The Elephant and the Letterman-Levitra Connection.

Posted Jan. 10, 2008.

What does a tetchy elephant sound like?

Find out for yourself.

Just a friendly remember from your local pachyderm...

...there's a new crossword at ElephantInTheCorner.com.

Did you notice the new crossword posted at www.ElephantIntheCorner.com?

(NOTE: This post has also been published at www.ElephantInTheCorner.com as part of the ongoing transition process to a new blog.)

Food records in the vein of “World’s Largest Hamburger” or “World’s Biggest Kebab” are the stuff of corporate promotions and bored local TV news producers.

Compared to legitimate world records that document fantastic physical and mental feats of humanity, food records have troubled me for a couple of reasons.

They’re horridly wasteful, for one -- think of all the families in poverty who could make more practical use of the 80 pounds of ground beef used for that world-record burger.

Secondly, food records are rarely more than vapid company PR events. Get a dozen employees, throw in some surplus foodstock (which later can be written off from taxes as business expenses), sprinkle with a few local news cameramen, and you’ve just whipped up the perfect, colorful feature story to ship nationwide on syndicated newsfeeds. A food record is just an advertisement masquerading as history.

But I’m not alone in my eye-rolling at the latest “World’s Greatest…” headlines.

Many cultural critics find such news stories symptomatic of American dietary decadence, additional evidence for our fatal fascination with monstrous portions. These Morgan Spurlock acolytes tend to view record-setting dishes through caloric lenses. They tally up how many grams of fat, carbohydrates, and protein are locked up in food-form and then roundly decry the supersized sums.

I think that’s too easy, though. Who wouldn’t think an 800-pound bagel is packed with thousands of carbs? A lot of food equals a lot of calories – duh.

So when I saw a BusinessWire press release heralding Coca-Cola’s joint creation of the World’s Largest Ice Cream Float with Edy’s Ice Cream this past Friday, I tried a different perspective.

I examined the sugary stunt from a student’s standpoint: just how much did all of this crap cost?

The float was constructed in a 15-foot-tall glass, according to the press release, and required 2,850 gallons of soda (Vanilla Coke).

Soda is sold most economically in two-liter bottles; that is, the average consumer is going to get the most soda for the least money with the greatest ease by purchasing soda this way. For a reason I have yet to discover, our pounds-and-inches nation seems to use metrics only for selling soda, so I must convert gallons to liters to find out how many bottles of Coke 2,850 gallons represent.

That much soda is equal to 5,395 standard two-liter bottles. At Harris Teeter prices, the float uses $9,118 worth of Vanilla Coke.

Now for the ice cream, which the press release said amounted to 7,200 scoops.

How many scoops are in a half gallon of ice cream, the standard supermarket unit of Edy’s? There is unfortunately no simple conversion here, for scoops vary widely in size. They are coded, however, with a system based on the diameter of the scoop bowl, which I am estimating as a rather average two-and-a-half inches.

A cooking reference shows that such a scoop could dip into a tub of Edy’s about 12 times without coming up empty. Do the math, and those 7,200 scoops come out to about 600 half-gallon cartons.

I turn again to Harris Teeter for pricing. Edy’s retails there for $5.29, so the float required $3,174 worth of ice cream.

All in all, this world record-setting ice cream float would cost me almost $12,300 to duplicate in my backyard. And that doesn’t include sales tax, transportation costs, or the steep price of angry neighbors’ stares I’m sure I would receive for attracting legions of winged insect pests.

What might a more practical student buy with the money? I could dine on ramen noodles (Top Ramen, not the contemptible Maruchan brand) three times a day well into my silver-haired retirement were I limited to a food budget of $12,300. Or I could afford to attend Columbia for a little more than 26 days, from the first day of classes in September until October 1.

Even more intellectually respectable, I could copy -- by hand -- Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment more than 1,400 times onto the reams of notebook paper I could purchase with the ice cream float funds.

