slkinsey

Oh, I don't disagree; nor with your premise. It just surprised me that the median was so low. And, believe me, I know that 99% of law firm lawyers completely hate their jobs.

Of course they do... unless the school decides they do not want to admit them. Then they don't. No one has the "right" to attend a private educational institution. But I think here we are discussing institutions that ARE allowing them. Obviously it would exclude the ones that don't admit them. Both of these things are up to the institution. Ultimately, that is how schools make their reputations... how selective is admission? how rigorous is the course of study/instruction? how hard is it to make the grade and stay in? what quality are they producing? If a cooking school is really interested in turning out top-level graduates who will be taken seriously, if they want their diploma to be accorded weight and significance, then they are well-advised to attend to the above described matters. If not... well, then that will be reflected in their reputation. If a cooking school is able to train prospective professional cooks to an exceptionally high level and also attract/retain paying amateurs to the same classes without compromising the focus of the curriculum and its rigor, then all the more power to them. This does not seem to be the case, and I gather that cooking school diplomas are not highly valued and respected in the business. That said, a professional cooking school ought to be able to administer some kind of test or evaluation that will determine whether those who have participated in its course of study are entitled to the diploma or to advance to the next higher course of study. Then the diploma might really mean something. Of course, such a practice would tend to turn off paying amateurs, so...

Is it really that low? I have an occasional day job (the arts market being what it is) at a mid-sized but certainly not top-shelf NYC law firm... and I happen to know that the first-years make over $100k/year. And I also know that this is not considered an extravagant salary in the biz. Of course, your figure may reflect the fact that there are way too many law schools turning out way too many lawyers and the business is so glutted that the median is being pulled down by the people who end up working for podunk practices in little midwestern towns.

Of course they do... unless the school decides they do not want to admit them. Then they don't. No one has the "right" to attend a private educational institution.

Oh, yes they do. See an example here from MIT's graduate program of economics. It's the same competitive environment for same basic end result. Um... that's why I said chemistry and not economics. The Econ Department at MIT specially offers a placement service. Not exactly quite the same thing I was talking about. The Law School at Harvard also may talk about the placement percentage and starting salaries for their graduates, but I very much doubt that the History Department there is doing so. Not that this in any affects my comparison of a pure academic setting and a vocational training program.

But how would such a school make this determination? And when would this happen? Wouldn't the applicants lie? At what point does it become painfully obvious that the student/applicant has no desire whatsoever to pursue a career in that trade? I knew after 2 years of graduate school that I didn't want to spend my live developing a humpback over a lab bench, but they let me stay in the program anyhow, and finally let me get my Ph.D. And they were even paying me to attend and get credits. I'm glad they didn't kick me out. I just wonder how this determination of students' ultimate goals would be made. Obviously part of that determination has to be done by admission standards of some kind. Second, in a cooking school one would, I suppose, have to rely on the students' stated career goals and reasons for attending the school. The third part is to set the bar high and weed out students who do not meet the standard which has been set for them. This third bit is exactly what I would expect a hypothetical "American College of Bricklaying" to do. The big difference between your academic experience and a cooking school is that traditional pure academia is not a vocational school. They were not training you to get a job as a scientist -- that is not the aim of academia. The aim of academia is the pursuit of knowledge. They were helping you to be a scientist. Schools like MIT and Stanford don't go around touting the placement percentage of the graduates from their chemistry graduate programs. That's not the point. Doing the work and getting the degree is the point. Not everyone can go on to be a professional pure scientist.

Hmm... I'm coming late to this discussion, but I would not say that is strictly true. Not strictly true, but it is both a trend in education and, I believe, specifically true of culinary schools. I'm sure we could make a simple factual determination, though, by looking at some educational sites and seeing how many people matriculate and graduate at the culinary schools. I'll check the CIA site. You look somewhere else. Oh, I don't disagree with the basic tenor of your remark. I do think that it is generally true of academic institutions, and probably none the less true of cooking schools. That said, an institution with a reputation and high standard to maintain will aggressively weed out students who are not capable of meeting that standard. As you rightly state, this process starts with admissions. I don't see why this should not be the case for cooking schools. More to the point, I do not see any reason why a vocational school devoted to a particular occupation -- cooking, in this case -- should not limit the student body to people who are interested in pursuing that occupation.

