Overheard at work

Among the many places I work, I am occasionally in R&D test kitchens.  They're pretty cool actually.  These people can come up with anything and have very well stocked kitchens to do it with.  But anyway, standing around tasting things all day apparently makes you a little punchy.

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"It's kind of chewy."

"Yeah, you have to hold it in your mouth for a while, like for an hour."

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"It's a good source of calcium."

"It's also a good source of butt fat."

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"Did you taste that bean thing the other day."

"It was awful.  It was like beans cooked with grass clippings."

"All I could think of was dirt.  It really smelled like dirt when I microwaved it."

"It tasted like a funeral for your pet."

[I can't say as I understand that last part.]

Chelada!!!

Clam and tomato together seem bad enough as it is, but I can't think of anything worse with them than Bud Light. Also available in regular Budweiser flavor. I can only assume that I'm not the target demographic.

Montana notes

Well, I made it back to civilization, at least compared to Montana. No offense, but there're more people in Portland than in the entire state of Montana. The biggest city in Montana (Billings, I think) still doesn't even have 100,000 people. (I sure hope nobody from Chicago or New York reads this and decides to start spouting statistics at me. I'm guessing that New York probably has more people than the whole Northwest. And don't even get me started on Tokyo and Mumbai and whatnot.)

I actually got back a day earlier than I expected. One of our customers declined service, so I could speed things up a little bit. They never said it explicitly, but I got the idea that money was tight, so they decided to forgo calibration this year. I'm not sure that's such a great plan. It's a little like deciding to do oil changes every 10,000 miles to save a few bucks. You'll probably still spend the money later and then some. It worked out for me though, so whatever.

I make a lot of noise, but I actually like travelling to Montana as far as travelling for work goes. People are friendly. The scenery is beautiful. This time around, there was some winter weather, but nothing that slowed me down. Lots of the rivers and lakes were frozen over, which is always cool. Lots of miles though. I think I put on about 2,400 miles in two weeks and stayed in 8 hotels, which is at least 6 too many. I have to give a shout out to La Quinta Inns though. Their rates are usually decent ($49.00 in Missoula for a single king room), the rooms are equipped well enough, and the beds I've had have always been extremely soft, which is a nice change from the ultra-firm plywood beds of the Super 8's and such.

I did have to be amused with Rock Creek, a little town near Missoula. Much of Montana is ranch land. Part of beef ranching is the annual activity of turning bulls into steers. Long story short -- you drive east from Missoula and see billboards for the Rock Creek Testicle Festival. That's all I'm about to say about that. I'll let the fine folks at TestyFesty.com deal with any further details.

On the way home, I happened to catch a radio story about a barge that hit and damaged the locks at the John Day Dam on the Columbia River last Friday. This is somewhat interesting in its own right, but it struck me because I was driving by the dam when I heard to story not too long after it happened. The lock was actually out of service for a few days, but the Corps of Engineers has since installed a temporary gate to restore passage to vital river traffic. The broken gate is floating on a barge until they can figure out how to make a permanent repair.

If this post sounds little random, it's because it's taken me almost a week to write in tiny bursts. I came back home to a sick toddler and last night was the first real good night's sleep this house has seen since I came home. Fun.

In penance for taking so stinking long, here're some interesting/funny videos that are not remotely related to Montana.

Enough already with the latkes and the fryin'

I have to start this by noting that, as anyone aware of my diet will attest, I can appreciate a fried bit of whatever. However, even I have to admit that there might be a limit. We've eaten latkes (potato pancakes, VERY fried, hash brown looking, but way better) with someone on four of the six nights of Hanukkah so far. I do love me some latkes, but that's too many. I feel like I have oil flowing out of my pores, not to mention the fact that I've had probably twice the recommended calories this week.

Maybe I'll cleanse my pallette for the next couple days by indulging in another Hanukkah tradition -- donuts. I'm pretty sure there's no way those can possibly be fried... (yeah, Dave, about that...)

Happy Halloween!

I hope everyone is having a fun Halloween. These are our jack-o-lanterns this year. Tutu helped the Mizz design his, but we just carved it this weekend along with the Mama Pumpkin and the Daddy Pumpkin.

We didn't do candy at home this year, since the Mizz is going down right at prime time. We just left the light off like all the other pathetic anti-social people in our neighborhood, although I did hear someone down the street scaring the crap out of trick-or-treaters. Oh, the memories.

