Seth's Blog

I’ve been making it in 2-quart jars. Doing little experiments, I’ve figured out that

1. 4 tea bags is better than 6. I’ve been using Tetley’s low-cost black tea. Each teabag supposedly has 33% more tea than usual. In Wild Fermentation, Sandor Katz suggests 4 teabags for 2 quarts.

2. 3/4 cup of sugar is better than 1/2 cup of sugar. The Wild Fermentation recipe says 1/2 cup of sugar for 2 quarts.

Part 1.

Today I had a hangnail. I realized I hadn’t had one in months. I used to get them all the time — say, once a week. The only big change in my life in the last few months is all the fermented food I now eat. I find it hard to believe there’s a connection but I can’t remember another time in my life when they went away.

Ankylosing spondylitis is a kind of arthritis with puzzling symptoms all over the body. Its main symptom is back vertebrae fusing together; ankloysis is stiffening or fusion of a joint. To read Wikipedia you’d think it can only be treated with dangerous drugs that don’t work very well.

I recently learned from someone with the condition that it got much better after he cut out all refined carbohydrates, especially sugar, an idea he got from Dr. Bruce West. He describes his regimen as “avoid processed foods [= food with lots of additives], such as fast foods, and especially refined carbohydrates, such as high fructose corn syrup.” After he started this, he felt better in three days. He can eat fruit, but not bread or soft drinks or desserts. He’s never tried eating more fermented foods; he barely knew what they were.

Is the idea spreading? I asked. No, he said. Curious, in this day of forums and patient-centered websites.

More A reader noted that the same advice is given here.

• Congratulations: You’ve become a New Yorker staff writer by Dan Baum
• History written by the losers by Nassim Taleb
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• Vast high-quality audio and text for learning foreign languages, including Chinese

Thanks to Ben Casnocha.

There is nothing new about large industry leaders, such as General Motors, going bankrupt; in The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen gives many examples and an explanation: complacency, also called smugness. We’re doing well, why shouldn’t we continue to do things our way? They fail to innovate enough and less-complacent companies overtake them, often driving them out of business. Complacency is human nature, true, but it’s the oldest mistake in the economic world. (I’ve studied a similar effect in rats and pigeons.) In the 1950s, complacency was surely why the big American car companies rejected the advice of quality expert Edward Deming. In less-complacent Japan, however, his ideas were embraced. This doomed the US car industry. Much later, Ford was the first American car company to take Deming seriously, which may be why Ford is now doing better than GM or Chrysler.

The further away you are I suspect the more clearly you see complacency for what it is — a failure to grasp basic economics (innovate or die):

“Chinese financial assets [in America[ are very safe," [Treasury Secretary Tim] Geithner said. His response drew laughter from the [Peking University] audience.