Blog much?

How often should a person put up posts on their blogs? It obviously depends on the person. What's fascinating for me is how much you can understand about a person (and how much I understand about myself) based on the way they blog.

I started this blog as a place to let me write, to really sit down and think through an idea and develop it in ways that I can't do on my job. The result is that I don't end up blogging that much, on the grounds that I don't want to fill this space with idle chatter. But an overly silent blog runs the risk of feeling like a house unlived in, a place that people forget about because there aren't any reasons to go there. My answer to this conundrum a contemplative post like this one, something of a blog about blogging.

When the web was first exploding in the late 90s I was desperate to put up a site, but was constantly confronted by the same dilemma -- what do I really want to say to the world? Developing a career in journalism was  in part an answer to this question. Journalists by profession are given specific subjects to write about, and don't generally find themselves questioned about their legitimacy to be writing on that subject. But this only in part solved my writing problem, as this blog evidently demonstrates.


It's the same problem I find myself having with Twitter, which despite my initial eyeball rolling have come to respect as serious tool to do all sorts of things including really good journalism. But from what I can tell, it really functions for you once you start throwing tweets out into the world, which isn't natural for me. It's the same reason that I want to sit down and really think about blog entries and ultimately feel like the post is reaching a conclusion and saying something coherent. My original post on this blog conjured up the idea of a version of a Twitter based on 400-word well-written and punchy posts on subjects of profound relevance. It's easy to see why micro-blogging will always trump my medium-sized blogging idea.

Trying to reserve this space for Writing with a capital W leaves out a lot of worthwhile things that could be said. It's possibly my biggest flaw as a writer -- not wanting to write things on concern that they aren't worth being published. I've been consistently surprised at how just about any post I put up -- even the ones I considered sending to the recycle bin instead of publishing -- almost always get at least a few readers. It's comforting to me that people still want to read some dude's blog even in today's overwhelming landslide of digital noise. I always turned up my nose at blogs filled with pedestrian details of a person's lunch meeting or shopping dates because they struck me about as interesting as a Twitter feed filled with "I'm eating soup" or "I'm drinking coffee" tweets.

Turns out people read both. Which is hard for me to believe, but an obvious sign of why blogging is self discovery.

Vegetable scraps for dinner? Waste not, want not.

I was glad to see the Times story today about the world’s most important and most overlooked subject – wasted food. Having yelled and screamed about our obsession with the world running out of food, I’m glad to see a story on how to eat things that we normally consider trash.

The headline could hardly sum it up better: That’s Not Trash, That’s Dinner.

Gourmet cooks and sustainable eating types have found ways to put potato peels, radish stalks, and cauliflower leaves into every day meals. Watermelon rinds can replace cucumbers in salad? Peach soaked in wine to make an after-dinner aperitif? These are folks after my own heart.

I’ve done some of this sort of thing in my own kitchen from time to time. I from time to time eat something I like to call “leftover vegetable soup,” which is more or less what it sounds like – broccoli stalks and thick watercress stems in a salty vegetable broth. It has a virtuous quality to it that I enjoy more than flavor itself.

Upscale Sao Paulo eateries have gotten in on this act too. Restaurants in the hip neighborhoods of Vila Madalena and Pinheiros have joined an event called Vila Integral that challenges chefs to come up with menus including usually discarded odds and ends. Last year’s event included chicken in watercress-stem pesto, salads with beat stalks, and a dessert made from coconut and watermelon rind. The event is sponsored by the non-profit Banco de Alimentos, which seeks to reduce hunger by reducing food waste – something I wish were the basic starting point for anti-hunger programs.

On a practical level these sorts of events only scratch the surface when it comes to reducing food waste, but they do get people thinking about what’s food and what’s not.

A glimpse of what Caracas could be

The crime-ridden colonial center of Caracas was lit up in celebration, the bars packed to the nines and the streets brimming with revelers enjoying live music on a Saturday night. In the eight years I lived in this city, I never saw el centro look this way. It was a rare glimpse of what I hope someday Caracas could become, a ray of a light for a city shrouded in darkness, struggling to overcome an international reputation for violence and decay.

