Now Hear (But Don't Eat) This

LIST OF THE MONTH: NOW HEAR (BUT DON’T EAT) THIS

On February 12, Onion Crock of Michigan recalled Old Fashion Potato Soup and Minestrone Soup due to undeclared wheat and soy allergens.
On February 14, Summit Import Corp. recalled Oriental Mascot Sweetened Sliced Coconut because of undeclared sulfites.
On February 15, Nutri-Foods recalled unhulled organic sesame seeds in half pound containers because of a “possible health risk.”
On February 18, Pierre’s Ice Cream issued an allergy alert on Homestyle Brand Dutch Chocolate for undeclared peanut butter candies.
On February 22, Lion Pavilion issued an alert on undeclared sulfites in Grassplot Dried Pachyrhizus.
On February 26, Summit Import Corp. issued an alert that fish in its packages of Sum Cheong Lung dried fish hadn’t had their intestines removed, creating a danger of botulism.
On February 28, Walker Food Products Co. recalled its Four Bean Salad because of “possible health risk.”
On February 29, Palo Alto Labs recalled its Aspire 36 and Aspire Lite dietary supplements because of contamination by a male erectile dysfunction drug,
On March 3, Gorton’s Seafood recalled Crispy Battered Fish Fillets (package of six) due to “possible adulteration.”
On March 4, Quaker Oats Co. recalled a “limited number” of Aunt Jemima Pancake and Waffle Mix products because of possible salmonella contamination.
On March 5, New BCN Trading, Inc. issued an allergy alert on undeclared sulfites in Asian Boy Sweet Ginger.
On March 8, the Texas Dept. of State Health Services closed Aransas, Corpus Christi and Copano Bays to shellfish harvesting due to a toxic algae bloom, and warned that “cooking does not destroy the toxin.”
On March 10, Hartz Mountain Corp. recalled Vitamin Care for Cats because of a “possible health risk.”
On March 14, Slade Gordon and Co. recalled Icybay Cooked Langostinos because of a “possible health risk.”
On March 16, Publix issued a recall for assorted flavors of Empanadas due to undeclared milk.
On March 19, the Food for Life Baking Co. recalled 2,241 cases of Spelt Bread because it contained spelt, a known hybrid of wheat.
On March 20, Williams Food, Inc. issued an allergy alert on undeclared milk in Bass Pro Shops Uncle Buck’s Light ‘N Krispy Fish Batter Mixes.
On March 22, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an import allergy regarding entry of cantaloupes from Agropecuaria Montelibano, a Honduran grower and packer, because they appeared to be associated with an outbreak of Salmonella Litchfield.

There were headlines in Vermont about that last one, but anyone who subscribed to the FDA’s email alert list (free) could see that a whole lot goes on behind the scenes that we never hear much about. Personally, from looking at a couple of months of these electronic missives, I’ve tentatively concluded the following:
--Our food is more likely to go kahooey than our pharmaceuticals. There were a few recalls of heparin products during the same time as the above food alerts—it’s a drug that helps keep blood flowing in intravenous hookups—but nothing much.
--Food is more likely to have problems because the food system is so complex. I’d never heard of pachyrhizus (“Pachyrha: a small genus of five or six species of tropical and subtropical plants growing from large, often edible taproots”) or empanadas (“These Latin American pastries, filled with seafood, meat, cheese, vegetables or fruit are wildly popular”) before they appeared in the emails. The FDA folks not only have to know what these comestibles are, they have to know how and where such goods are imported.
--American cuisine is being enriched by immigration, especially from Latin and South America.
--At the same time, it’s perfectly logical and appropriate that there be a localvore counterreaction. The words “possible health risk” make me think “this is worse than it’s been made out to be.”
--The human body, also very complex, is subject to a great diversity of ailments, including some caused by the intestinal immigration of inappropriate foods. Appearances truly deceive: the person to whom you are speaking, while seemingly quite “normal,” may be coping with any number of biochemical aberrations. At least the FDA recognizes that adjustments must be made for these people, too, to have good lives. I’ll say it here and I’ll say it again elsewhere: God have mercy on the chemical cripple, because nobody else will. I remember in my college biochem course, the Nobel prizewinneing professor said that each of us is carrying about eight lethal genes, which helps to account for the high level—perhaps as high as 50 percent, including first-month events—of miscarriages. As I said to my first wife, “I hope the bullets don’t fit the gun.” That was before our miscarriage. I would guess we have another thousand years of debating the nature of personhood before all this gets fully integrated into our lives.
--It just isn’t true that all, or even most, federal employees are “bureaucrats” who sit at desks soaking up tax money to no purpose. If the FDA has problems with politics at the uppermost levels, I don’t think those are coming down to the investigators, who ought to be counted among our best counterterrorism operatives.

