Chef's Table: Nancy Silverton

One more episode of Chef's Table from Netflix, about Los Angeles chef and restaurateur Nancy Silverton. Much less of the usual phoniness in this episode!

Nancy Silverton many years ago when she founded the LaBrea bakery. First she made all the bread by hand.
Then she expanded it into a commercial bakery and sold it. More recently: I've had their bread from major supermarkets.

I enjoyed the descriptions of the many places Silverton worked, showing how she established her reputation. I definitely had heard of her; unlike in some of the Chef's Table series, which feature fairly obscure though food-world-famous chefs. Overall, it was a good show.

Here's L.A.Times critic Jonathan Gold (whose face is usually a secret).
He's a bit over-the-top but not like the usual Chef's Table "experts."
The only other expert was Mario Batali who is always over the top.

Nancy Silverton has a very expressive face, and I enjoyed their close ups of her, as well as the scenes where she
tasted foods that her staff were preparing and showed her reactions. The impression (whether true or not) is
that she's a very hands-on director of rather large restaurant kitchens, as well as a host for the dining rooms.

Silverton's current restaurants are Italian, and I loved this image of her
hands preparing squash blossoms. I also liked the part where she purchases
the squash blossoms and many other foods from a delivery truck.

Wordy Wednesday: The Three-Toed Sloth

This sloth has three visible clawed toes. We saw a number of sloths on our trip to the upper Amazon in Peru.
If this were wordless Wednesday, I would say nothing. But it's Wordy Wednesday ...

Our original Scrabble game.

A wonderful Scrabble find is the two-letter word "ai." It means a particular type of sloth that lives in the South American rainforest. I learned this word soon after my family got our first Scrabble game, and my mother wrote "AI" with a little drawing of three toes inside the box. I still have that game and can see her very faint writing. Anyone who has played Scrabble can see how useful it would be to use up a stray letter on this unexpected word.

Inside the box my mother wrote "AI" and drew 3 toes.
I doubt if she had ever seen a picture of a sloth's toes.

According to various dictionaries, the word "ai" has its origin in the Brazilian Portuguese aí, which was borrowed from Old Tupi, the language of the local people in Brazil and Venezuela where the sloth lives. In English, the word "sloth" was applied to the very slow-moving animal because it reminded people of the sin of sloth, one of the seven deadlies.

I was disappointed to realize that the three-toed sloths we have seen in Peru, Panama, and Costa Rica are not ai, but are members of one of the six other species of three-toed sloth. The word "ai" refers to the maned sloth, Bradypus torquatus. I think that the three-toed sloths we have seen are species Bradypus variegatus. We have also seen two-toed sloths, which belong to the Megalonychidae family, rather than the three-toed Bradypodidae family.

It's very amusing to watch these slow-moving tree dwellers. They eat leaves and also eat the algae which grows in their own fur, sometimes making them look greenish. I thought everyone had heard of sloths. But on our first day in Peru, when our guide pointed to a treetop and said "There's a sloth," one of our fellow tourists asked "Is that a kind of bird?"

Passover: Too Many Recipes?

"Why is this night different from all other nights?" is the first question of the traditional four questions that the youngest child at the Seder is supposed to read. The questions inform the ritual telling of the Passover story -- the main event at the Seder. When I think about the menus for our Seders over the years, I'm tempted to substitute the following answer:

"On all other nights we eat one main course with a vegetable and maybe dessert. On a few nights we have an appetizer. On this night we start by eating several items from the traditional Seder plate: matzo, horseradish, greens, charoset (a fruit paste). Then we serve matzo ball soup, then gefilte fish, then a main course like chicken with a traditional side dish like tzimmis. Finally, we have three or four desserts like Passover cake, macaroons, and several types of candy."

From the Maneschewitz website: Matzos

From the Manischewitz website: Gefilte Fish

Like many American secular Jews, our family usually has a Seder on the first night of the holiday. And that's it. We might or might not eat matzo during the remaining days of the holiday. We don't give up bread or anything else. One ritual meal and we go back to normal.

