Is your blood tired?

Well, it obviously worked for Betty White.



For everyone else though, Geritol's efficacy was a bit more questionable.

The Twentieth Century was one long barrage of paradigm shifts and nutrition was no exception. The very word 'vitamin' was new.



Advertisers jumped on the nutrient bandwagon in a big way. All sorts of products bragged about being vitamin-rich. When it came to television, the king of the nutrient hawking business was arguably Geritol, which sponsored a number of popular shows.

Geritol was introduced as an alcohol-based, iron and B vitamin tonic by Pharmaceuticals, Inc. in August 1950 and primarily marketed as such into the 1970s. Geritol was folded into Pharmaceuticals' 1957 acquisition of J. B. Williams Co., founded in 1885. J. B. Williams Co. was later bought out by Nabisco in 1971. The Geritol product name was formerly owned by the multinational pharmaceutical firm GlaxoSmithKline. Geritol was acquired by Meda Pharmaceutical in 2011. The earlier Geritol liquid formulation was advertised as "twice the iron in a pound of calf's liver," and daily doses contained about 50–100 milligrams of iron as ferric ammonium citrate. The Geritol tonic also contained about 12% alcohol and some B vitamins.

It was also one of the first vitamin and mineral supplements to get into serious trouble with the FTC.

Geritol was the subject of years of investigation starting in 1959 by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). In 1965, the FTC ordered the makers of Geritol to disclose that Geritol would relieve symptoms of tiredness only in persons who suffer from iron deficiency anemia, and that the vast majority of people who experience such symptoms do not have such a deficiency. Geritol's claims were discredited in court findings as "conduct amounted to gross negligence and bordered on recklessness," ruled as a false and misleading claim, and heavily penalized with fines totaling $812,000 ($4,313,826 as of 2015), the largest FTC fine up to that date (1973). Although subsequent trials and appeals from 1965 to 1973 concluded that some of the FTC demands exceeded its authority, Geritol was already well known and continued to be the largest U.S. company selling iron and B vitamin supplement through 1979.

That didn't stop it from becoming entrenched in popular culture

In the early days of television, the marketing of Geritol was involved in the quiz show scandal, as the sponsor of Twenty-One. For many years after that, Geritol was largely marketed on television programs that appealed primarily to older viewers, such as The Lawrence Welk Show, What's My Line?, Hee Haw, and Ted Mack's Original Amateur Hour. It was also one of the sponsors of the original Star Trek. Geritol was often used in the 1960s as a punch line for a joke in sitcoms or in comedy routines; comic singer Allan Sherman satirized Geritol on his 1962 album My Son, the Folk Singer, singing "Yasha got a bottle of Geritol" to the tune of "Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho"

Repost -- Doesn't Alton Brown have a hand puppet for this?

TUESDAY, MARCH 22, 2011
[slightly edited]

Andrew Gelman feels he may have the solution to the mystery of why Nathan Myhrvold (billionaire, physicist and former Microsoft CTO) became so fixated on solar cells acerbating global warming that he convinced the authors of Superfreakonomics to include an almost immediately discredited section on the subject.

Aha! Now, I'm just guessing here, but my conjecture is that after studying this albedo effect in the kitchen, Myhrvold was primed to see it everywhere. Of course, maybe it went the other way: he was thinking about solar panels first and then applied his ideas to the kitchen. But, given that the experts seem to think the albedo effect is a red herring (so to speak) regarding solar panels, I wouldn't be surprised if Myhrvold just started talking about reflectivity because it was on his mind from the cooking project. My own research ideas often leak from one project to another, so I wouldn't be surprised if this happens to others too.

Gelman was referring to Myhrvold's writings on modernist cuisine (or what the slightly less trendy call molecular gastronomy) and specifically to this passage, "As browning reactions begin, the darkening surface rapidly soaks up more and more of the heat rays. The increase in temperature accelerates dramatically."

This may explain why Myhrvold had albedo on his mind, but the comments to Gelman's post suggest another mystery: does the change in color actually have a dramatic effect the rate of browning or is the rate primarily driven by other changes such as water boiling away from the surface of the food*?

Is it possible that Myhrvold is, at heart, basically a freakonomist? Someone who, though brilliant and accomplished, is so eager to find examples of important principles that he sees them where they don't apply?



* From Wikipedia:

High temperature, intermediate moisture levels, and alkaline conditions all promote the Maillard reaction. In cooking, low moisture levels are necessary mainly because water boils into steam at 212 °F (100 °C), whereas the Maillard reaction happens noticeably around 310 °F (154 °C): significant browning of food does not occur until all surface water is vaporized.

"Your wartime duty! Don't waste water"

Seems appropriate given the drought thread.

Title: Your wartime duty! Don't waste water Do not use more water in the kitchen than is necessary / / Kerkam.
Creator(s): Kerkam, Earl, artist
Related Names:
   Federal Art Project , sponsor
Date Created/Published: [New York] : NYC WPA War Services, [between 1941 and 1943]
Medium: 1 print on board (poster) : silkscreen, color.
Summary: Poster for The New York City Department of Water Supply, Gas & Electricity for a campaign to conserve water, showing a woman cleaning a pan and preparing food.

Repost -- Getting a handle on the paradox of hunger in a country of abundant cheap food

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2013

Andrew Gelman has a good SNAP discussion going over at his blog. He also raises an interesting point about the implied statistical content of the previous posts on the subject. The following is a quick attempt (almost entirely dictated into my smartphone while walking to the bank) to make a few preliminary stabs at framing the problem:

We start with household diets. These are collections of individual diets. In some cases we can get economies of scale by combining these while in other cases it makes more sense for them to differ at certain points (for example, if one member is gluten intolerant or is on a low sodium diet). Just to standardize our terms, let's say that each days diet consist of four meals breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a snack. We measure the quality of each of these meals based on three metrics: nutrition, appeal, and how filling it is. Note, these metrics are not weighted symmetrically – a low score in any one of these areas is more bad than a high score is good. Therefore the first objective is to keep any of these metrics from falling below a satisfactory level. After that is achieved the secondary goal is to maximize these three.

