I grew up in a family where protein was the most important nutrient. And while I want a certain historical sequence to this short essay, it seems smart to start after I turned 18 and leave discussions of my father’s heart disease and my thoughts about generational taste buds either to the ending portions of this or to another essay.

In school  a friend taught me to bake bread and make tofu. The same friend also introduced me to a series of books including, Diet for a Small Planet, The Book of Tofu, and The Book of Miso. Another friend had me read The Limits to Growth. Diet for a Small Planet by Francis Lappé was about how to sustain humans with limited resources and how it coul be done using less land, and less energy by emphasizing plant protein.  The book of Tofu and to some extent  The Book of Miso just restated the arguments in Diet for a Small Planet (DSP) to promote particular products normally made from soybeans.

Proteins are made up of Amino Acids. There are nine amino acids that people need that the human body cannot make itself. They must be consumed .  Meats are considered “complete”
proteins because meat constains all of these amino acids and that you can consider a diet with sufficient protein from meat to have sufficient supplies of each of these amino acids. Plant sources are not complete or less complete. They do not have the balance of amino acids needed. Much of DSP was involved in discussion how to mix vegetable sources to get a balanced amount of amino acids. My take away was that a small amount of beans with a large amount of traditional grains was a good easy mix that met these requirements. A generation of people were inspired by this book to get more protein from vegetable sources. Only a few of my friends became vegetarians. 

The amount of protein needed by an adult male is aobut 50 grams minimum. If you are big, you need more. If you are working hard you need more. It is not a firm line.There is also a maximum amount. If you exceed it you start to have kidney and other problems. 

If you eat a varied diet that is not based on certain protein poor sources you likely are getting enough protein.  In 1981, ten years after the books initial publication, she said,
“

In 1971 I stressed protein complementarity because I assumed that the only way to get enough protein … was to create a protein as usable by the body as animal protein. In combating the myth that meat is the only way to get high-quality protein, I reinforced another myth. I gave the impression that in order to get enough protein without meat, considerable care was needed in choosing foods. Actually, it is much easier than I thought.

With three important exceptions, there is little danger of protein deficiency in a plant food diet. The exceptions are diets very heavily dependent on [1] fruit or on [2] some tubers, such as sweet potatoes or cassava, or on [3] junk food (refined flours, sugars, and fat). Fortunately, relatively few people in the world try to survive on diets in which these foods are virtually the sole source of calories. In all other diets, if people are getting enough calories, they are virtually certain of getting enough protein.

“

By 1981 I was having blood sugar problems and my diet rich in wheat flour needed changing. Having consumed way too much sugar as a child my blood sugar was out of control and I started having large mood swings, fitful naps in the middle of the afternoon that left me feeling worse rather than better, and headaches. I started to wean myself of large amounts of grain, with the exception of oats. They seem to digest slow enough to not cause a spike in my blood sugar. I should note that almost all of my consumption was whole grain, brown rice and whole wheat flour.

The advice from my doctor was to increase my protein intake.  This worked OK but only for a week. What took long for me to understand was that what needed doing was not only reducing my high glycemic index foods (simple carbs and sugars) but increase my fiber. It is the increase in fiber that made the difference.  Ten years later I started a 15 year period where I could eat a more normal diet, that is without my allergens of milk and potatoes.

One of the more interesting things that came up was that the normal meat and grease heavy breakfast, really did not work for me. Eating Eggs, bacon, hashbrowns worked for an hour or two but by 10 am I was always hungry again. Eventually I found oatmeal. Once I started eating that breakfast was easy, cheap, and kept me feeling fed until lunch.  I started using it as a night time snack and I stopped waking up with a headache and desparately needing food.

At some point I bought a used copy of a cookbook, “The No Fad Good Food 5$ a Week Cookbook. For a 9 month school year I kept track . $3.27 a week for food. Using the cookbook’s guidance I met my adult daily requirements for everything according to the US government. I exceeded the minimum requirements for protein, and roughly got over 100grams per day. I was not thriving, but this was partly due to eating too much dairy and potatoes, things I am allergic to. The other part is that flour, whole wheat or not, has a pretty high glycemic index.  The advice “whole grains” is too general, although invariably the whole grain is better than the related refined version.  The other part is that I was using grain syrups on the bread, and eating a lot of bananas. 

