Idea a Day #2

People tend to put a bunch of stuff in their refrigerator that doesn't belong there and vise versa. Bananas turn black when left in the fridge, apples get too cold and get mushy if left to warm once taken out, etc. Eating well can be difficult as is so I'm always looking for ways to help myself make better decisions without requiring additional use of willpower (known as nudging). Hence, the need for a fruit fridge the main attributes of which would be:

• Contents are visible from the outside and lighting is flattering to said objects. Hence a glass front. A triple glazed argon or krypton gas filled window would do the trick. The function of this is to make the contents more appealing. Presentation of both the contents and the interior of the fridge should have significant influence on your likelihood to eat fruit.
• The temperature of this refrigerator would most likely be higher than your standard fridge which are usually set at about 34 degrees. Luckily this has been researched heavily. Humidity should be studied too.
• Maybe there are separate sealed compartments for different fruits and there's an ethylene gas filter that keeps fruit from ripening - or the reverse. Say you want avocados to ripen quicker so you put them with ripe apples (and this is all figured out in an algorithm that you merely have to press a button to get near ideal settings) in one compartment.

It'd be interesting to design a few dozen prototypes then run a double blind study and see if it did in fact effect participants consumption of fruit. You could take what you learned and tweak the design to try to maximize the influence it had.

I'm aware this would add yet another device to the kitchen. As an alternative maybe this could just be a shallow compartment within the door of a standard fridge. An operable window to the outside could serve much of the function as what was mentioned above.

Making Mead - Batch #1

I'm jumping the gun a bit here since I haven't posted photos of how Vija and I harvested honey from our beehive, but none the less.

About two weeks ago I picked up a book called The Complete Meadmaker along with some additional brew equipment since my friend Chris had given me some as a gift. Just to clarify, mead is basically honey wine. It was the preferred drink of the vikings and is thought to be one of if not the oldest fermented beverage on earth. People have been making it for at least 9,000 years.

I decided on two 1-gallon batches of traditional sweet mead. I opted for a method that involves no heating. It can be risky in that wild yeast could take over the fermentation, but 80% of brewing beer/mead is sterilizing everything, so it shouldn't be a problem.

The ingredients are:

3 or 2.2 pounds of honey - in this case south side of Chicago unpasteurized wildflower

1/2 pouch of Wyeast Sweet Mead yeast

1/2 gram of Wyeast yeast nutrient

Filtered water to fill up the rest of the 1 gallon carboy

The only equipment needed was a few 1 gallon glass carboys; a hydrometer; a hydrometer beaker; some airlocks and rubber stoppers, and eventually I'll need a siphon hose; capper/corker; caps/corks; etc.

Obviously I'm running it as a bit of an experiment. The IV is the amount of honey added. One batch got 3 pounds of honey while the other got 2.2 pounds. The idea is that, according to the book, every 0.2 lbs. honey/gal of must (that's the honey water mixture that ferments into mean) you get roughly 1% ABV (alcohol by volume).

The water honey mix.

Mixing and aeration is supposedly key to the initial steps of fermentation.

A hydrometer tells you how dense your must is. 1.000 is water. If something has a specific gravity (SG) of 1.11 as in this case then it is 11% heavier than water. Water being 8.33 lbs/gallon that makes this about 9.25 lbs/gallon. When it's done fermenting it should have a SG reading of around 1.0 again. They should finish in the 10-15% ABV range; I'm not very experienced so we'll see. Sweet meads tend to be less alcoholic

This is the fermenting must two weeks in. The one on the left is the 3 lbs and the right is the 2.2 lbs. The fermentation took about 48 hours to really pick up and the airlocks on top have been busy ever since giving off CO2.

Readings

Denmark, Germany, and Europe in general is betting on a more pedestrian centric city by making it harder more expensive to own cars. It's a little hard to imagine if you haven't been there but the US is going the opposite direction which I think over time will prove to be the wrong decision.

I'm not a big fan of articles about how college is or is not worth the cost and time. It clearly is with some caveats. This article from the NYT does a great job of breaking it down. To put things into perspective:

[C]ollege tuition in recent decades has delivered an inflation-adjusted annual return of more than 15 percent. For stocks, the historical return is 7 percent. For real estate, it’s less than 1 percent.

Someone finally puts solar panels into window assemblies. (Hat tip: Hass)

Food label 1 & 2 design seems to be getting a lot of press lately. Problem - if I walked around the street right now and asked people very basic but entirely relevant questions about food labels/general nutritional knowledge most people, as in 80-90%, would utterly fail. Until people can somehow understand that there are three major sources of nutrition (carbohydrates/sugars/saccharides, fat/lipids, protein/amino acids) what does it matter if you show how many grams of fiber are in something? Conversely, when I visited Google in Palo Alto they have a simple and effective system. Everything gets a color: red is unhealthy, yellow is in between, and green in healthy. In a society where people think that lower taxes decreases debt levels I think that's more the level we need to be shooting for.

