Heirlooms

  Just look at the cornucopia of fruits and vegetables available to us: such variety, such color, such mouth-watering attractiveness!  All because, starting when our ancient forebears changed from being hunter-gatherers to farmers about 10,000 years ago, "heirloom" species from the wild have been selectively bred into this gorgeous panoply.  Enormous ingenuity, displayed over millennia, has produced these marvels of nutrition.

  Alas!  Jo Robinson's just-published Eating on the Wild Side: The Missing Link to Optimum Health shows that such enthusiasm should be restrained, at least insofar as "marvels of nutrition" is concerned.  It seems that in progressing from heirlooms—the usually misshapen, tough, bitter and Lilliputian fruits and vegetables of the wild—to today's lush profusion, 400 generations of farmers have successively removed most of the plants' nutrition.  Their quest was for the eye-pleasing, tender, sweet and gargantuan (to say nothing of yield, disease resistance, etc.)—least of all nutrition.

  One shouldn't be surprised by their predilections.  Among us moderns, how many prefer dandelions to sweet corn?  Crabapples to sugar?  Even the most health-conscious of us cannot help ourselves—we go for the more succulent and sweet, which generally means the less nutritious.  Breeders and marketers—both unwittingly in the past and wittingly now—have followed the Lorelei's call, so our supermarket bounty gets more and more appetizing and less and less nutritious by the year.

  After my daughter recommended it, I approached Robinson's book with about as much enthusiasm as I several times have approached Pilgrim's Progress: it will be good for me to read the tome, I thought, so I'll plow through it.  Surprise!  The book is not only good for one's health, but is a spell-binder to boot.  Robinson has taken what could have been a medley of dull facts about nutrition and woven them into a tapestry as compelling as Michael Pollen's popular Omnivore's Dilemma was several years ago. 

  For each of an astonishing number of vegetables and fruits, Robinson guides us from the selection of a nutritious variety and an individual item of that variety, to how to store it, how quickly we must eat it to get its full nutrition, and how to cook it (including some recipes) to preserve that nutrition.  Each chapter on a class of fruits or vegetables ends with a concise summary of information about them.  A fascinating read.

  Part of the fascination is that virtually every page has an engrossing fact.  Here are a few, chosen almost at random (italics are Robinson's):

• "[Measurements of] the phytonutrient content of apples from 321 wild and domesticated apple trees … showed that the wild apples were vastly more nutritious than our cultivated varieties.  One wild species had fifteen times more phytonutrients than the Golden Delicious variety.  Another species had sixty-five times more.  The show stealer … had one hundred times more."

• "Some [scientific findings] are so different from conventional wisdom that you might feel as though you were tumbling down a rabbit hole.  Most berries, for example, increase their anti-oxidant activity when you cook them.  …  Simmering  a tomato sauce for hours … can triple its lycopene content.  Cooking carrots whole and then slicing them after they've been cooked makes them taste sweeter and increases their ability to fight cancer."

• "In a test-tube study measuring the anticancer properties of a number of vegetables, … garlic was the most effective. … In an intact clove of garlic, [the cancer-fighting compounds that need to react with each other] are isolated in separate compartments.  They do not commingle until you slice, press, or chew the garlic … [H]eating garlic immediately after crushing it or slicing it destroys … the reaction.  [K]eep it away from the heat for ten minutes [to allow the reaction to complete]."

• "When dried beans are canned, they become far more nutritious.  In a 2011 survey of the top one hundred antioxidant-rich foods in the United States, canned kidney beans and pinto beans were ranked first and second, respectively."

• "As a rough estimate, berries have four times more antioxidant activity than the majority of other fruits, ten times more than most vegetables, and forty times more than some cereals. … Blueberries … show great promise in fighting our so-called diseases of civilization.  In animal studies, the fruit has prevented tumor formation, slowed the growth of existing tumors, lowered blood pressure, reduced arterial plaque buildup and … prevented obesity and diabetes in rats that were fed a high-fat, high-calorie, and high-sugar lab chow. … The potential of blueberries to slow age-related dementia may be the most exciting news of all."

• Here's an all-American story:  A 19^th-century New England minister bred Concord grapes until he got what he sought—non-fermenting grape juice for communion.  He then commercialized rhe result under his name: Welch's grape juice.  It was shown in 2008 to have a higher nutritional value than all juices tested, including the now wildly popular acai juice.  Other research has shown that it can "make peoples arteries more flexible and lower their blood pressure … thin the blood, reducing the risk of blood clots … [and protect] normal breast cells from toxic chemicals that can damage the cells' DNA."

