Arte De Timo

Author: admin

  • Pink Socks and the Desert

    When you drive through the desert you have a lot of time on your hands to think and get bored. I thought of lots of things, and this is what my wife and I thought of to represent them. Pink socks looking out at the road and a bunch of brown.

    Outside of Primm, Nevada just on the, California side of the border, though, there was some neat construction going on. They were building three solar collection stations. They weren’t solar panels. They were thermal collectors that reflect light onto a tower, where either they pump some thick fluid through a turbine, or allow for liquid metal to pass through magnets. THey are less efficient than panels and need a lot of space, but a lot cheaper and more durable.

    Obviously, there are lots of energy ideas for the desert, and lots of competing interests to go along with those ideas (for example the Mohave has a couple species of endangered tortoises that needs lots of open space,) but there is a lot of room to do some very interesting things. It’s good to see some developments, but there is still a lot of room out there for some creativity and innovation.

    My big idea of the trip was to use the highway median to add a few gigawatts of solar panels. The big cost out in the desert for panels is the infrastructure. You need people out there to maintain them, and roads and power lines to get the power back to cities. The space in between highway lanes seems like the perfect place for the federal government to subsidize a lot of it. It wouldn’t cost the government much to just change the regulations for high land use, and it would provide revenue to a cash-starved government. Plus, it solves many of the issues about land and infrastructure for the companies who would install them. No need for power lines and roads; they are already there.The land for highways is already gone as a natural place, so it wouldn’t take away from pristine habit, and here’s another perk; it would cool the roads off a bit from the shade, and maybe even combat some the thermal island effects going on that contribute to global warming.

    Next time you’re on a trip, think of possibilities. Its a good pastime and maybe could spark something that leads to something, that leads to something.

  • Some Art finally, but the end…


    I am finally getting down to the dregs of what was once my studio at SJSU. There are so many little odds and ends that go into making a body of work, that when its time to clean it all out, inevitably there is a lot of tossing and stirred up emotions.

    I still had the M&M’s from the series by that name. About 5 years old now, they still look fresh and edible. Well, not anymore, now that they have been added to the compost pile and sprayed with water. Like burning the shards of picture framing wood from my MFA show last summer, this had a definite performance act attached to it. Plus, it was very cathartic, and photogenic. Who knows maybe I’ll make another series about decomposing art dregs. I”m off to a good start with these photos I think. Here is just one, so you get an idea of what it looks like.

  • Aerodynamics


    When I was younger I was really in to TV. Lots of TV! I’m pretty sure it rotted my brain, but I think it also spurred my visual imagination, and precursed some of the imaging skills I have today. As a teenager I liked the typical action movies, but I also really got into nature and technology shows. They gave me a vision of growing up and one day discovering or inventing something important for the world. Now, that hasn’t happened yet, but maybe one of these days I’ll get to it.

    One of my favorite show on the Discovery Channel was an Australian show called Beyond 2000. They had segments on all the latest technological and science developments from around the world. As the 90’s progressed, the name seemed a bit passé, so they changed it to Beyond Tomorrow, but by that point the show was on its way out.

    I remember seeing shows that featured techs like E-Ink, which is now in use in the B&W Kindle, wrist watch video screens (Ipod Nano) and futuristic vehicles. They had one show about the flying car, which I think is still in the works, and another one about hybrid transport trucks with aerodynamic spoilers and hydrolic, regenerative braking. Very cool and cutting edge stuff back then, and unfortunately even for today.

    Nearly everything I saw on those show was in production, and at some point over the last 20 years some of it has popped up in our lives. The ones that never came to be, though, have always made me wonder about the politics and business side of what products make it out of the labs. For example: why haven’t trucking lines spent time and money upgrading their trucks. They are in the business of efficiency and energy use, so why has it taken so long to do the very, VERY simple things that save huge amounts of fuel and money. I remember from that TV show back in the 90’s that adding an aerodynamic cone to the back of a truck would save 30% in fuel costs, and a hybrid braking system another quarter. That seems HUGE, and cheap to implement. Why haven’t we seen them?

