Alcohol, Cannabis, and Tobacco

Posted on April 13, 2016 by Davd

…Six Decades of Changing Acceptance and State Control
(c) 2016, Davd

This blog is a “backgrounder” for the news of this decade and the young 21st century—news about changes in the relative acceptance and condemnation of recreational drugs. The drugs on which i will focus are alcohol in the form of alcoholic drinks; cannabinol in the form of marijuana; caffeine in the form of coffee [and to a lesser extent, tea and cocoa]; and nicotine in the form of tobacco smoking. I plan to follow it with a shorter one about the growing acceptance of medical marijuana, the [relatively] heavy condemnation of alcohol and tobacco, and the ho-hum acceptance of caffeine (and its related xanthines theophylline and theobromine1.)

Looking back to the 1950s, a decade we identify with post-World-War prosperity and the Baby Boom, we can see a time when cigarettes were socially approved, alcohol tolerated as an accepted and sometimes beneficial vice (as caffeine typically is tolerated and accepted today), and marijuana condemned strongly. Since 1916 and since 1950, alcohol “has seen both good and bad press” with some decrease in toleration, cannabis has gradually received better acceptance, and tobacco (especially commercial cigarettes) has been increasingly condemned.

“The 1950s” were the first decade in which i read magazine and newspaper articles on such subjects; and i can report back that far from personal experience. As a schoolboy in the 1950s, i rode frequently in a cigarette smoke filled car—my parents were both regular cigarette smokers—and read advertising for cigarettes that praised their effect in resisting overweight. Second-hand smoke was not a public concern, nor was the connection between smoking and cancer. Cigars were associated with the wealthy (but seldom with wealthy women) and also with “tough guys”; while pipes were associated with scholars and seafarers: Popeye the Sailor and many stereotypes of the professor, smoked pipes rather than cigarettes or cigars.

Alcoholic drink was accepted as a social vice, with “cocktails” and mixed drinks of distilled liquor with fruit juice and “soda pop” being more usual than wine. Beer was widely accepted by and for Northern European and working class men, wine was something stereotyped for gourmets, “ethnics” from southern Europe, drunkards, and some artistic and intellectual types. Home beer and wine making were lawful but rare. Driving a car with less than .15% blood alcohol content was entirely legal in most states and provinces, and “driving under the influence” was a traffic offence, not a crime. The main medical concern associated with alcoholic drink, was cirrhosis of the liver; and that was something for drunkards, but not normal people, to worry about. (It was also recognized that men, and even some women, might become much more likely to fight and behave offensively “when drinking.”)

During the late 20th Century, evidence began to accumulate that red wine in particular, and perhaps all fermented alcoholic beverages to some extent, helped combat atherosclerosis and prevent heart attacks and strokes. Some stories seemed to indicate that alcohol itself scoured deposits from the walls of blood vessels; but the strongest attention went to resveritrol, a compound found especially in red wine. Over more or less the same span of time, evidence began to accumulate that alcohol itself was a risk factor for cancer. Even more recently, the harmful effects of alcohol on the unborn became widely known and pregnant women were warned not to “drink,” or to strictly limit their consumption.

Alcoholic drink is less accepted now than it was 60 years ago, overall; but not as condemned as cigarette smoking—except for drivers. Driving motor vehicles2 is legal only with less than .05% blood alcohol (one third the previous toleration criterion) and driving with more than .08% is a criminal offense in Canada. If there were to be a behavioural study of driving safety, it would doubtless show that in some circumstances, many drivers can be safe with levels of blood alcohol content which are criminal under the law… but the law is written in absolute terms, as are most laws3.

Apart from the resurgence of Islam, which religion forbids alcoholic drink, i cannot point to any good reason why alcoholic beverages and those who drink them, are so widely shamed. It is true that there are millions of people worldwide who should abstain totally from alcohol; but there are also millions who should abstain totally from fava beans, grapefruit, peanuts, and several other foods that are safe and healthy for the majority of the population. My assessment is that we need to recognize that while some people must abstain to be safe, more people can often make good and even beneficial use of alcoholic drinks, and to varying degrees depending on their individual physiological make-ups.

Cannabis was nearly always referred to as marijuana in the 1950s, and was criminalized. It was known to be used especially by jazz musicians; and “artistic types” more generally were known to include a significant minority of “reefer smokers.” Its effects were exaggerated in many published stories; and it was often said to lead to cocaine, morphine, and heroin addiction. (There was a statistical association between marijuana use and the later use of such “hard drugs”; but today, that association would be attributed to a willingness to break the law for fun—teenagers and young adults willing to smoke marijuana even though it was illegal, were also more willing than average to try drugs that were even more condemned.)

Despite criminalization, marijuana was widely used in the “hippie years” of the 1970s and late 1960s, and the attitude of most Canadians and “Americans” born after 1960, probably after 1955, was that “pot” or “weed”, as they usually called it, was about as safe as alcohol and tobacco, and for many, more fun. As the oldest, most condemning members of the populations died, and the younger, more accepting became adults and then parents and teachers and professionals more generally, the punishment of cannabis became restricted almost entirely to those who dealt in it for profit. Gradually, self-medication and then some formal medical research showed that cannabis did have therapeutic value for some illnesses and handicaps.

Cannabis today, is far more positively viewed than it was 60 years ago. “Medical marijuana” is now an accepted phrase, and its benefits for people suffering chronic pain and PTSD, especially, are widely recognized. Indeed, while there are some recent general media articles saying that alcoholic drink has no health benefits to offer, one in March, there are others affirming that for some people, marijuana does offer health benefits. One could fairly say that the two are more or less equally harmful, and while some are better off enjoying [or self-medicating with] alcohol, others are better off using cannabis… and one should do so apophatically, because our knowledge of their effects on the different physiologies of different people, is still far from complete.

Coffee and tea have meanwhile been accepted more or less the same degree, in more or less the same way, for the 65 years or so that i have been reading the news. Caffeine is by far the best known of the xanthines; and its concentration in coffee, combined with the way we make that beverage compared with how tea and cocoa are made, make coffee a much stronger beverage in terms of drug impact, than the others. These xanthine beverages can have negative effects—coffee especially, because it packs a stronger dose per volume—and they can have positive effects, for the health of people who drink them. Caffeine seems to help delay dementia, for instance (CBC News, 2007). More important, perhaps, it helps people stay awake and alert at work and when driving—it does others than the user, more net good than harm, from what we know now and have recently known.

While it would be foolish to say that coffee—or tea, or cocoa, or yerba maté—is always good for all or even most people, it seems far more likely than not, that these drinks will continue to enjoy a generally positive acceptance even by those whose philosophy or religion4 forbids them to use xanthines.

Since the 1950s, most of the news about cigarette smoking “has been bad”. First came research showing cigarettes to be a major cause of lung cancer, and to a lesser extent of other cancers. More recently, the dangers of exposure to “second hand smoke” have been documented. Pipe and cigar smoking have been found to be risk factors for mouth cancers but not significantly for lung cancer, because the smoke from these forms of tobacco is seldom inhaled deeply.

I myself have smoked, but seldom: If there are people who only use alcoholic drink on ceremonial occasions, i similarly use pipes and cigars: The passing of a pipe is a fellowship ritual among many North American aboriginal groups, including Métis; and having a cigar together is a less sacred fellowship ritual among some men of many ethnicities. (The last time i recall smoking two cigars in the same day, was over 25 years ago, as i was leaving Thunder Bay for the West. I had lunch with a Scots friend and dinner with a Bengali friend, and each meal ended with cigars.)

There are many people, most of them non-smokers, who find the odor of cigarette smoke offensive; and fairly many who also dislike cigar smoke and the smoke from some kinds of pipe tobacco. While smoking was relatively fashionable, these people tended to accept that their dislikes were “a matter of personal taste”; more recently, many have shamed smoking as anti-alcohol elements have shamed alcoholic drink.

In the case of alcoholic drink, the greatest danger to others comes from driving motor vehicles; in the case of tobacco smoke, the greatest danger comes from being in the “second hand” smoke. So while those who indulge in alcoholic drink are forbidden to “drive”, those who indulge in tobacco smoke are forced to go away from the general company of non-smokers.

In 2016, tobacco smoking is generally condemned as dangerous to oneself and [to a lesser extent] to those around one; and as a smelly, disgusting habit. Smoking in a motor vehicle where children are present, or in a public venue, is illegal, though some bars and pubs are allowed to have smoking sections. Cigar and pipe smoking are less condemned as disgusting, perhaps because of the peculiar places where they are common; but they are equally illegal in most public places and in vehicles containing children. “Smoking” is seen as a vice with no virtuous side effects, by most Americans and Canadians.

Alcoholic drink is condemned by Islam, by some smaller religions and some sects of Christianity, and its use by drivers is so severely limited that many prudent users refuse to drive if they have had even one bottle of beer [or equivalent]. At the same time, it is known to have some beneficial effects (e.g. Madrigal, 2008) at least for some people, and is honoured as an aesthetic enhancement to fine food. Its status is ambiguous and contentious.

Cannabis is becoming accepted to a comparable extent with alcoholic drinks. Some condemn it, but they are a shrinking minority; it is now widely acknowledged to have beneficial effects on some people; and few now believe it is addictive or leads to “hard drug addiction” Given that it is intoxicating, it would be logical to develop restrictions on its use analogous to those applied to alcoholic drink, but i have not yet seen such restrictions added to the law; and given that it is often deeply inhaled, it would be logical to anticipate dangers analogous to those which have been found for cigarette smoking.

