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Vaccine-or-test requirements increase work and costs for governments

Amanda Kostroski, a 911 dispatcher in Madison, Wisconsin, leaves her busy job once a week to go to a county health clinic to be tested for COVID-19.

She’s been making the 15-minute drive from work since late September, when Dane County mandated all employees get vaccinated or tested weekly. The testing is free, and she is typically back to work within an hour.

Kostroski is among 10% of county employees who are unvaccinated and get weekly tests. She chose not to get immunized because she thinks the vaccines are too new and she fears side effects.

Kostroski said she doesn’t understand the need for the shots or why vaccinated people are not tested, since they can sometimes also transmit the virus. “I think it’s pointless,” said Kostroski, 34, who has always tested negative. She’s been told by vaccinated colleagues that they feel burdened filling in for people getting tested.

Dane is one of several dozen counties, cities and states that require workers to get a COVID vaccine or get tested regularly. While some employees complained about the policy, county officials say, it helps keep the workplace safe with modest interruptions. They also say vaccinated workers don’t need testing because they are less likely to get infected and, if they do, are less likely to contract a severe case of COVID. But it has been costly, often requiring governments to use federal COVID relief dollars they would rather have spent elsewhere.

Some private employers have adopted similar policies. And starting Jan. 4, the Biden administration will require private employers with 100 or more workers to insist on shots or weekly testing.

But opposition to those mandates runs deep among some workers, unions and conservative leaders. More than two dozen Republican state attorneys general sued the administration, arguing the federal government lacks the authority. A federal appeals court agreed with them and temporarily blocked the order, and the case might end up before the Supreme Court.

Still, these early efforts by state and local governments offer insights into what Biden’s rule might mean for the wider private sector as companies deal with setting up and paying for testing and then monitoring the results. The regimen adds more work for government managers even in localities like Dane County, where nearly 90% of adults are at least partly vaccinated.

Nationally, about 81% of adults are at least partly vaccinated against COVID, although rates vary widely among states, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Jurisdictions run by conservative officials tend to have lower vaccination rates and are unlikely to require vaccinations or testing for workers — meaning experiences to date don’t reflect areas that have had strong opposition to vaccines and other COVID requirements.

Local and state governments that have embraced the testing option have done so because it straddles the line between creating a safe work environment and giving reluctant employees a way to opt out of the vaccine without losing their job.

Blaire Bryant, associate legislative director for health at the National Association of Counties, said, “It’s too early to give a definitive answer on how well it’s going, but so far [we have] not heard any major issues.”

Counties are relying on free COVID testing in their communities, paying for it through federal COVID relief dollars, or having their health insurance companies foot the bill.

Local governments have a smorgasbord of policies on who is subject to the vaccine-or-test requirement and how it’s enforced. For example, all unvaccinated employees of San Diego County, California, who do not work in a health care setting need to provide proof of weekly testing to their supervisor, said spokesperson Michael Workman.

Miami-Dade County’s policy applies only to nonunion workers, or about 9% of its 29,000 employees. About 380 undergo weekly testing. The Florida county is still negotiating with unions about adding the requirement.

Virginia’s Department of Corrections requires unvaccinated employees who work in crowded settings to get tested every three days, and the rest, every seven days. And the expense? It cost the department nearly $7,000 to test 442 staff members over two days in October. The state is tapping federal COVID relief funds to pay for the testing.

Securing scarce testing supplies can be difficult. The Virginia State Police had to wait more than a month to start a testing program in part because of delays in delivery.

While the Biden administration hoped its rule would motivate more people to get vaccinated, counties have had mixed results.

Officials in Fairfax County, Virginia, outside Washington, D.C., said they have not seen a significant increase in employees submitting vaccination verification since its mandatory shot policy took effect in October. More than 80% of county employees are vaccinated.

The county distributes and pays for self-administered tests for its 2,300 employees who need them, said spokesperson Dawn Nieters. The cost ranges from $35 for a rapid test to $53 for a PCR test, considered the gold standard for detecting COVID.

Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, which includes Charlotte, did see the needle move. Employees there are responsible for getting their own tests. The vaccination rate jumped from 62% to 85% one month after the requirement was implemented in early September.

George Dunlap, chairman of Mecklenburg’s Board of County Commissioners, said he prefers the vaccine-or-test requirement to a vaccine-only mandate because “you have to allow for human behavior that might be different than yours.” But he isn’t sure the policy will encourage any more workers to get vaccinated.

“The people that I know personally who decided to do the testing are still getting testing. They didn’t change their mind about the vaccination,” he said.

Some health experts question the value of testing as a backup and instead favor mandating the shots.

“A vaccine-and/or-testing policy is second best,” said Jeffrey Levi, a professor of health management and policy at George Washington University. “A testing policy catches a problem early. It doesn’t prevent a problem, whereas the vaccination requirement helps to prevent it.”

Marc Elrich, the executive in Montgomery County, Maryland, in suburban Washington, supports a vaccine-only mandate in theory but worries imposing it would result in workers leaving for jobs in neighboring jurisdictions without similar requirements.

“I wish the federal government would impose a [vaccine-only] mandate, because if the feds were to do it, there wouldn’t be any job portability,” said Elrich. “I wouldn’t have to deal with an employee’s ability to go from, particularly in this region, Montgomery County Police Department to pretty much every other police department around here.”

Robb Pitts, who chairs the Fulton County Board of Commissioners in Atlanta, would also like to do away with the testing option. “But I don’t think my colleagues would necessarily go along with that,” he said. About a third of county employees have opted for testing instead of vaccination.

“Why did I compromise? Because I felt, well, we had to do something,” Pitts said. “A lot of times, politics is the art of compromise.”

According to Pitts’ office, Fulton County saw its largest increase in vaccinations since May in September, when the vaccine-or-test policy was implemented. The vaccination rate now hovers around 72%.

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In defense of “onlies”: A growing share of American moms are having only one child — I’m one of them

In just about every modern TV show, from the Kardashians’ numerous reality epics to “Modern Family,” the model American family is depicted as having two (or more) children. Indeed, a 2018 Gallup poll found that the average number of children that American adults believe is ideal is 2.7. Somehow, despite the fact that 9.8 million moms last year were suffering from burnout amid a global pandemic, most women still envision their prescribed two kids, a spouse and a house on their future goal checklist. 

Curiously, what the average person says is “ideal” isn’t always what they really want, what’s best for them, or what they actually do. Demographic data bears this out: in 2016, the Pew Research Center found that 62% of American moms (ages 40 to 44) had given birth to one or two children. And a growing share of women are having “just one.” Indeed, almost a quarter (22%; the percentage goes up with education level) of American moms ages 40-44 have only one child, according to Pew Research Center’s most recent survey. That percentage has doubled since 1976.

What if choosing to have one child could reconcile mounting evidence that children may bring meaning to life, but also bring misery? Perhaps having an “only” could be the new feminist (and empowering) way to achieve a more balanced life.

One is a sweet spot. A twin study of 35,000 showed moms of only children are happier than women without kids, and happier those with two or more. A recent study of 20,000 parents over 16 years shows the birth of a second child increases parental stress due to time pressure, and mothers are hit the hardest. And some studies report moms of “onlies” are actually happier. 

Two years ago, The New York Times published Emily Oster’s piece “Only Children Are Not Doomed,” in which Oster notes that for a growing share of moms who only have one child, the kids turn out just fine. Indeed, some research suggests only children have many traits of first-borns. They are creative, independent and do well in school. So why do so many still perpetuate negative stereotypes about only children — especially when parenting experts and psychologists have fully debunked the myths?

Oster, a data-driven parenting guru and mom of two, agrees that one is not the loneliest number. “Overall, when it comes to what economists call success, having siblings simply does not seem to matter,” she continues.

Perhaps choosing to have an “only” is the life-hack that allows for both the joy of parenting and the ability for some women to stay sane.

As I was about to become a mother, I read everything I could to understand what motherhood would be like. Much of what I read was negative: stories from other moms about how having a baby would wreck my life, kill my marriage and career, and blast my identity. I was told my highs in life would go from European vacations to chugging $6 Splenda bean water inside Target, and calling it a “break.”

I didn’t know if I would like being a mom. I never had a crazy urge to have a child; yet I had a feeling the joy and fulfillment of being a parent was unmissable.

When my kid was born, the first year was tough — but not as bad as the internet had warned me it would be. Somehow I emerged unscathed. I was still me! With one kid, I am still able to have drinks, travel to Chicago for the weekend, do my workout videos and breathe.  

Being a parent to one is a shift in my expectations for life. I grew up thinking I would have two children, because that’s what people do. With delayed parenthood, rising costs of living, the high stress of parenting, and — let’s face it — the fact that it’s only been in the last century women have become able to truly think about their own happiness and fulfillment, it made sense for me to take a beat to consider the options.

Today, the thought of me getting two kids out the door into two car seats and two sets of activities, clothes, tantrums, heartbreaks, play dates, health issues, accessories and beyond is an overwhelming proposition. I can’t imagine de-centralizing my attention from my son and somehow multitasking topless with another infant.

This is not to denigrate those who choose to have multiple children; merely, to say, I have realized that it is not for me. And that this is OK.

I have to remind myself of that, because sometimes it feels like the world is quietly conspiring to pressure me into having more. Indeed, as a mom of a two-year-old, at least once a month I am grilled by fellow moms with questions like “when are you guys trying for another?” coupled with a not-so-sly glance downward.  

Last time, a frazzled, pumping eight-times-a-day-and-working-full-time friend pointed to another pal’s kiddos half-fighting, half-hugging on the ground during an outdoor play session, and said “Look how cute siblings are. You can’t miss out on that.”   

Actually, I can. Beyond being triggering to my fertility-challenged coevals, it is absurd to assume that one’s life — or one’s child’s life — is incomplete without a sibling. Of course I want myself and my child to have a good life. But opting for an “only” doesn’t force us to miss out on anything.  

With the insanity of living through COVID for almost two years, on top of the daily expectations of intense American-style parenting, moms everywhere are feeling burnt out.

Here’s a P.S.A. here for all my fellow mommas and moms-to-be out there: It’s OK to just have one child. (Or none at all, for that matter.)  And it doesn’t have to be because of fertility, a deficit, or career goal. Wanting to enjoy all that life has to offer (with less stress) is a valid reason to go for one.  

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Yes, there are some families who thrive on chaos. This is not a one-size-fits-all situation, and I certainly don’t want to prescribe singletons for everyone. Many people thrive with the multi-child lifestyle. But I want future moms to know — and let me shout from the rooftops — ONE IS AN OPTION. And it is not always a compromise.

Often, the one-and-done parents are depicted as “settling,” perhaps the victim of fertility problems or brutal miscarriages. Rarely do I see only-by-choice parents in popular media. Yes, child and pregnancy loss is torturous, full stop. But I can’t help but read between the lines that sharing only these narratives sends the message that one kid is sad, and a family is incomplete without a sibling. The message from this kind of narrative is that only children should be avoided at all costs, to the extent that so many will go to hell and back to avoid it.   

Let’s change the narrative.  

I enjoy being a mom. My son is the best! Watching him say new things each day and playfully learn about the world I often take for granted is truly magical. Having “just” him makes it easier to treasure the moments.

In Canada and Europe, the numbers of onlies are even higher than in the U.S. Recent studies say 39% of Canadian parents have only one child; within the European Union, nearly half of all households with children (47%) consist of only one child. And even in the U.S., in major metropolitan areas like Manhattan, studies suggest 30 percent of moms only have one kid.

Of course, those of us with siblings (self included) love them, and say our lives wouldn’t be the same without them. But I don’t miss a second sibling I never had. Children without siblings will  have oodles of friends, cousins, relatives and teachers to build memories with instead.   

Whatever you decide as a parent, please stop making moms of single kids feel bad. Stop the reproduction inquisitions during wine nights and happy hours. Kids without siblings are fine and thriving.

If having one kid gives me the joy of momming without double the stress, I’ll take it. Potential moms need to know: There’s joy in one.  

A casserole redux befitting of leftover turkey

Though I lived most of my life in the Midwest, I didn’t grow up on casseroles. However, my Illinois-born husband did. His childhood punctuated with quick ham bakes, easy cheesy pies, chicken rice supremes and taco casseroles more than made up for mine. 

America’s heartland can’t lay claim to the technique of layering starch, protein and veg in a sturdy dish with sauce and cheese and baking it, though it’s hard not to associate this vintage brand of comfort food with the Midwest. This is, after all, the land where dairy is king, where social circles are formed in church basements and over potluck dinners and where the main positive attribute people can ascribe to the endless, harsh winters is that they’re “character-building.” 

The name “casserole” refers both to the finished dish and its cooking vessel; this one-potter’s centuries-long history spans continents and age-old recipes from Lebanon’s eggplant-and-chickpea maghmour to France’s sausage-and-bean cassoulet. Casserole recipes started showing up in American cookbooks in the late 19th century, but the dish really gained steam during the Depression and World Wars as an affordable, fast and filling meal that stretched limited proteins and made use of produce that people canned at harvest time. 

If you hail from the Upper Midwestern states of Minnesota or North Dakota, you may know casserole as hot dish (excuse me, hotdish), which is technically distinguishable by a canned creamy soup base, but — depending whom you ask — must also include a topper of crispy tater tots or crushed potato chips. 

My husband’s late mom Betsy was not from Minnesota, though she was notorious for incorporating canned creamy soup into her hot dishes — especially cream of mushroom to the dismay of her funghi-hating husband and son. 

When Betsy died from ovarian cancer in 2009, my husband and I inherited her recipe collection — 60-odd years’ worth of stained notecards bearing her loopy cursive alongside recipes clipped from magazines and Hunt’s tomato cans — all crammed inside a couple of mismatched recipe boxes. I took comfort in pulling out her favorites — always desserts — so distinguished by their abundance of splatters, which tended to smear the ink in the most maddening places for those tasked with recreating them. Betsy was a skilled and enthusiastic baker who tackled all sorts of technically challenging pies, cookies and pastries. When it came to cooking, she prized convenience, speed and easy cleanup above most else, meaning many of her savory dishes leaned heavily on shortcuts: premade chicken kiev, baked chicken breast seasoned with Hidden Valley Ranch packets and casseroles combining several canned and frozen elements. 

RELATED: The pesky mushroom cookies I bake for Betsy, my late mother-in-law

A few years ago, I cooked a dinner in Betsy’s honor for some friends, headlined by taco casserole and chicken rice supreme. This being a proper potluck, I put each guest in charge of baking and bringing a different batch of her famous cookies. 

The eight of us crowded around my little dining room table, heaping big spoonfuls of cheesy, baked nostalgia onto our plates and washing it down with Miller High Lifes. Everyone loved taco casserole, which is exactly what it sounds like — starting with sautéed “ground beaf (sic) and onions (if you wish)” and ending with a dousing of canned enchilada sauce and a blizzard of shredded cheddar. But the regally named chicken rice supreme — with its bubbling layers of wild rice, broccoli and precooked chicken bound in creamy, mustard-tinged sauce topped with cheese — was the real showstopper, a salve for a bitterly cold night. 

I wondered what Betsy would say if she knew I’d replaced the canned cream of celery soup with fussy homemade bechamel and its unpleasant byproduct of extra dirty pans. Mainly, I think she would’ve delighted in knowing that we were all crammed together, sharing a cozy meal while we laughed ourselves hoarse, ending with far too many of her glorious cookies. 

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A few notes on the recipe

The changes I made to this superb hotdish came mainly in a panic, because I couldn’t find seasoned wild rice or cream of celery soup at the grocery store and time was running menacingly short until my guests arrived. Instead, I used plain wild rice (which, incidentally, made this less salty) and made a quick stovetop bechamel with celery and shallots — which, again, helped control the salt. I also added gruyere to the finishing cheese layer mainly because there might be no tastier combination than gruyere and Dijon mustard.  

***

Recipe: Chicken (or Turkey) Rice Supreme, Respectfully Updated

Adapted from Betsy Hardy Hennessy

  • 3/4 cup wild rice
  • Salt, as needed
  • Olive oil, as needed
  • 1 10-ounce sack frozen broccoli florets
  • 2 Tbsp butter, plus more as needed
  • 2 Tbsp flour
  • 1 small stalk celery, small-diced
  • 1 small shallot, small-diced
  • Freshly ground pepper, as needed
  • 1 1/4 cups whole milk (when I say whole milk, I mean it)
  • 1 cup shredded sharp cheddar cheese
  • 1 cup mayonnaise
  • 1 Tbsp Dijon mustard
  • 2 cups cubed rotisserie chicken or leftover turkey 
  • 1/4 cup freshly grated parmesan cheese
  • 1/4 cup freshly grated gruyere cheese

Cook the wild rice according to the package directions with a pinch of salt and about 1 tsp olive oil. When it’s about 5 minutes from done, stir in the broccoli to warm it through. Fluff the rice with a fork and set aside.

