Archive for November, 2009

5 Rules To Eat By That I Dug

Published under Favorite Quotes, Health, Life Nov 30, 2009

These are my favorite responses to Michael Pollan’s NYTimes blog request for readers’ rules about eating:

  • From my Romanian grandmother: “Breakfast, you should eat alone. Lunch, you should share with a friend. Dinner, give to your enemy.”
    - Irina A. Dumitrescu
  • “Never eat something that’s pretending to be something else…no textured vegetable protein or veggie burgers (fake meat), no artificial sweeteners, no margarine (fake butter), no ‘low fat’ sour cream, no turkey bacon, no ‘chocolate flavor sauce’ tat doesn’t contain chocolate…If I want something that tastes like meat or butter, I would rather have the real thing than some chemical concoction pretending to be more healthful.” - Sonya Legg
  • “Eat foods in inverse proportion to how much its lobby spends to push it.” Kirk Westphal
  • “One of my top rules for eating comes from economics. The law of diminishing marginal utility reminds me that each additional bite is generally less satisfying than the previous bite. This helps me slow down, savor the first bites,stop eating sooner. It also helps get plenty of variety in my diet because this rule also makes a meal of small plates more enticing: 3 bites of 5 plates versus 15 bites of 1 will maximize satisfaction and nutritional variety.” Laura Kelley
  • “When drinking tea, just drink tea.”  I find this Zen teaching useful, given my inclination toward information absorption in the morning, when I’m also trying to eat breakfast, get the dog out, start the fire and organize my day.  I believe that it’s so much better for our bodies when we are present to our food.  Perhaps a bit of mindfulness goes a long way first thing in the morning.  (Of course, some time ago, I came across a humorous anecdote about a hapless Zen student whose teacher taught him this aphorism and then was discovered by the same student, drinking tea and reading the paper.  When confronted, the teacher said, “When drinking tea and reading the paper, just drink tea and read the paper!”) Michelle Poirot
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Interesting article about an investment scandal in Lebanon that has tarnished Hezbollah’s reputation.

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My wife is a Doctor and she often shares stories about how the medical “system” leads to unsavory paths, often including terminally-ill elderly & infirm patients who are dragged through the indecency of two extra weeks of herculean efforts to keep them alive when it is pretty clear they are victims of technology and bureaucracy gone awry.  They would have much rather died a dignified death than be dragged through it.  But their families would of course want to know they did everything in their power for them. 

I have also heard that the costs of health care in the last two weeks of one’s life tend to account for between 50% and 75% of one’s lifetime expenses.    This data point may exaggerate the problem because obviously before you pass on it makes sense that a lot will be invested in to saving you.  But it does point to the challenge we need to confront in modern society: just because technology now exists that could “prolong” our lives does not follow that every instance we should deploy every available technology.

This is why it struck me that the campaign to scare people with the government’s “death panels” was a red herring – a silly distraction from a serious issue that our society needs to confront.

US Congressman Earl Blumenauer recently wrote the inside account of the “Death Panel” miscommunication campaign here. It is recommended reading not just to health care legislation aficionados, but to all who need to know about the sobering way in which our legislative system works.

[Read more →]

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Interesting article about a pious ayatollah who challenges the “Islamic” claim of the Iranian regime.

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I really liked this thought by Jonathan Safran Foer on his goal as a parent. He wrote it in the context of his journey as a vegetarian, but it has wider applications and resonates as a noble aim:

I’m not as worried about what [my children] will choose as much as my ability to make them conscious of the choices before them. I won’t measure my success as a parent by whether my children share my values, but by whether they act according to their own.

– Jonathan Safran Foer, in The Fruits of Family Trees, New York Times Magazine

[Read more →]

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Interesting article about a calorie-restriction study financed by NIH.

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I’ve always enjoyed reading Malcolm Gladwell, and yet some of his over-simplified discoveries have troubled me because they often ignore some logical alternatives to his explanations.  Now in the New York Times Book Review, Steven Pinker elaborates on this problem. 

An eclectic essayist is necessarily a dilettante, which is not in itself a bad thing. But Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring. He provides misleading definitions of “homology,” “sagittal plane” and “power law” and quotes an expert speaking about an “igon value” (that’s eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.

