Weekender

Saturday morning: Hit the farmer's market, then went with scrottie over to Brazos Natural Foods. BNF has a great organic vegetable discount bin, and this week it was full of organic tomatoes. I bought all of them. So then we dropped off the recycling, got a few things at the hardware store, and came home to cook like fiends. S made a mouthwatering marinara from half of the tomatoes plus fresh-picked basil from the garden, and also a mighty shepherd's pie. I made ice cream, a loaf of bread, and salsa from the other half of the tomatoes. I also tried to get the photo-emulsion screenprinting method going again, unsuccessfully (exposure time too long this time, I suspect). And I pulled up all the onions in the garden. It turns out growing onions is much easier when the dog can't dig them all up because they're planted in the front yard instead of the back. They aren't huge or amazing, but they'll do.

More projects on Sunday. In the morning, I helped bluepapercup with some image-processing items in Illustrator. In the afternoon, S and I went over to T's house for a wonderful Crafternoon. I'm now almost finished with a replacement mug cozy for my replacement caribiner mug. I still miss the second-such mug, which was constructed of more sturdy metal, even though the metal and plastic parts of the lid had separated and the bottom occasionally popped off. One of the best parts of recent Crafternoons has been my friend J's craft: cooking feasts for all of us to enjoy.

And now, back to writing. I have a grant proposal due in a week and two manuscript monkeys on my back.

Two science updates on food

Feeling braindead after working on a postdoc application for most of the day.

Over the weekend, I read through a somewhat-recent article on the backlash against gluten. The quality of writing felt uneven, but a section stood out:


“I also find it sad that because his book is filled with a whole bunch of nonsense, that’s why it’s a bestseller; that’s why we’re talking. Because that’s how you get on the bestseller list. You promise the moon and stars, you say everything you heard before was wrong, and you blame everything on one thing. You get a scapegoat; it’s classic. Atkins made a fortune with that formula. We’ve got Rob Lustig saying it’s all fructose; we’ve got T. Colin Campbell [author of The China Study, a formerly bestselling book] saying it’s all animal food; we now have Perlmutter saying it’s all grain. There’s either a scapegoat or a silver bullet in almost every bestselling diet book.”

The recurring formula is apparent: Tell readers it’s not their fault. Blame an agency; typically the pharmaceutical industry or U.S. government, but also possibly the medical establishment. Alluding to the conspiracy vaguely will suffice. Offer a simple solution. Cite science and mainstream research when applicable; demonize it when it is not.

“It makes me sad that somebody like you is going to reach out to me, so you can get what I’d like to think are sensible comments about a silly book. If you write a sensible book, which I did—it’s called Disease Proof , and it’s about what it really takes to be healthy, brain and body—nobody wants to talk about that. It has much less sex appeal. The whole thing is sad.”


I encountered a New Yorker cartoon about going gluten-free recently, too, captioned: "I've only been gluten-free for a week and I'm already annoying!"

This is NOT to discredit individuals who are gluten-intolerant or who have Celiac disease; those are real conditions. It's more that Americans still have an unhealthy relationship with food and are fixated on food as medicine. The thing is, nutrients don't occur in isolation; they come in packages known as seeds or grains or cucumbers. The food-as-medicine fixation comes from the period where we figured out how to extract and isolate different chemical components of food, making all kinds of bizarre processed substances. It's pop-nutrition to accompany pop-psychology.

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But for a different part of the food industry, consider this article on how native bees increase blueberry crop yields. I'm glad to see some scientists working to highlight this side of the pollination equation. Besides, there are so many thousands of cute native bee species at work in the U.S.