Tourism

OK. I want to see places where I don’t already live. See the problem?  To listen to some people, you’d thing that being a tourist was some sort of inherent crime against humanity. How dare I not be a native Parisian? Where do I get off not having been born in Thailand? What was I thinking, choosing parents who didn’t live nearer to Venice? 

There’s a large body of literature that interrogates what it means to be a tourist and sometimes very cleverly distinguishes between the tourist (who comes as some sort of cultural imperialist, if I understand things correctly) and the traveller, who is respectful and discerning about what he encounters. Oh, please.  If I’m in Paris I’m going to tie on my bright white running shoes, grab my day pack, see the Mona Lisa, go up the Eiffel Tower, buy a fridge magnet of Notre Dame, and photograph the hell out of the place.  Then I’m going to damn well put those photographs on Facebook, that weird world where people ask to be your friends and then complain when you use it for what it’s intended for. By all means get snooty about that while you wallow in whatever hellhole you’re from.

I'm writing this from Portugal, where there are important archeological sites, medieval towns, cathedrals, museums, and galleries that would slide into total ruin and decrepitude if not for the massive stream of tourists whose spending supports these places or the local economies that support them. And around the world whole countries depend on tourism as the backbone of their economy. This comes at a price, of course, because the tourists change the places they’re visiting. In some cases, such as Paris’s famous Latin Quarter, there is very little left of what drew tourists in the first place, just shops selling junk gifts and restaurants selling junk food to tourists who can’t imagine anything worse than eating something they’ve never eaten before (the kind of people who will line up on a Friday to eat at East Side Mario’s.)  

And there really are tourists who are culturally ignorant and insensitive. They use their camera flashes in places where they’re asked not to and don’t even bother to learn to say “hello” “please” or “thank you” in the local language. Last year a perfectly nice evening we were having in a very good restaurant in Paris was very nearly ruined by four people at a nearby table. Why was the service so slow? Why didn’t the waiters speak English, after all we had done for them in the war? And they demanded to know of a lovely couple from New Zealand, sitting (thankfully, for they absorbed the brunt of this) between us and them, how New Zealanders could possibly get by without gun rights? How did they defend themselves? (At this point you can probably guess which country the four were from, and probably who they voted for in its last several elections.)  With good humour, one of the New Zealanders opined that he’d never considered the need to defend himself at all in New Zealand, there having been five homicides, three of them committed by sheep, the previous year.  Game, set, and match, I thought, but it was more of a moral victory than an actual one. The big hairs carried on. They really need to fix the roads – they’re so narrow! And the locals are so rude!  I ordered a second bottle of wine to dull the pain.

It’s also true that there are weird forms of tourism: “dark tourism” (visiting sites of murders, massacres, genocides, and the like), and “poverty tourism”, where people who are rich pay money to see “authentic” people who are not. But I’m not sure that what I’ve done is much different: I’ve led battlefield tours, and spent the day today photographing character-filled medieval neighbourhoods in Lisbon, behind whose walls and doors are people who are by Canadian standards really quite poor.  

So I’m not sure what it all means. But I do know this: in about three days our plane will land in Toronto and one of the first things I will see will be that most ubiquitous of Canadian restaurant chains, and weary travellers who will immediately queue for a coffee that’s so bad they have to double the sugar and milk just to drink it, and a little part of me will die. But it won't be the unapologetically elitist part.

Eating

Those of you who read comic books back in the 70s and 80s will remember those ads, written in the very best tradition of hyperbolic circus-show fanfare, that promised to transform you overnight into a master of the martial arts. Hidden secrets of the dark arts would be revealed; effortlessly you would be remade into a man both feared and respected. And girls would like you. What red-blooded twelve-year-old Spiderman reader could resist?

So one time I scraped together the requisite two bucks (cash – I crammed American quarters right into an envelop) and sent away.  What came back four-to-six weeks later was a little booklet, printed on cheap paper, made up of dark and grainy black and white pictures of attacks and defences. You know the kind. Panel “A” would depict the stupidest criminal in the world. He would do something dangerous like grab your shirt, and then, very helpfully, stand there waiting. Panel “B” would show your response, typically: chop him on the neck, poke him the eye, and kick him in the nuts. That was pretty much it. Grabs your wrist: chop him on the neck, poke him in the eye, kick him in the nuts. Grabs your throat: chop him on the neck, poke him the eye, kick him in the nuts. Asks for the time: chop him on the neck, poke him the eye, kick him in the nuts. I was ecstatic.  No wonder these deadly secrets had to be hidden away! Knowing them was like carrying a concealed weapon around. Go ahead, punk. Grab my shirt. Make my day. Your nuts have my name on them. Or your name. Whatever.
 
