This is a great documentary about a new cancer treatment invented by a Texas doctor named Stanislaw Burzynski. You can watch it for free until June 20 (and perhaps later, since an earlier deadline was extended).
Time Out magazine was started in 1968 in London by Tony Elliot, who was 22 at the time. The original title was Where It’s At. There were all sorts of new cultural stuff, such as a concert by the Who, that the mainstream media didn’t notice. The fringe-y alternative media weren’t interested in the attention to detail required to put out a list of events. That was the gap Time Out filled. Elliot borrowed a small amount of money (70 pounds) to start it. He and his co-workers worked without pay for the first three or four months. It was hard to get distribution, so they went around to parks passing it out. At a Beijing talk, Elliot said he didn’t remember the first paid advertiser (maybe a music store) but he did remember when he got an unsolicited advertising order from the prestigious London Film Museum. They understand what we’re trying to do, he thought.
I asked what some of his biggest mistakes had been. Both involved not saying no when he should have said no.
Thanks to Dave Lull.
Better to light a candle than curse the darkness, the saying goes. What if there are no candles?
Ken Rousseau, a software manager in Silicon Valley, went to Caltech in the late 70s. He didn’t have a good time. He was a physics major He took a required course on electricity and magnetism where the average score on the final was 15 out of 100. As he took it, he thought, I guess I can’t be a physics major. He got a 16 — a solid B. That a professor would design such a demoralizing test revealed, he believed, that the professor didn’t care about students. At Tech, lack of caring for students was shown in big things and small. Every building on campus was air-conditioned except the student houses, and Pasadena gets really hot in the summer. The graduation rate around that time — the fraction of entering students who graduate in four years — was 59%. At MIT it was 80 or 90%. When a student drops out of Tech, it’s a lost opportunity on both sides, Rousseau felt. It was/is very difficult to get into Tech. To send 41% of admitted students away struck him as a terrible thing.
He did graduate. For many years, when Tech would ask him for money, he would say no, sometimes with a letter about why. But he kept in touch with other students who had lived in the same undergraduate house (Fleming House), one of the seven student houses. Every year, a bunch of them would have a weekend-long beach party. At one of them the idea arose: Let’s start a Fleming Fund. To help the students buy beer, that sort of thing. Tech is a tough place, let’s help them get through it.
In the 1990s, Rousseau got a letter from the president of Caltech that made him angry. Tech was #4 in the U.S. News rankings, it said, mainly because of the low fraction of alumni giving. Let’s make Tech #1 by giving more, wrote the president. Rousseau responded with a five-page letter that made one simple point: Alumni giving is so low because the people in charge cared so little about students. Their lack of concern is being reciprocated.
By 2003 or 2004 Rousseau had enough money that he got a personal visit from the development office. His visitor knew his wife’s name, the approximate ages of his children, and the high points of his professional career. Rousseau told him of his residual bitterness. “You’ve obviously benefited a lot from your Tech experience,” said the development officer. “Why have you only given $163 over the years?” He had it wrong, Rousseau said. He had given $1. His wife, who had also gone to Tech, had given $162.
He told the development officer he was interested in helping Tech students — particularly Fleming House residents. In essence, he wanted to bring the Fleming Fund into existence. Around this time, Frank Bernstein, another Caltech alum who was working as a patent attorney in Silicon Valley, was also solicited. “Frank, I’m looking for a really significant donation,” said the same development officer who had approached Rousseau. Bernstein, who’d also lived in Fleming, told Rousseau about the conversation and they again resurrected the idea of the Fleming Fund.
The development officer came back to them with ideas. Maybe you could fund a lecturer, he suggested. Or graduate student salaries. Helping undergraduates was clearly a new and difficult concept for the development office. They were looking for contributions that, in their words, “directly benefited the Institute.” Bernstein pointed out to them that this was a narrow and self-defeating view. They want alumni to contribute. They want to get them in the habit of contributing. A Fleming Fund will help with that.
