Food city area

More Thanksgiving Math

More Thanksgiving Math

From the incomparable mathemusician Vi Hart, here is another video. She now has 4 Thanksgiving videos, and a Halloween video with a sierpins...

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15.17

Thanksgiving Mathematics

Thanksgiving Mathematics

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13.39

<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivcTBiqVw6YfFt2PgTaqkxufgixoG6qIb5wdExK6kK-cgXRbkXXJfCjqpIYRg1ps7-Xi7eoZ6oTi9LemwJmYGyqG-M9DFZNT1bRRWlAHfuxCiG5bAml0Jr8rJSL5bQMWBjfHAncRXxWGJQ/s1600/twinkieday.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5457065926209672018" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivcTBiqVw6YfFt2PgTaqkxufgixoG6qIb5wdExK6kK-cgXRbkXXJfCjqpIYRg1ps7-Xi7eoZ6oTi9LemwJmYGyqG-M9DFZNT1bRRWlAHfuxCiG5bAml0Jr8rJSL5bQMWBjfHAncRXxWGJQ/s320/twinkieday.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 198px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 320px;" /></a>I had my last Twinkie a couple of years ago for Twinkie Day -- April of 2010. The funny thing, I wrote then, is that I remember thinking they were new when I first ate them as an elementary school child. That was long after 1930 when they were invented. Actually, I liked them. So after twinkieless years, I bought a package of 10 individually wrapped Twinkies. Despite the mile-long list of industrial ingredients, it tasted pretty good (the second helping, not so much).<br /><br />And now there will be no more Twinkies. The newspapers are full of reports on the final dissolution of Hostess Brands -- the Washington Post even wrote an obituary: "<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/a-eulogy-for-the-humble-hostess-twinkie/2012/11/16/1bb1e3c0-300c-11e2-a30e-5ca76eeec857_story.html?hpid=z4">A eulogy for the humble Hostess Twinkie.</a>" People are stocking up on them, though the recipe and process may be sold as part of the defunct corporation's assets, and thus the Twinkie may rise again.<br /><br />I read a book about Twinkies once. Here's a selection from my report, also from 2010:<br /><br /><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/images/B001UE7DHI/sr=8-1/qid=1271269527/ref=dp_image_0?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books&qid=1271269527&sr=8-1" onclick="return amz_js_PopWin(this.href,'AmazonHelp','width=700,height=600,resizable=1,scrollbars=1,toolbar=0,status=1');" target="AmazonHelp"><img alt="Twinkie, Deconstructed: My Journey to Discover How the Ingredients Found in Processed Foods Are Grown, Mined (Yes, Mined), and Manipulated into What America Eats" border="0" height="300" id="prodImage" onload="if (typeof uet == 'function') { uet('af'); }" onmouseover="" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51Y88dFGR-L._SL500_AA300_.jpg" width="300" /></a><br /><br />"Twinkies' buttery flavor provides the richness we expect from cake and likely also helps to mask their oiliness. Since due to cost and rancidity issues there's no room in a packaged cake like Twinkies for fresh butter, artificial butter is the answer. ... The most surprising thing about it is that it really stinks." In fact, we learn, many flavor chemicals smell "positively awful." Even natural flavors like vanilla have so many different flavor elements that some of them have unappealing notes, at least to some people.<br /><br />"Memory is also important to taste.... When we eat a favorite snack cake, we expect it to taste exactly as we remember from last time, or from childhood." And we expect it to <span style="font-style: italic;">feel</span> the same. In <span style="font-style: italic;">Twinkie Deconstructed</span>, author Steve Ettlinger provides an ingredient-by-ingredient analysis of just how Twinkies are put together: the flavors of sugar, vanilla, and butter; the texture of filling and cake;  and the way the cake stays dry and the filling stays creamy. I sort of reacted to this when I took a bite of the Twinkie, but I could also detect some of the chemical notes in its composition.<br /><br />In all Ettlinger counted 39 ingredients listed on the package of Twinkies a few years ago. He points out that the recipe subtly changes over time -- my Twinkie box was indeed just a bit different, but of course sugary-buttery cake and creamy vanilla filling predominate. Two of the three main flavors, vanilla and butter, are present only in artificial form, and another expected component, eggs, is mainly there as artificial stabilizers, with maybe 1/500 of a real egg in each Twinkie.<br /><br />I decided to buy a copy of <span style="font-style: italic;">Twinkie  Deconstructed</span> when I celebrated Twinkie Day as I described above. I found the book quite  fascinating. I liked the description of each ingredient's function in  creating taste or texture in the baking process, the history of the  product or the story of its invention, and the descriptions of how each  one is made.<br /><br />In his quest to deconstruct the Twinkie, the author visited the manufacturing plants where most of them are milled, refined, mined (yes, chemical leavening comes from mines), assembled or derived (mostly from petroleum), and often secretly manufactured (as in the case of vitamins). His sense of panic when deep down in a soda mine was especially memorable. His text lists of other processed foods that use each of the components, especially the artificial ones. Even flour, the least processed ingredient, is a pretty highly processed substance. Did you know that some of the fat in Twinkies is from beef? Me neither. Wow!