Anyway,  I'd forgotten all about this until recently, but lately those ads have come roaring back into my memory. Let me explain. Lately, I’ve become interested in fitness and nutrition. I’ll write more about this later, because I’ve found a very good gym and in the past year I’ve progressed from tub of lard to medium-size convenience pack of margarine instead, which is pretty good for me. I can do a pull-up. I have a six pack, too, although I had a couple last night so I’m down to four. Zing!

And, ooops. I’ve revealed something terrible about myself. I’ve consumed alcohol, which, according to innumerable nutrition websites, I’m never supposed to do.  You’ve probably seen the ad for websites of this kind. There’s a “five foods you should never eat” banner ad that has been chasing me around the Internet for months now. So earlier this week, with nothing on my plate except a pile of marking and a tenure application, I decided to Google “five foods you should never eat” and see what's up.

The precise phrase returned 43,000 hits. I clicked on a few at random. The remarkable thing was how much these pages sounded like those 1970s martial arts ads.  “Nutrition secrets they don’t want you to know!” “Transform your body overnight with super fat-burning foods!” “Hidden information revealed!” "Earn respect and be sexy!"  Increasingly this involves hormones. (Hormones are big these days.) “Put your hormones into overdrive!” one ad for a nutrition system said.  One home-and-garden type website even presented “five foods your doctor doesn’t eat!” I’m not sure how they know Dr. Baker, but there you go.

I discovered quickly, however, that in this community of nutrition experts, boldly revealing the secrets of their profession to the me, personally, for the first time, there is no consensus about which five foods I shouldn’t eat. For example, Cosmo suggested the following:

Artificial sweeteners
Margarine
Soy Protein Isolate
Diet Foods
Frozen Meals

While another fitness and nutrition expert suggested strawberries, butter, white bread, processed meat, and orange juice. My confusion mounted. More clicking ensued, more foods followed. In fact, after  visiting about half a dozen sites I had a list of twenty-five different foods or kinds foods I should never eat. These included: white chocolate. White sugar. White rice.  Beer. White bread. White wine. Red wine. Brown bread. Canned tomatoes. Processed meats. Meat. Fried foods. Eggs. Microwave popcorn. Butter. Margarine. Vegetable oil. Olive oil. Table salt. Orange juice. Salad dressing. Strawberries. Peanut Butter. Non-organic produce. Soda.

Measure of Doubt has long insisted that it is not merely the second best blog of that name. It is also an indispensable public service. To that end, your noble author, heedless of mortal peril and thinking only of the well being of humankind, followed in the footsteps of many a hero (and super villain) and performed an unauthorized scientific experiment on himself.

In a single weekend, I ate eighteen of the five things you should never eat, some of them simultaneously. I ate strawberries, had processed deli meats on white bread and scooped peanut butter right from the (plastic) jar. I had fried eggs and ham on brown bread and washed it down with orange juice. I snacked on microwave popcorn and Coca Cola. I stir fried non-organic produce in vegetable oil and ate it over white rice. Above all I drank beer. Lots of it.

Result? Well, let’s put it this way. Visitation will be held between 2-4 and 7-9 this evening. Memorial donations can be made to the Canadian Armed Forces "Save the F-35" Fund.

Pah. I’m fine. Barely even burped. These are beginner “never eat” foods for posers.

By contrast, after having conducted MINUTES of research I have compiled my own list of five of MEGA DESTRUCTIVE CERTAIN DEATH FOODS that you should NEVER eat. Some of these will SHOCK you, because THEY have told you that these things are good for you. But they're NOT.  I reveal this here to YOU for the FIRST TIME.

Measure of Doubt’s "Five Foods You Should Really NEVER Eat"

People. Never eat people! The average American, for instance, contains over 500,000 calories – more than 30% of them from fat!  (People from places like Africa might have fewer calories from fat, but why take the chance?)

Ninja Throwing Stars. Ever wonder why you don’t see many Ninjas around?

Water. Not only is a water a chemical substance (never eat anything with chemical substances in it!), water can sometimes contain sharks, poisonous blowfish, and even Nazi U-Boats!

Glutten. I have no idea what this is. But don’t eat it, whatever you do.
 
Food.  Food is the number one cause of obesity and a choking hazard. Avoid temptation by not keeping it in the house.

