bearing blog

We just got back from visiting Mark’s parents in the rural area northwest of Cincinnati.  Just before we left, an acquaintance of my father-in-law dropped off a Christmas present.  Dad carried the silvered-plastic insulated bag in from the porch.  "He said it’s a Virginia ham." 

"Ooh, what a nice present!" I said.  (He knows I wear my appetite on my sleeve.)  "That’s a treat.  They don’t have those in Minnesota.  At least I’ve never seen one sold up there." 

"You want it? I don’t care for that salt-cured kind." 

I agreed enthusiastically.  It went, still wrapped, into our cooler along with a frozen package of Mark’s grandma’s homemade goetta.  We drove all day and threw the ham into the fridge and the still-frozen goetta into the freezer when we got home.

Sunday night I thought I’d fry up slices of the ham for dinner, along with baked squash and collard greens and sauteed apples, and we’d wash it all down with a couple of cold beers.  But when I picked up the package I found it surprisingly light and, um, squishy. 

Upon opening the silvered bag I called out to Mark, "Hey, who was it that gave this ham to your dad again?" 

Mark named the gift-giver, somebody from Dad’s neighborhood whom I hadn’t ever met.  "Why?"

"Tell me about him."

"Um.  He’s not the sharpest tack in the barrel.  Why?" 

I showed him the contents of the pouch: a four-pound log of boned, chopped, cooked, pressed, flavoring-solution-injected, pre-sliced, pale pink lunch meat, heat-sealed in plastic.  Brownish speckles, no doubt intended to signify "spice," floated in the liquid in the package, which was graced with a shiny gold sticker bearing the prominent label, "VIRGINIA BRAND delicatessen-style ham." 

And me with only ten minutes or so before the squash was done!  After some discussion of the evidence for the refrigeration history of the ham log (the gift giver had called ahead and announced he was dropping off a "perishable" gift, and had gone to the trouble of wrapping it in an insulated bag, and the frozen stuff in the cooler had stayed frozen), we carefully and thoroughly fried up some of it for dinner anyway, ate about four bites each, and then, I’m sorry to say, threw the rest of it out.   

We did enjoy those cold beers…

I said in my last post that I would write more about the book Mindless Eating.  To balance my review, I should add that Mark (remember, he’s an engineer at a Major Food Company) didn’t like Wansink’s writing at all, and pointed out numerous flaws that I’d hardly noticed.  I think this is because I expect a pop-sci book like this one to be lighter on the "sci" and heavier on the "pop" than, say, a JAMA article. But the omission of technical details bothered Mark, as did the light writing style, and he noticed several places where Wansink offered one explanation for his findings while not mentioning a more plausible and glaringly obvious alternative explanation.*   He also didn’t like the repeated emphasis on how easy! painless!  it would be to lose weight by, say, using small dinner plates and repackaging food into smaller containers. 

"He needs an editor," Mark said. My view is that he has an editor, one who is attuned to selling books to the diet-book-buying population.   But let that be the warning:  if you already read a lot of technical literature about food marketing and flavor chemistry and things like that, you might not be impressed by the book. 

I am not interested in using his techniques to get my family to eat less.  I am interested in using them to get my family (particularly Milo) to eat more of certain foods.  Vegetables, for example.  Fish.  Nuts.  That kind of thing.   And in training my kids’ brains to expect a plate that’s half fruit or vegetables, to see that as a beautifully proportioned thing, as the "right" kind of lunch or dinner.  So what will I be trying? 

• Adding adjectives when I answer the question "What’s for dinner?"  "Power Peas" may sound silly to me, but if my four-year-old were to like the sound of it, perhaps he’d eat a few percent more.   And maybe everyone will think I’m a better cook if I tell them I’m serving "pan-fried ham, apples sauteed in butter, brown-sugar-baked acorn squash, and tender leafy greens"  instead of "ham, apples, squash, and collards."
• Using the right size plate and encouraging the kids to serve themselves (people eat 92% of what they serve themselves!) with enough vegetables to fill half of it. 
• Having a greater variety of vegetables on the table.  A friend of mine has recently had great success adding jars of various kinds of pickles to lunch.  Apparently, her kids can eat enormous amounts of sauerkraut and giardiniera.
• Leaving the vegetables on the table and the other stuff in the kitchen for second helpings.
• I always say I’m going to do this and I never do:  Cut up raw or lightly blanched vegetables and keep them in a bowl in the fridge at eye level.

I tried a little bit of this already.  We stopped at a chain buffet restaurant for lunch on our way back from Ohio.  Previously I might have put a tiny amount, one taste, of something green and highly nutritious, such as a single brussels sprout, on his plate and insisted he "train his tastebuds with it" as part of his meal.  This time I walked Milo around, showed him everything, and asked him first to pick his vegetables and fruit.  He chose corn and watermelon.  I filled half his plate with those and then he chose a slice of pizza.  I was very suspicious.  I expected him to eat all the pizza, maybe nibble the corn and watermelon, and then beg for more pizza.

Surprise!  He ate all the corn and all the watermelon before he finished that first slice of pizza.  When he wanted more pizza, I went and got him more corn, watermelon, and pizza.   On his third helping he didn’t finish the corn and pizza, but he did eat all the watermelon, even though he hadn’t asked for it.    He ate more veg than I would have expected.  I’m aware that corn and watermelon aren’t exactly superfoods, but it’s better than eating an equal volume of white-bread buffet pizza.   Maybe it’s better to get used to eating a large amount of veg, even if it’s just corn?  I don’t know.  Every kid’s different.   

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*Here is an example.  In one experiment, Wansink’s researchers gave people bowls of M&Ms to munch on.  The bowls were identical except that some contained a mixture of seven M&M colors and some contained three additional colors.   People ate significantly more from the ten-color mix.  Wansink says that this was caused by the perception of variety.   But given that the extra colors added were gold, pink, and teal — not exactly standard for M&Ms — doesn’t it seem plausible that people ate more because of a perception of novelty? Maybe Wansink and colleages had reason to rule this theory out, but if so, it wasn’t mentioned in the book.