Sudoku Sources

VIRTUOUS VIRTUAL: SUDOKU SOURCES

Finally I decided to try completing one of those little nine-by-nine-spaces number squares where every row, column, and three-by-three square must at the end have one of every number from one through nine. In a word, Sudoku.
Others would say, in word, addiction. Already I have been cautioned by my wife not to get lost in this pastime. I tell her it’s a medical insurance policy: if someone ever runs into my 1994 Geo Metro, whose only airbags are under my ribcage, I’m going to do a lot of down time in some hospital, and not caring much for TV I’m going to get terminally bored without something to exercise my brain.
Sudoku does that. It’s been recommended as one of those mental calisthenics that older people should do to keep their neurons nimble and their synapses synoptic. There are some elementary techniques that anyone could independently reinvent, but there are others that, on first presentation by some tutor, can make you feel like you’re back in Algebra II.
Which brings me to the point of this blog: pointing out some of the better sources for those who want to fill in that thing the Herald runs every day on one of the back pages (which at times is ridiculously easy and at other times is seriously challenging).
The Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that some academic scholars think is an asylum run by its inmates, does pretty well at introducing Sudoku. Among the other things you’ll learn is that a Japanese outfit called Nikoli introduced it.
Guess what: www.nikoli.com is still around. At that site, you can find samples of Sudoku which take various levels of skill to solve. Also, if you REALLY want to waste time, they also have stuff on Slitherlink, Nurikabe, Heyawake, Akari, Hitori, Masyu, Shikaku, and Kakuro. Also, assuming you have Adobe Flash Player, you can enjoy animated jigsaw puzzles and a game in which you need to paint a given map with four colors in a way that keeps each color separate. This being an Olympic Games year, it would be well for us to remind ourselves that our nation, wonderful as it is, has no monopoly on ingenuity.
Back to Sudoku. Serious players know that certain newspapers carry really, really tough puzzles, with the Daily Telegraph over in London being something of a rallying point. There is a website that carries both the Back Page and Announcements Page Sudoku from the Daily Telegraph (the guy who devises them runs the website), the Announcements Page generally having the gnarliest, especially toward the end of the week. There’s an archive, too, at least for much of the past year. That’s at www.sudoku.org.uk.
Most Sudoku sites have links to other sites, so once you get started you may not even need Google to find as much as you need. Were it not for that cross-linkage, I’d put more site reviews in here.
If the tutorials at the Wikipedia seem to complicated, there’s a quick but clear summary of all but the most arcane strategies at www.brainbashers.com. That and other Internet Sudoku lessons come with graphic illustrations, thanks to this new technology of ours. Brainbashers also has a multiyear archive of Sudokus, arranged in six categories: Very Easy, Easy, Medium, Hard, Very Hard, and Super Hard. If you’re thinking this might be a good parent-child activity, the Very Easy collection could be a blessing. This is an activity where success at the start can be inspiring, and being hit at the start with a Diabolical from the Daily Telegraph (that’s the actual term) could be so daunting as to produce a mental block.
One more thing about the Brainbashers tutorials: if you play online, you can pick a game at random (but at your chosen level) and get help if you’re stuck from “the assistant.” Ask it to apply on one of the solving techniques and it will demonstrate its usefulness—or if that doesn’t do the trick, choose some other strategem.
While we’re on the subject of learning and how-to, here’s something from yours truly that he has heard from more experienced players as well: there is no substitute for doing a bunch of Sudoku. After a while you get used to the grid, and better at spotting particular numbers, to the point where you can see at a glance the first spaces waiting to be filled. In time, various patterns become familiar. Farther along, you get a sense of where best to allocate your attention (if the great World War II general George S. Patton was right about reincarnation, he’s probably a Sudoku player now).
Also, with time, you learn your own characteristic mistakes, and learn to crosscheck yourself with extra vigor to keep them from recurring. This is the sort of thing people with specific learning disabilities like dyslexia learn to do to compensate, SLD having nothing to do with mental retardation. (Come to think of it, Patton was severely dyslexic, and had to memorize his way through West Point with the help of a tutor his wealthy family provided. His spatial sense, though, was right off the charts.)
Finding your own erroneous tendencies is crucial. If you keep failing to complete the puzzles, try to look back and see why, or copy the numbers into another grid and redo it. Recognizing your own weaknesses and learning how to cope with them isn’t just important in Sudoku. But if you can do that in miniature in a numbers game, it may give you insights into other obstacles to other endeavors.
One more site: once you’re hitting on all cylinders with Sudoku, you may want the wit-sharpening and adrenaline rush that comes with competition. Before going to some major city that has a Sudoku tournament, try www.sudokufun.com, where there’s always a timed puzzle, and where you can check how you did compared with other players (I see that SW, judy serve, pixw1, neja, Funkman, Synthest, 77523, moc, Mat2, hockeyman76ns and C Frank are logged in right now).
No, I’m not going to join them, Doing the March 26 Herald Sudoku was exercise enough. Besides, I want to go see how my wife is doing with her beading.

Nadir

NADIR

Thoughtless, selfserving, presumptuous, wasteful, oblivious, divisive, counterproductive, disdainful, arrogant, wearisome, simplistic, spoiled, querulous, wrongheaded, unpatriotic, pointless, irrelevant.

Nader.