Finally, coffee continues to be accepted as a relatively safe vice which can be claimed for a virtue when one will be driving or doing work requiring alertness. (Tea and cocoa can be treated as weaker forms of coffee for most assessment purposes, so far as we now know.) Its effects are “pro-social” in the sense that they are generally agreed to “do more good than harm” to others than the user. Its value to the present and following discussions, is as a pleasant, mind-affecting vice that has not been shamed—as the other three all have, for at least some of the past 65 years.

References:

CBC News, 2007, “3 coffees a day keep memory loss at bay for older women: study.” August 7

Madrigal, Alexis, 2008. “Red Wine Drug Shows Proof That It Combats Aging” Wired, August 08

Nathanson, Paul, and Katherine K. Young, 2001. Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press

Nathanson, Paul, and Katherine K. Young, 2006. Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination against Men Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Notes:

1. Theophylline is the caffeine analogue that is in tea; theobromine, in cocoa and some processed chocolate. For the sake of simplicity and familiarity, i will usually refer simply to caffeine.

2. Few people travel by horse drawn carriage any longer; indeed, few did in the 1950s. One wonders if driving a horse drawn vehicle would—or should—be condemned. Rural folklore includes the saying “horses know their way home”; and a drunken person or group could probably get in a carriage, tell the horse to head home, and let the horse do the driving… safely.

Bicycling while intoxicated is illegal in some places but not uniformly; and my best guess as to why, is that a bicyclist can do far less damage to others than someone driving a car or larger motor vehicle.

3. Individuals vary in the extent to which alcohol impairs their thinking and perception; and driving circumstances vary in the amount of perceptual skill and quick thinking they require. I do not know how the legal criteria for temporary loss of permission to drive [.05%] and criminal impairment [.08] were chosen; but two influences were doubtless involved: [1] The lobbying of anti-alcohol organizations, and aggrieved friends of persons injured and killed by impaired drivers; and [2] the assessment, whether impressionistic or scientific, of police, prosecutors, and judges, as to what alcohol content nearly everyone who can drive at all, can “carry” safely.

The law, by criminalizing a physiological state rather than a level of incompetence, punishes some competent drivers; it partakes of the mentality: “Don’t think—do what you are told!” This is often the case with laws which are applied to large numbers of people who are strangers to the enforcement officers.

4. Mormonism is the example best known in Western Canada and the Western USA.

 

Posted in Commentary, Men's Health | Leave a comment

Intimidation:

Posted on March 31, 2016 by Davd

…Not the Way to Motivate Good Men
(c) 2016, Davd.

As Nathanson and Young [2006] have detailed and i have summarized in my review, as Brown (2013) has further detailed for “family law”, much Feminist success in “changing society” has been achieved through the Law.

It is unfortunate for both men and women, that the Law is nearly always enforced rather than working by way of encouragement. Punishment is the main means by which men (and less often, women) are compelled by the Law to do good, or at least, to do “the will of Her Majesty”, which will is largely generated not by the Person of the Crown but by legislatures and judges1. When the Law is enforced, rather than conformed to voluntarily—that means that some people, anyway, don’t agree with the Law.

When “some people who don’t agree with the Law” are thieves or fraudsters, and the great majority of the people do agree with the Laws that make fraud and theft criminal; enforcement is consistent with the predominant public will… and also, reasonable psychologically.

Psychological research has been studying the effects of reward and punishment for decades; and it is rather well established, that punishment is far more effective in stopping behaviour than in promoting it, in reducing than increasing its frequency or prevalence. Punishing unwanted behaviours, can be an effective (and philosophically “reasonable”) way to discourage assault, fraud, theft, and spitting on the sidewalk. Reward, as one might guess, is more effective in encouraging (enhancing, increasing) desired behaviour.

The reason is reasonable: Punishment motivates avoidance; reward motivates repetition. If “the Law” punishes fraud and theft, the simple way to avoid that punishment is to avoid defrauding and stealing. Same goes for spitting on the sidewalk2. There are still thieves and fraudsters, but fewer than there would be if no laws were enforced against theft and fraud; sometimes sidewalks get spit upon, but less often than if it were not punished; and rewarding not doing those things, would be less effective than punishing doing them.

When we want more of behaviour we consider good, in contrast, rewarding it is the more effective “way to go”. Consider persuading Little Jane to eat her spinach: The usual tactic is approximately, “When you’ve finished your spinach, Jane, then you may have some dessert.” Sometimes access to a favourite toy, or the playground, will serve. Punishing not eating the spinach is uh, much less effective… and today, might be considered child abuse.

The troubles with law, often arise from trying to promote behaviour with punishment. Suppose Little Jane has grown up, and met a young man at a party, and got pregnant. She wants to keep the baby and have the young man support her, and the baby; but she doesn’t want to live with him. The Law will approve her choices (Brown, 2013, Nathanson and Young, 2006, Shackleton, 1999). But how will it motivate the young man, who is vanishingly unlikely to accept Jane’s choices?

He might perhaps accept supporting Jane and the baby in a traditional, lifetime monogamous marriage—but those are no longer supported by Canadian civil law. He might even accept paying partial support if he has some fatherly connection to the child—but though that idea exists in principle, it is very unlikely indeed to be enforced; Shackleton (1999) wrote, “We have ever more punitive enforcement of child support, but no enforcement at all for access by fathers to their children.” Brown (2013: 2, 52, 53, 130 et passim) agrees. So if Jane demands support and refuses to share parenting, and the Law enforces her will, against and overpowering his lack of consent, how will the Law enforce?

By punishment and threat of punishment, “that’s how.” The Law is vanishingly unlikely to offer the young man any incentives to pay Jane the money she demands. As the psychological research learned, the young man—much like a laboratory rat—will have an incentive to avoid the punishment, not to do Jane’s wishes. Doing Jane’s wishes gives him basically nothing—except avoidance of punishment—and it costs him plenty. If he can avoid punishment in some way that overall, leaves him happier or less miserable than paying Jane what she wants, it will be psychologically normal for him to do that instead of paying.

One way to avoid paying is to relocate to a state that does not enforce Canadian child support orders. Or perhaps he will stop working in the regular economy—take up crime as a way to support himself, or work “under the table”, or a bit more nobly, join a monastery. (Actually, joining a foreign monastery might be a promising strategy. Many foreign states would be reluctant to force a young monk to return to Canada to be the cash cow for a single mother—especially if she won’t allow him to father.) Probably there are some other ways of avoidance.

Notice the young man remains intimidated—in the sense that he fears Canadian governments. The Law has succeeded in frightening him—out of the conventional, productive economy and into crime, “underground” work, or a foreign state.

Canada winds up looking like a bully picking on a young man so as to avoid paying child support from State funds. Canadian economic output and tax receipts are less than if the young man had been a father in either marriage or a shared parenting regime. And other young men who hear about the case, will be rational if they respond by becoming afraid of women they don’t know well… rather as one might teach a child to be afraid of strangers.

Only a small fraction of strangers are dangerous to children; but we teach children to fear strangers generally—as many men, in response to the misandric changes in law over the past few decades, are learning to fear women generally3. Whether a small or medium sized fraction of women will actually exploit the privileges available to them in law and public administration, many women definitely have done. Now, as children learn to fear strangers most of whom could be trusted, because they do not know which are and are not worthy of trust; so men are learning to fear women strangers many of whom could be trusted, because we do not know which are and are not worthy of trust.

Feminism has achieved immense success, which Shackleton (1999) attributed to the power of shame in a world where women have more moral authority than men, and Murrow attributes to “maternalism”. However, that success is now maintained by intimidation, more than by shame; men in a state of true shame would suffer and pay; and today, men ordered to pay support and denied fatherhood, tend instead to feel abused by the Law.

Gynocentric lawmaking—and Murrow would say, the politics of begging for the votes of women over 50—has punished millions of men, but has not made as many millions of women happier. Counting only women, the polls seem to show no increase, and more than one poll shows a decrease, in women’s happiness (Koster, 2009). Counting both sexes, the decrease in happiness is probably rather greater—with a hint that men who have avoided marriage are happier than either men who married, or women, on average.

Feminist law making, enforced by intimidation, has failed to make either sex happier—with the possible exception of men who go their own way.4

Time for an Androcentric Law Reform Commission? Quite plausibly—if the law shifts back from gynocentrism to[ward] balance, there seems a very good chance men will accept it better.

Even more, it seems time for a major Law Reform away from using punishment to try to motivate doing things—what punishment motivates, is not doing things. If women want men’s support for motherhood—or anything—to increase, intimidation is the wrong approach.

References:

Bailey,William C., David Martin, and Louis N. Gray, 1972 “On punishment and crime [Chiricos and Waldo]: Some methodological comment.’ Social Problems (Fall) 284-28

Brown, Grant A., 2013. Ideology And Dysfunction In Family Law: How Courts Disenfranchise Fathers. Calgary and Winnipeg: Canadian Constitution Foundation and Frontier Centre For Public Policy

Koster, Olinka, 2009. “Women are more unhappy despite 40 years of feminism, claims study.” Daily Mail Online, 1 June.

Martin, J. David, and Louis N. Gray, 1969 “Punishment and deterrence: Another analysis of Gibbs’ data” Social Science Quarterly 50 (September) 389-395

Murrow, David, 2015. “Our New Moral Framework.” Church for Men website, September.

Nathanson, Paul, and Katherine K. Young, 2006. Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination against Men Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Shackleton, David, 1995. “The War Against Men”. Everyman, Issue #28 (Nov-Dec)

Shackleton, David, 1999. “Feminism Exposed: Our blindness to feminine evil”. Everyman, Issue #35 (Jan/Feb)

Notes:

1. The phrase, “the will of Her Majesty”, is still worth repeating sometimes; because it reminds us that the Law is often imposed: If and when it represents what the people actually want, what’s to impose?