My father had started his anti-vegetarian schtick which was entirely unhelpful, ” you can’t survive as a vegetarian”. I was expected to accept this verbatim because after all, he had a degree in biology and was therefore a “Scientist”.  Therefore, this harassment (3 or 4 times a year) had the tacit endorsement of my mother too. Since by this point I knew ten or twenty vegetarians that seemed to be surviving just fine, and I was not a vegetarian, by any stretch of the imagination,  it was irritating. Vengeance  did come. After his bypass and then valve replacement his cardiologist told him “it won’t likely lengthen your life, but will improve the quailty of it if you become a vegetarian”. He decided to give it a try. I started to introduce him, “This my father, he is a vegetarian”.

I was in rather desparate shape physically and monitarily and I was at a meat market for Art Professors, a conference “The College Art Association Conference” in NYC. I was asked by the interviewer, “What books have you read recently?”. 40 years ago now, I do not remember the  name of the book, but when asked what I learned from it I said, “Prior to the great potato famine in Ireland, the average Irish male ate more than 7.5 pounds of potatoes a day. Interested in survival, I looked it up,  7.5 pounds of potatoes have almost enough protein from a small male to survive. It is not particularly balanced protein, so it is not a good sole source of protein. Beans and squash seeds are good sources of these amino acids.

When I was working teaching and I had both a morning and early afternoon class I had only 40 minutes for lunch. Sanwiches did not work well. They left me hungry after only a few hours. During these semesters I was very good about bringing in food. I made up packs that could be microwaved.

To make the packs I would cook al dente about a pound of noodles. I would take two cans of rinsed beans, one can of diced tomatoes and then mix them with about 10 pounds of frozen mixed vegetables. I would mix it up, but not homogeneous, I wanted variation. Then I would add to different sections of the mixed veges, some Thai curry paste in coconut milk, some chili powder with peanut sauce, and then a section of soy sauce, hot sauce, garlic and sesame oil and pack it into bags, one bag per day. In general I would end up with 30 bags.  I would microwave them for lunch.  These meals were very low in protein, but would last through an afternoon. It was an eye opener for me. I had thought it would just get me through class. I did not need protein as much as a lot of fiber, and only a small amount of carbohydrate. The food was good. I shared packs with hungry students.

There are a bunch of protein based glues. One is casein. It is the protein from milk. The easy way to make it is to rinse cottage cheese until the curds are left without gooey stuff. Then cover them just barely with hot water and add a tablespoon of borax per 10 ounce container. In a few days you will have a gooey gluey substance that can be used as a glue or as a paint pigment binder, a medium.
Fish Glue, Hide Glue, are collagen protein glues used in furniture, and still used in musical instrument making. They are nicely reversable and stick to themselves making them valuable in repair.
Egg tempera is a paint medium using egg yolks, but the whites are also used as a binder.

By the end of my first year of ceramics classes in high school I was taken enough with the medium to want to work at home over the summer. I bought a wheel, a Pacifica Kit, and started to build a kiln in my back yard. I had no knowledge of propane, natural gas would have required copious plumbing and inspections. I built a wood fired raku kiln.
The softbrick were purchased about 7 miles from my house. I borrowed some red brick that was not in a returnable state when I was done, and found a sewer tile for the top of the chimney. Even with this I did not have enough brick for a firebox. Fortunately our soil where I lived was a pebbly glacial clay. It was full of lime, but for this purpose it did not matter. I dug a firebox. I was worried about it collapsing so I lined it with 3″ logs, and roofed the back of it near the kiln with more wood, covered on top with soil. I figured the wood would take a long time to burn and I could replace it. This worked out to be at least 4 hours of firing. My first few firings were started with small two inch cuttings picked up on the street, and finished with piano keys that I had salvaged ebony and ivory off of for my father’s harpsichords that he built as a hobby.
For a high schooler I was not poor. I had a two night a week dishwashing job at Oriental City restuarant, and I sang in a professional choir for a local synagogue. In three hours singing I earned about 1.5 times as much as an 8 hour shift washing dishes. But still I preferred spending money on other things and buying ceramics supplies was about 2 hours of driving during the week when time was often scarce.  Wanting glaze, and having already read perhaps 25 books on ceramics I decided that I could make my own with 20 Muleteam ® Borax and ground bottle glass. It worked! Later I started adding Colemanite to the mix. For raku, not kitchenware this was fine. I needed colorants. Blue bottle glass did not have enough blue in it to see over my clay, so I made some colorants. I got iron oxide by burning steel wool that I got from my father and copper oxide was gotten by heating copper wire up and then bending it to get the oxide off.  I had taken Chemistry in 10th grade. Knowledge is power!
Lots of other things happened in that kiln, most things were mundane except that the pots and surfaces added to my thoughts, and the process was educational. But at some point I began wondering how three dimensional I could get glaze to be, and then it dawned on me that I could add grog to my glaze. I gave it a go. I was not great at recording images of my work back then. I did not have my own camera, and using a roll of film for one or two objects did not make sense but I did get an image of one of these raku pieces. Its not much of an image. I never did much with these glazes but it was interesting. A
After the Wood buring Raku kiln I made other kilns, several at the summer camp I worked at. The first used charcoal and a blower. and about seven bricks. It fired one teabowl at a time. Another, a few years later visiting a friend was inside a hollow piece of tree trunk. Like the raku kiln firebox, the kiln provided some of the fuel. Years later I built a small kiln out of used phone books. Phone books were how we found phone numbers. You would get updated versions each year and in generall they covered the city you were in and nearby ones too.