Visit a Tomato Farm in Florida

During the winter holidays I visited the tomato farm where my uncle works. It's in southern Florida near Naples/Ave Maria. If I remember right it's roughly 10 square miles of land.

The plants are grown in very sandy and level fields surrounded by drainage canals. Some fields are drip irrigated and others are flooded.The soil is ploughed into raised beds and fertilized at the same time. Then they're covered in a plastic wrap to keep the fertilizer in and so they don't erode. Stakes are driven in and string is strung between them for the vines to grow on. Finally seedlings are placed and take about 2-3 months before they bear fruit. Each plant can be picked three times but each successive picking yields lower quality tomatoes.

When the alligators in the surrounding canals get to about 6'-7', such as this one is, they're "harvested." They were surprisingly skittish.

This reflective film is supposed to keep away bugs. The view literally went on for miles.

All the farm heads keep a private garden on the outskirts that are planted with cabbage, peppers, bell peppers, cilantro, etc. Everything grows at a greatly accelerated rate here because it's essentially a semi-hydroponic system powered by Florida sun.

This station filters and adds nutrients to the water. A computer does all the work and keeps tabs on everything. They know down to the penny how much of each fertilizer they're putting in every acre. Every aspect of the site is like a long term experiment.

There's also an uneasily fanatic drive towards cleanliness. Every day all the buckets are rinsed in a mild chlorine solution. Any plant that a bird defecates on is marked and anything within a 5' radius cannot be picked... it's some sort of regulation. I wonder if the scared public/lawmakers realizes that bird poo is fertilizer?

This is my uncle's solar powered shipping container tool shed/man cave.

Workers use a pneumatic air gun to press wooden stakes into the raised beds - all day long.

I felt kind of weird pointing my camera at people that I didn't even talk to. This machine is ploughing the raised beds and adding (I believe) the P value of the fertilizer (which always consists of a N-P-K mix).

The beds have to be covered quickly with plastic because the fertilizer is gaseous.

Drip irrigation costs more but yields are higher per acre as compared to flooding which requires big drainage canals every so often. Again, they can quote the cost of all this stuff per acre down to pennies and give you a back of the napkin cost benefit of plant variety, season, area of the farm, and what course of action should be taken - it's fascinating in the way that watching anyone who's good at what they do is always interesting.

Sand hill cranes. They're huge! Those are people size.

They allow a bee keeper to keep hives on their land even though tomatoes don't need pollination. There were over 20 hives.

They grow rounds, ugly (their own variety), and plum tomatoes. Here workers are picking plums and being paid by the basket; I forget how much they get paid, somewhere around 25 to 50 cents per basket and each one takes about 2 or 3 minutes to pick and haul. The foreman (the guy who's pouring the basket into the truck) gives them a token for each basket picked and the workers usually jog back to their picking spot. Every few minutes the trucks move down the isles to keep pace with the workers. They pick them green so they don't bruise prior to being sold.

Again with the hygiene - here's a mobile hand washing station.

The laborers are actually contracted out and run by someone else. The foreman owns the buses and sets the wages. The farm pays by weight picked so there's an interesting exchange there where if the yield is bad the workers may not get on the bus and essentially work harder for less, or of course the opposite can be true.

Bourdain on Choosing a Career

I read a lot - really disparate stuff. I have no idea how much of it I retain, but every now and then an article or book keeps reappearing in my ideas. This is one of them. It's Anthony Bourdain giving advice on whether or not someone should choose a career as a chef.

It's incredibly applicable to anything that requires real work and effort and a high probability of failure. I looked at architecture through the prism of my paintball experience knowing the years of crap I'll have to deal with and the requisite luck to get to a point where I can actually have some degree of freedom over what I want to do. Should be worth the price of admission.

Here's a series of shows by Bourdain that I really enjoy about Ferran Adria:

Brain Vomit

This is just a mild recap of my past few weeks. Where to begin...

As I was leaving for NC I got off my elevator (it was roughly 1 AM) and saw all the food collection boxes for donation to the needy. I peered over the edges and saw a bunch of free canned and boxed food. I have no idea how I restrained myself. Grad school is a bummer like that.