I could go on and on with this list, but you get the drift.

  One omission from the full story is not the author's fault.  When Robinson touts the greater nutritional value of certain species of vegetables and fruits, she is usually constrained to comparing measured levels of one or another plant nutrient.  What's often missing is evidence of a clinical connection between those nutrients and human health.  Although she frequently cites studies of their effects on the suppression or elimination of diseases in lab animals, or their ability to kill or restrain the growth of tumor cells in vitro, she is much less often able to give results of controlled clinical trials of their use in the suppression or elimination of disease in humans.  It's a long jump from measuring levels of nutrients, or studying their effects in animals or Petri-dishes, to establishing their value in human health.  What results of the latter sort Robinson is able to adduce makes her arguments infinitely stronger, and I wish she'd had more of them to cite.

  But, pending more clinical evidence, I'm only too happy to gorge on blueberries, the current varieties of which differ little from their wild heirloom ancestors.  In at least this case, the succulent and the nutritious are in the same package! 

Pets

   My family hasn't had successful experiences with pets.  For one reason or another, each—although much loved—had a short history with us.

  We got our first dog after my son David begged for a pet when he was about five.  Helen bought a Yorkshire terrier, which David named Sugie.  She was a wee thing—so small that when she jumped off a curb just a week after we got her as a puppy, she broke a knee and had to walk in a cast for months.  Despite her Lilliputian size, she dutifully sat by the stroller of David's baby sister Abby, defending her from the neighborhood's large dogs if they dared to come near—she would ferociously chase them off by yipping and nipping at their heels.  
  

David and Sugie

  Unfortunately for me, Sugie had a propensity for getting into poison oak and soon sensitized me to that weed, whose effects I'd never previously suffered—I got successively worse cases of it.  Nor was Helen's asthma helped by Sugie's dander.  After a few years, Helen left her at her mother's when visiting Utah one summer.  Sugie's memory was superb, though: when I visited Utah two years later, she immediately jumped onto my lap.  I was thankful that the homestead didn't seem to harbor poison oak.

  Our next animal lived in an outside cage: a husky rabbit, BunBun, which we inherited from friends.  He was allowed to wander freely in our back yard during the day, where the kids played with him.  "Dumb as a bunny" had no meaning for him, for he would endlessly play hide and seek with them, and would always win.  The only way to attract him from his well-chosen hiding places was for David to lie on the ground and play dead; then BunBun would hop up to him and sniff at his head to make sure he was alright.

Abby and BunBun

  Alas!  BunBun didn't always hide so effectively.  We had hired a neighbor girl to feed him and release him to run free in the yard each day during a month's vacation we took.  The day before we returned, a dog managed to get into our yard, and dispatched BunBun to rabbit heaven.

  Abby begged for another rabbit, so we got a little Dutch one, for which I built a hutch on our upstairs deck, where she could roam freely, away from marauders. Abby pledged to take faithful care of her, but I ended up doing most of the work.  Once, after a week of doing it all, I asked Abby if she had fed the rabbit.  She blanched, for she hadn't, and now feared that the rabbit must have died.  After running to the hutch, Abby was relieved to find the bunny in good health.

  This rabbit hadn't heard of "dumb as a bunny" either.  Although the walls of the deck are more than three feet tall—some ten times the bunny's height—and opaque, she soon figured out that freedom must lie on their other side.  She somehow managed to get to the top of them (probably via one of the lounge chairs), scramble over our roof, and spring to the nearest garden wall, never to be seen again.

  We thought a dog would engage Abby more, so we bought her a Cavalier King Charles spaniel, which she called Buttons.  Abby was indeed totally enamored of this pet, and the feeling was reciprocal.  One of his tasks was to awaken Abby each school-day morning, and he would wait anxiously in the kitchen until given the go-ahead.  When told "Go wake Abby," he would scramble lickety-split down the wood floor of the hallway, make a noisy, skidding turn into her room, then jump on her bed.

Abby and Buttons

  Helen's asthma regrettably intervened again, even more so than with Sugie.  To the sorrow of all, a year or two later we decided to return him to the breeder, who lived in Washington state.  It fell to me to send him off at the airport.  I still remember his baleful eyes looking accusingly at me through the door of his cage as he was driven off on a cart to be loaded onto the airplane. 

   It must be karma.  My family seems not to have been meant to live symbiotically with pets.   Balancing the karmic equation, I note with some satisfaction that we don't eat any of their four-legged cousins, confining ourselves to fish and fowl.  That must give us some standing among quadripeds, if not exactly for longevity of relationships with them. 

