Food

The Skinny on Milk

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Milk is near and dear to my heart, but not all milk. You may as well use water if you’re having your cereal with skim milk. I have loathed the fat-free version of milk all my life. The taste and the color is not anything close to the real McCoy. To make things worse, when I was growing up and was served skim milk at a friend’s house I would have to endure some lecture about how it is the smart, healthy choice when it comes to milk. I have never bought that BS so, naturally, I was delighted when I flipped open New York Magazine and read their food science article on milk.

The skinny:  Research shows that whole milk is the healthiest milk for a baby, a kid, a teenager, an adult male, or a woman trying to conceive. This, of course, was presented in a neat chart that can be found by clicking this link. For adult females (not trying to conceive), fermented milk products have been shown to be the healthiest. And for retirees, no more than a glass of milk per day for you.

Those in favor of whole milk say:

It may be high in (still controversial) saturated fat, but whole milk is also 40 percent unsaturated fat, which has been shown to improve blood-cholesterol levels (thereby reducing the risk of heart disease). And whole milk keeps you feeling full longer than milk with less fat, which some recent studies suggest may help keep off the pounds. The weight control may also be due to “bioactive substances” found in milk fat, which changes the way our metabolism functions, allowing us to burn that fat for energy instead of storing it in our bodies.

So, if you’re drinking skim milk, you are more likely to be hungry sooner and guess what is most likely consumed next in that scenario? According to Dr. David Ludwig, a professor of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, it’s processed carbohydrates. Michael Pollan even says the best milk to drink is organic whole milk from grass-fed cows.

What to do next? Well, if you’re sitting there with a glass of water that someone has spiked with a few drops of white food coloring and called it milk, it’s time to move on. 1% fat, 2% fat, or all the way to whole, the closer you get to the real deal, the better the milk is for you. Of course, moderation is always a necessary ingredient. Cheers.

12 Classics in 2015: The Jungle

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The Jungle is widely known as the book that turned the public’s gaze upon the meat industry. Months after the novel’s publication, the Food and Drug Act went into effect. The public was disturbed to find out that their chances of eating rotten and diseased food were quite good, as the condition of the slaughterhouses was revolting and what oversight existed at the time was a farce.

This was a positive reaction from the public, but Upton Sinclair did not mean to turn the people’s fervor toward the meat industry alone. Sinclair’s primary protestations regarded the labor conditions and complete lack of workers’ rights. Indeed, that is what struck me about the book. Sure, the descriptions of the making of sausage with scraps of meat and innards from the floor and the drains, and the tubercular cows passing right by the “screener”, are disturbing. But the human suffering detailed in the book is far more painful to endure. It lasts from shortly after the first chapter to the very last (357th) page.

The book’s main character is Jurgis Rudkus. You get the impression that the lion’s share of his life is lived out on these pages. What life Jurgis does have plays out like a train wreck. You see everything coming before he does. Blow after blow Jurgis is dealt with no means to protect himself or to save his family from abject poverty. My heart ached for Jurgis and every member of his family and for all those wasting away in Packingtown, the meat-packing area of Chicago.

I am thankful that workers’ rights are a thing now. No one spoke of them in The Jungle until the very last pages of the book, which is a screed in support of Socialism, one of Sinclair’s great causes.

The struggle of the working class is still very real. More than once I thought of fast-food workers, who are campaigning for greater pay because of the poverty they are forced into by trying to support a family on the current minimum wage, and I recognized that they are a group of people who would be at the heart of The Jungle if it were written today. Sinclair would be pleased to know that these workers don’t have to work 7-5:30 Monday thru Saturday just to keep their job, but many still work those hours because one job is not enough. A second is needed to scrape by.

The Jungle is a serious book with an intensely dark and sad narrative, but also a book with a surprising appeal to the reader to read just one more page. I found it enticing, even though with every new page Jurgis encountered his next setback or you could make out the train wreck on the horizon a little better. Out of the six classic books I have read this year, The Jungle has surprised me the most with its novel subject matter and its desperate plea for help from the immigrant masses who are still growing, tending, picking, and packing our food.