Speaking of which. There's a professor at my school from Germany named Werner Sobek. He first got PhD in structural engineering... in Germany none the less. So what happens when you have a PhD in structural engineering, are German, and hold the title of Mies van der Rohe professor at IIT? Well you're a bad ass, and you design a vacation home for yourself called R 128 that is entirely recyclable (the design uses mortise-and-tenon joints), all the building elements utilized are standard lengths so there is absolutely no wasted materials, because of this the materials are simply shipped to the site and assembled (further aided by mortise-and-tenon), the building produces all its own energy, and is totally off grid. O, did I mention that every item in the house is computer controlled? Here it is on Sobek's website, which is really worth looking at.

On the way to NC we (my mum, dad, and I) got stuck about 20 miles from our exit due to a blizzard. It was the worst they've had in a decade. Even if they did have plows no one knows how to drive in the snow there so they just kept getting stuck and running into one another, so we sat for about 10-12 hours. Luckily we had grapes and Evan's home brewed beer.





The cabin at night.











Night sledding!














I've been making several versions of this recently. It's an open faced sandwich on wheat bread topped with giadiniera (which literally translates to "female gardener" in Italian) covered by pepper jack cheese and onions, broiled, then covered with oregano and tomatoes.






My basil garden (this is right after I trimmed it) has become a bonsai garden of sorts. They're almost a year old and never get much over 18" tall. As a result of all the trimming their main stems are practically wood.









This was this weeks harvest.














This was the resulting pesto. For some reason you have to let it sit for a few days before it gets really good.

Required Reading

Color-blind monkeys get gene therapy and are cured. That's insane. They did it by injecting a type of virus carrying a gene that essentially activates a protein that the monkeys are lacking in their cone cells. Wired and MIT.

Interesting video on tangible statistics. So fascinating...

More interesting food research by Brian Wansink. Short

More on high speed rail. It's so cool but just not cost effective for the most part. More on this later when I eventually talk about sunk cost fallacy.

Great article on entrepreneurs in Africa. Must read.

Cameras in London and cops driving around in cars in America are really expensive and both don't do ANYTHING to deter crime... (sarcasm) shocking (/sarcasm)!

Buzz Aldrin gives a Q&A on Freakonomics.

Well written piece about the future of cars, or rather; electric cars are taking over.

New Scientist puts out a list of 13 things in science that can't be explained. Here's round two.

Contact lenses that can monitor your bodily functions. They actually have a working model too.

Penn and Teller's show, Bullshit, covers The Bible. It's good but I wish they'd scream less and be a bit more objective. Then again, it's a show called bullshit.

Some college professors are giving money back to their students that they receive in royalties for required texts that they authored.

Some 9/11 Bush hate pieces. One by Barry Ritholtz of The Big Picture and excerpt of an article in The Atlantic (long) commented on by Chris Blattman (short), a professor of economics and political science at Yale who runs this insightful blog.

Finally, an explanation of why people who don't necessarily agree with Republican candidates vote Republican; they prefer their moral values and views on personal wealth. The strongest indicator? "Whether candidates view themselves as 'better than normal' human beings because of their wealth."

Think the Tevatron (ever notice that just about everything cool was either invented in Chicago [skyscraper] or resides near Chicago?) or Large Hadron Collider is huge? The US was planning one back in the 90's that was over twice as big as the LHC and actually started construction. Here's a photo gallery and story about what remains - yeah I'd totally live there. Here's a piece from Wired about how Fermi Lab's Tevatron is working around the clock to churn out ground breaking research before the LHC comes online.

A company has found a way to detect autism in children much earlier - 2 years old instead of the usual 5 to 6.

A university professor lands in jail for sharing research with Chinese graduate students... really? And apparently The State Department classifies satellites as munitions so that some cutting edge research done on them is considered classified. Short.

A 48 pound genetically engineered rainbow trout was caught in Canada. Just go look at the photo.

The highest resolution photo of Andromeda ever taken can be seen here. Andromeda is 2.5 million light years away and is the closest galaxy to our own Milky Way Galaxy.

Dietary Help

I'm writing this as a reference stub so I can send people here where they ask me one of the same three questions that all of my friends ask me at some point:

"I want a bike kinda like yours but that costs around $200-$300, show me how to use a camera, and make me a diet."

1 - Cheap single speed bikes just don't really exist. If I had the capital I would go to China and build a quality stainless and chromoly (I just remembered I want to learn more about metallurgy) single speed bike and sell them in the US for $200-$300. But I don't have that kind of money so a good and somewhat cheap place to buy from called Bikes Direct.

2 - Taking/making photos is half physics half composition. Ansel Adams was the master at the physics portion and if you read and understand this book you'll be well on your way.

