Tag Archives: science in everyday life

Can science help the picky eater? Interview with Stephanie V. W. Lucianovic (part 1).

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This summer, I reviewed Suffering Succotash: A Picky Eater’s Quest to Understand Why We Hate the Foods We Hate by Stephanie V. W. Lucianovic. This month, with the approach of the holiday season (prime time for picky eaters to sit with non-picky eaters at meal time), Stephanie and I sat down for lunch at Evvia in Palo Alto to talk about pickiness while sampling foods that had previously been in our “no go” categories. (For me, this included dolmathes, for Stephanie, grilled octopus.)

In this segment of the interview, we discuss some of what scientists think they know about pickiness and why it matters. We also dip our tasting spoons into the steaming cauldron of early upbringing and cultural influences on the foods we like or don’t like, and chew on the idea that a kid’s pickiness can be developmentally appropriate.

Janet D. Stemwedel: The first question I have is about the expectations you had when you set out on this project, researching the book, about what you were going to learn about the science — whether you started out thinking science probably had a nice, neat explanation for why people are picky eaters, of whether you started out with the assumption that it was going to be a big old complicated thing?

Stephanie V. W. Lucianovic: I did not think science had the big answer, honestly. I thought science could answer the supertaster question for me personally, but that was the only answer I expected to get. In the meantime, I knew that I could ask scientists and psychologists and psychiatrists questions along with that. But I knew from what I was aware of already, the articles out there — I mean, they’re usually pop-culture articles, and they don’t always tell the science correctly or fully — I knew that science had some answers. I knew that there were so many avenues that could be explored, I really didn’t expect there to be a full answer. What I found, though, were more possibilities, like “this could be a possible reason — being a supertaster could be a reason, but it’s not the only reason.” Being exposed via breast milk — which I was not; I was a formula-fed baby — is maybe linked to being less picky, so maybe being formula-fed contributed to my pickiness. You’re never going to get an answer with 100% agreement behind it, because it’s still evolving. And science, as evidenced by Duke doing this study, for the adults at least, they don’t know what’s causing it, they just know that there are a lot of contributing factors. And, when they’re looking to treat it, it’s more like, “Well, let’s get really in-depth into what the possibilities might be that contribute to it, and let’s try to fix them” on sometimes just the psychological level.

JS: It’s an interesting kind of thing that something that goes along with studying a phenomenon like being a picky eater is the scientists saying, “And we’re going to fix it!” Like it’s something that needs to be fixed rather than just part of normal human variation. Why problematize it?

SL: Well, Dr. Nancy Zucker at Duke said what they worry about — less in my case, personally; more other people’s cases — they’re finding, if you’re a child, your development could be affected if you have what they call severe food refusal. They left the adults alone for a while, but now they’re discovering that maybe adults’ health and social lives are severely impaired by this problem, because they’re not eating the things maybe they’re supposed to be eating that can extend their lives or make them healthier, or if they don’t want to go out to dinner with friends and family, if they don’t want to be around friends, that’s a problem. So, that’s why they want to “fix” it, or at least help.

JS: So, it’s not necessarily, “We will find the picky eaters. They will all be cured. It will be a happy utopia.”

SL: I think the picky eaters have to want the help to be “cured”. While I got over it, I don’t believe that there’s going to be a cure. It’s very individualized. You really have to want to get over it, and to be fair to picky eaters who have it worse than I do, I don’t mean to say that all picky eaters want to live that way. But you have to have a very strong impetus to push you to do it. It’s a really scary thing. A lot of picky eaters will tell you it’s not a won’t, it’s a can’t. They can’t get over it.

JS: You interacted with lots of scientists who study many different aspects of pickiness in lots of different ways. You discovered that it’s complicated. Is your sense that the scientists feel like they may be getting near a place where things start seeming less complicated, where things start falling into place? Or was your sense, talking to them, that every corner they turned, they found a new way that it’s more complicated?

SL: I think the second. I think that as they gather information, especially about the adult picky eaters — because the adults are more forthcoming about what they don’t like and why or what they remember; you don’t necessarily reason with kids when you’re trying to treat them, you just treat them — so I think that they’re finding more nuances. It’s not just about the individual foods at all. It’s the reasons, if they can figure them out. So I think, when I spoke to scientists about my own personal experience and how I feel like I got past it, for some of them that was new information. To hear about my reactions to foods, or how I went to culinary school, some of it was like, “Oh, that makes sense. You learned how to cook and that demystified the food. That makes sense, on a psychological level, that that could have helped you.” But I think it’s still such a mystery because many people struggle with how to explain a dislike. You have to be pretty introspective to do it, and you may just be unable to explain it. “I don’t know why I don’t like it; I just don’t like it. I don’t know if it’s the texture or the flavor or what.” Some people haven’t thought very hard about it. They just know they don’t like it. I’m not sure it’s that complicated of a thing, except that humans are so complicated, and pickiness is more of an internal than an external issue. That makes it pretty complex.

JS: So scientists aren’t even expecting that it’s going to end up shaking out to be like three main ways to be picky.

SL: You know, I don’t know, because when I asked Dr. Zucker, who was heading up the Duke study, what they hoped to achieve, she was very careful to say that they were in the beginning stages of just assessing information with this online survey. I will say, they were surprised at the response. I’m remembering she said in a radio interview we were both part of that she expected around 3,000 people to fill out this form, and they got like 30,000. So I think the breadth of that response, what they’re learning about how many people out there might classify themselves as picky, as having food issues — and again, they were just amassing the information, they hadn’t yet begun to process it. Maybe they’ve started that now. Because I will say, also in that same interview, I always asked the question, is there a difference between men and women. That could have been something, potentially, I talked about in the book. Although I didn’t write about it, I personally found that of the people I’ve met who are former picky eaters, who have gotten past it, more are women than men. Men I’ve met who are picky eaters seem to just be OK with their state. They deal with it and they don’t really need to change it. We could go into philosophical reasons about women being social, or feeling judged, to explain why they might be more likely to try to get past it. But anyway, when I asked if there’s a difference between men and women, [I found out] there are studies with kids found that males may be more likely to reject a new idea than females. But Dr. Zucker did say in this one interview that they are starting to find out that there might be a difference between the sexes in pickiness itself. I wanted to talk to her about it more, but I couldn’t on the radio. Anyway, some interesting correlations are emerging.

JS: But then untangling what’s going on with those, whether it’s genes or environment, figuring out if there’s a cultural component to it …

SL: Whether there’s a cultural component is something I’ve been asked about a lot in interviews. It was something I did not feel equipped to cover, because it was just so big. I could have taken on the history of picky eating — it was something my editor wanted me to do — but I wasn’t even sure how to begin tracking the history of it. On the cultural side of it, you get a lot of people saying, “Well, in India babies eat spicy foods.” Yeah, they do; that’s what’s there, what they’re used to. That’s their normal. But I also had someone tell me about being an American in North Korea, working (yes, it can be done). They went out to lunch with their Korean counterparts, and the menu had a western side and a Korean side. The western side was all pastas, pizzas, whatever, and the Koreans at the lunch thought that was absolutely disgusting food. So, it’s all about what you’re used to. It’s not that Americans are predisposed to be picky because we live in this huge country of largesse. People in different countries are going to have different reactions to different kinds of food. What might be gross to someone who’s never had Japanese food before almost certainly has an American counterpart that someone in Japan would find gross. It’s a huge topic that I couldn’t even begin to get into.

JS: It makes you wonder. I would not describe my own upbringing as full of lots of different styles of food, or of foods from lots of different cultural traditions. My parents were from the midwest. I was growing up basically in the ’70s and ’80s, and that was not necessarily a time of astounding creativity among home chefs.

