Glenn Jacob

Philosophy of Learning – Practice Wisdom

לַעֲשׂוֹת – (to do, to make) learn by doing, practice wisdom

The imprecise world of Social Work science places a heavy emphasis on continuous reflection upon past experience. In their terminology this constant review with a supervisor of the past week’s sessions is called “practice wisdom” and it is a necessary component in the Social Work field. Every discipline and almost every job has practice wisdom, learning to do what cannot be taught in the classroom. Even the janitor learns how to wield a broom and mop to reach the tightest corners – this is practice wisdom too.

The peculiar nature of practice wisdom is that it is untestable. In the U.S.A. system of Social Work licensing, a social worker cannot advance to supervisor or higher without a Master’s Degree and a licensing test for the LCSW (Licensed Clinical Social Worker). For many states the LCSW is taken at a computer center and it is multiple choice. Professors warn their students to take the test as close to finishing the Master’s Degree as possible. The warning is because the test only covers what is taught in school and the candidate can be easily tripped up by practice wisdom that tends to deviate from classroom study. Imagine failing a test because you know too much rather than too little.

Practice Wisdom is often described as learning by doing. This is not the haphazard method of experimenting but the application of known knowledge to confirm its soundness and to continue forward. Practice wisdom is act, review, correct, and then act again.

Long time drivers use practice wisdom when they are focused on their driving. They anticipate probable behaviors of other vehicles and even identify potential problems ahead before they approach too close. A new driver is still far too aware of pedals on the floor, three mirrors, on-going and on-coming traffic, and turn signals to be able to see some of the involved traffic patterns. By definition bad drivers do not recognize traffic patterns or usual driver behaviors, learning nothing about their own defensive driving. A good driver is not about the number of hours behind the wheel but the number of hours in the driver’s seat focused on driving.

The difference between repetition and practice wisdom is the use of focus and formal review. In the famous or infamous text “How to Win Friends and Influence People”, one of the outstanding examples is of the wealthy businessman who stayed home on Saturday nights reviewing and identifying every mistake made during the last week as a painful but necessary ritual. Dale Carnegie was describing a man who used practice wisdom to attain success in his business.

No one likes to review their mistakes. None enjoy having another examine their work, looking for weaknesses and offering suggestions of different methods that lead to better outcomes. Criticism, even constructive criticism, is uncomfortable and yet practice wisdom is the commodity we use to gain promotion, attract better clients and write better. College degrees are a great foundation but practice wisdom is the method of advancement.

Philosophy of Learning – Practice

לִשְׁמֹר – (to keep, to guard, to observe) to practice or practice with repetition

Baseball or violin, the mantra a student hears from the first lesson is “practice, practice, practice.” What can be acquired by all of the other methods of learning is temporary unless the student practices the knowledge. Third graders memorize lists of vocabulary and take spelling tests while reciting their multiplication and division tables. Successful students of foreign languages learn from the get-go that the only way to conquer the material is to practice the vocabulary and the grammar every day. When studying for a quiz in a foreign language, students who study one hour the night before will do worse on the test than those who study ten minutes every day for six days before the quiz. The repetition of the material over time trains the mind, making a qualitative difference in the knowledge mastered and retained.

Most of us advance in our careers by expanding and deepening our skill sets. Writers have to write every day just as soldiers need to drill every day. Supervisors learn basic management skills and when they are mastered, these employees advance to the level of director. Practice is a long, laborious process that requires hundreds or thousands of hours. There are no shortcuts to becoming a master chef.

Some people are blessed with a tremendous amount of natural talent. However, all of that talent is only potential knowledge or art. The great talents of this world had to actualize their gifts with same rigor and drive as those with lesser gifts. Some claim that with great natural ability comes greater responsibility to fulfill the potential. The strongest can run faster but only if they rise to practice at that high level and maintain their regimen. The Julliard School is not for artistically talented students; the school is for talented students who match their potential with the drive and commitment to learn the depth of their gifts. The drive to practice or the lack of drive, often levels the playing field of potential success.

Practice is boring. When a student complains that school is boring (baring institutional dysfunction), the student is complaining that he or she does not want to learn by practicing. Fortitude is a necessary component of learning by practicing. Everyone whines about practicing, it is natural and healthy to acknowledge what is not fun. The successful ones still complain but then go back to work.

