And in the height of the Australian summer, on the eve of Australia Day, that’s what I’m basking in – all things Australian.

When we moved to Britain in 2005, I made the mistake of hanging on to lots of trappings of ‘home’. I took comfort in things American. I basked in my very different-ness. And I spent three of the four years we were there hating the place. In that last year, I finally sought what made Britain so, well, Great. Just as I figured it out and came to love the place, it was time to go.

So, this time around I’m leaving all that American nonsense behind. Yes, I am an American. Never try to hide it. But barring anything unforseen and earth shattering, I’m going to be an American living in Australia. My boys are going to be raised as Australians and I’m going to do my best to insure that they get the best of that.

We’re Australians.

And every day that I listen to the news from the country of my birth, I’m more convinced that this is a good thing.

Like tens of millions of other Americans, I got infected with Obama fever back in 2008. Full of his particular brand of Hope™, I bought into the idea of a transformative politician that would take my creaking country forward into a new progressive behemoth. Tears rolled down my cheeks when his victory was announced. I walked a little straighter as an American abroad after that, full of hope and pride in my country.

A year later, I feel worse that I did at the height of the Second Bush Dynasty.

Worse, because I’ve come to realize that Obama, like Clinton before him, has chosen to govern as a “pragmatic” centrist. That despite all the high flying rhetoric, he has to deal with the same right wing opposition that Clinton had to deal with and as a result, nothing truly transformative is going to get done.

Worse because I now realize how nasty some of my countrymen can be. Worse because I realize that despite massive majorities in two of the three branches of government, real change is not an option in American politics. Worse because I see the vitriol becoming more vitriolic, the polarization becoming more polarized, the black becoming more black, the white becoming more white and the gray? What gray?

I feel worse because I know that any kind of real health care reform is dead. That the system is rigged against real change. That banks and insurance companies and investment firms are more important to those who govern – Republican or Democrat – than you are. Beautifully illustrated by the Supreme Court granting huge multinational corporations the same rights as you and I. And guaranteeing America’s fate as an oligarchy. “Jennifer Government“. Read it. It’s our – well, your – future.

I feel worse as I realize that the nasty, hate infused post-9/11 nationalism wasn’t just a passing trend. That it has blossomed into a particularly vicious sort of populism that loathes the ‘elite’, the educated, the thoughtful, the well-spoken. A sort of populism that feeds on sound bites and half truths and ignorance.

I feel worse because nothing ever changes. Because Barack Obama is no different that George II, Slick Willie, George I or Crazy Ronnie. Because the system is rigged.

I feel worse because I can’t go ‘home’ again. That I’ve had a taste of the alternative and it’s too sweet on my palate to give up. I spent 33 years as an American in America, becoming more and more frustrated and disillusioned. Feeling more and more powerless. Now every day I’m gone, I feel lighter. Happier. I can watch American politics from afar with mild amusement. I can enjoy it for it’s entertainment value. It’s the best reality TV show that nobody has thought to produce.

When it doesn’t affect you.

Go ‘home’ again?

Nope, I’ll take my adopted Antipodean island. I’ll take her languid climate and her blithe people. I’ll take her byzantine cricket and her bizarre ‘football’. I’ll take her dotty, drunken politics and her genial socialism. I’ll take her genial patriotism and inflated sense of international importance. Hell, I’ll even take her unfortunate penchant for mullets and coupe utility vehicles. Because it is summertime in Australia and the living is easy.

I’ve probably managed to piss off my American readers and offend my Australian readers. Ah well, what the hell. I’m going to the beach before the cricket starts and I have to fire up the barbie.

Happy Australia Day.

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John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” is available from .

Inside was the biggest pair of chicken breasts I’d ever seen; each of them was upwards of 400g (just shy of a pound). This had clearly been the Pamela Anderson of chickens.

My thoughts immediately turned to foul play. Hormones. Has to be hormone treated chickens. I know that cattle manufacturers in the U.S. have been adding exogenous growth hormones to their beef stock, clearly Australian chicken men have been doing the same thing.

I’ve become increasingly concerned about eating meat. With beef in particular there are serious environmental and health concerns that I’m struggling to square with my lust for red meat. With a wee one or two in the picture, I decided to cut back a bit – a couple of meatless meals a week. However, faced with these H cup chicken breasts I made the decision to go even further – three maybe four meatless dinners a week – and to actively seek out ‘organic’ meat when we did go carnivorous.

But then I remembered that I am supposed to be a scientist and thus should probably do a bit of research before coming to a conclusion based on a single observation. So off I went in search of the biological explanation for voluptuous chickens.

It didn’t take long. The chicken industry in Australia  is quick to point out that neither hormones nor antibiotics are added to their birds, that the increase in breast size that older consumers are seeing is due only to selective breeding. Being an anti-corporate leftist, I tend to disregard anything that industry advocates say as propaganda, but the most recent survey by the Australian Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry confirms these claims. In their tests, Australian chicken meat is 100% free of exogenous hormones or antibiotics.

Now, I’m fully aware that most of my readers are American, so what about Yank chicken? As in Australia, it is illegal to use growth hormones on poultry in the U.S. and based on the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s testing, American chicken is largely free of hormones and antibiotics.

Looks like chicken is clean. Giant chicken breasts are just a product of some very clever breeders. See, genetics is awesome. Good news for the carnivores among us. There are, of course, still a lot of issues about how poultry is raised and the waste generated by chicken farms. Farms? Ranches? And beef is a whole different kettle of fish, so to speak. American and Australian beef has been shown to contain a whole cocktail of exogenous hormones, at least one of which is used illicitly by bodybuilders and professional baseball players and has been shown to cause DNA mutation at high doses.  

