and then set up overnight oats with milk and raisins which she ate for her last breakfast. It apparently turned out okay. She doesn’t like grain-free pasta (I have soy, chickpea, and lentil pastas in the house, but she dismissed all out-of-hand). I made her some rice with coconut water that I filtered from a can of coconut milk; I put the solids into the squash for the squash soup and pie and then later realized I could make rice with the liquid, and that went over fairly well.

However, in general, our changes in food acquisition / storage / preparation have created an absolute nightmare for houseguests. So much of what is in our house is unlabeled, or hand-labeled, often reusing commercial containers for homemade things like marmalade or strawberry sauce/jam or fridge pickles or whatever. The oatmeal is not the quick-cook type and it’s in a rubbermaid container (so that no one has to haul out the big sack of oatmeal). Because we were in week 2 and nearing our next produce delivery, our veg and fruit drawers in the fridge were low, and basically only had a few, somewhat odd items. There was _plenty_ of food to make delicious meals — but I really had to just do that, because once the rest of the lion’s mane mushrooms were cooked and the pre-cooked kale eaten in an omelet, the easy meals for one were basically gone. I did remember to thaw out the beef chili from Lilac Hedge but she never tried it.

It’s really not at all clear how to handle the houseguest problem. Obviously, I can cook for a houseguest! But generally houseguests want to have _some_ degree of independence. And this new way of doing this is super confusing. Even coffee was hard. We now make coffee with aeropress (husband) or a pourover filter (me). We made zero effort to teach her up front how to use the aeropress, but I didn’t show her how to use the pourover, and if you use it the obvious way (pour water in and let it filter through) it makes terrible coffee. You really do have to pour a little in, wait, pour a little more in, wait, pour more in, wait, pour enough to fill your cup. If you rush it — or let the water cool too much while waiting — it won’t extract as well. Back when I still had a functional drip coffee maker, this was so much easier.

Lessons Learned

I knew that chain fast food existed because travelers may be in an unfamiliar location and need food in a hurry and have no easy way to figure out which of the local places will be acceptable to them. One of my earliest boyfriends explained that to me when I was 19. McDonald’s doesn’t have to be good; it just has to be absolutely predictable.

What I did _not_ realize was that consumer packaged goods operate along exactly the same lines. The homogenized American supermarket with national brands does not exist to supply the best of anything; it exists so that if you go anywhere in the country, you have some chance of being able to acquire food to bring home and cook familiar foods in a familiar way. I moved our household in the direction of Support Local / Organic / WTF Farmers / Food Producers. I did not understand that I was simultaneously erasing all of that familiarity and creating massive cognitive load for all visitors. I _thought_ that it would simplify things, because there are really only so many distinct whole foods that anyone eats, and there is _way_ more variation in packaged goods than in distinct whole foods. However, no one consumes or is familiar with the whole range of either, but packaged goods have the desirable feature of having packaging that _explains what the fuck you are supposed to do with it_. Ooops.

I’m trying to find source reduction approaches to reducing food waste that are tips and tricks oriented approaches to helping people _bring less food home_. (I just drove my daughter over to Tougas Farm where we picked 8 quarts of strawberries so I hope you can clearly see the hypocrisy here.)

https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/new-canadian-study-finds-canadians-can-reduce-household-food-waste-by-a-third-with-just-one-use-up-day-per-week-866844575.html

This did not turn up with my search string; I found the underlying research, but it was paywalled, so I went looking for news coverage and found this. Basically, they had people keep a journal of food usages, and they assigned some interventions.

Obviously, keeping track — even in the control group — raised awareness and all by itself reduced waste. In addition, a group was encouraged to make a meal on a “Use Up Day”, where they used things they already had that were otherwise about to go bad. Also, they were given a “3+1” cooking approach, which I found mildly astonishing mostly because I was like, wait, people do it some other way?

“how to make a meal with what they could easily grab and use from their fridges and around their kitchen, combining a base, vegetable or fruit, optional protein and a 'magic touch' such as spices or sauce to bring the dish together and give it flavour”

I mean, repertoire gives you a way to do that in a “culinarily consistent” way, but honestly, it’s going to be fine regardless because it’ll be edible and not boring.

Finally, some were given flexipes: “flexible recipes with inspiration and ideas for using up commonly wasted ingredients following the 3+1 approach”.

This is pretty awesome!

I will go look for more.

