"US cats and dogs cause 25-30 percent of the environmental impact of meat consumption in this country. The nation's 163 million cats and dogs eat as much food as all the people in France. People should keep their pets -- and keep feeding them meat -- but there may be steps pet owners can take to reduce their environmental impact, says a researcher." Read more...
I just had an OpEd published on Project Syndicate on Surviving in a Post-Truth World. The main point worth discussing over dinner and drinks is what is truth and how would we identify it. If we agree that there are better and worse ways to seek it, shouldn't we lobby our politicians to follow those paths?
I've got a colleague visiting from the Czech Republic who saw some portobello mushrooms in the fridge and offered to make a Czech speciality. First, however, I had to buy caraway seeds (a major part of the cuisine). And, I have to say, I'm quite glad that I did. I've used caraway seeds in pickling before but the flavor they added to the potatoes and mushrooms was both delicate and exciting!
Here's Pavel Linhart's recipe for Smaženice:
100 g of butter, oil, or pork fat (for frying).
1 large onion, diced.
500 g of mushrooms (bolets, champignons, etc.), cut into 1-2cm cubes.
2-4 eggs, depending on mushrooms; it should be a dish mainly from mushrooms (e.g., 2-4 eggs / 500g of mushrooms)
pinch of salt
pinch of pepper
1 tsp to 1 Tbs caraway seeds (to taste--Pavel advises "it is hard to overdose caraway seed, do not hold back!'")
In a frying pan, warm the butter, oil, or pork fat and fry the onion until it's soft and glassy. Add the mushrooms, caraway seeds, salt and pepper. Cover with a lid, stirring occasionally until mushrooms are well cooked (10-20 min). Mushrooms will release water when cooked but if it is not enough and the mushrooms begin to stick to the pan, add a little water. When mushrooms are cooked add whisked eggs and stir constantly until they harden up.
Serve with bread or garlic bread, or with potatoes boiled in salty water with 1 Tbs of caraway seeds.
A fascinating paper was just published in Scientific Reports that followed a number of individuals who adopted different diets (omnivore, vegetarian, vegan). While we are all told that eating a vegetarian or vegan diet should have a lower carbon footprint and use less water, there was remarkable variation between individuals. Read and share the article and discuss diet choices at your next dinner party.
Former Obama administration science advisor John Holdren has written an excellent OpEd in the Boston Globe about the process by which we evaluate the evidence about man-made climate change.
Rather than questioning the evidence (which scientists constantly do and which leads to a better current understanding), discuss at your next dinner party the 'discount rate'. In other words, accept the scientific consensus and discuss who should pay and when.
Is it ethical for us to suffer now for future generations?
Is it ethical for us to not suffer now for future generations?
How much change in our current behavior is acceptable to support future generations?
And, what changes do you personally feel comfortable implementing.
If you want realistic scenarios of sea level rise in the US, have a look at this scary simulator published in Wired. Predictions like this explain why the US military views climate change an existential threat to our national security.
"But finally the film is more troubled by the erosion of trust in science and by anti-GMO activists like Zen Honeycutt who says on camera that she trusts personal experiences of mothers more than the conclusions of scientists. As writer Lynas says, "If you throw science out, there is nothing." Though it ultimately sides with the pro-GMO camp, "Food Evolution" makes some fascinating points about human behavior along the way, about how we don't make decisions based on facts as often as we think we do. This documentary may not change your mind, but it will make you consider what caused you to decide in the first place."
The LA Times just posted some of their favorite grilled recipes. Grilled radicchio looks great with our without the prosciutto as do the grilled avocados! I'm going to be trying some of these sooner rather than later (even if I don't have access to a grill in Colorado where I'm working...).
I was at a bar a while ago and ordered a variety of appetizers. One was what must have been a grilled portobello mushroom that was served with a smoky mayo sauce. Last month I got around to trying to recreate it. Easy and delicious. What I did was to:
1) coat with Olive Oil, 4 portobello mushrooms
2) grill mushrooms on a hot grill (can be done in a broiler or even a hot oven) until they started to shrink (on the grill they get nice grill marks...). When finished, cut into strips or cubes.
3) mix several tablespoons of Kewpie Mayonnaise (a delicious Japanese mayo, you can use any mayo) with liquid smoke to taste. I've recently discovered that it's not always possible to buy liquid smoke. I probably ended up using a teaspoon or so of it to about 4 Tbs of the mayo...but you should do this to taste.
4) drizzle the smoky mayo over the strips or cubes of portobellos.
Kerri Szejda wrote a thoughtful article in The Conversation nicely discusses the trade offs we must all make when selecting fish to eat (omega 3 fatty acids, sustainability, mercury...). Worth a read (and a discussion) if you eat fish.