Melt 2 Tbsps butter in a heavy-bottomed saucepan over medium heat. Add the celery, shallot and a sprinkling of salt and pepper. Sauté for 3 to 5 minutes, until the veggies soften and become translucent. Stir in the flour and cook, stirring constantly, until it thickens into a paste and bubbles a bit, but don’t let it brown — about 2 minutes. 

In a separate small saucepan, warm the milk on low heat just until little bubbles begin to form at the edges; remove from the heat. Add the hot milk to the veggies and roux, whisking constantly as the sauce thickens. Bring it to a boil. Add salt and pepper to taste, lower the heat to medium low and cook, stirring for 2 to 3 minutes more. Kill the heat and stir in the cheddar, mayo and mustard, whisking thoroughly to combine.

Preheat the oven to 325F. In a butter-greased 9″ by 13″ baking dish, spread the reserved rice and broccoli mixture into an even layer. Distribute the chicken or turkey meat evenly over the top, then spoon the bechamel-mayo mixture over everything, spreading it into an even layer to the very edges. Sprinkle the parm and gruyere over the top of everything and add a few grinds of black pepper.

Bake for 45 minutes, or until hot all the way through and bubbling at the edges. Let cool for 10 minutes and serve. This goes great with a bright, lemony salad and a cold glass of Chenin Blanc or a bottle of Miller High Life.

 

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With California’s OK, Chevron is selling oil from an illegal spill

Deep in the oil fields of western Kern County, a little northwest of the century-old town of McKittrick, hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude oil and wastewater filled with toxic chemicals have been seeping out of the ground for two years, in an area where companies operate hundreds of wells.

As of this month, exactly two years after it began, more than 576,240 gallons of oil and 4.2 million gallons of wastewater have seeped from the ground into a dry streambed. The ongoing pooling in the Cymric Oil Field “McPhee” lease area ranks among the largest spills in California history, though the state says the spread of spills generally in the Cymric field has been reduced by 90% since 2019.

Chevron, the company responsible for the McPhee spill, appears to be violating a law prohibiting so-called surface expressions. But the California Geologic Energy Management Division (CalGEM), the regulating agency responsible for enforcing such rules, hasn’t issued penalties to Chevron, apart from a fine it levied against the company for a nearby spill that occurred in May 2019.

More alarming, argue environmentalists, is that Chevron is selling the oil that it collects from the spill, even though it’s coming from a seep prohibited by regulations. CalGEM says it has yet to “assess” the amount of money Chevron has made off selling oil from this surface expression since November 2019.

In a statement, Chevron spokesperson Tyler Kruzich said the company has “made significant investments” into keeping the seep contained while implementing mitigation plans “with the goal to stop” the leaks.

CalGEM said it issued a remedial order requiring Chevron to undertake a root cause analysis “and to take all necessary measures to stop the flow of the ongoing surface expressions.” The company is injecting cooling water to reduce the subsurface energy buildup that causes surface expressions, which has been “substantially effective in reducing the flow of the surface expressions,” according to CalGEM spokesperson Jacob Roper.

Last year, The Desert Sun and ProPublica reported there were more than 70 “low energy” seeps in the state that generated revenue for companies, and all were exempt from CalGEM’s prohibition on surface expressions. The state confirmed to Capital & Main that its rules barring surface expressions don’t prohibit companies from selling oil recovered from them, and insisted companies face high costs in the form of potential penalties, spill response, and suspension of approvals for relevant production permits.

In spite of mitigation efforts, neither Chevron nor the state know when the seep will end. That California is allowing Chevron to sell oil bubbling up from a prohibited surface expression, with apparently no consequences for now, is a striking example of the state’s climate dissonance.

Earlier this month, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration submitted California as an associate member of the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance, a group formed at the U.N. climate talks committed to phasing out production and use of oil and gas completely. The state joins Denmark, Costa Rica, Greenland, and Québec, among others. Yet Newsom’s administration has continued issuing permits for new and reworked oil wells throughout his term.

In a phone call from the COP26 event in Scotland, California Speaker of the Assembly Anthony Rendon told CalMatters that the state was “no longer leading the world” on climate policy, falling behind peers like the city of Paris and the German state of Baden-Württemberg.

Newsom’s administration vowed to end fracking by 2024 and has announced other lofty goals on a decades-long timeline. The Western States Petroleum Association, the largest such trade group in the state, is suing CalGEM for denying permits for new fracking wells this year. The agency’s director, Uduak-Joe Ntuk, cited climate change as a reason for the denials.

And yet the oil at the Cymric Oil Field still seeps out of the ground, violating regulations strengthened by Newsom’s administration.

Half a dozen oil spills and a blowout have occurred in the field since 1999, according to The Desert Sun and ProPublica. The field is home to a number of cyclic steam injection wells, an intensive form of oil drilling where steam is pushed down at high pressure to loosen oil in a layer of what is often diatomite. Much of California’s remaining oil reserves are extracted this way.

The Cymric Oil Field, along with the nearby Belridge and Midway-Sunset fields, collectively emitted far more greenhouse gases than any other field in the state last year.

Surface expressions occur when oil and wastewater break through the ground via subsurface fractures and are likely caused by steam injection. Heated crude oil becomes less viscous and shoots out of the surface in unpredictable ways. It can also shoot out of damaged wells or pool on the ground.

In October 2019, CalGEM ordered Chevron to pay a civil penalty of $2.7 million for surface expressions in the Cymric field. According to state documents, the company reaped $399,231 in “economic benefit” from selling the spilled oil from the May 2019 incident. But it has paid none of the penalty, because it filed a notice of appeal and is engaging in settlement discussions with the state.

CalGEM hasn’t assessed how much economic benefit Chevron has enjoyed throughout the two year duration of the McPhee spillage, according to department spokesperson Roper.

Hollin Kretzmann, senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, said the fact that CalGEM has not collected any fines from Chevron for the spills calls the agency’s enforcement capabilities into question.

“The regulations say that the [surface expressions] are illegal, but if you have a regulator who’s unwilling to enforce the law, it doesn’t do much good,” Kretzmann said. “Chevron is selling the oil for additional revenue, so it’s very perplexing, to say the least.”

Eric Laughlin, a spokesperson for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, said that his agency has a wildlife officer assigned to the area and has recorded no injuries to animals to date as they related to the McPhee spill. Testimony from another agency member, during a hearing on surface expressions in January 2020, indicated that animals in the Cymric Oil Field near other spills have been seen covered in oil.

The state has faced other issues stemming from its permitting of cyclic steam injection. An audit last year found that at least 100 injection wells were approved without proper environmental reviews; CalGEM has since said the issue has been resolved, though the Center for Biological Diversity is suing over it.

And CalGEM’s Class II UIC Program, which oversees the state’s injection wells for oil and gas production as well as wastewater disposal, has been out of compliance with the EPA’s Safe Drinking Water Act since 2012, and the state now risks losing oversight of the program.

For a century, Chevron has been a political powerhouse in the state. This year alone it has spent $3.55 million lobbying both the Legislature and various agencies in the executive branch, on everything from carbon capture and fees for promoting zero emissions vehicle goals to opposing physical buffer zones between oil drilling operations and homes, schools and health facilities. The company also donated at least $438,400 to candidates and associated committees in state legislative races in 2020.

In May, Capital & Main filed a public records request for communications between Chevron’s lobbyists and employees at CalGEM, as well as other executive agencies, based on issues Chevron said it lobbied on in the first quarter of the year.

CalGEM spokesperson Roper said the agency’s legal team was reviewing responsive records and would release them soon.

How to transform leftover potatoes into shiny new dinners

As a single person who loves to cook, there are many a week where I eat the same dish over and over (and over) again. But as much as I love leftovers (especially leftover potatoes), I also love variety. To balance affordability and flavor fatigue, I turn to dishes that transform into entirely new meals with just a few extra ingredients.

I hardly need to tell you, but hearty, humble potatoes are leftover superstars. From mashed to baked, roasted to boiled, potatoes transition into solid foundations for salads, soups, patties, and casseroles. With a little bit of planning, potatoes can fill you up all week long. Here are some of my favorite ways to reuse spuds.

What to do with leftover mashed potatoes

Soft, fluffy mashed potatoes taste great with meatloaf or chicken cutlets, but there always seems to be extra once you’ve finished the main. If you have leftover buttery, creamy potatoes from your Sunday roast chicken or prime rib, you can reheat them in a saucepan and eat them hot with a large spoon. Good, but not exciting. Or, you can turn them into a few entirely new dishes (including one extra sweet surprise).

Mashed Potato Cakes with Broccoli and Cheese

Transforming mashed potatoes from creamy to crispy makes leftovers feel entirely new, and are a great way to breathe new life into leftovers. These cakes from Merrill Stubbs are stuffed with garlicky broccoli and sharp cheddar, then coated with a crunchy panko crust.

Flaky Baked Samosas

For less-fluffy mashes, consider stuffing leftover mashed potatoes into flaky baked samosas. To make the filling, boil some carrots, then combine with cooked onions, peas, cilantro, mint, garam masala, serrano, and salt. Dollop spoonfuls of spuds into squares of puff pastry, fold, crimp, and bake.

Chocolate-Mashed Potato Cake with Ganache

Before you click away, hear us out. We know it sounds weird. But in this fudgy chocolate cake, leftover mashed potatoes are incorporated into the batter along with the usual suspects (sugar, cake flour, butter, and melted chocolate). The spuds make each slice of cake extra fluffy, just the way we like it.

What to do with leftover baked potatoes

The perfect baked potato has a crispy outside and pillowy inside. Sure, you could pop one in the microwave and call it dinner, but the best bake comes from the oven (and is the definition of low-effort, high reward). Bake a batch and top with sour cream, bacon, and/or butter. If you have leftover baked potatoes (these Homemade Celery Salt-Crusted Baked Potatoes are some of our favorites), turn them into extra creamy, extra cheesy twice-baked potatoes or serve them with a rich gravy. Top ’em with kale or a creamy chive pesto. The world is your oyster . . er, tater.

Baked Potatoes with White Pepper Milk Gravy

To shake up your stock of baked potatoes, make milk gravy (aka béchamel) flavored with white pepper, which imparts an earthy flavor and won’t discolor your sauce.

Twice-Baked Potatoes with Kale

No one said you had to twice-bake at the same time. If you’re looking for another way to recycle baked potatoes, scoop out the center and mix and mash with sour cream, cheese, sautéed kale, salt, and pepper. Put that delicious, creamy mixture back in those skins and bake at 350° F for 25 minutes.

Twice-Baked Potatoes with Creamy Chive Pesto

If you have a fully baked potato, scoop out the flesh and mix the potato innard with garlic, arugula, scallions, chives, and olive oil. Fill the potato skin with the green mash and bake the spuds for another 20 minutes until the filling has browned on top. Take it one step further and dress the potatoes up with an herbaceous pesto.

What to do with leftover boiled potatoes

Basic, boiled potatoes make a substantial base for potluck salads (or mashes, if you want triple transformations). But it’s easy to turn the starch into loads of other meals.

3-Ingredient Potato Leek Soup

With leftover boiled potatoes, you already have a third of Posie Harwood’s soup ready. For this simple take on a classic vichyssoise, start by softening leeks in a Dutch oven, then add cooked potatoes and water. Purée in the blender (or with an immersion version), and voilà! Dinner is served.

Indian Club Sandwich

This spicy, vegetarian twist on a club sandwich includes thin slices of boiled potatoes. Layer chutney, potatoes, cucumber, beets, and cheese between two slices of buttered bread for a golden grilled meal.

Southern Potato Salad Recipe

Miracle whip, hot sauce, sweet relish, and hard-boiled eggs give this picnic side dish staple Southern flair. The recipe calls for cooking diced russet potatoes but if you already have some leftover boiled taters from last night’s dinner (even if they’re baby red or fingerling potatoes), use them here!

Marvel really should consider a real version of “Rogers: The Musical”

The moment I laid eyes on the first “Hawkeye” trailer, I knew “Rogers: The Musical” would be special. I knew it was going to be one of the highlights of the Christmas-themed Marvel show. I just didn’t realize at the time how special it would be or that I would come away from the first two episodes of the series hoping for someone to assemble an actual Broadway production about Steve Rogers and the Avengers. But here we are. And maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised.

The show-within-the-show was brought to life by the Tony Award-winning songwriting team of Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, the duo behind — among other things — Broadway’s “Hairspray” and “Catch Me If You Can” and the movie “Mary Poppins Returns” (they also worked on NBC’s “Smash,” which is always relevant and probably what I should have led with). All of that musical talent and songwriting experience is on full display in an extended Battle of New York-themed number in the first episode, which we see when Clint (Jeremy Renner) and his children attend a performance of the show just before the holidays.

Shaiman and Wittman co-wrote the lyrics, which include references to Captain America (portrayed by Chris Evans in the films) and Thor (Chris Hemsworth) being easy on the eyes. It also makes excellent use of the former’s iconic and oft-quoted catchphrase “I can do this all day.”

RELATED: “Hawkeye” reminds us why Jeremy Renner’s archer is the least Avenger

The number is full of energy, features dancers dressed up as Chitauri, and even includes Ant-Man, which Clint correctly points out wasn’t present at the Battle of New York in 2012 (the first Ant-Man film came out in 2015). It all adds up to being a catchy, show-stopping number in the vein of “Star Spangled Man” from “Captain America: The First Avenger” (which was written by Alan Menken and lyricist David Zippel). So if this is all we ever get to see of “Rogers: The Musical” — which appears in ads in the background of scenes throughout the first two episodes — it’s a shame. 

While “Hawkeye” plays the musical for laughs — the reveal that Clint had turned down his hearing aid was the perfect punchline and a prime example of the show’s sense of humor — it’s good to see people, albeit fictional characters, gathering for a big, slightly cheesy Broadway show after the pandemic forced theaters to shut down for so long. It was a treat to live vicariously through Clint and the others in attendance, even if it was only for a few minutes.

“Rogers: The Musical” in “Hawkeye” (Marvel Studios/Disney)

But it was also a good in-world reminder of not only how far the Marvel Cinematic Universe has come since the first Avengers film but also the reach and influence these characters have. This is an underlying theme of “Hawkeye” — which also stars Hailee Steinfeld as a young archer named Kate Bishop — since Clint is both an ordinary man without superpowers or special suit but also an original Avenger who played a significant role in bringing back half the universe and defeating Thanos (Josh Brolin). 

Although we know the Avengers are revered for their world-saving actions, we rarely get to see this appreciation (or the result of it) play out on screen since the films spend so much time in the insular world of the characters. That’s why it was important to see people all over mourning Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) in “Spider-Man: Far From Home,” the first film released after the character’s death in “Avengers: Endgame.” It’s also why it was fun to see people theorize what happened to Steve in “The Falcon and The Winter Soldier” after he traveled back in time in “Endgame” to reunite with Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell).

When you think about it, a Broadway show based on the genetically engineered supersoldier who fought Nazis, spent years trapped in ice, and returned to save the world from countless enemies (and briefly grow a great beard) makes perfect narrative sense. 

But it raises a few questions too. Because it’s a bit surprising we haven’t seen Disney and Marvel attempt to bring the events of the Marvel Cinematic Universe to the Great White Way in our world. The massive franchise already includes 26 feature films (soon to be 27 with the release of the third and final Tom Holland-fronted Spider-Man movie in December), multiple short films, digital series, and comic book tie-ins. There’s even an Avengers Campus at Disney California Adventure (and soon to be at other Disney theme parks around the world).

Now that Marvel is finally producing live-action series for Disney+ that don’t just operate within the greater timeline of the MCU but actually feature major characters from the films, it seems there are few avenues left to be explored.

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It wouldn’t be the first time a movie served as inspiration for a stage production either. Numerous Broadway shows got their start as feature films, from “The Lion King,” “Little Shop of Horrors,” and “Monty Python’s Spamalot” to “Mean Girls,” “9 to 5,” and the aforementioned “Hairspray.”  Of course, I recognize how difficult it would likely be to produce a Steve Rogers or Avengers-themed musical. I also remember the failure of the injury-plagued “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” which featured elements from the 2002 film starring Tobey Maguire. And I also acknowledge The Walt Disney Company doesn’t need more money and that there is a growing desire to limit the reach of the company before those in charge become our actual overlords and not just people who control how and when we consume pop culture.

But “Rogers: The Musical” is fun. The song we’re treated to in the premiere  is memorable and catchy. I have to believe it is meant to be more than just a brief gag in “Hawkeye.” So I really can’t help but hope this isn’t the last we’ll see of “Rogers: The Musical.” After all, between this show and “The First Avenger,” we’ve already got two excellent songs locked and loaded. 

