Whatever Happened to TV Dinners?

I was just reading a Charles Willeford (check out that guys biography!) novel from 1971, The Burnt Orange Heresy, and was struck by how an old French painter, living in anonymity in Florida, is enamored by TV dinners, something I'd completely forgotten about. From the novel:

He patted my arm. "Let us be the friends. It is not friendly to talk about nothing with such seriousness on your face. It is getting late, and you will both stay to dinner with me, please."

"Thank you very much. We would like very much to stay." He had changed the subject abruptly, but the longer I stayed the better my chances became to gain information about the old man. Or did they?

"Good!" He rubbed his dry hands together and they made a rasping sound. "First I will turn on my electric oven to four-two-five degrees. I do not have the printed menu, but you may decide. There is the television turkey dinner. Very good. There is the television Salisbury steak. Also very good. Or maybe, M. Figueras, you would most like the television patio dinner? Enchilada, tamale, Spanish rice, and refried beans."
"No," I said. "I guess I'll have the turkey."

"I'd rather have the Salisbury steak," Berenice said. "And let me help you--"

"No. Debierue will also have the turkey!" He smiled happily, and turned toward the stove. Relenting, he changed direction, went to the sideboard and got out a box of Piknik yellow plastic forks and spoons. There was a four-mat set of sticky rubber yellow place mats in the drawer. He handed the mats and the box of plastic utensils to Berenice and asked her to set the card table on the porch.

At some point TV dinners went from being 50s space-age wonders to being associated with the lower-class or the pathetically single divorced guy living in a dingy crackerbox flat. Perhaps that had already happened by 1971 when Willeford wrote the above passage.

I'm old enough to acutally remember the classic Swanson TV dinner on aluminum tray, I'm sure I had them more than once, and as a kid I thought they were pretty cool, but I can't recall when and where. But kids don't have the most sophisticated of palates, and are always going to dig the novelty of eating off a piece of space-age aluminum as opposed to a boring old plate as long as it's actually a novelty.

Back when I was single and living in America, and barely knew how to cook more than hamburger, my quick and dirty meal was a can of Campbell's chunky soup. A can of beef vegetable stew is a much more efficient food delivery unit than trying to freeze a real home-cooked meal onto an aluminum tray, then reheating it in an oven.

And this leads to the heart of the TV dinner phenomena, trying to imitate a traditional home-cooked meal with separate courses of meat, veggies and dessert.

Wiki

This is why they were such a big hit in early fifties America. It was a time when a home-cooked meal was the norm. The TV dinner was a home-cooked meal without the fuss of actually cooking--at least in theory.

TV dinners didn't suddenly disappear after ZZ Top mocked of them in 1983, although I've no idea how prevalent they are these days in their hipper, modern form. I don't really see them here in Czechia, except in the form of frozen pizzas (*gasp* *choke*). But "prepared meals" are apparently quite big in the UK. Of course there are all sorts of things like prepared salads in fine supermarkets the world over, but those have as much to do with a classic Swanson TV dinner as a bottle rocket does with Sputnik.

But were classic TV dinners really that unhealthy? The quality and nutritional value of TV dinners likely declined as the traditional home-cooked meal that they hoped to emulate declined, since the whole point of a TV dinner was to replace a home-cooked meal. While the above shot is most likely a idealized promotional, it's a pretty damn good meal--even if its real life counterpart would've suffered from the inevitable sogginess, freezer fatigue, and mismatched temperatures that a TV dinner naturally entails.

The obvious solution to the home-cooked meals gap is for the government to subsidize home-cooked meals. But instead of subsidizing home-cooked meals directly, as the NY Times social engineeress suggests, perhaps the better solution would be for the government to subsidize classic Swanson TV dinners. They could be handed out to children as they left their public schools, with an upbraiding note to the parents about the importance of home-cooked meals along with directions on how to reheat them.

Is There Such a Thing As True Bilingualism?

An interesting study about bilingualism, and by interesting I mean interesting in the fact that academia is such a ridiculous circle-jerk in the soft sciences (and not much better in the hard sciences these days).

"The predominant view of late has been that bilinguals will never be able to perceive a second language beyond what a late learner is capable of, or someone who learns a second language late in life. So even if you learn two languages simultaneously from birth, you're always going to perceive one of them like a late learner," Gonzales said. "Our findings cast doubt on that prominent view in the bilingual literature."