Each meal consist of one or more dishes. Each dish consist of one or more ingredients. Everything interacts. One dish may go badly with another. A light dinner might be more acceptable after a heavy lunch.

These ingredients have to be purchased and prepared under various constraints. These include but are not limited to money, time and access.

The ingredients are bought at various stores. Each store is associated with certain time and transportation costs. For each ingredient, there are a wide range of factors that need to be considered before deciding a purchase. These include the quality of the dishes that can be prepared from these ingredients, the cost of the ingredients, how perishable these ingredients are, how easily they can be stored, and their versatility. To further complicate matters, these factors are sometimes dependent on what other ingredients are available, where they are being purchased and the quantities being bought. For example:

The quality, based on the previous listed metrics, of a dry breakfast cereal is dependent on the presence of milk;

The cost of a given item may be cheaper at one store but only if bought in large quantities;

If the constraint of only being able to shop at one store is added, shoppers may be forced to pay a premium price for being able to get all of the items needed for a given dish (99 cent store shoppers run into this problem frequently).

Now add to that the complexity that comes from the huge number of items that potentially may be included in our analysis and the wide range in personal situations.

Here are some examples of the latter:

An individual with a car in an urban area can probably select from a dozen or more stores and visit 2 to 4 of them in the space of an hour;

Outside of a few areas will served by public transportation, an individual in that same area without a car might only have a choice of three or four stores and might require a full 90 minutes to visit just one;

An ambulatory person in good health might be able to shop a 2 mile radius on foot;

The radius for a senior using a walker might be three blocks;

A working parent might find him or herself so time constrained that any shopping trip that takes more than an hour represents a severe sacrifice.

Finally add to that the need to put every meal on the table every day despite the fact that food consumption can be difficult to predict.

Just to be clear, we are talking about big effects here with substantial policy implications. Inappropriate or overly simplistic analyses can easily lead to disastrously wrong conclusions, but I'm not really the person to say what the appropriate approaches are. Maybe there's an epidemiologist in the audience with a suggestion or two...

Flowchart

"Wartime Nutrition"

Wartime Nutrition
by U.S. Office of War Information, Bureau of Motion Pictures

Published 1943

Fascinating as a historical document, but also of special interest here because the war was such a turning point in the way we think about food and nutrition.

Repost -- Eating reasonably healthy at the 99 Cents Only Store

Previously posted at West Coast Stat Views.


I'm about to start another thread on how clueless most journalists are about living on a tight budget, so to do some research and because I was out of tamarind bars...

(mainly because of the tamarind bars), I dropped by the 99 Cent Only Store.

Much if not most of the food you'll find here is junk or junk adjacent, but there are healthy options. You can prepare some tasty, nutritious, filling and very cheap meals if:

You have access to one of these stores (preferably with a car so you don't have to haul groceries on a bus);

You're flexible about your menu (inventories are driven by odd lots and approaching expiration dates so you don't know what you'll find);

You have time to shop and to cook;

You have the facilities to cook and store lots of food;

You like beans.

And potatoes (rice works too)
,

Hot sauce is your friend.

It's not obvious from the picture but this is a pretty big can.

I don't want to oversell the virtues of these stores or understate the challenges of maintaining a healthy diet near the poverty line, but too many of the people driving the hunger debate are coming from a Whole Foods sensibility and they inevitably screw up the discussion no matter how good their intentions may be.

"About Bananas" -- a huge disappointment if you were expecting Abbott and Costello

For those of you unfamiliar with Castle Films, writer and pop culture historian Mark Evanier has a great post on the subject.

Castle Films was founded in 1924 by a man named Eugene Castle. This was before 8mm. Castle distributed 16mm movies — mostly newsreels and sports highlights — sold almost exclusively via mail order and in photography shops. There was also a successful business selling prints to film rental companies that would rent them out for non-theatrical exhibition…say, at a school or club function.
...
His timing was great. Soon after, another company stole the rights to the "soundies" away and Castle Films lost its most important item. To fill the void, the new owners made a deal with Universal Studios to release scenes from some of their movie musicals on 16mm and this led to them also putting out excerpts from other Universal movies, most notably Abbott and Costello films, monster movies and the Walter Lantz cartoons (like Woody Woodpecker and Andy Panda) that Universal distributed. They continued to also market newsreels and travelogues and also began releasing films in the 8mm format that was becoming increasingly popular for home movies.

There was a certain artistry in the editing. Most Castle Films came in two versions…a 50-foot reel (3-4 minutes) and a 200-foot reel (12-16). Someone had to take an 85-minute movie and edit the abridged versions, preferably selecting action with a minimum of dialogue. The technology of motion picture production marched in reverse as they made silent films out of talkies, adding in title cards where necessary. The editors for Castle were pretty good about keeping them to a minimum.

You should definitely check out the whole thing, even though he completely omits "About Bananas."

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Chickens

This one hits close to home, literally. I grew up in Western Arkansas, Tyson country, though I had no idea it had gotten this bad...




You probably already know that Oliver's show has become arguably the best weekly investigative journalism on TV, though it is a bit depressing to think that these days it seems that only satirists are doing real reporting.

Americana + Numerology = Bit-O-Honey

Bit-O-Honey was introduced in 1924. These ads are from the Post-War Forties. I have no idea when they got into the new age stuff.

Food Stamps [a repost from Joseph]

THURSDAY, MARCH 8, 2012


I was reading this piece by Ed Glaeser (the danger of following links posted at Noahpinion) and came across this rather interesting sentance:

The childhood obesity problem should also make us wonder whether food stamps are really good for kids.

My question is rather simple: how do we know that these two factors are causally related?  Chuldhood obesity is a complicated problem, but one possible driver is low quality food (such as potato chips) that is cheap, easily stored and (per calorie) relatively inexpensive.  Is it not plausible that reducing food budgets could increase obesity by focusing food intake even more on these foods?

