bearing blog

I don't care too much for money; money can't buy me safety.

Blame is still flying here in Minneapolis regarding the collapsed bridge.  It must be SOMEBODY'S fault!

We still don't know enough to rule out incompetence or malice, or even indifference, of course.  But we also don't know enough to point fingers.  Yes, people made decisions along the way.  Yes, some of those decisions -- had they gone the other way -- would have led to a different outcome.  This is not the same thing as those people bearing guilt.

A few days ago a Star Tribune editorial praised Richard Braun, an engineer who was in 1982  the state's Transportation Commissioner in 1982, for closing a bridge that year in St. Paul:  by himself, without funding, in place.  Now, I don't know what kind of shape that bridge was in back then.  Neither does the Strib, it seems, as they don't describe any structural findings, only the rusted steel plates that looked to Braun like a reason to shut down that bridge, and not any other bridge that year.  Maybe it was in such bad shape that it really needed to be replaced, by executive fiat.   

The story reveals more than that.  It describes "opposition by business owners,"  skeptical questioning from the press, and a threatened lawsuit over the closing of that bridge.  Does anyone doubt that the same would have happened had anyone closed the 35W bridge before it fell?  And by the way, maybe it would have been nice in 1982 to use some funds to repaint the 35W bridge, which by that time had already gone fifteen years without a new coat and would wait sixteen more...

I write that not to criticize Mr. Braun.  His decision might well have been correct.  Frankly, I agree with the Star Tribune that it's a good idea to have engineers in the top spots where engineering expertise might matter --- and that's the point they are trying to make.  But they do not make it well.  The editorial depicts a man who put engineering judgment above politics and personal image (good), but they seem to be trying to depict a man who puts engineering judgment above money concerns, and every engineer knows that money concerns are engineering concerns and vice versa; they can't be separated.

They'll never get anywhere with this argument:  that once upon a time, an engineer had the cojones to close a bridge without asking anyone else.  It's only a half-decent argument if there wasn't a better way to spend the money he spent in 1982 closing and rebuilding that St. Paul bridge.    Maybe we'll know the answer when we find out why the 35W bridge went down... and if it has anything to do with the thirty-one years (including 1982) the bridge went between its first coat of corrosion-protective paint and its second, I guess we will have part of that answer.

Thirteen people died when the bridge fell down.  For the families of those people, anything would have been better.   But... to say that bridges ought never to fail, as a societal calculation, isn't to put safety first; it's to put one kind of safety ahead of another.  Engineering structures that are guaranteed never to fall down is impossible.  Engineering and maintaining structures to have a 0.00001% chance of failure is not impossible... but it is very expensive and slow.   More expensive than engineering and maintaining structures to have an 0.00005% chance of failure.  And that's money that could be spent on improving other structures.  MnDOT put money above safety! the critics are screaming.  I have news for them:  Money can buy safety.

Or it can buy you a new baseball stadium.  It all depends on your priorities.

If thinking of money and safety is too fraught with emotion, try thinking about time.  Before the collapse, the engineers estimated that rebuilding the 35W bridge would require rerouting traffic for 5 years -- that's on the busiest bridge in the state, connecting downtown and the university, within a few miles of several hospitals.   Now:  imagine the impact of five years of rerouted, slower traffic and major construction.  I'm not thinking of your commute.  I'm thinking of patients in ambulances, whose drivers are trying to get across the river to the hospitals; of the increased number of auto accidents on the temporarily repainted extra lanes on the detour; of the risk to employees in the work zones.  In five years, who would have been dead instead instead? 

We don't know.

Migraine.

I am among the 18% of the female population who suffer from migraine headache.   My migraines recur at varying intervals:   I've gone years without any, and I've also had three in one week.   The first one hit me in 8th-grade debate class, and I thought I was having a stroke -- in the course of fifteen minutes I went half-blind (literally -- half my field of vision disappeared behind a shimmering, jagged veil), and then the headache, fatigue, and nausea arrived and took my breath away.  When my dad came to pick me up from school and I described the symptoms to him, he told me it was probably a migraine.  Oh.  So that was what my mom had been talking about for all those afternoons when she disappeared into a dark room to put a cold washcloth on her forehead. 