It’s not going to give me a better understanding of Raskolnikov’s criminal mind, but the task would certainly cast a new light on what Dostoyevsky meant by “punishment.”

Coca-Cola’s public relations stunt has little more purpose than any of these spending alternatives. All are silly exercises in numbers, but Coke’s float is the shrewdest, cleverest application for the money.

88 newspapers and television stations provided coverage to the world-record event, a Google News search reports. That’s 88 different commercials, 88 different opportunities to advertise soda. Inches upon inches of newsprint column space and minutes of uninterrupted TV broadcast airtime, all dedicated to discussing Vanilla Coke. I can’t even begin to calculate how much a company would have to spend for comparable amounts of legitimate advertising.

Perhaps the old saying is true -- you really can’t buy publicity like this. You have to cheat for it.

This is a heads-up to all:

In the coming week, I'm going to be switching to an independent blog format at www.ElephantInTheCorner.com.

This will free up my flexibility with post formatting, but it will also lend me some credibility -- I hope -- as I seek a greater Internet audience. It should even be easier to access my posts since they'll have their own website, but you won't be automatically updated from your LiveJournal "Friends" page whenever I post, I'm afraid.

But let's not dwell on the negatives.

Big changes are coming!

Could it be that my last crossword stumped you solvers out there?

I somehow doubt it, but since I didn't see any solutions posted, I'm inclined to think that even my most reliable solvers (Hang, I'm calling you out) were unable to fill in their last square.

No matter how far you got on that puzzle, though, it's only fair that you see the solution.

( Solution to 'Food for Thought...' )

I'll be posting another puzzle later this week. Hopefully, you'll have better luck.

Urban structures are famous for providing safe harbor to thriving populations of rodents. The density of humans in a major city brings together shelter, food, water, and most other of life's necessities for convenient access by hungry, homeless rats.

Manhattan, for instance, boasts an average 66,000 people per square mile. To put it another way, all of Chapel Hill and Carrboro's residents could fit in Central Park with room to spare. Think of what amenities that level of compactness must offer – no scurrying hundreds of yards unprotected from hawks in open fields, no sexless life of solitude, no enduring an endless battering of sun and rain.

Combine these “Club Med” conditions with a female rat’s talent for baby-making (about 300 ratlings a year), and it quickly becomes no wonder cities struggle against the rising Furry Tide.

What does it take for a far less dense, far less populated region to become rat-infested, though? With comparatively sparse surroundings, the accessibility of a rodent’s basic living needs must be dramatically increased in rural regions to compensate and sustain any significant nests. A building’s gotta be a cesspool, in other words.

Keep that in mind as you consider this sanitation report from Franklin Street’s Asia Café, which for the past three inspection cycles seems to have been serving fine Chinese cuisine to both its human and rodent clientele.

( Asia Café Inspection Report: B )

In my last post, I dangled the tantalizing prospect of a forthcoming crossword puzzle. I have labored long and hard, and the final product is ready.

Oh, who am I kidding? Here the danged thing is, in PDF format for easy printing.

"Food for Thought..." Crossword

Chances are, if you're under 35 years old, you don't read the newspaper during an average week. The latest circulation figures from the nation's major newspapers show that fewer than 35 percent of my compatriots in that age bracket bother to touch newsprint even just once during a work-week. A senior citizen's fingers, on the other hand, are much more likely to sport telltale smudges of newsink with that age bracket exercising over 70 percent readership.

Considering those statistics, I'm not going to be too surprised if you missed last Tuesday's "Check It Out" section in the News and Observer.

("Check It Out" appears weekdays in the paper's Life section and is a wide-ranging, light-hearted discussion of the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill experience. Written in a column format, the section is culled from musings, observations, and questions of N&O staff as well as readers.)

A reader named Denis two Thursdays ago posed the following to the editors of CIO:

"Why are some frankfurters (hot dogs) dyed red? Awaiting your informed response."

