a little respect

I have an exam in approximately 18 hours. My professor just e-mailed the class with some last-minute advice.

What I want to know is just how, exactly, am I going to get Vince Clarke and Andy Bell to show up for the exam with this late notice?

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: ________ <____@_____.edu>
Date: Oct 17, 2006 10:22 PM
Subject: BA 662, Wednesday Evening
To: list suppressed

There are about 75 multiple choice, true/false questions. Bring a
Scantron 882 or 884, calculator, number 2 pencils, and a good erasure.

No queuing formulas will be required. They become very complex, very
quickly. Nor will I ask you to construct R-Charts, or x-bar
Charts. All else is fair game. Look over your CalCopy.

See you tomorrow evening.

Prof _____

my cubicle

This video by Hilary's friend Erik killed me.
Via hilstah

| - |

Means tired.
Via Baglady

the vegetable-industrial complex

Spinach hasn't had this much buzz since "Popeye the Movie." We were still talking about spinach and food safety as we sat down to dinner with Charles and Cat this weekend.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that our food supply now sickens 76 million Americans every year, putting more than 300,000 of them in the hospital, and killing 5,000. The lethal strain of E. coli known as 0157:H7, responsible for this latest outbreak of food poisoning, was unknown before 1982; it is believed to have evolved in the gut of feedlot cattle. These are animals that stand around in their manure all day long, eating a diet of grain that happens to turn a cow’s rumen into an ideal habitat for E. coli 0157:H7. (The bug can’t survive long in cattle living on grass.)

Today 80 percent of America’s beef is slaughtered by four companies, 75 percent of the precut salads are processed by two and 30 percent of the milk by just one company.

This isn't the beginning. But it is the beginning of getting the American consumer's attention. Hopefully, more consumers will switch to locally grown (and organic) produce and bypass the vegetable-industrial complex altogether.

The Vegetable-Industrial Complex
By MICHAEL POLLAN
Published: October 15, 2006

Soon after the news broke last month that nearly 200 Americans in 26 states had been sickened by eating packaged spinach contaminated with E. coli, I received a rather coldblooded e-mail message from a friend in the food business. “I have instructed my broker to purchase a million shares of RadSafe,” he wrote, explaining that RadSafe is a leading manufacturer of food-irradiation technology. It turned out my friend was joking, but even so, his reasoning was impeccable. If bagged salad greens are vulnerable to bacterial contamination on such a scale, industry and government would very soon come looking for a technological fix; any day now, calls to irradiate the entire food supply will be on a great many official lips. That’s exactly what happened a few years ago when we learned that E. coli from cattle feces was winding up in American hamburgers. Rather than clean up the kill floor and the feedlot diet, some meat processors simply started nuking the meat — sterilizing the manure, in other words, rather than removing it from our food. Why? Because it’s easier to find a technological fix than to address the root cause of such a problem. This has always been the genius of industrial capitalism — to take its failings and turn them into exciting new business opportunities.

We can also expect to hear calls for more regulation and inspection of the produce industry. Already, watchdogs like the Center for Science in the Public Interest have proposed that the government impose the sort of regulatory regime it imposes on the meat industry — something along the lines of the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point system (Haccp, pronounced HASS-ip) developed in response to the E. coli contamination of beef. At the moment, vegetable growers and packers are virtually unregulated. “Farmers can do pretty much as they please,” Carol Tucker Foreman, director of the Food Policy Institute at the Consumer Federation of America, said recently, “as long as they don’t make anyone sick.”

This sounds like an alarming lapse in governmental oversight until you realize there has never before been much reason to worry about food safety on farms. But these days, the way we farm and the way we process our food, both of which have been industrialized and centralized over the last few decades, are endangering our health. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that our food supply now sickens 76 million Americans every year, putting more than 300,000 of them in the hospital, and killing 5,000. The lethal strain of E. coli known as 0157:H7, responsible for this latest outbreak of food poisoning, was unknown before 1982; it is believed to have evolved in the gut of feedlot cattle. These are animals that stand around in their manure all day long, eating a diet of grain that happens to turn a cow’s rumen into an ideal habitat for E. coli 0157:H7. (The bug can’t survive long in cattle living on grass.) Industrial animal agriculture produces more than a billion tons of manure every year, manure that, besides being full of nasty microbes like E. coli 0157:H7 (not to mention high concentrations of the pharmaceuticals animals must receive so they can tolerate the feedlot lifestyle), often ends up in places it shouldn’t be, rather than in pastures, where it would not only be harmless but also actually do some good. To think of animal manure as pollution rather than fertility is a relatively new (and industrial) idea.

Wendell Berry once wrote that when we took animals off farms and put them onto feedlots, we had, in effect, taken an old solution — the one where crops feed animals and animals’ waste feeds crops — and neatly divided it into two new problems: a fertility problem on the farm, and a pollution problem on the feedlot. Rather than return to that elegant solution, however, industrial agriculture came up with a technological fix for the first problem — chemical fertilizers on the farm. As yet, there is no good fix for the second problem, unless you count irradiation and Haccp plans and overcooking your burgers and, now, staying away from spinach. All of these solutions treat E. coli 0157:H7 as an unavoidable fact of life rather than what it is: a fact of industrial agriculture.

But if industrial farming gave us this bug, it is industrial eating that has spread it far and wide. We don’t yet know exactly what happened in the case of the spinach washed and packed by Natural Selection Foods, whether it was contaminated in the field or in the processing plant or if perhaps the sealed bags made a trivial contamination worse. But we do know that a great deal of spinach from a great many fields gets mixed together in the water at that plant, giving microbes from a single field an opportunity to contaminate a vast amount of food. The plant in question washes 26 million servings of salad every week. In effect, we’re washing the whole nation’s salad in one big sink.

It’s conceivable the same problem could occur in your own kitchen sink or on a single farm. Food poisoning has always been with us, but not until we started processing all our food in such a small number of “kitchens” did the potential for nationwide outbreaks exist.

Surely this points to one of the great advantages of a decentralized food system: when things go wrong, as they sooner or later will, fewer people are affected and, just as important, the problem can be more easily traced to its source and contained. A long and complicated food chain, in which food from all over the countryside is gathered together in one place to be processed and then distributed all over the country to be eaten, can be impressively efficient, but by its very nature it is a food chain devilishly hard to follow and to fix.

Fortunately, this is not the only food chain we have. The week of the E. coli outbreak, washed spinach was on sale at my local farmers’ market, and at the Blue Heron Farms stand, where I usually buy my greens, the spinach appeared to be moving briskly. I tasted a leaf and wondered why I didn’t think twice about it. I guess it’s because I’ve just always trusted these guys; I buy from them every week. The spinach was probably cut and washed that morning or the night before — it hasn’t been sitting around in a bag on a truck for a week. And if there ever is any sort of problem, I know exactly who is responsible. Whatever the risk, and I’m sure there is some, it seems manageable.

These days, when people make the case for buying local food, they often talk about things like keeping farmers in our communities and eating fresh food in season, at the peak of its flavor. We like what’s going on at the farmers’ market — how country meets city, how children learn that a carrot is not a glossy orange bullet that comes in a bag but is actually a root; how we get to taste unfamiliar flavors and even, in some sense, reconnect through these foods and their growers to the natural world. Stack all this up against the convenience and price of supermarket food, though, and it can sound a little. . .sentimental.

But there’s nothing sentimental about local food — indeed, the reasons to support local food economies could not be any more hardheaded or pragmatic. Our highly centralized food economy is a dangerously precarious system, vulnerable to accidental — and deliberate — contamination. This is something the government understands better than most of us eaters. When Tommy Thompson retired from the Department of Health and Human Services in 2004, he said something chilling at his farewell news conference: “For the life of me, I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do.” The reason it is so easy to do was laid out in a 2003 G.A.O. report to Congress on bioterrorism. “The high concentration of our livestock industry and the centralized nature of our food-processing industry” make them “vulnerable to terrorist attack.” Today 80 percent of America’s beef is slaughtered by four companies, 75 percent of the precut salads are processed by two and 30 percent of the milk by just one company. Keeping local food economies healthy — and at the moment they are thriving — is a matter not of sentiment but of critical importance to the national security and the public health, as well as to reducing our dependence on foreign sources of energy.

