Midwestern USA and food

When TPP first moved to the midwest in the fall of 1970, nobody knew what a bagel was. To a kid even one from upstate NY, no bagels was an indication of a lack of civilization, and even if they had been around, no one would have eaten them with lox. Bagels are now fairly common although they still do not seem as good as the ones from NYC bagel shops. So grad school, then a post-doc, and then a job all within an adjacent 4 state area of the midwest means TPP has spent 2/3s of his life in this area. Things have gotten a lot more sophisticated in terms of food even in small college cities such as ours, but a couple of general trends persist. People in this area are generally not big fans of seafood, or even fresh-water fish, and they don't like their food spicy. So when you put the two together, well, you can sort the "natives" from the "fureners" real easy. The graduate students are in charge of a fall grad student & faculty picnic, and they decided that having a crayfish (crawdad) boil would be a good idea. So they got them some Cajun spices and borrowed TPP's cooker and they went to town: potatoes, chicken, sausage, sweet corn, and crawfish, not necessarily in that order, but boiled to a nice spicy perfection! There was even some shrimp butter for the corn, an authentic southern LA recipe. Plenty of other food existed, and let me say, some of the Indian grad students bring the best items to pot-lucks like this, so you could easily see who had a pile of shells and who didn't ("natives"). Of course this just meant there were more for the more adventurous eaters. TPP used to bring a load (50-60) pounds of crawfish back from Baton Rouge each spring break having used collaborative research as an excuse to travel south. But it has been awhile since having had crawfish aplenty. So it was sort of fun. You could also tell the adventurous but inexperienced eaters who needed some technique lessons. The students only made one mistake, they waited too late to make their hush puppies and everone was filled up by the time those goodies made their appearance. The lesson is this: embrace new experiences, especially food.

Average weather here in the great midwest

Beware of the average lie when if comes to weather. Weather people are always fond of telling you that the temperature or rainfall is this much or that much above or below average for this time of year. Here's the big problem; this part of the world never gets average weather. Now you can take all those highs and those lows, those drenching rains and weeks of drought, those summer scorchers and Arctic blasts, windy days and doldrums, and you can average them even though you never get those conditions. So within 4 days the weather goes from lows in the upper 30s and low 40s to highs in the upper 80s and low 90s. Somewhere between the two is some nice average weather, but it never happens, just the turbulent stormy transition from one to the other. And then just to make life interesting, after a front passed during the night and morning dawns more summery, a day's outing took us north back across the front, so the temperature drops like a stone, storms attempt to belt us off the road, and then after a bit of wait, the front passes us again. Dumb. More on the field trip later.

Rainforest Field Trip - Picky Eaters

This post could go several different ways and maybe you're expecting specialist herbivores or specialist carnivores, but actually it's about a much more mundane group of picky eaters that in particular are found in the great 'Merican midwest, our students. One thing about field trips is that you spend a lot more time with your students than usual, and on most levels this is a good thing. Students find out we are more or less normal, approachable people, and not quite as intimidating as they thought. On the other hand we often find out more about students than we would like. So here is an observation and a big of advice that arises from our 3-meals a day experiences at a tropical field station, which by all reasonable accounts does a very good job of providing decent interesting food, and besides for a few days you can stand to eat more rice and beans than you would like.
Mothers don’t let your children grow up to be picky eaters. To some extent that's tolerable, but the fact that they are not just choosy mind you, but down right crazy, loony, nothing new or different will cross these lips picky, is your fault as a parent. Who was in charge when your child was young? You don’t let a fox watch the hen house and you don’t let 5-year olds dictate the menu. You are not doing them any favors especially if they ever plan to venture beyond the great Midwest, and oh,they have, so put quite simply being irrationally picky is not a characteristic that one associates with being smart, educated, sophisticated, professional, or accomplished. Now certainly the human brain is quite capable of maintaining a considerable disconnect between its rational thought on some issues and its irrational leanings about others, but it’s a sign of growing up when you put the rational part of your brain in charge and put the childish irrational brain to bed for good. With few exceptions food is not going to kill you, so when someone simply refuses to try a new food, for ridiculous reasons, what other people observe is an indulged little kid who is still engaging in very childish behavior. Granted in my tropical wanderings there have been a few times when something new was really was not very good, something that did not at all appeal to me, but nothing so terrible, ugly, or foul it could not be tried and survived. So do your kid a favor, do yourself a favor, feed them adult food, teach them about food as an adventure, and do not cave in to their childish likes and dislikes, and if they are this way because you are this way, well, what can be said because this message will only elicit indignant responses, and anyways by the age of 20-something, it’s too late for most of them now anyways, so the Phactor hopes the world is kind enough to let them live comfortably in some little Midwestern town. Is the Phactor being too harsh?

Spring in Lincolnland

Spring here in Lincolnland in the great American Midwest is more of a concept, a theoretical construct, than a reality. As if to prove my point nature provided our flowering bulbs and climatically stupid star magnolias with a snow covering and now plans to back up wintery threats with temperatures several degrees below freezing. And that’s the way it is here as often as not. Enough mild weather emerges from the cocoons of spring to raise your hopes and expectations with green buds and early flowers only to have them dashed down by one more cold front marching eastward like a chilly army bent on defeating spring.

No actual spring occurs here really. Just warring fronts, pushing back and forth, first mild, then bitter, back and forth again, and the war continues until suddenly one day in mid-May summer pushes through and exhausted by all the charging and retreating rests for five months. The weather war is repeated with the opposite outcome in November after summer hangs on well into October. It’s no wonder that those folks who live lives insulated from the reality of nature simply switch the thermostat from heat to cool without opening nary a window. And I know they do this because I’ve bought their houses and struggled to reopen windows painted shut all those years ago when central air was installed.

But no matter how buffered they are, I can’t live that way, so I fall for it every year. I emerge with the first whiff of mild weather to plant and prune and coax with the hopes of a spring and they get buried in a funeral shroud of white snow. Is there anything sadder than a magnolia festooned with drooping brown flowers? And the Phactor knows it’s really our fault for planting them too far north, but the alternative, to live without them, is unthinkable, and so for this reason the movement to landscape with only native plants will fail to capture my heart or enthusiasm. So you live for that one year in two, or three, if we are fortunate, that the magnolias will burst forth in flower without any critcal comment from old man winter.

What's left Tuesday will struggle back, sprouting up from its base, defiant. And the tough plants will once again show their toughness, their raison d'etre for being, yet, I think I shall provide my little coldframe with a bit of thermal assistance tonight, and we may yet enjoy some salad before May.