Cheetos — "one of the most marvelously constructed foods on the planet, in terms of pure pleasure."

Steven Witherly, author of "Why Humans Like Junk Food," "ticked off a dozen attributes of the Cheetos that make the brain say more. But the one he focused on most was the puff’s uncanny ability to melt in the mouth. 'It’s called vanishing caloric density... If something melts down quickly, your brain thinks that there’s no calories in it . . . you can just keep eating it forever.'"

From a very long NYT Magazine article titled "The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food."

The Invisible Driver Prank.

Nicely done!

"I mind my own business. And I don’t eat junk food."

In case you're assuming that the secret to longevity is whatever it is that is true of a person who happens to have lived to be very old.

Ever met somebody who minded her own business, didn't eat junk food, and died young?

I followed a link yesterday to some article — I forget where — that said maybe having a lot of orgasms would increase your life span. Knock yourself out. I mean... it also said that being lonely would shorten your life span but having relationships would lengthen it. So get out there and find somebody to love. Preferably not a murderer.

ip'ns.

The food we need now.

"Handless man throws volleyball-size rock through KFC window...:

"The 46-year-old also allegedly chucked a brick through KFC’s drive-through window..."

ADDED: An element of this mystery — why did he do it? why doesn't he have hands? — is that he was (allegedly) brought into this country by the United Nations. Could it be that in his home country, he had a penchant for throwing things through windows and he was punished by having his hands cut off?

NYT's Mark Bittman comes to Madison to talk about food and greenness... and insults Scott Walker.

Jeez. Why is it that we can't just enjoy our waffles? He comes here for some damned Green Day exposition and...

Bittman won Madison hearts, extolling the virtues of locally produced food and poking fun at corn producers in Iowa and Gov. Scott Walker.

"On a non-personal level, we have to look to the example of pink slime and Scott Walker and [ask]... how do we regain the power that's rightfully ours? What's government's role? Can corporations be made to behave?"

What exactly is "rightfully ours" here? Bittman isn't a Wisconsin voter, and Wisconsin voters elected Scott Walker (and the Republican legislature, which keeps forwarding him signable bills). But there's some governmental role he wants, to make corporations "behave"? What's the misbehavior — selling food that people choose to buy? What discipline does he have in mind?

Bittman's approach to promoting healthy eating is simple: tax junk food and subsidize nutritious, healthy food. But, thanks to the influence of large corporations, our approach to food has been the exact opposite, Bittman said.

Why not just withdraw the subsidies? Why is taxing so dear to the liberal's heart? And who will end up paying a tax on junk food? I don't think that tax is progressive. And it could be portrayed as part of the "war on women." It will hurt single working mothers. Ironically, it would benefit the single-earner family, where one adult is freed to shop for scratch ingredients and to cook nice meals.

To underscore the severity of the situation, Bittman fired off some alarming statistics. More than half of Americans are overweight or obese. On average, only 10% of our calories come from unprocessed fruits and vegetables (the rest come from junk food and industrially produced animal products)....

Fired off? Alarming? What embarrassing skittishness! Half of Americans are overweight. Thanks for coming all the way from NY to deliver that amazing statistic. And 10% of our calories come from unprocessed fruits and vegetables... well, yeah, these are low calorie foods. I've got an alarming statistic that will scare the hell out of you: 0% of our calories come from drinking water!

And could you do better math when reporting alarming statistics: "only 10% of our calories come from unprocessed fruits and vegetables (the rest come from junk food and industrially produced animal products)"? If that were an accurate statement it would mean that none of our calories come from processed fruits and vegetables, that we never eat animal products that are not industrially produced, and ordinary stuff like grains, bread, and pasta must be "junk food."

On the policy side, he suggested that the government actively discourage soda and junk food, and prevent children from purchasing them. Food stamps should not pay for them, and they should be taxed in the same way as cigarettes, Bittman said.

Here's your nutritional bit, man. No oral pleasure for you.

"Do poor urban neighborhoods lack places to buy fresh produce and is that contributing to obesity?"