Yet perhaps the gravest threat now to local food economies — to the farmer selling me my spinach, to the rancher who sells me my grass-fed beef — is, of all things, the government’s own well-intentioned efforts to clean up the industrial food supply. Already, hundreds of regional meat-processing plants — the ones that local meat producers depend on — are closing because they can’t afford to comply with the regulatory requirements the U.S.D.A. rightly imposes on giant slaughterhouses that process 400 head of cattle an hour. The industry insists that all regulations be “scale neutral,” so if the U.S.D.A. demands that huge plants have, say, a bathroom, a shower and an office for the exclusive use of its inspectors, then a small processing plant that slaughters local farmers’ livestock will have to install these facilities, too. This is one of the principal reasons that meat at the farmers’ market is more expensive than meat at the supermarket: farmers are seldom allowed to process their own meat, and small processing plants have become very expensive to operate, when the U.S.D.A. is willing to let them operate at all. From the U.S.D.A.’s perspective, it is much more efficient to put their inspectors in a plant where they can inspect 400 cows an hour rather than in a local plant where they can inspect maybe one.

So what happens to the spinach grower at my farmers’ market when the F.D.A. starts demanding a Haccp plan — daily testing of the irrigation water, say, or some newfangled veggie-irradiation technology? When we start requiring that all farms be federally inspected? Heavy burdens of regulation always fall heaviest on the smallest operations and invariably wind up benefiting the biggest players in an industry, the ones who can spread the costs over a larger output of goods. A result is that regulating food safety tends to accelerate the sort of industrialization that made food safety a problem in the first place. We end up putting our faith in RadSafe rather than in Blue Heron Farms — in technologies rather than relationships.

It’s easy to imagine the F.D.A. announcing a new rule banning animals from farms that produce plant crops. In light of the threat from E. coli, such a rule would make a certain kind of sense. But it is an industrial, not an ecological, sense. For the practice of keeping animals on farms used to be, as Wendell Berry pointed out, a solution; only when cows moved onto feedlots did it become a problem. Local farmers and local food economies represent much the same sort of pre-problem solution — elegant, low-tech and redundant. But the logic of industry, apparently ineluctable, has other ideas, ideas that not only leave our centralized food system undisturbed but also imperil its most promising, and safer, alternatives.

Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the author most recently of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.”

rhymenocerous and stealin'

I was catching up on some old posts on my friend Karl's blog today and came across Flight of the Conchords, a Kiwi comedy / music duo.

I like "Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenoceros" best so far ...
Via Karl

lunch at dana's

dana's tom kha soup by comment dit-on

Dana's soup on Friday was the perfect blend of flavors: coconut milk, lemon grass, and chili. Mmmmmmmmmm.

Now, if I only I could get the recipe ...

an improvised spanish breakfast

breakfast is served by comment dit-on

When Leo asked me what I wanted for breakfast Saturday, I was thinking about the football-size potato that Dana brought me from her recent trip to Idaho with Jason. So I suggested tortilla.

My suggestion was met with the appropriate enthusiasm, and Leo and I set out to make our breakfast. After discussing the differences in our mothers' tortillas, we opted to consult my Spanish cookbook.

The 2.5 lb potato yielded a 15 X 1.75-inch tortilla that took four hands to flip.

Here are some photos of the process and the outcome.

(I also threw in a shot of the cheese and quince paste that we ate with our breakfast. )

spuds, to scale by comment dit-on	ingredients by comment dit-on
buen provecho by comment dit-on	p'tit basque and quince paste by comment dit-on

2006: a spice odyssey

I love my house. But there are a few things that I wish were different. It's ridiculously trivial in the grand scheme of things, but I've reached the breaking point with my spice storage. It's just no good.

I want storage that lets me see everything at-a glance and that doesn't take up more space in my already-crammed cabinets. My solution:

1. Mount small shelves / baskets inside my cabinet doors near my stove.
   
2. Store my spices, one bottle deep, in said baskets for easy viewing and use.
   
3. Make sure the edge is high enough so that the bottles don't go flying out when the doors are opened.
4. Make sure that the edge does not completely obfuscate the labels.

My dad was in town today and in typical fashion, I asked for his help with what I thought was a simple home-improvement project. Three hours later, we'd been to no less than five stores (Lowe's, Ikea, the Container Store, Target, and Bed Bath & Beyond), searching for the perfect spice racks.

Sure, I saw the latest in new-fangled kitchen storage gadgetry, including magnetized (!) spice racks. But nothing quite worked for what I want in my kitchen. As I said to my dad by the time we left store #3, I'm finding it hard not to take this personally. The more I think about it, the more I think I may have just landed upon a million-dollar idea.

rip cbgb

CBGB Brings Down the Curtain With Nostalgia and One Last Night of Rock

Last year, as Ben and I meandered through the Bowery toward the Neuyorican Poet's Cafe, we turned a corner and saw CBGB. I stopped, straining to take in this landmark, as if being there meant that I'd absorb some of its energy.

I was unsurprised to see that it was dark and dingy. Frankly, I would've been disappointed if it hadn't seemed seedy. As I asked about it, Ben explained that it would be closing in 2006.

Disappointed, I looked for the playbill and found that there wasn't anything that I wanted to see in the days I had left in New York. I then closed my coat against the cold and hurried along, pleased at the chance encounter with the seminal club.

Do I wish I'd seen a show there? No. In some ways, it's better that I never experienced the inside, because it remains as it always has been for me: a mythical place in my imagination. Now that it's closed, it will forever live up to a rock-and-roll fantasy crafted by a Rolling Stone article when I was thirteen.

a kiss for owen eckblom

a kiss for owen eckblom by comment dit-on

My world just got bigger. Or smaller, I suppose.

A photograph I took last year got this response:

periodically, i search the web for this name ... today, I found your pic. we had a complicated relationship - he was my father ... he was part of my heart even though he left when i was 6. we tried again when i was 26 - there was too much pain. today, i'm 52. i missed his life. i missed his death. i missed him. your pic brought me some closure - i knew he had died - now i know where he is. if you are willing, please share the story of this photo with me.
many thanks,
formerly ... jennifer gail eckblom

I took the photo because the headstone stood out in the sea of white marble and anonymous names. Although it might seem that there's nothing more personal than one's name, seeing name after name in the same chiseled font in the Ft. Rosecrans cemetary was incredibly impersonal. This kiss, left by someone who loved Owen enough to leave a mark on his mausoleum, made his headstone personal. It reminded me that inside the crypt were the remains of an individual, with his own complicated story.

I just got a piece of that story and the lives he touched. To me, this was a snapshot of a stranger's name on a stab of stone. For Jennifer, it was closure.

ok go, redux

Nobody's Watching OK Go


In case you missed the original video:

biological allies

I have a friend who makes her own weather. When she enters a room, she changes the entire mood for the better, person by person. I'm fascinated by the (subconscious) contagious process whereby joy (or sadness, anger, etc.) is transmitted.

Friends for Life: An Emerging Biology of Emotional Healing
By DANIEL GOLEMAN
Published: October 10, 2006
A dear friend has been battling cancer for a decade or more. Through a grinding mix of chemotherapy, radiation and all the other necessary indignities of oncology, he has lived on, despite dire prognoses to the contrary.

My friend was the sort of college professor students remember fondly: not just inspiring in class but taking a genuine interest in them — in their studies, their progress through life, their fears and hopes. A wide circle of former students count themselves among his lifelong friends; he and his wife have always welcomed a steady stream of visitors to their home.

Though no one could ever prove it, I suspect that one of many ingredients in his longevity has been this flow of people who love him.

Research on the link between relationships and physical health has established that people with rich personal networks — who are married, have close family and friends, are active in social and religious groups — recover more quickly from disease and live longer. But now the emerging field of social neuroscience, the study of how people’s brains entrain as they interact, adds a missing piece to that data.

The most significant finding was the discovery of “mirror neurons,” a widely dispersed class of brain cells that operate like neural WiFi. Mirror neurons track the emotional flow, movement and even intentions of the person we are with, and replicate this sensed state in our own brain by stirring in our brain the same areas active in the other person.

Mirror neurons offer a neural mechanism that explains emotional contagion, the tendency of one person to catch the feelings of another, particularly if strongly expressed. This brain-to-brain link may also account for feelings of rapport, which research finds depend in part on extremely rapid synchronization of people’s posture, vocal pacing and movements as they interact. In short, these brain cells seem to allow the interpersonal orchestration of shifts in physiology.

