Ed’s corner of the web

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