The glories of American cuisine: Slate disses pie

June 5, 2011 • 10:18 am

I’ve always said that the world’s three best cuisines are these: Chinese, French, and Indian (in no particular order).  I’m told Italian cuisine belongs in this pantheon, but I’m less familiar with it since 1) I’ve been to Italy only once, and there was restricted to the grounds of the Rockefeller Center at Bellagio, and 2) I’m timid about ordering in an Italian restaurant (do you have to have every course? and in which order?).

And while American food is dissed—often by Europeans—we do have our own indigenous and glorious foods.  Were I to list the high spots of American food, it wouldn’t be haute cuisine, but comestibles like those on the following list, which I just scribbled down off the top of my head (readers, please feel free to supplement this in the comments):

  • Fried chicken (what a glorious dish when it’s made right!)
  • Pancakes, especially with maple syrup (another wonderful American product)
  • Barbecue, all styles from North Carolina pulled pork to Kentucky lamb to Memphis and Chicago ribs to Texas brisket
  • Clam chowder (New England style only, please) and fried clams
  • Hamburgers and cheeseburgers (I predict that the green chile cheeseburger, a transcendent sandwich, will become a classic)
  • Hot dogs (yes, I know the Germans have their wursts, but they’re bunless, and only America has the chili dog and—best of all—the Chicago-style dog loaded with condiments and veggies).

  • The southern breakfast: good biscuits with red-eye gravy, country ham (what a wonderful thing is a well-cured country ham!), eggs and grits
  • The Creole and Cajun cooking of Louisiana, including jambalaya, gumbo, boiled crawfish, beignets, and po-boys)
  • The southern meat-and-three lunch, washed down with sweet iced tea and followed by banana pudding
  • American-style pizza, by which I mean Chicago’s deep-dish or stuffed pizza
  • American Jewish deli food: pastrami and corned beef sandwiches, potato latkes, pickles, blintzes

Note, before someone points out that this food is unhealthy, yes, I already know that—if it’s all you eat.  But the stuff above is good!  Oh, and there’s one more item:

  • PIE!

Pies of all sorts are awesome, and—save for the odious rhubarb, often found in combination with strawberry (why do they do that?)—I’ve never met one I didn’t like.  Sadly, Nathan Heller, a columnist at Slate and clearly a man with too much time on his hands, has just taken it upon himself to criticize American-style pies. His “critique” is in a Slate banner article called “Pie: It’s gloppy, it’s soggy, it’s un-American.”  I don’t understand why Heller wrote it, since it just seems like a curmudgeonly attempt to attack something that many people love with good reason.  And despite his rant, Americans will go on scarfing down pies.

Heller’s indictment? Pies are sloppy, unpalatable, and, worst of all, not American.

The pie, because it is a pie, does not so much “slice” as volcanically erupt under the pressure of the knife, oozing its livid fluid everywhere; your own piece, when it comes, is a miniature apocalypse of broken pastry parts and heat-blitzed fruit. You demur, mumbling about having eaten too much cornbread. Someone’s aging, wild-eyed mother stares you down. “It’s pie,” she says. You are handed a fork. You start to peck at a morsel of fruit. Your plate is promptly whisked away again: Because it’s hot outside, you’re told, you’re supposed to enjoy your dessert “a la mode.” The pie is warm; the ice cream melts at once. You contemplate what now looks like a slice of jammy toast that has been soaked in milk for half a day and masticated by a dog. You work your fork into the only structure still intact, the woody, crenulated crust, beating and twisting this bumper of dough against each leverageable surface on your plate, trying to break it up. Your fork loses a prong. Abandoning all hope, you finally drive your broken-fork-with-giant-crust-piece through the mire of sloppy dough and heft the entire, dripping mass into your mouth. “Mmm,” someone says. “Isn’t it so great to have pie?”

Yes, it is great to have pie—much better than having, say, a slice of cake at a picnic. The man is a jackass.  And he helpfully points out, as we already knew, that Europeans have had savory pies for centuries:

The pies of the ancients, rather than being oozing desserts, were combinations of savory foods baked in a pot made of tough dough. . . Our modern pie of piled fruit stewing in a shell of fragile dough is not an innovation but a replica of something primitive—piled meat entombed in hard crust—nudged in the vague direction of dessert.

Who cares if it’s a replica? It’s a good one!  Finally, Heller sees pies as a debasement of their contents:

Today, this myth of historical continuity inspires many people to take pie as a given, though it makes little sense as a 21st-century dessert. In an era of refrigeration, produce shipping, and advanced kitchen tools, there’s little in a pie that would not be better out of a pie. Who but a sadist would take a basket of ripe seasonal fruit and bake it into mush? Who would labor over flaky pastry crust that’s destined to get soaked before it’s ever tasted?