SL: Not just in the midwest, it wasn’t anywhere. I’m from Minnesota, and I grew up the same time you did. It was a lot of frozen vegetables for me. Badly prepared.

JS: With the hell boiled right out of them.

SL: Right! So there was no way they were going to end up being anything good. Now, I could blame Minnesota for our lack of access to better food, but I’ve talked to a friend of mine who grew up in California —

JS: And it was the same thing?

SL: Yes. She said, “We just didn’t have the same access that we do today.”

JS: Huh!

SL: She’s a former picky eater turned foodie and food writer, and she said it wasn’t until she went to college that she was opened up to more food. Maybe it is all about what your parents are bringing home. My husband grew up in the Washington, D.C. area, and his mom always loved to cook, so she sought out the best recipes and there was more of that emphasis for him; even if they didn’t always have access to non-frozen vegetables, there was an attempt. I grew up on Chinese food and Vietnamese food, because we had a lot of it around, and I loved it, but I didn’t grow up around stuff I love now, like Ethiopian food or Afghan food. In this day and age, even in the midwest, there are more corner grocery stores that are going to have the ingredients, there are more restaurants, there’s more of an emphasis on the food culture than when you and I were growing up.

JS: Maybe that will have an impact on our kids. But, then again …

SL: It’s one thing that might help.

JS: Yeah. I have a kid who, as a two-year-old, cried inconsolably when, after her third helping of garlic broccoli, we ran out (and couldn’t get more, since it was Sunday, and the Thai restaurant down the street that we had gotten it from was closed). We said, “Child, you are not supposed to like broccoli this much!” And before that, when she was a baby, of course, every time my head was turned at the playground, she’d eat a handful of sand, I think just on principle. So, not what I would have called a super-picky child. But now, for her, there’s like a 15 minute window in which she’ll count a banana as ripe.

SL: I don’t blame her!

JS: And beyond that, she says, “It makes me gag.”

SL: Bananas are pernicious!

JS: It’s hard to know how much of this has to do with this is where her palate is right now (and it’s a moving target), and how much of it is, here’s a way to stick it to the parent.

SL: Speaking personally, I was the middle child, so I was always trying to be good. I was not ever trying to piss off my parents or run counter to them. And even my older sister, who was more the rebel, rebelled in other ways. I will say she became a vegetarian for a while, maybe to make a point — she was a teenager — but I also believe it was to avoid certain foods that neither of us liked. Speaking as a kid who grew up picky, I never consciously thought of my pickiness as a way to thwart my parents. I hated fighting with them about it.

JS: Yeah, I’m not even sure this would be a conscious thing. Once they’re thirteen, they don’t even know all the ways they’re trying to fight authority.

SL: Sometimes they’re disagreeing just to disagree.

JS: I think it’s part of demonstrating that you’re an autonomous human being; you have to reject every good idea that comes out of your mother’s mouth.

SL: Which is exactly what they’re doing around eighteen months. This is why it’s normal to see picky eaters at toddler age. It’s developmentally appropriate — they should be picky eaters. It’s the first time they can take control and say “No” and “You can’t put this in my mouth because I can now feed myself.” So yes, I learned that they’re little teenagers when they’re toddlers, with the same kinds of hormonal fluctuations going on.

JS: Well, it’s totally fun to get to do that twice with each child. Development kind of sucks.

SL: Yeah.

Book review: Cooking for Geeks.

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Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food
by Jeff Potter
O’Reilly Media, 2010

We have entered the time of year during which finding The Perfect Gift for family members and friends can become something of an obsession. Therefore, in coming days, I’ll be sharing some recommendations.

If you have family members and friends on your gifting list who are interested in science or interested in food (or interested in both science and food), then Cooking for Geeks is a book to give them that will have an impact that lingers for much longer on the palate than your run-of-the-mill book.

Partly this is because Cooking for Geeks is organized more like a manual (with sections on equipment, “inputs”, relevant variables for different cooking methods, etc.) than a linear narrative. Indeed, the book is also an astounding collection of fun things to try, whether with ingredients, cooking methods, equipment, or your own taste buds. There are at least a hundred science fair project ideas lurking within these 432 pages — although good luck to the kid who tries to pry this book away from the grown-ups, who will want to try the potential experiments themselves. Jeff Potter’s clear and engaging descriptions of issues like the chemistry and mechanics of leavening, strategies for adapting the kitchen equipment you have to perform the tasks you want to perform, or ways to avoid foodborne illness are interspersed with his interviews with food geeks of various sorts sharing their expertise, their recipes, and their enthusiasm for digging deeper and learning why things work the way they do. Basically, it’s almost a transcript of what I imagine would be the geekiest dinner party ever, and an invitation to recreate a piece of it in your own kitchen with your own friends.

There is so much good stuff in here that it’s actually a bit overwhelming. Here’s a tasting-menu of some of my favorite features:

  • A hands-on way to compare the levels of gluten in different kinds of flour (page 220).
  • Discussions of different culinary solvents, including the use of alcohol and water to isolate different compounds from the same raw materials in a bitters recipe (page 296), and the use of “fat-washing” alcohols (page 292).
  • An algorithm to optimize your cutting of a cake into not-neccesarily-equal slices in such a way as to satisfy the desires of N people hoping to get a slice of that cake (page 257).
  • An examination of factors relevant to the multiplication of bacteria in our food, shedding some light on what makes the “shelf-stable” items in the pantry less deadly than they might otherwise be — plus an exhortation to remember basic physics when deciding how to safely store foods in the refrigerator (page 162).
  • A discussion of why marshmallows made with methylcellulose melt when they are cooled rather than when they are heated (pages 316-317), including a recipe so you can try this at home.
  • A graph (page 159) comparing cooking methods by rate of heat transfer (plotting minutes to raise the center of uniform pieces of tofu 54 oC versus the temperature of the cooking environment). There’s something about a good graph that is deeply satisfying.
  • An examination why it matters what the bowl is made of when you’re whisking egg whites in it (page 253), as well as recipes for French Meringue and Italian Meringue which discuss why a slight difference in method can lead to a pronounced difference in texture (page 255).
  • In the eternal batter between weight and volume, a persuasive empirical case for measuring ingredients by weight (page 62).
  • Lots of discussion of the five primary tastes (bitter, sour, umami, sweet, and salty), including charts with suggestions on what to add to a dish to increase each of them — and another chart with suggestions for how to counteract a primary taste with which you’ve gone too far (page 115).
  • A discussion of the basis vectors for wine-food pairings and how to isolate them empirically (using lemon juice, sugar water, tea, and vodka) to taste your dish and figure out what kind of wine will go well with it. (page 89)
  • The recipes for crepes (pages 68-69), pumpkin cake (page 249), and chocolate panna cotta that uses agar rather than gelatin (page 311).
  • Suggestions for compounds you can play with (including lactisole, miraculin, and the humble Peppermint Lifesaver) that will mess with your taste receptors in interesting ways (pages 109-110).

A lovely feature of this book is that it makes no assumptions about the reader’s level of comfort or competence in the kitchen. Rather, it presents food and cooking as a realm where the newbie can learn some important principles (that also happen to be cool) and where the experienced cook can learn even more. Maybe the experienced cook has a larger store of “common wisdom,” but Potter puts lots of that common wisdom to empirical test to see just how wise it is. Moreover, the newbie may be in a better position to violate recipes and use methods “the wrong way” to discover what happens when you do.

As well, Cooking for Geeks makes no assumptions about just what kind of geek the reader might be. There is certainly a lot of real chemistry, physics, and engineering in this book (not to mention a healthy dose of biology), but all of it is presented in an accessible way, inviting the reader who is not (for example) a chemistry geek to use food as a reason to start taking chemistry more seriously.