Hmm... I'm coming late to this discussion, but I would not say that is strictly true. Some schools (I am thinking of top music schools in particular) are structured so that people without the proper motivation and/or talent are encouraged to drop the program or switch to a related course of study. Of course, many conservatories are affiliated with colleges or universities and they would often like for such students to pursue their interests there, but that does not change the fact that some conservatories have a fairly low graduation rate. To make an example from my own experience, I went to my undergrduate school specifically so I could do a double degree program (went 5 years, graduated with a BM in voice performance and a BA in psychology). When I was a freshman, there were around 30 of us in the double degree program. When I graduated, there were 4 of us left who went double degree all the way to completion. I would estimate that the rate of graduation in the conservatory was around 30% to 40%, and the percentage of freshman performance majors who graduated with performance degrees was even less. I was given to understand that these percentages were not all that unusual. Since a music school is essentially a vocational school (as distinct from a liberal arts school) it seems fairly directly comparable to a professional cooking school. This is to say that the main thrust of these schools is to prepare students to make a living as professional musicians (insofar as this is possible in today's arts economy) or professional cooks. Music schools do not typically accept amateurs or people who are not interested in pursuing a professional life in music into their regular curriculum, and I don't see why cooking schools would either. Most music schools have a "continuing education" division for that kind of thing, and I don't see any reason why a cooking school wouldn't as well.

Looking at your list, you could almost make the one kind of "alternative" pizza I can stand: fig, gorgonzola and ruccola.

I have enjoyed iced tea brewed from rooibos, a South African herb.

(Reads detailed instructions.) This is easier than burying a pig in a firepit, forgetting about it and digging it up 12 hours later?

You are?! DAMN IT! There goes my weight loss strategy!

I'm not sure we are exactly on the same page, because I don't exactly understand what you mean. As i understand it the efficiency of turning these things into fat is always relevant, no matter if you take fat in or not. The amount of fat the body can store seems to be endless. So if you take in excess fat it will be turned into fat, and if you take in carbs and protein in excess of what your body can store/use in those forms then it should be converted to fat by this ineffecient process. OK... let me see if I can explain myself better here... Let's say that an adult male burns 2,000 calories/day but eats 2,400 calories a day. We both agree that he will gain weight. Now, let us further say that this guy's diet is such that he takes his calories from the following sources: 800 from fat, 800 from carbohydrates and 800 from protein. So, there are two different ways of looking at the "extra" 400 calories... We can think of it as 133 calories each from carbs, fat and protein, in which case the extra calories would be converted into around 297 calories (129 from fat at 95% efficiency, 102 from carbs at 77% efficiency, 66 from protein at 50% efficiency) of stored fat. But, is there reason to suppose that the body would go that route? If there is plentiful dietary fat around (which there almost always is), why wouldn't the body simply do the most efficient thing and convert 400 calories of dietary fat into 380 calories of stored fat? My reading of what you are saying is that the body has a separate requirement for fat, carbohydrates and protein respectively and that any calories beyond those requirement are converted into fat according to the efficiencies you quantified. Except, obviously we know that this doesn't happen in the case of a hypocaloric diet where the individual eats more than the required amount of protein, for example, so the "extra" protein calories would have to be turned into something else and used, right? That's where I get confused. Given that the body seems to be able to use excess protein (or carbs or whatever) for something other than fat storage, why wouldn't the body choose the most efficient thing in and use dietary fat as the main source of calories for stored fat? Thanks for offering your expertise on these things, by the way. Is this kind of thing part of your profession or field of academics? So this assumes approximately 87.5% efficiency in converting extra calories from a mixed diet into stored fat. It strikes me, however, that the amount of dietary fat would not have to be all that high for this efficiency to come up a few percentage points. In the real world, of course, there is not much difference between 4000 calories turning into 1 pound of fat and 3500 calories turning into one pound of fat. If one's diet is consistently 250 calories over equilibrium (not a hard thing to do) it will take only two days more to salt away a pound of fat.

The first part of this is easy to explain when you understand that each pound of body mass burns off about 12 calories per day. So, for any given caloric intake there is an "equilibrium" weight where the calories consumed will equal the calories burned. I'll make an extremely simple example: Say you have a 200 pound male who burns off 2,400 calories a day (for the sake of simplicity we are going to assume that this person lies in bed all day long and does not burn off any calories from exercise). Further, suppose that this person normally consumes 2,520 calories a day -- 120 more than he burns. As we know, this person will gain weight. But once the person gets up to 210 pounds, he will stop gaining weight because he is consuming the same number of calories he burns. This is because the extra ten pounds of body weight burns 120 calories/day. The reason people tend to stabilise at a certain weight is because they tend to consume/burn right around the same number of calories on a daily basis. Whether or not people are genetically predisposed to put on "excess" weight... it seems fairly clear that some are. The mechanism by which this happens is not entirely clear, however, to me at least.

