Arizona charter school bans bikes

An suburban Arizona charter school has banned kids from riding bikes to school. Some parents are upset. This bike ban is actually part of a trend, as our kids get lazier.

How to solve this problem?

1. Stop the voucher programs that support these schools.

2. Stop the voucher programs that support these schools.

3. Stop the voucher programs that support these schools.

If you don’t like the dumb policies at your kid’s private school, don’t send him there!

(Also, please stop sending them my tax dollars.)

5 days ago  /  0 notes

Can color-coded snack chips hold you to a serving?

An interesting story from ABC about serving-size dividers in Pringles tins.  Basically, every serving is marked off by a chip of a weird color. This helps people hold themselves to a serving.

“The colored chip did all the work,” says Paul Rozin, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the authors of the study. “This study showed that segmenting foods gets people to eat less. People tend to eat what you put in front of them. If you put less in front of them and give them a signal, they will take it.”

Makes sense to me, although most snack foods aren’t so neatly stacked as to work this way. An even better idea is eating some nice crunchy carrots.

1 week ago  /  0 notes

An idiot walks into a Farmer’s Market…

So here’s a hilarious story from MSNBC about organic produce. The headline is “Does organic food turn people into jerks?“ It opens with an anecdote from some poor woman who felt totally out of place at a Farmer’s Market in Seattle.

“I stopped at a market to get a fruit platter for a movie night with friends but I couldn’t find one so I asked the produce guy,” says the 40-year-old arts administrator from Seattle. “And he was like, ‘If you want fruit platters, go to Safeway. We’re organic.’ I finally bought a small cake and some strawberries and then at the check stand, the guy was like ‘You didn’t bring your own bag? I need to charge you if you didn’t bring your own bag.’ It was like a ‘Portlandia skit.’ They were so snotty and arrogant.”

Now, I’m not, like, a huge Farmer’s Market fan. I like grocery stores, generally, though I do love finding weird things like wild ramps to cook. That said, this woman is pretty dumb.

Who would go to a Farmer’s Market looking for pre-cut and washed platters of fruit served on a plastic container? That’s just stupid. It’s like going to a church and asking them to pour you a glass of communion wine. Yeah, they could do it, but the point is sorta the opposite.

Also, reusable shopping bags aren’t, like, some newfangled thing. They probably should charge you 25 cents if you need a bag at the check-out. I’m fine with that. Especially at the Farmer’s Market.

Of course this is a serious news story backed by quotes from an actual scientist psychologist named Kendall Eskine, an assistant professor at Loyola University in New Orleans.

“There’s a line of research showing that when people can pat themselves on the back for their moral behavior, they can become self-righteous. I’ve noticed a lot of organic foods are marketed with moral terminology, like Honest Tea, and wondered if you exposed people to organic food, if it would make them pat themselves on the back for their moral and environmental choices. I wondered if they would be more altruistic or not.”

Honest Tea is, of course, a delicious pun. Southerners generally do not enjoy puns, I’ve found, but still… it’s a fucking pun.

So about Eskine’s study….

The methodology was utterly ridiculous. Basically, three sets of people were primed with either photos of organic apples, brownies or random stuff. They did not eat these things, they were just showed them and then presented with a bunch of scenarios where they were asked to make moral judgments.

First, I’m not sure how it matters the apples were organic and the brownies weren’t. It doesn’t. More likely, the issue was fresh produce versus junk food. My uneducated hypothesis is that junk food makes people feel like they have plenty to give and share, plus a little guilty and less judgmental. I’d bet that organic brownies (yeah, you could make ‘em) or GMO apples from Monsanto Family Farm would have roughly the same priming effects. Of course this clown Eskine says that it matters that the apples are organic. He goes so far as to coin the term ‘Organic People’ to label them.

“We found that the organic people judged much harder compared to the control or comfort food groups. On a scale of 1 to 7, the organic people were like 5.5 while the controls were about a 5 and the comfort food people were like a 4.89.”

Again, the ‘Organic People’ were the people randomly showed photos of apples. They were not people who bought or consumed organic produce even once. This idiot should be a lot more careful with his language, here. His explanation? 

“There’s something about being exposed to organic food that made them feel better about themselves. And that made them kind of jerks a little bit, I guess.”

Yes, looking at a photo of an organic apple makes you a jerk. At least according to this stooge. Shame on Eskine, shame on MSNBC and shame on Loyola University and Clown College.

