Governor Walker's frosted pecans.

Here is a recipe for our frosted pecans: http://t.co/E89eTKqsje
— Scott Walker (@ScottWalker) December 16, 2013

"Bad Eating Habits Start in the Womb."

According to the NYT.

I'm choosing to post this now because I believe in the value of the unborn comments within you readers.

"This is where the obesity-as-disease concept leads us – to a situation in which people demand that medicine shoulder the responsibility."

Karen Hitchcock, an Australian doctor who works in a bariatric surgery clinic, writes about the medicalization of the obesity problem.

I ask a young 200-kilo [440-pound] patient what he snacks on. “Nothing,” he says. I look him in the eye. Nothing? He nods. I ask him about his chronic skin infections, his diabetes. He tears up: “I eat hot chips and fried dim sims and drink three bottles of Coke every afternoon. The truth is I’m addicted to eating. I’m addicted.” He punches his thigh.


Addicted. The word is useless in my clinic, a mere barrier to any hope of self-determined change. My patient is not addicted; he’s a very lonely, unemployed young man who has gradually become socially isolated to the extent that the only thing available to him for comfort and entertainment is food. He has no friends, no money to buy other consumables, little education, no partner, no job. Some days he doesn’t leave his bed. The choice for him is to eat this food or experience no pleasure. The surgeon and I discuss his situation, concerned that he may overeat after the band has been fitted. We tell him that surgery may not be appropriate for him, given his situation. The patient is perturbed. “Well, what are you going to do for me if you won’t do the operation? Don’t you have some kind of ethical responsibility to help me lose weight?”...

For whatever reason, the majority of human beings respond to advertisements inviting them to enter a pleasure state by eating a day’s worth of calories in one sitting, again and again. In the face of this, we are stuffed. We could say, “You are free agents, totally free, so pay for your own consequences.” We could make people pay at the point of choice, via a food tax, or we could limit choice. The other option, always unspoken, is: let us have our cake. Let’s just eat and eat, get fatter and fatter, and work out how best to live with it. This is where we are heading now: fatness, outside of morality, as an accepted consequence of the world as we have made it.

Much more to consume at the link. 

"Don’t you just wish you were a dog, sometimes? Don’t you wish that all your intellectual human knowledge about sanitation..."

"... and all that ingrained human near-instinctive revulsion at dirt and contamination would just vanish in an instant, so you’d be free? Free of shame, free of rules, just able to eat anything you want whenever you want, to roll around on your kitchen floor and come up with a faceful of ketchup dribblings, then lie there and lazily lick it off your chin? Nobody’s watching. Nobody’s here. You can do it. You can do it right now. You’re free. You’re free."

"No, the [Chick-fil-A] CEO did not jump out of the hidey-hole slide, point at me... and yell 'You're one of the gays!' as I had imagined."

Writes Carolyn O'Laughlin, the Director of Residence Life at Sarah Lawrence College, in The Wall Street Journal (which I'm reading because a reader emailed asking what the author's point is, whether her position as Director of  Residence Life at Sarah Lawrence College is relevant to that point, and why The Wall Street Journal is publishing this sort of thing).

O'Laughlin is a member of a 4-person family consisting of 2 adult women and 2 male children, and they're on a road trip where they want to stop at the restaurant with a play area, and it happens to be a Chick-fil-A, which she put on her "list of places to avoid" when its CEO "went on record indicating his support for only families that meet the 'biblical definition of the family unit.'"

But O'Laughlin has a moderate approach to using her spending power to nudge businesses. She wanted to favor J.C. Penney, for using Ellen DeGeneres and "families like ours" in their advertising, but there was a pothole in the parking lot, so she went somewhere else, and she'd like to reward Starbucks, but it's overpriced, so she snubs it.

Noting that life is "complicated" and you've got to see the "nuance" and be "practical," she goes to the Chick-fil-A, buys the food, but hates the atmosphere — not because it's anti-gay, but it's noisy and chaotic (because of the very play area that made her overcome her political aversion to the place).

"Let's get out of here." I say to my boys.... Standing outside, my wife and I look around with road-trip decision paralysis. A kind Chick-fil-A employee comes toward us with four trays. "Y'all could sit on these if you'd like," she says. We smile, thank her, and set up a picnic on the grassy island between the parking lots of Chick-fil-A and Burger King. We're having it our way.