New episodes of “Hawkeye” premiere Wednesdays on Disney+. Listen to the full version of “Save The City” in all its glory below, via YouTube.

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Is science stuck? The “Great Stagnation Debate,” explained

For most of history, it was by no means obvious what was an irreducible material — what we now call a chemical element. But investigators discovered the building blocks of the universe and, in so doing, built an extraordinary foundational account of chemistry.

This history displays an uneven gradient of progress. Some elements, like gold, copper or iron, had been known for centuries. Early experimenters developed an understanding of elements like carbon and sulphur. From there, though, an infrastructure of techniques and tools, knowledge sharing and accumulation was required for exploration to keep going. Nonetheless, as the picture began to fill out individuals were still capable of making a huge impact. In the late eighteenth century, the British scientist Sir Humphrey Davy alone predicted the existence of elements like potassium, sodium and calcium, and was then able to isolate them. Around the same time the discovery of fundamentals of chemistry like hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen altered the chemical lexicon forever.

It was the more plentiful elements that were usually found first, relatively simple experiments sufficing to confirm their existence. Then it got harder. Progress slowed, before a breakthrough technology or insight opened a door and the process was repeated. For example, the rate of discovery dipped in the middle of the nineteenth century before accelerating at its end. When Mendeleev first announced the periodic table to the Russian Chemical Society in 1869, it included sixty-three elements. Soon after, new techniques enabled the discovery of noble gases like argon and neon. Then came radioactive elements like polonium and radium. But this was all much more difficult than stumbling across iron or even isolating oxygen. Fitting the wider pattern of diminishing returns and rational pessimism, the number of elements discovered per chemistry paper published then declined right up to the present.

Discoveries continue, but you need enormous equipment and extremely rare source materials to find these ‘superheavy’ elements. They are elusive and unstable, decaying in moments. Indeed, one Russian lab has built a $60 million experiment just to try and find the elements numbered 119 and 120. Compare the journey of discovery for two elements a few centuries apart:

Element 117 was discovered by an international collaboration who got an unstable isotope of berkelium from the single accelerator in Tennessee capable of synthesizing it, shipped it to a nuclear reactor in Russia where it was attached to a titanium film, brought it to a particle accelerator in a different Russian city where it was bombarded with a custom-made exotic isotope of calcium, sent the resulting data to a global team of theorists, and eventually found a signature indicating that element 117 had existed for a few milliseconds. Meanwhile, the first modern element discovery, that of phosphorous in the 1670s, came from a guy looking at his own piss.  

Nobody knows how many elements potentially exist, but it’s clear that when it comes to the periodic table, the low-hanging fruit was naturally picked first. Regardless of where the table ends, the direction is towards ever more difficult discovery. There will be no more Humphry Davys.

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That we pick the low-hanging fruit first is a truism. But its impact is enormous and almost wholly overlooked in policy, business and intellectual life, even among many who engage with the Great Stagnation Debate. Not only do we pick them first, but the world is unidirectional; save for extreme calamities like the collapse of the Roman Empire, once a discovery has been made, a technique implemented or a thing invented, it stays made, implemented or invented. That is to say, big ideas happen and are achieved once. They might have long histories, numerous tweaks and subsequent revisions, but this doesn’t hide the fact that once a big idea has been conceived, executed and found purchase, doing the same cannot rival it. The frontier has already moved. This fact alone explains much of the present’s mixed track record. And it is part of why the future contains such daunting challenges.

Although the theory is controversial, more and more scientists, economists and thinkers argue that the low-hanging fruit problem is real. Barring the intervention of transformational tools, discoveries or circumstances (the grand questions, all of which will be discussed), success at generating and delivering big ideas raises the bar for further big ideas. All things being equal, realizing, delivering, instantiating, imagining the significant ideas of the next one hundred or two hundred years will be – objectively – more difficult than those of the past. This emphatically does not mean there are no more low-hanging fruits. The argument is not that they don’t exist, only that in future they will be fewer and trickier to obtain.

Economists use this concept to explain slowing growth and the introduction of new technology.  In the “special century” already discussed, the average human life went from rudimentary – most people living in quasi-medieval conditions – to, roughly, barring some digital bells and whistles, an existence like ours today. As we know, everything from telephones to radio, fridges to central heating, motor cars to electric light was introduced during those years. Despite the average family having vastly more wealth than in the 1950s, these improvements are effectively one-time events, and so that increased wealth doesn’t translate into a kind of never-ending experiential escalator. Ubiquitous light or a warm home and the big ideas behind them have happened: no other home lighting or heating idea will have equivalent impact. You can try re-inventing the wheel, but it will still be a wheel.

An equivalent process can be seen in the arts. There can be only one Andy Warhol, Doris Lessing, Elvis Presley or Zaha Hadid, in that repeating their techniques never has the same impact. After the breakthrough is made, the idea established, the fruit eaten, the frontier shifted, it may cast a long shadow, but again it has happened, the world is changed. Repainting, rewriting, redesigning, reperforming is not equivalent. Once an aesthetic space has been opened, it’s open. Play in it all you want, but the key moment has already occurred. The same applies to scientific discovery; Copernicus might be revised, corrected and superseded, but (if we can set aside the Greeks for a second) the basic move – shifting our universe – has been made. I can paint like Picasso, suggest that an Internet search engine would make a clever business, or isolate oxygen but no one would accuse me of originality. This doesn’t mean that new things won’t come up in the future; it means we should expect a steeper bar, because “obvious” avenues at the frontier are already taken.

Charles I. Jones talks about “fishing out” as a possible mechanism by which the generation of ideas gets harder: in the great pond of ideas, the fat and lazy fish have all been caught. That is, ideas get harder as ideas are thought. Are we all fished out? While I don’t think we are, Jones is right to say, given the breakthrough problem and diminishing returns, that easy pickings are scarce and getting scarcer.

Ideas lie on a ladder of ascending difficulty or obscurity. The tools, methods and paradigms of the past cannot always make the climb. Scaling it rather requires external, frequently unforeseen breakthroughs, or more resources, or old-fashioned luck. Often all three. We therefore rely on circumstances being equal to the challenge, but there is no necessary reason they ever should be. It’s not that problems in the past were easy, the fruit lazily waiting; just that those strides forward moved us on to new peaks. Now they surround us.

Archaeology presents an interesting analogy: techniques like geophysical surveys, sophisticated dating technologies, drone mapping, autonomous submersibles, big data analysis of satellite imagery, lidar scans and 3D imaging amplify the discipline. Archaeologists can peer deep beneath the earth or within structures without having to lift so much as a trowel. They have more knowledge, more ability to collaborate and share data, expertise and tools. The capacity for making significant archaeological discoveries has never been greater and, indeed, impressive results have been delivered in recent years – from a complete Greek galleon to some of the earliest known paintings, sixty thousand hidden Mayan structures, mummy workshops, a palace of Ramses II and evidence of human migrations and ancestors earlier than any previously suspected.

But the impact doesn’t compare with the early days. There was a golden window for breakthrough archaeological finds, like Arthur Evans’ coming across Minoan civilization at Knossos, the great Heinrich Schliemann’s uncovering of Troy, Yale-affiliated Hiram Bingham’s adventurous rediscovery of Machu Picchu, the opening by Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon of Tutankhamun’s tomb in Luxor’s Valley of Kings, Leonard Woolley’s excavations in Iraq, and the discovery of Sumer and Ur and Uruk, cities older than had been known. Not to mention the caves at Lascaux, the Dead Sea Scrolls . . .

This is no skin off the nose of contemporary archaeologists. It’s just that back then the low-hanging fruit were bigger and riper, and no matter how much we throw at it, we’re unlikely to be able to repeat such stunning finds. Significant discoveries become less likely over time, even as the capacity to make them grows. We won’t find Atlantis because, truthfully, if it existed they’d already be offering guided tours and fridge magnets.

Archaeology isn’t a universally applicable illustration, in that there are a finite number of objects or sites to be found. It does however illustrate how when a field or technology or business is new, its growth accelerates fast, progress comes in leaps and bounds. But this cannot go on forever. Once the low-hanging fruit have been plucked what remains are more obscure concepts, knottier problems, mature markets, dustier corners in the attic of invention.

The nature of ideas means we must ascend rungs of difficulty and obscurity – and will keep on doing so. Despite being frequently dismissed, the low-hanging fruit phenomenon is ingrained. Science, technology, human civilization – unlike archaeology, these may be boundless territories. But we reach – and have reached – the more navigable destinations first. The corollary is clear. All things being equal, future destinations will be harder.

Excerpted from “Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking” by Michael Bhaskar. Reprinted with permission from The MIT PRESS. Copyright 2021.

9 victims of King Tut’s curse (and one who should have been)

On November 4, 1922, a team of archaeologists led by Howard Carter discovered a step that marked the entrance to King Tutankhamen’s tomb. When King Tut’s tomb itself was discovered on November 26, 1922 — after more than 3,000 years of uninterrupted repose — some believed the pharaoh unleashed a powerful curse of death and destruction upon all who dared disturb his eternal slumber.

Like any urban legend or media sensation, the alleged “curse of the pharaohs” grew to epic proportions over the years. Here are nine people who might make you believe in such things, and one who should have been a direct recipient of Tut’s wrath but got off with nary a scratch.

1. GEORGE HERBERT, 5TH EARL OF CARNARVON

The man who financed the excavation of King Tut‘s tomb was the first to succumb to the supposed curse. Lord Carnarvon accidentally tore open a mosquito bite while shaving and ended up dying of blood poisoning shortly thereafter. This occurred a few months after the tomb was opened and a mere six weeks after the press started reporting on the “mummy’s curse,” which was thought to afflict anyone associated with disturbing the mummy. Legend has it that when Lord Carnarvon died, all the lights in his house — or, according to some accounts, the lights in all of Cairo — mysteriously went out.

2. SIR BRUCE INGHAM

Howard Carter, the archaeologist who discovered the tomb, gave a paperweight to his friend Bruce Ingham as a gift. The paperweight appropriately (or perhaps quite inappropriately) consisted of a mummified hand wearing a bracelet that was supposedly inscribed with the phrase, “Cursed be he who moves my body.” Ingham did not die from the mummy’s curse, though his house burned to the ground not long after receiving the gift. When he tried to rebuild, it was hit with a flood.

3. GEORGE JAY GOULD

Gould was a wealthy American financier and railroad executive who visited the tomb of Tutankhamen in 1923 and fell sick almost immediately afterward. He never really recovered and died of pneumonia a few months later.

4. AUBREY HERBERT

It’s said that Lord Carnarvon’s half-brother suffered from King Tut’s curse merely by being related to him. Aubrey Herbert was born with a degenerative eye condition and became totally blind late in life. A doctor suggested his rotten, infected teeth were somehow interfering with his vision, and Herbert had every single tooth pulled from his head in an effort to regain his sight. It didn’t work. He did, however, die of sepsis as a result of the surgery, just five months after the death of his supposedly cursed brother.

5. HUGH EVELYN-WHITE

Evelyn-White, a British archaeologist, visited King Tut’s tomb and may have helped excavate the site. After seeing death sweep over about two dozen of his fellow excavators by 1924, Evelyn-White died by suicide — but not before writing, allegedly in his own blood, “I have succumbed to a curse which forces me to disappear.”

6. AARON EMBER

American Egyptologist Aaron Ember was friends with many of the people who were present when the tomb was opened, including Lord Carnarvon. Ember died in 1926, when his house in Baltimore burned down less than an hour after he and his wife hosted a dinner party. He could have exited safely, but his wife encouraged him to save a manuscript he had been working on while she fetched their son. Sadly, they and the family’s maid died in the catastrophe. The name of Ember’s manuscript? “The Egyptian Book of the Dead.”

7. RICHARD BETHELL

Bethell was Lord Carnarvon’s secretary and the first person behind Carter to enter the tomb. He died in 1929 under suspicious circumstances — though one modern historian has attributed his death to the work of Satanist killer Alastair Crowley. Bethell was found smothered in his room at an elite London gentlemen’s club. Soon after, the Nottingham Evening Post mused, “The suggestion that the Hon. Richard Bethell had come under the ‘curse’ was raised last year, when there was a series of mysterious fires at it home, where some of the priceless finds from Tutankhamen’s tomb were stored.” No evidence of a connection between artifacts and Bethell’s death was established, though.

8. SIR ARCHIBALD DOUGLAD REID

Proving that you didn’t have to be one of the excavators or expedition backers to fall victim to Tutankhamun’s curse, Reid, a radiologist, merely x-rayed Tut before the mummy was given to museum authorities. He got sick the next day and was dead three days later.

9. JAMES HENRY BREASTED

Breasted, another famous Egyptologist of the day, was a member of Carter’s team when King Tut’s tomb was opened. Shortly thereafter, he allegedly returned home to find that his pet canary had been eaten by a cobra — and the cobra was still occupying the cage. Since the cobra is a symbol of the Egyptian monarchy, and a motif that kings wore on their headdresses to represent protection, this was a rather ominous sign. Breasted himself didn’t die until 1935, although his death did occur immediately after a trip to Egypt.

10. HOWARD CARTER

Carter never had a mysterious, inexplicable illness and his house never fell victim to any fiery disasters. He died of lymphoma at the age of 64. His tombstone even says, “May your spirit live, may you spend millions of years, you who love Thebes, sitting with your face to the north wind, your eyes beholding happiness.” Perhaps the pharaohs saw fit to spare him from their curse.

A version of this story originally ran in 2018; it has been updated for 2021.

16 Muppets who moved to “Sesame Street,” from Ji-Young to Abby Cadabby

There’s a new kid on the block — or should we say, street?

Just in time for the holiday season, “Sesame Street” welcomes its newest Muppet resident, Ji-Young. The fun-loving, rock music aficionado is Korean American and loves playing the electric guitar and skateboarding. She also aspires to rock out with The Linda Lindas and share homemade tteokbokki with her neighborhood pals. 

At seven years old, Ji-Young is making history as the first Asian American Muppet on the beloved children’s television program. Her arrival comes after a tumultuous year of anti-Asian hate crimes spurred by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Ji-Young — who made her official debut this Thanksgiving in “See Us Coming Together: A Sesame Street Special,” alongside Simu Liu, Padma Lakshmi and Naomi Osaka — encourages conversations on racial prejudice and teach children how to be a good “upstander.”

RELATED: Six powerful ways “Sesame Street” shaped our culture

Ji-Young’s introduction is an exciting step towards increasing marginalized representation on “Sesame Street.” Since its debut in 1969, the series has featured a diverse group of puppets and tackled difficult issues like incarceration, poverty and parental divorce. A few of these Muppets will join Ji-Young in her future adventures while others will hopefully appear occasionally. Some have already enjoyed their time under the “Sesame Street” spotlight and are now branded as “toast.”

From Abby Cadabby to Osvaldo el Gruñón and Aristotle, here’s a look at “Sesame Street” Muppets who push the bounds of conformity and promote inclusivity:

Noor and Aziz (2020)

Like many young siblings, the brother and sister duo love sharing stories and learning together. The six-year-old twins are also Rohingya Muslim Muppets who currently live in the world’s largest refugee camp.

The pair’s arrival came during the second phase of the ongoing Rohingya genocide — an ethnic cleansing massacre in Myanmar fueled by the Burmese military. Noor’s and Aziz’s individual characterizations also reflect those of Rohingya refugee children — Noor, for example, is afraid of loud sounds, which are reminiscent of gun shots.  

Both Noor and Aziz speak in the Rohingya dialect and will appear alongside other notable “Sesame Street” Muppets.

Karli (2019)

In 2019, “Sesame Street” unveiled its first Muppet who is in foster care and has a parent battling addiction. Karli is a little green monster who loves eating pizza and playing monster ball (soccer for monsters). She’s best friends with Elmo and lives with her two foster parents, Dalia and Clem. It’s revealed that Karli’s birth mother is away and seeking treatment for substance abuse and addiction.    

Gabrielle and Tamir (2018 and 2020)

Gabrielle — who debuted in 2018 — and her older cousin Tamir are two Black Muppets who both live in the same apartment building with their family. They are also members of the Power of We Club, where they engage in conversations about general interest topics and social issues — like racism — with their Muppet comrades.

Tamir is slated to be in a band with Ji-Young, Elmo and Abby Cadabby.

Julia (2015)

Julia is four years old, best friends with Elmo and Abby Cadabby and loves her stuffed doll — Fluffster — dearly. She is also autistic and was brought to life by “Sesame Street” writer Leslie Kimmelman and puppeteer Stacey Gordon, who are both mothers of children with autism.

After her debut on “Sesame Street and Autism: See Amazing in All Children,” the artistically gifted Muppet continues to break down demeaning stereotypes and brings more awareness to the autistic community. To this day, Julia is a source of empowerment for children and adults alike.