We did take the Mizz out earlier to go trick-or-treating at the mall. He was a dragon, of the Old Navy type. He's a natural. Most of the kids just stood in line and held out their bags like collecting candy was their jobs. But not the Mizz. He delighted in holding his bag (a "happy" skull) at arm's length, and saying, loudly but not screaming, "Twick o tweet!" Sometimes he was several feet away from the person with the candy, and sometimes he was saying it to random trick-or-treaters walking down the hall, but he's getting the idea. Give him time. He got the hang of it after a while and then wouldn't stop. Once we let him eat a couple pieces of candy though, the monster was unleashed and he had a one track mind after that. I also found that young ladies at stores giving out candy in their sexy whatever costumes interact much differently with the old guy and his cute kid after Mama goes off shopping. I wasn't doing research, mind you, just an observation. It does seem that if you're looking to hit it off with someone half your age, for some reason a two year old dressed as a dragon would be a helpful accessory. They still gave out pathetic candy though. Franny snagged the only Reece's cup and there wasn't a Hershey miniature in sight. Just gobs of tootsie rolls and hard candy. You'd think businesses could do better, especially the big boxes. They could have had full size candy bars to give out without putting a dent in their obscene profit margins. Maybe that's not true, but I'm going to imagine it is anyway. I mean, Macy's running out of candy an hour into the event. Seriously. (Sounds like someone's jealous that nobody wants to give him a bag of candy. Poor, sad old man.)

How else does Portland do Halloween? How about a Zombie Walk? Be careful about clicking that. The link might not be too safe for appetites, depending on your zombie/gore tolerance. For the Zombie Walk, a bunch of people gather at Pioneer Courthouse Square at a designated time near Halloween and then stagger around town amusing the locals and freaking our tourists and children. There's something surreal about a video of a bunch of zombies lurching and moaning through Pioneer Place mall and then calmly riding the escalators en masse.

Fun Bottled Water Fact

I happened to be working at an environmental lab today. This place performs all sorts of analytical tests on all kinds of things -- mainly soil and water samples. They look for basics like sediments and microbes and more obscure things like dissolved organics and metals. They have a very extensive lab and one of their most basic necessities is very pure water for testing purposes. It wouldn't do much good to use water with dissolved iron or whatever in it during a test for trace amounts of iron. To that end, they have a very nice, and very expensive, water deionization (DI) system.

Knowing all this, I was completely taken aback when I saw one of the technicians filling sample containers from an Evian water bottle. She saw my look and explained that their DI system was down, but that for most of their tests, Evian was the purest thing they could buy. "It doesn't have anything in it. Nothing we'd be looking for anyway."

This would seems like a glowing recommendation for Evian. "It's so pure, you can use it for lab tests." But you have to understand that the dissolved metals that the lab would be concerned about are the same "minerals" that are touted in bottled water marketing, including Evian's website. That means that you are basically getting very clean water, or the same thing that you would get by extensive filtering or distilling. The fact that it's filtered through an Alpine glacier field in France doesn't really matter.

Personally, I've never been a fan of Evian; I've always considered it pretty bland. It turns out I might have been right. The same minerals that apparently aren't in it are the same ones that give water it's taste, and are even added by many other brands specifically for that taste. I've always felt somewhat morally superior to Evian drinkers ("naive" spelled backwards and all that), mostly because I just like to be difficult. This just serves to embolden my holier-than-thou attitude. Just what I needed. I should be a real joy at parties now.

What to drink, what to drink...?

A couple days ago I wrote about wine snobs and their corks. Specifically about the silliness of natural cork loyalty. Well, maybe the wine snobs aren't so dumb after all; they're just being environmentally friendly. Apparently, the lowering demand for natural cork is putting pressure on cork forests. I was unaware, before reading this article, that cork is harvested from trees without destroying them. In fact, the cork that is good for stoppering bottles isn't even found until at least the second harvesting. All this means that the forests and their associated ecosystems remain intact despite the commercial use. If cork ceases to be a viable crop for someone, the cork trees will be replaced by something that will be cut down for lumber, effectively gutting the forest ecology of that area. And if you want to push it further, I suppose that a renewable cork resource is greener than petroleum based plastic stoppers or metal caps. Just don't tell me it makes the wine taste better. That's all I'm sayin'.