In contrast, religious Jews have two Seders. Their holiday lasts for 8 days. Throughout these 8 days, they eat only matzo -- that is, unleavened bread -- and avoid all leavened bread, pastry, or other product that contains yeast, even beer. They rid their homes and pantries of every trace of leavened products, and observe many rules that limit their diet for the entire 8 days. Among the various sects of Jewish practice, the details of these rules vary, but the prohibition on leavened food is constant.

Historically, Jewish communities in Eastern Europe relied on bread as the main source of nutrition in their diet, so the holiday was a real hardship. The abundance of life in America and modern life elsewhere in the world changed this into a challenge for eating well without using leavening or leavened ingredients.

Passover is a time of family gathering and celebration, so many unleavened cakes and other sweets have been devised over several generations, as well as other foods such as gefilte fish, eaten on the Sabbath and many Jewish holidays. The number of recipes for Passover foods is enormous. The number of rules for what is allowed and what is forbidden, created over many centuries, is also enormous.

A huge number of Passover foods are also available ready-made. Markets with Jewish clientele stock products from several Kosher manufacturers that follow the rules with great cunning, so you can eat many types of food that you wouldn't expect to find. For example, the Barton company, in the 1950s, developed a line of candy that was accepted for Passover. Beginning in 1888, the Manischewitz company supplied Kosher products to American Jews. Starting with traditional matzos, matzo meal, and wine, they also developed cereal, pizza mix, noodles, over a dozen varieties of gefilte fish, and many types of macaroons. We definitely ate these products when I was a child!

With this huge range of beloved choices, our Seder menu is overwhelming! You might point out that we could do like the more religious people and have two Seders, but I must remind you that this is a religious ritual, and we aren't really sufficiently religious to do it twice even to have more goodies. It's complicated -- but we really just want to do the one-night version, which in fact is also what was done in my childhood.

Apple crisp: experimental version.

One of the big accomplishments of Passover cuisine is the flourless torte or cake, usually made with nuts such as almond flour. I've never really mastered this. Though it's delicious, I really think it's too heavy after all those other traditional foods.

This year, I'm trying something new: apple crisp, also called apple crumble, made with matzo meal instead of flour. I practiced it once (see photos), and the substitution worked. I'll probably make it for the Seder next week. You can find dozens of similar recipes online and probably in books, but here's one more recipe.

Apple Crisp for Passover

Topping:

2 Tb matzo meal

2 Tb softened butter or margarine

3 Tb brown sugar

3 Tb chopped walnuts

pinch powdered vanilla (optional)

Cream the butter with the other ingredients to form crumbs.

Fruit Layer:
3 apples, sliced thin (use the kind of apples that stay firm when they are baked)

1 Tb matzo meal

handful of golden raisins

squeeze of lemon juice
cinnamon-sugar

Butter a small baking dish. Add the sliced apples to the dish and sprinkle them with lemon juice and cinnamon-sugar. Toss with the matzo meal and raisins.

Top fruit layer with an even layer of topping. Bake for 1/2 hour at 325º. Raise heat to 350º and bake for another 1/2 hour or until apples are softened and topping is browned. Serves 2 very generously. Serves 4 when there are many other desserts. Scale this up for a larger number of servings. Like any apple crisp, this can be garnished with ice cream, non-dairy ice cream, yogurt, Kefir, etc.

Passover is Coming: Matzoh Ball Tips

Passover is coming very soon: Monday, April 10. I'm looking over my recipes and getting ready to cook. As I do so, I'll post a few ideas from past blog posts and other notes. A few years ago, I collected lots of tips on how to court failure with matzoh balls, repeated here. As for a recipe, I just use the one on the box of matzoh meal.

HOW TO MAKE TERRIBLE MATZOH BALLS

Matzoh-ball soup at my sister's Seder a couple of years ago.

