Archive for category Food
McDonalds’ “Secret”
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Food, Money and Marketing on March 6th, 2010
If I were asked why McDonald’s food tastes so good, I’d say a meticulously-perfected balance of fat, salt, and sugar. Little did I know that the actual answer is far more obvious.
We make it the way you would.
Well, that’s good. I suppose. Although, arguably, the whole reason I’m going out to eat is because you’ll make it better than I would. Or, perhaps you’ll make it worse, but the convenience of having someone else do it will offset that. But okay, bold idea: make it the way I would. I like it.
With 100% beef.
Ok, now here I was surprised, because it hadn’t occurred to me that anything except beef really could go into a hamburger. I mean, I’ve heard about the trace amounts of rat droppings and cockroach parts, but that hardly counts. No McDonalds’ bag has ever said, “Hamburger: Now With Roach Carcass.” Then Issa told me that McDonalds’ hamburger patties actually didn’t used to be 100% beef. They had soy, or something, in them.
So, shocker. The big marketing push for how awesome McDonalds’ burgers are is that they… drum roll… are made from cow. Can you hear the dripping sarcasm? I mean, isn’t that the least we can expect? This is kind of like a dry-cleaner saying, “I did not put any new stains on your clothes. AREN’T I AWESOME!”
Especially since pink slime (ammonia-treated slaughter-house-floor-scrapings) counts as 100% beef. And pink slime is in McDonalds’ hamburgers! Yeah. I have to tell you, every time I make a hamburger, I scrape up some fatty bits from my slaughter house, grind them up, treat them with ammonia, and mix them in with the chuck. Way to “make it the way I would,” McDonalds.
Fat-Hate: Calories In < Calories Burned = Weight Loss
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Food on February 19th, 2010
This whole Kevin Smith vs. Southwest Airlines thing is putting fat-hate front and center on the Blogosphere. It coincides with me starting to read Shapely Prose, so fat-hate issues are front and center in my mind, and you get to hear about them.
I feel like I have a lot to say about the issue, but I am going to try to keep this post down to just one main point: the “Bunsen burner” theory of metabolism. The theory goes something like this: the body burns fuel, like a Bunsen burner. If calories in is less than calories expended through metabolism and exercise, you will lose weight. Therefore, you are fat because you eat too much.
Fat-haters use this idea to put fat people’s weight into their control, which then justifies the fat-hate, since apparently what we learned from Teh Gays is that it’s okay to be hateful to people if the thing you’re being hateful over is a choice, but not if it’s innate.
I confess to having used this argument in discussions about weight. It made terribly good sense at the time. It’s basic thermodynamics, right? If you have a fuel source with so many calories of energy, and you burn off that many calories, plus some more, the extra calories have to come from somewhere. The thermodynamics are sound, but the Bunsen burner theory of metabolism is total bullshit. The human body is not a black-box in a lab.
The first flaw in the theory is that the human body uses calories for a lot more than just maintaining weight. For example, if you restrict calories, many people’s cognitive function will suffer or energy levels decrease before they reach a point where they begin to lose weight. You can’t pick and choose. You can’t say to your body, “Dear body, please take those calories from my fat and not from my brain-function.” Imagine that, on a given day, my base metabolic rate is determined to be 2200 calories, and from that point on, I begin to consume only 2000 calories, a 200-calorie deficit. Who’s to say that I won’t be 200 calories stupider, slower, grumpier, and weaker without losing any weight?
This brings up a fundamental flaw in the very idea of the base metabolic rate, which is the basis of the Bunsen burner theory. The BMR is defined as the amount of calories you need to eat to maintain your weight, therefore if you eat less than your BMR, you must lose weight. Can you see the circularity in this definition? If you’re eating your estimated BMR and not losing weight, the doctors and scientists will say, “Your BMR must be lower than predicted.” Then they’ll restrict your calorie intake until you start to lose weight and say THAT’s your BMR.
So, calories in minus my BMR equals weight gained or lost, right? But BMR is defined as, “the amount of calories below which I will lose weight.” So, let’s just substitute the variable in that formula, as they used to say in algebra. Calories in minus whatever number it takes to make me lose weight = lost weight. Uhhh… yes, I suppose that’s true. It’s also a tautology, and so not very interesting from a practical perspective.
