Glenn Jacob

Lessons From Granola #5

RE: Honey It’s Not

In April of 2014, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) offered a draft copy of new regulations concerning the labeling of honey sold in the United States. This proposed regulation was a foot-dragging response to a petition filed in 2006 by the American Beekeeper Federation requesting the FDA to specify the definition of honey as being only the substance that comes from bees. After five years (2011) the FDA rejected the request with the reasoning that every reasonable person knows what honey is. Three years later in 2014, the FDA was forced by its weak justification to agree to regulate the labels on honey but only as a gesture of confidence for the consumer, not beekeepers. The regulation is still in draft form as of this writing.

Here are the numbers. In 2013 residents of the United States consumed 400 million pounds of honey. The beekeepers of the United States only produced 149 million pounds. We imported 251 million pounds of honey or at least a golden colored substance called honey. One batch that came through Mexico that year was so adulterated that Customs seized it. The American Beekeeper Federation wanted the definition in place to stop the importation of adulterated honey. Their argument was only if the honey was free of fillers and unadulterated with other non-bee substances should the product be called honey.

In 2013, American honey cost $2.12 a pound for producers. Importing from other countries was much cheaper, especially if the honey was bulked up with inexpensive filler. Imports from Brazil, Mexico and the Soviet Union were impounded by the FDA during the 1990’s but apparently little has been done to stop the flow of adulterated honey in the intervening years.

Honey imports are not inspected because “FDA laboratories do not have the instrumental capability to analyze honey according to the Official Methods of Analysis of AOAC International, AOAC Official Method 991.41, which requires an isotope ration mass spectrometer.” (FDA Import Alert 36-01). This admission of the FDA that they do not own a spectrometer highlights that the honey you see on the shelf in the grocery store is honey-flavored corn syrup or more common, honey-flavored rice syrup. Rice syrup already has a color and consistency similar to honey.

The proposed labeling regulations will be meaningless. The FDA has no equipment to analyze honey and most honey is imported, where there is no monitoring of contents. A food corporation can plead ignorance and there is no follow-up regulation that an importing company must verify the purity of the honey at its source – a willful but legal ignorance.

Rice syrup is just as bad for the human body as corn syrup, which is already documented as harmful. The health benefits of honey, which has been used in wound care and medicine for millennia, are absent from the common products labeled “Honey” on the grocery shelves. Bacteria cannot live in honey. Thus coating an open wound in honey seals the injury from infection. The other words such as “pure”, “genuine”, “100 percent” are all empty, unregulated words by the FDA on honey labels.

Pure honey is expensive. However, purchasing the most expensive honey on the shelf is no guarantee of purity because there is no definition of honey and labeling is worthless. This is one product where the only guarantee is buying from the source, that is to say, direct from the beekeeper.

If this circumstance is not difficult enough, we are experiencing a die-off of European honeybees in the United States. The likely culprit is a pesticide manufactured by Bayer. “The deadly pesticide is one of a fairly new family known as the neonicotinoids—“neonics” for short—developed a decade or so ago to replace organophosphates and carbamates, which are also highly toxic but dissipate far more quickly.” (earthjustice.org) However, lobbyists for the company have convinced the Department of Agriculture not to pull the pesticide from the American market despite the European Union banning the pesticide in 2011. There is a distinct possibility that we will not taste pure honey for years to come in the United States.

My recipe began with a base recipe that called for ¾ cup of honey. Obviously the recipe was written for a more innocent time. By switching to molasses as the source of sweet and gooey, the honey was cut back to two tablespoons, although it could use more. Molasses has a harsher taste, wonderful in barbeque sauce to balance the bite of vinegar; however, using molasses forces the cook to rely on the maple syrup for a gentler, sweet taste. Due to the present lack of confidence in pureness of honey, this recipe must reach out for other sweet ingredients that must be combined to make up for the lack of honey. Tch.