Knowledge does not come cheap nor do the valuable kernels come easily. Human knowledge is vast and fascinating but all of this understanding is inaccessible to any person who cannot sit down and practice.

Philosophy of Learning – Teaching

לְלַמֵּד – (to teach) teaching

For as large as a role teaching plays in the history, the present, and in the future of humanity, the word itself as few synonyms. One can instruct, educate and coach. Most of the other possibilities bring other ideas and concepts into the definition of teaching such as imbue, infuse, impress upon, implant and instill. Some hope to broaden a student’s horizons or open their minds or even beat some sense into them. With these diffusion of ideas of the nature of teaching, teaching is a method of learning is hard to assay. The regional colloquialism “I’m gonna learn that boy somethin’” conveys more self-righteous indignation and anger than love of learning. (For non-native American English readers, the deliberate misuse of teach/learn is a statement of emphasis.) To understand the method called teaching, one does not need all of these ornaments. Teaching, which in its core definition of transmitting knowledge to those who do not have the knowledge, is one of the most potent and enduring methods of learning.

As every instructor of teachers has warned me: “You may think you know but until you have to teach it, you really don’t know the material.” Preparing a lesson plan is not a simple task of jotting down a quick outline and rushing off to class. The facts and the points of argument have to be verified as correct and in context. Point by point have to be confirmed as flowing in a comprehensible order. Then the plan has to be evaluated for clarity, reasonableness, goals, and after all of this due diligence, the teacher has to ask if the plan has a good chance of succeeding.

To teach one has to learn the material again. This time the student has to focus closely, determine the hierarchy of information points and the strength of connection between the points. The teacher has to be ready to address such questions as “why are igneous rocks important?” and “when am I ever going to use quadratic equations in real life?” Who, what, when, why and how may be points that a journalist ticks off when writing an article but for the teacher, these questions define the totality of the lesson. As a mere student, one gets to ask the question, but as a teacher/student, one has to ask and answer these questions in a thorough and convincing manner.

The best of teachers have lesson plans that fail. A teacher looks into the faces of students and notes the look of profound boredom and the furrowed brow of incomprehension. There are skills of classroom management and behavior modification processes, but teaching is still an art. No one is born a teacher, every teacher has to practice. There is more than one way to teach a concept, a fact or a process and there is no easy way to determine the best method to teach that lesson.

Learning and teaching go hand in hand when one commits to passing down knowledge. The two methods of learning become a dance of informing, deflating, and confirming each other. For some there is no higher calling than teaching and in terrible contrast, teaching is one of the most denigrated and underpaid professions in the United States. Is it a wonder why the nation worries that our education system is failing?

Philosophy of Learning – Book Learning

Book learning, a term I often hear spoken with a whiff of condescension, is a necessary but incomplete method of gaining knowledge. The AP (Advanced Placement) exams lean most heavily on this method, the more that the students have read, the better they should be able to answer the expansive questions on the test. In the debates over education across the world, the arguments for those who demand extensive testing are concentrating on book learning and dispensing with most of the other forms for gaining knowledge. Anyone who has studied at a trade school, be it auto mechanic or medical school, has experienced the vast gulf of difference between reading about a subject and confronting the task in the field. From this corrosive and unproductive debate between the perceptions of the method versus its necessary but shared place amongst the other methods of learning, the definition and goals of book learning are distorted, all for the sake of winning an argument.

Book learning is not just reading books, which is a descriptor, not a definition. One can read a hundred books and learn nothing. How many Junior High students have been forced to read Shakespeare’s “Romeo & Juliet” and left the class the class with the context that young people fall in love and parents hate that they do? Learning to read a book is a process of development of identifying patterns and relations, of placing facts within frameworks and useful contexts.

There are different processes of development for fiction and for non-fiction. Reading a journal article for a science discipline is a different form of skills than reading a book on the same subject, even by the same author. Articles and books have different functions. In non-fiction these different processes give us the tools to follow arguments, evaluate the evidence, and form conclusions about the validity of the arguments or the experiments presented. Knowledge in non-fiction book learning is an acceptance that the facts fit the conclusion or a rejection of the same. This statement is true for every human endeavor that falls under non-fiction from abortion to zoology and it is the definition of scholarship.

