American Fez

The Food Puritan

Traditional Thanksgiving dinner at my house always involved a traditional trip to a friend's house to enjoy their traditional Thanksgiving dinner instead of cooking my own. After all, eating other people's food is how the first Thanksgiving was celebrated, so my parasitism had a certain air of authenticity. And besides, who needs a ransacked turkey carcass dripping cold fat all over the fridge for days on end?
Nevertheless, I usually brought some sort of offering with me when invited elsewhere, no matter how paltry or inedible: a price-stickerless bottle of red wine unsuitable for a white-meat meal, for example; or perhaps an almond gateau from whatever bakery had anything left and was still open at the eleventh hour; maybe even a small selection of Viennese wafers if I struck out at the bakery and got really desperate. For some reason, those last two items, despite being de rigueur desserts at any Austro-Hungarian festivity, never seemed very popular at a Yankee dinner table dominated by withered pumpkins, a cranberry sauce bog, "squash," and a holiday theme plate heaped with arid slabs of roughhewn turkey: the stuffed and basted totem of most Thanksgiving celebrations.
Turkey, as any gourmand knows all too well, is a meat only slightly more flavorful than a pair of wooden clogs fitted with odor-eating charcoal insoles. Continental chefs have tried lathering its trussed body with all manner of exotic herbs and fragrant spices, but the bird's stubborn flesh remains about as mouthwatering as a dusty stick of gray chalk. Anyone who has ever attempted to submerge shards of turkey in a lake of gravy will be aware of its absorbent properties. In the past, I have even used uneaten drumsticks or the odd wing as a makeshift loofah when showering, since they are very convenient for those hard to reach places. Of course, everything changes after marriage: I no longer recycle Thanksgiving leftovers as bathtub accessories, obviously; but most importantly, I now bring proper food and booze with me instead of just store-bought snacks and booze. And this year I'm not only married but also suffer with a heart condition, so that makes everything double-different.
Soy protein is not a substance usually associated with the Pilgrim Fathers. Indeed, tofu, seitan and tempeh sound more like origami folds made during the creation of a decorative paper turkey rather than sauteed entree substitutes for a real, roasted bird. Nevertheless, an artfully marinated soy protein loaf makes a healthy and unique addition to any Thanksgiving feast. Tempeh, in particular, has a pleasing chestnutty taste and texture. A pretentious person such as myself might even describe tempeh as exhibiting certain autumnal qualities: an ideal companion, then, for non-buttered Brussels sprouts and other low-sodium sides. I wouldn't recommend bringing a tofu or seitan dish, however, since they are both extremely bland. In fact, you might just as well eat a paper turkey for all the piquancy you'll find in those poor examples of the bean curdler's art.
So this year I am thankful for tempeh; and low-fat frozen yogurt; and whole grain crackers; and organic root vegetables; and the fruits of New England's orchards; and red wine, naturally; and a large slice of Almond gateau - - yes, even diners with heart diseases are allowed to cheat on their diets at Thanksgiving.

Drug Facts

Taking medication is a sort of daily religious ritual, only with less billowing incense and a lot more enteric-coated communion wafer thingies. Fortunately, there is also no falsetto choir, unless, of course, you have taken the wrong pill at the wrong time of day. Regular observance of a medication regimen is certainly an act that requires a great deal of faith in the covenants and testaments of others: this doctor preaching Christian Crestor from his pulpit at the clinic; that doctor calling the afflicted to Islamic Zocor from a hospital minaret; another doctor is on a Hindu pilgrimage to the promised land of Questran; there are even some unorthodox, holistic healers who swear by herbal extracts and drinking fish oil on the Sabbath; and when Carl Sagan famously remarked that human beings are made of "star stuff," I imagine he had merely become confused by AstraZeneca's therapeutic products.

But there is no real evidence that any of these medication creeds actually work, in mysterious ways or otherwise, other than the biological wonders that their proselytizing doctors claim for them. Alas, there is no pharmacological equivalent of Pascal's philosophical wager, since the extremely provable existence of side-effects means that patients have a lot to lose if their prescription pill-God turns out to be naught but a hollow idol.