Lessons From Granola #6: The Other Ingredients and Dollars

Lessons on Granola #4

RE: Salt Ain’t What It Used To Be

Table Salt refers to rock salt that has been ground to a fine crystal. Salt is a mineral and for people who are looking at the ingredients in their food, unadulterated salt should be an easy find. After all, salt is so plentiful in our day that we throw hundreds of tons of in our streets in the winter. Ironies among the ironies, the salt we throw on the streets is purer than the table salt in our dining areas.

The ingredients in Morton Salt^© are:

SALT, CALCIUM SILICATE, DEXTROSE, and POTASSIUM IODIDE

Salt, the mineral, is an integral thread in the history of human civilization and is still essential. Potassium Iodide was added to pure salt in the 1920’s as a preventative for goiter, a disease caused by a lack of iodine in the diet. Calcium silicate is an anti-caking agent that stops the salt crystals from melding into thicker chunks because of moisture.

Dextrose is another name for sugar, albeit a more processed product than twice boiled sugarcane. Why add sugar to salt? The answer is a question of profit – How does one make salt taste better than the next choice for salt on the grocery shelf? Why sugar, of course. The salt producers have also experimented with adding MSG to table salt in the form of Citric Acid. Most have removed citric acid from their formularies as of this date, preferring to hide MSG in Dextrose, which is a known MSG product. To read more about the ingredients, read this article on salt published in 2010.

Food manufacturers are sensitive to complaints about their ingredients. Both Morton and Diamond Crystal now produce a table salt without iodine that also has no sugar. For pure salt, look to purchase Kosher Salt, although all kosher salt products are not the same. Morton adds anti-caking agent to their product because their method of creating the kosher grind (a larger crystal than table) creates a flakier, more intense salt. Diamond Crystal does not have such an agent.

To clarify the record, Kosher Salt does not refer to Jewish dietary laws of kashrut. Salt is a mineral and does not require rabbinic supervision. Kosher in this case refers to the size of the salt crystals. Kosher salt is a larger grain used often to soak the blood out of cuts of meat. The product is used in kashering kosher-slaughtered meats but in and of itself is inert in Jewish law.

NEXT: Honey Not!

Lessons from Granola #3

Dietitians recommend oatmeal. Doctors recommend the gummy stuff too because it is good for your heart and an excellent source of nutrition. Oatmeal is one of the ancient recipes that reaches back into the Medieval Period if not earlier, making oatmeal one of those more primitive and therefore more unadulterated recipes that excites food purists. The ancient history is correct but the recent history is a bit more convoluted. I am not sure your ancestors four or five generations back would be pleased with our oats.

The ingredients listed on the round container of Quaker Oats, a subsidiary of Pepsico:

WHOLE GRAIN ROLLED OATS, SUGAR, NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL FLAVOR, SALT, CALCIUM CARBONATE, GUAR GUM, CARAMEL COLOR, NIACINAMIDE*, REDUCED IRON, VITAMIN A PALMITATE, PYRIDOXINE HYDROCHLORIDE*, RIBOFLAVIN*, THIAMIN MONONITRATE*, FOLIC ACID*.

Compare and contrast with a more expensive brand of rolled oats, Bob’s Red Mill:

WHOLE GRAIN OATS.

The irony of this comparison is that the more expensive brand has only one ingredient. There are fifteen ingredients in the cheaper brand and some of them are nearly unpronounceable unless you are a practicing chemist. Why fifteen ingredients?

Quaker Oats is a highly processed product. A byproduct of manipulating the oats in the production process is the loss of nutrients. The more processing, the more loss. The manufacturer adds synthetic nutrients back into the oats to compensate and can actually add more to boost the nutrition claims. There are no impartial definitive studies that prove that the human body ingests synthetic nutrients in any significant quantities although there are studies that we do not absorb all of the synthetic nutrients, purging them from our bodies in our urine. These additives serve another purpose than health though. Food manufacturers are often called out for manipulating the nutrition labels on the side the packaging, trying to fool the consumer into believing that the product is healthier than it actually is.

