From the AP:
Denouncing a “squandering of the people’s money,” lawmakers voted decisively Thursday to impose a 90 percent tax on millions of dollars in employee bonuses paid by troubled insurance giant AIG and other bailed-out companies.
Excuse me? Doesn’t the Constitution outlaw this?
Uncharitable: How Restraints on Nonprofits Undermine Their Potential by Dan Pallotta is more a howl than a book. I enjoyed opening it at random, reading a few pages, agreeing with the author that the current situation is idiotic, and then going back to whatever I was doing. It is too repetitive to read sequentially but read in bits it makes a lot of sense. His big point is that nonprofits are forced to operate under weird moralistic constraints that do no one any good — and I’m sure he’s right. The main benefit of those moralistic constraints — no one must profit from charity! for example — is that the moralizers feel good. The charities are badly damaged. And the charities are self-destructive, too. After Pallotta’s company ran highly successful 3-day Breast Cancer walks for several years, the Avon Products Foundation, which benefited from these walks, decided they could do better themselves. After a year (2002) in which Pallott’s company raised $140 million, Avon themselves ran a similar event for four years (2003-2006) during which they raised about $60 million/year.
A month ago, as I blogged, my friend Carl Willat posted on YouTube a video he’d made titled “ If I Made A Commercial For Trader Joe’s“. It has now received several hundred thousand views. I asked Carl for an update. He replied:
This video has received a better reaction than anything I’ve done in quite a long time. Â Of course part of this is just YouTube, where suddenly you can know what people think of your commercial, through the comments they leave and how many views you get. Â In the past commercials were just sent out into the ether and you never really heard any firsthand audience reaction. Â But some of my old commercials are on YouTube and none of them has this many hits. Â Even Christmas Kisses, which people really seem to like, has maybe 28,000 views in two years. And people aren’t posting it to their blogs or Facebook pages, as far as I know. Â So something is different about this one. Â To a large extent I’m trading on the goodwill people already have for Trader Joe’s. Â People just love that store. Â And the spot is subversive, which makes it more fun. Â But I think the main difference is the fact that it’s heartfelt, in that it reflects my actual feelings about Trader Joe’s, both positive and negative, and a lot of people can relate to those feelings. Â You can’t do that in a real ad because there’s an agency and a client that only want to say positive things about the product, and it has to be part of their overall strategy and so forth, which is fine, and I’ve certainly done my share of ads like that. But it’s hard to get genuine human feeling into traditional advertising, which is a shame, human feeling being the only thing people really care about.
The viewing history:
The spike happened after mention on Boing Boing.
I think Carl’s commercial is very important as a glimpse of the future. Long ago, only the powerful could speak to a mass audience — and they couldn’t tell the truth, for fear of losing their power. Then cheap books came along. Instantly a much larger group of people could speak to a mass audience — and, having little to lose, they could tell the truth. The truth, being rare, was an advantage. When science was young and many scientists were amateurs — Darwin, Mendel — they could tell the truth. As science became a job, a source of income and status that you could lose, scientists lost the ability to say what they really thought. For example, David Healy lost a job because he told the truth about anti-depressants. Self-experimentation is a way around this problem because, as I’ve said, no matter how crazy my conclusions I can keep doing it. I don’t need a grant so I don’t need to worry about offending grant givers.
Because TV commercials are a source of money and status (for ad agencies and marketing execs), they too have great difficulty being truthful. After watching Carl’s commercial I watched a Coke commercial that used the same music. The Coke commercial now struck me as horrible — flat and insincere. (Yet expensive.) Given the choice between an official statement — namely, the commercials you see on TV — and a personal one — a commercial like Carl’s — everyone will not only prefer to watch the personal statement but will also be more persuaded by it. Win-win. So it is in the self-interest of any company that makes a product that somebody loves to stop making the usual insincere stuff and start finding people who love their products and help them express it.
As previously blogged, the evolutionary reason we like umami taste may be so that we’ll eat more bacteria-laden food. This makes sense only if bacteria-laden food would have been the main source of umami. Nowadays, you can get umami from MSG. What about before MSG?
The Umami Information Center sent me a free booklet called Umami The World — a better title than Umami: An Introduction. Umami taste is mainly supplied by glutamic acid, a protein building block. My assumption was that glutamic acid is usually a protein breakdown product. Bacteria feed on protein, leaving a pile of bricks — glutamic acid among them. Was this correct? Or could you get umami taste without bacteria?