I'm arrogant enough to assume that my experience of having a kid who is a native bilingual speaker trumps these guys with pipes and patches on their elbows (as my old music teacher used to say). I'm guessing these folk with the patches on their elbows who promulgate the 'predominate' view that a person can have only one native language haven't spent much time interacting with bilingual kids.

My six-year-old kid instantly switches from Czech to English depending on who he's talking to. It's a pretty amazing thing to see. Now, I admit my n=1 experience isn't very scientific, I just think that it is more scientific than those academicians who think otherwise.

Having dated a cognitive psychology grad student in college, I'm not exactly brimming with respect for the field. She was sharp enough herself, but it was clear to me that even this more rigorous branch of psychology was mostly about slinging bullshit.

Also interesting, my kid hates it when I speak Czech to him. American English is what Daddy and Batman speak (even if Batman is sometimes Welsh or English (and speaking of Christian Bale, I dare you to watch this all the way through with a dry eye)). Czech is what everyone else speaks. IT'S NOT A COMPETITION! But if it was Daddy and Batman would have the edge, outnumbered as we always are. What's clear to my son is that he interacts with Daddy in English and Mommy and the rest of the country in Czech.

The thing about cognitive psychology is that it's not all fluff. You can measure people's reaction time to phonemes and get real data. And you can measure an infant's reaction to phonemes (using suck or head turning response) to see how they lose the knack for hearing non-native phonemes at a surprisingly early age. This is all fascinating stuff with a pretty solid scientific base, as far as I'm concerned.

The idea that the human brain can only support one native language, whether or not it is predominant in academia, I find much less plausible.

Why I'm Not Quaking In My Boots Over The AI Singularity

Robot vacuums and text-to-voice.

I'm already on record as being skeptical of artificial intelligence (AI) hype and a big fan of Roger Penrose whose skepticism of AI has so far been several orders of magnitude more accurate than all the singularity folks.

Back when I was teaching a program for gifted Native American students, we took those high school kids to Sandia National Laboratories to see a demonstration of, wait for it......virtual reality! Remember when VR was the hot topic of the day? Probably not, but it was around the time this film came out--the Cold War had recently ended and facilities like SNL were trying to find new ways of justifying their huge budgets. These guys with their $50,000 research computers were soon overtaken by clever upstart game developers kludging 3D environments on simple PC computers with primitive graphic capabilities, along with the nascent field of Hollywood CGI.

Long before this heady time of 20 MHZ 486s Roger Penrose wrote a book about the limits of artificial intelligence that is as relevant today as when it was published.

The point of all this digression is that when there is a demand and a technology that's able to meet that demand, huge innovation can take place in a unfettered market.

Which leads me to a couple of technologies that still pretty much suck, despite what one would think would be obvious demand. Robot vacuums and text-to-voice apps.

I read a lot, listen to a lot of audiobooks and a fair amount of podcasts ranging from history to comedy, and I've been keeping my eye on text-to-speech engines for a long time. Okay, TTS is probably not in huge demand these days when people's attention spans are ever-shortening, but robot vacuums have to be. A vacuum cleaner that vacuums while you are at work and goes back home to charge itself in its little docking station, what's not to like, other than the fact that it costs 500 bucks, needs to be cleaned all the time and has less intelligence than a parameceum?

Yes, we have a robot vac and it is like owning a 70s British sports cars minus the coolness factor and the need to synchronize the Zenith Stromberg carbs.

Computer graphics are pretty amazing these days compared to what was available just a few years ago. Smart phones and tablets even more so. But these things are the result of increased algorithmic innovation. AI type innovations, even basic ones such as predictive keyboards, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, have been much slower to innovate.

The main point of all this is that we are really no closer to creating an artificial intelligence than we were way back in the early 90s. And yet people continue to talk about the coming singularity much like people used to talk about the coming triumph of communism.

Addendum: IVONA by a Polish company recently aquired by Amazon is the best TTS voice at the moment as far as I can tell, good enough that I could imagine listening to a converted ebook using it.

Do Kids Need Breakfast?