Some say they're triggered by foods or stress or hormones; I've never noticed any correlation to anything I ate or any stressors, but then, I don't keep detailed records of those.   I have learned that they are most likely to happen about a week before I ovulate, and after two of my pregnancies, I suffered my first postpartum migraine within days of my first postpartum ovulation.   It's not a perfect correlation, though;  I've had a few when I was pregnant, and the three-in-a-week happened when MJ was five months old and I was still deep in lactational amenorrhea.   (I watched carefully for an ovulation for weeks after that, but it didn't happen for five more months.)

For a couple of years before the Week of Three Migraines, my migraines had been curiously painless.  Still debilitating, because the shimmery blindness still cascaded across my vision and left me unable to drive, read, or take care of kids for an hour or two; and still exhausting, because after the "visual disturbance" passed I would tremble and need to lie down in a dark room for a few more hours.  But without the pain, hey!  I almost enjoyed it.  As long as I knew my kids were okay, cared for by someone else in another room, I could shut the door and just sort of float on the symptoms until they subsided.  Then I would go downstairs and eat an enormous amount of carbohydrates, and then it would all be over.   

The last few, though, really hurt.  So Mark finally convinced me to go to the doctor and get a prescription for Imitrex (sumatriptan succinate), which I gather is the drug-of-choice for occasional migraine sufferers these days.  Supposedly it is safer for the infants of breastfeeding mothers than are the ergotamine derivatives that are its alternatives.  You take it as soon as you have symptoms, and it's no good to take it unless you take it right away; so I guess I'll be keeping some in my car.  I will not know whether it's the right drug for me until I've taken it.

Whenever I take a medication, I always ask the pharmacist about its compatibility with breastfeeding.  As I reviewed the patient information insert, I realized I forgot to ask another question I always ask.  The insert says:

Do not use IMITREX if you are pregnant, think you might become pregnant, are trying to become pregnant, or are not using adequate contraception, unless you have discussed this with your doctor.

"Adequate contraception" -- what is that?   Everyone  who is using any contraception "might become pregnant," unless the contraception is removal of gonads or backed up by menopause.  Better not deconstruct this or I'll be here all day.   

I use NFP, and I have a lot of confidence in it, but my policy w.r.t. medications is always to act as if I "think I might become pregnant."     This means, for example, that I rarely take ibuprofen, which has first-trimester risks.   Anytime I might want to take it,  I consider how likely it is that I might be pregnant and not know it (only about half the time, mind you, is this situation even possible), and weigh that against the benefit of the drug (minor tension headache or rapidly swelling sprained ankle).

There is some data about the safety of Imitrex during the first trimester of pregnancy, at least with regards to birth defects.  Three hundred thirty-four first-trimester exposures reported in GlaxoSmithKline's data registry show no consistent pattern of birth defects nor a significantly high rate of them.   This does not mean, of course, that it is a good idea to use it when you know you are pregnant.  So I guess I will be using it with an eye on my menstrual cycle.  Since most of my migraines occur in the week prior to ovulation, when I am most certain I am not pregnant and when I can modify my behavior to practically ensure I will not become pregnant within a few weeks, it should not be a big problem.

Share the road.

Yadda, yadda, diversity, tolerance, multifaceted understanding about where people come from, but I just don't get this:  Why on earth would anyone be opposed to her neighborhood having sidewalks?

OK, I get this:  If you put in a sidewalk I lose a chunk of lawn.  It's self-centered (and inaccurate; the city has had the legal right all along) but self-centered is easily understood.  And I get this:  It's not worth the tax dollars and trouble.  A mere calculation of benefits vs. risks.  But the folks interviewed in this article appear to be opposed to sidewalks per se.  Evil things.  Encourage common rabble to walk in front of your house.  And they're bad for senior citizens too.

Perhaps my blindness to this comes from never having lived in a neighborhood without sidewalks.  I grew up in an older first-ring suburb and played on the sidewalk every day as a child.  I was not allowed to set foot in the street even to cross it until I was about ten years old. 