So what's the point? It seems to me that the point is that life is complicated, and we make individual choices to suit our own needs and tastes, some of which include politics and morality, and part of what we get to choose is how hardcore we want to be about where we go and what we buy. Also, the lower-down employees of a company are individuals with their own lives, making their own choices, just like you, and it's good for everyone to remember that.

This not the point of the article, but just something I'd like to add: Picnicking at ground level in a parking lot is not a good idea. Not only is it unfair to the business that has provided tables and chairs and wants to project an image of tidiness, but it's not a clean place to eat. Grassy does not equal clean. Grass doesn't magically repel the filth from the cars, and it attracts dog poop, human sputum, and dog and human pee.

"Scientists discover world's oldest clam, killing it in the process."

The clam was 507 years old, and the scientists were screwing around with it in their effort to research climate change — because old clams are (as the Christian Science Monitor puts it) "palimpsests of climate change."

[T]he lines on its shell to estimate its age, much as alternating bands of light and dark in a fish’s ear-bones are used to tell how old the animal is."

The clam "born in 1499." (Are clams born?)

This is the same year that the English hanged a Flemish man, Perkin Warbeck, for (doing a bad job of) pretending to be the lost son of King Edward IV and the heir to the British throne. It’s also the same year that Switzerland became its own state, the French King Louis XII got married, and Diane de Poitiers, future mistress to another French king, Henry II, was born.

It's not like the clam could reminisce about such things. What could the clam say? What's one century or the next to a clam? It's one eternal moment down there. Is it not? Do you revere a clam because it is 500 years old? Does it have a greater clam to continued life than all the little clams in the last bowl of chowder you gulped?

Oh, but those are not little clams in your chowder. Those are cut up large clams, often ocean quahogs like that Oldest Clam in the World, and probably often over a century old.

ADDED: I see I wrote "Does it have a greater clam to continued life." For years, I've had an uncanny tendency to write "clam" for "claim." Taking notes in law school, I used to sometimes need to stifle a laugh. But I don't think I ever wrote "clam" for "claim" while writing about clams. The claims of clams.

What does that clam claim?

"Cooking with hay may be increasingly fashionable…"

"… but its origins are far from sophisticated and most likely date back to medieval England and France, where cooking 'au foin' (with hay) was a practical way to deal with dried grass."

Teddy Diggs, the executive chef at Ripple in Washington, D.C., smokes a handful of dishes with hay, but also utilizes it as an ingredient in a few notable entrees. His smoked goat casoncelli…. features hay-smoked goat as well as a hay reduction…. “For me,” Diggs says, “hay implements flavor and sets a back note, as well as the stage for everything to work around it.”

The iconic foods of the states — one per state — ranked in order of greatness.

From #1 — Illinois (Chicago-style pizza) to #52 — Ohio (Cincinnati-style chili).

52?! It's coming in after #51, "Being hit by a car."

Whatever virtue this bad-tasting Z-grade atrocity once contained derived from its exemplification of a set of certain cherished American fables—immigrant ingenuity, the cultural melting pot, old things combining into new things—and has now been totally swamped and consumed by different and infinitely uglier American realities: the commodification of culture; the transmutation of authentic artifacts of human life into hollow corporate brand divisions; the willingness of Americans to slop any horrible goddamn thing into their fucking mouths if it claims to contain some byproduct of a cow and comes buried beneath a pyramid of shredded, waxy, safety-cone-orange "cheese."

Hey! I had some, back in '09. See:



Via Throwing Things, to which I also owe thanks for sending me to this page where you're asked to vote to rank "Pennsylvania's Top 10 Endangered Artifacts," including the wig of Thaddeus Stevens.

"But you don’t think that the proof is in the pudding at all? It is such a brilliant film."

"Yeah, because you can see that we were really suffering. With the fight scene, it was horrible. She was hitting me so many times, and [the director] was screaming, 'Hit her! Hit her again!'"

"In America, we’d all be in jail.... She was really hitting me. And once she was hitting me, there were people there screaming, 'Hit her!' and she didn’t want to hit me, so she’d say sorry with her eyes and then hit me really hard."

IN THE COMMENTS: Dad said:

It's hard for me to get past "The proof is in the pudding."

No, it isn't.

