Fortune Cookie Wisdom

Posted on September 21, 2021 by admin

I ate a fortune cookie not long ago, as I do when offered them by restaurants and takeout places that offer them. Also, I read the fortune, as a form of very low-grade entertainment.

Something I knew about fortune cookies: their origin seems to trace from Japan, Kyoto in fact, a place that’s long been inventive when it comes to confections. I’ve sampled some of the traditional products in the small, wonderfully colorful shops of that city.

“The idea that fortune cookies come from Japan is counterintuitive, to say the least,” wrote Jennifer 8. Lee in the New York Times some years ago, an article I remember seeing before. Maybe so, but ideas and inventions travel and morph, in this case to California for an association with Chinese food by the 20th century.

“The Japanese may have invented the fortune cookie,” she quotes Derrick Wong, the vice president of the largest fortune cookie manufacturer in the world, Wonton Food, based in Brooklyn. “But the Chinese people really explored the potential of the fortune cookie. It’s Chinese-American culture. It only happens here, not in China.”

Which brings me to the wisdom in my most recent fortune cookie, from a bakery in Chicago. Seven words, entirely sic:

Being an able man. There are always.

Glad to see that fortune-cookie writing, in this case, has been outsourced to someone whose native language isn’t English. Entirely possible in polyglot Chicago. I can’t say what language they do speak, but I’m certain of that.

Egg Harbor, Wisconsin

Posted on September 13, 2021 by admin

Here’s a short and incomplete list of businesses you can find on the few streets of Egg Harbor, Wisconsin, in Door County: Be Beauty, Buttercups Coffee, Fat Louie’s Olive Oil Co., The Fireside (restaurant), Greens N Grains Natural Food Market & Cafe, Grumpy’s Ice Cream and Popcorn, Hatch Distilling Co., Plum Bottom Gallery, and Shipwrecked Brew Pub & Restaurant.

Businesses aiming to capture out-of-town dollars, in other words. We dropped a few ourselves. We arrived just after noon on September 5, enjoying clear skies and warm temps, and by mere luck found a parking space on the main street (Wisconsin 42). On a slight rise at that spot, a little set back from the road, is Macready Artisan Bread.

With cast iron tables and chairs, it looked like a good place for an al fresco lunch, which it turned out to be. Good sandwiches: a braunschweiger and an egg salad. As Wiki says, braunschweiger refers to pork liver sausage in North America. At least it did in Egg Harbor that day.

As you’d expect, main street in Egg Harbor sports some handsome buildings and landscaping.

A park adjoining the street leads to the lakeshore.

The shore is mostly given over to a marina.

“The Seafarer” by Jeffrey Olson, 2012. He’s a local artist.

There’s also this, with a sort-of egg on top.

Just what is this kind of multi-directional sign post called, anyway? Who built the first one? How many are there?

Google Image “multi-directional sign post” and you’ll get a lot of images, so maybe that’s it. Seems a little too bland, though. This fellow, who built one, calls it a travel signpost. Also bland, but maybe current in the UK.

There’s whimsy to many (most?) of them, including the one in Egg Harbor. One sign points upward — the (sort of) direction of the International Space Station. Then there’s one pointing to Santa’s House, presumably due north, and a non-directional, still unfulfilled wish that Covid-19 disappear.

That reminded me that I saw a different take on such signs in Fairbanks.

Alaskan destinations up top, but also international ones, which are listed on the post itself on the side not visible in my picture. As if you need more evidence that Fairbanks, unlike Egg Harbor, is a long way from everywhere.

Bundaberg Ginger Beer

Posted on August 31, 2021 by admin

Last day of August, spent some time on the deck. A workday, so not a lot of time out there, but I did take the opportunity to finish the last of a six-pack curiosity we acquired from somewhere or other early in the summer.

Ginger beer. Bundaberg brand non-alcoholic diet ginger beer, whose bottle says twice — front and back — that it’s brewed in Australia. That fits. The only place I remember having ginger beer before was in that country, where I found it interesting, though not especially tasty. For its part, Bundaberg isn’t bad, but I’m not going to be a regular consumer.

Or be a drinker of the company’s rum, which it is better known for, at least in Australia. Rum production began there in Queensland in the late 19th century to take advantage of the local sugar industry to produce something Australians really wanted.

Odd thing about the bottle: though the ginger beer is brewed in Australia, and presumably in Bundaberg itself, another bit of text says: Bottled in the UK.

