Food for Thought

While I was recuperating from chemo, I read two different books that discussed the food eaten in yesteryears in the United States.  One, Appetite for America: How Visionary Businessman Fred Harvey Built a Railroad Hospitality Empire That Civilized the Wild West, addressed the food served by Fred Harvey (the company) from the late 1800s through the 1960s when the business faltered and for the most part died.  The other, The Food of a Younger Land: The WPA's Portrait of Food in Pre-World War II America, compiled the writings of a WPA project (America Eats) surveying the food of each region of the US from settlement through the 1930s.  Raccoon and entrails soup seemed to be in abundance in certain areas.  Reading this book reminded me that our national diet now is truly a melting pot of cuisines as well as horrible processed food derived from the abundant corn grown by agribusiness.  When I was in college in Massachusetts in the 1970s, most of us had never eaten a taco or a plate of sushi, nor were such foods available in our college town.  Not true now.  Frighteningly you can get sushi very far away from  the ocean. Mexican food is abundant everywhere.

This past weekend the NY Times Book Review also wrote about two new books that survey eating habits in America past.  Why all this interest in what our forebears ate?  Four books in one year on the subject?  Perhaps it has something to do with Michael Pollan's observation in In Defense of Food that we do not have a national identity in our food (our food is an amalgam of the immigrants who populated our shores and the product of extensive engineering by the food industry to satisfy our need for novelty).

The sheer novelty and glamor of the Western diet, with its seventeen thousand new food products every year and the marketing power - thirty-two billion dollars a year - used to sell us those products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition and left us where we now find ourselves: relying on science and journalism and government and marketing to help us decide what to eat. Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto)

Perhaps these books are a search for a national cuisine, a tradition to enshrine in the land of McNuggets and Cheese Doodles.  I don't know.  Having seen raccoon up close and personal (see my blog entry of October 27, 2009) I think I would rather eat the cheese doodle.

À la Recherche de l'été Perdu (In Remembrance of Summers Past)

Summer has been slow to come to Southern California this year, particularly at the beach where I live. Typically we have a month of marine layer (overcast skies and temps in the 60s but no rain) in June, but this year what we call "June Gloom" has extended into August.  Unlike our friends and family on the east coast, we have not needed to turn on our air conditioning this summer.  I am still wearing wool pants even in August.

So I have started to fugue in my memory to summers of my childhood spent in upstate New York at a small spring fed lake.  Here are some scenes that have flashed through my memory:

• When I was very young I had a stuffed bear named Joe (which was also my dad's name) who I believed was my only friend. I dragged him everywhere, smelling his sweet Teddy bear smell. One summer I vomited on Joe and my mother had to wash him.  I was beside myself until I got him back and then beside myself again because he did not smell the same. I have a specific memory of her returning Joe to me in the room I had in the house we had on the lake.
• At age 9 or so, I ordered a kit from the Jerry Lewis Muscular Dystrophy group to put on a circus/fair to raise money for the cause.  I set up a fair with games at our lake house (aka the "camp")on a Sunday when family was visiting.  I think I raised about $5.
• My maternal grandmother (aka Nanny) came to visit one summer and actually spent some time showing me how to cook.  She made wonderful pies but did not show me much about how to make them.  I guess the tutelage was not too extensive given that I still do not know how to cook all that well.
• One summer when I was about 11, my dad set up an archery set for me and showed me how to shoot a bow and arrow.  I got pretty good at hitting the bullseye.
• At age 10, I got a license from the state of NY to operate a motorboat so I learned to drive ours all over the lake and to take people waterskiing.  I repeated the mantra, "let the boat pull you up."
• I tried for years to learn how to waterski myself.  I only got up once and fell fairly quickly out in the middle of the lake.  I was the only one in my family who was never able to waterski.  For some reason, it seemed like my arms were never strong enough to hold on, although my family found ways to insult my balance, athletic ability etc.
• The summer I was 12, I decided to force myself to swim more so I set up a schedule for daily swims from our dock to another dock that I estimated was about 1/2 mile away.  I also spent that summer canoeing all over the lake. You would think I would have had strong arms but nope, still couldn't waterski.
• When I was 13, I spent a good chunk of the summer sitting or lying on the enclosed porch of the camp reading War and Peace.  I remember loving the book and loving the setting.

Whither Wilderness

As I have gotten older, I have become much more interested in National Parks and spectacular scenes of nature.  I even sat through a chunk of Ken Burns' The National Parks: America's Best Idea and would have watched more if my DVR had not thought keeping episodes of Star Trek The Next Generation was more important. The Parks are full of aging hippies like me with overpriced digital cameras.  Perhaps it is because we have more time now that our children are grown.  However, I never chose to go to the Parks when my children were younger and if I had been a true hippie I would have reveled more in the outdoors. No, something has changed in me.  I want to know more about geology and history of these beautiful areas.  They provide more perspective for our place on this planet in this point in time.

For a number of years, I have been exploring the Southwest.  I am particularly enamored of red rock and arches.  This year, I decided to re-explore California, my adopted state of residence for the past 35 years.  We went up the coast as far as Mendocino and back down with a nice side trip to Yosemite.

Here are four pictures of scenery we saw, three from Yosemite and one from the coast near Big Sur.  Please discuss among yourselves which scenery is most beautiful and/or spectacular to you and why.

525,600 Minutes

In reading Half the Sky recently, I was struck by the impact certain statistics have on me, and I suspect on others as well.  They are statistics that measure events relative to time and for me, that comparison makes the numbers seem more significant.

For example, here are two quotes from Half the Sky:

In India, a “bride burning” takes place approximately once every two hours, to punish a woman for an inadequate dowry or to eliminate her so a man can remarry ...