2. Assault is a more emotional activity than fraud, spitting on the sidewalk, or theft; so the threat of punishment is not always a good deterrent. There are more factors involved, too: The more quickly the punishment follows the act, the more effective it is; and certainty of punishment is more effective than severity. (Martin and Gray, 1969; Bailey, Martin and Gray, 1972)`

3. A parallel “fear” exists relative to strangers passing one’s car in a large public parking lot. Most passing strangers are worthy of trust—they won’t break into an unlocked car. A small fraction will break in and steal—so not knowing if one of that fraction will pass by while we are away from the car—we lock it.

4. Old-fashioned conditioning psychology “sees” this outcome as quite reasonable. To repeat: Punishment is a good way to suppress unwanted behaviour, and a very poor way to get others to do specific things you want from them. Intimidation can drive men out of the economy, even out of the country, better than it can make them be Nice.

 

Posted in Davd, Gender Equality, Human Nature, Marriage-and-Family Reform | Leave a comment

The Outdoor Piss Test

Posted on March 17, 2016 by Davd

.. Is This One Reason Men are More Rural than Women?
(c) 2016, Davd

I’d already been in a Big City too long, four months before i escaped to a village. Walking Fritz two or three times each day, showed me an indicator,

Walking Fritz down the streets and alleys, i often noticed that i had to hurry back indoors—to piss. I was feeling OK otherwise, Fritz wanted to keep walking, but because we were in a city i had to cut our walk short .. to urinate in a toilet. Hell, i might even get arrested if i didn’t go hide, to piss.

Back at Camp 1511, or on Vancouver Island: I just picked a tree to fertilize, and unzipped my pants. Occasionally i might have to walk a minute or less to be out of sight of others. We could walk for hours, as far as bladder capacity was concerned—because we could empty those bladders and do good by emptying them, and then walk on.

I gained from pissing away what my kidneys had filtered out as waste; and the tree also gained because that same waste, down by its roots, became fertilizer.

Ecologically, the tree and i “closed the nutrient cycle.” If it was an apple tree, that tree might combine some of those chemicals which had become waste for me to piss away, with sugars made in its leaves, and produce fruit for me and my friends to eat. Months later, pissing under the same tree, i might return a few molecules of those nutrients back to the tree a second time.

That’s how ecology ought to work.

In cities, it doesn’t: Pissing under trees is to put it mildly, bad manners. What’s more, there are so many people and so few trees in a square kilometre of city, that the trees could possibly “become overloaded.” So it is my duty, not only by way of being Nice, but also because cities are crowded, to hold my bladder until i can hurry inside to use a toilet—even if poor Fritz gets a shorter walk than he ought.

My personal attitude, my urinary measure of overcrowding, is that my kind of place is where i can piss while walking the dog. That’s not all there is to overcrowding, not nearly; the urinary measure of “my kind of place” is an incomplete, “negative” measure. But it’s true as far as it reaches.

Two further comments might be worth reading. First, as a matter of species diversity: My kind of place is a good place for dogs… and that seems generally true. Quite apart from being able to take longer walks without looking for a toilet to hide in, being in a dog friendly place is healthier for a man.

Second—and obvious when you think about it—is that women don’t find the freedom to piss outdoors as valuable as we men do. It’s more bother for them, to put it politely. In summer they run more risk of blackfly and mosquito bites; in winter, more risk of frostbite. And when the evening is over, it’s naturally a men’s job to piss out the campfire.

 

Posted in Davd, Male Lifestyle, Men's Health | Leave a comment

Fragile’s Not the Word:

Posted on March 6, 2016 by Davd

Essay Review of Pinker, Susan, 2008. The Sexual Paradox: Extreme Men, Gifted Women and the Real Gender Gap.
[no city listed in flyleaf] Random House of Canada; New York: Simon and Schuster.
(c) 2016, Davd

I borrowed this book from the Public Library to see what more i could learn about a “variance difference phenomenon”. There was much more to be learned here, than just that; and it has been a valuable read; but some syntheses Ms. [Dre?} Pinker offers appear mistaken, as often happens when the gynocentric is not balanced by the androcentric.

First, then, the variance difference: Boys’ and girls’, and men’e and women’s ability scores average about the same (as i recall being told in my student days, this is because the psychometricians set up the tests to get the same averages for both sexes); but boys’ scores are significantly more variable:

Even though the two sexes are well matched in most areas, including intelligence, there are fewer women than men at the extreme ends of the normal distribution. Men are simply more variable. Their ‘means,’ or the average scores for the group, are roughly the same as those for women, but their individual scores are scattered more widely. So there are more very stupid men and more very smart men, more extremely lazy ones and more willing to kill themselves with work. [p. 13, discussion continues to p. 18, citing among others Deary, 2003; Benbow and Stanley, 1980, Halpern, 2000, and the author’s brother Steven Pinker, 2002]

If a profession requires very high ability, or intense application to one kind of work, it will select from a part of the population distribution where male people predominate.

There seems to be one exception: Girls and women average higher in language aptitudes [e.g. 36-7, 45-47, 75-77]. (Boys and men have higher mathematical aptitudes—which accentuates the variance difference when a line of work or a university selects for those who are the very best at maths.) So men of exceptional language skill (e.g. Churchill, Jefferson, Lincoln, Pascal, Solzhenitsyn, Tolstoy, Steinbeck, Wells), and women of exceptional mathematical skill, are more different from the general run of their sexes, than the other way ’round.

Pinker names a second female advantage, empathy [ch 4]; and cites some fairly impressive research. But i’m not as nearly convinced as i am about language; men and women must share a common language more than a common sense of empathy; and Norah Vincent (2006), for instance, was surprised to see that men among whom she “passed as one of them” were attuned to one another in ways that Vincent herself missed.

Pinker rather thoroughly refutes the “glass ceiling” notion, and my blog on that subject cited her extensively. Her third chapter [pp. 62-91] contains several interview statements by educated women, that they were not disadvantaged and may have been advantaged. Again on pp. 92-97, she reports that women she interviewed got extra help to achieve senior management rank… but many chose to have more family time, … in particular, caring for ill or newborn, family members, rather than work as senior management are expected to do. On p. 124, she writes: “Even with the dramatic changes in customs, laws, and social expectations over the past four decades, there are aspects of women’s work preferences that are likely to stay the same—for example, a desire to stay in a position that accommodates family, or to find work that exploits a talent for connecting with people.”

Men are more likely to choose and enjoy intensive, relatively solitary work; women, more likely to insist on work which is more sociable. Or one could as fairly write, “More men are willing to choose and able to enjoy intensive, relatively solitary work ….” Men on average, choose sociable. work if they can get it at decent pay rates, and prefer family time to lonely career eminence… but women are more insistent about it.

On p. 159, she writes: “A study of Harvard law graduates found that women were more likely than men to be hired at elite firms, but ten years later only a quarter of the women had stayed on to become partners (meanwhile, half the men did.)” “Greedy” jobs, as she terms them, repel most women and a smaller majority of men; while many women who stay in such jobs become “machoid”, hiding heart attacks and cancer diagnoses.

So even fewer women than men, are at the top in ability, and even fewer are single-minded in the application of their talents. The “top” jobs that the Glass Ceiling concept claims women are denied, call for—very high ability and single-minded application. More men have both, than women—many rather than a few more—though even the men are a small minority of our sex.

Rather than a glass ceiling, then, there are two or three sex differences, working to put far more men than women in “top jobs.” It is not against women, but in favour of extremely high ability and intense application, that the biases work, and they are biases built into competitive, capitalist, even bureaucratic societies.

The “third sex difference” is distinct from, but easily confused with, the variance difference: Boys and men are more likely to have very high ability in one aspect of mental life, with ability levels at or below average in others1; while women are more likely to be high in all abilities, average in all, or low in all.

“On the one hand” such a combination of high and low abilities, leaves many men with clearer guidance as to what sort of work to do: Work your strength and not your weakness. In contrast, a woman with several strengths, must choose; while a man with one, has his path set clear before him.

“On the other hand”, a man with but one or two strengths loses less than a woman—or a man—with many, in taking up a “greedy job”. He has fewer ways to use his time “strongly”. Single-minded application comes more naturally to a man with few but great talents, than to a woman with many very good ones. Pinker didn’t seem to notice this particular cause-effect possibility.

(It’s worth mentioning, finally, that some men have multiple talents—a smaller fraction of all men, if Dre. Pinker has got these patterns right, than women with multiple talents are of all women, but still a large number of men. So it’s not a one-sex predicament.)

This book is a good “secondary source”—a source of many citations to reputable research, with worthwhile discussion of the primary studies and of other “secondary” books and articles—on sex and gender differences in abilities and in motivation. (Sex differences, to try to clarify the distinction, are innate; while gender differences are more learned than innate.) Susan Pinker does useful service in chronicling the effort to eliminate gender differences, and the stubborn persistence of sex differences in motivation.

To summarize yet again, since this is important and often mis-stated: Men tend to have more-variable abilities, both in the sense of varying more in each area of ability, and also in more often having very high abilities in some areas combined with average and low abilities in other areas. We are more likely to enjoy working alone or with just a few very well known colleagues. Women tend to be all high, all mediocre, or all low in their individual abilities; and to prefer larger groups and work that includes socializing. Thus, the “glass ceiling” is a mistaken expression; what actually produces a great male preponderance “at the top”, is the demand many, arguably most “top jobs” make for extremely high ability and extensively great application to a fairly narrow kind of work. More men than women have the extremely high ability and also the extensively great application.

And since many, probably most modern jobs call for a few, usually narrowly grouped abilities, many boys who didn’t do well in school where they had to sit still, be Nice, and pass a wide variety of subjects, mature into men who succeed at a job fitted to the abilities they do have (and often more tolerant of standing, moving around, and somewhat rude manners, than a schoolroom). It’s not that the world is biased against girls (this book demonstrates that it is not) but because school is organized around girls and their more compliant, sit-still characters, that boys do better relative to their school performance, after leaving school.