Well, Mr. Heller, what would you have us do with tart cherries or gooseberries, which reach their full glory only in pies or jams?  And yes, a ripe peach is very nice, but a warm peach pie is a luscious transformation.  But Heller seems to have forgotten that some of America’s very best pies don’t include fresh fruit. I’m referring to lemon meringue pie, chess pie (a Southern delight), sour-cream raisin pie (oy vey, could I do with a piece right now!), sweet potato pie, peanut butter pie (don’t knock it if you haven’t tried it), chocolate cream pie, coconut cream pie, shoo-fly pie and, finally, the Queen of All Pies:

Is there any dessert more American—and more tasty—than pecan pie warm from the oven, made with freshly shelled pecans, and chock full of big nuts? (I scorn those versions with only a thin layer of nuts atop a wedge of molasses-flavored gelatin.)

Heller’s piece is simply bad food writing, the attempt of a journalist who wants money and column space to stir up a trivial and unsustainable controversy.  He can stick his piece in his pie-hole.

________

nb: I did not mention pakes

The Arsenic Paper is out, along with eight critiques

June 5, 2011 • 5:43 am

After six months of languishing at Science Online Express, the “Arsenic Paper“, by Felisa Wolf-Simon et al. (full reference below), has finally appeared online. It also appears with eight “technical comments”—criticisms of the methodology and results—a response by the authors, and a note by editor Bruce Alberts (all of these are at the link, though I think there’s a paywall for the original paper).

As you remember, this paper attracted huge attention because of its claim that a bacterium growing in Mono Lake, California was able to incorporate arsenic instead of phosphorus into its DNA and proteins.  This in turn led to all sorts of speculations about whether life could have evolved in places (or on planets) that had different arrays of chemicals, or even more than once on Earth.  There was a press conference and a lot of hoo-haa promulgated by the authors, including a press conference and a TED talk and Glamour Magazine interview with Wolf-Simon.  At the same time, a lot of critics began to weigh in with serious questions about the paper’s results, with some researchers declaring it fatally flawed. Bloggers, scientists, and journalists, such as the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Faye Flam, all noted problems with the paper.  And I don’t recall anybody other than the authors defending it.

Summarizing the brouhaha around the paper, Carl Zimmer wrote a Slate piece titled “This paper should not have been published.”  He was right.

It’s extremely unusual for a paper to be delayed this long, and then to appear simultaneously with its critiques.  Usually the paper is published and then the critiques (with a response by the authors of the original paper) appear in the journal a few months later.  Alberts’s note doesn’t do much to clarify the situation:

The Research Article “A bacterium that can grow by using arsenic instead of phosphorus” by F. Wolfe-Simon et al. [p. 1163, (1)] was the subject of extensive discussion and criticism following its online publication. Science received a wide range of correspondence that raised specific concerns about the Research Article’s methods and interpretations. Eight Technical Comments that represent the main concerns, as well as a Technical Response by Wolfe-Simon et al., are published online with this issue . . .

. . . We hope that publication of this collection will allow readers to better assess the Research Article’s original claims and the criticisms of them. Our procedures for Technical Comments and Responses are such that the original authors are given the last word, and we recognize that some issues remain unresolved. However, the discussion published today is only a step in a much longer process. Wolfe-Simon et al. are making bacterial strain GFAJ-1 available for others (2) to test their hypotheses in the usual way that science progresses.

But what happened is pretty obvious.  After the blow-up around the paper’s release, Science realized that they screwed up.  Their way of making amends was to delay the paper—after all, they couldn’t reject it after it had already been accepted—and publish it simultaneously with the critiques. Having read them, and the authors’ response, you can easily see that the paper wasn’t properly reviewed in the first place.  Too many questions remain about the technique, the statistics, and the results.  Even I, a biologist far removed from biogeochemistry and microbiology, can see that the paper wasn’t thoroughly vetted.

Over at Slate, Zimmer weighed in again on Friday with an analysis of the scientific sociology of this paper.  The big lesson he draws is that we’re entering a new era of science, in which papers can be made or destroyed by post-publication review by blogging scientists:

Redfield [Rosie Redfield, a vociferous critic of the paper] and her colleagues are starting to carry out a new way of doing science, known as post-publication peer review. Rather than leaving the evaluation of new studies to a few anonymous scientists, researchers now debate the merit of papers after they have been published. The collective decision they come to stays open to revision.

