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DO I DARE TO EAT A PEACH?

HIDDEn SECRETS Of AmESTERDAmMore than Just coffee shops

2 · NOVEMBER 2011 COLLECTIVE · 3

noVeMBer

picky eater’s point of view

One Man’s Delight Is Another Man’s Disgust The Plight Of The Picky Eater

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Features12 Do I Dare to Eat a Peach?Because as a kid, I wouldn’t go near one. Or a cheeseburger. Or soup. Or any-thing that had touched a pickle.by Bill Magrity

20 The Secret of AAEveryone knows about Alcholoics anonymous. But after 75 years, no one really understands how it worksby Brendan I. Koerner

32 Head to Headdirector EdgarWright and actor Michael Cera crack wise about Comic-Con, Rambo, and their new film, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.


noVeMBer6 Speak: My Identical Twin BoysMy great grandmother had three sets of twins. My aunts would tell us girls that one of us would have twin s, I always believed that it was going to be me!by Sally Fields

In Every Issue1 Masthead3 Editor’s Letter4 Your Letters5 Contributors

8 Scenery: Amsterdam’s Hidden SecretsFrom Rijskmuseum to the Royal Palace by Brendan I. Koerner

11 Streatch: Recycled Pallet Vertical GardenThere have been many pallet projects and many vertical garden projects, but none combine the two elements as well as this tutorial developed by Fern Richardson

Departments


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speak

My great grandmother had three sets of twins. My aunts would tell us girls that one of us would have twin s, I always believed that it was going to be me!

When I met the man of my dreams we had a short courtship of only 6 months when I had an over-whelming inspiration saying Twins! I looked at my boyfriend and he looked at me asking if I had something to say, I wanted to tell him that we were going to have twins the problem was that I wasn’t pregnant yet! That night we made love and I prayed with all of my mind begging God that we would have twins. Seven weeks later I went in for my first ultra-sound I was seven weeks pregnant with twins! The radiologist showed me the first baby while hiding the second one she showed me there’s a little heart beat there then she magically lifted her hand and said there’s another little heartbeat there. I nearly jumped off of the hospital bed to do my happy dance! I was so excited my prayer was answered!

Later that day I took my boyfriend out for a picnic and after we ate our lunch I handed him the ultra-

sound photo and asked him what he thought of it. He looked at it for a moment and simply said Twins! Then he said Twins then he said it again and again until it finally sank in and we embraced eachother with sheer joy.

During the begining of the pregnancy I felt as swift as a deer and lived my life out as normally as I could but by four months gestation I started bleed-ing and was put on bed rest. At four months I was comparable to a woman who was eight months preg-nant in size. At six months pregnant I was bragging that I was as round as a beach ball and didn’t have a single stretch mark, until a week after bragging they all showed up. They looked like eagle wings and I was actually proud of my mommy tattoos.

I went in every week for a biophysical profile aka ultrasound and the doctors discovered that the twins were suffering from twin to twin transfusion syndrome where one was hogging all of the nutrients so I had them delivered by 34 weeks gestation by c-section. Baby A weighed in at 3lbs 10oz and baby B weighed in at 4lbs 3oz. They were small but healthy and they stayed in the hospital for 18 days. They were Christmas babies and were in the newspaper and everything. They even swaddled them in little Christ-mas stalkings. They were so cute.

I was 17 years old when I had the twins, my boyfriend and I got engaged and I was adjusting to our little family. It was hard at first but we were able to afford a nanny for the first year to help me with feedings and for someone to do the night feedings but the nanny never rotated the babies and Coreys head fused abnormally so he had to wear a helmet for

months he looked like my little Hockey player. When the twins got older they would take off their diapers and finger paint with doo doo all over the walls and carpet first thing in the morning and once a week I would have to steam clean their carpet in their bed-room. What a mess!

