I feel better about never drinking soda. But I also eat a lot of deli turkey.
I've also wondered if it matters where deli meat comes from. I've heard that nitrites are the problem. But, like, is the deli turkey that some from a local manufacturer which looks like a really big turkey breast as opposed to a perfectly shaped tube less processed enough to be better?
At the Reddit link, a lot of grocery store people are saying deli counter meat comes from the exact same factory as the pre-sliced pre-packaged stuff. But that's a good question about ground turkey - is that also full of nitrites?
All turkey is ground turkey. They don't fly.
4: NOW YOU TELL ME!
4. I did see a wild turkey fly once. It left the ground, but then it almost immediately crashed through a second story window into a classroom. The results were unpleasant.
Stale jokes, version 1:
Waiter, waiter! This coffee tastes like mud!
Well, it was just ground this morning.
Version 2:
This coffee tastes like turkey!
Well, vomit.
those who consumed the most ultraprocessed foods were 11 percent more likely to develop cardiovascular disease and 16 percent more likely to develop coronary heart disease during the study period, compared with those who consumed the least ultraprocessed foods
So that's statistically significant, sure, but it also doesn't sound like your deli turkey is a death sentence on its own? I'm not sure what the number would have to be for me to give up the peanut butter pretzels from Costco.
If not the deli turkey, why are my friends dying?
Nitrites sound like a completely different thing health-wise than "ultra-processed," though presence may be correlated.
Turkey flocks are all over the East Bay hills and one day driving Elke, age ~3, to daycare, she looked out the window and said, "Turkeys! I eat--" [wheels turn] "I don't eat walking turkeys. I eat food turkeys." I forget how long we let that relationship stay mystified.
We did spend a lot of money to buy her all the special hippie no-nitrite hotdogs and deli slices, and she is still alive at thirteen.
I do also would not be surprised if going to the trouble of avoiding "ultra processed" foods--and it does take some effort/consciousness given the current market--is not correlated with any number of other behaviors that could have health effects. I assume they tried to control for some, but would be hard to really tease out.
12: this. Eating lots of ultra-processed foods probably correlates with having a stressful job, no time to exercise, and other lifestyle "choices" or just, like, enjoying peanut butter pretzels and not being a health nut.
3: the turkey isn't naturally full of nitrites, so ground turkey is fine.
I am learning IN REAL TIME that when deli meat says "no nitrites", that means they used celery extract, which is full of nitrites but not classified as such by the FDA, because it is naturally occurring. And that when you eat regular celery (and vegetables in general) you're getting nitrites, but it's offset by the other stuff in the vegetables. So all deli meat has nitrites. And don't be drinking that celery extract.
Peanut butter pretzels just don't sound good to me. But I don't really like pretzels much.
17: Look at the big brain on Moby.
I love pretzels and most salty snacks. Especially after hiking or biking. Today my legs are shot after a short backpacking trip that went straight up for three miles.
The celery-nitrites one is an eye-roller. Plus also, meat is hard to preserve because it rots so well, anything that kills all the hopeful microbes is likely to be hard on us.
I have vexatious inchoate thoughts about food and labor, mostly that none of our attempts to make it easier have actually reduced work, they just move it around and wrap it in many layers of plastic.
Plus, re plastic and other molecules: just assume that anything allowed in consumer goods is going to be in your food. The distance between the habits we have and the habits that would actually keep technostuffs out of our soil/water/compost/food is so large that it would be easier to just quit producing PFAS, etc.
So Slim Jims are supposed to be bad for you now? Sounds like woke propaganda.
At least they didn't say anything about eating peanut butter by the spoon.
15 isn't surprising. I guess we didn't look it up at the time because of wanting to preserve illusions.
Also, NMM to Frederic Jameson, you communist pre-verts.
20.1- maybe irradiation? It causes some small generation of potentially harmful molecules as a byproduct but at least the "kill bacteria but not carnivore" part isn't directly in the final product.
They might forget and leave the cesium in the ham package.
15: but the fancy one just looks like a roast turkey; it has the skin and everything. Same with the fancy rosemary ham.
"And don't be drinking that celery extract."
Key fact: Jack Ruby got access to the Dallas PD headquarters basement that day because he was a regular visitor - as a keen supporter of his local police, he would regularly bring them chicken sandwiches and celery tonic from Phil's Delicatessen on Oak Lawn.
I have vexatious inchoate thoughts about food and labor, mostly that none of our attempts to make it easier have actually reduced work, they just move it around and wrap it in many layers of plastic.
If eating beef and tuna without killing the animal myself is wrong, then I don't want to be right.
A relaxing trip on a boat this past summer was made a lot more fun by trapping crabs, but (a) we had to throw them back so I still have no actual experience with eating any animal I had a part in killing, and (b) owning and maintaining a boat of my own is an expense I'd rather not shoulder.
No wonder Oswald looked like he had a stomach ache in the famous picture.
If eating beef and tuna without killing the animal myself is wrong, then I don't want to be right.
You just cut off a part and walk away?