Another huge burden for women in poor countries is maternal mortality, with one woman dying in childbirth around the world every minute.

 And here is a quote from today's article by Bob Herbert in the NY Times:

These are gloomy times in the United States. A child drops out of high school every 26 seconds.

Let's translate these time references into numbers.  As we all know from the Rent song, there are 525,600 minutes in a year. The "bride burning"  numbers translate to 4,380 deaths a year-- a disturbing number in and of itself but nowhere near as disturbing as the "every two hours" reference.  However, there are about 1/2 Billion women in India and approximately 70%  are over the age of 15, so that would yield a death rate for marriageable age women of about 0.00000125.  See the difference?

The maternal mortality rate translates to approximately half a million women each year.  I suspect if you take into account the number of women of childbearing age in the world, you would get a less startling statistic. In like vein, based on the statistic Herbert cited, there are approximately 1.2 million high school dropouts a year.  According to US Census figures, in 2008 there were 16.7 million high school students. That would yield a dropout rate of 13.9 percent (I am rounding everything so these numbers may be off by a little).

 My point is not to diminish the size of any of  the problems but to point out the impact of communicating the problem in terms of time rather than whole numbers or rates.  Why is a time reference so much more compelling?  I think our perception of time, even though it is measured in numbers, is much more subjective and personal than our perception of numbers and ratios.  We live in time and a minute can be long (e.g.when you are waiting for something) or short (e.g.when you are enjoying something).  If you associate an event such as high school dropouts with time, you can personalize the event.  "While I was typing this sentence, some child dropped out of high school."  Half the Sky cites some psychology research that showed that personalizing the story of someone in need makes the person hearing the story more likely to give money to help than if the story is not personalized or if just statistics of the need are presented.  Therefore, aid providing charities will do better if they tell us stories of individuals rather than tell us in numbers how big the problem is.  Similarly, when we hear a time reference, the problem is placed in a personal reference for us and thus becomes more compelling.  Whatever the reason, I now am much more sensitive to my gut reaction when I hear a time reference for a problem because of the bias we seem to have for this method of processing information.

Democratization of Journalism

When Elena Kagan was nominated to the Supreme Court last spring, I thought amusingly that I should write a blog about how hard it is for mothers to become Supreme Court justices.  At the time I was probably busy being sick (which incidentally has not really deterred my hero, Justice Ginsberg, from serving), so I let that blog idea slide.  Within a week or so, there was an article, which I cannot find now, that addressed my thought with the appropriate stats about how competitive it is for younger women lawyers now and almost impossible to rise to the top in law if you are a mother.  Then came the articles calling for a mother on the Supreme Court, e.g the one in the Washington Post.  Today, with Kagan's confirmation imminent, the issue has been examined again in the NYTimes, again with stats showing the difficulty for mothers to make it in business.

All of this leads me to think more about the role of blogs and what appears to me to be the democratization of journalism.  More than once, I have blogged about an issue that later appears in MSM as an article.  I have seen it happen in other blogs.  And some times, blogs present information that MSM does not even cover. Witness the front page article in Time Magazine this week and the critiques of its message in blogs.

My point is that with the internet and so many smart and educated people blogging, some news stories in MSM are behind the times.  Of course, there are still stories for those news outlets that can afford them where the correspondent travels internationally and writes on topics not readily available to the masses on the internet.  But unfortunately those stories seem to be becoming rarer.  And to the extent that blogs rely on sources from the internet rather than investigative journalism, there is always the problem of accuracy of those sources.  So as in governance, democratization may lead to less excellent results.

And, as irony would have it, someone, perhaps Jay Rosen, has probably already written about this issue, in more depth and with more thoughtfulness. I do, after all, have a day job.  And children.  And grandchildren.

Half the Sky; Wholly Inspirational

This book is a must read for the 21st century.  I hope it has the impact of a Silent Spring or Uncle Tom's Cabin, i.e. to start a movement to end the horrors that women face in most of the world--sex trafficking, death of infant girls, death in childbirth, fistulas, rape, physical abuse by husbands, fathers and brothers as a matter of right.

The book inspired me to take action.  I am sponsoring a woman through Women for Women International and am looking at another organization that works against sex trafficking, which enslaves more women annually than Africans were enslaved during the mid 19th century.  The book is difficult to read at times because the stories and the statistics are so brutal but Kristof and WuDunn give us hope by showing that good outcomes are possible.  They recommend a number of ways to take action, which seems inevitable in the face of such horror for so many women.

I'll Be Back

My hair is returning in an interesting salt and pepper shade.  It is still very very short but "punk chic" looking as one of my colleagues said.

My elbow is still injured--the result of repetitive movement and muscles weakened by chemo.  I am doing physical therapy and wearing a wrist brace.  I have been avoiding this blog because of the pain from typing.

I have been back to work for six weeks which I just realized means that I can start doing some ab exercises since my last surgery was also over 6 weeks ago.   I promise myself to exercise every day but I don't.  Mostly I sleep on the weekends.  That too will stop at some point.

Work has been interesting and challenging.  I am working on learning more about our business again and continuing to hone my skills and knowledge in the internet space.  I am also being brought into new areas which require me to stop coasting and start paddling.  After many years of indifference, I find myself excited about some aspects of work again.  I am building something, I believe, and that is exciting. (Sorry about the mixed metaphor!)

I have been reading a lot and want to return to the blogging I did before I became ill but I have been hesitant to type for long.  So I wanted to assure all you readers (all three of you!) that I will be back soon to  more frequent blogging and the subject will not be cancer or chemo.  I may still talk about grappling with one's mortality, but even that is mostly in "da Nile" (again with the bad metaphor!)