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conuly
One on 25 years worth of dryer lint. WOW
On wasting food. Or not.
On a sorta early EARLY intervention for potentially autistic toddlers.
At the Age of Peekaboo, in Therapy to Fight Autism
By APRIL DEMBOSKY
SACRAMENTO — In the three years since her son Diego was given a diagnosis of autism at age 2, Carmen Aguilar has made countless contributions to research on this perplexing disorder.
She has donated all manner of biological samples and agreed to keep journals of everything she’s eaten, inhaled or rubbed on her skin. Researchers attended the birth of her second son, Emilio, looking on as she pushed, leaving with Tupperware containers full of tissue samples, the placenta and the baby’s first stool.
Now the family is in yet another study, part of an effort by a network of scientists across North America to look for signs of autism as early as 6 months. (Now, the condition cannot be diagnosed reliably before age 2.) And here at the MIND Institute at the University of California Davis Medical Center, researchers are watching babies like Emilio in a pioneering effort to determine whether they can benefit from specific treatments.
So when Emilio did show signs of autism risk at his 6-month evaluation — not making eye contact, not smiling at people, not babbling, showing unusual interest in objects — his parents eagerly accepted an offer to enroll him in a treatment program called Infant Start.
The treatment is based on a daily therapy, the Early Start Denver Model, that is based on games and pretend play. It has been shown in randomized trials to significantly improve I.Q., language and social skills in toddlers with autism, and researchers say it has even greater potential if it can be started earlier.
“What you ultimately might be doing is preventing a certain proportion of autism from ever emerging,” said David Mandell, the associate director of the Center for Autism Research at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “I’m not saying you’re curing these kids, but you may be changing their developmental trajectory enough by intervening early enough that they never go on to meet criteria for the disorder. And you can’t do that if you keep waiting for the full disorder to emerge.”
Sally Rogers, a MIND Institute researcher who has been working with the Aguilars, said she faced several challenges in adapting the toddler therapy for infants.
Even normally developing babies cannot speak or gesture, let alone pretend. Instead, Ms. Rogers has parents focus on babbling and simple social interactions that occur in the normal routine of feeding, dressing, bathing and changing the baby.
“Patty-cake and peekaboo or tickle games, those are people games,” she explained to Carmen and Saul Aguilar during their first session with their son Emilio at 7 months old. Ms. Rogers talked about the next 12 weeks and how they would focus on getting Emilio to exchange smiles, to respond to his name, to babble with them, starting with single syllables (“ma”) and moving on to doubles (“gaga”) and more complex combinations (“maga”).
“Most babies come into the world with a built-in magnet for people,” Ms. Rogers said. “One thing we know about autism is that it weakens that magnet. It’s not that they’re not interested, they have a little less draw to people. So how do we increase our magnetic appeal for his attention?”
Lesson 1 was eye contact. Ms. Rogers had the parents take turns playing with Emilio, encouraging them to get face to face with the baby and stay in his line of vision. Mrs. Aguilar leaned down on the blue blanket and rattled a toy. “Emilio? Where’s Emilio?”
On the other side of a two-way mirror, another researcher watched the session and an assistant monitored three video cameras in the room. Sally Ozonoff, a researcher who first identified Emilio as a candidate for the study, stopped by to observe.
“He’s just staring at that object even though her face is three inches away,” she said. “He has that flat, very sober-looking face.”
Mr. Aguilar tried next. He put Emilio in a red beanbag chair and folded the sides together over the baby. “Squish, squish, squish!” he said. No response.
He picked Emilio up over his head and flew him like an airplane. Emilio stared at the ceiling.
Mr. Aguilar put the baby back in the beanbag and picked up a stuffed wolf toy. He put it on his head and let it drop into his hands. “Pschooo! Uh-oh!” Finally, Emilio was watching.
“That was great,” Ms. Rogers told the father. “You put that toy on your head and he was drawn to your face. You were using the toy to enhance the social interaction. When you bring it up to your face, he’s with you.”
While the causes of autism are still a mystery, scientists agree that it has some genetic or biological trigger. Experimental treatments like Infant Start are intended to address the social environment the baby grows up in, and to see whether changes at home might alter the biological development of the condition once triggered.
“Experiences shape babies’ brains in a very physical way,” Ms. Rogers said. “Experience carves synapses; some are built, some are dissolved.”
If a baby starts focusing on objects instead of faces, the theory goes, a “developmental cascade” can begin: brain circuits meant for reading faces are used for something else, like processing light or objects, and babies lose their ability to learn the emotional cues normally taught by watching facial expressions. The longer a baby’s brain runs this developmental course, the harder it becomes to intervene.
But the effort to stop autism in its tracks with earlier interventions presents a scientific problem.
Because there is no formal diagnosis for autism before age 2, it is impossible to distinguish between infants who are helped by the intervention and infants who never would have developed autism in the first place. Researchers must see enough improvement with babies like Emilio before they can do a randomized trial, comparing babies who get the treatment and babies who don’t.
Emilio’s parents are happy to have their son in the first wave of the pilot program. They saw their older son, Diego, make so much progress in behavioral therapy between ages 3 and 5 that they’re very hopeful about what might happen with Emilio.
Mr. Aguilar quit his job at a telecommunications company so he could care for Emilio and work on their objectives all day. Mrs. Aguilar had quit her job in social work when their first son received his diagnosis. But the commitment to the future is much revised since Emilio’s 6-month evaluation.
“I’m the first in my family to go to college, and grad school,” Mrs. Aguilar said. “My thought was, ‘Now I’ve set the bar for my son.’ ”
But after learning that Emilio too may have autism, “you stop looking that far into the future,” she said. “We’re forced to think day by day.”
On learning to like fruits and vegetables. I've never understood the hype about how "hard" it is to eat sufficient fruits/vegetables. Some of that hype, admittedly, is beverage ads (so... yeah), but a lot of it isn't. How hard is it to eat an apple with your breakfast (one or two servings of fruit), an orange and half a banana with your lunch (one serving each) which also has a small side salad (half a serving), a salad at dinnertime (another half a serving) and a vegetable side (another serving - hey, now I'm over 5 servings, and I haven't even had any snacks!), seriously?
Could be worse. I've seen an ad for some product full of vitamin C because it's "so hard" to get your RDA by drinking a gallon of OJ daily. *headdesk* Vitamin C is so prevalent in EVERYTHING that you can't even get scurvy unless you really try!
I’m overwhelmed! A recent column asking for suggestions on how to entice Americans to eat more vegetables drew nearly 600 e-mailed responses and a long, long menu of food for thought.
Most of the suggestions came from people who love vegetables and have already figured out ways to incorporate them into their own and their families’ diets. But equally instructive were those from people who said they were not especially fond of vegetables and suggested ways they could be made more appealing.
A recurring theme was that we should stop trying to sell vegetables for their health value (and stop scolding people for failing to eat enough of them) and instead focus on the positive — the delicious flavors and colors that can add so much variety to meals and snacks. Another was the importance of teaching people fast and simple techniques for achieving mouthwatering results.
As Elif Savas Felsen wrote, “If you teach Americans how to cook vegetables and stop yelling at them like some righteous food-health nut, they will learn.”
And Katherine Erickson urged that we “stop calling vegetables ‘sides’ ” and instead design meals around them.
Start Young
Give children a taste for fresh vegetables early on — very early. As soon as my sons could pick up pieces to feed themselves, minimally cooked mixed frozen vegetables adorned their food trays.
“Don’t give up,” L. K. Schoeffel wrote. “Keep making all those veggies a central part of your family meals.” If at first the children balk, reintroduce them again and again. And be sure to eat them yourself.
Introduce vegetables as fun foods, perhaps by reading, together, “The ABC’s of Fruits and Vegetables and Beyond” (Ceres, 2007), cleverly written by Steve Charney and David Goldbeck and beautifully illustrated by Maria Burgaleta Larson, complete with poems, jokes, riddles, geography, recipes and ways to grow food.
Create a sense of ownership. If possible, have children help plant a little vegetable garden or grow something edible on the deck or window ledge. Get them involved in choosing vegetables in the store or at a farmers’ market, remark about their interesting shapes and colors, and let children help prepare them. Even a 2-year-old can rinse cherry tomatoes and toss them in a salad.
“Ask them how many peas they can pick up with their forks,” Edward Batcheller suggested. “Help them cut up string beans. Let them learn how to peel carrots. Come up with all sorts of vegetables, fruits, etc. that they can put together to make a good drink with the blender.”
Many readers urged schools to reinstate cooking classes for both girls and boys — learning about food can also reinforce lessons in math, science and geography — with a focus on fresh vegetables that are also served in the lunchroom. But lunch offerings of overcooked, tasteless vegetables will win no converts.
Children and adults often learn to experience new vegetables at other people’s houses — or while shopping. Supermarkets, big-box stores and other retailers can prepare vegetable tastings for anyone to sample.
As in decades long past, children should be served the same foods the grown-ups are eating. No special “kid food,” as several readers put it. Likewise in restaurants, dishes on the children’s menu should include lots of tasty vegetables in place of fries.
Dr. Susan Gardner of Houston asked: “Where are the parents of yesteryear who simply put varied and nutritious foods on the table and assumed that their active and busy children would eat them? No wheedling, no begging, no comment.” Carol Caputo of New York had a similar thought: “Parents today ask their kids what they want to eat. You are the parent, you decide. Don’t discuss food, just serve it!”
For that witching hour when the kids are hungry but dinner is not yet ready, serve cut-up fresh carrots, cucumber, celery or red pepper, or a combination, with a dip like hummus, salad dressing or seasoned yogurt. Edamame beans are a great snack — children love popping them out of the shells.
Hungry children are likely to eat what is readily available. If instead of cookies and chips, there is a platter of ready-to-eat vegetables or a bowl of cherry tomatoes handy, they just may eat them.