8: Yeah, it's not a particularly sensible mindset, but as an ex-smoker I find all these "Modestly increased chance to have a relatively rare condition" (admittedly not all that rare in this particular case) hard to care about. When I smoked I assumed there was a 50/50 chance it would kill me very early (it may still do!). An 11% swing from one end of the spectrum to the other feels like nothing, even ignoring confounds.
But processed meats don't even look cool.
I remember the episode of The Beverly Hillbillies where they met hippies and the hippies were in awe of them because the Hillbillies had a way to smoke crawdads.
You couldn't film that script today, because woke.
But you can parlay crawdad-smoking into a vice-presidential bid.
Jethro would have won against Vance.
32: Yes, totally. Every day that I don't smoke, I'm decreasing my risk of death by so much that I drink and eat bacon just to make things fairer for everyone else.
I bought these perverted grapes at Trader Joe's just now -- they look like the fingers of a latex glove if you filled it with water. They don't taste better than regular grapes though.
Do they taste better than latex gloves filled with water?
22.last should immediately improve the lives of anyone in a first-year English graduate seminar.
I literally erased and chose not to post 42, verbatim. That laughter is rightfully mine.
IIRC the original "ultra-processed" definition is so baggy it includes putting salt in the water when you boil potatoes.
46 that's just "processed," it doesn't get "ultra" until you add the vinegar.
I'm so glad for proof that I have worse taste than heebie.
My turkeys fly, and they sleep in the trees! And they taste really good. To be honest they don't fly a whole lot, but they definitely get up in the air if they want to get somewhere in a hurry. I'm not sure if they like to eat celery, but they graze so I expect they would.
Drop them from a helicopter, the traditional test of being able to fly.
I don't really know what "ultra-processed food" is -- I thought it meant, food that had been subjected to several levels of processing and that you couldn't easily make at home using raw agricultural materials, but that would include things like tofu, kimchi, and soup made with dashi powder, all of which I eat on a regular basis and which I think is considered fairly healthy by conventional American standards? Anyway, because I can't make sense of it I've kind of dismissed it as a nonsense category, or a category of pure moral judgment as opposed to objective standards. Maybe I'm wrong and I'll pay for it in the long run, although I'm sure that texting while driving will get me first. (Just kidding, I would never do that.)
I sort of believe in it as meaningful but not well defined. Hot Pockets yes, tofu no, and if you sort things on an "I know it when I see it" basis you come up with something that tells you something useful about health effects.
But maybe it is pure moral judgment.
At a place out on Long Island several years ago and a flock of 40 or so turkeys* would roost in the nearby trees at night. Quite the spectacle at they would fly up to the lower branches in small groups and then make their way up to higher branches in awkward jumps/short flights.
*Including several "smoke phase" turkeys--which have lots of white and/or light gray.
Someone at my kid's college did their senior project on making a pop tart from scratch. It was quite an entertaining project. (She tried to include all the ingredients , not just make areasonable facsimile.)
There's a local bakery that makes their own version of a pop tart. It's very good compared to a real pop tart, but not very good compared to something like a slice of cake.
My kids chased a turkey once at a local zoo (not one of the exhibits) and it flew up into a tree to get away from them. OTOH all the obnoxious ones around here that stand in the road don't seem to ever leave the ground.
I made homemade pop tarts once, using Stella Parks' recipe. It was a fuck of a lot of work, and in the end, I had a pop tart, which was definitely better than a Kellogg's pop tart, but just like Moby says, not as good as a lot of other things that would have been easier to make. Her homemade oreos, however, which are also a lot of work, are delicious and completely worth the effort.
Also, the bakery got dragged over the internet for stealing tips from the workers. But I guess they got better?
I'm not a big baking person, but this reminds me that I bought plums for rsft's plum-cake thing.
A cat got up to the second floor of my building today, near my office. No turkeys or ultra-processed things involved.
There was something climbing on my roof last night and I hope it was cat.
I'm afraid it was a possum, because as soon as I touched the curtain, it went still. I think a cat either wouldn't care I was looking out at it or would move away.
I was going to say the same thing as 50. We have a lot of wild turkeys here, and they fly a lot, and often roost in trees. Keeps them safe from mountain lions -- or, I suppose, catamounts to you people.
OT: I didn't know that Joseph Priestley moved to central Pennsylvania and died there. What a thing to do.
Yeah, that's why eastern PA is now part of the Joseph Priestly District of the UUA.
I was in Meadville. I didn't know that as far as the UUA was concerned, it's a bigger deal that Pittsburgh.
That's where the seminary was before it moved to Chicago.
It's very scenic, except for the town.
||
Takes on the port-strike-that-might-be?
|>
52: I think we discussed the idea of ultra-processed food before and found it was incredibly inconsistent, and essentially boiled down to "these foods are virtuous and therefore unprocessed, and these foods are wicked and therefore processed". To the point that dried meat counted as processed and dried fruit counted as unprocessed...
Yeah, here we are http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2023_05_28.html#018333
That is not to undermine the research here, which seems reliable.
Should I switch to peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. They'll be made with Jif. The natural peanut butter is too much work.
Ugh, I was just stirring a new jar this morning and thinking how frustrating it is that the jar is full when you need to stir it. If it re-separates when it's half-full, it's not nearly so unpleasant.
If I have really good bread, I can eat bread with just butter or cheese. But I'm pretty sure that the bread I like best is really processed.
Oh man, I'm an obnoxious foodie for really beautiful bakery bread. The crap sliced bread that we buy by the truckload is such a sad facsimile.
It's kind of funny that "facsimile" is the word that the makers of the fax machine latched onto. "We unveil the Fairly Accurate Reproduction machine!" when photocopiers had already been around for awhile, and the novelty was mashing it up with a phone line.
Only doctors and spammer fax these days.
A sad facsimile of its former glory.
I was processed before it was cool.
I used to think the greasy stuff in the Spam can was fat, but I have learned it is mostly gelatin with only a bit of fat.
Wirecutter reviewed a PB stirring gadget that is a lid with a stirring rod built in. They claim it really does make dealing with fresh PB manageable. I didn't buy one yet, the trick seems to be that you have to find the size that fits the brand of PB jar you buy and I didn't check if they have one for Costco natural PB jars.
The one they reviewed seems to be sold out.
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/peanut-butter-stirrer-review/
Oh look they do cover most common brands.
https://www.witmerproducts.com/Mixer-Brand-Sizes-List.pdf
I used to think the greasy stuff in the Spam can was fat, but I have learned it is mostly gelatin with only a bit of fat.
Gefilte ham.
81 is very clever. They should sell one that just punctures the actual lid of your peanutbutter, and then you transfer it to the new jar, and usually only accidentally recycle it at most 1-2x per year.
re: 75
We had about a week on a French campsite at the end of August, and you could pre-order fresh bread and croissants every morning, and it was brought in from the bakery in the village about 500 metres away. It did feel like being spoiled as it was so good. Nothing fancy or sourdough or anything, just really perfectly made baguettes, croissants and pains au chocolat.
Czech bread can also be very good. Just ordinary village bakery houska* and rohlik are often excellent.
* the castle (Houska) is also very close to the in-laws and is supposed to be the gateway to hell
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houska_Castle
85: the finest bread I have ever eaten in any country except two was in a very expensive London restaurant where I could not possibly have afforded to eat if I'd been paying the bill myself, and it was only almost as good as every baguette I have ever eaten in France or Vietnam.
I've never been to Vietnam, but yeah, to France. I've also had amazing bread in Turkey, albeit a different style.
76: I think it's because transmitting pictures over radio or wires long predates photocopying!
From Credit Monthly, February 1929:
Dot and dash telegraphy, efficient and fast as it is, is a slow art compared with the future of telegraphy because it must be translated when sent, and again when received. Facsimile telegraphy, on other hand, will send and receive the message in identically the same that it is given to the operator. Actually, however, the facsimile or photoradiogram system makes use of dots and dashes but only as a means weaving a pattern at the receiving end. Facsimile is certain to become one of the most important functions radio can offer to the business man through the facsimile transmission of business documents, signatures, and pictures.
The commercial and legal potentialities of radio facsimile have been proved time after time. Checks drawn on overseas banks have been honored when presented in photoradiogram form a few hours later. The time may be coming when radio traffic will be conducted almost entirely through facsimile.
At least, photocopying using the current vocabulary, under Xerox. There were probably earlier approximations.
There was a grand opening of a French bakery near my office today but since we're in one of the most expensive parts of the city I can't see myself ever going there. $9.50 for a pistachio croissant.
81: I have that doodad! I suspect I got it from the Vermont Country Store.
It works pretty well. In my house it gets more use for sun butter (my kid developed a taste for it when he was in peanut-butter-prohibited preschool).
88: photocopying beats faxing by about a year; the first photographic copying was blueprint, invented 1842 by Sir John Herschel (not the Herschel who discovered Uranus, but his son) - one year before Cash and Bain's patent was granted on the Electric Printing Telegraph, the first fax machine.
We had about a week on a French campsite at the end of August, and you could pre-order fresh bread and croissants every morning, and it was brought in from the bakery in the village about 500 metres away.
This! We stayed one august on the French Atlantic in a campground. Totally full. Calm after 10pm. Enough baguettes and croissant for everyone in the morning. So orderly, civilized. Completely unlike Italy (where I live) at that time of year. French campgrounds for the win.
Plus a somewhat wild beachscape with sanddunes and grasses and big waves and beaches not chock-a-block with rental beach chairs and bars.
$9.50 for a pistachio croissant. >/i>
holy shit that is head-spinning. US prices, wow. Tough for those whose salaries are not keeping up. [before you tell me that's everyone, it's not. Noah Smith just showed data with average salaries outpacing inflation.)
the first photographic copying was blueprint, invented 1842 by Sir John Herschel (not the Herschel who discovered Uranus, but his son)
And the first thing he photocopied was...