Because Rousseau’s daughter, a high school student, was considering going to Tech, Rousseau visited the campus in 2006. He met with Tom Mannion, the administrator for student affairs, and came to believe that the administration cared more about students than they had in the past. A new incoming president, Jean-Lou Chameau, appeared to genuinely care about undergrads. (Later events have validated that view. Chameau has made a point of discussing student life in his public discussions and has started to push administration officials to discuss what they’re doing with regards to student life.) After that, Rousseau and Bernstein met with the development officer who had solicited them and started working on the details. The Institute set a minimum of $100,000. Once the fund reached this level, income from the fund would be given to the students to spend.
In 2008 the details were hammered out. There would be two sort of restrictions: 1. Obvious limits on what the money could be spent on (no bail, no illegal drugs, etc.). 2. An oversight committee of three people, including the past president of Fleming House. The oversight committee only gets involved when the amount of money is more than the house’s usual budget. The income, at least at first, would be about $10,000 year for a house of about 120 students.
In May 2009, the fund was announced during a Fleming House reunion dinner at Tom Mannion’s house. Many undergrads came up to Rousseau and told him it was a “really cool idea.” They were touched that someone out there cared about them. The Institute is thinking of repeating it with the other student houses.
Daniel Carasso, who popularized yogurt worldwide via the Dannon brand, died on Sunday. He was 103. From the obituary in the NY Times:
In 1916 his father took the family back to Spain, where he [the father] became disturbed by the high incidence of intestinal disorders, especially among children. Isaac Carasso [Daniel's father] began studying the work of Elie Metchnikoff, the Russian microbiologist who believed that human life could be extended by introducing lactic-acid bacilli, found in yogurt and sour milk, into the digestive system. Using cultures developed at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, Isaac began producing Danone. . . in 1941 the arrival of the Nazis forced [Daniel Carasso] to flee to the United States. There he formed a partnership with two family friends, Joe Metzger, a Swiss-born Spanish businessman, and his son Juan, whose flair for marketing would make Dannon a household name in the United States. . .The little company operated at a loss until 1947, when, in a concession to the American sweet tooth, strawberry jam was added to the yogurt. Sales took off, new flavors were added to the product line, and Dannon yogurt made the leap from specialty product to snack food and dessert.
Thanks to Marian Lizzi.
I eat natto (fermented soybeans) once/day. Most of the natto I see in stores is from Japan (soybeans from America) but I found one local source: Japan Traditional Foods, in Sepastopol, California. Like many people I believe traditional diets are far healthier than modern ones. How can such diets, now almost extinct in rich countries, become popular again? To learn more about this, I interviewed the owner of Japan Traditional Foods, Minami Satoh.
How did your company begin?
I started it in 2006. We started to produce product in November 2008. So far natto is our only product. I went to business school at the Thunderbird School of Global Management, a private business school in Arizona, and graduated in 1983. After that, I worked for DuPont in Japan, but I wanted to work in the US. At DuPont, I did marketing of Teflon and Silverstone (a sister brand of Teflon). Then I worked for my father’s company selling wholesale steel pipe and tubes. I was successful but felt it was boring. I thought food would be more interesting. I acquired a small natto-making company (Yaguchi Foods) in Japan in 2004 or 2005. The owner had died. His relatives sold it to me.
In 2004, I came to America to meet Malcolm Clark. He’s the great-grandson of Dr. Clark, who is very famous in Japan. Malcolm Clark was responsible for introducing shitake mushrooms to America. He owns Gourmet Mushrooms in Sebastopol and lives in Occidental. Natto is an unusual food, like shitake mushrooms. I thought he could give me good advice about how to start making natto or other possibilities. That’s why the company is in Sebastopol. When I met Clark, he was thinking of retiring. I bought a stake in Gourmet Mushrooms; now Gourmet Mushrooms helps Japan Traditional Foods sell natto. I moved here in June 2008 to manage this company.
Why natto?
Americans already eat tofu, soy sauce, miso, edaname, and soy milk — but no natto. Natto is more nutritious than the other forms of soy that we currently eat. It’s more nutritious because of fermentation. It has more vitamins. A enzyme found in natto called nattokinase dissolves blood clots. In Japan natto is a traditional health food. It is usually eaten at breakfast.
How is natto made?