Post-publication peer review—and open science in general—is attracting a growing number of followers in the scientific community. But some critics have argued that it’s been more successful in theory than in practice. The #arseniclife affair is one of the first cases in which the scientific community openly vetted a high-profile paper, and influenced how the public at large thought about it.

I think post-publication review is all to the good. Let a thousand voices blossom—even if some of them are misguided. In the end, it’s science, and the truth will out.  In the meantime, immediate online criticism is the only way to counteract the hype and p.r. that often attend the release of hot new papers—hype intensified by clueless journalists with no training in science.

The whole thing reminds me of the Darwinius affair, in which a primate fossil was touted as a missing link between the two major groups of primates.  There was a lot of buzz and an authorial press conference.  Science bloggers raised serious questions and, sure enough, more careful research showed that the vaunted fossil wasn’t a “link” at all.  In this era of tight money and lots of scientists competing for attention, the ability to call immediate online attention to problems with high-profile research can only be a boon.

You should begin to get worried about a paper when its authors (Wolf-Simon here, in a video for Dutch television) characterize their results, before publication, like this: “If my hypothesis proves to be true, it will fundamentally alter our understanding of being alive.”  Even if the arsenic hypothesis did prove to be true—and I suspect it won’t—it will have miniscule effect on our understanding of being alive.  Sheesh!

_____________

Wolf-Simon, F. et al.  2011. A bacterium that can grow by using arsenic instead of phosphorus.  Science 6034:1163-1166.

Our new library

June 5, 2011 • 4:46 am

On May 16, the new Joe and Rika Mansueto Library opened at the University of Chicago, right across the street from my lab.  And about time, too: parking near my building has been scant for the two years of construction.  The library, a Fuller-like glass dome designed by Helmut Jahn, with the stored books extending several floors underground, has been hailed as an architectural marvel.

Most intriguing is how the books are retrieved, described in the video below.  They’re sequestered in big bins, and huge cranes retrieve each book by grabbing its bin and hoisting the whole schmear up to circulation, where the book is plucked out. Presumably the cranes then lower the bin back underground. It does seem like an enormous use of energy to get a single book, but the University simply ran out of onsite space for book storage.  The librarians and University made a decision—a wise one, I think—to keep the books on campus rather than store them at a remote site, which would make them hard to access.

Here’s the dome from the outside:

I visited the place eight days ago.  It was a rainy day and so it was a bit gloomy inside the dome.  The students studying at the tables looked dwarfed and uncomfortable.  It was also a chilly day and quite cold inside. Note to University: get some heat in there!

My own building, a lovely Gothic-style construction, encrusted with spires and gargoyles, can be seen through the window, above the cylindrical fixtures on the right:

Here’s the futuristic circulation and book-retrieval desk:

Finally, a University-made video that shows you how books are retrieved:

It’s a nice-looking minimalist structure, and worth a visit, but I would not study or work in there—it’s too sterile and forbidding.  The older library to which it’s connected (Regenstein) is much more congenial, with cozy nooks and comfy chairs. The Chicago Tribune notes the pluses and minuses:

The design brings a welcome jolt of modernity to a campus that has sometimes seemed afraid to stray from its neo-Gothic roots. Here, architecture and time move forward boldly but respectfully — without the jarring crayon palette of orange, purple, yellow and pink at the adjoining Max Palevsky Residential Commons.

Still, there are faults, including the oversized, billboard-like letters that spell out the library’s name on the concrete beam. Thicker landscaping (perhaps with thorns?) will have to be added so people can’t climb the dome, as some already have done. In addition, a light-filtering ceramic dot pattern on the upper portion of the dome’s glass makes the dome look darker, less transparent and less delicately articulated than Jahn’s renderings suggested. Only at night, when it glows from within, does the library truly become a minimalist bubble.

Melissa

June 4, 2011 • 3:30 pm

I wouldn’t have thought that an acoustic rendition of Melissa could be this good, but the Allman Brothers do a fantastic job.  This is from the last episode of The Dennis Miller Show (1992).

Note that both Gregg and Dickey are wearing cowboy boots.

