Two short things

1) A request: Colin, what’s it been like being on the ground in Pennsylvania with the _six weeks_ of primary madness there now finally coming to an end (sort of)? And how do you feel about Hilary’s win? That kind of sounds like a weird formal interview question or something (“how do you feel about world peace?”) but I’m curious.

2) English nerds, this is for you: lately I’ve been obsessed with FreeRice.com, where you answer vocabulary questions. For every word you get right, 20 grains of rice are donated to the UN World Food Program. It’s all my weird word nerdiness finally put some good use!

You can read it right here.

She’s arguing that the idea of increased food stamp allowances wouldn’t be a useful economic stimulus in the way a tax rebate would.  There are five reasons that she gives, and the first is

The poor don’t need more food. Obesity is a problem for the poor in America; except for people who are too screwed up to get food stamps (because they don’t have an address), food insufficiency is not.

….

The next four are, roughly, that food stamps can only be spent on food not on other things, that if the only change is to increase eligibility people won’t find out in time for it to have much effect*, that the money will be spent on things that already exist and not go towards increased manufacturing (one would assume that this is the point of a short term stimulus, but ….), and that, finally, the government has already done an awful lot of interference in the food market (via subsidies, etc.) and it would be better if they didn’t get more involved.

So, at this point it should be clear that the title above there is obvious sarcasm.   It may not be worth saying, but all of these are obviously, stupidly wrong.
She defends her suggestion in the next post by arguing that  people who point out that poor people are in fact economically constrained in what they can and can’t afford to eat and hence probably could use some extra money are forgetting the first point she made – they’re already eating too much food. She makes four points here – (1)if they cut back they could afford the healthier fruits and vegetables which often aren’t actually available in poor neighborhoods.  She also argues (2) that the prices of high quality foods (fruits and vegetables, etc.) aren’t going up, incomes of poor people aren’t going down, but the poor are getting fatter (so presumably it’s personal choice making the difference and not situational factors or poverty).  Also (3) the causality is backwards here: it isn’t that poverty is causing people to become fat, but that being fat makes you poor**.  And finally (4) that all this relies on the notion that your eating habits have something to do with your weight – the poor are probably just naturally fat, that’s all.***

There’s one final post on the issue, which I’m not going to discuss in too much depth except to excerpt this sentence:

But food stamp programs are stupid at the best of times, and in a population that has clearly reached and surpassed caloric sufficiency, they are ludicrous.

She also makes a very interesting argument right at the end, namely, that the food stamps are either entirely or not entirely fungible.  In the first case every extra dollar of food stamps frees up a dollar that the person would previously have spent on food to spend on something else, in which case it is good economic policy.  Or, that they are not entirely fungible in which case they will result in more money being spent on food (which presumably is less good as far as the stimulus goes?  it is hard to tell what the argument is here specifically – perhaps they are just both bad social policy because they’re encouraging fat people to eat more).  The fact that “food” is not a single product (that is, that one might simply buy better or at least more expensive food) is ignored, as is, somewhat mysteriously, the fact that buying food actually still counts, economically, as buying something.

Note to someone who knows who they are: this is someone you take seriously arguing this.  Those links up there?  I found them before I had my coffee, using an internet connection that only works when I put my computer up on the window sill (at eye height) and get lucky.  Someone who can, you know, sit down and use the computer at the same time has no excuse here.  They are just an idiot.

*Which would seem like good reason to assume that it won’t just be increased eligibility but also increased funds.  Also even if it is only increased eligibility (which, by the way, since food stamps are given out on a sliding scale relative to income would be nearly impossible to do without, well, increasing funds given to specific people anyway) it would still work faster than giving everyone a tax rebate on their recent earnings which is, bear in mind, the other position here.