Maybe it’s school that is biased, and maybe the talents of many boys could be better nurtured and applied.

Discussion:

“Equal opportunity for women, a principle I hold dear ….” [17] could be called the foundation, or one wall of the foundation, of this book; and it underlies a basic fairness and clarity of fact, which makes the book so valuable. Too many Feminists, too much of Feminism, have sought and often won privilege, better-than-equal opportunity, for women and girls, and misused the word equality in the process. Nathanson and Young, 2006, is one of the better sources documenting this. Pinker really means equal opportunity, not privilege for women, and in the winter of 2015-16, that implies improvements in the status of men. It is no surprise that she dedicates the book to a [male kinsman, probably husband], names two sons and a daughter, and cites a brother as one of her important sources. Her social formation respected both sexes, and so does her book.

Still, this will be awkward reading for many men, in many places; because its perspective is quite gynocentric. She sees the world, human nature, and her specific subject matter in a woman’s way and writes in a woman’s patois.

It seems absurdly inconsistent to a man, for instance, to read that “Andrew”, a tall, self-confident body-builder working in the challenging milieu of a high-ranking commercial kitchen, is “fragile”. To a school psychologist, whose work is “about” passing reading and other required subjects, his dyslexia is a fragility; to the chef of the kitchen where he works, it is no problem if he can read the smaller vocabulary involved in meal orders. To a woman whose sex is more skilled on average at language, the weakness Andrew has finessed rather than overcoming, might remain a fragility; to other men, “he does his job and does it well.”

She does have a tendency to treat not the femme herself, so much as the schoolroom, as the criterial model from which other ways of employing the mind2 are to be treated as deviations. Since she worked for many years as a school psychologist, this is not entirely surprising. Likely she enjoyed her work and felt good about its effects. .. but at the same time, her text goes in and out of accepting the schoolroom standards based on the normal girl as the typical pupil3, and boys’ different ways as behaviour problems.

Are men in fact emotionally or empathetically inferior? Or is our way of showing emotions and assessing them, simply so far from the present day gynocentric standard or as Pinker would write, “vanilla model”, that it seems inferior to those who follow the standard?

No, men are not imperfect women any more than women are imperfect men; now let me add, that neither nearly perfect men, nor nearly perfect women, even approximate the odd variation on humanity who loves a “greedy job”. Those who love greedy jobs, really love them, and those who made those jobs to their own tastes and specifications4, are about as typical of humanity as are Buddhist monks. We happen to have had a society, in Canada, the US, [should i add the USSR?] and several other so-called “developed economies”, that over-rewarded the lovers of greedy bureaucratic and profit motive jobs, but not the monks. A majority of both happen to be male.

The cheap abundant “raw materials” that made these industrial economies able to support so many bureaucrats, sales representatives, advertising workers, financial number crunchers, etc. ad. naus., who produce no subsistence themselves, in addition to artists, engineers and scientists who might or might not—those resources are no longer so abundant; and the fraction of non subsistence-producers they can support is in decline.

In a 21st Century where resource efficiency matters more and more rather than less and less, the [frankly, awesome] efficiency of the “guided human muscle” will regain its pre-Industrial prominence. When the work is heavier and employs the large muscles, men’s guided muscles are much more powerful—and accurate—on average, than women’s. “It would only be natural,” to encourage boys who are capable but not brilliant, into skilled manual trades; and see that they are well paid for good, increasingly important work.

We will continue to benefit from scientific and engineering genius, and from mothering well done. There will continue to be ways to misuse men’s and women’s strengths. At the end of the day, perhaps instead of “top jobs” there should be decision circles and conciliar direct democracy, and men’s work especially should be more diverse.

Some References:

Baumeister, Roy F., 2011, Is There Anything Good About Men? New York: Oxford University Press.

Benbow, Persson Camilla, and Julian Stanley, 1980. “Sex Differences in Mathematical Ability: Fact or Artifact?” Science 210: 1262-64.

Deary, Ian J. et al, 2003. “Population differences in IQ at age 11: The Scottish Mental Survey 1932. Intelligence 32.

Groth, Miles 2012. Review of Roy F. Baumeister, 2011, Is There Anything Good About Men? New York: Oxford University Press. New Male Studies v. 1 Issue 1: 116-120.

Halpern, Diane F., 2000. Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities. Mahwah, N.J. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Nathanson, Paul, and Katherine K. Young, 2006. Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination against Men Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Pinker, Stephen, 2002: The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. NY: Viking.

Vincent, Norah, 2006. Self Made Man: One Woman’s Year Disguised as a Man. New York: Viking Penguin

Notes:

1. This book mentions handicaps more than mediocrity; my impression is that men are more likely than women to be extremely capable in one or a few areas, and mediocre (which means not subnormal, but ordinary or average) in others.

2. and the body, which in a schoolroom can be a hand to write and ears to hear, the rest being told to sit still and be quiet

3. In my grandfather’s German, student meant post-secondary.

4. .. or could it be that the profit motive and bureaucracy made those jobs?.. based on their limited objectives and limited notions of efficiency?

 

Posted in Book reviews, Davd, Gender Equality, Human Nature | Leave a comment

Linguine with Mussel Sauce

Posted on February 17, 2016 by Davd

…Some other kinds of pasta will also do.
(c) 2016, Davd

It was at a restaurant in or near Minneapolis, some 30-40 years ago, that i first ordered Linguine with Clam Sauce. I had been a few years away from the ocean and it was the least expensive seafood item on the menu—plus, it seemed likely some seasoning skill would be involved… and some was. The meal was memorable enough that i ordered that item again from time to time, in other restaurants.

I made Linguine with Clam Sauce occasionally when living on Vancouver Island, where good clams of the right kinds were abundant on the east-Island beaches; and the basic fourfold seasoning that works well with turkey, chicken, chowders, and some pork dishes, worked well in clam sauce: Sage, Celery, Onion, and Pepper.

Recently, here in Edmonton, i found some frozen cooked mussels, without shells, for a price per weight lower than the price of ground beef. I bought a bag, 2-3 pounds or maybe four, and put them in the freezer. I wasn’t quite ready to imitate exactly the sauce i’d made with clams, for two reasons: First, these were cooked and frozen, so i wouldn’t have the cooking liquid that i had to make clam sauce. Second, i knew from experience that mussels have a stronger, slightly “smoky” flavour when compared with clams.

I’d used mussels-and-broth in chowders and it had served well; but i was doubtful of using mussels without that broth. The solution to the predicament turned out to be cheap bacon. I had a package that contained several half slices with much more fat than meat, but decently smoked; so i tried cooking a generous fatty half slice, using the fat it left in the pan to lightly brown chopped onion and crumbling the bacon itself into the sauce with or before the mussels.*

It worked, so here is the technique, thrice tested.

Start with a cast iron frying pan or, if you’re cooking for five or more people, you might prefer a “Dutch oven”. Season it with oil or pork fat*—beef or chicken fat might add a taste that makes it less enjoyable rather than better. You can use an unseasoned pan and heat it slowly with some bacon fat; i prefer to season it first if there is time.

In bachelor format, one generous portion for one man, i put in a half slice of fat bacon, and cook it fairly slowly until it’s a pleasant tan color—by which time there will be a thin layer of liquid bacon fat in the pan.

If you’re going to cook your pasta at the same time as the sauce is cooking, then start the water boiling for that pasta while the bacon cooks. It’s OK if the pasts is cooked before the sauce is ready, and just sits and waits; but you won’t want to make the sauce wait for the pasta.

While the bacon is cooking is a good time to chop the onion, celery, and if you want some, carrot. I make a lot of carrot-raisin salad in the winter, and my rotary shredder leaves a thin strip of carrot that isn’t shredded well enough for salad; i save these and chop them into soups and sauces. Carrot, at least two chefs have told me, improves almost any soup or sauce; and of course, it’s good for you. I cut the carrot quite fine for this technique, smaller than i cut the celery or onion.

The onion—which will go in first—should be chopped small enough that you won’t feel it as distinct pieces when you eat it cooked soft in the sauce; the sauce can have a texture rather than being smooth, but this isn’t chowder, stew, or even salsa picante… it’s a sauce you’re making. I chopped, for one man’s one meal, between a quarter and a third of a cup of onion, chopped volume.. Since onions are layered in structure, not solid like potatoes or beets, i usually take two slices of an onion, lay them flat, and chop them with the vegetable knife, down to where no piece has any dimension longer than a quarter inch [6 mm].

Since the celery, like the onion, will cook quite soft quite quickly, i take a 5-6 inch [12-15 cm] piece from one of the outer stalks, cut it in half, slice each half into 3-4 pieces lengthwise, lay all those pieces parallel, and cut across them every eighth of an inch [3mm] or less. This should yield at least a quarter cup of chopped celery. The carrots have a harder texture and cook up more slowly, so i chop them quite fine.

Take out the bacon when its fat is tan, and it’s crisp; and leave it to cool (I put it on a spatula, because i usually keep one handy on or near the stove.) Turn up the heat a little and add the chopped onion. Let this start to brown but not go dark, then add some vegetable stock, the bacon, crumbled as you put it back, and the chopped carrot and celery. Sprinkle sage and pepper on the sauce while it’s heating back to boiling, cover the pan, lower the heat, and let it simmer for at least five minutes.

Then add the mussels (I put in about a dozen, and the ones i have are about an inch long); and since mine are frozen, i have to wait a few minutes for the pan to re-heat again to boiling. Simmer for another 5-10 minutes, and i’d suggest more nearly ten. While they simmer, take a less than heaping forkful of corn starch, add it to a small amount of vegetable stock, and stir it in. The rule is to add the starch to the liquid; and a fork is best for the stirring.