Cooking for Geeks would make a fabulous gift for a curious person who’s interested in food or cooking. It pairs nicely with Suffering Succotash: A Picky Eater’s Quest to Understand Why We Hate the Foods We Hate and a quad-ruled notebook.

Science, priorities, and the challenges of sharing a world.

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For scientists, doing science is often about trying to satisfy deep curiosity about how various bits of our world work. For society at large, it often seems like science ought to exist primarily to solve particular pressing problems — or at least, that this is what science ought to be doing, given that our tax dollars are going to support it. It’s not a completely crazy idea. Even if tax dollars weren’t funding lots of scientific research and the education of scientists (even at private universities), the public might expect scientists to focus their attention on pressing problems, simply because scientists have the expertise to solve these problems and other members of society don’t.

This makes it harder to get the public to care about funding science for which the pay-off is not obviously useful, especially “basic research”. You want to understand the structure of subatomic particles, or the fundamental forces at work in our universe? That’s great, but how is it going to help us live longer, or help us build more fuel-efficient vehicles, or bring smaller iPods to market? Most members of the public don’t even know what a quark is, let alone care about whether you can detect a particular kind of quark experimentally. Satisfying our curiosity about the details on the surface of Mars can strike folks not gripped by that particular curiosity as a distraction from important questions that science could be answering instead.

A typical response is to note that basic research has in the past led to unanticipated practical applications. Of course, this isn’t a way to get the public to see the intrinsic value of basic research — it merely asks them to value such research instrumentally, as sort of a mystery box that is bound to contain some payoff which we cannot describe in advance but which promises to be awesome.

Some years ago Rick Weiss made an argument like this in the Washington Post in defense of space research. For example, space exploration. Weiss expressed concern that “Americans have lost sight of the value of non-applied, curiosity-driven research — the open-ended sort of exploration that doesn’t know exactly where it’s going but so often leads to big payoffs,” then went through an impressive list of scientific projects that started off without any practical applications but ended up making possible all manner of useful applications. Limit basic science, the argument went, and you’re risking economic growth.

But Weiss was careful not to say the only value in scientific research is in marketable products. Rather, he offered an even more important reason for the public to support research:

Because our understanding of the world and our support of the quest for knowledge for knowledge’s sake is a core measure of our success as a civilization. Our grasp, however tentative, of what we are and where we fit in the cosmos should be a source of pride to all of us. Our scientific achievements are a measure of ourselves that our children can honor and build upon.

I find that a pretty inspiring description of science’s value, but it’s not clear that most members of the public would be similarly misty-eyed.

Scientists may already feel that they have to become the masters of spin to get even their practical research projects funded. Will the scientists also have to take on the task of convincing the public at large that a scientific understanding of ourselves and of the world we live in should be a source of pride? Will a certain percentage of the scientist’s working budget have to go to public relations? (“Knowledge: It’s not just for dilettantes anymore!”) Maybe the message that knowledge for knowledge’s sake is a fitting goal for a civilized society is the kind of thing that people would just get as part of their education. Only it’s not on the standardized tests, and it seems like that’s the only place the public wants to put up money for education any more. Sometimes not even then.

The problem here is that scientists value something that the public at large seems not to value. The scientists think the public ought to value it, but they don’t have the power to impose their will on the public in this regard any more than the public can demand that scientists stop caring about weird things like quarks. Meanwhile, the public supports science, at least to the extent that science can deliver practical results in a timely fashion. There would probably be tension in this relationship even if scientists weren’t looking to the public for funding.

Of course, when scientists do tackle real-life problems and develop real-life solutions, it’s not like the public is always so good about accepting them. Consider the mixed public reception of the vaccine against human papilloma virus (HPV). The various strains of HPV are the leading cause of cervical cancer, and are not totally benign for men, causing genital warts and penile cancers. You would think that developing a reasonably safe and effective vaccine against a virus like HPV is exactly the sort of scientific accomplishment the public might value — except that religious groups in the US voiced opposition to the HPV vaccine on the grounds that it might give young women license to engage in premarital sex rather than practicing abstinence.

(The scientist scratches her head.) Let me get this straight: Y’all want to cut funding for the basic science because you don’t think it will lead to practical applications. But when we do the research to solve what seems like a real problem — people are dying from cervical cancer — y’all tell us this is a problem you didn’t really want us to solve?

Here, to be fair, it’s not everyone who wants to opt out of the science, just a part of the population with a fair bit of political clout at particular moments in history. The central issue seems to be that our society is made up of a bunch of people (including scientists) with rather different values, which lead to rather different priorities. In thinking about where scientific funding comes from, we talk as though there were a unitary Public with whom the unitary Science transacts business. It might be easier were that really the case. Instead, the scientists get to deal with the writhing mass of contradictory impulses that is the American public. About the only thing that public knows for sure is that it doesn’t want to pay more taxes.

How can scientists direct their efforts at satisfying public wants, or addressing public needs, if the public itself can’t come to any robust agreement on what those wants and needs are? If science has to prove to the public that the research dollars are going to the good stuff, will scientists have to stretch things a little in the telling?

Or might it actually be better if the public (or the politicians acting in the public’s name) spent less time trying to micro-manage scientists as they set the direction of their research? Maybe it would make sense, if the public decided that having scientists in society was a good thing for society, to let the scientists have some freedom to pursue their own scientific interests, and to make sure they have the funding to do so.

I’m not denying that the public has a right to decide where its money goes, but I don’t think putting up the money means you get total control. Because if you demand that much control, you may end up having to do the science yourself. Also, once science delivers the knowledge, it seems like the next step is to make that knowledge available. If particular members of the public decide not to avail themselves of that knowledge (because they feel it would be morally wrong, or maybe just silly, as in the case of pet cloning), that is their decision. We shouldn’t be making life harder for the scientists for doing what good scientists do.

It’s clear that there are forces at work in American culture right now that are not altogether comfortable with all that science has to offer at the moment. Discomfort is a normal part of sharing society with others who don’t think just like you do. But hardly anyone thinks it would be a good idea to ship all the scientists off to someplace else. We like our tablet computers and our smartphones and our headache medicines and our DSL and our Splenda too much for that.

Perhaps, for a few moments, we should give the hard-working men and women of science a break and thank them for the knowledge they produce, whether we know what to do with it or not. Then, we can return to telling them about the pieces of our world we’d like more help navigating, and see whether they have any help to offer yet.

Wikipedia, the DSM, and Beavis.

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There are some nights that Wikipedia raises more questions for me than it answers.

The other evening, reminiscing about some of the background noise of my life (viz. “Beavis and Butt-head”) when I was in graduate school, I happened to look up Cornholio. After I got over my amusement that its first six letters were enough to put my desired search target second on the list of Wikipedia’s suggestions for what I might be looking for (right between cornhole and Cornholme, I read the entry and got something of a jolt at its diagnostic tone:

After consuming large amounts of sugar and/or caffeine, Beavis sometimes undergoes a radical personality change, or psychotic break. In one episode, “Holy Cornholio”, the transformation occurred after chewing and swallowing many pain killer pills. He will raise his forearms in a 90-degree angle next to his chest, pull his shirt over his head, and then begin to yell or scream erratically, producing a stream of gibberish and strange noises, his eyes wide. This is an alter-ego named ‘Cornholio,’ a normally dormant persona. Cornholio tends to wander aimlessly while reciting “I am the Great Cornholio! I need TP for my bunghole!” in an odd faux-Spanish accent. Sometimes Beavis will momentarily talk normally before resuming the persona of Cornholio. Once his Cornholio episode is over, Beavis usually has no memory of what happened.