I worry when we attribute a complex phenomonon (seen at all sorts of socio-economic levels) with a single government program.  I am not saying that this statement is incorrect (and it is phrased as speculative), but it seems like too important of a proposition to be confinded to a single sentance.  In particular, I would be interested in the counter-factuals:

1. Food Stamps
2. Cash Transfers
3. No Assistence

And a comparison of childhood outcomes (obesity but also starvation) under these three different scenarios. Or am I missing the relevant research and we already know the answer?

Culinary Luddism

Historian Rachel Laudan has a long and detailed take-down of conventional foodie wisdom.

As an historian I cannot accept the account of the past implied by Culinary Luddism, a past sharply divided between good and bad, between the sunny rural days of yore and the gray industrial present. My enthusiasm for Luddite kitchen wisdom does not carry over to their history, any more than my response to a stirring political speech inclines me to accept the orator as scholar.

The Luddites’ fable of disaster, of a fall from grace, smacks more of wishful thinking than of digging through archives. It gains credence not from scholarship but from evocative dichotomies: fresh and natural versus processed and preserved; local versus global; slow versus fast: artisanal and traditional versus urban and industrial; healthful versus contaminated and fatty. History shows, I believe, that the Luddites have things back to front.

Repost -- California Drought -- Bad Grandfather

[Originally appeared in the sister blog, West Coast Stat Views]

"Whiskey's for drinking. Water's for fightin' over."
            Someone who probably wasn't Mark Twain

I remember my surprise the first time I saw rice growing in the Central Valley. It didn't seem like a very profitable crop to grow in the desert. It wasn't until later that I learned about certain externalities that came into play.

SAN FRANCISCO -- California's drought-ravaged reservoirs are running so low that state water deliveries to metropolitan areas have all but stopped, and cutbacks are forcing growers to fallow fields. But 19th century laws allow almost 4,000 companies, farms and others to use an unmonitored amount of water for free -- and, in some cases, sell what they don't need.

With grandfathered legal rights, this group, dominated by big corporations and agricultural concerns, reports using trillions of gallons of water each year, according to a review by The Associated Press. Together, they have more than half of all claims on waterways in California.

However, the state doesn't know if any are overdrawing or wasting water. The AP found the state's system is based on self-reported, incomplete records riddled with errors and years out of date.

"We really don't know how much water they've actually diverted," said Bob Rinker, a manager in the State Water Resources Control Board's water rights division.

With a burgeoning population and projections of heightened climate-related impacts on snowpack and other water supplies, the antiquated system blunts California's ability to move water where it's most needed.

When gold miners flocked to the West in the 1800s, the state drafted laws that rewarded those who first staked claims on the region's abundant rivers and streams. Today, California still relies on that honor system.

The system's inequities are particularly evident in the arid Central Valley.

Near Yuba City, second-generation rice farmer Al Montna has been forced to idle 1,800 acres because of scarce water. About 35 miles north, however, fourth-generation Butte County rice farmer Josh Sheppard had more than enough water, thanks to superior rights to Feather River water dating to the late 1800s.

"No one thinks of it when there's ample water and plenty to go around, but in these times of tightness it is a very contentious resource that gets fought over," Sheppard said, standing next to his flooded fields.

I hope to get back to this soon. In the meantime, here's some data from the AP and a related article from the Washington Post.

Black bean soup "recipe"

[I should have mentioned this before, but if we're sticking with Trader Joe's prices, I might need to borrow a bit from the onion budget to cover the potatoes (which tend to be overpriced at TJ's). The onion (and most other things) was rounded up to the nearest fifty cents; the potatoes werre rounded down.]

When you read accounts of a journalist or blogger or celebrity trying to take the food stamp challenge, it almost always becomes obvious that they have no idea how to cook on a budget. I don't claim any special knowledge in this area, but I do know the basics and I thought it might be useful to blog a few dishes that are appealing and nutritious but which can be made for very little money.

I put quotes around the word "recipe," because what follows is to a true recipe roughly what a treatment is to a screenplay, a broad outline with lots of room for changes. That said, it does have enough in the way of instructions for you to try it at home.

I'm going to assume good but not great prices for the following ingredients (no 10 pounds for a dollar potatoes). I am also going to use canned rather than dried beans on the assumption that canned beans are available at more outlets. As a result, the price estimate here will definitely be middle of the road. If necessary, we could do this quite a bit cheaper.

Here is the basic version:

1 to 2 pounds of potatoes cubed

A quarter to a half of an onion chopped

Three or four cans of black or black and red beans

One 28 ounce can of tomatoes

A half pound of carrots

Lots of hot sauce

5 to 7 drumsticks


After draining the beans, mix everything except the chicken together in a 6 quart slow cooker (and yes I do have a 6 quart slow cooker). Add liquid, place the drumsticks on top, cover and cook for 5 or 6 hours. (This is a very forgiving recipe)

I said the basic version because there are any number of potential variants. Most of this comes down to targets of opportunity. You make your decisions based on what's on sale, what's available, and what's in danger of going bad.

You might leave out the potatoes and serve the soup over rice (probably cheaper this way, though rice can be a hassle to cook), or you might rinse out the remnants of a nearly empty catsup bottle for your liquid, or use leftover spaghetti sauce instead of the canned tomatoes. (If you get a good deal on Ro-Tel tomatoes, you can leave out damned near everything but the beans.)

Let's talk servings and price.

This part of the calculation can be rather tricky. Different people not only have different eating habits, they also react differently to different foods. That said, six quarts is a lot of food and this food is particularly filling . I don't think you would have any trouble getting six or more large meals out of this even if you remove the chicken.

And exactly why would you take the chicken out? Or, put another way, why did you put the chicken in to begin with? Mainly for flavor. These soups benefit greatly from some kind of meat or broth. The juices from the chicken balances out the soup, but the result is hearty enough that it doesn't actually need the meat to make a meal. If we're concerned about preventing hunger, we'll probably be better off setting the chicken aside and using it as the meat coarse for another meal.

