Seen today, posted in several locations near 16th and Mission streets in San Francisco. Several people who saw me looking at the poster stopped, took in the picture, and expressed dismay. Words to the effect of “that’s terrible!” Unknown to me is whether this is street art or a real warning or some of both. (Now to bed: I’ve got to get up in four hours to go out to the Bay Bridge construction site tomorrow to help in KQED’s coverage of the weekend closure.)
Potrero Avenue: PM Clouds
The other end of the day. Looking south on Potrero from Mariposa. Another warm evening, one that prompted me to run up to the top of Potrero Hill after I left work to watch the city and the sky. (And I mean run: I passed a cyclist who was struggling up the upper part of San Bruno Avenue. We said hi to each other, and she said, “You go!”)
Berkeley: AM Clouds
We at Infospigot Information Services are great fans of the evening sky, but we’re not often out and about to report on dawn-time sky conditions. This morning was the exception to that rule. According to the National Weather Service area forecast discussions, there’s some sort of low spinning off the coast and sending in a stream of moisture from the southwest, which takes shape as unusually high, fluffy, and abundant clouds hereabouts (are typical cloud cover in the summer months is a dense bank of low stratus). It’s also a warm, muggy morning, also atypical of our Mediterranean climatic regime.
Smoke
We have a fire in Southern California, and everyone gets to share in the fun. Above is a map from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Satellite Data Processing and Distribution (original here) showing the extent of smoke from the Station Fire in the mountains north of Los Angeles (and from a series of fires burning in the mountains of British Columbia). Here’s a snippet from the Smoke Text Product (actual name) put out by NOAA’s Satellite Services Division:
Monday, September 1, 2009
DESCRIPTIVE TEXT NARRATIVE FOR SMOKE/DUST OBSERVED IN SATELLITE IMAGERY
THROUGH 0400Z September 2, 2009Southern Canada/North and Central Plains/Midwest: Remnant smoke was seen covering a very large portion of southern Canada, the Northern Plains, most of the Midwest, and parts of the Great Lakes region. Most of this smoke is remnant from multiple large wildfires that have been burning in southern British Columbia over the past few days. Smoke stretched west to east from British Columbia to south Quebec just north of Vermont, as far north as central Hudson's Bay, and as far south as the Central Plains where it has been mixing with the dense smoke from the southern California wildfires. Several areas of moderately dense to very dense smoke were present, mostly along and north of the US/Canadian border with one of the largeest areas of very dense smoke northwest of Lake Superior and another over southern Alberta/southern Saskatchewan.
For more on how the smoke situation is evolving across the country, see NOAA’s Air Quality Forecast page, then check the smoke forecasts accessed through the table on the left side of the page. (NOAA’s graphical forecast pages are awesome, but they require either a tutorial or a lot of time just messing around with them — the latter is my method — to discover everything that’s there).
Health Reform, Meal Reform, and Wal-Mart
My friend MK Czerwiec — she’s an R.N., M.A. (in medical humanities and bioethics, from Northwestern), and comic-strip artist — wrote a while back that the elephant in the room in the health-care “debate” is one of the principal reasons we get sick and our medical costs run so high: the Great American Diet. You know: the massive number of calories we consume, the processed food, the fat, the salt. She points to writers like Michael Pollan and David Kessler who discuss our diet’s impact on both personal and societal health. And she’s in the midst of cartooning the issue (here).
Enter Wal-mart, by way of a commercial we saw tonight while watching a recorded episode of “Monk.” It was a short thing, and the theme was how busy, budget-conscious moms can feed their families while saving big bucks. Here’s a sequence of sloppy screen shots:
Step 1: Mom’s shopping for breakfast at the fast-food drive-thru. Here’s how much it’s going to cost her to shove a pile of greasy, empty calories down her kids’ maws.
Step 2: But wait. Mom’s got something up her sleeve. Or actually on a plate that at least her daughter seems to be less than thrilled to see.
Step 3: Turns out Mom’s gotten out of rancid old Mr. McGreasy’s breakfast line and done what any good mom should. She went to the store and loaded up on what Alex Trebeck and the “Jeopardy” crew would call comestibles. Let’s see: There’s Yoplait, Jimmy Dean sausage, egg and cheese croissant sandwiches, and a jug of Sunny D non-juice.
Step 4: Mom saves. Over $600 a year. And if you could read the fine print in the ad, which is pretty hard to do even in a still photo, you might be able to understand how that $600 is derived.
Now, it would be easy to say, “Let’s not be a snob about other people’s food choices.” Or, “Let’s not be a hypocrite.” And I’ve got a friggin’ mountain of breakfast pastries, cookies, brownies, Dairy Queen shakes, and lots more under my belt to make me humble about what I say about Wal-mart’s suggested breakfast menu.
But look at the Sunny-D ingredient list from the company website. Note that the company chemists have mixed in a variety of artificial sweeteners to cut down on the amount of high fructose corn syrup that they dump into the bottle. Yoplait does have identifiable food in it along with the inevitable high fructose corn syrup. The Jimmy Dean croissant sandwiches? Jam-packed with caloric goodness. (In fact, if one limited one’s self to single servings of each one of these products for breakfast, you’d be talking about 700 calories.) And the croissant features a “War and Peace”-length ingredient list:
“Croissant: Enriched Bleached Flour (Wheat Flour, Malted Barley Flour, Niacin, Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate [Vitamin B1], Riboflavin [Vitamin B2], Folic Acid), Vegetable Shortening (Partially Hydrogenated Soybean and/or Cottonseed Oils, Water, Salt, Mono- and Diglycerides, Annatto Extract [Color]), Skim Milk, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Yeast, Water, Contains 2% or Less of: Salt, Eggs, Wheat Gluten, Enzymes, Sugar, Natural and Artificial Flavors, Mono- and Diglycerides, Calcium Propionate and Potassium Sorbate (Preservatives), Soy Flour. Cooked Sausage Patty: Pork, Water, Contains 2% or Less of: Sodium Lactate, Salt, Sugar, Spices, Sodium Phosphates, Monosodium Glutamate, Sodium Diacetate, Caramel Color. Precooked Egg Patty: Whole Eggs, Water, Soybean Oil, Nonfat Dry Milk, Modified Corn Starch, Salt, Xanthan Gum, Natural and Artificial Butter Flavor (Butter [Cream, Milk], Partially Hydrogenated Soybean and Cottonseed Oil Soybean Oil, Lipolyzed Butter Oil, Natural and Artificial Flavors), Citric Acid. Pasteurized Process American Cheese: American Cheese (Cultured Milk, Salt, Enzymes, Artificial Color), Water, Cream, Sodium Citrate, Salt, Sodium Phosphate, Sorbic Acid (Preservative), Lactic Acid, Artificial Color, Enzymes, Soy Lecithin.”
The point being: You’re not a criminal to make this stuff, buy it, eat it, or feed it to your family. We all do it, or have done it, and we all have had good reasons for it. But ignorance shouldn’t be one of those reasons any longer. It’s one thing for people to eat this way because they feel they have to — it’s a cheap way to eat, at least at first, and it’s perceived as convenient. It’s another matter altogether to promote the idea that this is good, wholesome, nutritious food that also happens to be inexpensive food. That’s an untruth on a par with selling the health benefits of cigarettes.