Regular viewers of “Beavis and Butt-head” probably suspected that Beavis had problems, but I’m not sure we knew that he had a diagnosable problem. For that matter, I’m not sure we would have classified moments of Cornholio as falling outside the broad umbrella of Things Beavis Does to Make Things Difficult for Teachers.

But, the Wikipedia editors seem to have taken a shine to the DSM (or other relevant literature on psychiatric conditions), and to have confidence that the behavior Beavis displays here is properly classified as a psychotic break.

Here, given my familiarity with the details of the DSM (hardly any), I find myself asking some questions:

  • Was the show written with the intention that the Beavis-to-Cornholio transformation be seen as a psychotic break?
  • Is it possible to give a meaningful psychiatric diagnosis of a cartoon character?
  • Does a cartoon character need a substantial inner life of some sort for a psychiatric diagnosis of that cartoon character to make any sense?
  • If psychiatric diagnoses are based wholly on outward behavioral manifestations rather than on the inner stuff that might be driving that behavior (as may be the case if it’s really possible to apply diagnostic criteria to Beavis), is this a good reason for us to be cautious about the potential value of these definitions and diagnostic criteria?
  • Is there a psychology or psychiatry classroom somewhere that is using clips of the Beavis-to-Cornholio transformation in order to teach students what a psychotic break is?

I’m definitely uncomfortable that this fictional character has a psychiatric classification thrust upon him so easily — though at least, as a fictional character, he doesn’t have to deal with any actual stigma associated with such a psychiatric classification. And, I think perhaps my unease points to a worry I have (and that Katherine Sharpe also voices in her book Coming of Age on Zoloft) about the project of assembling checklists of easy-to-assess symptoms that seem detached from the harder-to-assess conditions in someone’s head, or in his environment, that are involved in causing the symptoms in the first place.

Possibly Wikipedia’s take on Beavis is simply an indication that the relevant Wikipedia editors like the DSM a lot more than I do (or that they intended their psychiatric framing of Beavis ironically — and if so, well played, editors!). But possibly it reflects a larger society that is much more willing than I am to put behaviors into boxes, regardless of the details (or even existence) of the inner life that accompanies that behavior.

I would welcome the opinions and insight of psychiatrists, psychologist, and others who run with that crowd on this matter.

Movie review: Strange Culture.

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The other day I was looking for a movie I could watch with instant streaming that featured Josh Kornbluth* and I came upon Strange Culture. Strange Culture is a documentary about the arrest of artist and SUNY-Buffalo professor of art history Steve Kurtz on charges of bioterrorism, mail fraud, and wire fraud in 2004 after the death of his wife, Hope.

At the time Strange Culture was released in 2007, the legal case against Steve Kurtz (and against University of Pittsburgh professor of genetics Robert Ferrell) was ongoing, so the documentary uses actors to interpret events in the case about which Kurtz could not speak on advice of counsel, as well as the usual news footage and interviews of people in the case who were able to talk freely. It also draws on a vividly illustrated graphic novel about the case (titled “Suspect Culture”) written by Timothy Stock and illustrated by Warren Heise.

The central question of the documentary is how an artist found himself the target of federal charges of bioterrorism. I should mention that I watched Strange Culture not long after I finished reading The Radioactive Boy Scout, which no doubt colored my thinking. If The Radioactive Boy Scout is a story of scientific risks taken too lightly, Strange Culture strikes me as a story of scientific risks blown far out of proportion. At the very least, I think there are questions worth pondering here about why the two cases provoked such wildly different reactions.

In 2004, as part of the Critical Art Ensemble, Steve and Hope Kurtz were working on an art installation for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art on genetically modified agriculture. The nature of the installation was to demonstrate (and involve museum-goers in) scientific techniques used to isolate genetic information from various food products and to identify genetically modified organisms. The larger aim of the installation was to help the audience better understand the use of biotechnology in agriculture, and to push the audience to think more deeply about the scientific decisions made by agribusiness and how they might impact everyday life.

Regardless of whether one thinks the Critical Art Ensemble was raising legitimate worries about GMOs, or ignoring potential benefits from this use of biotechnology**, there is something about the effort to give members of the public a better understanding of — and even some hands-on engagement with — the scientific techniques that I find deeply appealing. Indeed, Steve and Hope Kurtz were in active collaboration with working biologists so that they could master the scientific techniques in question and use them appropriately in assembling the installation. Their preparations included work they were doing in their home with petri dishes and commercially available incubators using benign bacteria.

However, this was where the problems began for Steve Kurtz. One night in May of 2004, Hope Kurtz died in her sleep of heart failure. Steve Kurtz dialed 911. The Buffalo first responders who responded to the call saw the petri dishes and freaked out and notified the FBI. Suddenly, the Kurtz home was swarming with federal agents looking for evidence of bioterrorist activities and Steve Kurtz was under arrest.

Watching Strange Culture, I found myself grappling with the question of just why the authorities reacted with such alarm to what they found in the Kurtz home. My recollection of the news coverage at the time was that the authorities suspected that whatever was growing in those petri dishes might have killed hope Kurtz, but at this point indications are that her death was due to a congenital heart defect. First responders are supposed to be alert to dangers, but they should also recognize that coincidence in space and time is not the same as causation. Hope Kurtz’s death was less than three years after the September 11th attacks, and the anthrax attacks that came close on their heels, which likely raised anxiety about the destructive potential of biological agents in the hands of someone who knows how to use them. I wonder, though, whether some amount of the reaction was not just post-9/11 hypervigilance but a deeper fear of biological material at the microscopic level. If you can grow it in a petri dish, the reaction seemed to say, it must be some seriously dangerous stuff. (I am grateful that these first responders didn’t stumble upon the forgotten leftovers in the back of my fridge and judge me a bioterrorism suspect, too.)

More baffling than the behavior of the first responders was the behavior of the federal agents who searched the Kurtz home. While they raised the specter that Steve Kurtz was producing biological weapons, they ended up leaving the place in shambles, strewn with bags of purportedly biohazardous material (as well as with the trash generated by the agents over the long course of their investigation). Leaving things in this state would be puzzling if the prime concern of the government was to protect the community from harmful biological materials, suggesting that perhaps the investigative teams was more interested in creating a show of government force.

Strange Culture raises, but does not answer, the question of how the government turned out to be even more alarmed by biotechnology in widespread agricultural use than was an art group aiming to raise concerns about GMOs. It suggests that scientific understanding and accurate risk assessment is a problem not just for the public at large but also for the people entrusted with keeping the public safe. It also suggests that members of the public are not terribly safe if the default response from the government is an overreaction, or a presumption that members of the public have no business getting their hands dirty with science.

It’s worth noting that a 2008 ruling found there was insufficient evidence to support the charges against Steve Kurtz, and that the Department of Justice declined to appeal this ruling. You can read the Critical Art Ensemble Defense Fund press release issued at the conclusion of Steve Kurtz’s legal battle.

_____
*Yes, it’s a very particular kind of thing to want. People are like that sometimes.

**On the question of GMOs, if you haven’t yet read Christie Wilcox’s posts (here, here, and here), you really should.

Book review: The Radioactive Boy Scout.

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When I and my three younger siblings were growing up, our parents had a habit of muttering, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” The muttering that followed that aphorism usually had to do with the danger coming from the “little” amount of knowledge rather than a more comprehensive understanding of whatever field of endeavor was playing host to the hare-brained scheme of the hour. Now, as a parent myself, I suspect that another source of danger involved asymmetric distribution of the knowledge among the interested parties: while our parents may have had knowledge of the potential hazards of various activities, knowledge that we kids lacked, they didn’t always have detailed knowledge of what exactly we kids were up to. It may take a village to raise a child, but it can take less than an hour for a determined child to scorch the hell out of a card table with a chemistry kit. (For the record, the determined child in question was not me.)