3 - And now the real reason for this post - diet. Here's the golden rule that a good portion of people I tell this to refuse to accept. Anyone can lose weight. I don't care what glandular problem you have or how slow your metabolism. If you burn more calories than you eat, you will lose weight. It's just math. At the risk of bringing up a terrible yet poignant event in history - have you ever seen what the Nazi concentration camp victims looked like? That's what happens when you burn more energy than you consume.

Here are some common truths I find to be helpful if a bit facile:

Consuming less calories while still remaining full seems to be the main goal. One of the easiest ways of doing this dietarily is to eat more fiber. Fiber is the part of a plant that your body can't fully digest. It sort of cleans you out and fills you up. It's worth mentioning that about 1/5 of your bodies energy is dedicated to digesting food. Since fiber doesn't release any energy into your body you end up burning more energy in digestion when you eat foods high in fiber. This is the main difference between white and whole grain rice, bread, etc. Foods high in fiber are vegetables, fruits, whole grains, nuts, flax seed, some cereals, etc.

There is no such thing as a "bad" food. Some just have more calories than others. The point here being portion. This may be the most important concept in dieting/changing your lifestyle. Eat more slowly, stop eating when you're full, don't eat because it's free... just think. A large part of portion control is being cognisant of what you're eating. Sometimes we go on autopilot and just stuff our faces. Sometimes it takes creativity or shear will power to overcome that one.

It's nearly impossible to be overweight if you eat nothing but vegetables and fruit. Seriously, minus salad dressing there are hardly any calories in a salad. Think about those rare occasions when you want a snack and you eat an apple. Think of how much that fills you up. That's something like 80 calories. One regular size snickers bar is 270 calories. How much does that fill you up? Now imagine eating 3 and a half apples. The energy content is that same but now you're much more full. This is the same argument as my one about fiber. Vegetables are essentially like a vitamin pill with fiber. The amount of calories in them is nearly negligible.

Oh, and drink more water. People often confuse being thirsty with being hungry. The price is right too. Assuming you're not above tap water. Similarly, stop drinking soda. It provides no substantive benefit to just about anyone's diet.

Vitamins and supplements: the evidence is confusing and all over the place. There's just so many variables that any experimental design is difficult. I personally don't take any.

Also, when you cook for yourself you begin to understand what goes into your food. You can start to omit parts of recipes that aren't contributing to a healthy diet. For example I rarely add the full amount or any of salt recommended in a recipe. Once you stop using it you stop missing it pretty quickly. Then when you do taste salt it's amazing.

And now to be a hypocrite; here are some foods that I consider amazing for one reason or another:

Ground flax seed - Tons of fiber. I add it to cereal.

Garlic (put in a garlic press) - Adds flavor without calories, there's also a ton of studies saying it has a myriad of other health benefits. Who cares, it's delicious.

Olive oil - Fat in general takes longer to digest and thus keeps you full longer. Olive oil has the added benefit of suppressing your appetite. Apples supposedly do a similar thing. If you have to heat it beyond 400 degrees don't use olive oil. Use grape seed oil or another oil that has a higher smoke point.

Tofu - You can buy a block of it from Whole Foods for $1.75 and its roughly equal to a few chicken breasts. Learn how to cook it in a Teflon pan. Filling, good for you, and sucks up the flavor of whatever you cook it with.

Egg whites - The best form of protein you can possibly get.

Broccoli or really just any vegetable - Filling, almost no calories, great for you.

Avocado - Great substitute for cheese on a sandwich. It's just better fat (monounsaturated) by which I mean that it's easy for your body to break down.

Goat cheese - Better nutrition profile than regular cheese and tastier.

Whole grain anything - Same calories as their white counterparts but lots more filling, don't spike your blood sugar, and they have more vitamins and minerals.

Shopsin's

A few weeks before going to New York I watched a documentary called I Like Killing Flies about a small breakfast and lunch spot in lower Manhattan. It's run by an guy named Kenny Shopsin who has a very unique, almost ineffable personality. The best description I can give of him is that he's just very honest about himself and others - a quality I find lacking in most people. Combine that with the fact that he's very nice yet blunt and you get Kenny Shopsin:



Just before I went back to Chicago I caught an F train to the Essex St.-Delancy stop and ate breakfast at Shopsin's located at 120 Essex Street. They've changed storefronts since the documentary was made. The place had seating for maybe 15 people tops.

I actually met Kenny Shopsin too. He sat about five feet to my left conversing with customers (which seemed more like friends who ate there a lot) the entire time I ate. He was really nice and fun to talk to. Apparently his brother is an architect who teaches at Pratt... which is funny because just hours before I spoke with a friend who told me that he's starting a sort of environmental architecture program at Pratt in the Fall. Crazy stuff. It's only once you start talking to people, anyone really, that you find out how similar we all really are.