ETA:

https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2019/09/09/psychology-food-waste-interview-brian-roe-and-laura-moreno

Meanwhile, in the US, no concrete suggestions and a lot of stuff that we know does not work well. They do have some interesting ideas about how to better track what people are doing? (No, I am not impressed either.)

I actually wish they had interrogated the people-buy-stuff-on-sale problem. I mean, if the store was going to throw it out if it wasn’t sold, and someone brings it home, uses part of it and throws the rest away, that’s a win, right? But not presented as on. *sigh*

ETAYA:

This is great! Potlucks, family style, tapas, etc. leads to excessive per person consumption / waste.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0743915618823783

“This is shown to be the result of both generosity motives and cognitive errors (specifically, failing to account for the reciprocal nature of CC). However, inflated purchase amounts in CC contexts can be reduced (i.e., consumer well-being can be improved) by (1) having consumers explicitly focus on the amount they expect to take from others and (2) providing antiwaste persuasive messages at the point of purchase.”

When we were at LegoLand this time, we did several things that we did 9 months ago (practice effect). So when we went to Royal Feast for lunch, I explicitly underordered by one full meal (4 meals for five people). It worked out almost perfectly — I had remembered just how much extra food there had been last time and compensated. We stopped at a place for ice cream, but it turned out to be all sorbet. A. didn’t want any, and I took a look at the sizes of the containers and declined as well. I got tastes of three different flavors, and it cut the total waste down to less than half of one full serving. That “focus on the amount they expect to take from others” is huge, and it helps a lot of the person who is paying for most of it does that, because they are not going to feel as much of a need to be generous by supplying food, because they are already paying.

In general, I do not like to buy or use boxed cake, pancake, etc. mixes. My reasons are twofold: I am allergic to milk products and I am sodium sensitive (I bloat)(my blood pressure, thus far, is fine, thank you very much for caring). Also, it is honestly just not that hard to make the equivalents from scratch.

However, I have used them a lot — they are how I started baking. And I have done some pretty ridiculous things with boxed mixes. Since I grew up using Bisquick, it was not too much of a stretch to look at pancake mix and think, that could be a cake. However, I had never taken the reverse step: Can I Make Pancakes from Box Cake Mix?

Short answer, of course I can.

Slightly longer answer, in addition to yeah, definitely grease the pan:

(1) Use English Muffin rings and you get little mini cakes.
(2) Keep the range temp low — I use 4 to cook a lot of stuff, but these cannot go above 3 and need to be dropped to 2 after flipping.
(3) Assuming you use the rings, you will need a little longer to cook, and use a lid.

A bit more about what I did: I did NOT follow the cake mix directions. I was using Betty Crocker Super Moist Devil’s Food, and it calls for eggs and water and oil. Ha ha ha ha no. I used water. I use water when I make pancake mix, because if I planned on using eggs, I would have used flour in the first place. I mixed to a medium thickness (where thin gets you crepes and thick is edging onto being a dough).

TL;DR: open the cake mix box, decant it into a resealable bag or container. Scoop out however much you want to use. Mix at 1:1 or slightly less water, depending on how thin you like your pancake. Use rings if you want an actual cake. This thing is prone to burning (suuuuugggggaaaarrrr), so cook it low and slow and use a lid to avoid drying it out.

I tried putting fluff onto the resulting cake, but the cake is pretty fragile. Hershey’s chocolate syrup is probably the right choice here, unless you are really creative, or willing to commit to actual icing or buttercream or WTF.

There are food trends. Once upon a time, organic food was a Thing. Now it is just normal. Then, Eating Locally was a Thing. Now, Food Waste is a Thing. And the single most commonly quoted number on food waste is that (up to)40% of all food produced in the US is wasted.

Where the heck did that figure come from, anyway?

Here it is! I will note up front that the sourcing on this is unusually solid AND it was unusually EASY to track down this origin point, versus tracking down various other trendy statistics. A lot of trendy statistics turn out to be unadulterated, Telephone-style bull shit. This is real.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/40039495_The_Progressive_Impact_of_Food_Waste_in_America_and_Its_Environmental_Impact

It’s from 2009. Basically, the authors do a bunch of math on some numbers to calculate how much food is produced in the US, how much food could be consumed in the US (there is obviously some potential for jiggery pokery here), and note that the difference between the two has increased over time (hence the “progressive” part) and as of 2009 it is running around 40% but that might well be a lower bound.