Thinking About DC

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Photos from DC…and some thoughts about the trip.

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Previously shared on Instagram, but this is in Georgetown, where you can show up at a bar and order an IPA with 8% ABV and get served a session IPA and then get a shrug from the bartender when you point that out. We stayed for one drink and tipped poorly. Shouldn’t have tipped at all. Our next round of beers was at a hotel bar just out of frame to the left. It was swanky as hell inside. Luckily, there were a few tables outside where I wasn’t too embarrassed about the drips of sweat falling off my nose into my beer as I was drinking it. That’s an exaggeration, but God, the humidity. I don’t miss it. Second bar, much better. Third bar, best.

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The staggering loss of life could not be displayed in a more powerful way than in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The font is small. The names are many. And the high-polished shine of the stone draws the eye. It is beautiful and somber and the quietest place I visited all weekend.

 

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 Lucky for me, the Washington Monument was no longer covered in scaffolding, but the Capitol building was. Washington, DC seems like one of those places with so many attractions, whether it be a museum or a giant patch of grass on the mall, that one of them is always under construction. For all the famous speeches given on the steps behind me, Glenn Beck’s restoring “honor” speech excluded, when standing here I thought first of the scene in Forrest Gump when Forrest is reunited with Jenny. Just watch the scene here. It’s awesome. So was this view.

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The Shake Shack. Last time I stood in line for one of these burgers it was 2009 and I was in line for an hour and a half. Since then, Shake Shack has gone public and has many more locations. Thank you, Jesus. I stood in line two minutes for this burger and it met the expectations I have held for the last six years. Come to Denver!

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To get Bryce and the Washington Monument in the same image, one has to turn the iPhone on its side and use the pano feature.

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Loved standing next to the Washington Monument. I would not have loved it if an earthquake struck when I was by its side. I couldn’t help but think about that, nor how scary it must have been to work on this thing during the mid to late 19th century. Chances are, it’s not as deadly as working in Qatar for the next World Cup, but it has to be close.

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I know I am in a special place when I am obliged to take a photo of the ground I stand on.

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Sadly, this is the best shot I got of the Capitol Rotunda. The ceiling has a protective drop cloth of sorts, which they call the donut, so it’s not much to look at. Loved the paintings in here. There was a senator giving some young guns a tour. If only I watched more C-SPAN, I would be able to tell you the name of that senator. He was old and white. Oops, that’s almost all of them.

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Best reading in DC. The Thomas Jefferson Memorial.

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As far as photographing the grounds of the White House, I couldn’t have asked for better late afternoon lighting than this. I want a yard like this and I don’t want to be involved at all in the care and maintenance of it.

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Again, the Washington Monument. It is just kind of always there. Liked the lighting on the monument better from this angle though, as we walked over to the White House, so I had to get a few more shots of it.

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I was totally unaware that planes were still allowed to fly this close to monuments, memorials, and other important buildings in DC. I was also unaware of how central Reagan International Airport is to DC. This flight path seems unavoidable. The plane I flew in on took this exact route, but at night. I had a window seat on the left and couldn’t have had a better view.

I had a great time in Washington, DC. I had incredible hosts, living so close enough to everything that we walked to the Capitol building in 15 minutes. Some memorable moments that do not live on in photographs: striking it rich at the local liquor store by finding Titan IPA from Great Divide Brewing Company, only to take it home, crack one open and get the distinct tasting notes of apple juice and then noticing it was bottled fifteen months ago. Beer returned and exchanged for a three-month old, local IPA. And then there was the ice cream truck rolling through the neighborhood on Sunday night at 9:30. My host turned to me and said, “Obviously, he’s not just selling ice cream.”

I’m a Cheerios Vacuum

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When London will not eat one thing I give her, Cheerios save us. They are like little life preservers floating about on the table top, saving her because they give her sustenance, saving me because she is actually eating something. 

