Apt. 11D

Food Stamps for Cool Ranch Doritos?

Question of the Day: Should poor people be able to use their food stamps to buy soda and other fattening foods? Or should they only be allowed to buy healthy food? See Megan McArdle and Kevin Drum. 

Why We Eat Big Macs

In yesterday's Week in Review, Mark Bittman responds to fast food defenders, who claim that people go to McDonald's because it is much cheaper than a home cooked meal. Bittman lines up a roasted chicken dinner with McDonald's for four and finds that the chicken dinner is cheaper, as well as more nutritious. McDonald's costs $27.89 and the chicken dinner costs $13.78.

I think Bittman misses the point here. People go to McDonald's, because it isn't that much more expensive than making a chicken dinner, and it is much, much easier. 

The past six months were insanely busy, and where we did we end up at least once a week? At the Wendy's drive through. Other nights it was Boston Market or the local pizza joint or the Greek takeout. In the height of the insanity, I cooked only once a week.

Bittman dismisses the ease of fast food too quickly. He says that people have time to watch an hour of TV every night, so they have time to go to the supermarket and cook dinner. Well, not really. To make a meal that everyone will eat, it requires planning, organizing, food shopping, food sorting, cooking, cleaning up. Doing all that after putting in a 12 hour day is gruesome. A fast food meal can be ordered and eaten in 20 minutes or less. 

To really jump start the food revolution, we either need to revamp our lifestyles (No more evenings with triple activities for the kids. Less homework. Less time at the office.) or we need better choices at the fast food restaurants. Better choices at fast food restaurants seems like a more realistic option.

Honestly, the salads at Wendy's and the unsweetened iced tea aren't bad. In my upper class suburb, I can split a Greek salad with Steve for $8 or get a plate of spaghetti and meatballs at the Italian pizza joint for $5. The problem is that these options are only available to those in the Upper West Side or the wealthy suburbs. Let's subsidize healthy fast food, so it can be more available everywhere. 

Starting With Strength

The New York Transit Museum has started a new program that is aimed at kids with autism. Knowing that autistic people are drawn to trains, their regular routes, and patterns of tracks, they have started a program that uses their love of trains to build social skills. 

At a meeting with Ian's school last month, his teachers' eyes glazed over when I told them about the amazing robots that he was creating with Lego and his prodigious memory. They had no interest in robotics or computers or the fact that he can mulitply 15 x 7 in his head. His speech teacher told me that they preferred to work on his deficits. I didn't say anything, because it is useless to argue with them. But I was thinking, "how would you feel if you only had to do things that you were bad at all day and didn't get to do the things that you were good at?" 

Autism education is still in the dark ages. Even the best programs still regard autism as just another disability. The primary goal is just to push the kids into a regular classroom as fast as they can. But, for many kids with autism, a regular education program isn't right. It's too focused on things that they are bad at. For example, many kids with autism are terrible at word problems in math, but are fantastic at computation. But the poor scores on the word problems leads to F's on the report card. Maybe they shouldn't have to do word problems. Or maybe the word problems should be just about trains and robots. 

Every week at school, Ian gets pulled out of his classroom for speech therapy. In these 20 minute sessions, Ian is shown pictures of various scenes and he has to explain what's going on, what's going to happen next, and so on. These sessions are incredibly boring, but the poor kid has been in therapy since he's been 2-1/2, so he either particaptes willingly or stares blankly and pretends to be dumb. He never protests. 

His best speech lessons happen outside of the school at the local YWCA. He attends a special swim class where high school volunteers teach disabled kids how to swim. Most of the kids in the class aren't like Ian. They are severely disabled, but they learn how to swim. It's incredibly inspiring and I'm nudging my brother the reporter to write about it for the Times.

At the Y, Ian is now swimming across the pool with his face in the water. And he's also getting speech therapy, even though it isn't officially speech therapy. The high school kid, who is completely untrained in these matters, talks with Ian the entire time. He and Ian go back and forth discussing what he is supposed to do in the water and what exercise he wants to practice next. There are no xeroxed pictures to discuss and no cubicle. 

The exercise is also fantastic in and of itself. I swear that his speech is better after the exercise in the pool. 

So, kids like Ian learn best when we start with their strength, they learn naturally, and there is a lot of exercise. But, you know, I think we all learn better that way, too. I think that one of the promises of special education is that it has the potential to reform the existing classroom model for all kids. 