The End of the Twinkie

I had my last Twinkie a couple of years ago for Twinkie Day -- April of 2010. The funny thing, I wrote then, is that I remember thinking the...

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00.29

Calder's Fork

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwNyNYeB7EpPalZgFdiF5amk_5EAZ86iU4jHDzAnPv3TMTVenSs7n_1HnI_aHTIVGkUnPegvV9Py66AFor82JxmMtkkUbcRClg-ZEHMWvEU_2IVsBJz_jG8EjXAczk0lHT_euwlkPYW-wn/s1600/calders-fanciful-kitchen.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="375" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwNyNYeB7EpPalZgFdiF5amk_5EAZ86iU4jHDzAnPv3TMTVenSs7n_1HnI_aHTIVGkUnPegvV9Py66AFor82JxmMtkkUbcRClg-ZEHMWvEU_2IVsBJz_jG8EjXAczk0lHT_euwlkPYW-wn/s400/calders-fanciful-kitchen.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br />In the <i>Los Angeles Times Today</i>: "<a href="http://www.latimes.com/features/food/dailydish/la-dd-alexander-calders-fanciful-kitchen-utensils-20121106,0,7923386.story">Alexander Calder's fanciful kitchen utensils</a>" -- he'd make them for his wife when she needed something. I'm a big fan of his fanciful wire and metal objects, such as portraits and his circus. I wonder if I can find the book, <i>Calder at Home</i>, that these images are from.

Calder's Fork

In the Los Angeles Times Today : " Alexander Calder's fanciful kitchen utensils " -- he'd make them for his wife when she ...