Our Dickensian Nation

  I had no sooner read a recent spate of newspaper articles on the prison crisis in the U.S., and heard Attorney General Holder's announcement that he would seek to curtail stiff federal drug sentences, than I received from my daughter-in-law Kate a very germane book on the subject: Ernest Drucker's A Plague of Prisons: The Epidemiology of Mass Incarceration in America.  It fully opened my eyes to an ongoing catastrophe.  Shame on me!  I had been only vaguely aware of its monstrous national proportions, even though it has been all too prominent in my own state, California.  Drucker rightly calls it a plague.

  Just a few statistics tell the incredible tale.  The U.S. stands first in the world in rate of incarceration:

Rates of Incarceration, 2008

[Source: A Plague of Prisons, p. 43]

With only 5% of the world's population, it has 25% of its prisoners.  About 2.5 million Americans are currently in prisons/jails, and almost another 4.8 million are on probation or parole, the total accounting for 3% of the adult population enmeshed in the criminal-justice system. 

  It was not always like this.  Incarceration rates in the U.S. were virtually constant for the hundred years prior to 1975, before beginning to surge to current levels, as seen in the data for New York State:

 Growth of Prison Population in New York  State, 1880-2000

       [Source: A Plague of Prisons, p. 51]

  Drucker, an epidemiologist, rightly calls the surge an epidemic. His book shows that it indeed has all the hallmarks of disease epidemics: sudden onset, rapid growth, large magnitude, persistence, self-sustenance, collateral damage to families, and destabilization of communities.  Like tuberculosis, it is disproportionately clustered among the poor.  Like HIV/AIDS, response to it is through ostracism rather than engagement, leading to its further spread.  Recidivism is similar to the relapse of an illness, also usually for lack of proper treatment.

  Just as John Snow, the father of modern epidemiology, used data analysis to trace the source of a cholera epidemic in 19^th-century London to a single well polluted by sewage, Drucker likewise traces the cause for the incarceration epidemic to the start of the war on drugs in the 1970s.  The startling growth of New York's incarceration rate shown above began just when a new set of drug laws and policies were implemented there in 1973.  Those laws mandated lengthy minimum sentences for possession and use of even small quantities of drugs—sentences that were often more severe than for violent crimes like rape and murder, and they increased enormously for repeat offenses.  By 2000, drug-related commitments rose from 10% to 45% of the total.  Funding for more prisons grew proportionally, at the expense of funding for research on and treatment of addiction.  (It's as if research on the causes and treatment of leprosy had been defunded in order to build more leper colonies.)  And as New York State went, so went the nation.

  Racial profiling exacerbated the epidemic by disproportionately targeting blacks and Latinos, just as sickle-cell anemia preponderantly targets blacks.  The following graph shows that rates of incarceration in New York State for blacks and Latinos have been 10 to 20 times higher than that for whites, both before and after the onset of the epidemic in the 1970s.  There are those who would claim this as evidence that minorities are more prone to crime, including drug crimes.  But in fact use and possession of drugs by minorities is at about the same level as or less than that of whites; so, if there were no profiling, the rate of jailing minorities should have decreased comparatively as drug crimes rose from 10% to 45% of the total.  On the contrary, blacks and Latinos continued to be arrested at a rate more than 10 times than that of whites after the 1970s, including for  drug offenses:

White, Black and Latino Incarceration Rates in New York State, 1880-2000

[Source: A Plague of Prisons, p. 60]

  A single passage from Drucker's book illustrates the extent of this racial inequity:

"In 2010, the New York City Police Department arrested 50,383 for misdemeanor marijuana possession, at a cost of over $75 million … making marijuana possession the leading reason for arrest in the city.  The vast majority of these arrests are of young people under thirty, and nearly 86 percent of those arrested are black or Latino, even though research … consistently shows that young whites use marijuana at higher rates."

Another fact further emphasizes the inequity:  For the one drug used more by blacks—crack cocaine—federal penalties have historically been as much as 100 times harsher than for powder cocaine, which is used more heavily by whites.

  The appalling statistics about the epidemic of incarceration for all kinds of crime go on and on.  Particularly shameful is the vast proportion of incarcerations for misdemeanors and victimless crimes rather than for felonies and violent crimes.  Even in the impoverished South Bronx, for example, only 3% of convictions are for felonies, while approximately half of all arrests are for "life-style" crimes such as loitering, vagrancy and recreational drug use.