I know that the vegetarians out there are saying to themselves, “well just don’t eat meat, problem solved.” But it isn’t so simple.  When it comes to hormones, it isn’t just beef that we need to worry about. Soybeans, the most readily available protein replacement, contain high levels of an endogenous non-steroidal hormone known as phytoestrogen. These hormones may be good for women, having been linked in some studies to have a mild preventative effect against some types of breast cancer. But for men, and particularly boy children, phytoestrogens may do more harm than good. When Boy Z turned out to be intolerant to standard infant formulas, we stayed away from the soy alternatives. This was due to studies that have been done demonstrating that a high soy diet and/or soy based infant formulas have “adverse effects with respect to carcinogenesis, reproductive function, immune function, and thyroid disease.”  There is a lot of controversy around the soy studies, but I tend to pitch my tent in the better safe than sorry camp when it comes to feeding my kids.

So, chicken is fine. Beef is probably not great for a number of reasons, but man I love a good steak. Soy is OK in reasonable doses. So what that leaves us with, I suppose, is that balanced diet approach that health professionals are always on about.

God, I hate it when the obvious answer is the best one.

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I love Kimya Dawson. Her music on the “Juno” soundtrack helped to make that film and her 2006 album “Remember That I Love You” is just fantastic. She got her start in the band The Moldy Peaches, whose self-titled album is available from .

Image credits:

Chickens feeding

Hens

Chicken shed

But I was back at work for half a day today, which allowed me to clear the cobwebs from my head. With that clarity, I’ve decided that rather than posting cute photos of my sons or moaning about the hardships of life as a father of two, today I want to talk about race.

Yes, I know that after that prelude, I’ve gone and posted a picture of my kids. I was trying to get a good picture of my study, where I do a fair bit of my writing, for a different post – one that I’m no longer interested in writing. I decided to take this shot, however, as an illustration of why it is essentially impossible for me to work from home right now. Creaking bed springs and gurgling baby are not sounds conducive to writing a lecture on human evolution or a report on a new cancer drug.

Your eye was probably immediately drawn to the two flags on the wall and they are what I want to talk about.

My friend Jamie and I liberated the flag on the right, the banner of the State of Florida, from St. George Island State Park during a drug fueled midnight run to New Orleans. I’m pretty sure that we broke both state and federal laws that night and that’s one of the reasons I’m happy to be living outside the reach of the Florida and U.S. criminal justice systems. However, I’d be happy to assist authorities in the apprehension of my accomplice, who was in fact the criminal mastermind. And a Florida Gator fan, which ought to be a crime.

But let’s be honest, if you’re American your eye was drawn to the flag on the left. The old Georgia flag featuring the Confederate battle flag – one of the most potent and divisive symbols that we’ve got in the States. You were probably thinking to yourself,  “Well, I’ll be damned. I know A Free Man has a penchant for college football, but I didn’t realize he was a redneck. A racist. A (shudder) Republican.”

One of the things I don’t miss about the USA is societally mandated political correctness. American society has become so precious about race, gender, disabilities, religion, etc. that it was like a breath of fresh air when I landed in the slightly less PC United Kingdom and dramatically less PC Australia. It’s not that I want to walk the streets spouting racist or sexist diatribes. It has just gone too far in the United States. Gone so far, that a bad joke can get someone fired and exiled from polite society. Gone so far, that we’ve become humourless as a culture.

Gone so far, that legitimate political opposition to a black president is presumed to rooted in racism.

I don’t like the Far Right. I disagree with almost everything that they believe in. But they absolutely have the right to criticize the President. The same way that I, as a radical leftist, had the right to criticize President Bush. I’m sure there are some pissed off white supremacists out there who hate the president because he’s black. But most of the detractors on the right have, in their mind, legitimate political disagreements with Obama. Yes, some of them are being nasty and some are being dishonest. But I think back to 2002-3 when I began to realize that Bush was an incompetent at best or a liar at worse. I wasn’t very nice about him. Nor were a lot of the bomb throwers on the Left. But that had nothing to do with the fact that Bush was a white, Protestant from Texas. Just like the vast majority of the teabaggers’ problems don’t stem from President Obama’s skin color. Let’s get real.

But we need to talk about that Georgia flag. I bought it in 2001 after the state, under heavy political pressure, replaced it with a tepid politically neutral compromise. I picked it up, because at the time I thought Georgia was being cowardly by surrendering to the moral majority of the left – the forces of political correctness. And it was an incredibly unpopular decision in the state, leading to the election of the current governor – Sonny “Praying for Rain” Perdue. (Probably time to get off your knees, governor.) Perdue held a referendum which resulted in the replacement of one Confederate symbol with another one.

I never really ‘flew’ the flag when I was still living in the States. I’m sensitive to the divisiveness of the battle flag and the statement that it makes about an individual who displays it. But that has always annoyed me. Why does it mean I’m a racist if I choose to hang that flag on my wall? I’m kind of an amateur U.S. Civil War history buff and I’ve always had more sympathy for the Confederacy than the Union. I admired the spirit of the rebellious South, their gallant military leaders, their unwillingness to accept the reality that their lifestyle was untenable and their revolution was doomed.

But that doesn’t mean that I’m an advocate of slavery or even racial segregation. And, when it came down to brass tacks, that is what the Confederacy was about – the continuation of slavery. Unfortunately, the symbols of the Confederacy are inextricably tied up with racism.

Ignoring that part of Georgia’s past is nothing more than historical denial. The legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and the battles over segregation are part of what Georgia and the rest of the South are today. I don’t know if you need to fly the Confederate battle flag in front of the state house, but banishing it from the public eye doesn’t do any good either. One could argue that Georgia and the other ten states of the old Confederacy should be required to fly the battle flag lest they forget. It is so oft cited that is almost cliche, but George Santayana’s most famous quote rings true again – “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Today, I don’t know what that flag means to me. I don’t know why, when I pulled it out of a box of stuff we had shipped from the U.S. to the U.K. to Australia, I decided to hang it on the wall of my study. I like it. It doesn’t bear the heavy burdens here in Australia that it does in the U.S.  It reminds me of the five years I spent in Athens in the late 90’s. It reminds me that political correctness is a blunt, ineffective instrument for changing public opinion. But it also serves to remind me of the shameful legacy of race relations in a part of the United States that I love, both despite and because of its history.