Somehow, “Calories In < Calories Expended = Weight Loss,” sounds very reasonable, but it sounds pretty stupid when you translate that to, “In order to lose weight, restrict your calories until you begin to lose weight.” Thanks. Next you’ll tell me, “In order to be able to live in a vacuum, hold your breath until you no longer need to breathe.”
In closing, to the person with whom I argued in favor of the Bunsen burner theory: I was wrong. You were right. I was stupid and bigoted. I’m sorry.
On a side-note, the next time you hear somebody debating whether people are “born gay” or “choose gay-ness,” please for the love of whatever you find holy, remind them that it doesn’t matter, because who you love and fuck is nobody’s business but your own, regardless of why you’re choosing to love and fuck them. The whole “innate vs. choice” debate presumes that the only reason we shouldn’t punish a person for gay-ness is because the person had it imposed upon them, like some sort of birth defect. This is equally true for fat people.
Garden Update: Baby Plants!
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Food on February 15th, 2010
I built a light stand for my baby plants out of PVC.
It’s pretty rudimentary. 3/4″ PVC and some fittings. Didn’t even really glue it, as friction seems to be doing the job okay so far. Since I took this picture, I even hung some aluminum foil curtains from the lights to reflect more light on the plants and less into the room.
This little plant right here is going to grow up to be broccoli some day.
As a side note, the grow lights make wonderful photography lights too, as long as the camera and lights are both about 6″ or less from the subject.
These here are the onions and leeks.
I actually started the first batch on the 12th, and most of them didn’t germinate. I may have planted them too deep in the soil, or maybe the seeds are just no good, because they are left-over from last year. I put in a 2nd batch of seeds, and if those don’t start, I may chuck the whole batch and open the new batch I ordered this year.
I have also started some lettuce and carrots.
First Seedlings of the Year
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Food on February 4th, 2010
The first seedlings, onions and leeks, have been started, and a few are even poking their heads up to get some light.
It’s really early in the year to be starting seedlings, but onions are a slow starter,and as near as I can tell, late January is actually the right time to have them ready to go into the ground by April.
Especially with the trouble we were having with the wood stove, the house has been very cold. 50 degrees in the morning, and seldom higher than 60 throughout the day. Putting on thermal underwear first thing in the morning has become routine, although hopefully that’ll resolve itself now that the stove seems to have been fixed. (New gaskets. Where, by, “new,” I mean, putting in gaskets that somehow were not present at all.)
They say that the soil needs to be above about 60 degrees for the seedlings to germinate. This is a bit of a mis-statement. Many plants will germinate at lower temperatures, even down to freezing. They just take a good long time to do it, and the whole point of starting seedlings indoors is to use the warm, protected environment to get a jump-start on the year’s crop.
Additionally, I have found that, with starting seedlings in a windowsill there’s just not enough light and they get very spindly. This house is especially well shaded. Although it has a south-facing front, it also has a porch, and the sun is usually shaded from the windows.
So I decided to get some grow lights and a heat mat for my seedlings.
You can spend a lot of money on grow lights, and perhaps the high-priced lights are better, but for my purposes, I’ve decided to see what kind of results I get with fluorescent shop lights. You can buy them at your local hardware store for about $20 each, and a pack of ten bulbs is about $20. All told, I spent $50 for two lights, which I estimate will be enough to light all of my seedlings.
In the photo above, the lamps are resting on the greenhouse boxes. I plan to build a stand out of PVC. It’s nice to have a stand so that you can adjust the height of the lamps. As the plants get taller, you raise the lamps so they’re consistently just a few inches above the plants, maximizing the light the plants get.
The lights are on a timer so that the seedlings get 16 hours of light and 8 hours of dark. Some people say that you can give them 24 hours of light, but I figure they might get a little confused when they get set outside. The timer was about $10 and has integrated switches to allow you to set “on” and “off” in 15 minute increments. I like this better than the ones where they give you four plastic tabs that you have to set for “on” and “off.”
Heat mats, you can buy online all day long, but finding them in stores is harder. Even Mayo, the local lawn and garden center didn’t have any in stock. Luckily, Ferry-Morse makes a heated greenhouse kit that comes with 72 peat starter-pellets, a mini-”greenhouse,” and a heat mat, and Home Depot carries all variety of Ferry-Morse products. The kit is about $24, which, if you were going to buy the greenhouse at $7 anyway, is a fair price for the mat.