    My guess has always been that fuel costs are unnaturally low in this country (A book I read on the subject as a teenager was Against Empire by Michael Parenti ), so truckers never bothered. My guess now is that there have been DMV regulations, and a set of anti-progress capitalists (An oxymoron?) that prevented anything from sticking out past the main trailer.

    With the price of gas inching higher and higher with every boom-crash cycle, I suppose I was bound to see something turn up. On our trip to Arizona a few weeks ago I saw this truck, and a few others, retrofitted with some aerodynamic spoilers, presumably within DMV codes yet shaped to improve gas mileage. Finally; though not as cool looking as I had imagined.

    Just think, some technology we will probably need today to beat the peak energy curve has been around for at least 20 years. What other simple techs are out there that might save our globally warmed butts? And that some schmoe buried for the sake of a quick buck?

  • Loquat (A.K.A. Nispero) jam


    This last winter was a particularly warm one, and though my apple tree and pear trees are barely scratching out fruit and staving off disease, the loquat tree went gang busters with fruit. The combination of weather, dispatched rats, cats keeping the rodents away, and a neighbor with a BB gun has produced a bumper crop that’s still on the tree. This from a fruit tree we barely knew anything about before we moved into our house.

    Any good homesteader will tell you that when you are given a blessing of extra fruit, you don’t just sit there scratching yourself. You bust out the canning supplies and buy some jars. And that is exactly what my household did! Two batches over the last couple weeks, and another on the stove right now. Plus, the tree barely looks as if we picked anything, so there will probably be more. Tonight’s batch has some of the first plums of the season in it, too. I tried some “raw” fruit in combination off the trees and they seemed to compliment each other quite well. Whomever planted the trees decades ago, was a wise person.

    So you might be wondering, if you haven’t been to a house with this sort of tree what the hell loquats, A.K.A Nisperos, are. The answer is that they are a distant relative of the apple, and are from Asia. They taste a little like an apricot and are about the same size. I’ve loved having visitors over in the Spring and having them try a loquat for the first time. The experience tells a lot about a person’s experiences and food spirit. Is the person knowledgeable about food and the fact that there are literally thousands of varieties and species of fruits around the world that never make it to the supermarket? Are they a little adventurous to try new things? Its fun, and most people find the experience of loquats agreeable, though not impressive.

    Loquats are a very simple tasting fruit. They are almost generic in the sense that they are a little tart when under-ripe, really sweat when over-ripe, yet don’t have much complexity beyond that. Making jam out of them wasn’t all that hard to figure out either. We combined a few recipes from the web with our experience using plums and Voilà, loquat jam.

    I mentioned the jam and brought a jar over to a friend’s party last week and got some, “Ooh, I love loquats,” and “Wow that sounds like a lot of work.” Nothing unusual, but it got me thinking about the idea of hand made foods and more generally anything that is made through craft. In this case, loquats are a fragile fruit that go bad within a day or two, making them unsuitable as a trade fruit. The only way to experience them is by having a tree, or knowing someone with a tree. Next, having enough of them and the patience and energy to make them into a jam, makes this product that much more rare. Additionally, it must be hand made, and so will always bring a different experience when making and consuming the jam. So on the one hand we have this rather benign, little-known fruit, but on the other we have a process that turns them into a jam that has unique hand craft all over it.

    The point of crafting things by hand in an age of mass-design and manufacture is that you get unique experiences and outcomes. For me that is one of life’s ultimate pleasures, even if it is slow, tiring, and a “lot of work.”

    Just had a try; plum, nispero, and wildflower honey jam is fantastic!