The story (from SongFacts):

Gregg Allman spoke at length about this song in an interview with the San Luis Obispo (CA)Tribune on November 30, 2006: “I wrote that song in 1967 in a place called the Evergreen Hotel in Pensacola, Florida. By that time I got so sick of playing other people’s material that I just sat down and said, ‘OK, here we go. One, two, three – we’re going to try to write songs.’ And about 200 songs later – much garbage to take out – I wrote this song called ‘Melissa.’ And I had everything but the title. I thought (referring to lyrics): ‘But back home, we always run… to sweet Barbara’ – no. Diane…? We always run… to sweet Bertha.’ No, so I just kind of put it away for a while. So one night I was in the grocery store – it was my turn to go get the tea, the coffee, the sugar and all that other s–t… and there was this Spanish lady there and she had this little toddler with her – this little girl. And I’m sitting there, getting a few things and what have you. And this little girl takes off, running down the aisle. And the lady yells, Oh, Melissa! Melissa, come back, Melissa!’ And I went, ‘Oh – that’s it.’ I forgot about half the stuff I went for, I went back home and, man, it was finished, only I couldn’t really tell if it was worth a damn or not because I’d written so many bad ones. So I didn’t really show it to anybody for about a year. And then I was the last one to get to Jacksonville – I was the last one to join the band that became the Allman Brothers. And my brother sometimes late at night after dinner, he’d say, ‘Man, go get your guitar and play me that song – that song about that girl.’ And I’d play it for him every now and then. After my brother’s accident, we had 3 vinyl sides done of  Peach [“Eat a Peach”], so I thought well we’ll do that, and then on the way down there I wrote “Ain’t Wastin’ Time No More.” I wrote that for my brother. We were all in pretty bad shape. I had just gotten back from Jamaica and I was weighing at about 156, 6-foot-1-and-a-half – I was pretty skinny. So we went back down there, got in the studio and finished the record. And the damn thing shipped gold.”

It was one of the songs that Gregg sang at Duane Allman’s funeral.

Glass houses, etc.: Templeton and global-warming denial

June 4, 2011 • 6:14 am

As the Templeton Foundation tries to claw its way up to respectability, it finds a number of willing pitons, ready to accept its largesse while ignoring the organization’s anti-science agenda.  For example, there are some journalists who have accepted prestigious and lucrative journalism fellowships from the Templeton Foundation, and yet, as journalists, decry the anti-science activities of the very organizations funded by Templeton.

The Heartland Institute, located here in Chicago, is well known for its anti-global warming agenda.  In 2009 they held a notorious “climate-change” conference partly sponsored by Free to Choose, an organization that not only has been funded by Templeton, but was in fact a recipient of a 2009 Templeton Freedom Award, money given to “free market think tanks.”  (The prize was for an educational-video website that distributes, among other right-wing material, climate-denial videos.)  Although the Freedom Awards are administered by the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, they are completely funded by Templeton.  (For information on the Templeton/Atlas connection and more, see the paper by Sunny Bains and these two posts by Salty Current.)

Chris Mooney has condemned the Heartland Conferences as “idiocy,” which they are, but he is either ignorant of, or chooses to ignore, their connection with Templeton.  And just this week Mooney also condemned the American Tradition Institute (ATI) for “seeking scandal amongst the ranks of climate scientists.” And again, this condemnation is justified, for the ATI is simply trying to discredit global warming.  But the ATI is also a partner with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation.

As Salty Current documents, Templeton has given money to other antiscience enterprises:

Building on the success of the Templeton Freedom Awards (Grant #10605), this expanded program seeks to improve research and education on the nature and benefits of freedom and free enterprise. The program will introduce a new competition to launch Free Enterprise Centers and establish a high-profile Templeton Leadership Fellowship program to advance the strategic impact of think tanks.

Salty Current notes that Atlas is affiliated with other sponsors of global-warming denialist activities:

I noted parenthetically in the previous post on the subject that several of the organizations listed as sponsors [of Heartland’s 2009 “global warming” conference] are funded by Atlas, and I’d like to be more specific. Most of these were listed by DSB as having “No funding records from Exxon, Koch, or Scaife,” but they all appear to be in the Atlas international stable:

  • Institute of Public Affairs, Australia
  • Instituto de Libre Impresa, Peru (2007 Templeton Freedom Award grant winner)
  • Instituto Juan de Mariana, Spain (2008 and 2010 Templeton Freedom Award winner)
  • Instituto Liberdade, Brazil (2006 Templeton Freedom Award grant winner)
  • Instituto Bruno Leoni, Italy (2004 Templeton Freedom Award winner)
  • Liberales Institut, Switzerland (2005 Templeton Freedom Award winner)*

Note the nepotistic connection between Templeton and its awardees, something we’ve seen before with Templeton Prize winners.  Those institutes affiliated with Atlas, which itself gets big-time funding from Templeton, also get Templeton Freedom Awards.

The point of all this, of course, is to show that Templeton is anti-science in more than one sense. It not only promotes woo, religion, and “spirituality,” but also, as part of its right-wing, free-enterprise agenda, supports—directly or indirectly—global-warming denialism. Those scientists and science-friendly journalists who take money from Templeton should be aware of this connection.  Let us also note that the World Science Festival, going on right now in New York (and I do approve of the event itself!), is heavily funded by Templeton.