Even the most reluctant consumer of vegetables can handle them if they are grated or puréed and hidden in stews, soups, pasta sauces, loaves, quick breads and muffins. My family’s favorites included pumpkin and zucchini breads.
Missy Chase Lapine, who has won fame as the Sneaky Chef, suggested “slipping veggies in the meals people already like to eat, like spaghetti and meatballs. Once people realize that the meal they just loved contained spinach, they become more open to trying spinach straight up.”
Focus on Flavor
“Never boil them,” Walter Jacobsen wrote. “Even if they’re frozen, I think they taste much better, are much crunchier, if sautéed in a flavored oil.” A popular refrain: “What’s wrong with a little fat — olive oil or butter — to make vegetables more palatable?” As some noted, if you reduce the meat portion and buttered bread, there’s ample caloric room for some oil or butter — even pancetta or bacon bits — to season the vegetables.
A very popular idea was a vegetable-rich soup (I used to purée the vegetables my boys rejected on sight), perhaps with tiny meatballs, chicken cubes or seasoned tofu. Consider making a big batch to eat for a few days, perhaps freezing some (labeled and dated) for another day. My lunch the other day was split pea soup that I’d made and frozen in 2008. Beneath it I found turkey and cabbage soup I cooked last year.
Many readers suggested my own favorite: stir-frying vegetables in a little olive oil seasoned with garlic, onion, shallots or balsamic vinegar and a sprinkle of salt and pepper. Another of my favorites: grilling vegetables, which can be done on the stovetop in a ridged grill pan as well as on a barbecue grill.
Roasting vegetables, either individually or mixed, in the oven or toaster oven was another popular suggestion. Cut the vegetables into approximately equal sizes, toss with olive oil, season with salt and pepper or herbs, and bake at 400 degrees for about 20 minutes or until they reach the desired texture.
Roasted kale crisps for snacks were mentioned often. Margaret P. Mason suggests spreading a single layer of kale pieces on a cookie sheet. Brush with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and bake at 375 to 400 degrees. Turn them after about five minutes, making sure they don’t burn.
Juiced vegetables were frequently mentioned, too. Chester Chanin thinks restaurants should offer “appealing fresh vegetable juices as a complimentary side drink before the meal arrives.” I’ll drink to that!
Explaining the 2nd Avenue Subway to first graders.
Last week, Michael Horodniceanu, the man in charge of building the long-delayed Second Avenue subway, agreed to sit down with about 25 fidgety residents of the Upper East Side who demanded answers about the toll that his $5 billion project had taken on their neighborhood.
“I am sure many of you are going through the trials and tribulations of being around the subway construction,” Dr. Horodniceanu said sympathetically, the faint sound of jackhammers in the distance. “But this is being built for you.”
It was a tough crowd to read. One person doodled on lined paper. Another put her fingers in her mouth, while her neighbor stared off into space.
First graders are not usually treated to a face-to-face meeting with officials of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
Now, however, the authority is embarking on a stepped-up effort to address the concerns of New Yorkers who live along the torn-up route of the future subway, and the outreach campaign — led on Friday by Dr. Horodniceanu, the agency’s president of capital construction — came to the 5- and 6-year-old set in Paula Rogovin’s class at Public School 290 on East 82nd Street.
The conversation skipped the more controversial elements of the project: failing businesses, falling real estate values and noisy construction sites.
Instead, the avuncular Dr. Horodniceanu offered a more basic lesson: how to make concrete.
He brought small plastic bags filled with sand, gravel and cement, poured all three into a plastic bowl and swirled the mixture with a silver spoon as the students watched, agog.
“These kids are terrific, and the amount of interest they are showing is overwhelming,” Dr. Horodniceanu said. “Quite frankly, I’m hoping they will be able to transfer their enthusiasm to their parents.”
Construction on the first stage of the Second Avenue subway, which will stretch from East 96th Street to East 63rd Street when it opens around 2017, has created a deep animus between the authority and residents who say the project has transformed a once-bustling boulevard into dystopian blight.
Dr. Horodniceanu, who has overseen the authority’s largest projects since 2008, says that his workers need to do better.
“We are really not a good neighbor,” he said. “We are working — I don’t want to say, in their living rooms — but in front of their living rooms.”
He added: “People are willing to accept construction over a period of two years. We’re going to be there for the next six.”
Officials have pledged to replace bent, unsightly fences; repave broken sidewalks with flat, cleaner surfaces; and open up sidewalks that have been gobbled up.
The authority plans to open an office in a recently vacated retail space, where residents can stop by with concerns, and a Web-based timeline, to provide a block-by-block guide of the planned work schedule.
Renovations near East 92nd Street, along the first section to receive the spruce-up, are expected to be completed around Thanksgiving at a cost of about $70,000.
“When you look at a fence, it should not be a wave; it should be a straight line,” Dr. Horodniceanu said, pointing at an unpainted, crooked barrier held together by chicken wire.
The first graders, however, did not seem too perturbed by the messiness. Every Friday, Ms. Rogovin, an 18-year teaching veteran, takes her class on a short field trip to the corner of East 82nd Street and Second Avenue, a half-block away, where an enormous crane sits in the middle of the street, lowering materials below-ground.
The students know many of the workers by name and often ask for their autographs.
“All types of different people come and talk to me, but they are the only ones who are actually happy about what we’re doing,” Danté Claude, an inspector at the site, said of the children.
In her classroom, Ms. Rogovin puts up photographs of the immense, yellow, tunnel-boring machine, which the students visited earlier this year. A “word wall” features curious terms like “excavator” and “sandhog.”
“It’s very fun at the construction site,” Natalie Drabkin, 5, said to Dr. Horodniceanu during his recent visit. “It’s interesting to see the different machines they use there.”
Parents who tagged along last week agreed, to a point.
“The transparency is terrific,” said Todd Girshon, whose son, Justin, 6, is in Ms. Rogovin’s class.
He said he was skeptical about the start-stop pace of construction. “These guys will be entering high school when the subway is supposed to open,” he said, referring to the first graders, “and even that remains to be seen.”
Apparently, some genius has decided breast pumps do not merit a tax break.
Acne Cream? Tax-Sheltered. Breast Pump? No.
By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI
Denture wearers will get a tax break on the cost of adhesives to keep their false teeth in place. So will acne sufferers who buy pimple creams.
People whose children have severe allergies might even be allowed the break for replacing grass with artificial turf since it could be considered a medical expense.
But nursing mothers will not be allowed to use their tax-sheltered health care accounts to pay for breast pumps and other supplies.
That is because the Internal Revenue Service has ruled that breast-feeding does not have enough health benefits to qualify as a form of medical care.
With all the changes the health care overhaul will bring in the coming years, it nonetheless will leave those regulations intact when new rules for flexible spending accounts go into effect in January. Those allow millions of Americans to set aside part of their pretax earnings to pay for unreimbursed medical expenses.
While breast-feeding supplies weren’t allowed under the old regulations either, one major goal of the health care overhaul was to control medical costs by encouraging preventive procedures like immunizations and screenings.
Despite a growing body of research indicating that the antibodies passed from mother to child in breast milk could reduce disease among infants — including one recent study that found it could prevent the premature death of 900 babies a year — the I.R.S. has denied a request from the American Academy of Pediatrics to reclassify breast-feeding costs as a medical care expense.
In some respects, the biggest roadblock for mothers’ groups and advocates of breast-feeding is one of their central arguments: nursing a child is beneficial because it is natural.
I.R.S. officials say they consider breast milk a food that can promote good health, the same way that eating citrus fruit can prevent scurvy. But because the I.R.S. code considers nutrition a necessity rather than a medical condition, the agency’s analysts view the cost of breast pumps, bottles and pads as no more deserving of a tax break than an orange juicer.
Many mothers’ groups and medical experts say that breast milk provides nutrition and natural supplements that prevent disease, and would like to see its use expanded. Hospital accreditation groups have been prodding maternity wards to encourage parents to feed only breast milk until a child is 6 months old.
The new health law does include one breakthrough for nursing mothers, a mandate that they be permitted unpaid breaks to use breast pumps. Spurned by tax authorities, breast-feeding advocates say they will return to Congress to get a tax break, too.
“There’s been a lot of progress in the past few years making the public, the medical establishment and even Congress recognize the health benefits of breast-feeding,” said Melissa Bonghi, a lactation consultant in Bainbridge Island, Wash. “But I guess the I.R.S. will just take a little longer.”
With the new regulations set to take effect in two months, millions of American workers now in the open enrollment period at their employers have to determine whether, and how much, to set aside for 2011. More than 20 million people have flexible spending or other tax-exempt health care savings accounts, and the programs are projected to cost the federal Treasury about $3.8 billion this year and $68 billion over the next decade.
The most far-reaching change involves over-the-counter medicines. Since 2003, most of them have been eligible expenses, making flexible spending accounts so popular that some plans issued debit cards that allowed users to make purchases without having to file for reimbursement later.
As of Jan. 1, however, over-the-counter medications — including allergy remedies, cough suppressants or even pain relievers like aspirin or ibuprofen — will be eligible only if they are prescribed by a doctor. That change is so drastic that the National Association of Chain Drug Stores, which represents 37,000 pharmacies, last week asked the I.R.S. for a two-year delay in that regulation, to allow merchants to recalibrate the computer systems that determine which products are eligible for purchase with flexible spending account debit cards.
Many factors, including the length of maternity leave, affect how long a woman breast-feeds.
According to a survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 75 percent of the 4.3 million mothers who gave birth in 2007 started breast-feeding. By the time the baby was 6 months old, the portion dropped to 43 percent, and on the child’s first birthday, to 22 percent.