"In 2003, I was told by a restaurant owner on a Thai island that local fishermen used to wrap their lunch in banana leaves, which they would then casually toss overboard when done. That was OK, because the leaves decayed and the fish ate the scraps. But in the past decade, he said, while plastic wrap had rapidly replaced banana leaves, old habits had died hard – and that was why the beach was fringed with a crust of plastic. Beyond the merely unsightly, this plasticcongregates in continent-scale garbage gyres in our oceans, being eaten by plankton, then fish; then quite possibly it’ll reach your plate ..."
I'm fearful for the reduced role that science and evidence are playing in today's policy decisions. Thus, Janice and I decided to join the Union of Concerned Scientists. As a thank you gift they sent me a GREAT book--"Cooler Smarter: Practical Steps for Low-Carbon Living."
Filled with concrete things that you can do to reduce your carbon footprint and ensure that your voice is heard by policy makers. The not so dirty secret is that when you save carbon, you save money so it should be a win-win, right?
It's worthy to get a copy and pass it around at your next dinner party (better than those damn smart phones!) and discuss how each individual's concrete actions can help reduce our carbon footprint.
You can buy the book on Amazon or you can donate to UCS and get it as a gift.
"The abstraction of “inequality” doesn’t matter a lot to ordinary Americans. The reality of economic insecurity does. The Great American Escalator is broken—and it badly needs to be fixed." So writes Nicholas Eberstadt in the 15 February 2017 issue of Commentary in his article "Our Miserable 21st Century." The depressing article is a worthy read and could form the basis of an interesting dinner party conversation. I found it by reading David Brooks' essay based in part on it in the NY Times. Both include shocking statistics about unemployment, drug use, and felony convictions. Both paint a picture of a polarized country filled with suffering and blame. I think that if we are to productively work towards a better future we have to address these issues--the two faces of America--and stop pointing fingers of blame and start working together for solutions. Ask your guests, what will they do to change our presently disturbing status quo. And, ask yourself too.
It's been raining a lot recently--we need it but it does stifle going outside. Our son and his friends wanted to bake something chocolate. They Googled double chocolate cookies and found this NY Times recipe--which they decided to bake it as one big cookie on a large cookie sheet covered with a silpat. Peels of laughter emerged from the kitchen as it expanded, and expanded, and expanded into a HUGE cookie.
As we all wiped chocolate off our mouths, one of his friends called it 'diabetes waiting to happen' which is what I'm going to call it when we serve it the next time we make a desert for a dinner party.
Aaron Hanlon, a professor at Colby College, wrote about being a conservative student on a liberal campus and how his advice for his students was to hone their powers of persuasion, rather than victimizing themselves as a minority conservative.
I really enjoy those challenging dinner party conversations that are polite but involve people with very different viewpoints logically developing their position. I learn a lot from these and often become less polemic in my own views.
Check out his essay at the NY Times and see if his advice works around your table (it certainly does around our table).
I was interviewed by Extra Crispy (Time magazine's food newsletter/blog) about eating groundhog in honor, of course, of Groundhog Day.
At the outset I'll admit that I've not eaten groundhog or any of the 14 other species of marmots (but I have eaten a variety of wild ungulates, boar, hare, geese and ducks, reptiles, and, once, in Norway, Eurasian beaver). Ken Armitage, my mentor and founder of the long-term yellow-bellied marmot project that I now run once said to me, "I wouldn't eat my friends!"
And I too would not eat our friends, but I would consider eating a groundhog (preferably a very, very fresh accidental roadkill), or a marmot from Eurasia (where they are shot for their fur and many are eaten).
Sustainably harvested wild game can be both good for you and an ethical food choice. The crux is the sustainability threshold--how do you know if your wild food is sustainably harvested? Something I'll throw out for a discussion this next week at 2 vegetarian dinner parties I'm hosting (on Saturday and Wednesday).
I came across this today and, after checking her Facebook Page (she wants to share it), decided to share it through this blog. These are the sorts of non-partisan dinner party topics that are essential to have these days.
"I don't like to talk about politics on Facebook-- political history is my job, after all, and you are my friends-- but there is an important non-partisan point to make today.
What Bannon is doing, most dramatically with last night's ban on immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries-- is creating what is known as a "shock event."
Such an event is unexpected and confusing and throws a society into chaos. People scramble to react to the event, usually along some fault line that those responsible for the event can widen by claiming that they alone know how to restore order.