The banalities come from a gimmick that can be called the Straw We. First Gladwell disarmingly includes himself and the reader in a dubious consensus — for example, that “we” believe that jailing an executive will end corporate malfeasance, or that geniuses are invariably self-made prodigies or that eliminating a risk can make a system 100 percent safe. He then knocks it down with an ambiguous observation, such as that “risks are not easily manageable, accidents are not easily preventable.” As a generic statement, this is true but trite: of course many things can go wrong in a complex system, and of course people sometimes trade off safety for cost and convenience (we don’t drive to work wearing crash helmets in Mack trucks at 10 miles per hour). But as a more substantive claim that accident investigations are meaningless “rituals of reassurance” with no effect on safety, or that people have a “fundamental tendency to compensate for lower risks in one area by taking greater risks in another,” it is demonstrably false.

In an otherwise interesting (though earlier) New Yorker article on the history of Ketchup, Gladwell naively equates the iconic and amusing Grey Poupon advertising campaign to challenge French’s Mustard with the store-sampling efforts of one Massachusetts fancy ketchup entrepreneur to challenge Heinz Ketchup.  Gladwell frames the story to imply that this Ketchup entrepreneur won’t stand a chance to break the Heinz Ketchup empire because Ketchup is fundamentally different from mustard.  It may well be true that Ketchup is different from mustard, but in this particular example, it is far more relevant that Grey Poupon’s multi-million dollar campaign is different from one guy selling one version of fancy tomato sauce from a truck.

That said, I heartily recommend this article on the history of Ketchup – and how Heinz came to dominate the space so thoroughly.

The excerpt below particularly resonated with me, as it accurately describes a challenge you need to embrace and be aware of when you create a new food product – as when we design new KIND flavors – that the final product must add up to much more than just the sum of the individual components; its notes must join to create a transcendental melody that works magically together as one:

After breaking the ketchup down into its component parts, the testers assessed the critical dimension of "amplitude," the word sensory experts use to describe flavors that are well blended and balanced, that "bloom" in the mouth.  "The difference between high and low amplitude is the difference between my son and a great pianist playing ‘Ode to Joy’ on the piano," Chambers says.  "They are playing the same notes, but they blend better with the great pianist."  Pepperidge Farm shortbread cookies are considered to have high amplitude.  So are Hellman’s mayonnaise and Sara Lee poundcake.  When something is high in amplitude, all its constituent elements converge into a single gestalt.  You can’t isolate the elements of an iconic, high-amplitude flavor like Coca-Cola or Pepsi.  But you can with one of those private-label colas that you get in the supermarket.  "The thing about Coke and Pepsi is that they are absolutely gorgeous," Judy Heylmun, a vice-president of Sensory Spectrum, Inc., in Chatham, New Jersey, says.  "They have beautiful notes—all flavors are in balance.  It’s very hard to do that well.  Usually, when you taste a store cola it’s"— and here she made a series of pik! pik! pik! sounds—"all the notes are kind of spiky, and usually the citrus is the first thing to spike out.  And then the cinnamon.  Citrus and brown spice notes are top notes and very volatile, as opposed to vanilla, which is very dark and deep.  A really cheap store brand will have a big, fat cinnamon note sitting on top of everything."

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Further to my earlier post about Apple’s cool ads, I got hooked on the songs in there and tried to find the original videos.  For Chairlift-Bruises I came across the video immediately below and was struck by it.  It seemed so cutting edge and professional, yet so casual and young (uncomfortably so for my wife – and I can understand why as a parent I’d also be concerned).  Was it possible that kids did this on their own? Or was the video director so sophisticated as to make it look so down-to-earth? It turns out it was all done by an 8th grader who is quickly building a following.  And it’s actually far better than the official video! You factor in these considerations and you understand why we are just in the beginning of what will be a revolution in content generation, with repercussions for business, culture and society that we cannot begin to comprehend.

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In addition to being in Us Weekly, Kelly’s love of KIND was featured in OK! Magazine, In Touch and Life & Style… OK Magazine 11-30-09
In Touch 11-30-09  Life  Style 11-30-09

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This is a great little vignette…

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