Such coordination of emotions, cardiovascular reactions or brain states between two people has been studied in mothers with their infants, marital partners arguing and even among people in meetings. Reviewing decades of such data, Lisa M. Diamond and Lisa G. Aspinwall, psychologists at the University of Utah, offer the infelicitous term “a mutually regulating psychobiological unit” to describe the merging of two discrete physiologies into a connected circuit. To the degree that this occurs, Dr. Diamond and Dr. Aspinwall argue, emotional closeness allows the biology of one person to influence that of the other.

John T. Cacioppo, director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago, makes a parallel proposal: the emotional status of our main relationships has a significant impact on our overall pattern of cardiovascular and neuroendocrine activity. This radically expands the scope of biology and neuroscience from focusing on a single body or brain to looking at the interplay between two at a time. In short, my hostility bumps up your blood pressure, your nurturing love lowers mine. Potentially, we are each other’s biological enemies or allies.

Even remotely suggesting health benefits from these interconnections will, no doubt, raise hackles in medical circles. No one can claim solid data showing a medically significant effect from the intermingling of physiologies.

At the same time, there is now no doubt that this same connectivity can offer a biologically grounded emotional solace. Physical suffering aside, a healing presence can relieve emotional suffering. A case in point is a functional magnetic resonance imaging study of women awaiting an electric shock. When the women endured their apprehension alone, activity in neural regions that incite stress hormones and anxiety was heightened. As James A. Coan reported last year in an article in Psychophysiology, when a stranger held the subject’s hand as she waited, she found little relief. When her husband held her hand, she not only felt calm, but her brain circuitry quieted, revealing the biology of emotional rescue.

But as all too many people with severe chronic diseases know, loved ones can disappear, leaving them to bear their difficulties in lonely isolation. Social rejection activates the very zones of the brain that generate, among other things, the sting of physical pain. Matthew D. Lieberman and Naomi Eisenberg of U.C.L.A. (writing in a chapter in “Social Neuroscience: People Thinking About People,” M.I.T. Press, 2005) have proposed that the brain’s pain centers may have taken on a hypersensitivity to social banishment because exclusion was a death sentence in human prehistory. They note that in many languages the words that describe a “broken heart” from rejection borrow the lexicon of physical hurt.

So when the people who care about a patient fail to show up, it may be a double blow: the pain of rejection and the deprivation of the benefits of loving contact. Sheldon Cohen, a psychologist at Carnegie-Mellon University who studies the effects of personal connections on health, emphasizes that a hospital patient’s family and friends help just by visiting, whether or not they quite know what to say.

My friend has reached that point where doctors see nothing else to try. On my last visit, he and his wife told me that he was starting hospice care.

One challenge, he told me, will be channeling the river of people who want to visit into the narrow range of hours in a week when he still has the energy to engage them.

As he said this, I felt myself tearing up, and responded: “You know, at least it’s better to have this problem. So many people go through this all alone.”

He was silent for a moment, thoughtful. Then he answered softly, “You’re right.”

Daniel Goleman is the author of “Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships.”

spicy baked yams with orange butter

I made this, along with pork loin piquant, for dinner with Nolan last night. He liked the yams so much that he finished what was left in the pan.

I used organic golden yams and organic garnet yams for my yam-off. There was no appreciable difference in flavor, color, or texture with the cooked yams.

Like people, only the skins differentiate them. (And I'm way ahead of you on the cracks about people's flavor, texture, etc.)

Preheat oven to 375°F.

Rinse and pat dry:
2 lbs true yams, peeled and cut into 1-inch pieces

Put the pieces in a large roasting pan along with:
2 TBSP light olive oil
½ tsp salt
¼ tsp ground black pepper
¼ tsp chili powder

Turn the pieces to coat well. Bake, turning often, until browned on all sides, 40 to 45 minutes. Add ½ inch water to the pan and bake until softened, about 15 minutes more.

Serve with orange butter.
Via The Joy of Cooking

pork tenderloin piquant

This dish is easy and delicious. It's excellent with spicy baked yams and orange butter.

Prep time: 10 minutes
Marinating time: 6 to 12 hours
Roasting time: 30-35 minutes
Oven temperature: 450°F

1 ¼ - 1 ½ lbs whole pork tenderloin or boneless pork loin
1 TBSP Dijon mustard
1/3 cup bourbon, sherry, Madeira or chicken broth
¼ cup fresh lime juice
½ tsp salt
¼ tsp black pepper
¼ tsp ground allspice or nutmeg
3-5 TBSP dark brown sugar, packed

Preparation:

1. Trim fat from pork loin. Place in shallow dish. Rub all over with mustard.
2. Mix bourbon with juice, spices, and salt. Pour over meat.
3. Cover and refrigerate for 6 hours or overnight. Lift meat from marinade and place on rack in roasting pan. Coat with brown sugar.
4. Roast at 450°F for about 30 minutes or until meat thermometer registers 160°F. As meat roasts, baste occasionally with marinade.
   
5. Cut meat into thin diagonal slices. Spoon pan juices over slices and serve.
   

Serves 4.

orange butter

Omit the salt and pepper for use on pancakes or other sweet items.

In a small bowl, cream with a fork or wooden spoon:
4 TBSP (1/2 stick) unsalted butter, softened

Gradually stir in:
Finely grated zest of one orange
1 TBSP strained fresh orange juice
Pinch of ground red pepper or paprika
Salt and ground white pepper to taste
Via The Joy of Cooking

bitch-slapped by the invisible hand

I've been known to complain about grad school from time to time. (Okay, a lot of the time.) Economics was especially dismal for me.

It's good to know that I'm not alone. But I still feel bad for Diana.

Finals are over. We find out our grades in about two week. I have no idea how I did on Organizational Behavior. The final consisted of three and a half hours of non-stop writing. Everyone had hand cramps afterwards.

Unfortunately, I have a pretty good idea of how I did in Microeconomics. I knew that I didn't do well on the midterm, however, I felt okay about the final. That is, until I saw the answers. I think that I got every answer wrong. It's so demoralizing. I went to every section, did every problem set and yet I still bombed the final. The worst part is that I got an A in Micro as an undergrad, where I was competing against Wharton students.

I hated econ when I was in college. Thomas Carlyle called economics "the dismal science." I got bitch slapped by the invisible hand. All I can do now is to consider it a sunk cost.

the politics on our plates

Once upon a time, I was a vegetarian. I chose to change my eating habits because I was shocked at the environmental costs of industrialized chicken and beef production.

I pulled it off for about 22 months in college before becoming anemic and losing my resolve.

Nowadays, I'm an omnivore, an environmentalist, a hedonist, and I make deliberate choices about what I buy because I believe my wallet is the most powerful tool I have for impacting the world. In short, I strive to be a conscientious consumer.

Food is a sensuous pleasure for me ... and I'm interested in maximizing pleasure while also being cognizant of my responsibility (to my body for being healthy, to the environment for sustainability, and to the world at-large for how I spend my hard-earned money). To that end, I found this article very interesting. But I'll admit that while I'm trying to be a conscientious omnivore, the whole thought of making "least worse" choices is just depressing.

Time to read, discuss, shop, cook, and (of course) eat.

The Politics on Our Plates
By AMY BENTLEY

Few would argue with the premise that food has taken on new importance in the United States in recent years. Cities are banning foie gras and considering whether restaurants should eliminate most trans fats from their menus, and schools are debating the merits of creating "junk-food-free zones" to encourage healthy eating. Experts declare the United States a "toxic food environment" and, taking cues from battles over smoking, seek to establish a "fat tax" on high-calorie, unnutritious foods. Many are wringing their hands over what they see as the extinction of family meals and the disappearance of home cooking.

Meanwhile, pricey new homes must include spacious kitchens complete with granite countertops, a stainless-steel Viking range, and a Sub-Zero refrigerator. McDonald's and Kraft are scrambling to create snacks and meals lower in fat and sugar, and trans fats and high-fructose corn syrup have assumed "evil" food status. As Wal-Mart begins to stock organic foods, Whole Foods — that bastion of virtuous food procurement — counters criticism by offering more local, seasonal items. Add to the mix the boom in culinary tourism — restaurants, food television, books, magazines, cooking classes, artisanal products, and the search for "authentic" cuisine of every sort — and the result is a surfeit of interest and anxiety about food. Americans cannot, and should not, avoid the subject.