The question of knowledge — and of gaps in knowledge — is a central theme in The Radioactive Boy Scout: The Frightening True Story of a Whiz Kid and His Homemade Nuclear Reactor by Ken Silverstein. Silverstein relates the story of David Hahn, a Michigan teen in the early 1990s who, largely free of adult guidance or supervision, worked tirelessly to build a breeder reactor in his back yard. At times this feels like a tale of youthful determination to reach a goal, a story of a self-motivated kid immersing himself in self-directed learning and doing an impressive job of identifying the resources he required. However, this is also a story about how, in the quest to achieve that goal, safety considerations can pretty much disappear.

David Hahn’s source of inspiration — not to mention his guide to many of the experimental techniques he used — was The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments. Published in 1960, the text by Robert Brent conveys an almost ruthlessly optimistic view of the benefits chemistry and chemical experimentation can bring, whether to the individual or to humanity as a whole. Part of this optimism is what appears to modern eyes as an alarmingly cavalier attitude towards potential hazards and chemical safety. If anything, the illustrations by Harry Lazarus downplay the risks even more than does the text — across 112 pages, the only pictured items remotely resembling safety apparatus are lab coats and a protective mask for an astronaut.

Coupled with the typical teenager’s baseline assumption of invulnerability, you might imagine that leaving safety considerations in the subtext, or omitting them altogether, could be a problem. In the case of a teenager teaching himself chemistry from the book, relying on it almost as a bible of the concepts, history, and experimental techniques a serious chemist ought to know, the lack of focus on potential harms might well have suggested that there was no potential for harm — or at any rate that the harm would be minor compared to the benefits of mastery. David Hahn seems to have maintained this belief despite a series of mishaps that made him a regular at his local emergency room.

Ah, youth.

Here, though, The Radioactive Boy Scout reminds us that young David Hahn was not the only party operating with far too little knowledge. Silverstein’s book expands on his earlier Harper’s article on the incident with chapters that convey just how widespread our ignorance of radioactive hazards has been for most of the history of our scientific, commercial, and societal engagement with radioactivity. At nearly every turn in this history, potential benefits have been extolled (with radium elixirs sold in the early 1900s to lower blood pressure, ease arthritis pain, and produce “sexual rejuvenescence”) and risks denied, sometimes until the body count was so large and the legal damages were so high that they could no longer be denied.

Surely part of the problem here is that the hazards of radioactivity are less immediately obvious than those of corrosive chemicals or explosive chemicals. The charred table is directly observable in a way that damage to one’s body from exposure to radioisotopes is not (partly because the table doesn’t have an immune system that kicks in to try to counter the damage). But the invisibility of these risks was also enhanced when manufacturers who used radioactive materials proclaimed their safety for both the end-user of consumer products and the workers making those products, and when the nuclear energy industry throttled the information the public got about mishaps at various nuclear reactors.

Possibly some of David Hahn’s teachers could have given him a more accurate view of the kinds of hazards he might undertake in trying to build a back yard breeder reactor … but the teen didn’t seem to feel like he could get solid mentoring from any of them, and didn’t let them in on his plans in any detail. The guidance he got from the Boy Scouts came in the form of an atomic energy merit badge pamphlet authored by the Atomic Energy Commission, a group created to promote atomic energy, and thus one unlikely to foreground the risks. (To be fair, this merit badge pamphlet did not anticipate that scouts working on the badge would actually take it upon themselves to build breeder reactors.) Presumably some of the scientists with whom David Hahn corresponded to request materials and advice on reactions would have emphasized the risks of his activities had they realized that they were corresponding with a high school student undertaking experiments in his back yard rather than with a science teacher trying to get clear on conceptual issues.

Each of these gaps of information ended up coalescing in such a way that David Hahn got remarkably close to his goal. He did an impressive job isolating radioactive materials from consumer products, performing chemical reactions to put them in suitable form for a breeder reactor, and assembling the pieces that might have initiated a chain reaction. He also succeeded in turning the back yard shed in which he conducted his work into a Superfund site. (According to Silverstein, the official EPA clean-up missed materials that his father and step-mother found hidden in their house and discarded in their household trash — which means that both the EPA and those close enough to the local landfill where the radioactive materials ended up had significant gaps in their knowledge about the hazards David Hahn introduced to the environment.)

The Radioactive Boy Scout manages to be at once an engaging walk through a challenging set of scientific problems and a chilling look at what can happen when scientific problems are stripped out of their real-life context of potential impacts for good and for ill that stretch across time and space and impact people who aren’t even aware of the scientific work being undertaken. It is a book I suspect my 13-year-old would enjoy very much.

I’m just not sure I’m ready to give it to her.

Book review: Suffering Succotash.

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What is the deal with the picky eater?

Is she simply being willful, choosing the dinner table as a battlefield on which to fight for her right to self-determination? Or, is the behavior that those purveyors of succotash and fruit cup interpret as willfulness actually rooted in factors that are beyond the picky eater’s control? If the latter, is the picky eater doomed to a lifetime of pickiness, or can help be found for it?

These are the questions at the center of Suffering Succotash: A Picky Eater’s Quest to Understand Why We Hate the Foods We Hate. Its author, Stephanie V. W. Lucianovic, survived a childhood of picky eating, grappled with the persistence of pickiness into adulthood, went to culinary school, became a cheesemonger and food writer, and then mounted her quest for explanations of pickiness.

Her book tries to illuminate the origin story of picky eaters. Is it in their taste buds, and if so, due to the number of taste buds or to their sensitivity, to genetic factors driving their detection power or to environmental impacts on their operation? Is it rather their keen sense of smell that triggers pickiness? An overachieving gag-reflex? Their “emotional” stomachs? Or maybe how they were raised by the people feeding them when they were young? Are there good evolutionary reasons for the pickiness of picky eaters — and will this pickiness again be adaptive when the zombie apocalypse renders our food supply less safe in various ways?

As well, Lucianovic inquires into the likely fates of picky eaters. Are picky eaters destined to spawn more picky eaters? Can picky eaters find lasting love with humans who are significantly less discriminating about what they eat? Can picky eaters ever get over their pickiness? (Spoiler: The answers to the last two of these questions here are both “To a significant extent, yes!”)

One of the joys of this book is how Lucianovic’s narrative weaves along the path of science-y question she was prompted to ask by her troubled relationship with yucky foods as with the people trying to feed them to her. Lucianovic leads us on a non-scientist’s journey through science on a quest to better understand features of her everyday life that mattered to her — and, which likely matter to readers who are themselves picky eaters or have picky eaters in their lives. After all, you’ve got to eat.

Suffering Succotash explores a wide swath of the science behind the foods people like, the foods people hate, and the various features that might make some of us pickier eaters that others, without ever seeming like a science book. Indeed, Lucianovic is candid about the usefulness (and limits) of the scientific literature to the lay person trying to find answers to her questions:

When you’re in search of very specific information, pawing through scientific papers is like disemboweling one of those Russian nesting dolls. The first article makes a claim and gives just enough information to be intriguing and useless, unless you look up the source article behind that claim. The source article leads to another claim, and therefore another source article that needs to be looked up, and another and another until you finally reach the tiniest of all the dolls, which hopefully is where all the answers will be found since the tiniest of all dolls can’t be opened. (31)

The literature, thankfully, was just one source of information in Lucianovic’s journey. Alongside it, she partook of a veritable smorgasbord of test-strips, questionnaires, genotypying, and interviews with scientists who work on very aspects of how we taste food and why we react to foods the way we do. She even got to try her hand at some of the relevant laboratory techniques at the Monell Chemical Sense Center in Philadelphia.