It does not, however, mean that I’m a racist. Or a redneck. Or a Republican.

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The coolest man in Country, Dwight Yoakam’s classic 1988 LP “Buenas Noches from a Lonely Room” is available from .

Flag images from Wikipedia.

I’ve been thinking a lot about accents these days, particularly in terms of my kid(s. It is still weird to use the plural). Every time I get an e-mail from my Strange Scottish friend in Oxford she asks, “does Wee Z have an ozzie accent?” And I always reply to this question in the same way – “He only speaks in three word phrases. You daft c*nt.”

We have that kind of relationship.

Daft or no, she’s not far off. Boy Z and Not Max will most likely develop a South Australian accent as they get older and move further away from the parental sphere of influence. I’m not crazy about this, but I guess it’s better than a Sydney accent in a lesser of two evils way*.

I lay awake for a little while last night wanting to know how accents work. This is how I ended up in science – sleepless nights trying to figure out how things work. I want to know why there are so many regional dialects, even within a fairly small geographical area? There are probably a dozen fairly distinct accents in the British Isles – a land mass about the size of the state of California. Why? Where do all these accents stem from and how are they maintained? Why do children pick up the accent of their peers rather than that of their parents, who teach them to speak? Why does  a person maintain the accent of their childhood even after a lifetime away from their childhood home?

So this morning, I got up and started doing some research. I’m not a linguist, but this article seems pretty thorough to me. Apparently your accent is all about peer pressure and mimicry. According to the article, “children who grow up together are a ‘peer group’. They want to speak the same as each other to express their group identity.” But it isn’t that simple:

People do not have a single fixed accent which is determined by their experiences. We can control the way we speak, and do, both consciously and unconsciously. Most people vary their accent depending on who they are speaking with. We change our accents, often without noticing, as we have new life experiences.

This statement, I can definitely relate to. Both my parents were born and raised in Canada, but haven’t lived there since the early 70’s. If you spoke to my Mom, you would never know that she left. She still speaks with a pretty pronounced Ontario accent. My Dad, on the other hand, is a mimic. These days if you had a conversation with him, you would think he spent most of his childhood in north Florida.

Like father, like son.

My family moved around a lot until I was about 10 and we settled down south. At that point, I would guess that I was speaking with a mixture of the eastern Canadian accent of my parents with a bit of western New York that I picked up in elementary school. When we arrived in the pine hammocks of north Florida, my accent marked me as a foreigner among the slow-talking, twangy natives. I found the easiest way to fit in was to mimic the accent. So, at school I tried to speak like a native Floridian. At home, I spoke like a native Canadian. As I got older and struck out on my own, I kept up with this mimicry – picking up a Carolina lilt while living in the Piedmont, a Nordic hoot during my time in the Pacific Northwest. Down in Georgia, I stuffed my mouth with gravel and honey before flattening out my vowels for a stint in the Midwest. When we crossed the Atlantic to Oxford, I started enunciating crisply and studying the diction of BBC television presenters for cues on how to speak to the locals. Down Under, my R’s are vanishing and I’m drawing out my vowels.

I don’t know what kind of accent I have any more. These days, when people meet me for the first time they rarely guess that I’m American. This is partially out of politeness, it’s a bit risky to misidentify someone as a Yank, but I think my accent has just morphed into something that is difficult to identify. In fact, roughly half of the people that meet me for the first time guess that I’m Irish. I’ve never lived in Ireland and Dr. O’C, despite being born in County Cork, has no trace of an Irish accent. But after five years abroad in the UK and Australia, I definitely don’t sound as American as I did before emigrating.

I also found this site in my internet research. Set up by linguists at George Mason University, it has sound files of hundreds of people from all over the world reading the same passage:

Please call Stella.  Ask her to bring these things with her from the store:  Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob.  We also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids.  She can scoop these things into three red bags, and we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station.

I don’t know why they chose these words. Presumably, they have characteristic sounds that differ among different accents. Whatever the reason, it’s a pretty cool resource to compare accents from South Africa to Siberia.

I thought I’d do a little (unscientific**) experiment. If you didn’t know, where would you think I came from based on my accent. Have a listen to my version of “Please call Stella…” and tell me what you think.

Bonus question: what is your favorite and least favorite accent?

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*I find the ‘typical’ Australian accent – the one endemic to New South Wales – to be really grating. It’s the nasal pronounciation, drives me nuts. As does that really nasal northeastern U.S. accent. The South Australian accent is a little softer, more English sounding. Here you are – compare Adelaide with Sydney.

For the record, my three favorite accents are:

1. Glasgow
2. Southern United States (especially the Carolinas)
3. South Africa

And my three least favorite:

1. Texas (thanks W)
2. Eastern Australia
3. New Yawk

**Dr. O’C has pointed out in great detail the many flaws in my experimental design. Damn scientists.

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Johnny Cash’s cover of Tom Petty’s “Southern Accents” is from his 1996 album “Unchained”. It was the second in his ‘American Series’ that catapulted him back to fame after a couple of decades in the Wilderness. Also made him a household name again for Gen X hipsters like your underwhelming correspondent. It’s an outstanding record and if you don’t own it is definitely worth the price of purchase from .

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Image credits:

Mouths

Mimic

Elocution

I grew up with an All-American boy’s passion for the American game. The players whose faces festooned my collection of baseball cards were like idols to me. Steve Garvey, Pete Rose, Willie Stargell, the Niekros – Phil and Joe – Ron Guidry, Don Sutton, George Brett, Dale Murphy – they were demigods battling with bat and pitched ball in the pantheon of Major League Baseball.