1. Don’t let the dough rest long enough. The recommended 15 minute waiting time for the dough to condition itself is not long enough. If you wait only 15 minutes you will have hard matzoh balls, as the fat & moisture won't be absorbed enough. If you wait longer, the result will be better.
2. To make the matzoh balls fall apart, put them in water that’s only simmering instead of very hot -- it should be at a rapid boil.
3. Take the lid off the pot often to let the steam out. Letting steam escape helps to prevent the matzoh balls from getting light and well-cooked inside. Leaving the lid on makes them lighter and fluffier.
4. Don't boil them long enough. The time on the package is just enough. A little more is ok too. If you want them to be hard and undercooked, take them out sooner.
5. Leave the cooked matzoh balls in the broth for the soup for a long time. They will absorb the liquid and you won't have enough broth to serve all your guests.

I'm planning to make matzoh ball soup for the Seder this year. I plan to let the dough rest, to bring water (not the broth) to a rolling boil, to keep the lid on the pot while they are cooking, to boil them long enough, and to save them until serving time in the water not in the soup pot. And I won't say "Dayenu" after any of these: they are all important. (Dayenu means "it would be enough." It's the refrain to a Passover song and figures in one of the Seder rituals.)

Do you know the old joke about the blond movie star who married a Jewish intellectual and was invited to his mother's house for Passover? According to the story she said: "These matzoh balls are delicious! What other parts of the matzoh do you eat?" If you are old enough to know the joke you probably can identify the movie star and her husband.

Kitchen Miscellany for the first of April

Smiles in my kitchen -- the Mona Lisa winkie is new this month. I think Mona says "April Fool." THANKS, CAROL!
Left of Mona: a couple of years ago, Miriam and Alice made the collage of themselves smiling at various ages.

The oldest item in my kitchen: a pencil sharpener that somehow
always moves when I do. I think I've been sharpening pencils
with it since I was in around third grade.

Food production: what a kitchen is for. Here's a pizza that I made,
topped with smoked salmon, cheese, olives, onions, and sauce.

My kitchen bookcase has all kinds of odds and ends in front of the books.

The kitchen witch on top of the bookcase -- I've had her
for years, usually feature her for Halloween.

A little Ganesha figure in front of the books.
Ganesha is known to remove obstacles -- good in a kitchen!

A blue thing from my tour of the Jiffy Mix plant.

My new markers from Ikea. I've colored in a couple of
pages in my coloring book with them.

Most uninteresting new item: magnetic chip clips.

Waiting in a grocery bag: Passover foods for the coming holiday.
Passover starts April 10. I'm just starting to get ready.
More posts about Passover will be coming soon.

"In My Kitchen this Month" is a blogger event that's recently been hosted by Bizzy Lizzy's Good Things. Unfortunately, in Australia where Lizzy lives, there's been a devastating hurricane. Thinking of this disaster, she has posted an appeal for contributions from other Australians to help those in need as a result of the storm. Fortunately, she lives in an area that was not affected.

"I know that many thousands of others, friends included, have lost everything, so publishing a bunch of photos showcasing (showing off) new stuff in my kitchen doesn't sit well with me right now," she wrote.

I respect Lizzy and the Australians who come together to help victims at a time like this -- here in the US, we do the same after disasters of all sorts. She's continuing to link to other writers' In My Kitchen posts, and I'll be sending this her way, as several other bloggers have already done.

Myths, History, Science: "The Story of Corn"

The Story of Corn by Betty Fussell was first published in 1992 in a beautifully designed edition with many illustrations. Books about a single food topic have become very popular more recently: this was one of the first of its type. Mark Kurlansky's book Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, which was published in 1997, is often credited with "inventing" this genre, but it was far from the earliest such book, and though I enjoyed Cod, I don't know why he gets the credit.