It is an accepted tenet that children must have a healthy breakfast, "healthy" for most kids being a bowl of sugar-coated cereal fortified with vitamins and minerals, but is it really necessary? While it's true that children, like other small, hyperactive mammals, have a faster metabolism and need to eat more frequently, children ought to have better access to fat stores than adults who've been abusing their bodies with sugar and processed carbs for years and years. It would be interesting to test my kid's blood glucose every hour for a day to see how well his body regulates glucose but he's not down with that for some reason.

There is, of course, a mountain of "evidence" that shows that children who eat breakfast have higher IQs, better memory, etc etc etc. A Google search for "children score better breakfast" turns up 23 million hits with this vapid NPR article as the number one hit.

Evidence suggests that eating breakfast really does help kids learn. After fasting all night, a developing body (and brain) needs a fresh supply of glucose — or blood sugar. That's the brain's basic fuel.

"Without glucose," explains Terrill Bravender, professor of pediatrics at Duke University, "our brain simply doesn't operate as well. People have difficulty understanding new information, [they have a] problem with visual and spatial understanding, and they don't remember things as well."

Dozens of studies from as far back as the 1950s have consistently shown that children who eat breakfast perform better academically than those who don't. In a recent study of 4,000 elementary school students, researchers measured the effects of eating breakfast by administering a battery of attention tests. To measure short-term memory, researchers read a series of digits out loud — 5, 4, 2 and so on — and asked the children to repeat them. The children were scored on how many digits they could remember correctly. To test verbal fluency, the kids were asked to name all the animals they could think of in 60 seconds. Across the board, Murphy says, the breakfast eaters performed better than those children who had skipped breakfast.

Actually, Terrill, without glucose, our brain doesn't operate at all.

This is all about as interesting to me as studies that correlate the number of books a kid has at home, or the inverse number of televisions with IQ and achievement. Pssst: it's not the number of books, or TVs, it's the parents who bought or didn't buy those books and TVs, more importantly, it's the genes those parents passed along to their children that really matter. The same article goes on to recommend oatmeal with the same amount of sugar as Cap'n'Crunch as the optimal breakfast because of it's allegedly low glycemic index, that it's high in fiber, blah blah.

This is not to say that kids, especially elementary school children and younger function just as well without a breakfast of some sort--but they might. Kids with access to fat stores might be just as well off and are almost certainly much better off in the long run than kids who have to have their morning dose of sugary cereal doused in low-fat milk, AKA lactose water.

Infants eat every two hours or so, and while children should probably eat more often than adults, by toddlerhood they ought to be well beyond a two hour feeding window. As Neal Matheson and I were discussing in the comments a while back, it seems ridiculous to have to bring snacks to the playground, snacks which are almost invariably crappish in nature, as if a kid can't go down a slide for ten minutes without eating or descending into a hypoglycemic coma. But ever ready plastic baggies of Cheetos and other toxic waste are becoming the norm in many playgrounds as vigilant parents guard against the threat of such comas.

My kid typically just has a glass of chocolate milk in the morning (some hot water, raw Dutch cocoa, smidgen of sugar, mix to paste, add whole milk and cream, microwave for 20 seconds), which he typically doesn't finish, but he seems to do get along just fine with that. I'd be lying if I said this didn't have a lot to do with time constraints, but is similar to my wife and I's breakfast of coffee and heavy cream which often lasts through till dinnertime. We go through a lot of heavy cream and would buy it by the liter if it was available as such at the local shops.

So how do I break a kid's fast when hot chocolate isn't enough? Breakfast cereals are, not surprisingly, verboten around Chez Sean. Krupičky or porridge from farina (AKA Cream of Wheat) cooked in whole milk is pretty quick and easy and healthier than a bowl of water cooked oatmeal. One cup (225 ml) milk, 1 1/2 Tbs farina, some raw cocoa, a smidgen of Nutella. Here's a pic of this morning's remains:

Oh wait, that's a kid demanding breakfast, or more likely just trying to stay home from school. Here's a pic of some leftovers:

Another breakfast I consider to be relatively healthy and kid-friendly, but is more of a weekend thing, is crêpes. 1/3 cup of flour (actually somewhat less), 1 egg, 1/3 cup milk (or milk mixed with cream), and the pièce de résistance, a healthy dollop of coconut oil. Also some raw cocoa and a smidgen of sugar or honey can be added. These tend to turn out thicker than classic crêpes depending on what's thrown in the mix. They are relatively easy to make and clean up.

