The Business of Being Born

The Business of Being Born is a documentary on childbirth in America. It is a project taken on by Ricki Lake and explores the options or lack there of women giving birth in America. The pushing of C-sections, drugs, and anything but natural births. The following is the trailer for the movie:



This flim is as much about our connection in America to giving birth and ways in which we view it as it is about real options that women have. It also explores in depth why things are done the way they are, and almost none of it has to do with the best needs of the baby and mother.

Genmaicha -An unexpected surprise

Genmaicha is green tea with toasted brown rice. It is remarkably nutty and flavorful. It took me off guard at first, a flavor of tea that I did not know how to describe. With its earthy grain flavor I soon became enthralled. I inquired about what was in the tea and was quite surprised when it was disclosed that it was brown rice. The nutty grainy flavor makes it almost feel like a comfort food to me. I picked up some Genmaicha today in Chinatown at Ten Ren's.

Is Your Fish Bloated?

STPP (Sodium Tri-polyphosphate)

Sounds delicious doesn't it?

Your carpet thinks it sounds good when it is being cleaned with it, as do you walls when it is thinning the paint off of them.

But what does this mean to all of us?

Well, we along with our carpets and clothes, we are consuming an awful lot of it. It is used as a preservative in fish, meats, poultry along with other processed goods including detergent and toothpaste as a whitening and cleaning agent. Is it preserving taste? Perhaps stopping the growth of some harmful bacteria? No, actually, it is preserving water. It is making the fish bloated and keeping them from losing water on their long journey to you. If fish is treated with a lot of STPP it means that you are paying for this extra water that fish is retaining when it is weighed.

According to Wikipedia, in 2000, in western Europe the estimated consumption of STPP from food sources was around 300,000 tonnes. Studies for US consumption? I don't know, we don't really do that kind of thing here in the US. What I can tell you is that it is a GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) substance designated by the FDA, which means...exactly nothing to me.

You see the FDA should be looking out for our best interest, unfortunately this is not the case on the whole. The partnerships forged between big business, lobbyist, and the FDA render them unrecognizable from each other. We have to remember that when it comes down to making decisions about our health, there are ultimately people in charge. These people are just people, they are the man behind the curtain, not the "Wizard of Oz." They have no special powers, no extraordinary moral code, and it seems all to often no dedication to safety. They are subject to the same laziness, lapses in judgments, and bullying that can sway even the best of us. When people's money is at stake, morality all to often goes out the window.

The fishing companies claim that polyphosphates are not harmful to humans. They claim that once you ingest them, the polyphosphates will break down into single units of phosphate they will be ingested in the same way that any other naturally occurring phosphate would enter your body. They do concede however, that large amounts of the substance may be harmful, but feel that the average consumer consumes much less than this threshold. The UK and the European Union are both in the process of studying the amount of Polyphosphate that can be injurious to the health of humans. They are considering imposing strict limits, and I believe they already have some import limits.

So, how can you avoid a chemical like STPP. With the exception of carefully questioning the fish vendor at your local farmer's market and watching them from the time the fish is caught until it hits your plate, you can't. The same goes for other products plumped up with the chemical. Trying asking the fish vendor at your local supermarket if the fish contains STPP, they are still trying to get down the wild versus farm raised question.

Here in the United States STPP consumption is dropping in the detergent industry, in favor of more natural substances. As far as food goes, it is not even on the radar of most people. And in all honesty, with the rash of problems with our food supply, before we tackle this problem, we do indeed have bigger fish to fry!

The Myth of the Baby Carrot!

I was having a conversation with a friend and she starts to tell me how she only likes baby carrots and not regular carrots. To this I respond, wow that is interesting, considering that baby carrots are regular carrots, but they are cut up and shaped. She did not believe me...

In her mind I believe somewhere there is a baby carrot field, where tiny perfectly shaped carrots grow. In reality this is not the case.

Granted there are varieties of small carrots that have been harvested early, but these are not the uniformly shaped, bright orange carrots everyone eats. This type of carrot would be generally served with the plant part still attached and steamed.

So once and for all, let me dis spell the myth.

Baby carrots are regular carrots!

They are usually made from oddly shaped, less aesthetically pleasing carrots, that are peeled and cut into the uniformly shaped carrots you see in plastic in the grocery store. The carrots in some cases have been bred or genetically modified to have their bright orange color, sometimes to be sweeter, and be larger from the start with uniform size all the way through the carrot. After they are cut they are soaked in some sort of antimicrobial substance such as chlorine to keep them fresh and from developing a film in the package.

So there you have it!