I loved everything about the game – the slow pace and the Byzantine rules and scorekeeping. I loved hearing the crack of the bat and the thump of a blazing fastball in the catchers mitt. I loved the national anthem and the organ music in the ball park and the seventh inning stretch.

My Dad is a baseball fan and he passed that on to me. He’s a Dodgers fan, so I was a Dodgers fan growing up. My favorite color was Dodger blue. I can still name the legendary infield of the 1981 World Series winners (Cey, Russell, Lopes and Garvey), can still picture Fernando Valenzuela’s bizarre windup and Tommy Lasorda’s waddling gait when he went out to the mound.

At some point,  I got to the age when you start to disagree with your Dad and then I became a Braves fan – probably just to annoy him. I loved the Braves when they sucked, in the 80’s when they wore powder blue and averaged 65 wins per season. When Dale (The Stormin’ Mormon) Murphy was their sole All-Star. There’s something pure about a team that bad, something simple and something loveable. The best thing was that every single game could be seen on “The Superstation” sandwiched between reruns of “The Dukes of Hazzard” and “Dallas”. That glorious 1995 series win over Cleveland made it all worth while, even if they’ve never won since. I love the Braves for Chipper Jones, who is in his 17th season with the club, a true rarity in modern baseball and Bobby Cox, who holds the major league record for being tossed as a manager, that my friends is a record!

My blind love for baseball started to fade during the 1981 strike, even at 10 years old I recognized that something was rotten in the game that I loved. Slightly wounded, I kept up my adoration for the game – you don’t throw out a true love for one little indiscretion. Or two. Or three. But finally, sometime in the last decade, I tired of being a cuckold. Sure, I hung around for a while. Kept my eye on the standings, watched a game on TV if the Braves were playing, even made it to the ballpark once in a while – but the passion was gone. And when I left the country and keeping up with American sports became a bit tougher, baseball was one of the first to slip away. As I write this post today, I couldn’t tell you where my beloved Braves are in the NL East.

It was a lot of things that made me finally give up - the strikes, the money, interleague play, epidemic free agency – but the final straw was the cheating. The steroids. The first cases hurt a bit, but were forgivable. But as player after player came up dirty, in ‘98 when Sosa and McGwire were chasing Maris’s record while juiced, when Bonds broke Aaron’s record – each of those incidents . Ironically, it was Alex Rodriguez this year who made me just stop caring, a player I don’t really care about. But I remember seeing A.Rod playing for the Mariners in the Kingdome back in 1995. This was the year that the Mariners made the playoffs for the first time in ages and featured such stars as Ken Griffey, Jr. and Randy Johnson and A.Rod. All of whom jumped ship for greener pastures shortly after that season and certainly before they tore down the Kingdome for whatever insurance company sponsored field they put up on the south side of Seattle.

And now, the skinny kid who was playing backup to Luis Sojo is getting paid $50,000 an at bat to play for the evil Yankees and he’s juiced. I don’t care what he or any of them do off the field, but the cheating – I just can’t deal with the cheating. So, baseball? It’s over. It’s not you, it’s me. I just think it’s time to move on. Sure, we can stay friends.

My love affair with Major League Baseball is over, but not my love of the game. There are other places to find baseball in a purer form – on dusty little league fields, college campuses and small minor league parks all over the U.S. One of my favorite movies, and the best baseball movie ever, is “Bull Durham”. This film paints a romantic and hilarious picture of minor league baseball and is probably the only Kevin Costner movie that is ever worth seeing. There are 246 minor league teams spread all over the country, thus you are probably not far from a minor league club. Admission is dirt cheap, parking is not usually a problem and in most parks you can sit close enough to smell the players sweat if that’s your kind of things. A lot of these guys make it to the bigs, so you may get a chance to see a player before he becomes a greedy, drug ridden freak.

When I go to visit my parents in Florida, my Dad and I usually catch a  game. The Daytona Cubs are a Class A affiliate of Chicago playing in the Florida State League against such perennial powerhouses as the Brevard County Manatees and the Lakeland Flying Tigers. The Cubs play at Jackie Robinson Ballpark which sits on the Intercoastal Waterway. It’s so named because, according to the club website in 1946, Robinson came to town for spring training with the Montreal Royals. He was banned from playing in Jacksonville and Sanford, but not in Daytona.. His first plate appearance came in an exhibition game against their parent club, the Brooklyn Dodgers. Robinson then became the first African-American player in the Major Leagues.

Dad and I go to to watch the Cubs, fill up on bad hot dogs and pretzels, I keep score, we try to catch foul balls and usually come away with some kind of free promotion. We enjoy the Florida summer twilight and do the things that fathers’ and sons’ have been doing in America for over a century.

During my last trip to see my parents we got to take Boy Z to a game and I’m grateful for that. He’s not likely to grow up a baseball fan here in Oz (though there’s talk of establishing a professional league Down Under) and will be more like to be a fan of the Adelaide Crows or South Australia Redbacks than the Braves or the Dodgers.  But when we visit the States, I want him to get a glimpse of the joy I got from the American pasttime when I was a kid. I want us to enjoy a game of baseball and the best place for us to do that is not going to be at Turner Field or Dodger Stadium or, god forbid, Tropicana Field but at Jackie Robinson Ballpark or one of the hundreds of minor league parks scattered around my homeland. Those are the places where real baseball gets played today.

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I’ve dumped MLB, however I do still love music about the game. Here, in no particular order, are my five favorite songs about baseball:

• Billy Bragg & Wilco – “Joe DiMaggio” from “Mermaid Avenue Vol. II” (Buy from )
• The Felice Brothers – “Cooperstown” from “Yonder is the Clock” (Buy from )
• John Fogerty – “Centerfield” from “The Long Road Home – The Ultimate John Fogerty & Creedance Collection” (Buy from )
• Whiskeytown – “Empty Baseball Parks” the source of today’s title is from the unreleased “Those Weren’t the Days”. You can get part of that album here for free.
• Belle & Sebastien – “Piazza, New York Catcher“, because this…

“San Francisco’s calling us, the Giants and Mets will play
Piazza, New York catcher, are you straight or are you gay?”

