Field Notes from a Gastronomic Experiment

So, it turns out that if you eat hardly any wheat for three weeks, then have three sources of it in the one day, it kind of hurts.

After the first week on my self-imposed low gluten experiment, I was reasonably certain I didn't have to care about a gluten intolerance. I was feeling a little less bloated, a little "lighter" and a little more energetic - and my bowel movements had improved a bit (you needed to know that, I'm sure), but my dyspepsia hadn't radically improved and I wasn't thinking "Oh, my word! This has made such a huge difference in my life - I wish I had done this years ago!"

Or anything like that.

I felt a little better. For a major dietary change like removing all wheat (I mean, seriously, do you have any idea how much wheat is in the stuff we eat?), you want a slightly bigger payoff than "I feel a little better".

I did come to realise how much of my food was basically centred around one grain, and resolved to shake things up a bit more rather than being so wheat dependant in my food, but I figured I could probably go back to eating wheat again without too much bother.

After two weeks, I tried some bread and had no problems. A few days later I had some spaghetti and was fine. On Friday I had a hot-cross bun, a piece of cake and a pasta salad for lunch. By that night I was feeling decidedly put-out - as though I had something in my stomach that my stomach didn't particularly want to process. By Saturday morning, I was reaching for my dyspepsia pills and heading back to bed until midday, when I finally felt like being upright.

Of course, to make it a true experiment, I'm going to have to repeat it to see if I get the same result. That does seem reasonably unpleasant, but I am nothing if not a semi-rigorous quasi-scientist.

The main thing I might be learning from this experiment is that giving up wheat "just to see what happens" is a stupid idea if it means you aren't really much better off than you were before you gave it up, but you now experience pain when you attempt to eat the kinds of things you used to eat without problem...

Things I am learning so far:

• As a society, we are far too dependent on wheat - even foodstuffs that don't contain anything resembling flour have "flavors" which are wheat-based - which is really annoying and kind of weird because without those particular flavours they would be able to call it gluten free and sell it to more people.


• If you are currently giving up coffee, avoiding wheat and trying to resist the temptation to replace everything you aren't eating with chocolate, cafes completely disappear. They have absolutely nothing to offer except overpriced tea.


• Buying groceries is surprisingly easy, buying food "out" is surprisingly difficult


• Wheat is really sticky. It has some strange elastic property to it that makes it work for things like bread and pasta and muffins that other "flours" can't quite pull off. I wonder if that coats your innards and is harder to process?


• Quinoa based pasta does not taste very pleasant.

This Woman Kind of Rocks

Hazel Ying Lee:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazel_Ying_Lee

American-Chinese female WWII fighter pilot. Aviatrix extraordinaire.

But does it help you stink less?

Denglish

I stumbled across this on the English version of a German website the other day. Something redirected me to the page again today, and it just makes me smile every time I see it:

IMPORTANT

Returns can be made ​​unfree organizational

Reasons NOT be accepted!


I'll do my best to keep that in mind...

Visit your Home

So, here's the brief:

You won a competition in which the prize is an all expenses paid vacation in... the town where you currently live and work.

You can't trade it in for cash, transfer it to another person or change it to another location. For one week, someone is going to foot the bill for the hotel of your choice as well as any travel expenses or entry fees associated with "seeing the sights" of this city (and it's satellite suburbs).

For one week, you may as well play tourist in your own town.

Where do you stay? What do you see? Where do you go?

Adopt a Food Intolerance

So, largely for my own personal amusement, but also as part of a poorly formulated scientific experiment, I've decided to cut back on the amount of gluten I consume.

Specifically, I'm going to try to avoid wheat for a few weeks, while opting for "gluten free" things as much as possible. I may occasionally make exceptions for cake - it depends on how well my will power holds up. Plus, I'll probably not shy away from oats, rye and barely as much as wheat, even though eatin "gluten free" things will probably cut those down as well.

I'm largely doing this to see what will happen. I happen to know I don't have coeliac disease (had the blood test a couple of years ago, which came back negative), but I also have a lot of symptoms that are often associated with it. It occurs to me that I might not have an autoimmune reaction to the stuff, but I might be reacting to it nonetheless.