The Story of Corn is reasonably well-organized, extremely detailed to the point of being encyclopedic, and not at all badly written. It describes and illustrates everything you could think of from the Maya corn gods to modern advertisements and agricultural issues.

Images come from a wide variety of times, places, and sources.
This 19th C. drawing shows a woman in Eastern Europe stirring a pot of mush,
also called mamaliga, pulszka, or polenta. 

Each chapter begins with a very beautiful page, often incorporating drawings from pre-Columbian Indian art.

The Story of Corn remains in print, reissued by the University of New Mexico press. The description from amazon.com: calls the book "a unique compendium, drawing upon history and mythology, science and art, anecdote and image, personal narrative and epic to tell the extraordinary story of the grain that built the New World."

The wide-format pages allow for lots of white space and illustrations.

I find only one thing wrong with this book: it's boring. At least that's my gut feeling. I read half of it, put it down, and I just can't seem to pick it up again. Classics can be like that.

Wordy Wednesday: Inside the Dictionary

Just published on March 14:
Word by Word by Kory Stamper.

Kory Stamper is a lexicographer, whose definitions and other work appear anonymously in the Merriam-Webster dictionaries. I already knew that outside of producing dictionary entries she writes in a delightful way because she has a very readable blog titled "Harmless Drudgery." Stamper's new book Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries is every bit as enjoyable.

Each chapter of Word by Word focuses on a single word. Mostly, Stamper illustrates how the dictionary is created by examining the process that she and her colleagues followed when composing entry for that word. Here are a few of these chapter titles:

IRREGARDLESS: On Wrong Words

SURFBOARD: On Defining

TAKE: On Small Words

BITCH: On Bad Words

NUCLEAR: On Proununciation

MARRIAGE: On Authority and the Dictionary

In some cases, Stamper covers more than just the process of creating these entries. A lexicographer's job at Merriam-Webster also includes answering mail from critics and other members of the public, and her material includes quite a bit on the expectations expressed in the letters she and her colleagues have had to answer.

Most interestingly, in the chapter titled "MARRIAGE" Stamper describes the furor that erupted at a certain point when opponents of gay marriage discovered that a few years earlier an edition of Merriam-Webster had expanded the definition of marriage to include marriage between members of the same sex. Over 500 angry emails filled her inbox, which made her quite desperate. She found consolation in humor -- her own, and that of Stephen Colbert, who covered the flap on his late-night show. For one thing, same-sex marriage was not yet legal in most states at the time, so the complainers were afraid that including same-sex marriage in the dictionary would influence the courts to legalize it. Thus in this chapter Stamper included a fascinating survey of how much the members of the Supreme Court use dictionaries in their decisions, of just what they use them for (mostly for confirming their already-made decisions), and of which editions and which dictionaries they use.

One of the many things I learned from the book is the source of her blog's title "Harmless Drudgery." Samuel Johnson, one of the most famous dictionary writers ever, defined the word "lexicographer" as "a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge." Stamper continually describes the characteristics of the lexicographers who occupy the cubicles at Merriam-Webster. Their most frequent trait is that they are shy people who almost always maintain silence during their work day, and who do not wish for a lot of human contact: their life it seems is in the words they work with.

Despite their shy and retiring personalities, the lexicographers find themselves working for a company that wants good publicity for their work: dictionaries. From the days of Noah Webster, whose heirs they feel they are, Merriam-Webster and other dictionary companies, says Stamper, have "had no problem setting themselves up as  an authority on life, the universe, and everything... because doing so ultimately sold books. Actual human lexicographers, on the other hand, would rather hide under their desks than be reckoned culture makers. In fact, and in spite of their publishing house's own marketing copy, they have been deliberately avoiding the cultural fray since at least the mid-nineteenth century." (p. 248)

Stamper succeeds in making lexicographers, their work, and the history of dictionaries into a fascinating and sympathetic subject for her book -- it's a good read for anyone who likes words.