What’s that about? Vats of ginger beer go by container ship from Australia to the UK because… bottles are cheaper in the UK? Most of the export market is there, with a trifle making its way here? Something about EU regs, pre-Brexit? The ways of international logistics, now so tied in knots, are strange even in normal times.

Far North Leftovers

Posted on August 17, 2021 by admin

I got a couple of concerned text messages after the 8.2 magnitude earthquake off the Alaska Peninsula late on the evening of July 28. Did I feel it? Was I all right? Didn’t feel a thing, I answered. Alaska is big.

During the quake — which is thought to be largest affecting Alaska since the Good Friday disaster of 1964, but nothing like it in terms of damage — I was in Fairbanks, not too far from the words United States on the USGS map I clipped.

Curious, I got out my physical atlas and a ruler, and measured the distance between Perryville, the town on the Alaska Peninsula closest to the epicenter, and Fairbanks. As the crow flies. A tough old crow, used to the freezing temps.

Total, about 1,200 miles, very roughly. But the point is, I no more felt the earthquake than someone in Texas is going to feel a California earthquake, unless it’s really big.

Near the main building of the Museum of the North is a blockhouse that used to be part of the Kolmakovsky Redoubt.

The museum explains: “In 1841, the Russian-American Company (RAC), seeking to obtain the rich beaver and land otter furs of the Interior of Alaska, set about the construction of Kolmakovsky Redoubt on the middle Kuskokwim River in Western Alaska. As the only redoubt (fort) deep in the Interior, it became the major trading center along the river for the next 25 years…

“Relations between the RAC and the local Yup’ik Eskimos and Athabascan Indians was amicable and instead of acting as a means of defense, the building served other purposes, including at one time a fish cache and during the gold rush, a jail. The blockhouse stood at the site for over 80 years before being dismantled and shipped to the University of Alaska in Fairbanks in 1929.”

More recently, the museum restored the blockhouse, including the replacement of rotten timber and putting tundra sod on the roof, “complete with blueberries, Labrador tea, and all manner of tundra flora.”

A building of a difference sort, but also Alaskan, near the auto museum: Joy Elementary School.

One look and I thought, 1960.

Sure enough: “Construction of our original circular school began July 21, 1960. It was completed and dedicated as Louis F. Joy Elementary on November 9, 1961. Louis F. Joy was Fairbanks City School Board President and a member for over 25 years. Lee S. Linck, the school’s engineer and architect, received an award for the school’s unique and beautiful design at the 1962 Seattle World Fair.”

A quick peek at the first place I ate in Fairbanks.

Bahn Thai. Had a good massaman curry.

Another lunch place in Fairbanks.

Soba. A Moldovan restaurant. That was the main reason I went. Glad I did, since the dumplings I had were wonderful, though massively filling. I asked the waitress, whose English I took to be Moldovan flavored, how she came to be in Fairbanks. She said she came with her husband and members of his family, which no doubt was true, but didn’t quite answer the question.

Speaking of immigrants to the Far North, this is the last place I had lunch in town, The Crepery.

Had a delicious salmon crepe there. I sat way in the back, and instantly noticed a wall covered with photos of Sophia, Bulgaria. I asked the girl who brought me the order about that. The owner’s from Bulgaria, she said. People get around.

The Nenana River.

At this point, it forms one of the borders of Denali NP. I was on the non-park side, looking into the park.

As I was driving southward on the highway Alaska 3 after my stop in the town of Nenana, I passed by a military installation without noticing it. No signs point the way, and while the place isn’t precisely hidden, it is off the main road. It’s the Clear Space Force Station.

Not only that, the facility only recently became part of the Space Force.

“Clear Air Force Station, a remote military installation outside of Fairbanks, Alaska, was officially renamed from Clear Air Force Station to Clear Space Force Station during a ceremony on June 15, 2021,” the Air Force reports.

“Clear will continue to serve as home to Arctic Airmen and Guardians assigned to the 13th and 213th Space Warning Squadrons, providing 24/7 missile warning, missile defense, and space domain awareness…

“The history and mission of the base began in 1958 when the U. S. Air Force acquired the site to set up a Ballistic Missile Early Warning Systems and became fully operational in November of 1961 as the second detachment of the 71st Missile Warning Wing. The detachment became the 13th Missile Warning Squadron in January 1967. The unit was re-designated as the 13th Space Warning Squadron and reassigned under the 21st Space Wing at Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado.”

