"What worries me most is winding up a vegetable — any vegetable..."

"... and that includes corn, which under happier circumstances I rather like."

Warning: The linked funny essay is in the NYT and by Woody Allen — cue all the usual attacks — and he sums up with punchline that ends with the words "probably better than being a Republican."

Are "community gardens" too ugly to have in a conspicuous place in a city park?

Controversy in Madison, Wisconsin.

Critics of the plan say weeds and scraggly vines would be visible to nearby residents and cars rushing by on West Washington Avenue, and that public park land should not be carved up for gardens used by only a few.

But.... vegetables!!!!

Overdosing on Brussels sprouts.

Too much vitamin K!

"I have to suspend my brain and mingle the subtle essence of my mind with this air..."

"... which is of the like nature, in order clearly to penetrate the things of heaven. I should have discovered nothing, had I remained on the ground to consider from below the things that are above; for the earth by its force attracts the sap of the mind to itself. It's just the same with the watercress."

Socrates, in "The Clouds," by Aristophanes.

At the October Café...

... what are you doing indoors?

"What's behind all the... hype?" — asks the Washington Post, revealingly.

The WaPo seems to be brimming with optimism about the sunny prospects of our handsome President. Look at him striding forward silhouetted against blue skies.



But look closely, there across the top. Yes, the new poll — Lead widens! — and there's Elizabeth Warren — Gloves are off! — but then the facade slips. See it?

"What's behind all this kale hype?"

Yeah! Hype! I keep seeing it everywhere! Ridiculous promotion! Ridiculous promotion of... a vegetable. You know, that one: Kale!!! Why's everybody talking about kale?!! Kale! It's on everyone's lips! Kale! We're gonna live forever! Kale! I'm gonna learn how to fly! On Air Force One!!!11!!1! I got more in me, and you can set it free, I can catch the moon in my hands. Don't you know who I am? Barack Obama. And Kale! We're gonna live forever. I feel it coming together. People will see me and cry. Kale! I'm gonna make it to heaven! He went to Harvard not Yale! Kale!

And have you heard? WE'RE EATING MORE BEETS!

At the Hot Pepper Café...

... we're just getting warmed up.

At the Pumpkin Man Café...

... you can talk about anything you want.

On the Capitol Square, today in Madison...

A Farmers Market day...



No protesters around the Hans Christian Heg statue. The sun is shining on the strings of peppers, and everyone seems pretty happy.



Around on the State Street side of the Square, there was protest activity...



... of a tired, embarrassing kind.

"[M]en don’t believe as strongly as women that fruit and vegetable consumption is an important part of maintaining health..."

According to some new study, which supposedly suggests that men are less "receptive" to "messages" that we ought to eat more fruits and vegetables. It also looked at something called "the theory of planned behavior," which (if I understand this correctly) says that people construct beliefs to match their behavior. Then there's this additional idea that it's because men are less able to get their fruits and vegetables that they develop the belief that it's not really so much of a problem.

By contrast, women — who get their fruits and veggies — end up thinking this food will make them good-looking and long-lived. So, if only men did eat more fruits and vegetables, they'd arrive at the appropriate beliefs. But how do you get men to do that unless they believe it's good?

See how they're trying to reverse things? Do it, and then you'll believe it's good. We don't want to have to convince you that you should do it so that you'll do it. We just want you to do it, and the belief that it's good will follow, pursuant to the theory of planned behavior.

But wait. Is it good? When was it ever proved that eating fruits and vegetables is important? Maybe men don't believe it because it's just been mostly nothing but a folk belief all this time. Why assume the women are the norm and men are misbehaving? Maybe men demand evidence and don't simply follow the dictates of experts.

I got this link from Instapundit, who just says: "FEAR OF E. COLI? Why men don’t eat vegetables." Maybe there is an instinctive resistance at least to raw foods. What I'm resisting is the ever-irritating bullshit science that presents whatever is true of women as what's good.

"What a perfect opportunity to inflict this on Althouse readers!"

Said Palladian...

Is a mobile fresh-fruits-and-veggies vendor in a city's so-called "food desert" a good idea?

Madison is full of grocery stores, but it has a neighborhood that that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has labeled a "food desert," because there's no grocery store within walking distance. There was one, but it closed, for whatever reason. I'd imagine most people drove to that one anyway, but now the people in the area have to drive (or bike?) to do their grocery shopping. So now the owner of a campus area grocery story comes up with the idea of "a grocery store on wheels called the Freshmobile."

Something like this...



... but with a jaunty instrumental version of this. And you can just picture the desert dwellers running after it waving dollar bills, can't you?

