Cosmic Treats

The niblets of information listed in the Star Tribune's front page "Have you heard?" box always catch my attention. A few days ago, I saw that the first item had a photo of a chocolate cookie with white chocolate in it, and zeroed in to see what that was about. (An involuntary reaction.)

I laughed out loud when I found out it wasn't a cookie at all, but an elliptically cropped photo of the universe, taken by the Hubble telescope.

Yum! This cookie -- it's full of stars!

Stimulating Food

Why might a person lose her sense of taste? (I'm talking about the literal sense of taste in her mouth, not the kind that keeps her from wearing stripes with plaids.)

In answering that question, the To Your Good Health column in the Pioneer Press (by Dr. Paul Donohue) included this bit of advice for reviving the sense of taste:

Take a forkful of meat, then a forkful of vegetables, and then a piece of bread. The change in foods stimulates dulled taste buds.

I've always eaten my food this way, to the compulsive point where I need to have just the right amount of each food to be sure the meal ends evenly. But now I know there's a not-so-bad reason for it. Thank you, Dr. Donohue, for justifying my neurosis.

Osteopenia and Fosamax, Part 2

There's a follow-up to my earlier post on osteopenia and Merck's Fosamax:

Dr. Harriet Hall (the SkepDoc) has written an analysis of the NPR story with additional medical links.

She charitably allows that Merck may have been more overzealous than greedy, but still comes down in favor of trying non-drug interventions for women under 65.

Next Time, Try a Better Mouse Trap

Cleaning out the basement has its benefits... there's lots of material down there for blog posts! In fact, you might even say it's the biggest filing cabinet I've got.

Here are two objects we've been storing for decades without ever using them. They have finally been ejected from the basement, but before they went to their new home, I took some photos to share.


Although it is impossible to tell from looking at it, this is a cooler. Like you would take to the beach, get it? Nice strap!


You can open it up. See the hot pink freezer pack inside.


Then when you shut the lid and rotate the turquoise-blue thingy, it becomes a chair! Just what you need for the beach... if you want to sit upon your ice-cold drinks.


This is not a bread box. It's a modernist picnic set from 1981. The rubbery straps on the sides have holes that stretch over the pegs that stick out from each layer to hold it together for transport.


When you take the top off, you see there's a tray for each person.


And when you remove the tops, you're ready to eat your freeze-dried picnic food. Just add water. Yum!

Is It Time to End the Filibuster?

Ezra Klein, writing for the Washington Post (reprinted in the Star Tribune Saturday, Jan. 2), made a cogent argument for getting rid of the filibuster rule in the Senate. Lately, I'm not much of a fan of the rule, but I recall times in the past when I was glad it was there to stop bills I completely disagreed with. So I've been feeling torn about the idea of repeal.

Klein, however, points out that it wasn't until the '90s (during the Clinton/Gingrich/Dole years) that it became a "strategy of relentless obstruction." According to a political scientist cited, only 8 percent of major Senate bills faced a filibuster in the '60s; in the 2000s, it was 70 percent. As freshman Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley put it, that's "not a filibuster anymore. That's a supermajority requirement. And when that becomes commonly used, it's a recipe for paralysis."

Merkley has floated the idea of eliminating the filibuster with a six- or eight-year delay before implementation, because then neither party would know who would have a majority when it was put into effect. He hopes that his colleagues can see this as a bipartisan issue. To use Klein's well chosen words:

Members of both parties often take the fact that neither Democrats nor Republicans can govern effectively to mean they benefit from the filibuster half the time. In reality, the country loses the benefits of a working legislature all the time.

But members of both parties have become attached to this idea that they can block objectionable legislation even when they're relatively powerless. This is evidence, perhaps, that both parties are so used to the victories of obstruction that they have forgotten their purpose is to amass victories through governance. Either way, a world in which the majority can pass its agenda is a better one, a place where the majority party is held accountable for its ideas and not for the gridlock and inaction furnished by the Senate's rules.

It's been a long time since the filibuster was a tool for mavericks like Mr. Smith when he went to Washington. It's probably time the Senate gave it up and got some business done, even if it's business I disagree with.

I Couldn't Resist

From the Huffington Post, 1/2/10:



From the Huffington Post, alternate universe:

Naming the Decade

It's amazing that no name has emerged to label the decade we just finished. With the thousands of instapundits, too-clever-by-half verbal gymnasts, and neologism factories of the mass media and interweb, you'd think it would have been on everyone's lips by 2003 at the latest.

But no consensus has emerged. I was actually starting to get used to hearing "The Naughties" (or is it "Noughties"?) until I read Richard Chin's piece in today's Pioneer Press, Decade's Diversity Defies Description.

There were two names on Chin's list that I thought had potential. My criteria were:

1. It had to refer to the numerical oddity of the 00s.
   
2. It had to have a good ring to it -- as if it might actually be something you would say! (As we used to put it, "It has a good beat and you can dance to it." Which automatically eliminates the Oh-Ohs, in my opinion.)
3. Style points were awarded for any verbal elements that illuminated the decade's notorious or notable moments.
   