For consumers the idea of eating whole foods such as WHOLE GRAIN ROLLED OATS is to eat minimally processed foods. A basic formulation of rolled oats is processed to a small degree – oats on the plant are not flat. Health conscious consumers want minimally processed foods. In contrast, a manufacturer wants to increase market share by having more consumers purchase their product and by having the dedicated customer buy more of the product. These two different agendas do not have to be in opposition but overarching greed is enough incentive for a manufacturer to take advantage of the relationship between producer and consumer.

The usual method for increasing sales is not price. Price is a one-shot proposal for coupon-cutting budgeteers. Increasing sales on a broader scale usually means adding salt, fat and sugar. Notice that sugar is second and salt is fourth on the Quaker Oats listing of ingredients. However, there is another powerful weapon for promoting appetite for a product: monosodium glutamate otherwise known as MSG. MSG is flavor and it is addictive. There are four ingredients on the label that definitely contain MSG and a fifth that probably does. The four definite items are natural flavor, artificial flavor, guar gum and caramel color. The probable fifth is salt. MSG is intimately connected to significant and sustained weight gain.

The first and largest ingredient in my granola is oats, and already the recipe is landmine for the unwary. By choosing the wrong manufacturer, you lose nutrition and you gain weight. A bag or a box of ROLLED OATS should be just one ingredient, rolled oats.

Next Episode: Salt Ain’t What It Used To Be

Lessons from Granola 2

Re: Gluten Free misdirection

Members of my family have food intolerances that include wheat and corn. They have tested negative for Celiac Disease, meaning that they do not have a wheat allergy, or precisely, a gluten allergy. People with symptoms such as inflammation across the body, belly bloat, and unusual weight gain (such as 2, 3 or 4 pounds in a twenty-four hour period) have a greater probability of having an intolerance of some sort rather than a gluten allergy. A simple blood test of Celiac Disease can sort out the truth. My family members have intolerances but the question is what substance or substances can their bodies not tolerate?

Gluten Free is a meaningless term for people with food intolerances. It is not the gluten in and of itself.

The issue may be the preferred processes of large scale monoculture agribusiness. Two weeks before the harvest of wheat, corn and soybeans, farmers are instructed to spray their fields with herbicide, typically Roundup^©. By killing the plants at the root and drying up the plant, sophisticated combine harvesters need less maintenance and repairs. My family may be more sensitive to herbicides.

Others have mentioned pesticides and fungicides used during the growing season, although these substances usually run off earlier in the growing season, causing other sorts of environmental damage. More often, purists point to manufactured fertilizers. When Egypt built the Aswan dam, replacing the annual flooding of the Nile River, their agriculture changed in fundamental ways. The flooding had brought nutrients from the center of the continent to naturally fertilize the land. The Egyptian government responded to the loss by building synthetic fertilizer factories. The taste of the vegetables changed dramatically, giving off a metallic or aluminum flavor that replaced the more organic flavonoids. I was unable to locate any studies on the increase or diminishment of the nutritional content of Egyptian produce after the placement of the Aswan dam. There are no studies on the rise of environmental ailments either.

In the United States, the ORGANIC label means herbicides are tightly controlled. The Federal Regulation on Organics reads: “Herbicides, soap-based—for use in farmstead maintenance (roadways, ditches, right of ways, building perimeters) and ornamental crops.” Crops are harvested differently than the large-scale agribusiness crops; the plants are more likely to be alive at the time of harvest. Herbicides cannot be used on the crops themselves, only in the adjacent areas used for keeping the farm up and running and farmers cannot use harsher chemicals.

I wish this was the end of the story, a tale of virtuous farmers producing a better food for us to eat. This is only the beginning, however. Most of us do not purchase our grain products directly from the farm. This granola is gluten free because the recipe is oats and buckwheat but, alas, in the American food market, even the simplest ingredients can trip the unwary.