Not that I have a problem with a proper British fry-up, but it's hard enough to get decent bacon here in Prague, much less decent sausages or breakfast sausage. I did mess around with grinding and spicing my own pork to make breakfast sausage but it's something I'm too lazy to bother with on a regular basis.

Sklizeno

A new store opened up in the neighborhood and the window art is very promising. If, for some bizarre reason, you ever need a chart of Czech beef cuts, this one is pretty good.

I'm digging the logo also.

Opravdové jídlo--real food.

Lasagne With Liver

The other day I bought some ground pork liver at the local butcher, this is sold here for making liver dumplings, and I ought to try making those some day, but I decided I'd try incorporating the liver into lasagne.

Here's the some of the ingredients I started out with, hamburger, a couple different kinds of ground pork and the ground liver in the middle.

I sauteed the onions and garlic on low in ghee for about 20 minutes until they were nice and golden.

Added in the ground pork and hamburger, let them cook, then added in the liver. Not all of it, I didn't want to overpower things, in retrospect I think I could've added quite a bit more.

Ended up with this, already quite tasty meat mixture. Add in the tomatoes, tomato sauce, some white wine (I know, I know, didn't have any red, I mean real, wine in the house), and spices, ended up with a really nice meat sauce. My son who's pretty shaky on the liver thing thought the meat sauce was awesome.

Didn't take any pics of the rest of the process, but you know the drill.

Here's a pic of the leftovers.

In summation, I'd definitely do this again except go heavier on the liver. It really went well together and I think the liver actually enhances the sauce, even for people who aren't huge liver fans (like my son), by adding another layer of complexity which we might be evolutionarily selected to find tasty, perhaps for the same reason that ground pork and ground beef tastes so much better in combination for dishes like lasagne.

Robb Wolf--American Hero

Robb crossed the line of professionalism yesterday by telling CarbSane to go fuck herself in a tweet. And in the most egregious of follies, he put a "." in front of the tweet so it would be visible to all of his followers, like me. Further expanding upon this folly, Robb didn't reexamine his terrible  transgression and, upon reflection, delete said tweet as the first act of contrition.

.@carbsane Evelyn: go fuck yourself.
— Robb Wolf (@robbwolf) March 15, 2013

It's a national tragedy of epic proportions and I'm sure I won't be the only one waiting with bated breath for a conciliatory Robb to appear with Oprah and make a groveling, heartfelt apology.

This is the official position of CarbSane a simple seeker of truth who was much maligned by Robb's terrible, awful, traumatic tweet.

As a person who finds it necessary to define herself as sane wrote in a comment on her blog:

I have conceded the point that my tweet was not in the best of form. OK? But. I have had FAR worse directed at me and I have not devolved to responses remotely resembling this. I let it "sit" for a while to allow him to cool off and delete it, he did not, and he made sure his followers saw it. Robb could have responded "whoa Evelyn, dial it back" or something like that, but he did not.

His words are inexcusable. Nothing hypocritical about that. 

I'm guessing that the inexcusable words weren't Evelyn, go or yourself, so there was really just one word that was inexcusable. Or perhaps it was simply the combination of all four words that made them so incredibly inexcusable to Ms "Sane".

If you've been aware of Robb as long as I have, you'll know that the guy has a really long fuse. Way, way longer than I have in any case. 

Not surprisingly, Melissa McEwen immediately posted Robb's transgression against women on her PaleoDrama blog. It's called PaleoDrama but it doesn't include the drama of Stephan Guyenet melting down because Ms McEwan has chosen to focus on the drama of misogynism that she and other bold women in the blogosphere have had to valiantly struggle against. 

Such as Robb Wolf's awful, awful tweet.

Eat Your Fish, Jeeves!

The idea of fish as brain food is an old one. I'm not sure how old, but I'm struck by how it was taken for granted by PG Wodehouse in his classic Edwardian Jeeves and Wooster books and stories.