**I’m not going to give you links on that one, you’ll have to figure out why it’s ridiculous on your own.
***Here, too.

Hey there. Jealous as I am that you are all in Minneapolis having fun without me, I have to admit that, well, I love Paris. In the Spring, presumably, but also now: there’s something about big cities in the late Fall/ early Winter, I think. Much as I”m not a huge fan of New York, it’s magical this time of year: Christmas stuff just going up, chilly enough that everyone is in dark coats, but not too cold. And Paris also looks heartbreakingly beautiful right now: the cold light is perfect, somehow. Traveling in the summer really does suck in many ways: one of my clearest memories of Prague is going to the Charles Bridge, pushing through hordes of tourists, and then watching it literally shimmer in the heat, as I nearly passed out.

 Right now, in Paris, the annoying tourists like me, who can’t speak French, and say “Oh my goodness!” when the food arrives, much to amusement of the traditionally snotty waiters, are at a minimum, everyone is wearing a dark coat, the streets are busy but not too busy, the cafes are not too crowded and buying your fourteenth crepe from a street vendor seems just the right thing to do.

We almost didn’t get here, as the air traffic controllers went on strike Tuesday. Luckily, thanks to the miracle of time travel, it was Wednesday by the time we actually got here and the strike was over. The metro was also not working for the first few days, then it was going about 1 in 8, then it was “quasi-normal” and now it’s fine. 70% of the population didn’t support the strikes, and everyone seems to approve of the way Sarkozy handled them. I have to say that with a 15% unemployment rate, it’s hard to feel sympathetic to transit workers who can retire at fifty with full benefits. But that makes me feel a little dirty to say.

My family, not being genetically American, has the way of spending American holidays not in America. We spent fourth of July here when I was thirteen. I kept a journal, in which I wrote deep, biting thoughts like how McDonalds was taking over the world and how Mona Lisa was smaller than you’d think in real life. I also worried about my diet alot, deciding that the best way to to spend my time in Paris was counting calories. Yay, being thirteen!

I’m enjoying this trip much more. Instead of my lame journal, I have you guys. Paris is cleaner and pleasanter than it was my first trip: a) because it’s not summer, I guess and b) because it, well, is cleaner. There are trash bags everywhere, laws about dog poop, etc. Nortre Dame, in my memory, was dark and covered in scaffolding. Now it’s sparkling and restored. Also, I’ve being stuffing myself. I’ve discovered this amazing French dish called a canale (spelling?) that is, check this: essnetially a dumpling made out of fish. Dumpling! Made out of fish! My two favorite things! Combined! Last night I dinner, I ordered something that was a chocolate M——. My parents had no idea what this word meant, but I ordered it anyway: chocolate, Paris, can’t be bad, right?

It was like chocolate mouse and chocolate pudding has a love child, and this was it. And it came with something that was like ice cream and whipped cream has a love child, and this was it.

So: Paris. Turns out it’s really beautiful. And the Eiffel Tower is way smaller than you’d think it would be. Chocolate M——- is delicious.

I’m so glad my observations are  way more mature now.