This is Wordy Wednesday, but if I were observing Wordless Wednesday I would have posted this photo of late winter in Michigan.

A Simple Classic Lunch

Tagine of Lamb with Dates: a Recipe by Paula Wolfert

After slowly simmering lamb with spices. butter, and onions, you transfer the nearly-finished tagine to a serving dish,
surround it with dates, and sprinkle them with cinnamon. You finish it in a very hot oven, which slightly crisps the dates.
The photo shows the result, as I served it for our dinner this evening.

My copy of Paula Wolfert's Couscous.

Paula Wolfert has been in the news this week, including an interview in the New York Times (link), and a review of a new book about her in Food 52 (link).

I read both articles with pleasure, and decided it was time to try another recipe from Wolfert's book Couscous and other Good Food from Morocco. I chose Tagine of Lamb with Dates. The combination of onions, garlic, saffron, cilantro, pepper, and ginger really appealed to me, and for once, I followed the recipe pretty faithfully, except for scaling down the quantity to make it appropriate for only two of us.

Both of the inspiring articles were frank and detailed about the fact that Wolfert is suffering from Altzheimer's, and no longer can write or cook in the way she was famous for. Mayukh Sen his Food 52 article "Who is Paula Wolfert? A New Biography Gives an Answer," was also interested in introducing Wolfert to his readers, whom he feels might not be familiar with her work. While I had heard of her long ago, I admit that I only recently began experimenting with her recipes, such as the one I did tonight.

Before I cut up the lamb, I assembled all the ingredients.

Accompanying our tagine: salad of small tomatoes, cucumber, chopped preserved lemon, lemon juice, cilantro, and olive oil.

"Wolfert, author of nine cookbooks, was an early champion of Mediterranean foods in a time when their ingredients went unnoticed in American kitchens, beginning with 1973’s Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco," wrote Sen. His article interestingly describes how Emily Kaiser Thelin worked on the new biography, titled Unforgettable: The Bold Flavors of Paula Wolfert's Renegade Life (cover at right).

Sen describes Wolfert's reputation thus:

"Though many American home cooks have been singing Wolfert’s gospel for decades, she isn’t discussed nearly enough as she should be. She's existed in the shadow of men like Yottam Ottolenghi, her spiritual successor, even though she tilled the ground he now walks on. Her lack of name recognition is incommensurate with her legacy, and with time and distance, it’s become easier to see how this happened. When Wolfert’s The Cooking of the Mediterranean came out in 1994, Wolfert toured the country, shoving hulking jars of Marash chile flakes under chef’s noses, going to bat for meze and pomegranate molasses. 'She was like a community organizer, lobbying for the region...,' Thelin claims. This was her modus operandi: She’d get these foods on your plate no matter what, cheerleading for them as loudly as she could."

And from the New York Times article "Her Memory Fading, Paula Wolfert Fights Back With Food" by Kim Severson --

"It would be hard to overstate the importance of Ms. Wolfert’s work, which introduced couscous and other classic Mediterranean dishes to generations of cooks. The New York Times food writer Craig Claiborne called her 'one of the leading lights in contemporary gastronomy.' She made Alice Waters fall in love with chicken cooked with preserved lemons and olives in a tagine, and primed America for the Middle Eastern flavors of Yotam Ottolenghi, who remains a fan. The British chef Fergus Henderson chose her cassoulet as his favorite recipe of all time.

"A whole murderers’ row of great American chefs — Thomas Keller, David Kinch, Judy Rodgers — has said how much her work mattered. 'I have always treasured and loved the vigor of her passionate and intellectual approach to authenticity,' Mario Batali said."

