Katherine

Yup. That's a pie.

A while back I read an article in a worthless magazine that said, basically, that more Americans were eating healthier food than ever, more fruits and vegetables, less fatty foods, etc. It looked suspiciously like the entire article was based on one of those surveys where people know the "right" answer in advance, and give it back to the pollster so they'll look good. And then I wander through Walmart, and see endless shelf-space devoted to processed foods, and a pitiful collection of semi-fresh vegetables. People are buying this stuff, it's not there for looks. I imagine a "junk food" index, where raw ingredients would fall at one end, and totally processed foods (like brightly-colored fried or sweet crunchy things) would fall at the other end. It seems to me that if foie gras was a poor folk's food, it would be lumped in with burgers as junk food.

Actually, two days ago somebody started forging my email in the return address of several types of generic viagra spams. My mailbox was full of returned email. I complained to my ISP, and they stopped it. I'm a little worried that whatever filter they put on my mailbox might be filtering out my intended email, but what can I do? At least they stopped the rebounding mail.

So what you're saying is that I can buy them by the case from my wholesaler, right?

I had it at a restaurant once. A long piece of cheesecake was wrapped in a spring roll wrapper, deep-fried, and served with fruit and chocolate sauce. It was really, really good. I suspect the cheesecake was frozen, because it was still properly cold in the middle.

The "cause" of obesity is mostly genetic. The cause of weight gain is the consumption of more energy than is expended. There is a significant difference between the two. It's hardly been a secret hidden from you by fast food companies that tartar sauce is mayo with chopped pickle. You chose not to know what was in your food. That is your choice to make, but not a reflection on them for following the standard (century-old?) recipe. How many years have we had nutrition labeling on ice cream? You had the option of using it, and it was there for you when you wanted to. What else should they have done for you? If light cream cheese has 10% fat vs the 90% fat of regular, in what way is that not light? You have the option of switching to fat-free "cream" cheese, if you can tolerate eating something that tastes like spackling compound. Now what you're saying is that if you had known what was in tartar sauce, you could have chosen to leave it off your sandwich, thus resulting in 100 calories saved per fish sandwich, and net weight loss of one pound per 35 deep-fried breaded fish sandwiches consumed. Right? You're basing this on several misconceptions: -Cutting fat in the diet will result in weight loss; ----This is completely disproved. -You can do this and your body won't notice, just lose weight; ----When you cut your intake, you get hungry and end up eating more. -There is no human appetite that regulates when you get hungry, and what you choose and how much of it you will eat. Everything is a conscious choice. ----This is why modifications to the diet doesn't work. Whatever the changes you may make to your diet, they do not exist in isolation. They are interrelated in the appetite, which is designed to keep humans alive by having them eat what they need when they are hungry. This is why people who cut red meat to save fat end up eating more cheese and ice cream, or if they only allow themselves to eat Snackwells at night, they eat the whole bag, ending up stuffed to the gills with empty carbs, but still unsatisfied. When their bodies crave fat, do they choose carrot and celery sticks? No, they reach for a substitute for the fatty foods they crave.

Do you really think that if the government ordered people to stop eating until they reached some arbitrary weight, they could and would? And thereafter they would stay at that weight, just by wishing it? It sounds to me that such people would be less motivated, not more, and it takes an extraordinary motivation to lose weight. Starving people will steal food, even if they're still significantly overweight.

What methods would eliminate obesity in our population or any other? I think the only effective weight-loss plan they've come up with is surgery. Unless, of course, one considers an extraordinary life-long commitment to self-starvation to be an plan that is universally applicable.

I asked a sushi chef once about sushi etiquette as it would apply in America, and he said that here, basically, anything goes, and nobody's going to take offense if you do something that would be considered rude or ignorant in Tokyo. Not to say that there's not a practical reason for these things. I once sat too close to some sushi rubes who were clumsily picking up their sushi with chopsticks, and dipping it rice side down. By the time they were done, their sauce dish was full of something that looked like, er...

We used to stop at Burger King when we were on the road at mealtime and there was noplace else to eat (this happened far too often), but now, never.

I once made a carb-free (<5g/serving) cheesecake that was sweetened with Splenda. The crust was crushed macadamia nuts, cinnamon, and Splenda. The filling was a simple one that called for no starch, mostly eggs, cream cheese, and Splenda that I substituted for the sugar. It was fabulous. No one would ever have been able to guess it was artificially sweetened.