The current interest in food has historical roots that reach back centuries, as Warren J. Belasco describes in his book Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food. However, in the last 30 years or so in the United States, we've witnessed an emerging food "revolution" that has attempted to counter (or at least circumvent) the worst aspects of the industrialization of food. Those involved have worked to demonstrate the connection between good food and sustainable agricultural practices and to create better-tasting, higher-quality food for restaurants and consumption at home. Within the last decade, scholarly and political attention to food matters has deepened as the field of food studies has emerged, and as popular books by Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) and Marion Nestle (Food Politics and Safe Food) exposed to an interested public the questionable practices of the food industry and the government's willingness to accommodate food-industry demands. It's easy to understand why books about food sell — food matters, and people are rarely neutral about the subject.

The books discussed here are concerned with food in all its broad sociocultural, environmental, and nutritional aspects, and all in one way or another are in dialogue with the current gestalt regarding food. What cultural currents underlie today's interest in and anxiety about food? First is the sheer amount of food that is available to Americans, with all the ramifications, positive and negative. The United States has become particularly adept at producing huge amounts of food, and we eat a lot more of it than we used to. The industrialization of agriculture, combined with government policies and politics encouraging the mass production of food, is a double-edged sword, of course. While it has facilitated better overall nutrition and health, it has also allowed excess and, ironically, poor health. While some critics wonder whether the uproar over the obesity "epidemic" is fueled less by health concerns and more by superficial cosmetic and aesthetic responses, there are important health concerns that can't be dismissed, such as the startling rise in Type 2 diabetes among children.

Combine the sheer abundance with the "omnivore's dilemma" — the anxiety created by the multitude of food options — and it is easy to understand the well-fed human's predicament in the 21st century. Further adding to the anxiety is that the people of plenty now must reckon with the reality of finite resources: the water, oil, and arable land that have driven the modern agricultural revolution. There are also fears that industrial food culture has damaged the social fabric as well as the environment. The rise of fast food combined with other social and cultural phenomena (more single-parent and two-income families, cars built with cup holders and food trays) have led to changes in domestic food practices, which have in turn been viewed as having affected family life and even civil society. Whether this is accurate remains to be seen. While I think it is possible (as some do not), for example, to have a meaningful meal prepared from a microwave or around a table of fast food, I am persuaded by the opinion articulated by some of these authors that by its nature, quickly produced and quickly eaten food changes the qualitative experience of a meal.

Taken together, a cluster of themes emerges from these books. With various emphases, all address the ethical, health, environmental, and aesthetic issues as well as the anxieties about cultural and social reproduction that have been central to discussion about food production and consumption in the last decade. Setting the stage for all of this is Meals to Come, an intellectual history of world hunger and the debate over the ability to provide sufficient food for all. Belasco, a leading food-studies scholar and author of the highly regarded Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took on the Food Industry, examines in nuanced detail how each generation of Western philosophers, economists, politicians, and fiction writers has framed and evaluated that dilemma. Belasco divides the discourse into two main camps. On one side are the pessimists (Malthus and his intellectual offspring), who argue that there will never be enough food to feed us all — think of the film Soylent Green. On the other side are the optimists — Belasco terms them the "cornucopians" — who see science and human ingenuity as sufficient to meet each generation's challenges and shortcomings. Throw in the "egalitarians" (William Godwin, Frances Moore Lappé) — those who see the problem as less about quantity than about equal distribution between the haves and have-nots — and you have the basic theoretical positions that keep cropping up over the centuries. Belasco makes cogent, chilling observations about the culturally bound nature of definitions of "enough food." Invariably the discussions turn to meat, and we witness successive generations of European and American thinkers worrying about having enough meat, many fretting that the West will be reduced to "coolie" (grain-based) diets.

Speaking of meat and egalitarians, Peter Singer and Jim Mason's The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter is a thorough, clear examination and critique of the meat-laden American food system and diet. The acronym they choose — SAD, for the Standard American Diet (heavy on meat, other animal products, and refined grains, while light on fruits and vegetables) — gives some idea of their opinion of mainstream food and food habits. Both Singer and Mason are committed vegans, and they collaborated on an earlier book, Animal Factories. Their ultimate purpose in writing The Way We Eat, however, is to expose the injustices (environmental, human, animal) of SAD rather than to necessarily persuade all Americans to eschew all animals and animal products.

The Way We Eat follows three American families, each of which has a different approach to food: one that eats SAD-ly; the "conscientious omnivore" family that tries to shop and eat ethically, though it finds doing so consistently difficult; and the vegan family whose more strict ethical orientation toward eating renders it, the authors argue, the most ethically successful. But the authors themselves admit that what constitutes "eating ethically" is open to debate. If San Franciscans, for example, are faced with the choice between buying a bag of California rice (local, though not sustainably grown in such an arid environment) and one from Thailand (indigenous to the tropical region but bearing high energy costs from shipping), the somewhat counterintuitive answer is to choose the Thai rice, which, according to the authors, comes out as the least worse choice in terms of natural resources used. Also, somewhat surprisingly, for Singer and Mason waste is waste — whether organic, animal, or vegetableand they give an approving nod to a committed vegetarian who chooses to eat leftover Thanksgiving turkey rather than throw it out. The wasting of food for Singer and Mason thus emerges as a central principle for defining "ethical eating." They note that 40 percent of the food produced in the United States is thrown away, half of it still edible. If we could eliminate waste, they argue, we could better feed people while creating less havoc for the environment.

In a similar vein, Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, which has received the most attention of the books discussed here, also explores the ethics and anxieties of eating in the 21st century. Pollan traces from farm to fork four different meals, examining and evaluating the different food systems — "industrial" (represented by a meal from McDonald's); "industrial organic" (made from organic ingredients produced on a mass scale and procured from around the globe); "pastoral" (a regional, seasonal meal made largely from food acquired from Polyface Farm in Virginia); and "neo-Paleolithic" (made from ingredients Pollan himself hunted or foraged).

Through those journeys we meet memorable people, such as Joel Salatin, the Virginia farmer who helped Pollan understand the issues involved in food produced off the industrial grid. We look over Pollan's shoulder as he slaughters chickens, and take a seat with his family and friends at each of the meals. While Pollan is not the first to employ a meal as a rhetorical device for a broader discussion of food, this eminently readable book, framed largely by the Malthusian and egalitarian traditions, successfully integrates discussions of both science and culture, and of issues of production and consumption. It is also soulful to its core. Pollan observes, for example, "However we choose to feed ourselves, we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we're eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world." In the end, Pollan tips his hat to the "conscientious omnivore," the person who may not always make the most sustainable food choice but who is at least cognizant of and grappling with the complicated, often fraught provenance of the food we eat.

Attempting to assuage the omnivore's anxiety at the grocery store is Marion Nestle's What to Eat, an encyclopedic spin through the food aisles with an expert who knows her stuff. A nutritionist by training, with degrees in biology and public health, Nestle's delightfully straightforward approach does not belie her considerable expertise and opinion on the subject of healthy (and unhealthy) food. Her previous books are provocative, tough-minded critiques of corporate food politics and misplaced government loyalties. Nestle's goal here is to bypass all the hype and veiled advertising to tell us what is what. Sweetened breakfast cereals? "Most are now so thoroughly processed and sugared and filled with additives that they might as well be cookies." The "Law of Portion Size"? "The more food in front of you, the more you will eat." No corner of the grocery store is left unexamined, it seems, and food items (produce, bread, baby food, meat) are discussed multidimensionally: as fuel, as a portion of the household budget, and as affecting and affected by labor issues, the environment, and the corporate bottom line, to name but a few. In addition to Nestle's critiques of the American food system are — thankfully — sound, helpful recommendations on how to avoid the supermarket land mines and get on with the business of healthy and enjoyable eating.

Finally, Bill Buford's Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany is a refreshing antidote to the earnestness of the others. Heat comes from a different but important genre of food book, the epicure's obsession with high-end consumption and unique gastronomic experience. Such forays into culinary tourism are significant contributors to the booming interest in food. While perhaps less concerned with high-minded aspects of food and eating, Buford describes another sort of "earnest eating" — the behind-the-scenes culture of the hot restaurant run by a big personality (Mario Batali).