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Zeerak and Zari (2016 and 2017)

Zeerak — who is four years old — is the younger brother of six-year-old Zari. The brother and sister duo appear on “Baghch-e-SimSim,” which is the local version of “Sesame Street” in Afghanistan. Together, they promote gender equality and emphasize the importance of education in a conservative nation where women’s rights are abysmal and women’s literacy rates are astoundingly low.

Alex (2013)

Alex made his debut on “Little Children, Big Challenges: Incarceration,” an educational resource video. The short special discusses parental incarceration after Alex tells Rosita, Abby Cadabby and Sofía that his father is in prison.

Lily (2011)

On “Sesame Street,” it’s revealed that Lily is the show’s their first homeless and food insecure Muppet, seven years after her original debut. In a 2018 special for the Sesame Street in Communities outreach program, Lily confesses to Elmo and Sofía that she and her family struggled to make ends meet after losing their apartment. 

Lily also makes an appearance at the National Press Club for a Sesame Workshop presentation on the “Food for Thought” campaign.

Abby Cadabby (2006)

Abby Cadabby is a four-year-old fairy muppet and the first leading female character on “Sesame Street.” She adores her magic wand — which can turn random objects into pumpkins — and flaunts a pair of dragonfly wings. A magical multilinguist, she’s fluent in the made-up languages of “Dragonfly,” “Butterfly” and “Puppydog.”

Since her inception, the jaunty Muppet has been hailed as a role model for young girls. In a 2014 educational special — which takes place in a fictional NumberCon convention —  Abby cosplays as “One-Da-Woman,” a spoof of DC Comics’ Wonder Woman.

Abby later reveals that her parents are divorced in a 2012 online special and resource kit. Her experiences helps showcase the complicated emotions children undergo during a family divorce and reinforces themes of self-awareness and perseverance.

Kami (2002)  

Kami is a Muppet from “Takalani Sesame,” the South African co-production of “Sesame Street.” She wears a bright blue cut-off vest and a necklace decorated with flowers, pendants and seashells. A year after her debut, it was revealed that Kami is HIV-positive.

She’s made appearances with Bill Clinton, former United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Oprah Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg to raise awareness on HIV/AIDS. In 2003, Kami was appointed as a global “Champion for Children” by the UN Children’s Fund.

Rosita (1991)

This turquoise monster — who originally was designed as a fruit bat — is the show’s first Latina muppet. Rosita is five years old and speaks both English and Mexican Spanish, which she’s also teaching to Abby Cadabby. She loves playing her guitar and excels in both history and geography.

In the “Spanish Is my Superpower” special, Rosita teaches us about xenolingohassen (the hatred of foreign languages) after she recounts a racist incident that took place in the supermarket. She also incites conversations about extended families, military families and deployment — Rosita’s father, Ricardo, was injured while serving in the military and is now in a wheelchair.

Aristotle (1981)

Named after the Greek philosopher, Aristotle is a blind Muppet on “Sesame Street.” He loves collecting an assortment of odd things, namely broken sports gear, lettuce, music and objects that start with the letter “F.” Aristotle has taught audiences about braille and demonstrates that his visual impairment doesn’t hold him back from participating in everyday activities with his friends.

Osvaldo el Gruñón (1979)

Also known as Oswald the Grouch, this trash-can-residing pessimist hails from Puerto Rico and was the first bilingual Muppet. He frequently shares common Spanish phrases and illustrated — albeit somewhat grouchily — the beauty of learning new languages.

Ji-Young’s introduction in “See Us Coming Together: A Sesame Street Special” is available to watch on HBO Max, PBS Kids, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. A Twitter watch party takes place Saturday, Nov. 27 at 3 p.m. ET. 

Watch a trailer for the special below, via YouTube:

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Stay inside Black Friday and eat scones instead

You know those families, the ones where every Thanksgiving everybody gets excited every year about some uncle’s “famous” green beans or Grandma’s “famous” pie? Yeah, that’s not mine.

My family Thanksgivings, first with my grandmother and then with my in-laws, have always been… fine. Year in and year out, the fare has been reliable and unvarying — no surprise spices, no experimental techniques. A Butterball served with a boat of McCormick gravy, a pie made from a can of Libby’s. And that’s okay. After I became a mom, I got custody of most of the holidays, and I’ve typically used my position as host to play around, refine and try new things. The rest of the year is my menu dominating domain, and I like it that way.

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This year, however, my mother-in-law is in a care facility, and my immediate family and I are tossing out the turkey and stuffing for a dinner of our own design. But one remnant of our traditional Thanksgiving is holding firm — we go nowhere near a store on Friday and instead curl up with my morning after scones.

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The Black Friday scones are a product of my desire to bring something to the holiday weekend, even when there is no room for me to flex at the Turkey Day meal itself. They are not pumpkin, not gingerbread, not apple pie-inspired. The only nod to the season is the simple maple glaze on top, which is just enough to say, “I get it” without trying too hard. They are also incredibly good.

Scones to me fall into that category of foods that are easier to make yet somehow better tasting than their more complicated culinary peers — like how French toast is superior to pancakes, or how cobbler beats pie. I would rather make and consume scones over muffins any day of the week. I appreciate that they ask no paper liners of me, no fiddly individual scooping, and that they take about seven minutes to pull together, from stuff you probably have in your kitchen right now. But mostly I love that a good scone has such a messy, crumbly vibe.

I make scones year round (Smitten Kitchen’s chocolate and pear version is a killer), but the ones I return to over and over are Ree Drummond’s vanilla scones. She describes them as “As close to the little Starbucks delights as I could get,” but that is not true, because they are eight hundred times better. She makes hers with heavy cream, paradise if you have it on hand or are being fancy. But don’t let what you might not have on hand stop you here — I have made these with whole milk, plain full fat yogurt, and a combination of the two and they’ve always turned out beautifully. She also makes them with split vanilla beans, but you can use extract. And in place of her classic sugar glaze, I use maple syrup for an autumnal kick. My only request here is that you do use very cold butter and don’t overmix the dough. This is such a simple recipe, and the magic comes from making it as light as possible.

How good are these? After I made the scone dough for this week’s column, I baked two to photograph and froze the rest. I’d just set my freshly baked ones on the table to cool when one of them immediately disappeared into my daughter’s mouth. They were not glazed, not buttered, and it was not breakfast time. “You didn’t, like, need this?” she asked  “Because, too late.” She did not leave a crumb.

***

Black Friday Scones
Inspired by The Pioneer Woman
Makes 6 – 8 generously sized scones

 

Ingredients:
Scones

  • 3 cups of all purpose flour
  • 2/3 cup of sugar
  • 4 teaspoons of baking powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon of sea salt
  • 1 teaspoon of vanilla
  • 2 sticks (1/2 pound) of cold butter
  • 1 egg
  • 3/4 cup of heavy cream (Note, you can substitute whole milk, half and half, and even plain yogurt here. I’ve even made these with buttermilk. The final product will not be as rich, but equally delicious.)

Glaze

  • 1/3 cup of maple syrup
  • 1 cup of confectioner’s sugar

Directions

  1. Preheat your oven to 350°F.
  2. In a large bowl, mix together your flour, sugar, baking powder and salt.
  3. Using a box grater, grate the cold butter into the flour mixture. (You can also use a vegetable peeler, or cut the butter into small cubes.)
  4. Mix the butter and flour mixture until it resembles coarse crumbs.
  5. Add the cream, egg and vanilla, and stir until there are no dry parts and it is all just combined.
  6. Turn the dough out on to a piece of parchment, and pat into a roughly 8-inch circle. Cut into six or eight even wedges. (We like ours substantial, so six it is.)
  7. Put the parchment and the dough on a baking sheet. Separate your wedges. Bake for roughly 25 minutes, until light golden.
  8. Meanwhile, make the glaze. In a small bowl, stir together your syrup and sugar until well combined. If you like, you can add a dribble of cream and a pinch of salt. Glaze right before serving.

 

Note: I like to freeze the dough and then chuck these in the oven in the morning. If you’re baking them straight out of the freezer, allow for about 35 minutes of baking time.

 

More breakfast recipes we love: 

18 best ways to use leftover stuffing (if you have any)

When it comes to Thanksgiving table hierarchies, for me, stuffing sits securely at the top. Whether you call it stuffing or dressing; make it from cornbread, hand-torn white bread, or the pre-hardened croutons from a bag, I will love it. And when it comes to leftovers, stuffing is more than just another topping on the beloved next-day sandwich.

Here are 18 ideas for recipes to transform leftover stuffing into meals, plus some of our favorite stuffing recipes (though they’re so good you may not have any left over, just saying.)

Stuffing Patties

If you are going to make the almighty leftovers sandwich, go the extra step instead of microwaving the stuffing—or worse, leaving it cold. Use a cookie cutter or paring knife to cut out stuffing patties from whatever’s left in the baking dish. If your stuffing is super dry the next day, pour a few tablespoons of leftover stock over to moisten it before cutting your patties out. Fry the rounds in a skillet with a tablespoon or two of butter. Slide them onto a slice of sourdough or halved English muffin with leftover turkey, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, and gravy. These little disks of buttery goodness will make any Thanksgiving leftovers sandwich shine.

Stuffing Patty Melt

If you’re all turkeyed-out, or don’t partake in poultry, transform that stuffing patty into a stuffing patty melt. Bread on bread on cheese? Sounds about right to me.

This sheet pan stuffing makes cutting out patties easy.

Recipe: Sheet-Pan Cornbread Stuffing With Sage

Stuffing Muffins

If you’re a stuffing purist or catering to picky eaters who only want the original flavor in their leftovers, whip up a batch of stuffins’ (a.k.a. stuffing muffins, a tip I learned from Budget Bytes). Mix stuffing with eggs and cream or milk to bind, and scoop into a muffin pan. Drizzle each muffin with melted butter and bake for 25-30 minutes at 375°F until warmed through and crisp.

Stuffing Cakes

More of a brunch person? For a decadent brunch after Turkey Day, throw together a batch of stuffing cakes, inspired by Well Plated. Mix about 2 cups of leftover stuffing with an egg to bind. If you have any herbs, grated or crumbled cheese, or chopped bacon on hand, fold those in as well. Pan fry the cakes in butter, and top with a poached or soft-boiled up egg and flaky salt.

Stuffing Waffles

Break out the waffle iron you got last Black Friday for stuffing waffles. Fold in a bit of stock to loosen up the stuffing, then press an even layer of stuffing into a waffle maker. Top with a fried egg and drizzle with gravy and cranberry sauce.

Stuffing-Baked Eggs

Stuffing baked eggs are sort of like shakshuka, but instead of spicy tomato sauce, you’ll use stuffing! Fill a cast iron or nonstick skillet with stock-refreshed stuffing, make a few divots in the surface—I like to use the cracked eggshells to gently press these holes for the eggs to sit in (bonus points: one tool fewer to wash!), but a spoon will work too.

Sausage and cornbread stuffing is a natural fit with eggs, and works perfectly for brunch repurposing.

Recipe: Andouille Sausage and Cornbread Stuffing

Stuffing-Stuffed Mushrooms

Repurpose your stuffing to stuff something else, like mushrooms. Remove the stems from portobello or Baby Bella mushrooms and fill them halfway with like Boursin or chevre. Top with leftover stuffing and bake, stuffing-side up, until the mushrooms are tender and the stuffing is crisp.

Stuffing-Stuffed Peppers

No mushrooms on hand? Turn stuffing into dinner with stuffed peppers. Substitute leftover stuffing for rice or whatever grain you’d typically use in stuffed peppers (peek at these lamb and halloumi or this vegan harissa-tahini recipes to get inspiration.) Or keep it simple: Top stuffing-filled peppers with your favorite grated cheese and bake until the peppers are soft and the cheese is melted.

Stuffed Squash

When it comes to stuffing (other foods with stuffing), my favorite vegetable for the job is decidedly squash. Grab a delicata or acorn squash, halve and scoop out the seeds, then bake until tender, then fill with stuffing and bake for a few more minutes. Garnish your stuffed squash with any and all fresh herbs you have on hand. If you want extra credit, try swapping stuffing for the pesto in these Squashduckens.

A classic, buttery stuffing like this one lends itself well to leftover makeovers.

Recipe: Brown Butter Stuffing

Turkey and Stuffing-Dumpling Soup

Put on a pot of turkey and stuffing-dumpling soup. First, make a stock from your leftover turkey carcass. Then make balls of stuffing to mimic dumplings or matzo balls: Mix stuffing with an egg and a few tablespoons of flour for every cup of stuffing. Scoop stuffing balls into simmering broth and cook until the dumplings float, about 3-4 minutes. Toss in shredded leftover turkey and any roasted veggies you have hanging around. This quick, hearty soup will warm you up without sending you back into last night’s food coma.

Stuffing Meatballs

Try your hand at stuffing meatballs: Soak leftover stuffing with some milk to make a panade—that’s the mixture of starch and liquid often added to a meatball mixture to keep them tender. Then follow your favorite meatball (or meatless-ball!) recipe, subbing your stuffing-panade mixture for any bread or breadcrumbs in the recipe. Use up leftovers and fast-track your way to super flavorful, perfectly moist meatballs. Note: you could use the same tactic for a Thanksgiving meatloaf. If you glaze with cranberry sauce instead of ketchup, you get extra credit.

Stuffing-Shepherd’s or Pot Pie

Hoping to knock out a bunch of your leftovers in one dish? Bake them all into a Thanksgiving shepherd’s pie or pot pie. In a casserole dish, layer leftover turkey, stuffing, and veggies, being sure to dress with ample gravy and cranberry sauce between layers. Top with leftover mashed potatoes for a shepherd’s pie, or use that pie crust you made and forgot about during the Thanksgiving madness for a pot pie, and bake. Marvel in how it’s possible to cram all the flavors of turkey day into one bite.

The fat from sausage in this DIY pork-sage stuffing helps keep the casserole moist, even days into leftovers.

Recipe: Grandy’s Sausage Stuffing

Stuffing Arancini

When it comes to satisfying cravings, arancini-style stuffing balls will do the trick. Roll hunks of leftover stuffing into balls using your hands or an ice cream scoop, then dip in flour, egg wash, and panko or Italian breadcrumbs. Shallow fry in neutral oil and serve with warm gravy.

Thanksgiving Quesadilla

Whether it’s a leisurely morning breakfast or a midnight snack, you can’t beat a quesadilla. Crumble leftover stuffing onto a tortilla, then layer with pieces of turkey, dot cranberry sauce over the surface, and definitely don’t forget the shredded cheese (I like sharp cheddar or Oaxaca cheese here.) Top with another tortilla and fry in a little neutral oil until golden brown.

Thanksgiving Nachos

Thanksgiving nachos: a slight deviation from quesadillas, but with similar late-night snacking vibes. Spread tortilla or potato chips in an even layer on a sheet pan, and top with shredded cheese. Top them with shredded leftover turkey breast, crumbled stuffing, and drizzle the whole thing with gravy. Broil for a few minutes, or until the cheese melts. I promise they’re as delicious at 2 a.m. as they are at 2 p.m.

Ditch the traditional celery-herb stuffing for a recipe like this chorizo version. The oft-overlooked mushrooms make for a super moist, flavor-packed stuffing.

Recipe: Ciabatta Stuffing with Chorizo, Sweet Potato, and Mushrooms

Stuffing Dumplings

Fold chopped leftover turkey, bacon, or ham into leftover stuffing along with chopped fresh herbs, a little grated Parmesan cheese, and a generous splash of chicken or turkey stock. Stuff a tablespoon or so of this filling into dumpling wrappers, and steam or pan-fry for an inventive, satisfying spin on Thanksgiving flavors that’s just begging for a dip in cranberry sauce.

Bacon-Wrapped Stuffing

Shred half a cup of your favorite bacon-friendly cheese (also known as “any cheese”) and add to two cups of stuffing, along with a beaten egg and a splash of stock. Form this mixture into balls about the size of a ping pong ball, then wrap a slice of bacon around each one, secure carefully through the middle with a toothpick, and transfer to a baking sheet. Bake at 375°F for about 20 minutes, or until bacon is crisp and stuffing bites are golden-brown, and serve hot out of the oven with cranberry mustard for dipping.

Stuffing Hush Puppies

This is a great way to repurpose any kind of cornbread stuffing (but especially the sausage-studded, jalapeño-spiked variety). Stir a big handful of coarsely shredded sharp cheddar and a small amount of stock if necessary, and form into golf ball-sized balls. You can also use a scoop for uniform results. Roll in beaten egg, then in breadcrumbs or cornmeal, and shallow or deep-fry until golden-brown. Dips-wise, you know what to do.

Chick-fil-A, the National Prayer Breakfast and right-wing Christianity: Delicious combo!

One of a series about the Fellowship Foundation, the secretive religious group that runs the National Prayer Breakfast and is popularly known as The Family. This series is based on Family documents obtained by TYT, including lists of breakfast guests and who invited them.