One of the things I like about twins is the uncanny coincidences. One day we took our identical twin boys out for lunch. They were about four years old and they both got stung by a bee on their cheek the day before and so they both had a swollen cheek and when we went for lunch they both tossed chocolate milk over their left shoulder they still looked identi-cal for sure with swollen cheeks and chocolate milk over their left shoulders. Who would have thought that they’d both get stung for the first time on their cheeks at different times on the same day and both end up with swollen cheeks. The twins were our ring bearers at our wedding and they looked so handsome in their tuxedo with their blonde curly hair and sweet blue eyes. They were definately lookers.

zNow the twins are 12 years old and so different, they like different hair cuts and Tyson is an air cadet while Corey would rather hang out at the library with friends. We have two other children since we started with twins, Nickolla is our seven year old daughter and princess and I thought that my family was complete when we had our youngest Orion who is now four, he looks just like the twins when they were that age and we call him the triplet. I absolutely love being a mother they have been such a blessing in my life.

The radiologist showed me the little heart beat. Then she lifted her hand and showed me another.

My Identical Twin Boys

by Sally Fields


scenery

Amsterdam’s Hidden Secrets

From Rijskmuseum to the Royal Palace Amsterdam is more than just Coffee Shops

The Amsterdam canal system is the result of conscious city planning.[37] In the early 17th century, when immigration was at a peak, a comprehensive plan was developed that was based on four concen-tric half-circles of canals with their ends emerging at the IJ bay. Known as the Grachtengordel, three of the canals were mostly for residential development: the Herengracht (where “Heren” refers to Heren Regeerders van de stad Amsterdam (ruling lords of

Amsterdam), and gracht means canal, so the name can be roughly translated as “Canal of the lords”), (Emperor’s Canal), and Prinsengracht (Prince’s Canal).[38] The fourth and outermost canal is the Singelgracht, which is often not mentioned on maps, because it is a collective name for all canals in the outer ring. 2 The Singelgracht should not be confused with the oldest and most inner canal Singel. The canals served for defense, water man-agement and transport. The defenses took the form of a moat and earthen dikes, with gates at transit points, but otherwise no masonry superstructures.[39] The original plans have been lost, so historians, such as Ed Taverne, need to speculate on the original intentions: it is thought that the considerations of the layout were purely practical and defensive rather than ornamental.[40]

A woodcut (1885) of the 3 Nieuwezijds Voorburg, a canal that is now filled in

Construction started in 1613 and proceeded from west to east, across the breadth of the layout, like a gigantic windshield wiper as the historian 4 Geert Mak calls it – and not from the centre outwards, as a popular myth has it. The canal construction in the southern sector was completed by 1656. Subse-quently, the construction of residential buildings proceeded slowly. The eastern part of the concentric canal plan, covering the area between the 5 Amstel river and the IJ bay, has never been implemented. In the following centuries, the land was used for parks, senior citizens’ homes, theaters, other public facili-ties, and waterways without much planning.[41]

Over the years, several canals have been filled in, becoming streets or squares, such as the Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal and the Spui.[42]

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1 Keizersgracht2 The Singelgracht3 Nieuwezijds4 Geert Mak5 Amstel river


streatch

There have been many pallet projects and many vertical garden projects, but none combine the two elements as well as this tutorial developed by Fern Richardson of Life on the Balcony and recreated by Steph of the local spoon.

Recycled Pallet Vertical Garden

Double or triple up your landscaping fabric and ataple fabric along the back, bottom and sides of the pallet, taking care at the corners to fold in the fabric so no soil will spill out.

Begin planting, starting at the bottom of the pallet and ending at the top. Make sure soil is firmly packed in each layer as you move up. Add more soil as needed so that plants are tightly packed at the end.

Water your wall garden thoroughly and let it remain horizontal for 1 to 2 weeks to allow plants to take root. After 1 to 2 weeks, you can set it upright.

Because as a kid, I wouldn’t go near one. Or a cheeseburger. Or soup. Or anything that had touched a pickle. My parents said I was the finickiest child they’d ever seen, and our meals together gave new meaning to the phrase “food fight.” So now that I’m thinking about starting a family of my own, I decided it was time to figure out why I used to be such a picky eater.

