Bittman and Cooking

Sunday NYTimes columnist Mark Bittman had a misleading article entitled "Is Junk Food Really Cheaper?"  His answer is "no", but he cheats, hence my "misleading". What he compares is junk food/fast food to meals cooked at home.  Buying the ingredients and cooking at home is cheaper.  An economist would object, however, that he fails to account for the cost of the cook's labor. You answer: but my wife isn't paid?  Makes no difference, you need to include the value of her time, which is more than minimum wage. Do that and I suspect you'll find a fast food meal is cheaper than home cooking.  Throw in home delivered pizzas or TV dinners and the good old days of home cooking really lose out.

He briefly considers a calorie versus calorie comparison, but avoids carrying through with the comparison.

I can agree with his point that Americans generally, even those on food stamps, have enough money to eat well if they cook, and cook wisely.  USDA even has recipes for such diets.

But that "if" is a big one.  Few people really like to cook, not on a regular basis.  It's a chore, like milking cows or gathering eggs. Bittman recognizes this: "The core problem is that cooking is defined as work, and fast food is both a pleasure and a crutch." He goes further by saying fast food is addictive..

His penultimate paragraphs:

To make changes like [returning to home-cooked meals] this more widespread we need action both cultural and political. The cultural lies in celebrating real food; raising our children in homes that don’t program them for fast-produced, eaten-on-the-run, high-calorie, low-nutrition junk; giving them the gift of appreciating the pleasures of nourishing one another and enjoying that nourishment together.
Political action would mean agitating to limit the marketing of junk; forcing its makers to pay the true costs of production; recognizing that advertising for fast food is not the exercise of free speech but behavior manipulation of addictive substances; and making certain that real food is affordable and available to everyone. The political challenge is the more difficult one, but it cannot be ignored.

 Of course, the real answer is for women (or their spouses) to leave the workplace and return to the kitchen.  Good luck to Mr. Bittman to push that!

Seasonal Dairy?

One of the certainties of my life has been that dairy farmers work harder than other farmers, since they have to milk cows 365 days a year.  Turns out that's not true, you can go with the "seasonal" approach as described by MO extension. (For those not familiar with mammalian milk production, a cow's milk production dwindles slowly as time from when she last gave birth grows. Dairy cows are milked for about 300 days, then "dried off" for the last two months before they give birth again.)  I follow the concept, but it used to be that milk prices were higher in the winter months, when milk supply was lowest, so there was a financial incentive to spread calving times out, not to mention the need to get a monthly milk check.  Things may have changed since I was a boy.

Lines Heard in the Theater Watching "Contagion"

From the movie, as the epidemic is gaining speed:

"The Secret Service has moved the President to an undisclosed location.

Congress is trying to learn how to work online"

From the audience:

"Why bother"

Improving Federal Websites

If you've bitched, you can offer input.  See this link for a schedule .

[Update--Another link   ]

[Second update: link to the government site]

Papa and the Bulls--Barcelona's Last Bullfight

By chance the Sunday paper had a review of a new book on Hemingway and this morning I see on Treehugger that Barcelona held its last bullfight.

My impression is Hemingway's reputation started slipping in the late 50's, even before his suicide, and continued to decline until recently.  He certainly loomed large in the early 50's, writing for popular magazines and being a presence.  My first contact with his writing was a bullfight article, though I can't remember where it was published.  One thing which he thought he saw in the bull ring, but left to us all, is: "grace under pressure", his definition of "guts".  The popularity of that phrase is still growing.

Great Untold Story: James Angleton's Offspring

James Angleton was the long time head of counter-intelligence for the CIA.  Some say he was paranoid about moles in the CIA; others say he was right. 

Anyway, his widow's obituary was in the Post this morning--sounds as if she was an interesting person in her own right: a history scholar and a poet with several volumes published.  But what struck me was this final paragraph:

Survivors include three children, James C. Angleton of Los Angeles, Guru Sangat Kaur Khalsa of Great Falls and Siri Hari Kaur Angleton-Khalsa [emphasis added]of Espanola, N.M.; two grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

How does one connect these dots, particularly when you throw in the fact that in the CIA, dominated by Ivy Leage WASPs in his time, he was apparently half-Hispanic, albeit a Yalie and a poet?

US Refrigerators 3X European

That's a factoid from a NY Times article on an automated refrigerator recycling facility: US refrigerators are three times the size of European ones.

Eliminating Earmarks = Eliminating Ag Research?

That's from Farm Policy: "Sen. Stabenow noted that, “And in the current budget situation, the way we fund ag research has been eliminated, a lot of that through direct funding to universities and through community designations and so on, what’s been called earmarks in the past. And that’s fine to change that structure, but it wasn’t replaced with anything. And so we’ve seen huge cuts in the current budget that are very concerning to me."

Yellow Margarine

Via Ezra Klein, a history of coloring margarine. New York was one of the states in which Parkay margarine was sold white, with a packet of coloring which you kneaded into the product to turn it yellow. I remember my mother doing this, so it must have been right at the end of WWII.  I'm sure mom, being a true believer in the virtues of dairy, was not using margarine willingly.

Picking on FSA

Just a late afternoon Friday thought:  my impression is that FSA was the first government agency to be dinged by GAO/IGs for issuing payments to dead people.  That was maybe 3 years ago, but since then there have been a number of agencies hit the headlines for the same problem, including this week OPM.

Was that just chance, because someone has to be first, or do the dark forces have it in for FSA?