Part Anthony Bourdain, part M.F.K. Fisher, Heat is Buford's experience as the novice who gradually acquires skill in the kitchen, and through his experience gains important insight into the genius of culinary mastery, admires kitchen professionals' dedication to their craft, and grapples with why good food is so important psychologically and culturally. While Buford paints hilarious portraits of dinner rushes and kitchen prep snafus, and reveals the (surprise, surprise) testosterone-charged environs of the three-star kitchen, he reveals a serious, reverential side as well. As manly kitchen tell-alls are not my favorite genre, I admittedly approached Heat with some reluctance. Yet I was both enlightened and entertained by Buford's honest approach to himself and his characters, and the book stayed with me long after I turned the last page. Perhaps even more viscerally than The Omnivore's Dilemma, Heat confirms the crucial link between history, culture, place, and food, and what happens to people and places where food traditions thrive. When people regard food not as medicine to be endured or as dangerous and fraught but as an integral part of life, to be savored with friends and family, they seem to be healthier and can celebrate their food without dissonance.

As these books make clear, food issues are a prominent part of the public discourse because for many Americans, careful consideration of the food one eats and serves one's family helps fill a spiritual void. As most of these authors suggest, only a return to more humane, more harmonious methods of growing, cooking, and eating will help restore a spiritual connection with the land, with our food, and with each other. This is not new, of course; thinkers from Thomas Jefferson to Wendell Berry have been preaching these ideas for years, but as we have entered the 21st century, these notions have taken a qualitatively different turn. As Jackson Lears has demonstrated about mass production in general, a century ago, many Americans felt alienated by modernism and the industrialization that severed the connection between producer and consumer; that alienation is still palpable in our relationship to mass-produced, industrial food.

Seeking local, seasonal food today, then, can be viewed as a version of the early 20th-century critique of mass society, in which a return to artisanal food functions as a bulwark against the ease and reproducibility of mass-produced, industrial goods — indeed, "pap" and "gruel" were frequently employed metaphors used by critics to describe the fare produced by the media and entertainment industries. For many Americans, preparing meals from scratch for one's family, using ingredients bought at a local farmer's market, signifies self-reliance, a sense of simplicity, and a voluntary disconnect from the fast pace of our postindustrial, digital era. It can also result in less wastefulness. Many producers and sellers of this alternative vision of food, including Whole Foods markets, capitalize on and cater to these kinds of desires.

Indeed, marketers have learned that while emphasizing the new food culture may not appeal to all (in fact, it may not appeal to the majority), it does appeal to a sizable, influential minority. Supermarkets have become willing to stock their produce section with organic fruits and vegetables, and even if they don't sell readily, they are attractive, powerful "loss leaders" that may draw customers into stores and bring them back again. Nonindustrial food (and industrial organic food, as Pollan terms it) is simply more readily available today — think of what's changed in grocery stores over the last decade or so — and that availability is shaping Americans' consumption and food habits. Though I may be completely off the mark, the current discourse over food may signal a modification of the traditional American emphasis on quantity over quality. Perhaps now the image of the overflowing cornucopia needs to have organic or artisanal labels attached to grapes, walnuts, and pineapples. Possibly we are modifying our utilitarian, Protestant outlook for one that is more thoughtful, more sensuous, and more flavorful and includes a more complex palate of tastes and flavors.

Weberian musings aside, what this spate of food-studies books represents is a new maturity in thinking, a genuine attempt to integrate complex issues linking aesthetics and ethics with health, the environment, family life, and social- and labor-justice issues, previously seen to have little in common. Further, the authors explicitly link issues of production with those of consumption, something not done as well since Sidney W. Mintz's superb 1985 Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. The books also demonstrate the convergence of the environmental movement and the "delicious revolution" — the two are on the same page, after all. Aldo Leopold meets Alice Waters, Rachel Carson meets M.F.K. Fisher. If these books fall short in any area, it is in addressing the difficult but crucial issue of getting all this healthy, sustainable (more expensive, less widely distributed) food to people of little means. Finally, these authors see little difference between science and poetry, between applying rational thought and romantic sentiment, to food problems and issues. For them, all knowledge, all emotion leads to the same point: a refashioned food system incorporating sustainable practices, cultural sensitivity, good nutrition, and taste. Such a system in the long run is the most practical and economically viable.

Not all people feel this way, of course; there are many who would unequivocally subscribe to straight cornucopian notions of food production, believing that scientific advancement and human ingenuity will preclude the need to alter our eating habits. But as Marion Nestle concludes in What to Eat: "Willingly or not you participate in the environment of food choice. The choices you make about food are as much about the kind of world you want to live in as they are about what to have for dinner. Food choices are about your future and that of your children. They are about nothing less than democracy in action. I truly believe that one person can make a difference and that food is a great place to begin to make that difference. Yes, you should use personal responsibility — informed personal responsibility — to make food choices you believe in. Exercise your First Amendment rights and speak out. And enjoy your dinner."

Amy Bentley is an associate professor in the department of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University and author of Eating For Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity (University of Illinois Press, 1998). She is working on a cultural history of baby food.

Via Leo

quotable

Who am I to argue?

Tomatoes and oregano make it Italian;
Wine and tarragon make it French;
Sour cream makes it Russian;
Lemon and cinnamon make it Greek.
Soy sauce makes it Chinese;
Garlic makes it good.
-Alice May Brock of "Alice's Restaurant" fame

this i believe: failure is a good thing

I love success. But I'm beginning to cozy up to failure.

Failure Is a Good Thing
by Jon Carroll
Morning Edition: This I Believe
October 9, 2006
Last week, my granddaughter started kindergarten, and, as is conventional, I wished her success. I was lying. What I actually wish for her is failure. I believe in the power of failure.

Success is boring. Success is proving that you can do something that you already know you can do, or doing something correctly the first time, which can often be a problematical victory. First-time success is usually a fluke. First-time failure, by contrast, is expected; it is the natural order of things.

Failure is how we learn. I have been told of an African phrase describing a good cook as "she who has broken many pots." If you've spent enough time in the kitchen to have broken a lot of pots, probably you know a fair amount about cooking. I once had a late dinner with a group of chefs, and they spent time comparing knife wounds and burn scars. They knew how much credibility their failures gave them.

I earn my living by writing a daily newspaper column. Each week I am aware that one column is going to be the worst column of the week. I don't set out to write it; I try my best every day. Still, every week, one column is inferior to the others, sometimes spectacularly so.

I have learned to cherish that column. A successful column usually means that I am treading on familiar ground, going with the tricks that work, preaching to the choir or dressing up popular sentiments in fancy words. Often in my inferior columns, I am trying to pull off something I've never done before, something I'm not even sure can be done.

My younger daughter is a trapeze artist. She spent three years putting together an act. She did it successfully for years with the Cirque du Soleil. There was no reason for her to change the act -- but she did anyway. She said she was no longer learning anything new and she was bored; and if she was bored, there was no point in subjecting her body to all that stress. So she changed the act. She risked failure and profound public embarrassment in order to feed her soul. And if she can do that 15 feet in the air, we all should be able to do it.

My granddaughter is a perfectionist, probably too much of one. She will feel her failures, and I will want to comfort her. But I will also, I hope, remind her of what she learned, and how she can do whatever it is better next time. I probably won't tell her that failure is a good thing, because that's not a lesson you can learn when you're five. I hope I can tell her, though, that it's not the end of the world. Indeed, with luck, it is the beginning.

oh lordy

This four-part series, "In God's Name," examines how American religious organizations benefit from an increasingly accommodating government.

The second article in the series shows how U.S. judges have used the separation of church and state to shield religious employers of all faiths from labor laws and most employee lawsuits. What these churches are doing is downright immoral.

Where Faith Abides, Employees Have Few Rights
By DIANA B. HENRIQUES
Published: October 9, 2006
J. Jeffrey Heck, a lawyer in Mansfield, Ohio, usually sits on management’s side of the table. “The only employee cases I take are those that poke my buttons,” he said. “And this one really did.”

His client was a middle-aged novice training to become a nun in a Roman Catholic religious order in Toledo. She said she had been dismissed by the order after she became seriously ill — including a diagnosis of breast cancer.

In her complaint, the novice, Mary Rosati, said she had visited her doctor with her immediate supervisor and the mother superior. After the doctor explained her treatment options for breast cancer, the complaint continued, the mother superior announced: “We will have to let her go. I don’t think we can take care of her.”