Fiction is not a different set of learning processes but a different set of applications. A lot of mythology about the prowess and potency of understanding literature is offered up as definitions of knowledge through the study of fiction. Symbolism and insight, morals and consequences, are tools for telling a story that are elevated to a level of factual points of knowledge. Literacy is an oft repeated word that appears to have no concise meaning but is the agenda of testing or the rejection of testing. What is this form of knowledge called literacy?

The cynic labels literacy as brainwashing. Not a particularly helpful definition but at least it sets a boundary at one extreme. Masters in the field are applauded as erudite, extremely well-informed, a boundary at the other extreme. Between these boundaries are culture, discipline, information, history, empathy, logic and scholarship.

Book learning is only useful if first, it leads to more book learning and second, it informs other methods of learning. Like the great librarians before Google, book learning teaches us how to search for more book learning. The knowledge sought may be fiction or non-fiction, and facts or advice, and insight or theory. A good book learner will read a Wikipedia article with keen skepticism and leap with gusto into the sources cited at the bottom of the article. Book learning is not facts and figures although facts and figures are its tools. Ultimately, book learning is about learning how to teach oneself.

Philosophy of Learning 4 (active listening)

לִשְׁמֹֽעַ – (to hear) active listening

Active Listening is often reduced from a method of learning to a technique for success in business and diplomacy. Psychology textbooks teach active listening as a tool for diagnosing patients. More than one popular “success in business” text blithely offers this method as a skill. However, in the Eastern understanding of active listening, the Chinese character for the phenomenon captures the complexity that the West so often dismisses as mere technique or skill.

The symbol above is a sophisticated combination of characters. The senses of the eyes and the ears are both employed as the mind focuses and the heart analyses the conversation. The U.S. Department of State teaches this Chinese lesson explaining that to listen, the diplomat must use both ears, watch and maintain eye contact, give undivided attention and be empathic.

Ideally one is listening to a monologue more than participating in a back and forth. When I am conducting a eulogy interview, I ask an open ended question such as “Tell me about your loved one,” which is the colloquially correct way to ask, “Teach me about your loved one.” The words may issue forth in a monotone but the face and the body will often with emotion, whether it is a furrowed brow of pain or gesticulating arms of excitement.

Active listening is the opposite of asking questions to elicit answers. While psychologists may be correct that active listening is a technique for discovering the issue or the trauma, the method offers so much more to learn. When questions are asked, they are open ended ones or requests for clarification, or in my personal language, “Tell me more.”

This type of learning may also be the most ancient, the oral tradition of passing down knowledge. Unlike all the other forms of learning, this form is first and foremost aural. Learning is comprehending words spoken and words not spoken; silence has the power to teach in this method. The absence of words, the people, events, and issues not mentioned are powerful lessons.

The point about active listening is that it is not about you, the listener. Active listening is not a conversation after all; it is receiving, organizing and analyzing. When I start a discussion of a eulogy, I put away my pen and paper. I will write it down later in the car soon after I depart the house of mourning. The writing afterward is the analysis and synthesis of the teaching, in this case of learning the events, circumstances and essence of one person whose life is now complete. One gains the knowledge of relationships, of human success and folly, of history and philosophy.

This is knowledge that novelists attempt to capture in words and this is their most powerful method for capturing the emotional turmoil of their characters. They listen.

Philosophy of Learning 3 (common sense)

לְהַשְׂכִּיל –(to discern) common sense

The old tired cliché is common sense is neither common nor sense. Some go so far as to argue the entire idea of common sense is a fallacy. Definitions of common sense are as varied as the ideas of what common sense might encompass, which is the source of the confusion. One might easily argue that the rubric is a phenomenon that everyone can perceive but no one can comfortably define for everyone else to agree. As Justice Potter Stewart wrote in a Supreme Court decision, it is hard to define pornography, “but I know it when I see it.” (Jacobellis v. Ohio, 1964) We know common sense when we hear it, which is not only too ambiguous to be useful but also counter-productive. We are left without a definition; nonetheless, the rubric exists.