Since I can't feel quite as superior to wine drinkers, I'll move on to bottled water people. I've always thought that buying water was silly, especially if it has to come from France or Fiji or whatever, and it's even more silly that people believe that it's melted off a glacier or scooped out of a cave or whatever. But with the recent revelation that Aquafina (from Pepsi) is tapwater, now everybody seems to care. In truth, most of the bottled water out there comes from tapwater. Certianly Dasani (from Coke) and all the store-brand stuff is tap water. Granted, it is filtered through some serious equipment, and not your store bought PUR or Brita stuff either. But seriously, these companies use the same water for their other sodas and such, and despite the complete lack of other, more expensive ingredients including secret formula flavors, you still pay the same price for the plain water. Just the cost alone ought to be enough to deter, as noted by the New York Times. But beyond that, understand that bottled water is usually not even regulated as much as your tap water, meaning that there are things that, by law, cannot come out of your tap, but can legally be sold to you at 7-11 with a picture of a pristine mountain spring on the front of them. One the one hand, buying bottled water is silly when the water in your house is probably plenty good, especially filtered through your fridge or whatever. On the other hand, you may live in a place that has nasty tap water. Check here. I've certainly been to places (some of the places I travel for work, especially) where the water doesn't taste so great. Luckily, Portland water is pretty good, and is in fact, some of the best water in the country. But not everyone lives in a place where the tap water is anything more than passable. On the OTHER other hand, remember that your bottled water=somebody else's tapwater anyway.

So back to my original premise, stick with beer.

Beer Snobs are better than Wine Snobs

Oregon State University has released research clearly showing that wine snobs are full of it. Everybody likes to claim that there's something about natural cork that makes for better wine than synthetic cork or screw tops. However, everybody is apparently incapable of distinguishing the difference in blind taste tests, so as noted before, everybody is full of it. Wine from bottles sealed with synthetic corks and even (gasp!) screw tops is every bit as good as the same wine sealed with natural cork, maybe even better since natural cork can grow fungus.

Currently, of course, wine in screw caps may well be terrible, but that has more to do with the type of wine that is put in screw cap bottles. As far as I know, the research didn't cover boxes.

Beer snobs, on the other hand, seem to be in agreement that beer in cans is far inferior than beer in bottles. Unlike wine drinkers, however, beer drinkers will go ahead and drink the cans anyway, if that's what's around. If it's not so good, they'll just drink it faster. Standards only get you so far.

What are they doing to the chocoholics?

It appears that chocolate companies want to start making chocolate without cocoa butter and still call it chocolate! Because they're cheap money-grubbing capitalist pigs! Exclamation point! I've had chocolate chips made this way (called chocolate flavored chips) and they sucked. I'm sure there will still be chocolate marketed with real cocoa butter, but it'll be buyer beware and most of what gets put into other things or maybe even served at some restaurants will be the crappy kind. I was going to just quietly absorb this with righteous indignation, until someone noted the relationship to one of the tangents on my melamine rant.

If nothing else, think of Hershey turning into the Budweiser of chocolate. Very sad.

Note: The inspiration for this was shamelessly ripped from Basement Patter. Sorry Josh.

Melamine everywhere

I'm sure everyone has heard about the melamine contamination in pet foods. Mostly just the dog and cat foods have made the headlines, but the contaminated wheat gluten got in lots of other animal feed too. Last week, I was working at a US Fish & Wildlife research fish hatchery and they were in the process of investigating a die-off of some of their juvenile trout. They were concerned because there was nothing they could find about the water or any microbiological issue, but they were loosing fish at a fast enough rate that it might jeopardize their ability to continue the study long enough to get results, which means wasting grant money and not getting it again. Anyway, they were just looking into the possibility that they might have some melamine contamination. According to this article, they were probably right. They do get some of their food from Bio-Oregon, which is listed in the article. Incidentally, I work there every summer too.

The thing that gets me about this melamine thing is how far it got before it was caught even though it clearly has widespread health effects. The problem is an over dependence on China as a supplier for everything: a) because they have as much manpower as we want them to throw at anything, and b) because they are willing to make everything very cheaply. This is fine for a lot of things, but cheap food ingredients are not necessarily the best choice.

The melamine was used because it fools a test for protein, but is much cheaper than actually fortifying the food for real. The normal test for protein in food is a determination of the amount of nitrogen in the food. Melamine has a lot of nitrogen, but unless further testing is done, it just raises the overall result of the nitrogen test, which is taken as higher protein content. Now, the companies involved are no longer in business, but it has been pointed out that this is a widespread practice well known in the industry in China.