What she found was that there are not simple scientific answers to the question of why some people are pickier eaters and others are not. Instead, there seems to be a complicated interplay of many different kinds of factors. She also discovered some of the limitations of the scientific tools at our disposal to identify potential causal factors behind pickiness or to reliably sort the picky from the not-so-picky eaters. However, in describing the shortcomings of taste-tests, the imprecision of questionnaires, the sheer number of factors that may (or may not) be at play in making peaches a food to be loathed, Lucianovic manages to convey an enthusiasm about the scientific search to understand picky eaters even a little better, not a frustration that science hasn’t nailed down The Answer yet.

There are many other strands woven into Suffering Succotash along with the scientific journey, including personal reminiscences of coping with picky eating as a kid — and then as an adult trying very hard not to be an inconvenient houseguest, interviews with other picky eaters about their own experiences with foods, a meditation on how parenting strategies might entrench or defuse pickiness, consideration of the extent to which eating preferences can be negotiable (or non-negotioable) in relationships, and practical strategies for overcoming one’s own pickiness — and for moving through a world of restaurants and friends’ dinner tables with the elements of pickiness that persist. These other strands, and the seamless (and often hilarious) manner in which Lucianovic connects them to the scientific questions and answers, make Suffering Succotash the perfect popular science book for a reader that doesn’t think he or she wants to read a popular science book.

Plus, there are recipes included. My offspring are surely not the world’s pickiest eaters, but they have strong views about a few notorious vegetables. However, when prepared according to the recipes included in Suffering Succotash, those vegetables were good enough that my kids wanted seconds, and thirds.

Book review: Coming of Age on Zoloft.

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One of the interesting and inescapable features of our knowledge-building efforts is just how hard it can be to nail down objective facts. It is especially challenging to tell an objective story when the object of study is us. It’s true that we have privileged information of a particular sort (our own experience of what it is like to be us), but we simultaneously have the impediment of never being able fully to shed that experience. As well, our immediate experience is necessarily particular — none of us knows what it is like to be human in general, just what is is like to be the particular human each of us happens to be. Indeed, if you take Heraclitus seriously (he of the impossibility of stepping in the same river twice), you might not even know what it is like to be you so much as what it is like to be you so far.

All of this complicates the stories we might try to tell about how our minds are connected to our brains, what it means for those brains to be well, and what it is for us to be ourselves or not-ourselves, especially during stretches in our lives when the task that demands our attention might be figuring out who the hell we are in the first place.

Katherine Sharpe’s new book Coming of Age on Zoloft: how antidepressants cheered us up, let us down, and changed who we are, leads us into this territory while avoiding the excesses of either ponderous philosophical treatise or catchy but overly reductive cartoon neuroscience. Rather, Sharpe draws on dozens of interviews with people prescribed selective seratonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) for significant stretches from adolescence through early adulthood, and on her own experiences with antidepressants, to see how depression and antidepressants feature in the stories people tell about themselves. A major thread throughout the book is the question of how our pharmaceutical approach to mental health impacts the lives of diagnosed individuals (for better or worse), but also how it impacts our broader societal attitudes toward depression and toward the project of growing up. Sharpe writes:

When I first began to use Zoloft, my inability to pick apart my “real” thoughts and emotions from those imparted by the drug made me feel bereft. The trouble seemed to have everything to do with being young. I was conscious of needing to figure out my own interests and point myself in a direction in the world, and the fact of being on medication seemed frighteningly to compound the possibilities for error. How could I ever find my way in life if I didn’t even know which feelings were mine? (xvii)

Interleaved between personal accounts, Sharpe describes some of the larger forces whose confluence helps explain the growing ubiquity of SSRIs. One of these is the concerted effort during the revisions that updated the DSM-II to the DSM-III to abandon Freud-inflected frameworks for mental disorders which saw the causal origins of depression in relationships and replace them with checklists of symptoms (to be assessed in isolation from additional facts about what might be happening in the patient’s life) which might or might not be connected to hunches about causal origins of depression based on what scientists think they know about the actions on various neurotransmitters of drugs that seem to treat the symptoms on the checklist. Suddenly being depressed was an official diagnosis based on having particular symptoms that put you in that category — and in the bargain it was no longer approached as a possibly appropriate response to external circumstances. Sharpe also discusses the rise of direct-to-consumer advertising for drugs, which told us how to understand our feelings as symptoms and encouraged us to “talk to your doctor” about getting help from them, as well as the influence of managed care — and of funding priorities within the arena of psychiatric research — in making treatment with a pill the preferred treatment over time-consuming and “unpatentable talk-treatments.” (184)

Sharpe discusses interviewees’, and her own, experiences with talk therapy, and their experiences of trying to get off SSRIs (with varying degrees of medical supervision or premeditation) to find out whether one’s depression is an unrelenting chronic illness the having of which is a permanent fact about oneself, like having Type I diabetes, or whether it might be a transient state, something with which one needs help for a while before going back to normal. Or, if not normal, at least functional enough.

The exploration in Coming of Age on Zoloft is beautifully attentive to the ways that “functional enough” depends on a person’s interaction with environment — with family and friends, with demands of school or work or unstructured days and weeks stretching before you — and on a person’s internal dialogue with oneself — about who you are, how you feel, what you feel driven to do, what feels too overwhelming to face. Sharpe offers an especially compelling glimpse at how the forces from the world and the voices from one’s head sometimes collide, producing what professionals on college campuses describe as a significant deterioration of the baseline of mental health for their incoming students:

One college president lamented that the “moments of woolgathering, dreaming, improvisation” that were seen as part and parcel of a liberal arts education a generation ago had become a hard sell for today’s brand of highly driven students. Experts agreed that undergraduates were in a bigger hurry than ever before, expected by teachers, parents, and themselves to produce more work, of higher quality, in the same finite amount of time. (253)

Such high expectations — and the broader message that productivity is a duty — set the bar high enough that failure may become an alarmingly likely outcome. (Indeed, Sharpe quotes a Manhattan psychiatrist who raises the possibility that some college students and recent graduates “are turning to pharmaceuticals to make something possible that’s not healthy or normal.” (269)) These elevated expectations seem also to be of a piece with the broader societal mindset that makes it easier to get health coverage for a medication-check appointment than for talk-therapy. Just do the cheapest, fastest thing that lets you function well enough to get back to work. Since knowing what you want or who you are is not of primary value, exploring, reflecting, or simply being is a waste of time.

Here, of course, what kind of psychological state is functional or dysfunctional surely has something to do with what our society values, with what it demand of us. To the extent that our society is made up of individual people, those values, those demands, may be inextricably linked with whether people generally have the time, the space, the encouragement, the freedom to find or choose their own values, to be the authors (to at least some degree) of their own lives.

Finding meaning — creating meaning — is, at least experientially, connected to so much more than the release or reuptake of chemicals in our brains. Yet, as Sharpe describes, our efforts to create meaning get tangled in questions about the influence of those chemicals, especially when SSRIs are part of the story.

I no longer simply grapple with who I can become and what kind of effort it will require. Now I also grapple with the question of whether I am losing something important — cheating somehow — if I use a psychopharmaceutical to reduce the amount of effort required, or to increase my stamina to keep trying … or to lower my standards enough that being where I am (rather than trying to be better along some dimension or another) is OK with me.

And, getting satisfying answers to these questions, or even strategies for approaching them, is made harder when it seems like our society is not terribly tolerant of the woolgatherers, the grumpy, the introverted, the sad. Our right to pursue happiness (where failure is an option) has been transformed to a duty to be happy. Meanwhile, the stigma of mental illness and of needing medication to treat is dances hand in hand with the stigma attached to not conforming perfectly to societal expectations and definitions of “normal”.

