Wednesday, June 03, 2009

If "science" says I can't deep-fry things, then let's bring back the Inquisition (Mourning Gnus, 6/3/09)

It's still the morning where I am for 17 minutes more, so it's still the Mourning Gnus...


I wonder how they'll cover this in the school's newsletter: You try, as parents, to prepare your kids for all the ne'er-do-wells they'll meet in school, ranging from bullies to drug dealers to sex predators...

... wait a minute. Now that I look at that, just what the heck is going on in our schools?...

... that's for another day, I guess. The point is, when you send your little toddlers out the door alle excited to learn (or push your sullen teenagers towards the bus stop and remind them that in 372 days they're 18 and on their own), you hope that you've covered in your advice every possible situation they might face.

And then you learn that there's a black bear outside the school -- like the one that crawled into a tree outside a Wausau, Wisconsin school and stayed there all day, forcing recess to be indoors and requiring that the kids leave at the end of the day from an alternate exit.

The bear ultimately left without incident, but experts report that it had a pretty solid grasp of phonics by the time it moved on.

I've cut-and-pasted their report into my "To Do" List for this weekend: The Center for "Science" in the Public Interest continues to put the emphasis on "science" as most people use that word today -- that is, "science" meaning "things we already know but paid a lot of money to hear again." The latest study... excuse me, "study"... reports that we eat a lot of unhealthy stuff that can make us fat.

In their "Xtreme Eating Awards 2009" (nothing says "science" like lame words like Xtreme), The Center for "Science" calls out restaurants for serving large portions and not labeling their menus with a calorie count.

I'm not sure where the "science" part of all this is-- unless "science" now means "stating the obvious," in which case let me just say The sun comes up in the East and collect my Nobel prize money... but I agree with them that there's simply no way we could ever know this food is unhealthy without a calorie count. Take, for example, the "Fried Macaroni & Cheese" appetizer at "The Cheesecake Factory." Without a menu label showing that it has 1,570 calories, how would you or I know that a cheesy dish dipped in batter and deepfried, and served by a restaurant called "The Cheesecake Factory" was unhealthy?

Website of the Day: I'm going to promote, again, the Pepins' new effort, Memoir of the French Resistance, and heartily recommend that you read about Marco Pepin's life during WWII... and that you do so while eating some Fried Macaroni & Cheese. Everything goes better with a deep-fried snack, don't you think?







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