HFCS rant.

Here's my contribution to the massive blogospheric response to the "Sweet Surprise" pro-high fructose corn syrup ads. HFCS is not a food choice I would make. I think that "food" should be "something you can figure out how to make yourself, in a normal kitchen, starting from pieces of plants and/or animals." (Admittedly, I don't know how to make baking soda, but then, I use it mostly as a cleaning product.)

I also feel strongly that food should be artisanal, not industrial. I was waiting for a freight train to pass at the intersection of Seminary Road and Capital View, and I was watching the cars go by, and I got a bit alarmed at one point by the progression of petroleum product-petroleum product-some kinda sulfate-some kinda sulfate-petroleum product-corn syrup-corn syrup. Just kinda freaked me out.

This is a "best of all possible worlds" rant. I'm not naive. I know I'm privileged beyond the dreams of most humans ever in history in terms of the options available to me in choosing food. I don't think everyone in the world (or even everyone in my neighborhood) has regular, affordable access to fresh fruit and vegetables and protein sources; I just think they should. I'd rather see social changes to encourage that than corporate profit-driven monoculture schemes to feed the burgeoning masses as cheaply as possible, and the stockholders as richly as possible. It's a giant weird Malthusian/Hieronymus Bosch nightmare to me, the way economics and agriculture have twisted around each other.

The ads say it's "made from corn".
Well, yes, in a way.
But it's not made from corn in the same way as, for example, maple syrup is made from maple trees.
Maple Syrup:
Step 1- Tap tree.
Step 2- Boil sap.
Done.

Corn Syrup:
Step 1- Mix dried corn kernels with water and sulfur dioxide for a day or two.
Step 2- Grind up the corn.
Step 3- Separate the germ (oily part) from the pulp (starchy/protein/fiber part) using a centrifuge.
Step 4- Filter off the fiber with some more milling and screening.
Step 5- Centrifuge the remainder, to separate the gluten from the starch.
Step 6- Keep diluting and centrifuging the starch mixture up to 14 times to make sure you've got just starch. (I'm pretty sure I could handle this recipe myself up to this point, but I don't have the right screens and I don't know where to get sulfur dioxide.)
Step 7- Get some bacteria (Bacillus sp., but I don't know what the sp. stands for) to make some alpha amylase (that's an enzyme that occurs naturally in saliva and pancreatic juices).
Step 8- Mix the alpha amylase with the starch. This breaks it down into polysaccharides. I guess if you were trying to do this at home, you could spit in it.
Step 9- Get some aspergillus fungi to make you some glucoamylase.
Step 10- Mix the glucoamylase with the polysaccharide solution. This gets you glucose.
Step 11- Get some D-xylose isomerase. (I don't know where you get this, or how it's made.)
Step 12- Mix the D-xylose isomerase with the glucose. This gets you a mixture of about 42 percent fructose and 50-52 percent glucose (and some other sugars).
Step 13- Using liquid chromatography, get your fructose level up to 90%. (I don't think you can get a liquid chromatograph setup for the home kitchen. Not even at Sur La Table.)
Step 14- Blend some of your 90% fructose with the 42% fructose/52% glucose so you have a 55% fructose solution. (SAT mixture problems, anyone?)
Done.

So, corn syrup is sort of made from corn. But I'd argue that it's made from corn even less than Velveeta is made from milk. (Acknowledged: Beer and cheese are produced in multi-stage processes involving bacteria and/or fungus, too. Also acknowledged: I don't know what liquid chromatography is, and it probably isn't scary.)

And it makes rats' hearts get really big. (I couldn't find a proper scientific study that actually says their hearts exploded, but this study says "fructose feeding induced significant increases in...left ventricular weight.")

Giant Art Crush

Lanea, Anubh, and I had a great time performing at the Pennsylvania Celtic Fling, thanks in large part to the primal ecstasy that is Albannach. I have a big crush on them.

Articles and geography

In the movie we saw last night about Bela Fleck taking the banjo back to its African context (which was very moving and deserves more than the off-hand mention it gets here), it struck us that the country we thought of as "Gambia" is actually "The Gambia". Which led to a brief bit of research into what other countries have a "The". Officially, just The Bahamas. Unofficially, Ehren decided, it should be all countries that start with "United", plus all plural island chains.

Ecoguilt parameters, continued

Eating local good; eating veggies better.
This article from Science News discusses the various sources of greenhouse emissions in the farm-to-table chain.
Sadly, the online version does not include the fab pie chart from the print version, but you'll get the idea: eating less beef and dairy does more to reduce your ecoguilt total than only buying local.
I guess it's time to start phasing out the lattes...

Outraged, and mollified

Outraged: What happens to unsold books.

Mollified: Inspired, even. These people were outraged too, and look what they did. (I think their domain name is a little bit of a stretch, though.)

The Mysteries of Google, continued

Google has changed its favicon in Firefox, but not in Internet Explorer. [1]
Puzzling.
In IE it's still the boxy capital G we're all used to.
In Firefox, it's suddenly the lower-case g ("good girl's glasses").
Weird how such a small thing can be such a big distraction.
(Not unlike corn in Italian wedding soup.)

[1] Is this a geek badge?

Bad Timing.

From the schadenfreude file:
FranklinCovey just sent me an email about a huge sale.
My LLBean Traveler convertible backpack finally bit the dust last week after a hard ten years of use. [Digression: to my deep annoyance, particularly following on Aveda's recent decision to discontinue the best shampoo of all time, I discover LLBean has redesigned the bag, and there's no convertible-backpack option, so I find myself considering a $300 handmade Italian bag instead, but that's another rant].
FranklinCovey has nice totes.
Big FranklinCovey email.
Huge Sale.
Tell everyone, said the email.
Shop now, said the email.
I tried.
I clicked through.
Their site is down for "scheduled maintenance."

I don't think so. I don't think anyone schedules maintenance for the same time as the "everyone come to the big giant sale" email is going out.