PEACH

Do I Dare

eat aPeach?

by Bill Magrity


My mom served dinner on steel cafeteria trays purchased at an Army surplus store. That allowed her to segregate my food. She’d sprinkle Jell-O mix on banana slices to make them seem closer

Never eaten a pickle, at least not on purpose. It’s not a claim I make with pride, though it comes up somewhat often, especially in the summer months. Backyard-beer-and-burger-

flip season. For much of my life, such occasions were actually harrowing affairs, hardly conducive to the relaxation for which they were purposed. The stress typically kicked in at the end of hour one, just as the congregants moved to the fixings table. The sun might shine and the birds might sing. A piñata might even hang in the yard. But the spread would stretch out like a minefield. Plates stacked with onions, tomatoes, and lettuce, items that, to my mind, had no more business on a burger than peanut butter. Bowls filled with potato salad and coleslaw, two concoctions whose very names I preferred not to let pass my lips. For dessert, the dreaded watermelon. My only solace would come when the chef called, “Who wants cheese on their burger?” at which point, if I was

to my dad, the opening skirmish was over a sweet potato, when I was two. Though I remember noth-ing of the encounter, my guess is—given that my parents were children of the Depression and were neither adventuresome eaters nor particularly ad-ept in the kitchen—that the sweet potato had been boiled, probably for longer than it needed to be. I looked at it and told him that I didn’t eat those. He responded that this was the first sweet potato I’d seen. At his strong insistence I took a bite, then airmailed it onto his chin.

And then there were tomatoes. I’d long heard that garden-fresh tomatoes were nothing like the canned ones I’d picked out of my mom’s spaghetti. I could even recite the lyrics to Guy Clark’s celebratory hymn “Homegrown Tomatoes.” But I’d never been willing to try one until an afternoon twelve years ago at the home of the writer Jan Reid. The occasion was a reunion of sorts. Four months earlier some friends and I had been with Jan in Mexico City. Our cab had been hijacked by two pistoleros, and Jan had fought back, ending up with a gunshot wound in his belly and a bullet near his spine. While rehabbing in Houston, he had asked me to water his cherished tomato plants. When he finally got home, the Gang of Four, as he called us, met at his house for dinner.

Meals became a combination of accommoda-tion and subterfuge. My mom served dinner on steel cafeteria trays purchased at an Army surplus store. That allowed her to segregate my food. She’d sprinkle Jell-O mix on banana slices to make them seem closer to candy. She’d even turn a blind eye—occasionally—when I’d slide objectionable items to my two younger brothers, neither of whom suffered from finickiness. One of them actually ate crayons and cigarettes.

My palate did broaden as I got older, though none of these victories were won at my parents’ table. And so ingrained were the food phobias that I can clearly remember each time I branched out. I first tried ketchup as a tenth grader, at the old Holiday House on Austin’s Ben White Boule-vard, in an effort to look sophisticated in front of two much cooler upperclassmen. I was a Univer-sity of Texas sophomore standing on the corner of Speedway and what is now Dean Keeton when

lucky, I’d spot a five-year-old wearing my same look of disgust. A compatriot. We’d get our burg-ers first—less time was spent in their construc-tion—then go eat at the swing set. “You know,” I’d explain, “I’ve never eaten a pickle, at least not on purpose.”

On one such occasion a friend’s son got curi-ous. “Does that mean you’ve had one on acci-dent?” he asked.

“Actually, your father once snuck four pickle slices and some mustard on a hamburger he fixed for me. It was at a cookout shortly after we got out of college, an engagement party for him and your mother.”

“What did you do?”“I took one bite and spit it all over the table. I

think your grandmother was pretty grossed out.”He looked up at me skeptically, causing me to

worry for a moment that he might be pro-pickle. But as he turned to examine the burger on the

paper plate in his lap, I knew it didn’t matter. I could make him understand by likening the pickle to the beet. Or to broccoli. For that is the essence of the picky eater’s dilemma: Whatever that food-stuff is that he finds most objectionable, nothing will be as terrifying as the thought of having it in his mouth.

