Food

I love food.  Good food.  I am not one to just shovel any old edible item in to satisfy the cravings unless I am really desperate.  Even though I thought I was fairly selective in what I ate, I keep bumping into people, articles, books, and movies that cause me to think hard about the food choices I make.

A couple of years back The Wife returned from a trip reading the book ‘Fast Food Nation’.  She read me large sections, and we both came away a bit concerned about our food supply and made some changes into what and how we ate.    Soon after that the movie ‘Super Size Me’ by Morgan Spurlock came out, reinforcing some of the biases we developed from ‘Fast Food Nation’, though in part I am a bit immune from the McDonalds phenomenon.  I have not eaten at a McDonalds since circa 1969, a while before the concept of ’super size’ was developed.

Last year on our trip to Canada we stayed at an Inn in Kelowna, B.C., run by an expatriate from L.A. who is an advocate of the 100-mile diet.  He had run an orchard for years, but had changed to running a sheep and goat farm after rehabilitating a 1909 arts and crafts house as an inn/artist’s workshop.   Our breakfast conversations revolved around the ethics and politics of eating locally produced foods items, all while we dined on fresh goat milk yogurt and a variety of items produced either on the property or nearby.

At the present time I am reading “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals” by Michael Pollan.  The first part of the book, the first of the four meals, is what Pollan terms the ‘industrial diet’.  Specifically he talks about the current diet in the U.S., a diet based primarily in some form on soybeans and number 2 feed corn.   He traces the feed corn from a farm in Iowa through feedlots, cereal processors, and the industrial production of items like HFCS (high fructose corn syrup), pointing out that the current farm policy that favors this type of food production is the legacy of the policies of Earl Butz, Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture.  The villians in this section are our government along with the manufacturer’s reaping the benefits, mostly Cargill and ADM. Reading that section is enough to scare one away from most of the stuff items found at the local supermarket.  The last of the four meals, the part I am reading now, follows the diet that Pollan himself admits is not sustainable in our current environment,  the hunter-gatherer way of life.  Most interesting, to me, was the third meal, a meal based upon foods grown locally on managed grasslands. Grazers were rotated through sections of land in prescribed progression without chemical inputs. Here the case is made that we should be looking at local, low impact on the land, non-industrial food production with its inherent seasonality and favoring quality over quantity.

Yesterday, at the Toronto film festival, a movie titled ‘Food, Inc.’ premiered. From the press pieces it sounds like a movie documentary version of Pollan’s industrial diet, and features Pollan, Joel Salatin (the grassland farmer followed by Pollan), and the author of ‘Fast Food Nation’, Eric Schlossberg. The movie has not been picked up by a distributor yet, so I will not be seeing it soon. But the more I see and read about our food supply the more tempted I am to rip out all landscaping and to start growing as much of my own food as I can.

Saturday ridin’

I decided to test out riding with the damaged thumb on Saturday but I was not quite ready to tackle the thumb lever of the Campy shifters. So I grabbed the TT bike, with the bar end shifters, and headed to the west. I found it easy to operate the right shifter with a combination of two fingers and the hand. After a nice warmup in the flatlands I made my way into the Los Altos Hills and started some VO2Max intervals, and I was feeling good. I put in a bit over two hours with no problems whatsoever.

Sunday ridin’

If one day of riding is good, two is better. The Wife was heading out to lead a team workout and asked if I wanted to carpool northward to ride in that area. Sure, but what bike? I had torn down the TT bike to clean and prep for Madera this coming weekend and did not have time to get it together. So I threw the Colnago in the Toaster and headed out to Woodside. While The Wife and her teammates did their review of what was ahead I did some loops of the parking lot and found I could use the finger next to the thumb to shift the thumb lever, just not smoothly or quickly. I did a warmup then cruised north on Cañada road for a fast tempo ride. There was heavy drizzle and stiff headwinds, but I did not care. The legs felt great and I rode hard, minimizing gear changes. I got in a big gear and powered up, doing 22-25MPH even on the uphill sections, all the while keeping the cadence above 95 rpms. I was shooting past groups of riders, the only one’s who were matching me were two guys in DBC kits. If I had felt that good, and had that much drive, last Sunday then I think I would have been in the front group all day. Maybe the extra rest did me good, or maybe the somewhat hard workout on Saturday. Need to sort that out, but it was fun and I was feeling it.

Glue and tape

One of my teammates had a tubular tire roll of the rear rim while he was cruising for an almost certain 2nd place at the Rondee von Brisbeen crit a week ago. The race official noted there was very little glue on either the tire or the rim. The teammate says that the tire was mounted by a local bike shop owner, one whom some folks claim tell them that they use too much glue when mounting tubulars. I do not know about that, but that shop owner has told me that I should be able to swap tubulars faster than I can repair a flat clincher. Never been able to, mostly due to the time it takes me to peel the old tire off the rim; maybe if I used less glue I could peel them off faster.

