TracyFood

Monkey Monday: home sick edition 17 September 2007 5:47 pm

Posted by Tracy in : Marion Nestle, Morning Glory, anthropology, books, cooking, eating, garden, health, meat, meta, news, politics, tea, work , trackback

I have a cold, so I am staying home and rocking the hot fluids. Later in the week this little bout of upper respiratory yuckiness will probably translate into a post about miso soup (I hesitate to call my approach to miso soup a recipe), but for now all I’m good for is sitting on the couch with the cats, catching up on my Google Reader. I had miso soup and echinacea tea for breakfast, with Yorkshire Gold black tea for dessert. For lunch I had no-knead bread, and I’m thinking of making tomato soup with extra garlic for dinner, because I believe in feeding a cold, dangit. My other project for the day is updating my reading list, in particular to make note of my shiny new used copy of Stand Facing the Stove which Powells had just for me for $5 on this weekend’s trip to Portland, yay! My excitement might even be enough to get me to finally finish writing a review of this fantastic history-biography.

But Tracy, don’t you usually work on Mondays?

I used to, dear readers, but my schedule’s been switched to Tuesday closing shifts, just in time for me to spend today getting healthy enough to work tomorrow. (My poor neglected garden will have to wait, dangit.)

Why did your schedule change, Tracy?

I’ll tell you later, when I’m more capable of stringing sentences together. For now, here’s some fun stuff I’ve been reading (much of it almost a month old because I am way behind on my RSS feeds, oh yes):

Accounting for Taste at Culinate, about why and how people develop their food preferences, why mass-market foods are bland by sad, sad necessity, and cross-cultural notions about what is disgusting, which gave me all kinds of flashbacks to my food anthropology class last fall.
Do We Really Know What Makes Us Healthy? from the New York Times Magazine, all about epidemiology, which I think is super-cool because I am a colossal nerd. The author, Gary Taubes, has a book coming out: Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control and Disease. Marion Nestle is cautiously optimistic about the new book in her blog post on the subject, Does Nutritional Epidemiology Work? noting that Taubes was the author of Big Fat Lie, the 2002 NY Times article sometimes credited with setting off the Atkins and low-carb diet crazes.
Steaking a claim on Culinate (I really like Culinate, and Matthew Amster-Burton’s “Unexplained Bacon” column is pretty consistently one of my favorite features there), which might be TMI for my vegetarian readers. Still, I really liked the line “Dry-aged is the Scharffen Berger 70 percent bar of steaks: more expensive and hard to find, but once you taste it, it’s tough to go back.” Confession (again, vegetarians might want to skip ahead): I have sort of been craving a steak ever since watching the Alton Brown episode with a title very similar to this article. I am thinking of making the steak au poivre recipe from the March-April 2006 issue of Cook’s Illustrated, but there’s no way in hell I’m cooking more than one filet, and even 8 ounces seems like way too much for me and Peter to share, which is part of the reason why I haven’t done it yet (also I keep forgetting about the relatively early closing times at Long’s Meat Market, whose website is seriously not OK for vegetarians)
Finally, I enjoyed The Worst Op-Ed Ever Written?, a bit of commentary on Slate.com devoted to making fun of an August 5 New York Times op-ed about Starbucks-style coffee places. I liked that the Slate writer caught and pointed out that there is something elitist about customers who complain about having to pick up their own mess in self-service businesses, but I think that comment doesn’t go far enough. Automated phone systems (to give another example of a system that makes customers do some of the work) and fast food places where you’re supposed to bus your own table — both of these make the customer do work that used to be done by underpaid workers, usually women who didn’t have a whole lot of other employment options. That’s what “the servant problem” is all about — when other jobs became available to the servant class, they ran like hell, leaving their employers to whine “it’s so hard to find good help these days.” And yeah, a lot of the servant class was female. Mix that in with the fact that it’s usually a guy complaining about computer voices or, gods forbid, picking up his own trash… well, I don’t care what the commenters on the Slate piece say, that kind of whining always rubs me the wrong way. The rule, as always, is: either quit your bitching or go someplace with better service — but be prepared to pay for it, and tip your servers really well or I will destroy you.

All right, it’s getting late enough that I should admit I’m not going to come up with many clever thoughts in between bouts of sneezing and aching. I quit for today; here’s hoping I feel well enough to write something more interesting tomorrow.