My two favorites were:

• The Zilches, submitted by Marc Drummond of Woodbury.
• The Drearios, submitted by Bob Katula of Stillwater.

The Zilches sounds more like something I could imagine myself saying in future decades... but the Drearios sure has a ring to it!

Deborah Howell, Newswoman

I was very sad to hear of the death of Deborah Howell, former editor of the St. Paul Pioneer Press. (I met her back in the late '80s, while in grad school doing some participant observation research in the newsroom.)

Howell left the PiPress in 1990 to head the Washington bureau of the Newhouse news chain, then later was the ombudsperson for the Washington Post. I had stopped following her career by then, but according to the NPR story I heard this morning about her death, it sounds like there were some eventful moments there related to names like Jack Abramoff and Bob Woodward.

The PiPress won two Pulitzers under her leadership. Reading her Wikipedia entry, I learned that Howell, born in 1941, was part of the first generation of women to break down the men-only barriers that surrounded the news business:

[She worked] on her high school paper and then, as a journalism student, on The Daily Texan, the student newspaper for The University of Texas at Austin. After graduating, Howell had difficulty finding a job off the old women's pages and would instead take a job as at a local TV and radio station. Eventually, Howell would get a job at the copy desk of the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, before later moving on to the Minneapolis Star as a reporter, then city editor and assistant managing editor and then at the St. Paul Pioneer Press as the senior vice president and editor.

What a waste it was, when our country's businesses used to pretend half of our human potential didn't exist. I'm glad Deborah Howell kicked her way into the news business.

12 Sentences from the Past for the New Year

I spent the day cleaning out the basement, so I haven't had much time to write something for the first day of the new year. Inspired by Michael Leddy at Orange Crate Art (who was in turn inspired by another blogger), today's post is made up of the first sentence of the first post from each month in 2009.

Michael says it's an exercise in parataxis, one of those lovely Greek terms I never managed to learn during my years as an English major:

A couple of my friends recently added themselves as fans of Wendell Berry on their Facebook profiles. In the early '90s, I attended a design conference that had Chip Kidd as a speaker. As a little girl, I played with Barbies. Now that I've finished Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, I'm recommending it to anyone who has an interest in the ways things have been changing lately -- the death of the newspaper, the rise of social media, the shift in how politics operates, and more. I almost choked when I heard about the Wall Street Journal story that said over 450,000 Americans are making a decent living by blogging. I've posted before about the strange iconography of diaper-changing tables, mostly ones I saw while on a cross-country drive. From the land of LOLcats comes GraphJam.com, in which users submit graphs on any topic that pleases them, and other users vote on the best ones. What a combination -- an authentic 19th century horse hitching post, funky vernacular lettering, and an easily misreadable message (they have baby goats for sale, in case you were wondering if you should call child protective services). I'm generally not a big fan of vanity plates, but I liked this one. Today's Star Tribune celebrated the 40th anniversary of the paper's Taste section. I love the mapping of food customs and language conventions related to food (like my long-ago post about the usage of soda vs. pop). Knowing I would be in Flatbush, I did a little research to see what might be off the beaten path, and found out that Erasmus Hall high school is on the north end of the neighborhood.

Whew. I sure talk about myself a lot. Perhaps in 2010 I can resolve to stop using "I" quite so much.

Ammonia, Beef, and Bacteria

The harder things get for newspapers, it seems, the more I love the New York Times. Yesterday's story by Michael Moss on a South Dakota company named Beef Processing Inc. was classic journalism.

Eight years ago (I guess that would be 2001), the U.S. Department of Agriculture endorsed BPI's big idea: injecting ammonia into its ground beef to kill E. coli and salmonella bacteria.

The Times makes it pretty clear that calling BPI's product "ground beef" is stretching that term pretty far: BPI's founder was "looking to expand into the hamburger business with a product made from beef that included fatty trimmings the industry once relegated to pet food and cooking oil. The trimmings were particularly susceptible to contamination." Why are the trimmings more susceptible? Because the trimming " 'typically includes most of the material from the outer surfaces of the carcass' and contains 'larger microbiological populations.' " The outer surfaces of the carcass.... gee, I guess that would be the part where all mud and excrement accumulates on these CAFO-raised cattle.

The process used by BPI involves "liquefying the fat and extracting the protein from the trimmings in a centrifuge." The meat is then "sent through pipes where it is exposed to ammonia gas, and then flash frozen and compressed..." In my opinion, calling this liquid meat would in no way fit with the assumptions of consumers.

The liquid finally becomes "a mashlike substance frozen into blocks or chips, ...used in a majority of the hamburger sold nationwide...." Yum, how's that for a menu description? A "mashlike substance frozen into blocks or chips."

This Shit (Literally) Is Everywhere

Back in 2001, when the USDA first proclaimed the method effective, BPI was exempted from routine testing of its meat. The Times tells us, BPI's ground beef is now a "mainstay in America’s hamburgers. McDonald’s, Burger King and other fast-food giants use it as a component in ground beef, as do grocery chains. The federal school lunch program used an estimated 5.5 million pounds of the processed beef last year alone."