A study released this year by Harvard Medical School concluded that if 90 percent of mothers followed the standard medical advice of feeding infants only breast milk for their first six months, the United States could save $13 billion a year in health care costs and prevent the premature deaths of 900 infants each year from respiratory illness and other infections.
“The old adage that breast-feeding is a child’s first immunization really is true,” said Dr. Robert W. Block, president-elect of the American Academy of Pediatrics. “So we need to do everything we can to remove the barriers that make it difficult.”
To continue breast-feeding once they return to work, many mothers need to use pumps to extract milk, which can be chilled and bottle-fed to the child later. The cost of buying or renting a breast pump and the various accessories needed to store milk runs about $500 to $1,000 for most mothers over the course of a year, according to the United States Breastfeeding Committee, a nonprofit advocacy group. Lactation consultants, who can cost several hundred dollars, also would not be an eligible expense.
Roy Ramthun, a former Treasury Department official, said that tax officials’ reluctance to classify those costs as medical expenses stemmed from a fear that the program might be abused.
“They get very uneasy about anything that smacks of food because they fear it will open up all sorts of exceptions,” said Mr. Ramthun, who runs a consulting company that specializes in health savings accounts. “It’s a matter of cost and of protecting the integrity of the tax code.”
Bills introduced last year by Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York, and Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, would have allowed nursing mothers to claim the tax break. But breast-feeding advocates say that effort, like many before, was undone by economic and cultural factors.
“Everyone says they support breast-feeding, but getting businesses and Congress to act on it has been surprisingly difficult,” said Barbara Emanuel, executive director of the breast-feeding advocacy group La Leche League International. “We get resistance from the formula companies and cultural resistance, so it can be hard to get nursing mothers the support that everyone agrees they deserve.”
Unless the law changes, some mothers may ask their pediatricians for a note that breast-feeding is medically necessary. Jody L. Dietel, who works for a company that processes claims from flexible spending accounts, says that many patients who receive orthodontic procedures have used such a tactic.
“Orthodontia is really so you have nice, straight teeth,” said Ms. Dietel, chief compliance officer for WageWorks. “But the doctors write notes warning that the patient’s jaw might be damaged without treatment or their overbite could cause health problems, and it becomes an eligible expense. For breast-feeding there are two components, too: nutritional and preventative medicine.”
The return of Pee-wee Herman
Candy-Colored Bow-Tied Redemption
By DAVE ITZKOFF
THE Pied Piper was nowhere to be heard, and Santa Claus wouldn’t be coming to town for a few more weeks, but something irresistible had drawn a small crowd to the West Fourth Street basketball courts in Greenwich Village on a recent Thursday morning. Huddled in groups of two and three, a few dozen men and women in their 20s and 30s glanced at one another and at their smartphones, rereading the Twitter and Foursquare messages that directed them here, waiting for something to happen.
Without fanfare a white van sailed up to the curb, and from it emerged a thin, 58-year-old man — wearing a gray suit, a tiny red bow tie and white loafers — who seemed as uncertain to meet his fans as they were excited to receive him. The gathering parted as he stepped onto the blacktop, picked up a basketball and made a few graceless attempts at hurling it at a hoop. “Yeah, match that,” he said snidely, to laughter.
As he returned to the van to be shuttled to his next mystery destination, one bystander after another — not just the supporters who had responded to his electronic siren song, but those who did not expect to see a long-forgotten figure from their childhoods suddenly materialize on a Manhattan street — felt compelled to shout at him some variation of these words, if not this exact message: Pee-wee Herman, I love you!
The next afternoon Paul Reubens, the man who has played Pee-wee Herman for more than 30 years, was sitting at a patio table in the shadow of the U.S.S. Intrepid, the aircraft carrier turned museum. Forgoing his Pee-wee costume for head-to-toe black, he was marveling at the previous day’s promotional stunt for his coming Broadway show, which had sent him whizzing around Manhattan while broadcasting his whereabouts on the Internet.
The affection he had been shown throughout the day, Mr. Reubens said in his gentle whisper, was “so weird and so great at the same time.”
“It was odd and it was fantastic,” he continued. “Both, rolled into one.”
It is impossible to discuss Mr. Reubens without discussing Pee-wee Herman and duality: the entertainer who made a career of playing a boy in a man’s body, who turned an adult comedy show into family-friendly movies and a children’s television series; the apparent innocent who was felled by a pair of decidedly grown-up sex scandals; and now, most improbably, the written-off washout on the verge of a major comeback — the man who for years was reduced to a punch line, about to have the last laugh.
When “The Pee-wee Herman Show” opens on Broadway at the Stephen Sondheim Theater on Nov. 11, Mr. Reubens said, it will complete a cycle of downfall and redemption not only for himself but for the blameless Pee-wee character from which he is inseparable.
“I wrecked it to some degree, you know?” he said. “It got made into something different. The shine got taken off it.”
He added: “At a certain point I just wanted to have a better end to my career.”
That career started for Mr. Reubens, a Los Angeles transplant by way of Peekskill, N.Y., and Sarasota, Fla., at the Groundlings improv comedy theater. There in the late 1970s he created the impish Pee-wee Herman, a volatile man-child descended from the likes of Peter Pan and Willy Wonka, and imbued with Mr. Reubens’s own love of toys and kitsch. With the help of fellow Groundlings Mr. Reubens fleshed out the anarchic world of that character in “The Pee-wee Herman Show,” a mildly risqué stage send-up of a vintage kiddie-television program that became a cult sensation.
Pee-wee went mainstream in 1981 when HBO broadcast the show as a special, propelling Mr. Reubens to the hit 1985 Tim Burton movie “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” (and a less successful 1988 feature, “Big Top Pee-wee”). For five seasons starting in 1986, Mr. Reubens also hosted his own CBS Saturday morning series, “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” a kaleidoscopically colorful parade of puppets, props and cartoons aimed at the ids of kids.
“ ‘Sesame Street’ taught children how to read,” said John Paragon, who has written for and performed in Pee-wee projects since the Groundlings. “We taught children how to bang pots and pans.”
That legacy was badly tarnished in July 1991, when, just as “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” was ending its run, Mr. Reubens was arrested in Sarasota for exposing himself in an adult theater. The incident, which resulted in a no-contest plea, seemed to evoke the unsavory flip side of his artistic fixations on youth and innocence, and tittering conversation about the arrest dominated that summer, at least until Clarence Thomas’s controversial Supreme Court confirmation hearings a few months later.
Mr. Reubens was arrested again in 2002 after thousands of vintage erotic artworks were seized from his home, and in 2004 he pleaded guilty to possessing obscene material in the case. But the damage of his 1991 arrest, which in a later era might have been one more entry on a TMZ.com ticker, had been done. He became increasingly reclusive and unsure whether the public would ever accept him again.
“I had to go through a horrible time of feeling like I didn’t want to go anywhere or be anywhere, see anybody,” Mr. Reubens said. “I, at a certain point, thought, ‘Well, if I just wait long enough, everything will go away, and I won’t be famous anymore and I’ll go back to my total anonymous civilian life.’ ”
For nearly two decades Mr. Reubens continued to play small supporting roles in films from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” to “Blow” to “Life During Wartime”; he popped up on comedies like “30 Rock” and “Reno 911!” and got caught in the occasional dead-end development deal.
Though he says he never felt locked into the Pee-wee character, he rarely connected with other roles he was offered either. “If somebody wants to hire me for something,” Mr. Reubens said, “I look at it and go: ‘I could think of 50 other people who could do that. Why me?’ ”
Then, about two years ago, theatrical producers started approaching him about reviving “The Pee-wee Herman” show in Los Angeles, a prospect that left him deeply conflicted.
“There were age-related issues to it,” Mr. Reubens said. “There were career-standing issues.”
There was also the opportunity to reclaim what he had before — not the fame, which Mr. Reubens said always troubled him, but the freedom to create, to make people laugh and once again to play Pee-wee on his own terms.
“Was there a way to figure that out, to get that back in some way?” Mr. Reubens said. “I felt like this was my window, right now. If I didn’t do it now, I would really be too old, and I don’t want to do it with a new face.”
(Asked if that meant creating a new character for himself, Mr. Reubens replied, “No, I meant to go and have plastic surgery.”)
The Los Angeles run of “The Pee-wee Herman Show,” which played at the Club Nokia theater in January and February, did not deviate drastically from the original stage script in which Pee-wee must decide between using a wish to help two friends fall in love or giving himself the power to fly.
It incorporated characters created for the “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” series, while it reunited Mr. Reubens with Groundlings colleagues like Mr. Paragon (who plays Jambi the Genie), Lynne Marie Stewart (Miss Yvonne) and John Moody (Mailman Mike). This turned out to be exactly what audiences wanted.
“There’s never been anything from the fans other than, please do more,” said Judd Apatow, the director of “Knocked Up” and “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” and a longtime devotee, who is producing a new Pee-wee movie for Mr. Reubens. Whatever was written about Mr. Reubens in gossip columns or on blogs, Mr. Apatow said, “if you asked anybody who loved Pee-wee Herman, ‘Would you like him to do more?,’ everybody would say yes.”
Mr. Reubens said that success would have been sufficient, and that the Broadway transfer of “The Pee-wee Herman Show,” which was announced in May, was an unexpected bonus. (So far the show has a solid $3 million advance in ticket sales.)
“I thought I was really done, I really did,” he said. “I thought, ‘O.K., I did it, I proved something to myself.’ ”
But to his collaborators the Broadway show and the extent to which Mr. Reubens has so far been embraced by New York are hopeful signs that whatever outrage or offense his arrests engendered, it has finally been put to rest.
When the “Pee-wee” cast members were asked how they were affected by the generosity shown to Mr. Reubens, Mr. Paragon choked back tears. “Considering the way that a lot of the press made him feel,” Mr. Paragon said, “it just makes me feel good, because we love him.”