I’ll hand London some Cheerios wherever we are. She drops half of them on a good day and 75% of them on all other days. 

I can’t let them go to waste. I will eat them off the carpet, the kitchen floor, from the couch cushions, from the bottom of her activity saucer, and from inside her onesie. 

There are two places I won’t eat Cheerios from. One, the bathroom floor. This has only happened once as I have never fed London Cheerios in the bathroom, but I mush have carried one in there on my clothing. I found it today. 

And two, from inside her diaper. Found one of those yesterday. 

And you can forget about the five-second rule. I am confident I have eaten Cheerios that were several days old, maybe a week. It’s easy to tell when you get one of those. They have entirely lost their crunch. 

My Cheerios consumption is up 1000% over last year. I suspect that as London grows older it will steadily decline from the current stage, which, I would guess, is at peak Cheerios flow. 

She Sneezes Into Her Hand As Well

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She sneezed into her hand five minutes after it happened. I shook my head in disgust and in further disappointment in myself for not stopping her five minutes earlier.

We were all out at one of my favorite restaurants, the Bull and Bush, having an excellent weekend dinner. London was in a high chair eating off of the disinfected table. She wasn’t too enthralled with the food. It was great, but there was so much to look at so sometimes she just wouldn’t eat what we were offering her. When that happens we always set the food in front of her.

London is finicky about when she wants to feed herself versus when she wants us to give her food on a spoon or with our fingers. Right before our server walked up to the table London turned away from a piece of food Kate was offering her. Kate placed it on the table in front of London, knowing that London would pick it up eventually and feed herself. But there would be no time for that. The server picked up the piece of food and fed London right off her finger.

I was so freaking surprised I froze, didn’t say anything, and looked at Kate. Did that just happen?

Kate’s eyes answered back, yes, yes it did. 

Okay, I thought. It’s probably not that bad. Wait, who am I kidding here? That server just fed London like she was her grandkid (interestingly enough, she was plenty old to have a few) without any knowledge of London’s past. And we have no knowledge of where her hands have been. Does she wash them as much as she should? Not sure, but I found out she prefers to sneeze directly into her palm.

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Our old lofty perch, from where the Bull and Bush was within walking distance.

I thought about saying something to her or writing on the receipt, but the damage had been done. If she had some disgusting bacteria on her hand she had already gifted London with it. I know very well that at some point I will transfer a bug to London, but that’s the right of the parent to do. Plus, I know I have big pump action bottles of hand sanitizer on both floors of the house. I know my hands get dry and cracked from using so much of that stuff. I have the cleanest hands I have ever had in my life.

Yes, I was mad at the server, but I let it go. I was mostly disappointed in myself. We were both trying to be so nice that we didn’t say anything at all when it happened. And it happened so fast. If we were going to say anything at all it would have needed to be pretty blunt like, “Stop! What in the hell do you think you’re doing?”

I vow to never let this happen again, but I also don’t expect to come across too many servers who feel like they can hand feed my baby. If they do, I’ll throw being polite right out the window.

Losing Anticipation

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I touched on this topic a while back in “Life Goes On, But Something Was Lost,” but I wanted to write about it a little more.

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A getaway to Voodoo Doughnuts…we did bring some back to the NICU for the nurses.

When you have a baby in the NICU long-term, it takes a while to establish a routine. At first, you’re there all the time, until life elsewhere completely falls apart. By life elsewhere falling apart, I mean there will be no food in the fridge when you come home from the hospital, you’re out of toilet paper, you’ve forgot to pay bills, and you forget how to have fun, or, at the very least, you feel guilty for having fun or for merely being busy with something else other than sitting in the hospital with your baby.

The NICU nurses tell you right away that you can’t be at the hospital all the time. You’ll go mad if you do. As weird as it feels, you need to go out for dinner, go see a movie, and spend some time at home just relaxing. In our case, it was spending time at the house making it feel more like a home…we had moved in two weeks before London arrived.