When opponents speak out, the authors of the shock event call them enemies. As society reels and tempers run high, those responsible for the shock event perform a sleight of hand to achieve their real goal, a goal they know to be hugely unpopular, but from which everyone has been distracted as they fight over the initial event. There is no longer concerted opposition to the real goal; opposition divides along the partisan lines established by the shock event.
Last night's Executive Order has all the hallmarks of a shock event. It was not reviewed by any governmental agencies or lawyers before it was released, and counterterrorism experts insist they did not ask for it. People charged with enforcing it got no instructions about how to do so. Courts immediately have declared parts of it unconstitutional, but border police in some airports are refusing to stop enforcing it.
Predictably, chaos has followed and tempers are hot.
My point today is this: unless you are the person setting it up, it is in no one's interest to play the shock event game. It is designed explicitly to divide people who might otherwise come together so they cannot stand against something its authors think they won't like.
I don't know what Bannon is up to-- although I have some guesses-- but because I know Bannon's ideas well, I am positive that there is not a single person whom I consider a friend on either side of the aisle-- and my friends range pretty widely-- who will benefit from whatever it is.
If the shock event strategy works, though, many of you will blame each other, rather than Bannon, for the fallout. And the country will have been tricked into accepting their real goal.
But because shock events destabilize a society, they can also be used positively. We do not have to respond along old fault lines. We could just as easily reorganize into a different pattern that threatens the people who sparked the event.
A successful shock event depends on speed and chaos because it requires knee-jerk reactions so that people divide along established lines. This, for example, is how Confederate leaders railroaded the initial southern states out of the Union.
If people realize they are being played, though, they can reach across old lines and reorganize to challenge the leaders who are pulling the strings. This was Lincoln's strategy when he joined together Whigs, Democrats, Free-Soilers, anti-Nebraska voters, and nativists into the new Republican Party to stand against the Slave Power.
Five years before, such a coalition would have been unimaginable. Members of those groups agreed on very little other than that they wanted all Americans to have equal economic opportunity. Once they began to work together to promote a fair economic system, though, they found much common ground. They ended up rededicating the nation to a "government of the people, by the people, and for the people."
Confederate leaders and Lincoln both knew about the political potential of a shock event. As we are in the midst of one, it seems worth noting that Lincoln seemed to have the better idea about how to use it."
An essay in the Guardian today got me thinking about the ethics and welfare associated with how we decide what eggs (if any) to eat. Chas Newkey-Burden writes:
"... the “free range” egg is perhaps the most audacious. You’d need Disney-level imagination to believe the UK can produce more than 10bn eggs each year without inconveniencing any chickens. But by slapping “free range” on the label, and perhaps a nice pastoral scene with a few chickens roaming free, most consumers never realise how the eggs came to be in the box." Read the entire thoughtful essay and discuss this at your next dinner party. And, if you find it upsetting, then perhaps eggs shouldn't be on the menu.
For my 'day job' I study marmots--large, alpine ground squirrels--that include the groundhogs we celebrate on Groundhog Day. It turns out that marmots face the same problems as we do when making decisions with unreliable news sources. I wrote the following for the Huffington Post Blog about what we can learn from groundhogs about fake news and the importance of reliability assessment.
Here's the text reprinted here.
Our ‘fake news’ epidemic reminds us that we all must be mindful of the sources of our information. Obtaining information is essential for the innumerable decisions we make daily including decisions about what to wear, when to cross the street, and whether to put milk in our coffee or tea. We also make more consequential decisions about whom to date and marry, where to go to school, or what car or house to purchase. Information has never been so abundant, but it is not all equally reliable. Yet, reliable information is essential to make rational choices. Can we trust that our milk is fresh and unadulterated? Can we believe the graduation statistics from a college or university? Can we trust the safety statistics about a car? This problem is not uniquely human and I suggest that we can learn effective strategies from other species, including the groundhogs we celebrate each year on Groundhog Day.
Groundhogs are one of 15 species of marmots and I study antipredator behavior in these cat-sized alpine ground squirrels. Like many other species, marmots must trade-off risks versus rewards when they leave the safety of their burrows to go out to forage to avoid terrestrial predators—foxes, coyotes, and mountain lions, as well as aerial predators—hawks and golden eagles. Upon detecting a predator they emit alarm calls—loud chirps that warn other marmots. Marmots hearing those alarm calls cease all activity, look around to detect the predator, and often run back to the safety of their burrows. But, while at their burrows they are not able to eat, and this is a costly situation for marmots must double their weight each summer during a 4-5 month active season to be able to survive a 7-8 month long hibernation.
A yellow-bellied marmot alarm calling in a Colorado alpine meadow.