I suppose I could go through a doctor or natropath and find out if I have an honest-to-goodness food intolerance, but where's the fun in that? I'd rather randomly pick something and see what happens if I just act like I have an intolerance. It's less stressful that way (an experiment, rather than a health imperative), and it gives me a slightly different perspective on the world. Even if it turns out that cutting my gluten intake to a minimum has no positive effect on my health, I'll have a better appreciation of the way people who are gluten intolerant see the world.

I'm already annoyed by the local cafe that, the other day, offered only two salads - one with crutons and the other with couscous. Surely someone avoiding gluten should be able to safely order the salad?

Anyway, my goal is to take as much wheat out of my diet as I can for a few weeks (to let it get out of my system), and then eat a big bowl of spaghetti and see how I feel. I like to think of it as scientific enquiry meets blind stupidity.

So far I've been doing it for a couple of days, and my rice intake has almost quadrippled. I keep looking at the amount of rice and corn I would be eating to replace the wheat, thinking "my, that's a lot of rice and corn"... Which, when you think about it, just highlights how much wheat I usually eat.

I should probably be looking at changing my eating habits entirely to default more to meat/fish/poultry and fruits and vegitables. It seems I have a lot of processed grains in my current diet.

We do tend to fall into a habit of processed foods in our modern world, don't we?

Some musings on "Der Gute Mensch von Sezuan"

Okay, I cheated. I read an English translation. I always meant to go back and read the German version as well, I just wanted to have the story in my head first. Now, of course, I'm in the middle of reading the next book and I just haven't bothered re-reading the last. I'm trying to avoid making the same mistake with The Reader, by making sure I read the German version of the last chapter before I let myself continue with the English.

Anyway, this ramble is about Brecht's Gute Mensch, and serves towards being part of my "reading diary" to be reworked and reproduced for assessment purposes later.

First, a bit of intertextuality. When reading Der Gute Mensch I couldn't help thinking about Louis Nowra's The Precious Woman, a play I used for a number of assessment pieces a few years ago (and, by "a few", I meant probably ten or twelve - my, how time flies).

Nowra's play was published in 1981, so it's entirely possible that it was influenced by Brecht's play. It was set in China, featured a woman who thought well of the world until given an unavoidable wake-up call and ended miserably. So, some strong similarities there.

It wasn't Epic in nature, although it's form owed a lot to Brecht and his ilk, who broke the old three-act structure and had plays run simply scene by scene. The dialogue, though, was more naturalistic.

Was it communist? Bourgeois? Well, it wasn't saying anything about capitalism, or encouraging us to change the world for the better, but it was saying "warlords aren't the way to go" - if that counts towards anything. I think it was closer to a feminist text than a communist one, as there was an undertone of women gaining strength by shaking off the illusions weaved around them by husbands and sons.

After reading Gute Mensch I realised it had a lot in common with Sugar Heaven - the novel by Jean Devanny. Now, it's highly unlikely that Brecht would have read that novel (it was first published in 1936, two years after Brecht's ur version of Gute Mensch and before it developed into the play we know today), or that Devanny would have read Brecht's ur version (given that it was just a manuscript in Germany [and in German]), but the works have a similar sensibility.

Hard to explain that, really. On the one hand we have a spot of reportage and on the other a bit of Epic Theatre. The stories aren't similar, and there aren't even any calls for action that seem to echo the same thoughts.

So why would I think they were similar? Well, it's that reportage and epic theatre both came out of Communism. Those styles exist to be a kind of didactic literature - there's a message, it's always the same message, and that message is rammed home at every given opportunity: "This world sucks and needs to be changed: The working man must rise up and have his say/day."

In Gute Mensch we are reminded over and over again that poor people can't afford to be "good" people - that the current world simply won't let them survive without ruthlessness, so goodness cannot be asked or expected. Cheerful stuff.

In Sugar Heaven its this sense that a bright and shining future is waiting for us, we just don't have enough courage or enough power to get it. The strike is for our own good, and it will make things better - but the bosses won't hear of it, and the official unions are in cahoots with the bosses. We'll have to wait for a Communist Australia before we can expect anything better.

