Reuters Science News has a new story today reporting that the genome of maize has been sequenced, which reminds me that corn is a grain. It is a starchy carbohydrate. Like rice and wheat it could be cultivated to produce an abundant harvest that would feed villages and cities. It was a miracle food. It has been developed into a fertile, abundant and cheap, food resource. This has presented a business dilemma and challenge for farmers, food processors, distillers, and business people. How much corn can people be led to purchase and consume?
It turns up as an ingredient in processed goods. Michael Pollan provides an interesting and informative explanation of modern corn, corn farming and industrial food processing in The Omnivore’s Dilemna.
In the grocery store, it is presented identifiably in ground corn flour (grits, meal, polenta), as the main ingredient in corn chips, and as a fresh, frozen or canned product. In its raw forms, it is a nutritious and tasty item. It is a starchy grain, though, not a vegetable. Corn chips are fried or baked flat breads or croutons, made of starch and fat, just like potato chips.
A meal of meat, potatoes or rice, and corn, has protein and two kinds of carbs. I was looking at the labels on the (Green Giant) frozen foods in my freezer. Corn has over 150 calories in a 3/4 cup serving. Peas have about 90 calories for that size serving. Beans have about 35 calories. Mixed vegetables with corn, peas, beans and carrots are marked at about 70 calories.
I like corn. I plan to keep using corn as a occasional treat – corn on the cob is wonderful. I think it is a staple, but I have to think of it as a starch course like bread, pasta, potatoes and rice.
Author: Tony Dalmyn
In Defence of Food
In Defence of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto has received favourable reviews in the LA Times and the Sunday Times (of London), and is a bestseller at this point in time. Michael Pollan is an experienced journalist and writer. He reviews a fair amount of history and science in a short book. He tries to talk about food from a common sense perspective. He is cautious about food science, which is often bad science. He is skeptical about anything the food industry, nutritionists and journalists say about food. All too often, claims about food are made to sell new kinds of processed foods, or to sell books, diet plans, supplements and fads.
His advice for eating well, to avoid malnutrition and obesity is: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” His idea of food is something pretty close to the original plant or animal – fresh, dried, frozen – cooked at home, not processed at a factory. Don’t buy or eat processed and packaged things that claim to produce health benefits or weight loss. If you want to avoid obesity, eat less.
Pollan advocates a natural diet, organic produce and Slow Food. He describes the Western diet as a disaster, and cites the studies of people who return to a traditional diet from a Western diet. He says that there are many traditional diets incorporating indigenous resources and cultural traditions – and all of them are healthier than the Western diet, which manages to produce malnutrition and obesity at the same time. Many of the themes of In Defence of Foods were developed in his previous book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. In Defence of Food summarizes those themes and adds a discussion of the research into traditional diets – many of which are high in fats – and why people who stick to those diets don’t have the same problems with obsesity, diabetes and heart disease as people who eat a high-carb Western diet.
His main criticisms of the Western diet are that it is based on a handful of plants and animals raised under industrial conditions, heavily processed, mixed with chemicals that are not food, and served in gargantuan portions. He suggests that refined white flour, processed in mills with steel rollers is probably the first true fast food. It was the first food processed to the point that vitamins have been added back in to avoid contributing to vitamin deficiency diseases.
Throughout the book, he flirts with the French paradox. The French diet, like the Italian diet features wheat flour, carbs, meat, fat, sugar and alcohol, but it doesn’t seem to produce as much heart disease or other health problems. The French eat small portions at long meals, and to some degree they invest in diverse fresh ingredients.
The problem with food in America is that it is cheap, and served in large portions. North Americans don’t know when they are full or when to stop. The food processing industry has succeeded in securing a supply of cheap ingredients – partly because of government agricultural subsidies, and it sells lots, cheap, with the full force of modern marketing. Medicine, science and journalism don’t provide eaters with valid information, because science is too fond of trying to refine the idea of food into the idea of essential ingredients. The problem is that the science never gets it right. Science has not identified all the key nutrients and the idea of adding vitamins back in to make food healthy is, in his view, ridiculous. It isn’t completely ridiculous, but he makes a very good point about the marketing of processed food on the basis of health claims. Food should be nutritious – nutrition shouldn’t have to be a marketing point.
The history of food science has been blotted by disasters. Margerine was marketed as a healthy alternative to butter – it has been easier and cheaper to make, but the hydrogenation of vegetable oils has produced a toxic chemical. There is a long history of processed baby foods that prove to be nutritionally deficient. Nothing has come close to mother’s milk.