Yes, I selected that quote for the headline — I had my reasons — despite the presence of a cliché — normally, I filter out clichés — and a particularly bad cliché, since it's a corruption. Like "You can't have your cake and eat it too," it's a cliché that has superseded an earlier cliché that made more sense. Here's a couple of NPR guys talking about it:

STEVE INSKEEP: The proof is in the pudding, he said. Tim Lowe wrote us all the way from Santiago de Cali, Colombia, and he writes the following: Frank, the proof is not in the pudding. It would be a messy, if not completely silly place to keep it. With that in mind, we called Ben Zimmer, language columnist at the Boston Globe.

BEN ZIMMER: Well, the proof is in the pudding is a new twist on a very old proverb. The original version is the proof of the pudding is in the eating. And what it meant was that you had to try out food in order to know whether it was good.

INSKEEP: Zimmer adds that the word pudding itself has changed. In Britain, dating back centuries, pudding meant more than a sweet dessert.

ZIMMER: Back then, pudding referred to a kind of sausage, filling the intestines of some animal with minced meat and other things - something you probably want to try out carefully since that kind of food could be rather treacherous.

And that gives new insight into the old saying "If you don't eat your meat, you can't have any pudding!"

ADDED: Cliché or not, the suggestion that test is whether the movie is good must be answered, clearly, NO. If we know that what looks like a great acting performance is, in fact, real human suffering, we should — out of morality — decline to see the film. And we shouldn't enjoy it, or if we do find it pleasurable to observe that suffering, we should recognize that this is either sadism or a creepy capacity to compartmentalize.

Further pursuit of this thought in a new post, here.

"Mrs. Hazan embraced simplicity, precision and balance in her cooking."

"She abhorred the overuse of garlic in much of what passed for Italian food in the United States, and would not suffer fools afraid of salt or the effort it took to find quality ingredients."

Her tomato sauce, enriched with only an onion, butter and salt, embodies her approach, but she has legions of devotees to other recipes, among them her classic Bolognese, pork braised in milk and her minestrone.

That sentence happens to name 4 of my favorite recipes in "The Classic Italian Cook Book," my favorite cookbook. Well-used since the 70s, that book lost its cover the 1990s, and in old age, it obligingly splays open to pages festively splattered with the sauces of suppers past.

Goodbye to Marcella Hazan. She was 89.

3-D printed food.

This seems incredibly dumb, unless you are hyper-focused on the shape of food — enough to ignore that it's all processed from already-highly-processed food paste.

[W]e had (once again) food in the shape of our initials. It was creamy and light, though the monogrammed letters made us feel uncomfortably Trump-like.

Are billionaires into monograms? Seems to me monograms are a pretty squarely middle-class affectation. Here's Pottery Barn's Monogram Shop, where the promotional copy stresses "personalizing" things like towels and pillowcases to make them "extraordinary."

I mean, it's funny to purport to squirm over feeling like a very rich man, when what you are doing is the sort of thing that stolidly mainstream retailers use to make the most conventional shoppers feel special.

What's funny is that the writer of that lengthy NYT article indulges in the liberal's cliché snubbing of Donald Trump, when he would know enough to refrain from displaying snobbery toward the actual middle-class Americans who patronize The Monogram Shop.

"Why Madison, Wis. is a top foodie paradise."

It's not me saying that. It's Fox News. With 10 suggestions, one of which is where I spent the evening tonight.

"I love the sweet aroma of squirrel, and I’m surprised at most folks’ inexperience with serving the little guys."

Says the chef, Levon Wallace, with a recipe for Braised Squirrel With Bacon, Mushrooms, and Pinot Noir.

"A growing trend to leave salt off the table in restaurants should fill me with satisfaction."

"I have said for years that it doesn’t belong there. In a restaurant, the chef should determine the seasoning of the food, and you may judge the restaurant on the choices made. If you want to decide for yourself, eat at home. Salt no more belongs on a table than do cloves or cinnamon or, for that matter, pepper.

But Mark Kurlansky — author of the book "Salt: A World History" — is not happy about this trend.

"If a possum takes up residence in your shed, grab a barbecue brush to coax him out. If he doesn't leave..."