Mr. Moody added: “He gets to see what the real people think. Real people, not somebody pretending.”
Even in the early months of a Broadway season that is very much in flux, the creative team of “The Pee-wee Herman Show” senses their show is an unusual assemblage of contrasts and contradictions.
“It doesn’t want to be, like, ‘Sesame Street Live,’ ” said its director, Alex Timbers, who also directed the Los Angeles production. “It doesn’t want to be the TV show onstage. It’s got to have a real, grounded center, even though it lives in this completely up world.”
Mr. Timbers, who is also the book writer and director of “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson,” another offbeat new Broadway arrival, said that the “Pee-wee” show’s farcical, vaudevillian aesthetic could help it connect with theatergoers.
“It reminds me a little of drag theater,” he said. “There’s a sense of conversation happening across the footlights that welcomes the audience as an active member, as opposed to, like, shutting down there.”
What the show also has is Mr. Reubens, who at all times is the final arbiter of what Pee-wee Herman would or would not do.
“It’s all from his gut,” Mr. Apatow said. “That feels wrong, that feels right. And a lot of the time what feels right is that Pee-wee Herman would do something that’s wrong and so inappropriate.”
Before he headed into the Intrepid gift shop and proceeded to spend $120 on assorted postcards, magnets, models and paperweights, Mr. Reubens said the challenge before him was not the Broadway show, but rather an unfamiliar world where people are genuinely delighted when they encounter him.
“This is very telling to me,” he said with a touch of Pee-wee playfulness, “that I have such a strong reaction. Like: ‘Not too much love. Hold back on the love a little bit.’ I could call up a therapist and find out what it meant.”
While he would obviously prefer a hit Broadway show to a flop, he said the past 20 years had made him impervious to criticism.
“Honestly,” he said, “I’m somebody who there’s nothing more horrible left to say to me. You know? There really isn’t. And there’s enormous power in that.”
Is Candy Evil or Just Misunderstood?
FOR Samira Kawash, a writer who lives in Brooklyn, the Jelly Bean Incident provided the spark.
Five years ago, her daughter, then 3, was invited to play at the home of a new friend. At snack time, having noted the presence of sugar (in the form of juice boxes and cookies) in the kitchen, Dr. Kawash, then a Rutgers professor, brought out a few jelly beans.
The mother froze. Her child had never tasted candy, she explained, but perhaps it would be all right just this once. Then the father weighed in from the other room, shouting that they might as well give the child crack cocaine.
“It was clear to me that there was an irrational equation of candy and danger in that house,” Dr. Kawash said in a recent interview. “And that was irresistible to me.”
From that train of thought, the Candy Professor blog was born. In her writing there, Dr. Kawash dives deep into the American relationship with candy, finding irrational and interesting ideas everywhere. The big idea behind Candy Professor is that candy carries so much moral and ethical baggage that people view it as fundamentally different — in a bad way — from other kinds of food.
“At least candy is honest about what it is,” she said. “It has always been a processed food, eaten for pleasure, with no particular nutritional benefit.” Today, she said, every aisle in the supermarket contains highly manipulated products that have those qualities.
And, she points out, many people who avoid candy will cheerfully eat sugar-packed chocolate-chip energy bars and drink Gatorade for health reasons, although a serving of Gatorade contains about the same amount of sugar as a dozen pieces of candy corn. Dr. Kawash’s expertise is in American culture and gender studies, but some nutritionists share her views on the pariah status of candy.
“I don’t think candy is bad for you,” said Rachel Johnson, a nutrition professor at the University of Vermont who was the lead author of the American Heart Association’s comprehensive 2009 review of the scientific literature on sugar and cardiovascular health.
Dr. Johnson said that candy is considered bad because it lacks the “health halo” that hovers over sweet food like granola bars and fruit juice. “Nutritionally there is little difference between a gummy bear and a bite of fruit leather,” she said.
Dr. Johnson also noted that candy provides only 6 percent of the added sugar in the American diet, while sweet drinks and juice supply 46 percent. “There’s reason to believe that sugar in liquid form is actually worse than candy, because it fills you up and displaces healthier food choices,” she said.
Dr. Kawash, who studied architectural theory, narratives of women and medicine, and the imagery of terrorism before she began to write Candy Professor, has complicated feelings about her current specialty. She describes her childhood in Sunnyvale, Calif., in the 1970s as an “endless, and mostly frustrating quest for candy,” restricted to a small weekly indulgence after church on Sundays. Later, she said, binges on gummy bears and spice drops fueled her undergraduate research at Stanford; more recently, she found herself flushing handfuls of candy corn down the toilet to prevent herself from eating “just a few more.”
“Obviously, my own relationship with candy is not totally healthy,” she admits.
Fortunately, some of that passion has now been channeled into research. There are many blogs devoted to tasting, photographing and tracking down obscure types of candy, such as Candy Addict and Candy Blog, but Dr. Kawash’s work is rarely about taste or nostalgia. She is much more interested in untangling the threads of control, danger and temptation that candy has carried since it became widely available in the 1880s.
Until then, most candies — like fudge, brittle and taffy — were homemade, and store-bought hard candies like horehound sticks and peppermints were relatively expensive. But advances in technology enabled sugar to be spun, aerated, softened and flavored in new ways, and sold cheaply. Just like that, candy entered popular culture.
Dr. Kawash notes that candy, like cigarettes, was long advertised as having health benefits. “Eat Tootsie Rolls — The Luscious Candy That Helps Beat Fatigue,” reads one of the many ads she has exhaustively analyzed on her blog. One post is dedicated to the “slippage” between candy and medicine that she has found in a close reading of the history of cough drops — hard candy in a socially acceptable form.
But there have always been what she calls “candy alarmists,” who warned that candy was too stimulating, too soporific, poisoned, or otherwise hazardous. Dangerous candy appears in many fairy tales, a theme continued with the modern public-safety message, “Don’t take candy from strangers,” and in public scares over tampering and contamination. (Dr. Kawash recently detailed how all of this led to the candy wrappers we know today in The Journal of American Culture.)
In the early 20th century, she said — in the absence of any medical evidence — doctors blamed candy for the spread of polio. In the 1970s, refined sugar approached the top of the food counterculture’s list of enemies, spurred by international best sellers like “Sugar Blues” and “Sweet and Dangerous.” Tooth decay was the longtime threat; more recently, the global spread of obesity has prompted fears of the “empty calories” in candy.
Now a tentative cook and a buyer of organic eggs, Dr. Kawash is convinced that candy is often the scapegoat when Americans sense that something is wrong in the food supply. The social critic in her says that corn syrup and the cheap candy produced with it have unhinged our notions of how much candy is too much. At the same time, the historian in her can’t help pointing out that “corn syrup was a wonderful thing for candy.” Its invention in the late 19th century made the commercial production of soft confections like fudge and candy corn possible.
The disruption of traditional agricultural systems — including the presence of corn in so many processed foods — has also dislodged candy from its established place as an occasional treat.
“Candy should not be sold in huge bags at the drugstore,” said Jennifer King, a founder of Liddabit Sweets, a small candy company in Brooklyn that proudly sells candy bars — such as a recreated Snickers — for as much as $6.50. Liddabit products are indulgent but also virtuous: Ms. King and her partner, Liz Gutman, make treats like apple-maple lollipops and spiced caramel chews by hand, from prestigious and often local ingredients. (The honey in the honeycomb candy is gathered from hives in New York City.)
Dr. Kawash says that the fetishization of candy ingredients and the aestheticization of candy — like the color-coordinated candy landscapes now popular at weddings — are relatively new.
“When the moneyed classes indulge in sugar, it’s part of an acceptable leisure activity,” she said, chewing over the significance of high-end candy destinations like Dylan’s Candy Bar.
“But when poor people do the same thing, it’s considered pathological,” she added, citing the current debate over using food stamps to buy soda, candy and other “bad” foods.
Dr. Kawash, 46, retired from teaching in 2009. She said that her increasing interest in candy was making it difficult to fulfill her administrative, teaching and parental responsibilities, and knew that studying the evolution of the shape of the Hershey’s Kiss would never win her respect within the academy.
The blog is not so much a public forum, she said, as a “research trail,” a way of chronicling the hours she now spends reading old issues of Confectioners’ Journal, scanning patent applications, and combing archived phone books to count the number of candy shops in Brooklyn in 1908 (564).
Dr. Kawash says her research is partly fueled by anger toward candy manufacturers who publish inaccurate, often sugarcoated histories of their products. In fact, she says, the home-kitchen inventions of candy-shop owners were often simply copied, stolen or swallowed up by large companies.
“The history of candy, like the history of wars, is always written by the winners,” she said. “We can’t just let that go unchallenged.”
On wasting food. Or not.
On a sorta early EARLY intervention for potentially autistic toddlers.
At the Age of Peekaboo, in Therapy to Fight Autism
By APRIL DEMBOSKY
SACRAMENTO — In the three years since her son Diego was given a diagnosis of autism at age 2, Carmen Aguilar has made countless contributions to research on this perplexing disorder.
She has donated all manner of biological samples and agreed to keep journals of everything she’s eaten, inhaled or rubbed on her skin. Researchers attended the birth of her second son, Emilio, looking on as she pushed, leaving with Tupperware containers full of tissue samples, the placenta and the baby’s first stool.
Now the family is in yet another study, part of an effort by a network of scientists across North America to look for signs of autism as early as 6 months. (Now, the condition cannot be diagnosed reliably before age 2.) And here at the MIND Institute at the University of California Davis Medical Center, researchers are watching babies like Emilio in a pioneering effort to determine whether they can benefit from specific treatments.
So when Emilio did show signs of autism risk at his 6-month evaluation — not making eye contact, not smiling at people, not babbling, showing unusual interest in objects — his parents eagerly accepted an offer to enroll him in a treatment program called Infant Start.