…is awesome. From “Dear Catastrophe Waitress” (Buy from )

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*If anyone can tell me why, there’s a prize in it. How about a copy of that unreleased Whiskeytown album for the first person who leaves a comment explaining the Soundgarden/baseball link.

** I’m plagiarizing myself a bit here. Some of the words and the sentiment in this post comes from one that I wrote when I first started blogging. But most of y’all haven’t read it, so I figured it is as good as new.

Image credits:

81 Dodgers

The Stormin’ Mormon

Basball player

UK advocacy group the Children’s Food Campaign released a report in May analyzing the nutritional information provided for 107 foods marketed toward babies and young children in Britain. They found that “several products contained levels of sugar or saturated fat higher than those in adult products considered ‘junk food’.”

The CFC used the British Food Standards Agency guidelines for healthy levels of saturated fats and sugars. For example, the FSA defines a product as ‘high’ in saturated fats if its level exceeds 5 g per 100g, for sugar the threshold is 15 g per 100 g. These are the levels are for adult foods, so for babies and young children these amounts should probably be lower.

The CFC was interested in saturated fats because they are often indicative of the presence of trans fats. The level of trans fats, which have been associated with coronary heart disease, are not required to be disclosed in the UK, so saturated fats are the best indicator for these. While children need a higher level of fat in their diets than adults, saturated fats are not necessary. Breast milk, for example, contains only 1 – 2% saturated fat.

The CFC was worried about sugar for obvious reasons. There is strong evidence that regular consumption of sugary foods makes it more likely that they will develop a taste for sweet foods. Excessive consumption of sugary foods is linked with obesity and tooth decay. Sugar levels in children’s food is tricky, because most fruits have naturally high levels of sugar. The CFC report makes a distinction between foods that have naturally high levels of sugar – banana puree for example – and those with unnecessary added sugar.

Now, to be fair, none of the foods that the CFC flagged as having worrying levels of sugar and fat were baby ‘meals’ – creamy chicken curry, for example – or pureed fruits. These products seem to be safe. The products that we should be concerned about are snack foods – biscuits (cookies), rusks, savoury snacks and desserts. The CFC found that the three major baby food manufacturers had at least one product that had high levels of sugar, saturated fat or both. Heinz was the worst offender with 25% of their products containing unhealthy levels of sugar or fat.

The CFC points out that a lot of these products make health claims that “while factually true, distract the consumers’ attention away from the less healthy attributes of the product”. In other words, baby food manufacturers are deliberately misleading consumers. What the CFC doesn’t point out is a pet peeve of mine. Some of the products that they flagged are ‘organic’. Folks, this is important – organic does not mean healthy.

After reading this report, my curiosity was piqued. Is this a UK problem or a world wide one? I decided to do a bit of research.

Because I live in Australia, I am more concerned with products marketed for children Down Under. I’m aware, however, that most of my readers are American but an exhaustive survey of the multitude of baby food brands available in the U.S. would require a significant investment of time. Nonetheless, a quick analysis of American baby foods reveals that the trends observed in the U.K. are also seen in U.S. products.

Most of the American baby food manufacturers do not publish complete nutritional information for their products online. Heinz, for example, publishes thorough information for all of their jarred food, but interestingly does not provide information for savory snacks, cookies and many dessert items. Beech Nut – didn’t Beech Nut used to be a type of chewing tobacco? – does not use a standard serving size for cookies and snacks, instead opting for providing nutritional information per cookie. This makes it difficult to determine how much sugar and saturated fat their products contain. Somehow I doubt that this is an accident. Gerber should be lauded for transparency if not for healthfulness of their products as they offer full and clear nutritional information on their company website. Virtually all of their Gerber Graduates line of snacks contain very high levels of sugar – up to 57g per 100g serving in their Yogurt Melts. To their credit, most of these products are low in saturated fat. However, it seems that the CFC’s findings regarding baby foods in the UK are very similar in the United States.

There are only a few major baby food manufacturers in Australia. Heinz has the major market share with Only Organic and Golden Circle fighting over the remainder. Only Organic is pretty good, with only a couple of products exceeding the recommended levels of sugar. Both of these products contained large amounts of sugars from fruit sources and thus are not likely a major concern. Only Organic does not produce a snack food line, however. The two companies that do, Heinz and Golden Circle, offer no useful nutritional information online and have not yet replied to requests for information. (I used my professional affiliation in the request thinking that association with a university and a school which includes a large Nutrition Science program would get their attention).

A quick trip to the closest Woolies, however, answered my questions in a disturbing way. As in the U.K. study, most of the baby food  ‘meals’ and fruit purees were fine with very few additives and fat and sugar levels well within acceptable boundaries. But almost every snack or dessert food on the baby food shelves contained well over the acceptable levels of sugar and saturated fat. Every item in the Heinz Little Kids line exceeds these recommendations with levels of saturated fat from 2.5 to 8.1 g per 100 g and sugar from 40 to 52 g per 100 g. These products make claims like 35% Less Sugar than the leading brand (Heinz is the leading brand of biscuits targeted to infants and toddlers), No Added Colours or Preservatives or my favorite – All Natural. Folks, lard is natural but you wouldn’t feed it to your infant, would you?

CHOICE Food for Kids, an excellent consumer website, has thorough information on a number of other foods targeted at the toddler market and provides more information about the unfortunate state . Some of the worst offenders are products that imply healthiness. Mother Earth Fruit Crumble Muesli Bars, for example, contain 6.7 g per 100 g saturated fat and 30 g per 100 g sugar. Go Natural Berry Pieces in Yoghurt are one of the worst products on the market, containing a whopping 18.2 g fat per 100 g and 58.1 g sugar per 100 g. While they are more than half sugar, these tasty treats contain neither real fruit nor real yogurt. Yummy, dig in kids!

