Serving Size

Pull a box or can of anything out of your pantry or fridge and read the label on the side. There's the rundown of ingredients, where the stuff inside is listed in order of predominance: those used in the greatest amounts are listed first, followed in descending order by the rest. There are usually some warnings, alerting those with specific food allergies that something inside will cause them harm. There is an accounting of the nutrition content of those ingredients, along with a weighting of how far each goes towards a healthy daily diet. And there's a tally of calories, so you know just how much fuel you are putting into your tank.

All of those measurements are based on perhaps the most important number displayed, the serving size. That measure is supposed to be a standardized, common household unit: a cup, a tablespoon, a singular unit. Milk and juice are easy: liquid measures are how we consume those beverages. Other things require a little transposition: peanut butter and mayonnaise are detailed in tablespoons, but we consume them by spreading with a knife. That requires that you have to visualize a rounded blob as stretched out across a flat blade. Some unit-type things make sense: a slice of bread, a container of yogurt. Others are only for the anal-retentive among us: do you count out 12 chips or 4 crackers in a single serving, or do you stick your hand into the bag and grab a bunch? And then there's the can of cooking oil spray, which lists serving size as "1/3 of a second." So if you go Pfft you're good, but if you go Pfffffffttt you are overindulging. 

The old labels used to say "recommended" serving size. That recommendation was a based on the findings of a panel of nutritionists who, while they may have been healthy, never obviously took seconds. And so in a nod to reality, the law was changed so that serving sizes are supposed to reflect the amount that people ACTUALLY consume, as opposed to what they SHOULD consume. And those are hardly the same.

In fact, those numbers are adjusted periodically adjusted to reflect changing habits and, well, how fat we are all getting. For instance, servings of frozen yogurt and ice cream have shifted upward from a half cup to two-thirds of a cup. The serving size for toaster pastries, such as Pop Tarts, has been doubled, because who leaves one left in the package-of-two wrapper? And perhaps as a result of the Starbucks-ification of our world, for almost all liquids, starting with coffee and tea but also soda and water, serving size is now assumed to not be "Short" (8 ounces) but "Tall" (12 ounces).

These measures all seem legitimate in some abstract construct, a place like Lake Wobebon on Prairie Home Companion, "where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average." But most of us live in a grittier neighborhood, where things are not so orderly. Since our eating habits are reflective of that world, perhaps it would be more helpful if the serving size notations were more in tune with that. 

So instead of the serving size for tortilla chips being listed as "6 chips," maybe "3 handfuls" would be more helpful. Likewise, soda might be noted not as "12 ozs" but "enough to accompany 2 slices of pizza." A time period might work: not "6 crackers" but "as many crackers as you can grab during a commercial break in the game as you pass through the kitchen on the way to the bathroom." We could even include situational references: while the serving size for ice cream might be "2/3 a cup" under normal circumstances, it could note "if you're stuck home on a Saturday night with nothing to do, serving size is this entire container of Chunky Monkey." At least we'd be nodding to reality.

Of course, none of this matters is you don't care, and most of us don't. We eat what we want when we want it, consuming appropriate amounts at some points, and wildly stupid quantities at others. As for me, I am committed to making meaningful changes. So going forward, I will limit my consumption of non-stick spray. From now on, it's just one Pfft for me.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford likes it when serving size is "entire box." 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.

Talking Behind My Back

Like almost every homeowner these days, we have a WiFi network that enables us to connect our various devices to the wider world. That same network also feeds a variety of entertainment channels to televisions upstairs and down. And we have several light switches connected so that they can be turned on remotely, as well as thermostats that do the same. However, while our doorbell has a video feed in it, we don’t really use it, and neither have we put cameras all around the place. In short, our house is smarter than some, dumber than others.

By and large this arrangement between us and our "things" is a monologue and not a dialogue. To be accurate, there is some exchange going on, but it is extremely limited. As such it might better be described as a call and response system. I call and request an action: turn off the lights, turn up the heat, turn on the radio. The device in question performs the action and responds back with a confirmation. That’s it. There is no discussion, no negotiation, no talk about what we might have for dinner.