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Why common sense is not.

When we think of common sense we think about things that intuitively make sense. They are necessarily based on what we have seen, thought or been taught before. The effects of gravity on earth make sense. The historical context of this is interesting as a force it was discovered. Before gravity common sense said that a released ball fell because there was nothing holding it up. Gravity, at least as it is seen to affect us on the planet earth is the force the pulls the ball down. We have lived as a species with the concept for so long that it is common and makes intuitive sense.  Lots of other things make sense. That heat flows from one object to another, that when you mix two vessels of air at different temperatures you get air that is the average temperature.
But there are lots of other things in our common everyday environment that are not known via sense that is common. One I learned as a child, What are the chances that in a class of 23 students some two students will have the same birthday?  It would seem that the chance me having the same birthday as you is 1/365 so with 23 students that would be 23/365. But that is not it.
Not counting the fact that there are more people born on weekends and during some seasons of the year, when you have 23 people I could have the same birthday as 22 of them. So really the number now seems like it should be 22X23/365 . This works out to a probability of over 1, more than always true. It makes no sense. The problem is more complicated than that, and I told myself I would keep math simple, intuitive for this essay. It works out to just over a 50% probability for 23 students. There is a nice wikipedia page on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem
Einstein’s E=MC**2 is another example. Without an understanding of speed and satelites none of our modern navigation would work.
But for me  thermodynamic problems are both simple and counterintutive. They do not make common sense, although the sense that they do make is not so hard to understand. The basic law of thermodynamics, the first law is conservation of energy. Its been around long enough that it makes common sense. You cannot create or destroy energy. This that run contrary to this or seem to run contrary do not make common sense.
A heat exchanger is something that transfers heat from one medium to another. I like to think of these and explain them as devices that exchange air in your house with outside air. I live in Texas so I think more about airconditioning than heaters and will use a cold house for an example. Lets say that you have a kitchen exhaust fan and you cool your house to 80 degrees F and outside it is 100˚F .If you just exhaust the smokey air from your kitchen the air that sneaks into the house to replace it is 100˚F and your air conditioner will cool that down.  Its not cheap if it runs often.
So, lets say you develop a device, a metal tube with fan pushing air  outside maybe 6″  in diameter and another maybe 4″  tube placed inside it arranged with a fan to push air from outside to the inside. Just for simplicity lets say that you recover half the cooling, that the air released into the house has passed half the difference to the air going outside and they are both at 90˚F. This seems like the best you can do, it makes common sense.

But if you now place another identical device feeding air outside, and inside and place it on the inside end of your first device, coming from the outside you now have air at 90˚ and on the inside air at 80˚ so this device should do a similar thing and cool the outside air that is coming to only 85˚F . If you keep adding devices, sooner or later you get air coming in at the inside temperature and leaving at the outside temperature. If you ignore condensation you can recover nearly 100% of the coolness or if you prefer the heat. 90% efficiency is not hard to achieve for heat exchangers for the home. To really understand how these work you need calculus. But they work. Common sense would limit you  to 50%,, recovering half the heat.

Air conditioners and heat pumps are even harder to make sense of with common sense. It just is not common. These do not create heat or cool, they just move it from one place to another.

If we just used some common sense, almost no modern technology would work. If we went back to before people figured out the world was a globe we would not be able to go from Europe to Japan via New York without going back over Europe. Common sense evades sense.

I am failing at finding a way to tie this essay together so will just get writing.
Clean.