With any luck, the nation will endure, its current political dyspepsia forgotten, and in 100 years the only thing people will remember about the Trump administration is that it founded the Space Force. That might be more important than we can know.

On my last day in Fairbanks, I took a walk along some of the trails at Creamer’s Field Migratory Waterfowl Refuge, on the outskirts of town. Formerly a diary farm with a lot of surplus land, the place is now devoted to keeping birds happy and providing a place for people like me to walk.

There are buildings.

But mostly it’s undeveloped, except for the trails themselves.

Revealing scenes like this.

Looks remote, no? I parked my car only about 20 minutes’ walk away, so the place is close to the infrastructure of Fairbanks. Then again, Fairbanks is a manmade place surrounded by wilderness, so what I drove and then walked to was merely the leading edge of something vast.

One more thing.

Alaska makes 50.

New Buffalo

Posted on July 19, 2021 by admin

A Mediterranean pattern has set in, here on the brief plateau of high summer. I’m taking as many meals as possible out on my deck.

Not long ago, we went to Buffalo, so by my idiosyncratic lights, that meant we ought to visit New Buffalo too. So we did on Sunday. Good thing that town is only about two hours away, assuming good traffic, which in no safe assumption. Even so, it isn’t that far, with New Buffalo hugging the eastern shore of Lake Michigan just inside the state of Michigan, only about two miles north of the Indiana line.

New Buffalo has been a nearby vacation destination for metro Chicago for many years. I first visited in 1987, when I spent a short time at the vacation house of a Chicagoan I knew, and went back occasionally after that, though not in about 20 years.

A lot of people go for the public beach, but Waikiki crowded, it isn’t.

We didn’t spend long this time, since it was nearly 90 F, and our idea of a good beach is an almost empty one in the 70s F. It was nice to see the lake, though. And the marina.

A boat belonging to the Berrien County sheriff’s office, docking.

Not far inland from the marina is the town’s commuter rail station.

Not much to look at, but the station and the line facilitated New Buffalo’s growth in the early 20th century, providing easy access from Chicago in the days before the Interstate or major suburbs. Come to think of it, if I were planning to be in New Buffalo and nowhere else for more than a few hours, that would be the way to come, so as to avoid pain-in-the-ass traffic jams south of Lake Michigan.

We parked on a leafy residential street and walked a couple of blocks to the main tourist street. One of New Buffalo’s two main streets is Whittaker, which connects the shore with I-94. About three blocks of Whittaker is lined with retailers, restaurants and new-looking residential properties, such as these.

That told me that, except probably for recessionary downturns of a few years at most, the second home and residential rental business in New Buffalo has expanded over that last few decades, taking advantage of the fondness among well-to-do people for parking themselves close to water. Not an ambition I share, but water does have its allures.

The street wasn’t overly crowded on Sunday, a very warm summer weekend day, but busy enough. We wandered around and looked in some stores, and came away with a t-shirt, refrigerator magnet and some postcards, as one does.

Interesting mural.

I’ve been able to find out that it’s painted on the side of Michigan Mercantile Building, home to a recently opened Starbucks. At the end of a short alley under the mural is the New Buffalo Farmstand by Mick Klug Farm. As for the mural, it looks new as well, but that’s all I know. I didn’t check for a signature.

A detail.

One reason we spent the day in New Buffalo was to have lunch at Redamak’s.

Since 1946 is a telling detail, since the restaurant is on Buffalo Street, the town’s other major thoroughfare. It isn’t a pedestrian-friendly road and the train doesn’t go there, so for Redamak’s to prosper in its early years, it needed car traffic — which was booming about then.

Currently the place is owned only by the second family ever to own it, which makes for continuity. I had a good hamburger there more than 30 years ago, and we had good ones there on Sunday: one with bleu cheese for me, a barbecue burger for Yuriko.

The road out front is also U.S. 12. Ah, where does that go? I wondered as we waited on the porch for a table. My phone wasn’t connected to the Internet at that moment, so I had to wait to find out. Just like in the not-so-old days.

All the way from Detroit to Aberdeen, Washington, running almost 2,500 miles, it turns out. We had a table next to a window. There’s something satisfying about sitting in a storied burger joint that looks out on a 2,500-mile highway. Not a nostalgia-industry highway like the defunct U.S. 66, but a genuine active part of the U.S. highway system in the 21st century.

High Summer Debris

Posted on June 30, 2021 by admin

High summer is here — I’ve seen fireflies and we can buy Rainier cherries — and holidays are ahead, such as Canada Day, World UFO Day, Independence Day, X-Day, Nunavut Day. Back to posting on July 6.