Pollan doesn’t think that buying fresh food is the answer, because the food industry has already colonized the production of fresh produce. Intensive production and specialized fertilizers grow large vegetables full of water and fertilizer. I was a little surprized – I thought that the people who said that fresh produce was lacking in nutrients were trying to sell vitamin supplements, but it turns out that there is something to that claim. He doesn’t push vitamin supplements though – he suggests finding organic vegetables grown in healthy soil, and he encourages home gardening.
In large part, he encourages investing more money in good real food, more effort in cooking it, and more time enjoying it, eaten slowly, in the company of family and friends, and savored. My main criticism of the book is that his recommendations are aimed at affluent Westerners who can afford to purchase organic produce. He ignores the green revolution – the genetic programs that produced healthy high yield grains and other scientific advances, in favour of a rather Arcadian view of life. He does, in the end, align himself with the organic food snobs, as Rob Lyons’s review in Spiked agrees. But Pollan makes a lot of sense.
Continue reading “In Defence of Food”Yummy
The National Post has been publishing a series of articles titled “Beyond Belief”. A piece by Charles Lewis or Charlie Lewis (not the Charles Lewis of 60 Minutes and the Center for Public Integrity) titled “The Trouble with Mary”, featured at AL Daily, discussed the psychology and semantics of “belief” and “faith”. Lewis found a psychologist who was said that faith in miracles and faith in the future are equally valid because they are equivalent subjective events. He found some theologians and Churchmen to explain the meaningfulness of belief in miracles. This was good journalism. Religion is a hard topic for the news industry to configure as marketable news. The political and criminal acts of people who belong to a religious group are news but their inner lives, including their beliefs, are beyond description in a news story. The philosophical rationalizations for religious belief are like book reviews – the justifications offered for people’s likes and tastes are usually meaningless outside the circle of people who care about those things.
Spinning the Golden Compass
The Golden Compass has been criticized for its negative presentation of organized religion. Its principal critic its the American Catholic League, a conservative body that speaks for conservative and traditional elements in the Catholic Church in America. The League says that the movie, like the books, promotes atheism, but their grievance appears to me to is that Pullman presents the history and traditions of Catholicism in a negative way. The criticism is a defensive reaction to Pullman’s presentation of the belief system and power structure of the Church as repressive, exploitative, manipulative, cynical, and dishonest. The League’s campaign brings to mind its reaction to Kevin Smith’s Dogma. It is incongruous for parents to take their children to this movie on Saturday, and then make them to Church and Sunday school. If you believe the Church is benevolent, why challenge your child or pay someone to insult your belief?
The shoe was on the other foot when the Christian churches in America were promoting the movie version of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia stories and defending Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.
The challenge for self-professed faithful Christians is whether to deny their kids the experience of consuming the latest must-see fantasy product from the movie industry in the hope of consolidating their belief in the conservative Christian version of reality. It seems to me that parents who think they are insulating their children from secular ideology and popular culture by not taking them to one particular semi-animated fantasy film based on a coming of age novel are a little confused.
Old Age
My parents are getting old, and old age is not pretty.
My mother has had Alzheimer disease or another form of progressive denile dementia for about 5 or 6 years, although it took some time for her physician to learn all the symptoms – my mother thought that it was in her interest to minimize her symptoms. She has been a mistress of denial, and my father was a co-dependent in her efforts to resist interventions.
I visited Winnipeg from October 3 to October 12. My father was tired, my sisters were concerned. Her needs were beyond my father’s capability and have been for some time. My father has tried to enjoy the good moments, and has been concerned that if her demented behavior was admitted, she would have to be monitored closely and sedated and restrained. He has kept home care out and aided her in her efforts to fool the people who might arrange for care – under conditions that he does not think are good enough. His judgments have been loving, but risky.
The week after I returned, my sisters realized that her complaints about some bowel trouble were serious and had her admitted to hospital. She had developed a rectal prolapse. The prolapse itself is apparently inoperable. Over the first few days of November, my father thought another doctor thought that there might be partial blockage of the lower large intestine, which has been causing the straining that causes the prolapse. This presented the possibility of surgery for the blockage and some relief for the prolapse. The idea that she might have surgery has energized my father. He hopes she might come home. He accepted the idea that they might accept some home care though. [Updated – Nov. 10/07. My father misunderstood the medical information. The hospital had ordered a colonoscopy to assess the damage, not to look for blockages. There was no prospect of any relief of the prolapse].