"... brush him for twenty minutes and let him stay. Let a dog (or two or three) share your bed. Say the rosary while you walk them. Go to church with a chicken sandwich in your purse. Cry at the consecration, every time. Give the chicken sandwich to your homeless friend after mass.... Put picky-eating children in the box at the bottom of the laundry chute, tell them they are hungry lions in a cage, and feed them veggies through the slats. Correspond with the imprisoned and have lunch with the cognitively challenged. Do the Jumble every morning."

Tips from Pink — of Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin — made public via obituary by her 6 children and 17 grandchildren.

She was 85, so the Richard Dawkins approach to thinking about child abuse applies (if you've got any inclination to condemn that "hungry lions" method of getting kids to eat vegetables).

Could you assemble a similarly charming list of tips from the quirkiest things your mother did? Consider the potential for matching the love these children and grandchildren showed and the alternative: Indict mom for child abuse.

The other day, when Meade and I were traipsing around in that Wisconsin landscape (the photo of which sat at the top of this blog for 18 hours), we were talking about stories people tell about the hardships they endured as children and, in mockery, we started listing the worst things that were done to us, some of which would, I think, be regarded as criminal child abuse today. For example: In the summer, I was taken to Ocean City, New Jersey for a thorough, painful sunburning. (And, no, it did not "turn into a tan," as some people used to say — and Meade still says — about the way their skin functions.)

Scenes from the drive from Lincoln, Nebraska to Madison, Wisconsin.

1. On 2 overpasses to I-80, there were groups of protesters with signs calling attention to the Obama scandals: Benghazi, IRS, Fast & Furious. I saw at least one Gadsden flag.

2. "The corn and soybean crops looked really good. I didn't see any poor crops at all." So says Meade when I ask him about the highlights of the drive. Some people driving from Nebraska to Madison might say "Ugh, corn. Too much corn. When will we get past all this corn?" But Meade is not one of those people. His father was in the popcorn seed business.

3. Mostly looking for coffee, we got off the interstate in Williamsburg, Iowa, where there's a big outlet store shopping center. Meade wanted to go into Lids to get some baseball hats, so I went into the Coach store and was checking out with a book bag and at the next cash register, there was a woman who was quickly replaced by a man who said she didn't speak English. The older woman behind the counter plied him with cheerful questions including "Where are you from?" He said "Iraq," but he said it in his Iraqi accent, which is nothing like eye-RACK or even eee-ROCK. It was more eee-RAHqqq. The woman said she wasn't familiar with that country, and the man repeated the name, perhaps wondering whether this woman had not heard of the events of the last 10 years. I didn't want to intrude. I cast a glance at her and then at him, as they kept going back and forth, and it was obvious she was never going to hear the word he was saying as "Iraq." Finally, I said to her, "He's saying  eee-ROCK," and of course, she knew Iraq. To him, I said, sympathetically, "It was the way you said it."

4. Meade's team the Cincinnati Reds were playing the Milwaukee Brewers, so Meade listened to the whole game on the satellite radio as he drove, and Meade didn't see that I'd put in the earbuds and was listening to an audiobook (which happened to be "Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim"). I laughed and he said "I wonder if they cooked up sushi?" because he thought I'd laughed at the baseball announcer who'd just said that the people coming to the Miller Park were tailgating and "cooking up every kind of food imaginable." Apparently, my laugh was perfectly synchronized. Meade's reference to sushi harkened back to lunch, wherein I ate this:

The snobbish rejection of pre-fabbishness.

We're finally getting around to putting wood flooring in the one room in this big house that hasn't had it, and we got into comparing pre-finished wood flooring and what I call — in my impoverished lingo — real floors. In the showroom, I had to suppress my urge to say things like "It doesn't look real" and "It looks like fake wood" and "You might as well have wood-patterned linoleum" more than... well, what do you think is decent? 20 times?

Back at Meadhouse, 12 hours later, we had a conversation about the prejudice against pre-fab things. We're not disrespecting pre-fab homes anymore. Some of the best-made, coolest houses are in this category. And no one sniffs at ready-to-wear clothing, because no one even knows anyone who wears couture. You might sew your own clothes and knit your own sweaters if you had some meditative, aesthetic relationship with fabric/yarn, but you still wouldn't think ill of the pre-made stuff in the stores. Some people might coo over handmade pottery, but it's more elevated aesthetically to value straightforward perfection that's mass produced and machine-made.