What is my opinion of baby carrots? Well, a good deal of the nutrients are in the peel of the carrot, which is clearly gone in the baby carrot situation. Also they lose nutrients in the soaking processes, and whether those antimicrobial processes are doing anything to them or adding something you do not want to ingest, I am not sure. But for every day a carrot is out of the ground it is losing nutrients. So you are better off to eat regular carrots from that perspective, there is no processing time, you are likely to get them sooner.

A Remedy For Sweet Misery?

Sweet Misery and Sweet Remedy are two well done documentaries on the effects of Aspartame and politics behind its approval as a GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) substance.

Aspartame, along with all other artificial sweeteners, is a serious neurotoxin that leads some people to become very ill and can cause brain damage and exacerbate symptoms of Multiple Sclerosis, have seizures, headaches and other effects that we are only beginning to comprehend.

Also find out Donald Rumsfeld's direct connection to the FDA approval during his time working with G.D. Searle.

Sweet Misery: A Poisoned World




Sweet Remedy: A World Reacts




What I find interesting about artificial sweeteners is that they do not help you lose weight. They actually cause you to gain body fat in areas such as your abdomen and hips because your liver doesn't know what to do with the poison and it stores it as fat. Baring the issue of diabetics, people seem to buy this stuff because they think it is healthier. There really is no evidence that this stuff is safe at all and in fact a large body of evidence that it isn't. If you are over the age of 20 you probably remember seeing on sweet and low packets that it had been proven to cause cancer in lab rats. Well guess what, the fact that it is no longer there has nothing to do with the safety of the product and everything to do with politics. When other sweeteners came out and the substances were pushed through as GRAS all dangerous labels came off. If you think you don't ingest artificial sweeteners think again, they are in your toothpaste, dental floss, mouthwash, yogurt, vitamins, mints, all "diet" products, protein shakes, cookies, gum and countless other places that you wouldn't expect them.

If you suffer from headaches, nausea, or mood swings take a look at your diet and see if eliminating artificial sweeteners helps the problem.

The second documentary also goes into Mono Sodium Glutamate MSG, material for another post...

Viagraberries and AIDS-vaccine Pear?

This is an except directly out of the book "Last Chance to Eat" by Gina Mallet published in 2004. I picked it up at Strand Books last week, and highly recommend it.

She details the declining taste and quality in food along with the rise in industries such as CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) and Aquaculture (farm raised fish), among others.

This is the Epilogue from the book. I was going to do just small excerpts but I couldn't decide what to pull out, it is all good. It made me laugh, and then cry :(

"Imagine flying over North America and Europe in, say, the next couple generations. The first thing you notice is how much of the land is doomed with transparent plastic. All fruit and vegetables that can be are grown under glass, and those can't are gone, with the exception of some field crops. As far as the eye can see, wind turbines march across the land, even into the sea, like armies of giant cranes. The coastlines are back to their old shape, though, because the fish farms are no more. All factory farms have been banned since excrement, human and animal, was threatening to overwhelm the earth. Fish and beef are produced in small quantities and the animals are treated kindly. Pigs play football in their spare time and calves swing baseball bats-both sports are popular among animal brethren.

The foodscape has changed at ground level. The two foods that scientists discovered to be the healthiest, most likely to extend life, were alcohol and dark chocolate. As a result, people became drunk and got fat. This sent scientists rushing back to the lab. How could it be that the healthiest things were in fact the unhealthiest? This latest crisis of confidence in food science prompted the government finally to step in, and alcohol and chocolate are now strictly rationed. Each consumer is given coupons with which they buy their weekly share, along with their beef and fish rations. This hasn't stopped wave after wave of lawsuits from consumers claiming their lives are being shortened. While they wait for justice, however, they can go to the foodeasy. Foodeasies sell forbidden food after dark.

Once the amount of time the industrial human spends watching something rather than doing it was put at 90 percent, the authorities decided that the human aiming at eternal life, "kick the death habit," must change diets, concentrate on lighter food, mainline liquids constantly. So the state authorized hydration stations, run privately, which look like old time Coke machines and dispense organic, plasticlike packs of liquid nutrients, flavored and sweetened artificially. At first, there was fear that the water might run out; but then a cheap way to desalinate the oceans was discovered, and global warming did the rest.

Food often looks different. Eggs now come shelled in transparent packs of some kind of organic material. Milk no longer exists; it has been replaced by genetically modified soy, once it was found there was no way to wipe out pathogens in industrial cattle. There is no butter because of the cow problem; it has been replaced by genetically modified canola oil spread, which tastes of nothing. There is no honey because the bees were redundant once we had genetically modified plants, and only bumblebees were needed, with the occasional vibrator. There are no more apples because they were too much trouble to grow, and we are now in a trade war with China and cannot import them.