When I told people from home that I was going to Alaska to join the commercial fishing industry, they invariably made some excited comment involving The Most Dangerous Catch. The television gods have apparently replaced getting a summer job in the canneries with something a little more scintillating as the standard preconception. People now think of crabbers, trawlers, or purse seiners; the kind of serious fishing boats that spend weeks at a time in the rough, frigid waters of the Bearing Sea and have a tendency to go missing when the big storms hit.
I’m sitting in a 1966 Airstream Land Yacht, throwing distance from the beach on the eastern side of Cook Inlet. It’s the middle of the fishing season, and I haven’t seen a film crew or a snow squall yet. Clearly, this is a different type of fishing.
We’re setnetters. Our boats are twenty to twenty-eight foot aluminum skiffs, powered by anything from 55 horse tiller motors to 200 horse motors run through a console. [For those of you who don’t know boats, a boat with a console means that there is a little control station with a steering wheel and a throttle somewhere, usually towards the rear of the boat. If it’s a tiller motor, that means that the driver has to stand in the very back of the boat and control direction and throttle with a short handle that is integrally connected to the motor.] We move our boats around and put them in the water with simple trailers and unlicensed, uninsured “beach trucks”-most commonly, twenty-year-old Ford pickups with severe rust issues. Each boat holds between four and seven nets, which two men can load and unload by hand. The operation is simple, and at first seemed so small-scale to me that it was inconceivable that one beach-mile of fishermen could bring in a million pounds of sockeye salmon in a one-month period. But they do.
Cook Inlet is the body of water pinned between the Alaska Mountains and the Kenai Peninsula, due south of Anchorage. Cook Inlet is the final destination for some of the best salmon rivers in Alaska, which means that every summer it is full of millions of king, red (sockeye), humpy (pink), and silver (coho) salmon on their way to their respective spawning sites in the regions lakes and rivers. Unlike the drift netters or seiners who drive their boats around looking for fish to net, we setnetters set our nets at the same legally regulated sites all season and simply wait for the salmon to swim into them. Though four types of salmon run here, we are primarily catching reds (known to rest of the world as sockeye), and our fishing season is supposedly timed to align with the reds’ yearly run. [More on this later.]
The nets themselves are 210 feet long and 15 feet deep, with about sixty feet of rope tied to each end to anchor the net to stationary buoys. There is a line of corks at the top that keep the net floating at the surface, and a lead-filled rope on the bottom that keeps the net stretched out vertically in the water. The net is made of various substances (a topic of much debate among fishermen), but is always woven into diamonds of a size determined to catch the target species around the gills. The material is thin -think heavy fishing line- but strong enough that it is very hard to break with your hands, though large king salmon, seals, and drifting logs all can, and do, tear sizable holes that must be mended by hand back on shore.
Being in a giant inlet makes for some interesting effects when the tides can run more than twenty feet. Most people think of tides running simply into and off of the beach, a simple up and down. In an enclosed space like Cook Inlet, however, the force of the tide creates a river effect, so that to someone standing on the shore the tides move left and right in addition to up and down. In the words of my captain “On a flood tide in Cook Inlet we’ve got the entire Pacific Ocean trying cram itself up our ass.”
The strength of the tide blows our nets into a U shape, creating a bag against which the fish are held by the shear force of the water. Many of the fish we catch, especially the kings, are not tangled in the net at all, but just pinned there broadside by the tide. This bagging of the net means that we have to pick the fish out at every tide change or risk losing a lot of fish when the net swings around and the “bag” is turned inside out.
Picking the nets is where we fishermen earn our pay. To pick a net, we drive our skiff up to one end of the net so that the bowman (I am one of these) can reach down with a gaff, grab the rope, and lift it up and over the bow so it sits on top of the boat. The captain then cuts the motor and we simply pull the boat down the net, hand over hand, one man on the corks and one on the lead line. The net is pulled out of the water, across the boat, and then falls back into the water on the other side. We pick the fish out of the net as they come into the boat, using just our hands and a variety of learned techniques.
Now, this may not sound hard, but remember: we’re pulling a boat broadside through one of the strongest running tides in the world; the net may contain hundreds to more than a thousand pounds of fish, which all add drag against the tide; we may be doing this in ten foot seas, or in the dark, or both. Every fisherman here has chewed-up hands that won’t heal and complains about their hands and arms falling asleep when they lay down, an effect caused (we think) by growing muscle too quickly and thus incorrectly pressuring blood vessels.

