Monkey Monday: vitamin C, English muffins, and soup 9 February 2009 11:50 am
Posted by Tracy in : breakfast,events,geekery,health,school,soup,tea,writing , trackbackIt’s a tea for health Monday here at the Moon Monkey Bar, Grille, and Cocktail Lounge: I woke up dehydrated, sniffly, and with just a hint of a sore throat, so clearly, it’s time to invoke the placebo effect. Echinacea tea and chewable vitamin C for the win! Which is appropriate, since I’m going to be writing about vitamin C for my food studies nutrition class this term. (Working title of that report: “Apologies to Linus Pauling,” not that I’m intimidated or anything.) More on that in a bit. Also, thoughts on English muffins and my mom’s annual soup party (unrelated).
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As I’ve only mentioned a few (hundred) dozen times, I’m taking a class from Marion Nestle this term: Nutrition for Food Studies. It’s a broad, survey course, with a lot of material to cover, so to contrast that and get a taste of going into depth on a nutritional subject, each of us is adopting a nutrient to research. I chose vitamin C, in a fit of overconfidence and not really considering the fact that research on it probably outweighs me by at least an order of magnitude. But seriously, I’m happy to have picked it, because vitamin C is the only supplement I really take. Not on any kind of regular basis, mind you, just when I’m not feeling well. I know it’s probably a placebo, and I don’t care — if it makes me feel better, that’s valuable in and of itself, right there. Right now I’ve got Sunkist brand chewables, 500 mg, and they’re kind of gross — I hope to go back to the brand I had before this next time I buy vitamin C, but that’s a ways off and I’m in no particular hurry. Chewing vitamin C is comforting: it feels like I’m doing something about not feeling well. Also, I know it’s the kind of vitamin I pee out if I take too much of it (whatever that means). It’s water-soluble. I can’t overdose. Not that I’m in any particular danger of that, mind you, but it’s still reassuring to know. But maybe by the end of the term I’ll have learned so much about it that I never want to take vitamin C again. We’ll see — and of course, readers, I’ll keep you posted.
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A reliable source (okay, Peter) tells me that there’s an Entenmann’s discount store near the subway stop Peter takes to Manhattan College. (Side note: it’s like the Promised Land of baked goods up there, what with S & S cheesecake and the Stella D’Oro cookie factory making it smell like anisette on a regular basis. But I digress.) What this means is if I’m good, I might get boxes of their not-quite-bite-sized chocolate chip cookies every now and then. I know they’re not the best cookies in the world, but I don’t care: I love them. (Kind of like vitamin C, actually: it may not work, but I like it, and that’s good enough. Anyway.) Right now, there’s a big pile of English muffins in our kitchen, courtesy of the Entenmann’s discount store, and although I gave Peter a hard time about them over the weekend, this morning I take it all back — because two of the English muffins are missing. Which means that Peter had breakfast today, unlike every other Monday morning this semester, to which I can only say: hurray!
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Finally, about my mom’s soup party. Every first Sunday in February for the past 13 years, Mom’s been inviting people over to eat soup: three or four different kinds, with bread, wine, and good conversation. Or so I hear: I hadn’t been to one of these parties since 1997, on account of being on the West Coast and all. Yesterday was my first time back in eleven years, and I think a good time was had by all. The soups were: Dutch split pea (snert), roasted butternut squash, creamy salmon chowder, and an Italian minestra with chicken, greens, and tiny pasta whose name I’ve forgotten. I got to tell a lot of people about food studies with my clever one-sentence cocktail party answer: “It’s a masters degree in ‘Are you gonna eat that?’” but lots of people wanted to hear more. As a result, I now want to write more about fish (health and environmental concerns as well as labeling problems), whether any foods that are absolutely necessary to a diet (I’m pretty sure the answer is “no”), additives in salt (really? I guess I wouldn’t know, since I only ever buy the kosher stuff), and food as an approachable way to get people talking about science. Yay!