The most popular fruit is the GM Viagraberry, a huge strawberrylike fruit, strawberries and raspberries crossed and spiked with Viagra. After much polling and many in depth focus groups consensus was reached on the favorite fruit, the strawberry, of course. Raspberries scored high, but they are no longer grown as they are too labor intensive a crop, and no machine seemed able to pick them as capably as humans, so the search was on to find some way to keep the flavor. Viagra was no-brainer as the increasingly aging population has no end of sexual problems.

It is now common for transgenic fruits and vegetables to be spiked with vaccines, vitamins, and mood-changing drugs, excellent add-ons when it comes to sales. The AIDS-vaccine pear is hugely successful and has revived pears as a fruit. Onions are banned because they rotted too fast in the markets. They have been replaced by transgenic scalery, a mix of celery and scallions. Another successful transgenic cross is the pinemelon, a smooth orange melon tasting like pineapple, pinapples themselves proving too unreliable a commercial crop.

Only one supermarket chain is left. The only one necessary because most people don't cook, they eat takeaways as in "Come on over for a takeaway," and takeaway cooks buy wholesale. Takeaway is almost all ethnic-industrial sushi, fajitas, lasagna, chicken tikka, fish and chips.

There are still a few restaurants serving Grandads, as meals are now called, and they are patronized by old and older people, those who still remember what an omelette fines herbes used to taste like. The chefs are French almost without exception as they were the only cookds to hide their books when the Food Police decided to eliminate all gastronomically incorrect cookbooks, the kind that featured verboten foods like butter and wine, beef and fish. Some restuarants are licensed to serve the small amounts of meat that has been organically raised and closely supervised, and a Porterhouse steak is what Beluga caviar once was - expensive, and hard to get. You need atleast five people's rations to buy it. On nights that steak is advertised, the restaurants is invariably sold out, although some pesky perfectionists grumble that the meat is obviously wet-aged, not dry-aged.

It is generally agreed that the best place to eat a Grandad is at home, but then the problem arises how to find a home that still makes Grandads. After the supreme technological kitchen of the nineties was declared environmentally unfriendly, those who had them felt so guilty that they tore them out and replaced them with the sole essentials for modern eating: the microwave and the refrigerator. People who kept their old kitchens are frowned upon as insensitive. "Have you thought at all about how the non-aligned nations have to eat?" Owners of old kitchens are careful not to boast, but their kitchens are regarded the same way a fine Boulle cabinet was once, as a priceless antique. See the great six burner stove and the copper hood, the bar sink and dish sink, the silent Rolls-Royce of a dishwasher where the only sounds is the click when the cycle changes, the glistening freezer-fridge, the home coffee roaster, the blender, electric beater, food processor, the maple chopping block, the battery of knives, so many wooden spoons and metal whisks, the gleaming cookware...

Guests who attend a Grandad are invited by self destructing email. Which means the invitation is destroyed the moment the recipient reads it, so no one else gets wind of it and tries to crash. To get invited to a Grandad, you have to join a Health Club, the cover for Grandads, an you receive a password with which you can log on to an encrypted Grandad newsletter that gives you the address of new foodeasies, and accounts of recent Grandads that featured leg of lamb with flageolets verts, osso bucco, pork roast with crackling, and of course Montrachet and Haut-Brion, and Scharffen-Berger Chocolate from the foodeasy. Sometimes a Grandad veteran gets carried away - usually after too many glassed of contraband Dom Perignon - and cries when he talkes about the bad old days, when people ate so well and enjoyed their food. But he is quickly shushed because it is all too painful. Food is dead, continuity is dead, and the new Ice Age finally closes over our heads."


I titled this Viagraberries and AIDS-vaccine Pear? for two reasons, one to get your attention, but two because this is sadly not far from the truth. Our food is fortified with all kind of nutrients. To the scientists putting them in there it doesn't really seem to matter if we actually absorb them it is more of a marketing gimmick. In Michael Pollan's book "The Omnivore's Dilemma" he says that we used to think that food of the future would be in the form of a pill, now it is more like the pill is in our food. This is especially true right now, when food scientists are trying to genetically modify rice to be anti malarial and spraying store bought cold cuts right here in the US with bacteria killing viruses. Viruses sprayed on your food trigger an immune response in your body even if you do not get sick. This causes unnecessary strain on your immune system. All of this is done to hide shady and unsanitary manufacturing processes that leave the products vulnerable to pathogens.

Stand up for your right to eat the food you want! If we don't this bleak picture will be even further upon us.