Fortunately, individuals differ in their propensity to emit alarm calls and there are essentially Nervous Nellies and Cool Hand Lucys! Nervous Nellies call in response to not only predators, but other things as well that are not alarming. We all recall the story of the Boy Who Cried Wolf. By crying wolf when there was no wolf the villagers learned to ignore the lying shepherd boy, which had disastrous consequences when a real wolf appeared.
From the perspective of a marmot trying to decide whether to keep foraging or run back to their burrows, Nervous Nellies are sending unreliable signals. This is not much different than the problem we all face in determining whether the news we encounter is supported by facts or made up by someone on their kitchen table as click bait. If The Boy Who Cried Wolf explains marmot behavior, then Nervous Nellies—who are unreliable— would be ignored.
Humans partially solve the problem of information acquisition by relying on trusted sources. If I am going to purchase a car, I poll trusted friends and colleagues about their experiences. By doing so, I’ve saved a lot of time reading each and every review about cars and making hundreds of visits to car dealers. The problem today is that we trust our partisan news aggregators or sites and this makes highly susceptible to fake news that taps into preexisting confirmation biases.
Turns out that marmots also trust reliable but not unreliable marmots. We conducted an experiment and found that marmots hearing alarm calls from reliable callers responded immediately but then resumed their prior behavior more quickly than those hearing unreliable callers, who kept looking for a non-existent predator. In some sense, this is exactly opposite what one would expect from the story of the Boy Who Cried Wolf, but it’s very similar to what we see when we trust, but verify, our news sources.
So what to do? Marmots have it easy—a handful of predators to detect, and only a few individuals to potentially assess the reliability of. This palls in comparison to a 24-hour news and spam cycle churning out vast amounts of potentially contradictory along with some genuinely erroneous information.
We all have an inner marmot; we have evolved mechanisms to believe trusted sources. But now we face an evolutionary mismatch and our evolved evaluation mechanisms have broken down because there’s simply too much potential information to process.
Mindful of this, I suggest that we scrutinize our news sources. If it sounds too ‘good’, perhaps it is. News sources that follow strict journalistic practices and fact check their sources are, without question, going to be more reliable on average than those that simply aggregate information. The rise of fake-news means that we must re-learn to trust but verify. And we must dig deep into our pockets and support reliable journalism that properly fact-checks sources because there simply isn’t enough time for each of us to fact check everything we hear. The truth is out there and we need good information to make informed decisions.
Readers of this blog will realize that I like having a lot of small plates. Playing around with ingredients in our larder a while ago I stumbled upon this easy and delicious recipe. It works wonderfully as an appetizer or as a side dish.
In a 9 x 9" baking pan,
fill the bottom with a single layer of brussel sprouts.
add about 2 Tbs sesame oil and shake to coat the sprouts,
sprinkle on about 1 Tbs kosher salt; shake.
Bake at 400°F for about an hour or until browned on the outside and soft and buttery inside.
Serve warm.
Because the pan is on the small size, other things can be baked in the oven at the same time to efficiently use energy. You can cook it at 350° but it may take a bit longer and doesn't brown as nicely. Feel free to experiment!
I've been laying low for the past year or so--busy with work (I finished a 7-year term as Department Chair), and busy with my research. I was on my first-ever sabbatical--where I wrote half a book, and I've been trying to make time to finish writing the book (Fear and It's Consequences) ever since. And, I've also been struck with an unusual (for me) paralysis. I simply don't know what to do to help restore communication and civility in a time where we really must figure this out. The US election, Brexit, and the rise of nationalism throughout the West is alarming.
I'm an American and our country is deeply divided. I am frustrated, scared, and saddened. Frustrated because the American Dream is shattering in front of our eyes--partially fueled by inequity, and partially fueled by fear of change. Scared because the rise of demagogues is not really a good way out. And, I'm saddened because I believe that liberal democracy is a good thing and that our past century's experiment with it may be coming to an end; not just in the US but throughout Western Europe. The World will be a very different place in the coming decades and it will not be a safer place.
I've been cooking, and having dinner parties (of course), but it's been harder to reach out and have hard conversations with folks who have a very different perspective. People are emboldened to be intransigent. We follow our own news unable to conceive there are different perspectives out there. We are more entitled than ever to believe that their perspective is the only correct perspective.
But it's never been more important to do so--to communicate with fellow citizens. And, it's also not been more important in a while to work together to make positive changes.
Regardless of whether you're surrounding yourselves with like-minded friends, or or neighbors with vastly different beliefs, we all can, and should, eat our way to civility. I'm going to try to share recipes and discoveries more regularly now. Open a good bottle of wine and have some friends over. Nibble on some apps, and talk politics. Just be polite because civility and politeness is what we really need now.
