Tweet What You Eat

Originally posted on the Slow Food USA Blog.

Back in October when I began tracking everything I ate in a month using twitter, I had no idea what the list would reveal. I'd like to think my eating is pretty deliberate, so I never would have guessed how much I would learn about my eating habits - and myself - through this project. The idea was originally to help me remember everything I had eaten in the past - but it has also made me think more and more about where my next meal would come from.

While I could have just written a list the old fashioned way, I decided to take this into the digital world to exploit fun analysis tools and the ability to share. This graph shows higher word frequency by increased size. The easiest thing to notice is that I eat a lot - and I have a sweet tooth. My coworkers and roommates have long harangued me for my big meals. When you look at my eating over 54 days I was eating an average of only 4.37 meals times a day. I don't snack much - I have a large breakfast, large lunch, sometimes a mid-afternoon snack, a mid-sized dinner, and always a dessert. I ate the most on Mondays (when my roommate was always home to eat with me) and the least on Saturdays (when I would usually cook a brunch and dinner and nothing more).

My spending stayed mainly local. I spent a slightly larger percent of my income on food in October than September - 13.11% - likely because of higher prices of produce as the summer's bounty waned and because I had several restaurant-frequenting guests in town. The breakdown of where my money was spent stayed pretty similar to the preceding months:

• 52.1% of my food spending was with my CSA and the local farmer's market (by number, 72% of my meals contained home cooked elements)
  
• 18.3% of my food spending was at brick-and-mortar grocers (a vast majority going to nuts, chocolate, rice and pasta)
  
• 5.9% for ice cream (26% of my meals contained prepared or purchased foods - a good bit of which was ice cream)
• 2.3% for drinks
  
• 18.3% for restaurant meals (restaurant meals only constituted 8% of my meals by number of occurrences - showing how much cheaper cooking at home is!)
  

Looking at the content of my meals, there are clear trends. I am a creature of habit who eats a lot of pancakes - nearly half of my days begin with them. I also eat a lot of chocolate - it appears in my diet 1.27 times a day on average. Other most frequently eaten items are no surprise to me - 43 instances of apples (all local!) and 48 instances of bread or toast (all homemade!). I ate duck twice as often as chicken (if you buy the whole bird, they are similar prices per pound at the market - and duck is so much tastier!), but only had beef four times. I fry (15) about as much as I sautee (14), which I do both more often than I steam (11), but I bake or roast my food most of all (21).

As much fun as analyzing the data in hindsight had been, the process itself was just as edifying. Spending the time writing what I ate was really centering - I didn't consume things mindlessly. The voyeuristic aspect of the project created an invisible pressure - knowing someone could be judging my decisions subtly pushed me to keep doing the right thing.

A friend pointed out I wasn't the first person to Tweet What I Eat - there's actually a whole fad diet around the idea that collective, silent pressure through exposure can help you lose weight. Though I did lose weight during the course of this exercise (10 pounds!), it wasn't the deliberate goal. A brief period in which I tracked calories (using one of the many iPhone apps that integrates with Twitter) I found that despite the volume of food, with the abundance of veg and homemade goods, I was eating about what I should for my age and activity level.

My aim wasn't to change my eating, but to prove that even in New York City, it's possible to eat local, healthy, good clean, fair food. Even without big brother watching, I will continue to gorge on homemade pancakes and roasted root veggies - but for now, the project is going offline. The archives are all still in the tweet-o-sphere at nleamy.

Amazing Tongue Tricks

Originally published on the Slow Food USA Blog

I never thought I would find myself drinking white vinegar on a Saturday night, but this past weekend, I was doing exactly that.

In my constant quest to expand my palate, last Saturday some friends and I ate miracle fruit - and saw just how much taste perception can change in a single evening. Miracle fruit - a name that is endearing and whimsical, but touch of hyperbole - is a small, red berry that is native to West Africa. While in and of itself it is rather tasteless, it contains a glycoprotein that binds with taste-buds - making sour things taste sweet, and shifting a person's entire range of flavor a bit. I originally read about miracle fruit in the New York Times a year ago, but finally made the plunge last weekend. I bought my berries online on Monday and they were delivered by FedEx to the Slow Food USA national office freeze dried on Friday.

Saturday evening, a friend and I assembled a wide selection of foods that we thought might taste interesting - from olives and apples to beer and limes. We invited a small crew over to my apartment, and tossed the berries in our mouths. To get the full effect, the berry must lull about in your mouth for five minutes before you can start eating other foods with your new sense of taste.