Send $59.95 for the video. I will show you how to avoid the agony of food preparation and meals with family and friends. I'll reveal the hidden secret I used to lose 30 pounds in one night, just by sawing my own leg off!  And, as an added bonus, I’ll throw in the sixth food you should never eat, yours to not eat for free! (It’s black liquorice. Shudder.)

Dinner

For this, my fiftieth post, I promised to turn to the eternal question, the one that has bedeviled human beings since the first of our protohuman ancestors vocalized a thought, namely: “What’s for dinner?” I wonder how you would feel if I told you that Dawkins, pictured on the left, was on the menu.

Did that thought fill you with revulsion? It did me, because I rather like the little girl, even though she bites our feet and tracks slightly moist kitty litter onto the bed in the morning. But, really. Why not eat her? Why not brain the little sucker, bleed her, skin her, cut her into parts, hang her up to let her age (the meat we eat is decomposing, you know - after all, rigor mortis makes for tough chewing), then joint her, and cook her up in some olive oil, sprinkled with rosemary, sea salt, and freshly ground pepper? Yum yum. Why make pets of some animals, but imprison, fatten up, slaughter, and then chomp down others? Intelligence cannot be the dividing line — she’s is not very bright, trust me — so why should cuteness be?

I have been troubled by this question for some years now. On what warrant do we claim the moral right to select certain animals for food and lethal medical experimentation, but not others? I have no satisfactory answer to the question. Clearly the mere fact that something benefits us does not make it moral. I long ago concluded that higher-order primates, our evolutionary cousins, must absolutely be left alone, regardless of any impediment it puts in place to scientific research. We share something on the order of 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees, for example, and I can locate no rational defense for performing experiments on them, or for making them perform circus tricks for us, that, were we to be consistent, wouldn’t also apply to certain human beings with cognitive impairments.

Anyway, dinner. About a year ago, my wife and I made a quite conscious decision to become flexitarians - consumers of a mostly vegetarian diet who aren’t dogmatic about occasionally eating meat. We reduced our consumption of meat, poultry, pork, and fish from about six dinners per week to one, and did the same with lunches. (Breakfast was mostly vegetarian anyway.) Some flexitarians would say that we need to go further still, which is why I prefer Mark Bittman’s term “lessmeattarianism” to describe our diet. We did this for a variety of reasons.

First, we are utterly convinced that industrial meat production is cruel to the animal and environmentally damaging. On these grounds alone, there would be sufficient cause to stop or hugely reduce meat eating. Add to that the following fact: the average steak or piece of pork or poultry from the supermarket, shrink-wrapped onto styrofoam, doesn’t taste like anything - it's basically a dead delivery vehicle for spices and sauces. Might as well save the money.

When we do eat meat now, we try to select it carefully from those rare vendors whose practices, we believe, are more ethical and ecologically sustainable, and which result in a better-tasting critter. (We have abandoned our former favourite fast-food, sushi, altogether: either it’s fake, the seafood equivalent of McDonald’s — that bright red tuna is dyed, people — or real but involving endangered fish flown in from the Pacific, in which case it’s environmentally catastrophic.) I realize that some vegans in particular would rebut that we are therefore simply reducing the amount of murder that we’re complicit in, but, as I’m constantly reminding my moral relativist students, the number of corpses one generates does matter.

Our second reason for reducing meat consumption concerns matters of health. While we’re convinced that there’s no particular evidence that eating meat generally is bad for your health, the enormous quantity of meat that most Westerners eat almost certainly is, if only because it comes at the expense of other things that are good for us, which is to say, plants. The dismissal of vegetables as "food's food" used to be a joke around our house, but no more, and people who don't eat them would be amazed with how good they taste if you prepare them properly.

And what has been the consequences of all this? Well, for one, we’re better and more imaginative cooks. I’ve lost 14 pounds by this expedient alone. My resting heart rate is down. My blood pressure is down. My cholesterol is down. Our grocery bill is down, too - by about one-third per month.

But, for me, at least, there’s something lacking. An important point of any personal ethics is that you should never ask someone to do something that you wouldn’t be willing, in theory, at least, to do yourself. (Educators take note.) Therefore, I feel that it’s rapidly coming to the point where I’m going to have to get my hands dirty or else give up meat altogether. That means that I either have to try hunting or at the very least witness the slaughter of a cow, pig, or chicken first hand. I made this point earlier when I discussed the death penalty - that people who support the death penalty, it seems to me, have an obligation to support public executions or at the very least must witness an execution sometime. The people calling for blood, I said, don’t get to shield their eyes from it when it’s spilled. And the people eating the flesh of animal shouldn’t get to pretend that it’s something other than what it actually is.