Common sense can be found in all sorts of human endeavors but no matter where common sense is identified or claimed, two elements must be present. First, there must be a convincing argument. The argument does not have to convince everyone but the argument must have accepted assumptions, a logical progression from point to point, and reasonableness. The first element must be well-structured argument whose conclusion cannot be challenged because one of the assumptions is false.

The second element is all other competing arguments must be disproved. For a common sense point to be valid, the presenter cannot just have the best argument. The presenter has to demonstrate conclusively that the other arguments fail to prove the point they are attempting to make, or unmake as the case may be. This second element is a much higher bar of proof than most other human endeavors.

If one of the two elements is not present, then one holds an opinion rather than a proof. Even if a presenter offers a persuasive argument with gifted tongue and keen insight to sway the most skeptical, unless the presenter meets the higher bar of disproving the other arguments, then all of the bombast is for naught. A good argument is not enough.

From the other side, if all that one can do is prove that the other arguments are inadequate but can offer nothing in their place, the presentation is also a failure. Disproving everyone else is an accomplishment but by itself, this type of argumentation fails. The absence of competition does not convey success because common sense is neither a race nor a battle of wits.

Common sense is rare because both elements together are difficult to create. Common sense is a type of truth, a rarity of human truth that is also universal. Most human truth is flawed because anything mortal is imperfect. Common sense is a high goal but as we can attest, this truth can be achieved.

Philosophy of Learning 2

לְהָבִין – (to understand) comprehend/analyze concepts or abstraction

The rubric of understanding, which is used in this case as a technical term, is one of the ideas in human history whose evolution can be demonstrated. The evolution begins with a concrete or literal understanding of the world and transforms over time, sometimes with revolutionary leaps and other times gradually, into abstract ideas.

Consider the human quest to understand math, which is worldwide. The path begins with addition/subtraction, which are inescapably concrete equations. The first documents unearthed in the Ancient Near East are tax collection documents – all addition until the king spends it. Humans quickly discover fractions, decimals, zero as a number, pi, algebra and onto calculus, the most abstract set of concepts of mathematics. The history of mathematics is not just the history of learning and discovering, advances in mathematics required the development of an idea of existence without a concrete substance to anchor it. Plato records this first great explication of abstraction as “The Theory of Forms,” one recognizes a chair, not because one sees it, but because of understands what “chair-ness” is and sees that form in that particular object.

In our own day and age, we are so far into the compelling world of concept and abstraction that we do not even recognize that the foundational assumptions we use every day are great leaps of comprehension. Sticking with math a moment more, the least of the book-learned of the world have no problem understanding this symbol: “3”. The symbol 3 represents three objects such as three x’s – xxx. Whether one is giving a foreign tourist a price at a store or one is standing at an ATM, when eyeing the 3 symbol, most recognize they are expecting 3 of that currency. Holding up three fingers for three euros is concrete, writing the number 3 on paper across the sales desk is abstract.

This evolution of thought can be applied to every human endeavor. The walls of the ancients Egyptian tombs are filled with art, yet all of the gods have distinct concrete depictions, no matter how fantastical, of a human body with the head of an animal, a falcon or a jackal perhaps. Compare that one of these figures to a Picasso where the human figures are presentations that have to be interpreted.

From simple counting to double-entry accounting, or from quill and ink to the ballpoint pen, these are examples of the evolution of understanding, not just the evolution of discovery and invention.

The ideal of being able to manipulate abstraction in one’s thoughts using memorized points and conscious focus is a goal of the common core curriculum. When entrepreneurs in the New Economy jobs are successful, their success is often attributed to this type of learning. STEM jobs are supposed to be this type of comprehension, although they are so much more.

From the other side of the coin, when people proclaim that they are stupid, what they often are referencing is a perceived failure to comprehend abstraction. “I just don’t get it” or “I hear what you are saying but I don’t understand.” The slang “get it” refers to the failure to formulate an abstract thought.