Finding General Tso and his Chicken

"The Search for General Tso" is a documentary film about the ubiquitous chicken dish that's been popular in American restaurants since the 1970s. It describes the history of Chinese immigration into the United States beginning with the California Gold Rush. It traces the persecution and abuse of Chinese immigrants at various times in our history, the development of Chinese-American food and American Chinese restaurants, and some of the actual traditions of Chinese food in China. It even briefly summarizes the way that Jewish New Yorkers often habitually ate Chinese food on Sunday and on Christmas. Interviews with American food writers, chefs, owners of Chinese restaurants, and various people in China and Taiwan provide a variety of facts and opinions about Chinese food and American history. We watched it on Netflix.

The movie includes lots of local color!

Several scenes are in Hunan Province where the original General Tso lived
during the 19th century. He is remembered fondly: he never lost a battle.

Almost every American city and town has a Chinese restaurant.
And virtually all of them serve General Tso's chicken.
Owners from many small towns were interviewed about their family history.

Adapting to American taste was a matter of survival for the restaurants in American cities where Chinese food
was unfamiliar and the restaurant's owners were often the only Chinese people in the area.

The inventor of the dish was a Chef Peng in Taiwan in the 1960s. The original dish was less sweet than the eventual
American-Chinese version, and did not have broccoli, which is not known in China.

The producer of "The Search for General Tso," which was released in 2014, was Jennifer 8. Lee, author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, a book that I also enjoyed very much.

What I've been cooking

Chocolate Fudge Pie in the oven.

Last week I wrote about pie for Pi Day (here: Pi Day Discovery and Zingerman's Pie). This week, I tried the recipe for Cruchon's Fudge Pie that was in that post. This recipe, which I found online, didn't specify what size pie was intended. Fortunately, I guessed that the original proportions were for a large pie, so I scaled down for the small pie (7" or 8") illustrated above. The texture of the fudge filling was very nice, and it tasted quite good.

Browning potatoes & carrots for corned beef hash.

Corned beef hash made from the Saint Patrick's Day corned beef, browned onions, hash brown potatoes, and a few carrots.

One more corned beef dinner: sandwiches with turkey, corned beef, and cole slaw on Zingerman's bread.
The slaw ingredients were chopped cabbage, grated carrots & ginger root, mayo, keffir, a dash of hot sauce, & caraway seed.

I rarely write up the meals that we eat on an everyday basis. This week I decided to describe some of the simple meals we ate. Two of our dinners were salmon broiled on skewers with portobello mushroom quarters one night, and broiled flank steak with heart-of-palm salad including olives, lettuce, and cherry tomatoes on another night. The best lunch I made consisted of a tabbouleh salad containing parsley, bulgar, tomatoes, lemon juice, and olive oil (recipe amalgamated from several online sources) and home-made hummus from chickpeas, tahini, and Trader Joe's pickled red peppers.

A Psychological Thriller in Japan

A Quiet Place by Japanese mystery writer Seicho Matsumoto (1909–1992) is classified as a "psychological thriller." It's entirely centered on one character: Tsuneo Asai and his reaction to the sudden death of his wife Eiko. Because she already suffered from heart disease, her death in itself was not shocking, and Asai and her family perform the standard Japanese funeral rites. Of course for the American reader, these and other unfamiliar Japanese customs in the book create fascinating reading, but the point of the book is not to offer anthropological study, but to set up for a tale of suspense and action.

What disturbed Asai, once he dealt with the formalities, was that Eiko had died while walking on a strange street in Tokyo far from her home and far from the other Tokyo locations that he was aware she often visited. She had entered a small shop on the street when she became ill, but he soon learns that the shop owner had no idea of who she was or why she was walking by.

Asai thought he knew about all Eiko's daily activities, such as taking a class in writing haiku, so he feels a need to know what she had been doing in this neighborhood of beautiful and expensive homes mixed (strangely) with "couples hotels" where lovers could meet for a short or long assignation. At first Asai anonymously hires a detective firm to investigate the circumstances, but soon becomes involved in his own investigations, and immerses himself in a project of discovery that goes off the deep end. The plot  and character development that follow are extraordinary, but further discussion would be a very terrible spoiler, and you should read this book for yourself!

