Billy's Lines Of Gibberish

[The discussion born from the comments about the recent blog 'Eating together' made me think of several old blogs of mine about food, that disappeared when I deleted my other blog on Yahoo! 360. This post was published in May 2007]
I was in a bookstore in Chicago several months ago, looking for medical books, when I happened to glance through a little book called Mindless Eating, by Brian Wansink, a professor at Cornell University, NY. The experiments depicted in the book were clever, and often funny.


I remembered of it yesterday when I came upon an article by David Leonhardt in the International Herald Tribune (The Herald is an international newspaper in English, based in Paris, that combines the resources of its own correspondents throughout the world with those of The New York Times). Leonhardt began his article by telling about an experiment I especially remembered because the idea of eating lots of stale popcorn almost made me sick when I was in this bookstore in Chicago.

Mr. Wansink gave away five-day-old popcorn — “stale enough to squeak when it was eaten,” he wrote — to moviegoers one day at a theatre in the Chicago suburbs. The crux of the experiment lay in the size of the buckets that held the popcorn. Some people got merely big buckets, while others received truly enormous ones. Both sizes held more popcorn than a typical person could finish.
 
Yet when the Wansink research team weighed the buckets after the movie, there was a huge difference in the amounts the two groups ate. Those with the bigger buckets inhaled 53 percent more on average, suggesting that a lot of stale popcorn is somehow more appealing than a little stale popcorn.
 
Over the years, Mr. Wansink has done similar experiments with everything from different-size dinner plates to bottomless bowls of tomato soup that are secretly connected to a tube underneath a restaurant table. His overarching conclusion is that our decisions about eating often have little to do with how hungry we are. Instead, we rely on cues like the size of a popcorn bucket — or the way we organize our refrigerator — to tell us how much to eat. These cues can add 200 calories a day to our diet, but the only way we’ll notice we are overeating is that our pants will eventually get too tight.
 
The scariest part is that most of us think we are immune to these hidden persuaders. When the moviegoers were told about the popcorn experiment afterward, most of them scoffed at the idea that their bucket size had any effect on them.

• Brian Wansink's Web site
• David Leonhardt article (NYT): Your Plate Is Bigger Than Your Stomach
• Kim Severson article (NYT): Seduced by Snacks? No, Not You

The starter I've prepared for dinner: a few cherry tomatoes and a big sliced one, feta cheese, some lettuce, a bit of chicken cut in dices, olive oil, vinegar, pepper, salt, that's it. Bon appétit!

'French women don't get fat', a US best-seller book stated. It's almost true: despite their food is usually considered rich, the French have the average lowest corpulence in Europe, relatively low rates of diabetes and coronary diseases, and are among the people with the longest longevity. Many reasons have been given as an explanation for this French paradox, that include habits of eating small portions of several foods rather than one huge portion, using olive oil, eating a lot of dairy produce and vegetables, drinking red wine, and walking rather than driving for short distances.

According to a recent study by the INSEE, the French Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies, there may be also another cultural reason: the ritualization of meals, a distinctive features of French people, most of whom still take their meals together at a given time. Such a synchronisation of meals, at around 13h for lunch and 20h for dinner, 'distinguishes France from most other countries in Europe and the United States, where traditional meal — conceived like a moment shared by all members of a family gathering together on this occasion — almost disappeared at the end of the 1970's', the study says.

Dinner, especially,'is still a mandatory stage in daily timetable of the French, one of last refuges of family socialization'. Indeed, it is often the only common activity for married people who go their separate professional life in the daytime, and the moment when parents and children have a time to talk together. Meals are not only considered a moment when you fill up your stomach as fast as possible, but a dedicated period of the day when you talk and share with your family.

I love the idea that gathering together and sharing meals is beneficial to relations between members of a family, and to health as well.

Oops, by the way... I got to go: it's 8:00 pm now, dinner time here!

When I opened my email box the other morning, there were a couple of job-related mails... and 37 spams! Granted, the latter got filtered by my spam firewall, but I waited for an important mail then, and was afraid of missing it, if it was considered a spam by mistake. Therefore, I explored the spam folder also. You know what? I don't like spam!

The word SPAM was coined in July, 1937 when Hormel foods, a company that processed a meat product called Hormel Spiced Ham, decided to change this name to a more memorable one. The precise meaning of the acronym is disputed though: SPAM may be the contraction of either Shoulder of Pork and hAM, Spiced Pork and hAM, or simply SPiced hAM — although malicious gossip would say it should rather be Specially Processed Artificial Meat or Spare Parts Already Minced.

During the WWII and following years, SPAM was among a few products excluded from food rationing in the United Kingdom, and the British grew heartily tired of it.

Several years later, the Monty Python broadcast a sketch that parodied an advert for the canned meat: in a restaurant, a couple tries to order a breakfast. The lady (Graham Chapman in drag) dislikes spam, but every dish in the menu contains spam (egg and spam; egg, bacon and spam; egg, bacon, sausage and spam; etc.). A group of Vikings seated at a table starts chanting "SPAM, SPAM, SPAM..." and progressively jams every other talk in the restaurant, while John Cleese gets picked up by the police for Hungarian-accent-induced obscene words.

This hilarious sketch became highly famous, as well as the Vikings' song. That's why, several years later, the phenomenon of marketers drowning out discourse by flooding email boxes with junk advertising messages was named spamming, recounting the repetitive and unwanted presence of SPAM in the sketch by the Monty Python.