Leg of Lucy

Like a thousand other ads in "Backstage," this one was looking for just the right cast members. The production company, Spun Gold TV, was looking for "real food-loving families to take part in a new, experimental documentary that asks: ‘How much do we really know about the animals that we put on our plates?'" The concept seemed intriguing: "We're looking for warm, opinionated families who will share their homes with an animal they would normally eat (i.e. a chicken/lamb). For three weeks they'll learn all about the animals whilst living up close and personal with them!" In the world of reality TV, where people are dropped naked on desert islands and filmed trying to survive, a show about people cozying up to critters seems pretty, well, tame. 

However "Meat the Family" was anything but. One analyst called the show "the most transgressive of the year." If you're unfamiliar with term it means "involving a violation of accepted or imposed boundaries, especially those of social acceptability." And once you get the hook, you might agree. 

In the first set of shows, four committed top-of-the-food-chain families took home and looked after the animal which most often ended up on their plates. That meant individual episodes focused on folks taking care of a lamb, a pig, a chicken and a calf. In the installments, the families treat each animal as a household pet, feeding and caring and, indeed, growing to love them. They travel to learn about the food industry, and how their little Porky fits into the greater scheme of things. They are exposed to experts on animal welfare, learn about farming and production, and visit food processing plants. It's all aimed at giving each family a chance to better understand the impact that a carnivorous lifestyle has on the environment and our health, while relating it directly to their animal charge. 

Then, at the end of the three weeks, they get a choice. They can convert to being vegetarians and send Lucy the Lamb to an animal sanctuary to live out the rest of her days in peace. No? OK, they can stay meat eaters, but then they have to kill their pet and eat it. Leg of Lucy anyone? 

It is one of a new type of show that forces regular people to confront ethical questions and behaviors that have remained theoretical to many. Earlier this year Britain's' Channel 4 had "The Great British School Swap." The three-part series followed the lives of two groups of students from different schools with ethnic, cultural and religious splits. Twenty-four kids, half from an effectively all-white school, and half from a practically all non-white, mainly Muslim school, where paired up. They went to class together, and as well as participating in after and out of school activities. While there were certainly some positive moments, filmed interviews with the kids also produced some cringe inducing sound bites such as a Muslim child saying "I just don't like gay people, they make me feel weird" and a white child saying "The burqas are wanting to ban bacon." Disturbing, even if not totally surprising. 

Then there's the new Dutch show called "The Cocaine Trials" and another similar British one named "Doing Drugs for Fun?" Both confront casual cocaine users, showing them the consequences of their habit on the Colombian communities where coke is farmed and refined, and life is controlled by cartels. The idea is to show them the impact that their habits have on others in the broader sense. And there's Australia's "My 80 Year Old Flatmate" which pairs millennials locked out of Sydney's pricey housing market with seniors who have an extra room. Admittedly this one seems less interested in bridging the May-December generation gap that divides, and more intent on looking for the gross out moment that comes from either being too young or too old to care. 

But back to our friends in "Meat." The program is set to air next year, and while it will start in Britain, it is expected to quickly find an international market. For what could have more universal appeal than eating your pet? On the bright side, should Brexit indeed happen, it might cost a premium to see this. In which case you'll have a real reason to skip this red meat and load up on the veggies.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford loves foods with legs and without. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

The Cost of Free

The usual state of affairs is for things to keep getting more expensive. That increase can be driven by a number of factors: scarcity, design, materials and even perception all play a part. But it's just as common these days for prices to head in the opposite direction. Especially for items which have become commodities, such as clothing basics or housewares or office supplies, advances in production techniques have streamlined manufacturing so that it can cost less to make an item than ever before. Where it used to take a person sitting at a bench days to make a single pair of shoes, today a factory can churn out hundreds or even thousands an hour. Couple that with cheap labor in Vietnam or China or Malaysia, and a pair of wearable running kicks can be had for less than the price of lunch. 

That's the physical world. Move over to the electronic one and the change is even more profound. It may take a person or team of people hours and hours to code a game for your phone where you get points for collecting cats. But once it exists, copies can be made for next to nothing. Other than distribution and marketing, the actual cost of replicating the final product is effectively zero. In his book "Free: The Future Of A Radical Price" author Chris Anderson put it this way: "In the atoms economy, which is to say most of the stuff around us, things tend to get more expensive over time. But in the bits economy, which is the online world, things get cheaper. The atoms economy is inflationary, while the bits economy is deflationary." 