So now we've discovered another test to run on foods from China, and I'm afraid that we'll pat ourselves on the back for solving this particular problem and then go back about our business of buying basic food ingredients from the lowest bidder. But how many other kinds of routine deception are happening, in China or elsewhere? If they are not an immediate health issue, would we even know? What if some petroleum byproduct happens to be a good looking substitute for vitamin C or something? What if it accumulates in people and causes birth defects or whatever? The problem is that we are getting our most basic needs filled by the lowest bidder and until something happens, we have no idea at all. Just look at the ingredient list on just about anything you eat. Chances are, unless it says nothing but "apple," there is probably something on it you can't identify. Guar gum, or soy lecithin, or some chemical you can't even pronounce that is added to keep the guar gum from sticking to the soy lecithin while your frozen whatever is shipped to your grocery store. Even the things you do understand (this case was wheat gluten) have unknown origins.

The problem is that we like to pretend that we are at the top of the world food chain, that we have the safest and best of everything, and that all the food companies have our best interests at heart. In real life, we are incredibly dependent on the rest of the world for our food supply, we have food that is safe until we find melamine or e-coli or whatever, and food companies want to avoid contamination only because it causes lawsuits and hurts shareholder value. We love to have anything we want, anytime we want, and as cheaply as possible, and in order to do that we have to keep pretending.

The alternative is making all this stuff ourselves. We have the capacity to do a lot of that, but right now, our main ability seems to be growing freaking corn. So we use it for everything we can imagine: plain corn, corn meal, corn starch, corn oil, animal feed, and high fructose corn syrup. These days we even use it as a fuel and for other industrial compounds. Aside from plain corn, most of these uses are better served by other items, i.e. sugar instead of corn syrup, but we are in a good climate region for corn, so we subsidize the hell out of it, put tariffs on the competing products, pour on gobs of fertilizer and grow as much corn as we possibly can. This is great for products that can be made out of corn, but for many other things, we now have to look elsewhere, and that is what makes us vulnerable.

The irony is that we are one of the most efficient food producers in the world. By sheer volume or total calories or whatever, we make far more than we need. But we've concentrated it into a few basic products (corn, wheat, potatoes, a few other basics), but for most other things, we have to buy from the rest of the world. We grow a lot of other things, but not in the volumes we need. We import meat, fruit, vegetables, and lots of basic ingredients from all over the world, and that puts us at risk for unscrupulous companies or even entire industries taking advantage of any cost-saving shortcuts they can think of.

As a country, we have to change our attitudes about what is worth paying for. There are many reasons I can think of for eating locally produced foods, but this may top the list.

Sorry for the rant.

But not really.

There's always time for cookies

We made official Nestle Tollhouse Cookies last night. By we, I mean I. Franny does get credit for the idea, but I at least want props for cranking them out. And by them, I mean a grand total of 12 cookies. The rest is in dough form in the fridge and I'm not at all confident that it will ever turn into cookies. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I grew up on raw cookie dough, and I don't see any reason to stop eating it now.

Eating toast shouldn't be such a big effort

Yesterday sucked. I couldn't finish a second piece of toast because it was more work than it was worth. Pathetic. Walking up and even down stairs was a chore too. Mostly I just laid around watching movies. The first two Lord of the Rings movies and some subtitled Chinese sword fighting/westernish thing. It doesn't matter, since I mostly slept through them anyway. I also had a raging headache by the evening. I was a little better off this morning, so I was able to at least keep Mizz out of too much trouble while Franny was out, but I fell asleep again as soon as she got home. The stomach seems to be happier, but I still have a nasty sinus cold, so nothing tastes good. I now have the strength to get through toast, but it might as well be cardboard for all I can taste.

The only benefit to all this is that I haven't had much caffiene the last couple days. 2 1/2 cans of soda. Typically over a couple days, I would have had at least 4 cups of coffee and 3 or 4 cans of soda, maybe much more depending on the day. I like to get away from the need for all that. If I can get down to maybe a cup of coffee in the morning and nothing else, I'd be happy. I don't mind a little bit, but I don't like being completely addicted. I'd like to be a casual user who only drinks coffee for the taste. Right now I'm a pathetic junky who can't move without it and who's always looking for his next fix.