The treatment is based on a daily therapy, the Early Start Denver Model, that is based on games and pretend play. It has been shown in randomized trials to significantly improve I.Q., language and social skills in toddlers with autism, and researchers say it has even greater potential if it can be started earlier.
“What you ultimately might be doing is preventing a certain proportion of autism from ever emerging,” said David Mandell, the associate director of the Center for Autism Research at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “I’m not saying you’re curing these kids, but you may be changing their developmental trajectory enough by intervening early enough that they never go on to meet criteria for the disorder. And you can’t do that if you keep waiting for the full disorder to emerge.”
Sally Rogers, a MIND Institute researcher who has been working with the Aguilars, said she faced several challenges in adapting the toddler therapy for infants.
Even normally developing babies cannot speak or gesture, let alone pretend. Instead, Ms. Rogers has parents focus on babbling and simple social interactions that occur in the normal routine of feeding, dressing, bathing and changing the baby.
“Patty-cake and peekaboo or tickle games, those are people games,” she explained to Carmen and Saul Aguilar during their first session with their son Emilio at 7 months old. Ms. Rogers talked about the next 12 weeks and how they would focus on getting Emilio to exchange smiles, to respond to his name, to babble with them, starting with single syllables (“ma”) and moving on to doubles (“gaga”) and more complex combinations (“maga”).
“Most babies come into the world with a built-in magnet for people,” Ms. Rogers said. “One thing we know about autism is that it weakens that magnet. It’s not that they’re not interested, they have a little less draw to people. So how do we increase our magnetic appeal for his attention?”
Lesson 1 was eye contact. Ms. Rogers had the parents take turns playing with Emilio, encouraging them to get face to face with the baby and stay in his line of vision. Mrs. Aguilar leaned down on the blue blanket and rattled a toy. “Emilio? Where’s Emilio?”
On the other side of a two-way mirror, another researcher watched the session and an assistant monitored three video cameras in the room. Sally Ozonoff, a researcher who first identified Emilio as a candidate for the study, stopped by to observe.
“He’s just staring at that object even though her face is three inches away,” she said. “He has that flat, very sober-looking face.”
Mr. Aguilar tried next. He put Emilio in a red beanbag chair and folded the sides together over the baby. “Squish, squish, squish!” he said. No response.
He picked Emilio up over his head and flew him like an airplane. Emilio stared at the ceiling.
Mr. Aguilar put the baby back in the beanbag and picked up a stuffed wolf toy. He put it on his head and let it drop into his hands. “Pschooo! Uh-oh!” Finally, Emilio was watching.
“That was great,” Ms. Rogers told the father. “You put that toy on your head and he was drawn to your face. You were using the toy to enhance the social interaction. When you bring it up to your face, he’s with you.”
While the causes of autism are still a mystery, scientists agree that it has some genetic or biological trigger. Experimental treatments like Infant Start are intended to address the social environment the baby grows up in, and to see whether changes at home might alter the biological development of the condition once triggered.
“Experiences shape babies’ brains in a very physical way,” Ms. Rogers said. “Experience carves synapses; some are built, some are dissolved.”
If a baby starts focusing on objects instead of faces, the theory goes, a “developmental cascade” can begin: brain circuits meant for reading faces are used for something else, like processing light or objects, and babies lose their ability to learn the emotional cues normally taught by watching facial expressions. The longer a baby’s brain runs this developmental course, the harder it becomes to intervene.
But the effort to stop autism in its tracks with earlier interventions presents a scientific problem.
Because there is no formal diagnosis for autism before age 2, it is impossible to distinguish between infants who are helped by the intervention and infants who never would have developed autism in the first place. Researchers must see enough improvement with babies like Emilio before they can do a randomized trial, comparing babies who get the treatment and babies who don’t.
Emilio’s parents are happy to have their son in the first wave of the pilot program. They saw their older son, Diego, make so much progress in behavioral therapy between ages 3 and 5 that they’re very hopeful about what might happen with Emilio.
Mr. Aguilar quit his job at a telecommunications company so he could care for Emilio and work on their objectives all day. Mrs. Aguilar had quit her job in social work when their first son received his diagnosis. But the commitment to the future is much revised since Emilio’s 6-month evaluation.
“I’m the first in my family to go to college, and grad school,” Mrs. Aguilar said. “My thought was, ‘Now I’ve set the bar for my son.’ ”
But after learning that Emilio too may have autism, “you stop looking that far into the future,” she said. “We’re forced to think day by day.”
On learning to like fruits and vegetables. I've never understood the hype about how "hard" it is to eat sufficient fruits/vegetables. Some of that hype, admittedly, is beverage ads (so... yeah), but a lot of it isn't. How hard is it to eat an apple with your breakfast (one or two servings of fruit), an orange and half a banana with your lunch (one serving each) which also has a small side salad (half a serving), a salad at dinnertime (another half a serving) and a vegetable side (another serving - hey, now I'm over 5 servings, and I haven't even had any snacks!), seriously?
Could be worse. I've seen an ad for some product full of vitamin C because it's "so hard" to get your RDA by drinking a gallon of OJ daily. *headdesk* Vitamin C is so prevalent in EVERYTHING that you can't even get scurvy unless you really try!
I’m overwhelmed! A recent column asking for suggestions on how to entice Americans to eat more vegetables drew nearly 600 e-mailed responses and a long, long menu of food for thought.
Most of the suggestions came from people who love vegetables and have already figured out ways to incorporate them into their own and their families’ diets. But equally instructive were those from people who said they were not especially fond of vegetables and suggested ways they could be made more appealing.
A recurring theme was that we should stop trying to sell vegetables for their health value (and stop scolding people for failing to eat enough of them) and instead focus on the positive — the delicious flavors and colors that can add so much variety to meals and snacks. Another was the importance of teaching people fast and simple techniques for achieving mouthwatering results.
As Elif Savas Felsen wrote, “If you teach Americans how to cook vegetables and stop yelling at them like some righteous food-health nut, they will learn.”
And Katherine Erickson urged that we “stop calling vegetables ‘sides’ ” and instead design meals around them.
Start Young
Give children a taste for fresh vegetables early on — very early. As soon as my sons could pick up pieces to feed themselves, minimally cooked mixed frozen vegetables adorned their food trays.
“Don’t give up,” L. K. Schoeffel wrote. “Keep making all those veggies a central part of your family meals.” If at first the children balk, reintroduce them again and again. And be sure to eat them yourself.
Introduce vegetables as fun foods, perhaps by reading, together, “The ABC’s of Fruits and Vegetables and Beyond” (Ceres, 2007), cleverly written by Steve Charney and David Goldbeck and beautifully illustrated by Maria Burgaleta Larson, complete with poems, jokes, riddles, geography, recipes and ways to grow food.
Create a sense of ownership. If possible, have children help plant a little vegetable garden or grow something edible on the deck or window ledge. Get them involved in choosing vegetables in the store or at a farmers’ market, remark about their interesting shapes and colors, and let children help prepare them. Even a 2-year-old can rinse cherry tomatoes and toss them in a salad.
“Ask them how many peas they can pick up with their forks,” Edward Batcheller suggested. “Help them cut up string beans. Let them learn how to peel carrots. Come up with all sorts of vegetables, fruits, etc. that they can put together to make a good drink with the blender.”
Many readers urged schools to reinstate cooking classes for both girls and boys — learning about food can also reinforce lessons in math, science and geography — with a focus on fresh vegetables that are also served in the lunchroom. But lunch offerings of overcooked, tasteless vegetables will win no converts.
Children and adults often learn to experience new vegetables at other people’s houses — or while shopping. Supermarkets, big-box stores and other retailers can prepare vegetable tastings for anyone to sample.
As in decades long past, children should be served the same foods the grown-ups are eating. No special “kid food,” as several readers put it. Likewise in restaurants, dishes on the children’s menu should include lots of tasty vegetables in place of fries.
Dr. Susan Gardner of Houston asked: “Where are the parents of yesteryear who simply put varied and nutritious foods on the table and assumed that their active and busy children would eat them? No wheedling, no begging, no comment.” Carol Caputo of New York had a similar thought: “Parents today ask their kids what they want to eat. You are the parent, you decide. Don’t discuss food, just serve it!”
For that witching hour when the kids are hungry but dinner is not yet ready, serve cut-up fresh carrots, cucumber, celery or red pepper, or a combination, with a dip like hummus, salad dressing or seasoned yogurt. Edamame beans are a great snack — children love popping them out of the shells.
Hungry children are likely to eat what is readily available. If instead of cookies and chips, there is a platter of ready-to-eat vegetables or a bowl of cherry tomatoes handy, they just may eat them.
Even the most reluctant consumer of vegetables can handle them if they are grated or puréed and hidden in stews, soups, pasta sauces, loaves, quick breads and muffins. My family’s favorites included pumpkin and zucchini breads.
Missy Chase Lapine, who has won fame as the Sneaky Chef, suggested “slipping veggies in the meals people already like to eat, like spaghetti and meatballs. Once people realize that the meal they just loved contained spinach, they become more open to trying spinach straight up.”
Focus on Flavor
“Never boil them,” Walter Jacobsen wrote. “Even if they’re frozen, I think they taste much better, are much crunchier, if sautéed in a flavored oil.” A popular refrain: “What’s wrong with a little fat — olive oil or butter — to make vegetables more palatable?” As some noted, if you reduce the meat portion and buttered bread, there’s ample caloric room for some oil or butter — even pancetta or bacon bits — to season the vegetables.