The question appeared at the end of that day's CIO, and since the editors were stumped, I took it upon myself during a dull moment at WCHL (you mean there are exciting moments?) to dash off a quick answer. The following Tuesday my response appeared in the print edition.

That's right -- I done got published!

Yeah, it's a cameo appearance at best and I'm not even identified with a last name, but who cares. It's not often that such office unproductivity turns into cold, hard news copy. I've reproduced the column below.

( 'Check It Out', Tuesday, May 8 )

STAY TUNED: I've finished another crossword puzzle and I'll be posting it shortly for your summer perusal.

I spent this past weekend on a road trip to southern Georgia to attend the funeral of a relative from my mother's side of the family.

The deceased was the operator of a produce and cattle farm in the veritable blip-on-a-map town of Milan, population 762, and a dear uncle to my mother. He was the breed of man one reads about in history textbooks: pioneering, stoic, and unbelievably hardy. This guy had one lung removed in the 1960s because of cancer, yet he managed to raise enormous steers and tend acres of vegetable fields for the next four decades until only shortly before he succumbed to heart failure last Friday. Perhaps it's only fitting he gets to spend eternity in the very earth he worked.

My mother and I drove from Carrboro to Atlanta to Milan and back all in two days, what amounts to 18 hours behind the wheel of a car with a night layover in a hotel outside of Hartsfield International Airport. I don't recommend the mode of travel to anyone but the sado-masochist.

Still, I learned some valuable lessons on my trip that I feel I should share with you all. They're the result of first-hand experience, so you know they're more than simply theory, and hopefully I'm saving you the trouble of learning these lessons yourselves.

(And feel free to ask for the background story behind any of these.)


( Top Ten Things I Learned on my Road Trip Through Georgia )

cheshirequeen

Weaver Street Market, Whole Foods, what used to be EarthFare -- they're all in the same family of grocery stores. Half health food, half specialty foods, they typically enjoy big business in Chapel Hill among people who are more concerned about the origin, content, and preparation of their meals. I call them green-and-gold groceries: green for the strong organic, sustainable, or otherwise "healthy" qualities of the merchandise, gold for the higher prices these upscale stores tend to charge.

Foster's Market off of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard is a green-and-gold grocery. The chain was actually started by a former employee of Martha Stewart who moved to Durham in the early nineties. The Chapel Hill branch opened in 1998, and although I never would have predicted its survival to today, Foster's enjoys respectable traffic from UNC students and the downtown lunch crowd.

But what lurks beneath the high-priced, specialty veneer? According to recent health inspection records, the answer might well be a nasty growth of listeria monocytogenes.

( Foster's Market Inspection Report: B- )

Lousy bleeding-heart students.

They're holding a candlelight vigil for Katrina victims on the steps of Wilson Library right now and I've been asked to cover. Did they bother to bring noisemakers, though? Bongos? Tambourines? Clever, rhythmic chants?

Absolutely not! This is a silent vigil.

Now this radioman has a half-hour to kill before any of them will speak to reporters. The photographers, of course, have something to do in the meantime, and even the newspaper reporters can use the free minutes to begin composing their ledes.

I, however, constrained by the limited interest silence has when carried on the air, am bored stiff and frozen solid.

Couldn't they have picked a warmer day in the year to get commemorative?

Sun-soaked fields are blushing with ripe strawberries.

Winter’s parting gift, the little red morsels begin trickling into grocery stores around March from warmer climates of Latin America and California. The long trip usually leaves a number of the berries bruised, blemished, and about to spoil, but even in this regrettable state, their sweet kiss is enough to whet my appetite. I will soon pluck bucketfuls straight from their leafy tendrils on Piedmont farms, spread them into cardboard pallets, and drive directly home to stow the berries in a refrigerator emptied specially for the occasion.

Kevin Hardison is a marketing specialist with the state’s Department of Agriculture. Each agent is assigned crops to generate publicity for in anticipation of their peak harvest seasons, and in Hardison’s case, strawberries have lately cycled to the top of his list.