I grew up in a home with kosher food. My mother had promised her mother that she would keep a kosher home. I suspect that my grandmother was a believer, but never met her. She was deceased before I was born. 
There are a couple of proscriptions that became very important in some ways in my life. The first is not eating milk and meat, and pigs not being kosher food. The issue of pigs, pig fat, sea food, will have to be dealt with in another essay. The need in a kosher home for four sets of dishes is another. The laws of kashrut, keeping kosher, are a boon for ceramic producers. This too is a separate issue and deserving of its own essay. But today getting ready for the beginning of Passover is the topic, or at least the start of it.

Passover is the holiday commemorating the Exodus from Egypt. There are a lot of parts to this, many separate aspects, but I want to focus on cleaning up of leaven, grains that can be fermented into bread or alcohol, and its impact on my life. So first you have to understand this.

Before the start of Passover, at least in the tradition that was my house, and most Jewish cultures, you have to get rid of all of your grain, and things made of it. This seems pretty simple. But like many things in Orthodox and Conservative Judaism, trying to keep the letter of the law, and trying to make sure of it, gets complicated.

Left over products in the refrigerator and cabinets, rice, flour, starch, sugar, almost everything, was given to someone who was not Jewish. This could include the woman who cleaned once a week, the mailman,  and others. If it could not be given away it was thrown away. The only exception to this as I remember it was unopened cans and hard liquor. The cans and booze went into our cold cellar in the basement, really a long term pantry, it was not that cold.

The kitchen was cleaned. One year the glasses of mine that were lost were found behind the fridge as it was pulled from the wall. The coils on the back were cleaned and the floor underneath it scrubbed. As I remember it, the coils were my brother’s job. I cleaned the blender.

At some point we got an Osterizer® blender with ten speeds controlled by buttons. It was going to be used over Passover, so it had to be cleaned. The buttons got really grimy over the year so it had to be disassembled. This was my job. I remember it being difficult the first time. When finished there was no visible gunge anywhere.  We used this blender over Passover. Somehow this sort of cleaning was not acceptable for other kitchen appliances except the stove, fridge, dishwasher and sink.

In high school one of my jobs was to wash dishes for a Chinese Restaurant. Work started at 4pm by cleaning the dirty dishes from lunch, running them through the dishwasher and getting ready for the evening rush. Each evening at about 8 there was an additional cleaning task, although a few times I got to help mass producing egg rolls.

Chinese restaurants were a target for food safety inspectors. Consequently where I worked was one of the cleanest restaurants I have every worked in. It seemed like we got inspected every two weeks, fined threatened with closure, harassed. One time I remember the inspector decided he was going to target the stock pot. The stock pot held about 12 gallons of broth. It was left running 24 hours a day. Good stock was used in any dish that needed cooking liquid and in all the soups. He said something about food poisoning. I got a little argumentative even though I should have held my breath. I was just the dishwasher. But it worked he left us alone. I was left with the impression that my white skin was bigger influence than what I said.

On weekends we cleaned. Often the cooks helped. The cooler was emptied and cleaned. The floor and walls were left immaculate. The corners had to always be scrubbed. The smell of bleach could be overwhelming. On Sunday afternoon we cleaned the grease traps or filters over one set of woks and then the other. This was hard work. I wish that I knew then what I know now about removing grease.

When I got to The Kansas City Art Institute I eventually got a job in the school cafeteria. Although it did not pay as well as my previous job, the shorter travel time made it a better deal. At first I was the weekend cleaner. The first week or two I was given directions and a special job. By week three I was left alone. “Are you doing the coolers and  grease traps every week?” “Yes”.

I worked hard for Marion League. Once I knew what her life was like I worked harder. She was the foster mother for a group of disabled children and had a hard time making ends meet. At school no one starved. She would feed students if they were hungry even if they were broke. I do not know the limits of this, but one friend got fed for a few days every month. I do not know if they paid her back.

After about a year I was asked if I wanted to be the Saturday short order cook. I said OK.  This was sandwiches, eggs, hash browns, biscuits and gravy, bacon and sausage. Also coffee. Marion said that we had to turn $120 to break even. I made it my business to do what I could. I cleaned the coffee urn when I got there in the morning, especially the filter holder. I increased the strength of the coffee and let people know. I cut lunch meats and but the “sawdust” from this process to sprinkle on the gravy. I also put paprika on top. Bacon grease was used in the gravy. To me this was still pretty yucky but I knew others would like it. Not growing up with much bacon in my life it was not an easy flavor. I would rather just eat the biscuits.