You can, but in most cases you don’t. In Japanese cooking, a potent source of umami is konbu, a type of seaweed. Perhaps because konbu produces so much umami and so little else that umami was discovered by a Japanese scientist. Umami flavorings are used in many other cuisines but the source is usually fermented food. In many Asian countries, umami comes from fermented fish sauce and fermented bean products (e.g., miso, soy sauce). In Chinese cooking, umami comes from a condiment called jiang, which is made from fermented grain, meat, or fish. In Western cuisines, cured pork is often used as a flavoring agent. “The curing process liberates more of the glutamic acid content of the meat.” Curing takes place at room temperature, which means bacteria grow. “Much of the food of ancient Rome was routinely seasoned with a sauce [that] was made from salted fish, fermented and strained. . . The polar Eskimo people traditionally fermented a small portion of their harvest of fish.” Tomatoes and shitake mushrooms are non-fermented sources of umami.
A telling comment in the book is that umami usually comes from sauces (e.g., fish sauce) or liquids (e.g., dashi, bouillion). Cooks use sauces and liquids to add what is missing. The presence of umami in so many sauces — as if sauces have been devised or selected to be high in umami — suggests that ordinary foods don’t have much umami. A table of glutamate concentration says that parmesan cheese has 1700 mg/100 g whereas several vegetables — tomatoes (246 mg/100 g), green pea (106), onion (51), spinach (48), potato (10) — and meats — beef (10), chicken (22), pork (9) — have much less.
The breakdown process I imagined is spelled out: “During the ripening of cheese, proteins are broken down progressively into smaller polypeptides and individual amino acids. Large increases in free amino acid content also occur during the curing of ham.” Surely the same will be true during room temperature aging of any protein source. Beef is routinely aged at room temperature for about a week to give it a “meaty” flavor (not from the umami book but from here).
I became interested in fermented foods less than two months ago but I’m sure I’ll be eating plenty of them for the rest of my life. The benefits have been very clear and — not that it matters — the intellectual case is strong. Being new to it, I have wondered how my ideas and habits might evolve.
I got a glimpse of a possible future from a comment on this blog by Heidi. She linked to a page about kombucha and probiotics and bee-keeping and later sent me a link to a discussion of using probiotics to keep bees healthy. A discussant named Tim Hall said this:
I once scratched open my index finger, and somehow caught an MRSA [Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus] infection so bad I was in the hospital for a week. This incident completely changed my perspective on chemical culture. Now not a day goes by that I don’t ingest some form of live cultured food…most of it I culture myself.
I make kefir on a daily basis. Kombucha I have not tried since I avoid caffeine. I also make my own sauerkraut, kimchi, koji, miso and koji pickles (and of course mead).
Hmm. I have never made kefir, but it’s not hard to make. I hadn’t even heard of koji, which is a kind of fermented rice.
A new restaurant with the excellent name Umami Burger has just opened in Los Angeles. According to The Foodinista, the food is as good as the name:
An attractive space with an attractive clientele. The tightly edited menu consists of 10 burgers, and a few sides including fries and a market salad. But, we’re told at 12:45 pm on a Tuesday afternoon, they’ve run out of buns. . . . amazing homemade ketchup . . . The beef patties on all of the above, really flavorful and just plain GOOD. I don’t know how they can make such a great burger and charge so little. . . . I’m telling you, the burgers are great.
Review by Jonathan Gold.
Thanks to Tucker Max.
In his Entertainment Weekly TV Watch synopsis of Tuesday’s American Idol, Michael Slezak wrote:
Can we all raise our lighters in unison for the most convincing rocker chick to ever grace the Idol stage? Yes, it’s Allison Iraheta, who took ”Give in to Me,” a completely obscure album track from Jackson’s Dangerous album and delivered it with such passion and confidence, I felt like I should call Ticketmaster and let them retroactively charge my credit card a couple hundred bucks just for the privilege of hearing her.
That’s a critique. Which I agree with. I can’t imagine reading something like this in print — it’s too heartfelt about something too small — but online, it is possible.