A very popular idea was a vegetable-rich soup (I used to purée the vegetables my boys rejected on sight), perhaps with tiny meatballs, chicken cubes or seasoned tofu. Consider making a big batch to eat for a few days, perhaps freezing some (labeled and dated) for another day. My lunch the other day was split pea soup that I’d made and frozen in 2008. Beneath it I found turkey and cabbage soup I cooked last year.
Many readers suggested my own favorite: stir-frying vegetables in a little olive oil seasoned with garlic, onion, shallots or balsamic vinegar and a sprinkle of salt and pepper. Another of my favorites: grilling vegetables, which can be done on the stovetop in a ridged grill pan as well as on a barbecue grill.
Roasting vegetables, either individually or mixed, in the oven or toaster oven was another popular suggestion. Cut the vegetables into approximately equal sizes, toss with olive oil, season with salt and pepper or herbs, and bake at 400 degrees for about 20 minutes or until they reach the desired texture.
Roasted kale crisps for snacks were mentioned often. Margaret P. Mason suggests spreading a single layer of kale pieces on a cookie sheet. Brush with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and bake at 375 to 400 degrees. Turn them after about five minutes, making sure they don’t burn.
Juiced vegetables were frequently mentioned, too. Chester Chanin thinks restaurants should offer “appealing fresh vegetable juices as a complimentary side drink before the meal arrives.” I’ll drink to that!
Explaining the 2nd Avenue Subway to first graders.
Last week, Michael Horodniceanu, the man in charge of building the long-delayed Second Avenue subway, agreed to sit down with about 25 fidgety residents of the Upper East Side who demanded answers about the toll that his $5 billion project had taken on their neighborhood.
“I am sure many of you are going through the trials and tribulations of being around the subway construction,” Dr. Horodniceanu said sympathetically, the faint sound of jackhammers in the distance. “But this is being built for you.”
It was a tough crowd to read. One person doodled on lined paper. Another put her fingers in her mouth, while her neighbor stared off into space.
First graders are not usually treated to a face-to-face meeting with officials of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
Now, however, the authority is embarking on a stepped-up effort to address the concerns of New Yorkers who live along the torn-up route of the future subway, and the outreach campaign — led on Friday by Dr. Horodniceanu, the agency’s president of capital construction — came to the 5- and 6-year-old set in Paula Rogovin’s class at Public School 290 on East 82nd Street.
The conversation skipped the more controversial elements of the project: failing businesses, falling real estate values and noisy construction sites.
Instead, the avuncular Dr. Horodniceanu offered a more basic lesson: how to make concrete.
He brought small plastic bags filled with sand, gravel and cement, poured all three into a plastic bowl and swirled the mixture with a silver spoon as the students watched, agog.
“These kids are terrific, and the amount of interest they are showing is overwhelming,” Dr. Horodniceanu said. “Quite frankly, I’m hoping they will be able to transfer their enthusiasm to their parents.”
Construction on the first stage of the Second Avenue subway, which will stretch from East 96th Street to East 63rd Street when it opens around 2017, has created a deep animus between the authority and residents who say the project has transformed a once-bustling boulevard into dystopian blight.
Dr. Horodniceanu, who has overseen the authority’s largest projects since 2008, says that his workers need to do better.
“We are really not a good neighbor,” he said. “We are working — I don’t want to say, in their living rooms — but in front of their living rooms.”
He added: “People are willing to accept construction over a period of two years. We’re going to be there for the next six.”
Officials have pledged to replace bent, unsightly fences; repave broken sidewalks with flat, cleaner surfaces; and open up sidewalks that have been gobbled up.
The authority plans to open an office in a recently vacated retail space, where residents can stop by with concerns, and a Web-based timeline, to provide a block-by-block guide of the planned work schedule.
Renovations near East 92nd Street, along the first section to receive the spruce-up, are expected to be completed around Thanksgiving at a cost of about $70,000.
“When you look at a fence, it should not be a wave; it should be a straight line,” Dr. Horodniceanu said, pointing at an unpainted, crooked barrier held together by chicken wire.
The first graders, however, did not seem too perturbed by the messiness. Every Friday, Ms. Rogovin, an 18-year teaching veteran, takes her class on a short field trip to the corner of East 82nd Street and Second Avenue, a half-block away, where an enormous crane sits in the middle of the street, lowering materials below-ground.
The students know many of the workers by name and often ask for their autographs.
“All types of different people come and talk to me, but they are the only ones who are actually happy about what we’re doing,” Danté Claude, an inspector at the site, said of the children.
In her classroom, Ms. Rogovin puts up photographs of the immense, yellow, tunnel-boring machine, which the students visited earlier this year. A “word wall” features curious terms like “excavator” and “sandhog.”
“It’s very fun at the construction site,” Natalie Drabkin, 5, said to Dr. Horodniceanu during his recent visit. “It’s interesting to see the different machines they use there.”
Parents who tagged along last week agreed, to a point.
“The transparency is terrific,” said Todd Girshon, whose son, Justin, 6, is in Ms. Rogovin’s class.
He said he was skeptical about the start-stop pace of construction. “These guys will be entering high school when the subway is supposed to open,” he said, referring to the first graders, “and even that remains to be seen.”
Apparently, some genius has decided breast pumps do not merit a tax break.
Acne Cream? Tax-Sheltered. Breast Pump? No.
By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI
Denture wearers will get a tax break on the cost of adhesives to keep their false teeth in place. So will acne sufferers who buy pimple creams.
People whose children have severe allergies might even be allowed the break for replacing grass with artificial turf since it could be considered a medical expense.
But nursing mothers will not be allowed to use their tax-sheltered health care accounts to pay for breast pumps and other supplies.
That is because the Internal Revenue Service has ruled that breast-feeding does not have enough health benefits to qualify as a form of medical care.
With all the changes the health care overhaul will bring in the coming years, it nonetheless will leave those regulations intact when new rules for flexible spending accounts go into effect in January. Those allow millions of Americans to set aside part of their pretax earnings to pay for unreimbursed medical expenses.
While breast-feeding supplies weren’t allowed under the old regulations either, one major goal of the health care overhaul was to control medical costs by encouraging preventive procedures like immunizations and screenings.
Despite a growing body of research indicating that the antibodies passed from mother to child in breast milk could reduce disease among infants — including one recent study that found it could prevent the premature death of 900 babies a year — the I.R.S. has denied a request from the American Academy of Pediatrics to reclassify breast-feeding costs as a medical care expense.
In some respects, the biggest roadblock for mothers’ groups and advocates of breast-feeding is one of their central arguments: nursing a child is beneficial because it is natural.
I.R.S. officials say they consider breast milk a food that can promote good health, the same way that eating citrus fruit can prevent scurvy. But because the I.R.S. code considers nutrition a necessity rather than a medical condition, the agency’s analysts view the cost of breast pumps, bottles and pads as no more deserving of a tax break than an orange juicer.
Many mothers’ groups and medical experts say that breast milk provides nutrition and natural supplements that prevent disease, and would like to see its use expanded. Hospital accreditation groups have been prodding maternity wards to encourage parents to feed only breast milk until a child is 6 months old.
The new health law does include one breakthrough for nursing mothers, a mandate that they be permitted unpaid breaks to use breast pumps. Spurned by tax authorities, breast-feeding advocates say they will return to Congress to get a tax break, too.
“There’s been a lot of progress in the past few years making the public, the medical establishment and even Congress recognize the health benefits of breast-feeding,” said Melissa Bonghi, a lactation consultant in Bainbridge Island, Wash. “But I guess the I.R.S. will just take a little longer.”
With the new regulations set to take effect in two months, millions of American workers now in the open enrollment period at their employers have to determine whether, and how much, to set aside for 2011. More than 20 million people have flexible spending or other tax-exempt health care savings accounts, and the programs are projected to cost the federal Treasury about $3.8 billion this year and $68 billion over the next decade.
The most far-reaching change involves over-the-counter medicines. Since 2003, most of them have been eligible expenses, making flexible spending accounts so popular that some plans issued debit cards that allowed users to make purchases without having to file for reimbursement later.
As of Jan. 1, however, over-the-counter medications — including allergy remedies, cough suppressants or even pain relievers like aspirin or ibuprofen — will be eligible only if they are prescribed by a doctor. That change is so drastic that the National Association of Chain Drug Stores, which represents 37,000 pharmacies, last week asked the I.R.S. for a two-year delay in that regulation, to allow merchants to recalibrate the computer systems that determine which products are eligible for purchase with flexible spending account debit cards.
Many factors, including the length of maternity leave, affect how long a woman breast-feeds.
According to a survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 75 percent of the 4.3 million mothers who gave birth in 2007 started breast-feeding. By the time the baby was 6 months old, the portion dropped to 43 percent, and on the child’s first birthday, to 22 percent.
A study released this year by Harvard Medical School concluded that if 90 percent of mothers followed the standard medical advice of feeding infants only breast milk for their first six months, the United States could save $13 billion a year in health care costs and prevent the premature deaths of 900 infants each year from respiratory illness and other infections.
“The old adage that breast-feeding is a child’s first immunization really is true,” said Dr. Robert W. Block, president-elect of the American Academy of Pediatrics. “So we need to do everything we can to remove the barriers that make it difficult.”
To continue breast-feeding once they return to work, many mothers need to use pumps to extract milk, which can be chilled and bottle-fed to the child later. The cost of buying or renting a breast pump and the various accessories needed to store milk runs about $500 to $1,000 for most mothers over the course of a year, according to the United States Breastfeeding Committee, a nonprofit advocacy group. Lactation consultants, who can cost several hundred dollars, also would not be an eligible expense.
Roy Ramthun, a former Treasury Department official, said that tax officials’ reluctance to classify those costs as medical expenses stemmed from a fear that the program might be abused.
“They get very uneasy about anything that smacks of food because they fear it will open up all sorts of exceptions,” said Mr. Ramthun, who runs a consulting company that specializes in health savings accounts. “It’s a matter of cost and of protecting the integrity of the tax code.”
