Bread & Woeisus

BREAD & WOEISUS

I was upset when the price of bread hit a dollar, so you can imagine how I feel about paying $2 a loaf. Old phrases drift into mind, like gathering clouds—mass calls like “Bread, peace, land” and “Give us bread but give us roses.” When the staff of life bears a stiff price, expect bad stuff to happen.
In our household, we’ve gotten the automatic breadbaker going again. Of course if you’re paying a hefty price for a package of bread mix plus the electricity, store-bought bread might be the better bargain. So we’re on a quest to find a good from-scratch recipe for whole wheat bread.
The “woe is us” part of this blog is on impending onset of a diabetes epidemic, with yours truly doing his best to stave off Type II thereof. Eat whole grains, not refined grains, say the medical experts. But if that’s your goal, read the labels closely. “Wheat” bread is white bread with the whiteness covered up. “Multigrain” bread often has white flour as a major ingredient. And like so many other products, bread has become a way of dumping corn syrup and high-fructose corn syrup for human digestive system disposal, regardless of the health consequences.
So if we can find a reliable recipe for the bread machine (using the oven would waste way too much heat, much as both of us love baking) would solve several problems at once. However, we haven’t solved the recipe problem. Maybe I didn’t measure things out correctly, maybe I did—I’ll try the recipe again. The first batch came out so badly that the breadmaker quit, twice, refusing to go any further. The results made good pancakes, but pancakes make awkward sandwiches.
It’s possible that our local whole wheat bread is so different from the substance usually available that the recipe must be restructured. Here in Addison County, Ben Gleason has mastered the art of growing Vermont wheat, and flour from it is reasonably priced at the Middlebury food co-op. So going localvore is another reason for baking our own bread. We’ll keep at it, after the bread mixes I glommed onto during a discount food store’s going-out-of-business sale gets used up. The first one worked fine.
While we’re on the subject of adult onset diabetes, I want to tell you about one of my investigations-in-progress. Cinnamon, according to several reliable sources, can help in sugar metabolism; but a medical school newsletter expressed skepticism about this as a nutritional because you would have to eat 1-6 grams a day for it to have the effect in question.
It’s entirely possible that I do eat that much, in my usual breakfast of nonfat cottage cheese, milk, artificial sweetener, raisins and dry cereal. I’m accustomed enough to cinnamon to put in a tablespoon of it, not just sprinkle some on top, which I suspect is what the medical newsletter folks think everyone does.
The food co-op didn’t have a scale that would weigh something as light as a gram—but I’m sure there’s one somewhere in Middlebury College’s seven-story science center. I’m about to email some people I met when the college magazine asked me to do an article on undergraduate research there. Stay tuned.