Myth of the "food desert" debunked.

Within a couple of miles of almost any urban neighborhood, “you can get basically any type of food,” said Roland Sturm of the RAND Corporation, lead author of one of the studies. “Maybe we should call it a food swamp rather than a desert,” he said....

In one neighborhood in Camden, N.J., where 80 percent of children are eligible for a free school lunch, children bought empanadas, sodas and candy at a grocer, while adults said they had no trouble finding produce. Wedged in among fast food restaurants, convenience stores, sit-down restaurants, take-out Chinese and pizza parlors were three places with abundant produce: Pathmark and Save-A-Lot supermarkets and a produce stand.

People are just making bad choices. Time once again for the liberal meme: Choice won't make you happy. Cue Barry "Paradox of Choice" Schwartz to tell us once again that "When the choice set is larger, people tend to make worse choices."

"This is way too healthy for a snack."

"Kids want healthy stuff like baked Doritos, but not an apple that they can get at home free."

The new vending machine is supposed to provide more "healthy choices," but kids don't buy the fresh fruit and vegetables. Actually, it sounds pretty gross: fruits and vegetables in a vending machine. It's supposed to be fresh, but the vending machine environment seems inherently unfresh.

"Dark brown and shiny worm-like pieces of batter, soft to the touch, piled in a biodegradable cup."

"It comes topped with cola syrup, more icing sugar, whipped cream, and two cherries."

Fried Coke!

What are you deep frying these days?

At the Deep Fried Café...

... keep it crispy.

"If you’re eating Chick-fil-A, you’re eating anti-gay."

Mmm. Well. At least I'm now able to confirm by inference that my pronunciation of Chick-fil-A is correct.

ADDED: To respond to some questions in the comments, I assumed, reading the sign, noting the capital A, and using common sense, that the name was pronounced "chick fill AY," that is,"chick fillet." But recently somebody laughed at me for saying it like that and insisted it was pronounced "chick FILL uh." I was embarrassed. When I came across the slogan that I've put in the post title, I thought it was a funny way to say I was right. Why does that slogan show I was right? Because it has meter and rhyme only if it's pronounced my way. As for the folks in the comments who thought it had something to do with fellatio — "fill-A-tio"....

"It's a hamburger wedged between two grilled cheese sandwiches."

1 of the 10 worst fast food products of 2010. And it's not the only grilled cheese-based one. There's also a grilled cheese sandwich with 4 fried mozzarella sticks inside.

Gift ideas — food category.

I was searching around in Amazon for gifts and, bereft of ideas, decided to search for "food." (Ah! What searching for food has meant over the ages of human history and pre-history!)

Well, the first 7 items on the list weren't even food. The top 30 was mostly things like the Melissa & Doug Wooden Sandwich-Making Set, the Melissa & Doug Slice and Bake Cookie Set, and various other Melissa & Doug wooden food stuff. Why wooden toy food? — you might ask. Whatever happened to plastic toy food? I figure, when it comes to play food, wooden is like organic. You want the kids to have healthy fake food.

If you don't count jars of baby food* — organic, of course — you don't get any food when you search for food until you get to.... well, the list goes up to 50 without any food. Okay. I'll search the Grocery & Gourmet Food category. Again, baby food is huge. Obvious why, actually. Diapers are popular too. You know what you need. You need a lot. And it's hard to get out of the house. Those single-cup coffee packets are popular. Pet food. Astronaut Ice Cream. Iffy gift baskets.

Back to that pet food:

Pack of twenty four, 5.5-ounces per can (total of 132 ounces)
With ingredients that are fit for human consumption
Made in a human food facility
Boneless, skinless, white breast meat chicken in a sumptuous gravy
Grain free product
All food ingredients are fit for human consumption

What are they trying to say?

