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In any case, the very idea of an egg endangering health was implausible.  Eggs were the nutritionists' darling.  The egg is packed with good things.  It has the highest quality protein of all foods and is the source of eleven essential nutrients and fifteen important vitamins and minerals.  They include B vitamin folate, which has been found to reduce birth defects, carotenoids (lutein and xanthophyll) that may reduce the risk of cataracts and macular degeneration, and half the required daily dose of choline required to protect memory.  Of the 5 grams of fat in an egg, only 1.5 comprise saturated fat, the fat fingered as harmful to the heart, which makes eggs positively virtuous.  An egg, moreover, is as slimming as a bottle of vitamins:  it contains only seventy calories.  An egg does lack vitamin C, but that can be added with a glass of orange juice, a staple of the American diet...

In the early 1970s, out of the blue, the American Heart Association declared the egg a threat to the heart.  The egg contained 278 milligrams of cholesterol, and food scientists had just decreed that no one should consume more than 300 milligrams of cholesterol a day...When I learned this, I thought of course that the scientists, being scientists, had arrived at a safe level of dietary cholesterol through proof.  How wrong I was...[in 1968] a group of food scientists got together and hashed over the idea of setting a safe cholesterol standard.  Some thought the whole idea unnecessary, but others were adamant.  So the debate went back and forth, and finally a compromise was reached.  The average human intake of cholesterol is 580 milligrams (per liter of blood) a day, so let's just halve that.  Make it 300 milligrams...So, overnight, as it were, and on the basis of an arbitrary calculation, the egg was in trouble, deep trouble.

                                             -- Gina Mallet, Last Chance to Eat

Dear friends at NY1:

It's not that I mind that you devoted editorial air time to what turned out to be, basically, an advertisement for the Pump Energy Food restaurant chain.  I've never eaten at the Pump, but based on what I saw on your report, they do at least make an effort to use whole foods, and prepare them carefully.  I think they may be a bit stricter than they need to be on the whole salting-the-food issue, but considering how much some restaurants oversalt their food, I will allow that this might be a good thing -- and if it isn't, hell, I'll bring my own salt.  Likewise, I'm not going to eat nonfat mozzarella any time soon, but I'll grant them that it wouldn't kill me to watch my butter intake.  And certainly, if I bought more lunches from the Pump and fewer from the Daisy May cart on 47th Street, I would be healthier for it, and maybe I would lose my ass just a little faster.

I understand it all, even if I don't agree with it all, and I know that you have to get their message across in a short time slot, as concisely and efficiently as possible.  I just wish, though, that you could have resisted the temptation to insert this little nugget of information into your copy:

Everything on the menu is baked, not fried; no salt or sugar is added; and egg yolks and soda are strictly off limits.  (Emphasis mine. -- Jen)

It has been almost six years since the Hu-Willett study, conducted under the auspices of the Harvard School of Public Health and the National Institutes of Health, concluded that there was no link between the dietary cholesterol found in eggs and an increased risk of heart disease, and yet we are still so frightened of egg yolks, and the fat and cholesterol contained in them, that we are willing to jettison the healthiest part of the egg.  Those nifty vitamins and minerals, those carotenoids that may protect us against cataracts and macular degeneration, that choline that may protect our memory, all of these are found in the yolk.  The white, being pure protein, has none of these.  And yet, we have restaurants that brag about not serving egg yolks.  We have health reporters on local news stations mentioning these lovely little yolks in the same breath as soda, which, last I checked, did not contain any vitamins or minerals or anything to keep you alive but sugar -- excuse me, I mean high-fructose corn syrup.  I'm trying to find words for how baffling and sad I find this, but all I can come up with is, well, nothing.

A postscript, to the guys with whom I stand in line at the deli for our breakfast sandwiches:  If you are trying to watch your fat intake, then what is the point of ordering an egg white and sausage sandwich, or an egg white and cheese sandwich?  (Or even the triple-dog-dare version, the egg white + cheese + sausage sandwich?)  Do you really think that you are doing yourself any favors by skipping the yolks and then filling the vacuum with cheese?   Do you really like the taste of egg whites?  What do you get from these sandwiches?  I'm not being food-snobby, or a crank.  I am genuinely confused.  I genuinely want to know.

The following blather is meant for all, but particularly for new visitors to PTMYB, particularly those who may lean to the more conservative side of the political spectrum and/or those who live in what, for better or worse, has been codified by the media as a "red" state. (Those of you who have been visiting for a while: The silly stories about food will be back, really, they will.)