I learn something new every day. I've always used the terms interchangeably; I've never heard anybody make the distinction, which seems entirely obvious now that you've said it. What I have is all black/blue steel, but I've always referred to it as carbon steel, blue steel, French steel, black metal, whatever -- never made any distinctions. Yeah... according to "The Well-Tooled Kitchen" they're different. The blue/black kind are annealed. I don't know if that makes them harder or not. Your link to Gaspary's Kitchen & Home Products has different listings for black, blue and carbon steel pans. How different they are, I really don't know. What I can say about mine is that they were definitely not black or blue when I got them, so I have assumed they are regular old unannealed carbon steel. They are quite soft -- easily scratched with a Scotch Brite pad.

Ah! Very interesting. Thank you for making that explanation, as that clears up quite a bit. Just to be sure that we're on the same page, it would seem that the efficiency of turning these things into fat is only relevant to losing/gaining weight if the person consumes practically no fat. Otherwise, the body will simply store excess calories by converting dietary fat to fat storage, which is extremely efficient -- yes/no? So, basically what this information tells us is that, if you are going to consume excess calories, it is better from a weight maintenance standpoint if you eat zero fat and high protein so you make your body burn the maximum number of calories converting the protein to stored fat. Wouldn't this tend to suggest that the best diet for fat loss would be a zero fat, high protein, moderate carbohydrate diet?

I scour my cast-iron after each use. I'm sure you do. So do I. That's why I said "scour out and restart the seasoning" instead of just "scour." Look... if you think they season just like cast iron, then I guess we have a difference of opinion there. My carbon steel pans are soft enough that I can easily scour the seasoning pretty much completely off with a Scotch Brite pad. I do not find this to be the case with my cast iron pans, nor would I want it to be. Maybe my pans are softer than yours, or maybe you treat yours differently than I do mine, or maybe I treat my cast iron differently. Who knows? I know that carbon (aka "mild") steel is different from black (aka "blue") steel, which is annealed. Maybe we don't have quite the same kind of pan.

I did the "whole pig buried in a big hole in the back yard" thing when I catered a friend's wedding in Arizona. Lot of fun, not too hard, and delicious results. We stuffed ours with sage and rosemary for the roast. Served it with a balsamic reduction, fire-roasted fennel and soft polenta with stracchino. Two web sites that may be of interest to you are: The Team Mumu Pit Cooking Page and Pig Roast and BBQ Links

I have found that there is a significant difference in the moisture content just after one day of sitting in the fridge. And I leave mine in the liquid. Difference in what direction? Tightens up the texture. Makes it less watery. If you're going to eat the cheese "straight" it makes a huge difference in taste and texture to eat the cheese on the day it was made without ever subjecting it to refrigeration.

The same is true of cast-iron. Well, except that most cast iron has a rough texture whereas carbon steel has a smooth texture. This is to say that cooking eggs on a cast iron pan that has recently had the seasoning ruined, removed and restarted might be a fairly dicey proposition. It's no big deal with carbon steel. If you like, you can scour out and restart the seasoning on your carbon steel pan every time you use it (this is easy to do because carbon steel is fairly soft) with little trouble. I would not want to try this with cast iron.

I have a carbon steel crepe pan and a carbon steel omelette pan. Got them for cheap at Bridge. Wouldn't give them up for anything. Although I don't have a carbon steel saute pan, I'd definitely think of getting one if I had a need for more. The nice thing about carbon steel is that it doesn't really need to be seasoned exactly like cast iron. This is to say that it's not such a big deal if you need to scour out the pan and start over again. A film of cooking oil and 10-15 minutes on low heat are all that is required. In fact, I find that my omelette pan tends to work better if I give it a little scrubbing with a Scotch Brite pad, brush it with oil, let it heat up for a while and then wipe it out and proceed with the butter, eggs, etc.

This, I thought, was one of the most telling things in the whole article: This suggests to me that America suffers more from an epidemic of sitting on our asses than we do an epidemic of unhealthful avoirdupois. That pretty much answers that question, I'd say.