One of the top people putting together the National Prayer Breakfast guest list for decades has been a longtime executive at Chick-fil-A, the controversial fast-food chain run by a conservative Christian family, TYT has learned.

A company spokesperson confirmed that Tim Burchfield, a Chick-fil-A franchise owner/operator and executive since 1983, has been involved with the National Prayer Breakfast for more than two decades. The event is marketed as ecumenical and nonpartisan, but internal documents show that the breakfast’s organizers and guest list are overwhelmingly evangelical conservatives.

Two European advocacy organizations warned this year that right-wing foes of LGBTQ and reproductive rights are using prayer breakfasts to advance their legislative and political agendas. They are doing so, the LGBTQ groups said, with unwitting aid from liberals unaware of who’s really involved and how they’re using the events to build their networks.

That appears to be the case with the U.S. National Prayer Breakfast, which presents the president and members of Congress as hosts, but conceals the identities of the Family insiders who actually draw up the guest list.

One internal Family document shows that Burchfield was one of the top 10 individuals who submitted guest names for the 2016 breakfast. Like Burchfield himself, his guests were overwhelmingly Republican. Many gave money to anti-LGBTQ candidates and promoters of the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen.

Revelations by journalist Jeff Sharlet and others show a growing pattern of the National Prayer Breakfast functioning as a de facto convention for religious conservatives. A source close to The Family says the organization’s relational style — relying on friendships to drive breakfast invitations — inherently limits the range and diversity of guests.

RELATED: How MyPillow guy Mike Lindell came to Jesus — and to Donald Trump

While some Democrats in Congress still lend their names to the event — bolstering the fiction that it’s semi-official, nonpartisan and ecumenical — Family guest lists for the 2016 and 2018 breakfasts skew dramatically toward religious conservatives. LGBTQ and reproductive-rights leaders are virtually absent, as are even nationally known religious leaders on the left.

The annual event has served a key role in creating or elevating right-wing icons such as Ben Carson and Mike Lindell.

And Chick-fil-A is not the only right-wing Christian entity with secret ties to the breakfast. TYT recently revealed that the only direct donor to the four-day breakfast event is superstar evangelist Franklin Graham, through the two anti-LGBTQ nonprofit organizations he runs. The Family’s biggest known donor overall is Mountaire Poultry CEO Ron Cameron, a GOP mega-donor whose CFO helps oversee the breakfast and sits on the Family’s board of directors, including as its president until 2017.

In an emailed statement to TYT, Chick-fil-A said the company is not involved in the National Prayer Breakfast, but gave some details about Burchfield’s role. The statement said:

Tim served in a volunteer, non-partisan capacity for more than 20 years coordinating guests for The National Prayer Breakfast from the state of Tennessee. Each state has a representative that coordinates the invites for the national prayer breakfast that serve in the exact same role as Tim. Invitees over the course of more than 20 years spanned the political spectrum and none of them were personally his guests. He no longer serves in this capacity. Neither The Chick-fil-A Foundation nor Chick-fil-A Inc., are involved in the National Prayer Breakfast.

We cannot speak to Tim’s personal philanthropic efforts but no donations to the Fellowship Foundation or National Prayer Breakfast were made from his local Chick-fil-A restaurant or from Chick-fil-A, Inc.

Several of Chick-fil-A’s claims are contradicted by The Family’s internal documents. In response to follow-up questions, however, a Chick-fil-A spokesperson responded, “We have nothing further to add.”

Despite Chick-fil-A’s claim that it’s not involved, the documents show that two CFA executives other than Burchfield also attended the 2016 National Prayer Breakfast. One of them, director of corporate communications Greg Thompson, is listed as submitting his own name to be invited, with a Georgia designation. The source said that means Thompson was involved with The Family’s breakfast team in Georgia, where Chick-fil-A is headquartered.

Also, congressional travel forms show that Burchfield, Thompson and members of Thompson’s family were part of a 2013 U.S. delegation to Guatemala that included former South Carolina Gov. David Beasley, Rep. Robert Aderholt, R-Ala., and then-Rep. Randy Hultgren, R-Ill. Aderholt and Hultgren’s travel was paid for by the Fellowship Foundation, The Family’s legal entity. The trip was to attend Guatemala’s National Prayer Breakfast; both Aderholt and Hultgren are longtime Family insiders. As TYT recently reported, Beasley’s work for The Family has included building international networks of like-minded Christians.

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According to one public account, Chick-fil-A founder Truett Cathy attended the U.S. National Prayer Breakfast in 2004.

Although Chick-fil-A said Burchfield no longer serves in his capacity as a state coordinator, his current status with The Family is unclear.

In 2016, he invited 38 people to the National Prayer Breakfast. In February 2017, an official with the anti-LGBTQ organization Con Mi Hijos No Te Metas (Don’t Mess With My Children) posted on Facebook from that year’s National Prayer Breakfast, “Thank you so much Timothy Lynn Burchfield for making it all happen and our friends from The Fellowship.”

As recently as 2018, Burchfield submitted at least 19 guest names for attendance at the main National Prayer Breakfast event.

The source close to The Family said that regardless of Burchfield’s official capacity, his ties to The Family mean that, even today, “if he wanted to invite one [or] 10 people, he could. It’s not dependent on ‘serving in that capacity.'”

Although Tennessee is only the 16th most populous state, only eight Family insiders invited more guests individually (rather than as part of internal Family teams) than Burchfield did to the 2016 breakfast.

And despite Chick-fil-A’s assertion that Burchfield’s role in the breakfast is not personal, many of his guests share his politics, religious leanings and, in some cases institutional affiliations. “The idea that Tim didn’t personally invite guests to the NPB over the years is ridiculous,” the source said.

In fact, despite the suggestion that Burchfield was impersonally coordinating guests from Tennessee, many of his guests were not even from the U.S. At least a third came from Guatemala, where Chick-fil-A acknowledged Burchfield had traveled on company business, saying that serving people there “has become a passion for him.”

Chick-fil-A’s claim that Burchfield’s guests span the political spectrum isn’t supported by federal donation records and public information about those guests. His Guatemalan guests do not have campaign-donation records, but of Burchfield’s 35 guests from the U.S.:

  • 16 have supported Republican politicians publicly or financially,
  • Five have supported the lie that Donald Trump won the 2020 election, or have donated to politicians promoting that lie, and
  • Only two have ever donated to federal Democratic candidates.

The two Democratic donors include one who backed then-candidate Barack Obama in 2008 and hasn’t donated to a Democrat since. The other is a lawyer who made a single Democratic donation — to a former Tennessee judge running in a Virginia primary — and almost a dozen Republican donations.

Not a single 2016 or 2018 guest of Burchfield has given money to a Democratic presidential candidate in almost 13 years. Out of all of Burchfield’s guests, TYT was able to identify only one, a Guatemalan politician, who had publicly advocated for LGBTQ rights.

Based on his own donations and public statements, Burchfield’s deeply conservative politics align with those of most of his guests.

In a recent interview with a Tennessee podcast, he criticized his former employers, the wealthy Belgian family that owns the Food Lion grocery chain. “They were socialists,” Burchfield says. “Probably some of the most dishonorable people I’ve ever run into.”

Despite The Family and Chick-fil-A championing religious freedom elsewhere, Burchfield is comfortable making his workers conform to his religious beliefs. “We’re straightforward with the people who work for us: This is a business run on Biblical principles, and we’d like you to follow them,” he says. “Don’t have to be a believer, we’d just like you to follow them. We get zero pushback.”

Discussing immigration, Burchfield says Tennessee has “probably a million undocumented illegals.” (One recent estimate put the number at 128,000.) Referring to the federal government taking undocumented immigrants to various states, Burchfield said, “Thank goodness none here, but … we’re gonna have to deal with that.” Although Burchfield holds no public office, he added, “I’ll be playing a part in that when it happens.” He did not elaborate on that and did not respond to emailed questions. (Chick-fil-A’s spokesperson said the company had consulted with Burchfield about its response but would not clarify whether it was speaking on his behalf.)

As an old friend of former Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam, Burchfield has been politically active in the Republican Party for years. Haslam appointed Burchfield to serve on a board dealing with labor issues, and Burchfield was a finance committee member and county chair for the gubernatorial campaign of former Rep. Zach Wamp, R-Tenn., a Family insider who once called homosexuality a “sickness” and now helps oversee the breakfast.

In 2018, campaign filings show, Burchfield donated Chick-fil-A catering valued at $1,000 to the gubernatorial campaign of current Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee. After one year in office, Lee signed into law a ban on abortions after six weeks. Lee has also restricted the rights of LGBTQ people and same-sex couples seeking to adopt children.

Adoption is a common issue for Family insiders. A number of them are involved with international adoption charities — some of which proselytize to children and discriminate against LGBTQ would-be adopters. Burchfield sits on the board of Serving Orphans Worldwide, a member of the Christian Alliance of Orphanages, which cheered this summer’s Supreme Court ruling permitting anti-LGBTQ discrimination by orphanages.

Serving Orphans Worldwide has ties to Church of God World Mission and supports its orphanages financially. The Church of God statement of values is explicitly anti-LGBTQ.

Burchfield’s donations go beyond politics. He’s also a financial backer of Milligan College, which prohibits same-sex relationships and recently fired an LGBTQ professor.

Burchfield has not only served on the president’s advisory board at Milligan but, in 2016, invited a member of Milligan’s board to the National Prayer Breakfast. And while Nashville got plenty of invitations, Tennessee’s next three largest cities — Memphis, Knoxville and Chattanooga — only got three invitations each that year. Johnson City, where Burchfield has his Chick-fil-A, got five invitations and nearby Kingsport got 10.

One Burchfield guest, a “compassionate conservative” and Kingsport columnist, lamented Trump’s style, but cheered his policies. On the other hand, another Burchfield guest, Kingsport’s former mayor, looks up to Trump. Others have championed the Big Lie on social media, going so far as to call Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., a “traitor.”

Another Burchfield guest, Stacie Caraway, is a singer who performs alongside anti-LGBTQ preachers. Caraway has been a featured headliner at Billy Graham’s crusades and the Chattanooga Prayer Breakfast, which hosts speakers such as David Barton and the board chair of Hobby Lobby. She’s also a regular on cruises organized by anti-LGBTQ preacher Charles Stanley.

In her day job, Caraway is an attorney whose specialties include “religious accommodation” and employment law. As a lawyer, Caraway advises companies on matters such as how to deny unemployment benefits to people. One “encouraging note” during the pandemic, Caraway wrote, was that companies could fire people whose only justification for refusing to come to work was fear of getting COVID.

As far as the general public knew, guests at the 2016 National Prayer Breakfast were invited not by Burchfield and other Family insiders, but by members of Congress, who let their names be used on the letterhead of the official notification each guest received of their attendance. While Republicans have generally sided with the political stances of Burchfield and Chick-fil-A, most Democrats are ostensibly LGBTQ allies.

The Democratic co-chairs for the 2016 and 2018 breakfasts were Reps. Juan Vargas, D-Calif., and Charlie Crist, D-Fla. Vargas also headlined September’s Ukrainian National Prayer Breakfast in Kyiv, organized by anti-LGBTQ political leaders there, and has refused to discuss his support for The Family’s network-building.

2016 NPB invitation letterhead

After TYT’s reporting on anti-LGBTQ guests and Family support for the Big Lie, Reps. Crist and Ann Kirkpatrick, D-Ariz., along with former Rep. Janice Hahn, D-Calif., distanced themselves from the National Prayer Breakfast. Reps. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and Ted Lieu, D-Calif., had done so earlier, in response to the Maria Butina scandal.

The Freedom from Religion Foundation last month called on members of Congress to stop participating. “[N]ew records and reporting are exposing the shadowy, secretive nature of the agents behind this event,” said FFRF director of strategic response Andrew Seidel. “Smart politicians ought to look at that steady flow and wonder, ‘What’s next?’ Because it’s not going to be good.”

But a handful of Democrats continue to support both the NPB and the conceit that it’s a semi-official event. Democratic Family stalwarts who still lend their names to the event, such as the 2021 co-chairs, Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware and Rep. Tom Suozzi of New York, continue to maintain their silence about how The Family runs the breakfast, and to what ends.

If Chick-fil-A is not officially involved in the National Prayer Breakfast, the company has a long history of other ties to the religious right. Through its nonprofits, the company and its owners have given millions of dollars to groups that oppose LGBTQ rights.

When that support appeared to be softening in 2019, Franklin Graham called Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy. “Dan was very clear that they have not bowed down to anyone’s demands,” Graham tweeted afterward. “They haven’t changed who they are or what they believe.”

More from TYT on “The Family” and the National Prayer Breakfast:

“Oh creator, it’s you I now renounce”: How death metal lyrics echo some Bible passages

The other day I came across a Buzzfeed quiz that asked me: “Heavy metal lyric or bible verse?”

As someone who is a PhD candidate in religious studies and loves heavy metal, I was surprised to see that I hesitated on a number of my responses. Why does heavy metal use so many biblical references and symbolisms?

As I researched, I rediscovered death metal, a musical genre I used to listen to as a teen. It seems like death metal was even more fixated with religion than heavy metal. But why is this musical genre so obsessed with religious and spiritual symbolism?

Heavy metal and religion

Known as an extreme sub-genre of heavy metal, death metal usually uses techniques such as deep growling vocals, blast beat drumming, minor keys and atonality (not conforming to the system of tonal hierarchies) to transmit its lyrical themes of not just death and violence, but also of political conflict, philosophy, true crime and, more importantly, religion.

In 2010, historian James Robertson published an article called “Death metal: A ‘pipeline to God?’” One of the few published articles that examines the connection between death metal and religion, Robertson writes:

“What is fascinating here is the consistency with which black metal has pursued religious forms […] Such religious pluralism begs the question as to whether these are just new and interesting attempts at youth rebellion, or whether something more is playing itself out.”

But what is that something more?

Many metal historians such as Ian Christie have said that the history of heavy metal begins with Black Sabbath’s debut studio album, “Black Sabbath,” released in 1970.

When the album is opened it reveals an inverted cross and a disturbing poem. The fourth track on the album is called “N.I.B.“, which was written from Lucifer’s point of view. Thus, the relationship between heavy metal and religion was born.

Christie points out in his book, “Sounds of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal” that anthropological history is interwoven with metal’s musical history as “the rise of black metal coincided with the thousand-year anniversary of Christianity in Norway, when two pagan kings […] violently imposed religion on the western coast of Norway,” the territory that has most influenced black metal.

“Chapel of Ghouls” and “Blessed are the Sick”

Death metal then appeared with the fusion of thrash metal and first-wave black metal in the 1980s. Possessed, Death, Deicide and Morbid Angel are a few of the first bands to fall into the death metal genre. Morbid Angel has written songs such as “God of Emptiness, Rapture, Immortal Rites, Chapel of Ghouls, Angel of Disease and Blessed are the Sick.” And Deicide has written about ritual sacrifices, the crucifixion, Satan, Jesus and anti-Christian sentiments.

As the connection between death metal and religion solidified, so did its controversy. In the mid-80s, Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) was born, an institution focused on increasing parental control over access to music that was deemed violent or satanic. This didn’t deter death metal musicians or followers, but hardened their criticism of mainstream religion.

PMRC’s biggest issue was over anti-Christian sentiments. The song “Away from God” by Immolation discusses salvation, heaven and hell in a way that could be seen as an extreme form of biblical lament. Part of the song goes:

“You sit and watch, in all your splendour Oh creator, it’s you I now renounce Ever-loving God, your love has failed me I don’t need your love …”

Compare the lyrics with Psalm 22:1-2:

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest.”

Death metal’s obsession with religious themes

So, the question remains, why is death metal so obsessed with spiritual and religious themes? Perhaps the only other genre that is so preoccupied with religion and spirituality in such a focused way is gospel music, yet the two seem like complete opposites.

One apparent answer to the proposed question would be that death metal, like other forms of rock, is anti-establishment. Rebelling against religion and the status quo seems to be one of the reasons this kind of music is so popular.

Another possible answer could be that death metal and its parent, heavy metal, are trying to find a language to express their dark mystical experiences — metal is attuned to spirituality.

As someone who studies religion, I believe that writers, musicians and listeners of death metal who are attuned to spiritual matters believe there’s more to the world than meets the eye. Many feel the need to attend to their turbulent inner life, and oftentimes value principles that religion has neglected or opposed.

Death metal explores the dark side of the human experience with the same vehemence that some forms of organized religion resist it.

So why would anyone want to experience violent, angry music that could lead to having negative experiences? A 2019 study looked into who and why people enjoy listening to violent music, they found that they are not angry people: “They’re not enjoying anger when they listen to the music, but they are in fact experiencing a range of positive emotions.” The catharsis that death metal fans experience is in fact a way to release negative emotions.