Today I live in the inner city, and my children play on the sidewalk here.   Our street is residential, but cars speed down it regularly;  I have seen empty Minneapolis school buses going at least 45 mph past my house.    A good friend of mine recently moved to a sidewalkless suburban cul-de-sac.  The children in that neighborhood ride their Big Wheels and bicycles merrily in circles in the middle of the street and nobody seems to mind!   I guess that if I had grown up in this kind of situation I would think that the street is a perfectly normal place for children to sit down in the middle of the street, right there on the blacktop, are their parents nuts?!?!  but it is rather hard for me to get into that mindset.   It is too ingrained in me that little children aren't supposed to play in the street.   That cars + children = bad.    Whenever my kids are out there I feel like there's a little buzz in my ear all the time keeping me on heightened alert.  It's not so bad in the middle of the day, but when there are more people driving home from work and teenagers in their big honkin' pickup trucks careening around to drop off their friends after school, it's really hard for me to relax about it.

Perhaps I need to get over this, at least when I visit the suburbs...

Meal planning algorithm: A request from a friend.

Step 1.  Take a good hard look at your family's shopping, pantry-stocking, and dining habits.  Ask yourself the following questions:

• Ideally, would I visit the grocery store once every two weeks?  once a week?  twice a week?
• If I never went shopping again, how many days would pass before I would be unable to serve a balanced meal to my family from the ingredients in my pantry and freezer?
• Do I like to know exactly what I'm going to make for dinner every day of the week, or do I like to decide on the spur of the moment?  And never mind what I like, does that actually work?   
  Does it depend on what's going on in your life that day?   
• Who does most of the cooking?  Who does most of the shopping? 
• Do I like to work with a fairly limited repertoire of meals or do I like to make something new every week?  Is this working?  Would people in my family like to see less repetition?  Or am I working too hard and maybe I need to develop a reliable repertoire?

Step 2.  Considering your other obligations, decide on a fairly regular schedule for grocery shopping.  "Every other Wednesday morning" will do fine.  Or, "Saturday mornings."  If you shop more than once a week, designate one of those trips as the primary shopping trip. 

Step 3.  Whatever day you do your primary grocery trip, decree that the day before that will be your meal-planning day.   Then, begin to think of your weeks as beginning on grocery-shopping day and ending on meal-planning day.

Example 3-1:  In my house, my husband does the grocery shopping twice each week:  Saturday morning he does the main weekly trip to the grocery store, plus a Friday-afternoon stop at the co-0p to pick up fresh fish for dinner that night plus things that we can only get at the co-op.   Ergo, my planning day is Friday.   I think of my weeks as beginning on Saturday and ending on Friday.

Example 3-2:  If you shop every other Wednesday, then you must plan two weeks out, and your planning day is every other Tuesday.  Think of weeks as beginning on Wednesday and ending on Tuesday, and take them two at a time.

NOTE.   Usually you will plan meals on meal-planning day (i.e., the end of your imaginary week) for the days beginning with grocery-shopping day (i.e., the beginning of your next imaginary week).  If it's not meal-planning day yet, don't let that stop you from getting a head start.   For now, make a plan that skips over the days from now to meal-planning day.

Step 4.  Go take a quick glance in your freezer, refrigerator, and pantry, just to see if there's anything in there that you ought to try to use.  No sense buying a chicken if you've already got one in the freezer.   And if you have a boatload of ground beef, maybe you should plan something that uses it.   Don't get sidetracked listing all the food in your pantry.  Just make a mental note of one or two things that you won't have to buy, because you've already got it.   

Step 5.  Gather materials:  two pieces of paper, a pencil, your appointment calendar or planner, and something that inspires you to think of things to cook.  For me, a couple of random cookbooks will do; for you, it may be a diet plan or a foodie magazine.   If nothing inspiring is at hand, don't worry about it.

Step 6.  One sheet of paper is the meal plan.   Make a column on the left side that lists days of the upcoming week (or two, if that's your plan), and -- because you are no longer a slave to convention -- you begin with grocery-shopping day.  Since I shop on Saturdays, the first column reads

Saturday

Sunday

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Step 7.  Consult your planner.  Next to each day of the upcoming week, make a note about what's going on that day that might affect your dinner situation.  Husband out of town?  Inviting anyone to dinner?  Swimming lessons that evening?  Going to do grocery shopping in the late afternoon?  Need to work on something in the evening so clean-up has to be minimal?  Planning to spend the whole day at a friend's house and not come back till four-thirty?  Expecting the kids to be extra needy?  Expecting your day to be extra relaxed with plenty of time? 