Bills introduced last year by Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York, and Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, would have allowed nursing mothers to claim the tax break. But breast-feeding advocates say that effort, like many before, was undone by economic and cultural factors.
“Everyone says they support breast-feeding, but getting businesses and Congress to act on it has been surprisingly difficult,” said Barbara Emanuel, executive director of the breast-feeding advocacy group La Leche League International. “We get resistance from the formula companies and cultural resistance, so it can be hard to get nursing mothers the support that everyone agrees they deserve.”
Unless the law changes, some mothers may ask their pediatricians for a note that breast-feeding is medically necessary. Jody L. Dietel, who works for a company that processes claims from flexible spending accounts, says that many patients who receive orthodontic procedures have used such a tactic.
“Orthodontia is really so you have nice, straight teeth,” said Ms. Dietel, chief compliance officer for WageWorks. “But the doctors write notes warning that the patient’s jaw might be damaged without treatment or their overbite could cause health problems, and it becomes an eligible expense. For breast-feeding there are two components, too: nutritional and preventative medicine.”
The return of Pee-wee Herman
Candy-Colored Bow-Tied Redemption
By DAVE ITZKOFF
THE Pied Piper was nowhere to be heard, and Santa Claus wouldn’t be coming to town for a few more weeks, but something irresistible had drawn a small crowd to the West Fourth Street basketball courts in Greenwich Village on a recent Thursday morning. Huddled in groups of two and three, a few dozen men and women in their 20s and 30s glanced at one another and at their smartphones, rereading the Twitter and Foursquare messages that directed them here, waiting for something to happen.
Without fanfare a white van sailed up to the curb, and from it emerged a thin, 58-year-old man — wearing a gray suit, a tiny red bow tie and white loafers — who seemed as uncertain to meet his fans as they were excited to receive him. The gathering parted as he stepped onto the blacktop, picked up a basketball and made a few graceless attempts at hurling it at a hoop. “Yeah, match that,” he said snidely, to laughter.
As he returned to the van to be shuttled to his next mystery destination, one bystander after another — not just the supporters who had responded to his electronic siren song, but those who did not expect to see a long-forgotten figure from their childhoods suddenly materialize on a Manhattan street — felt compelled to shout at him some variation of these words, if not this exact message: Pee-wee Herman, I love you!
The next afternoon Paul Reubens, the man who has played Pee-wee Herman for more than 30 years, was sitting at a patio table in the shadow of the U.S.S. Intrepid, the aircraft carrier turned museum. Forgoing his Pee-wee costume for head-to-toe black, he was marveling at the previous day’s promotional stunt for his coming Broadway show, which had sent him whizzing around Manhattan while broadcasting his whereabouts on the Internet.
The affection he had been shown throughout the day, Mr. Reubens said in his gentle whisper, was “so weird and so great at the same time.”
“It was odd and it was fantastic,” he continued. “Both, rolled into one.”
It is impossible to discuss Mr. Reubens without discussing Pee-wee Herman and duality: the entertainer who made a career of playing a boy in a man’s body, who turned an adult comedy show into family-friendly movies and a children’s television series; the apparent innocent who was felled by a pair of decidedly grown-up sex scandals; and now, most improbably, the written-off washout on the verge of a major comeback — the man who for years was reduced to a punch line, about to have the last laugh.
When “The Pee-wee Herman Show” opens on Broadway at the Stephen Sondheim Theater on Nov. 11, Mr. Reubens said, it will complete a cycle of downfall and redemption not only for himself but for the blameless Pee-wee character from which he is inseparable.
“I wrecked it to some degree, you know?” he said. “It got made into something different. The shine got taken off it.”
He added: “At a certain point I just wanted to have a better end to my career.”
That career started for Mr. Reubens, a Los Angeles transplant by way of Peekskill, N.Y., and Sarasota, Fla., at the Groundlings improv comedy theater. There in the late 1970s he created the impish Pee-wee Herman, a volatile man-child descended from the likes of Peter Pan and Willy Wonka, and imbued with Mr. Reubens’s own love of toys and kitsch. With the help of fellow Groundlings Mr. Reubens fleshed out the anarchic world of that character in “The Pee-wee Herman Show,” a mildly risqué stage send-up of a vintage kiddie-television program that became a cult sensation.
Pee-wee went mainstream in 1981 when HBO broadcast the show as a special, propelling Mr. Reubens to the hit 1985 Tim Burton movie “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” (and a less successful 1988 feature, “Big Top Pee-wee”). For five seasons starting in 1986, Mr. Reubens also hosted his own CBS Saturday morning series, “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” a kaleidoscopically colorful parade of puppets, props and cartoons aimed at the ids of kids.
“ ‘Sesame Street’ taught children how to read,” said John Paragon, who has written for and performed in Pee-wee projects since the Groundlings. “We taught children how to bang pots and pans.”
That legacy was badly tarnished in July 1991, when, just as “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” was ending its run, Mr. Reubens was arrested in Sarasota for exposing himself in an adult theater. The incident, which resulted in a no-contest plea, seemed to evoke the unsavory flip side of his artistic fixations on youth and innocence, and tittering conversation about the arrest dominated that summer, at least until Clarence Thomas’s controversial Supreme Court confirmation hearings a few months later.
Mr. Reubens was arrested again in 2002 after thousands of vintage erotic artworks were seized from his home, and in 2004 he pleaded guilty to possessing obscene material in the case. But the damage of his 1991 arrest, which in a later era might have been one more entry on a TMZ.com ticker, had been done. He became increasingly reclusive and unsure whether the public would ever accept him again.
“I had to go through a horrible time of feeling like I didn’t want to go anywhere or be anywhere, see anybody,” Mr. Reubens said. “I, at a certain point, thought, ‘Well, if I just wait long enough, everything will go away, and I won’t be famous anymore and I’ll go back to my total anonymous civilian life.’ ”
For nearly two decades Mr. Reubens continued to play small supporting roles in films from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” to “Blow” to “Life During Wartime”; he popped up on comedies like “30 Rock” and “Reno 911!” and got caught in the occasional dead-end development deal.
Though he says he never felt locked into the Pee-wee character, he rarely connected with other roles he was offered either. “If somebody wants to hire me for something,” Mr. Reubens said, “I look at it and go: ‘I could think of 50 other people who could do that. Why me?’ ”
Then, about two years ago, theatrical producers started approaching him about reviving “The Pee-wee Herman” show in Los Angeles, a prospect that left him deeply conflicted.
“There were age-related issues to it,” Mr. Reubens said. “There were career-standing issues.”
There was also the opportunity to reclaim what he had before — not the fame, which Mr. Reubens said always troubled him, but the freedom to create, to make people laugh and once again to play Pee-wee on his own terms.
“Was there a way to figure that out, to get that back in some way?” Mr. Reubens said. “I felt like this was my window, right now. If I didn’t do it now, I would really be too old, and I don’t want to do it with a new face.”
(Asked if that meant creating a new character for himself, Mr. Reubens replied, “No, I meant to go and have plastic surgery.”)
The Los Angeles run of “The Pee-wee Herman Show,” which played at the Club Nokia theater in January and February, did not deviate drastically from the original stage script in which Pee-wee must decide between using a wish to help two friends fall in love or giving himself the power to fly.
It incorporated characters created for the “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” series, while it reunited Mr. Reubens with Groundlings colleagues like Mr. Paragon (who plays Jambi the Genie), Lynne Marie Stewart (Miss Yvonne) and John Moody (Mailman Mike). This turned out to be exactly what audiences wanted.
“There’s never been anything from the fans other than, please do more,” said Judd Apatow, the director of “Knocked Up” and “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” and a longtime devotee, who is producing a new Pee-wee movie for Mr. Reubens. Whatever was written about Mr. Reubens in gossip columns or on blogs, Mr. Apatow said, “if you asked anybody who loved Pee-wee Herman, ‘Would you like him to do more?,’ everybody would say yes.”
Mr. Reubens said that success would have been sufficient, and that the Broadway transfer of “The Pee-wee Herman Show,” which was announced in May, was an unexpected bonus. (So far the show has a solid $3 million advance in ticket sales.)
“I thought I was really done, I really did,” he said. “I thought, ‘O.K., I did it, I proved something to myself.’ ”
But to his collaborators the Broadway show and the extent to which Mr. Reubens has so far been embraced by New York are hopeful signs that whatever outrage or offense his arrests engendered, it has finally been put to rest.
When the “Pee-wee” cast members were asked how they were affected by the generosity shown to Mr. Reubens, Mr. Paragon choked back tears. “Considering the way that a lot of the press made him feel,” Mr. Paragon said, “it just makes me feel good, because we love him.”
Mr. Moody added: “He gets to see what the real people think. Real people, not somebody pretending.”
Even in the early months of a Broadway season that is very much in flux, the creative team of “The Pee-wee Herman Show” senses their show is an unusual assemblage of contrasts and contradictions.
“It doesn’t want to be, like, ‘Sesame Street Live,’ ” said its director, Alex Timbers, who also directed the Los Angeles production. “It doesn’t want to be the TV show onstage. It’s got to have a real, grounded center, even though it lives in this completely up world.”
Mr. Timbers, who is also the book writer and director of “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson,” another offbeat new Broadway arrival, said that the “Pee-wee” show’s farcical, vaudevillian aesthetic could help it connect with theatergoers.
“It reminds me a little of drag theater,” he said. “There’s a sense of conversation happening across the footlights that welcomes the audience as an active member, as opposed to, like, shutting down there.”
What the show also has is Mr. Reubens, who at all times is the final arbiter of what Pee-wee Herman would or would not do.
“It’s all from his gut,” Mr. Apatow said. “That feels wrong, that feels right. And a lot of the time what feels right is that Pee-wee Herman would do something that’s wrong and so inappropriate.”
