More EW

As if fish additives in your bread weren't bad enough, now, just in case you're the type of person willing to drop $45k on a fur coat this winter, you have to be sure it's not coming from THE SKIN OF FETAL LAMBS. EW.

Food additives

This article is just one of the reasons why I try to eat as much of my food as possible from local, organic, and unprocessed sources. How appetizing does this sound?

On a recent summer morning, he hovered over a whirling assembly line as a waterfall of gray liquid cascaded over slabs of breaded chicken. Then the magic began.

During the bath in the liquid solution, which consisted of water and protein molecules extracted from a slurry of chicken or fish tissue, a thin, imperceptible shield formed around the meat. When the chicken was submerged in oil, the coating blocked fat from being absorbed from the fryer.

The point, of course, is the next sentence, which states that the result contained 50% less fat than normal fried chicken. But who would want to eat chicken coated with a "gray liquid ... consist[ing] of ... a slurry of chicken or fish tissue"? EW!

Apparently, lots of Americans. And this is perhaps what most disgusts me:

The most obvious way to get more fiber into the diet is to increase consumption of whole and unprocessed fruit, vegetables and beans. But food companies say that many Americans are unwilling to make significant changes in their eating choices to do this, and food companies are more than willing to fill in the gaps.

...

Food companies insist that, unlike their critics, they are pragmatists. They say their consumer research shows that convenience and taste still outrank nutrition as the top priority for most people and that consumers have no intention of giving up their favorite foods.

That is good news for the industry. If Americans stopped eating large quantities of fried chicken, sweetened breakfast cereal, cookies and snack chips, the financial health of many companies would suffer. [emph. added]

Oh, I bet they are. Remind me NEVER TO BUY ANYTHING PROCESSED, EVER AGAIN, just in case I should get FISH EXTRACT in my bread:

Coming soon to your grocery store, for example, could be ... bread containing microscopic capsules of fish oil, enabling food companies to contend that the bread is "heart-healthy" because of the cholesterol and triglyceride-lowering omega-3 fatty acids found in fish oil.

Again, I say: EW! I don't suppose they'll even bother LABELLING this, so those of us that prefer to know what we're eating can avoid it, eh? Answer: no. To wit:

The label on the bread, [Jim Zallie, a food scientist and National Starch group vice president] says, is unlikely to advertise the fish oil content, but simply cite the presence of omega-3's.

Fuckers.

Sigh. All the more reason to get that sourdough starter going, and just make my own ...

Army discipline

A special today on how US soldiers in Iraq can get sped-up citizenship. Good; they should.

But, a detail I did not know:

Some joke that the privilege of citizenship comes more easily now to American troops than sex or alcohol, both banned in a war zone. [emph. added]

Woah! Seriously? I'd heard the Army was Draconian, but ... wow.

Indulgences

Reasons why I love the New York Times, #89,632: the following juxtaposition, from the international roundup:

Pope Benedict XVI plans to grant special indulgences -- remittances of punishment for sins -- to hundreds of thousands of young Roman Catholics expected to attend the church's World Youth Day ...

The church's practice of selling indulgences in the Middle Ages helped to spawn the Reformation.

No, really. Despite my ellipses, it reads just like that. Heh.

Nothing gained

Apparently, someone else has done a lot more research on the whole daylight savings extension than I did before writing about it. I sagely said something like "who gets up that early, anyhow?"; what I didn't really consider was "getting up that early" in November means "before 8:30." I'll have you know I'm up by 8 on weekday mornings -- only my sister, who has a late shift, and my roommate's dysfunctional imbecile of a boyfriend (nothing to do with his sleep habits), who has no job and isn't bothering to try to find one, sleep that late.

So, I stand corrected. This op-ed is worth a read (they're the best part of the paper, esp. when Down/Vowell aren't writing -- pithy, short, and with license to be more direct than the rest of the articles), if for nothing else than the history of screwing with clocks in this country. Check it:

• " ... the Germans were the first to try [daylight savings] in 1916, hoping that it would help them conserve fuel during the First World War. .... The fuel savings never materialized."
• "That most Americans still believe we save daylight to help farmers tells you something about the quality of debate on this perennial controversy. In fact, farmers hated daylight saving." Uh, oops -- that's what I thought, too ...
• "By 1965, 71 of the largest American cities practiced daylight saving and 59 did not."
• "Richard Nixon infamously mandated year-round daylight saving in 1974 and 1975. This ... put school children on pitch-black streets every morning until the plan was scaled back."

Okay, great. When this provision made it into the energy omnibus, I just assumed that it had been well-researched and -vetted by dispassionate experts. Guess I still have too much faith that government is out to do the Right Thing.

Not, I'm saying, that this is the Wrong Thing. Just that it was perhaps a Poorly Researched Thing. Hmm ... guess time (no matter how you measure it) will tell.