LIVING AT THE HEIGHTS

LIVING AT THE HEIGHTS

One of my boyhood heroes died this winter, and in death, he became a hero for the rest of my life.
The best-known feat of Sir Edmund Hillary, famous for being the first man to stand on top of Mt. Everest, captured my imagination because my younger brother Walter was named for a climber. Walt Bailey had conquered Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, but had died trying to scale one of the peaks of the Andes. And my name was Edward, if not exactly Edmund. So in June of 1953 (the ascent of the world’s highest mountain having come on May 29, 1953, far away in the Himalayas over which my father had navigated his B-24 in World War II), the news of this feat impressed me as Neil Armstrong stepping onto Earth’s moon would impress youngsters more than 40 years later.
As time went on, I gained a greater appreciation of Tenzing Norgay, the Sherpa guide who had helped Sir Edmund and who became the second man to reach the top, though probably he could have outsprinted the Englishman. (To Hillary’s credit, he was the one who made the trail though the treacherous Khumbu Icefall, and figured out how to get past the final obstacle to the summit, a 40-foot rock face, by squeezing into a crack between the wall and the ice buildup.) Like the barrel-chested inhabitants of the Andes foothills I had learned about in graded school, these Sherpas had a special strength, and probably could have gone up Everest long before, if they hadn’t been doing other things.
Little did I know that Buddhism was among those strengths, and that some day I would become a Buddhist. Why do we choose the heroes we do? Why, in first grade, did I attach to a young New York Giants player named Willie Mays, among all the players whose names and faces were on the bubble gum cards I bought with my carefully saved allowance money?
There was a lot I didn’t know about Hillary, which I have now gleaned from obituaries and research:
--As for the “Sir” part, he wasn’t some English aristocrat hiring the locals as if on safari, as I had assumed. He was Ed Hillary, New Zealand beekeeper and talented amateur climber (beekeeping was seasonal, so he could make ascents in the winter).
The 9th British expedition to Everest—over 400 people, including 362 porters and 20 Sherpa guides--were surprised to learn, when they returned to Kathmandu, that young Queen Elizabeth II had knighted Sir Edmund and expedition leader John Hunt, and had awarded a top medal to Norgay.
The Kiwis and the Australians had their own, independent-minded way of doing things, as the British officers found during World Wars I & II. The Brits were appalled at the lack of discipline in the Anzac ranks—but were impressed when the fighting started. Hillary’s first words coming down from the summit, to lifelong friend and fellow climber George Lowe, who was coming up to meet him and Norgay with hot soup, were characteristic: “Well, George, we knocked the bastard off.”
--Everest wasn’t the end. Hillary climbed 10 other Himalayan peaks, plus some serious mountains in New Zealand. He reached the South Pole as part of the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, for which he led the New Zealand section, in January of 1958 (his party was the first to reach the Pole overland since Amundsen in 1911 and Scott in 1912, and the first ever to do so with motorized vehicles). In 1977, he led a jetboat expedition from the mouth of the Ganges River to its Himalayan source. And in 1985, he went in a twin-engined ski plane to the North Pole, thus becoming the first person to surmount the world’s highest peak and reach both its poles. (His companion on that trip: Neil Armstrong.)
--The Sherpas who helped so many outsiders with the Himalayas needed help themselves, and Hillary became one of their helpers. Much of his work after Everest was spent founding and leading the Himalayan Trust, which built schools and hospitals in remote regions. America’s Himalayan Foundation made him their Honorary President. In the late 1980s, he spent four and a half years as New Zealand’s High Commissioner to India, a post which combined that role with being High Commissioner to Bangladesh and Ambassador to Nepal. On the 50th anniversary of the first ascent of Everest, he became the first foreign national ever to receive honorary Nepalese citizenship.
At a time when scandals and corruption have tarnished the image of professional athletes in this country, it’s worth remembering that on a global scale, citizen-athletes like Edmund Hillary will probably, as the years turn into centuries, count for more. It is possible that he was not the first to stand atop
Everest. A case can be made that George Leigh Mallory, more famous these days for having replied “Because it’s there” to an American questioner who in 1923 wanted to know why he wanted to go up Everest, got there before disappearing in the swirling mists (his body was found at 8,100 meters in 1991; Everest is 8,848 meters or 29,035 feet high, but there is a fast route down that he may have taken—long story, few certainties). But Hillary stands at the heights in so many other ways that his place is secure.
At the edge of a cliff in the Himalayas, facing Everest, the people who regard Sagarmartha/Chomolungma (Nepal/Tibet) as sacred have put up a row of stone stupas in memory of the many who have lost their lives trying to climb that highest mountain, Sherpas and foreigners alike. The melancholy row of person-size stone towers seems to be watching for eternity what they could not quite attain.
But Hillary lived to see his son Peter reach the top of Everest in 1990. And in 2003, as part of the 50th anniversary celebration of Edmund Hillary’s feat, Peter Hillary once again ascended Everest—together with Jamling Tenzing Norgay, the son of Edmund Hillary’s Sherpa teammate.