It would be cool if we had tasty, healthful food on every corner, but one of the points of the article is that it's not what you eat that matters. Eating a really healthy diet is obviously better for you, but doesn't seem to impact what you weigh. Another point is that hefty people are eating the same amounts as slender people, and for most of them, their weights are stable. In other words, moderating your intake would only be useful if you were currently eating more calories than you were expending, and gaining weight. If what you mean by "moderating" the diet means a person will expend more than they intake, resulting in weight loss, then that's a diet. Maybe not a crash diet, but one that will result, over a period of time, in constant hunger, and ultimately in failure, if permanent weight loss is the goal. The recommendation I see everywhere, and mostly from medical sources, is that people who weigh more than the charts (or the fashion mags) say they ought to should diet to get down to that ideal. Implied would be that they should stay on that diet for the rest of their lives, if that's what is necessary to stay there, since there is no reason to believe that anyone ever came off a diet and remained at their new, fashionable weight. Also implied is that if you haven't done this, it's because you've chosen to be fat (lazy, gluttonous, etc), and the people who are thin have decided to be virtuous, rather than just being lucky enough to have a setpoint that puts them in the fashionable range. So we'd be back talking about fat as a moral issue. Dieting is the only medically recommended "treatment" that has only a 1-3% success rate. Would you even bother to go through with a procedure that had so little chance of success? My opinion is that another reason why people nowadays are getting fatter (aside from all the discussion in the article) is that food is so readily available, and it's ready to eat when you're ready to eat it. Americans have led the way, but it is becoming more so all over the world. If we had to scavenge for food like hunter-gatherers used to, we couldn't drop coins in a machine or pick up a jumbo drink full of empty calories. And we'd probably stop right away when we had enough, if having more meant going out into the woods for three hours with a sharp stick, too.

This is part of a series on obesity in America. Very interesting.

We used to have really tasty water, but they changed the process, and now it's a chemical soup. Wouldn't dream of drinking it.

Yes, except for Asian things, that I use peanut oil for, I deep-fry in pure olive oil that I buy in very large quantities. It doesn't affect the flavor of the fried food, even when frying pastries, like doughnuts. It can be reused repeatedly, but it's cheap enough to throw out guiltlessly when you need to. I like to saute in a mix of butter and EVOO.

I made the buttermilk sorbet using my scrape'n'stir method. I also made (at the same time) a batch of 50% buttermilk 50% sour cream. The one containing sour cream froze more quickly. The buttermilk one is tasty, but I prefer the texture of the sour cream one, which tastes almost cheesecake-like. (Buttermilk feels powdery in my mouth.)

C'mon Dorietz, don't hold back. Tell us how you really feel.

What is it about Americans that makes us so responsive to the "gluttony" marketing pitch?

but katherine, don't you think that's the unwritten policy for many many bars/restaurants that cater to a youngish male clientele? It just seemed that the range of types of females I saw serving there was much narrower than any place I'd seen before. In most places they seem to self-select, but here it was clear that a good-looking good worker might not be hired. That and the fact that it wasn't a bar, as much as you may feel it was, it was a restaurant, with a full menu, and drinks on the side.

When my parents first retired and moved down to Florida, we ate at Hooter's a few times during my visits. The food was ok, about on par with the other places they chose. There was something we liked on the menu, oysters or clams? I forget exactly what now. Being served by nubile young things didn't bother me so much as the idea that management had to have refused to hire anyone that didn't look good in crop tops and short gym shorts.

While you recall correctly, the fact that I never seek anything but a blizzard there means that I had not missed them, so I cannot verify their departure.

Actually, I don't need a ride per se, it's just that the trip from here is too much for one person to do.

True, there are currently a number of places that call themselves "BBQ" in Maine. The ones I'm familiar with on your list are regular restaurants that grill meat. I know of a couple of would-be BBQ joints that didn't make your list. This is all new, though, not at all indigenous, any more than a good Thai place would be. I sincerely doubt that any of these were in existence when I was growing up in SE Massachusetts in the 60's.

Now we're veering from food to linguistics/lexicology. I've checked with my mom, a leading computational linguist, and your statement is a matter of some debate among linguists and lexicologists. The original meaning of barbecue (from dict.org), i.e. the Guiana Indian meaning, is "a frame on which all kinds of flesh and fish are roasted or smoke-dried". They would argue that your definition is incorrect, since it refers to the food and not the tool. My mom said: Sorry to get so pedantic... - Scott From one linguist to another (your mother), I would say that among linguists, there is no debate. Usage is as usage does. Only grammar mavens argue about lexical proscription. BTW, growing up in SE MA, we never went out for BBQ once, even though we travelled far and wide to eat out. I doubt that anyone in my town, nay, my region knew where a BBQ joint (as we now know it) might be. BBQ chicken, in that time and place, was chicken grilled in oil drums until the skin was blackened and the meat at the bone was not done enough. FG has his work cut out for him. Man the barricades!