If you are new to this page, there are few things that may not be self-evident about me, so I will elaborate (probably more than is necessary, and I thank you in advance for your forbearance):

1. I am not a Christian, by which I mean that I don't pray, I don't practice, and although I am too leery of labels to call myself an atheist, I am probably closer to atheism than to any other point on the religious spectrum. Having said this, I was baptized as a Lutheran when I was a squalling infant, and I did have a church wedding at First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia, which I picked because a) the minister is a smart and fabulous guy and b) First Unitarian hosted a lecture and discussion with the Berrigan brothers during the height of the Vietnam War. I am married to a man who is also not a Christian, although he did go on a bit of a pilgrimage between high school and college, looking for answers in various Christian sects, even working and living for a while in a mission in Del Rio, Texas. In the end, he decided that he was not a believer, either, but in that time, he managed to amass a wealth of information about Christianity, and he knows the Bible better than almost anyone I know. However, even though we are not Christian, we are not going to smack your hand if you are. (We also won't smack your hand if you're Jewish, or Muslim, or Hindu, or Buddhist, or none of the above.) In my short and unstoried life, I have seen a lot of the damage that religious zealotry can do, but I have also seen the good that can come from generous, principled religious thought and deed. I know that those of you who do find strength in your religion, who pray, who practice and are definitely theistic, you are smart and honorable people who find solace and inspiration and courage in faith, and I applaud this. Moreover, even though Lloyd and I pretty much celebrate Christmas as a secular holiday, we do celebrate Christmas. We will wish you a merry Christmas; we will wish our Jewish friends a Happy Chanukah, we will tip our hats to our druid friends -- yep, we've got 'em -- who celebrate the Solstice. Ten days after Christmas, we will say Merry Christmas again, to our Greek neighbors, who celebrate Christmas on the Julian calendar, rather than the Gregorian. We will not look sneeringly down our nose at you if you don't say Season's Greetings or Happy Holidays to us. In fact, I'll appreciate your kind thoughts so well that I'll put you on the mailing list for hot cross buns, which I make at Easter.

2. I live in New York City. I was born in Pennsylvania, and Lloyd was born in California and raised in Washington state, but we have made New York our home together for the past 12 years. Eventually we will have to leave, because we will be priced right out of the city and the surrounding metropolitan area, but until that moment comes, we are New Yorkers, fully cognizant of the city's myriad faults, but still grateful for its myriad pleasures. For every moment that I am convinced that we are surrounded by crybabies and litterbugs, there is another in which I see people give lost tourists directions on the subway; where waiters find lost wallets full of cash and actually return the wallet to its rightful owner, cash intact; where you can eat a slice of pizza in a fluorescent-nightmare pizza shack and suddenly realize that the guy with the huge platinum pompadour who just walked by the window is indeed Jim Jarmusch. There is a story, probably apocryphal but I hope it's true, in which Russell Crowe was shopping at Tower Video on Lafayette Street, and his haul included a Hunters and Collectors concert DVD. Apparently the clerk was not familiar with H&C, and, as the story goes, Mr. Crowe was so appalled by this that he ran across the street, bought the new H&C cd and gave it to the clerk, his gift to her, so that she could learn just why they are considered one of the best bands Australia has ever produced. (Myself, I would have bought her a copy of Human Frailty so that she could hear "Throw Your Arms Around Me," one of the most gorgeous, sent-from-the-angels pop songs ever written, but that's just me.) Again, I probably only wish that the story were true, but if it were, it would not surprise me in the least. It is the New York music-nerd version of a right neighborly thing to do.

Why am I so keen to establish my non-Christian, New-Yorker, nice-guy (so to speak) credentials? Because, dear friends, old and new, I am sick of the culture war. I am sick of the whole idea of it, and I was sick of it long before "culture war" entered the lexicon. I am fully aware that there are plenty of people who live in cities on both coasts and points between who are dismissive and snotty about rural and suburban areas, and they should be called on that snotty dismissiveness, but dear friends, that bad attitude cuts both ways. We city-dwellers do not have a moratorium on smug superciliousness; if you (the editorial you, not you in particular, reading this) are the salt of the earth, but you look down on us simply by virtue of not being just like you, it's still smug and it's still wrongheaded, every bit as much as it is when New Yorkers (or Angelenos or Chicagoans or Seattleites or Bostonians) do it to you.