Ald. Brian Solomon, 10th District, represents the Allied Drive neighborhood [says] “I know a lot of people in Allied that want to eat healthy food, they just don’t have access to it"...

According to Mayor Paul Soglin, the city’s vending ordinances are “not designed to encourage this kind of activity.”

But they're changing the ordinances. And the Freshmobile guy (Jeff Mauer) has "raised most of the $125,000 needed to buy the trailer, truck and equipment thanks to grants from local foundations and donations." So Mauer has all this free publicity for his downtown grocery store, people are changing laws for him, and giving him thousands of dollars to tool around town in a mobile billboard for his business... which will presumably make it all the more unfeasible for a real grocery store to want to open in the area where the old one closed.

[Mauer] said the nonprofit Freshmobile Initiative can provide low overhead costs that would help keep food prices low.

You have to know how to work the "green" liberal minds of Madison, Wisconsin. Throw enough buzzwords at them — nonprofit, under-served, affordable, access — and no one will think about your carbon footprint.

At the Salad Garden Café...

... you can eat all you like.

"Somehow I get the feeling that when young Ann Althouse refused to eat the carrots on her dinner plate, her parents just sighed and got out the Cap'n Crunch."

Roy Edroso cuts and pastes some of my very best material onto his blog, but leaves me out of his Village Voice column "Dog Soldiers: Rightbloggers Meld with Mitt over Obama Mutt Meal Story." He just doesn't know how to "meld" my material with his "rightbloggers" shtick. It's too meta (and meat-a) for him to grind up into the usual sausages the folk at VV use to metaphorically masturbate.

But I must correct Mr. Edroso. There are 5 errors in the statement "when young Ann Althouse refused to eat the carrots on her dinner plate, her parents just sighed and got out the Cap'n Crunch."


1. "Cap'n Crunch is a product line of sweetened corn and oat breakfast cereals introduced in 1963," and I was already 12 in 1963.  My sweetened corn cereal of choice was Corn Pops, born in 1951, like me. Here I am explaining my cereal preference to 2 guys including a guy who looks like my dad and has a name like some guy in my adopted home town, Guy Madison.

2. Since carrots were never cooked in my 1950s childhood home, but were served raw, I liked them. Now, if it were something like spinach, which my mother always served with slices of hard-boiled egg on top, I would have avoided it, perhaps, along with the other kids in the family, with some simple commentary like "ew, spinach."

3. My parents never sighed about anything like this. At most, they would inform us that we were saying something that wasn't good "dinner conversation" and they would continuing modeling what was to their ear good dinner conversation.

4. My parents wouldn't get up from the dining table and go back into the kitchen to get different food if we didn't want to eat what we were served. They might say something like "That's dinner" and then move on, in the usual fashion, to good dinner conversation.

5. I was left to my own devices at the dinner table, devices I pursued silently and without parental comment or intervention of any kind: I drank milk, I ate plenty of potatoes, and I sprinkled sugar — copiously — on the wedge of iceberg lettuce. Later, after I was excused from the table — we said "May I be excused?" — I ate all the ice cream I wanted.

IN THE COMMENTS: At Roy's, Halloween Jack says:

Althouse probably thinks of her blogging self as a shorter, snappier Maureen Dowd, but she doesn't have the detached hollowness at the heart of MoDo's mean-girl act; she's usually petty, often smug, and when she gets like this, downright creepy. 

If it were a dinner party and she started in on this, people would probably laugh at first, mostly out of politeness, but a strained silence would ensue as she went on and was obviously getting into it. Then she realizes that not only is everyone else silent but almost everyone is averting their gaze; she clears her throat, murmurs "Well, anyway," and drains her wine glass. The guests can hand-wave it away as an odd tic (although one or two might reach for their list of handy excuses on the occasion of subsequent invitations), but on the blog it sits there, generating a veritable miasma like the stench of garbage left in a warm apartment for a week. 

Fortunately from her perspective, unfortunately from anyone else's, she's got her regulars to reinforce her behavior, with Meade piping in with a HuffPo piece about the amount of lead in the White House lawn, and she'll have a virtual dinner party at which she's always the toast of the town.

Enjoy the party!

Eat what you're told — a precept that appears and reappears in the life of Barack Obama.

First, there was the young Obama, as described by Obama himself, in terms of taking instruction from his stepfather:

“With Lolo, I learned how to eat small green chili peppers raw with dinner (plenty of rice), and, away from the dinner table, I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy). Like many Indonesians, Lolo followed a brand of Islam that could make room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths. He explained that a man took on the powers of whatever he ate: One day soon, he promised, he would bring home a piece of tiger meat for us to share.”