A fine day to end June, warm and partly cloudy until a massive but short downpour in late afternoon. Dry days ahead, including the July 4 weekend. I’ve been nattering on about the excellence of summer lately, and while I realize a lot of places endure relentless heat during this time of the year, including places I used to live, I’m sticking with my sentiment. I’ve lived here enough winters to appreciate the summers. A Northern summer is much better than this:

Looking at a major news site yesterday, I saw this.

I hope visitors to Alaska or anywhere won’t see such a thing. No bad-taste Florida Man jokes for this, either. I refreshed the page and the picture changed to something fitting the headline.

Our last lunch in Detroit recently was at a Cuban restaurant, Vicente’s. The food was good, but the Cuban lemonade (limeade, really) was wonderful.

The restaurant is on Library Street, across from the Skillman Branch of the Detroit Public Library. On the other side of the library is the enormous Hudson’s Site development. Got a good look at its rising elevator shafts.

The drive home from Detroit was fairly straightforward, but I did take one short detour to Ypsilanti, Michigan. I had to see the (sort of) famed Ypsilanti Water Tower, dating from 1890 and still used as part of the city’s water system.

Wags call it the Brick Dick. There’s a bust of Demetrius Ypsilanti nearby, along with Greek and U.S. flags, but I didn’t care to cross the busy street for a closer look.

Grilling & Gabfest ’21

Posted on June 15, 2021 by admin

A most social weekend. On Friday night, a zoom.

Not because we feared contagion, but because miles and miles separate Illinois, Tennessee and Washington state.

Early on Saturday afternoon, a phone call — the standard kind, no pictures involved — with a old friend in Texas. I don’t use that term lightly. I’ve known him since the Nixon administration.

Late in the afternoon, other old friends, though not quite as long-standing (all less than 40 years), came to visit and I grilled dinner for them, despite heavy rain for about an hour beginning at 2. The deck was dry by 4, and we had a fine time sitting around there into the early evening, engaging in actual conversation, with comments about how great it was to meet in person again after skipping last year. It was.

One of my guests brought some Space Station Middle Finger beer, a product of Three Floyds Brewing Corp. of Munster, Indiana. Today, I posed one of the empty bottles on top of the now-cold grill.

Nothing like an amusing label. Nice caps, too.

I tried a bottle. I’m hardly one to judge beer, but it did have a smooth flavor going down.

Main Street, Buffalo (NY 5)

Posted on June 7, 2021 by admin

At about 8:30 this evening, as dusk settled in, I was reading out on the deck. I glanced up and spotted a brilliant rainbow. It had been cloudy and slightly misty much of the day, but no real rain. The clouds off to the west were pink and gray.

I could see almost all of the arc, which stretched from due east to south-southeast. Should I tell the rest of my family? I did, and remarkably they got themselves outside in time to see the glorious multicolored curve, which lasted all of about five minutes.

In Buffalo, Main Street is a main street, running northeast from downtown roughly to the border with Amherst. Because we stayed in Amherst over our Memorial Day weekend trip, it proved to be the best route into the city and downtown, so I drove it more than once. Much of the street also counts as New York State Route 5, a highway that runs from the Pennsylvania line on Lake Erie to Albany.

Main is a busy commercial street, marked by various restaurants, retail establishments, public buildings and more. As you head into Buffalo, you’ll also see Grover Cleveland Golf Course, University at Buffalo South Campus, St. Mary’s School for the Deaf, Sisters of Charity Hospital, one edge of Forest Lawn Cemetery, Canisius College, and two restaurants we visited on different days: Lake Effect Diner and Anchor Bar.

The former.

The latter.

Originally a Philly diner, new owners relocated Lake Effect to Buffalo in 2002 and restored it to its ’52 chrome-and-neon self. I had a good Reuben sandwich there. Anchor Bar, which sports a sizable collection of motorcycles along its walls, and a truly enormous collection of old license plates and other bric-a-brac, claims to have invented the Buffalo wing. Whatever the truth of that, we had the wings, and they were a tasty highlight of the trip.

After lunch at Anchor Bar on May 30, we drove along Main Street to see other things. Or rather, I did. Lunch had been heavy, and Yuriko napped in the passenger seat. I drove along, parked on the side of the street — there was always plenty of parking — and walked around for a few blocks, and then repeated the process a few blocks further on. That was when I spotted the KEEP BUFFALO A SECRET mural.