Myself, I have become more than a little tired of the "New York is the greatest city in the world" meme. I believe that by virtue of chasing the maximum dollar value of every inch of real estate space possible in this city, we are pricing ourselves right out of what makes the city great. It is becoming harder and harder for artists to make a living, harder to find work, harder to find living space. I think much of the talk about the greatness of New York is ourselves coasting on our laurels. Whenever I hear anyone talk about Philadelphia, where both of my parents were born, where I met Lloyd and where the pith and marrow of my best childhood memories comes from, as a junior-league New York, kind of cute but not a *real* city, my back goes up. When I came back from Arkansas this summer, having spent a month in a town with an active, engaged local government and an arts council and a summer film series and a farmers market, a place where many of the local businesspeople are cranky old hippies but they still welcome back the returning vacationers from Texas and Oklahoma and Missouri as if they were long-lost cousins, I told many of my friends what a wonderful part of the country I'd been to, and I still heard a distressing amount of Deliverance jokes. I brought back bottles of Arkansas wines -- yes, Arkansas has wine country, and some truly wonderful stuff is being produced there by wineries such as Post Familie, Wiederkehr and Chateau Aux Arc -- and I don't want to tell you how many people made the joke about the jug with the three X's on it. It's not funny, and it certainly doesn't do anything for countering our reputation as a city full of world-weary poseurs. (As it turns out, the Arkansas wineries are located in or around Altus, also known as the home of the family hapless enough to host Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie on the first season of The Simple Life. As I did not watch the show, I asked my brother, who did, "So did they mention any of the wineries, or did they just make Altus look like Hooterville?" "What do you think?" he replied. Huh. That's what I thought.)

So I know. We need to get over ourselves, really, we do. But so do some of your neighbors. They did not invent love or kindness or community or looking out for one's neighbor, any more than we invented hate or alienation or suspicion.

By now I know you're wondering, good heavens, Jen, whyfor do you rant so much? I have had this rant before, but this morning I found myself ranting it all over again, reading this story from the AP wire. (Note: This is going to get more than a little graphic, so if you are easily upset, you may want to just stop reading here and write me off as a damn crazy ranting fool.) This is a grotesque and upsetting story, about the murder of a pregnant Missouri woman and the theft of her unborn daughter, by a woman who confessed to lying to her family and friends about being pregnant, who confessed to murdering this woman, tearing her daughter from her womb, bringing her back to Kansas and passing her off as her own newborn daughter. Hours before Lisa Montgomery's arrest, she and her husband went to the Whistle Stop Cafe in Melvern, Kansas with the baby and showed her to a crowd of neighbors who had believed that Mrs. Montgomery had been pregnant for months.

It is a horrible crime, sickening to contemplate, and I'm sure it was incredibly shocking to the people who were at the Whistle Stop that morning to learn that the missing Missouri baby who was the subject of an Amber Alert was the same baby the Montgomerys introduced as their own. Nevertheless, I think it was something worse than just shock that prompted this comment from Kathy Sage, the owner of the Whistle Stop: "You read about this stuff...It blows you away when it's here. This stuff is supposed to be in New York City or Los Angeles."

Let me repeat that. "You read about this stuff...It blows you away when it's here. This stuff is supposed to be in New York City or Los Angeles."

Ms. Sage, let me assure you, as a New Yorker, as a non-Christian, as a member of a population routinely accused of treating People Not Like Us with contempt: this stuff is not supposed to be in New York City or Los Angeles. I assure you, if one of my neighbors came into the Italian deli where I buy my cheese and polenta on a nearly daily basis, with a baby to whom she had just given birth, and we found out three days later that she had murdered a pregnant woman and stolen her child from her body, we would not just be horrified, we would be shocked. We would be in pain for the man who has just lost his wife, the mother of his child; and we would be sickened by the deception practiced on us by a killer. And yes, I'll say it again, we would be shocked, because this stuff, as you put it, is not supposed to be anywhere. Not New York, not Los Angeles. Not Melvern, Kansas or Skidmore, Missouri. Not London, not Paris, not rural China, not Central Africa, not in a packed tenement neighborhood or an isolated farm belt town. This is an abomination no matter where it happened, and your suggestion that it is less so in my backyard than in yours is contemptible. And I'm sorry, but your shock, while understandable, does not get you off the hook.

Let me tell you exactly what stuff is supposed to be in New York. During Friday night's extended pub crawl to celebrate the lovely bunni's birthday, we ran into a friend of hers, an NYPD officer, who hadn't known it was her birthday and who left the bar abruptly, with a promise to be back and a direction for us not to leave. He returned 20 minutes later with two dozen long-stemmed roses. These are my neighbors. These are my friends. This is how we celebrate the presence of each other in our lives. As far as this overwritten, food-obsessed blog goes, there is room here for all of you, each and every one of you. All I ask is that you remember that we are all precious in someone's sight, we are all someone's dear friend, and that we are all deserving of peace, love and understanding.

Here endeth the lesson. Go forth and consider this beautiful picture of bunni and her roses, which she has given me her express permission to post.