One’s ability to comprehend abstract ideas cannot be measured by tests unless the test is attuned to way a specific person learns. Humans learn and practice the art of abstraction using different methods. Some are visual learners (“I see what you mean”), some are aural learners (“I hear what you’re saying”), and some, particularly artists, are kinetic learners (Let me draw you a picture”). None of us are purely one type. Films combine all three types of learning and viewers pick up cues from all three sensory avenues to follow the story although not everyone will follow the film in the same manner or identify all of the cues.

Understanding is not simple; it is a universe of perceiving ideas and invoking imagination.

Philosophy of Learning 1

How do we learn? (or how did the Common Core curriculum, written by some smart people, miss the mark so widely?)

The Jewish world has a particular set of ideas of what is learning that are encapsulated in the morning service a Jew is supposed to recite every day. In our day where the methodologies of learning are changing with technology and global economy, this Jewish approach argues that the act of learning is still the same. Moreover, this particular approach to learning is more comprehensive and (one would hope) more effective than the methods being applied in public school curricula and often in college level curricula. For the non-Hebrew reading person, not knowing Jewish liturgy or Hebrew is not an obstacle for understanding the points this essay but my argument demands I reference the source text in the original:

וְתֵן בְּלִבֵּֽנוּ לְהָבִין וּלְהַשְׂכִּיל, לִשְׁמֹֽעַ, לִלְמֹד וּלְלַמֵּד, לִשְׁמֹר וְלַעֲשׂוֹת וּלְקַיֵּם אֶת כָּל דִּבְרֵי תַלְמוּד תּוֹרָתֶֽךָ בְּאַהֲבָה..

“. . .and You have placed in my heart the ability to understand and discern, to hear, to learn and to teach, to observe and to do, and to uphold all the words of learning of Your Torah with love.”

The Hebrew above is a phrase taken from the morning service. The blessing is Ahavah Rabba (“With Great Love” has God given us. . .) from the Shemah and Its Blessings קריאת שמע section. Buried in this ancient text is a philosophy of how we learn that is very different from the mainstream of Western Thought that begins with Socrates and his foundational ideas (e.g. the Socratic Method). Jewish learning enters into the Western Canon at various points in time and a student will recognize the methods. The uniqueness encapsulated in this blessing is the number and depth of the approaches.

Unusual in Jewish history, all of the earliest versions of this blessing all agree on this text. There are no variants (Ismar Elbogen “Jewish Liturgy”). The blessing is first mentioned in the Babylonian Talmud (Berachot 111b) although not all of its contents. Centuries later among the various written sources that stretch from Babylonia to the north coast of Africa through Spain and Europe continuing on to Russia, all extant prayer books or commentaries use the same wording for this sentence. Recognize that this exact wording remained intact over both thousands of kilometers and a thousand and a half years.

If from our most ancient available sources there is unanimous agreement, then it follows that this philosophy of learning was not only accepted but it was practiced. The opposite of controversial, this philosophy was concrete and confirmed through use. The Talmud has expansive examples of all sorts of methods of learning, including climbing a tree and hiding in the leaves to memorize Bible passages that the students were supposed to have already committed to memory (the art of procrastination). For quick access, the Talmud is unwieldy. The prayer book reduces a great deal of belief and learning that Talmud aggregated into an easily accessible daily repetition. This partial sentence on learning is one of those well done, concise reductions.

According to this blessing, learning and the love of learning is a gift from God. Rabbis are lifelong learners first and foremost; they are scholars. The ideal for them is “Let your house be a meeting place for the Sages, and sit amid the dust of their feet, and drink in their words with thirst.” (Pirke Avot 1.4 though the quote is earlier, 2^nd century BCE). In the rabbinic mind, if one receives a gift from God, then one is obligated to make the gift orderly and use it. This line in the blessing is the rabbinic presentation of the elements of learning.

There are eight methods of learning, which I will translate literally in parenthesis and contextually in modern parlance afterward:

לְהָבִין – (to understand) comprehend/analyze concepts or abstraction
לְהַשְׂכִּיל –(to discern) common sense
לִשְׁמֹֽעַ – (to hear) active listening
לִלְמֹד – (to learn) book learning
לְלַמֵּד – (to teach) teaching
לִשְׁמֹר – (to keep, to guard, to observe) to practice or practice with repetition
לַעֲשׂוֹת – (to do, to make) learn by doing, practice wisdom
לְקַיֵּם – (to uphold, establish, preserve) memorization and recollection.