Commercial fishermen are under constant attack from both sport fisherman and environmentalists, and generally for good reason: no fishery in the world has proved sustainable over any lengthy timeframe. Setnetters seem to catch little flak over their fishing practices, however, compared to other methods. The only environmental issue seems to be the total number of salmon caught, but not always for the obvious reasons.
All salmon in Cook Inlet are bound for a river. The salmon we catch are almost exclusively headed toward the Kenai River. The Kenai, like all rivers in the area, has a counter that keeps track of escapement, or the number of fish that have escaped being caught to make it to their spawning grounds. Every year Alaska Fish and Game publishes a predicted run and an escapement goal. Clearly, the escapement number has a direct influence on the size of the run five years from now (red salmon return to spawn after five years in the ocean somewhere, no one is really sure where). In theory, there should be some fairly consistent ratio of escapement-to-return. The problem is that nobody seems to agree on exactly what that ratio is, or even what the desired return should be.
My boss, who has been fishing here for thirty years and is widely regarded to know more about Cook Inlet salmon than anyone around, including the biologists, says that an escapement of 400,000 will produce a return of about 6,000,000 fish. Conversely, an escapement of 1,000,000 will produce a return of only about 1,000,000, due to the salmon fry overcrowding their freshwater feeding grounds and causing a massive die-off. Historically, that is what the numbers show, according to my boss. Either Fish and Game is looking at different numbers, or they have much different motives than we do.
You see, if you have a goal escapement of 400,000, and 6,000,000 reds run up the Cook, then the commercial fisherman can take a little more than 5,000,000 reds, leaving about 500,000 for the sport fisherman and dipnetters. [Every Alaska citizen is allowed about 60 salmon a year by dipnetting, wherein you stand in a river with what looks like a giant butterfly net and hope a salmon swims into it. Miraculously, salmon do swim into them.] The reason the sport fishermen don’t like this plan is that the commercial fishermen would also be catching a lot of kings (which they are allowed to keep), which are the real prize of the sport-fishing world and the goal of many tourists who pay very good money to fly to Alaska to catch them. According to my boss, what sport fishermen would like best is to have an escapement of 1,000,000 reds with a return of 1,000,000 and no commercial fishing at all, which would allow all of the kings to run up the rivers and directly into the boats of fishing guides.
This seemingly scientific battle is made political at the Northern Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission (NPAFC) (I think; there are a lot of commissions). These are the guys that decide what the escapement goal should be, and thus how many fish us commercial fisherman should be allowed to catch. The problem is that this body is under constant siege from both the commercial fishermen and the sport fishermen, with the two sides at opposing goals. Whichever side can gain the most influence in Fish and Game and the Commission can change fishing policy in their favor.
The direct effect on the setnetters is in the number of hours per week we are allowed to fish. We are “guaranteed” (which is to say, under most circumstances) two twelve-hour periods per week, one on Monday and one on Thursday. We fish seven-to-seven on those days every week, more or less regardless of the current escapement. Any hours beyond those two periods are called “emergency openers”, and are granted on short notice based on the number of running reds. The closer we get to escapement, the more hours we’ll get, though we have had some openers already due to some big, though short lived, runs.
The Commission does not want to overshoot the escapement for risk of causing an overpopulation-related die-off of salmon fry. They use the commercial fishermen to limit the escapement, but that tool is only available during the open season. In recent years, reds have been running later and later, through the end of August (the commercial season this year is July 9th to August 9th). Last year 900,000 reds swam up the Kenai after the season ended, more than doubling the escapement goal. Commercial fishermen have been pressing for an extended fishing season but thus far their pleas have fallen on deaf ears.

I’ve never been anywhere that thrived so much on hope and rumor. Everyone in camp talks incessantly about when we’ll get another opener, for how long, how many fish are running in the southern part of the inlet, how the drifters are doing, what the current escapement is, and when the big run will start. No one mentions the possibility of not reaching escapement this year or catching too many fish. There seems to be no doubt that our practices are sustainable, even below sustainable, and there are data to back up the claim. At the same time, in quite moments the older men will confess that they are not planning on bringing their grandkids into the industry. They will point over the bluff to where our nets are and say ‘This won’t last forever’ with an air of grim acceptance. It is hard for me to tell if they are talking about the fishing or the fish.

Last night, I went out to Brasa, which replaced Betty’s Bikes and Buns at the corner of Central and Hennepin.

It’s clearly supposed to be an upscale sort of place, as upscale as rotisserie chicken and paper cups can get. They make a point of telling you that the meat is local and organic. The bar inside, where they have a wine and beer selection, is shiny metal against a faintly southwest decor. When I say ‘faintly’ it means I really couldn’t tell. I got the impression that was what they were going for. To be honest, there is a certain ‘corn chips and sour cream’ kind of color that makes me think ‘bad attempt at southwest decor.’