BIG BLUE COLLAR

BIG BLUE COLLAR

Manufacturing has taken hard hits in Vermont, and those concerned about the loss of well-paying jobs don’t expect the situation to be turned around by large companies locating major plants here. Encouraging homegrown enterprises is now the primary strategy.
I would like to do my small part in this effort by suggesting such a business, one I think would be well-suited to Vermont traditions. Perhaps some of those former IBM employees singing the Big Blues could get together to engineer the first working-class computer.
Statistics on home computers suggest that non-computer-users are becoming a smaller and smaller minority. But still there are millions who remain intimidated by the digital world--unnecessarily, in my opinion. Restructuring desktop computers to be more working-class-friendly would resolve some of these issues, and bring needed dollars to the Green Mountain State at the same time.
So--what would such a device look like?
To start with, don’t keep miniaturizing and flattening and making computers seem otherworldly. Let them look like TV’s, big and ample TV’s that a family would be proud to own. You could even rename the computer “the intellivision,” and avoid all the bad feelings conjured up by a name reminiscent of difficult days with third grade math teachers.
Next, demystify all this stuff about input and output ports. “Serial” sounds like a killer. “Parallel” could make someone think they should be seeing double. “USB” looks too much like some stock that tanked in the company 401K and postponed everyone’s retirement by five years. “Firewire”--heavens, who thought that one up? Even a kid would know that sounds unsafe.
Instead, put all these beasties in things like look like cigarette lighters and call them highlighters or something. Working people know how to live in their vehicles, and know that once the lighter is out, all sorts of things can be plugged in to inflate tires, take better nighttime pictures of wildlife, and so on. Heck, put in a real cigarette lighter as well.
Which brings us to the problem of that little tray that makes a weird noise and sucks in flat discs that at first don’t seem to do anything then go off like two-dimensional fireworks. The way to make all this seem natural and comfortable is actually pretty obvious: call it the cupholder. Put in a real cupholder, and explain in the manual that there’s one cupholder for you, and one for the computer, and both of you like snacks, and the computer particularly likes these flat cracker-y things, and the way the screen changes shows it’s happy. Which is true enough.
A modem--that sounds like something from a fashion magazine. Just shape it like a tin can with a string coming out the back and everyone will get the idea--as well as not being surprised when the blamed thing doesn’t do what you expected.
The hard drive--good name. Don’t change that one. In fact, you could explain that a more powerful hard drive is just harder, like hard cider is harder than cider. Software, on the other hand, sounds too much like the stuff men don’t know women wear under the things they think they do. “Instruction manuals” should do it for the programs.
But the worst problem may be getting real-life, down-to-earth, no-nonsense people to trust an operating system. That sounds too much like something a crooked poker player or sports bar betting pool might use. Or some sneaky billing practice used by one of those specialist professionals who are always charging working people three-figure sums for go-figure jobs.
Just call it the wife. You wonder where you put something in these heaps of data stuff? The wife knows, ask the wife. Need to get from one place to another? The wife already asked for directions. Something has to be put in order, so it looks good? The wife knows how to do such things. Be on good terms with the wife and everything else will be much, much easier.
So there you have it, tech mavens. May you make a million dollars, and employ a thousand people, and finally bring plain common sense to a world that has as many real mirages as virtual miracles.