Genetically Modified Foods - There is something you should know.

"About 70% of the food we eat contains genetically engineered ingredients and the biotech industry is spending millions a year to convince us that this technology is our only hope."

If you do not know anything about genetically modified organisms(GMO), it is time you start educating yourself. These foods are extremely pervasive in your food supply, particularly if you live in the US. The European Union bans Genetically Modified food and is very vigilant about keeping GMO's out of their food supply. Are they wrong, or are we turning a blind eye to a problem that could be bigger than any of us would like to accept?

Fed Up! (2002)

Redbridge Beer - Beer made with me in mind.

As one of the roughly 1 and 133 people in the US living with Celiac Disease it is very rare that I drink beer. Beer is made with barley and other gluten filled grains that I must avoid. Redbridge is made from sorghum, a gluten free grain, and is produced by Anheuser-Busch.

I must preface the following with two pieces of information:

1) I was never a beer drinker before my diagnosis (about 3 years ago)
2)I am forever grateful that companies are coming around and making gluten free products of all kinds that I may enjoy.

From what I remember, Redbridge tastes like any other beer, quite good along those lines. I however, apparently have not quite acquired a taste for beer. I was never a fan, and I am not one now. I am sort of determined though to find what people enjoy so much about beer. As a lover all of all good foods, especially ones that are finely crafted, there must be something there that I am not getting. Or perhaps not... Maybe I haven't had it with the right food, or at the right moment, or maybe I am missing the taste bud that likes it. ;) My selection of beer is now quite limited, but I will try again...

Monsanto: Patent for the Pig

If you do not know anything about the company Monsanto, stay tuned to future blogs. This short 42 minute documentary can give you a bit of an idea of the tactics of the company. They are currently trying to patent a gene sequence of pigs. This would be the first patent on a biological life form. The scariest part of this is not that they are searching for the patent, but that they have not done anything to warrant it. All they have done is compare gene sequences of pigs and found which are likely to be the largest and most substantial. The patenting of this information will allow Monsanto to file lawsuits against against pig farmers that currently have pigs that have this gene sequence! This natural gene sequence, that Monsanto claims to have "discovered." The repercussions of this are endless. Please watch this video and send it to your friends.

Real Smoked Cured Chorizo

At Esposito’s Pork Shop on Ninth Ave in Manhattan you can find the best REAL chorizo sausage I have ever eaten. I made it once just cutting it into small round slices and heating it in a big cast iron skillet. And the other time cut length wise into thin shaved slices, fried up in a wok with onions, pepper, and garlic. Both were very tasty. I do not know how I will eat chorizo from anywhere else!

Corked wine and wowed by an Oloroso (Sherry)

Yesterday for the first time I tasted what a wine is like when it is slightly corked. This wine wasn’t undrinkable and in fact to me initially it just tasted very austere and dry. Upon further inspection, by that I mean someone pointing it out to me, I realized that it was starting to turn. It had a slightly cardboard flavor and reminded me of the smell of wet fur. I won’t say what the wine was but it was a red wine from along the River Duero in Spain.

A wine being corked is a term that refers to a set of undesirable smells and tastes that is only detected when the wine is opened. The presence of 2,4,6-trichloroanisole (TCA) is usually found in a bottle of wine with these smells and tastes. It is not known why a particular wine becomes corked and therefore not predictable.

After that I had the pleasure of tasting a Matusalem Oloroso Dulce Muy Viejo, a sweet 25 year aged Sherry from Spain. Full bodied wine, dark brown in color almost like that of light maple syrup. It left a coffee flavor in my mouth and throughout tasted of Maple Syrup, Coffee, Roasted Nuts, and Caramel. It was a really good dessert Sherry.

Functional Circuit Training and Organic Farming

I just saw a guy on the street with a shirt that said, “Functional Circuit Training” on it. He clearly worked out and may have even been a trainer. For some reason this really peaked my curiosity. Enough that I thought about running after him to talk about it. Though I wouldn’t hold someone to something that is on their t-shirt especially if they may work in an industry like the fitness world where you get a lot of free promotional stuff. When you take multiple showers and change clothes multiple times a day, you need clean t-shirts. If you catch me at the right moment you might be able to get me to put on an I *heart* Britany t-shirt.

Regardless, more important than the man wearing the shirt is the message, or lack there of. What does that even mean? Does Functional Circuit Training involve Kettlebells? If so, maybe I am down.

