Happy T-Day

You say you're eating me? Hah!

Whether 'T' in your world is "Thanksgiving" or "Turkey" or "Tofurky" ... a veggie turkey-equivalent which we cooked one year and found very tasty but a great deal of trouble to prepare; also, the name of the company that manufactures the veggie turkey as well as many other meat substitutes much easier to prepare and including Polish sausage, Italian sausage, various sandwich-style lunch "meats," and so on... I hope your T-Day is a joyous one, celebrated with friends and family, given over to excess in eating (and drinking if you're not driving somewhere), and focused on the notion that we actually have much good in our world to celebrate, notwithstanding the utter stupidity of evil people who do their best to spoil the celebration. I raise my glass to you all!

Stella and I and our decades-long friend Catherine, none of us being interested in cooking this year, are taking advantage of another culture's indifference to the uniquely American holiday (i.e., they're willing to open their restaurant and make money off of us) by dining at India's, one of our favorite Indian restaurants... indeed, none better in Houston, though a few are as good. None of us has family in Houston or easily accessible, and over the years a personal tradition has emerged: gathering a few long-time friends to serve as family (the tradition is old enough to extend back to including, one year, my father and Catherine's mother, who bravely undertook their first sampling of Indian cuisine) and voicing our gratitude that life has, at least some of the time, been very good to us. I raise my glass also to the late Mr. Bates and the late Mrs. Fairchild, and to other willing "family" who were not biologically family, who gathered with us over the years.

Finally, I heft yet another glass (and begin to grow a bit woozy!) to all of you who blog for the progressive or Democratic or other liberal cause. Hang in there. I can't promise things will improve, but I know we will keep trying, as have so many before us, to better the lives of those less fortunate or downright unfortunate. Surely that is why we are really here. Surely it is any such betterment for which we give thanks. Put aside fear for a day; give your best and receive our best. For all of you I give my thanks; to all of you I raise my glass!

Blue Bell Update — And It's Not Good News

This updates my post on the return of Blue Bell ice cream to the market.

Suggested new Blue Bell slogan

My thanks to regular reader George ('B'-but-not-Bush) who points in comments to an article from last Sunday's Houston Chronicle, Inside Blue Bell: Grime and discontent, that indicates a culture of indifference to worker safety and plant cleanliness... or as George put it, in what may or may not be a terrible pun, "the manufacturing culture that existed at the Blue Bell plants." Here's George:

...

My saying I probably would not buy any more Blue Bell products was not based on the likelihood that I or my family might get listeriosis, but on the manufacturing culture that existed at the Blue Bell plants. The Chronicle article gives some graphic descriptions of employee injuries apparently due to failure by management to maintain a safe facility. Providing lots of jobs is a good thing, and Blue Bell did that until the latest crisis, but the working conditions should be safe, which they were not. Indeed, some of the safety features on machines were overridden, and that caused one or more employees to lose parts of fingers.

I simply cannot see supporting a company that operates that way.

[Bolds mine. - SB]

Added to the Houston Press article I offered in the same comment thread, an article George says is lacking in some important details, the total impression is that Blue Bell has more to rectify than just contaminated equipment. For all I know, this may be common in older companies manufacturing dairy products, but even if so, Blue Bell should get its own house in order, the sooner, the better.

AFTERTHOUGHT: whatever you do about the ice cream, please do view the TV ad from a decade or so ago, one of the all‑time best.

Like Asking The Cats HumansWho Gets The Cream Blue Bell

This morning as we dressed for our Labor Day outing, Stella favored me with a wicked grin and flashed me. It is probably illegal in Texas for a mid-sixties-ish woman to look that enticing, but she does, and I, remembering that Blue Bell Ice Cream came back on the market about 2-3 days ago after what seemed an eternity to those of us addicted to it, couldn't help thinking... but not saying aloud... "By the way, Stella, let's remember to stop by a Blue Bell outlet [note: not every store has been favored with a restock yet, and only four flavors are available] and pick up some Homemade Vanilla just before we return home." Instead, I said something equally complimentary and a lot less publicly repeatable, and indeed we did get some Blue Bell on the way home. Mmmmm! It's been a day full of treats!