Indeed, in that deflationary spiral, the ultimate stop is "free." In fact, we've not only come to accept it but assume it. In spite of the tremendous investment in time and/or money it takes to get to that point, once we're online we have come to expect that it costs nothing to be a part of that world. Information? Wikipedia is there for the taking. Communication? Google, Yahoo and AOL all provide options. Travel, weather, friends? TripAdvisor, Weather Channel, Facebook. Just this past week most of the major online brokers, and even some brick and mortar players, lowered their price to trade stocks and their ilk to nothing. Charlie Merrill may have brought Wall Street to Main Street, but Charles Schwab brought it to Gmail. 

Of course, free is not really free. The model is to give something away, and then charge for something adjacent. The orchard has cider, but you have to buy the cup. The razor handle costs you nothing, but you need to purchase the blades. Go to many bars at happy hour, and the snacks they put out are on the house. That said, whoever is cooking in the kitchen uses a lot of salt. Hey, can I buy you a drink? 

In the online model, the equation above is slightly flipped: they don't charge you outright, but rather you give them something of value for nothing. In this case, that adjacent thing is your personal and browsing data. When you sign on or sign up, you give the firm your okey-dokey to watch and track and aggregate all you do for their own purposes. You grant them permission to monetize your activities at no charge to them. Yes, they do ask if it's OK, in the form of a dense legalese posting you have to click on before you can enter their gates. But click we do, usually without a moment of hesitation, and into the fun house we go. And so we can't blame them for doing exactly what they say they will do: making money off of our electronic souls. 

Like addicts hooked on heroin, there's almost no chance we can kick the habit. Pay for Facebook? Be charged for email? Pony up for the weather? Free traffic info has become an inalienable right of the internet age: you can have my Waze if you pry it from my cold dead fingers. It recalls another thing we hear more and more: Big Government, get out of my life, but don't you lay a finger on my Medicare. It's a devil's bargain to be sure, but one into which we willingly enter. So the question is this: free at what cost?

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Marc Wollin of Bedford uses many free services. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

High Times

Used to be that "data" was the buzzword of the moment. Any company that asked for your name, rank and email address said they were in the data business. Didn't matter if they were health care providers, car manufacturers or online retailers. Take insurance giant Allstate. They collect about 11,000 terabytes of data from 1.2 million people every day. Says CEO Tom Wilson, "Allstate is not an insurance company, we are a data company - a customer-centric data company."

Then there was "cloud." Why have anything local when it can reside somewhere else? A market which is projected to reach $214 billion this year means that almost every piece of information you need is somewhere over there, wherever "there" is. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud are increasingly the repositories of everything from customer data to product information to patient files. Even your own pocket reaches to the skies: those pictures you took of your cat are safely filed away on a server in Ashburn VA (Amazon) or Maiden NC (Apple) or Pineville OR (Facebook).

If you had to pick the next word of the week, it might not be a word but an abbreviation. CBD can mean Central Business District, as in the downtown area of Bangalore India. Or it can refer to Christian Book Distributors, a company in Peabody MA. Or it can be the designation of a type of accredited midwife, also known as a Certified Birth Doula. But none of those are why the initials are turning up on the shelves of Kroger supermarkets or in aisles at Walgreens. That's because these days CBD generally refers to cannabidiol, a component found in marijuana. And unlike its cousin tetrahydrocannabinol (or THC), it's not known for its psychoactive effects, but rather for its calming qualities.

According to the Harvard Medical School blog, the strongest case for CBD is "its effectiveness in treating some of the cruelest childhood epilepsy syndromes, which typically don't respond to antiseizure medications." Additionally, it may prove to be an option for managing anxiety, insomnia, and chronic pain. However, these therapeutic uses are anecdotal at best, as studies are just getting underway and "because CBD is currently mostly available as an unregulated supplement, and it's difficult to know exactly what you are getting." 

Still, as grass and its offshoots have become legal in state after state, CBD products are cropping up everywhere. Its calming properties make it a natural for an almost unimaginable array of items. Topicals are big, like Saint Jane Luxury CBD Beauty Serum, "An antioxidant packed serum with 500 mg of full-spectrum CBD plus 20 potent botanicals that help to deeply hydrate, detoxify pores, and boost skin's natural glow." You can soak in it as well: Vertly Hemp CBD Infused Bath Salts combines the active ingredient with "lavender, lemon and clary sage and you've got good vibes right in your tub." And if it really hurts somewhere you can try a Pure Ratios Hemp Patch which applies "50 milligrams of CBD on a targeted area for up to 96 hours. It's strong, so save it for those bad days when nothing else works."