In the end, what can it mean to feel “normal” when I can never get first-hand knowledge of how it feels to be anyone else? Is the “normal” I’m reaching for some state from my past, or some future state I haven’t yet experienced? Will I know it when I get there? And I can I reliably evaluate my own moods, personality, or plans with the organ whose functioning is in question?

With engaging interviews and sometimes achingly beautiful self-reflection, Coming of Age on Zoloft leads us through the terrain of these questions, illuminates the ways our pharmaceutical approach to depression makes them more fraught, and ultimately suggests the possibility that grappling with them may always have been important for our human flourishing, even without SSRIs in our systems.

Science-y books for kids.

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There seems to be a profusion of fabulous kids’ books these days, including many engaging books on scientific topics. Indeed, there are so many that I wouldn’t even know how to boil them down to a top ten list.

So, I’m going to just point you towards some of the books my kids have enjoyed, especially in the early grades of elementary school (roughly K-3).

A Drop of Blood by Paul Showers, illustrated by Edward Miller.

The text of this book is straight-ahead science for the grade school set, explaining the key components of blood (red blood cells, white blood cells, platelets) and what they do. There are nice diagrams of how the circulatory system gets involved in transporting nutrients as well as oxygen, pictures of a white blood cell eating a germ, and a step-by-step explanation of how a scab forms.

But this unassuming text is illustrated in classic horror movie style.

All the “people” in the drawings are either vampires or … uh, whatever those greenish hunchbacked creatures who become henchmen are. And this illustration choice is brilliant! Kids who might be squicked out by blood in real life cannot resist the scary/funny/cool cartoonish vamps accompanying the text in this book. The drawing of the Count offering Igor a Band-aid for his boo-boo is heart-warming.

Read an archived conversation with a younger time-slice of my kids about blood.

* * * * *
Octopuses and Squids by Mary Jo Rhodes and David Hall. Photographs by David Hall.

Seahorses and Sea Dragons by Mary Jo Rhodes and David Hall. Photographs by David Hall.

We love books with chapters, lots of photographs, and glossaries. What can I say?

These two books pair with each other nicely, since evaluating the relative merits of syngnathids and cephalopods is kind of like weighing whether you’d rather be able to fly or to become invisible. Is it better to have leafy bits on your body the better to hide in seaweed, or to be able to change color and shape to camouflage? (What if you got distracted and forgot to do it?) To keep your fertilized eggs in a cave, or to have the father incubate them in his brood pouch? To enjoy solitude in your corner of the ocean, or to be social?

Read an archived conversation with a younger time-slice of my kids about these choices.

* * * * *
How a Seed Grows by Helene J. Jordan. Illustrated by Loretta Krupinski.

This is a nifty science book for little kids. Our favorite thing about this book is that it’s all about getting empirical.

After some unassuming storybook text (with lovely illustrations) about different kinds of seeds and the different kinds of plants that grow from them, the book gets down to business and lays out an experiment for the young reader to do: Plant a dozen bean seeds and see what happens to them over time.

After planting the seeds, each in its own eggshell or other container, and watering them daily, on day 3 you dig up the first seed and examine it it. Two days later, you dig up the second seed and see what’s happening. Every few days you dig up another seed so you can observe the roots growing and developing root hairs. Once the shoots start pushing out of the soil in the containers with the not-yet excavated seeds, the kids can examine the growth of the plants without digging them up. At this point, if the kids are still interested, they can plant the bean seedlings in the ground.

The charm of this book is not just that it lays out a hands-on experiment for kids to do. It also makes it clear to the kids that there is likely to be some variation in what is observed — not only might your bean seeds grow more quickly or more slowly than the day-by-day development illustrated in the book, but that your 12 beans of the same kind might develop at different rates, even if you do your best to plant them and water them just the same. As well, the idea of sacrificing growing seeds to learn something is presented in a way that kids can handle. (If a book doesn’t give you permission, sometimes kids are a little too precious with the seeds they have planted.)

This is a fun way to get your hands dirty.

* * * * *
The Periodic Table: Elements with Style, written by Adrian Dingle, illustrated by Simon Basher. (Boston: Kingfisher, 2007)

The book introduces several representative elements from the periodic table. For each element, there’s a listing of crucial information like the element’s symbol, atomic number, atomic weight, color, standard state, density, melting point, boiling point, and data of discovery. But the real story is the first person introduction to each element’s character, tendencies, and common uses. Hydrogen says, “I am the simplest and lightest of all the elements, the most abundant in the universe, and the source of everything in it — from matter and energy to life.” Cesium pipes up, “Soft and golden, I’m way more exciting than gold.” Magnesium chirps, “I’m happy to mix in any social gathering of the elements, making friends with anyone.” Iron hollers, “I am at the center of everything.”
Clearly, there are a lot of strong personalities here.

For all the elements that appear in this book (except hydrogen), the introductions to the elements are preceded by a discussion of the group they run with — the alkali metals, the halogens, the carbon elements, and so on. The book offers a description for each of the groups in the periodic table, including the lanthanides and actinides and the transactinides (although given their instability, we don’t get to meet individuals from the latter group). The group descriptions are a little less gripping than the portraits of the elements in each group, but they do a nice job conveying which groups have elements that seems to copy each other closely and which of these periodic table cliques seem to tolerate more individualism.

Each element also has a portrait, a bold graphic that conveys some visual clue to the element’s temperament of common uses.

Of course, the book includes these portraits in periodic table layout, too. And the book includes an index and a glossary.

As a casual read, this is not a book that will leave a kid with exhaustive knowledge about all the chemical elements. However, the “personal information” about these elements comes across as quirky and compelling, and it’s hard for the young reader to resist forming some opinions about which elements he or she would like to hang out with.

Read an archived conversation with a younger time-slice of my kids about this book.

* * * * *
Big Tracks, Little Tracks: Following Animal Prints by Millicent E. Selsam, illustrated by Marlene Hill Donnelly.

This book helps kids to become “nature detectives” by getting them to look at different kinds of animal tracks for clues about the animals that left them. The presentation is pretty Socratic: What do we see in the prints? What do we know about how this animal or that animal moves about?

The approach of inferring what happened from clues is fun. There are some facts that are kind of cool to learn (e.g., seagulls run into the wind to take off, so you can tell by the direction of their footprints what direction the wind was blowing when they launched). But the ick factor for this book is pretty low. (There is a trangressive moment where cats and dogs switch places, but it’s not gross.)

Along the same lines, but harnessing the magnetic power of the gross:

Who Pooped in the Park? Great Smoky Mountains National Park by Steve Kemp, illustrated by Robert Rath.

Like Big Tracks, Little Tracks, this book gets kids interested in the inferences they can draw from their observations. However, it beats out Big Tracks, Little Tracks for the simple reason that poop (as a charter member of the Pantheon of Gross Things) is absolutely hilarious.

In fact, scat is only the bait that attracts kids (like flies, if you will) to learn about the other clues animals leave in the National Park: tracks, nibbled twigs and scraped tree bark, rocks that have been moved. This book doesn’t just talk about the particular animals that inhabit Great Smoky Mountains National Park, but it describes some of the ways they interact with each other in the ecosystem. (For example, the non-native wild hogs eat up the native salamanders.) Scattered through the book are “The Straight Poop” boxes of related facts (e.g., that rabbits eat their own scat to maximize the nutrition they get out of their food by digesting it twice).

My kids loved this book, and it gave them something intelligent to say about animal droppings we came upon in family hikes — at least, once they were done giggling.

There are versions of this book available for many other National Parks, each of which deals with the particular fauna that inhabits (and poops in) the particular park.