Anyways, the menu (1,2) is huge and really original. I had the Iliana which consisted of a egg and cheese omelet, mangoes, guacamole, chips, and refried rice. It was really good.

New York's "Green" Street Vendors

A green street vendor at 84th Street and Park Avenue.

A while ago I read that New York was going to issue another 1,000 street vendor permits, in addition to the already 3,000 that they issue, to "green" carts that would peddle produce exclusively. To be honest I thought it was a bad idea. They were controlling where they could set up shop, the number of permits available, and the good to be sold. I suppose specifying the good to be sold, in this case produce, is fine, but the rest just seemed like a bunch of bureaucratic hassle and piecemeal economic development.

Wow was I wrong. Why doesn't Chicago have these things? I don't care what silly bureaucratic nonsense has to go down. When I was in NY I ate more fruit and less crap because I could pick up two apples and two oranges for $2 right before I hoped on #2 train in Harlem everyday (too many twos?). Harlem - fruit? There have been entire chapters in prominent books devoted to the fact that getting produce to city dwellers is a problem. Especially if they're poor.

Naturally, the grocery stores complained and of course they have a point, but here's mine. I live in a city and when I go grocery shopping I generally have to carry it home. I don't like to go shopping for groceries too often so I buy a limited amount of fruit due to its weight and perishablility. Thus, by placing fruit strategically on my walking routes my diet and well being were improved.

Grad School and Sandwiches

I previously wrote about sandwiches and food research here.

Also, I got accepted to the Graduate Architecture program at the Illinois Institute of Technology (who's, I shit you not, name I spelled wrong at the end of my professional statement - long story). Check out the curriculum section of this page. Those are the courses I have to take over three years. It totals 103 credit hours which is a bit intense considering my undergrad was 129. Should be fun and interesting though.

Now, for no real reason other than the fact that I like cooking, eating, and taking photos; I bring you - sandwiches (that I've eaten in the last week or so)!

Toasted whole wheat white bread (I know weird), guacamole, lemon chicken, sprouts, lettuce, tomato, and cucumber.


Toasted whole wheat bread, fried tofu, red pepper, lettuce, sprouts, tomato, sauteed onion, and roasted garlic.


Toasted whole wheat bread, black bean burger, lettuce, tomato, red onion, jalapeno, and avocado.


Toasted whole wheat bread, egg whites with ground flax seed cooked in olive oil, lettuce, tomato, red onion, and avocado.


Toasted whole wheat bread, guacamole, sprouts with olive oil, lettuce, tomato, jalapeno, and cucumber.


Toasted whole wheat bread, goat cheese, roasted red pepper, spinach, friend tofu, lettuce, tomato, and avocado.


Toasted whole wheat bread, avocado, fried tofu, spinach, tomato, red onion, and cucumber.


Not pictured was an excellent egg white and goat cheese sandwich and a tofu, goat cheese, and pea sprout on ciabatta bread sandwich. I really need to get some new breads and make sauces to go on top of my sandwiches, but as they're mostly for sustenance and health I haven't been doing either. Health wise almost nothing tops olive oil and wheat bread. I just found out that goat cheese is far better for you than regular cheese. It has far few calories, less saturated fat, and more protein than other cheeses... and it tastes amazing.

I kind of figured If I felt entrepreneurial I'd open up a vegan restaurant. There aren't enough of them in Chicago, and all of them I go to with my friend Justin are always packed. Plus they're priced at a slight premium to everywhere else I eat. Here are two I really liked: Karyn's and Amitabul. I guess that won't be happening anytime too soon with my likely foray into graduate school, but in the mean time I've been creating all these sandwiches in anticipation/hunger.

Hydroponics Update #2

So remember that lettuce and basil garden I was working on? The lettuce has finally taken off and it's growing pretty fast. I think the basil is a week or two behind. I still have some modifications to do to the whole setup too.

These pictures are taken 25 hours apart:


Notice the new set of leaves on the basil in the upper-left hand corner.


And that's three posts about food in a row...

Salad > Hamburger

For the past few years I've been asking myself this question; why is a salad more expensive than a hamburger? It's illogical. At McDonald's you can buy a salad for about $5.50 or a hamburger for $1.00. You can even buy a fancy big mac or whatever for $2 or $3. How is this possible? A cow requires more feed than do some lettuce and vegetables, vegetables don't need to be slaughtered, sterilized, frozen, cooked, given antibiotics, etcetera. Basically, I'm arguing that it is simpler to make a salad than it is to make a hamburger.

