Category: Food
Here’s the Halifax I love
While puffed up pols and media toffs worked overtime this week to present Halifax at its snotty, hidebound worst, one local business demonstrated the city’s best spirit. During tonight’s Occupy Nova Scotia rally on the Parade Grounds, a carload of free pizza arrived from Freeman’s Little New York, together with a note:
And how did the Occupy Nova Scotia kids respond? They voted to donate one of the pizzas to the HRM cops. Now that is classy.
Photo: Bethany Horne; H/T: Chris Lambie
The hidden cost of farmed fish
As ocean stocks dwindle, humanity turns increasingly to farmed fish. But does this actually make matters worse? Graphic artist Nigel Upchurch thinks so:
It matters which farmed fish you’re eating, as some species consume more than others. Salmon is the worst, as this table, from a paper by Albert G.J. Tacon and Marc Metian of the University of Hawaii, demonstrates:
The red arcs represent wild fish inputs, the yellow arcs farmed fish output. The numbers inside the circles show the ratio between the two. Numbers greater than one mean more wild fish is consumed than farmed fish produced. Upchurch provides additional fine print.
H/T: Nathan Yau
A Halifax resident writes her councillor
Contrarian has previously voiced astonishment that environmentalists — more accurately crackpots posing as environmentalists — would oppose a recycling project that transforms harmful municipal waste into a valuable organic fertilizer here and here. We’re also chagrinned the Halifax media’s gullibility and lack of interest in actual scientific information about the topic. Now, a North End resident has voiced similar incredulity in a letter to District 11 councillor Jerry Blumenthal:
Dear Mr. Blumenthal,
For a long time, I couldn’t understand why Haligonians keep comparing their city to tiny Moncton, but now I’m beginning to get it. And I’m not referring to Moncton’s apparently inexplicable ability to host major concerts.
Halifax has set aside $100,000 to study whether its own biosolids, produced according to a plan established at least five years ago, are safe. All of the hundreds of similar studies done in the past 80 or more years are evidently insufficient, no doubt because they didn’t benefit from the special scienctific perspective available only in HRM. And it seems there is no obligation for opponents to biosolids to produce any reputable science supporting their position. All this because staff made the mistake of mixing the material with wet compost and causing a stink in Clayton Park. We’re spending $100,000 to investigate a bad smell in Clayton Park that has come and gone.
Meanwhile, Moncton is selling its biosolids by the bag back to the citizens who generated it in the first place as a fertilizer branded “Gardner’s Gold.” Even better, they’re getting the equivalent of $40 a tonne for it, roughly four times what HRM gets from farmers still brave enough to buy its material.
At this point, convention requires me to make a bitter reference to the Great Cat Bylaw Debate, or HRM’s inability to join the rest of the province in mandating clear garbage bags, but I’m just too tired.
Sincerely,
Lindsay Brown
Tamworth outpost
Oblivious to their fate, five Tamworth pigs, a scarce heritage breed, peer out from their pen at a certain unconventional restaurant somewhere in Nova Scotia.
More on this another time.
What slim looked like in 1940 – ctd.
Contrarian reader Stan Jones offers further evidence of 21st Century North America’s altered perception of weight: Footage of the Benny Goodman Orchestra playing Sing, Sing, Sing in 1937. Those are some skinny musicians. Note especially Harry James, whose solo begins 38 seconds into the tune:
(That is, of course, Gene Krupa on drums, and Goodman himself on clarinet.)
As a former TV host, Glennie Langille has first hand experience with society’s social expectations around weight. She offers a skeptical view of the notion that skinny equals healthful:
My first observation is that the original photo of Kennedy makes him appear to have an enormous head. This is a look normally associated with especially thin tv actresses creating the “lollipop” effect. As a former tv host, I am aware this is also the look preferred for that profession. But it strikes me the real reason the boy was thin was because he smoked and he was young. Those two things make for a slim appearance. It should not be confused with a healthy person.
Greg Beaulieu also wonders about the role of that other health policy priority, smoking cessation:
As Scott [Logan] states, it is a hugely complex issue, but fundamentally it comes down to what you eat and how much physical activity you perform. Over the generations both of those variables have changed dramatically. While this generation has made a mega-industry out of the exercise/fitness segment, it also consumes things that our grandmothers and great-grandmothers would find astounding. To use just one example, I am old enough to remember when hamburgers and french fires were a rare treat, and not a lunch staple as they are for some these days.