Those without a steady supply of Blue Bell have to understand: when the company calls their vanilla ice cream "Homemade," I don't question their choice of word for even a second: what they sell bears a respectable resemblance to the ice cream both sets of grandparents hand-cranked when I was a tot... and little else on the market here evokes that memory the way Blue Bell does. Their traditional flavors do not assault the ice cream lover with too much sugar or overly intense flavorings; if you buy Dutch Chocolate or Homemade Vanilla or plain old Strawberry, the flavors are about 99 percent like those you once cranked, and the Strawberry contains small chunks of, um, strawberry, the real thing.

Welcome back, Blue Bell. Don't ever go away again!

The Last Of The ♭ Big Flats ♭

A chain pharmacy with a huge presence in Houston carried a truly undistinguished lager named Big Flats, which a quick google tells me has been around since 1901. Starting in the week before Super Bowl Sunday a few years ago and continuing through those years, the pharmacy sold Big Flats really, really cheap, and for good reason. But sometimes a guy (in the gender-nonspecific sense of the term) needs a beer even if that guy is not flush with cash, so over the past few years I've drunk a fair amount of it. Here's a can (and half a glass) of Big Flats sitting on the table next to my reading chair (click the pic for a lager beer, uh, a larger image):

Well, that pharmacy just discontinued selling Big Flats. Since I'm not quite ready to inflect my pitch from Flats to Sharps (which is neither cheap nor alcoholic), I'll be consuming that pharmacy's new cheap beer, Frio, another undistinguished lager and, worse yet, a "light" beer. But I like the pic on the Big Flats can (hmm... based on the pic, is it "a lager for a logger"?), so for pure nostalgia I snapped it in its natural habitat as seen above.

Here's to cheap beer for tough times!

Why Is Papa Pizza A Republican?

Paul Krugman has an answer of sorts, and I suppose it's plausible, though the whole notion that pizza is partisan strikes me as... ahem... un-American. (Except pizza from Papa John's, of course... now that's partisan... RWNJ-partisan! [CORRECTION: Pizza Hut is even MORE Republican than Papa John's!])

Here's Krugman:

No, really. A recent Bloomberg report noted that major pizza companies have become intensely, aggressively partisan. Pizza Hut gives a remarkable 99 percent of its money to Republicans. Other industry players serve Democrats a somewhat larger slice of the pie (sorry, couldn’t help myself), but, over all, the politics of pizza these days resemble those of, say, coal or tobacco. ...

I'd be willing to bet that if you assessed the pizza Americans eat according to a single categorization, pizza shop or grocery store, you could still detect the partisan difference. Most of the pizza I eat is from the grocer. These days, who can afford to order a fancy pizza out? Republicans, that's who! (YMMV. Just an opinion.)

‘Chocolate Snorting’? Tell Me You're Joking, Please!

No, apparently not; someone actually sells a device for it. Here's Miranda Alexander Webber at Reuters:

(Reuters) - When Belgian chocolatier Dominique Persoone created a chocolate-sniffing device for a Rolling Stones party in 2007, he never imagined demand would stretch much beyond the rock 'n' roll scene. But, seven years later, he has sold 25,000 of them.

I like chocolate as much as the next blogger, and I generally have a box of cocoa around the kitchen for the few recipes that call for it... but I think I'll pass on this delivery method!

(H/T Avedon.)

---

In other food-related news, you can add bacon to the list of inadequately inspected foods. (FWIW, Morningstar Farms offers a perfectly acceptable vegetarian bacon substitute; we consume quite a bit of it around Our House. Try some; go whole hog!)

NC Senator Would Not Wash His Hands Of The Matter

When Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) offered his opinion that food workers at public accommodations like restaurants should be allowed to opt out of the legal requirement that they must wash their hands, I thought he was joking, perhaps satirizing the anti-vaxxers. I should have known better.