Well, I had some loose ideas why this situation exists, but now I think I fully grasp the variables at play. My explanation comes from the documentary King Corn. Brief rundown of the movie; two guys move to Iowa, rent an acre of farmland, live with a farmer, plant corn, go around learning what happens to corn after it's harvested, find out almost all of it goes to feeding animals, realize their corn isn't edible, harvest said corn, lose money, and get close to breaking even because of government subsidies.

Let me first start with subsidies. An agricultural subsidy is essentially a financial incentive given by the government to farmers in an effort to change the behavior of the farmers. Carrot = subsidy; horse = farmer. Here's what a subsidy does to an agricultural good, in this case corn:


First, farmers grow more corn because they know that they'll get money from the government to do so. In the movie it was $28 dollars an acre. The actual commodity price they received for their 180 bushels of corn was about $300. Anyways, once the supply curve shifts to the right (increases) you can see that price drops from P1 to P2 and quantity increases from Q1 to Q2. The true market equilibrium is disrupted in favor of an artificial one brought about vies a vie a subsidy that produces more corn.

Prior to the 1970's this meant the government paid farmers to leave fields fallow in an effort to keep commodity/food prices high. They still do this in some cases. The whole system is mind bogglingly complex. Then Earl Buntz came along and told farmers to "get big or get out [and] plant hedgerow to hedgerow." In response farms got huge, small and medium sized farms got pushed out (which is fine it's a natural trend within the market), and food got a lot cheaper. So what's the catch?

Corn got crazy cheap, yields skyrocketed, and now it's in absolutely everything. Over 95% of the corn you've ever seen is completely inedible in its raw state. About half goes to livestock feed, a quarter goes to ethanol production, about a fifth is exported, and a mere 4% is used to make high fructose corn syrup. Which is crazy that that percentage is so small because it's in just about every packaged food and is the main ingredient in soft drinks.

So again, half of all corn is used as feed grain. It used to be the case that cows lived on open grass pastures and ate grass. Now cows are raised that way for the first half of their lives then put in confinement so that they fatten up quickly. During this time they're fed a grain (read: mostly corn) diet. This diet would literally kill the cow if it weren't for the fact that they're slaughtered after about 120-140 days after starting this process. This practice leads to beef that is three times higher in fat and contains less omega-3 fat (a hard to get essential fatty acid). So, more saturated fat and less omega-3; not good. There are a number of other reasons farming cows this way is illogical but you get the point. Bad for you, bad for the cow, and as I'm about to show, bad for your wallet.

So why is a salad more expensive than a hamburger? Because the meat industry is huge (read: efficient) and feeding cows is cheap because of subsidized corn and grain. Farmland that could be used to grow other crops that humans can actually consume ends up as acreage for feed corn. Hence, the price of other vegetables is artificially raised because there is less land to produce it on. The end result is a lot of beef that isn't good for you, cheap ubiquitous soft drinks, high vegetable prices, cheap McDonald's meals, and fat Americans. It's also worth mentioning that subsidies imply a certain degree of inefficiency. The reasoning goes that the government gets its money from you, the taxpayer, so in giving the farmers money to grow something that wouldn't otherwise be profitable they are in fact distorting economic signals.

My solution? Simple - slowly end the subsidies. Let the market decide what it wants and at what prices. It would also mean less bureaucracy.

Side note: ending farm subsidies would make agriculture in the US more of a truly "perfect competition" situation which is really exciting... to me.

Sandwiches and Food Research

I recently ran across this site called Scanwiches which I found unique. I'm not sure if it was that inspiration nudging me subconsciously, or just the fact that I found a cheap produce store on my way to and from work.

Here is yesterday's red lettuce, tofu sauteed in garlic and olive oil, tomato, avocado, cucumber, red onion, jalapeno, and hummus sandwich on toasted wheat bread. It ended up at about 3" thick once I put on the top piece of bread and compressed it.


And here is today's romaine lettuce, tomato, cucumber, spinach, onion, red pepper, jalapeno, olive oil, and guacamole on toasted wheat bread.


It may be worth mentioning that lettuce and spinach make a sandwich look much more substantive than they really are - in terms of volume, not nutrition at. Of course this is the point. The mechanisms by which your brain tells you that you are full can be tricked. In this case your eyes are telling your brain there's a lot more calories and volume there than there really is. There's some really great work done by a guy named Brian Wansink on eating behavior. In one of his studies a soup bowl is designed to refill itself via a tube running underneath the table. Participants in his studies would unknowingly eat about 3/4 more soup simply because they could never finish. He has a plethora of elucidating experiments like this.

Among his other tips are to not eat directly out of containers as you tend to not recognize how much you're eating (about 1/3 more). Also, use smaller plates, you'll end up eating less and feel just as full. Here's a great new study he did on family style serving.