Sure, it's not every day this kind of thing happens. The government spruced up downtown for the bicentennial independence anniversary celebrations and paid big bucks to put on all sorts of shows and organized restaurants to join bar-crawl type events. And there were the occasional obligatory references to Chavez and the revolution that I could have done without.
But it was a unique experience in a city where street life has been drowned out by the steadily growing dominance of cars, the blatant disregard for public spaces, the crime rate that the most dire estimates show Caracas as dangeorous as Baghdad. Few foreigners care for Caracas except to make it the butt of jokes, and I found myself over the years repeated defending it to out-of-sorts ex-pats who couldn't make the place work for them. It's a city I've always wanted to hear some good news about.

On Saturday I got a call from a friend who was heading down to the Plaza Bolivar to see a group called Bacalao Men (I'd first gone to see them in 2001 and was surprised to see they were still around). The city's old colonial center looked cleaned up, the facades repainted and repointed, with enough lighting and security around that people looked geniunely relaxed. I drank stale Malbec out of a Gatorade bottle. People took pictures of each other and had random conversations with whoever was standing next to them. They even put up tanks of potable water -- a brilliant touch for people like me with ideological baggage about buying it in bottles.

This is what Venezuela's supposed to be, it struck me. People are not quiet or shy and taken to hiding in shopping malls or staying inside their houses. Venezuela's oil wealth meant it had cars and highways before most other countries in the region, which left Caracas with a plethora of malls and parking lots. But Venezuelans were born to drink and dance on the street, and there's no reason that Venezuela's colonial center can't be a thriving center of nightlife.

For as long as I can remember, it hasn't been. That plaza was overtaken by clouds of tear gas or convulsed by politically-sparked shoving matches that ended in confused gun battles more times than I could count. Its isolated and poorly lit streets were always prime territory for muggings and robberies, its sidewalks for years overrun by informal street vendors hocking everything knock-off t-shirts to bootleg CDs.

We finished watching the show and walked to a restaurant, where I used to have lunch while covering Congress, that was holding a poetry slam. The place literally has a sign that says "Dancing is Prohibited -- The Management" but it didn't seem to be bothering anyone. On the way out we ran into a parade with a live band of drums and brass and a line of people in a Chinese-New-Year-dragon-style costume walking through the streets with kinds and grandma's lined up to dance alongside.

Could downtown Caracas eventually become a nightlife center the way Rio's colonial Lapa district transformed itself from a Brazilian skid-row into the city's main night-time attraction? A decade ago, few would have believed that Lapa would be home to the city's most exclusive clubs or be a magnet for moneyed cariocas looking to see a samba show. Rio had a number of advantages, a country a thriving economy and no political polarization or ideological doctrine splitting its society in half.

I think the answer is yes. There's a lot that will have to get straightened out before that happens, a lot of which goes far beyond what the local authorities in Caracas can do. People begin taking back public spaces when they realize the advantages of doing so. Let's hope the scene this weekend will remind them that being on the street is better than hiding in your house.

My unexpected Russian following

The meager traffic on this site has doubled in the last week, with nearly all of the increase coming from Russia. This strikes me as either a strange internet fluke, some virus hitting my page for no reason, or an error in the Blogger stats. Russia has never been remotely on my radar screen, or on my blog so I can only say I’m confused, if pleasantly surprised.  

I noticed one source of traffic was this site which includes a search for my blog. But none of this new traffic appears to show up on any of the posts, so I can’t tell what I might be writing that could be interested in Russia.

I haven’t done much to promote this blog, so I’m guessing it’s unlikely I’ve developed a fan club of Eastern European readers. I think Russia’s fascinating but can’t say I’ve really followed it much, apart from a fascinating book about the Litvinenko poisoning. I also found it a bit strange that among my Google followers is a person named “UA1p.0EnvoObo_M28C.SPoFwArQ-“

I couldn’t figure out for the life of me who this might be. I have seen that comments on some blogs were clearly coming from viruses or bots. I honestly don’t get it. I’d love to think more people are reading, but I’m guessing it’s a glitch somewhere.