Mine for this week looks like this:

Saturday - shop

Sunday - friends coming over

Monday - home all day

Tuesday - at Melissa's all day

Wednesday - not sure if Mark will be here for dinner

Thursday - need to send dinner home with Hannah

Friday - can't make a big mess

Step 8.  Now go down that list and think what kind of cooking makes sense for that day.  If you're going to be gone from the house all day, then a slow-cooker meal is a good idea.  If you would like to make something that takes a long time, then it should happen on a day when you're home and have time to do it.   If you don't eat meat on Fridays, or try not to do unnecessary work on Sunday, then you should figure that in.   If you like to save time by eating a grocery-store rotisserie chicken sometimes, shouldn't that be on the day you plan to go to the grocery store?  Make more notes.  Note that you're not yet writing down the menu, just narrowing down the kinds of things you want to do.  For example, :

Saturday - shop - pick up rotisserie chicken

Sunday - friends coming over, need to make side dishes only

Monday - home all day - anything ok

Tuesday - at Melissa's all day - slow cooker

Wednesday - not sure if Mark will be here for dinner -  order pizza with salad

Thursday - need to send dinner home with Hannah - some kind of casserole

Friday - can't make a big mess - eat up leftovers in fridge

Step 9.  Now you start the menu plan.  Label the next column "Dinner."  In that column, consulting your inspiration sources if you need them, start writing down what you're going to make for dinner each day.   Include the side dishes, but you need not get very specific; I might write "oven roasted green beans," but I often write something like "some yellow vegetable" or "some kind of frozen greens."   As you write down menu items, list needed ingredients -- even if they are just "some green vegetable" -- on the other piece of paper, which will be the grocery list.  (Writing the meal plan and the grocery list on the same piece of paper is just asking to lose your meal plan in the checkout line.)

Step 10.  Next to each evening's dinner, you will plan the next day's breakfast and lunch menu.   Why do it that way?  Efficient planning of expected leftovers, if any.  So the next column is the list of days of the week -- shifted by one.  Next to Saturday's dinner write Sunday morning, next to Sunday's dinner write Monday morning, etc.   The columns to the right of that will be breakfasts,  lunches, and (if you like to plan them) snacks or tea-times or cocktails or whatever else needs planning.

Step 11.  How you plan breakfasts and lunches depends largely on your family's style.   In my house I like to make pancakes for breakfast once a week, and the rest of the time it works okay for me to  serve eggs or toast or cold cereal, which we always have on hand, depending on how I'm feeling when I wake up.  So I plan the pancakes but leave the rest of the week "blank."  For lunch, I have a limited repertoire of sandwich- and canned-soup-based meals that I make for children.   So I typically run down the "lunch" column scribbling "pb&j/fruit" or "quesadillas/fruit" or "tuna salad/crackers" without much thought.  The important thing is that the ingredients necessary for these lunches get onto the grocery list, and that I know what I have to make each day.  If you like to cook a hot lunch every day, do so with an eye on the list of dinners -- you might be able to save time and effort by, say, planning chicken soup the day after you make roast chicken for dinner.

Step 12.  Hang the meal plan on the fridge.  Take the grocery list and check it against the contents of the pantry, adding staples that you're low on and removing items you already have.

Next day, you're ready to shop.

If you have a gap between now and the grocery trip -- plan extra meals using what you have in your house already.  Chances are good you can make spaghetti sauce or something each day from what's in your pantry, especially if -- like the friend who inspired me to write this post -- you're the type who can make five weeks of balanced (if oddly creative) meals without going to the grocery store.

There are some other ideas you can adapt to make this algorithm work even better.  For example, you can save your menu plans from week to week and use them to remind you of meals you like to cook.  I used to have a list I made of all the kinds of produce carried by our grocery store; it would remind me that, when we are sick of carrots, I could make parsnips or rutabagas instead.  Eventually, I used Excel to print up sheets that had a grocery-store form on one side and a meal-planning form on the other (I make each week's grocery list on the back of last week's menu plan).

