Sylvie’s Underhanded Wonderland

The new USDA food pyramid sure has gotten its share of ridicule since its release a month or two ago. But that guy who writes Mallard Fillmore can bite my a$5 - I can’t believe he spent a week ridiculing the damn thing. Let me start by saying I’m all for the new guide. Now, I never really paid attention to the old one, and to be honest, I haven’t sat down and figured out how the new one works, visually. Something about color coding for the different food groups and a 1980’s-Olympics-style man-symbol running up the side to represent the role of exercise in it all. What I am enthusiastic about is the online journal option that’s available to anyone at the website. Sign up for “My Pyramid Tracker” and you can keep an ongoing record of what you’ve eaten and how much you’ve exercised on a given day. You start by entering basic information about yourself, like height, weight, and age. Then, each day, you make entries for how much you’ve eaten of which kinds of foods.

You can choose to analyze your food intake for specific nutritional content, relative to the recommended allowances. I like this option because it’s just fun to estimate how much selenium or folate I’ve taken in for the day, and whether it’s enough to meet my RDA. Or, you can do the typical, boring thing and worry your confused head over how many calories you’ve taken in on a given day, and simultaneously win my eternal annoyance. Then, you can choose one of two formats for entering your physical activity for the day and see how you rate relative to a physical activity score index. One format simplifies things by inferring a certain amount of activity and inactivity for the day and only having you enter the strenuous, notable stuff. The other wants you to note absolutely everything you’ve done, all day long, and for how long you’ve done it.

Needless to say, keeping track of both the food and the activity is actually kind of hard. There are some days I can’t even remember what I ate for breakfast in the morning by the time I sit down to make my entry at night. A saving grace has been the fact that I eat almost exactly the same thing, every day, for breakfast. Yes, I am THAT boring. But what makes things harder is the fact that there’s something seriously funny going on with how you have to make the food entries. In order to have an exact nutritional analysis of each food item, the USDA obviously had to collect data on certain foods in certain portions. When you make an entry, you have to pick from amongst those pre-set foods. I have no idea how they collected their food items, but it looks like a combination of self-reporting by average Americans in a scientific study, and shameless collusion with brand-name food manufacturers. Throw in the occasional clerical error by whoever had to enter all that data and the fact that the search engine uses a Soundex filter to get you results close to what you’ve typed, and you get quite an interesting mess. For instance, there are three different options for “chocolate cake made with mayonnaise”, and not one for just plain chocolate cake. There’s “french bread, whole wheat, homemade”, but not store-bought white french bread. There’s the inscrutable, like “cold cut” (they don’t specify the kind of meat), “watergate salad” and “sushi, no vegetable, no fish” (…and hence, “no sushi”?). There’s little logic to it, but there are certainly a lot of options.

I can’t decide how I feel about the branded entries. You can be more sure you’re getting a definite nutritional analysis when you can pick a definite branded item out of the list. But it can be obnoxious to have to cobble together Trader Joe’s artichoke dip out of “artichoke, globe (french), cooked” - 3 leaves, “parmesan or romano cheese” - 1 Tbsp, and “cream cheese dip” - 1 Tbsp, because it’s sure not in the directory. Brand names like Powerbar and Gatorade are easy to find, but their competitors, like Powerade, are not included. There are Lean Cuisine and Jenny Craig frozen entrees, but only certain ones. Typos sometimes trump the reliance on name branding, like when Campbells becomes CaNpbell’s. Everything’s in capitals, so it’s sometimes hard to determine a brand name, like the items “green goddess dressing” or “team cereal”, which to my mind could be cereal someone brought to team practice, cereal made from a team, or Team cereal, which I’ve never seen before. And sometimes, as is the case with plain Tropicana orange juice, you’ll find every single product by a certain company EXCEPT for the one you drank with breakfast. I just can’t tell whether some of the absences are due to the fact that no one in the study ate those particular brands, or whether certain companies paid to have their foods in the list.

I’ll venture into delicate cultural territory and say that there are some foods here I can’t really picture eating, like “cake, peanut butter, with icing”, “clam cake or patty, deviled”, or “beef salad” (mmm…beef salad). Some, like “yogurt, vanilla, lemon, coffee” sound gross as a single entry but if you take a second you can figure out what they mean. But that’s perhaps the wonderful thing about the data here; that it was obviously drawn from quite a wide range of diets. You can choose “moose”, you can choose “squirrel”, you can mark down your “manapua, filled w/bean paste, meatless”, “ray, baked or broiled” (hope that’s a fish they’re talking about), or “fish cake (kamaboko) tempura”. It’s just frustrating that with such ridiculously specific items as “beans, lima, imature, canned, low sodium”, you sometimes will still eat something for which they don’t have an analysis.

And whoever filled in “carmelized sugar” better watch their mispronouncing heinie ‘cause I’m coming after them. Even the Soundex doesn’t agree with you!

