Seth's Blog

In James Michener’s Poland (1983), a Polish peasant in a concentration camp tries to survive by thinking about food (p. 532 of the paperback):

He then transferred his imagination to a supper served at the wedding of a well-to-do farmer, where huge platters of sauerkraut, sausage, boiled pork and pickles had been provided, one to each of six tables, and he had helped himself piggishly, moving from one to the other so as not to reveal his gluttony.  He recalled this particular feast for two reasons: as a peasant, he knew that the acid bite of the pickled kraut was good for him, all peasants knew that and it was one reason why they survived so long; and he could see in the rich fat of the meats the strength that came from them.

Later he thinks about animal fat:

He imagined himself luxuriating with platters of butter, or grease, or pork drippings, or oil that rich people bought from Spain, or the golden globules at the edge of a roast, or plain lard.

According to Wikipedia, Poland was based on “extensive study of Poland’s history and culture.” Thanks to Nadav Manham.

I am staying in a nice hotel near Shanghai. Last night I dreamed that my stuff (suitcase, etc.) had been put in the hallway outside my room. As — in the dream — I was walking to the front desk to complain, I realized I must be dreaming. This couldn’t possibly have happened, I thought. It was that realistic. Later that night I had another mild realistic nightmare — about missing the bus.

I rarely have dreams like that. During the day I’d had a lot more Chinese food than usual. Two big meals. (Lunch, at a restaurant, had included yogurt, incidentally.) Without my friend’s experience I would have never connected the Chinese food and the nightmares.

On Christmas, I had lunch in a factory town near Shanghai at a restaurant whose Chinese name means Stupid Noodle Restaurant. It’s not a joke. Nor a mystery, if you’re Chinese. The reason a restaurant would call itself stupid is because a stupid owner won’t cheat you. Next to the restaurant are a small store that sells cables and a small store that sells car batteries. At the restaurant, the knife-cut noodles were very good.

Jenny Holzer, the artist, says, “I get up about four times a night and go back to sleep, or not.” I suspect she’s not eating enough animal fat. At my local Beijing supermarket yesterday, I asked a butcher to cut the meat off a piece of pork fat. Reverse trimming. At the moment, I think about 180 g of animal fat/day is a good dose. I’m much less concerned about amount of meat. Another instance, I thought to myself, where I want the opposite of everyone else. But that’s far more true in America than here. In China but not America, I can buy pork belly at any supermarket; in China but not America, there is vast selection of pickles and yogurt at any supermarket.

From Wikipedia:

A more serious problem arose when fellow Quaker Philip Ford, his business manager, embezzled from Penn. He capitalized on Penn’s habit of signing papers without reading them by including a deed transferring Pennsylvania to himself, and then demanded more rent than Penn could pay.

Why am I reading about William Penn? Because Penn was an insider/outsider. Born to wealthy parents and educated at Oxford, he became a marginal religious leader, at one point imprisoned for eight months for writing a “blasphemous” pamphlet. Just as self-experimentation empowered me, cheap travel across the Atlantic empowered Penn. He took his followers to what became Pennsylvania.

I believe that cheap new ways of doing things empower insider/outsiders. A modern example is Stephen McIntyre, empowered by blogs. (His blog is Climate Audit.) The classic example is Martin Luther, empowered by the printing press. In contrast, expensive new ways of doing things empower insiders (the already powerful) because only they can afford them. I suppose the classic example is agriculture. Agriculture is expensive because it requires land. Lots of things start off expensive and become cheap, but many do not. The classic example is agriculture (land never becomes cheap); the big modern example is health care. It is very expensive to develop a new drug or new medical technology. This is at the heart of why the health care industry is extracting more and more money from the rest of us, just as government officials in rural China regularly ripoff farmers. I am unsurprised that doctors resist cheap new improvements, the only way out of a terrible situation. In China, people in rural areas migrate to cities; that’s how they escape. In Croatia, some friends of mine lived downhill from neighbors who were in the Communist Party. My friends were not Communists. One day they woke up to find that the property line between them and their uphill neighbors had shifted downhill about 10 feet. Unlike William Penn and rural Chinese, my friends could not move — and thus the powerful became more powerful.