From the abstract of a 2007 paper about oral health and heart disease:
The high prevalence of cardiovascular diseases (CVD) and infections of the mouth has led to the hypothesis that these disease entities [are] connected. Oral biofilms contain numerous micro-organisms with more than 700 identified species. . . . These micro-organisms cause dental caries and periodontal disease of which the majority of humans suffer during their life. Oral bacteria are presumed to gain access to the blood circulation and are postulated to trigger systemic reactions by up-regulating a variety of cytokines and inflammatory mediators. Infection and inflammation play a role also in atherogenesis. Furthermore, traces of oral micro-organisms, such as the gram-negative anaerobic bacterium Porphyromonas gingivalis, have been detected in atheroma plaques. This bacterium seems to be potentially atherogenic in animal models. Epidemiologic data have shown a statistical association between periodontal disease and coronary heart disease and stroke. In a meta-analysis, the odds ratio increase for CVD in persons with periodontal disease was almost 20%. Poor oral health also seems to be associated with all-cause mortality.
Emphasis added. As I blogged earlier, during my last trip to the dentist I was told my gums were in great shape, better than the previous visit — and the only intentional change since the previous visit was a huge increase (a factor of 50?) in how much fermented food I eat. So perhaps fermented foods improve oral health. A reason to suspect that fermented foods reduce heart disease is that Eskimos, with very low rates of heart disease, eat lots of fermented food. If both these ideas are true — fermented foods improve gum health and reduce heart disease — it would explain the observed correlation between gum disease and heart disease.
A vast number of people believe that sugar and refined flour are bad for us. In large amounts, sure, because they cause so much dysregulation (e.g., high blood sugar) and in ditto foods cause obesity. But what about average amounts? Here I’m not so sure. The shift to a diet high in sugar and refined flours has usually happened at the same time as a shift away from traditional diets. In other words, the increase in sugar and flour wasn’t the only change. I suspect there was usually a great reduction in fermented foods at the same time. Maybe the reduction in fermented foods caused the trouble rather than the increase in sugar and flour. The reduction in fermented foods is almost always ignored – for example, by Weston Price and John Yudkin (author of Sweet and Dangerous).
Probiotics and oral health. An experiment about probiotics and oral health.
The data I posted that showed a sudden improvement in my arithmetic ability is among the most interesting data I’ve ever collected. Not because it revealed something wildly new — I was already sure flaxseed oil helped — but because it revealed something intriguing and new (the time course of the improvement is puzzling).
I collected the data in an unusual way — watchful waiting. I didn’t do an experiment, the way experimental psychology data is usually collected. I didn’t do a survey, the way epidemiological data is collected. In the emphasis on one person it resembles a case report in medical journals — but I didn’t have a problem to be solved and the data is far more numerical and systematic than the data in a case report.
And this rarely-used scientific method paid off. Hmm. I think the scientific methods currently taught have a big weakness: They focus almost entirely on idea testing, whereas idea generation is just as important. Tools that work well for idea testing work poorly for idea generation. The effect of this imbalance — a kind of nutritional deficiency in intellectual diet — is that scientists don’t do a good job of coming up with new ideas.
What should scientists be doing? I would like to find out. My watchful-waiting data collection is/was part of trying to find out. That it paid off pretty quickly is a good sign. It’s the third step in a long process. Step 1. When I was a grad student, my acne self-experimentat led me to realize that one of my prescribed medicines didn’t work — a surprising and useful new idea. Step 2: Later self-experiments had the same effect: Generated surprising and useful ideas. At a much higher rate than my conventional experiments. Why? Perhaps because it involves cheap frequent tests of something important. Step 3: Arrange such a situation — cheap frequent tests of something important — and see what happens.
Just as there are probiotic foods — that encourage digestive bacteria — perhaps there are antibiotic foods that kill them off. Stacy Ashworth writes:
The flip side of the good-bacteria-stimulates-the-immune-system theory must be that bacteria-killing-foods-weaken-the-immune-system theory. Could this be why I come down with a cold within a day or so of indulging junk food cravings, food that is chock full of bacteria-killing preservatives? . . . I’m also looking at food preservatives in a new light: if they are added to food to kill bacteria to keep the food fresher, then I suppose it stands to reason that they are also going to kill off some of the immune-system enhancing bacteria in my body.
Do some popular foods kill a significant amount of internal bacteria? I don’t know.
I’m sure you need to eat lots of bacteria to stimulate your immune system; the ones already in your body are not recognized as new. New bacteria must come from outside. Then the problem with preservatives is not that they kill bacteria in our bodies but that they have made the preserved food unusually low in bacteria.