You boil the soybeans in a steam basket. Spray with bascillus. Put the soybeans in a paper cup. Put the cups in a fermentation container for 20-24 hours. Take them out and put in packages. Then give to the distributor. If you ferment more than 20 hours, natto bascillus start to eat themselves, which produces ammonia. Most companies stop fermenting at that point to avoid ammonia. If fermented longer, it may smell of ammonia. Japanese accept this, but Americans may not.
How big is Japan Traditional Foods?
One person plus myself. I hired someone from my natto company in Japan. He makes artisanal natto. He handcrafts it.. We put it in the paper cups by hand.
How did you get distribution?
It wasn’t hard. There are two distributors, one for Los Angeles, the other for San Francisco. They specialize in Japanese markets. Now it’s in close to 30 stores, including Korean and Chinese stores. The Los Angeles distributor wanted to sell his stuff in New York but the shipping costs would have been too high. This summer we will start going to farmer’s markets. We’ll have a booth there to sell and sample. The goal is to educate and share recipes. We’ll be at the San Rafael Sunday market and the Ferry Building Tuesday lunchtime market. It’s a kind of test. We’re talking to distributors about getting the product into non-Japanese grocery stores, such as Berkeley Bowl and Whole Foods. From the farmer’s markets we hope to get feedback to improve the packaging, size, and recipes. We want to find the best ways to make the Western market receptive to natto. For example, we can sample it in different ways. In Japan, the most popular way to eat it is over rice with finely chopped green onions, often at breakfast. I’ve come up with many different recipes: with rice or bagel or lettuce or crackers. With different sauces and toppings.
What were the hard parts?
It was difficult to find a good temperature control system here; I had to import it from Japan. I also needed a big steam cooker, which I had to import. This was hard because it is prohibited to export them from Japan to other countries.
Your promotional leaflet says “stir natto more than twenty times” before eating it. Why?
We do not have any valid research on this. But somebody says stirring natto creates the “Fifth Taste” we call “umami.” Somebody else said that it gets the natto bacillus awake again with oxygen because the bacillus was sleeping in the refrigerator.
Today, at the Fancy Food Show in San Francisco, I learned about Golden Star White Jasmine Sparkling Tea, the most new interesting product at the show (out of thousands). I asked the CEO, Edward Carden, how it came to be. He said he was helping his parents move several years ago when he thought: Why isn’t there a sophisticated non-alcoholic beverage? Like wine, but non-alcoholic. Starting with the best ingredients, what could they come up with? They could make stuff that tasted great, but there was an arbitrariness to it. Making a tea allowed them to connect with that heritage. Wine has a heritage, beer has a heritage, cheese has a heritage. They start by infusing tea leaves, then add sugar and microorganisms and ferment for a short time to develop complexity of flavor. The fermentation produces a small alcohol content. Call it a microwine. It was delicious.
Park(ing) Day was today. The first Park(ing) Day was in 2005. You celebrate it by turning a parking place into a park — as in the verb to park. In North Berkeley, around lunchtime, I came across a dozen Landscape Architecture grad students sitting around a long table full of food that filled up two parking places on Shattuck Avenue (a busy street). My big question was where the tables came from — that seemed like the hard part. From Wurster Hall (where the Landscape Architecture Department is). They invited me to join them and the whole thing was so interesting I couldn’t resist.
The food was very good. One person brought tomatoes, broccoli, cucumbers, and purslane picked that morning from his garden. Someone else brought homemade salsa.
You might think you could lay claim to a parking spot by putting money in the meter. Not in Berkeley. A parking cop came by and wondered what was going on. Someone had reported “a picnic,” the cop said. The cop left. Twenty minutes later he returned. Apparently there had been discussion about how to handle this. The ruling was you need a permit. Parking places are for cars, said the cop. Feeding the meters wasn’t enough. The cop gave the students 15 minutes to leave. At that point I left.
The City of Berkeley, which Jane Jacobs called a “pretentious suburb,” isn’t doing well economically. There was a Barnes & Noble downtown, a kind of anchor store. It closed. There was a Ross downtown. It closed. Chain stores don’t do well in Berkeley. One downtown corner has gone through several renters, including Gateway Computers, Cody’s Books, and L.L. Bean, in just a few years. The main reason I go to downtown Berkeley is to take BART to San Francisco.