How do we make room for pink microscopes? (More thoughts on gendered science kits.)

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As we’ve been considering the hazards of gendered science kits for kids, some have suggested that it is simplistic to paint pink microscopes as an unalloyed evil.

One response on the potential value of girls’ science kits comes from Meghan Groome at Pathways to Science:

As someone who studies the formation of science identity in middle school students, I see everyday how girls try to navigate acceptable girl identities with those teachers look for to identify science talent.  For many girls, upper elementary and middle school is a time where they are expected to lose both boisterous and intellectually curious elements of their external personalities.  Day in and day out, I observe teachers, boys, and other girls in the class act as “gatekeepers” for smart, vocal girls in science. It’s subtle but once you point it out, it’s unmistakable. …

Teachers look for somewhat specific characteristics to define a kid who is smart or good in science. Those include excelling on exams, participating in class, and showing an interest in the content.  Excelling on exams is a fairly private affair but class participation and curiosity become high-risk behavior for girls lead to them hiding their interest and talent.

All students have to make choices about who they are to the outside world, but for girls, there are fewer ways to be both a girl and someone who is outwardly interested and good at science.

So, when I originally read about girly science kits I balked at what appeared to be a gross exaggeration of girly identity.  I’ve had similar responses when I got to robotics competitions and see the all-girl teams decked out like princesses or cheerleaders.

But upon reflection, I wonder why we adults are so quick to shut down another way that a girl can navigate being a girl and being a scientist? Do I personally want to be a scientist who acts like a Barbie? No, but who am I to shut down someone who chooses Barbie Scientist over Tom Boy scientist?

I think this assessment is onto something — although my experience is that there are fewer acceptable ways to be a girl regardless of whether one is outwardly interested in and good at science. Still, it’s worth asking if the rejection of gendered science kits might function (whether intended to do so or not) as another kind of gender policing, insisting that girls who pursue science must foreswear femininity entirely.

Another response, which I take to be less a defense of gendered science kits and more an examination of the assumption built into negative reactions to them, comes from Lauren at teenskepchick:

I kind of felt like there has been a bit of pink-slagging going on.

Now, I’m not averse to pink. At one stage in my childhood I used to bemoan the colour and anything my parents chose out for me that happened to be pink. I didn’t want to be like those girls. With their pink and their cattiness and their girliness. Internalized misogyny is about valuing “masculinity” and male-ness over “femininity and female-ness, and that is exactly what I did with my dislike of pink. I got over that (for the most part) long ago, and now I’m more than happy to wear pink or stick pink things on my walls or (as my avatar would have you believe) in my hair (and if the blasted colour held well, it might still be in my hair). Which is cool! I like pink. It probably isn’t my favourite colour, but I like it and I see nothing wrong with anybody (of any gender identity) embracing the colour pink.

Except, apparently, when it came to physics. If there was any pink anywhere near my science, it could GTFO as far as I was concerned. I had become used to being incredibly outnumbered in my classes, and getting the reaction “Oh, but that’s a boy subject” when I told people what my majors were. I don’t even understand why people think that is a socially acceptable thing to say, but it happens more often than you’d think. I was tired of second-guessing my wardrobe choices for some classes, and I was tired of coming across stories about T-shirts with messages that implied girls suck at maths.

Enter the Science Babe, aka Deborah Berebichez. When I first started coming across some of her work in my journeys across the intertubes, I wasn’t a fan. The opposite. It was physics and it was pink and it was high heels and it was very gossip-y and I hated it. I’ve lately come to realise, though, that that’s okay! If that is what it takes to get more girls interested in physics, then that is awesome. Same deal with the pink science kits. The problem (well, one of them) is with how they are marketed to reinforce set gender roles, that girls need to be girly and boys… boy-y. The problem is not that pink and femininity and all of that are bad.

There are a bunch of related issues intertwined here.

There seems to be a strong societal presumption that science (and math, and related subject matter) are “naturally” of interest to boys (and men), but not to girls (and women).

There seems to be another strong societal presumption that girls are “naturally” inclined toward femininity — where femininity is described in a pretty narrow way connected to pink stuff, pretty clothes, interpersonal relationships, and the like — and boys are “naturally” inclined toward masculinity that is defined in similarly narrow terms.

Then there’s the presumption that science and math are more compatible with those masculine characteristics than with feminine ones.

Finally, there’s at least a tacit assumption that feminine characteristics and pursuits compatible with them are not as valuable as masculine characteristics and pursuits compatible with them — that the things that are linked to femininity are less than. (This is the internalized misogyny Lauren describes in her post.)

And these intertwined assumptions set up what can feel like a minefield for girls trying to negotiate the twin challenges of figuring out what pursuits interest them and of figuring out who they want to be.

On the one hand, a girl may be totally non-plussed by social pressure to be a certain kind of girl, compliant with a stereotypical version of femininity. But if this girl who resists the pressure to be “feminine” also decides she’s into science, maybe this runs the risk of reinforcing the assumption that science is not compatible with femininity — sure, here’s a girl who wants to do science, but she’s not actually a girly girl.

Indeed, if the girls one knows who are into science are uniformly those who depart from society’s picture of femininity, it may seem to the girls just working out whether to explore science that there is a forced choice between being feminine and pursuing science. And, if they’re OK with the bundle of qualities that is part of societally sanctioned femininity, they may conclude that they’re better off opting out of science (a conclusion peer-pressure may support).

Worse, the grown-ups mentoring girls, including the ones teaching them math and science, may believe that there is a forced choice between science and femininity. Among other things, they may pre-emptively decide that girly girls are not part of their target audience.

And, falling in line with society’s judgments, the girls who pursue science may assume that the girls who hew closer to the “feminine” stereotypes are less interested in or able to do science. This attitude may leave the girly girls who actually pursue science feeling rather isolated even from other girls in science.

All of this strikes me as a pretty raw deal.

In a perfect world, a pink microscope would be just as valid a choice as a blue one (assuming both have the same magnifying power). But in the world we currently inhabit, the pressure on girls to fit the stereotype of femininity is enormous, and comes from multiple sources, including (but not limited to) family members, peers, and school.

A well-meaning attempt to suggest to girls that science can be compatible with the stereotype of femininity can end up being yet another reminder that you need to conform to that stereotype. Otherwise, why the heck would every science kit in the girls’ section come in a pink box?

And lest we forget, Krystal D’Costa reminds us that boys face a parallel pressure to avoid anything that might be officially recognized as feminine:

[G]irls have the option not to choose pink, but do boys ever have the option to choose pink? Will the little boy curious about scents be isolated by his siblings and extended family if they learn what science kit he wants? Because it comes in a pink box?

To get to the point where a pink microscope does not act as yet another tool to police gendered expectation on girls (and boys) — and when women who reject pink microscopes are not used to police gendered expectations on scientists (as not girly) either — we need to figure out how to change the societal presumption that femininity and masculinity have anything at all to do with inclination towards, or ability in, science. We need to recognize opting into, or out of, femininity or masculinity as a completely separate issue from opting into, or out of, math and science. And, decisions with respect to math and science need to be seen as counting neither for nor against your opting into or out of a particular package of gendered characteristics.

After all, as far as I can tell, whether one is interested in math and science, or displays an ability for them, is an empirical question. Why not drop the gendered assumptions about who will be “naturally” suited to them and see what happens?

It would also be great if we could let kids find out who they are and how they want to be without locking them into a rigid, binary choice. If there was no pressure to be a particular kind of boy or a particular kind of girl — if the full range of options was open to everyone — I suspect it might be easier not to judge one set of options as inherently less than.

Again, I think it’s an empirical question — so let’s roll up our sleeves and create the conditions where we can actually find out.