As the berries did their magic, participants wondered aloud about the experiment I had pulled them into. "Are you sure this is safe?" one friend asked. "Are you sure this is legal?" chimed in another.

Once the berry's power set in, we began munching. Suddenly lemons tasted like they were candied. The red onions that typically make my eyes tear-up with their spicy glory, suddenly tasted watery and dull. Chipotle-Tabasco sauce was like chocolate syrup. Raw beets seemed extra earthy, and so well rounded. White vinegar tasted like sugared syrup and with an overwhelming memory of Easter egg dying.

Some foods didn't change at all - carrots still tasted like carrots - but for the most part it was a pretty wild experience. By the time we sat down for dim sum an hour later, the effects of this miraculous berry had worn off - but the idea still sticks with me. Taste is only one of many ways I interact with the food I eat and it is so easily tricked - even by nature.

In the 1970s, food companies distilled the essential chemical from miracle fruit and proposed it as a natural - if trippy - sweetener. The US government ruled it out, but so many similar additives have slipped through the cracks since. Chemicals naturally found in corn have been extracted and bent to become calorie-free sweeteners. Naturally occurring MSG gives mushrooms their savory, musky flavor - but the synthetic version of this universal flavor enhancer is strongly reviled. The line between honest eating and confounding consumption becomes ever twisted. Because miraculin was denied as an additive and the fruit itself is highly perishable, miracle fruit will likely never make it big. It will remain as a strange and rare way to change your perception of taste, and nothing more.

The experience will go down with other 'madeleine memories' - the first time I ate a fresh tomato from my grandfather's garden; those fantastic spring rolls that made my stomach flutter in Thailand; a sip of warm milk from a cow I had just hand-milked; - but this taste will have a little asterisk by it. Sunday morning I tried another spoonful of white vinegar - sans miracle fruit - and it was incredibly, but reassuringly, bitter again.

Stalking my Stomach

Originally posted on the Slow Food USA blog.

Eating is something I take very seriously - and so is the concept of memory. Yet in spite my love of eating, I often have a hard time remembering what I ingest - even just a day or two later.

I moved in with an old friend at the start of September and we have been having dinner together most nights - but with time I began forgetting what I had cooked. Knowing my love of data collection, he suggested I start writing our menus down. In college I studied history, and the intersection of memory and record is really fascinating to me. In this case, how does the concept of enjoying a meal change when I can't recall it without the help of notes?

I began tracking our dinners, but soon enough that expanded to jotting down all my meals, snacks, and desserts. At that point I realized, why keep this to myself when I could share it with the world through twitter?

This step changed the process for me. What began as a way to remember personal experiences, became a willfully public statement about my food decisions. Knowing that someone - anyone - could see what I eat has begun a curious change in my behavior.I have always eaten well, but now the pressure is even greater. Social pressure, though silent (and potentially non-existent!), made me want to strive to eat well.

Once I had begun down this path, why stop there? Looking at my consumption is interesting, but then I realized I could bring the analysis further by bringing in how much all of this cost. I keep pretty good track of my finances, so I began pulling numbers.

New York can be a tricky place to eat on a budget - but in the ten months since I landed here, I have found my way around the markets. I now eat what I want while spending only 12.04% of my income on buying local, good, clean, fair, food. I am slightly above the average American spending of 9.8% of disposable income on food, but doing pretty well.

Looking backwards at the month of September, my food spending was split like so:

• 13.0% for my CSA deliveries (Each week I receive around 30 pounds of vegetables and fruits from a Long Island farm.)


• 44.7% for the farmer's market (I usually buy two birds a month, a touch of sausage, some cheeses, dried beans, supplementary veggies, some flour for bread baking, and dairy.)


• 21.9% for brick-and-mortar grocers (Mostly at a local cheese store, and a dry goods seller for nuts and dried fruits, chocolate, peanut butter, some flour, and spices.)


• 6.1% for ice cream (Yeah. My ice cream habit is bad enough that I keep an entire spending category for it.)


• 4.8% for drinks (I enjoy the occasional glass of wine or cocktail when out on the town.)


• 9.5% for restaurant meals (An infrequent a slice of pizza and a meal in a sit-down local twice a month or so.)

I will be interested in continuing to learn about my own eating habits through this experiment - and I would be happy to have you follow along. You can follow my consumption on twitter here or searching for my handle, NLeamy. I indicate food that is homemade with the tag (h), prepared food are labeled with a (p) , and restaurant meals by (r). In about a month I hope to write another update with what I've learned and how my eating is changing.

Superlatives: The Bests and Worsts of Travel

People don't want to hear about the things you kinda liked or thought were kinda interesting while traveling. They want to hear about the biggests, brightests, bests... or worsts. This is list of lists of those things; all the extremes split into bite size categories.