As Jen Hayden at Kos points out, quoting the CDC:

The spread of germs from the hands of food workers to food is an important cause of foodborne illness outbreaks in restaurants. It accounts for 89% of outbreaks in which food was contaminated by food workers. Proper handwashing can reduce germs on workers’ hands and the spread of germs from hands to food and from food to other people. [Bolds mine. - SB]

In other words, a food worker's handwashing is all that stands between you and food poisoning.

But in these days of utter Republican insanity, the whole GOP seems as dependent on magic as the wizards at Unseen University, with results no better than many of those wizards achieve. Basic precautions known to health workers for at least two or three centuries are both necessary and sufficient to prevent devastating outbreaks of some kinds of disease. People who believe they have some sort of personal individual right to ignore the laws establishing those precautions in public accommodations like restaurants are themselves a danger to society. People who are both stupid and hostile make me sick: their liberties must end with their endangerment of the community's health.

Five Ways To Peel A Hardboiled Egg

... collected all on one web page for you at epicurious. I haven't tried any of them yet, but after having had completely unpredictable results from one egg to the next, peeling them by hand in the obvious way, I'm willing to try something else.

I must say, though: however well his method works by comparison to the other ways of doing it, the guy in the first YouTube video ... his name is Tim Ferriss; yes, he's moderately famous; no, he's NOT the pretentious neoliberal science and political writer we all know and don't love... that's Timothy Ferris... and yes, Tim Ferriss, uh, well, to put it bluntly, Tim Ferriss really blows eggs:

I can't wait to try it, preferably within Stella's field of view! First, though, I have to find the baking soda...

Agent Orange-Like Herbicide Soon To Be Approved By USDA, FDA; Only Obama Can Stop It

This dropped in my email box this morning like a Vietnam-era defoliant: Food and Water Watch, which has been fighting this battle for a long while, notes that

The USDA has already approved [this herbicide], and the EPA is likely to approve the herbicide that will be used on these crops soon. Our last chance is to urge President Obama, who has the authority to block the EPA's decision, to act to protect our health and our agriculture.

That's right. President Obama, Dog help us, is our last hope to stop approval of herbicides made to be used on "[c]orn and soybeans genetically engineered to withstand 2,4-D — [which] are on the verge of being approved for use on our food." Here is a general (though not recent) article on the subject. Here is a press release published this week, "Approval of 2,4-D Tolerant Crops Speeds up Agrichemical Treadmill", that has a few more details. Regrettably, Food and Water Watch does not have a standalone web page directly connected with its current petition campaign, but here is the link embedded in my email if you want to try to sign on to the letter to President Obama.

Your Tea: Flavored With... Pesticides? Including Even Long-Banned DDT?

Clarissa A. León at Alternet:

Tea time is supposed to be a time to relax and regroup, but it could be one of the riskiest moments of the day. At least, that’s according to a new study released by Greenpeace earlier this month [.pdf] that found a number of popular tea brands contain high doses of pesticide residues. Some teas even tested positive for the long-banned DDT.

...

Say, will it poison Tea Party folk? or are their brains already too toxic?

Tea - the toxic brew!

The teas cited in the Greenpeace report are from India and (yes, ellroon, add it to your list; it's in a similar Greenpeace report from 2012) China. I drank a lot of tea in my twenties and thirties, but ever since I became a contract IT professional, coffee has been my drink of choice, and necessity... most American tappers of code, apart from those of Asian or direct British Empire heritage, are a lot less interested in tea. I, at least, am never happier than when I've just located a new source of really good coffee, as I did this week. I'll bet a follow‑up study shows pesticide in coffee too...

(H/T BrandonJ at FDL.)

Tex-MexRetch ‘Food’

Do you live in Houston, in or near the surrounded small city of Bellaire? Have you noticed a small Mexican restaurant named Carmelita's, located in the shopping center called the Bellaire Triangle (legend has it that SUVs enter and are never seen again)? Hungry for some good Tex-Mex?

