The Ankle Biter @ Quibbling.net

• Salary, Gender and the Social Cost of Haggling - washingtonpost.com
  researcher suggests that the reason women tend to be less aggressive in salary negotiations and suchlike is because women tend to be penalized more often for doing so
  (tags: gender workplace salary negotiation career mpoj women business)

For the third week in a row, Tom and I hit the farmer’s market in Courthouse as part of our program of eating more fresh, local produce.

We’ve decided to make this change (which is happening by degrees) for a few reasons.

First, we’re becoming increasingly convinced that industrially-produced food is just not as good for you, and buying more of our food at farmer’s markets is part of a larger effort to reduce our processed-food consumption. 

I have kind of mixed feelings about industrial food- on one hand, industrialization of food production is what has made food cheap and plentiful in this country.  American poverty does have severe nutritional issues associated with it, but poverty in America is generally not marked by starvation. Quite the contrary- obesity is most prevalent among people with lower incomes.  On the other hand, industrialized food production has made food that’s just BAD for you cheap and plentiful (think 14-cent packages of ramen noodles, trans fats, and high fructose corn syrup).  As a result, as the congresspeople participating in the Congressional Food Stamp Challenge discovered, families with low incomes often have to choose between eating to feel full and eating for nutrition.  On a macro level, if the people with the buying power start gravitating toward fresh and local and away from industrial food, then the market will produce more of it, and prices will come down.  I am a good capitalist.  On the micro and more immediate level, however, since I can afford to eat better food, I’m going to choose to do so.

Secondly, produce from the farmer’s market usually just tastes better than what you can get in the grocery store.  Varieties commonly available in grocery stores have been specifically bred and hybridized to look pretty, resist bruising, and hold up to shipping.  You will note that taste is not anywhere on that list.  Farms that make their money selling produce locally can afford to choose which varieties to grow based on taste, rather than fitness for shipping over long distances.  So you can have a particularly tasty peach, instead of a hard, tasteless one that had to endure a trip from South America before getting here.  In fact, I walked into the living room on Saturday morning to find Tom eating a peach he had bought from the local chain grocery.  He looked at me and said, “This peach is reminding me why we get up on Saturdays to go to the farmer’s market.”

As a corollary, I get to try all kinds of things from the market that I’d never be able to find in the grocery store.  Varieties of heirloom tomatoes, different textures of cucumber, particularly sweet corn, and salad greens I have never heard of.  Buying locally helps me broaden my gastronomical horizons.

Thirdly, there’s food safety.  With all the recent horror stories about food safety of imports from China, Tom and I started considering the implications of not knowing where our food comes from.  Food is what we fuel our bodies with, and is one of the most fundamental things that determines our health and well-being, but we tend to get it from chain stores run by executives we will never meet, who arrange for food to be imported from producers we will never meet, who have factories in countries we will likely never visit, which are regulated by governments we did not elect.  Meanwhile, there’s no country-of-origin labeling regulations, it’s easy to ship through a third country to obscure where an ingredient came from even if there were.

That’s all fine and good for my cell phone, but it seems like an overextended chain of trust for something as basic as nourishment, no?  This is also a reason to eat fewer processed foods- the less something has to be processed before you buy it, the less opportunity there is for someone to put melamine in your wheat gluten.

When you go to a farmer’s market, you can meet the people directly involved in the production of that ball of mozzarella.  Yes, you do have to extend trust to them that they aren’t slipping all kinds of nasty chemicals into it to make it whiter or squishier or whatever, but they’ve still got to look you in the eye to sell it to you.  And you know that they’re subject to food safety laws put in place by a government accountable to the public that you’re part of.