An open letter to the fine young minds of Huntington, Selden and Centereach, N.Y., who were involved in Saturday’s prank gone wrong in Lake Ronkonkoma:

Dear Fine Young Minds:

If your lives are lacking for drama, chaos and misery, I suggest you take a look around you. There are plenty of people who have drama, chaos and misery to spare, and would be more than happy to offer you some of it. Manufacturing more of it really was not necessary.

Regardless of what the law may have in store for you, regardless of the outcome for the woman you put in hospital, I hope that the last thing you think of before you fall asleep, and the first thing you think of when you wake up in the morning, is how you spent your Saturday night, November 13, 2004, and I hope it never gets easier with the passage of time.

Signed,

Still Wondering if that Evolution Thing Was a Good Idea After All

"Hey, there's something I've been meaning to ask: All these years, you never thought about leaving?"

-- from Sick Puppy by Carl Hiaasen

As others have pointed out on sites more learned and thoughtful than this one, there is a time for licking wounds and a time for getting angry, not bitterness-flavored angry but energy-flavored angry, the kind that drives you to get smart and organized, the kind that stirs you to volunteer your time to organizations and/or individuals who will be enriched by your help, the kind that reminds you that, to your opposition, there is no such thing as "just" a local race and that from small things, mama, big things one day come. I hope the time is coming for you, dear friends. It's almost, almost here for me.

This past week's election-based adventures have called up all of my worst turtley impulses, the desire to, in Terry Jones and Michael Palin's words, stick my head, sand-like, into an ostrich. I don't want to live like this forever, and as much as I love our dear friend Vicki, I'm not quite ready to move to Canada yet. But dear friends, I find myself sorely tested, and looking about for the nearest ostrich, by that whipping boy we love to hate, the media. Specifically, I find myself tested by the New York Post, who appeared to have discovered the 2,000,000-point font in their headline for yesterday's late edition, labeled simply, "W2." To those of you who live in red states, you Kerry voters surrounded by acres and acres of Bush country, I realize it's probably more than a little obnoxious to hear someone from the ne plus ultra of blue-state cities complain about the Post. I know, and I'm sorry. Understand, though, that despite all contrary appearances and/or stereotypes, New York is not the huge liberal monolith so many believe it to be. You have Staten Island Republicans, commuters from wealthy suburbs in Long Island and Rockland County and New Jersey and Connecticut, Upper West Side liberals who suddenly found themselves on the same side of the homeless issue as Rudy Giuliani, outerborough Reagan Democrats, new immigrants from conservative Catholic countries, and millionaires, both self-made and inherited, who have more money than God and vote with their pocketbooks. Just because their votes were not enough to put Bush over the top in New York doesn't mean that they don't have strong and passionate convictions about this election and these candidates. If you shout out your misery here, you will not hear your own voice echoing back at you. In other words, we effete New York liberals have to play nicely with our neighbors, who are very pleased with Tuesday's results, and it shouldn't be too much to ask that we be able to walk past a deli without being confronted by those enormous Post orgasm headlines. Then again, that's all part of the free and pluralistic society we all know and love, or at least claim to. If we all march in lockstep with each other, it's not a great day for pluralism. Dear Republican friends, I'll try to remember that if you extend the same courtesy to me. That means you, Mr. and Mrs. Ohio Couple Who Voted for Bush Because A White-Hatted Cowboy Always Saves The Day. (That's a paraphrase, but not by much.)

However, just because I recognize that we all have beliefs and opinions and they don't always dovetail with each other's, that doesn't mean that I'm going to smile prettily while the Future Dark Minions of Karl Rove try to pull another elaborate shell game, the kind that terrifies people into overwhelmingly voting for laws that would deny gay people the right to marry, while drawing their attention from the things that really should terrify them. From now on, I'm going to get angry, not bitterness-flavored angry but energy-flavored angry, and I'm going to throw my weight behind the candidate who will pick that energy up and run with it. To those friends of mine who insisted that Kerry was our only choice for an electable candidate, and that my long-ago-thwarted plan to vote for Howard Dean was tantamount to rolling over and handing the election to Bush, I appreciate your concern but I'm still saying no. Think of the way Bush galvanized his supporters; think of the way they screamed at every campaign stop, at the convention, at his Wednesday afternoon speech. Now think of how it would feel if we had a candidate like that. I'm not saying that Dean had to be the pony that you should have bet on, but I *am* saying that maybe this tendency to pick our candidates out of resignation is not doing us any favors. I can tell you that I had the first inkling that Dean might have been onto something when, upon announcing his candidacy, he called out, "Mr. President, I want my country back!" <em>Hmmmm</em>, I thought.