Breaking my coffee addiction, one year later

“What in all fiery hell made you do something like that?” is usually the first response I get when I tell people about this adventure. The answer is simple. I was in my kitchen one morning, sipping a cup of my favorite brew – three ounces of espresso and powdered milk blended whipped in with a hand-held latte foamer – when I thought to myself “I don’t actually want this cup of coffee, I’m simply staving off an addiction.”

Truth be told, that preparation of coffee was – and still is – one of the most amazing things I’ve come across on God’s green earth. It combines the angry punch of an espresso with a sublime creaminess that starts with the foam at the top stays with you until the last drop, a concoction I developed over years in Caracas in with the help of my wife and many Venezuelan friends.

My thought at that moment, standing in my pajamas in front of the stove, wasn’t that I never wanted to drink coffee again. It was more motivated by the question “Shouldn’t I be able to drink coffee because I want to, and not because I have to?”

I could have of course just poured out the cup of coffee I didn’t want so that I could start to break my addiction. But I’d actually tried that before. Several years earlier, just to confirm I was in fact addicted, I tried to see what would happen if I just stopped from one day to the next. At that time I was drinking three or four dark shots of espresso a day. Let’s just say it didn’t go well. Yes, first the headaches, then the dizziness. Within two days I was constantly nauseous. The third day I was vomiting. As you can guess, the fourth day I was drinking coffee again. I can’t help but smile to myself when I see the coffee industry groups insisting caffeine withdrawal only causes “temporary, mild discomfort.”

That was enough to scare the daylights out of me. For the next six years I didn’t give the slightest thought to ditching my morning brew, even downing a few sips of warm Coke when I couldn’t find coffee on the road, or munching on chocolate covered espresso beans on camping trips. But over time the thought came back to me – do I really want to have to drink this stuff every day? Part of my problem is that I even when I was a regular coffee drinker, I had to constantly resist the call of coffee anyway. My metabolism only allowed me to have my own cup of coffee in the morning, which gave me the nice jolt I wanted. After that, coffee usually did more harm than good. Those slow, boring afternoons, when I was nodding off from a big lunch, drinking a cup of coffee would simply make my head swim. Granted, I don’t have kids, so I sleep pretty well, otherwise this might be a different story. So I thought, if I can’t try this now, when will I ever be able to?

And so it began. When things first started I was putting about two teaspoons of coffee into my little espresso pot, so I started to taper down while I kept the water constant. It was a slow ramp-down, but I could feel it. In the afternoons my stomach would clench up, and I’d have this irresistible urge to lie down on the floor. People asked me if I was sleeping OK. Most of the time I just told them I was tired (which was true). It was probably a period of two weeks or so where things were tough, but after that it got noticeably better. And, at the same time, the coffee was getting noticeably worse. By the end I was only putting in 1/8 of a teaspoon of grounds, which yielded a pale watery brew with a few grounds floating on top of it. The declining quality of the coffee was a deterrent to continuing to drink coffee. So I quit.

And to my surprise, I haven’t missed it as much as I thought I would. I do sometimes walk past a coffee shop and really feel myself being pulled in by the overpowering scent of roasting beans. And I so get up on Saturday mornings and have a cup of coffee with my wife while I read the paper, and I truly enjoy it. It becomes a special occasion with that absence-makes-the-heart-grow-fonder intensity.

I remember one dark early morning a few months later I had to get up at some godawful hour to return from a reporting trip, I stood in front of a coffee counter at the airport. I wasn’t sure if should take advantage of the moment to indulge in an espresso. Would the coffee keep me up on the plane? Or should I drink the coffee so I could stay awake on the plane and then get home and rest? Or would the coffee dehydrate me too much on the plane? And then I had a sudden realization, like clouds parting to reveal a brilliant sun – “I don’t want coffee!”

Our global food drama (redux)

I came to the conclusion that there’s not much of a place in the news world for what I think is the most overlooked issue of the debate over the world’s food supply: waste. Last week’s extensive investigation in the New York Times about how climate change is cutting into the world’s food production is one such example. A thoroughly reported, clearly sourced and well-written story outlining how demand for food is outpacing production and the consequences of this trend – yet without a single mention of the staggering inefficiencies and endemic waste at every level of the world’s food production (and consumption).