Best foods I ate:

• Chicken in a chipotle sauce served at an Argentinean restaurant in Texcoco. Creamy, spicy, served with soggy french fries which are perfect to dab up excess sauce.
• Cohorizo enchiladas in Chiapas that demonstrated how great a sausage can be. Crisp, vibrantly flavored, and dripping fat.
• 30¢ tacos from the place by the movie theater in Texcoco. Savory and crunchy and salty and fresh and amazing. The best food I have ever had for 30¢.
• A meal in La Olla, in Oaxaca City Mexico: Oaxacana pasilla chile rellano with refried black beans and fennel; tomato and tomatillo salsa with unknown savory spice; guacamole made with a nutty flavored local avocado.
• Amazing Vietnamese spring rolls in Eat Me in Bangkok, Thailand. Duck, and mint leaves, cucumber, and sweetness. Made me feel like I was falling out of a dream.
• Chicken in curry paste and pork in coconut cream with red chili at an unnamed roadside stand on Ko Chang. Both were so steeped in flavor that the tastes were lingering in the mouth well after I had finished eating them.
• An amuse-gueule of salmon mousse with a tomato concasse and a little sesame stick. Appetizer of snails with wild forest mushrooms, cream sauce and thyme, with crispy crust. Main course of guinea hen with foie gras and wild mushrooms wrapped in a crust with brown butter sauce, with green beans, carrots, and small potatoes in Colmar France. After, I felt a bit like I would pop. (I did not).
• In Genoa I had a pesto dish which made me a bit weak in the knees.
• In Florence I had a pig side which tasted just like everything should taste. It was salty in a way which slid down your throat.
  

The most impressive things which were made by dead people:

• Teotihuacán
• Monte Albán
• Baths of Nezahualcoyotl
• The National Palace in Bangkok
• The Golden Temple
• The Mini Taj
• Duomo of Florence
• Pantheon
• Pyramids at Giza
  

Coolest Animals I saw in the wild

• Parrots
• Monkeys, monkeys, monkeys
  
• Crocodiles (including babies!)
• Raccoon
• Puffer fish
• Iguana
• Geckos
• Other small lizards
• Turtles
  
• Pelicans
• Storks
  
• Crabs
• Guinea Pigs
  

Animals I saw on my plate:

• Rabbit
• Worms
• Crickets
• Ant eggs
  
• Cow
• Pig
• Sheep
• Chicken
• Duck
  
• Many unidentified fish
• Snails
• Baby cow
• Guinea Hen
• Goose
  
• Scorpion (okay, not on my plate, but a mezcal which had a scorpion in the bottle and an obscene flavor.)

Strangest things I imbibed:

• Mezcal – an alcoholic beverage which can best be described as if A-1 steak sauce decided to start producing tequila.
• Tibetan Butter Tea – This drink is quite literally just a big glass of melted Yak butter. Even I, The Lover of Butter, couldn’t take it. Added a bunch of honey and was able to make it through half the drink – but not without feeling quite ill after.
• Chartreuse - at a Mexican family birthday party I had this brightly colored drink forced upon me by a man who was taking a bit too much pleasure in forcing it upon me. The flavor was a bit like blindness.
  

The most awkward bathroom experiences:

• The flushless, toiletpaper less, seatless, outdoor bathroom in the back of a farmer's home in Chiapas... while I had diarrhea.
• The bathroom in the CAPU station in Puebla, Puebla, Mexico had a floor to ceiling gate you had to pass through to get to the toilets which my large backpack barely squeezed through. When I finally made it to the bathroom, the floor was being mopped by a cleaning woman.
• Several days in late November I was tied to my hotel room in Delhi. Every 22 minutes (give or take 4 minutes) I needed to go. And bad. Oy.

Airport Review:

• Out of the seventeen airports I am seeing during my trip one stands out above the rest. The Seoul Airport is a work of art - absurd, friendly, efficient, and from the future. I think I had everything I could ever ask for there - and some things I never even thought of.
• The worst airport comes in two categories. The Delhi airport is the sort of thing which makes you wonder "how do planes land here?" Dusty, no amenities, rushed, ugly, delayed, and dirty - it was nothing pleasant to look at.
  