The incident has led to a lot of on-line chatter about gluing techniques, etc. Basically it is a religious war as to whether to glue or tape, if glue which one, etc. With Madera a week away, and The Wife wanting to ride the TT with the high zoot carbon trispokes, with tubulars, I decided to peel and remount the tires just to make sure they were on well. I glued on the front, using the Continental glue. For the rear I tried Tufo tape. When picking up the tape I did a quick check: regular or extreme? Extreme is for ‘extreme’ conditions of low or high temperatures, with the ‘extreme high’ meaning above 74 degrees F! Where is the world is it that 74 degrees F is an extreme high? Antarctica? I know Tufo is a Czech company, but the Czech Republic is not that moderate in their temperature range. Upshot is I went for the ‘Extreme’ stuff. While I was at it, I got a new tubular spare and needed to stretch that. All I can say is that gluing tires and stretching new tires onto rims really calls for having two good thumbs. I got it all done, but it was not easy.

New track wheels

While looking at the website of the manufacturer of the carbon trispokes for gluing recommendations I found that they sell a road to track kit for the wheels. For a couple of bills I can get the parts so I can swap them back and forth between road/TT duty and use at the track. Sweet! A lot more friendly on the budget than a new set of wheels.

Dr. Brooke wrote recently of making her pilgrimage to Trader Joe’s to stock up on cartons of Luna Bars and other easy treats to fuel the fires while pedaling for hours. I am jealous; all she had to do was make a long trip to go shopping. I have a more onerous task; to find a food item that I can consume on long rides that does not taste like cardboard and does not produce copious quantities of extra gas on its way through.

Nutrition used to be easy on days where I planned long and/or hard rides. I would start with a big bowl of oatmeal with some fresh fruit (peaches are the favorite). I would fill my pockets with Clif Bars, and off I would go, hoping to get back to civilization by the time the energy from the bars was tapped. Then it happened. For years I had symptoms of a problem; one major symptom was physical, but there was a blood makeup issue, too. After lots of tests, I made the connection myself: the physical symptom reared its head on days I ate my oatmeal and bars! I cut oats out of my diet and rapidly the physical symptom and the blood makeup symptoms faded. I am allergic to oats!

Since I came to my realization I have been on the search for something I can eat in place of the ubiquitous oat-based bars. I tried PowerBars, and beyond the terrible taste and the fact they do not look like anything I would voluntarily put in my mouth there is the problem of the bloat they seem to cause. LaraBars are OK, but most of the flavors are uninspired and they tend to be slow to get sugar into the bloodstream. A number of newer bars are too heavily biased towards protein or to have a high fat content. I found a new brand, Greens Plus Bars, at Trader Joes a couple of weeks back. The ingredient list sounded like they had gone through the forest extracting from every plant in sight, and the bar tasted a bit like a good compost pile smells. Gels are, well, gels. So far my best choice seems to be to bake some banana bread or pumpkin bread and take slices of that with me. I did contact the Clif Bar folks a couple of years ago, and they were sympathetic but did not see a market for replacing oats with another grain for the few odd-balls like me who are oat sensitive. The quest continues.

A couple of months back I lamented that autumn seemed to have passed us by this year. I take that back, as the past two weekends I have experienced rides that my senses told me were autumnal, that fall had indeed made a visit this year. Part of that feeling comes from the visual cues, such as golden and red leaves falling off trees, persimmon trees heavy with fruit, surfaces littered with acorns and buckeyes being picked over by woodpeckers, deer, and squirrels. The weather, overcast and cool with a moistness indicating rain, is another clue. But for me, a lot of the fall experience is olfactory: fall has its smells, and those as much as anything have told me that fall is here. The damp, earthy smell of wet leaves decomposing, the sweet smell of the remnants of the apple crop being converted to alcohol by the forces of nature, the odors of fermenting grapes being coaxed into wine, the smell of wood fires lingering in the cool air all tell me that this is autumn.

Thinking of the smells of autumn has made me a bit homesick for the southwestern high country where I used to live. At times like this I miss waking up in the morning, walking out into frosty air, the surrounding hills golden with aspens still clinging to their leaves, the sweet odor of juniper smoke mixing with smell of the pepper harvest being roasted in propane fired roasters. That would be a fine day to start off with a plate of eggs smothered in freshly roasted green chili’s and sopped up with some fresh corn tortillas, all fueling a long ride along the rim, and a return to a lunch of steaming hot posole washed down with cold beer. Geez, I need to get back for a visit one of these years.

I am sitting here thinking about what I should do this weekend.  Late Friday morning and, for a change, my weekend is moderately free.  The only commitment I have right now is to go spend a couple of hours Sunday morning watching our friend Josh run in circles, or more correctly, ovals.  Josh is celebrating his 40th birthday by running 40 laps of the Stanford track and using it as a fundraiser with a goal of $40K.

Guess in the remainder of the time I will work on some landscaping, take a long, slow bike ride with my sweetie, and try out my new ravioli mold (hopefully easier than handcutting all the little buggers), probably with some form of butternut squash ravioli, or maybe some with mushrooms (I love mushrooms), or artichokes.  Lots of possibilities!  Probably should put the lights on The Wife’s winter commuter bike, too.

Love having so little time pressure on the weekend for a change.