VERMONT STATE TOMATO

VERMONT STATE TOMATO

Yesterday, January 8, 2007, I ate our last tomatoes—that is, the last tomatoes we had grown ourselves. Brought in as teenie greenies back when the hard frosts arrived, in November, they had gradually matured and turned red. I wouldn’t call them flavor champions, but they were tasty, and best of all they were mercifully free from all the stuff in which the “perfect” supermarket tomatoes were probably soaked to ward off Southern weeds and bugs.
They were Romas.
For the first time, but not the last, we had experimented with growing our tomatoes in five-gallon buckets rather than putting them out in the clay area where the slugs celebrate various summer fairs and festivals, many of which concern vegetables. First-timers that we were, we didn’t have enough good soil to fill the buckets to the brim, and weren’t sure which varieties to plant.
To cut to the finale, Brandywine (promise of big red ones, but with too long a growing season for us) literally flopped. Sweet 100 just about paid back all our costs with its clusters of mini-tomatoes, which came in first. But our beloved Romas once again proved the best producers.
There are some types of tomatoes bred for container gardening (apparently there’s a Windowbox Roma), but try to find flats of them at the local garden store. Someone who would like to make some money, perhaps as a school class fund-raiser, should advertise that for a fee they will start your seeds under lights and in their greenhouse—with you sending the seeds.
But much as I like to experiment, the vigorous and bountiful Roma would be my choice for a Vermont Tomato. The plants are “determinate,” which means you don’t really have to prune them, because they lack the desire to conquer the world shown by many varieties. The clusters of medium-size fruits will supply either sauce- and salsa-makers or salad enthusiasts. The chunky little ovals are not as frustrating to can as the more watery round varieties, and they dry better. They are less apt to bruise if you grow too many (very easy) and want to give some away. They last and last once brought indoors--I’ve even used one as the star on a Christmas tree.
And if you let them go long enough for them to start showing signs of illness, usually you can cut off that end (the meatier interior has more compartmentalization that with round tomatoes) and immediately gulp down the rest, because they’re at maximum sweetness just before they decide to try a mid-life career change as compost.
Vermont’s climate may actually make it easier to domesticate Romas. Here’s a North Carolina contributor to a nice gardening site called Dave’s Garden (the following is at http://davesgarden.com/guides/pf/go/30674):
“On Mar 25, 2003, Piedmont_NC wrote:
‘VERY productive, with over 100 tomatoes per plant. Excellent for canning, sauces, and salsa. Plum shaped, but about 1.5 times larger than a plum.

Although this is a bush variety, I would recommend at least a 4 foot tall cage. My 3 foot cages got pulled out of the ground by this vigorous plant!

Another great point: very disease resistant.

If I were to choose one variety for an inexperienced gardener, this would be it. Easy to grow, and LOTS of tasty tomatoes!’”
If you’re serious about extending the tomato-eating season, look in catalogs for winter-keeper varieties like Criterion. Make sure to wash what you bring into the house in the fall, both red and green, and dip each tomato in a weak Chlorox-and-water mixture to kill off your fungal competitors (about one sodium hydroxide to ten hydrogen dioxide, if I remember rightly—I think I’ll call the Master Gardener hotline on that one). Some sources say to wrap them in newspaper, but then how do you know which ones are ready or going bad? Do put a pad of something underneath, like a few Rutland Heralds, so any that ooze don’t contaminate a bunch of others. Store them in something with enough of a lid to keep them from drying out, and don’t forget to check them.
I’m an unrepentant former back-to-the-lander, so I’m delighted to see a critical mass of concern developing over importing so much of our food. I hope to see the day when people talk about the different breeds of winter squash, and which ones the kids like best as dried “candy” (cut into thin strips, put near the stove, throw those oily potato chips in the fire for additional drying heat). I want to see the local “chicken tractor” garden get as much attention as the latest celebrity scandal (divide the land half and half, raise chickens on one half and garden on the other, switch halves each year). I’d like to see Red Landon recognized for all the work he’s done on how to grow mushrooms (anyone remember the Thursday Extra I did on his homestead in Shrewsbury?). I long for the day when neighbors see someone digging in the snow out back of their house in December and say “I’ll bet they still have brussels sprouts.” I want to see the LEEDS point system for honoring the best “green” construction include extra points for walling off a root cellar on the other side of the basement from the furnace. The pilot of a small plant cruising over a town ought to see flash after flash from the window glass of living room solariums.
Though we don’t have the land for a very big garden, and are shaded by neighboring trees, you can bet we’ll be growing tomatoes in buckets again. And you can bet the majority will be Lycopersicum lycopersicon, cultivar “Roma.”