Not Carmelita's - Probably Better

Resist... resist... resist the temptation to stop at Carmelita's. On the recommendation of a friend, we tried it yesterday, and it was the worst dog‑awful Tex‑Mex food I have ever had in my life. The. Worst. The spinach enchiladas, I kid you not, were made with canned spinach; nothing else could possibly account for the watery texture and absence of flavor. Stella's enchiladas first arrived, one cheese, one chicken; she sent them back, and they sent out cheese enchiladas with onions... not in the menu ingredient list, and Stella is very allergic to onions. They corrected that as well, but everything happened in slow motion, rendering (oops, bad choice of word) what could have been at least acceptable performance instead unbelievably incompetent.

They say the proof is in the eating, so I tried to make a go of it, but I failed. I left about half the meal on the plate. We're talking about a guy who almost never doesn't finish his Tex‑Mex, but I couldn't do it. If you have a hankering for Tex‑Mex, don't stop at Carmelita's; if you do, you'll be sorry.

---

AFTERTHOUGHT: I really should provide newcomers to the Houston area a few suggestions of where they can get good Tex‑Mex:

• (Our old favorite, the formerly down-home and reasonably priced Pico's Mex‑Mex, has moved to upper Kirby and doubled its prices; we don't go there often now.)
• Our top pick is Chuy's (2706 Westheimer and two other locations): you are guaranteed a good meal; vegetarian options are available (they even make a gravy without meat) and the food is promptly delivered piping hot (what does that expression mean, anyway?). Prices are moderate; service is excellent. I've never had them make a mistake on an order, and they are accommodating about reasonable substitutions. (The Austin Chuy's is [in]famous for carding Jenna Bush back in the day. The manager decided even a president's kid must abide by the liquor law.)
• Best hole-in-the-wall: Fajita Pete's, in the center near Stella Link and Bellaire. Good food, fast service, flexible about off-menu items for sprout-eaters... what more could you ask? what's that? oh, yeah... CHEEP! CHEEP! Tiny, though, and the small staff necessitates closing between lunch and dinner.
• Teotihuacan (3 locations) has excellent, very flavorful food, decent service and prices, and only one downside: all three locations are a bit of a drive away from us. Nonetheless, it's well worth the drive. Go for breakfast.
• Molina's (about 6 blocks from Our House, on Holcombe [same street as Bellaire]), is an old-line mainstream Tex-Mex source, probably in business since my early childhood and still delivering quality food. Not cheap, but not knock-me-down expensive, either. The new one near us is lacking in the Austin atmosphere of the old place, but one can ignore that for the food.

And that should get you started!

Australian Organic Farmer Loses Livelihood Over GMO‑Contaminated Crops

(Subject changed; it's not clear the farmer is suing. FDN could be clearer on the actual facts on the ground. - SB)

Details are taken from a Food Democracy Now petition:

Organic garden

Right now an important case is being heard halfway around the world in Western Australia about organic farmer Steve Marsh, whose organic field was contaminated by his neighbor’s genetically engineered canola. As a result, Steve lost his organic certification and as much as 70% of his Steve’s farm has been contaminated with Monsanto’s patented genes.

With clever fine print in their seed contracts, Monsanto is not legally liable for their patented genes contaminating an organic farmer’s field due to their "no liability" agreement farmers are forced to sign when they plant Monsanto's GMO seeds.

As a result, Steve’s family’s livelihood has been put at risk. He could literally lose everything.

,,,

Bolds original... after all, it is a promo for a petition and optional contribution. But the problem is agonizingly real for organic farmers everywhere. If Monsanto proceeds as it has to this point, we could literally end up with genetic contamination of every formerly organic crop everywhere.

It is hard to find any absolutes in the world of GMOs. The subject is scientifically complex, the determinations of safety rarely uninfluenced by commercial interest, and the dangers, if any, quite possibly very slow to appear in the food chain. The cases in which published papers opposing GMOs have been outright faked do not help matters. And there's no denying the substance of what Richard Schiffman says in the same article: whatever the problems in GMOs themselves, the worst thing about them is what they enable in the way of pesticide‑heavy agriculture using repeated dousing of crops to keep them bug-free.

