Will Shetterly's Blog, page 74

Peasant Diet, Day 3: the more complex the diet, the more you have to count calories

I'm still in the calorie-counting phase, which may be a necessary first step to creating a modern version of a peasant diet. Today's surprise was learning margarine is more caloric than I'd thought. On average, it's the same as butter, 102 calories for a tablespoon. An advantage of calorie counting is the peasant got to eat half a pizza today. And I haven't figured out how a fun-size Snickers

Why socialist parties shouldn't fight with each other

I'm periodically struck by the fact that socialist parties always talk about solidarity, but too often mean, "Solidarity with me, not them!" Here's a very strong argument for keeping the focus on the capitalists. FromVote for the Lying Neoliberal Warmonger: It’s Important: ...in the early 1930s, as the National Socialists gained strength, Ernst Thällman, the Chairman of the German Communist

Peasant Diet, Day 2, Update: Jaipur Vegetables, dark chocolate, and wine

For dinner, I fried the rest of the boiled potatoes from yesterday, then dumped in a bag of Trader Joe's Jaipur Vegetables (one of my favorite convenience foods) with a can of tuna, a quarter cup of raisins, and a quarter cup of cashews. That was divided with Emma. We each had a glass of red wine, then split a haystack (dark chocolate and coconut) from The Candy Jar, our great neighborhood candy

On ginger-curry carrot and pea soup and the Peasant Diet

I'll probably stop posting my daily calorie counts because one of the things I liked best about the Potato Hack was that you can eat as much as you want of what you're allowed to eat. I hope to do the same thing with the Peasant Diet—you can eat as much as you want of things that a peasant could've eaten—assuming there's no famine, and, if you include meat, the lord doesn't catch you

Peasant Diet, Day 2

Among the fun things about shopping at a farmers market is you sometimes get vegetables that major grocery stores would reject. I like the Cthulu carrot, but I'm curious about the other. They must've come from a fairly conventional plot. Why would one grow a little, then say, "I'm bored" and take a right angle, then head down again? Okay, it's probably something as boring as encountering a

Potato Hacking, Day 1, Update 2: it's definitely the Peasant Diet

Now I know why the official potato hack calls for not exercising during the potatoes-only phase. I was feeling light-headed again before my Zumba class, so I had a fun-size Snickers, 11 peanuts, and the last of the plain yogurt in the fridge, prob'ly a quarter cup. When I got home, I decided I was going to eat like a peasant whose family had caught a fish and grew more things than potatoes.

Potato Hacking, Day 1, Update 1: No, let's make it an International Peasant Diet

I began feeling a bit light-headed. That could come from the reduction in calories or from not drinking enough or from a spike in carbs due to only eating potatoes. My goal is to come up with a diet that acknowledges the reality of CICO ("calories in, calories out") and the need for balanced meals but is easy and satisfying. Light-headedness isn't part of that, so for lunch, I had a fried egg (

Potato Hacking, Day 1 - First lessons, and hacking the hack into an Irish Peasant Diet

This morning's first lesson is to make sure pictures are in focus. The fuzzy pic above is three pounds of potatoes. The second lesson is to buy potatoes of about the same size, if possible. It would'vebeen fine to boil these uncut until the largest ones were done, but I wanted to trim the imperfections, and since I was cutting, I chopped them all to about the same size on the theory that

Potato Hacking, Day 0

Tomorrow, I'll start a four-day "potato hack" diet. The most interesting article I found on the idea, The Penn Jillette Diet – 105 Pounds in 86 Days, is intelligently skeptical about its would-be profiteers. Here are my fave bits: "How plausible is it that Jillette lost about a pound a day over three months? The first consideration is that, as he lost weight, the rate of his weight loss would

Two and a half examples of bias at Politifact

The first time I noticed blatant bias at Politifact was when readingHillary Clinton says Bernie Sanders voted for regime change in Libya | PolitiFact. It gives Clinton a rating of "mostly true", even though it admits, "Sanders supported a non-binding Senate resolution that called on Gaddafi to resign his post in a peaceful, democratic transition of power" and quotes Sanders explicitly opposing