Side-effects come in all shapes and sizes and degrees of severity: bloating, swelling, liver disease and hives, for example; not to mention our old friends nausea and vomiting. Victims are advised to consult their doctors, somewhat counter-intuitively, since it was this drug-pushing know-it-all who originally prescribed the bile producing poison, and will undoubtedly suggest yet another innocuous-looking pill to address the negative symptoms of the first. I don't know what the medical term from such treatment is, but in alcoholic circles I believe it's called "the hair of the dog."

Thankfully, the only medication side-effect I've experienced so far is a creeping, shapeless sense of dread that I'm going to experience side-effects from taking medication: a chronic condition for which medication is unsurprisingly available. And so it becomes a vicious circle; a queasy carousel from which you can't escape once it's started going round. We must just hang on for dear life, literally, hoping and praying that the mechanism won't terminally malfunction. Frankly, it makes me feel dizzy and lightheaded just thinking about it.

Feeling the Burn

In bygone days, the expression "feel the burn" was just another insult hurled at poor old witches tied to a flaming stake. Today it's become a bodybuilding mantra for sweaty athletes and workout addicts. But our ancestors required no daily exercise regimen; mostly because they were either rampaging, bloodthirsty cutthroats, or were the sort of desperate, unprotected peasants always running away from rampaging, bloodthirsty cutthroats. Constant rape, pillage and bare-knuckle boxing at weekends kept their adrenalin flowing and their heart rates high. They needed no twelve-speed treadmill or tanned personal trainers in the seventeenth-century. And when not fleeing from psychotic pirates and marauding press-gangs, people were too busy collecting firewood and skinning oxen to bother about slipping into a pair of bright orange spandex pants and joining an expensive gym. The so-called "burn" was felt during their everyday activities. Life may have been, as Thomas Hobbes claimed, "nasty, brutish and short," but it was also a simpler time. Of course, maybe everyone would be dead by the age of thirty, but that's because our ancestors' idea of preventive medicine was drinking frog bile mixed with mandrake juice while chanting old wives' mumbo-jumbo.

These days, thankfully, we know better, even if only slightly so. The local witch has been replaced by the Primary Care Practitioner and frog bile is now called Lipitor. The mumbo-jumbo, unfortunately, has merely been incorporated into your Health Insurance policy, but you can't have everything. Still, on the whole, our prospects of not dying in agony and ignorance before reaching middle age have largely improved. The area in which we have not progressed, however, is our physical fitness. Modern man's sedentary lifestyle means we need far more recreational exercise than our muscular but superstitious, axe-wielding forebears did. This is especially true if you suffer from heart disease, like I do, and so I'm forced to endure something called Cardiac-Rehabilitation twice a week at seven in the morning. Cardiac Rehab, so the brochure says, is an exercise and informational program "designed to increase physical fitness, reduce cardiac symptoms, improve health and reduce the risk of future heart problems."

Like the Naked City, there are a thousand stories in Cardiac Rehab: this guy had a heart attack while collecting maple syrup sap; this guy felt chest pains while singing second tenor in an amateur production of Rigoletto; and this guy - me, for example - just thought he was going for a routine check-up, failed his stress test, and wound up staying in hospital for two weeks to undergo coronary arterial bypass surgery. And so I have to make my way to 75 New Chardon Street in Boston for my bi-weekly exercise, although, as I discovered to my cost, actually finding New Chardon Street for the first time is an exercise in itself: an exercise in extremely heart-unhealthy frustration and anxiety. Apparently, fifty percent of New Chardon Street is an architectural monstrosity called Bulfinch Place, another forty percent is a concrete wasteland named Bowdoin Square, leaving ten percent of actual street which isn't signposted. When I eventually found the place, fifteen minutes late for my appointment, I was too exhausted to jog on the treadmill and had to sit in a mechanical rowing boat for twenty minutes while a nurse lectured me on removing stress factors from my life.
"That's good," she said, as I rowed through imaginary water. "It looks like you're starting to break a sweat."
"Yeah, but I'm a naturally sweaty person," I told her. "So I wouldn't read too much into that if I were you."
"No problem. Just let me know when you're feeling the burn," she replied.