One of the problems you can run into with a heat mat is overheating the plants. The heat mat will keep the plants about 10-20 degrees warmer than ambient temperature (mine is doing about 22 degrees, so it’s a bit of an overachiever). For my house, that’s no problem, as they hover around 80 in the kitchen. For a typical American house, it would put the temperature in the 90’s, which may be too hot for some seeds. You can buy a digital temperature controller for about $30, but I suggest simply putting the heat mats on a $10 timer.
The lights are on a timer so that the seedlings get 16 hours of light and 8 hours of dark. Some people say that you can give them 24 hours of light, but I figure they might get a little confused when they get set outside. The timer was about $10 and has integrated switches to allow you to set “on” and “off” in 15 minute increments. I like this better than the ones where they give you four plastic tabs that you have to set for “on” and “off.” The nice thing about this timer is that, if I wanted to, I could put the heat mats on the timer and do 15 minutes on, 15 minutes off, all day long. If the timer had removable plastic tabs, I would only be able to turn on and off four times a day.
In order to monitor the soil temperature, I have stuck a kitchen thermometer into a peat pellet that hasn’t been planted with anything. I set it so that 80 degrees is straight up and then I can quickly check the temperature through the moist plastic of the greenhouse.
Garden Layout
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Food, Homesteading on January 25th, 2010
I’ve finished a first pass at my garden layout. You can view it here (you’ll need to click on the “layout” tab at the bottom of the page).
The beds are 30′ by 3′ each. On the spreadsheet, they’re one on top of another, but in reality, what I will have is a four-by-two grid of 30′ by 3′ rows. Hence, the first two beds, which are labeled “1 north” and “1 south” will actually be end-to-end with each other. It’d just make for a lot of scrolling to actually arrange them that way on the spreadsheet.
Coming up with the layout was pretty challenging, especially because there is conflicting advice as to what compliments what and what plants should rotate with what. I ultimately settled on an arbitrary set of advice and left it at that.
You might notice that row 1 north and south are awfully similar and likewise for row 2. Why not combine the plants into blocks? Two reasons: first, separating them might keep pests from migrating between them as easily. If pests find one batch of plants, perhaps they won’t find the other. This is an organic pest-control technique I’ve read about. Second, the south half of my yard gets more sun than the north half, and I’m curious to see the difference in planting the same or similar stuff in both halves.
The peas / corn / squash setup, I’m pretty confident about, as the Native Americans have done it that way for a long time. Usually, beans are used instead of peas, but I haven’t planned for any pole beans this year, and peas are also nitrogen-fixers, so I figure I’ll give it a whirl.
I read that onions can cut down on squash bugs, so I plan to interplant onions, leeks, and shallots around my zucchini and yellow squash. I’m sticking lettuce in there too, mostly because there’s room. I don’t think I need as many onions as it would take to totally fill in around the squash.
In the map, the sweet peppers and the hot peppers look like they’re on top of one another, but like I said, the rows are actually end-to-end, so they’ll be about 32′ apart, to prevent cross-pollination.
The melons at the end of row 1 take up a lot of space, and I could probably get away with planting something quick like lettuce over there, before the vines get too big.
Row 2 starts with a variety of tomatoes. I’m planting two each of slicers, roma, cherry, and tomatillos. These are surrounded by various root crops such as carrots, parsnips, beets, and radishes. The other end of row 2 contains brassicas like broccoli, spinach, collards, bok choy, and kohl rabi. The remaining space is taken up with potatoes.
Crop rotation guides say to plant nightshades (tomatoes and potatoes) and brassicas separately, but I just don’t have enough brassicas to really fill up a row, and I can’t see leaving half the row fallow each year. I figure if the potatoes suffer somewhat from their proximity to the broccoli, well, I’m growing a lot of potatoes. And if the broccoli suffers… it’s broccoli… I mean, come on. Acceptable losses.
Not present on the diagram are all the herbs that I will be or already am growing in planters, as well as garlic, which I started this fall, and will start again next fall, also in planters. I just don’t want to do the work of fitting garlic’s odd schedule into my rotation at this time. Also, I plant to dedicate an entire bed to strawberries, which don’t rotate.
Any advice from gardeners reading is welcome.
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