From the very beginning of the book we learn that Asai is much more dedicated as a "salaryman" than as a husband. His first thoughts on receiving the call from his wife's shocked and grieving sister and father are on his obligation to spare the business sensibilities of his superior in the government bureaucracy where he works and the feelings of their clients with whom he is having dinner. They seem more concerned about the loss of his wife, in a way, than he does.

While the foods being consumed at this and other meals in the tale is briefly described or at least listed, the real role of food in this novel is unusual and interesting. Asai's job in a government office is promoting agriculture in rural Japan. His education in a small college put him at a disadvantage in competition with other more prestigiously educated and socially privileged colleagues, so he worked extremely hard to become an expert at helping traditional rice farmers make a transition to production of beef and other more valuable commodities, as well as understanding the meat-packing industry and working with plant owners. His lectures and consultations were very well-received and in high demand. This paragraph explains:

"Asai made an effort to throw himself into his work. He was sent to Ishikawa and Yamanashi on government business. Farmers in both prefectures were interested in moving away from the cultivation of rice and developing their meat-processing industry. Asai went on a week’s tour, invited by local agricultural cooperatives to give lectures on the meat industry in their town or village. The Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry had been trying to deal with the national rice surplus by getting farmers to reduce the acreage devoted to the cultivation of rice, but they knew their measures were inefficient. Local farming families also knew that this policy was doing nothing to improve their prospects. In the current recession, the present system of food control was just not working, and the future looked grim. The farmers felt that the recent trend of leaving the countryside in the off season to find outside work was not what their job should be about. Lately, even the women were being forced to go to the cities to find jobs to supplement their falling income." (Kindle Locations 1658-1665). 

Asai's ambition and commitment to his job motivated much of  his action in the book, and the description of this "salaryman" ethic was one of the most fascinating parts of the psychological portrait.

I wrote about another novel by Matsumoto a couple of years ago here: Inspector Imanishi Eats Sushi. He was a very prolific author, although only a few of his works have been translated into English, and this translation dates only to 2016. I hope to read more!

FDA Guidelines

The politicization of diet guidelines, the role of big food and big agriculture in determining what the FDA can say, and the disputes overall about what people should eat -- everything is so troublesome! Maddening, in fact. The conclusion, often, that your mother was right, you should eat your vegetables and leave it at that, is tempting. I rarely comment on this because it's so Byzantine.

I think this very old (2014) article from the Onion is very helpful or at least enlightening. Directly quoted (in fact lifted) from the Onion HERE.

FDA Recommends At Least 3 Servings Of Foods With Word ‘Fruit’ On Box

SILVER SPRING, MD—In an effort to get Americans to at least go through the motions of a healthier diet, the Food and Drug Administration announced Wednesday that it is now recommending individuals consume three servings of foods every day that simply include the word “fruit” on the box. “Though we have in the past advised eating a minimum of three pieces of actual fruit per day, it is now acceptable to eat any food labeled with the word ‘fruit,’ including variations such as ‘fruity,’ ‘fruit-a-licious,’ or ‘fruit-blasted,’” FDA commissioner Margaret Hamburg told reporters, also noting that sweetened cereal or gummies shaped like fruit are entirely permissible under the agency’s new guidelines. “If it smells somewhat like fruit, or even if there’s a cartoon strawberry or orange on the wrapper, that’s sufficient at this point.” The FDA’s new recommendations are expected to be followed up by other guidelines under which anything successfully chewed and swallowed can now be considered a vegetable.

Seeing with an iPhone

Today at the Matthaei Botanical Gardens, we visited the 2017 Ann Arbor Orchid Festival. Several orchid societies presented carefully arranged displays of their members' orchid plants. I was concentrating on getting close-up photos of the orchids, but the photos weren't really that interesting. So I moved on, and tried to see how other people were experiencing the orchid displays. Many were doing so with their iPhones.