  • I guess I was wrong about Hot Dogs…


    When I posted about hot dogs in my vegetarian posts I kinda made an exaggerated claim (surprise!) about people who like hot dogs not eating vegetables. This month’s issue of Sierra, as if to smack down obnoxious bloggers, has an interview with Natalie Coughlin. In it she says,

    Also, my guilty pleasure is a really good hot dog. It’s funny because I eat mostly vegetarian and I’m all about health, but one of my favorite foods in the world is hot dogs, which is terrible.

    She also says she is an urban farmer. That much more to like. Even more to root for this summer. Go Natalie!

  • Travels Through the West


    Last week my family and I drove about 1500 miles through a big chunk of the Southwest. I like driving. It lets me think with few distractions. There is no screen, keyboard, or much else except good company to pull me from a focused conversation, or line of thought. It can be a test of focus and stamina, though, even if it is welcomed.

    This trip was definitely a test, but I enjoyed it. I thought often about so many of the topics that I post here on this website. Food flowed in and out of my thoughts, of course, but I also had some ideas on energy, transportation and living in the desert. As always, Las Vegas depressed me, but there was also a lot of interesting sites on the road. The next few posts (with pictures) will delve into some of my road inspired thoughts.

    This time, instead of writing extended manifestos that strain even the most committed reader, I will break things up by topic and length. I will also attempt to move my posts toward the Multi Medium Art that the title of the site implies. It’s been a long time coming, and now that I am a year out of grad school, I will start developing some discourse around all that education of mine (Remember I also have a B.S. in physics, so lets see if I can sneak some of that in here, too).

    Catch you later with some short writings and fun posts.

  • Vegetarianism – Notes

    Since I started writing these posts on vegetarianism, I have been asked again “why [am I] a vegetarian,” asked if I “am still a vegetarian,” asked for advice about diets because I am an “expert,” agreed with, disagreed with, and generally been put at the center of some weird conversations about meat and food. I suppose that is why I write, to stir up some “food for thought” as one of my friends likes to say.

    After all these posts on food and being a vegetarian you may be wondering where I am getting all this (Or simply that I am a hack, egotistically trying to make a big deal out of my latest lifestyle choice.) In my writings, you may also notice the lack of citations. It’s on purpose. I don’t link out too much in my writing anymore, because it has become a narrative. I write stories that dip in and out of logic and reason, facts and opinion, and are meant to pull you, my reader, along with my musings. That is not to say I am writing fiction, or am pulling your leg though. I just like to build a world where an idea can be stretched out for all its worth without being destroyed in a debate. Parallel thinking if you will. It’s more entertaining and informative that way.

    Much of my thinking on food comes from a combination of media, observation, and experience. I think that can be a pretty powerful combination even if it doesn’t live up to scientific standards, or classification as art. This is a place of Arte de Timo after all. (Look on the About page.)

    Here are some of my pivotal “sources” for my writing, and things I recommend.

    Media – Books I have read other books and lots of specific articles online, but the following are the big philosophical ones.

    1. The first book I read about food was Coming Home to Eat. The book deals with eating locally and thinking about where food comes from. The author took the idea of locality to the extreme by conducted an experiment where he only ate food from within 100 miles of his house in Tuscan for a whole year. The book taught me two things: 1. Think more about food, then act more on food. 2. Experimenting on yourself is fun and rewarding.

    2. No conversation about food these days can start without bringing up Michael Pollen. Omnivores Dilemma and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto changed my way of thinking about food, as they have for millions of others. I learned to be skeptical, persistent and in depth in my eating choices. Food is a hugely complex topic that reaches everything in life. To figure food out, I have to study, and test myself. What are those chemicals? Why am I scared of them? Is organic really better?

    3. The latest book that has blown my mind has been Wendel Berry’s Bringing it to the Table. This guy has been thinking and writing about food for 40 years, and he’s nailed it since the beginning. Most alternative/sustainable food ideas stem from him. Michael Pollen even admits that Berry is the original. This book paints an amazing and complete picture of farming and food, and where it all went wrong. Berry’s arguments are vivid and enchanting. We know how to live better, and it ain’t through “bigger, faster, cheaper!”