Next Episode: Aren’t Oats Good For You?

Lessons on Granola #1

Please find the recipe below. The lessons and reasoning in choosing these ingredients will follow in #2 and if necessary #3.

Glenn’s Granola

2 sets of ingredients: the grain (Dry) and the glue (Wet)

Prep time: 1 hour

The Grain (all raw)

8 cups rolled oats
1 cup kasha (buckwheat whole oats)
1 cup sunflower seeds
½ cup pumpkin seeds
1 cup chopped almonds
1 cup chopped (choose) Cashews, pecans, walnuts, and/or macadamia

The Glue

½ cup brown sugar
¼ cup maple syrup
2 Tbs honey
¼ cup molasses (unsulfured is better)
1 cup oil (I use olive)
1.5 tsp salt
2 Tbs cinnamon
1 Tbs ginger
1 Tbs vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 325 degrees F. Mix all the grain ingredients in an over-sized bowl.

Add all the glue ingredients to a sauce pot set on medium. If brown sugar is hardened, press down on chunks as the mixture heats. Stir occasionally. Allow mixture to foam once and immediately turn off heat. Stir. Entire process takes five minutes.

Pour glue into grain mixture and stir until thoroughly coated. Use wire rimmed baking pans or parchment paper on top of cookie sheets. Spread mixture on pan evenly. Place pans in center of oven.

Total Bake Time is 30 minutes. At 15 minute mark, swap places and turn around the pan for even baking. Let granola cool in pan or on paper.

12 servings. Granola will last a week (hah!) in plastic-ware on counter.

Lesson in Jewish Humor

There once was a powerful Japanese emperor who needed a new chief samurai. So he sent out a declaration throughout the entire known world that he was searching for a chief.

A year passed, and only three people applied for the very demanding position: a Japanese samurai, a Chinese samurai, and a Jewish samurai.

The emperor asked the Japanese samurai to come in and demonstrate why he should be the chief samurai. The Japanese samurai opened a matchbox, and out popped a bumblebee. Whoosh! went his sword. The bumblebee dropped dead, chopped in half. The emperor exclaimed, “That is very impressive! “The emperor then issued the same challenge to the Chinese samurai, to come in and demonstrate why he should be chosen. The Chinese samurai also opened a matchbox and out buzzed a fly. Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh! The fly dropped dead, chopped into four small pieces. The emperor exclaimed, “That is very impressive!” Now the emperor turned to the Jewish samurai, and asked him to demonstrate why he should be the chief samurai. The Jewish Samurai opened a matchbox, and out flew a gnat. His flashing sword went Whoosh! But the gnat was still alive and flying around.

The emperor, obviously disappointed, said, “Very ambitious, but why is that gnat not dead?” The Jewish Samurai just smiled and said, “Circumcision is not meant to kill.”

************************************

Point #1 – No other group, including the emperor, was denigrated in order to generate the humor. Historically, Jewish humor has been sensitive to the inferior position of Jews in a given culture and has striven to be uplifting rather than degrading of others. However, Jewish humor is often self-denigrating.

Point #2 – There is a wonderful ambiguity between taking the joke at its plain meaning or as an act of unbridled chutzpah. When in doubt, the holy grail (ahem) of the Jewish comedian is chutzpah. It is true Jewish mothers feed their children chutzpah in their breast milk.

Point #3 – There never was nor is such a thing as Jewish samurai, at least as of today.

How the USA Lost Its College Mojo

The government intervention in full-blown love affair between college degrees and the middle class (and lower classes) began in the aftermath of the Russian launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957. The G.I. Bill after World War II started the movement of greater accessibility to college but Sputnik launched a new era of education. Leadership in government, industry and academia were panicked that the Red Menace may have eclipsed the mighty, rising American Democracy. Coincidentally, universities and colleges across the United States were bursting with some of the best talent that the world had ever known at the time of the launch. Thirty-three thousand German Jewish scientists and artists, the epitome of European intellectualism, had been expelled from Nazi Germany in 1933 and they, along with their talented American students, were bringing American intellectual prowess to the fore on the world stage. Then Sputnik announced itself with a plaintive beeping from outer space.