This batch ought to be good for five to eight one-pot meals. Approximately how much does this come to per serving? Using roughly Trader Joe's prices we get:

Potatoes                              $0.50

Onion                                  $0.50

Beans                                  $3.00

Tomatoes & seasonings     $2.00

Carrots                               $0.50
                                           $6.50

With chicken                   +$3.00

                                           $9.50

This is not a lowball estimate. Shopping around could easily knock one, maybe two dollars off, but I don't want to go too far down the ideal conditions road. The point here is to be representative. Even under less than optimal conditions (and TJ's is definitely less than optimal), it is possible to make a reasonably filling and tasty meal with limited prep time for about a buck fifty.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying that it's easy to live on an incredibly restrictive budget -- it is just the opposite, unrelentingly difficult and stressful -- but if we want to address poverty, we need to start with an understanding of how poor people actually cope..

"Researchers find food assistance program is linked with better mental health"

From Kim Krisberg:

In a study published in the June issue of the American Journal of Public Health, researchers set out to examine whether participating in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly referred to as food stamps, was associated with better overall well-being and specifically, lower rates of psychological distress. In analyzing data from the SNAP Food Security survey, the largest longitudinal survey of SNAP beneficiaries to date, they found participating in the food assistance program did indeed decrease levels of psychological distress. Study authors Vanessa Oddo and James Mabli write:

Although research is limited, participation in food assistance programs may be particularly effective in modifying the relationship between food insecurity and mental illness. Certain nutrients, overall diet quality, and patterns of dietary intake may be important in reducing the prevalence of adverse mental health outcomes. By reducing households’ exposure to food insufficiency, federal nutrition programs, such as SNAP, may improve well-being by reducing the public health burden of mental illness among vulnerable populations.

In particular, the study found that psychological distress was less common among heads of households who had participated in SNAP for at least six months than among those who had just enrolled in the program — the percentages were 15.3 percent versus just more than 23 percent. Overall, the findings suggest that SNAP is associated with a 38 percent reduction in psychological distress among participating households.

In addition to improving food security, the researchers wrote that SNAP likely alleviates psychological distress by allowing beneficiaries to direct their limited incomes on basic needs outside of food, such as housing, utilities and health care. In other words, SNAP can help lessen a family’s financial strain and often provides a vital stepping stone for families struggling to get by in the current economy. The authors noted that their findings align with previous research on food assistance programs and improved mental health among adults.

“In light of the sizable variation in the monthly allotment of SNAP benefits across households, future studies should explore the role of benefit size on improving the well-being of program participants,” the study authors wrote. “In addition, a better understanding of the most effective pathways through which SNAP affects mental health and thus well-being in subpopulations of interest, including households with children or elderly persons, is warranted to inform future policy and intervention strategies.”

"The Breakfast of Champions"

Wheaties has been using sports-based marketing for a long time:

Wheaties began its association with sports in 1927, through advertising on the southern wall of minor league baseball's Nicollet Park in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In the contract, Wheaties sponsored the radio broadcasts of the minor league baseball team, Minneapolis Millers, on radio station WCCO and Wheaties was provided with a large billboard in the park to use to introduce new slogans. The first such slogan on the new signboard was penned by Knox Reeves, of a Minneapolis advertising agency. When asked what should be placed on the sign for Wheaties, Reeves sketched a Wheaties box on a pad of paper, thought for a moment, and wrote "Wheaties-The Breakfast of Champions".

Throughout the 1930s, Wheaties increased in popularity with its sponsorship of baseball broadcasting, and by the end of the decade, nearly a hundred radio stations carried Wheaties sponsored events. During these events, athlete testimonials about Wheaties were used to demonstrate that Wheaties was indeed the breakfast of champions. Also in the early 1930s, athletes began to be depicted on the packaging of Wheaties, and the tradition is continued today.

The heyday of Wheaties came in the 1930s and early 1940s, as testimonials peaked from nearly every sport imaginable. Among the many testimonials included were: baseball stars, managers, and trainers; broadcasters; football stars and coaches; circus stars and rodeo; livestock breeders; a railroad engineer; horsemen and jockeys; a big-game hunter; automobile racers; an aviator; a speedboat driver; an explorer; and parachutists.

Wheaties maintained brand recognition through its definitive association with sports, and its distinctive orange boxes. It became so popular that in the 1939 All-Star Game, 46 of the 51 players endorsed the cereal. In the months following, Wheaties became one of the sponsors of the very first televised sports broadcast to allow commercials. On August 29, 1939, NBC television presented the first major league baseball game ever televised between the Cincinnati Reds and the Brooklyn Dodgers to approximately 500 television set owners in New York City over experimental station W2XBS (now WNBC). Red Barber was the play-by-play broadcaster. Although full commercial television would not be authorized until July 1, 1941, the FCC allowed commercials to be inserted in this particular, special event broadcast as a test. Barber had to ad-lib three live commercials, one for each Dodger sponsor. For Procter & Gamble, he held up a bar of Ivory Soap. For Socony, Barber put on a Mobil gas station cap and raised a can of oil. For General Mills, he poured Wheaties into a bowl, added milk and sugar on top (some reports say he also sliced a banana), then proclaimed "Now that's the breakfast of champions." "There was not a cue card in sight," Barber said.

A measure of the product's familiarity is the reference in the 1941 baseball song Joltin' Joe DiMaggio, performed by Les Brown and his orchestra during DiMaggio's record hitting streak. In the song, Joe D. gets a clutch base hit, and the band awards him "a case of Wheaties".

Repost -- Saturday Afternoon in LA

SUNDAY, JULY 22, 2012

I'm typing this sitting under the umbrellas at Irv's Burgers, a Fifties era hamburger stand in West Hollywood. It's a notoriously friendly neighborhood place and it reminds me of something that first struck me when I moved to LA from Atlanta: for all its trendiness, LA has a distinctly old fashioned attitude toward dining. In most of the country, if you drive down the street looking for a quick bite to eat, you will see the same places serving the same food.