    Media – Movies I’m going to just list the best of them here.
    1. Forks over Knives
    2. Fresh
    3. The Future of Food
    4. Ingredients
    5. Broken Limbs
    6. Food Inc.
    7. King Corn

    Observation
    This will seem obnoxious, but hey, that hasn’t stopped me before, but I actually watch people eat, all the time. I pay attention to the reactions people have to their food. Admittedly, judgments do surface once in a while, but that isn’t the important part, so I try not to let that get in the way of seeing what’s going on. Watching people of all ages respond, for example, to salty foods and sugary foods is very telling of their overall eating habits. So are the vegetables on a person’s plate, and how they are eaten. These observations are along the lines of how we use and see manners at the table. “Please” and “thank you,” napkins and elbows, cookies and chips really do show off how considerate and civil we are.

    In addition to watching others, I also feel and think about what I am doing in comparison to others. I can’t know what others are feeling when they eat, but if I eat similar foods and a build up a few different perspectives on what that food does to a person physically and emotionally, I can start to form a profile of food and people. For example, in my observations, people who like hot dogs often don’t like to eat vegetables, presumably because they lack the intense sensations that the salts and refined sugars in the hot dogs provide. Whereas, someone like me who eats a lot of fruits and vegetables finds sugary things like hot dogs, cake and generic purple jelly unappetizing and quite unpleasant.

    Experience
    This is a big topic for me, but I’ll give you the key points. Two years ago I got a letter from my doctor recommending that I join a study called E-LITE. The idea of the study was to determine what life tools are required to get people to change enough to improve medical health outcomes. They divided the participants into three groups. The first got some money, were told to lose weight, and left on their own to figure it out. The second, my group, was brought in for a 3 hour session, given a scale, pedometer, DVD’s and a regiment on how to count calories and record our activities. The third group was given all the same things but were also given access to personal trainers, and brought in for personal health sessions on a regular basis. In addition to all this, the participants were tested for weight and girth, plus our blood chemistry tested every few months.

    I lost 15 pounds and got in shape in the first three months, plus I had the tools, both technically and skill-wise, I needed to keep the pounds off and monitor my activity. The cool part is that I also had detailed records of my blood chemistry to go along with all the other records I had for weight, physical activity and food. I could experiment!

    What I learned was that the general advice given out by doctors about lessening health risks is pretty much right; nothing much more, and not much less. What I mean is that, is that as far as blood chemistry goes and the risks we can infer from them, getting the numbers into medically healthy ranges is usually as simple as losing weight and exercising. Not a very complicated recipe, but one that gets clouded because of all the lifestyle drugs and trendy diets out there. Reduce your intake by 3500 Kcal and you will lose a pound of weight. Once I realized all this it was a matter of planning how much to lose per week, eating to my numbers, doing a lot more exorcize, and tracking the decline of my infer-able health risks like diabetes.

    Since I could track my blood chemistry through the study, I could test which behaviors were most important in my body. For example, I found that weight and then exercise controlled my blood sugar. As my weight went down so did my fasting blood sugar. As I got in shape and exorcized, so did my long term blood sugar level. Exercise! Exercise! Exercise!

    An interesting result about vegetarianism was that since my decision lined up with a blood drawn, I could see how it affected in my body. The result was that it controlled my cholesterol somewhat. Since I became a vegetarian, my totals have gone down quite a bit (maybe 20%), though my HDL/LDL ratio’s are off because I also became out of shape in that time.

    In the two years I also experienced a lot of ups and downs that were directly related to my eating. I had mood swings when I didn’t eat enough over the course of a day, and my elbows hurt if I was going low on calories for too many days in a row. I have done a lot of little tests involving salads and fruit, wheat flour vs. corn, caffeine or not, and generally how to balance hunger vs. healthiness. Together with my commitment to farmer’s market foods, gardening, and cooking and canning fresh foods, I think I have built up some good experiences with how to eat really well, maintain energy and health, and address many of the social concerns I have with food production. Answers? Maybe not, but experiences, I do have.