Reaching Minority Youth

Years ago, I worked on an evaluation of a reorganization of the New York City probation department. In addition to interviewing a ton of probation employees, I also talked to academics and went to conferences on the topic. At one conference, a professor who had worked extensively with the city bureaucracy said that statistical models could predict with near certainty who would commit crimes and violate probation. The most significant variables were age (18-24), ethnicity (Black or Latino), and gender (male). 

This problematic statistic is now getting political and deep pocket attention from Mayor Bloomberg. He's launching a $130 million project to help young minorities get out of this rut. $30 million of the financing will come from himself. The program will offer opportunities for education and job internships, among other policies. 

I look forward to seeing how it all pans out. 

Poop Better

More info at Grist. 

A New Theory of Poverty: The Overtaxed Brain

Between a vacation and house selling, I've been in a bubble for a weeks and am just starting to emerge. Some of the following posts may not be the most timely. Oh, well. You know, it is really sad that information becomes stale after two weeks. 

I know that David Brooks has been writing some good stuff this month, because my Facebook friends have been furiously linking to them. I'm finally getting around to reading his last month's columns.

Last week, Brooks wrote about a new theory of poverty coming out of Harvard using behavioral research.

There are two traditional understandings about why poor people are poor. The first theory is that poor people are poor, because they are lazy and they would rather collect welfare than find a job. The second theory is that people are poor, because they grow up in a culture of poverty. They grew up in isolated and stressed families, and the bad habits of the mom are passed on to the child. 

Brooks describes the research of Eldar Shafir of Princeton and Sendhil Mullainathan of Harvard, which has created a whole new explanation for poverty. Shafir and Mullainathan believed that scarcity produces its own cognitive traits.

A quick question: What is the starting taxi fare in your city? If you are like most upper-middle-class people, you don’t know. If you are like many struggling people, you do know. Poorer people have to think hard about a million things that affluent people don’t. They have to make complicated trade-offs when buying a carton of milk: If I buy milk, I can’t afford orange juice. They have to decide which utility not to pay.

These questions impose enormous cognitive demands. The brain has limited capacities. If you increase demands on one sort of question, it performs less well on other sorts of questions.

So, people are poor, because they need to keep track of all sorts of stupid shit that you and I don't have to deal with. Because they must use up brain space remembering that beans are on sale, then they can't remember to do the bigger stuff that would actually help them get out of poverty. 

I like this theory in some ways. Because I remember the dumb shit, like birthday presents and shopping lists, Steve doesn't have to keep track of that stuff. He has the brain capacity to figure out mortgage rates and refinancing and all sorts of stuff that actually leads to a bigger financial return. The dumb shit in life really does wear you down.

When you're poor, you're not only keeping track of dumb shit, like I do, but you're also making tough and depressing decisions. If you haven't paid your phone bill, then you're not much in the mood to study for GEDs.  

On the other hand, I know some extremely poor grad students and writers who do actually produce books and dissertations, despite their poverty. Maybe they aren't poor enough to count. 

Why Not More Zoning?

Out here in Jersey, people love to announce their wealth by the creative usage of Greek columns on their homes. Also marble fountains, circular driveways, and statues of David. Preferably that's all happening at the same time on one home.  That's how we roll out here. These are MY people. 

So, it was a bit jarring to pull onto Cape Cod and see nothing but tasteful shingles, short homes, and gardens. Where are the cathedral ceilings, man? 

Either there are no Italians on the Cape or they have really good zoning laws. 

I'm going with the good zoning laws. So, why don't more towns have these strict zoning laws that mandate that an area should have a uniform look? Wouldn't that increase the property values of a town? 

The New Dinner Plate

The old food pyramid was too confusing, so Michelle Obama has introduced the Dinner Plate concept.

What do you think? 

Is there anyone on the planet who doesn't know that vegetables and fruits are good for them? I doubt that this new graphic will stop people from buying that Big Mac and instead encourage them to make their own plate of organically grown lettuce and kale. People need to know how to cook, they need access to supermarkets, they need time to cook, they need to eat enough salads to get used to the taste, they need good lunches at schools, they need enough money to make better food choices, and they need enough free time to plan a good meal. 

Recycling in Germany

Germans already recycle like crazy. They have a yellow bin for packaging materials, a brown bin for compostables, a blue bin for paper, a white glass bin, a colored glass bin, and a grey bin for the rest of the trash.

Now, they are adding an orange bin for toys, electronic devices, old pots and pans, and even furniture. 

Would lazy Americans ever agree to recycle like the Germans? 

The Girl Effect