To clarify any misunderstanding, these eight approaches are not types of knowledge. Knowledge (דעה) is an entire philosophy unto itself. These eight methods lead to knowledge.

In the next essay I will explain each of the eight methods as I develop this idea into an article. At first glance does this presentation make sense?

P.S.: I am so impressed that WordPress can publish a foreign alphabet.

Books, Erotica and Kindle (SFW)

Despite the fact that 4000 new books were published every day in 2013, 23% of the adult population of the United States did not crack open a book in 2013. The Pew Research Center published their findings with the ominous warning that the trend of non-readers is growing larger every year. Another, less reputable survey concluded that 89% of American adults did not read a book cover to cover in the calendar year surveyed. However, 31% of the adult population read eleven or more books in 2013 or at least started them. Someone is reading at least some of these new books.

UNESCO tracks the number of books published in the world by country. In 2014 2,200,000 books were published on the planet, about 6000 a day. Of that number 537,000 were published in the U.S., U.K, Australia and Canada, breaking down to 1475 books per day in these English speaking countries. Almost none of these books made significant sums of money.

Kindle Publishing, owned by Amazon, promotes the publication of books directly from the author to the reading public. The enticement for the writer is a greater share of the profits from each eBook download. An author can expect $2.80 for every book priced at $3.99. This pricing structure is a tremendous boon for an unknown author.

Until now.

Kindle is changing its payment program from dollars per download to a percentage of the dollars based on how much of the book the downloading reader of the book reads. Payment does not begin until the 10% mark. Once 10% of the book is read the author receives 10% of the total if the entire book is read. The author receives the full $2.80 (on a $3.99 book) only if the reader reads to the end of the text. Yes, Amazon tracks how many pages you read of every book you have downloaded from them. If you skip to the end of the book, cutting out chunks of the middle pages, there is an algorithm that identifies that behavior as well.

Big Brother knows what you are reading and just as important, what you are not reading. However, Amazon has opened up a vigorous platform with ever expanding room for new authors. Amazon is in the business of online retail, and Kindle and Kindle Publishing is a part of the business plan. The goal is to make money by attracting authors who will produce work that reading consumers want to purchase by download. Kindle Publishing offers a new avenue for aspiring authors to make money in the narrow and idiosyncratic (some say failing) publishing industry.

All is not functioning well on this new platform, which is to be expected. Within the broad-based and convoluted system of Kindle, there are ways to advance one’s personal priority over others with methods that have nothing to do with the quality of the writing. Another term for this sort of advancement is “gaming the system.”

This is a tail tale of sex or, more precisely, writing naughty stories. Results on the Kindle platform demonstrate the easiest way to encourage a download of an unknown book is to put forth a salacious cover. A significant population of readers are looking for the promise of an erotic story, a naughty fantasy often with particular kinks. The most prolific downloading readers of erotica on Amazon are women who enjoy fantasies of cowboys, firefighters, billionaires (e.g. 50 Shades of Grey) or werewolves followed by gay men who read everything that includes gay sex, including dinosaurs; extra points for this bestseller.

Many of these titles are hack writing – formulaic stories with poor grammar and whose length is no longer than thirty pages long. As a technical accomplishment, these books can be written in a day or two. There is no outside editing, the grammar is typically atrocious and clichéd terms such as “washboard abs” and “burning passion in his/her eyes” are the norm. There are online vendors that cater to these authors, producing the spicy book cover, which is a much better work of art than the writing, for as little as five dollars.

These writers game the Kindle system by producing tens of these books quickly, building a portfolio of fifty to a hundred titles. The last page of the book will be links to their other titles on Amazon. They further game the system by rotating pricing from free to $.99 to $2.99 and back. There is a market for these naughty books but the selection has slipped downward to the lowest common denominators allowed by the restrictions on pornography as defined by Amazon. (Amazon has clear boundaries on what is erotica and what is pornography in books.) This is the definition of hack writing, which has a long tradition in the United States from the “Dime store novels” to “pulp fiction.” Kindle is a new avenue for an old phenomenon.