I am wondering how anti-science the Templeton Foundation has to be before scientists become unwilling to take its money.  It’s an object lesson on how scientists and journalists can look the other way when there’s funding to be had.

Caturday felid: the wisdom of the kitteh

June 4, 2011 • 4:54 am

Today we have two videos showing the awesome wisdom of felids.

Reader Janice called my attention to a video of a tool-using cat.  In this case the tool is its owner’s hand:

(There may be a bit of the ouija-board phenomenon going on there.)

And here Ceiling Cat cannot resist a felistic intervention, especially to prevent a discussion of the Euthyphro Dilemma, which questions Him as a source of morality.

Sarah Palin explains Paul Revere

June 3, 2011 • 4:57 pm

I can’t believe that some smart people, including Ann Althouse (I’m using “smart” in the sense of “accomplished academic” here), still think that Sarah Palin is a viable political candidate. In case you’ve missed Palin’s latest string of mind-dump gaffes, check out her explanation of Paul Revere’s famous Midnight Ride:

Transcript:

He who warned, uh, the British that they weren’t going to be taking away our arms uh by ringing those bells and making sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free.

Paul Revere warned the British?  Trying to enforce the yet-to-exist Second Amendment?

Apparently Althouse thinks that Palin is a viable candidate because many Americans feel that she’s “just like them.”  Frankly, I’d rather have someone running the country who is not like me, i.e., not a hothead lacking diplomatic skills.  Running a country is a big, hard job, just like brain surgery. And if I needed a brain surgeon, I’d sure as hell look for one who was smart—not dumb and folksy like Palin.

Get a degree in atheism!

June 3, 2011 • 1:00 pm

According to the Wall Street Journal, you can now get a bachelor’s degree in atheism at California’s Pitzer College.  Well, not really atheism: the major is called “secular studies,” whose driving force is none other than sociology professor Phil Zuckerman, whom we know from his book Society Without God, a study of the pervasive secularism in Sweden and Denmark (I’d recommend it.)  Since the article is 1) in the Wall Street Journal, and 2) is written by Alan Jacobs, a professor at the Christian school Wheaton College, in Illinois (Jacobs appears to be an Anglican), and 3) Jacobs has written quite a bit for the Templeton Big Questions Online site, we can expect some snark in this news report.  And of course Jacobs provides it:

One could respond in several ways to the news that California’s Pitzer College is starting a department of “secular studies” and creating a major in the field. Religious believers may see another sign of encroaching, well, secularism on American campuses. Conversely, just as the rise of religious studies—as opposed to theology—happened when religious belief was in precipitous decline among academics, perhaps the rise of secular studies indicates that secularism is a fading enterprise.

This is just a snide crack at secularism, which of course is on the rise.  “Fading enterprise”? I think not.

This assumes that Pitzer’s program in secular studies will bring a critical, analytical approach to its subject. Mr. Zuckerman—who runs a website called “Phil Zuckerman’s 65 Greatest Songs for Atheists and Agnostics”—might belong to a team and be inclined to cheer for it. But that doesn’t mean he can’t be a fine scholar in his field, just as many Christians are fine scholars of the history of religion.

Some of Mr. Zuckerman’s scholarship acknowledges that secularism is far from dominant or inevitable. In an article in “The Cambridge Companion to Atheism,” he notes that “most nations in Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia contain almost no atheists.” And while some societies are seeing increasing non-belief in God, “atheism overall may be in decline, due to the demographic fact that highly religious nations have the highest 22 birthrates in the world, and highly irreligious nations have the lowest birthrates in the world.”

Condescending and distorting!  Why is there no mention of Zuckerman’s serious research embodied in Society Without God, a very nice book.  Why the mention, instead, of  only “Phil Zuckerman’s 65 Greatest Songs for Atheists and Agnostics”?  To denigrate the man, of course.

Any intellectually serious program in secular studies will avoid triumphalism and deal with the complexity of secularism’s history.

If Jacobs were reviewing a major in theology, would he admonish it to “avoid triumphalism”?

A serious program will also acknowledge that some of the best work on secularism has been done by Christians, foremost among them the Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor.

Thank you, Dr. Jacobs, for your helpful advice on how Pitzer should design this major so that it gives religion the proper credit for atheism.  That advice is like having a fox design the chicken coop.

There are more obliquely snide remarks, but you can read them yourself.  Templeton and The Wall Street Journal: a match made in heaven!

h/t: Diane G.