Author: Seth Roberts

Hanging Birds

Seth Roberts9 Comments

In the comments, Patrik links to a fascinating post about “hanging game birds” — that is, hanging them at low temperatures (such as 50 degrees) for several days to improve their flavor. I especially liked this quote from Brillat-Savarin:

The peak is reached when the pheasant begins to decompose; its aroma develops, and mixes with an oil which in order to form must undergo a certain amount of fermentation.

Yet another example of more bacteria, better flavor. I can’t find my copy of Brillat-Savarin but in Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking I found this (p. 144):

Despite the contribution that aging can make to meat quality, the modern meat industry generally avoids it, since it means tying up its assets in cold storage and losing about 20% of the meat’s weight to evaporation and laborious trimming of the dried, rancid, sometimes moldy surface.

Okay, I am taking those short ribs I bought today out of the freezer. If people knew that well-aged beef is healthier, as I believe, this meat-industry practice might change. There should be a recommended daily allowance of bacteria. A few billion, perhaps? Bacteria count would be included in the nutrition label. Because the numbers would be so large, everyone would learn scientific notation.

What Did Eskimos Eat?

Seth Roberts13 Comments

In the early 1900s, the anthropologist/explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, after living with Eskimos for a long time, returned to tell Americans what he had learned about nutrition. Eskimos ate meat almost exclusively, he said, which contradicted the usual emphasis, then as now, on diversity and fruits and vegetables. Yet Eskimos were healthy. Eskimo diet became even more fascinating when it was realized they had very low rates of heart disease — much lower than Danes, for example. In the 1970s, two Danish doctors, Bang and Dyerberg, found that Eskimos had large amounts of omega-3 fats in their blood, much more than Danes; that was the beginning of the current interest in omega-3 and the idea that fish and fish oil are “heart-healthy”.

As I pointed out earlier, discussions of the Eskimo diet have ignored the fermented food they ate. Here’s what Stefansson said in 1935:

I like fermented (therefore slightly acid) whale oil with my fish as well as ever I liked mixed vinegar and olive oil with a salad. . . .

There were several grades of decayed fish. The August catch had been protected by longs from animals but not from heat and was outright rotten. The September catch was mildly decayed. The October and later catches had been frozen immediately and were fresh. There was less of the August fish than of any other and, for that reason among the rest, it was a delicacy – eaten sometimes as a snack between meals, sometimes as a kind of dessert and always frozen, raw. . . .

[At first, Stefansson didn’t want to eat decayed fish.] While it is good form [in America] to eat decayed milk products and decayed game [well, well], it is very bad form to eat decayed fish. . . . If it is almost a mark of social distinction to be able to eat strong cheeses with a straight face and smelly birds with relish, why is it necessarily a low taste to be fond of decaying fish? On that basis of philosophy, though with several qualms, I tried the rotten fish one day, and if memory serves, liked it better than my first taste of Camembert. During the next weeks I became fond of rotten fish.

So Eskimos ate fermented whale oil and a lot of rotten fish. (“A lot” because if they didn’t eat a lot of it, Steffanson wouldn’t have felt pressure to eat it.) I had no idea that Americans used to eat decayed game.

Organize by Function

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Andrew Gelman makes an excellent suggestion:

At the airport they have different terminals for different airlines, with flights leaving from all over the place. Why not have a simpler system, where all the flights to Chicago leave from one section of the airport, all the flights to L.A. leave from another section, and so forth?

Flight as commodity. He adds:

Imagine a bookstore where the books were arranged by publisher and you had to look at the Random House books, then the Knopf books. etc.

A big bookstore in Beijing called Bookstore City is organized like this. On the other hand, the last 20 years of American retail have seen the rise of the opposite of Andrew’s suggestion: Whole stores devoted to one brand, such as Apple or Nike or Samsung.

Some Beijing stores (or collections of stores) are hyper-organized-by-function. An electronics mall near me contains dozens of booths, each with a big selection in a narrow niche, such as laptop cleaning products, videocams, computer cables, laptop bags, disk drives, and so on. Whereas an electronics superstore might sell ten different laptop bags, the laptop-bag booth probably had 60 different ones. Not so different from the Beijing Zoo. This is why I love shopping in Beijing. It really is a shopper’s paradise.

Sellers want brands so that they can charge more (and perhaps feel better about themselves). Buyers, unless they want to show off, want commodities for low cost and convenience. Nobody brags about what airline they flew. Until airlines start giving away cool t-shirts and tote bags, Andrew’s idea makes sense.

JAMA Editors Go Nuts

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Emory University professor Charles “Disgraced” Nemeroff was, you should remember, a respected psychiatric researcher. One of the most respected. What this says about academic psychiatry — and perhaps all academic medicine — is scary to think about.