My neighborhood, North Berkeley, is doing much better, although there are two empty storefronts and the Starbucks will close. Elephant Pharmacy, a New-Agey kind of pharmacy (“the drugstore that prescribes yoga”), has been successful and has started opening branches in nearby cities. (It’s a good place to shop, too. Yesterday I bought some whole nutmeg there.) The Cheese Board, a worker’s cooperative, with a great selection of cheese, has done a good job adding pizza sales to cheese sales.
The overall economic record of the neighborhood is staggering, since it includes the original Peet’s, the inspiration for Starbucks, and Chez Panisse, the most influential restaurant in the world. It also includes the first Papyrus store. I don’t drink coffee, and didn’t start drinking tea until the Shangri-La Diet, so I never shopped at Peet’s until recently. A friend, however, has been going there almost its entire history. He says that when Mr. Peet died, the workers became a lot friendlier. Before that they had a snobbish attitude. Some workers from Peet’s started a similar business in Seattle, which they called Starbucks. It was very successful and they sold out to Howard Schulz, who greatly expanded it.
Was Mr. Peet’s snobbery “bad”? Well, it — plus the corresponding attitudes of Berkeley residents — allowed him to develop a unique business. After that business was developed, that attitude could be shed and the whole thing could be moved to a place (Seattle) where its business potential could be revealed. The shift of ownership allowed the idea to become separated from the “big business is bad” notion (which was helpful at first) and launch a thousand Starbucks. (An excellent company, by the way, that not only provides me a place to work but also produced How Starbucks Saved My Life, a very good and persuasive book.) This is yet another tiny illustration of my theory of human evolution, how it all started with hobbies which eventually became businesses. Peet’s wasn’t a hobby, but it was hobby-like in its expression of the owner’s attitudes. It was far more a labor of love than most businesses. There are other examples. Survivor is to The Real World as Starbucks is to Peet’s. The Omnivore’s Dilemma is to Slow Food as Starbucks is to Peet’s.
ROBERTS Were there really some people that didn’t think that opera is highbrow and comics are lowbrow? Was that a hard thing?
NUSSBAUM The complicated thing is: why is opera considered highbrow and why is comics considered lowbrow?
ROBERTS That’s a different question.
NUSSBAUM We were trying to articulate this. Part of it is a mass versus elite thing. Part of it is a notion of the complexity of ambition of the thing. But that doesn’t really work.
ROBERTS That’s not quite fair.
NUSSBAUM You can have an opera that’s incredibly dumb and not very well thought through. And you can have a comic book that is the most ambitious thing ever in terms of its narrative or in terms of its artistry. The tricky thing is: what pulls something up or down? Also, I just couldn’t over the fact that people didn’t understand that lowbrow is not a bad thing. It’s not a bad thing for something to be mass and enjoyable. That’s why there are two different things. The visual is meant to literally suggest that highbrow and lowbrow are not same thing as brilliant and despicable.
ROBERTS I liked The Approval Matrix for that. I took it for granted.
NUSSBAUM I’m kinda chatterboxy today for lack of sleep.
ROBERTS That’s fine. You’ve helped a lot. The wonderful thing about The Approval Matrix is that in a small space it makes me aware of many new things I would like to find out about. It improves my world. It opens me up to lots of stuff. It opens me up to lots of art. It helps me find lots of great art.
NUSSBAUM That’s great!
ROBERTS Other magazines don’t do that as well. I think every magazine does that a little bit.
NUSSBAUM Not only is that very exciting to hear, it was one of the things when I was redesigning the section that was really difficult. When you read a section on culture it is generally divided into genres. So if you’re interested in visual arts, that’s what you end up reading about. If you’re interested in visual arts, you flip to the visual arts section. You’re likely to perhaps never read the book section or the TV section or something you’re not interested in. The thing about The Matrix is, because it’s a destination that sort of forces everyone to go to this place where it’s like a big bus station where everyone interested in everything is forced to hang out, I hope it has that service quality you’re talking about. Which is it opens your eyes to things you’d normally not have heard of, you’re forced to mingle with all art forms, to be very high-faluting about it.
ROBERTS That’s a good way to put it.
NUSSBAUM Are there other questions?
ROBERTS There’s aren’t any other pressing questions, no. You’ve done a wonderful job answering my questions. Thanks a lot, Emily.
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