I spoke with Hardison by telephone last week to find out when I might begin traveling to local farms for strawberries. He was quite eager to speak with the public, particularly so when I identified myself as a reporter. Berries are his big business, after all.

According to his best estimates, this weekend will be the first of the $20 million strawberry season. He expects most area berry patches to be open and stocked with berries, provided the recent flash of near-freezing nights doesn’t destroy the past months’ growth.

Such is the cruel temperament of the temperature. Hardison points out the state has experienced since the first of the year unusually warm weather, speeding up the ripening process on most strawberry farms but leaving mature plants vulnerable to swings of meteorology. Consequently, last night may have been the first I have ever wished winter would give up without a fight.

Once I have gathered my berry supply, though, I’ll be racing to eat them before the chill does. Strawberries have a short life expectancy in the refrigerator for the same reasons an early spring frost can cause so much damage. I need recipes incorporating strawberries – eating them raw gets monotonous quickly, so why not take advantage of the once-a-year, copious supply?

Quick Googling has produced some rather strange recipes that feature my favorite red berry as their main ingredients. Forget strawberry shortcake and strawberry smoothies; these dishes range from exotic to outlandish to repulsive. I’ve compiled the top ten to share, although I make no guarantees about your health should you decide to get adventurous in the kitchen.


THE TOP TEN

( 10. Chilled Rhubarb and Strawberry Soup )
( 9. Strawberry Omelet )
( 8. Cheap and Easy Ramen Dessert )
( 7. Fruited Chili Sauce )
( 6. Pretzel Jell-O Mold )
( 5. Strawberry Risotto )
( 4. Strawberry Pork Chops )
( 3. Cheesy Strawberry Ham Rolls )
( 2. Lori's Pork and Strawberry Crisp )
( 1. Meatballs with Strawberry Jelly Sauce )

I never got in trouble when I was elementary school. Though it's probably not hard to believe, I was a pretty straight-laced little guy. Perhaps that's why I found this news story so shocking, basic hygiene standards aside.

( Read the article from the Toronto Star. )

( Analysis )

How often do you check the sanitation grades of your favorite restaurants?

I rarely check what bold, blue letter is stamped on the grade placards of my usual haunts. Only slightly more frequently will I check the grade of an unfamiliar or new restaurant, since the assumption I carry with me is that dining out is a relatively safe practice. If the state Board of Health inspects commercial kitchens, after all, wouldn't that oversight sort of ensure their cleanliness?

Wiggle room exists in those inspections, though, as with any subjective assessment process. I've discovered this reading over the actual score reports health inspectors must file with the county and state. These reports show how many points were deducted and for what reasons. To my shock, restaurants can receive an 'A' grade and still have serious sanitation flaws -- flaws from which one might expect a bad case of gastroenteritis.

Even more shockingly, restaurants where one would expect (if not demand) to find safe, clean food preparation practices do not necessarily live up to their pricey, gourmand reputations. I would probably not blink twice to learn that a greasy spoon diner next to a truck stop earned a 'B,' but what if it were Nobu earning the low grades? Should I be as trusting of my twenty-dollar entree?

You may wish to re-examine your instinctive "yes" answer in light of what I've collected. I contacted the state Board of Health to retrieve their database of score reports and sorted through them, pulling out the more unexpected grades. I'll share them over the coming weeks in order that your evening spent out not turn into an evening spent on the commode.

The first offender, so to speak, is Penang, the Malaysian-Thai fusion eatery on Franklin Street.

Penang earned an 85.5, a B.

( See the score report breakdown. )

A competently rhymed limerick is usually about the most intelligent I can expect bathroom graffiti to get, and even so, scrawled ditties about marijuana, sex, and otherwise are only moderately more illuminating than "For a Good Time..." messages.

Imagine my surprise, then, to see Euler's identity scrawled above the urinal at Weaver Street Market. Displayed at right is the photo I snapped of it with my cell phone.