There was a rush to prioritize American intellectual and technological innovation. The challenge for the leaders of that time was finding a methodology that harnessed the resources of the country to meet the needs of what they believed was a decades-long race into space. They discovered that were neither enough engineers or scientists in the specific bleeding-edge STEM fields nor enough classes for new students to learn these disciplines. Everyone agreed that expanded, elite education (and a tremendous amount of money to the military-industrial complex) was the necessary element to win the space race. They were thinking long-term, looking for promising students in public school and pushing them through the college process.

The United States reinvested in a part of the scientific process called Basic Research. They paid professors through their colleges to do basic research in university laboratories with their graduate students and promising undergraduates at their sides. Colleges built laboratories and hired more professors. The students from the public schools came, understanding that a secure financial future could be had with a college degree.

The plan worked. The United States put a man on the moon in 1969 and then several times more. No other country or corporation has been to the moon since.

When Ronald Reagan became president in 1980, he came with a certain set of ideas about the relationship between government and industry. During his tenure as governor of California, he had been a great supporter of the state college system but he did not follow the same pattern as President of the United States. As president, Reagan argued that the government was paying for basic research that benefited private industry but the government received nothing in return. Advanced research as done by industry was proprietary. Private industry would use the basic research as a foundation for their own specific, advanced research but they did not contribute to the basic research funding. President Reagan decided that industry could pay for their own basic research and cut funding to universities for research so deeply that private college undergraduate tuition jumped up as much as 33% between 1982 and 1984.

The cutting continued unabated through this year. Tuition has surpassed a boundary from affordable to unaffordable even in state schools. Tenure for professors is rapidly disappearing and adjuncts cannot make a living wage. Federal loan programs for college and graduate schools are predatory with alarming interest rates. Aberrant and predatory pro-profit post high school institutions have monetized education.

Over the weekend, the Department of Education announced a new program of debt forgiveness for victims of the for-profit Corinthian College. The expected tab is as high as $3.5 billion. All sides of the education debate can agree that this allocation is wasted taxpayer money as far as investing in workers and jobs for the next years. The money invested by students and the government in this for-profit corporation has disappeared into a black hole of high finance.

Would it or would it not have made sense to spend taxpayer money on basic research in universities that would have kept tuitions lower and the quality of education higher? Would it not have been better fiscal policy to pay professors and colleges to produce boring and laborious research while training students in those laboratories? Professors are not paid just to teach; they are paid to produce research and train the next generation in scientific theory and in practical application. Private industry and for-profit colleges are not engaging in nor plan to engage in such costly activity. The long term prospects for the country’s economic health have been endangered by short-term shareholder priorities.

Ronald Reagan was wrong. Thirty years later, college students are either dropping out because of the lack of funds or they are saddling themselves with unbearable debt. The emerging world economy demands a college degree or two just as states are ratcheting up education cuts. Reagan’s model of higher education is failing and the youngest generations are being sacrificed.

In the pragmatic realities of the world, the U.S. government was going to spend billions of dollars in higher education. The post-Sputnik model worked and generated the enormous benefits that we still enjoy in the science, technology and engineering sectors. We need to return to this older model, not as a matter of a political ideology, but as a matter of investing in American prosperity in the coming decades.

The Favorite Book 2

The evolution of the ebook is a heated discussion. While there is the convenience of traveling with an e-reader like the IPad or a Galaxy tablet, there is a visceral loss of paper and ink. Scribbling in the margins does not work on an e-reader but hauling a bunch of books around in a backpack or a messenger bag is a series of frustrations too.