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04.20

Mo Yan: The Garlic Ballads

<div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioxj8aEToanNXXu-zJNpjUvdqWJb4gmvTnluzQUbS2pMVKxnfD4MKaisnPEEh8k13SyDnXJmyi7fb_61BQEpYVghZ4-NV98hN4oY30Yj7aAvJfwhkFa64J-GNMWC1K94xvlpxZOdWIDrmS/s1600/Screen+shot+2012-10-31+at+2.17.42+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioxj8aEToanNXXu-zJNpjUvdqWJb4gmvTnluzQUbS2pMVKxnfD4MKaisnPEEh8k13SyDnXJmyi7fb_61BQEpYVghZ4-NV98hN4oY30Yj7aAvJfwhkFa64J-GNMWC1K94xvlpxZOdWIDrmS/s320/Screen+shot+2012-10-31+at+2.17.42+PM.png" width="224" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal">     <br /><div class="MsoNormal">I don’t understand China, but I decided to read <i>The Garlic Ballads</i> by this year’s Nobelist in Literature, Mo Yan. I don’t understand the book any more than anything else about China. I can follow the narrative, which is not in chronological order, but still not too complicated -- I just find the culture to be a challenge.<br /><br />At the beginning of each chapter of <i>The Garlic Ballads</i>, we hear a few lines about garlic and politics, sung by a blind street singer named Zhang Kou. At the beginning:</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>“Pray listen, my fellow villagers, to Zhang Kou’s tale of the mortal world and Paradise!</i> </blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i></i><i>The nation’s founder, Emperor Liu of the Great Han,</i> </blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i></i><i>Comanded citizens of our country to plant garlic for tribute…”</i> (p. 1)</blockquote></div><div class="MsoNormal">Who is Emperor Liu? I don’t know. Why garlic? We’ll find out.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">After a few lines of ballad starting each chapter, the author slowly introduces a number of characters: dirt farmers in the village, the poor and mistreated of China. They have planted garlic for the 1987 harvest because it was selling for a lot of money – and because the planners told them to. They are very poor. They complain all the time because of rapidly rising prices of the things they need, such as pork and fertilizer for their garlic fields. The peasant women even have to stand in line at the birthing center. They constantly have to bribe the officials, who live much better than they do.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">When it’s time to sell the garlic, the market collapses and the farmers are left worse off than ever. Communist ideals of earlier days have been betrayed as this new free enterprise enables whole new abusive situations under the onus of bureaucracy. I think that this life doesn’t make sense to the characters, and that’s a reason why it doesn’t make sense to me.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The first chapter tells of the arrest of one of these farmers, Gao Yang, who seems to have no idea what crime he was being accused of. Soon we meet another character named Gao Ma, who is also accused of a crime – starting a riot at the local city hall. A third arrestee, who appears somewhat later, is a woman of the village with a complicated relationship to the others. The chapters bob and weave back and forth between the horrible conditions in their jail cells, the filth, the lice, the smells, the abusive fellow prisoners. We follow the prisoners’ memories of their lives, from the time their fellow elementary school students mistreated them, through the recent garlic debacle, and up to the time of their arrest.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Garlic is everywhere. Green shoots in the fields. Piled in the farmers’ carts pulled by cow or donkey. In everything the farmers eat. Overflowing the warehouses. Confiscated in shakedowns by petty officials. Rotting in the street. An ingredient in many very unappetizing meals. Garlic everywhere! The crop should have sold for lots of money. As the blind poet said<i>,<o:p></o:p></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: 3.0pt;"><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>“Sing of the brilliant Party Central Committee… Elders and brothers, get rich on garlic, remake yourselves!” </i>(p. 205)</blockquote></div><div class="MsoNormal">Food is one of the principal elements in the characters’ lives. Most of the time they eat coarse flatbread “hard and resistant as a frozen rag.” In jail, one prisoner receives a bowl of noodle soup to make others jealous, so they will abuse him – their normal ration is “one steamed bun and a ladleful of soup.” (p. 87) The best meal in book is for a prisoner on death row -- a last dinner of fatty pork, potatoes, wafer cakes fried on a griddle and stuffed with green onions, and bean paste. (p. 247) Prison buns are made from stale mildewed flour with a few vegetables – and garlic, “raw, cold garlic,” “cold garlic broth” (pp. 79, 123)</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Sometimes I felt as if I was reading an even grimmer version of the “laughter through tears” style of Yiddish writers like Sholem Aleichem, whose characters endured similar mistreatment -- though not really as degrading. Reviewers have compared Mo Yan to Dickens, to Faulkner, or to South American Magical Realists. Hmmm.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Comedy or tragedy? There’s a comic scene when Gao Ma attempts to take a bride whose family had promised her elsewhere. But her tragic suicide is in no way amusing. The failure to sell garlic involves some comic scenes. But as the discouraged farmers, who had waited in a line of “farmers, trucks, oxcarts, horsecarts, tractors, bicycles, even motorbikes” (p. 130), dragged their garlic back home, one dies a tragic death when struck by a drunken official driving an unlicensed car. The riot in government offices is somewhat comic. I guess.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Jail time is too humiliating to be funny, as are lives of mistreatment in memories; one charater says “dogs are better off than we are. People feed them when they’re hungry, and as a last resort, they can survive on human waste.” (p. 124) Finally, one accused prisoner stands up to the judges at his trial, and a seemingly true voice of a noble soldier pleads for a better society. <br /><br /></div>The epigraph to the entire novel is attibuted to Joseph Stalin, “Novelists are so concerned with ‘man’s fate’ that they tend to lose sight of their own fate. Therein lies their tragedy.” I say attributed, since the only google hits for the quote are in articles about <i>The Garlic Ballads</i>, not about Stalin. I don’t understand this book.</div>

Mo Yan: The Garlic Ballads

I don’t understand China, but I decided to read The Garlic Ballads by this year’s Nobelist in Literature, Mo Yan. I don’t understand t...