I grew up the worst eater I’d ever heard of, the kid that my friends’ parents always sent home at suppertime, a sufferer of bizarre food phobias that were absolutely nonnegotiable. I’d refuse to eat cheese, except on pizza, and then only with pepperoni. Mac and cheese and grilled cheese sandwiches were out. By a similar logic, french fries were in but mashed potatoes were out. Con-diments were unthinkable, and so too soup, fruit, and any vegetable that wasn’t corn. Those few foods I did eat could never be allowed to touch on the plate; “casserole” was the dirtiest word I could think of. I would eat a peanut butter sandwich but had no use for jelly and would refuse to take a bite within an inch of the crust. Chicken was fine, turkey was not, and fish was just weird. Es-sentially, all I ate willingly was plain-and-dry hot dogs and burgers, breakfast cereal with “sugar” in bold letters on the box, and anything with Chef Boyardee’s picture on the label. Or, rather, almost anything. I didn’t fully trust the shape of his ravi-oli; something told me cheese might be lurking within.

Such proclivities came at a cost. In elementary school, I was regularly disciplined for not eating enough of my lunch, sequestered to the “baby table,” where talking was forbidden and cafeteria monitors would loom overhead, pushing me to eat.

When summer came, my parents would no doubt have loved to ship me off to camp but didn’t out of a legitimate fear that I’d starve. That was fine by me. I was similarly terrified that some camp counselor would force me to drink iced tea.

At home, my parents did what they could but never had much heart for the battle. According

I became an acknowledged fan of caramelized on-ions. A friend argued that they were the primary attraction in the $1.50 fajitas we’d just bought from a campus vendor, then opened one up to prove it. I was shocked. At that point I’d been enjoying them unwittingly for more than a year.

As we sat down, he announced he was serving BLTs, casually mentioning how good it had felt to have been able to pick the tomatoes that after-noon. He thanked me for keeping them alive while

he’d been in the hospital. It didn’t seem an appropriate time to say, “I don’t eat those.” They tasted as great as food served by someone who’s saved your life should. And the affinity held up; the next time I encountered a home-grown tomato I bit into it as if it were an apple.

By then I was 33 years old. And though nowadays I’ll eat just about anything—and have never really wondered what my life would have been like

if only I’d met tomatoes sooner—a new concern has arisen. At 44, I’ve finally gotten married, and my wife and I are talking about starting a family. We’ve seen enough friends have children to know that wearing regurgitated yams will be part of the bargain. But we’d like to find a way to make that stop sometime before the kids go to college. Since my genes will get the credit for any picky eaters produced, the burden of learning why they hap-pen and how best to deal with them has fallen to me. So I started doing some research.

Imagine a caveman is eyeballing a hamburger. His reaction will be as instinctual as going to the bathroom or looking for love. The sight and smell will alert his brain that proteins and calories are available. With the first bite, chemical reactions between the burger’s ingredients and taste recep-tors in his tongue will send messages through his nervous system, primarily the chorda tympani nerve, which stretches around his eardrum to the stem of his brain. If there’s a tomato on it, or maybe some ketchup, he’ll get a sweet taste, which upon arrival upstairs will trigger a small dopamine release. His body will read that as good news. The same will happen with the salty fat in the meat and cheese. But if by chance there’s some arugula onboard, a bitter taste will register, signifier of potential poison. He’ll likely spit that out and pick it off the rest of the burger. As he continues, chewing and swallowing each bite, a second, internal smelling process will take place every time he exhales. This information will be more detailed than that from the tongue, which can read only the five basic tastes: salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and the newly discovered, ever-nebu-lous umami. The news will combine in the brain and be read as distinct flavors. He’ll go about the


pen and how best to deal with them has fallen to me. So I started doing some research.Imagine a caveman is eyeballing a hamburger. His re-action will be as instinctual as going to the bathroom or looking for love. The sight and smell will alert his brain that proteins and calories are available. With the first bite, chemical reactions between the burger’s ingredients and taste receptors in his tongue will send messages through his nervous system, pri-marily the chorda tympani nerve, which stretches around his eardrum to the stem of his brain. If there’s a tomato on it, or maybe some ketchup, he’ll get a sweet taste, which upon arrival upstairs will trigger a small dopamine release. His body will read that as good news. The same will happen with the salty fat in the meat and cheese. But if by chance there’s some arugula onboard, a bitter taste will register, signifier of potential poison. He’ll likely spit that out and pick it off the rest of the burger. As he con-tinues, chewing and swallowing each bite, a second, internal smelling process will take place every time he exhales. This information will be more detailed than that from the tongue, which can read only the five basic tastes: salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and the newly discovered, ever-nebulous umami. The news will combine in the brain and be read as distinct flavors. He’ll go about the rest of his day with a good supply of en-ergy and remember that meal as a fine thing.

