DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

The Paranoid’s Pocket Guide is a small book with a big worry: Is your cutting board safe? No.

“Take a look at your hands,” admonishes the text, “They’re crawling with bacteria.” Some of those bacteria are listed, along with the symptoms of an infection of same: “Shingella (can cause cramps and bloody diarrhea).”

I don’t recommend you buy this book for yourself, because reading it might affect your ability to sleep, eat, cook, bathe, exercise, or read pocket books. Because you have to figure, this book is itself coated with dangerous bacteria. What if the packer at Amazon wiped his nose while putting your order together? You’ll be carrying alcohol swabs in no time.

Hair in the sink: it could be male pattern baldness, a fungal infection, or a surprisingly common stress-related disorder called alopecia universalis, which causes all the hair on your body, including eyelashes and eyebrows, to fall out.

The book is not entirely about germs and infectious diseases. No, there are a lot more things to be concerned about.

Department stores now release scents into the air that make a person feel good and want to buy.

Bathroom sinks cause over 45,000 injuries every year.

Men with extremely symmetrical features are less attentive to their partners and more inlined to cheat on them.

The best reason to buy this book is as a gift for someone else. Especially someone you don’t like very much. Or, it’s the perfect gift for a friend whose latent paranoias you’d like to reinforce for your own entertainment, which I think is how I ended up with a copy. Thanks a lot, Bim.

Patronize these links, man:

• Amazon (small hardback)

Some interesting, nonconventional thoughts on vegetarianism from “food chain” expert Michael Pollan:

I looked at the environmental issues and I realized vegetarianism wasn’t necessarily the answer. If we were all vegetarian, it would still require a huge industrial food system because there are parts of the country where you can’t grow fruits and vegetables. For example, there are certain landscapes, like the rocky landscapes of New England, where animals are the best way to get protein from the land, not row crops. If you really want to conform food chain to place, meat has to be a part of it. We should be eating less meat, especially with 70 percent of our country’s grain going to feed animals. Yes, we’d be better off with more vegetarians, but I’m not going to be one of them…

We don’t need one kind of food chain; we need 10. Monoculture is as much of a mental problem as an agricultural one.

I think I have that mental problem. I do tend to think in absolutist terms. I embrace complexity unwillingly.

Even so, I believe vegetarianism will never achieve even 10% penetration in the US. Look no further than the Atkins diet for proof — millions of people would willingly eat no vegetables, in spite of the risks, in spite of common sense.

That would be an interesting survey: are there more Atkins dieters or vegetarians in the US?

Anyway, getting back to Pollan’s statement about the environment, I think Pollan does vegetarians a disservice when he says “vegetarianism [is not] necessarily the answer,” because it’s clearly part of the answer. I’d like to know what another eight food chains are that could break up the current beef monoculture and solve the problem of the food industry trashing the environment.

As you might expect, Pollan also has some interesting things to say about “cheap food,” which is the output of the big agribusiness and fast food industries:

The industrial food chain does produce food more cheaply, in terms of the price you pay at McDonald’s or the supermarket, but the real cost of cheap food is not reflected in those prices. You’re paying for it in your tax dollars because you’re giving farmers $20 billion a year in subsidies. You’re paying for it in public health costs. These subsidies make unhealthy food cheaper than healthy food, and so our country is facing an obesity epidemic. The antibiotics you need for your son’s illness don’t work anymore because we’ve squandered them all on farm animals. We can’t take fish from the Gulf of Mexico because of the nitrogen runoff from agricultural fertilizers. The people of Des Moines, Iowa, have to drink bottled water in the summer because their water is poisoned. Those are all costs. The phrase I use is “the high cost of cheap food.”

Here’s the whole article: The High Price of Cheap Food: Mealpolitik over lunch with Michael Pollan

Pictured is Spring Lake, in Annadel State Park. We took a slow two-hour circuit around the lakes with some friends. I can’t call it a hike so much as a stroll. Still, by the end I had developed an intense pain in my hip. How old am I, again? After the hike we went to Costco to stock up on denture glue.

As easy as we took it, the hike was not without risks. In this case the risk wasn’t that I might get attacked by a snake, but that I might get yelled at by an overcautious hiking companion/wife. Never let it be said I wouldn’t put my life on the line for a photo… especially a photo of a harmless non-rattlesnake. (It is generally true that “the only dangerously venomous native snakes found in California are the rattlesnakes, which have a rattle on the end of the tail.”)

A revelation in cookbook psychology, from Russ Parsons of the LA Times, appeared in a piece called Take my recipe, please:

…the conventional wisdom in the publishing industry holds that most buyers cook fewer than three recipes from any book…

Only three? That sounded low. Surely I am more efficient than that, I thought. Surely I am capable of finding more than three decent recipes in a $30 cookbook.

Nope. Three is about right. I checked.

I hate to quote any character played by Catherine Zeta-Jones, but… what does it all mean? Are cookbook users unwilling to try more than three recipes from a single book? Or are cookbook authors unable to find more than three good recipes for any given cookbook? Is this about picky eating habits, or a subtle psychological condition in which the reader stops at the 3-decent-recipes point because, deep down, s/he believes that no cookbook author is capable of delivering the goods more than a few times? Or maybe it’s just laziness.

I estimate that an average cookbook contains 40 recipes. Three out of 40 equals 7.5%. That is, most cookbook owners use a mere 7.5% of the recipes in their collection.

Most of my cookbooks are bread books, but the rule of three still applies. The biggest exception is the one non-bread cookbook we use weekly, Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, which contains approximately one dozen recipes we use frequently.

But that book contains 1400 recipes. Twelve out of 1400 is… 0.86%. After rounding up.

The LA Times article isn’t about cookbook usage so much as it is about Amazon.com’s book-sampling feature, which allows users to view entire pages from inside some books. You could do this at the bookstore, too, although you’d be unlikely to have a portable printer with you at the bookstore. The point is, Amazon’s preview feature would seem to enable recipe theft. Parsons explores those issues in his article.

It seems to me that paging through Amazon’s page-previews is a terribly inefficient way to search for recipes. Recipes are a commodity. There are probably 50,000 free recipes online at foodtv.com — as an example, here are 8053 ways to eat butter. So I agree with the folks in Parsons’ article who claim that cookbooks will continue to sell, despite Amazon’s preview service, because a good cookbook is more than a simple collection of recipes.

I’ve published the results of my personal cookbook-use-efficiency review — I’ve updated most of my cookbook reviews with lists of the three recipes we actually use. Check them out, in case you own these books already. Maybe you’re using the wrong three recipes.

Cruising around the web recently, I stumbled across an exercise called Hindu Pushups. You can see the technique here, read about it here, and (of course) buy a book about it from this guy.

The exercise promises functional strength, endurance, flexibility, peace of mind, and “a deep feeling of connectedness” as well.

Who wouldn’t want that?

I’m not ready to blow hundreds of dollars on yet-another miraculous self-improvement course, but I started doing Hindu Pushups. They’re hard work, much more so than traditional pushups. My body cracks like a tree branch under a car tire. I guess I’m not getting much shoulder movement in my typical day of sitting at a desk writing email, because by three reps into a set of Hindu Pushups they’re popping like a six-pack on a summer afternoon.

I hope the racket dies down eventually. It’s unsettling. It’s hard to believe I’m doing something good for my body when it sounds like it’s on the verge of splitting in two.