Before he headed into the Intrepid gift shop and proceeded to spend $120 on assorted postcards, magnets, models and paperweights, Mr. Reubens said the challenge before him was not the Broadway show, but rather an unfamiliar world where people are genuinely delighted when they encounter him.
“This is very telling to me,” he said with a touch of Pee-wee playfulness, “that I have such a strong reaction. Like: ‘Not too much love. Hold back on the love a little bit.’ I could call up a therapist and find out what it meant.”
While he would obviously prefer a hit Broadway show to a flop, he said the past 20 years had made him impervious to criticism.
“Honestly,” he said, “I’m somebody who there’s nothing more horrible left to say to me. You know? There really isn’t. And there’s enormous power in that.”
Is Candy Evil or Just Misunderstood?
FOR Samira Kawash, a writer who lives in Brooklyn, the Jelly Bean Incident provided the spark.
Five years ago, her daughter, then 3, was invited to play at the home of a new friend. At snack time, having noted the presence of sugar (in the form of juice boxes and cookies) in the kitchen, Dr. Kawash, then a Rutgers professor, brought out a few jelly beans.
The mother froze. Her child had never tasted candy, she explained, but perhaps it would be all right just this once. Then the father weighed in from the other room, shouting that they might as well give the child crack cocaine.
“It was clear to me that there was an irrational equation of candy and danger in that house,” Dr. Kawash said in a recent interview. “And that was irresistible to me.”
From that train of thought, the Candy Professor blog was born. In her writing there, Dr. Kawash dives deep into the American relationship with candy, finding irrational and interesting ideas everywhere. The big idea behind Candy Professor is that candy carries so much moral and ethical baggage that people view it as fundamentally different — in a bad way — from other kinds of food.
“At least candy is honest about what it is,” she said. “It has always been a processed food, eaten for pleasure, with no particular nutritional benefit.” Today, she said, every aisle in the supermarket contains highly manipulated products that have those qualities.
And, she points out, many people who avoid candy will cheerfully eat sugar-packed chocolate-chip energy bars and drink Gatorade for health reasons, although a serving of Gatorade contains about the same amount of sugar as a dozen pieces of candy corn. Dr. Kawash’s expertise is in American culture and gender studies, but some nutritionists share her views on the pariah status of candy.
“I don’t think candy is bad for you,” said Rachel Johnson, a nutrition professor at the University of Vermont who was the lead author of the American Heart Association’s comprehensive 2009 review of the scientific literature on sugar and cardiovascular health.
Dr. Johnson said that candy is considered bad because it lacks the “health halo” that hovers over sweet food like granola bars and fruit juice. “Nutritionally there is little difference between a gummy bear and a bite of fruit leather,” she said.
Dr. Johnson also noted that candy provides only 6 percent of the added sugar in the American diet, while sweet drinks and juice supply 46 percent. “There’s reason to believe that sugar in liquid form is actually worse than candy, because it fills you up and displaces healthier food choices,” she said.
Dr. Kawash, who studied architectural theory, narratives of women and medicine, and the imagery of terrorism before she began to write Candy Professor, has complicated feelings about her current specialty. She describes her childhood in Sunnyvale, Calif., in the 1970s as an “endless, and mostly frustrating quest for candy,” restricted to a small weekly indulgence after church on Sundays. Later, she said, binges on gummy bears and spice drops fueled her undergraduate research at Stanford; more recently, she found herself flushing handfuls of candy corn down the toilet to prevent herself from eating “just a few more.”
“Obviously, my own relationship with candy is not totally healthy,” she admits.
Fortunately, some of that passion has now been channeled into research. There are many blogs devoted to tasting, photographing and tracking down obscure types of candy, such as Candy Addict and Candy Blog, but Dr. Kawash’s work is rarely about taste or nostalgia. She is much more interested in untangling the threads of control, danger and temptation that candy has carried since it became widely available in the 1880s.
Until then, most candies — like fudge, brittle and taffy — were homemade, and store-bought hard candies like horehound sticks and peppermints were relatively expensive. But advances in technology enabled sugar to be spun, aerated, softened and flavored in new ways, and sold cheaply. Just like that, candy entered popular culture.
Dr. Kawash notes that candy, like cigarettes, was long advertised as having health benefits. “Eat Tootsie Rolls — The Luscious Candy That Helps Beat Fatigue,” reads one of the many ads she has exhaustively analyzed on her blog. One post is dedicated to the “slippage” between candy and medicine that she has found in a close reading of the history of cough drops — hard candy in a socially acceptable form.
But there have always been what she calls “candy alarmists,” who warned that candy was too stimulating, too soporific, poisoned, or otherwise hazardous. Dangerous candy appears in many fairy tales, a theme continued with the modern public-safety message, “Don’t take candy from strangers,” and in public scares over tampering and contamination. (Dr. Kawash recently detailed how all of this led to the candy wrappers we know today in The Journal of American Culture.)
In the early 20th century, she said — in the absence of any medical evidence — doctors blamed candy for the spread of polio. In the 1970s, refined sugar approached the top of the food counterculture’s list of enemies, spurred by international best sellers like “Sugar Blues” and “Sweet and Dangerous.” Tooth decay was the longtime threat; more recently, the global spread of obesity has prompted fears of the “empty calories” in candy.
Now a tentative cook and a buyer of organic eggs, Dr. Kawash is convinced that candy is often the scapegoat when Americans sense that something is wrong in the food supply. The social critic in her says that corn syrup and the cheap candy produced with it have unhinged our notions of how much candy is too much. At the same time, the historian in her can’t help pointing out that “corn syrup was a wonderful thing for candy.” Its invention in the late 19th century made the commercial production of soft confections like fudge and candy corn possible.
The disruption of traditional agricultural systems — including the presence of corn in so many processed foods — has also dislodged candy from its established place as an occasional treat.
“Candy should not be sold in huge bags at the drugstore,” said Jennifer King, a founder of Liddabit Sweets, a small candy company in Brooklyn that proudly sells candy bars — such as a recreated Snickers — for as much as $6.50. Liddabit products are indulgent but also virtuous: Ms. King and her partner, Liz Gutman, make treats like apple-maple lollipops and spiced caramel chews by hand, from prestigious and often local ingredients. (The honey in the honeycomb candy is gathered from hives in New York City.)
Dr. Kawash says that the fetishization of candy ingredients and the aestheticization of candy — like the color-coordinated candy landscapes now popular at weddings — are relatively new.
“When the moneyed classes indulge in sugar, it’s part of an acceptable leisure activity,” she said, chewing over the significance of high-end candy destinations like Dylan’s Candy Bar.
“But when poor people do the same thing, it’s considered pathological,” she added, citing the current debate over using food stamps to buy soda, candy and other “bad” foods.
Dr. Kawash, 46, retired from teaching in 2009. She said that her increasing interest in candy was making it difficult to fulfill her administrative, teaching and parental responsibilities, and knew that studying the evolution of the shape of the Hershey’s Kiss would never win her respect within the academy.
The blog is not so much a public forum, she said, as a “research trail,” a way of chronicling the hours she now spends reading old issues of Confectioners’ Journal, scanning patent applications, and combing archived phone books to count the number of candy shops in Brooklyn in 1908 (564).
Dr. Kawash says her research is partly fueled by anger toward candy manufacturers who publish inaccurate, often sugarcoated histories of their products. In fact, she says, the home-kitchen inventions of candy-shop owners were often simply copied, stolen or swallowed up by large companies.
“The history of candy, like the history of wars, is always written by the winners,” she said. “We can’t just let that go unchallenged.”
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no subject
Date: 2010-11-03 06:28 pm (UTC)Actually...yeah. Most of them taste bad and the rest feel icky between the teeth (I have major texture issues). And I'm not going to choke down things I don't like just because. There are very few veggies I can stand to eat. I'm better with fruits, but not by much.
I know not everybody has the same problems, but.... *shrug* It's a breaking point with me.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-03 06:35 pm (UTC)The commercials and the articles and the drama about eating enough fruits and vegetables are written, for lack of a better term, for "normal" folks - or those perceived as normal anyway. And the official view of normal probably doesn't include sensory problems.
Well, it is hard sometimes.
Date: 2010-11-03 10:39 pm (UTC)I don't know how anyone gets by who can't grow their own, since it gets hard financially too--your thirty apples a month will cost you a lot if you're buying your apples at $1.79 a pound, and we haven't even gotten to the thirty oranges, fifteen bananas and bushels of vegetables. (Veggies, especially frozen, are usually much much cheaper.)
Right now I'm eating a lot of Satsumas because the stores are putting them on sale as they come into season. When nothing's on sale (by which I mean less than a dollar a pound for fruit and less than .50 a pound for fresh veggies), it's back to the dried and canned and frozen produce we put up while it was in season.
Re: Well, it is hard sometimes.
Date: 2010-11-04 02:02 am (UTC)For a year and then some, Evangeline every day for lunch had a sandwich (with lettuce on it if possible), half a tangerine or banana, two prunes, six grapes, and three each cherry tomatoes and baby carrots. Plus two snap peas if we had any.
Admittedly, you can get away with giving children the same lunch every single day because they often prefer it, but it was an easy lunch because all we had to do was count. And it was easily portable too, and all finger foods because god knows I wasn't about to play the "Use your fork!" game at the table.
your thirty apples a month will cost you a lot if you're buying your apples at $1.79 a pound
Maybe I'm lucky, but I can get three pounds of apples for a dollar (from the farmer's market), or six oranges for the same price (from the dubious fruit section, in the fresher section they're a dollar or two dollars a pound), and bananas at 49 - 79 cents a pound in the middle of winter. Grapes are two or three pounds for the dollar, so they're more of a treat.