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Monkey Monday: extra-rambly edition. 23 November 2009 10:21 am

Posted by Tracy in : baking,books,breakfast,cookies,cooking,fangirl,geekery,milk,monkeys,random,vegan , View Comments

Because I expect everyone will have better things to do over the long weekend than read my blog, and because I have been unable to decide on a regular posting schedule for months now, which might mean not writing anything else postable this week, today’s post is extra-bonus long. There’s lots of Post-Punk Kitchen fangirling, odds and ends about stuff I cooked, upcoming events, and more. Here we go…

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Yay for book review comics! Here’s one for Vegan With a Vengeance. So cute! So awesome! And speaking of that book, I made Isa’s Tempeh Helper for dinner last night, and it was comfort food-alicious (bear in mind, however that I don’t think I’ve ever eaten Hamburger Helper in my life, so I have almost no frame of reference here). Because I had to cut some gnarly-looking bits off the tempeh, I made up the weight difference in cremini mushrooms, which made the end result taste more than a little like the Seitan-Portobello Stroganoff from VWaV, but that’s just another way of saying it was very tasty indeed. (more…)

Foto Friday: more cookies, less ranting. 20 November 2009 12:08 pm

Posted by Tracy in : baking,books,cookies,dessert,food as spectator sport,food snobbery,fun,winter squash , View Comments

So yesterday I thought about going out to do some responsible stuff before my 7 PM yoga class, but decided that I would be happier staying at home to restock our supply of delicious instant food. End result bragged to Facebook and Twitter last night:

Final score for Afternoon O’Domesticity: 1 big pot dal, 1 batch punkin spice cookies, 1 pan cornbread, and many dishes done… priceless.

The dal was an extra-spicy version of the recipe I made up out of Nepal nostalgia, and the cornbread and pumpkin cookies are both from my beloved Moosewood New Classics. It’s actually my second batch of these cookies in a week; the first was last Friday, when I decided it was time to use up the leftover canned pumpkin from our Halloween winter squash-stravaganza — only then of course I ended up opening another can of pumpkin, so I was still left with a partial can in the fridge, like when I started, only with more delicious, delicious cookies. Check them out! (more…)

Thank you Thursday: geeking out on government data 19 November 2009 2:13 pm

Posted by Tracy in : diet stress is a health hazard,fun,geekery,health,health at every size,media,meta,random,reading,silly,work,writing , View Comments

So today I ran across a survey on the CDC website while I was doing some research for my food policy final project (on how maybe health at every size is a better goal than weight loss, or obesity prevention, weight control, “healthy eating” or any other euphemism for making ourselves miserable about being irresponsible, fat, unhealthy failures at life, despite the fact that life, y’know, is not always easy, and there’s plenty of reasons we might be unwell besides the stuff we can try to control if we have the means, which not everybody does). I had a surprising amount of fun with that survey, and I copied some of the questions and my answers to prove it (there were questions about whether I might blog about what I was finding on the websites, and then I knew for sure I would have to go all meta). But before I get to that, today’s Thank You:

Dear CDC and USDA Economic Research Service and other awesome organizations doing public policy research and putting it online where I can geek out over it,

Thank you. Keep up the good work, and please give me a job someday.

Love,
-Tracy

And now, on to the survey silliness. (more…)

The weird, wild world of childhood obesity statistics. 18 November 2009 5:48 pm

Posted by Tracy in : geekery,health,health at every size,news,politics,school,society,weird,whoops , View Comments

So I knew I was going to have trouble with the reading for next week’s Food Sociology class when on the very first page I read the statement:

“We suffer from widespread obesity, particularly among children…”

Karl Weber, preface to Food, Inc.: How Industrial Food Is Making us Sicker, Fatter, and Poorer — And What You Can Do About It (New York: Public Affairs, 2009).

Oh, really? Last time I checked, I thought rates were way higher in adults than in kids…. oh, sure enough. According to the U.S. Center for Disease Control, “Results from the 2005-2006 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), using measured heights and weights, indicate that an estimated 32.7 percent of U.S. adults 20 years and older are overweight, 34.3 percent are obese and 5.9 percent are extremely obese….” That’s with your standard BMI >24.9 kg/m2 for overweight, BMI > 30 kg/m2 for obese, and BMI > 40 kg/m2 for extremely obese, and it’s a grand total of 72.9 percent of the adult population weighing in (har, har) as overweight or obese. Compare that to the CDC on childhood overweight and obesity, which says, “The most recent NHANES data (2003–2006) showed that for children aged 6 –11 years and 12–19 years, the prevalence of overweight (BMI ≥85th percentile) was 33.3% and 34.1% respectively.”

Holy cats! Adulthood makes you fat!

Ok, but seriously. First of all, at first glance those kid numbers don’t look nearly as bad as the numbers for adults. But wait — how the hell can 33.3% or 34.1% of a population be at or above the 85th BMI percentile? What in the name of monkeys does that even mean? (more…)

My weekend readings, they relate to current events. 10 November 2009 11:09 am

Posted by Tracy in : culture,geekery,health,health at every size,history,monkeys,news,politics,random,reading,school,society , View Comments

So like I mentioned yesterday, I read a lot this weekend (more so than usual even), because I had a new deadline on top of the stuff assigned for class: two of my NYU library books were recalled. (A third book is also now due the 20th, so I’ve got just a little time to keep that one on the back burner for a bit. Anyway.) Book #1 was Weighty Issues: Fatness and Thinness as Social Problems, edited by Jeffery Sobal and Donna Maurer (1999). We read the introduction to an earlier Maurer and Sobal book, Eating Agendas: Food and Nutrition as Social Problems (1995) earlier this term at the start of Marion Nestle’s food sociology class, and it was so interesting I got the whole book out of the library, which in turn led me to some of Sobal and Maurer’s other books, namely Weighty Issues and Book #2: Interpreting Weight: The Social Management of Fatness and Thinness (also 1999). Anyway.

The centerpiece for today’s post is from Chapter 3 of Weighty Issues, “Fat Boys and Goody Girls: Hilde Bruch’s Work on Eating Disorders and the American Anxiety about Democracy, 1930-1960″ by Paula Saukko. I promise you, it’s awesome. Saukko takes a historical case study about some early research into eating disorders, and uses it to demonstrate how health theory and practice is a reflection of its social, cultural, political, and historical context. I was so not expecting this piece to be great, and then (more…)