In other words, I believe every one of us wants positive experiences and are attuned to spirituality in the way that we understand it. In the words of Venom’s “Angel Dust“:

“I live my life, Like there’s no tomorrow, Take no chances I’m drowning all my sorrows coz’ I, Need it, want it, You know I’ve got to have it, Takes me higher than anything I know.”

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The science behind the scoop: Four key factors to consider when making ice cream

I’m obsessed with ice cream’s inner workings, and a little technical know-how can help perfect frozen creations. What follows is a brief primer on key factors to consider with ice cream: how to properly balance a formula, mastering the right consistency, building proper structure and controlling the size of ice crystals.

Formula

While there may not be one “ideal” ice cream formula, one can assemble one much like an algebraic equation based on the desired end result. The key to success is knowing which components are proportionally static and which ones are variable. Then it’s about knowing how your ingredients supply these basic components.

One can very generally place ice cream formulas and their constituent components within the following ranges:

  • Milk fat: 10-16%
  • Egg yolk solids: 0-2%
  • Nonfat milk solids: 9-12%
  • Sweeteners: 12-16%
  • Stabilizers and emulsifiers: 0-1%
  • Water: 55-64%

There are, of course, exceptions. Gelato-style products often have a fat content in the 7-8% range and soft serve products may contain 5% fat or less, though such products cannot commercially be called ice cream, which is defined by U.S. law as containing a minimum of 10% milk fat.

Crucial to understanding how to build an ice cream formula is knowing the composition of your ingredients; this basic information is important no matter the preparation at hand. With knowledge of an ingredient’s composition, structure and function is one of the great powers of cooks. For example, rather than thinking of milk as simply “milk,” one must look at it as a system of water, fat, protein and sugar; its structure is at once an emulsion, a suspension and a solution. We can examine every ingredient we use in an ice cream under the same figurative microscope.

Consistency

The amount of solutes in the unfrozen water phase determines the volume of ice crystals that form. Water containing dissolved solids such as salt and sweeteners are affected by something we refer to as colligative properties. These solutes will raise the boiling point of water on the high end of the temperature range, and at the low end, they lower the freezing point of water. It is this very property of freeze point depression that makes ice cream possible at all — served below water’s freezing point, it is soft enough to scoop and chew.

ICECoffee ice cream made at ICE. (Photo courtesy of the Institute of Culinary Education)

Different solutes — for the sake of this discussion, sweeteners — will lower the freezing point of water to different degrees. The measurement that we use to correlate freeze point depression is a sweetener’s molecular weight: The lower the molecular weight, the greater the effect of freeze point depression. Sucrose, for example, has a molecular weight of about 342 grams per mole. Dextrose is lower at 180 grams per mole and glucose is slightly higher at 428 grams per mole. So what does this mean for an ice cream maker? Dextrose can produce a softer product at colder temperatures, while glucose will firm up an ice cream at warmer temperatures. Simply put, we can use multiple sweeteners to modify the freezing point — the relative firmness or softness — of an ice cream.

Also interesting to consider is the idea of freeze concentration: as a solution freezes, only pure water crystallizes into ice, which means the concentration of solutes in the remaining unfrozen water increases, which also means that the freezing point of that water continues to drop as more water turns into ice. Thus, even at a temperature of about 3˚F/-16˚C (below the typical serving temperature of ice cream) only about 72% of the total water in a base mix is frozen as ice. The rest remains unfrozen as a very concentrated sugar solution, thus giving a soft scoopable consistency.

Structure

In addition to supplying creamy mouthfeel, the milk fat content of ice cream will determine its basic physical structure. The best way to understand ice cream’s structure is to step back and consider first the structure of whipped cream. As we whip heavy cream, we can begin to visualize individual fat particles swirling around the continuous phase of water, slamming into each other almost as if in a mosh pit (my favorite way to describe it). With help from some of the milk proteins, these partially coalesced fat particles begin to form a kind of “scaffolding” — a solid structure — that traps the air bubbles that are incorporated into the cream as it is being whipped. Though the composition of ice cream is more complex, this same type of structure is being created in the freezing and churning process.

Size

Ice cream is made up of a lot of ice. (Obviously, right?) Ice defines its nature, yet improper formulation or handling can result in the ice emerging as a negative attribute — too much ice or in too large a crystal size. The rate and speed of freezing the base mix determines crystal size — the lower the temperatures, the faster the base freezes to produce the smallest possible ice crystal. These ice crystals will always be at their greatest number and smallest size the moment they are extracted from the machine; they can never get smaller.

How do we keep those ice crystals as small as possible for a smooth and creamy texture? It’s all about speed and temperature. A high-end batch freezer that can process ice cream in a few minutes will make better ice cream than lower-end methods that may take much longer to freeze. It’s a classic example of getting what you pay for. Spin your ice cream as quickly as possible and store it as cold as possible to minimize the size and growth of ice crystals.

Below is one of my standard well-balanced formulas for classic vanilla ice cream.

***

Recipe: Vanilla Ice Cream

Yields approx. 1,950 grams/2 liters

Ingredients

  • 970 grams whole milk
  • 2 vanilla beans, split and scraped
  • 97 grams nonfat dry milk
  • 200 grams sucrose (1)
  • 85 grams glucose powder
  • 80 grams sucrose (2)
  • 8 grams ice cream stabilizer blend
  • 60 grams pasteurized egg yolks
  • 360 grams heavy cream

Directions

  • Place the milk and vanilla in a sauce pot. Whisk in dry milk to rehydrate, followed by the first measurement of sucrose (1) and glucose. Bring to a boil.
  • Meanwhile, combine the sucrose (2) and stabilizer. Whisk into egg yolks.
  • Temper the hot milk into the egg yolk mixture. Return to low heat and cook, stirring, to 85˚C/185˚F.
  • Remove from heat, whisk in heavy cream and homogenize with an immersion blender. Chill in an ice water bath. Allow the mix to mature under refrigeration for at least 12 hours.
  • Process in a batch freezer; extract the mix at -5˚C/23˚F. Alternatively, transfer to PacoJet canisters and completely freeze; process as needed.

What exactly has gone wrong in America? Frat boys, light beer or Skynyrd? IDK

Everyone has a pet theory or two about what has gone wrong in America. And by America I of course mean the United States of, discounting the other 34 countries of the Americas — which speaks to our exceptional self-centeredness, which might in fact be seen as one of the overarching reasons why the country has gone to pot. Not only do we harbor a fervent belief that we have nothing to learn from others, we barely comprehend that they exist. 

With the Republican Party’s platform morphing from obstruction to fascism (e.g., CPAC is planning a spring fling in authoritarian Hungary), citizens losing their minds over wearing masks and talking up anything but a safe and free vaccine in a deadly pandemic that has taken more American lives than were lost in our Civil War (in an era before doctors could do much more than use a saw), and school board members facing violent threats for supporting basic inclusion and diversity efforts in public schools — for many, the concept of American exceptionalism has been turned on its head.

One could easily contend, as was argued back in the day, that the country “went south” (literally) when it was first truly established because too much had to be given to the South to get the Constitution ratified. We are still suffering from those compromises, and still making them, to this day. America’s hidden wound, as writer Wendell Berry termed it, our collective unwillingness to fully acknowledge our history of slavery, is now producing the bad-faith arguments about critical race theory being taught in public schools and the banning of books that address the history of slavery in this country. This wound may prove mortal. 

RELATED: Sorry, Josh Hawley, the left doesn’t hate masculinity — women just don’t want to make you a sandwich

In what I wish were a side note, I will mention the insightful — and unfortunately highly pertinent to our era — article entitled “Who Goes Nazi?” by Dorothy Thompson, published Harper’s Magazine in 1941. If you’ve not read it, read it now, as if we were up against it. Because we are.

My few pet theories cannot compete with the increasingly bizarre QAnon-ish fantasies on the right, of which the less said the better. (I won’t bother to link to anything. Anyway, as we know all too well now: Do your own research!) 

While there is still time, while we enjoy what could be the final days of this little experiment in semi-representational democracy, let me put a few lesser theories forward, just for the record. Lesser theories, one might say, from my admittedly lesser mind.

Was it the frat boys?

The serious lack of seriousness and misogyny inculcated by life in a typical fraternity during a young man’s college career has bled into most of our institutions, including Congress. The problem with many former frat boys is that they are never really former frat boys. Then, they were young and strong and could chug a beer without so much as a thought. Not thinking about things was a badge of honor. They look back on those years as defining and suffer at least a certain level of arrested development. In their underdeveloped minds, they are still gleefully cheating on exams, bragging about their sexual prowess, regularly using words like “pussy” and making the pledges’ lives a living terror. If you want to comprehend how dangerous they can be if they stumble into public service roles later in life, in the previous sentence just swap out pledges and swap in citizens. You’re done, pledge. Fetch me a beer.

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I’m unhappily compelled to note that the current Congress has many members, both Democrat and Republican, a number of whom I admire, who went Greek in their college days. All I can say is that when I was pledge-class president in a fraternity, trying to get a group of a dozen pledges through a mind-bendingly idiotic and semi-dangerous Hell Week (only one guy had to be taken to the hospital), I determined that I would not be returning the next year and quietly let that be known to the active members. The upperclassmen brought down four or five of the more sober, sensible members to try to talk me out of it. So I’m assuming there are some sensible members who have not engaged in “the stupidification of the Right” as even Bret Stephens, a conservative voice at the New York Times, calls it. But for the most part, I think the frat-boy theory must stand, much as the endless influx of so-called Oxbridge graduates apparently leads to group dope-think within the Westminster Parliament. So, yes, go on and get me that beer. Speaking of which …

Perhaps it was light beer

I contend that the remarkable success of light beer around the era of Ronald Reagan has led to further gaslighting, a continual drift away from reality and an unremarked-upon underlying roiling dissatisfaction among U.S. males. They’ve been hammered their entire lives by the message that these weak froths “taste great and are less filling,” which is utter nonsense. Being of a certain age, these men first felt bamboozled and then likely hoodwinked, but they kept buying the stuff because, you know, sports.

Maybe there was another message being conveyed: We don’t need any darker brews around here, no swarthy beers, my fellow good European-descended sirs! Light is right! Someone on the right must have figured out that if you could get men to believe that these watery brews were beer, you could get them to believe anything. Even younger men began falling for the light beer marketing onslaught (see above: Frat Boy Theory). Again, the lack of flavor created an unrecognized deep, underlying dissatisfaction with life’s prospects, like that “incel” thing, but with beer. Light beer is to beer what viewing porn is to having sex — you’re definitely going to end up feeling disappointed. The advent of an unending panoply of delicious (and, yes, sexy) craft beers, enjoyed by younger Americans (the 18-40 demographic accounts now for 31% of voters), sometimes brought away from “microbreweries” in “growlers,” no doubt overwhelms and enrages the ever-aging cohort of light-beer quaffers, whose lives were stolen from them, so they irrationally demand, you know, MAGA. Don’t forget where Hitler and his swell pals worked up their grievances into an incoherent conspiracy theory–fueled rationale for ruthlessly murdering, plundering and conquering the world — in beer halls. Beer matters.

The athlete-pay breakthrough theory

When St. Louis Cardinals centerfielder Curt Flood sued Major League Baseball, in 1970, for his independence from the reserve clause, which left all decision-making about his career to team ownership, he never personally enjoyed the fruits of his labor. But other players did, kicking off the free agent era and elevating salaries for professional athletes. Interestingly, in that same era corporate heads looked around and muttered to themselves they should be paid more, and we saw the relative pay of CEOs and other corporate executives grow exponentially, leaving their workers far behind. 

When Flood was pleading his case for freedom as an independent contractor, a top executive’s salary was roughly 30 times the pay of their lowest-paid worker; now it is nearly 400 times higher. Corporate America’s most devoted lackeys in Congress would later come to call these men “job creators,” as if they were demigods. (I didn’t mention that many of these liberated athletes were people of color because, you know, that might sound like some CRT tangent and be upsetting for some folks. I just want a little credit for not bringing it up. Now, get me one of those craft beers, will you? If it’s going to cost $10 for a beer at the ballgame, it might as well taste like something.)

Service with a smile

The culture and traditions of the American workplace have always been linked with the slave economy, and our expectations as consumers of endless “service with a smile” fit right in with that owner’s mentality. Think of Brad in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” berated by a smirking customer who demands his money back, and not being backed up at all by his manager. Or think of me, as a young man working in a New York City restaurant and taking over for a female colleague who was in tears after being harassed by a four-top of coked-up Wall Street characters. One of them thought it would be fun to grab me by the shirt and pull me down close to his face to express his unhappiness that I was not the waitress he wanted to continue to harass. Now think of store clerks and line cooks and flight attendants and nurses getting screamed at by endless streams of toddlers posing as adults. This is the attitude — on steroids, if not cocaine — that essential workers around the country have faced during the pandemic. As journalist and author Sarah Jaffe notes in an excellent interview with Ezra Klein, during the COVID crisis many workers learned that their bosses literally didn’t care if they died.  

The “Prosperity Gospel”

The Republican Party managed to make people think they cared about religion, grabbing their votes while they transformed God into a CEO who’s suitably impressed by your numbers and Jesus into a caddie waiting to serve your needs at the country club. (Much as I loved playing golf, what are country clubs but a somewhat more presentable version of the Old South plantation?)

Talk radio 

You hear them whenever you drive across the country, especially outside metropolitan areas: Endless tirades from religious and political lunatics, for hours and hours. Just try to find an NPR station out there. It’s unbelievable. 

The “Freebird” theory

Gosh, I really don’t mean to keep talking about the South. I loved that double lead guitar sound — I mean, back when I was a frat boy). But, really, it’s hard not to put at least some of the blame on Lynyrd Skynyrd, isn’t it? I know that statement will likely send some of their fans into a blind rage. So, listen, just give me three steps, mister.

Consider this similarly illuminating material from Salon dot com:

16 leftover turkey recipes that don’t start with “Thanksgiving” or end with “sandwich”

It’s almost Thanksgiving! Have you signed up for our newsletter yet? Leading up to the big day, get all the best tips from Food52 editors right to your inbox. Today, we’re talking about Thanksgiving leftovers, namely what to do with all that leftover turkey. Tuck in:

* * *

Whether you stuff rolls with slices of turkey and ham, or spoonfuls of green bean casserole and creamy mashed potatoes — the Thanksgiving leftover sandwich is as classic as the bird itself. But even tried-and-true favorites can get a bit stale; there’re only so many sandwiches you can stomach.

Instead, transform your turkey into a comforting pho or pot pie. Fry up mashed potatoes into savory pancakes or swirl spoonfuls into cake batter for moist, rich slices. Puree roasted roots into soups and whisk gravy or stocks into vinaigrettes. Even leftover pumpkin can make smooth and silky spreads.

So, go ahead and make your sandwich. But after, try one of these 10 ways to clean the fridge of your leftover Thanksgiving turkey.

Best leftover turkey recipes

1. Deconstructed Turkey and Brie Sandwich

The most festive charcuterie board that autumn has ever seen! Cheese board extraordinaire Marissa Mullen makes hers with deli turkey, but feel free to swap leftover Thanksgiving turkey in its place. Garlic confit, sliced apples, grapes, fresh brie, an assortment of nuts, and fig jam bring it all together.

2. Stock

First things first: Make turkey stock. This recipe below is for chicken, but turkey will work just as well.

3. Maple-Glazed Leftover Turkey Sandwiches with Cranberry Relish

I know I said this wasn’t a roundup of leftover turkey sandwich recipes, but I’m not above including one or two. And this one is really good. Instead of warming the leftover turkey up in the microwave or oven, recipe developer Catherine Yoo reheats the turkey in a skillet in a combination of melted butter and maple syrup.

4. Curried Smoked Turkey Salad

Did you smoke a turkey this year? Repurpose it in the form of this garlicky, balsamic-laced turkey salad that’s inspired by Amanda Hesser’s favorite meal from the now-closed Iris Cafe in Brooklyn Heights.

5. Turkey Pot Pie

What could be better than tucking into a creamy, buttery, flaky pot pie after Thanksgiving? Not much.

6. The Silver Palate’s Turkey Hash Salad

“This salad is exactly what you’ll want to eat (and cook) the day after Thanksgiving — and includes a smart hack for quicker roasted garlic, too,” according to our editors. It’s the perfect recipe to use up Thanksgiving leftovers like roasted potatoes, shredded cooked turkey, and salad greens.

7. Leftover Turkey Soup

The best part of Thanksgiving is getting to gather with loved ones to share a delicious meal. But a close second is leftovers! They can get a little boring on their own, so recipe developer Rachel Gurjar turned cooked turkey meat and homemade turkey stock into a cozy soup that will keep you warmfor chilly days to come.