‘Here is some more text in ridiculous single quotes.’

The food is good. I couldn’t try the pork, but gather that it is what really brings the people in. On the menu it lists the chicken as available all night. The pork is only served ‘until we’re out.’ Having said that, the chicken was good last night, and the piece that I had left over today passed the cold chicken taste test. It was flavorful and tender. Last night it was melt in your mouth moist. They have a variety of sides, you get two with your order. I had yuca and chick peas with barley. Both were tasty, if unspectacular.

All of which sounds pretty good, right? Well… I don’t know that it was $14 good. That’s probably my inherent prejudice against rotisserie chicken, but it’s comfort food. I always want comfort food to be pretty cheap, so that it can comfort me often. When you add in the $5 beer, I was suddenly feeling lite of pocket.

I also have a no molestation policy at restaurants, and the waitress made it a point of touching me every time she came to our table. At one point she fingered my earlobe. For some reason 5% of all middle aged waitresses seem to think that part of their charm is feeling up the customers. Icky.

In the end, I felt like Brasa did for me what Big E’s did a few years ago. It made good home cooking seem so good and cozy, that I want to learn to make the dishes at home, instead of eating out.

One of my new favorite activities since graduating from college is cooking. I’ve been helping my mom cook dinner since high school, but I never really paid attention to what I was doing. I’d stir while she chopped, and we’d gossip about the latest drama in my world. Thus, my stirring skills are top notch, while my chopping skills are practically non-existent. So, in order to survive on my own cooking (basically a necessity if you want to be able to save any money in grad school), I started watching the Food Network to learn. Seriously.

Last fall, I found out that I loved the FN. Man, all these cool, celebrity chefs teaching me how to cook? Awesome. I felt like we were all buddies, and that they were talking just to me. Of course I have my favorites. Giada de Laurentiis is at the top of my list as I love Italian food, and I have utmost respect for Alton Brown since he explains the science behind cooking. I’m even a fan of Rachael Ray because her energy and vernacular amuse me. My labmate absolutely hates that she says “E.V.O.O.” and “delish!” Naturally, I’ve started using them in lab just to get under her skin.

Okay, so I love the FN. The thing is, I don’t think my cooking has actually improved much from watching the shows. When I’m presented with a recipe and shown how to cook it, like Giada’s Red Wine Risotto and Peas, my product is pretty great. Slightly crusted pork medallions with a white wine sauce? No problem. However, I’m mostly confused when I try to “put something together” with my pantry ingredients. I could blame my pantry (rice and beans anyone? Followed by the dozens of packets of freeze-dried fruit my mother sends me?), but that’s not fair. Bobby Flay could probably cook up something delicious from my tomato paste, rice, almonds and peanut butter. I certainly don’t want to blame my burgeoning palette. No, no, that would mean something was actually wrong with me, and we all know I’m near perfect. Maybe I can just blame the lack of FN shows on what to do when you’re a student and you have five random ingredients. They should just expand that Top Chef episode. Or give Arthur Schwartz a TV show.

One of the times I tried to throw something together, I ended up with onion breath for over a day. Yes, I brushed my teeth and used Listerine. Three times. Three weeks later, it happened again. Another time, I combined Cheerios, cheese and oregano and then microwaved it. Does that sound like a good idea? Clearly, I have a problem. On the other hand, I can whip up some form of curried chicken with ease and even spring rolls that taste good. Never mind that I can’t get them to stay rolled. Perhaps it’s my filter that has failed me. I guess my main problem is that I’m forced to follow “recipes” (yes, we call them that) in lab all day, and when I get home, I don’t want to think of how many milliliters of red wine vinegar or grams of sage I should add. Thus, my aversion to recipes. I need some form of chaos in my life to balance out the order in lab. But, in order to learn, I probably should follow recipes for a while. Will I actually do it? Well, I promise to keep you all updated on my future culinary adventures.