So I guess one thing to note is that the (up to)40% may actually be (at least)40%. Or (something on the order of)40%. Or WTF.

In answer to your question, YES how much food got shipped into and out of the country is part of the calculation of “produced in the US”.

These authors say we are _producing_ about twice as much food as we could possibly be consuming. And that is Not Good, because it consumes a lot of fossil fuels and other stuff, and then it rots making more greenhouse gases.

Here is my analysis:

Why the fuck has trimming food waste _at home_ and _in restaurants_ at the point of consumption become a Thing, when that will have Zero Impact on overproduction?

That’s it. That’s my entire analysis. Should you buy too much food and then throw it away? Probably not.

Will reducing the amount of food _purchased_ by individuals in the store and at restaurants or wherever create net pressure to reduce overproduction?

Doubtful. If you’ve ever met anyone involved in commercial food production, you realize they are focused solely on ramping up production, so as to make more money. You can talk them into wasting less so as to improve their margin, but it is difficult to get them to consciously limit how much they produce. In fact, generally speaking, imposed quotas generate a ton of cheating and political pushback.

Good news, tho! It’s super easy to feed up to twice as many people as are currently alive! We’ve already solved that problem.

“my regular supermarket adds a new variety of store-baked bread and tempts us shoppers with samples. Last week, it was something called a “filone”. Before that it was a cheddar jalapeño loaf.”

So, I looked up what a filone was. I don’t know why he put “filone” in quotes but not “cheddar jalapeño loaf”. Filone is a legit bread. I’m not sure about that cheddar jalapeño thing.

He then whines for a bit about how only two days a week does a non-profit pick up the remaining bread; the rest goes into the trash. He does say this. “Because stores refuse to run out of anything — they view it as driving customers to their competitors — they feel compelled to have the full lineup of thirty breads available from the time they open their doors until closing time. And that ensures a surplus at the end of the day.”

In my younger years, post first divorce, I lived in Ballard (before Ballard was expensive). I figured out a bunch of shops that were walking distance to where I lived, where I could buy high quality produce, bread and meat (three shops, if you are counting). I wanted to live a life where I didn’t go to the supermarket, but went to local stores that specialized in things and got good at them. The butcher was decent — it was no A&J, mind you (which I understand has been closed for some years but recently replaced by another butcher). The produce shop was pretty fun to go to. And the bread bakery?

Oh, where do I even start?

They were unpredictably out of what I wanted more often than not. So I started placing an order. That helped, but sometimes they would sell the loaf I had on order even if I arrived earlier on the pickup day than I normally did. And then I missed picking up a week, and they canceled the order going forward. Why? I mean, they were already guaranteed to sell that loaf. I didn’t just stop shopping at _that_ bakery. I pretty much swore off shopping at bakeries period. I mean, it was pretty good bread, but you could easily get bread of comparable quality at the Ballard QFC — and you could be certain they’d have something in stock.

I can’t quite figure out where this author is going with his advocacy. He’s anti-waste. That’s fine. And his analysis of the amount of waste is pretty credible — he has multiple approaches to calculating the waste that produce comparable results over the population as a whole, usually a good sign. He can’t _really_ want us to go back to being hungry (can he?). But it was hunger that caused us to eat everything in sight. We’ve had a collapse in demand, that started in the 1920s when we switched from using muscle power predominantly to using fossil fuel power (sure, coal predated that, but the decline in agriculture devoted exclusively to feeding horses and so forth that occurred in the first quarter of the 20th century is absolutely astonishing, and unique in world history). And it would be for the best if that demand never came roaring back, which is why we work so hard to overfeed everyone starting from birth.

We don’t want hungry people.

So, how are we going to reduce waste? I don’t know. Mostly, he keeps mourning how people in the past used to really _value_ food. Which, true! They were hungry. We are not. And that is a good thing.

Expect edits.

ETA:

Wow is this man an idiot. He says that “American excess fully arrived when chemical fertilizers and pesticides became commonplace after World War II”. No, that’s when there was plenty to buy AND plenty of buyers with the money to pay. American excess had arrived much earlier, as I note above. But the collapse in demand occurred because we didn’t have plenty of buyers. Lots of food — some of my ancestors switched _back_ to horse drawn from trucks, because grain got so cheap that it was cheaper than gas, and that was _wheat_. Not enough buyers. How can one fail to notice this?

