by Chris Van Tulleken

(Sorry about that awful image, it was hard to find a picture of the book cover.)

I’ve certainly been reading plenty lately about how bad processed food is for you. Problem is, “processed food” has always been so weakly defined. Beer, bread, cheese, tofu? Very processed. But evil? No, but hot dogs, Doritos, baloney – processed and OBVIOUSLY evil. Why? They don’t define the difference.

And then there’s all the talk about feeding your “gut biome.” I even read a study recently that tried to tell me it was healthier to eat a steak than ground beef. Come on! After I chew it, it’s all the same, isn’t it?!

What we have here is a much more in-depth treatment than those attention-grabbing media articles, and I am thankful. Here we get definnitions – and they come from the “NOVA” system of classification. (I don’t think he ever tells us what the acronym stands for, and I think that might be because it’s not English – I think this system came out of Brazil.) Foods fall into four groups: unprocessed; processed culinary ingredients; processed foods; and ultra-processed foods.

A decade ago, everyone’s rule of thumb came from Michael Pollan – don’t eat anything with more than 5 ingredients. Don’t eat anything your grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. Van Tulleken’s got a similar heuristic to offer – don’t eat anything with ingredients that don’t represent things you can find in your kitchen.

HA! Joke’s on him. My kitchen’s got xantham gum (which he hates).

There you have it. Yes, cheese, beer, and bread are processed. But they are not “ultra-processed.” You could make them in your kitchen (granted they take a little bit of talent and ingredients you can’t get at the convenience store). But you know very well you couldn’t make hot dogs in your kitchen. Or Doritos. You KNOW what ultra-processed food (UPF) is.

A lot of the book was pulling every conceivable threat out of the air that could be associated with UPF – decays tooth enamel and makes your jaw smaller! Seriously! I didn’t care so much for that aspect of the book. Focus. You can convince me very well to avoid UPF without all the threats of Crohn’s disease and mental illness and autoimmune disease and everything else you can throw at the wall.

Funny quote about how he can’t fathom people who aren’t interested in food (ditto). “I still find indifference to food hard to understand. I plan dinner at breakfast. When I’m at a wedding, my whole focus is on the canapes. My holiday itineraries are just lists of restaurants and markets.” I’d say I identify with this 110% except for one thing. You plan dinner at breakfast? Breakfast on the SAME DAY? Amateur.

by Stephan Pastis

I’m a fan.

I love rat.

I don’t like the long shaggy-dog pun ones, though. Puns only work if they are at least *kind of* a surprise.

I found a pair of these used during the South End Art Hop… They had a load of Peanuts books too, but they wanted $9 for skinny paperbacks. These big Pearls compendia were only $10 each, much more giggle for the buck.

by Will Grant

This guy rode horseback across the original Pony Express Trail, maybe 2000 miles, over 142 days, with two horses, one for riding and one for carrying gear. It was amazing – and what’s truly unbelievable, the point he drove home, is that Pony Express riders used to complete the route in TEN DAYS.

The road goes from St. Joseph, MO, on the Missouri River, to Sacramento. The Midwest did not interest him. The west did. Cities gave him the heebie-jeebies; the biggest one standing in his way was Salt Lake City, and he opted to have the horses trailered around it.

He had LOTS of assistance. His girlfriend mailed him supplies. He used a smartphone. When it came time to cross the dessert, he hired someone to drop off hay and water along the route at given intervals. The desert crossing was scary to consider. There were long stretches with no water sources. If something went amiss with the hay and water dropoffs, well, I was about to say he’d be up shit’s creek, but shit’s creek would have been an improvement – at least it would have had water.

Color photos in the middle made me glad I didn’t read it on Kindle. The picture of the two horses standing utterly alone in the middle of the alkali flat in western Nevada was worth the price. One horse looks at the camera, the other “looks east from where we’d come.” I wonder what is going through that horse’s mind. Something along the lines of, “What the hell are we doing here and can we go back soon?”

They do not go back, they go forward! After the desert, which was obviously the biggest challenge, near the Nevada/California border, Grant got the heebie-jeebies again at Carson City, and just wanted the trip to be over. He did not want to subject his horses to the big city of Sacramento, he knew the hard part was over, so he had the horses trailered to the endpoint. I thought it was a fine decision.

His lesson is that the real heroes of the Pony Express were the unsung heroes: “the station keepers and stock tenders”, the people hauling water out to those waterless spots in the desert, enough to keep ten or so horses in fine condition at all times at each relay station. Astonishing. Astonishing too to think what the whole thing cost. It is very little wonder the enterprise survived for so little time. What in the world piece of mail could have been THAT important?