Fourth, there are our own eating habits to consider.  Tom and I are busy people, and it’s hard for us to reliably predict when we’ll be home in advance.  As a result, we haven’t kept a lot of fresh veg and stuff around the house, because when we’ve tried, the stuff has often gone bad.  So the balance of our diet has suffered as a result.  The farmer’s market has two advantages here- one, since the stuff is really fresh and didn’t spend a week on a boat getting here, it’ll often last quite a while if we refrigerate it.  Two, the stuff is so delicious, that dinner on Saturday and Sunday is often comprised almost entirely of produce from the market.  Last night, for example, we ate salad made of basil, feta, and tomato from the market and avocado, cucumber, and bell pepper from the store, plus some fresh corn, also from the market.  The night  before that was caprese and bread for dinner.  We’ve still got some corn, tomatoes, and zucchini to use up, as well as some blackberries, peaches, and nectarines, which will probably get consumed by Tuesday or Wednesday.  The stuff is so good that I’m eating a lot more fruit and veg- for a couple of days, we effectively become vegetarians each week. Even if it IS concentrated toward the beginning of the week, my eating habits have improved a great deal.  I don’t think it’s my imagination that I’m feeling a lot better in this last week- due to some work stress, I was feeling pretty wiped, but I’m feeling a lot more energetic lately.  I should start keeping notes about my subjectively-perceived energy level vs. what I’ve eaten in the last 24 hours.

Finally, I’ve been thinking more about the ethics of food production, particularly as relates to animal products.  The argument that factory farms, being more efficient, are better for conservation purposes because they reduce the human footprint required to feed people is a persuasive one.  On the other hand, if industrially-farmed cows produce meat and milk that is less nutritious (and indeed, probably overtly WORSE for you) than pastured cows, what have we really gained with that efficiency?  Meanwhile, while I have no particular moral objection to using animals for food, do we really have to make them miserable before sending them to the slaughterhouse?  Would it be more ethical to eat less meat to make room for the cows to be pastured?  It’s a complicated question, and one that I don’t pretend to have the answer to, but I do believe I have a responsibility to make the best choice available to me based on my understanding of the problem.  So if I reduce the amount of meat I consume and try to eat cage-free eggs and pastured beef while I figure it out… well, that’s not so bad.

• There are only 12 kinds of ads. Resist them all! - By Seth Stevenson - Slate Magazine
  yet another slate story - the twelve archetypes of advertising.
  (tags: advertising business corporate Slate)

• Giving Evil the Eye - washingtonpost.com
  Someone’s working out a “Depravity Scale” (seriously!) because degrees of depravity often go into how a defendant is sentenced for his/her crimes.
  (tags: crime legal sentencing evil measurement psychology)

What’s this? Comedy up on YouTube so soon? Can it be? Yes!
(more…)

• Why the disappearance of the honeybees isn’t the end of the world. - By Heather Smith - Slate Magazine
  (tags: honeybees farming pollination)

My weekend was fantastic, but now I need a weekend from my weekend.  When I left work on Friday, I was mentally AND physically exhausted.  With all the goings-on this weekend, I find myself mentally rested, but just as physically in need of a nap as ever.

On Saturday, Tom and I went to the Courthouse Farmer’s Market, figuring we’d get just some tomatoes and mozzarella and whatnot for lunch.  But you see, Tom and I have been talking about trying to eat more locally-grown food, less meat from factory farms, that sort of thing.  Not as a necessarily political statement, but more as an investment in better quality nutrition, better-tasting food, and keeping more of our dollars in our local (or at least regional) communities.  I actually have a lot more to say on this topic, but I’ll save it for another time.

Anyway, the point is, we went in for caprese ingredients, and came out with something like $90 of produce.  It started when someone had a bag of peaches. I LOVE LOVE LOVE farmer’s market peaches.  And then we saw the berry farm’s stand.  And the blackberries were the biggest and most beautiful-looking I’ve ever seen.  And then as we were debating how many tomatoes to get, since there are just the two of us and we’re not home all the time, the farmer said, “These tomatoes will last 10 days.  If they don’t, I will replace them two-fold.”  That’s a strong statement.  We bought the extra tomatoes.  And zucchini.