Now picture the caveman eating at Austin’s Counter Cafe, right-fully considered home to the city’s best burger. Sitting next to him and regarding an identical lunch is a member of that class of Aus-tinite that considers itself the town’s most evolved: the trendy hipster. (Though they share the same bedhead and beard, the hipster will be identifiable by the pair of Ray-Bans folded next to his plate.) His relationship with the burger will be much more complicated. Assuming his parents were middle- to upper-class, he’s at least one generation removed from foods of necessity, so he’s known only the luxury of choice. If he grew up in the seventies or eighties, his earliest exposure to vegetables was probably via Del Monte and Green Giant, black-magic alchemists who, through canning and freezing, confused an entire nation on the meaning of “garden fresh.” If he suffered from chronic ear infections as a kid, his chorda tympani may have been damaged and his sense of taste permanently altered. Or he may even be a supertaster, one of that quarter of the populace whose tongues can have twice as many taste receptors as the average eater’s. In that case, every taste will be magnified, particularly the bitter ones. Given all the variables, if the hipster chooses to leave everything off his meat patty but the bun, there’d be plenty of potential reasons why.

“When we talk about picky eating, we are talk-ing about pleasure and people who don’t get the

Every meal became a battle of wills. My parents would tell me to eat, I would re-fuse, and they’d wait me out. My brothers would finish dinner and be excused to their rooms before I could sneak them my

green beans. The family dog, a supremely overfed basset hound named Bobo who was my greatest ally in such matters, would be shooed to the garage. While Mom cleaned the kitchen, I’d remain at the table. Eventually she’d sit and watch me, sometimes for as long as an hour. She never turned cruel. One doctor I talked to described parents who tell their children, “If you don’t want it for dinner, you’ll have it for breakfast,” then put the plate in the fridge to serve it again in the morning. That sounds like tor-ture, and that didn’t happen. Instead, I’d ultimately give in, choke down my two green beans, and wash off my plate.

But those wars were fought just once a week. My dad worked days and my mom worked nights; Thursdays were the only time we assembled for what we called “sit-down family meals.” Only years later did I recognize another dynamic at work. My folks split at the start of my senior year at UT, after 29 years of marriage. Suddenly it dawned on me that they’d never exactly been crazy about each other. That explained their work schedules and the tension around mealtime and the fact that my dad moved into my room when I left for college. It also provided a new name for the suppers he had cooked solo: Dysfunctional-Family Recipes. We ate a lot of fried bologna sandwiches and pancakes made with Bis-quick and water when there was no milk in the house. A favorite among us three boys was something my dad called “barbecued hot dog casserole,” which consisted of butterflied foot-long wieners spread out in a glass dish, bathed in a full jar of hickory sauce, and baked. I’d always thought that eating a condiment and a casserole represented growth.

On weekends we’d occasionally hit the McDon-ald’s drive-through as a full unit. I was, of course, unwilling to eat any of the already prepared items that give fast food its name. The burgers under the heat lamp sported mustard, pickles, and onions, and I wouldn’t touch one, even with everything scraped

same hit from eating that others do,” instructs Linda Bartoshuk, the director of human research at the University of Florida’s Center for Smell and Taste. She was one of the first experts I called, a legend in the tight circle of neuroscientists, psychologists, and nutritionists who study the way people eat. She’s researched taste for 45 years, and among her discoveries is the supertasting phenomenon. “There are major categories of things that affect how much pleasure we take from food. One is sensory, and that’s where the supertasters fit in. We don’t all taste things the same way. That’s hardwired. The other is experience, the pathologies you have encountered. That is all learned.”

Those lessons come early. When Bartoshuk ex-plained the fundamental nature of conditioned food preferences and aversions, she pointed to baby rats, who sniff their mother’s breath to learn what is safe to eat. In finicky humans, the primary pathology is gastrointestinal problems. If a person of any age

throws up shortly after eating, he’ll automatically develop an aversion to whatever he just ate, regardless of any causal connection between it and getting sick. “When I see a picky kid, the first thing I try to find out is his medical history. If the parents say he threw up a lot when he was young, I’ve got a pretty good idea why he finds many foods disgusting. It’s a brain mechanism he can’t help.”