What does the other 50% become? Yes... that is exactly my question. What happens to the other 50% of the calories? Let's look at a hypothetical example: Let's say we have a person who, through a combination of exercise and basic metabolic activity, burns off 2,000 calories a day. This person never eats anything but protein. Every day this person eats 2,500 calories of protein for an excess of 500 calories per day, which the body will store in some form as we know. My understanding is that excess calories are stored as fat and that the body does not store excess calories in the form of protein. I have never, ever read anything suggesting that extra calories are stored as anything else other than fat, so maybe you could explain how this might happen otherwise. So, what I am saying is that this person would gain a pound of fat -- fat having around 3,500 calories/pound) -- every week until equilibrium is reached between calories consumed/burned. I welcome any other explanation you could offer as to what would happen with those extra calories. Given your explanation, I can see how in a hypercaloric diet composed of mixed protein, carbohydrates and fat that the fat would most likely be stored as fat, as this would be more efficient. But, in such a case, we come back to the calorie is a calorie issue. If one is eating a 2,500 calorie diet that is 500 calories per day over what is required, I don't see how monkeying with the relative caloric contributions of fat, carbohydrates and protein could possibly change the storage of fat in the body.

It's not entirely clear to me that the whole "starvation mode" thing has ever been scientifically substantiated. It has always struck me as a hypothesis that some diet people came up with to explain why it is hard to lose weight and why rebound weight gain is so common after overly strict dieting. I beg to differ. Kindly see Keys A, Brozek J. Henschel A, Mickelsen O. Taylor HL. Human starvation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1951. Or this abstract from an NIH workshop: http://www.healthy.net/asp/templates/artic...article&ID=1675 Interesting. Thanks for the link. I stand somewhat corrected. That said, I have several issues: 1. I would very much like to see something that is less than 50 years old, although I imagine that Keys' findings have been corroborated. 2. I wonder how much of the decrease in basic metabolism after a certain amount of calorie restriction is due to the lower caloric requirement of supporting less body mass after weight loss. The NIH Workshop link seemed to indicate that most of the metabolic change Keys observed was due to a decrease in body mass. Indeed, they say, "...hypocaloric diets will induce a drop in RMR [resting metabolic rate]. This seems to be in proportion to the loss in LBM [lean body mass]." I wonder if there are any studies that show a reduction in RMR following, say, one week of caloric deficit. 3. It is unclear how long it would take the body to rebound back to "normal calorie burning" if/when such a metabolic phenomenon occurs. After 1-2 days of normal caloric intake, why wouldn't the body respond with a switch in basic metabolism back to "normal?" If we are to assume that the metabolic change happens quickly and is caused by the calorie decifit rather than the reduction in body mass, would not a reversal of this effect also take place quickly if there were a change in caloric intake? 4. It is unclear how long the period of calorie restriction and how great the extent of calorie restriction must be for such a thing to happen. People talk like it is something that happens at the drop of the hat. I think it is important to understand what the Keys study was looking at. They had these (presumably healthy) young men on a 2/3 calorie reduced diet over the course of 24 weeks. That is quite a bit of starvation indeed. I would expect to lose around 37 pounds of fat (and perhaps an additional 17 pounds of muscle) if I were among those test subjects, which is quite a lot of weight in a relatively short period of time. To give you some feeling for the effect of this diet: I am a relatively healthy 200 pound male and as such I burn off around 2400 calories/day with just my metabolism (12 calories/pound/day). A 1/3 reduction in my caloric intake would put me at 1600 calories/day. This is the proper caloric intake for someone who weighs 133 pounds, which is what I would weigh if I continued such a diet until I was no longer losing weight. All this is to say that it does not seem to be the case that a reasonable program of reduced calorie consumption necessarily induces a "starvation metabolism." While this phenomenon may help to explain rebound weight gain, I think that this offers a more plausible explanation for how this commonly occurs. Thanks for the info.

Here's a page full of research which supports low-carb eating: Low Carb Research: Low carb diets Results of some of those studies: It is not clear whether or not the studies were controlled so that the caloric intake was the same across all groups. I could go on... but let me just say that these studies are not exactly ringing endorsements for low-carbohydrate diets. Furthermore, they do nothing to demonstrate that the body processes calories that come from fat and protein fundamentally differently from calories that come from carbohydrates in terms of weight loss/gain.