I mentioned this not long ago in my post about the FAO report that concludes that a jaw-dropping one-third of the world’s food goes uneaten. That post argued that the world prefers dramatic Malthusian tales of the human race slowly starving like castaways on a desert island over the much more prosaic reality that really solving this problem will require changes in how much consume food and not simply producing more of it at any cost.

I will admit that I’m falling into a trap here that I don’t care for, which is stirring up a debate about the debate itself – rather than a debate about the issues themselves. I find meta-debates problematic because they get people more cemented into their positions and less likely to think openly about what needs to be done. But this issue is sorely lacking in our consciousness of the problem, and it’s one that escapes the eye of blog and newspapers. The “We’re all gonna starve” script is simply more appealing, rich with its villains and heroes, its moral quandaries and complex ambiguities, its tales of oppressors and downtrodden, of profligate hedge funds stealing land from poor African tribes. In contrast, the mindboggling amount of food wasted each year can be boiled down to the eight famous words of American comic strip character Pogo: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

I’m glad the Times is looking at this issue of how global climate change will affect our capacity to produce food. But the trouble is that the more food we have, the more we waste – and the more we waste, the more convinced we are that we need more of it. There’s nary a mention of this in the Times story, which instead rings a lot of the customary alarm bells (passages of which I’ve included in italics).

“There’s just such a tremendous disconnect, with people not understanding the highly dangerous situation we are in,” said Marianne Bänziger, deputy chief of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, a leading research institute in Mexico.

Ironic that this comment should come from Mexico, where 70 percent of adults are either obese or overweight – the highest rate among developing nations in last year’s OECD study. Obesity, as a rule of thumb, is a often a good sign that as society is not making very good use of food, or of the elements that go into making food. It is not caused by a person eating too much, it’s almost always a function of a person eating too much of the wrong things – processed foods, red meat, and rendered animal fat (of course a lack of physical activity is key here). These foods are notoriously inefficient in their use of planet’s resources, because, as we know, eating grains ourselves rather than feeding them to animals and eating the animals would save an order of magnitude of resources. Neither in this story nor in the debate about food in general is this presented as a choice we make, rather a fait accompli that we have to accommodate by producing more food.

… food and feed demand was starting to take off, thanks in part to rising affluence across much of Asia. Millions of people added meat and dairy products to their diets, requiring considerable grain to produce.

The Asian miracle is also an oft-cited reason for the rise in food prices, and China is not without reason proud that hundreds of millions of its citizens there are eating more than they used to. What doesn’t seem to come up is that China is by some measures headed down the same nutritional dark alley that the United States is stuck in – 15 percent of children between 10 and 12 living in Chinese cities are or overweight, and more than half of those are obese. If the Chinese want to eat themselves into oblivion the way Americans have, then I agree with the gloom and doom predictions one hears about the world’s shrinking food supply. Given demographic and geopolitical trends, it’s hard to argue that a 12-year-old Chinese boy is not a potent symbol of the world’s future. What we are not contemplating is whether the Chinese – along with Brazilians, South Africans and Indians – who want to escape the malnourishment associated with poverty can make the choice not to enter the over-fed, overweight, diabetic middle class living on unhealthy quantities of corn-fed meat and poultry.

These experts say that in coming decades, farmers need to withstand whatever climate shocks come their way while roughly doubling the amount of food they produce to meet rising demand.

Fixing a broken food system can’t simply rely on producing more calories. The system we have today provides so many calories to one growing minority as to make it sick, while systematically denying another growing minority the calories it needs to survive. The idea that this system will somehow be set straight by pouring more food into it is a bit like saying Donald Trump needs huge tax breaks or he won’t be able to pay the salaries of his army of minimum wage employees.

A wheat physiologist at the center, Matthew Reynolds, fretted over the potential consequences of not attacking the problem vigorously. “What a horrible world it will be if food really becomes short from one year to the next,” he said. “What will that do to society?”