“Our separation from the production of food has helped erode our food knowledge, and, accordingly, our kitchen confidence. . .We’re not sure how long to cook items.”

Some of this is a direct result of public policy by body count. Having reduced the number of bodies that are produced by car accidents, we are now focusing on things that kill people earlier than they should. In addition to finally dealing effectively with cigarette smoking (yeah, I know we’re not done) we have actually gone after food borne illness with some focus. And along the way, we have discovered things that were always there, but which we didn’t necessarily recognize until now. Like, flour that hasn’t been through a kill step can give you a nasty E. coli infection. This is not an artifact of being separated from the production of food — this is an artifact of increased total knowledge of possible risks.

ETA:

“43 percent of respondents sought instructions explaining how best to reheat the items. While such tips in doggie bags would help solve part of the food-waste problem, shouldn’t it be self-evidence when the food is no longer good and how it should be reheated?”

Let’s just start with an easy one: French fries. Arguably, you shouldn’t be eating them in the first place, and what a surprise that any made it into a doggie bag, but let’s say you got those fries home. How should you reheat them? In order: a deep fat fryer, if you own one, an air fryer if you own one, a convection oven if you own one, a toaster oven if you own one, etc. Don’t bother with the microwave, that’s just nasty. I’ve had no luck reheating them in a pan on the stove, but some people say that it works for them. And that’s approximately the simplest food ever. Most people don’t even bother to bring fries home because it doesn’t occur to them to reheat fries other than in a microwave, which is, again, the worst idea ever.

So, NO, people don’t know how to reheat food. And we know that, because 43% of respondents to a survey on restaurant leftovers said they wanted instructions. They TOLD you they didn’t know.

Next up: the self-evidence of spoilage. Periodically, NIH and similar survey people in various countries to get a sense of just what kind of risky business people get up to when storing and eating leftovers at home (whether produced at home or from elsewhere). They are rarely impressed by typical practice. So, why should anyone assume that people in general know? This is learned, just like everything else.

“We squander more food than our ancestors. If their ghosts could talk, they’d call us wasteful.”

Yeah, well, they’d say it with an envious tone. And some of them probably became ghosts as a result of eating bad food — the loss of smell in the elderly along with their frugality (whether necessary or the habit of a long lifetime) is legendary for leading to illness. (Go ahead: google anosmia elderly food poisoning — you’d be amazed how everyone knows this except possibly this author.)

Dude worked at a McDonald’s for a while for research. Notes few people ordered the regular hamburger or cheeseburger (my husband orders two of the former, typically, as a way of working around onion issues). Lots of people ordering the McDouble (which is interesting — it’s basically slightly less meat than a quarter pounder, if I remember the patty sizing standard correctly), at a much better price point at that point in time. Seems _entirely_ unaware that back when people ordered the regular burgers (because all those fancy big burgers were still in the future), they ate a _bag_ of them. Same thing with the waffles. You eat _a_ waffle now, if you own a “Belgian” waffle iron. The waffle irons of our past you ate more than one waffle. Same thing has happened with pancakes and a bunch of other things. I’m sure this isn’t universal, but it’s really easy to misrepresent the past.

One way you can tell the book isn’t new: Brian Wansink is mentioned lovingly, respectfully, with no caveats. Brian Wansink is Poster Boy for P-Hacking right now. Which basically calls into question all of the book that is derived from Wansink’s work.

Google Brian Wansink P-hacking Joy of Cooking. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

“Food was just not wasted in the 1930s. Not when nearly everyone was struggling just to survive.” Yeah. We’re going to just ignore that year when the AAA (no, not the car organization) destroyed hundreds of thousands of pigs because the price was too low, in an effort to support prices to keep farmers from going under.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_Adjustment_Act

Bon Appetit!

If you write a book with the theory that everything worked better in the past, and you really only pay attention to what end consumers can do to change things, you’re gonna miss things like this.

We took advantage of the snow day and trooped over to the post office to get T.’s passport renewed. On the way, R. and A. got lunch at McDonald’s. T. is not feeling well, so he had leftovers from the kids’ visit to Julie’s Place last night. I had leftovers from Feng Shui, supplemented with a bunch of vegetables, some hoisin sauce and wrapped up in a flour tortilla. Hey, it’s leftovers. Also, it was quite tasty.