• The worst airport experience however was the Ben Gurian Tel Aviv Airport in Israel. Though it features air conditioning, clean bathrooms, and high ceilings - the security and incompetence of the place was absurd and aggravating. While I had expected to be subjected to interrogation upon entering the country, I didn't expect the inquisition to be so strong upon departure. I don't quite know what got me into the mess, but at the pre-check in screening I was whisked off to a cubicle for interrogation for 45 minutes. They asked a little bit of everything: where I had been in Israel, why I had been in Mexico, what I studied, if I knew anyone in Cairo. I eventually was forced to bring out my laptop and show the interrogator my blog and allow him to read it (to which he snapped "Why have you written nothing about Israel yet??"). He then asked to look through the two hundred photos I had taken in Israel (to which he snapped "Why don't you take pictures of yourself?"). The men I dealt with were condescendingly and kept the aggressiveness of their voice barely checked. After that I still needed to get my bags checked twice - getting through the pre-check-in security took me over two hours. Afterwards I was greeted with wrong directions to my check-in counter, chided by security guards for walking the wrong direction down halls which other guards had directed me into, and having to hunt down an elevator attendant so I could give her my checked bag. Boo.
  

Craziest things I have seen in transit:

• In Mexico Ciy there are all sorts of things being sold in the metro - bubble gum, toys, CDs, brooms - whatever. There are also many people asking for money for various reasons - the blind, old women, musicians, small children. None were too out of the ordinary - except for one guy. One day I was on the metro, the doors opened and a man threw a white shirt full of something heavy into the center of one of the cars. He follows it in, shirtless, and begins to unfold the shirt, revealing broken glass inside. He proceeds to stand on his head as the train gets going, then throws himself onto the shirt, back first. He does this several times. Eventually he is bleeding a little and has some glass stuck in his back. He reaches back and pulls it out, puts everything back in his shirt-satchel, and goes on to ask for money from his unwilling audience. Craziest of all, some people gave it to him.
• In India there is an ongoing competition to see what is the strangest thing you can fit on the back of a bicycle or motorcycle. I am not sure what the final prize is, but there have been some pretty good entrants I have seen around. Four goats in a basket on the back of a scooter (Trivandrum), nine mattresses on top of an auto-rickshaw, which was filled with pillows (Trivandrum), and about 25 flats of eggs and a man on a scooter (Trivandrum). Largest number of people on one scooter? Six. (Oh, and by the way, it's required that men wear helmets in India - but not women - apparently much protest that it would muss their hair).
  

How Long I was Where:
I know my map might be confusing. I went so many places - but here's the time axis for that bit

Time spent in…	in days	in hours	in minutes	Percentage
Mexico	98.20	2,356.92	141,415	24.66%
United States	0.13	3.00	180.00	0.03%
Thailand	11.43	274.25	16,455	2.87%
South Korea	0.12	2.92	175	0.03%
Cambodia	3.79	90.98	5459	0.95%
India	120.26	2,886.25	173,175	30.19%
Qatar	0.04	0.92	55.00	0.01%
France	87.19	2,092.58	125,555	21.89%
Italy	21.79	522.98	31,379	5.47%
Egypt	24.42	586.00	35,160	6.13%
Israel	8.11	194.57	11,674	2.04%
Latvia	1.25	29.92	1795	0.31%
Sweden	8.27	198.50	11,910	2.08%
Canada	9.83	235.83	14,150	2.47%
Monacco	0.01	0.30	18	0.00%
Vatican City	0.25	5.97	358	0.06%
Total known	395.08	9,481.88	568,913.00	99.19%
Flight and ship	3.21	76.95	4,617.00	0.81%
Total Trip	398.28	9,558.83	573,530	100.00%

Red

The Travel Map

There it is, everywhere I went in my year of wandering and my bird flies routes.



Click on 'satellite' if you want more than just a vague notion of what is going on. Click here if you would like to see the full size map with markers.

Alive and Famous

So, I am working for Slow Food Nation, and everything is well. Hopefully more will be written abou the experience later, but I had my photograph on the front page of the Washingpost on Saturday because of it. If anyone has a copy around, I would love to see it. The website has it online at here.

Video Adventure: The Presentation

So, I gave my final presentation on the 28th. Want ten minutes of me explaining what I did over my year? Here it is!



The whole thing cuts off before I get to say that I think more people need to follow the spirit of the Watson... though unlikely to get the cash of it. It's all about exploring and talking to people in a way which helps you learn and learn about learning. And I said thank you. Because I am truly thankful.

I know I spoke too quick. And the photos were to fast. But I rewrote the whole thing the night before - from a ten minute lecture on agricultural politics to a bit more about me - and this is the consequence. How far this former state champion in speech and debate has fallen...

I am still trying to figure out what is going to happen with this blog, but things will continue to trickle in over the next couple of weeks which will be talking about my Watson. Then, who knows?