And that would all be well and good, if distasteful, BUT -- the meat is not free of pathogens. The school lunch program folks have been testing the meat even though they didn't have to, and found E. coli three times and salmonella 48 times, "including back-to-back incidents in August in which two 27,000-pound batches were found to be contaminated."

But it wasn't until the Times presented the school lunch program results to USDA that the Ag department revoked BPI's testing exemption. At this point, I need to point out that the school lunch program is part of USDA!

"School lunch officials said that in some years Beef Products testing results were worse than many of the program’s two dozen other suppliers, which use traditional meat processing methods. From 2005 to 2009, Beef Products had a rate of 36 positive results for salmonella per 1,000 tests, compared to a rate of nine positive results per 1,000 tests for the other suppliers, according to statistics from the program."

So Why Is It in School Lunches?

According to the Times, "Despite some misgivings, school lunch officials say they use Beef Products because its price is substantially lower than ordinary meat trimmings, saving about $1 million a year."

And: "School lunch officials said they ultimately agreed [despite qualms about its odor and flavor] to use the treated meat because it shaved about 3 cents off the cost of making a pound of ground beef."

"In 2004, lunch officials increased the amount of Beef Products meat allowed in its hamburgers to 15 percent, from 10 percent, to increase savings."

Hiding the Ammonia

USDA approved BPI's process based on studies performed by BPI, without its own studies. Not everyone at USDA agreed with this. One microbiologist "called the processed beef 'pink slime' in a 2002 e-mail message to colleagues and said, 'I do not consider the stuff to be ground beef, and I consider allowing it in ground beef to be a form of fraudulent labeling.' "

What's more, "Federal officials agreed to the company’s request that the ammonia be classified as a 'processing agent' and not an ingredient that would be listed on labels."

Beef Products has faced the challenge of balancing safety with taste for years. Customers have complained of the ammonia smell on several occasions, assuming the meat was tainted because ammonia was not listed as an ingredient. But, ironically, the less smelly the meat is, the more dangerous it is.

"Pathogens died when enough ammonia was used to raise the alkalinity of the beef to a high level, company research found. But early on, school lunch officials and other customers complained about the taste and smell of the beef. Samples of the processed beef obtained by the Times revealed lower levels of alkalinity, suggesting less ammonia was used."

The less ammonia used (to improve smell and taste), the more likely the paste is to contain bacteria. Ammonia makes the meat more alkaline -- when it passes a pH of 8.5, it is inhospitable to bacteria. Samples tested by the Times, however, had a pH of only 7.75.

All This Has Consequences

Aside from all the fast food restaurants and schools already cited, the agribusiness giant Cargill is a major purchaser of BPI's beef paste. Cargilll was recently named in a lawsuit by Stephanie Smith, a young Minnesota woman who nearly died from and is now paralyzed because of an E. coli infection from a Cargill hamburger.

A recently launched Twin Cities food website, Simple Good and Tasty, recently ran an impressive interview with Smith's lawyer, Bill Marler. Check it out for even more outrage about the conditions of our food, and some bracing skepticism about some dearly held natural food beliefs, too.

Marler is well known for his aggressive pursuit of food safety cases. And, not surprisingly -- no one in his family ever eats ground beef.

I Wish Our Line Went the Other Way

Here's one of the best data visualizations I've seen in a long time, from National Geographic (click on the image to see it significantly larger):


The left side lists countries in order of how much they spend per person on health care. Countries shown with a turquoise line have some type of universal health coverage. Countries with an orange line (U.S. at the top, Mexico at the bottom) do not.

The right side of the graph is a range of ages reflecting life-expectancy at birth, from 73 to 84 years. Each country's line goes from its amount spent annually at left to its life expectancy at right, so -- in terms of "value" for the money spent on health care -- a line that goes uphill is good, and a line that goes downhill is not so good, or in the case of the U.S., pretty damned bad.

One of the most interesting parts of the graph is the way its designer used the thickness of the lines to indicate the average number of doctor visits per year. A heavy line (e.g., Japan or the Czech Republic) indicates heavy use of doctors (if my line-width-assessments are correct, they both have more than 10 visits per year), while a thin line (as in the U.S., Switzerland or Sweden) indicates an average of around 1 visit per year.

Remember how we're sometimes told Americans use too much medical care, and that we need health savings accounts so economic reality can control our unreasonable desires to go to the doctor all the time? I guess that wasn't true after all. Huh.

And Mexico, which spends 11 percent of what we do on health care, has only a 4 percent lower life expectancy.

(via kottke.org)

Move Your Money

Some folks are making a New Year's resolution to move their money from large banks to community banks. Someone's set up a website called moveyourmoney.info to encourage this, and help people find a community bank near them.

And someone's even made a video about it:



I don't have to move my little pot o' cash, though... it's in a local credit union.