I need to get back to my search. If you're searching too, please use this portal:



____________

* A deeper search reveals baby food — organic, of course — that comes in pouches. Do they out-green the glass jars? Eh! Who knows? Glass jars, you can recycle, but recycling uses fossil fuels. Pouches... must be plastic, but they roll up into nothing. My advice is: Buy what you like! The same goes for Christmas trees.

Caught in a rainstorm, ducking into a small-town libraray, I read the Utne Reader yesterday.

I used to subscribe back in the 80s, when I loved it. But what is it now? I found the cover pretty amusing:



I can't find a bigger picture of that at the site. Too bad! They should show it off. It's funny — Obama biting into a sloppy cheeseburger and cringing as the angry Michelle waves a bunch of carrots much like wives in old comic strips used to wield rolling pins. And you know what it means when a First Lady gets after the President to eat carrots.

Of course, the article inside isn't critical of Michelle Obama and her eat-your-vegetables shtick. It's critical of Obama, but not because he eats cheeseburgers, because he "loves up industrial agriculture." We're supposed to identify with the angry woman swinging her lo-cal phallic symbols at her man. (At least they aren't cut up phallic symbols like the ones Hillary famously foisted on Bill.) The cheeseburger Obama prefers — like the onion rings Bill Clinton preferred — is a symbol, a symbol of what he loves. In Obama's case, according to the article, it's agribusiness. He "loves up" agribusiness, that big sloppy, gooey cheeseburger.

It's Utne Reader, that magazine for aging lefties, and the article assumes you're into the anti-business agenda. The magazine assumes you'll identify with Michelle and her vegetables and is oblivious to the possible revulsion you might feel to the angry face they've given her. You're supposed to think:  Yes, Obama, come back to your lefty roots. (Note: Carrots are roots.) Your policies need to kick big business in the ass and embrace the local and sustainable and holistic.

But I didn't get that far into the magazine. The library was closing and the rainstorm was ending, and we needed to get back to the Glacial Drumlin Trail. I only had time to read: 1.  a letter from the editor by a subscriber who was sending back an issue of the magazine because it had Sarah Palin on the cover and she didn't want to look at that ever ever ever (though presumably the articles inside assailed the Alaskan), 2. "On Being Fat and Running: Abandoning insecurity for a full life," by Brenton Dickieson, from Geez, and "Sentenced to Life: A man ages in prison and outlives society’s fears," by Kenneth E. Hartman, from Notre Dame. But none of those things are accessible on line, so I can't send Utne Reader some traffic and set up some discussion about that here.

The Hartman article is a reprint, and — unlike the Geez reprint about running while fat — the original is on line, so you can read it.

Prison is a young man’s world, a world of physical violence and posturing, a world of brute strength and primal, unfocused rage. It is not a place to grow old, although more and more of us are doing just that: growing old in prison.

But Utne Reader is not a young man's world — or a young woman's world. It feels like an old person's place. I felt too young for it... and I'm old. Or it's for those other aging Americans... the lefties.  I see these people in Madison all the time. Do they feel left behind? Do you think the day will come when "lefty" will seem to mean left behind?

IN THE COMMENTS: lemondog has a way to get to an enlargement of the cover. Here's a closeup screen grab that shows Michelle's face:



The artist is Jason Seiler. Nice work. I notice the cigarette over the ear now. Ha.

Using lemondog's method, I can get to that letter about Sarah Palin. If you page forward in the magazine, you'll find it. You can see the cover that upset the poor woman so. She complains:

When the media gives air space, page space, and cover space (albeit in jest or irony) to crazies such as Palin, they are complicit in her plan to lend credence to the climate of ignorance, sensationalism, and just downright muddled thinking that is passed off as a national discourse these days — and which she is one of the most visible muddlers.

Jeez, the mere image of Sarah Palin unleashes hysteria.

AND: The image of Michelle Obama drives other people nuts. Women's faces. They're so provocative.

Let's take a closer look at those 310 million tits.