Will we all die like pirates lost at sea, wasting away from scurvy, counting our last rations of hard-tack as we scan the horizon for signs of land? Or will we realize that we have more control over this than we’re allowing ourselves to believe?

Take the stairs!

I’ve discovered that most buildings have special devices that give you the exercise of a Stairmaster, only they simultaneously transport you from one floor to another.

People still look at me like I’m an idiot when I tell them I climb up the twelve flights of steps to our office instead of taking the elevator. It probably doesn’t help that I get into the office panting like a freak with a drop of sweat on my forehead. But I’ve managed to win over a few coworkers with a pretty simple explanation: it’s free exercise.

Modern existence has left most spending much of our days moving only our mouths and our hands for hours on end. We take great pains to avoid walking anywhere or doing any mild level of physical exertion. Then at some point we get motivated and join a gym, so can spend an hour or two making up for the previous eight to ten hours of ass time. I tried to think of a different want to do this – what if you could spread the exercise out over the course of the day?

Sure, I walk into work huffing and puffing, but I get to enjoy a slight tingling in my quads and a pulsing in my lungs as if I’d actually I’ve gotten a cardiovascular work out. The reality is I have, just a very small one. It doesn’t take more than three or four minutes to climb up all those stairs, but it leaves me with the sensation of actually having done something. This contrasts with the typical day that involves sitting in the office, sitting in a taxi, sitting at a press conference, and then sitting on the bus on the way home.

It also offers an alternative when you’re nodding off in the early afternoon. Those are the moments when I usually head for the coffee machine or go downstairs (in the elevator) to buy snacks. I find most of the time I do this I’m not actually hungry or sleepy, just really bored and needing a change of pace. Twelve flights down the stairs, a walk around the block, 12 flights back up, and I’m feeling a lot more awake. And with no snacks or caffeine.

I’ve started to notice the effects of taking the stairs. A couple months after I started this routine, I went on a hike with a friend of mine who was running half marathons, and somehow my lungs were holding up better than his. Friends started commented that I looked skinnier (I guess that’s not hard for me), even though I wasn’t doing much else in the way of exercise. A least a couple people in the office have said they like the idea, and talked about doing it themselves (mostly talk so far, from what I can tell).

Stairs can also teach you interesting things about buildings. Some buildings won’t let you anywhere near them. At my old office in Caracas I once stopped on the way out by security because I tripped a fire alarm by walking down the stairs after I got tired of waiting 10 minutes for the elevator to show up. Our Sao Paulo offices block them except in the case of an emergency. At a hotel I stayed at in Times Square, I spent a few days walking up and down the stairs, which involved wandering through service areas, walking past utility control closets and laundry rooms, nodding confidently to chambermaids as if pretending I really did belong there (eventually a staff member saw me doing it and told me to stop – seeing the fallout over the former head of the IMF I can understand why). My apartment building’s stairs serve as repositories for residents to stow whatever unwieldy objects like large packaging or strollers or broken chairs that residents don’t feel like leaving in their homes.

People sometimes ask me if taking the stairs is all part of, you know, that whole good-for-the-planet stuff I’m all into. Yes and no. Elevators do use a considerable amount of a building’s energy, and I like to think I’m reducing the number of elevator trips every time I take the stairs. The problem is that assumes that somebody else doesn’t take the elevator anyway – somebody might be pushing the button on the 12^th floor just as I walk past the bank of elevators toward the staircase. The elevator would travel anyway, without me in it, which saves a bit of energy but not a huge amount. Unless several hundred people in the building joined the Take the Stairs Challenge ™, you would probably not see a decline in the number of trips the elevator makes. I’m under no delusion that that many people would consider doing this (and am not really upset about it).

At my apartment I may be saving my condominium owner a couple bucks every year by walking, since there are a fewer elevator trips and I’m generally alone in most of them. But that’s not really the point. The benefit is to me. And I can’t even begin to imagine the benefits that the occasional stair hike could provide to millions of people with heart problems, clogged arteries, obesity, or circulation difficulties. Or to people who are just plain bored in the afternoon.