The microwave, unfortunately, really has gone horribly awry. I noticed yesterday that the turntable was still moving when I opened it, and today it did that again, so I didn’t just imagine it. Needless to say, I no longer trust the interlock — if the turntable is moving, it could still be emitting microwaves and I don’t feel like engaging in a bunch of experiments to find out. I have ordered a new one, rather than go to Kmart, because it occurred to me that I have already bought 2 microwaves at that Kmart and I’ve only lived in this house for less than a decade. Either microwaves these days suck (possible), our house kills microwaves (surprisingly also possible — RHI that arc fault breakers and microwaves are not good buddies) or Kmart has unusually awful microwaves. I can experiment with the third option and I did by ordering from Amazon. Also, lazy.

A.’s Luciana Vega doll arrived, so she’s wearing the equivalent dress and carrying the doll around. That’s fun.

List of things I normally cook in the microwave, but have done something else to prepare today. Thawing frozen blondies: normally 20 seconds in the microwave, or sit on the counter for 20 minutes. I sped things up by putting them in the toaster oven at around 250 for a few minutes. Worked great. Heating up leftovers — frying pan on the stove. Various mugs of tea allowed to cool to room temperature before drinking — found the travel immersion heater I had never taken out of the package and figured out how to use it. Wow, that is awesome. I may actually pack that when I travel again. Then I thought, why do I need that microwave, anyway (don’t answer — I do want it and need is a really tricky concept in a developed nation). Popcorn! We have one of those silicone poppers, so we were already using normal kernels and oil. I thought, I’ve never made popcorn on the stove and we don’t seem to currently own an air popper (honestly don’t love air popped popcorn anyway). So I read a few blog entries, decided unilaterally that these people were making things way too complicated, found a saucepan, put the usual amount of oil in with a kernel. When it popped, I dumped the rest of the kernels in (lid, obviously!). Shook it while it popped. Took out the popcorn, salted it, handed it to A. who said it was at least as good as microwave popcorn. Turned the burner back on and reheated the kernels which had not popped; popped them. So. Wow. So much innovation applied to this task that strikes me now as wildly unnecessary.

Oh, and s’mores. We make A. s’mores with hershey squares, fluff and graham crackers. Usually, this is a 10 seconds in the microwave sort of activity, if she even wants it heated up (fluff vs. marshmallow makes the heating up very optional). She wanted it heated tho, so I gave the gas burner a go. I pulled the metal grate that supports the pots off, turned on the burner I wanted to what I thought was a reasonable level, held the s’more over it for a few seconds using tongs, turned it over, and then handed it to A. on a plate. She asked why it was a little burned on the edges, but said that it tasted as good as the microwave version.

So. Interesting kitchen experiments today for people with very middle class standards.

It's 4H around here! Okay, not really. I had a haircut this morning, and I got going early enough to walk. I dropped a check off at the post office after, and then went for a walk with M. It was T.'s half day, so I picked him up, and then took him to gymnastics. He was unhappy with the choice of t-shirt and shorts (not quite matching green color apparently was not acceptable). Sitter texted in sick for the third day in a row; poor T. really misses her.

I headed out at 4 after R. came home early from work to watch T. I had a program to attend at Harvard, a UCS national food policy panel that was probably intended to be a bit of a victory lap and then buckle down to continue working on food but instead, as a result of the election not turning out as expected, turned into something else entirely. One nutter on the microphone during the q&a. Bittman's presentation got me thinking about the line 501(3)c organizations have to walk in terms of not taking a position on specific candidates. Emily Broad Lieb's presentation was fantastic -- she talked about some specific issues that might well arise in the next few years: there may well be a push to convert school lunch funding and/or SNAP to state block grant programs. She outlined other programs (AFDC and TANF) that went through this conversion back in the 1990s and the ramifications from that conversion that continue to this day in terms of state-to-state differences in coverage. Very, very, very good things to talk about and stay focused on, with bipartisan, broad interest. Salvador had a good presentation as well, talking about how the new administration's promises are out of step with the direction the population as a whole has been moving and also about how some of those promises, if implemented, would be directly and immediately harmful to people who helped elect this administration. 2 big tables (about a dozen per) at Henrietta's after. I got to chat with several really nice, pleasant people from various backgrounds about a variety of topics, some related to the presentation but a lot just getting to know each other. One of the nicest things about giving money consistently to organizations which align well with one's values is getting the opportunity to meet other people doing the same thing, and finding out that, what do you know, they are really wonderful. Big crowd at the main discussion -- over 300.