Until now. The so called "internet of things" is pushing further and further into our lives whether we want it to or not. On the surface it seems like a reasonable idea: interconnect all the devices in your world to make it easier on you. With a modicum of specialized yet limited intelligence, each device can be the master of its own domain, and report back as needed. Everyone stays in their own lane, focused strictly on their assigned task, with you as the benevolent overlord.

That said, there appear to be a few busybodies in the mix.

All these devices have to have a hub, a control point, a place to which they report. While it can be your phone, that is not the only smarty pants in the system. Like many, we also have what is generically called a "smart speaker." While our choice was the Amazon variant, there are models from Google, Apple and others. Each offers voice control not only of music, but of other smart devices connected through their own ecosystem. So turning on the lights is as simple as saying, well, "Turn on the lights."

But I guess if you talk about one thing you can talk about another.  While we should have seen this coming, it appears that the machines are doing more than just responding: they are talking about us behind our backs. It started when we got a new printer and hooked it into the system. With no prompting from us, it shared its status with its other inanimate friends. It’s not like I introduced them at a neighborhood blocktail party. Rather, they shared a nod as if they were both at the end of their driveways checking their mailboxes at the same time. 

And so it was that yesterday I got an email that said that, based on our usage and past orders, our smart speaker thought we might need more ink. Mind you, this is not just some time stamp whereby X months go by, and based on average use we might be in need of a fill up. No, this is based on our own individual personal track record as reported back from one independent device to the mothership, who then took the initiative upon itself to send us a memo. Simply put, our printer ratted us out to Alexa.

It's not that the two of them are wrong: we do need ink. And while they may be smarter than me, they lack opposable thumbs, and so it is left to me to actually do something if I so choose. As such they are hardly a threat to my well-being. Still, I’m not sure I like that my technology is, if not spying on me, at least monitoring my actions and suggesting course corrections. 

In "Brave New World," Aldous Huxley writes about a dystopian world controlled through drugs and technology. The main character revolts, saying "I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin." My needs are simpler. But even if I just want ink, I still want to be the one to decide.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford still controls his remotes, but for how long? 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.

Don't Do As I Do

Parents want to impart all kinds of knowledge to their children. At a high level they hope that they will be able to teach them right from wrong, how to cope with success and failure, and how to have productive relationships with others. They also hope to teach them more mundane things: how to juggle your finances, how to read a map and how to tie your shoes. 

However, while the former set of items is evergreen, the second set has changed over time, in many cases obviating your parental smarts. Online systems effectively balance your checkbook and suggest budgeting and investments. Maps that you have to follow with your finger have practically become obsolete, as GPS is used in your car or on your phone whether you are walking or driving. As to tying your shoes, it's fair to say that between elastic laces, slip-ons and Velcro, you could conceivably get to age 65 and never had learn bunny ears. 

In any case, regardless of how much of an oracle you think you are, there comes a point in time when the kids stop listening. It's not that they can't learn anything more from you, it's just that they would rather figure it out on their own. There are also so many more sources of information in easy reach, all available with just a few keystrokes. That instruction is free, easy to follow and unencumbered by any long-winded family history diversions. Whether it's how to carve a turkey, how to fold a fitted sheet or how to fix a flat bicycle tire, there is a video that will show them how to do it before you can finish saying "When I was your age." 

But eventually the tide turns once again. Mark Twain put it best: "When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years." As children mature into young adults they recognize that perhaps there might be some hard-earned tips and tricks buried with all the memories - if they can just get past the stories.

And so it was that our son is his persona as a new homeowner reached out with a routine and mundane question. As this is their first house, he and his wife are learning all the joys of being your own slumlord. For sure the biggest is having your own piece of turf with no one telling you how to use it. But it also means dealing with the almost endless set of challenges and headaches that come with being your own plumber, electrician and gardener.

His question was a routine one born out of a lack of experience in their new world: "How often do you clean the dryer vent? I know it can be a fire hazard." A legitimate question to be sure, and one with which a newby washer and dryer owner should certainly be acquainted.  

Here's where reality and practice diverge. The "right" answer, the one I should have imparted as a long-time homeowner based on our own best practices as evidenced through years of experience, is between once and twice a year. This keeps the appliance running at its highest efficiency and reduces the chances of fire. But taking the question in the most personal way – as in "How often do YOU clean the dryer vent?" - I was embarrassed to answer with a single word: "never."