    A great example of this knowledge comes from two restaurants I’ve eaten at lately. The first was an organic bistro in Paso Robles called Thomas Hill Organics. The other is a South Indian place here in Santa Clara called Dasaprakash South Indian. The first was a new place, I think. We obviously have never been there, but the place also seemed like it just opened. There were too many servers, and they were all a bit excited and nervous. Without getting into a lot of detail, the food was good enough, but my vegan pizza just didn’t fill me up. It wasn’t that it was too small, but the sprinkling of lentils and thin crust felt like the cooks had no experience actually being vegan or vegetarian. It gave me the impression they cooked it for a steoreotype that in their head about who vegans are.

    It was a meal that followed the letter of the law of veganism, but lacked any sense of meality. The rest of the menu had steaks and salmon, etc. so vegetarian food wasn’t the focus. It felt like they were aware that their clients might be vegan or vegetarian, and so provide several options, but were also going to punish any vegans or vegetarians by making us/them order several items and glasses of wine to actually feel like a meal was had. It was uninspired to say the least.

    Compare that to the vegetarian Indian restaurant, and everything about a vegetarian meal changes. That Indian meal made me feel like a king. It was fiery, complex and rich. We ordered three combo type platters and at the end of it all my stomach was screaming at me both because I ate a lot and because it was so confused about the ten thousand flavors I had just eaten. Both meals were comparable in price, service and portions. I was equally hungry going into both, and would say I like pizza and Indian food equally, so the difference was the experience of the meal making. The Indian restaurant wasn’t strictly traditional (we got served what was basically Mexican salsa on one of the plates), but it made sense because it had thousands of years of experience behind it. The organic vegetarian French bistro food was…, well, new.

    Is a vegetarian diet right for you? After getting this far, my hope is that the answer isn’t simply “yes” or “no,” but maybe something with more nuance. Maybe the time isn’t right for you, or your lifestyle doesn’t give you the extra time to prepare better meals everyday. Or, you do so much exercise and have so little time to cook, that high calorie meats are where you have to be right now. My hope is that you will want to study your food a little bit, make some observations about how it affects you, then build up some new experiences with what it could be for you at this point in your life.

    As some men realize, Polish sausages for dinner every night may have been tolerable in college, but will definitely cause problems after thirty. Look forward to changing your diet. It’s good for you, and you might just be better for it.

  • Vegetarianism – Part 3

    To open this part, I have to admit defeat, and I have to confess that my vegetarianism was giving me problems even as I wrote part 2.

    I didn’t fail because I gave in to eating meat, though as I am sure many vegetarians do I did eat meat products several times by accident to my knowledge. I’ll explain that later. I failed, because I didn’t provide my body with what it needed.

    As I wrote before, and as you know, humans store energy as fat, and we have a gene that makes us want to store as much fat as possible. It is the underlying biological mechanism with obesity, in fact. Another less known part of our biology is that our bodies also store a lot of minerals and nutrients in our bones. It is part of being omnivores, and red-blooded I suppose. Our biological development was one of scarcity and surplus, so we evolved to be able to go for long periods with little food, and/or poor quality food. This storage capacity is hard to monitor and can run out, though.

    I still have plenty of fat stores, to be be clear, but my nutrient reserves are gone, and I have become very sensitive to my immediate diet. I made it through the holiday season simply avoiding meat and eating everything else because of these mineral reserves. But, I didn’t make it through the last couple of months of travels and events very well, though.