It's true that national chains are eating away at local dining, but the independents and local chains like Tommy's and Zankou's still dominate much of the town. Part of the reason is certainly the loyalty these spots inspire. Pulitzer Prize winning food writer Jonathan Gold once refused to say whether he preferred Apple Pan or Pie N' Burger because he didn't want to deal with the letters from the patrons of the spot he didn't pick.

I was having a cheeseburger at Apple Pan last week and I got into a conversation with the man sitting next to me. He had been coming there weekly for over fifty years, only slightly longer than the counterman had been there.

There are plenty of regulars here at Irv's, walking in and picking up old conversations through the pick-up window with the family that owns the place. There's a comfortable, small town vibe here that you can find in most of LA.  That's not something most of the world associates with LA, but the locals know. 

First assume a fairy godmother... [repost]

From FRIDAY, JULY 19, 2013

This is one of those stories illustrates just how bad journalists have gotten at covering life in the bottom quartile. Here, from Marketplace, is the set-up:

The fast food chain teamed up with Visa to create an online budget guide for its employees. And most of the criticism is directed at the fact that the company's budget doesn't list 'food' or 'heat' as monthly budget items. 

...

"Helping you succeed financially is one of the many ways McDonald's is creating a satisfying and rewarding work environment," the McDonald's site's about page states. "So you can take the next step towards financial freedom." 

To do that, the guide suggests journaling daily expenses, setting up a budget and outling a savings goal. Sound reasonable? 

One problem: the sample budget offered by McDonald's (below) doesn't mention money for basic necessities like food, heat, gas and clothing. 

The budget also assumes a worker will need to maintain two jobs in order to make roughly $24,500 a year.

Here's the actual document:

A heated debate has broken out over whether it's possible to live on $24,500 a year. This is not a question that would perplex a group pulled at random from the general populace. People do it all the time. I've done it myself (and yes, I'm adjusting for inflation). I even have a musician friend in New York City who's doing it now.

You eat lots of beans and potatoes. You get a prepaid phone. You buy a set of rabbit ears (which, as mentioned before, would actually give you more channels and better picture than the basic cable the WP article suggests). You live day-to-day. You constantly worry about money. You're one one bad break away from disaster but with exception of the health insurance and heating items, nothing in expenses, including rent, is that unreasonable.

There is, in fact, only one completely unrealistic item here:

Second job: $955

Angry Bear, which does get it, explains just how much work we're talking about.

Besides skipping certain expenses and skimping on others; to meet the income levels portrayed in the budget, McDonalds suggests associates to work not one but two jobs. A full time job at McDonalds and a part time job elsewhere totally 62 hours per week (if the worker resides in Illinois where the minimum wage is $8.25/hour). If perchance, the worker resides in one of the other 48 states; the total hours needed to hit the suggested income level jumps to 74 hours/week due to a lower minimum wage (the equivalent of a second full time job). 

And Marketplace explains how unlikely that 74 is:

At the same time, there’s been a sharp drop in the number of people who are holding down multiple jobs, and most of those are likely to be part-time, since there are only so many hours in a day. The number of multiple job-holders is down by more than 500,000 since 2007.  So, there are more people in part-time jobs, but fewer people able to cobble together two or more of those jobs to make ends meet.
...
This trend to more part-time work could be permanent. Employers like the flexibility, and the low cost. Benefits in many part-time jobs -- health care, retirement -- are slim to none.

But there’s a complication. For job-seekers, it’s now harder to find and keep multiple part-time jobs. “Among low-wage employers -- retail, hospitality, food service -- employers are requiring their employees to say they’re available for a full-time schedule, even when they know they’re never going to schedule them for full-time,” says Stephanie Luce at the City University of New York’s Murphy Institute.

Luce is a labor sociologist who studies union movements around the world. She co-authored, with the Retail Action Network, a study based on surveys of retail workers in New York, Discounted Jobs: How Retailers Sell Workers Short. “Managers are asked to schedule based on customer-flow, on weather, on trends in the economy, and to change the schedule day-to-day,” says Luce. “They don’t want employees that are going to say ‘I can’t come in, I have another job.’ They want employees that’ll say, ‘OK, I’ll come in if you need me. I won’t come in if you don’t need me.’”  

"Troubling new research says global warming will cut wheat yields"

In a sane world, this would be big news.

“Wheat is one of the main staple crops in the world and provides 20% of daily protein and calories,” notes the Wheat Initiative, a project launched by G20 agricultural ministers. “With a world population of 9 billion in 2050, wheat demand is expected to increase by 60%. To meet the demand, annual wheat yield increases must grow from the current level of below 1% to at least 1.6%.”

That’s why the punchline of a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is pretty troubling. A warming climate, it suggests, could drive wheat yields in the opposite direction – down — in the United States and, possibly, elsewhere.

Frankenberry, Count Chocula and the late Forry Ackerman

Frankenberry and Count Chocula were arguably the last of the wave of cartoon and sugar based kids' cereals that started showing up in the sixties (Lucky Charms, Froot Loops and, of course Cap'n Crunch).  By this point, the Madison Avenue types pretty much had the process down, as Nick Martin explains:

“Why would a rabbit be qualified to sell the cereal? Or a tiger? We were just looking for a funny character,” said Laura Levine, the creator of Count Chocula and Frankenberry. During the late sixties, Levine worked in advertising at Dancer Fitzgerald Sample (a major ad firm — much like Sterling Cooper on Mad Men). Levine explained Count Chocula’s inauspicious beginnings, “General Mills invented two new cereals — one chocolate, the other strawberry, both with marshmallow bits — and they needed characters to embody them.”

Levine was responsible for creating these characters. She wrote an entire (single-spaced) page of prospective cartoon duos; Chocula and Frankenberry were just one option. Unfortunately, that list is lost, likely somewhere in Levine’s garage. In fact, Levine explained, she wasn’t even the person to narrow the list down: “If anyone should get credit, it should be Tony Jaffe.”