Another insidious trend is using well known children’s entertainment characters. The cloyingly sweet, yet remarkably slender Wiggles are probably not eating a lot of their ABC Letter Biscuits (7.6 g of saturated fat per 100 g).

It isn’t just sweet treats. Heinz Little Kids Cheesymite Bread Sticks have an unacceptable level of saturated fat. Every kid’s favorite ‘cheese’ food, Kraft Singles, pack a whopping 13.9 g of saturated fat per 100 g and 1.4 g of sodium per 100 g.

In short, Australia is in the same boat as the UK. If we buy baby and toddler food off the shelf, with the assumption that they are safe and healthy products – as advertised – we’re feeding our kids crap.

The CFC report offers a number of recommendations, most of which are directed towards the companies and government regulators. I’ve got a few suggestions as a parent.

• No matter what country you live in, Heinz kid’s snacks are junk. Don’t buy them.
• Don’t believe anything you read on a box. The health claims are marketing tools and are often deceptive. Look at the nutritional information. The UK Food Standards Agency recommends healthy levels of no more than 5 g per 100g saturated fat, 15 g per 100 g sugar and 1.5 g per 100 g sodium in any food products. Bear in mind that these recommended levels are for adults, kids probably need less. If the nutritional information is incomplete, they are trying to hide something. Don’t buy those products.
• Don’t give kids cookies as a snack. The CFC recommends raw fruit or vegetables or natural yogurt. I know it is easier said than done. I’m guilty of taking the path of least resistance. Boy Z lived on those Heinz Little Kids ‘fruit bars’ for a while. I won’t be making the same mistake for baby #2. There are reasonably healthy packaged snack foods available. The CHOICE Food For Kids site is a good resource in Australia. If anyone knows of similar sites in the UK or US, let me know and I’ll link to them.

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“Nina Simone Sings the Blues” is available from .

Image credits:

Feeding baby

We’re a good match:

Be forewarned – I’m pissed off. I’m sick to my stomach and I’ve got some strong words regarding my homeland. Some of my American readers may be offended, I may even lose some readers today. But to be perfectly honest I’m not in the business of stroking the egos of my fellow countrymen and I’m not in the mood to mince words.

I’m disgusted by the execution of Dr. George Tiller, the Kansas physician gunned down at church this weekend. I’m not going to talk about abortion because ultimately, abortion is not the point. I’m not interested in an argument about abortion. My views on the subject aren’t black and white, nor are they particularly relevant.

There’s a meme circulating about some of the media that Right Wing talkers bear some of the responsibility for Tiller’s killing. As an example they cite hosts like Bill O’Reilly, who referred to him as Tiller the Baby Killer, compared him with a Nazi and went through great pains to paint the doctor as a murderer. They say that he stirred up the passions of the radical anti-abortion movement by essentially painting the doctor as a mass murderer. Between this killing and one last year in a Tennessee church in which the murderer cited a book by right wing author Bernard Goldberg it does seem that there are some truly unhinged individuals listening to the Far Right. But I think this is an oversimplification – something at which the American media excels.

For the last month, a la Morgan Spurlock’s “Supersize Me”, I’ve been listening to some of the far right talkers on a daily basis - O’Reilly, Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin and Michael Savage. And like Spurlock, with a steady diet of this tripe I feel sick and rotten inside. These people mislead for a living – plucking stories from the news and sound bites from enemies (and anyone who disagrees with them is an enemy) to support an agenda driven message. These people are frightening in their capacity for hatred of those with whom they disagree. Homophobia is rife in the Far Right as is misogyny. Savage regularly refers to homosexuals as ’sodomites’ and talks about the ‘fetid skirts’ of women in power. Levin recently suggested to a female caller that her husband ‘put a gun to his head’ rather than listen to her speak.

After a month of listening to these guys I’ve had enough. I can’t take anymore. I was interested in listening to a perspective with which I disagree and still am. I was amused for a while, then bemused. But after a month of listening I found that some of the hate that they spew into the ether was finding its way into my head. Not knowing how to process it, I started to feel a little bit dirty inside. I can’t handle this perspective. It’s too angry. Too rooted in fear and hatred. And I’m just not that kind of guy. I live pretty happily without hatred, anger and fear. I want to keep it that way. I’ve unsubscribed from all these Far Right podcasts. I’ll stick with The Economist and Counterpoint for my right wing perspective.

Appalling as these people are, as full of hate and vitriol, they aren’t responsible for Tiller’s death. They are not accessories to the crime. No more than Keith Olberman is responsible for the slaying of an army recruiter in Arkansas. Certainly not on their own. They created an environment in which it was acceptable to despise the work that Tiller was doing, but they didn’t pull the trigger.

Tiller’s murder is indicative of a greater problem, of a disease that has infected my homeland. And lest you think I’m a standard ranting Leftist, this disease isn’t just being spread by the Far Right. What about guns? The Left has muzzled itself on the issue of gun control. It seems like every week there’s one of these killings. In 2004, 81 people a day died from gun shot wounds in the United States. About half of these are suicides, but still – 81 people a day. In the last month, 57 people have died in seven different mass shooting events – dead at the hand of some madman with easy access to a legal gun. Earlier this year we commemorated the tenth anniversary of the Columbine shootings. And the Democratic Party has been silent on gun control for about the same amount of time. We – the people who don’t fancy getting shot by some random psycho – have lost the war.

The NRA has won and sits bloated and smug on its coffers while America shoots itself – repeatedly – in the foot.

And then there’s the media itself. The media that is so obsessed with ‘fairness’ that it shows two sides (and only two) to every story – one is either for abortion or against abortion, one feels that it is either a fundamental right or murder with no room for nuance.  The media that glamourizes violence by splashing murderers faces all over the television for weeks after a grievous crime. The media that creates a carnival atmposphere whereever it goes – with bold headlines and special reports. The media that is unwilling or unable to scratch below the surface of a story, opting instead for the fifteen second sound bite to explain the news.