I have a theory, and I'm waiting for someone to disprove it, that Communist/Marxist literature is depressing. There's never a happy ending, because it's all designed to make us unsatisfied with our lot. It's all a sales pitch chanting "change the world, for we are all miserable".

I wonder if Soviet literature is like that, or if it tries to "hold the line", as it were - "nothing to see here, everyone's happy, but those poor fools in the West need to be saved from their miserable lives..."

Researching Literature

So, after years of helping people find literature for the Sciences (particularly the Medical Sciences), I'm now trying to use my skills to find literature for Literature...

Back when I was studying Literature the first time, I didn't really know indexes from Adam. I just found a likely journal and went flicking through until I came across something useful. Not very efficient, but people who don't know the first thing about information literacy rarely are very efficient.

Now I'm using all sorts of databases, federated search engines and what-not to try to track down some stuff on Brecht for use in a rather short assignment. Problem is, most articles written about the B-man were written quite some time ago. As in, somewhere between 20-40 years ago.

Now, I tell all of the students who come to our training sessions that the majority of their sources should be less than six years old. This is all well and good, if people have been publishing about your topic in the last half-decade.

It doesn't look like many people have been writing about Brecht recently at all. At least, not in relation to the play I'm discussing. I have to keep reminding myself that this is Literature, not Science, and things written 30 years ago are not, by virtue of their age, dangerously wrong or out of date.

I also have to wonder: Why has Brecht gone out of favour? Is it him? His plays? Communist writings in general?

More on Sword Things

Over on my other blog I'm rabitting on about movie versions of Hamlet.

One of the things I mention is that in the two versions I've seen which try to modernise the costumes and settings, the sword fight seems odd and tacked on.

If you take it out of some sort of historical setting, it just doesn't seem like a natural conclusion that the play would end with a sword fight. Even though there is a comment in the text earlier in the piece about Laertes getting into mischief such as carousing, womanising and fencing, it doesn't actually sink in at any point that these people actually fence as a sport. That every time someone mentions "sport" in the play they are, in fact, talking about sword fighting. It's not obvious that this is something they do, and that they are therefore likely to dare each other to fencing bouts later on.

It's almost a little like you took an otherwise normal crime thriller, and right at the end someone said: "I know how we can solve this problem! To the kayaks!"

Sure, a kayak race might not be completely unlikely, out of character, or ridiculous - but if you hadn't seen any reference to kayaks before this moment it's a bit disconcerting.

If there had been images of "the boys" in their fencing gear, some pieces of equipment (like swords or masks) lying around the place or some footage of a few of them actually going through some training exercises scattered throughout the film, then it would have seemed perfectly natural - even inevitable - that the play would end with a sword fight.

Chekhov pointed out that a gun hanging over the mantelpiece is bound to be fired at some point. If it's pulled out of a cupboard, though, you feel as if it has come out of nowhere (which, in a way, it has).

With these modernise/modern dress versions of Hamlet, the fencing scene was pulled out of the cupboard. They could just as easily have decided to have a kayak race.

Which, now that I think about it, sounds like a great way to end a story full of death, betrayal and ghosts.

"To the kayaks!"

Give Up

It's strange how often you can read the same thing without reading the same thing.

When I first read Kafka's short story (very short - barely more than a paragraph) Gibs Auf, I took it at face value. A story of a man who was trying to get to the train station in an unfamiliar town and became disoriented after noticing he was running late. He asks a "guardsman" for directions, and the guardsman rather unhelpfully says "you want advice from me? Ha! Give up! Give up!"

So, I read that as being a story about a man who encounters a less than useful person on his way to the train station.

Later I read some "comprehension" questions, and they were asking some questions that made very little sense if you read the story the way I had. It took me a while to realise that the person who had written the questions was interpreting the story as a parable or a metaphor, rather than a straight narrative.

So I reread the story, and noticed you could interpret it completely differently. It could be a parable about a man who has been travelling through life quite without realising what was going on around him, when he receives a "wake-up call" pointing out how much time has passed while he wasn't paying attention. Suddenly, he's no longer sure of himself, what he is doing, where he should be going. He turns to a source of authority looking for answers, but the truth is authority cannot provide direction.

Dream sequence with reflections of angst from growing older? Parable? Metaphor? Story of a guy who is going to miss his train?

That's literature for you.