When the mussels are hot, and have given some of their flavour to the sauce, add the water and starch, stir it through the sauce, and let it heat just until it starts to bubble—at which point the whitish colour of the starch will disappear and the sauce become thicker. The sauce is now ready: Turn off the power, as soon as the bubbling starts and the sauce thickens, and if you’re adding cold cooked pasta, you can do it a half minute later. The boiling hot mussels and sauce will average out with the cold pasta, and your meal will be at eating temperature.

Linguine, i believe, are the best shape of pasta to use with clam or mussel sauce; but fettuccine [which i used in my trials], rotini, fusilli, and probably “sea shell” pasta, should do quite well enough. All these have about the same thickness; it’s just that to avoid a really messy job of eating long strings, and to be able to take one bite containing both mussel and pasta, you should probably cut linguine or fettuccine down to two inch lengths or shorter. Spaghetti will work with this sauce, if that’s the only kind of pasta you have handy—but don’t grab just any pasta at all.

If i write that fettuccine, fusilli or rotini, even spaghetti should work well enough with this technique, don’t take that as encouragement to get really silly and put in, for instance, penne, orzo, or elbow macaroni. (I can think of two good dressings to put on elbow macaroni: Cheese [with a little pepper and chives if you have some handy], or mayonnaise, as part of a macaroni salad. Myself, i almost never buy elbow macaroni, because i like potatoes at least as well with cheese. and potatoes make a better protein balance with cheese than macaroni does; while rotini, fusilli, and shell shaped pasta are at least as good as elbows as a shape for pasta salad.

Don’t try vermicelli or even spaghettini with mussel sauce, either. The wrong shape of pasta won’t make you sick, but it won’t make you as happy an eating experience, either—the mussels are too large relative to thin thin pasta..

So there, with plenty of commentary and a bit of a story, is a technique you can use often if you live near a seacoast, and “from time to time” if you don’t. The sauce, you’ll notice when the winter beefsteak blog appears, is not quite the same as for beefsteak and pasta, but really quite similar. The SCOP seasoning check-list is something well worth learning, along with its variations for beef; it will make you a better cook, and will make your sauces and [seafood and poultry] soups impressively more savoury than the ones sold in cans and jars.

Notes:

* Mussels aren’t Kosher, so there’s no point trying to find an alternative to bacon for devout Jewish readers. (About Halal and other dietary disciplines, i still know too little to comment.)

 

Posted in Davd, Food | Leave a comment

The Devil Herself

Posted on February 4, 2016 by Davd

… is hiding behind male pronouns.
(c) 2016, Davd

Evil is not male. Lorena Bobbitt cutting off her husband’s penis, and a few parallel, less famous incidents were no less evil because their perpetrators had ovaries. Nor was what Amanda McGee did to several young women in Calgary, more recently.

Female evil is nothing new nor recent—nor is it obsolete. H.G. Wells [1949: 350-1] describes Olympias, the mother of Alexander the Great, as evil. We might possibly say the same of the General Motors executive who lied when she said she was widowed, She had “a love affair” with a recently retired union executive, and even got engaged to him. Then, when he hired a detective and learned she was actually married—a woman set fire to his house [Vyhnak, 2011].

Recent research has shown women to be less honest than men, if anything. A 2003 study found that “The number of sexual partners a woman reported nearly doubled when women thought they were hooked up to a lie detector machine.” Men reported about the same number with or without the polygraph.

Norah Vincent [2006] noticed something similar in a very nonsexual activity:
“When [Jim, the bowling team captain] whom I’d never met before shook my hand he gave me something real. He included me. But most of the women I’d ever shaken hands with or even hugged had held something back, as if we were in constant competition with each other, or secretly suspicious, knowing it but not knowing it, and going through the motions all the same. In my view bra burning hadn’t changed that much.

“Next I met Alan. His greeting matched Jim’s. It had a pronounced positive force behind it, a presumption of goodwill that seemed to treat me as a buddy from the start, no questions asked, unless or until I proved otherwise.” [pp. 25-6]

There is some evidence that child sexual abuse is much more a woman’s crime than a man’s. Fromuth and Burkhart [1987] found that in two samples of college men, those reporting they had been sexually abused as children, reported that the perpetrator was female 78% and 72% of the time1.

By calling evil male, then, we hide significant female evil—and i’m not talking about cows, mares, sows, or genuine bitches. Evil is human2; this is about women vis-a-vis men. I’m not claiming that women are more evil than men, though some recent evidence points that way. I am insisting that where equality of the sexes is the philosophical norm, that equality includes evil. It includes treating women and men as equally evil, and equally good, until they show otherwise as individuals.

When he, him, and his were the generic human pronouns, then “the Devil himself” was in mere conformity to that common usage. It was used by Wells, probably, though he recognized Olympias as an evil woman, and the English (Canadians, Kiwis, Yanks, …) who used the generic he, likewise recognized evil women in the ancient stories of Jezebel and Potiphar’s wife [Genesis, ch. 39].3.

Unfortunately, “the Devil himself” still is standard usage… when in fairness, in equality rather than misandry, “the Devil herself” should be at least equally common. (Why “at least”?  First, because the face of power today, in bureaucracy and in legal biases [Nathanson and Young, 2006, reviewed and summarized here], is more female than male. There are more women positioned to attract devilment, than men. Second, as “affirmative action”, to correct for the bias against men which has prevailed in depictions of and references to evil, for at least as long as i have been alive, and i’m in my 70s.)

This is not merely a Christian, Jewish, and Muslim issue. “The Devil” is a concept routinely used by agnostics, atheists. and people of many faiths… with a male pronoun. Routinely referring to the Evil One as “She” and to “the Devil herself”… that, i have not heard nor seen. It’s time for a change.

It may be worth mentioning, that spirits have no inherent gender. They can manifest as male or female. What motivates their choice of male, or of female, is unknown to mere humans; but as a good guess, the motivation is practical.

With women enjoying privilege and power, manifesting as a woman seems likely to be more valuable to those spirits, evil as well as good, than in the patriarchal days of Abraham and Moses and Muhammad. If the Ottawa bureaucracy is now more than 70% women, evil spirits have more women than men to imitate and influence, in Government. If young lawyers are well over half women, the same applies to the application of laws once passed (and having received Royal Assent in the name of a woman who has been Queen for over six decades.) The face of power today, it is fair to claim, is more female than male.

“Power corrupts” is an ancient folk maxim. It implies that the face of evil today, is also more female than male. (Yes, there is more to evil than corrupting power; corrupting power is however a very important part of the operation of evil, and i have no evidence that the other parts are mainly male; indeed, that research on lying suggests they are also, more female4.)

Meanwhile, people go on saying “the Devil himself.” In the name of accuracy (and in the additional name, less morally valid but commonly applied against men and boys, of Affirmative Action), it is time to correct that, to say “the Devil herself” at least half the time for accuracy’s sake and all the time for many years to come, if you’re catching up.

References:

Bhattacharya, Shaoni, 2003. “Fake lie-detector reveals women’s sex lies” New Scientist 14:16, 14 July

Fromuth, M. E., & Burkhart, B. R. (1987). Childhood sexual victimization among college men: Definitional and methodological issues. Violence and Victims , 2 (4), 241-253.

Nathanson, Paul, and Katherine K. Young, 2006. Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination against Men Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Vincent, Norah, 2006. Self Made Man: One Woman’s Year Disguised as a Man. New York: Viking Penguin

Vyhnak, Carola 2011 Love affair spawned at car plant crashes and burns. Toronto Star, February 23

Notes:

1. This is not as shocking as it might be, since children are in the control of women much more of the time than in that of men. It is shocking enough, especially to those who might pretend that women never do such evil things, to refute any notion that custody of children should be usually or normally given to women. The care of children past weaning should be decided on a better basis than sex or gender.

2. I can’t state for certain, that evil is absolutely and solely human; the most nearly precise assessment is that among earthly life, it is predominantly human.

3, When Indira Gandhi ordered her army to storm the Sikh Golden Temple in Amritsar, Sikhs at least called that, evil. And Olympias, Alexander’s mother, was well outside the Abrahamic religions also.

4. The research on sexual abuse of children is not as easy to summarize [e.g. Footnote 1]

 

Posted in Davd, Female Privilege, Gender Equality | Leave a comment

Canadian Winter Stir-Fry

Posted on January 23, 2016 by Davd

… Not Nearly as Expensive:
(c) 2016, Davd

Day-to-day cooking should not need expensive ingredients. A good cook should be able to make the good, staple foods taste delicious—not exquisite, maybe, but delicious. As seasons go ’round and prices change over the years, some foods may go from staple to expensive, as broccoli and zucchini do from summer to winter, and back again; and shrimp have gone up in the past ten years. Some would say beef is now too expensive for regular cooking—but i expect beef prices to ease sooner than shrimp prices, and indeed this January 2016, beef can be bought for less per kilo than can shrimp. I’m eating less beef; i haven’t bought shrimp in six months or longer.1

In a Canadian winter, especially this winter when the Canadian dollar is “down”2, economical cooking means making good use of four basic winter vegetables: Cabbage, carrots, onions, and bean sprouts.3  With pork or chicken, plus of course rice and soy sauce, those first four basic winter vegetables can make you a delicious, economical, nourishing meal.

The meat should be cut no larger than 1”[25 mm] on its longest dimension, and ¼” [,7 cm] on its thinnest. This will facilitate browning and make sure it is fully cooked. The onions should be chopped fairly small, but not “fine,” The cabbage and carrots should be in strips which may be a wee bit longer than the meat [maybe 3 cm] but thinner—an eighth of an inch, or 3mm, would be about ideal. (The [mung] bean sprouts are the size they are, and need no cutting, duuuuuuuhhh.) If you have mushrooms (and in Edmonton in January 2016, mushrooms cost less than half the per pound price of broccoli!) they can be cut roughly the size of the pieces of meat.

