Life as an Extreme Sport

Category: …and everything else

Mostly everything else in a brain-academic way.

Food

...and everything else, life and living

A couple of years back, while I was attending an undergrad conference at Penn, Art Caplan stated to a group of students (for reasons I totally don’t remember) “I like all kinds of food ”” immobile, slow, accelerating and fast”, and it cracked me up, and stayed with me. It’s one of those quotable quotes he’s known for, and I’ve done more than my fair share of quoting it. But, it’s true – I like all kinds of food, too, and I especially like reading about food. Just as an example, I’m currently at my parents house, 3000 miles from my home, and yet within arms reach I have three books on food (Mark Kurlansky, known for the brilliant Salt, collected a bunch of food writing from, oh, the second century BC to now, into a volume known as Choice Cuts: A Savory Selection of Food Writing from Around the World, a book on the history of vanilla, and the reason I’m writing this, The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation). It’s a rare week my desk doesn’t see a book on some type of food, be it Steingarten collecting his latest batch of Vogue writings into a book, or analyzing a recipe and accompanying facts in an Alton Brown cookbook (both of which are also here, although not within arms reach – they’re in the kitchen, covered in flour from a failed scone attempt).

Over the summer I read Michael Pollan’s amazing Omnivore’s Dilemma, which I keep saying that I’ll write about some time and never get around to. But basically, Pollan follows four “types” of meal from farm to table, and the sometimes circuitous route the food takes to get there. A hunter/gatherer meal, fast food, organic, and so forth – and he explains a lot about the history of how Americans eat in the process. He also, and perhaps more significantly for at least me, put the fear of God, or at least famine, in me. I had no idea, before reading this book, just how heavily our food supply relies on corn, and just what it would do to us to lose it. I also had never really stopped to look at just how much high fructose corn syrup is in just about everything we eat. More than anything I’ve read in the last couple of years, (or seen, if we want to include Morgan Spurlock’s great documentary, Supersize Me), this book impacted how I eat.

David Kamp’s The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation is almost the flip side of Pollan’s book. Instead of looking at how our food is grown, manufactured, and made into tablefare, Kamp looks at just how we moved from pressed jello molds to baby green and chevre salad. And for those of you who, for reasons that I cannot begin to fathom, want to ditch nouvelle anything and go back to the days of canned salads and potted meat, you now have a pre-Julia Child scapegoat: the French themselves, and their export of Escoffier and the impact this had on the American culinary institution.

Kamp’s book is a rollicking and entertaining romp through American, specifically New York and LA, food history, starting with the seemingly omnipresent media chefs like Lagasse, Flay, Batali and others in the Food Network stable (as well as those who just occasionally stop by for a visit, like Bayless), and then backs up to the world wars, the French exodus, American GI’s in Paris, and the cannot-talk-about-American-chefs-without-mentioning James Beard. He weaves the story well, rarely dipping into sensationalism or lingering too long over tabloid-style gossip, but instead looking at how the influence, passion, drive and growing star-power of the folks behind some of the biggest restaurants changed our individual eating habits – and hopefully, you’ll agree, for the better.

The United States of Arugula is similar to Pollan’s book, in that it gets you thinking about what we eat and why we eat it – why French cooking is so revered, how revolutionary the idea of sun-dried tomatoes were, why we have Williams-Sonoma and just how radical radicchio is. The way of life Kamp takes on is one Pollan skipped – the one of the celebrity chef, with their audience of fans flocking to the nearest Dean and Deluca the day after their favourite chef used this great new gadget, be it a new way to measure or a certain twine to tie pork, and who demand the exact product being shown. It’s not full of any shocking revelations, not the way Pollan’s might be, or Old MacDonald’s Factory Farm is, but it is certainly full of quiet realizations of the power a small group of determined people can have, and the impact they can have on us all.

friends, nameless and otherwise

...and everything else, Academics, Albany Medical College, AMBI, Bioethics

A friend, who shall remain nameless, sent me the following link, along with the rather breathless “omigosh, he’s at Albany Medical College and a medical ethicist! Do you know him?!” question.

I honestly don’t know how to reply (politely; the rude things pop to mind right away, of course), so instead I’ll ask the question that pops to mind: is it really a matter of how old is too old for society? Does it really matter that 1/3rd of the children in the USA are being raised by a grandparent/someone over 60 – does necessity necessarily necessate action? (Just because something is being done doesn’t mean it should be being done, after all.) And why shouldn’t we put limits on when people should or should not have children? What about the physical distresses of pregnancy? Isn’t there an obligation to the child? (Can you imagine what the generation gap would be like?)