To those who have communicated with me via e and/or other message boards and all asked me the same question: "But what about The Scream?" (That would be Howard Dean's whoop in Iowa, not the recently-stolen Edvard Munch painting)...for shame, dear friends, for shame. I know at least one of you was impressed with Jon Stewart's argument on Crossfire. If you'll remember, Jon was less than impressed with CNN's (and other networks') tendency to reduce complex issues to two formats: "Pro and Con, as Described by Two Talking Heads" and "Pro and Con, as Described by Two Screaming Jackasses." I don't know if Roger Ailes and Jamie Kellner (or whoever is responsible for the shenanigans on CNN now) really think that they are imparting news or providing entertainment, but from I where I sit, they are doing a piss-poor job of both. If you listen to the talking heads and the screaming jackasses, the Dean whoop was considered the beginning of Howard Dean's plummet from grace, the moment at which he proved himself as too unstable to lead the nation. Never mind that it was played over and over, out of context, the aural equivalent of taking a photograph of someone at the exact moment he is sneezing. The day that some smartass producer is comfortable with my taking a picture of him sneezing and then sending it to that really hot girl he keeps running into at Max Fisch, that's the day I'll cut them some slack for the Dean contretemps, that day and not one day sooner.

(You may wonder, <em>why all the Dean material, Jen, and why now?</em> I will admit that my mind was tickled by a conversation with my dear reality-based friend C. JoDI at Journal of the Demographically Insignificant. He has a theory that Dean was finished long before the scream; Dean was actually finished the day he appeared on one of the Sunday morning gasbag news shows and said that one of the first issues he would tackle in his administration would be the overconsolidation of the media. It was at about this point that we heard less about the wildfire nature of his campaign and more of the "Is Dean just too damn loony to be electable?" stories. I will try not to dwell on the observation that a man who cheers his own victory in a primary is considered batshit crazy, but a man who utters profanities about reporters into an open mike, who until recently didn't believe that Sweden had an army, and who still can't make up his mind on whether or not Osama Bin Laden is still considered a threat to this country is considered presidential. I will not dwell, simply because dwelling impedes action, and it is time to get my head out of the ostrich.)

Dear friends,

As you know well, this is not a political blog.  This is not because I don’t have strong opinions, or because I’m a wuss about sharing them, but simply because the landscape is filled with political blogs written by people who do it much, much better than I could ever hope to.  I know I am visited by people all across the political spectrum, which is very cool.  I won’t tell you for whom to vote.  I won’t even opine at length about the Sean Penn vs. Trey Parker and Matt Stone controversy (the short version is that Sean Penn took exception to comments Parker and Stone made about how anyone truly uninformed should just stay home on Election Day; Parker and Stone have suggested that Sean might just be smarting over their treatment of his puppet doppelganger in Team America: World Police).  I will follow the example of one of my favorite philosophers, who said “You are all individuals!  You are all different!  You’ve got to think for yourselves!”

Having disclaimed all over the place, can we at least agree that, whatever your opinions are of the incumbent, this is not conduct becoming to a president?:

In the Oval Office in December 2002, the president met with a few ranking senators and members of the House, both Republicans and Democrats. In those days, there were high hopes that the United States-sponsored ‘’road map’’ for the Israelis and Palestinians would be a pathway to peace, and the discussion that wintry day was, in part, about countries providing peacekeeping forces in the region. The problem, everyone agreed, was that a number of European countries, like France and Germany, had armies that were not trusted by either the Israelis or Palestinians. One congressman—the Hungarian-born Tom Lantos, a Democrat from California and the only Holocaust survivor in Congress—mentioned that the Scandinavian countries were viewed more positively. Lantos went on to describe for the president how the Swedish Army might be an ideal candidate to anchor a small peacekeeping force on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Sweden has a well-trained force of about 25,000. The president looked at him appraisingly, several people in the room recall.

This is one key feature of the faith-based presidency: open dialogue, based on facts, is not seen as something of inherent value. It may, in fact, create doubt, which undercuts faith. It could result in a loss of confidence in the decision-maker and, just as important, by the decision-maker. Nothing could be more vital, whether staying on message with the voters or the terrorists or a California congressman in a meeting about one of the world’s most nagging problems. As Bush himself has said any number of times on the campaign trail, ‘’By remaining resolute and firm and strong, this world will be peaceful.’’

The above is excerpted from the Sunday New York Times Magazine’s cover story, “Without a Doubt,” by Ron Suskind.  The complete article can be found here.  If you have never registered with the NYT website, it is worth the registration foofaraw to read it.

Here endeth the rant.  We now return to our regularly scheduled program of food-based nonsense.