I haven’t used a wok in months, perhaps years. They are useful and effective, but awkward to fit in and work around in an undersized kitchen; and i can do an acceptable job with a frying pan—of which i have three good cast iron examples.

Stir-fry technique starts with hot oil4 in a seasoned pan. Then you put in the meat, and as it starts showing that it’s browned, the onions. When the onions are lightly browned, add the carrots (and mushrooms if you have them), and almost immediately, some vegetable stock. (If you have plenty of meat stock to go with cooked meat that you are using, add that; with raw meat or smoked ham, vegetable stock will do fine.) Add a little soy sauce also, lower the heat under the pan, and cover while you are cutting or assembling the carrots and cabbage.

If you’re new to cutting carrots into small strips, start at an easy pace rather than hurrying; the knife can slip because carrots are cylindrical rather than rectangular in shape. It helps to cut them in half lengthwise, and lay the flat sides on the cutting board. It helps to use a vegetable knife rather than a generic cook’s knife. Until you get used to cutting carrots into strips, cut them before you start cooking, so you won’t feel a need to rush.

Cabbage can be cut more easily because it naturally comes layered, and in more neatly flat layers than onions. I sometimes use Fiskars cook’s scissors, sometimes a vegetable knife [which in my case is also Fiskars brand—both items made in Finland5.]

After a minute “or three” of wet cooking, check the stock level and if the carrots are getting close to tender, add the cabbage. After another “minute or three” add the bean sprouts. The goal is to have sprouts, cabbage, and carrots, three very different vegetables, all at the bright and slightly crisp state at the same time the meat and mushrooms are just fully cooked.

If you want a thickened sauce, mix some corn starch into cool to cold stock, stirring preferably with a fork,while the vegetables are cooking. Add this when the sprouts and cabbage brighten, quickly stir into the hot stock with a fork, and as the stock returns to a boil, it will thicken.

You can add rice to the pan, or put the rice on plates and then top it with the meat, vegetables, and sauce. A bachelor eating alone can add the rice and eat from the pan, for minimum dishwashing burden.

As you get used to making stir-fry meals, you’ll also get used to how fast the meat and vegetables cook in your particular pan on your particular stove; and to how much soy sauce to add, when. You might get it just right the first try; but be willing to settle for “pretty good” on the early efforts. You are using economical foodstuffs to make an “upper middle grade”, one-dish meal that can even become a presentation item. (It does not, however, carry well to potlucks away from home. It should be eaten within minutes of becoming done.)

If you “run into” a specially low price on sweet bell peppers, pineapple, or broccoli, they are very good in stir-fry. I tend to steam broccoli tops and slice the peeled stems like i do carrots, but a little thicker, into stir-fry. When using broccoli, reduce the cabbage accordingly.

I stir-fry often, with chicken, ham6, raw pork, sometimes leftover beef. Fish hasn’t worked well for me stir-fried with vegetables; and has been delicious steamed, or poached in salsa (or for the stronger, fattier fishes, grilled, fried, pickled, or smoked. Salmon and trout are good raw-salted.) Chicken “burgers” have been an economical form of mostly meat with a little breading, which has also worked for stir-fry meals.

This year, the high US dollar and low Canadian dollar, plus the fact that most Canadian stores stock US rather than Canadian grown vegetables, has driven prices well above a dollar per pound for most.

The sensible answer to Canada’s vegetable supply predicament is to grow plenty of good winter vegetables here, store them as our grandparents did (and have larger scale storage for urban stores), and use them as our staples when our gardens are not producing. Stir-fry is one way to do that which is quite different in taste and texture than the Euro-Canadian staple, stew. If the Asians who showed us the basic technique, insist on exotic vegetables, let them; i’ve learned to use staple vegetables i can grow myself to produce a reliably good result with chicken, ham, pork, and when it’s less expensive, beef. (Meatless stir-fry also works; but with meat, it has better protein balance.)

Part of the pleasure of eating, is having chowder from time to time, Likewise for stew, steamed fish, pork chops and porridge, … and stir-fry. Adding this technique to your repertoire will make your meals more diverse and enjoyable for many winters to come—and come fresh garden broccoli, beans, and tomatoes, those will make a stir-fry repertoire different enough to give a change of pace. Then next winter, the winter version will be less repetitious—and again, nourishing goodness from plain staple foods.

 Notes:

1. This fall, pink and then sockeye salmon have been the most economical seafood in Edmonton (and Edmonton is far indeed from being a port city.) From what all i know, they are more nourishing than shrimp. So while six years and longer ago i ate quite a lot of shrimp and very little sockeye, this winter i eat shrimp only when somebody else serves it, but lots of salmon. That calls for quite a change in cooking techniques. Changing from summer to winter stir-fry, doesn’t.

2. In the stores in mid-January, i looked at the bags of carrots and saw California, not Canada, as the place of origin. I know damn well that Canadian grown carrots can be stored in sawdust or even their own greens, in buckets with air holes too small to admit mice, in a cold room or cellar. That’s how i stored my home grown carrots last winter and the winter before.

3. Sorry, but so far i haven’t had any good experiences using beets, parsnips, or rutabagas in stir-fry. I’ve already written-up a good, easy way to cook beets that provides a change from plain boiling; i eat turnips white and yellow, sliced raw with a sprinkling of salt, or as lazy man’s pickles; and parsnips remain outside the range of my cooking. (Anyone care to tell me the great, easy way to really enjoy them? There’s a contact link you can click near the top of the page.)

4. If you are cooking children and have some saved chicken fat, or likewise for beef, pork, or turkey, use that or a mixture of fat from your meat animal, and canola oil. Olive oil does not usually perform well at meat browning temperatures; US readers might want to use corn or safflower oil. Soybean oil will work, but with canola oil so inexpensive in Canada and my preferring its taste, i use canola.

5. I’ve been quite satisfied by Fiskars kitchen and garden tools made in Finland, where the firm originated; but not with Fiskars garden tools made in China. Quality control is a fairly general problem with “outsourced production”… indeed, “Made in Japan” once symbolized low quality, while today, Japanese goods are respected for the same high quality that made the katana famous centuries ago.

6. Mushrooms don’t seem to go as well with ham as with other meats.

 

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Tolerating two “Foul-Mouthed” Women

Posted on January 16, 2016 by Davd

… as seen on the Edmonton bus system:
(c) 2016, Davd

On the way to church one recent morning, the bus was at least half full. Edmonton City Transit was making expenses, i’d say, maybe doing better than that, on that post rush hour run; and i was glad; because the more people ride the buses, the more likely they will be rescheduled to run more often. Nobody i have ever met likes waiting around for a bus in January in Canada’s Prairie Provinces.

I did find a seat facing the back door, with an empty seat between me and a young man. After a mile or two, he got off, and soon a young woman who had just got on, took the seat he had been using. There was one empty seat between her and me; and i was thinking mostly about the church service i was headed toward, but also about where the bus was along its route and how soon it might reach the stop where i should “get off and walk.”

She got out her mobile telephone and called someone. Her first remarks were about food; and then, as or shortly after the bus crossed the Yellowhead Highway, i began to hear “F[***]” and “S[***].*” I listened just enough to make sure that—as i expected—she was not referring to copulation, nor defecation. The rude words were used for some other reason, than to say what they mean.

For two or three miles she continued to use those words, never that i noticed to mean anything like their meaning in say, cattle or pig farming. She did not shout them, but they were the most prominent words she said; i’m more than 90% convinced that if she used any other words as often, those were common words like “and”, “he,” “if”, “she”, and “the”. Nobody tried to offer her any lessons in good manners; all of the 30-50 people on that bus ignored, or pretended to ignore, the “vulgarity”

I don’t mind hearing those words used accurately*. Indeed, i use them myself on those fairly rare occasions when i am talking about what they mean—and am not in the hearing of someone who i know considers them offensive, nor in a place full of strangers like (for instance) a city bus.

It occurred to me, as i was getting off the bus to walk to the church, that i haven’t heard any men, or boys, using those same words on a bus. If i or another man on the bus had used them equally often, methinks he very, very likely would have been shamed. If 50-60 years ago the F-word and the S-word were sometimes tolerated when spoken by working-class men and larger boys, but forbidden to decent women and girls; today the reverse is true.

One week later, on the same midweek “ride to church” a different woman, of a different race, was repeatedly “foul mouthed” on the bus; and again, no one intervened.

I don’t know the women’s names; i don’t want to know them. Neither is a personage to me, any more than the “foul mouthed” boys and occasional young men were, who used such language on street corners in the 1950s. What’s important about them, from my perspective anyway, is that they each used that kind of language, many times, without good reason, in a confined public bus full of strangers; and even more important, were tolerated, more tolerated than if they had been male.

Notes:

This is not a statistical social survey; it’s a report of one incident involving the toleration of a hundred or more repetitions of the two standard “dirty words”, by a few dozen bus riders, It’s the kind of typification that anthropological field work often contains: A reaction or lack of one, is reported as typical because many people haphazardly assembled, do or do not react to behaviour. Its context includes the presence and absence of the behaviour in populations observed at other times, who represent the same society. In this case the context also includes past reactions to the same behaviour: 50-60 years ago, uses of the F- and S-words by women were far less tolerated than uses by men. In this decade, uses by men are less tolerated, as indicated by their rarity as well as by reactions. (cf. Nathanson and Young, 2006: ch 3, 39-40, 49-50).