Questions like that could be asked all the livelong day, though, and from what I’ve seen via Google News Alert lately, have been. I think what I’m more interested in is this notion of the society being ready. What reasons would it not be ready? We expect people to be mothers young, but that’s slowly changing as more women build careers. Yet we certainly expect women to stop having kids once biology kicks in – or once they get to be a certain age, where we begin to think that it would do more harm than good for the child to have a parent of that age.

And parent, I think, is key. We have a different cognitive category for parent versus grandparent; yes, both are caretakers, but the way we name our caretaker still means something. It seems to me that grandparent implies a categorical and functional difference than parent (even if technically speaking, the roles are the same). It’s certainly a way to acknowledge age gap and experience differences, but I wonder if there’s more to it than that?

Maybe there is, maybe there isn’t – I just felt the distinct shutting down algorithms for my thought shutting down, which means this is going to go nowhere fast. I suppose, though, that the age difference, physical differences, and simple fact of statistics leads me to intuit that we should have limits on this sort of thing, and that if society has decided “too young”, (which we have), then it should not be terribly difficult to decide “too old”, either.

fading in to flat

...and everything else, Duct Tape and Prayers

I’m tired.

I feel like I have to preface anything I say with that. I’ve shifted back to what some of my friends refer to as “Kelly Standard Time”; my own, insomnia driven “sleep” (I use the word ever so lightly) schedule. Drugs can sort of make me sleep, but not really, anymore.

And so I’m tired. The tiredness feeds in to all sorts of negative things, and this Friday night, as I get ready to chemically fall asleep before midnight, I find that I feel hollow. A shell with strings, going through the motions. A single ship in the sea, a solitary star in the sky…how many phrases can I come up with to creatively say I feel forgotten by friends and colleagues, that I feel alone? Probably quite a few, and it’s illogical – I know it’s illogical!

Feelings aren’t terribly logical, are they? I would have made an awful Vulcan.

I’m tired.

Out with the Old,…

...and everything else, Academics, Bioethics, Duct Tape and Prayers, life and living

It’s 2007. My instinctive response is “good fucking riddance to 2006, and here’s hoping the next one is better” (but I know better than to taunt the universe by making it any sort of challenge). But Discardian had an interesting tip up a day or two ago that suggested we – and I assume she meant social we, and not just you and me we – have a bit of a binary, black/white, good/bad way of looking at life. We see the highs and lows, and not miss the rest.

Now while I have often told friends that the nice things about the lows is that you can’t see the highs without them, I am often guilty of overlooking that in the middle – the not extraordinary, the not horrible, but that which moves us forward in life. Or holds us back, if we let it.

2006 is always going to be a hard year to look at, even when memory takes the edge off the sharpness of Mom’s cancer, or the loneliness and difficulties my first semester of graduate school brought. And it will round the edges off those highs, too – my letters of acceptance, teaching my first class on my own, reading my first feedback reports that were just about me, writing something as big as my thesis (and finishing on time!), graduating, the fun things I’ve done in NYC and people I’ve met and so on.

But 2006, I think, will also be remembered as a year where I made a lot of forward movement in my life. I see a lot more clearly where I want to be, down the road, and the things I’ll need to do in order to get there, and I’m on my way doing most of them. Yes, life keeps throwing challenges in my path… but Phillip told me something, once – it must have been three years ago? My husband had left me, my best friend had died a horrible death, and I simply could not get my act together. I couldn’t juggle all the balls I had in the air, and I let them all drop. I was sitting in his office, telling him that just as soon as life calmed down I’d have it all together, I’d be better. And with his typical bemused expression, he glanced over the haphazard stacks of books between us and told me that life just keeps coming, it never calms down and never gets better. It’s always one thing after another, and we all juggle; what matters is how we do it.

I learned to juggle, and I did pretty well. But now it’s a new game; the ante has been upped, and the stakes are higher. My sneaking suspicion, though, is that I’ll learn the rules to this game soon enough, and then I’ll shine as brightly as a I did before.

2006 was a bitch of a year, dragging me all over the map, not just emotionally but literally. But if I was pressed to admit it, I would admit that I’ve probably grown more this last year than the past few combined – and that’s saying a lot. I might not look fondly back on the year, but I suspect I will eventually be very grateful for the contributions it has made to who I am.

And so I raise a glass to 2006, and to all of you. May 2007 be everything you wish for, and more.