Some months later Ms. Rosati was told that the mother superior and the order’s governing council had decided to dismiss her after concluding that “she was not called to our way of life,” according to the complaint. Along with her occupation and her home, she lost her health insurance, Mr. Heck said. Ms. Rosati, who still lacks health insurance but whose cancer is in remission, said she preferred not to discuss her experience because of her continuing love for the church.

In court filings, lawyers for the diocese denied her account of these events. If Ms. Rosati had worked for a business or almost any secular employer, she might have prevailed under the protections of the Americans With Disabilities Act. Instead, her complaint was dismissed in December 2002 by Judge James G. Carr of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, who decided that the order’s decision to dismiss her “was an ecclesiastical decision” that was “beyond the reach of the court” because “the First Amendment requires churches to be free from government interference in matters of church governance and administration.”

Legislators and regulators are not the only people in government who have drafted special rules for religious organizations. Judges, too, have carved out or preserved safe havens that shield religious employers of all faiths from most employee lawsuits, from laws protecting pensions and providing unemployment benefits, and from laws that give employees the right to form unions to negotiate with their employers.

Some of these exemptions are rooted in long traditions, while others have grown from court decisions over the last 15 years. Together, they are expanding the ability of religious organizations — especially religious schools — to manage their affairs with less interference from the government and their own employees.

The most sweeping of these judicial protections, and the one that confronted the novice nun in Toledo, is called the ministerial exception. Judges have been applying this exception, sometimes called the church autonomy doctrine, to religious employment disputes for more than 100 years.

As a rule, state and federal judges will handle any lawsuit that is filed in the right place in an appropriate, timely manner. But judges will almost never agree to hear a controversy that would require them to delve into the doctrines, governance, discipline or hiring preferences of any religious faith. Citing the protections of the First Amendment, they have ruled with great consistency that congregations cannot fully express their faith and exercise their religious freedom unless they are free to select their own spiritual leaders without any interference from government agencies or second-guessing by the courts.

To do otherwise would be an intolerable government intrusion into employment relationships that courts have called “the lifeblood” of religious life and the bedrock of religious liberty, explained Edward R. McNicholas, co-chairman of the national religious institutions practice in the Washington, D.C., office of Sidley Austin, a law firm with some of the country’s largest religious organizations among its clients.

Judges have routinely invoked the ministerial exception to dismiss lawsuits against religious employers by rabbis, ministers, cantors, nuns and priests — those “whose ministry is a core expression of religious belief for that congregation,” as Mr. McNicholas put it.

But judges also have applied the exception to dismiss cases filed by the press secretary at a Roman Catholic church, a writer for The Christian Science Monitor, administrators at religious colleges, the disgruntled beneficiaries of a Lutheran pension fund, the overseer of the kosher kitchen at a Jewish nursing home and a co-founder of Focus on the Family, run by the conservative religious leader James C. Dobson. Court files show that some of these people were surprised to learn that their work had been considered a “core expression of religious belief” by their employer.

Religious employers have long been shielded from all complaints of religious discrimination by an exemption that was built into the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and expanded in 1972. That historic exemption allows them to give preference in hiring to candidates who share their faith. In recent years, some judges have also refused to interfere when religious groups have dismissed lesbians, unwed mothers and adulterous couples, even if they profess the same faith, because they have violated their employers’ religious codes.

A federal court decision has given religious broadcasters an exemption from some of the fair-hiring requirements of the Federal Communications Commission, even when they are hiring secretaries and receptionists. Two other decisions, one in federal court affecting a Mormon church and the other in a state court of appeals case involving a Roman Catholic nursing home, affirmed the right of religious employers to dismiss employees whose faith changed after they were hired.

“These are very difficult cases because they pull at some very fundamental heartstrings,” said Steven C. Sheinberg, a lawyer at Outten & Golden, specializing in employment law. “There’s our belief that employees should be free of discrimination in their work, versus our belief that religious organizations should be free to hire people who best help them fulfill their religious mission, without the intrusion of government.”

Employees at religious institutions face other risks as well, thanks to pension law exemptions granted by Congress and upheld by the courts. Religious employers are exempt from Erisa, the federal pension law that establishes disclosure requirements and conflict-of-interest restrictions for employee pension plans. That exemption has given rise to several cases in which workers at religious hospitals found that their pensions had vanished because of practices that would not have been allowed under Erisa’s rules.

A related exemption frees religious employers from participating in the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the government-run insurance program that provides a safety net for corporate pension plans. And some significant court decisions in labor disputes in the last several years have made it easier for religious schools and colleges to resist collective bargaining efforts.

But for Mr. Heck, the question of whether these workplace exemptions are fair to religious employees was crystallized by the case of Ms. Rosati, the novice nun in Toledo.

He said the doctor involved in her case had been prepared to testify under oath on Ms. Rosati’s behalf. The doctor “had quite a vivid memory about these events.” In fact, Mr. Heck said, the doctor had cautioned the nuns who accompanied Ms. Rosati that it would be virtually impossible for the ailing novice to get affordable insurance anywhere else if she were dropped from the diocesan health.

Lawyers for the diocese disputed Ms. Rosati’s account of that visit and denied that health reasons were the causes of her rejection by the order, the Sisters of the Visitation of Holy Mary, which is covered by the diocesan health plan. For the court “to even begin to inquire into that decision-making process, we believe, crosses the line set by the First Amendment,” said Gregory T. Lodge, a lawyer for both the Toledo diocese and the order, which operates under papal authority.

“I understand and absolutely appreciate that in matters of religion, the state has no business meddling,” Mr. Heck said. “It would be unthinkable for a judge to be able to say, ‘Hey, I don’t like the way you’re interpreting the Book of Luke.’ ”

But what religious principle is offended when an employee simply grows old or becomes ill, he asked. If the answer is “none,” he continued, judges should be more willing to “look behind the curtain.”

Exemptions From Employee Suits

For 28 days last May, Lynette M. Petruska, a former nun who now lives in St. Louis, thought she had finally found judges willing to listen to her complaint against Gannon University, a coeducational Catholic college in downtown Erie, Pa. As it turned out, she was wrong.

Ms. Petruska was educated in Catholic schools from kindergarten to college commencement, graduated at the top of her law school class and practiced law for several years before deciding to become a nun. In 1999, as she was working toward taking her final vows, she became the first woman to serve as Gannon’s chaplain.

Three years later she was demoted and, according to her complaint, effectively forced out. In her lawsuit, she said this action was in response to her having notified the administration of a case of sexual misconduct by a senior university official, resisted efforts to cover up that case and opposed proposals to weaken campus policies on sexual harassment. In 2004, she sued, accusing the university administration of forcing her out simply because she was a woman and because she had opposed the sexual harassment others experienced on campus.

Gender bias claims against religious employers have generally been dismissed under the ministerial exception. But some judges across the country have been less quick to dismiss cases where sexual harassment or abuse of an employee is involved. And unlike many other plaintiffs, Ms. Petruska claimed that her supervisor had actually acknowledged to her that she was being demoted solely because of her sex, not because of any religious doctrine.

Judge Sean J. McLaughlin of the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania nevertheless ruled that Gannon was protected by the First Amendment and the ministerial exception from any court interference in its choice of chaplain. Gannon itself argued that it had many women in leadership positions and that Ms. Petruska had resigned simply because she was unhappy with a staff reorganization. But its fundamental argument was that it would be unconstitutional for the court to second-guess these disputed decisions.

“You may ask, ‘Why should these decisions go unquestioned?’ The reason is plain and simple: The First Amendment protects a church’s right to freely exercise its religion,” said Evan C. Rudert, a lawyer for the university. “And that includes organizing itself as it chooses and selecting those who it believes will serve best as its leaders — without interference from the courts.”

Then, last May, in a decision that caused considerable comment in legal circles around the country, a federal appeals court panel reversed the trial judge’s decision.

For four weeks, the prevailing law in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and the Virgin Islands — the jurisdiction of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit — was that “employment discrimination unconnected to religious belief, religious doctrine, or the internal regulations of a church is simply the exercise of intolerance, not the free exercise of religion.”

