March 27, 2009  ·  20 comments

March Maidens.

I don’t follow college basketball at all, and even March Madness holds only a faint interest for me, since I’m usually wrapped up in spring training at that point. I do pay attention to one aspect of the tournament though: I pull for the maidens – that is, the teams that have never won the championship before. (In horse racing, a maiden is a horse that has never won a race.) We came close to having a maiden team win last year with Memphis, but they let me down.

Unfortunately, this is looking like a really lousy year for maidens. Memphis has just been knocked off by Missouri, and while Missouri is an even bigger maiden than Memphis (the Mizzou Tigers have never reached the Final Four, and this is just their third Elite Eight appearance), Memphis was Ken Pomeroy’s top-ranked team, so in theory, they had a better shot to topple one or more #1 seeds.

Pitt is the only maiden among the #1 seeds, but of course, they barely got by Xavier, which doesn’t inspire any confidence in me that they’re going to beat this relentless ‘Nova team.

Today was actually the better day of the two Sweet 16 days for maiden teams, as Friday’s four games feature just two maidens: Oklahoma (two title game appearances: a 1988 loss to Kansas and a 1947 loss to WHO THE HELL LOSES TO HOLY CROSS IN ANYTHING? back when the court was 12 feet long and they used peach baskets instead of nets) and Gonzaga (never reached the Final Four). Gonzaga faces UNC, who seem to be the consensus “expert” pick to win the whole shebang.

College basketball might be the most likely endeavor among major team sports where you could very easily see a maiden winner every two or three years. In MLB, we get long droughts, but there are only eight franchises that have never won, two of which are less than twenty years old. (It’s nine if you don’t count the New York Giants’ titles for San Francisco). The NFL and NBA have more maidens, but more than half the franchises in each league have won, and it’s hard to get all worked up about Oklahoma City’s title drought of one year even if we don’t give them Seattle’s win in 1978-79. In college basketball, not only do we have a huge number of schools that have never won – only 34 of 347 schools who play D1 basketball have won it – but it takes neither a long time nor a large number of great players to make a team competitive. Unfortunately, we’re on track for our third straight year without a maiden winner after a great run of five in ten years (Arizona, Connecticut, Maryland, Syracuse, and Florida).

* Speaking of the NCAA, Dayn Perry has a great post on Spolitical about the exploitation of college athletes, specifically those in “revenue sports,” which for most schools means football and basketball. That said, issues like revocable scholarships crop up in baseball as well. You’re a freshman pitcher. Coach works you so hard that by year-end you can’t comb your hair and have to visit Dr. Andrews. You’re out for a year or more and odds are your velocity isn’t coming back. You lose your scholarship. Coach loses … nothing. Yeah, that seems fair. If scholarships were guaranteed for three years, wouldn’t coaches have an incentive to handle players (particularly pitchers) better in at least their first two years at the school?

* So my alma mater has a couple of researchers trotting out the new vegetarian mantra that eating beef boosts global warming. Here’s the part that confuses me: If raising cows means more greenhouse gas emissions, can’t we slow global warming by killing all cows? That seems to be the obvious conclusion here.

* Handshake deals are illegal under MLB rules, folks. The Nats should tell Young’s agent to shove it. An oral agreement is only worth as much as the paper it’s written on.

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December 5, 2008  ·  No comments yet

Bluefin tuna.

I’m never sure how seriously to take enviro-scare articles in the mainstream media, although this bit on the threat to bluefin tuna populations seemed somewhat well-researched, keeping the hysteria to quotes from researchers. The article refers to the northern bluefin tuna simply as the bluefin tuna and notes that it has nearly been fished out of existence, with the global population dropping by an estimated 90% in the last thirty years.

Bluefin toro, when it’s fresh, is among the best kinds of sushi you’ll ever have, up there with yellowtail belly and Pacific salmon in my book. Bluefin toro, a fatty cut from the tuna’s belly, falls apart in your mouth, like a very high-quality steak cooked rare, but without the slightly grassy flavor. It is, however, quite expensive – I’ve paid $10 a piece for it before and I’ve seen it cost more than that. I rarely have it, and if living without it for a few years will help restock the oceans, I’m fine with that.

Here’s what I’m not fine with:

Several smaller ICCAT members such as Guatemala and Panama had initially backed a proposal supported by the U.S. and environmental groups to halt all bluefin fishing for nine months of the year, and to crack down hard on violators. But European officials persuaded them to instead adopt a reduced quota of 22,000 tons in 2009, and 19,950 tons in 2011. That certainly represents a sharp drop from last year’s estimated global sales of 61,000 tons of bluefin tuna — and even from this year’s official quota of about 29,000 tons — but it’s still far above the 15,000 tons that marine scientists advise is the limit that can be fished without without the species becoming extinct.

You know, the Europeans do like to lecture us on environmental issues (Kyoto comes to mind), but damn if they don’t change their tune when their own self-interest is at stake. I often say, half-jokingly, that I’ll turn down my thermostat and buy a car with better gas mileage when Russia, Brazil, and Nigeria stop cutting down all of their trees. (Nigeria has already wiped out over 90% of its original forest stock. Good work.) Maybe I should add to that quip one about only giving up eating bluefin toro when the Europeans agree to stop overfishing it.

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September 28, 2008  ·  15 comments

Reusable bags.