8. Thanksgiving Leftovers Breakfast “Burritos”

For a delicious twist on a day-after-Thanksgiving breakfast, fill a large flour tortilla with all the fixins’ — a spoonful of leftover mashed potatoes, a scoop of leftover cranberry sauce, diced roast turkey, and stuffing.

9. Turkey Pho

Pho is a Vietnamese noodle soup, usually made with beef or chicken — but turkey adds a rich, gamier spin on the comforting classic.

10. Turkey Empanadas

Turkey empanadas are, yes, little pockets for your Thanksgiving leftovers.

11. Turkey Tetrazzini

Did you know that “turkey tetrazzini” is one of the most googled phrases the day after Thanksgiving? Who knew?

12. ‘Thankful for Leftover Turkey’ Jambalaya

This leftover turkey jambalaya gives us something to be thankful for.

13. Turkey Quiche

Your quiche would be very, very happy if you fed it leftover turkey.

14. Pull-Apart Thanksgiving Leftover Stuffed Bread

You know dump cakes? Well, this one’s a leftover turkey dump bread. Dump away, little birdies!

15. Canal House Turkey and Potato Soup

All the familiar flavors of Thanksgiving, but in a cleaner, more refined format.

16. Best-Ever Turkey Chili

This recipe calls for ground turkey, but if you have some leftover Thanksgiving turkey lying around, just fold that in for a comforting bowl of chili.

Ilhan Omar fact-checks Lauren Boebert’s “made up” “jihad squad” story

Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., went back to her home district for the Thanksgiving holiday, and while there she spoke to constituents where she made fun of her Democratic colleagues. Her story, according to one Democrat, was a lie. 

According to Boebert, she was in a Capitol elevator with Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., when a Capitol police officer ran up, supposedly alarmed.

“Well, she doesn’t have a backpack. We should be fine,” Boebert claimed she said, an obvious allusion to the idea that Omar must be a terrorist because she’s Muslim. Boebert went on to call Omar a member of the “jihad squad.”

RELATED: Lauren Boebert hired QAnon superfans to run Shooters Grill, staff her campaign office

But Omar is speaking out. After seeing a tweet about Boebert’s remarks, Omar tweeted in response that the incident never happened. In fact, Omar seemed to suggest that Boebert seems too scared even to look her even the eye.

“Fact, this buffoon looks down when she sees me at the Capitol, this whole story is made up,” Omar tweeted Thursday evening. “Sad she thinks bigotry gets her clout. Anti-Muslim bigotry isn’t funny & shouldn’t be normalized. Congress can’t be a place where hateful and dangerous Muslims tropes get no condemnation.”

 

Welcome to the Martians! We now live in a world stranger than science fiction

Who knew that Martians, inside monstrous tripodal machines taller than many buildings, actually ululated, that they made eerily haunting “ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla” sounds? Well, let me tell you that they do — or rather did when they were devastating London.

I know that because I recently reread H.G. Wells’s 1898 novel “War of the Worlds,” while revisiting an early moment in my own life. Admittedly, I wasn’t in London when those Martian machines, hooting away, stalked boldly into that city, hungry in the most literal fashion imaginable for human blood. No surprise there, since that was almost a century and a quarter ago. Still, at 77, thanks to that book, I was at least able to revisit a moment that had been mine long enough ago to seem almost like fiction.

Yes, all those years back I had been reading that very same novel for the very first time under the covers by flashlight. I still remember being gripped, thrilled and scared, at a time when my parents thought I was asleep. And believe me, if you do that at perhaps age 12 or 13, you really do feel as if you’ve been plunged into a futuristic world from hell, ululations and all.

But of course, scary as it might have been, alone in the dark, to secretly live through the Martian desolation of parts of England and the slaughter of countless human beings at their hands (actually, more like the tentacles of octopi), as if they were no more than irritating bugs, I was always aware of another reality as well. After all, there was still the morning (guaranteed to come), my breakfast, my dog Jeff, my bus trip to school with my friend Jim, my anything-but-exciting ordinary life and my sense, in the ascendant Cold War America of the 1950s, of a future extending to the distant horizon that looked boring as hell, without even a stray Martian in sight. (How wrong I would turn out to be from the Vietnam War years on!)

I felt that I needed some Martians then. I needed something, anything, to shake up that life of mine, but the sad truth is that I don’t need them now, nor do the rest of us. Yet, in so many ways, in an America anything but ascendant, on a planet that looks like it’s in a distinctly “War of the Worlds”-style version of danger, the reality is that they’re already here.

RELATED: “Code red for humanity”: Most dire climate report in history poised to be ignored

And sadly enough, we Americans and humanity in general seem little more effective against the various Martian stand-ins of today than the human beings Wells wrote about were then. Remember that his Martians finally went down, but not at the hands of humanity. They were taken out, “after all man’s devices had failed,” as the novelist expressed it then, “by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.” The conquerors of those otherwise triumphant Martians were, he reported, “the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared.”

If only we were so lucky in our own Wellsian, or do I mean Trumptopian (as in dystopian, not utopian) world?

Living in a science fiction (or science-fact) novel?

In the 1950s, I went on to read, among other books, John Wyndham’s “Day of the Triffids” (about giant killer plants taking humanity apart), Robert Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers” and Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” trilogy, which sent me into distant galaxies. And that was before, in 1966, I boarded the USS Enterprise with Captain James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock to head for deep space in person — at least via my TV screen in that pre-Meta era.

Today, space is evidently something left to billionaires, but in the 1950s and 1960s the terror of invading aliens or plants with a taste for human flesh (even if they had perhaps been bioengineered in the all-too-earthbound Soviet Union) had a certain strange appeal for the bored boy I was then. The future, it seemed, needed a Martian or two or a Triffid or two. Had I known, it wouldn’t have mattered in the least to me then that Wells had evidently created those Martians, in part, to give his British readers some sense of what it must have felt like for the Tasmanians, living on an island off the coast of Australia, to be conquered and essentially eradicated by British colonists early in the 19th century.

So, yes, I was indeed then fascinated by often horrific futures, by what was coming to be known as science fiction. But honestly, if you had told me that, as a grownup, I would find myself living in a science-fiction (or do I mean science-fact?) novel called perhaps “Trumptopia,” or “The Day of the Heat Dome,” or something similar, I would have laughed you out of the room. Truly, I never expected to find myself in such a world without either those covers or that flashlight as protection.

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As president, Donald Trump would prove to be both a Martian and a Triffid. He would, in fact, be the self-appointed and elected stand-in for what turned out to be little short of madness personified. When a pandemic struck humanity, he would, as in that fictional England of 1898, take on the very role of a Martian, an alien ready to murder on a mass scale. Though few like to think of it that way, we spent almost two years after the COVID-19 pandemic began here being governed (to use a word that now sounds far too polite) by a man who, like his supporters and like various Republican governors today, was ready to slaughter Americans in staggering numbers.

As Trump’s former White House COVID-19 response coordinator Deborah Birx recently testified, by rejecting everything from masking to social distancing in the early months of the pandemic (not to speak of personally hosting mass superspreader events at the White House and elsewhere), he would prove an all-too-literal murderer — though Birx was far too polite to use such a word. In the midst of a pandemic that has, by now, killed an estimated 17 million people globally and perhaps more than a million Americans, he would, she believed, be responsible for at least 130,000 of those early deaths. That’s already slaughter on a monumental scale. (Keep in mind that, in the Trumpian tradition, from Florida’s Ron DeSantis to Texas’s Greg Abbott, Republican governors have continued in that distinctly murderous tradition to this very moment.)

And when it came to slaughter, the Trumpian/Republican response to COVID-19 will likely prove to be the milder kind of destruction they represented. As a climate denialist (it was a Chinese hoax!) and a major supporter of the fossil-fuel industry (no wonder the Saudis adored him!), The Donald would prove all too ready to all-too-literally boost the means to destroy this planet.

And wouldn’t you say that the various Trump supporters who now make up what’s still, for reasons unknown, called the Republican Party are ululating all too often these days, as they hover over dead and dying Americans, or at least those they would be perfectly willing to see wiped off this planet?

Lights off, flashlights on?

Sadly enough, however, you can’t just blame Donald Trump and the Republicans for our increasingly endangered planet. After all, who needs giant Martians or monstrous human-destroying plants when carbon dioxide and methane will, in the long run, do the trick? Who needs aliens like Martians and Triffids, given the global fossil-fuel industry?

Keep in mind that more representatives of that crew were accredited as delegates at the recent Glasgow climate-change talks than of any country on the planet. That industry’s CEOs have long been all too cognizant of climate change and how it could ravage this world of ours. They have also been all too willing to ignore it or even to put significant funds into climate-denial outfits. If, in 2200, there are still historians left to write about this world of ours, I have little doubt that they’ll view those CEOs as the greatest criminals in what has been a sordid tale of human history.

Nor, sadly enough, when it comes to this country, can you leave the Democrats out of the picture of global destruction either. Consider this, for instance: after the recent talks in Glasgow, President Biden returned home reasonably triumphant, swearing he would “lead by example” when it came to climate-change innovation. He was, of course, leaving behind in Scotland visions of a future world where, according to recent calculations, the temperature later in this century could hit 2.4 to 2.7 degrees Celsius (4.32 to 4.86 degrees Fahrenheit) above that of the pre-industrial age. That, of course, would be a formula for destruction on a devastating scale.

Just to consider the first leading “example” around, four days after Glasgow ended, the Biden administration began auctioning off to oil and gas companies leases for drilling rights to 80 million acres of public waters in the Gulf of Mexico. And that, after all, is an administration headed by a president who actually seems committed to doing something about climate change, as in his ever-shrinking Build Back Better bill. But that bill is, of course, being Manchinized right now by a senator who made almost half a million dollars last year off a coal brokerage firm he founded (and that his son now runs). In fact, it may never pass the Senate with its climate-change elements faintly intact. Keep in mind as well that Manchin is hardly alone. One in four senators reportedly still have fossil-fuel investments and the households of at least 28 of them from both parties “hold a combined minimum of $3.7 million and as much as $12.6 million in fossil-fuel investments.”

Take one small story, if you want to grasp where this country seems headed right now. As you may remember, the Trump administration worked assiduously to infringe upon national parks and indigenous lands to produce yet more fossil fuels. Recently, President Biden announced that his administration, having already approved a much-protested $9 billion pipeline to carry significant amounts of oil through tribal lands in Minnesota, would take one small but meaningful remedial step. As the New York Times described it, the administration would move “to block new federal oil and gas leasing within a 10-mile radius around Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, one of the nation’s oldest and most culturally significant Native American sites.”

I know you won’t be shocked by what followed, sadly enough. The response was predictable. As the Times put it, that modest move “generated significant pushback from Republicans and from New Mexico’s oil and gas industry.” Natch! And that, of course, is but the smallest of stories at a time when we have a White House at least officially committed to dealing in some reasonable fashion with the overheating of this planet.

Now, imagine that the Republicans win the House and Senate in the 2022 elections and Donald Trump (or some younger version of the same) takes the 2024 presidential election in a country in which Republican state legislators have already rejiggered so many voting laws and gerrymandered so many voting districts that the results could be devastating. You would then, of course, have a party controlling the White House and Congress that’s filled with climate-change denialists and fossil-fuel enthusiasts of the first order. (Who cares that this country is already being battered by fire, flood and heat in a devastating fashion?) To grasp what that would mean, all you have to do is expand the 10-mile radius of that New Mexican story to the country as a whole — and then the planet.

And at that point, in all honesty, you could turn off the lights, flick on that old flashlight of mine and be guaranteed that you, your children and your grandchildren will experience something in your everyday lives that should have been left under the covers. As almost happened in “The War of the Worlds,” it’s possible that we could, in essence, kiss this planet goodbye and if that’s not science fiction transformed into fact of the first order, what is?

The Martians have arrived

You know, H.G. Wells wasn’t such a dope when it came to the future. After all, his tripodal Martian machines had a “kind of arm [that] carried a complicated metallic case, about which green flashes scintillated, and out of the funnel of this there smoked the Heat-Ray.” In 1898, he was already thinking about how heat of a certain sort could potentially destroy humanity. Today, the “Martians” stepping out of those space capsules happen to be human beings and they, too, are emerging with devastating heat rays.

Just ask my friend journalist Jane Braxton Little, whose town, Greenville, largely burned down in California’s record-breaking Dixie Fire this fall, a climate-change-influenced inferno so vast and fierce that it proved capable of creating its own weather. Imagine that for our future.

Of course, in another sense, you could say that we’ve been living in a science fiction novel since Aug. 6, 1945, when that first American nuclear bomb devastated Hiroshima. Until then, we humans could do many terrible things, but of one thing we were incapable: the destruction of this world. In the nearly eight decades that followed, however, the Martians have indeed arrived and we human beings have taken over a role once left to the gods: the ability to create Armageddon.

Still, the truth is that we don’t know how our own sci-fi tale will end. As in “War of the Worlds,” will some equivalent of those bacteria that took down the Martians arrive on the scene, perhaps some scientific discovery about how to deal so much better with the greenhouse gases eternally heading into our atmosphere? Will humanity, Greta Thunberg-style, come together in some new, more powerful way to stop this world from destroying itself? Will some brilliant invention, some remarkable development in alternative energy use, make all the difference in the world? Will the United States, China and other key fossil-fuel burners finally come together in a way now hardly imaginable?

Or will we truly find ourselves living in Trumptopia?

Stay tuned.

Copyright 2021 Tom Engelhardt

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, “Songlands” (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel “Every Body Has a Story” and Tom Engelhardt’s “A Nation Unmade by War,” as well as Alfred McCoy’s “In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power” and John Dower’s “The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.”

The politics of water

Think of it this way: what we don’t know will hurt us. And water — yes, water — is an example of just that. Even at a time of such angry political disputes, you might imagine that, in a wealthy country like the United States, it would still be possible to agree that clean water should be not just a right, but a given. Well, welcome to America 2021. 

When it comes to basic water supplies, that’s hardly an outlandish thought. After all, back in 2015, our government, along with other members of the United Nations, embraced the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals, the sixth of which is universal access to safe drinking water. Despite modest progress globally — 71% of the world’s population lacked that simple necessity then, “only” 61% today — nearly 900 million people still don’t have it. Of course, the overwhelming majority of them live in the poorest countries on this planet.

The United States, however, has the world’s largest economy, the fifth-highest per-capita income, and is a technological powerhouse. How, then, could the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) have given our water infrastructure (pipes, pumping stations, reservoirs, and purification and recycling facilities) a shocking C- grade in their 2021 “report card”? How to explain why Yale University’s Environmental Performance Index ranked the U.S. only 26th globally when it comes to the quality of its drinking water and sanitation?

Worse yet, two million Americans still have no running water and indoor plumbing. Native Americans are 19 times more likely to lack this rudimentary amenity than Whites; Latinos and African Americans, twice as likely. On average, Americans use 82 gallons of water daily; Navajos, seven — or the equivalent of about five flushes of a toilet. Moreover, many Native Americans must drive miles to fetch fresh water, making regular handwashing, a basic precaution during the Covid-19 pandemic, just one more hardship.

“Safe” Water

Washington and Philadelphia are just two of the many American cities whose water-distribution systems, some of them wooden, contain pipes that predate the Civil War. Naturally, time has taken its toll. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reports that water mains, especially such old ones, rupture 240,000 times annually, while “trillions of gallons” of potable water worth $2.6 billion seep from leaky pipes, and “billions of gallons of raw sewage” pollute the surface water that provides 61% of our supply. Fixing busted pipes, which break at the rate of one every two minutes nationally, has cost nearly $70 billion since 2000.

The U.S. has 2.2 million miles of waterpipes, which are, on average, 45 years old. The EPA’s 2015 estimate for overhauling such an aging system of piping was $473 billion, or $23.7 billion annually over 20 years — in other words, anything but chump change. Still, compared to the way Congress allots money to the U.S. military for its endless losing wars and eternal build-ups of weaponry, it couldn’t be more modest. After all, the Pentagon’s latest budget request was for $715 billion, to which the House Armed Services Committee added $25.5 billion, unsolicited, as did its Senate counterpart. Self-styled congressional budget hawks never complain about our military spending, even though it exceeds that of the next 11 countries combined. So, $23.7 billion annually to renovate an antediluvian water system?  That shouldn’t be a problem, right?

It turns out, though, that it is. The federal government’s share of total investment in updating water infrastructure plunged from nearly-two-thirds in 1977 to less than a tenth of that by 2019. With state and local governments under increasing financial pressure, the funding shortfall for modernizing the water infrastructure could reach a staggering $434 billion by 2029.