Even more, reading an ebook is a subtly different set of mental processes than a print book, especially non-fiction. In a print book, I may tag a sentence with a pencil in the margin that stands out for retrieval or further review. Often I read a sentence of which I am unsure and I let it remain unmarked although I tag the page number or the page itself in my memory, waiting to see if the next pages prove or disprove the relevancy. This is the process of reading a book and its arguments closely. If the sentence proves relevant, I will flip back a page or two because I am haphazardly counting pages as I continue to follow the argument of the sentence or the paragraph.

I find that in an ebook, the pages look altogether much more similar – the page with the large paragraph followed by the two small paragraphs blends away. Further, I am less conscious of swiping pages compared to turning pages. I lose track. Short arguments work well on an ebook but long, involved arguments are easier to comprehend on printed pages. These minor differences frustrate my long-time developing methodology for studying. The fixes that others have suggested are time-consuming and loss of time defeats the purpose.

The paper-based thesaurus is superb at presenting a lot of information quickly and taking the reading to further information just as speedily. Most online thesauri stink and fail either criterion, a lot of information quickly or access to expanded but related information just as rapidly. I say “most” because I was recently sent to a website that is a holy grail of computing promises; namely, transforming a process done with paper and ink into a better process in digital format. The ebook format excels.

Check out graphwords.com. Plug in a few common words and watch the maps blossom across the screen. Please, though, don’t blame me for all the time you spend with this word engine.

The Favorite Book

When authors are interviewed, inevitably one of the questions will be a variation of “Who is your favorite author?” or “What is the title of your favorite book?” because curious readers want to know. If the interview is published in the New York Times Book Review, the reader can guess the typical answer before reading it, choosing from the top twenty required-reading authors from English 101 and 301 at university. Modest or immodest, the author wants to inform competing authors that they are well versed in the English canon of good literature. Choosing from the canon is an intelligent and forward-thinking decision; knowledge of the canon is a prerequisite for author-in-residence and other excellent appointments. For the rest of us, however, we are less than impressed.

My own choices for a favorite book, if someone were to ask, are based on a long examination of my reading history. There are favorites from my teenage years that stick with me as well as college and graduate years. Between my office study and my house, I count over a thousand titles of which a number were brought in by the rest of the family. These past decades have been full of great titles and exciting reads. None of them qualify as my favorite.

The only criterion for my favorite book is the continual sparking of the imagination. When I crack open the same book again and again, I want to see new possibilities, new understandings and relationships. I want to be reminded how much there is still to learn. My favorite book, my only favorite that meets this high standard, is Roget’s Thesaurus.

The deadline is looming and the pile of tasks is thick but if I open this text to find a word, I can be derailed from my work in an instant. I may be looking for another noun for “gambler” but look, they have a list of all of the gambling games and another list of dice points and rolls. How does one play chuck-a-luck? Unrelated but on the same page is “bare naked fact” and it is listed under the rubric Existence. Someone decided that facts are the foundation of existence. Uh Huh.

Yep, Roget’s Thesaurus. Buried in the pages of the text is the genesis of a million novels and the opening nouns of every piece of non-fiction. Advertising taglines and poetic metaphors are lurking on any given page. For those who dream of writing a book or just hope to turn in a paper for a decent grade, there is no other text that can offer as hope, example or proof.

Carry on. (see entries 328.8, 330.15 and 360.2)

Wine and Cheese – How To

Once in a while, a learned student will step back from his/her life and work to create an accessible lesson of what they have learned. Wine and cheese are wonderful treats but few of us have time or the ability to pair the two to enjoy the most out of both. Bon Apetit!

When you are done enjoying this visually rich chart on the pairing of cheese and wine, step back and consider how this teacher chose to present the subject. Most of us would have been content with a spreadsheet or even an how-to booklet. I count at least four or five chapters of a book in this chart yet in this case, the making of a book is unnecessary. How often to do we fail to recognize the genius of teaching subject matter?