Appellate Judge Edward R. Becker wrote that opinion; his colleague on the three-judge panel, Judge D. Brooks Smith, filed a stinging dissent. A few days later, Judge Becker died. On June 20, in a rare move, the Third Circuit granted Gannon’s routine request to have the case reconsidered and named Judge Smith to the new three-judge panel that would do so.

On Sept. 6, the new panel swept the earlier decision away, unequivocally restoring the protections for religious employers that it had put in doubt. As Judge Smith put it, the ministerial exception “applies to any claim, the resolution of which would limit a religious institution’s right to choose who will perform particular spiritual functions.”

Ms. Petruska, who has left her order and returned home to work at her old law firm, describes herself as a feminist who is “committed to peace and freedom.” She has a long history of putting her words into action — she has been arrested at protest marches, most recently at an antiwar rally the day before the Iraq war began, she said. She plans to appeal the ruling against her.

“I think this issue needs to be decided by the Supreme Court,” she said. And she has hopes that the justices will agree with Judge Becker that, absent some grounding in religious doctrine, sex discrimination by religious employers is wrong.

No Recourse On Age Bias

Add age discrimination to that wish list, the Rev. John Paul Hankins says.

At 73, Mr. Hankins can look back on 50 years in a loving marriage, 40 years as a minister in the United Methodist Church — and 3 years as the plaintiff in an uphill court fight over his denomination’s mandatory retirement policy.

Eight months after he turned 70, that policy forced Mr. Hankins to leave his pulpit in the historic Stony Brook Community Church in Stony Brook, N.Y., where he had served for 37 years. He loved his flock and the feeling was mutual: the congregation withheld part of its annual contribution to the regional church that year to express its dismay.

“He had served for many, many years and wanted to continue to serve, and his congregation wanted that, too,” said David S. Warren, a professor of computer science at Stony Brook University who had been a member of the congregation for more than 25 years but who left because of how Mr. Hankins was treated.

Mr. Hankins said he was suing because age discrimination is almost as hateful and senseless to him as the racial segregation and bias against women that used to be “mandatory policies” of his church.

“I feel, and have long felt, that discrimination in any form has no place in the life of a faith community,” he said.

Under the federal age discrimination law, most employees of all but the smallest businesses can sue if they are forced to retire for no other reason than that they reached a certain birthday; increasingly, government and academic employees have the same protection. But Mr. Hankins knows his complaint will probably never come to trial simply because he is a clergy member trying to sue his church. Indeed, court rulings around the country suggest that if he had been forced out at any age and for almost any reason — for a deceptive reason, or even for no reason at all — he would face the same judicial roadblock.

“I never, ever thought that the last years of my ministry would be involved in a fight like this,” Mr. Hankins said.

Lawrence H. McGaughey, the lawyer for the regional Methodist governing body and its bishop, acknowledged that there is a movement in the church to eliminate the retirement rule opposed by Rev. Hankins. But if the rule is ultimately changed, it should be the church’s decision, not a court’s, he said.

“Any private employer would feel the same way — they’d like to be able to make these decisions without having to face the courts,” Mr. McGaughey said. “But the difference is the First Amendment.”

He continued: “We’re talking about worship here. Are you going to go into church and have someone standing there who was ordered to be there by the courts? There are certain things a government just cannot do in this country.”

In September 2003, a federal trial judge on Long Island ruled that Mr. Hankins’s complaint was barred by the ministerial exception. Last February, a federal appeals court panel sent the case back, directing the trial judge to decide the case by applying a 1993 federal law, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, rather than the ministerial exception doctrine. But there was little in the instructions to the trial court to encourage Mr. Hankins.

He nevertheless thinks his complaint will eventually help his church see that its mandatory retirement rule is unfair.

“I don’t need to win the case,” Mr. Hankins said. “I feel the movement of history at work here, I really do. Ideas find their feet, and start to walk.”

State judges have been equally reluctant to interfere in disputes between religious employers and their staff members — to the sad frustration of Rabbi Isaac H. Celnik of Albuquerque.

Rabbi Celnik, one of the youngest men ever ordained in Conservative Judaism, was just 30 when he was hired in 1971 as the spiritual leader of Congregation B’nai Israel. Eight years later, he entered into a 30-year contract with the synagogue, an arrangement his congregation endorsed by a margin of almost nine to one, he said.

Then the medical problems began. In 1996, Rabbi Celnik was told he was in the early stages of Parkinson’s disease; in April 2000, his wife, Peggy, was told she had breast cancer. In October 2000, he said, the president of the congregation’s governing board at the time suggested he retire on disability.

But the rabbi did not consider himself disabled and did not want to retire, he said. He had two young children and a wife whose treatment required continuing health insurance. He “loved the work, and loved the congregation,” he said. Indeed, when the synagogue’s cantor resigned a month after the retirement discussion, Rabbi Celnik proposed, and the board agreed, that he would take on the cantor’s duties as well, he said.

But the relationship deteriorated as he tried to negotiate retirement terms that would provide him and his family with adequate financial security. In January 2002, after those negotiations faltered, he was dismissed; in 2003, he sued. But last February, the state’s court of appeals dismissed his case, based on the ministerial exception, also called the church autonomy doctrine.

“We are sympathetic to Rabbi Celnik’s struggles with Parkinson’s and the manifestation of the disease after so many years of service,” the chief judge wrote. But he ruled that the dispute “is precisely the type of religious debate that the church autonomy doctrine is intended to protect from judicial review.”

The congregation’s current president, Alan M. Chodorow, declined to discuss the details of the dispute. “I do not want to talk about anything that might impair our search for reconciliation and forgiveness” with Rabbi Celnik, he said. “But I will say that we believe strongly in the separation of church and state, and that the state should not have any part in choosing our spiritual leaders.”

But Mr. Chodorow said that he was sympathetic to the situation that this freedom for congregations created for employees and that he believed that religious institutions have to provide other protections by contract. Although clergy members in many faiths work without formal contracts, the model contract in wide use within Conservative Judaism provides that rabbis and cantors can terminate the agreement without cause and seek binding arbitration to resolve disputes, he said.

The church autonomy doctrine “takes away certain rights and this is put in specifically for the purpose of preserving rights,” Mr. Chodorow said.

Rabbi Celnik and his wife continue to struggle with the financial and physical burdens of his deteriorating health and her second episode of cancer. “They don’t teach this in rabbinical school,” the rabbi said in a recent interview. Teach what? Mrs. Celnik answered before he could: “Don’t get old. Don’t get sick.”

Mr. McNicholas, the Sidley Austin lawyer, acknowledged that some “unjust and sinful” treatment has been protected from litigation by the ministerial exception. But he argued that “the openness of the religious process” would remedy those situations, making it possible for a clergy member dismissed by one congregation to find a home in another.

But what if they are sick? “That’s harder — and very troubling,” Mr. McNicholas said. “But if you have a judge deciding it, that’s just too much intervention in the process of deciding the hiring issues” at religious institutions. “There’s no easy answer.”

Protections Against Unionization

The University of Great Falls, in Montana, has a tidy urban campus, a bold crucifix-topped chapel, a master’s program in criminal justice and, according to one student’s Internet posting, a cafeteria that serves pretty good spaghetti.

What the small Roman Catholic college doesn’t have is a faculty union.

It wasn’t for lack of trying. In 1995, the Montana Federation of Teachers, which had unionized most of the public universities in Montana, asked the National Labor Relations Board to recognize it as the collective bargaining agent for the teaching staff at Great Falls.

“Some of the faculty members there traveled in circles that included professors at the other schools,” recalled James McGarvey, who was president of the Montana Federation of Teachers at the time. (It has since merged with the Montana Education Association.) Teachers at those other campuses had better pay and more favorable work rules, and some professors at Great Falls had expressed interest in seeing whether the federation could help them as well, according to Mr. McGarvey. “We felt we had a pretty strong showing,” he said.

J. C. Weingartner, a union lawyer who worked on the campaign, said that while “pay did come into it, it wasn’t what got it started.” That spark was discontent among some professors over the president’s appointing members to an important advisory council who “did not reflect the views of the majority of the faculty” in negotiations with the administration, he said. “So they felt their interests would be better served with collective bargaining.”

The university, which has a new management team today, declined to comment on the long legal battle.

But when the labor board held a hearing on the union’s request, the university’s lawyers argued that the board had no jurisdiction because the university was a religious institution, and to force it to negotiate with the union would violate its religious liberty.