I was given a couple of options for biscuits. There was mix or I could make it from scratch. I aways made it from scratch. They got better as I worked there longer but not much better. But along with the gravy the biscuit sales went up. We started to make a second urn of coffee just before lunch. The last innovation was “garbage omletes”. I did not yet know the value of a good name. Anyhow, just before closing you could order a 2 or 3 egg omelette and I would stuff it with what ever there was that I was going to have to dispose of after the shift. We closed at 3 and stayed closed on Sunday. Leftovers were disposed of. Most vegetables were disposed of and replaced early Monday morning. There was a lot of food to put in these. If there was not any, I used cabbage and onions. I also made the hash browns from scratch. They are best if left on the griddle for a long time.

After a few months, Marion pulled me aside, “I know that you cannot be stealing from me, where is all the money coming from?” I asked if she looked at the register tape. She said that it made no sense.  How do you sell 25 omelettes in the last 15 minutes of business? Even the coffee sales are better than some weekdays.  I explained it to her. 

The food there was wholesome for the most part.  The year after I graduated they replaced her with a food service.

So, why this essay? Just the thoughts running through my head as I clean the Kitchenaide® mixer, full of bread residue, as I get prepped to regrease it. I am thoroughly impressed with the beefy engineering of this 4.5 quart mixer. Serviced every couple of decades it could last forever. Now, even the slots in the heads of the screws have been cleaned.

Kitchenaid ® is a registered trademark of Kitchenaid I guess.

Innovation is often brought about by pressure. You can do something a certain way and it is expensive, so cost pressures you to find a cheaper way. The expense can be time, material, monetary currency, complexity, reliability, lack of beauty. The expense does not even have to be real to pressure you towards innovation. It just has to be perceived.

Early on in my development of my current light installation I had to have a way to turn up and down the levels of light on Red Green and Blue LEDs. The light levels built into my RGB chip that I am using are 0-255 . There are only 256 levels. The problems are that there is nearly no difference between 254 and 255, the lowest levels are not visible, 0,1,2, and sometimes 3, cannot be seen, and the difference between 3,4,and 5 are pretty coarse and that the three colors have different properties. Some seem more linear at lower levels than others. The lowest visible level on each of them is different. Each time you want to adjust one of the levels you change the code and then load it up to the chip. Getting it to look smooth was not difficult, but at the start it was time consuming.

When using a bigger chip with more memory I used three lookup tables for the levels. This is a table that might start like this, [0,2,3,4,6,8,10,13,16, etc.] But for this piece I only had ATTiny 85 chips during the development. Others were becoming available again. The ATTiny has got “Tiny” in its name for a reason. At $1.59 its memory is limited.

Using the lookup tables I started to get “out of memory” type errors when trying to “compile” the program. Compiling is the process where what you have written gets translated into the code your computer, in this case the ATTiny can use. I had to come up with another way. The errors made no sense to me, my program did not use that much memory. But I am not a computer scientist, no degree, no deep expertise. “Live with it, find a new way”.

So, instead of using a lookup table I used multiplication and division of integers. But because numbers with decimal points use more storage, I would multiply by 106 and then divide by 100 then add 1 on the way up . So 30 stepped would step to the integer portion of 30*106/100 +1, or 32. 100 steps to 107 and as you get higher the steps get bigger. Coming down I multiply by a number less than a 100, say 94 and subtract the 1. This does not use that much less memory as far as I could figure, but it worked. Maybe there was something I did not know. I cannot know everything, sometimes I just let things be if they are working.

Well turns out I had tried to compile my software with the settings set for an ATTiny 25, not an ATTiny 85 and it has much less memory. However, the new method is much easier to tweak and keep track up so I have stuck with it. It produces numbers very similar to my lookup tables, mostly because my lookup tables were done by mostly approximating the formula in my head. The formula has a softer top or bright range and I like the way it looks. I ran a single strip of lights back and forth the old lookup table way and the new way. I like the new way. If I go back to a lookup table for some reason I will likely calculate the steps.

The chips I am talking about using in the next piece have four times as many steps. I am about to start working with them. But I think that the properties of LEDs will stay the same so the formulas will stay similar. Since the communication time with the new LEDs is also faster there should be less jitter and flicker. I am excited to see them. With more steps lookup tables become even less efficient and more difficult. The multiplication and division for indexing is much easier.