Only in Carrboro would someone seek to deface property with a mathematical equation.

Beware, you users of the biometric fingerprint scanners on your UNC laptops...

( Man's finger cut off to steal car )

Yikes.

Try using that as an excuse to your professor for why you couldn't finish your paper.

Chapel Hill groceries stock a wide selection of yogurts, but the endless parade of Stonyfields and Cascade Freshes begins after a while to fall flatter than a sustainably-fished flounder, even when served in a broad spectrum of flavors. Call it the "Law of Acidophilus" or the "Curd Curve."

Either way, it's at such a juncture when I get adventurous with my dairy.


THE SETUP

Redwood Hill Farm goat's milk yogurts

Whole Foods sells Redwood Hill Farm yogurt, a brand distinguished by its use of goat's milk rather than the traditional bovine variety. My local WF carries only the plain, blueberry, and strawberry varieties, though according to the farm's website, they also manufacture vanilla, cranberry-orange, and apricot-mango. Redwood Hill doesn't earn points for novelty based on these offerings, though cranberry-orange is perhaps unique to this brand.

Regardless, I've never tried any of their products, my yogurt experience being limited to the traditional Swiss-style and Greek. Motivated by monotony, I decided to strike out and buy a cup.

I settled on strawberry to be my inaugural flavor for two reasons. Plain yogurt, no matter what animal's milk is used, bores me. I also recalled from previous experiences in petting zoos a goat's tendency to emit fetid odors, so on the offchance that any barnyard effluvia made its way into my six-ounce cup, I wanted a fruit flavor there to do masking duty. My third option was blueberry, but a suspicious crust decorated all available cups -- I would be having strawberry.


ALL THAT GLITTERS...

Nothing about the yogurt stands out as peculiar when the foil lid is peeled back. I have to admit, I'm surprised by this; other goat dairy (like cheese) has a different texture from cow dairy noticeable merely by cursory visual inspection. Even cow's milk yogurt has more apparent variability across styles. Greek yogurt, for instance, is visibly thickier and drier than Swiss, almost the consistency of sour cream, but the Redwood Hill has no distinctive hallmarks that scream "goat's milk."

The fruit flavoring is a standard strawberry jam resting beneath the custard. Like all fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt, the cup needs to be stirred. Redwood Hill includes a generous helping of fruit, which raises some concern for me. Should this berry beneficence be interpreted as a mark of Redwood Hill superiority or a warning of an intensely unpleasant goat taste to come? What might they be covering up?

On first plunge, the spoon confirms my earlier observation about consistency. The yogurt indeed feels like every other yogurt I've tried. Now to separate the billies from the kids: it's time to taste.

Sweet, sweet, strawberry, strawberry, strawberry, tangy -- okay, here it comes -- petting zoo.


...IS NOT GOAT

About eighty percent of the flavor experience is on par with standard yogurt brands, but Redwood Hill has a distinctly gamey kiss goodbye. I can only conclude this aftertaste is the result of the goat's milk. The gaminess isn't overwhelming, but I'm not particularly fond of it.

(And that's coming from a fan of rather pungent cheeses like roquefort.)

The fruit flavoring is definitely a must-have for my tastes. I doubt I could tolerate the plain variety or, for that matter, the vanilla. Even with the copious strawberry jam, I find it difficult to finish the entire cup; the goatish taste does not become less pronounced with greater exposure. Sure, it grows on you -- like a bad rash.


THE WRAP-UP

Redwood Hill Farm yogurt met my needs for variety. Goat's milk yogurt certainly provides a reprieve from boredom; it is different, but not in an entirely positive way. I ought to say, though, nothing about the experience was definitively dreadful. I was able to finish, I didn't spit it out, and I surely didn't suffer stomach distress ("tummy-ache") afterward.

While goat's milk yogurt may have found its way off my future shopping lists, I would urge others to try it anyway as people have inexplicable tastes in dairy.

Someone out there is buying all of that soymilk, after all.