At the NICU, I got the impression that some parents didn’t heed the nurses’ advice and spent every waking minute at the NICU. And when their baby was ready to come home, they were already exhausted. Eventually, we did take the nurses’ advice. Spending time away from the hospital did keep us sane, but it also allowed us to gain back some of that time we feel we had lost, the time we would have spent anticipating the arrival of our first baby. We had a lot of that time left, 14 weeks perhaps, and then it vanished the night London was born.

As a couple, spending time together away from the hospital was essential to our ability to get through the challenges that London faced. Before she was born, I had made Valentine’s Day reservations at a place downtown we had been wanting to go to for a while. When London arrived, I assumed I’d be canceling that reservation. It seemed like everything was off the table for weeks. Thankfully, I was wrong.

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My sister and I, post-brunch and many mimosas, getting ice cream at Little Man.

We could have gone 109 days without a night out, a Sunday brunch at Cafe Bar, a trip to Little Man Ice Cream. Kate could have gone without a baby shower…or three (with pictures of actual baby present). I could have gone without a couple trips to the Bull and Bush (“The pub you’ve been practicing for.” God bless them). We could have passed on going to church Easter morning. But if we had not done all these things, we would have completely lost those 14 weeks to the NICU.

The NICU is a beast. You don’t want to give her more time than you already have to. Of course, don’t take this too far. One nurse told us about a couple who had been told that their baby was going to be discharged on Friday of that week and they objected because they were going to Vegas that weekend. There’s a sweet spot you can find. I think we eventually found it. Our hearts never left the NICU, but our minds and bodies knew they had to leave that place every once in while to keep going.

Forget About Stress Eating, We Forgot to Eat

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A few words about food. If you have found yourself in a situation similar to ours, you will know that really simple things, like grocery shopping, cooking, eating…heck, even bathing, become so overwhelming that they don’t get done. Of course, that is if you even think about them. There were quite a few mornings that I did not think about them at all as I sat in the NICU holding London. Then, around noon, when I would start to think about lunch, I’d realize I hadn’t had breakfast. I hadn’t thought about it at all. Trust me when I say this, I have to be extremely stressed out and busy to completely forget about eating.

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Coq au vin, prepared by my mom. With Odell beer and Highland Park 18 Yr Scotch.

Things were like this for a while. Kate and I did not have the time or energy to sit down and plan meals for a week and then figure out the necessary items to pick up at the grocery store. It was never going to happen.

We had so many people asking us how they could help. I don’t know about you, but it feels weird to say things like, “Well, we could really use a dinner tonight,” or “Do you want to go vacuum our house?” “Do our laundry?” “Bring us lunch at the hospital.”

Luckily, we have some amazing friends who know from their own experience or the experience of others that stepping up and providing a meal is the best thing you can do for parents who have a baby in the NICU.

We had meals in the freezer for weeks. Friends even came into our house while we were still at the hospital and made dinner, so when we got home there was soup in the crockpot, bread on the counter, and salad in the fridge. There were meals on our doorstep, driven in from Boulder. There were strangers at the door, well, someone who knew someone who knew Kate, dropping dinner off and telling me, “You look tired. Be sure to get some rest.” There were people showing up at the NICU to meet London, but also handing us a meal. There was a Trader Joe’s gift card in the mail. There were parents who cooked amazing meals for us at the end of a long day in the NICU.

I did not do a big grocery shopping for four weeks. I occasionally had to get a few items like milk (of course), eggs, and bread, but other than that, we survived on peoples’ kindness and generosity for weeks, even months. I want to write that we could not have made it through the NICU days without them, but that is silly exaggeration. We would have made it, we just would have survived off countless Chipotle burritos, Einstein bagels, and Panera sandwiches. For bringing a home-cooked meal into our home, we thank you. For keeping us far away from regular fast food stops, our tastebuds, waistlines, and digestive tracts thank you.