Amazon wants to close these hackneyed avenues by putting in a new system that excises the profitability of these piss-poor lascivious fictions. The new remuneration system appears to favor book lengths of 300 pages or more as formatted for the eReader. As far as Amazon is concerned, there is nothing wrong with writing erotica but there is an issue with poorly written erotica.

Erotica is healthy and normative, even tales of billionaire werewolves engaging in tentacle sex with virginal lasses on their luxury spaceships as they attempt to penetrate the blockade around the mysteriously inhabited planet of a distant star system. If it gets adults who are not reading to pick up the book, it must be good, right? No human being is exploited in books unlike other forms of pornography such as photography and videos. Contrary to the Puritan view, a fantasy life is healthy, dynamic, and celebratory. A good story is also titillating if written well.

(Yes, tentacle sex is an appreciated and monetarily rewarded kink on Kindle Direct. I cannot make this up.)

A final thought, taking into account that reading dirty stories is usually a private endeavor. Reading books has typically been a solitary affair and reading erotica is typically more so. I do not want to know your kinks; I do not even want to know that you have kinks. Each should keep their private fantasies to themselves or at most, share them with their lover. With the issue of intimate privacy at the fore, is it or is not creepy that a major corporation is tracking your sexual proclivities? Eww.

P.S.: Those free naughty books – you get what you pay for, washboard abs and all.

Lessons From Granola #6

RE: The Other Ingredients and Dollars

Notes

Vanilla is very expensive when purchasing the small bottles at the grocery store, best price I found was $7 for 4oz (118 ml) at Korger or $5.50 for 2oz at Publix (59 ml). Vanilla is the most expensive ingredient of the recipe when purchasing in the grocery store. I use approximately one liter a year, which would be $59 at Kroger or $93 at Publix. In contrast, vanilla Beans cost $2.99 or $3.99 a bean at my usual spice store but I can also purchase them on Amazon, 5 beans for $8. A liter of inexpensive vodka cost $8. Add three beans to one liter of vodka and hide the bottle in a cabinet for 9 months. The product is full-fledged, delicious vanilla extract. Doing the math, I make vanilla for $17-20 a year.
Raw nuts and fruits, even dried beans and peas, are also difficult products to track for purity. The Ball Corporation has put out a product since the 1970’s called Fruit Fresh^© that is a preservative that retail consumers can purchase in powder form. Fruit Fresh is advertised as a product that keeps foods from turning brown. Food manufacturers and farm wholesalers have access to a liquid form and other competing products. MSG is an excellent preservative and adds flavor to factory farmed products that are often deficient in flavonoids. Sulfites are also common in these sprays. The big strawberries that are popular at this time are often sprayed with a product that gives flavor and sweetness to the fruit while increasing their shelf life. In my experience these chemicals do not wash off in water.

Molasses, boiled sugarcane, comes in two basic categories, blackstrap molasses and molasses. Each of the two categories will have two choices: sulphured and unsulphured. Blackstrap is more caramelized and tends towards bitter while regular molasses may be blended with other syrups. Sulphured is a manufactured product in which Sulphur Dioxide is added. Don’t breathe the stuff. The best bet is unsulphured Blackstrap, which is also recommended by the American Heart Association.
Do NOT purchase spices at the grocery store. Herbs and spices lose their taste within one year. Every item for purchase in this section of the grocery store is old and already devoid of full flavor. If there is not a spice store near your location, order online for a better product and almost always a better price. Amazon.com is not the best retailer for spices and herbs because they carry the same grocery store brands. Look here, here, or even here (larger quantities) for an idea of what you can stock in your house.

Bon Appetit!

I hope you have enjoyed this research project into a commonly considered healthy food. Please consider a few takeaways:

Reading labels is not enough. Each ingredient may deserve a label of its own contents. Caveat Emptor!
Pure is not necessarily better but purity establishes a baseline from which an informed consumer can make choices of what to eat.
Food manufacturers are sensitive to complaints. If enough consumers complain and force the comments into the media cycles, they will change formulations.
Food is not a zero-sum game, where the consumer must always trade off one priority to gain another.
When it comes to creating quality foods that are healthy, money is not the most significant barrier. Preparation time is the most consuming component.