I can’t recall hearing any men using such rude language—definitely not so much rude language—on the bus, in the four months i’ve been riding Edmonton Transit. Between 40% and 60% of the people riding with me have been men and boys, of all races—as the women have been of all races.

* I find this website’s “PG-13” policy vexing at times, and this is one of them, but it does remind me that if any reader wants to go into the erotica selling business, “The F-Word” would be a cute name for an erotic boutique.

 

References:

Davd, 2012. “If The Genders Be Reversed: a Test for Equal Treatment. The Spearhead website [no longer accessible] Reprinted May 2015, on this everyman.ca site.

Nathanson, Paul, and Katherine K. Young, 2006. Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination against Men Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

 

Posted in Davd, Female Privilege | Leave a comment

New Year’s Resolutions

Posted on January 2, 2016 by Davd

… some Review Principles for 2016:
(c) 2016, Davd

Because i had to re-install my Linux operating system New Year’s Eve, this post not only won’t get up that day; by the time it is published, it will be January 2nd in English time, which for some reason, seems to be what the everyman.ca web server uses. But New Year’s Resolutions are famous for not being kept. If you’re not going to commit the effort to keep them, don’t say them. This is about making resolutions worth keeping. It might help you make resolutions after The Day, or edit those you made.

Remember, this is voluntary. You don’t need to make New Year’s Resolutions! And if a “resolution” is not expressing your personal philosophy of life, it is really not yours—it’s somebody else’s resolution imposed on you. For instance, if you are fat, overweight anyway, and you’re getting pressured to resolve to lose weight, that’s not a resolution, it’s a capitulation. If the person putting on the weight loss pressure is your Mother, or your wife, or anyone who cooks your food—then rather than resolve to lose weight, you can agree to eat what they cook for you—but there are better ways to lose weight than “dieting,” as we shall see.

That same classic post-holiday resolution, “to lose weight”, is fine if you want to weigh less badly enough, to plan how you will lose that weight. Then it’s a real resolution. I intend to lose some weight myself, but i’m not making that a resolution. In the form of a resolution, i’m resolving to get out of the Big City1 to someplace where i get lots of exercise, including arm and shoulder muscle exercise, and have men friends around me... and the guiding principles that follow all support that… indeed, helped me to word it.

1. Don’t let Feminism, or any other-people’s perspective, be a basis for how you think and feel about yourself! Because this is a men’s website, and Feminism has been “Politically Correct” lately, it’s the ideology, the perspective, that i name first; but it’s not the only one that may try to tell you how to think and feel.

Instead of letting some ideology from outside tell you what to think and-or feel, make personal choices of perspective and “ideology”. Choose your outlooks, and your beliefs. Maybe you have chosen perspective[s] and beliefs already; if not, spending some time this year, choosing and clarifying your philosophy of life, would be an excellent specific New Year’s Resolution.

Personally, i’m Christian, meaning i have thought long and reflectively about the Christian Faith, the teachings of Jesus, and decided voluntarily to make it one of my perspectives. Not the only one—probabilistic science is another perspective that is mine by choice, and overlapping with probabilistic science, there’s ecology. Those perspectives influence what i think and feel because i have chosen them. But Feminism, i never chose, nor profit-motive capitalism, nor bureaucratic socialism—nor even the notion that punishment is the best way to motivate good behaviour. Those ideologies, those ways of seeing things, are foreign to me. Living in the countryside, there’s less pressure from them.

Refusing to let your mind be pushed around by Political Correctness, choosing and clarifying your philosophy of life, are not easy resolutions to keep. Don’t kick yourself too hard if you notice a “slip-up”. Do stop and ask, when a foreign ideology or perspective tries to boss your mind around—what’s a better basis than that, for how i feel and think? If you don’t have a philosophy of life, then forming one, or more than one, is a good resolution just because it gives you something better than yielding to social pressures, to live by.

Along with a philosophy and perspectives of your own, comes an appreciation of the difference between pleasing others by choosing company who find you pleasing, and making it the reason you do things you’d rather not.

2. Don’t try too hard to please anyone else—especially not a woman who thnks it’s your duty to please her. In my Christian philosophy of life, one of the Teachings is: Don’t judge others. Assess them, if it seems fitting, as i’ll assess “Geoff”, below; but don’t judge them and, reversing the direction, don’t let them judge you. Be good, in the sense of the classic virtues, but don’t be nice. “Being nice” amounts to letting somebody else judge your worth.

It can make sense, short of letting someone’s feelings be the chief influence on your conduct, to let people of both sexes influence you naturally. Pleasing someone is better than not pleasing him, if it costs you no more to please. It might be better if it costs you a little more to please. It’s not if you have to go to a great deal of trouble.

And you might just have noticed—i wrote “pleasing him”, not “… her”. Most of the readers of this site are men; and we are more like other men than we are like women, indeed, the sexes are more different than the races. Which implies, we benefit more from learning from other men. And because they’re more like us, other men will usually be easier and more enjoyable to please.

3. Give Yourself Enough Elbow Room: In Time, in Money, in Space:

There’s a friend i’d like to see more of, talk longer with, but he’s always “behind”. He’s late to meetings, late to meet friends, late getting home to his family. (I’ll call him Geoff because he is English and Geoff is no part of his real name.) Geoff is late for ‘most everything except his church services (which are always the same time Sunday morning). He makes promises he doesn’t turn out to have time to keep—not on rare occasions, but more often than not, that i’ve noticed.

Geoff calls himself an extrovert, and feels good about that. For other people to feel good about it also, he needs to discipline that extroversion. And even more important, he needs to provide enough time in his planning, to be available, to be present, close to when he says he will be. I’ve started avoiding Geoff, started viewing him as unreliable, not because he lacks good will or competence, but because he lacks time. He expects things to go smoothly, to take a practical efficient minimum of time, always—and that’s not realistic.

It’s not realistic to expect everything to take the length of time you estimated it would—even if you are very good at estimating. It’s not even realistic to expect traffic to always flow smoothly, or a chore to take the usual length of time. It’s not realistic to expect no interruptions if you walk to a meeting. It’s not even realistic to expect appointments to begin on time—if they did, waiting rooms would be far smaller than they are.

Allow time for “random errors and interruptions”! If you go to an appointment, a class with a scheduled time, a church service, or a meeting, plan to be ten minutes early if the journey is short (walking a few hundred metres, for instance); fifteen minutes early if it’s a few kilometres, half an hour early if it’s an hour or more one way, and an hour early if it’s two hours or more. Have something to do if you arrive early—a nearby library, for instance, a shopping errand, or some notes to work on. But if you can talk with somebody you know who’s also prudently early, and don’t see often, do that instead. Keeping your network active is a benefit of arriving early!

(Mobile phones can be used almost anywhere; so if you do have a wait of more than ten or fifteen minutes—get out your mobile phone, and you should easily find people to call and “touch base with”, people you’ve wanted to call, even phoning and “texting” chores you have to do “sometime soon” that you can do now, while you’re waiting.)

I could conjure up more examples, but i think you get the pattern: Add extra time into your schedule to make room for the random unpredictability of life. Don’t fill the day cram full with appointments, meetings, tasks that need specific times. Leave room for delays and for opportunities to keep up your friendships.

In the case of money, “elbow room” isn’t so clear, because you can borrow money but you can’t borrow time. My own philosophy has been “stay out of debt”, all the way back to my student years. I have not kept it perfectly, but i have borrowed less, for shorter times, and lived more simply, than other men (or women, that i have noticed) with similar incomes. I believe this old-fashioned perspective on money has served me well.

As for space, my resolution to get out of the Big City says much: I want to meet more people i know than people i don’t, in a day. I want to go for walks with Fritz and when he lifts his leg on a tree or a post, i want to be able to do likewise, not have to drag him back to the house early so i can use a toilet. And i can say from recent experience, that walking outdoors with other men i know, i can fertilize a tree instead of hurrying indoors to piss, and they won’t mind. Strangers are another matter.

What “enough elbow room” means specifically for you, i won’t say; maybe you have enough elbow room in your time, your personal space, and your finances, now. If you know you don’t have, a New Year’s Resolution is a good way to “explain” a change to fewer promises and more free hours, less spending and more saving.

Some of your “elbow room” time can best be spent, if you don’t use it up on delays, doing useful, manual work… work that can save you money and grow you healthier food than the stores typically have, and rural spaces make it easier.

4. Value manual labour is my fourth New Year’s Resolution guideline: Manual labour is good for your health and your thinking power. Exercise helps you avoid overweight, even reduce your weight if you’re overweight now. Twenty minutes a day ought to be your minimum.

Walking counts as exercise, and i do a lot of it myself; but a study done recently on 54 older women, showed that “upper body resistance training” (muscle building) stopped “white matter” brain deterioration while balance and flexibility exercise did not. And the muscle building participants also maintained a youthful walking speed. (As the CBC News article said, “gait often slows about 10 years before cognitive impairment.” That normal walking speed implied ten more years, for most of them, of thinking competence.) The MRI images and the walking speed both indicated, that keeping and improving their upper body strength went with keeping their brains functioning well.

Walking is good for you; letting your muscles atrophy above the waist is bad for you. And a lot of men’s work is “upper body resistance exercise”: Digging your garden by hand counts. Chopping firewood counts. Changing tires by hand, counts. Helping a friend or relative build a house or a garage, counts. Even pushing a lawn mower instead of riding one, counts. Shoveling snow counts, this time of year.

So if the job’s manageable, do shovel that snow. Do dig your garden with a spading fork. Do keep using a push mower. And do get in your own firewood: If the wood is really big in diameter, say over a foot across, accept that neighbour’s loan of a hydraulic splitter—and then go help him load, unload, and pile his firewood, to get the “upper body resistance exercise” the machine spared you, in an easier form.