Tony Jaffe is an old school ad man, much like Don Draper (“I didn’t drink, only smoked,” Jaffe said). Jaffe understood that, “Monsters were very popular at the time. Maybe it was Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, or they were just on TV a lot. Frankenstein and Dracula are classics. Kids are always fascinated with monsters and dinosaurs and stuff like that.”

Dracula was over 70 years old by 1971; Frankenstein was over 150! Both characters were entrenched into the western collective consciousness. Levine echoed this idea: “I thought we could have fun with monsters. Voices that were known in the psyche — people knew what Bela Legosi sounded like.”

Jaffe’s job was managing million dollar ad accounts and keeping clients happy. He created the Trix Rabbit, the Cheerios Sugar Bear and other cereal cartoon mascots: he’s a man who understands what makes little kids buy cereal. “At the time, kids cereal had no restrictions — you could basically do whatever you want. It became nutritious because you put milk on them,” Jaffe said.

“You tried to match the character to the cereal or vice versa,” Jaffe said. “Kids can remember all of this stuff. They keep it straight in their heads better than adults.” The commercials establish a form that’s easy to replicate.

“…And the formula lets kids remember the critters better,” Jaffe said. “For Trix, the rabbit gets into a disguise; the kids reveal the rabbit in some creative way and discover he’s a rabbit. There’s a pattern to the sales in the cereal.” In other words: the rabbit never got any cereal because if he did, you wouldn’t have remembered the Trix slogan.

Remind me to use the "It became nutritious because you put milk on them” quote again.

One the subject of Frankenberry and Count Chocula, Mark Evanier has a great anecdote:

Back in the sixties, the members of our illustrious Comic Book Club were occasional visitors to the "Ackermansion," which was the home of Forrest J Ackerman, editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine and all-around science-fiction fan/agent/guru. Mr. Ackerman was very nice to us and he welcomed our club, as he welcomed so many, into a dwelling festooned with memorabilia and collectables from the history of s-f and monster movies. Everywhere you looked, there were pictures of Chaney, pictures of Lugosi, etc. The Vatican probably displays fewer images of Christ Almighty than Mr. Ackerman had around of Boris Karloff. (This was not, by the way, the Ackermansion in Los Feliz, which many folks reading this perhaps visited. I went there too but this was the previous Ackermansion, the one on Sherbourne just adjacent to Beverly Hills.)

We were all fond of Forry (as he asked us to call him) to some extent but found him and his home a little creepy, perhaps by design. We were kids and he was an adult with an actual job…but we didn't take our fannish obsessions to quite that level. And we joked about Forry…not to his face, of course, but we'd say things like, "Hey, did you hear? Forry Ackerman went to see Richard Burton in Hamlet and he walked out on it because there were no monsters in it!" One of our club members did a very funny impression of Forry touring the Louvre and asking everyone, "But why aren't there any pictures of monsters?"

So one morning around 11 AM, we're going over to Forry's to talk to him about something and as we're walking towards the front door, I say to my friends, "He's probably sitting in his kitchen eating Count Chocula and saying, 'This is great stuff! At last, they finally made a monster cereal!'" My friends and I all howled at this, then Ackerman's assistant answered the door and let us in. He steered us towards the kitchen and we walked in there —

— and there was Ackerman sitting at the breakfast table, eating a big bowl of Frankenberry with the box next to him. He looked up at us and said, "This is delicious! I'm so glad they finally made a monster cereal!"

Well, we just laughed for about the next hour.

Repost -- Heroic bureaucrats and annoying foodies -- one reason so many reforms fail

MONDAY, DECEMBER 15, 2014

As promised, here are some more thoughts on West Virginia's promising initiative to improve school lunch programs.

From a transcript of the interview with writer Jane Black:

People in Huntington across the board were very interested and concerned about what he was doing. But the place that the show focused probably the most was in the schools. There he went in and was shocked and horrified that they were eating breakfast pizza and what he called luminescent strawberry milk. He tried to get them to start cooking from scratch. He said it didn't really matter that the food met the guidelines of the USDA as far as nutrients were concerned, but it wasn't fresh.

Of course what people saw on TV were the school lunch ladies being furious about this and feeling like he was stepping on their toes. They also saw the kids taking those lunches, which are paid for by taxpayer dollars, and dumping them in the trash.

What happened in the aftermath was really interesting. After he left, they were audited by the USDA, who came in and said, "These meals may be fresh, but they don't meet our requirements for nutrients." The head of school food, Rhonda McCoy, basically could have gone back to the way she'd always been doing everything. Even though on the show she came across as this cold, aloof bureaucrat, clearly the message had gotten through.

What she did over the next summer was redevelop the recipes, change the flavors a little bit. For example, she took some of the garlic out of his garlicky greens so that the kids liked them better. Within a year they were basically cooking all their meals from scratch.

I went down there. In this kitchen that any New York restaurant would be happy to have, there were 10 cooks making chicken, rolling it in a spice blend, baking it in the oven, taking potatoes, cutting them up, putting them in olive oil and roasting them in the oven. The meal that I ate there included a salad that had lettuce from a student farmer. It was incredible.

What's even more amazing is that since then, Cabell County, the county that Huntington is in, has trained I think 52 of 55 West Virginia counties to do the same. I would say West Virginia, which is not known as a very progressive state, probably has one of the best school lunch programs in the country.

If you follow reform movements, you see this all the time (particularly in education). Outsiders come in with lots of valid criticisms and some good ideas, but they also come in with unacknowledged personal preferences and cultural biases amplified by a subjective viewpoint and a dangerous lack of humility.

Jamie Oliver had some useful things to say about a tremendously important topic, but his initiative was a failure. His creations were, in many ways, less nutritious than the "unhealthy" meals they were supposed to replace. They didn't meet federal guidelines, making the whole enterprise a non-starter. Oliver brought the sensibility of a celebrity chef from a Michelin-starred London restaurant (specializing in Italian cuisine which might explain the level of garlic). He didn't think through the problems of dealing with kids or the other constraints school officials work under.