That isn’t the only mural on Main. Late last year, two local artists, Edreys Wajed and James “Yames” Moffitt, collaborated on a mural commissioned by the Albright-Knox Public Art Initiative.

Then there was this. Sigh.

A handsome block.

It includes this delightful find: the former home of McDonnell & Sons who, as the building itself still says, were “dealers in every variety of granite work — monumental and building.”

Vacant now, as it has been for many years. According to this short history of the company, McDonnell & Sons moved to Buffalo from Massachusetts in 1884 and stayed in business until about 1968. The perfect place for a hipster bar, if you asked me, though restoration would cost a pretty penny.

The Catholic Center, which is another building on Main with a backstory.

A nice bit of art deco, designed by Monks & Johnson of Boston and completed in 1930. Until 1982, it was HQ for Courier Express newspaper. The Catholic Diocese of Buffalo has owned the building since 1985.

The figures toward the top, which I didn’t notice until I looked at my pictures, are famous printers (such as Ben Franklin). This site has better pictures of them and some detail.

One more Main Street building for now.

The Beaux-Arts Sidway Building, designed in 1907 with a two story addition in 1913 by McCreary, Wood & Bradney of Buffalo. An office building originally; these days, loft apartments. Curious, I checked the rents. About $1,200/month for a one bedroom. The average in Manhattan would be three times as much at least, and even in or near the Chicago Loop, twice as much. That’s the Buffalo discount, I guess.

Shuffle Off To Buffalo

Posted on June 1, 2021 by admin

Just back yesterday evening from 72 hours in Buffalo. Roughly. Not quite 72 hours over Memorial Day weekend and not quite all in Buffalo, though we were in the Buffalo-Niagara Falls MSA the whole time.

Three days isn’t enough to drive to Buffalo from northern Illinois and spend a worthwhile amount of time. Like Pittsburgh, that would be a four-day venture. So we flew. First time since early 2020. Except for mandatory masking at the airports and on the planes, everything was about the same as it used to be, including holiday-weekend crowds. One of our flights was on a Boeing 737 MAX-8, and clearly we lived to tell the tale.

We, as in Yuriko and I, arrived late Friday night and made our way to Amherst, New York, a Buffalo suburb, where we stayed. We were up early the next morning to spend most of the day at Niagara Falls State Park. I was fulfilling a promise I made in 1996, when we arrived at the falls in March to find the American Falls still frozen. I told her we’d come someday when the liquid was moving again, and so we did.

That wasn’t the whole first day. I discovered that nowhere is very far away from anywhere else in this corner of New York state by driving north along the Niagara Gorge, stopping at Lewiston and Fort Niagara, and then returning to Amherst.

On Sunday, we weren’t up quite as early, but we made it to downtown Buffalo in the morning for a walkabout. As promised by various sources, the city has some first-rate architecture, most especially Buffalo City Hall. Late in the morning, after a brief stop at Tim Horton’s — they’re everywhere in metro Buffalo — we toured the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural National Historic Site, formerly the Ansley and Mary Wilcox home.

Lunch that day was on Main Street at the Anchor Bar, which specializes in Buffalo wings and claims their invention, but in any case the joint didn’t disappoint. Afterward, Yuriko napped in the car while I spent time looking around Main Street, which includes Buffalo’s theater district and Saint Louis Roman Catholic Church.

Also, this mural.
Created by local t-shirt designer David Horesh and painter Ian de Veer, it’s highly visible when you’re traveling southbound on Main.

Could it be that current Buffalonians might not want millennials, or more importantly, tech-industry millennials with high incomes, to show up in droves to drive up prices for everyone else? Maybe. Not sure Buffalo has the tech ecosystem, as they say in the biz, to support such an influx. Then again, in the vicinity of the mural are places probably supported by people with at least some disposable income, such as Just Vino, the House of Masters Grooming Lounge, Hair to Go Natural, and Fattey Beer Co. Buffalo.

I had a mind to visit Delaware Park afterwards, since a Frederick Law Omstead park is always worth seeing, but we ended up sampling it merely by driving around it. Looks like a nice place to while away a warm afternoon.

By that time, Sunday afternoon, it was fairly warm in greater Buffalo. Rain had clearly fallen the day before we arrived, and cool air arrived afterward, taking temps down into the low 50s early Saturday, when we got to Niagara Falls. Did that matter? No. It wasn’t cold enough to freeze anything.