Food

People eat the most abominable food, and in my misbegotten youth (d. 2005), I ate a good deal of it myself. Fast food, frozen food, food served in chain restaurants where, three or four times an evening, the waitstaff emerge half-heartedly to sing a happy birthday song that is not actually "Happy Birthday." I've eaten white bread that claims to be wondrous but that has no taste at all; "Chinese take out" that no person from China would recognize as Chinese food; edible oil products that are dyed orange, sliced thin, wrapped in plastic, and called "cheese"; and even Minute Rice. The passage of time has taught me the virtues of brown bread and authentic ethnic cuisine; that cheese is not orange; that all rice can be made in minutes, and that moreover Minute Rice is not rice at all. As near as I can tell, it is some sort of Styrofoam that tastes vaguely like soap. "Minute Rice," says Mark Bittman, the brilliant New York Times food writer. is "the stupidest food ever invented."

People will, in the supposed name of convenience, eat an astonishing array of truly repugnant edible consumer goods that I won't dignify with the title "food." An alarming number of these products seem to be manufactured — that is the right word, by the way — by Kraft. Consider these gastronomical hand grenades, marketed as a quicker alternative to bagels, in order to spare frequent bagel eaters the anguish of toasting real bagels and then having to spread cream cheese for themselves. How did we ever survive before our bagels were produced in factories, crammed with chemical goop by machines, flash-frozen, wrapped in plastic, dropped into a cardboard box, and shipped thousand of kilometers to our breakfast counters? The wonders of modernity never cease. Why, next somebody will think of pouring tap water into plastic bottles, trucking it across continents, and selling it for four times the cost of gasoline!

If the development of an eating disorder is among your life goals, I highly recommend that you spend some time on Kraft's website, checking out their recipes. Consider this burnt frozen hamburger served on a bed of pasta (and tell me that it doesn't look exactly like the killer robots from The Matrix.) Yum. Yum. And for those parents who truly despise their own children, the good people at General Mills market Pizza Pockets, which are made with the same loving care for children's health that Big Macs are.

If I sound slightly evangelical about all this, it's because I turned 39 today, and birthdays are occasions for reflection. The 90th Psalm allows that the number of our years are "threescore and ten" or, "by reason of strength" fourscore - this upper extremis being a mere twenty-nine thousand days. Of those, there are about fourteen thousand behind me, and I'm resolved that I will not spend any of the remainder eating food that reduces the number of my days and that tastes bad, to boot.

So, listen up, you students! (I know you're reading this.) This is the most important lesson I'll ever teach you. Tonight, you'll pick up that phone and chalk up another $25 on your VISA for a soggy pizza from some crappy place that sells "2 for 1" to students who don't know any better. Don't. Stop at the supermarket on the way home. And when you get home, follow these directions:

Heat some olive oil in a big frying pan. Chop up some onions, celery, carrots, and a couple of gloves of garlic. Throw them in. Add some salt and pepper and, if you've got it, a bit of oregano or thyme (in the summer, use the fresh stuff.) Cut up some peppers or mushrooms, if you want. Again, in summer, get the locally grown kind. Add some diced tomatoes and their juice and let it simmer while you boil some water for pasta. By the time the water is boiled and the pasta is cooked, your tomato sauce will be done. Grate some real parmesan on it (not the kind that comes in a green cardboard shaker.) If you're either totally alone or trying to impress somebody, get a bottle of this on the way home, too.

There. The whole thing (minus the optional wine) will cost less than the pizza, will be ready in the same time as delivery, and you'll have plenty of ingredients left over for future meals. It will taste better, too, and in no small measure because you made it. Next time, experiment. Serve it with a little salad or some bread from the local bakery.

If you can read, you can cook. There's no reason to buy and eat tasteless, high fat, high sodium, nutritionally worthless "food" manufactured according to same principles that Henry Ford used to build cars. Because the fact is that it is not cheaper; it is not faster; it is not more convenient. What it is, is just another product marketed by people who, in another lifetime, with a different spin of the wheel, would probably be tobacco lobbyists.

I mentioned the brilliant but down-to-earth and highly pragmatic Mark Bittman before. Here's his column at the New York Times, and the next time you even think about eating a meal that involves a cardboard box and a microwave oven, dip into this article instead.

Oh, and do the dishes before you go to bed.