Animal Videos

The most amazingly humane dairy ever. I doubt many dairies look like this. I'd pay an extra buck for a gallon of milk to know that the cows got to live better than me.



Too much time... (HT: Vija)

Reading Material

A new study shows that people with schizophrenia aren't fooled by the concave face - lite from the bottom optical illusion that the rest of us are. The video is interesting as hell. I couldn't not watch it. Total side note: at the end of the article it's mention that drunk and high people are often not fooled by the illusion much like people suffering from schizophrenia. Perhaps this explains why when watching a movie in one of these states I often can't buy into whatever the actors and scenery are trying to convince me of. Interesting.

Google talks with newspapers. Not exactly a riveting read, but a bit funny.

Food myths. One of those guys, Brian Wansink, I've been planning to write about forever and just haven't. His research is truly fascinating.

Just found this data website called data360.org... yikes. It's a collaborative open-source place to upload your data for others to see. Getting excited by such things... man. Their about us page is a good read too. Here's an excerpt:

"I continue to believe that responsible citizens must strive for objectivity when thinking about issues. To not strive for objectivity is to leave the realm of facts and enter the realm of dogma, doctrine proclaimed as true without proof. I believe that a current reality does exist and that from that situation, we are both confronted by real problems and that we are making real progress. Knowing specifically where there are problems and where there is progress is one crucial objective"

Word.

Soilless Basil/Lettuce Garden

Here's a project I finally completed yesterday. On the left you can see my 2' square hydroponic basil and lettuce garden. It's pretty simple. Water is pumped from the 15 gallon reservoir (that black Rubbermaid container) into that white ebb and flow tray for about 15 minutes every hour. Lighting is provided by my north facing window (weakest light of any direction, boo) and a 2' strip of high output T5 florescents for 18 hours a day. I also set up some white construction board to help with light reflectivity.

Here you can see the plants in their growing medium which is called hydroton. It's basically just lightweight baked clay; expanded terracotta sort of. The green stuff is rockwool (fiberglass insulation without the flame retardant) that I used to start the seedlings. I'm growing: Italian large leaf basil, summer long basil, purple ruffles basil, spicy saber basil, little caesar lettuce, butter crunch lettuce, and burgundy ice lettuce.

This is the plant's food. It's supposedly the same stuff NASA uses in all their hydroponic research.

This is one of my purple basil plants. This is the plant I'm most excited for.

Vanilla

I just find this interesting, it has nothing to do with anything other than the fact that I happen to like plants, especially vine plants. Bines too.

• Vanilla beans, actually seed pods, are derived from the vanilla orchid which grows as a vine. Great pictures of the whole process here.
• Although there are 110-150 species of vanilla orchid, only two are grown commercially. The Mexican or Bourbon (they're really similar) vanilla plant is native to the Atlantic side of Mexico while the Tahitian vanilla plant is either a mutation or hybrid of the Mexican vanilla plant that occurred in the last 50 or 60 years.
• The bloom of a vanilla orchid only opens for one day. If it hasn't been pollinated then it drops and will not produce a bean.
• The seeds of a vanilla pod or really any orchid will not germinate (sprout and grow) without the presence of a certain fungi, mycorrhiza. Orchid seeds have almost no stored nutrition so the seed and fungi form a symbiotic relationship whereby the orchid obtains carbon from the fungi.
• Although orchids are self pollinating the flower can only be pollinated in the presence of a specific stingless bee, the Melipona, native only to Mexico and parts of South America. Because of this the beans must be hand pollinated as most beans are grown outside of Mexico. This is what makes vanilla so labor intensive and expensive.
• Almost all vanilla plants are cultivated within 10 or 20 degrees of the equator with the world's largest producer being Madagascar.
• Once pollinated the pod takes 9 months to mature.
• Each vanilla plant will produce about 50-100 blooms per year, but only 5 or 6 flowers out of about 20 on each raceme (single vine) of these are pollinated to ensure higher quality.
• Vanilla plants remain productive for 12-14 years but take at least 2-3 years to become productive.
• About 97% of all vanilla that is consumed is synthetic. Which is scary because although vanilla can be synthesized in many ways (even from cow dung) presently it is usually made from guaiacol, a petrochemical.

Food Experiment Day 1

A lot of my data is incomplete due to a lack of packaging for certain products, free food, and the grocery store not stocking soybeans... the third largest cash crop in the US (behind marijuana and corn respectively).

Breakfast: 410 calories, $0.86

1.5 C skim milk - $0.28
2 C cereal (honey nut cheerios and honey bunches of oats) - $0.47
1 T ground flax seed - $0.11

Lunch: 560 calories, free (about $1)

2 pieces of wheat bread - $0.50
some celery and 3 T peanut butter - $0.50
strawberry jelly, hummus, salsa 1 T each - $?

