Tuesday 4/13

And Counting

Any calorie-conscious consumer will tell you, it’s tough.  Counting is generally an easy thing to do and we’ve all been counting since we could play hide-and-seek.  It’s the adding that’s the hard part.  But even the adding isn’t the hardest thing.  There’s the serving size (who has time to figure out exactly how much their eating).  You need to figure out how much you should eat at each sitting and how many calories are in each food being eaten and add them all together and . . . well, it’s turning into rocket science.  What is a calorie, anyway, and who decided that it was a good idea to start counting them?

That’s a two part answer (Great… now we’re answer-counting.)  What is a calorie?  Easy, it’s the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of one kilogram of water by one degrees Celcius.  (I know what you’re thinking: . . . what?)  In other words, one calorie equals 4.184 joules.  (That didn’t help either, did it?)  Oh, and the real name of the food calorie is the kilocalorie.  ( . . . )  Simply put, a calorie isn’t really a thing.  It’s a measurement.  Think of it as like an inch or a centimeter.  You know what an inch is, and how long it is, but you can’t physically touch it.  Even the word ‘calorie’ comes from the Latin word for heat, which is another way to look at them.

How do you count something like that?  Thanks to the Nutrition Facts labels on foods you buy, you don’t have to.  It’s right there on the side . . . or the back . . . or somewhere on every package (except those ones that say ‘not labeled for individual resale’).  Sometime back in the 80s, someone started a movement to label foods with all this information because Americans were unarmed in food facts.  Then it became law in 1990 and has been changing ever since.  Thank the government for making eating so hard.  (Help us if they ever start requiring nutrition labels on those little produce stickers.)

So the question is still out there: Why count?  I’ll answer that question with another question: Why do some people still wear tie-dyed shirts and have mullets?  Because it was all the rave at one point in time. 

Intuitively, people know whether or not something that’s going in their mouth is beneficial for their body and that exercising is a good thing.  The best advice?  Don’t emo-eat, patrol your portions, regularly recreate, and enjoy less junk. 

So I’ll leave you with one last question: Are you hungry yet?  I am.

By: S. Cole Garrett

Monday 4/12

Age Old Answer

Which came first: the chicken or the egg?  This is a very interesting question.  You ask someone and they usually have an answer for you fairly quickly.  Either the chicken came first or the egg.  Then you ask the counter-question to their answer, either the egg was laid by a chicken or the chicken had to have hatched from an egg.  Soon, you’ll start to sound like those vultures on the Jungle Book deciding what to do for the day.  It’s a vicious cycle of repetitiveness.  The more you think about the chicken or the egg, the more confusing it gets.  That’s kind of backwards from how you normally figure something out.  You’re supposed to come to a conclusion, not to venture out from it.  Well, there may be several reasonable answers for which actually came first.

So, again . . .

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Answer 1: The Velociraptor

Let’s say you’re a big fan of Charles Darwin’s work: evolution, natural selection, and all that jazz.  Let’s rule out the egg.  If the egg “came first,” then there would not have been any nurturing parent chicken or protector.  Anything that hatched from that egg wouldn’t have lived more than a week (and that’s just sad).  Your answer would be that the chicken came first.  You should also be ready if someone were sly enough to challenge you with asking where that chicken came from.  Just tell them dinosaurs because birds came from dinosaurs and so the velociraptor clearly came first. 

Answer 2: The Rooster

Well what if you’re not convinced by evolution.  You’re a hard-core creationist.  God created the Earth in six days and rested on the seventh.  Fact.  And in due time, He took some dust from the ground, created a man, Adam, and breathed life into him.  Then, from one of Adam’s ribs, He created Eve.  It might be safe to assume that some of the other animals that roam the Earth were created in the same manner.  God may just as easily have scooped up some dirt and made the rooster and when the rooster was lonely, He used a drumstick to make the chicken (no souls, of course).  Voila!  The rest is history.

Answer 3: The Chicken

(Well, that seems pretty straight forward.  What gives?)  Some believers out there think UFOs and extra-terrestrials visit Earth from time to time.  In my opinion, “to each his own.”  But let’s be open-minded.  We’re all waiting for aliens to visit us and bestow upon us unimaginably advanced technology and understanding.  Perhaps in an inter-planetary fly-by, some Alien race decided our world could be a better place with fried chicken, chicken kiev, and barbecued chicken pizza so they left us one to get started with (and a rooster, too, because . . . you know, it takes two to tango). 

So choose a side, or make up a different theory.  Just realize you’re practically justifying your entire religious and scientific beliefs in the answer to one silly, age-old riddle!

By: S. Cole Garrett

Friday 4/9

Burnt Sugar

Something undeniably and divinely delicious happens when you melt sugar and boil it to around 240® F.  A sweet, rapturous aroma is released.  The sugar turns to a perfectly creamy, light beige.  You might have second thoughts about what was originally planned for that caramel.  Maybe you’ll just eat it all yourself and cook up a replacement batch.  Good thing there’s a kitchen towel nearby to wipe the drool from the corner of your mouth.  I’ve met very few (if any) people who don’t enjoy the gift of caramel.  One thing is certain: caramel is a well-loved treat.  One thing, however, is far less certain about the concoction.  That is, how to say it.  So that begs the question.  What is it: Carmel or caramel? 

Well that’s kind of a trick question.  (Actually, if you weren’t tricked at all, then it was a dumb question.)  Carmel and caramel are not the same things, not by a long shot, but it was the easiest way for me to express, in writing, the two different ways to pronounce it.  So let’s rule out Carmel.  Carmel is: a city in Indiana, a community in Louisiana, a town in Maine, a town in New York, a mountain in Israel, an ancient town in Judea, a river in California, and a town in California, just to name a few.  Carmel is anything but candy.  Caramel, on the other hand, is basically burnt sugar.  (Burnt, ooey, gooey, yummy sugar).  So I suppose a better question would be: is it cäramel or cāramel?

You see, Carmel (the non-food) has two syllables and sounds like what you drive down the street (like “car”).  Caramel (the food) has three syllables and sounds like when you have strong feelings about something (like “care”).  Arguably, (but not originally) caramel (the food) could also be pronounced like “car” (vroom, vroom).  So which one is right? 

Unfortunately, they’re both right.  Look in any dictionary.  Well, caramel quite possibly originated in France (at least, some people speculate) which would make the original word have three syllables.  Typically, with foreign food words assimilated into English, the pronunciation goes relatively unchanged.  We don’t shorten burrito to burto.  Likewise, escargot doesn’t become esgot and manicotti doesn’t become mancotti.  But caramel slips through the cracks.  So how to pronunciation disputes get settled?

Easy, dictionaries publish them both.  It’s like compromise, but no losing for either side.  And it doesn’t really solve the debate.  Just know that words usually start out with just one way to say them.  Judge the facts for yourself.  So choose sides: potato, tomato, pecan, vacuum, envelope, caramel, whatever.  I recommend you check the facts yourself.  Who knows?  You might have been saying it wrong all along.

By: S. Cole Garrett