So stupid.

1 week ago  /  1 note

Portland to the Pacific by bike

The guy at the bike store was impressed.

“You rode to the ocean on an 8-speed city bike?” he asked. “With your stuff in a bag on your back?”

Yes, I did. It wasn’t as pleasant as I’d hoped—I was at the shop to get a rear rack and a pair of those foam underwear things—but I did it. I’ll be writing a long story about it for Willamette Week later, but I wanted to share a picture from the finish line, 65 miles from where I started. Three years ago, it would have been about a week since I’d started the diet that became Chubster. I could not have imagined doing something like this.

If you’re maybe wondering if you should start a new lifestyle this summer, you should. I know New Year’s is the big time for resolutions, but summer is another great time to take up self-improvement and self-discovery. There’s plenty out there to distract you from food.

Who knows what you could be doing three years from now?

1 week ago  /  0 notes

The Biker Bar (Portland Style)

Original photo by Vivian Johnson for Willamette Week

Velo Cult, Portland’s newest bike shop, might also be its most ambitious. It’s huge, for starters. Like, 10,000 square feet—that’s larger than a lot Trader Joe’s. It’s also got a stage for concerts, a museum of old bikes, a bar, and big plans.

I stopped by again last night after reviewing it for the latest Willamette Week and got to chat with the owner. Cool dude. He moved his successful shop up from San Diego because he knows this is the best biking city in the country (sorry, Twin Cities, that “study” was dumb) and he wants to be part of it.

“It’s gonna be like a community center,” he said.

This, to me, is the future of bike shops. The biker bar. Motorcyclists have them, obviously, and bikers are the new, ahem, bikers. Sure, you can get bargain and find nice service anywhere, but how often do you need to go to a bike shop? This is a shop you want to go to, not only when you have a flat tire but when you could use a beer and some conversation. The merchandise is there, but it’s really all about the community. See a show, get a new back blinker, guzzle a beer, meet a friend.

This idea is, of course, ridiculously Chubster friendly. When I talk in the book about evolving our society into something that makes us healthier while fitting with the fun parts of our culture, this is exactly what I mean. I think my new friend Nicholas, who hit the bar with me, was also impressed.

The Velo Cult leader has some cool ideas, like raising funds to put a sorely needed corral rack out front (there is very little bike parking on the block, oddly). I tried to convince him to bring up some great San Diego beer. Right now, there’s not a single SD beer on the menu, but that’s not because he doesn’t dig his native brews as much as I do. I really bent his ear about getting a buddy to bring up a keg of Sculpin to get the beer geeks on board with this, too.

We’ll see what happens. Better ideas have failed in this crazy world, but I dig this place.

1 week ago  /  1 note

The ice cream issue…

So this week’s Willamette Week features my review of a Portland chain of ice cream shops (well, there are two now) called Salt & Straw. They’re doing the old-timey thing with the artisan unexpected mix-in thing and the T-shirt thing. The review stands on its own, of course, but I did find it interesting that several angry commenters cited Chubster as a disqualifer. As in, I should not comment on ice cream since I wrote a diet book.

This is both hilarious and a little scary.

Scary, because it confirms that people have such dumb ideas about losing weight is thanks to the Organized Dieting industry. Dieting isn’t eating only kale, or only meat, or meat and kale but nothing else, or smoothies, or TrimSpa, baby, until you shed a certain amount of weight then resuming your old habits. It’s about creating a lifestyle that works for you and sticking to it through discipline. Period.

To paraphrase what a wise man once said, when dieting you can have whatever you like provided you limit your portions and keep track of it.

It’s also hilarious, because I eat so much ice cream. In the book they will never read before commenting on, I explain that I eat ice cream pretty much everyday. I don’t eat ice cream like Salt & Straw’s everyday because I don’t like it, but you could eat a scoop in a cup if you wanted. I’d roughly estimate most flavors to be around 300 calories. This is not ridiculous if you like ice cream like I like ice cream. It’s all about how you allot your calories.

You do have better options, of course. Let’s say you like caramel ice cream. For 150 calories, you can enjoy Skinny Cow’s excellent and readily available Dulche de Leche. If you wanna go all out and double your calories there is truly delicious salted caramel artisan ice cream out there that’s totally worth the 300 calories.

Now, if you’ve read Chubster you realize I make plenty of controversial points. But leading an anti-ice cream jihad is not one of them.

2 weeks ago  /  1 note