So, let's talk about packaged food — processed food. It's another category of prefab, and it's an area where rejection is on the upswing. The idea of cooking your own food and making everything from scratch — the finest, purest scratch — is pushed by opinion leaders. Should we be following Mark Bittman and Michael Pollan — or would a scoop of skepticism hit the spot? Here's a long — really long — article in The Atlantic with the somewhat distracting title "How Junk Food Can End Obesity."

Foodlike substances, the derisive term Pollan uses to describe processed foods, is now a solid part of the elite vernacular. Thousands of restaurants and grocery stores, most notably the Whole Foods chain, have thrived by answering the call to reject industrialized foods in favor of a return to natural, simple, nonindustrialized—let’s call them “wholesome”—foods....

The Pollanites seem confused about exactly what benefits their way of eating provides. All the railing about the fat, sugar, and salt engineered into industrial junk food might lead one to infer that wholesome food, having not been engineered, contains substantially less of them....

The fact is, there is simply no clear, credible evidence that any aspect of food processing or storage makes a food uniquely unhealthy.... The results of all the scrutiny of processed food are hardly scary, although some groups and writers try to make them appear that way....

In many respects, the wholesome-food movement veers awfully close to religion.

When pre-fab things are good, opposition is superstition. That's not sophisticated. The better class of snobs is looking down on you.

ADDED: Meade, reading this post, getting to the excerpts from the really long article, observes that they are the equivalent of fast food. My blogging is processed journalism. Blogging is pre-fab.

ALSO: Here's the actual pre-fab flooring we ended up liking — specifically, the "stained white wash." We're still comparing that to "real floors" — hardwood that is installed and then finished.

The Althouse Amazon portal: your gateway to revolution.

By using the Althouse portal, you can buy things you want and – while paying nothing extra – make a contribution to this blog. We notice. We appreciate it. And we'll only know who you are if you come right out and answer the timeless question: Hey, hey, good lookin', whatcha got cookin'?

Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking [Hardcover]
Nathan Myhrvold (Author), Chris Young (Author), Maxime Bilet (Author)

"We want the Beacon Food Forest to serve as a model for cultural equality... and food justice."

Free food, for foraging, in Seattle.

... Glenn Herlihy... hopes visitors will practice "ethical harvesting"--taking what they need, or what they can eat right away. But for those feeling greedy, there will be a "thieves garden" containing lower-grade stuff. "We also plan to have a lot of people around, so you’re not going to feel comfortable taking a lot of stuff," he adds....

Falling Fruit’s founders, Caleb Phillips and Ethan Welty, see foraging as more than just another source of food. "Foraging in the 21st century is an opportunity for urban exploration, to fight the scourge of stained sidewalks, and to reconnect with the botanical origins of food," they say, at their website.

"What’s interesting is that just because a food is delicious doesn’t necessarily make it popular."

"You enjoy it because, well, people around you seem to enjoy it. This means that items can also change contexts. This is what happened to Pabst Blue Ribbon, which went from a working-class Midwestern beer to Brooklyn’s preferred Hipster beverage. It’s also what happened to Marlboro, a poorly selling women’s cigarette ('Mild as May') before being rebranded to appeal to men. In both cases, nothing about the product itself changed. But if the peer behavior around the product changes, so too does our appreciation of it."

From an essay called "How Lobster Got Fancy/The surprising history—from food for the poor, servants, and prisoners to a soldier’s staple to everybody’s idea of a delicacy—of 'the cockroach of the ocean'" — via Metafilter — which first made me think why would anyone write an essay about lobster after there's already a greatest-essay-ever-written-level essay about lobster, which, by the way, the first-linked essay quotes — how could it not? — but doesn't link. But there's some good info and analysis about the culture of food:

During the Great Depression, impoverished families in Maine would sneak down to the ocean in the dark to empty and reset their lobster traps and take home the day’s haul to feed their families. It was still seen, at least in Maine, as a food for the poor. It was considered embarrassing for children to have to go to school with sandwiches made of lobster meat.

During World War II, however, lobster wasn’t rationed like other foods, and so people of all classes began to eat it enthusiastically, and discover its deliciousness.

Things that are delicious that you're nevertheless disgusted by. Is it because you're disgusted by other people? If you know that's your reason, do you overcome your disgust? If you do, is that because you're ashamed of yourself for looking down on other people or because you think that the food of the common people is usually pretty good and actually just what you're looking for?

But you still won't eat the cicadas, will you?