Now comes a second episode along these lines: JAMA editors attack Jonathan Leo, a professor at Lincoln Memorial University, for daring to publish an article pointing out an undisclosed conflict of interest — exactly Nemeroff’s problem. In the most self-righteous editorial I have ever read, Catherine DeAngelis, JAMA‘s Editor in Chief, and Phil Fontanarosa, the Deputy Executive Editor,

  • say that Leo should not have contacted the New York Times
  • “A telephone conversation intended to inform Leo that his actions were inappropriate transformed into an argumentative discussion as Leo continued to refuse to acknowledge any problem with his actions.”
  • tell Leo to never submit anything to JAMA due to “his apparent lack of confidence in and regard for” the publication
  • “We felt an obligation to notify the dean of Leo’s institution . . . We sought the dean’s assistance in resolving the issue . . . “
  • “Our tone in these interactions was strong and emphatic . . . seriously . . . responsibility . . . fair process . . . integrity of science . . . We regret . . . “
  • make it more difficult to report future conflicts of interest

To make sure everyone understood this wasn’t temporary insanity, Catherine DeAngelis made similar comments to the Wall Street Journal:

“This guy is a nobody and a nothing” she said of Leo. “He is trying to make a name for himself. Please call me about something important.” She added that Leo “should be spending time with his students instead of doing this.”

Yes, nothing is less important than an unreported conflict of interest in JAMA.

The JAMA editorial, published a week after the WSJ article, claims that DeAngelis didn’t call Leo “a nobody and a nothing” but since the WSJ has not fixed the supposed error I conclude that the editorial claim of quote fabrication is wrong — not to mention highly implausible.

In their editorial, the JAMA editors write that “a rush to judgment [that is, Leo pointing out the conflict of interest himself rather than deferring to them] . . . rarely sheds light or advances medical discourse.” Au contraire. This “rush to judgment” has shed a hugely unflattering light on the very powerful doctors who run JAMA — and thus an hugely unflattering light on a culture in which such people, like Nemeroff, gain great power.

Plagiarism in Chinese Academia

Seth Roberts1 Comment

I was glad to read this article in the Christian Science Monitor about an attempt to reduce plagiarism among Chinese professors.

The latest fraud to rock Chinese academia centers on He Haibo, an associate professor of pharmacology at the prestigious Zhejiang University. [Not very prestigious, since I haven’t heard of it.] He now admits to copying or making up material he submitted in eight papers to international journals and has been fired, along with the head of his research institute. The affair has drawn particular attention because a world-renowned expert in traditional Chinese medicine, Li Lianda, lent his name as coauthor to one of the fraudulent papers. His tenure will not be renewed when his contract expires soon, the president of Zhejiang University has said.

The Beijing Sport University, one of three sport universities in the world, is near my university. It has a Ph.D. program. To get a Ph.D. you must submit three books! As one of their graduate students told me, no way you can do that without plagiarism. He had noticed that a book by one of his professors was simply a copy of another book.

This paragraph, however, amused me:

Stearns [a Yale professor who taught at Beijing University] says that he and his colleagues at Yale “do not believe letters of recommendation from Chinese professors, for we know that many of them are written by the students themselves,” and merely signed by their teachers.

He thinks letters from Berkeley are different? My system for writing letters of recommendation was more nuanced, after I learned that students had great trouble writing these letters. I met with the student and we wrote it together. This had two great advantages: 1. It showed the student in the best possible (i.e., truthful) light. 2. It was easy. Trying to write a good letter by myself was tough.

Thanks to Sheila Buff.

Bacteria and Learning?

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Do bacteria-laden foods improve learning? A recent study:

The ability of dietary manipulation to influence learning and behavior is well recognized and almost exclusively interpreted as direct effects of dietary constituents on the central nervous system. The role of dietary modification on gut bacterial populations and the possibility of such microbial population shifts related to learning and behavior is poorly understood. The purpose of this study was to examine whether shifts in bacterial diversity due to dietary manipulation could be correlated with changes in memory and learning. Five week old male CF1 mice were randomly assigned to receive standard rodent chow (PP diet) or chow containing 50% [raw] lean ground beef (BD diet) for 3 months. As a measure of memory and learning, both groups were trained and tested on a hole-board open field apparatus. Following behavioral testing, all mice were sacrificed and colonic
stool samples collected and analyzed by automated rRNA intergenic spacer analysis (ARISA) and bacterial tag-encoded FLX amplicon pyrosequencing (bTEFAP) approach for microbial diversity. Results demonstrated significantly higher bacterial diversity in the beef supplemented diet group according to ARISA and bTEFAP. Compared to the PP diet, the BD diet fed mice displayed improved working (P = 0.0008) and reference memory (P < 0.0001). The BD diet fed animals also displayed slower speed (P < 0.0001) in seeking food as well as reduced anxiety level in the first day of testing (P = 0.0004). In conclusion, we observed a correlation between dietary induced shifts in bacteria diversity and animal behavior that may indicate a role for gut bacterial diversity in memory and learning.

Previous studies had found that changes in diet changed behavior. This article says that changes in diet can produce changes in bacterial diversity and these bacterial changes might have caused the behavior changes.

Eventually I will stop eating lots of fermented food and see what happens. Perhaps my arithmetic scores will get worse.