Wikipedia states:

Although omega-3 fatty acids have been known as essential to normal growth and health since the 1930s, awareness of their health benefits has dramatically increased since the 1990s. The health benefits of the long-chain omega-3 fatty acids — primarily EPA and DHA are the best known. These benefits were discovered in the 1970s by researchers studying the Greenland Inuit Tribe. The Greenland Inuit people consumed large amounts of fat from fish, but displayed virtually no cardiovascular disease. The high level of omega-3 fatty acids consumed by the Inuit reduced triglycerides, heart rate, blood pressure, and atherosclerosis.

Wodehouse often has his characters talk about Jeeves needing to top up his magnificent brain with sea food in order to help extricate Wooster and/or one of his comrades from a particularly vexing situation (usually something to do with marriage), along with quotes about cutting down the starchy food to lose weight (although I was too lazy to find those), and the dangers of smoking gaspers.

Here's a longish quote from Much Obliged Jeeves (1971). I made it longish so that readers unfamiliar with Wodehouse can get an idea of his style:

'It is difficult to say on the spur of the moment, sir. The tide of popular opinion appears to be swaying in Mr Winship's direction. Lord Sidcup's eloquence is having a marked effect on the electorate and may well prove the deciding factor. Mr Seppings, who obliged as an extra waiter at the luncheon, reports that his lordship's address to the members of the Market Snodsbury Chamber of Commerce was sensational in its brilliance. He tells me that, owing entirely to his lordship, the odds to be obtained in the various public houses, which at one time favoured Mrs McCorkadale at ten to six, have now sunk to evens.'

'I don't like that, Jeeves.'

'No, sir, it is ominous.'

'Of course, if you were to release the club book ...'

'I fear I cannot do that, sir.'

'No, I told Ginger you regarded it as a sacred trust. Then nothing can be done except to urge you to get the old brain working.'

'I will certainly do my utmost, sir.'

'No doubt something will eventually emerge. Keep eating lots of fish. And meanwhile stay away from Ginger as much as possible, for he is in ugly mood.'

'I quite understand, sir. Stockish, hard and full of rage.'

'Shakespeare?'

'Yes, sir. His merchant of Venice.'

I left him then, pleased at having got one right for a change, and headed for the drawing-room, hoping for another quiet go at the Rex Stout which the swirling rush of events had forced me to abandon. I was, however, too late. The old ancestor was on the chaise longue with it in her grasp, and I knew that I had small chance of wresting it from her. No one who has got his or her hooks on a Rex Stout lightly lets it go.

Hold on, 1971 isn't that long ago, I hear you saying as one of the competing voices in my head. Shut up!!! I don't want to take my medicine!!!

But fish as brain food was a Jeeves and Wooster leitmotif that goes all the way back to the beginning of the canon. Here's the closing lines from My Man Jeeves (1919), which, by the way, is open source and available for download from Project Gutenberg.

I was stunned by the man's resource.

"It's brain," I said; "pure brain! What do you do to get like that, Jeeves? I believe you must eat a lot of fish, or something. Do you eat a lot of fish, Jeeves?"

"No, sir."

"Oh, well, then, it's just a gift, I take it; and if you aren't born that way there's no use worrying."

"Precisely, sir," said Jeeves. "If I might make the suggestion, sir, I should not continue to wear your present tie. The green shade gives you a slightly bilious air. I should strongly advocate the blue with the red domino pattern instead, sir."

"All right, Jeeves." I said humbly. "You know!"

The idea that civilization, and especially Science with a capital S, is always marching forward is part of the narrative of progress that so many people buy into. It is a sticking point for these people in accepting the idea that the Food Pyramid was actually a gigantic boondoggle, saturated fat phobia was diametrically opposed to reality, salt might not be the anti-Christ, and dietary cholesterol doesn't morph directly into artery-chocking-globs-of-pure-evil once past the lips.

Note: If you are interested in Jeeves and Wooster, I suggest listening to them as audiobooks, at least as an introduction. Different narrators approach Wodehouse in different ways, and I'm not going to weigh in on who's the best, but they mostly all manage to capture the nuances of tone and accent that might be missed to readers, especially outside the UK. Once you've got a template for the voices it is much more interesting to read them. I disliked the ITV TV series because it necessarily omits the first-person narration by Wooster and much of the dialogue in favor of having to visually act out the plot, and the plots are really just a MacGuffin for the dialogue and narration in the first place.