But do you know who bears the most responsibility for Tiller’s death?

We do. We who will watch the press coverage with disgust, outrage and sadness for a few days and then move on. We’ll think, ‘how sad’ and ’something must be done’ for a week or so. But then we’ll find another shiny object to distract us.  We’ll find some new story to briefly grip our attention. We’ll go back to watching American Idol and I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. We’ll go back to moaning about our jobs and our families and the difficulty of life.

And nothing will change.

Nothing ever changes.

But something has changed irrevocably for George Tiller’s wife and children. They won’t be getting back to life as normal in a few days. I’ve never lost a spouse or a parent, so I don’t know how long it takes to mourn but I don’t imagine that they’ll be sitting down with a bowl of popcorn to watch the next episode of The Real Housewives of Wherever the Hell any time in the near future. And even if they do there is going to be a yawning hole in their lives where their father/husband used to be. How the hell do you fill that hole?

I hear on almost a daily basis about just how wonderful the United States of America is – a force for good in the world, a beacon of freedom and liberty, a noble and powerful country to be admired and imitated. I’ve felt that myself. I felt it with the election of Barack Obama very recently (that feeling is rapidly fading). I feel it when I think about the U.S. that saved the world from Hitler. I feel it when I think about the moon missions and biomedical advances and American fiction and jazz and rock and roll.

But today I call bullshit on the myth of America.

With the death of George Tiller, I see the United States of America in 2009 as a cancer patient, rotting away from the inside. The United States of America in 2009 is a parody of itself, a nation self-obsessed, a nation trillions of dollars in debt but still spending hundreds of billions of dollars for a military to protect itself from an imagined enemy while its people can’t afford to go to the doctor. The Unites States of 2009 spends countless hours arguing about the trivia of who can and cannot get married while madmen can buy guns at the local Wal-Mart. The United States of 2009 doesn’t make anything and sits idly by while jobs go overseas and people lose their homes. The United States of 2009 watches with the appropriate amount of manufactured horror while innocent people get gunned down at work, at school, in the street, in their cars or at church. And then the United States of America in 2009 changes the channel and thinks to itself…

But everybody’s gotta die sometime and we can’t save everybody
It’s the best that we can do.

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The legendary Steve Earle’s “Jerusalem” is available from .

Probably a good thing, as the day of the DJ is long gone and I don’t really have the stomach to be a talk radio host. You see, after a week spent listening to Savage and Levin, I was all prepared to come out today guns a-blazing in my best impression of a talk jock. I was ready to spew vitriol and poorly researched opinions masked as fact. I was poised to skewer the American health care disaster, was itching to tear down the lies that have been spread surrounding tax rates in countries with socialized health care, was formulating a conceit about the mythical ‘Middle Class’ in America.

But then as I was walking to catch the bus this morning I asked myself “What’s the point?”

When I write political rants I basically only get myself upset. For the most part I’m preaching to the choir and if you disagree with me I’m not arrogant enough to believe that you’re going to change your mind. What’s the point? Post another picture of the boy and move on.

I mean, I know that I pay a lower tax rate in Australia (26% versus 28% plus) then I would (and did) in the US. It’s hard to gauge the quality of health care, but I know that the infant mortality rate is lower in Britain (4.8 per 1,000) and Australia (4.4) than it is in the US (6.3). I also know that life expectancy is higher in Britain (77.7) and Australia (79.8) than it is in the US (76.1). I know that, if you’re an American taxpayer, you’re getting screwed – that most of your taxes are going to pay for a ridiculously bloated and largely unnecessary military rather than the basic necessities for your survival. I know that I’ve gotten outstanding, compassionate medical care in all three countries. I know that the only difference is that in Australia and Britain I don’t pay for it and they make house calls.

I know all these things because I’ve experienced all three systems. I know what I prefer and I know that I wouldn’t even consider moving back to my homeland unless they sorted out the health care mess. I would much rather pay taxes that get reinvested in the health care system than pay insurance premiums that just line the pockets of insurance company executives. I can’t imagine going back to the States and relying on the fickle rules of some insurance company or my employment status for my son’s well being.

It’s not just health care – there’s education. In the Western European style social democracies, one of the responsibilities of the government is to offer affordable tertiary education to those who desire and have earned the opportunity. Therefore, university costs are heavily subsidized. In fact, a university education was free until very recently in the UK.The cost of a college education has skyrocketed in the last couple of decades in the U.S., pricing a lot of people out of the market and leaving the rest massively in debt after four years. I know from first-hand experience. It’s important to me that my kids have a shot at a university education, but another reason I would be reluctant to return to the States is that we should have started saving about five years ago in order to pay for it.

Let’s assume, as Dr. O’C prays, that Boy Z becomes a scholar. What would it cost to send him to the finest higher education institution in the three countries under discussion? We’ll focus on public institutions*, assume resident tuition and include all estimated living costs (food, housing, etc. all in U.S. dollars). To get a Bachelor’s degree from Oxford University would cost us about $45,000. The same degree from the Australian National University in Canberra would leave us about $41,000 poorer. But, if Boy Z decided to head to the Sodom of the Left Coast and got his degree from UC Berkeley, we’d be $114,000 in debt.  Even if he went to my alma mater, the finest university in the South – The University of Georgia, we’d still be down $68,000.

I’ve gone further with this than I intended – but with less ranting than originally planned at least. And this is where I ask again – what’s the point? If you’re reading this and aren’t living in Britain or Australia (or Canada or Sweden or France or Germany or Latvia or basically any other industrialized country) and you’re now convinced that a touch of socialism is a good thing, chances are you’re not packing your bags.