My mother also had pneumonia when she went to hospital. She has had asthma for decades and she has become accustomed to using an inhaler when she is short of breath. She gets short of breath when she is anxious, then used the puffer. This accelerates her heart, which make her anxious, which lead to more use of the puffer – especially since she doesn’t remember she has been using it or realize that she is overdosing. The hospital has tried to restrict her use of the puffer. My father apparently gives it to her when the nurses are not around to relieve her distress.
The prolapse cannot be managed by an Alzheimer patient who doesn’t remember why she is in pain. She has been in hospital, and can’t go home again. She is calm most of the time, but becomes agitated and wants to go home. My father is full of anxiety. Over the last few weeks he has been occupied with worrying about my mother. My sisters and sister in law have been working hard to arrange transportation to the hospital and get meals delivered to him at the hospital, and to take care of him during this stage.
My sisters and brothers are doing their best to help him make the decisions that will let him know that she is getting care, and to let go of the idea that he can protect her independence. We can hope for decency, dignity and respect.
[Updated Sat. Nov. 10/07. On Friday (Nov. 9), my father agreed to sign the forms to admit my mother to a nursing home and to get some home care services for himself, to let him stay at home before his own health deteriorates further].
Catching Up – Templeton and Positive Psychology
Having mentioned Templeton, the mutual fund manager turned patron of the spiritual arts, in passing in my entry Ruse on Evolution, and Seligman’s Positive Psychology movement in my entry Psychology in Recovery and Be Happy, I was interested in “John Templeton’s Universe” in the The Nation. Barbara Ehrenreich looks at the weirdness that happens when inspiration, large sums of money, corporate values, positive thinking, psychology and spirituality intersect.
Unfortunately, it appears that Seligman, who had said some interesting things in his books on positive psychology, has become another corporate inspirational performer, hyping his own line of coaching and positive thinking “products”.
Alternate Nobel Writers
The Alt-Reality Nobel prize for literature, 2007, would have gone to J.K. Rowling?
Ted Gioia’s list is pretty good. He would have given the award to several genre writers. He has a different theory of aesthetics and less impressed with old canons of high art and literary fiction. His Great Books Guide site is informed by the same theories and is pretty good too.
He has some comments about Heinlein, Dick, Rowling, genre fiction and some good reviews.
On related topic, here is an essay about SF Out of this World from the New Humanist, reflecting on why people who take the magic of out real life like fantasy in books and performances.
Last Sunday in September
One of the benefits of my job is that I attend educational conferences from time to time. I am in Ottawa, on what turned out, after a cloudy start, to be warm sunny afternoon. The city was crawling with police – really and literally. The police stage a memorial event on the last Sunday in September. Representatives of almost every Canadian police force march in their full dress uniforms. Some forces have pipe bands – seems the Scots ran the police forces in the old days and their traditions carry on. There were a few officers in kilts in line when I walked by Tim Horton’s this morning, which must have given the staff a start.
I spent the afternoon in a seminar. One of the other participants said that I had worked out what many other people hadn’t. I had moved to Victoria to do a job that I liked with many years before retirement to enjoy.
Wonder Books
From The American Scholar, a review of the style of popular and literary fiction based on healing journeys: Brooklyn Books of Wonder, by Melvin Jules Bukiet. It’s a savage assessment of my least favourite literature, sentimental fiction. It has a good explanation of why this stuff sellsit works: narcissistic empathy. Read it, weep and perceive yourself as a nice, sensitive person.
They’re kitsch, which Milan Kundera defined as “the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling [that] moves us to tears of compassion for ourselves, for the banality of what we think and feel.”
Serious fiction, literature, even if it’s fabulist, sharpens reality. BBoWs elude reality to avoid the taint of anger or cynicism or the passion for revenge felt by real people in similar situations. Instead of telling a story of brute survival, BBoWs indulge in a dream of benign rescue.
And yes, another hit from AL Daily.
Light Exercise
Link to an excerpt from Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease, a new book by Gary Taubes, published in New York Magazine, The Scientist and the Stairmaster.
Taubes says that the idea that light exercise is a way to lose weight has been oversold. He agrees that light exercise is a good idea, but light exercise doesn’t burn enough calories to let us eat and drink as much as most of us, in North America, tend to. He also supports some of the criticisms of the dominance of carbs in diet.