  To read Drucker's book is to be thrown into the world of Dickens, where whole families were imprisoned for being in debt, where being in the company of gypsies for a month could be punished by hanging, where orphans were often placed in gruesome workhouses.  The society Dickens wrote about was based on class-conscious definitions of morality and fitness—a state-sponsored code of living, violation of which likely would lead to severe, life-derailing and usually undeserved punishment. 

  Have we become a Dickensian nation, one which prefers conformity to heterogeneity, incarceration to education, punishment to remedies?  I shudder to think so!

The Luxor

  My maternal grandfather, David Podolsky, was principal owner and president of the Luxor Baths Hotel.  It was a well-known establishment in its time, located on 46^th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues in New York City—just off the hustle-bustle of Times Square.  In that neighborhood, it was a favorite of Broadway actors and mobsters alike (think Damon Runyon).  It even got an appropriate gangsterish/showbiz line in Woody Allen's "Bullets over Broadway," about a struggling playwright being forced to cast a mobster's talentless girlfriend in his play.

  

Postcard from the Luxor.
[Source: Tichnor Collection, Boston Public Library.]

  In that day, "baths" was an appropriate description.  It would certainly not have been called a spa, and many would have called it a shvitz.  Nonetheless, it was a relatively posh place, not only with a degree of fame, but maybe even notoriety.  The bath area had the huge swimming pool shown above, surrounded by various hot rooms for shvitzing (cleaning out the pores by sweating): a steam room, a sauna, a Turkish hot room, and a Russian bath (in the latter of which one was vigorously scrubbed with an implement made of what I remember as soapy tree leaves).  There was also a "scotch douche," which in this case consisted of high-pressure hosing with cold water. 

  For those whose hearts could survive alternate exposures to heat in excess of 150º F and cold water not much above 50º F, there was on another floor a gymnasium for exercise, where massages could be had, and a rooftop solarium (but not one with much chance of overlaying New York pallor with a tan, for it was glassed in).  Dormitories were available where one could take a brief nap after these exertions, as well as many floors of hotel rooms for overnight stays.

  My mother was for many years the manager of the Luxor, an unusual position for a woman, because its clientele were exclusively male.  Since men roamed all floors above the ground floor clad only in towels or less, she couldn't inspect the operation first hand, but only through subordinates.  This led to some strange situations.  Once, she heard that women had been seen on upper floors, clearly not having entered through the lobby.  Suspecting collusion by some of the staff, on a hunch she posted herself one evening in the narrow alleyway between buildings on 46^th and 47^th Streets, and saw what was happening.  Planks were being placed between a window in a 47^th-Street building and one in the Luxor, over which "ladies of the night" crawled to enter the Luxor!  (I never understood how the 47^th-Street building was accessed.  I think it was another hotel, obviously coed.)

  My youth was replete with such anecdotes.  I've already described my mother's annoyance at the sometimes-incomprehensible and pettifogging application of health and safety rules by city inspectors.  Notices of minor "infractions" issued by them were understood as warnings, anticipating the holiday season when the same inspectors came to collect their "gifts."   Disregard of that nicety would result in the discovery during the next year of yet more-minute "infractions" of questionable authenticity.  My mother would choke on her anger, but then she would shrug and accept the "rules" as they were, and would pay up.  In that day, and probably now, the watchword in New York was "Don't fight City Hall"; the inspectors' level of jurisdiction was of course many layers below the City Hall of then-Mayor La Guardia, who was in general a paradigm of fair play, even though he might have been aware of this endemic lower-level monkey business.

  In an early year of high school I was allowed to take a group of my classmates to use the bath facilities.  It was the only time I ever entered them, and that was true of my classmates too.  Teen-age propriety having been more modest then than now, the visit was the cause of some embarrassment, since except for an occasional towel wrap in a hot room, all activities were in the buff.

  My sister and I were beneficiaries of the Luxor management in other ways.  She often worked week-ends running the hotel's telephone switchboard.  I would be called upon to audit stacks of charges to clients to make sure that they totaled to the amounts that had been posted to the hotel's books.  In my sister's case, it was honest labor; in mine it seems in retrospect to have been make-work, but at the time I didn't suspect that, and appreciated the 25¢ per hour I was paid.

  Shortly after my grandfather died in December 1945, the hotel was leased to another operator and my mother went on to a job elsewhere.  It was subsequently sold and vanished from our purview; later it vanished altogether, replaced by a modern skyscraper.  Also gone with it: most of the shvitzes of the day, superseded by tonier spas. What elegance modernity brings!