California, 2012, 3

In which we go to Yosemite by way of a barren waste, bloodcurdling cliffs, mining camps and NPS death notices

The punctuality of one's departure on an auto trip is inversely proportional to the cubic capacity of the auto. Although we began with the best of intentions, one thing and another led to a last-minute packing that mostly resembled a stuffing. The first of the one things was breakfast at Sconehenge which despite its Hebridean name serves up a wicked good Mex breakfast...also decadent scones, if huevos revueltos with scones appeals.

It was also a Cal home game day, so grabbing good parking became a priority.

As we rode out of Dodge, I beheld a Cal student of the female persuasion heading off to what I suppose was a game day party. She was heading away from the stadium, at any rate, wearing the local Cal bearskin cap, a halter, and a nether garment that was somewhere north of shorts and south of belt. I kept my silence: nice neighbourhood.

By now, I've grown blase about California freeways, but it was a relief to see that in order to go south and west on the 205, it was first necessary to go north and east. It make me feel that Massachusetts highway engineering isn't totally unique. That was about that. The upper Valley's economic devastation has done nothing to improve one of America's dullest landscapes (except all of Oklahoma).

Some two hours later it became clear that plans were afoot for a late lunch. Ever since my spouse's solo trip out here in January I'd heard "In n Out...In n Out...." The context convinced me this was not sexually oriented. Now the term rose again, and shortly I found out what this was all about.

Manteca is, lord help it, a featureless suburb of recession-blasted Stockton. It's chief interest for us is that it's the place we leave the freeways and head east on CA 120. It also has an In-n-Out by the exit.

In a state where something 40 years old can be considered an historic site, In-n-Out is a museum piece: a fast food, quondam drive-in, chain, in existence for over 60 years. Kindly leave your food preferences at the door. You're going to get a hamburger. With vegetables if you ask. And french fries (a vegetable). And catsup (ditto). Lay back, enjoy it, and be sure your cardiologist is on speed dial.

Eastbound on 120 is all agribusiness, nearly all the time, with the occasional local farm stand. We stopped at one to complete the fruit and veg provisioning, filling up the last cubic inches in the car. The Sierras were still a dark smudge in the haze.

Linux subsidio est.

A bit buggy

PBS news is busy hyping a story about the latest in upscale culinary fashion trends: eating grubs and insects. The News Hour is the chief source of broadcast news in this house. I hope they appreciate the fact that they have an audience in which the critical faculty is turned on.

There's an angle here that PBS hasn't explored. What we hear is "isn't it about time we joined the rest of the world?" However, the rest of the world eats grubs and bugs because people have to. Here, this addition to the food pyramid is chiefly a novelty cuisine for the one percent. At least, it's presented as such. Beyond whatever taste the little critters may have (not much, apparently), there is an odour of hypocrisy here. We don't have any coverage or reflection on the possibility that there are also Americans who eat insects out of necessity. Also, this is all about eating bugs on purpose, and doesn't consider the wee beasties that may be a part of our daily diet by accident.

Let's also consider that certain seafood--crab, lobster and shrimp--are pretty closely related to certain insects. I don't like them, either.

Meaty WABAC

One of the lesser media amusements of the last fortnight has been the exposure of pink slime and its associated evils.

This is one of those items that recurs about once a generation, when certain people discover they've been eating garbage. My mother could remember when one didn't admit to eating beans and hot dogs on Saturday night. It wasn't the beans so much as it was the hot dogs, which were generally known to be made from scraps, floor scrapings and sawdust. Spin the wheel of time ahead to the time when us people of a certain age were in college. Then, the dining halls specialised in Mystery Meat. That was a meatlike substance that was constituted into various exotic dishes, such as pasta with "meatballs"* and the ever-popular "Swiss steak." One feels certain that Mystery Meat was an earlier manifestation of pink slime.

One of the generational changes I found had to assimilate when the offspring went to college was that college dining had become a serious culinary experience. My daughter's ultimate choice did itself proud, but I was utterly blown away by student dining at Gettysburg College and Bowdoin, then engaged in a bloody contest for the nation's top college dining accolades. It seems reasonable to suppose none of them served pink slime in any form.

Lest anyone wonder why the last two generations didn't all die of food poisoning, there was a radically different standard. It appeared in local stores and butcher shops. If someone ordered ground beef, they could specify the cut and stand there while the butcher ground it to order. We were still out of luck with hot dogs, though. My mother's antidote to frankfurter toxicity was to remind us how hard they had it when she was a child. Guilt kills all known biological toxins.


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*"They taste the same...if you close your eyes." (Rent)

The unbearable lightness of feeding

Believe it or not, once upon a time we had no nutrition labels. We had no sell-by dates either. We may not have been (collectively) as obese, but we did have a mortality rate to match. But I digress.

Lately, I've been noticing calorie creep in the reduced-fat category. I've noticed it chiefly in potato chips and prepared salad dressings. In our house, potato chips aren't a snack, but an ingredient in a supreme comfort food, my mother's tuna casserole. Over the years I've successfully trimmed a lot of calories and excess salt from this recipe, by using fat-free Greek yogurt in place of white sauce, using low-sodium soup for the soup part of the dish, and by using reduced calorie potato chips in the crust. (Don't go reminding me that I could do this dish with pasta. Of course I could, but the chips add the comfort.) As a result, I've been watching the per-serving fat content of "reduced calorie" chips creep up to 7 g a serving.

Now, Pilgrims, not so many years ago an ordinary bag of potato chips had 7g of fat per serving. Doing a little comparison shopping, I saw that the best you can do in that line today is 9 g per serving. Some products are in double digits. The reduced-fat category is relative, not absolute. note too that when reduced-fat chips shaved 2 g of fat off 7 g , the fat content dropped about 28 percent. Shaving the same 2g of fat off 9 g, fat content drops about 22 percent. Clearly, there's a vanishing point somewhere in the future when the act isn't worth the trouble.

Much the same holds with reduced-fat salad dressings, which are a boon to those of us who have to swallow statins every day. Within the past couple of years, these products have undergone a similar, or greater, calorie creep. Worse, the variety of products seems to be shrinking, which is a blow to my salad-making at this season.

No wonder we're all getting fat.

Now that my curiosity is aroused, I'm going to take some names, or rather numbers, and track this trend. Results as they happen.