I found one aspect of Scott’s comments thought-provoking. He noted the changes made in society’s attitudes towards smoking. While smoking is undeniably a filthy, deadly habit, I wonder if I am the only one who has noticed that as the smoking rate goes down, the obesity rate goes up? It is not surprising given the well-known connection between quitting smoking and gaining weight. But I wonder if the success our governments and public health agencies have had in demonizing smoking has inadvertently led to the increase in obesity? Are these unintended consequences that are their fault? Is the fat, so to speak, on their hands? And if so, what does it mean for other attempts by such agencies to affect the behavior of the population as a whole?
Since we will all die eventually, perhaps some enterprising economic analyst could delve into the cost-benefit quotient of spending public funds on attempting to keep people from killing themselves. Just a thought.
There’s little doubt that people who quit smoking often put on weight, but so do plenty of people who never smoked. Blaming the entire change, or much of it, on those pesky policy-makers who nagged us to quit smoking seems a tad convenient.
What ‘slim’ looked like in 1940 – feedback
Scott Logan, who formerly served as Nova Scotia’s Assistant Deputy Minister of Health Promotions, responds to our observation that John F. Kennedy would seem skinny today:
This piece and the previous on “Your Lying Pants” speak so graphically to socialized
norms. When the majority of people smoked it was “cool.” When—for various reasons—the tipping point was reached where the majority were non-smokers, the efforts to reduce tobacco’s harmful impact on society gained great momentum. In tobacco, the strategy was based on “re-normalizing” society’s previous normal view of smoking. In other words the “new cool” was re-cast in a non-smoking image.
The health of the population is based on numerous factors, not the least of which are recognized determinants of health. However, with the majority of citizens in numerous North American jurisdictions overweight or obese it is difficult to re-normalize the perspective on healthy body weight, or to gain any sort of broad-scale momentum on health promotion efforts to reverse the tide.
It is a hugely complex issue, and so it is likely that until something fundamentally sociological changes our psyche on what’s a normal body weight and until we look at the agri-food industry with the same scrutiny tobacco companies now face, it would seem that false waist sizing will continue to be a new norm all its own.
Contrarian has been trying to lose weight himself, a project that got underway last summer when my avoirdupois crept into the obese zone – 50 pounds above the upper limit of the normal range for my height (according to those BMI calculators).
I made good progress, shedding 30 pounds in a few months. Then something totally unexpected happened: a good friend demanded I stop dieting. He said I was starting to look unhealthily thin. In fact, I was (and am) still 20 pounds over the normal zone—20 pounds overweight, in other words, and 70 pounds above Kennedy’s weight, despite our shared height of six feet.
Losing 20 more pounds* will put me just inside the upper limit of the so-called normal range. Kennedy’s 150 pounds put him well above the lower limit of normal. As Logan points out, today’s social standards make that normal zone seem anything but.
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*Readers are welcome to give me a deadline.
What ‘slim’ looked like in 1940
The John F. Kennedy Library in Boston has released a huge trove of digitized images and recordings of the late president. Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic’s tech blogger, has published a selection. Here’s what struck me:
As a young naval officer, Kennedy was certainly slim, but no one would have thought him gaunt or emaciated.
Yet Kennedy’s Navy ID card reveals that he was six feet tall and weighed just 150 pounds. Six feet, 150 pounds! How our standards of girth have changed (as previously noted).
Top banana… sticker
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Chiquita Brands International, successor to the United Fruit Company, a cartel whose imperialist policies in Latin America gave life to the term banana republic (coined by O. Henry), has revealed the winners in its contest to replace the company’s iconic fruit sticker.
Here are Contrarian’s favorites:
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Why I drink black coffee – updated x 2
Men’s Health offers graphic equivalencies for the 20 sugariest drinks in America. A 20-oz Starbuck’s Peppermint White Chocolate Mocha with Whipped Cream has as much sugar as as 8½ scoops Edy’s Slow Churned Rich and Creamy Coffee Ice Cream.
A 20 oz bottle of SoBe Green Tea has as much sugar as four slices of Sara Lee Cherry Pie.
Tim Horton’s medium black coffee, no sugar:
[Update] But Jocelyne Marchand of Grand Pré points out:
A teaspoon of sugar has 16 calories – the issue is not a teaspoon of sugar in a cup of coffee.
Source: Tim Horton’s nutritional calculator.
And then there’s the Cold Stone offering: equivalent to 68 strips of bacon.
The same product family being tested at select Tim Hoton locations in Nova Scotia: Bedford (980 Bedford Way), Dartmouth (577 Main Street), Halifax (6455 Quinnpool Rd), Sydney (479 George St), and Wolfville (370 Main St).
Hat tip: Flowingdata.com