The university based its case largely on a 1979 decision in which the United States Supreme Court ruled that the labor board’s jurisdiction did not extend to religious schools. After that decision, which resulted in what is called the Catholic Bishop doctrine, the board began case-by-case examinations to determine whether the schools that came before it were sufficiently religious — whatever their faith — to be exempt from its jurisdiction.

The University of Great Falls did not qualify, the board concluded in February 1996.

For the next seven years, the little Catholic college fought both the federal labor board and the faculty union, keeping lots of lawyers busy and incurring official charges of unfair labor practices in the process. In 2002, it won.

The federal appeals court panel in Washington ruled that a three-prong test should be the labor board’s only standard for determining which schools were religious enough to be exempt from the nation’s collective bargaining laws under the Catholic Bishop decision.

Any school that is nonprofit, has a religious affiliation and presents itself to the public as a religious institution must be exempted from jurisdiction, the court said. And that included the University of Great Falls.

And the court ruled that the labor board’s old case-by-case approach had to stop immediately. For the board even to conduct such inquiries raised serious issues of religious freedom, the judges said.

Of course, some casually faithful or broadly tolerant schools that might previously have failed to win a labor board exemption would easily pass the court’s new test.

The appellate judges anticipated that complaint, and dismissed it. “If the university is ecumenical and open-minded, that does not make it any less religious, nor N.L.R.B. interference any less a potential infringement of religious liberty,” they said.

David Strom, general counsel of the American Federation of Teachers in Washington, doesn’t mince words about the impact of the Great Falls decision. “It means that the difficulty of organizing a religiously affiliated college has become enormous.”

Although federal statistics show that one of every seven colleges in the country describes itself as a religious institution, it is not clear how far-reaching the Great Falls decision will be. On its face, it would seem likely to reduce any union-driven salary pressures on exempt religious schools, allowing them to maintain more competitive tuition levels. However, some colleges that might be eligible for an exemption under the new rules may already have collective bargaining in place or may not oppose unions as fiercely as the Montana university did.

And the decision limits only the protections of the National Labor Relations Act. But last fall, in a case involving teachers at Catholic schools in Boston, a federal district judge in Massachusetts ruled that part of another federal labor statute called the Taft-Hartley Act could not be applied to church-operated schools without raising First Amendment issues.

Notwithstanding the protracted battle in Great Falls, Catholic institutions are not doctrinally opposed to collective bargaining, said Julie N. Secviar, senior vice president for strategic resources for the Franciscan Sisters of Chicago Service Corporation, which manages Catholic hospitals, nursing homes and retirement communities.

In fact, the ethical health care directives of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops require “recognition of the rights of employees to organize and bargain collectively without prejudice to the common good.”

Next, Exemptions for Hospitals?

At the other end of the spectrum stand the Seventh Day Adventists, a Christian denomination with more than 14 million members worldwide. Like many denominations, it provides global humanitarian relief and maintains a large network of church schools and colleges, including Loma Linda University in California. But it also operates the largest Protestant nonprofit health care system in the country, with 38 hospitals in 10 states, 23 nursing homes and 44,000 employees.

And not one of those employees is in a union, for a very simple reason: The church believes that collective bargaining “defies Christ’s admonitions that behavior must be directed by individual conscience” and “is inherently disruptive” of the church’s healing mission, as lawyers for the denomination first explained to the national labor board in 1998.

The lawyers were responding to a petition by the California Nurses Association to represent the nonsupervisory nurses employed at Ukiah Valley Medical Center.

As in the Great Falls case, the lawyers argued that the labor board had no jurisdiction because the hospital was a religious institution and to force it to recognize or bargain with a union would violate its freedom under the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

As in the Great Falls case, the labor board ruled otherwise. The next step should have been union balloting, explained Jeffrey A. Berman, the Sidley Austin lawyer who represented the hospital in the case. But the nursing association withdrew its petition and the case ended, he said.

According to the American Hospital Association, about one of every four of its members has a religious affiliation. But the Adventists’ problem before the labor board was that hospitals, unlike religious schools, were specifically included in the board’s jurisdiction by Congress. The only labor-law accommodation that Adventists have been able to win from Congress was a provision in 1974 allowing church members to pay the equivalent of their union dues to one of several agreed-upon secular charities, according to Mr. Berman.

Adventist hospitals are still waiting for their own Great Falls moment. As Mr. Berman put it, “We’re not asking for carte blanche, for the ability to be exempt from all laws — just with respect to what is unique about these hospitals.”

gonna make slugs sweat

Martha Wash, you done been wronged again.

sock dollagers and blond quiffs

"Requiem for a Goose"

falling

This morning, my senses tell me that it's nearly autumn:

1. Exhibit A: My shoulders were cold when I woke up, so I burrowed deeper under the covers and slept in.
   
2. Exhibit B: The Bartlett pear I just ate. The ripe flesh yielded perfectly, and I'm still savoring its quintessential fall flavor.
   

The only downside: it's dreary outside my window, and I don't have soup for lunch.

carrie and mike's wedding

Josh had a great time at the wedding. So did the rest of us.

Josh and Leo by comment dit-on

these people know how to party

It's been awhile, but I finally posted photos from last month's party.

The French connection by comment dit-on

quotable

"Racism isn't born, folks, it's taught. I have a two-year-old son. You know what he hates? Naps! End of list."
-Denis Colin Leary (August 18, 1957 - ) is an Emmy-nominated American actor, comedian, writer and director. He is known for his often angry comedic style with an extremely libertarian viewpoint.

allison's quasi-vegan banana bread

This dense, bready treat is best served hot from the oven, with plenty of butter.

Preheat oven to 350.

Mash together:
3 ripe bananas
1 cup fat-free vanilla yogurt
1 cup sugar

Sift in:
2 cups whole wheat flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
~1/3 cup soy milk

Mix until just combined. Bake in a greased and floured bread pan at 350 for 51 minutes.

rocking sandals

Reason #3,719 that I don't respect the San Diego Union Tribune: they rarely get the facts right.

This note from Zach illustrates why the UT doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

On the front page of [today's] UT:

"Sandal rocks GOP House Leadership"

At no point in the article is anyone named Sandal mentioned. The word "scandal," however, is used a couple of times.

the best medicine

"When you're in it up to your eyeballs, keep your mouth shut."
-Yiddish proverb

I have a friend who is completely slammed right now.

He's got a patent deadline this week.
He just moved out of his house, and doesn't have a new place to live yet.
He's also got an infectious laugh.
And he's an amazing storyteller, so I'm glad that he didn't know (or heed) the advice of the above proverb.

He took the time to join Leo, Dana and me for breakfast yesterday. And in spite of the fact that I was struggling to get my tea and English muffin down, I had a great morning — loving, laughing, and feeling completely, wonderfully alive.

In the end, I had such a great morning that I couldn't stop laughing or get rid of my hiccups until we parted ways after breakfast was over. I'm sure that those hiccups were just what I needed to turn the corner and feel much better.

Jason, thank you for my tea and English muffin, for your stories, and for your infectious laughter. Thanks most of all for my hiccups.

Let me know when I can return the favor.

biologically imposed hunger strike

"You have three modes right now: cranky, puking, or asleep."
-Leo, to me, on Saturday night.

It's true. But there's a damn good reason why ...

I felt generally queasy on Thursday night when Leo and I sat down to dinner, so I picked at a few bites and then gave up.

I woke up in a ball of sweat at 1:42 a.m. and made a mad dash for the bathroon, where I proceeded to be sick from both ends. That continued about once every 90 minutes until 10 a.m. I opted against going to work when I stepped on the scale and saw I was down 6 lbs overnight. When I spiked a fever of 102 around 1 p.m., I made an appointment for urgent care. The soonest they could see me— 7:50 p.m.

I checked in at 7:35. Two hours, two immodium AD tablets, a shot of phentergan (anti-nausea drug), and 500 cc's of IV fluid later, I was still feeling weak, but Leo drove me home and proceeded to take care of me for the next two days. Thankfully, the nausea didn't return and I didn't have to resort to using the (chilled) promethgan suppositories. I'm still taking the immodium and making baby steps toward solid foods. After sleeping an average of 14 hours per day for the last 72 hours, my energy's back and my mood is approaching normal.

I miss food. And as I said to Leo on Friday, I'm not cut out for a hunger strike. Ever.