Beyond that there's a CBD-infused breakfast cereal called Froot Poofs, snacks like Chill Gummies Gummy Bears, and artisanal chocolate bars infused with CBD. Depending on local laws your favorite grocery store might carry Recess Sparkling Water, CBD Pops White Cheddar Popcorn or Flaming Hot Weetos, all boasting of great flavor and that special calming goodness. 

You can even buy CBD infused workout clothes. Acabada ProActiveWear is designed to preemptively sooth your aching muscles with CBD oil. Prices start at $120 for a bra, which can be worn and washed 40 times before the oil runs out. As with most CBD products, proof that it works is sketchy: testers reported "feeling exhausted, as per usual" after working out, but certainly no less sore.

CBD may indeed turn out to be a miracle elixir, once they figure out the right dose, concentration and method of use. But as of now it's just a modern version of snake oil. If you think it works for you, go ahead and rub it on or eat it. That said, sing its praises a little too much and you might need to forgive any inquisitor who asks if you are indeed smoking something.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford favors a hot shower as calming his drug of choice. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Stupid Exercise

For years researchers have reported that working out is good for you. Not only is it beneficial physically, but it helps improve cognitive functions as well. You'd be hard pressed to find a doctor or nutritionist or indeed an expert in any health-related field that doesn't preach the virtues of a physical activity. While opting for the stairs or talking a walk certainly counts, most would endorse having a regular regime a few times a week where you sweat and grunt and raise your heart rate, and it's not because you're lifting a few six packs in or out of the fridge. 

But then there's this: a new study just published in journal Current Biology says that it appears that there is a direct correlation between physical exertion and your brain slowing down. The paper, entitled "Neuro-computational Impact of Physical Training Overload on Economic Decision-Making," studied 37 male triathletes. According to Bastien Blain, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral fellow at University College London, half of them were instructed to continue their usual workouts. The rest were told to increase their weekly training by 40%. All were monitored and put through batteries of physical and mental tests. These were paired with MRI scans, correlating brain activity with the results of the cognitive exams. The questions in the tests were designed to reveal whether a person is more inclined to choose immediate gratification or a long-term reward, couched in economic queries such as "Do you prefer $10 now or $60 in six months?" 

Different parts of the brain lit up with more or less activity based on the amount of training the individual did. That was matched against the answers given on the tests. Or in scientific speak, "The activity level extracted from certain regions served as a reference to assess the effects of training overload. As expected, we observed significant conjunction in a bilateral prefronto-parietal network, including the middle frontal gyrus (MFG) and the inferior parietal lobule (IPL), with training overload effects were predominant in the left MFG cluster and during the inter-temporal choice task." Or in layman speak (or at least my layman speak), if you work out too much, your brain gets stupider. 

The explanation, according to Blaine, is that while athletes are generally able to play down immediate gratification in favor or longer term goals, training too hard may change that balance. Usually they can ignore their screaming muscles telling them to stop or slow down, with their goal being to win the race. "But when an athlete trains too hard, a sort of brain fatigue sets in and the person has less ability to push their body" says Blaine. 

This conclusion is backed up by other studies as well. Tanja Mueller at the University of Oxford writes that when the body becomes physically depleted, the brain begins to experience "motivational fatigue," which affects decision-making. When that happens, the brain "may not consider it worth it anymore to wait for higher rewards." And Todd Braver, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Washington University in St. Louis writes, "your brain is doing these kind of cost-benefit trade-offs all the time. Is it still worth the effort? Is it still worth the effort? And when it decides it's not, it changes direction." 

To sum it up: workouts are generally good for you. But work out too much, and your brain starts to focus not on the goal of finishing, but on recovering from the punishment you're enduring. It changes your decision making ability so that you focus not on the best outcome over the long term, but on the short term fix. And this appears to carry over from purely physical calculations to other cognitive areas such as economics. 

You know those cautions with certain drugs not to take them if you are operating heavy equipment or driving? Well it would seem from this study that if you exercise vigorously you shouldn't then make important business decisions. My takeaway is this: while it's true that I'm not an extreme athlete, everything is relative. So if you consider my normal exercise is taking a walk, a 30 minute run would overtax my brain big time. And so if I have to work on some budgets later, I would be better off not pushing myself, and just take a nap first. Sometimes I just love science.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford tries to work out, but it doesn't always work out. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.