Personally, I'm not happy with R=====p™ or R=====p‑Ready™ crops. It seems to me that the following is only fair, no matter what Monsanto may wish:

• Foods made with GMOs should be labeled in all cases. That way, the consumer has a choice if s/he has an opinion.
• Producers of GMO technology should be strictly liable for contamination of nearby organic crops, as GMO contamination renders formerly organic produce valueless.
• Research on the safety of GMO technology should continue aggressively in an unbiased setting, which probably means not in a country in which GMOs are already heavily deployed (US, India, etc.).

Will that make a difference? Likely not. My best guess is that this sucker is going forward no matter what anyone does to hold it back. Welcome to your future... just remember, you have no say in it.

---

(I found quite a bit of background info on the blog Food Politics by Marion Nestle, NYU professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health.)

How Do We Get Out Of This Chicken-S#!t Outfit?

Fair warning... if you enjoy eating chicken (it's not my thing, but people's tastes vary), reading this article will cure you of that fondness for good and all:

USDA takes its bad idea of speeding up chicken inspection lines and makes it worse.

A Regular Vegetarian Option In A Public School Cafeteria? What A Concept!

Well, OK; it's in New York, specifically, in Queens. But apparently it's more popular than anyone ever expected, let alone predicted. I wonder how long it will be before the same cattle ranchers' association that tried to shut down Oprah Winfrey when she commented on mad cow disease gets cranked up about this...

One More Time I'm Glad I Don't Eat Meat

This post is mainly directed at my many carnivorous friends, because they are in danger and I am not. From the AARP Blog:

Ready-to-Eat Salads With Meat Recalled for Listeria

Posted on 10/24/2013 by Candy Sagon
Updated Friday Oct. 25

Sample only...
NOT the recalled food

Refrigerated, ready-to-eat salads from two firms have been hit with government recalls because of possible contamination with dangerous listeria, both the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration announced.

Boston Salads and Provisions Company is recalling nearly 223,000 pounds of ready-to-eat chicken salad products distributed to retailers in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, the USDA announced today on its website.

Package labels will have sell-by dates ranging from “9/13/2013″ through “11/4/2013” as well as the establishment number “P-17999” inside the USDA mark of inspection. ...

Just a few days earlier, USDA also announced a recall of 22,000 pounds of products by Reser’s Fine Foods of Beaverton, Ore., including several kinds of chicken salad, ham salad, barbecue beans with beef, pasta salad, and potato salad with bacon.

... [The products have been distributed nationwide in the US and in parts of Canada. - SB]

Recalled products will have the establishment number EST. 13520 or P-13520 inside the USDA mark of inspection. The USDA said the packages will be marked with a use-by or best-by date and followed by a plant identifier code of 20.

...

Most old folks like me eat a lot of convenience foods; e.g., prepackaged potato salad and coleslaw are standards in this household. Grocers are actually pretty good about observing recalls, but in case you're concerned, it doesn't hurt to look at the various links from the FDA Food page.

Here's to your health!

Bill Clinton, Vegan... Who Knew!

For the past three years, since his emergency heart surgery, Bill Clinton has eaten a vegan diet, the strictest kind of vegetarian diet, excluding eggs and dairy products. As to "who knew," evidently not the beef industry, or else perhaps Bill is not as famous as Oprah Winfrey, because as far as I know, they haven't threatened to sue Bill for his non-carnivorous habits.

In the summer of approximately 1981 (?), about a month before my 33^rd birthday, I turned lacto-ovo-vegetarian. My choices were to go veggie or to eat out for three continuous weeks: the house in which I lived for the duration of the Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute had a lot of sprout-eaters in it, and we decided as a community that all of us would go veggie for those three weeks. It was easy, and I liked it so well that I brought the habit home with me.

Today I turn 65 years old. Yes, I'm still lacto-ovo-veggie. No, I don't miss meat at all, though I do eat things like veggie bacon, veggie burgers, etc. But given the typical short lifespan of my mother's side of the family, I believe I've already lengthened my life by switching over.