The physical activities entries are where the fun really begins. Think it’s hard to remember what you ate for breakfast? Try remembering EVERYTHING you did today, down to brushing your teeth and walking to the trash can. These are all obviously self-reported, with entries like “bookbinding”, “fishing in stream, in waders” (why do the waders matter?), and “retreat/family reunion activities, sitting, eating” sorted into categories like “self care”, “occupational” and “miscellaneous”. The “religious activities” category is a real hoot. Do “eating in church”, “standing, talking in church”, and “walk/stand combination, religious purposes, usher” really burn more calories than plain ‘ol secular walking, talking, and eating? Some of them make me wonder as to why the participants thought they needed to provide such specific information. They were in a government study, after all.

The activities database hasn’t escaped typos, either, so I can now dance “ballet or modeM, twist, jazz, tap, jitterbug” all in the same entry. Ah, yes, the modem. I dance it all the time. There’s no entry for sprinting or really fast running, but there is one for “running, on a track, team practice” which I guess I can’t use ‘cause I’m not on a team. But I do just love that if ever I’ve been “butchering animals”, “cooking Indian bread on an outside stove” (no, not challah in an indoor oven), or “canoeing, harvesting, knocking rice off stalks” (all at once), I’ll be able to analyze it.

Last, but not least, there is no USDA Physical Activity entry for sex. Because, as we all know:
healthy, good, USDA-approved Americans do not have sex.

Bummer. I know THAT would boost my fitness score. : )

I just Nadded my eyebrows! What an experience. Somewhat akin to peeling off a BandAid, but with better cosmetic results. Actually, this is my second go with Nad’s. I can’t quite say what brings me to do this. I get the impulse to remove my facial hair about as often as I get the urge to go shopping. That is to say, maybe once every four months, with anything actually coming of the urge on the average of about once every six months. Maybe I have a low tolerance for pain. Usually I just wander around Express and PacSun (the stores of my youth- the grown-up stores take themselves more seriously than I can) until I get disgusted with myself. And usually I don’t have any particular need to rip out my eyebrows from their follicles. But boredom is a powerful motivator.

As you might have guessed because no one here can say the name without giggling, Nad’s does not come from America. It comes from a smiley woman named Sal in Australia. Originally it was sold only through infomercials, but maybe two years ago it showed up on the shelves of my local Rite-Aid. It’s bright green and comes either as a twenty dollar pot in a box, or as a small tube (with applicator wand!) designed for facial use. Why did Nad’s appeal to me when none of the other fruity-death scented Nair-type products did? Namely, the ingredients. Where products like Nair list things like castor oil (pop quiz: what other fun thing can you make with the castor bean? Ricin!) and ammonia(?) as ingredients, Nad’s is made of nothing but fructose, glucose, molasses, vinegar, lemon juice, and food coloring. MMMM. So hard not to eat it. I held my nose, pointed my dignity in the other direction, and plunked down twenty dollars for the pot.

But it’s not so much the healthy appeal that got to me, it was more an urge of indeterminate origin. My eyebrows had been looking…heavy lately. I didn’t seem to have my normal ability simply not to care. To put this in perspective, let me say that it’s unusual for me to even be looking that closely in the mirror. Inspection is a luxury - a frivolity. I just don’t need to do it most of the time. I think I let myself experience the nagging self-doubt and attention to detail that some people call femininity only occasionally. But this past week I’d been looking at them more and more. And I started wondering what other people thought about me, without knowing it was my eyebrows that shaped their impression– what impression of surliness came from my browline. I don’t know what caused this low point, but apparently the beauty industry survives on it. And likely creates it, too. The beauty industry’s not about looking beautiful- it’s about not looking ugly. There is a difference.

Who came up with this kind of ritual? She must have really pissed off the other tribespeople, who were busy doing important things like scraping rabbit hides and poison-testing berries. Who was it that first said, “I’m going to smear sticky goo on my vestigial (albeit expressive) brow-fur, smooth a little cloth over it, then rip it off in the hopes of getting a positive reaction out of people”? And who the hell at the ad agency takes herself seriously thinking, “I wonder what insecurities I can artfully exploit (or create!) today?” I know it’s a question that’s been asked before, and gone over by sociologists and anthropologists. My question is more why women on both ends of the marketing scheme don’t take a step back and look at the ridiculousness of it all more often.

I mean, come on ladies, what does it really mean that you’re putting Nads on your face?

From time to time people tell me I look like an anime character. Usually they don’t mean one character in particular, but I have in fact just found one character who bears a striking resemblance to skinny old me. I give you Haruko Haruhara, from the FLCL series (which I’ll admit I haven’t really seen).

She’s got the bad posture, the sticky-out elbows, and the weird yellow eyes. And she stole my velvet pants!