But then we ended up with this giant sack of fruit, and the peaches were really ripe. We had to eat them over the sink, they were so juicy.  So of course we can’t expect them to last the week, and we had this huge flat of cherries, blueberries, and blackberries so we decided on the only natural course of action…

Sangria party.  But we couldn’t do it the same night because, of course, that was the night of my First Ever Professional Comedy Gig.  I got all dressed and made-up and whatnot, and Tom and I headed out to meet up with Dawn for a little pre-show dinner.  I had to duck out of dinner early because I had to work the door, so I headed into the room, where the guy who runs it suggested that I get up on the stage and get used to the light.  The lights are always directly in your eyes, but this venue is a long, narrow banquet room that doubles as a comedy club, so the stage is at one end, and a really bright spotlight is at the other, and it literally feels like an oncoming train.  So I was glad I acclimated myself to it.

But then, I stepped off the stage and headed toward the back of the room, eyes still adjusting to the darkness, when I noticed a couple of people sitting in the back. “Huh, that woman looks a lot like my mom…” and then the man with her lowered the menu from in front of his face.

My parents came down from Pittsburgh to surprise me and see the show!

Understand that this is a big deal- it’s a long-running joke in my family about how the Baxendell men hate to travel.  My dad in particular is just not into the road trip thing.  So it’s A Thing that he drove four hours to hear me do 7 minutes of comedy.

They hung out with us after the show, and then we took them out for brunch the next morning, which was really nice.  It’s nice to hang out with them in my ‘hood.

Once they were on their way home, Tom and I had to clean up the house for the sangria-consumption. So Tom chopped fruit while I tidied up in the front of the house, and then he cleaned up the kitchen and dining room while I worked on the back room and the bathroom, and by the time we were done, the house was solidly Good Friend Clean- the floors could use a good vacuuming and the shelves could be dusted, but things were put away, and the kitchen and bathroom were both very clean, which are the two key things that might skeeve people out if they aren’t.

Holding a dinner party is always a challenge to our priorities.  We have a lot of friends, and we love to have them over, but we’ve got a small place.  Our table seats 8 when extended, but extending it tends to make the place feel even smaller since it blocks the hallway access to the kitchen and bathroom. It’s not a problem when we’re throwing a big cookout like we did for our anniversary, but when it’s too hot to hang out outside and we want to have a sit-down meal, it’s a real issue. 

So as we’re cleaning the place up, we’re going over who we’ve invited, who we might like to invite, etc.  And we got to a point where the conversation went like this:  “Do we want to invite [so-and-so]?” “Well, we’ve already got 8.” “We do?”  “Yep [rattling off names].”  “Huh.  Well, we’ll have to invite so-and-so next time.”  “Yep.”

But I made lasagna (unfortunately mostly not from the farmer’s market, which is a shame because we get the BEST ricotta there), and we had that, and some shrimp some friends brought, and the zucchini, and salad, and of course the sangria… and then dessert. 

Dessert was grilled peaches with mascarpone cheese, berries with chocolate whipped cream, and vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce. 

Every time we cook for friends, I think we’ve had the best dinner ever.  I don’t know if it’s short memory or that we just get better every time.  But in any case, it was a good time, and we’re going to have to remember that sangria for the next party.

headshot

Originally uploaded by tiffany bridge

This is the headshot I’m using for the show at the Hyatt this Saturday. I’m pretty pleased with it, considering that I didn’t know I needed one until a couple of days ago and we took this one with my little point-and-shoot at 10:30 last night.

At some point soon, I’ll actually do my hair and put on makeup and whatnot and we’ll take one with the good camera. But I’m really very pleased with how this turned out.

I got a shiny new toy.

But the number is taking a while to transfer from my POS Kickflip, so it might be hard to get hold of me on the phone for a day or two. 

UPDATE:  The transfer is complete.  My iPhone can now be the only phone.

• Psychology Today: Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature
  demonstrates my point that all of human history is powered and advanced by one thing: access to sex.
  (tags: brain culture psychology science sex sociology women gender evolution society nature)