The neuroscientists I consulted stressed the same kinds of physical problems as Bartoshuk. Psychia-trists and psychologists, on the other hand, steered the conversa-tion to the behavioral side of the equation. They said that many kids

between the ages of two and four will experience some measure of pickiness. It’s as natural as learn-ing to say no. Timid children may have an ingrained distrust of things that are new. Tactilely sensitive kids, like the ones who need the tags cut out of their T-shirts, may have trouble with food textures. Others may live in the neon food world of a supertaster. In these instances, the key is the parents’ reactions. If the parent forces the kid to eat food he doesn’t like, meals will turn into power plays. With a strong-willed child, that’s the kind of problem that can stretch well into adolescence. (The chefs I talked to, by the way, piled on the parents even harder. The problem, they said, is that most moms and dads can’t cook.)

As the experts ticked off the things that typically go wrong, they sounded as if they had had access to my childhood scrapbooks. My first extended hospital stay came shortly before I turned three, during a frightful bout with epiglottitis. Because tion to the behavioral side of the equation. They said that many kids between the ages of two and four will experience some measure of pickiness. It’s as natural as learn-ing to say no. Timid children may have an ingrained distrust of things that are new. Tactilely sensitive kids, like the ones who need the tags.

off. Instead I’d insist on one specially made.The cashier at the window would direct us to a

corner of the parking lot, where we would sit in the station wagon and wait. My mom didn’t believe in air-conditioning, and my dad didn’t believe in bicker-ing, so the interludes were quiet and uncomfortable. He might fiddle with the radio; she might comment that the car needed washing. My brothers and I would turn around to stare out the back window at the McDonald’s front door.

Eventually an employee would emerge and bring out our order, then wait by the car while I inspected my burger. If so much as a hint of yellow mustard showed up on the outside of the wrapper, I’d send it back.

Chef Andrew Zimmern is the co-creator and star of a program on the Travel Channel called Bizarre Foods With Andrew Zimmern. For six seasons, he’s played the part of the cheerfully daring food tourist, landing each week in a new spot on the globe to sample local staples, always something that would shock any eater back at his Minneapolis home. He’s become a devotee, for in-stance, of spoiled foods. “Whether it’s fermented skate wing in Japan, or hákarl [fermented shark] in Iceland, or stinkhead in Alaska, fermented and rancid foods are eaten all over the world,” he told me. He’s had bat meat on three continents. “Fruit bats are actually really clean. You can even eat all the innards because they have a very small diet in a very-small-ranging area.” He once stood with members of the Masai tribe in a corral inside the Ngorongoro Crater, in Tanzania, drinking cow’s blood directly from the source. “That was a big jump,” he admitted.

The segments are essentially snuff films for picky eaters, the kind of TV that would have once given me nightmares. “It’s been amazing to watch my gag reflex get less responsive,” he said over the phone after a weekend exploring Montreal’s finest seal meat dishes. “I was certainly more trepidatious about food when I started. But when you taste something that at first scares you, that you don’t understand or just don’t want to eat—maybe you’ve had a bad version of it before—if it’s good you learn to stop practicing

There are major categories of things that affect how much pleasure we take from food. One is sensory...We don’t all taste things the same way. That’s hardwired. The other is experience, the pathologies you have encountered. That is all learned.”

Healthy foods your kid won’t spot

Put fruit in an ice cream cone. It singles to them that it’s a treat, but you’re it’s really just fruit. Those suckers.

Look at this, its’ a plate of broccoli, but we’re putting disgusting fake cheese on it. Kids love that crap.

Peanut butter is a great way to fool kids into eating fruit. Slather it on. You may even get them to drink some milk too.

You can totally make fruit snacks out of actual juice with just some added gelatin. Granted juice has lots of sugar, but whatevs.

If you have a ton of time on your hands make super cute bento lunches like the japanese do. Kids love eathing things with a face.

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