Actually, I have to qualify that. Once in a blue moon (or longer) we notice that the clothes are taking longer to dry, or we feel a heat buildup in the laundry room. Then, and only then, will I dismantle the flexible tube coming out the back of the unit, as well as the longer pipe leading to the outdoors, and scrape the fur off the sides. 

The truth is that while I might preach preventive maintenance – clean your gutters, trim trees near the roof, weatherproof your windows – I am as much reactive as proactive. My inner boy scout is ashamed. Like so many things in life, the older I get the more I am living testament to the old proverb: do as I say, not as I do. 

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Marc Wollin of Bedford finds his home maintenance routines are getting less stringent. 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.

Pandemic Speak

The list of things that have changed because of the pandemic is long. It's changed how we work. No more do most workers commute to offices on a 9 to 5 schedule: remote work and variable hours are the norm rather than the exception. It's changed how we educate students from kindergarten to college: remote classes and distance learning, formerly reserved for a small subset of students, are being integrated into schoolrooms in a way as to make snow days obsolete. It's changed how we furnish our homes, what we eat, even how we dress. And it seems that it has also changed what we say and what we hear.

At the most basic level we've added a whole raft of words and phrases to our everyday lexicon. Strictly speaking, the terms are not new. But while we might have heard them before, we would be hard pressed to recall the last time we used them in a sentence. Now, hardly a day goes by without one of them leaving our lips. The very words themselves - pandemic, epidemic, outbreak - were the stuff of Hollywood movies. Likewise, quarantine, super-spreader and contact tracing were only to be found in dystopian novels. Beyond those there was social and there was distance, but the oxymoronic thought of putting the two together never occurred to us. Now you can hardly go a day without putting the compound phrase into play. (In truth, it's not a new construct: it was first quoted in 1824, but was used to describe the separation between different races, classes or ethnicities.) And the use of the "Z" word -  as in Zoom - as a verb was not used as a mechanism for meeting face-to-face, but more likely a person quoting "The Honeymooners" as Ralph laid into Alice: "Bang! Zoom! You're going to the moon!" 

On the other side of the coin, the way we hear words and process them has also changed. According to a study in PLOS ONE, a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary scientific journal from the Public Library of Science (PLOS), the pandemic presented an opportunity too good to pass up to do some research on speech and hearing. Prior similar research had looked at how major events like 9/11 or the Kennedy assassination had affected cognitive areas, such as memory and recall. But these were quick incidents, and the research focused on the effect and retention of so called "flashbulb memories." The pandemic offered a unique chance to look at a sustained event as experienced by a large sample size, namely every living person. 

The researchers looked at how our common experience affected what we were hearing. They took speech samples and asked test subjects to repeat back what they heard. But in certain spots they added an obscuring sound, in this case a coughing sound effect. That forced people to "fill in the blanks" to make sense of what they thought they were hearing. 

Unsurprisingly, given our now common experiences and shared perspectives, the test subjects heard pandemic-related words as opposed to other possibilities, and indeed, what was actually said. For instance, when the sample word was "injection" but mixed with and slightly obscured by a cough, a statistically significant number heard not "injection" but "infection." Likewise they heard "isolation" instead of "oscillation," "sheltering" rather than "sweltering" and, hardly surprising, "mask" in place of "task." 

While context could, of course, make the word selection more apparent, the research does indicate how our biases shift in favor of what's on our mind. It's a reversal of Abraham Maslow quote how if the only tool you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail. In this case, if everything looks like COVID (every sniffle, every cough, every fever), then everything we hear and every response we have is in relation to that.

In the classic definition, a Freudian slip is when we mean to say one thing but say something else, revealing something that weighs on our unconscious. (Or as one wag put it, it's when you say one thing and mean your mother.) In this case, it's as if that construct has been flipped. Our COVID experience has meant that whatever we hear we associate with the disease, regardless of what was actually said. So, thanks for reading, stay safe, and stay on mask. Er, task.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford has returned to sort-of-normal, whatever that means. 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.