On Monday I got up early and visited the splendid Forest Lawn Cemetery, permanent home of President Fillmore and Rick James, among many others. Later, we drove to Lockport, New York and spent some time along the Erie Canal. As long ago as elementary school, I heard about the Erie Canal, but had never seen it. We also took a tour of one of the manmade caves near the canal, where rapid water flows formerly powered local industry.

Back in Buffalo for a satisfying lunch at Lake Effect Diner, housed in a chrome-and-neon diner car dating to 1952. Then we drove south via surface streets to Lackawanna, where you can see the Basilica of Our Lady of Victory, our last destination for the trip.

Why Buffalo? There was that promise to visit the falls, of course. But I also wanted to see Buffalo. My single previous experience there had been a quick drive-through in 1991 after I saw Niagara Falls for the first time, from the Canadian side. Every city of any size has something interesting. A lot of smaller places do as well. So we shuffled off to Buffalo.

Pre-Holiday Nattering

Posted on May 26, 2021 by admin

Back again after the Memorial Day weekend, when it will be June already. June, now that’s a fine month.

Lilly arrived for a short visit today. We all went out to a restaurant to eat this evening. Sounds ordinary, but that was the first time since March 2020. We went to the last place we all went together that month, SGD, or So Gong Dong, a Korean place with about a dozen locations in the Midwest and on the Eastern seaboard. It’s a wonderful place, glad it survived.

My meal.

As usual with a commencement program that lists everyone’s full names, I spent some time during Ann’s graduation on Monday examining those names, and again just now. As usual, the variety is remarkable.

Last names, for instance: Ahmed, Awdziejczyk, Bhandar, Cwik, Degrazio, Garcia, Gomberg, Jayawardena, Jones, Kaspari, Kobe, Lavrynovych, Mapembe, McCoy, Michalowski, Nguyen, O’Connor, Onilegbale, Picadi, Schoefernacker, Shah, Stribling, Wang.

Common names aren’t so common. There are no Smiths and two Joneses, three Browns and one Johnson (and a single Johnston) and a pair of Williamses. There are four Garcias and three Sanchezes but only two Gonzalezes and one Hernandez and one Gomez. Rodriguez is fairly common: seven. No one is named Kim, though there is a Lim. The aforementioned Wang is the only one.

Far and away the most common surname among the Class of ’21 is Patel. How many? Twenty-one. It’s a common name from Gujarat state on the west coast of India, and apparently Patels are well-represented in the diaspora.

One reason: Idi Amin. “When Idi Amin turfed out some 100,000 Indians (mostly Gujaratis) from Uganda in 1972, most of them descended on Britain before peeling off elsewhere,” notes the Economic Times of India. The timing was right, since the U.S. had junked its racist immigration policies that effectively kept out most South Asians only in 1965.

“There are said to be more than 500,000 Patels scattered across the world outside India, including some 150,000 each in Britain and the US,” the paper continues. A good many in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, clearly. Then there’s this associated term, which I’d never heard before.

During research for an article not long ago, I came across the persnickety food site Eat This Not That!, whose very title screams judgmentalism. One article is called “20 Vegetarian Foods That Are Surprisingly Aren’t.”

The subhead: These supposedly animal-free foods will make you gag, regardless of your dietary lifestyle.

I don’t have anything against principled vegetarianism or veganism, though I don’t plan to be either. But I do think an article that essentially says, Look how gross food additives are! is an exercise in simplemindedness. Overthink just about any food and you can say it’s repulsive.

The additives the articles objects to include animal bones, sheep’s wool, pork fat, shellfish, bird features, beaver musk, crushed beetles, fish bladders, pig hooves and calf stomachs. I don’t see that list and think, ew, gross. I think damn, human beings are awfully clever, using the most unlikely things to improve our food. Is that not a virtue among primal peoples anyway — using every part of the animal?

My favorite entry:

If you’re eating … Lucky Charms
You’re also consuming … Animal Bones
Those marshmallow moons, clovers and horseshoes are made with gelatin, derived from animal collagen (aka cartilage, skin, tendons, bones). True veg-heads — and those who keep kosher, and cannot mix milk and meat — have known this for years, staring regretfully at the taunting leprechaun. Also containing gelatin: Smorz, Fruity Marshmallow Krispies, and Rich Krispies Treats Squares.

There may be legitimate reasons not to eat a lot of sugar-coated cereal, but animal collagen doesn’t strike me as one of them.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Food & Beverage