After you get into the meal planning habit, you may discover that you are better off making room for a "wild card" meal or two each week.   I typically plan only five meals for every seven days, because when I plan seven it seems that I don't actually cook seven, and some of the stuff goes to waste.    We'd have too many leftovers one night, or we'd decide on a whim to go out to dinner.    This works best if you always have in mind a couple of "Plan B" meals that can be made quickly from the staples in your pantry if it turns out you do need to cook.  Then instead of  "My plans fell through, I didn't plan dinner, I don't know what to make," your situation is "My plans fell through, I didn't plan dinner, and that makes this chili night."  These also come in handy when you discover you forgot to defrost the roast or turn on the slow cooker.

Stargazing.

After a couple of weeks reading about stars and galaxies and squinting at overcast skies, we finally saw a clear night.  So yesterday night we piled into the van and drove thirty miles out of town to get away from the lights of the city, at least a little bit.   Oscar read the sign at the park entrance that said "Closed at Sunset" and became worried.  "It'll be okay," Mark told him, "look, the gate's still open."  I remain hopeful that we haven't just inculcated a lifetime of relativism w.r.t. trespassing and breaking of minor civil ordinances.

We threw a couple of blankets down on the ground and got out the star maps and library books and flashlights and spent an hour lying on our backs looking at the sky and talking and snacking on the emergency beef jerky I keep in my car.  Mary Jane nursed.  Oscar kept insisting he could see Orion's Belt and I kept insisting that he couldn't, because it was summer.   Milo kept begging to be taken to the water fountain.  But still, it was lovely; a perfect, cool evening, with a perfectly clear sky.  Oscar pointed out the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper and answered Mark's questions about them.  I learned to recognize a constellation I did not know before (Lyra, the lyre, and its bright star Vega, which was almost directly overhead last night at 9:30 or so CDT).   Oscar thinks he found Pegasus, which he remembered from The Sky is Full of Stars, and I'm pretty sure he was correct.   

We left when Milo got impatient.  All three kids fell asleep on the way back, and were carried up to bed.  It was such an easy outing, I wonder why we never did it before -- does it seem too much trouble to drive out of town?  Mark said at one point (because Milo was wanting a snack) that we should have brought a mini-picnic, but I'm glad we didn't make a big production out of stargazing.  We just threw some sweatshirts and blankets and flashlights in the car, and I grabbed the school bag because it had some star guides in it, and we were off. 

We should get a few more chances to go in the next few weeks, while we study the planets and the moon.

Playing doctor.

Amy Welborn's not sure what to say at the doctor's office:

...the doctor said, “What we generally have is three options….” and he ran through them quickly, and then looked at me and said, “Well, what do you want to do?”

Of course, I’m sitting there trying to still sort of what “lumbar” and “thoracic” are all about and trying to imprint in my brain of Notoriously Poor Retention whether he said a certain disc space was a bit small or large, and he’s presenting me with three options for treatment and I’m supposed to choose one? Now?

... I sense what it is: a definite move away from the paternalism of days of old, because, of course, we patients should have final say over our treatment options... But still…I couldn’t help but wonder what I, not exactly a professional orthopedist, could knowledgeably decide without a bit more input.

... Not that I’d define what I’ve described as a “problem,” and I should mention that the reason I moved from OB/GYNs to midwives was precisely because of paternalism and attendant issues,  but this tentativeness gives me pause and a little crack in the my confidence about the care I’m receiving.  I like my rights, but I’m not sure I’m exactly competent to direct my - or someone else’s - medical treatment.

I'm convinced the average person, sufficiently motivated, and in touch with the necessary resources, can become competent to direct her medical treatment.  And something like a serious diagnosis, or a lot of pain, can be a great motivator.  Faced with Amy's situation, you can take the information home and research it in the library or online. 

So you didn't go to medical school.   Most of what your physician learned in medical school is probably irrelevant to your condition. Not everybody has the time and inclination to acquire the broad general knowledge of a trained physician; but if you’re sufficiently motivated to learn about the narrow area of a specific condition, you can learn enough to direct your treatment options. (If this sounds overwhelming, just consider how much the average NFP user knows about NFP relative to the average OB/GYN.)