    On a week-long trip last month, I did well to eat healthy and maintained a vegetarian diet, but I didn’t have access to what I normally eat at home, like Tempeh, Tofu, Ezekiel bread, and most importantly, my fortified breakfast cereal. Travel is already draining, so when I started getting a little more tired than usual I didn’t notice. And when I got sick to my stomach two days after getting back, I figured it was food poisoning, or a bug I caught. Both of these seemed plausible, since I was exposed to some sort of stomach bug, and I did eat a piece of questionable pizza, but what caused it isn’t the important part. What should have been a day or two of discomfort was a week of battling off sickness.

    Anemia is a dangerous thing. I got lucky and figured it out before it spiraled out of control. Iron is a tricky and complex agent in our bodies, as I learned, because it is used in the digestive system along with every other major system. When I didn’t have enough, it cause a digestive impairment that made it hard to uptake the iron I was missing, hence the potential for a dangerous spiral.

    What made all the pieces fall in to place was a trusty vegetarian beet salad. Beets have a wonderful side effect of showing me clearly (or maybe that is not clearly) whether I’m getting enough iron or not. Called Beeturia, (I kid you not) the condition color codes a certain bodily function, and makes it easy to know what’s going in my digestive tract. Once I realized the problem, and could eat properly at home, I recovered. But, it took a while, and it was pretty bad for a couple of days.

    That was a failure. Under normal conditions I shouldn’t have been so sick, nor lost all those days. And, it wasn’t isolated. I just got back from another trip of only four days, and I have still needed to recover even if I haven’t been sick. On this trip I caused a lot of trouble trying to eat properly, but apparently still didn’t get it right. My host graciously cooked up some amazing vegetarian food (grilled nopales being the most memorable among them,) also stirring up some resentment and complaints from the natives, so-to-speak. Upon my return, I felt the need to stock up on certain foods again. It is discouraging that it took so little to drain me.

    Obviously, limiting choice of diet is a struggle, and eating while traveling always puts a strain on my body, whether it is eating too much junk, just over eating, or simply stressing about what and where to eat. My recent trips were short and easy, though. Everyone (host-wise anyway) accepted my decisions about food and was very gracious. On future trips I can’t and shouldn’t count on good graces. I will have defeated many of the social reasons for being a vegetarian, if I become hard nosed, and truly start behaving as if I am different and better than everyone else (even if I am thinking it!).

    Much of why I ultimately became a vegetarian revolves around that fact that I eat out of the house a lot. When I go out I have very little control over the quality and kind of food I eat, but being a vegetarian actually takes a lot of that back psychologically and socially. If I set hard lines about what I am going to eat based on my beliefs, it actually becomes easier to make choices while at restaurants or on trips. It is the same sort of effect that a diet (in the “Atkins diet” sense) has. If the choice is already made, I don’t have to be as strong willed with the menu in front of me. Convoluted and weak minded, yes, but it can work.

    When I stock up my fridge and pantry at home I can do it with local, organic, food, or I can buy properly raised animal products from places where I have a direct line to the producers. This lets me just eat, and enjoy it, which is a very important part of who I am as a person. Food is as much about social connections and intellectual structures as it is about nutrients and biological sustenance. So, in that sense, my home is very food-peaceful. Out of the house is a whole different story, strewn with many of the problems I brought up in the other parts (1 and 2), and as such, requires careful decisions and thought, often involving conflicting motivations and politics. That eats into my enjoyment, and I like food and eating too much to play those games. But, low and behold, vegetarianism brought up a whole other more direct set of issues to deal with.

    I recognize that becoming a vegetarian when I enjoy eating so much is a strange decision that may even seem self-deprecating, but it is consistent with my beliefs. Ultimately eating is a circular act. It is an ingestive private phenomena that also projects my beliefs out into society, and it is a momentary occurrence within life-long habits and traditions. I can’t isolate one side of the equation from the other for the sake of ease. Eating is about how I am living my life; not just in my mind, or just in my body, but in its totality. Knowing thine-self is no easy task, and never ebbs. I change, and how I know myself changes, so too must my eating. That is my point in all this.