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11.25

School Lunch

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/12003515@N05/8087959278/" title="IMG_1224 by mesander2000, on Flickr"><img alt="IMG_1224" height="375" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8331/8087959278_899c213c1e.jpg" width="500" /></a><br /><br />School lunches are much in the news this fall, as recently-enacted nutritional standards are mandating changes. The public schools in St. Paul, Minnesota, have been experimenting with new programs for a few years, so I was very pleased to receive an invitation to have lunch at the Horace Mann Elementary School barbecue while visiting Miriam and Alice this week. I ate with Alice and several of her friends.<br /><br />"Sometimes they have completely gross foods," says Alice, "but others are the best. I like the veggie pizza, but the chicken teriyaki and other meat items are gross."<br /><br />As is evident in the photo, there are lots of vegetables -- and the classroom teachers discussed this with the children earlier in the year. Each child is required to try some veggies, which at least on the special family barbecue day were served on a sort of buffet in the cafeteria (which is also the gymnasium), after the line where the cafeteria ladies put the hot dog and baked beans on our foam trays. I gathered that there used to be things like chips on the menu which have disappeared this year.<br /><br />The hot dog came on a whole-grain bun, baked in the central food prep kitchen according to the various articles I read earlier this fall. Alice ate the bun but not the hot dog. The children separate the food from the foam trays after lunch, and the edible rejects go to feed pigs at a special farm.<br /><br />The "breakfast cookie" had lots of healthy ingredients, but didn't taste bad -- a tiny bit salty, I thought. Beverage choices: milk or chocolate milk. I doubt that I've tasted chocolate milk since I was eating in school cafeterias myself -- this was not as sweet and creamy as the chocolate milk of my childhood, if my memory serves.<br /><br />During lunch Alice and her friends normally play a game called "Hello, Bob." Someone starts by saying, "Hello, Bob. Say hello to Bob, Bob." The response is to say "Hello Bob," and turn to the next person and say the same thing. Everyone has to talk in a sort of British or Australian accent. Eventually they also say "Hello, Sheila," or "Hello, Steve Owen." Hard to describe this one, but a couple of other visiting fathers and mothers and I played along with the group.<br /><br />"The school lunches are better than our old school lunches," says Miriam, who ate lunch with Evelyn and Lenny and some of her friends elsewhere in the lunch room. "But home made lunches are still better."<br /><br />

School Lunch

School lunches are much in the news this fall, as recently-enacted nutritional standards are mandating changes. The public schools in St. Pa...

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15.27

Disorder as art in food photos

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_UB1eLSK53uNnjSS-6TqrlPpBqNMhlgv20h-vJ1hwFI_BXAmJhb-4R3Ygr0nSOTNXQlwdMqwz6ytxkaOLfeiHFa5FbLJiv2x8KiNKbYInNlFsN_TBFm53oyrZDsuZzDdk1Iz85hF0H2T8/s1600/Screen+shot+2012-10-10+at+6.12.27+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_UB1eLSK53uNnjSS-6TqrlPpBqNMhlgv20h-vJ1hwFI_BXAmJhb-4R3Ygr0nSOTNXQlwdMqwz6ytxkaOLfeiHFa5FbLJiv2x8KiNKbYInNlFsN_TBFm53oyrZDsuZzDdk1Iz85hF0H2T8/s320/Screen+shot+2012-10-10+at+6.12.27+PM.png" width="258" /></a></div><br />Not all food in art is perfect, as many Renaissance artists illustrated. In a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/10/arts/design/laura-letinskys-food-photography.html">current New York times article,</a> photographer Laura Letinsky's work demonstrates the same principles. Both in her fine-art work and in her magazine illustrations she uses chaotic or at least very informal tables with the remains of a meal, a cup of tea, or a party.<br /><br />According to the article:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">"Dirty spoons, empty cantaloupe rinds, half-eaten lollipops and clumsily cut slices of bread are her trade. Her pieces, she said, explore 'the problem of the illusion of perfection.' ...  </blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">"Even Brides, a magazine that would presumably want to present images of serenity and order, ran in its July issue Ms. Letinsky’s photographs of table settings. In these pictures macaroons are half-eaten and abandoned. Teacups and bowls are askew, and party organizers have hastily tied together a mishmash of silverware. The associates who work with Ms. Letinsky on these magazine pieces seem tickled by her chaos." </blockquote><br /> Several slick food magazines have used her work -- but evidently there are still quite a few editors who think their readers aren't ready for such realism.

Disorder as art in food photos

Not all food in art is perfect, as many Renaissance artists illustrated. In a current New York times article, photographer Laura Letinsky&#...

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15.24

Food city area

More Thanksgiving Math

Thanksgiving Mathematics

The End of the Twinkie

Calder's Fork

Mo Yan: The Garlic Ballads

School Lunch

Disorder as art in food photos

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