My daughter suffered a severe urinary tract infection at a few months old, and in the week that elapsed between the treatment of the acute infection and the follow-up appointment at which we were to decide her long-term preventative care, I was able to identify the typical course of prevention, figure out ways we could make it less aggressive or more aggressive, find out how risky are the radiology procedures that would be recommended, decide which facility we wanted to perform them, prepare for cushioning my daughter from the stress of the upcoming experiences -- plenty of useful things.

Unless your physician knows you very well, he is not an expert on what's important to your family.  Something that's important to you may not seem important to him.   It goes without saying that this is crucial wherever ethical questions are involved -- end-of-life decisions, reproductive conditions, experimental treatments.  But it's true for ordinary decisions too.  For example, I was concerned about the effects of a daily antibiotic that is usually prescribed for my daughter's condition.  I was worried it would upset her intestinal flora and lead to yeast overgrowth, which van be a real problem for nurslings.  To my relief I learned that the recommended antibiotic is one that resides almost wholly in the urinary tract and doesn’t migrate to the gut — a detail that the pediatrician either didn't know or did not consider important enough to mention to me  — and this information helped me decide to consent to the antibiotic instead of a less aggressive option. 

Not everybody is interested in independently researching their own medical conditions.  Some are more comforted by avoiding decision-making, letting someone else call all the shots and possess all the knowledge.   When my mother was first diagnosed with stage III-B adenocarcinoma of the lung,  a bit more than five years ago, my brother was the one who passed that news on to me.   I had never heard the term "adenocarcinoma" before, and didn't know what III-B meant (neither did my brother); I hung up the phone and turned on the computer, and in less than an hour I knew just how bad the news was, the average length of survival, and also what the various treatment options were for her.   But my mother did not actively seek out any information, and waited for the doctor to give her information as he saw fit.  By the time she finally asked the doctor to tell her how much time she had left, and the doctor told her, one-third of that time was gone.  As far as I know my mother never opened a book or read an article or anything else about her condition, never compared treatment options, never questioned what the doctors suggested.   

It's not what I would have chosen;  I still find it very hard to understand, now that she has been gone for four years.  Perhaps it reflects different ways of coping with difficult news:  trying to gain control (however illusory) by gathering as much information as possible, versus trying not to have to think about it very much. 

I'm heavily biased towards the former.  I believe that by learning more, you always get a little bit of control that isn't an illusion. But I concede that others might be able to enjoy life more by letting someone else think about what is frightening, what is complicated, what is serious.

This catalog just jumped the remote-controlled robotic shark.

On the airplane this morning coming back from a wedding, I made the mistake of perusing the Sky Mall inflight catalog.

If only I hadn't!  For now I am consumed with the knowledge that I lack the "latest technology" that "unites a weather station and a coffeemaker."

O unholy union!

Multi-level teaching.

Valerie, who has more kids than I do, has a nice post up in which I learn a new buzz phrase:

I've hit upon something with multi-level teaching, in which I try to cover as many topics as I can with as many kids as I can.  In other words, much of our learning takes place as a family, with essentially math and language arts being taught individually (for the most part).

I only have the one school-ager and then an up-and-coming pre-schooler, but this approach is already making a lot of sense to me.   When I made out my daily schedule for this year I broke the instructional day up into three chunks: 

1. working intensively with my second-grader while the preschooler is busy with a video or a project;
2. working intensively with my preschooler while the second-grader is doing independent work;
3. "family learning," in which we all enjoy the same thing, although often in different ways.

"Family learning" is surprisingly broad.  It can include listening to Spanish or Latin audio materials, most of the stuff that I read aloud, art appreciation, nature study, and timeline/map work.  It also includes the morning chores we all do together, and sometimes cooking.   

Convenience and variety.

DarwinCatholic has a post pointing to a report of an intriguing study.  Convenience foods don't help you get dinner on the table faster -- they help you get more elaborate dinners on the table.

Interesting!  But I want to know what is meant by "prepackaged convenience food."  The article says that convenience foods "tend to be high in preservatives, unhealthy fats and sodium. tend to be high in preservatives, unhealthy fats and sodium."  But then, at the end of the article, a short list of examples from a "convenience" dinner includes "prebagged salad" and "bagged dinner rolls," while a "from scratch" dinner includes "bread."   (The "convenience" dinner also included "macaroni and cheese."  I guess I'm to infer that it came from a box; perhaps the reporter, like one of my mother's amazed co-workers on seeing Mom's lunchtime leftovers, doesn't know there's any other kind?)