So I did a little research, turns out that you can become NESTA certified to be a Circuit Training Instructor. Through this certification you become certified to teach Hydraulic Circuit Training (riiiiight...), Traditional Weight Circuit Training, Functional Circuit Training, and Sports Specific, you guessed it Circuit Training all for the bargain price of $160.00. However, though I can pay for the home study course which includes no actual “function” except answering some multiple choice questions, I cannot find a good definition on their website of what it is exactly that makes this special. To me trying to sell functional training is like trying to sell someone on eating an apple after you have told them for a decade that an orange was an apple. They will probably miss the point completely and focus on the semantics.

My issue with this t-shirt slogan is that it is some man or woman’s attempt at reinventing the wheel to impress and bewilder you.

So let me break it down for you. At some point there was just exercise, mostly in the form of manual labor. This was indeed “functional” exercise. Improving your function at this particular task of life. At some point someone came along and decided that they wanted to make a ton of money off of busy people and invented the machine in the gym, or even the free weights. Refer to these persons as Cybex, Nautilus, Hammer Strength, ICarian, or my personal favorite Precor, whoever you want it doesn’t matter. Just as GE did for dinner, they made workouts easy, and much much less “functional” in its original sense.

But as time went on we all lost touch with our bodies, due to busy work schedules or some never being in touch in the first place. We just listen to these manufactures, joined a gym, and got down a routine. For many people this routine was a circuit. In traditional circuit training as I know it, you work every body part to exhaustion and then go again for a second set, or you alternate body parts with different exercises, in a circuit, always coming full circle. Unless if you live in the film short Tango, this will not be very functional for your life. (Hopefully at least one person in the world besides me gets that reference) That is not to say that it cannot be helpful in absence of anything else. It is certainly time efficient.

Sidebar - Did you know babies don’t really crawl anymore? They often just skip that phase and go right to walking. Crawling is an exercise essential to developing proper integration. If you didn’t crawl as a baby get down on all fours right now. I’m serious, it will do you good.

Back to what I was saying, as we lost touch, there was great financial opportunity for so called experts to jump into the field. People listened to these experts many of whom glistened with their steely six packs and fake tans, bloated on whey protein and weight gainers. Most of whom had nothing productive to offer but being eye candy. While in my eyes, as eye candy these people hold very valuable places in society, they should not be directing your workouts.

So they sold you on all of this and now they are trying to sell you on functional training. They are trying to sell you on what you once knew, what we once all knew as a culture. Sound confusing? It should, that is what these people are going for. The more bewildered you are, the more you will buy, the richer they get and the more people praise them for it. It is not necessarily malicious either, I believe that they believe what they are doing is helpful and in the interest of the people they are selling to, with one exception, the people that made those pulsing abdominal belts that allow you to sit on the couch and eat fritos while loosing weight. I believe those people knew they were full of sh*t.

So the title of this post was Functional Circuit Training and Organic Farming, seems that I have not established a connection between the two, but here it is... In the same way you are being sold the word functional with exercise, you are being sold the word organic with food. A hundred years ago everything was organic until someone came along and decided to profit large scale off of agriculture, make it more efficient, spray crops with chemicals, growth hormones, human sewage, you name it to increase yields and at the same time confuse the hell out of you and bully your local farmer. One thing is sure hasn’t done is improve taste. The declining taste of food in America is hard for anyone to dispute.

With the mechanical takeover of agriculture, came a subsequent decline in laborious jobs from which the workers derived significant exercise. This decline in exercise left the door open for inventions that made exercise fit back into our lives. Now we are fitting exercise back into our lives instead of our lives revolving around exercise, in the same way that we now fit meals into our lives as opposed to the rest of the things we have to do being secondary to meals.

My point is that organic is not a new invention and neither is functional exercise, in fact they are older than anything we know. So instead of getting involved in all of the rhetoric of these people, take a step back and look at what you can learn from history, see if you can learn anything from something your grandmother said to you as a child. and maybe, just maybe, if you are not too scared, take a look at what your instincts have to tell you. We, in America, spend less time in search of food and more time trying to avoid food than any animal on earth. We are in the middle of a major food crisis right now and maybe only generously 2% of Americans could even fathom that that is possible gauging on what Americans waste and consume every day.

There are ways to not participate in this giant mess of rhetoric, one of the best is to shop local as much as possible, this dramatically cuts out the supply chain that helps to perpetuate these activities. As far as exercise, get out of the gym and give yourself some more time! Trying to squeeze in that 30 minute workout, functional or not, is not the best way to go about it. Find something that you enjoy doing, that doesn’t involve a fixed machine. If you have kids play with them, if you like to garden get outside, go for a hike, go for a walk, buy some snowshoes, there are endless possibilities here. All, you guessed it... functional.