If you are interested for health reasons, be aware that vegetarianism is like horseshoes... close counts. Cut your meat-eating to a couple of times a week, and you probably will lengthen your life and improve your day-to-day health.

Bill's looking mighty good these days!

(Meanwhile, GeeDubya Bush had a stent put in... my best wishes to him for his continued good health, even if he is a sorry a$$h*le...)

Priorities

Have you wondered why I haven't yet gone after President Obama for his budget attacks on Social Security and Medicare? Is it because I support Obama's position in those matters? No. Is it because those positions have any sort of merit as policy? Hell, no. Why is it nowhere on the main page of TPM? I don't know. But I suspect one thing...

Priorities. This article is of overwhelmingly greater importance...

Thieves Make Off With Five Tons Of Nutella In Germany

OK. I ate a lot of that stuff 35 years ago when I spent a summer in Austria. (Nutella, I mean.) I don't believe I've had any since then. I can't imagine why!

Harder To Dispute: Sprout-Eaters Have Less Risk Of Dying Of Heart Disease

Reuters:

Feb 1 (Reuters) - In yet more evidence that avoiding meat is good for the health, a UK study has found that vegetarians are one-third less likely to be hospitalized or die from heart disease than meat and fish eaters.

...

"We're able to be slightly more certain that it is something that's in the vegetarian diet that's causing vegetarians to have a lower risk of heart disease," said Francesca Crowe, who led the new study at the University of Oxford.

...

This is on our fridge door

Some conditions apply; read the article. Your mileage may vary. So may mine, but I'm "dancin' with them as brung me," as the late great Darrell Royal (probably not himself a vegetarian, though he lived to age 88) said. My not particularly severe lacto-ovo-veggie diet can't possibly be worse for me than a typical carnivorous American's diet today. I do not proselytize at all, but this is how I eat and how I intend to continue eating.

Afterthought: this makes good evolutionary sense: it's a lot easier to hunt and catch vegetables, and you don't even need a firearm to harvest them.

Back Home To Comfort Food

Tonight I dined on comfort food in the manner of my younger days, having eaten disgustingly healthily while in hospital: in celebration of coming home, I had an Antone's Po' Boy (the falafel sandwich; there are many others available) and Zapp's Potato Chips (the original, available here but originally from Louisiana... perhaps made from an oil well; it's hard to tell).

Po' Boy, Carnivore's Version

Antone's Po' Boy started up over a half century ago as a deli and sandwich shop; the original location (since demolished) was in Houston, on Taft north of West Gray, a few blocks from where I grew up. The sandwiches, then as now, were excellent, though when I lived nearby, my family was in no position to treat ourselves to such delights very often.

As for Zapp's chips, good Cajun Ron Zappe died in 2010 at age 67, and as many have remarked, no one needed to ask what he died of. They were, and are, the ultimate fatty salty kettle-cooked potato chip; others are mere imitations.

No, I had not been craving these "indelicacies," but when Stella brought them home to me, I wasted no time polishing them off. Ah, memories of the old neighborhood, not to mention living off the fat of the land...

Happy T-Day!

'T' can stand for turkey...

Not Suitable for Our House,
but maybe for Yours

... or tofu...

Fried Tofu with Lemon Grass
Kim Son is a Good Source in Houston

... or Tofurky™, a roastable... thing... shaped vaguely like a turkey, made mostly of tofu and intended to be roasted. We did one of those one year; it was a royal bother, but it was a convincing substitute for a dead bird (and the stuff in the middle is a fairly persuasive... um... stuffing):

Tofurky™
Whole Paycheck carries them,
but you'd better get there early...
They're long gone by now!

Whatever you're... ah... stuffing yourself with, have a wonderful T-day, with family and friends! What are we doing? Well... with Catherine (see blogroll), we're going out to an utterly traditional Thanksgiving day meal (for us, at least): the buffet at India's, on Richmond, one of the best Indian restaurants in town, and always open on American holidays. Mmmmm, I can just taste the sag paneer now...

(Catherine is mere days back from more than two weeks in Morocco, where she tells us she took 7,000 pictures. I hope we're home before she starts showing them. :-) )