I’m in Milwaukee, eating and writing up a storm. To tide you over, here’s a great WSJ article on the rise of the reusable bag, replacing the so-called “T-shirt” disposable plastic bags that have become the environmentalist’s new bête noire. It’s a well-written, balanced piece and brought a few things to light for me (like how the “I used to be a plastic bag” slogan has two interpretations).

Chez Law, we have more of those reusable bags than we really need, but many are the products of trips to the store without our bags and our subsequent refusals to take disposable ones. I think we have five from Whole Foods and at least four from Trader Joes, although I will take any bag to any store. I always tell myself I’m going to leave one in my car, and sometimes I do, except that then I take it into the store, fill it, bring it inside to empty it, and never restore it to the back seat.

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June 11, 2008  ·  16 comments

Organic, Inc.

Samuel Fromartz’ Organic, Inc. might be the most balanced nonfiction book on a contemporary subject I’ve ever read. Even though Fromartz is clearly a pro-organic partisan, he focuses the work on the food and the various personalities that helped turn organic food from tasteless hippie health food into the panoply of choices the organic-minded consumer has today.

Organic, Inc. is part history and part description of what “organic” really means, both today and what it meant in earlier eras. The history is interesting enough, as Fromartz discusses how natural farming methods were slowly and then quickly overtaken by more industrial production methods, from the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to the loss of critical agricultural techniques like crop rotation, and then shifts gears to focus on the various organic-food advocates who, for health or culinary reasons, pushed back against the agro-industrial complex. While many of the characters Fromartz presents were – to my eyes, at least – certifiable kooks, some, like chef Alice Waters, who is responsible for introducing Americans to “spring mix” or mesclun salad, were just passionate about one specific aspect of organic food (in Waters’ case, taste) and matched it to a niche in the market that would allow them to sustain and even grow their food-related businesses.

Fromartz also provides two chapters that delve more into the way Big Bad Corporate America has gotten its grubby mitts on organic food. One chapter talks about soy milk, going into the history of White Wave, the company behind Silk that has since sold out to Dean Foods, which has introduced non-organic products under the Silk name. (I checked at Whole Foods yesterday; even chocolate Silk can’t call itself organic because the cocoa used in the drink isn’t organic.) The last chapter goes into the pitched battles, some still ongoing, between the hardcore organic community and the growth-oriented side seeking to ease labeling rules and guidelines for organic agriculture and husbandry. Fromartz builds the first six chapters to leave this conflict as somewhat inevitable, and manages to keep his own views out of the fray, although it would be hard to read that chapter and side with the “growth” crowd when you see what they would like to make acceptable under the label “organic.”

Fromartz’ prose was the one obstacle that was tough to surmount, however. His word choices are often awkward and occasionally wrong, referring to one veterinarian as “widely regarded” without saying how he was regarded or what he was regarded as. I also caught a handful of grammatical errors or funky word orders that made the subjects of sentences unclear. I also would have preferred to see inline citations; the book has a thick Notes section, with notes by page number, but the lack of inline citations creates a game where you guess that there might be a citation for what you just read and check the Notes section to see if there’s one there. Given the frequency with which he uses the “Some people say” device, inline citations are a must.

If you care about food, or the environment, Organic, Inc. is a solid and informative read. I know I’ll be looking for organic strawberries wherever possible, and will probably shift what little conventional dairy buying I do to organic as well, all the result of the information Fromartz gave in the book, rather than any rhetorical or polemical arguments I’ve read.

Next up: A return to the TIME 100 with Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant.

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May 18, 2008  ·  22 comments

A new trend this year for America: wasting food!

Quick note: I’ll be on ESPN Radio’s Gameday in about 20 minutes (1:20 pm EDT).

Found this interesting article in the International Herald Tribune via Gmail on how much food we waste:

In 1997, in one of the few studies of food waste, the Department of Agriculture estimated that two years before, 96.4 billion pounds of the 356 billion pounds of edible food in the United States was never eaten. Fresh produce, milk, grain products and sweeteners made up two-thirds of the waste. An update is under way.

I have to admit that nothing makes me more upset than throwing food away. In the past few years, I’ve decreased my food purchases to more or less just what I know I’ll use, making more trips to the store (which isn’t feasible for everyone) and, for ingredients that can’t be purchased in small enough quantities, planning several meals around them to avoid waste. I also convert foods that maybe are past their primes for eating straight and convert them into other foods, like using fruit to make pies or cobblers or jams, or taking stale bread and making fresh bread crumbs by tossing it in the food processor. And yet I still find myself tossing, usually via the garbage disposal, way more food than I’d like – leftovers usually.

Unfortunately, short of tailoring your purchases to more closely fit what you eat, which isn’t easy for people who shop for food once a week, there’s not much you can do to reduce the impact of what you waste. Composting isn’t for everyone, and with skunks and raccoons in our neighborhood, it’s definitely not for us. There’s just no way to get the food I’ve bought and won’t or can’t use into the hands of someone who needs it.

Anyway, it was an interesting read for me, because I’m conscious of what I waste. Just the other day, my wife and I both bought strawberries without realizing the other had done so, and one batch (mine, I think) had mold on half the berries by the next day. With a two-year-old in the house, it wasn’t worth taking chances on the “clean” berries, so out they went. It’s just a shame.

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