Manual Labour, in the forms you most enjoy it or need to get it done, is good for your body and also for your mind. 20Th Century society over-mechanized “work”. Many things can best be done by skilled human muscle, and men have significantly more of that muscle on average, than women. Now we’re learning just how valuable manual work is to the worker, as well as the ecological state of the Earth and thus, the human condition overall.

5. Include plenty of buddy time in your future. My father went bowling and fishing, played squash and snooker, with a total of maybe two dozen buddies from work, from college, from church. He was active in the Elks Club (membership was much more widespread in his time than it seems to be today) and in his fifties, joined the Masons and became a Shriner.

My grandfather2 lived on the other side of town, near where he worked before retirement; and kept in touch with the men “from the shop.” He also had a few women friends who were buddies of a sort; i think their common interest was gardening. He belonged to the Odd Fellows, a lodge which has declined even more than the Elks. Like my father, he counted buddy time as a normal and important part of his day to day life.

Buddies—the word seems obviously to have formed as a variant of brothers—have the sort of “male bonding” relationship that men formed hunting together in prehistoric times. Men bond by sharing hard co-operative work and at least a little adversity. Violence is not a requisite. Sports can and often do substitute for the work of hunting, fishing, farming, and teamwork generally (in Grandfather’s case, maintaining railroad equipment.) Boys who grow up as brothers, bond by sharing chores and the adversities of school. I doubt if urban office work or solitary work like bus driving, can bond men like barn raising, harvesting together, fishing together, or being together on a sports [or charity] team.

For some men today, especially urban men, the first task is finding the buddies. Sports are one way that often succeeds. Hobbies, and church men’s programs, can lead to buddy friendships. Choosing a line of work where you will have plenty of men co-workers and plenty of time to work with them rather than separately, might be the best way to assure having buddies; most skilled manual tradesmen seem to have several.

Feminism attacked all-men organizations in the last century; but blessed and praised all-women organizations. That’s neither equal nor good human social life; in an old folk saying, “Turnabout is fair play.”

If you are married, or “cohabiting”, the woman in your house probably spends considerable time with her women friends. You are equally entitled to spend comparable time with men friends… and you have equal claim to supervise her women friendships, as she has to supervise your men friendships. In my boyhood years, the main rightful limit on same sex friendships, was the avoidance of using them as a means to adultery or the appearance of pursuing it.

(And it’s a sign of gender inequality, that i even saw any need to write those last two paragraphs.)

It is with your buddies that you will form much of your perspective on and philosophy of everyday life. In the days before history when human nature was being formed, men and women lived in tribes of a few dozen to a few hundred people. Men and women usually slept with a spouse, but spent more of their waking and working hours in same-sex company. Most people, including most men, would probably be happier living in that kind of social context, the one that formed our nature. It provided men [and women] with plenty of buddy time, plenty of manual, arm and hand and shoulder work, plenty of uncommitted time to philosophize and to catch up on unfinished tasks that had not got done as fast as predicted, little pressure to cater to the feelings of the other sex (and even less toleration for cruelty.)

I encourage you to reflect on those five “guiding principles,” maybe even memorize them. I also encourage you to reflect on how well they are calls to “be true to your nature.” An old short maxim-in-a-verse, famous when i was a university student, put it this way:

This above all: To thine own self, be true
and it will follow as the night the day
that thou cannot be false to any man.

References:

Lenski, Gerhard, Jean Lenski, and Patrick Nolan, 1991. Human Societies: An Introduction to Macrosociology. 6th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill. 333-5:

Turnbull, Colin M.1968. The Forest People. NY: Simon and Schuster paperback.

Notes:

1. I’m in a Big City now because i spent the autumn on prostate cancer treatment. Click that link and it will take you to the first of the Movember blogs,.. seven of them in total.

2. .. the one i knew as a boy. My other grandfather lived 800 miles away and i only met him once or twice.

 

Posted in Davd, Male Lifestyle, Men's Health | Leave a comment

Easy Picklish Beets:

Posted on December 23, 2015 by Davd

…Suitable Hot or Cold for Holiday Meals and Parties..
and Easy to Boot
(c) 2015, Davd

The beet, or beetroot in real-English, is a classic winter vegetable: It stores well in a cold [but not freezing], damp cellar. It is just about as good taken from storage in April, even May, as it was dug fresh in October or even September.

The big difference, that makes beets much more a winter than a fall vegetable, is that from early December or late November onward, the gardens have stopped producing. The sweet, slightly crunchy boiled beet slices that were outshone by broccoli, lettuce, kale, maybe fall peas in September and October, are just as good in the first four months of the New Year when those other vegetables—never mind cucumbers, tomatoes and zucchini—simply aren’t available fresh.

You can look, and there will be “fresh” vegetables in the stores. “Fresh”, in winter and the early spring “hungry gap”, means “never frozen, neither canned” After a long truck ride from the Southern United States or farther away, including probably a wait at the Border, and then the usual warehouse treatment, no vegetable is fresh.

Roots and cabbages take long waits from harvest to use, better than lettuce, cucumbers, sweet corn, etc. Broccoli, cauliflower, sometimes sweet peppers can survive the trucking in good enough shape to be worth buying—at a reasonable price. (I bought some broccoli myself, this week, at just under $1.50 per bunch, after preferring steamed cabbage with caraway for most of the autumn when broccoli cost $5-$9 per kilo.) This winter, import prices are high, and we can give thanks for the staple winter vegetables: Roots, cabbages, canned tomatoes—and bean sprouts, which you can sprout economically at home.

The usual way to cook beets is, of course, boiling. Steamed beets, i have never seen, nor baked, nor fried. They’re not bad if boiled in plain water; but a little spice and vinegar can give them a different taste, one which many people prefer and most people find a pleasant “change of pace”. Instead of one good winter vegetable, then, boiled beets can give the menu diversity of two vegetables.

Especially if you’re trying to use local produce as much as possible, that extra flavour is well worth a little extra work; and it is only a little. To make picklish beets, you simply add allspice, chopped onion, and white vinegar to the cooking water.

Of course, there are recipes for pickled beets that are much more complicated; and some of them make quite impressive pickles. If you want to “can up” a dozen or several dozen jars of pickled beets for the future, those recipes are worth trying, perhaps varying, and choosing among. What “picklish” beets offer as a technique, is quick, easy results that taste good—and taste pleasantly different from ordinary boiled beets.

For the Solstice holidays, (often mislabeled as “Christmas”) a picklish taste is generally more welcome than the plain taste of a good vegetable—hence, this technique goes up now, for the last week-plus of December* as well as for the occasional winter use until home grown vegetables are again possible in most of Canada.

Start with a beet or two—if you’re not confident how much to season it, take a small or medium sized one, and slice it about 3/8″ thick, (err toward thinner.) Put the beet slices into a cooking pot, and add water enough to cover them. Then take out the water long enough to measure its volume.

To the water, add about 10% as much vinegar: In the trial i cooked up while writing this blog, i put ¼ cup vinegar in 2½ cups of water—one tenth as much vinegar as water—and added about the same amount of chopped onion as vinegar, plus a rounded teaspoonful of allspice. That cooked two small beets. They came out so good that i recommend you start with these ratios—10 parts water, 1 part white vinegar, 1 part chopped onion, a slightly rounded teaspoonful of allspice per half litre of water—and then change to your tastes after the first batch, which i predict you’ll like well enough already.

I slice my beets about 1 cm thick—that’s three-eighths of an inch in English measure—so they will cook in a bit over half an hour’s time. Cut off the top where the leaves were, and the “tail” or taproot; and then you can slice the beet in half to make it lie flat on the cutting board, or slice it straight across if you prefer a round slice and have good control of your vegetable knife.

Use, in general, the smallest stainless steel cooking pot that will cover the smaller size element of your electric stove. If the water [plus vinegar] covers all the beet slices, you have enough liquid; and in general, that’s easier to accomplish in a smaller pot. (If you cook on a woodstove, you probably know how to choose a pot to suit the job; if in doubt, use one in which the beets and liquid total 3-5 cm [1¼” to 2″] deep.)

Bring the seasoned water to a boil on high heat, then lower the power to the level that just keeps the pot gently boiling. Expect beets, even sliced this thin, to take at least a half hour to cook—mine did, the two times i’ve made picklish beets this autumn. (The vinegar may turn the surface of the beet slices whitish while they are cooking; when my test batch had cooled from boiling to eating temperature, they were a good beet red color again.)

Don’t use a clock to decide when they are done—use a fork: The beets are cooked when a fork will easily penetrate through the slices. A sharp pointed “salad fork” is OK to use for testing them; and if in doubt as to whether the fork penetrates easily enough, let them cook a few more minutes at that gentle boil. They won’t turn from too-crisp to mushy in ten minutes.

My test batch of beet slices took more like 45 minutes than a half hour, to cook, so to be prudent, i suggest you allow at least an hour (but don’t expect to need that long.) They weren’t as strongly flavored as the pickled beets i’ve been served by households that can them up at harvest; but they were very good, and sweet despite no added sugar.

They’re good cold, too, and can go on the pickle tray at a holiday party—or any other party this winter that has a cold tray.

Notes:

* This technique should ideally have been posted around December 20; but my attention was on something more important just then. I was working with a few other men toward founding a co-operative household. So far, nothing of our activity is worth writing up; i hope to post something in the first half of 2016.

The reason i write ”mislabeled as Christmas“ is that Orthodox Christians fast during the weeks running up to December 25, and i see no Christian basis for calling typical December partying a form of homage to Jesus Christ. A feast on the 25th, or later under the Julian calendar, yes. A feast for the poor on St. Stephen’s Day [Boxing Day in British usage], yes!  Shopping mania, no!

 

Posted in Davd, Food | Leave a comment