I love the Simpson "tit" flap. Even as the "Ground Zero Mosque" saved us from having to talk about the economy, that giant udder with 310 million tits has saved us from further discussion of that damned mosque. This is good, from Jacob Sullum:

The mention of outraged feminists suggests that Simpson stands accused of sexist vulgarity. I have to admit that I was shocked the first time I saw my mother use tit in a Scrabble game, but I was about 12 at the time, and she explained that the word is a perfectly acceptable variation of teat. Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary backs her up, saying tit is deemed "vulgar" only when it refers to a woman's breast. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary likewise lists "teat" as the first definition for tit, although it notes that the usage is "now obscure" except in certain dialects (such as Alan Simpson's, evidently). So even by the arbitrary standards that make certain words unacceptable in polite company, in  family newspapers, and on broadcast television between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m (though that last rule may be a thing of of the past), Simpson need not apologize for his use of tit.

Ha. That reminds me of this part of one of George Carlin's "7 Dirty Words" routines:

Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, and Tits, wow. Tits doesn't even belong on the list, you know. It's such a friendly sounding word. It sounds like a nickname. 'Hey, Tits, come here. Tits, meet Toots, Toots, Tits, Tits, Toots.' It sounds like a snack doesn't it? Yes, I know, it is, right. But I don't mean the sexist snack, I mean, New Nabisco Tits. The new Cheese Tits, and Corn Tits and Pizza Tits, Sesame Tits Onion Tits, Tater Tits, Yeah. Betcha can't eat just one. That's true I usually switch off. But I mean that word does not belong on the list.

Or this — not about "tits," but conceptually more apt:

[C]ocksucker is a compound word and neither half of that is really dirty. The word - the half suckercock is a half-way dirty word, 50% dirty - dirty half the time, depending on what you mean by it. Uh, remember when you first heard it, like in 6th grade, you used to giggle. And the cock crowed three times, heh, the cock - three times. It's in the Bible, cock in the Bible. ...
Now the word twat is an interesting word. Twat! Yeh, right in the twat. Twat is an interesting word because it's the only one I know of, the only slang word applying to the, a part of the sexual anatomy that doesn't have another meaning to it. Like, ah, snatch, box and pussy all have other meanings, man. Even in a Walt Disney movie, you can say, We're going to snatch that pussy and put him in a box and bring him on the airplane.

AND: Could someone digitally alter this scene and replace Woody Allen with Alan Simpson?

Prank caller James Tyler Markle "convinced a McDonald's worker to set off the restaurant's fire suppression system, which released a liquid from overhead extinguishers... and directed the worker to break the store's windows 'for ventilation.'"

Then he bragged about it on Pranknet and got tracked down by the authorities. 

He also did the same thing to a Wendy's, and you can listen to the audio of that prank call.

As a frantic, gasping worker busts out windows, Markle assures the man, "Sir, you're gonna be a hero." Markle, who was linked to the Wendy's call via his Skype records, has been charged with terrorizing and criminal damage, both felonies (the terrorizing count carries a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison).

"The American way of eating has become the elephant in the room in the debate over health care."

Ha ha. Get it? The elephant? That's you, reader. You're fat, says Michael Pollan. And you are a big — a huuuuge — part of the problem the government needs to solve. Pollan links to a study that supposedly shows that the reason we spend twice as much on health care as Europeans is because we are so grotesquely tubby. How can the government come between you and your food?

Cheap food is going to be popular as long as the social and environmental costs of that food are charged to the future. There’s lots of money to be made selling fast food and then treating the diseases that fast food causes. One of the leading products of the American food industry has become patients for the American health care industry.

Greedy corporations are making you fat and costing the health care system money. They are so greedy that — how awful! — they are selling food cheap. Expensive food also makes you fat, of course, but it's less obvious who's making money selling expensive food and thus harder to blame the evil corporations. 

The market for prescription drugs and medical devices to manage Type 2 diabetes, which the Centers for Disease Control estimates will afflict one in three Americans born after 2000, is one of the brighter spots in the American economy. As things stand, the health care industry finds it more profitable to treat chronic diseases than to prevent them. There’s more money in amputating the limbs of diabetics than in counseling them on diet and exercise.