I got a copy of the text of the article, which is Beck ME, "Dinner preparation in the modern United States," British Food Journal v.109 n.7 pp.531-547 (2007).  Here Beck defines her terms:

Commercial foods, as the term is used here, are either purchased as ready-to-eat or prepared by the home cook entirely according to package directions.  "Commercial foods" are similar to "convenience foods", formally defined elsewhere as "fully or partially prepared foods in which significant preparation time, culinary skills, or energy inputs have been transferred from the home kitchen to the food processor and distributor" (Capps et al., 1985).   Time saving is not considered in this definition of commercial foods, because time can be measured independently.  Emphasized instead is the lack of independent handling and preparation... Such foods are often highly processed, because increased processing tends to remove the possibility of independent decisions in dish completion.

I was wondering if canned single ingredients, like tomatoes or tuna, counted as convenience/commercial food.   It turns out that they are:

The following items were not considered to be commercial ingredients for the purposes of this analysis:  spices, seasonings, or marinades; dairy products...; dried pasta; ready-made tortillas...; and frozen edamame (soybeans) in their pods.  Commercial items include prepared meats such as hot dogs and pepperoni as well as vegetarian versions... They also include purchased tomato or alfredo sauces, rice in flavored rice mixes and pre-measured boil-in bags (but not non-instant rice purchased loose in larger quantities), and frozen or canned vegetables (which are processed to the extent that they may be simply heated and served, without washing, trimming, or adding other ingredients).

What's with the amnesty for the frozen edamame?  Is it because they have pods?  Every restaurant that I know of serves it up in the pods as a finger food, kind of like shell-your-own-peanuts.   And what about the tortillas?  Sliced sandwich bread doesn't count as non-commercial [I presume -- you would think they would mention it], but tortillas are OK? 

Here's a fascinating paragraph from the journal article:

Families in our study often served extra dishes to please individual family members who did not like the rest of the meal.  In their study of Italian-American families, Goode et al. (1984, p. 199) noted, "The way of handling the strong likes and dislikes of non-influential family members is to make them supplementary dishes or serve them leftovers" and argue that it is "a distinctly modern American pattern."  Other researchers have found that such accommodations to individual tastes are an accepted part of meal preparation in Italy, although they are often considered frustrating or annoying in the USA (Ochs et al., 1996).   Some parents in this study approached such requests with flat refusal or open resentment while acquiescing.

I was amused by the Goode et al. quote -- "non-influential family members?"  Is that just code for "little kids?"  If so, how non-influential could they be if they got the cook to make something special just for them?  Anyway, since one of the points of the study is that people who don't use prepared food make simpler dinners with less dishes, a corollary here seems to be that if you make food from scratch you're less likely to make sure that picky Junior gets peanut butter AGAIN while the rest of the family eats moussaka.

Saw it today.

I didn't make a special trip, and I didn't get a look at the stuff down in the river; but I did finally get a glimpse of the space in mid-air where the bridge used to be.  The kids had pediatrician's appointments, which took us across the river for the first time in a week.  As I drove on University Avenue from Mark's office to the clinic, and approached the 35W highway entrance, the first thing we saw were signs:  a "No Right Turn" arrow and an orange one stating "This ramp closed starting June 18."  The ramp was blocked by concrete barriers (for all I know those might have been up since the closing of the on-ramp to begin the resurfacing work).  In front of the barriers, a couple of folding chairs, one of which supported a police officer.  And the yellow caution tape, of course.

Beyond that, looking south, I could see the tilt of the approach span, which still holds a few silent cars at odd angles.  It looks very much like a toy highway, left in scattered pieces by some giant's child.  I have seen the pictures, but I inhaled cold air when it came into view.

In with the new image, out with the old.

They are saying that the new bridge, a ten-lane span with room for LRT and bus lanes, will be fast-tracked.  Firms that want to bid on contracts were to prove their qualifications by today.   They want it in by the end of next year, which seems insanely fast; but at the same time it's hard to believe I'll be taking surface streets to cross downtown for the next year-and-change.