    My decision to not eat meat wasn’t a life long commitment. I am not, and don’t expect to be married to any one source of nutrition. Adapting tot eh local foods is how my ancestors lived, and so shall I. I don’t know when or where I will make the choice to eat meat again, but it will come eventually. As my life goes on, I am going to make decisions that are personal, emotional, and reasoned about what I eat, and I will enjoy that process. I find it absolutely amazing and exhilarating that I can get so much pleasure and satisfaction out of something I do several times a day, and every single day. Why would I give up any of that to a “strict” diet? Vegetarianism is just another way of exploring more foods and responses to foods. It is a way of satisfying my tastes and pleasures in food.

  • Environmental Impact of Foods

    Per ton of product, animal products generally have a larger water footprint than crop products. The same is true when we look at the water footprint per calorie. The average water footprint per calorie for beef is twenty times larger than for cereals and starchy roots. When we look at the water requirements for protein, it has been found that the water footprint per gram of protein for milk, eggs and chicken meat is about 1.5 times larger than for pulses. For beef, the water footprint per gram of protein is 6 times larger than for pulses. In the case of fat, butter has a relatively small water footprint per gram of fat, even lower than for oil crops. All other animal products, however, have larger water footprints per gram of fat when compared to oil crops. From a freshwater resource perspective, it is more efficient to obtain calories, protein and fat through crop products than animal products.

    –Source www.waterfootprint.org

    And…

    “Old MacDonald’s Carbon Footprint”
    – Source SierraClub.org

    Seems that the environmental cost of meat is pretty high. Not that that would affect many decisions about what a person eats.

    Just some food for thought.

  • Vegetarianism – Part 2b

    While writing part 3, I came across this article, “22 Reasons Not to Become a Vegetarian.” If you are interested in this topic please read it, but with a cynical eye. I did, and it bothered me.

    The article didn’t bother me because it is anti-vegetarian, but because it is so misleading and cynically put together. There are lots of references, for sure, and I will be digging through some of them, but when you actually read how they are used, you will begin to realize that not one of them is used in a proper context. Once you see that, you will start to see a whole bunch of other misleading statements, unsupported claims, and inconsistent “arguments.” (I reads like a Tea Party article about politics.)

    For example, the author switches back and forth between arguments against veganism and vegetarianism depending on what suits her point. She almost promotes vegetarianism in a third of it as she bashes veganism instead of vegetraianism. Most of her points are debunked, and she admits it many times, when you add dairy and eggs to a diet.

    Another great example, is that she contests a claim with “References, please?” Then goes on to quote a whole bunch of studies. In her number 11 argument, she provides the references she is asking for, then some that seemingly dispute them. So there are studies for AND against the point? So its not conclusive then right?

    If you read what she is contesting carefully you see that those points are written to state facts and offer vegetarian responses to the facts. They are very self-consistent. The author on the other hand tries to make universal claims about everything having to do with nutrition and diet. Oh, and I checked two of the studies referenced for this one. They study very specific cases (one involving only young males) to study the mechanisms of absorption, but the author makes wildly generalized comments about all foods and people to make her point. And what’s funny is that in the end she only disputes a vegan diet.

    So why write this half post? To demonstrate how irrational otherwise smart and educated people get when they have an agenda or an emotional bias. There is nothing new in that, but with food we enter a complex social and personal space. Eating for humans is social. People almost uniformly prefer to eat with other people rather than alone (I’m not saying it’s universal, but the preference is pretty deep into our biology,) yet it is a very personal act. Nourishing our bodies is about individual satisfaction, cravings, and preferences. Hunger and taste are personal, and almost intimate feelings, yet eating is a public act that is wrapped up with every level of human society and culture. We all get into each others eating business no matter how personal it is. How, what, and with whom we eat is important and draws us into a strange place where we judge each other freely and intensely, even when there is no other reason to do so.