Oh, here are the money-mad limb-hackers Obama was warning us about. Now, what I want to know is what is so terrible about the fact that most of the health-care money is spent treating diseases? Why should healthy people be consuming a bigger portion of the money? It's a good thing that people are left alone to take care of themselves and that health care professionals are used to do the things we can't do for ourselves. Of course, it would be nice if people didn't get diseases, and maybe a lot more of us could have long, disease-free lives, with little consumption of health-care resources if only we did more prevention. But would it change anything to give people ample free sessions with professionals who tell us to do what we already know we ought to do? The doctors actually don't have a clue how to get us to stop overeating (or — as if it would help — push us into a vigorous exercise program).

Pollan gets an economic theory going. He says health insurance companies drop customers after they get diseases, but if new law prevents this and requires them to charge all customers the same rates, then, they will have a strong new interest in preserving health and, allied with government, will stimulate the creation of government programs, policies, and laws aimed at stopping us from eating so damned much.

When health insurers can no longer evade much of the cost of treating the collateral damage of the American diet, the movement to reform the food system — everything from farm policy to food marketing and school lunches — will acquire a powerful and wealthy ally, something it hasn’t really ever had before....

In the same way much of the health insurance industry threw its weight behind the campaign against smoking, we can expect it to support, and perhaps even help pay for, public education efforts like New York City’s bold new ad campaign against drinking soda. At the moment, a federal campaign to discourage the consumption of sweetened soft drinks is a political nonstarter, but few things could do more to slow the rise of Type 2 diabetes among adolescents than to reduce their soda consumption, which represents 15 percent of their caloric intake.

"Bold new ad campaign"? Nicely, the NYT includes a link. Here's the ad:

It's a run-of-the-mill public service ad? What is bold about it? Picking on one product? Using tax money to pay for it? Oh, I see, it "graphically depicts globs of human fat gushing from a sideways drink bottle." I couldn't tell by looking at it. So shoving disgusting images in our face is bold. How admirably edgy of New York City. What's next? Pictures of ugly fat people slobbering over hamburgers? Something like this?



Throw all the taxpayer money you want into preventive care and raise the price on our too-cheap food. Blare nauseating ads at us. But we will still eat. We already care and we already don't want to be fat. We're not fat because corporations are greedy or because you can't get a free appointment with a nutritionist. We're fat because of the deep, innate appetite that saved our ancestors from famine and motivated them to eat whatever they could find to survive. We are here thanks to those profound desires, and life is all too easy these days. The unfortunate consequence of the beautiful amplitude of modern life is that we grow too big.

IN THE COMMENTS: Bissage said:

It’s funny that some people look at that ad and see “globs of human fat gushing from a sideways drink bottle.”

Not me.

I see a dog’s head with a dagger in it, a penis, and the word “sex."

Makes me want to consume alcohol, but I don’t know why.

"Mix wedges of tomatoes and peaches, add slivers of red onion, a few red-pepper flakes and cilantro. Dress with olive oil and lime or lemon juice."

101 recipes like that.

Let's make salads!

Am I going to live-blog Day 3 of the Sotomayor hearings?

No, no. I'm afraid I can't. I've got places to go. But I will listen to it, live, on the satellite radio as we cover a lot of miles today. And I'm going to take notes in a notebook, because that's how much I care.

And when I stop for a cheeseburger in a McDonalds, I'll get on the WiFi and share my observations, which may or may not be skewed by my personal experience of watching the interstate fly by instead of watching the faces of the Senators confronting the wise Latina.

Somebody, anybody, please, take the initiative to live-blog in the comments — to live-comment the hearings. Or not. Say anything. On the topic of Sotomayor. I'll put up a general open thread in a few minutes. Then, I'm throwing my things in a suitcase, so we can be in the car by 9 Central Time, when Senator Leahy restarts the proceedings.

"This photo somehow belongs in a certain comment thread yesterday."

LOL. He's talking about the thread that goes with this: