Ed’s corner of the web

At long last, all of our Vietnam photos are uploaded here.  It was a great trip, and we had an especially great time exploring all of the culinary variety of the country.  The Vietnamese are serious about food, and it was an adventure finding all the favorite local spots to eat.  We had great success using online blogs and personal travel pages to target our searches, and we found this strategy to be much more fruitful than using guidebooks, which usually cater to slightly different palates.  The “find the sketchiest-looking place that’s full of Vietnamese people” strategy also worked exceedingly well.  Other highlights included whizzing around on motorbikes in the countryside around Hue, getting lost in the frenetic markets, and experiencing the near-worship of Uncle Ho.

Throughout the trip, I found myself having a hard time capturing the country in pictures.  For one thing, large parts of the country aren’t objectively pretty – lots of urban landscapes, traffic, crowds, pollution.  But I felt it went beyond that; I was taking pictures of some of these not-so-pretty things because they appealed to me on some level.  The photographic result failed to capture that appeal; places seemed bland and lifeless when they were anything but.  Only looking back over the photos after the fact did I realize what the problem was.  You use all your senses to experience Vietnam.  You smell it, you feel it, you hear it, you taste it.  My photos failed because they only had one sense to exploit when all five were necessary.  You have to smell the fish market of Hoi An to really experience it.  You have to feel the quiet misty air and cool water of Ha Long Bay, hear the cacophony of motorbike traffic whizzing around you in Saigon.  And by god you have to taste the tamarind crab – not to be missed.  Perhaps truly great photographers are able to somehow capture more that what the eye sees.  I’m not there yet.  But I’ll keep on trying.  In the meantime, enjoy these pale, washed-out reflections of a vivid, vibrant country.

Obligatory shot with the Lunch Lady of Saigon. This is a badge of honor for Vietnamese foodies.

Carisa brought to my attention a recent paper in the journal Environmental Health that details an inquiry into the mercury content of high fructose corn syrup, a ubiquitous food additive (fervently disliked by this blogger).  As the story goes, an Environmental Health Officer (EHO) at the FDA was trying to track down some missing mercury in the chlor-alkali industry starting in 2003.  During this process, the EHO learned that two products created by the chlor-alkali industry, sodium hydroxide and hydrochloric acid, could contain small amounts of mercury depending on the processes used in their manufacture.  The EHO then went on to discover that these two products were used mainly in the production of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS).  It wasn’t a huge leap of insight from there to surmise that mercury might, as a result, end up in HFCS and thus the country’s food supply.  Sure enough, government labs, followed subsequently by an independent lab, found mercury in HFCS samples.  The paper mentions that out of twenty samples from three production facilities tested by the independent lab, nine contained detectable amounts of mercury.  Of course, being smart people, your next question is how much?  The dose makes the poison, after all.  Well the range was 0.012 to 0.570 micrograms mecury per gram of HFCS, with an average of 0.252 micrograms Hg/gram HFCS.

Still need more info?  That’s the spirit.  The average American consumes about 50 grams of HFCS per day.  Revolting, isn’t it?  Taking the worst case scenario of 0.570 micrograms Hg/gram HFCS, that means 28.5 micrograms Hg per day just from HFCS.  The FDA lists 0.1 micrograms Hg/kilogram as a “no effect” amount of intake (note that this is a very controversial number, with different values almost everywhere you look).  So for a 70 kg person (high unlikely if you’re really consuming 50 grams of HFCS per day), that means you can safely shoot for 7 micrograms of mercury a day, or about a quarter of what you just consumed in all that HFCS.  Oops.  Just for reference, that six-ounce can of albacore tuna you just ate?  The stuff that you’re not supposed to have too often?  That’s roughly twice the amount of mercury from your HFCS.

Is there room for tighter standards and regulation here?  I think so.  For sodium hydroxide intended for food use, there is an international cap of 1 microgram mercury per gram of sodium hydroxide.  Unfortunately there is no such limit for hydrochloric acid.  At the other end of the food production chain, the FDA checks a lot of the food we eat for mercury, but unfortunately carbonated sodas – a huge source of HFCS – aren’t included on the list.

Now avoiding tuna and other yummy, high-mercury fish is difficult, especially since fish is generally good for you.  But luckily, avoiding this newly-recognized source of dietary mercury is not particularly challenging, at least from the culinary or health standpoints.  Avoiding HFCS means avoiding sugary sodas, over-sweetened breakfast cereals, and a lot of the highly processed, crappy excuses for food you find out there.  You’re not missing out on anything by cutting HFCS from your diet, and you’re probably doing yourself a great deal of good.  As if you needed another reason.

People have often asked Carisa and me why in the world we chose to go to Jordan for our recent vacation.  I usually answer politely, but internally I’m often thinking, “Why the hell shouldn’t we have gone?”  It’s a stable secular state with clean, safe cities; interesting Roman ruins; resorts on the Dead Sea; mind-blowing desert landscape; very tasty food; diving in the Red Sea; all the wonder and beauty of Petra; and some of the nicest, most polite, and sincere people we’ve met anywhere in the world.  I felt safer in Amman than I have in many cities here at home, and I have felt as welcome in Jordan as I have anywhere else in the world.  There should be no good reason not to go to Jordan.

That bit of annoyance out of the way, I can report that our trip was truly wonderful, all the way from Amman to Aqaba.  I’m still working on the photos, but soon you’ll be able to see that there’s really a ton to see and do in Jordan.  And then there’s the food, admittedly – for us – one of the primary attractions of any trip.  I had the best hummus and shawarma of my life, became a big fan of baba ganoush, and greatly enjoyed the various permutations of cheese, pastry dough, and honey that Jordanians love to have for dessert (or at any other time of day).  There are several new words in my food vocabulary – galaya, fatteh, knafeh – that I hope to put to use more in the future.

Petra is truly one of the wonders of the world and needs to be seen by everyone with even the remotest interest.  Walking through the slot canyon that is the Siq and then seeing the red sandstone facade of the Treasury suddenly appear around a bend will make even the most jaded traveler catch his breath.

Those of you who know me well know that I am greatly enamored by the night sky.  Spending a night in the Jordanian desert around Wadi Rum, away from almost all of the lights of civilization, provided a night sky the likes of which I hadn’t ever seen before except in the Outback of Australia.

These are just a couple highlights.  They don’t include the chariot race in Jerash, the surprisingly comical visit to Jesus’s baptism site, the obligatory dip in the Dead Sea, or any of those wonderful unexpected experiences that make travel what it is.  Of course Jordan has its fair share of problems – worsening water shortages, a limited economy, a shifting national identity with large refugee populations – but it remains safe and welcoming to travelers.  Whatever your brand of travel – leisure, adventure, active – I recommend it highly.

You might say I’m a well-traveled vomiter (vomiteer?). I’ve puked in several different countries around the world, not to mention over international waters, and I’ve had some sort of GI distress in 6 continents (only because I haven’t been to Antarctica yet). I love to travel, but somehow the damn food gets me every time. I don’t go out of my way to eat chilled monkey brains or day-old street food, but I’ll be damned if I travel somewhere just to eat American peanut butter and energy bars for two weeks. I think one of the strongest expressions of culture is via food, and I would feel shortchanged if I didn’t have the opportunity to taste the native flavors of a new destination.

You can imagine my dismay, then, at a recent report from the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, which demonstrated persistent contamination of vegetables with coliform bacteria despite cooking.  Coliform bacteria are those bacteria which normally reside in the gut but can end up in unwanted places, like on your dinner plate, due to poor food hygiene practices.  These are the guys that gave Montezuma his revenge.  Turns out that these buggers can persist in cooked veggies, even when served hot.  So it seems like I’m doomed to playing Russian roulette with my gastrointestinal health even if I forgo the fresh salad for a side of steamed vegetables.  Sometimes you just can’t win.

I got a message in my inbox a couple days ago highlighting a recent controversy in infant formula. Now infant formula is controversial enough to begin with, so some sort of brouhaha is certainly nothing new. But this one struck me as, if not sinister, certainly a little troubling. Evidently a particular market-leading brand of organic infant formula is being sweetened with sucrose as opposed to the lactose used in other brands of infant formula. Since sucrose tastes more sweet than lactose, this gives the sucrose-sweetened formula a sweetness equivalent to “grape juice or Country Time lemonade” as opposed to the “unsweetened apple juice” of other brands. Maybe this substitution is a simple cost-cutting measure instead of a concerted attempt to sway a baby’s formula taste preference – maybe. In either case, sucrose is also less preferable to lactose because it might cause more rapid tooth decay. We cannot be sure at this point if, by feeding our babies sucrose-sweetened formula instead of lactose-sweetened, we are giving them an early sweet tooth that has the potential to lead to nutritional ramifications down the road (obesity, diabetes, etc.), but at the least it sounds like a bad idea. Consumers and physicians, take heed.

Photo by Wendy Harman

Remember “Super Size Me” with Morgan Spurlock, that self-sacrificing documentarian who ate nothing but McDonald’s food for a month?  (Ick – makes me shudder just thinking about it.)  Well, Gut (great name for a journal, don’t you think?) recently published an article that illustrates some of the biochemical effects of fast food consumption.  Subjects were instructed to eat at least two fast food meals a day and limit their daily exercise to less than 5000 steps (not a hell of a lot).  Even after just a week of this, over half the group showed abnormally elevated levels of a liver enzyme (ALT, for those who care).  These levels persisted for the rest of the 4-week study.  If I remember the documentary correctly, Spurlock experienced elevation in his liver enzymes, as well.  In fact, I think I remember his PCP seeming rather concerned by it.  Oh – and the average weight gain by the end of the study?  14 pounds.  As if we needed any more reason to shy away from those Big Macs.

I consider myself an big fan of fairs, even the ones spelled with an extra “e”. They’re a great excuse to get outside, spend too much money trying to win crappy prizes, laugh at people spending too much money trying to win crappy prizes, and eat all sorts of bad-for-you food. Out of all the fairs I’ve had the pleasure to attend, one of my favorites is the Eastern States Exposition, or just the Big E. It’s basically the state fair for Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Maine, and Rhode Island. I’ve been to bigger fairs, but the food at the Big E is my favorite. Of course it’s got all your typical fair food: curly fries, fried dough, Italian sausages, cheesesteaks, cotton candy, turkey legs, etc. But what sets the food here apart is the Avenue of the States. Here, within scale models of the six state houses, you can get Maine lobster rolls, Vermont cheddar cheese, Rhode Island quahogs, apple pie, loaded baked potatoes, maple sugar everything, ravioli, flatbread pizza – just writing about it makes me pine. Honestly, the rest of the fair has become secondary for me. I go now for the food. That being said, the rest of the fair is pretty damn fun, too. Great livestock shows, big-name musical performers, parades, butter sculptures – highly entertaining and highly recommended.

Enormous rabbit. Saw it for free, unlike the enormous pig and enormous horse.

Some Ukrainan women I met at the fair.

Everybody wants beads at the Mardi Gras parade

Our new friend Ginger

The midway at night