I guess the point is that the people who are telling you that socialized medicine doesn’t work are either liars or idiots. Or both. The people who are teabagging and telling you that higher taxes will break the back of the middle class are either dangerously deceitful or morons. The fact of the matter is that you, those of you who are residents of the US, are getting the shaft.

To be 100% honest, I really don’t think it’s going to change. This idea – that taxes and government are bad – is so ingrained in the American psyche that I don’t believe even the new administration with Democratic majorities in both houses is going to be able to sort it out. I did the same thing that a lot of you did – 52% in fact – voted for Obama and hoped that he would be able to change what is a broken system. I know it’s early, I know he has a year or so to take the big steps that need to be taken before the 2010 congressional races start up.

But listening to these guys on the Right and listening to the people that call in to their shows, I just don’t think it is going to happen.

Well, there’s some upbeat Friday reading for you, gentle readers. Y’all have a good weekend, you hear?

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* Just for kicks, I checked out Harvard – $208, 000.

The Killers’ “Hot Fuss” is a great record and is available from .

Image credits:

Maypole

Socialism cartoon

Socialism poster

There’s a song on “Grave Dancers Union” that I haven’t been able to get out of my head for roughly the last four years. It’s a handful of lines from the chorus of this slightly cheesy track that keep bouncing their way around my old auditory association cortex…

And oh, I am so homesick
But it ain’t that bad
Cause I’m homesick for the home I’ve never had.

It isn’t just since the beginning of this expat adventure that this song has taken its place in the soundtrack of my life. The first time I heard Pirner’s woeful voice, Seattle 1993, it hit home. Home – that’s the key. I didn’t (and don’t) really know what the word means. At the time, I was 3,000 miles away from the closest approximation of ‘home’ for me – my parents’ house. By that point in my life however, that didn’t correspond to ‘home’. Seattle wasn’t home, as much as I had hoped it would be, I was restless there and morbidly confused.

I’ve spent some part of the last fifteen years trying to figure out where ‘home’ was, what it meant. With my expatriation four and a half years ago, the concept became even more confusing. Quite literally I had ‘withdrawn’ myself ‘from my homeland’.  Over the years, my definition of the word has made the transition from wherever sleep found me on a given night through wherever my paycheck got sent up to wherever my budding family is at any given time.

And that’s where it stands today. Home is where Dr. O’C, Boy Z and I are at any given time. On a good day, that works for me. But I’m less than a year in Australia and on a lot of days I just don’t feel at home. In the course of a day, a simple thing – a steering wheel on the wrong side of the car, a nasal Aussie twang, bone dry hills – can serve as a vivid reminder of the utter foreignness of my ‘home’.

This post is going all over the place, but so is my mind right now. All this thinking and writing about home has me thinking about my national identity – something that is starting to fade the longer I’m away from my homeland. I catch myself getting sucked into the stereotypes about Americans that I encounter on a daily bases, despite knowing better. In one of the Q&A’s that my Interview 2009 has generated there was talk about keeping up kids’ national identities in international relationships. That was something that’s always been very important to me – I made sure to get Boy Z his U.S. citizenship, I stock his toy box with tokens of America. Hell, I dress him in American flag inspired shirts that would embarrass me if we were living in the States.

But what I’m beginning to wonder is whether or not it is important for Boy Z to be aware of his national identity as he’s growing up. I was keenly aware of and reveled in mine. I was of Italian descent. I was born of Canadian parents. I was a New York yankee in King Cotton’s court (or King Tobacco’s more accurately). But all this awareness of where I came from only served to make me feel ‘different’ from my Anglo-Saxon, American, southern fellows. I took that sense of being different and ran with it in some pretty stupid directions. I got great ‘pleasure’ out of feeling different (read superior) to those around me, but it didn’t ever get me much other than a sense of futile alienation. In fact it is only when I started to look for similarities with those around me that I started to feel happy with life.

Chances are that Boy Z is going to grow up an Aussie bloke. I don’t see another trans-continental move in the cards for us any time soon. Does it really matter that he was born in England, that his Dad is an American, that his Mum is Irish? Or would he be better served to settle in amongst his Antipodean brethren and just fit in? Would he be better off accepting that he’s like his peers – going through the same things at the same time. I don’t know the answer to these questions, but a lot of times I think that life could have been easier if I had run with the pack more rather than sitting in the corner feeling like…

We are not of this world
And there’s a place for us
Stuck inside this fleeting moment
Tucked away where no one owns it
Wrapped up in a haste,
And by mistake got thown away
And oh, I am so homesick

Maybe it’s time to stop listening to Soul Asylum…

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I shouldn’t be hard on Soul Asylum. I’ve been listening to ‘Grave Dancers Union’ while I write this one and even sixteen years on it sounds damn good (if a bit earnest). Check it out on .

From frozen Sverige, we got the news of an addition to the clan. The brood of Dr. O’C’s sister and brother-in-law grew by one as they welcomed their third kiddie, and first daughter, early this morning. Here’s the first picture of little Amber, for which I’m pretty sure Dr. O’C’s sister will be kicking my ass the next time she’s down under.

Boy Z had the chance to spend some time with his maternal grandfather over the weekend. One of the troubles with having family in five different countries is that we don’t get together as much as we would like. This was the first time Dr. O’C’s dad had a chance to meet Boy Z in person. The boy is usually painfully shy around people that he doesn’t know well (just ask Arizaphale). But a couple of minutes after meeting his Grandad, he was absolutely in love. Not even 18 months old and the boy’s already got Genetics sussed. Like father like son.

Finally, back Stateside, my Dad will – barring any last minute reconsideration by the NSA – be sworn in as a U.S. citizen on Friday. A mere 35 years after emigrating to the States from Canada, he’s ready to spurn the country of his birth. Behold, your soon to be fellow American. Congratulations, Dad, don’t waste your vote on the Republicans.

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Belle and Sebastian’s “Fold Your Hands, Child, You Walk Like A Peasant” is available from .