The difference between success and failure was Rhonda McCoy. We normally think of bureaucrats like McCoy as being, if not out-and-out villains, then at least being part of the problem, but it was McCoy who understood both the kids' tastes and the constraints of the program and who took this dead-in-the-water proposal and made it work. McCoy managed to take the best parts of Oliver's ideas and make meals that were both appealing to the students and manageable from a standpoint of budget, logistics and federal standards.

The press loves stories of the heroic outsider who shows up and fixes everything in a few easy steps. It's a plus if the outsider is a celebrity but an economist is almost as good (for some reason, this is one discipline that is always granted instant expert status). One of the main problems with these stories is that they tend to assume that the people in the field before the outsider showed up were either criminally lazy or dumb as a box of ball-peen hammers.

Finding an entire field full of idiots is rare (finding one with a dysfunctional culture is a bit more common but that's a subject for another post). That means that it is extremely difficult to come up simple ideas that are good and easy to implement but which haven't already occurred to almost everyone already working on the problem. That doesn't mean that people who are new to a field can't make a contribution, but it does mean that these contributions usually need to be collaborative. Fresh perspectives make for good first drafts, but it generally takes experience to fashion them into something usable.

Eggs [a repost from Joseph]

From May 18, 2010:

Nutritional epidemiology is a very complex area; eggs are a case in point. Evidence has been emerging that eggs are better for you than we had previously thought.

(h/t: Obesity panacea)

My SO (who does nutrition) has pointed out that we often look at just one part of a food and forget the other aspects. The result of simplistic recommendations may result in unbalanced diets -- a focus on fruits and vegetables can overlook important elements like adequate dairy intake. It's just hard to reduce to dietary recommendations to sound-bytes. Add in individual differences and the complexity of the problem increases (a lot).

Nutrition is a complex system with dozens of exposures (both macro- and micro-nutrients) that has significant issues with data collection. Food frequency surveys have known limitations and more sophisticated measures have their own limitations. Experiments are also difficult to design given the complexity of nutritional requirements across the lifespan.

It's not easy stuff!

"The exact same milk"

Mark Evanier makes an interesting observation while grocery shopping in LA.

The other night, Carolyn and I were in an Albertsons Market and while passing the dairy case, I happened to notice something. This is their 2% milk but it was the same situation with all the different kinds of milk they were selling. As you may be able to see from the above photo I grabbed, you have your Albertsons house brand on the top shelf and a container of it is $3.99. On the shelf below, you have Foremost brand for $3.29.

I don't get this. They're the exact same milk.

I don't mean similar. I mean the same. The codes on the containers show they come from the exact same plant on the exact same day — and I don't think that plant has two grades of cows…

"Harry, make sure you don't get the milk mixed up. Remember that the milk from Bossie and Flossie goes into the $3.99 bottles and the milk from Bessie and Tessie goes into the $3.29 bottles. Bossie and Flossie give much better milk and we have to charge more for it!"

No, that's the exact same milk in the exact same containers. Only the label is different and for the Albertsons label, you pay 70 cents more.

I've mentioned this before. I see this almost every time I go to a market. The Whole Foods outlets around town here sell my favorite drinking water, Crystal Geyser, side-by-side with the Whole Foods house brand which is bottled for them by Crystal Geyser. Same facility, same water, same container, different label. In this case, the Crystal Geyser gallon is $1.49 and the same thing with the house brand label is 99 cents. Actually, the Albertsons/Foremost situation is the first time I've seen the house brand cost more but the point is that there's a shelf with a product…and then next to it or above it is the exact same thing with a different label and a higher price.

This is a new blog, so I may not have mentioned how dickish Scott Walker is

It's late and I'm busy but I will be getting back to this and this.

The enormous difference that $4.45 a day can make [repost]

SEPTEMBER 24, 2013

While on the subject of food stamps, you should check out the latest Paul Krugman column. He does a great job spelling out some of the touchstone points of the debate:

Still, is SNAP in general a good idea? Or is it, as Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, puts it, an example of turning the safety net into “a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency.”

One answer is, some hammock: last year, average food stamp benefits were $4.45 a day. Also, about those “able-bodied people”: almost two-thirds of SNAP beneficiaries are children, the elderly or the disabled, and most of the rest are adults with children.

Beyond that, however, you might think that ensuring adequate nutrition for children, which is a large part of what SNAP does, actually makes it less, not more likely that those children will be poor and need public assistance when they grow up. And that’s what the evidence shows. The economists Hilary Hoynes and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach have studied the impact of the food stamp program in the 1960s and 1970s, when it was gradually rolled out across the country. They found that children who received early assistance grew up, on average, to be healthier and more productive adults than those who didn’t — and they were also, it turns out, less likely to turn to the safety net for help.

Not sure if there's anything to be learned from LA's very limited fast food ban...

Other than "badly thought-out rules with lots of exceptions don't accomplish a lot," but for the benefit of those following the story, here's a relevant article from the LA Times.

Now, as evidence mounts that the Los Angeles City Council's ban on new fast-food restaurants is so far failing, leaders and thinkers are again scrutinizing the role restaurants of all kinds play or could play in this historically troubled cluster of largely low-income neighborhoods.

Seven years ago, the city pushed through the nation's first ordinance to focus on public health and fast food, at least in part because a community health nonprofit had lobbied tenaciously for the regulation as a way to fight obesity — a problem that is typically worse in poorer neighborhoods.

But despite passionate arguments that the law would encourage healthier, sit down-style restaurants to come to the area, a Los Angeles Times analysis shows the food landscape here remains unchanged.

Fast-food outlets have continued to spring up while the places with wait staff that city leaders had hoped to attract have been slow to arrive. To make matters worse, a recent Rand Corp. study shows that obesity rates have gone up since the ban was enacted.