Notice how the individual will of the child is missing. The father figure teaches; the child learns how to eat. He receives instruction. He has feelings in that he reports the texture (but not the taste) of the various foods, but we hear absolutely nothing about whether he resisted these impositions or felt any sort of disgust. What happened happened. He was in Indonesia, things were like this there, Lolo had his ideas, and Obama existed in that milieu, which was tough/crunchy and infused with spiritual beliefs.

And now, Obama, President of the United States, is married to a woman who purports to teach us all how to eat. She's not forcing us to do anything. And despite some recent talk on the subject, the government has never undertaken to require us to eat broccoli. But young Obama wasn't forced to eat dog. He "learned." He was "introduced." (Fido, meet Barack. Barack, meet Fido... meat Fido.) It's instruction, not compulsion.

And maybe you will eat what you're told.

Children.

"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."

"The other day I gave her mash and fishfingers for dinner — something quite boring — and her response was 'That’s impressive,' so she has a sense of humor, too."

An English dad describes the experience of living with a 4-year-old genius. 

ADDED: Confession: I had to Google to make sure "mash" referred to potatoes. The process of doing blog tags confronted me with the part of my brain — of whatever size IQ, I don't know — that has been dealing with English food. Long ago, "mash" got mushed with "mushy peas," and I'd never had the push to straighten that out until just now. But, thanks to Wikipedia, I've set my head straight. "Mash" is just mashed potatoes. And "bangers and mash" — which sounds dirty — is just sausages and mashed potatoes, which I think are "impressive."

The term "bangers" is attributed to the fact that sausages, particularly the kind made during World War II under rationing, were made with water so they were more likely to explode under high heat if not cooked carefully; modern sausages do not have this attribute.

Wikipedia kindly includes some pop culture references, including Peter Sellers singing to Sophia Loren, about how he's unsatisfied with her "macaroni" and would like her to "give us a bash at the bangers and mash me mother used to make," which you can listen to on one of those YouTube videos where all you look at is the record spinning. Sellers and Loren do their best to exclude any double entendre that those lyrics may seem to convey in writing.

There's also a Radiohead number called "Bangers + Mash," which has lyrics that begin "You bit me, bit me, bit me, ow," which is something Peter Sellers never sang to Sophia Loren.

Times change, which reminds me of my favorite "banger" song: "Lieutenant Custard & His Banger of Time," which involves a time-travel sausage. Please be careful with this!

"If you order a Bloody Mary in Wisconsin, it comes with sausage, cheese, and beer!"

Chris, caught Facebooking at Graze.

Also on the skewer: an olive and a pickled brussels sprout.

At the Where's-the-Beets Café...

... you can get to the root of things.

Have you heard about the health insurance plan that covers your fresh, organic fruits and vegetables?

It's real!

Last summer, I paid a whole dollar for weekly half-boxes of fresh, organic fruits and vegetables as part of a community supported agriculture program. My health insurer paid the rest.

But wait, there's more:

A meditation-based stress-reduction class I took last year also was eligible for reimbursement...

Meditation! You know what else is stress-reducing? Sex. Why don't health insurers cover that? And I don't mean birth control and Viagra. I mean sex itself. Isn't that where we are going? Sex is a health matter. Insurance is going universal, with extensive government-imposed coverage requirements. I think those who have to pay for sex — people with various (undoubtedly health-related) limitations that preclude their acquiring it free — should be reimbursed.

Yes, you have to legalize prostitution first, but the prospect of something else that people like becoming eligible for government-mandated insurance ought to provide the incentive for legalization. As with marijuana, legalization is achieved through medicalization, and there's never a stage where you're simply free and able to seek pleasure. The old restraints will be removed only for the purpose of locking on the new restraints. You will have sex and drugs, when it's your medicine and when you can be made to pay for everyone else's.

Just wait!

I wrote all that without reading the rest of the column, so I'm amused to see what the columnist — Chris Rickert — actually did with the groundwork that got me going. He goes from meditation to sex too:

You don't have to look far to find that sex — at least the kind of sex society values, i.e., that occurring in loving, mature, committed relationships — is a partner with wellness.... Depending on which studies you believe, sex encourages intimacy, in some cases might reduce depression, provides good exercise, reduces pain and may even reduce the risk of cancer.

If a health insurer is going to buy its customers kohlrabi and celeriac to encourage healthy eating, why shouldn't it buy them contraception to encourage more healthful sex? In the end, everyone wins.

He'd just buy contraception at this point, not an actual sex worker's treatments. That seems so unfair. Them that's got shall get. Those with benefits get more benefits. When will government level the playing field?