Late Lunch: 550 calories, $2.77

2 potatoes - $0.50
1 large onion - $0.85
1 T olive oil - $0.21
1 clove garlic, 1/2 jalapeno pepper - $0.10
1 PBR beer - $0.53
1 granny smith apple - $0.58

Dinner: 600 calories (maybe?), free + $0.53

1 cup white rice
chicken, carrots, snow peas, and bamboo stir fry
1 PBR beer - $0.53

Late Dinner: 330 calories, $0.67

1.25 C skim milk - $0.23
1.5 C cereal - $0.35
1 T ground flax seed - $0.11

Total: 2450 calories, $4.80 plus 2 free meals contributing about 1000 calories to my diet

First, this seems a little high. Add in the 2% food tax and my bill today was $5 (tax is included on alcohol as it's expensive). Cheap, sure but I can do better. I need to buy onions in bulk and if I were really serious I'd cut back on the beer. Other than that the rest was as expected: fresh fruits and vegetables are expensive and not calorie dense and starchy carbohydrates are cheap.

It's also worth noting that its actually quite hard to get enough calories if you aren't eating processed food. If I were to omit the oil and beer from my diet I would be on track to lose about a pound a week (450 calories a day, 3150 a week, 3500 calories in a pound of fat). Replacing those calories is the equivalent of 4 potatoes (110 calories each). I guess cereal counts as processed too... hm. Getting enough calories requires that you eat a bit on the unhealthy side. An egg is about 70 calories, but I always throw out the yolk... which leaves you with 17 calories of egg white (a 75% reduction). Or skim milk, just as expensive as whole milk but 60% fewer calories (skim 90, whole 150 per cup)

Then there's the problem of free food... I'm not sure how to deal with it yet.

I Love Predictions

Freakonomics is having a long sighted contest for economic or really the best unforeseen event of 2009. You can enter here.

That being said, I write down predictions/business ideas (that are inevitable) from time to time. It's a pseudo hobby of mine and I'd like to think I'm good at it. One of my big ones for the past couple years now has been that some day all media will be licensed to users and downloaded cheaply via the internet. By media I mean books, music, movies, etc. Anything that has a transaction cost that approaches zero will be salable via this method. Why is this inevitable? Currently stores like Best Buy and Borders exist... which means they have to pay employees to stock a physical product, rent a store, pay for electricity, get books/cds from a distributor, who gets them from a manufacturer, etc. By downloading these things via the internet you get rid of over 90% of that. Apple's iTunes is screwed up because they charge $1 a song. Yea, it should be like 5 or 10 cents and the price should fluctuate with demand... will someone please hire me to think up ideas? I have note books full of them.

Here's another; okay, everyone needs food right? And less and less people can or have the time to cook... yet the current food that fits this bill is crazy unhealthy and we all know it. Speaking of which, McDonalds is posting some of its biggest gains they've ever experienced. No money? It's cheap and calorie laden. So why not combine the cheapness and ubiquity of McDonalds with the health that should be inherent to inexpensive food. Cheap tasty food doesn't need to be unhealthy. Now the twist, serve in measured portions and allow your customers to sign up in your store or online for a preferred card type system (much like your grocery store) that would allow them to see what they've eaten in terms of calories, protein, carbs, etc. (if anyone steals this idea, which BTW I'm fine with, please credit me or hire me as a consultant or something). This also allows the business to gather a ton of data on its customers. Parents could also give their kids meal cards that could specify dietary restrictions, allow the kids to eat a good meal in the absence of their parents, and allow the parents to check up on their childrens' diets. The prices of food should also fluctuate with market prices, and the menus should be diverse and constantly changing. So an electronic menu would be necessary. Also, these restaurants should be low frill affairs. They should also start in cities and there will need to be a lot of them initially to achieve the kind of economies of scale that will make the food affordable. O, and it needs to be deliverable. The mission statement of this business should follow along the lines of... improve the health of your customers while providing transparency of dietary information at an extremely low price (meal + snack for between meals for about $2-4, yes it's possible).

Side note: the reason this will work is because kitchens are expensive to build, grocery stores are inefficient (it's a middle man), healthy restaurants are unnecessarily expensive, peoples time is increasingly limited and valuable, cooking for yourself is inefficient, fast food is generally unhealthy, and fewer and fewer people can cook or ever do so at home.

And yes, all my ideas eliminate jobs. I'm evil. Then again wouldn't it suck if we still had blacksmiths and ice delivery men? There's plenty of work to be done in this world. Don't cling to menial tasks that can be done better by technology.