The ordinance has fallen short of its goal in part because it only prohibits new stand-alone restaurants, and not those that are willing to operate in strip malls or shopping centers.

Another flaw, critics say, is that its definition of fast food doesn't address health head-on. Rather, the ordinance limits the location of "any establishment which dispenses food for consumption on or off the premises, and which has the following characteristics: a limited menu, items prepared in advance or prepared or heated quickly, no table orders and food served in disposable wrapping or containers."

About the time the ban was imposed, however, the line separating one type of restaurant from another grew fuzzy, and "fast casual" chains such as Chipotle, Tender Greens and Panera Bread — known for marketing to the health-conscious — remain prohibited from opening stand-alone establishments in South Los Angeles under the current ban.

The ban, supporters say, was meant to be a stop-gap measure to buy time as officials crafted initiatives to lure the sort of restaurants that area residents want. But when Gov. Jerry Brown dissolved redevelopment agencies in 2012, the city lost one of its best tools for enticing developers to invest in blighted communities. Without the leverage of tax incentives and other city support, attracting new restaurants is tough, city officials and business leaders say.

I will be coming back to this

In the New Yorker, David Owen has a long and interesting piece on the Western drought,

Where the River Runs Dry

The prizes were much cooler before they worried about choking hazards

I suspect raisin bran was considered more of a kid's cereal back in the day.


From 1951

 

Why are these food stamp challengers so miserable? Because they don't know about Wikipedia.

... or at least they chose not to use it, going by the high-profile examples of Panera Bread CEO Ron Shaich, actress Gwyneth Paltrow, and Business Insider's Kathleen Elkins.

All three wrote about their experiences trying to live on less than thirty dollars a week, but none of them appear to have done any significant reading on relevant topics like nutrition. If they had spent twenty or thirty minutes on Wikipedia, they probably would have come across this:

Considerable debate has taken place regarding issues surrounding protein intake requirements. The amount of protein required in a person's diet is determined in large part by overall energy intake, the body's need for nitrogen and essential amino acids, body weight and composition, rate of growth in the individual, physical activity level, individual's energy and carbohydrate intake, as well as the presence of illness or injury. Physical activity and exertion as well as enhanced muscular mass increase the need for protein. Requirements are also greater during childhood for growth and development, during pregnancy or when breast-feeding in order to nourish a baby, or when the body needs to recover from malnutrition or trauma or after an operation.

If not enough energy is taken in through diet, as in the process of starvation, the body will use protein from the muscle mass to meet its energy needs, leading to muscle wasting over time. If the individual does not consume adequate protein in nutrition, then muscle will also waste as more vital cellular processes (e.g. respiration enzymes, blood cells) recycle muscle protein for their own requirements.

According to US & Canadian Dietary Reference Intake guidelines, women aged 19–70 need to consume 46 grams of protein per day, while men aged 19–70 need to consume 56 grams of protein per day to avoid a deficiency. The generally accepted daily protein dietary allowance, measured as intake per kilogram of body weight, is 0.8 g/kg. However, this recommendation is based on structural requirements, but disregards use of protein for energy metabolism. This requirement is for a normal sedentary person.

Several studies have concluded that active people and athletes may require elevated protein intake (compared to 0.8 g/kg) due to increase in muscle mass and sweat losses, as well as need for body repair and energy source. Suggested amounts vary between 1.6 g/kg and 1.8 g/kg, while a proposed maximum daily protein intake would be approximately 25% of energy requirements i.e. approximately 2 to 2.5 g/kg. However, many questions still remain to be resolved.

Based on admittedly crude back-of-the-envelope calculations, none of these people were hitting even their sedentary targets and all of them reported substantial physical hardships -- severe hunger, lack of energy, headaches, mood swings, nausea -- but all of them passed over high protein foods for comparably priced low protein options. Elkins' choice to pay a dollar extra for almond milk is perhaps the most egregious example.

At the risk of patronizing, I am willing to give the movie star a pass here, but for a journalist or an executive, "let me research this" should have been the first impulse.

It's Sunday. We need a cartoon.

This isn't just a California Drought

Eric Holthaus writing for Slate:

Last week, Lake Mead, which sits on the border of Nevada and Arizona, set a new record low—the first time since the construction of the Hoover Dam in the 1930s that the lake’s surface has dipped below 1,080 feet above sea level. The West’s drought is so bad that official plans for water rationing have now begun—with Arizona’s farmers first on the chopping block. Yes, despite the drought’s epicenter in California, it’s Arizona that will bear the brunt of the West’s epic dry spell.

The huge Lake Mead—which used to be the nation’s largest reservoir—serves as the main water storage facility on the Colorado River. Amid one of the worst droughts in millennia, record lows at Lake Mead are becoming an annual event—last year’s low was 7 feet higher than this year’s expected June nadir, 1,073 feet.

If, come Jan. 1, Lake Mead’s level is below 1,075 feet, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which manages the river, will declare an official shortage for the first time ever—setting into motion a series of already agreed-upon mandatory cuts in water outlays, primarily to Arizona. (Nevada and Mexico will also receive smaller cuts.) The latest forecasts give a 33 percent chance of this happening. There’s a greater than 75 percent chance of the same scenario on Jan. 1, 2017. Barring a sudden unexpected end to the drought, official shortage conditions are likely for the indefinite future.

More on the Business Insider SNAP challenge explained

As mentioned before at great length, when journalist Kathleen Elkins wrote about her attempt to live on a food-stamp budget, the result told us more about Elkins shopping habits than it did about the plight of the poor.

I've tried to retrace Elkins' steps in my local Trader Joe's, trying to see what went wrong. For example, here are a the tortillas that she bought as part of her challenge.

I'm sure that they are very good, what with being from grandmother (Abuela) and all that, but they were also a bit pricey.

Particularly when you consider that you can get more, both in terms of number and weight, for half the price.

And, at least in my store, it's fairly easy to make the comparison.