Considering where the American water system already falls utterly short, a contrarian could counter that it’s not a big deal for a mere two million people in a country of 333 million not to have water directly piped into their homes. But in the wealthiest country on earth? Really? And a lack of easy access to water is hardly the only problem. A substantial number of Americans are drinking (and cooking with) contaminated supplies of it. A 2017 investigation found that 63 million of them had done so at least once during the previous 10 years, or nearly a fifth of the population.

This finding wasn’t an outlier. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) discovered that, “in 2015 alone, there were more than 80,000 reported violations of the Safe Water Drinking Act by community water systems” that served nearly 77 million people. And of the total number of violations, 12,000, traced to water providers serving 27 million people, were health-related (rather than monitoring and reporting infractions). There’s more. A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that 21 million consumers received water that didn’t meet federal standards; and Time reported that 30 million did in 2019.

The Flint Saga and Beyond

Occasionally, stories about unsafe drinking water do make the headlines, as happened with Flint, Michigan. Once a prosperous city, Flint was slammed by a post-1970s wave of de-industrialization in the Midwest and now has a poverty rate of nearly 39% (and 54% of its population is Black). By 2013, facing its massive budget deficit, a commission appointed by the governor devised a cost-saving measure. The city’s water supply would be switched to the Flint River, pending construction of new supply lines from Lake Huron. That river, however, had long been contaminated by waste from factories, paper mills, and meatpacking plants along its shore, as well as untreated sewage.

Residents began complaining that their water smelled and tasted bad, but were regularly reassured that it was safe. Testing, however, revealed lead levels that far exceeded the EPA-stipulated maximum because the water hadn’t been treated with anti-corrosion additives to counter contamination. (There is, in fact, no “safe” level for lead, a toxic metal, but the EPA requires remedial action if 10% of water samples show concentrations exceeding 15 ppb, or parts per billion.) Flint’s water also contained trihalomethane, a carcinogen, as well as dangerous E. coli and legionella bacteria. A scandal ensued.

Flint, as it turned out, wasn’t alone. The NRDC reported this year that “dozens of cities have been found to have dangerous levels of elevated lead” in their water. Another of its studies concluded that the drinking water of 186 million people (56% of Americans) had more than one part per billion of lead, the maximum recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics, and that 61 million Americans used bottled water from sources that exceeded the Food and Drug Administration’s five ppb maximum, while lead levels in the water of seven million others exceeded the 15-ppb EPA threshold for mandatory corrective measures.   

In 1986, Congress banned the future use of pipes that weren’t “lead free,” but didn’t require the replacement of existing ones. Even today, as many as 12 million lead pipes still serve households in this country and scientists generally regard the EPA’s lead limit as far too lax and its testing requirements and reporting standards as too permissive. Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that local governments and utility companies have regularly opposed tougher regulations for lead-pipe replacement.

Eliminating lead water pipes entirely in this country would cost up to $50 billion. Though that’s a lot of money, it’s hardly unaffordable. In fact, the American Jobs Plan proposed $45 billion for that task, though the separate bipartisan infrastructure bill cut it to $15 billion — again illustrating that penny pinching applies to threats to Americans’ day-to-day well-being, but not to our militarized conception of national security.

Other Contaminants

Lead isn’t the sole contaminant in our drinking water.

  • In farming communities in California’s Central Valley and in the San Joaquin Valley, increasing amounts of uranium — associated with kidney damage and a greater risk of cancer — have turned up in the local drinking water, including private wells, which aren’t regulated by the EPA, but are used by migrant workers. A 2015 Associated Press investigation found that a quarter of San Joaquin Valley households were then using drinking water from private wells containing  “dangerous amounts of uranium.” Moreover, one in 10 of the Valley’s community water systems contained uranium levels that exceeded federal and state limits — and there’s no reason to believe that has changed in the last six years.
  • The rise in fertilizer use — fivefold since the 1950s — to boost crop yields and its runoff has increased the nitrate levels in drinking water. High levels of nitrates, which have been linked to various forms of cancer, birth defects, and thyroid disease, have been found in 4,000 public water systems in 10 states supplying 45 million people, especially in the West and Midwest. In more than half of these places, the contamination seems only to be increasing. The EPA’s maximum concentration level for nitrates is 10 milligrams per liter, but studies reveal that the risk of birth defects and cancer increase even when people consume water containing half that amount.  
  • Arsenic, a known carcinogen, is another hazard. A 2020 Columbia University study found that, though the average concentration of arsenic in the water supply, nationwide, fell by 10% between 2006 and 2011, concentrations exceeding the EPA’s maximum of 0.01 milligrams per liter were far more likely in smaller communities that use groundwater and are disproportionately Hispanic. A U.S. Geological Survey report, which focused on wells providing drinking water, noted that there were “dangerously high levels of arsenic, potentially exposing 2.1 million people” to health risks in more than half of all states.
  • Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are used in numerous products, including non-stick cookware, pizza boxes, firefighting foam, and waterproof apparel. However, they remain unregulated by the EPA despite being associated with a range of health risks. Worse yet, these “forever chemicals” take thousands of years to break down. Scientists estimate that the tap water of 200 million Americans contains PFAS concentrations that put them at risk.

The Bad News for 2021

Since the early nineteenth century, enormous progress has been made toward providing Americans with abundant, clean water. And water-borne diseases like cholera, which still kills close to 100,000 people worldwide every year, and typhoid, which claims as many as 161,000, have essentially been eliminated in this country (though there are still 16 million annual cases of acute gastroenteritis traceable to contaminated water). So, yes, water in the U.S. is generally fit to drink, but given this country’s economic and technological resources, it’s scandalous that the problems that remain haven’t at least been substantially mitigated.

To understand such a failure, just consider our politics, which, in the wake of recent elections, only seem to be growing worse by the day.

Since the 1980s, the public sphere has been dominated by a narrative that portrays just about anything the government does, other than profligate spending on the U.S. military, as financially reckless, intrusive, and counterproductive. Instead of creating a compelling message to persuade Americans that many valued public benefits, ranging from land grant colleges, the Internet, Social Security, and Medicare to the national highway system and medical research breakthroughs, owe much to government policies, too many Democrats continue to run scared, fearful of being labeled “big-government-tax-and-spend liberals.”

Add to this the outsized political influence that big money exercises through copious campaign contributions — all but limitless thanks to recent Supreme Court decisions — and pricey lobbyists. (Yes, unions and public interest groups lobby, too, but for each dollar they spend, corporations spend $34.)

Companies that, for instance, produce perchlorate, a chemical found in U.S. water supplies that’s used in rocket fuel and munitions and is harmful to iodine-deficient pregnant women and fetuses, have paid lobbyists to fight stricter regulations for years. Not coincidentally, the EPA, which has been monitoring perchlorate since 2001, has yet to set mandatory limits on it for drinking water, though it continues to consider a “roadmap” for doing so. Similarly, the seven largest producers of PFAS spent $61 million in 2019 and 2020 on campaign contributions and lobbying efforts. In 2018, there were only two firms lobbying against tougher PFAS regulations; a year later that number had increased to 14.

The EPA sets maximum drinking water levels for 90 substances, but hasn’t (except in a few instances where Congress mandated that it do so) added more since 1996 even though its “Drinking Water Contaminant Candidate List” now contains nearly 100 additional substances. This shouldn’t be a surprise. Companies that oppose tougher regulations have political access and clout. Political appointees to important EPA posts often hail from those very industries or the lobbying groups they bankroll. Scientists paid by industries have weighed in, lending an aura of legitimacy to special-interest pleading.

Water policy is rife with scientific complexity, but the legislation and regulations that shape it are hashed out in the political arena. There, the deck is increasingly stacked — and not in favor of the average consumer. If the Republicans take back Congress in 2022 and the presidency in 2024, my small suggestion: have a nice cool glass of ice water and relax. What could possibly go wrong?

Copyright 2021 Rajan Menon

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

 

Rajan Menon, a TomDispatch regular, is the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of International Relations at the Powell School, City College of New York, Senior Research Fellow at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, and a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He is the author, most recently, of The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention.

Stupid turkeys? Scientists say that the unfairly maligned bird may actually be stuffed with smarts

There is an old myth about turkeys that never seems to die. The basic premise is this: Every time there is a rainstorm, turkeys will turn their heads upward out of curiosity to observe the drops as they fall. Because they are reputed to be unintelligent, the folk tale says the turkeys will remain in this position even after it has become difficult to breath. Eventually, the turkeys will drown. The moral, it seems, is that turkeys are literally too dumb to survive.

While there is exactly zero scientific evidence supporting this belief, it underscores the larger cultural stereotype that turkeys are not very bright. It is hard to blame anyone for reaching this conclusion: Turkeys are, admittedly, a ridiculous-looking (and sounding) animal, with their necks pressed against their bodies, their ungraceful gaits and their “gobble gobble”-sounding cluck.

Yet if you want to feel less guilty about chowing down on a juicy gravy-covered drumstick on Thanksgiving, you can’t use the premise of turkey stupidity to do so. The science makes it clear that turkeys are actually pretty smart.

“Turkeys probably can’t do multivariable calculus or explain string theory, but then neither can most people I know (me included),” Christopher Elphick, an ornithologist at the University of Connecticut, told Salon by email. “At one level, any organism that can survive and thrive in a constantly changing environment that they have little control over, as turkeys often do, must be doing something right.”

Elphick’s observation about surviving and thriving while one’s environment changes is crucial. When measuring intelligence, cognitive scientists emphasize an organism’s ability to effectively adapt to its surroundings, not human-centric activities like reading a book or solving an algebraic equation. In other words, it is a mistake to dismiss turkeys as “stupid” because they can’t do tasks that humans must perform — but it would be rational to draw that conclusion if, for instance, they did indeed drown themselves whenever it rained. Yet turkeys have proved quite adept at surviving amid changing conditions, perhaps more so than a bipedal species that is currently overheating the planet.

Alan Krakauer from the University of California–Davis expressed a similar point about turkeys’ versatility.

“Turkeys may not have the problem solving skills of crows and ravens, but I’m reluctant to call them stupid,” Krakauer wrote to Salon. “They can survive in all sorts of habitats, including cities, and make use of a huge range of different types of food. They have to do all this while navigating a complex social world. Turkey hunters will be quick to tell you how wary they can be during hunting season.”

That said, if you’ve ever seen a squashed turkey as roadkill, you’ll know that turkeys struggle with manmade environmental changes completely outside their sphere of understanding. This speaks not to “stupidity,” but the simple fact that wild turkeys had no reason to ever need to comprehend something as complex as traffic.

Of course, domesticated turkeys aren’t necessarily more intelligent for the experience. As Krakauer put it, there is a “night and day” difference between wild and domesticated turkey intelligence. Wild turkeys live in large ranges where older birds teach the younger ones how to flourish with a wild, unfettered lifestyle. Domesticated turkeys, by contrast, are stuffed into crowded quarters and bred to be docile.

“Many of the early wild turkey management projects failed because they used genetically wild turkeys that were raised on farms and then released, and these weren’t able to gain enough survival skills to make it,” Krakauer recalled. “Wildlife biologists realized they had to catch already savvy wild adults and move them so the new stock would have those wild behaviors to pass along.”

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One of those wild behaviors is the ability to form complex social structures. In this respect, wild turkeys are not dissimilar from humans. They both crave interactions and approval from other members of their species, and they rely on building teams in order to achieve immediate day-to-day needs.

These traits are not limited to merely forming rudimentary groups; turkeys have sophisticated social structures that they rigorously enforce.

“Males and females form separate flocks during the non-breeding season,” Elphick explained. “Within these flocks there are well defined social hierarchies – usually pretty stable in the female flocks, less so in the male flocks.” Elphick noted that this hierarchical behavior in poultry is where humans get the concept of a “pecking order.”

Turkeys seem to embrace their various roles based not just on their relevant physical characteristic (size, speed, and so on), but also on their “personalities.” As Elphick pointed out, researchers are finding more and more evidence that individuals in various bird species have “personalities” of their own. As one example, some individuals in a species will be more or less likely to take risks, such as visiting a bird feeder when a human being is close by.

“Turkeys can certainly learn that it is safe to come in to feeders, and I have friends who have birds show up at a regular time every day as though they are ready to have the feeders filled – a sign of intelligence,” Elphick observed.

Krakauer also gave an example of turkey intelligence that involves a characteristic one does not usually associate with birds — putting one’s immediate self-interest aside in favor of the long view. Reflecting on male turkey behavior during mating season, Krakauer described how turkeys who are brothers or half-brothers “sometimes form teams to cooperatively court and defend females.” Their strategy is to make sure that a turkey hen breeds with a victorious member of their group; even though only one of them gets to breed, “the others benefit by passing on more of their genes through their successful brother than they would if they tried to go it alone.”

Does this mean that one shouldn’t eat turkeys during Thanksgiving? Obviously this is a matter of personal preference — Krakauer said that he still enjoys eating turkey, while Elphick is a vegetarian — but, at the very least, it is illogical to do so on the grounds that turkeys are somehow too stupid to have lives that even matter. As Ingrid Newkirk, president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, wrote to Salon, “wild turkeys are smart enough to find their way, to avoid many predators, to diligently protect their brood, to find food in the forest, and can fly up to 55 miles per hour and run up to 25 miles per hour. They haven’t a house with plumbing but they keep themselves impeccably clean by taking dust baths and preening their feathers meticulously.”

In other words, turkeys are definitely more complex than the Thanksgiving-friendly stereotype would want you to admit.

A Thanksgiving hunt to remind ourselves that dinner means death

My grandmother, God rest her soul, used to tell a story every year around Thanksgiving. It was a holiday that, for a woman who spent most of her life in rural Wisconsin, became almost one in the same with the state’s simultaneous nine-day deer hunting season. I can attest that our family still very much feels that way today.

As the tale goes: My grandfather, a dairy farmer in central Wisconsin who sadly died before I had much of a chance to get to know him, was — to put it charitably — poor. So poor, in fact, that one year, in the face of rising ammunition prices, he decided that he could not justify buying a box for the upcoming hunting season. Instead, he set out into the woods opening morning with three bullets he was able to scrounge up from the bottom of a drawer, knowing that he had three shots to bring home food for his family to eat during the winter months. They ate well that year, or so I’m told, after he brought home three deer — one shot, one kill for each.

I can’t quite attest to the veracity of the story, but as with any outdoorsman’s tale, it’s important to pay attention to the broad strokes over the details: Our family was poor, and he was a great hunter. When I asked my mother about it, she confirmed one key detail: just about the only meat she and her siblings ate during the winter months was venison. “We almost never had beef,” she declared, as it was too expensive to buy at the store and too costly to butcher one of their own cattle — the animals’ milk provided for the vast bulk of the family’s livelihood, after all. 

Deer, however, were a sustainable food source growing right outside that my grandfather could rely upon whenever needed (or whenever money ran tight).

“He hunted every month with an ‘R’ in it,” my mother said wryly when I asked her about it. That left the spring and summer open for turkey, fish and other assorted game meat. But venison always held a special place in his heart, from what I understand. 

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I think about that story every year as I pack up every piece of orange clothing I own and head back to that farm, which is now run by my uncle, for Wisconsin’s annual deer hunting season. Though some things have changed — we’re a little more inclined to follow state hunting regulations now, for instance — so much has also stayed the same.

We are, of course, no longer reliant on the spoils of our hunt. Globalization and wide-scale factory farming have made meat of all kinds — really, food in general — cheaper and more available to Americans across the board, and my family is no exception. Despite this, fresh venison is still a family staple we enjoy during Thanksgiving week and something I look forward to every year. 

***

Opening day of this season broke clear and warm last Saturday, with the sunrise sending jagged lines of light across the same central Wisconsin woods where my grandfather hunted all those years ago. 

It’s a familiar ritual by now: walking slowly through frozen alfalfa fields in the dark, testing the wind, then waiting still and silent for the sun to rise just enough to give the shadows shape. Some mornings, the shrill yip of coyotes can still be heard on the horizon, impossible to place.

Most of the hard work has been done for us, as generations of our family have painstakingly mapped out the local herd’s wandering routes. One group of animals likes to cut up from the land of a neighboring Mennonite family — members of a particularly fundamentalist Christian sect whose numbers seem to grow every time I return — and across a maple grove that my cousin has in recent years begun to tap for syrup. 

From there, the deer hug a coulee that follows the route of a creek, twisting and turning through another patch of forest before crossing a pockmarked cattle lane that provides an especially fruitful shooting path — clear of brush, with just enough distance that the deer seem to reliably appear regardless of which way the wind is blowing.

Others cut through the property’s back field, running for half a mile across a ridge that allows them to see in all directions. Great visibility, but a tough shot; it’s an ill-advised tactic to fire over any land feature because there’s no accounting for where the bullet may go if you were to miss. 

Hunters will say they’re always heartened to hear the cacophony of gunfire at sunrise — it’s as good a sign as any the deer are moving, even if you haven’t seen anything yet. Opening morning dawns and wanes without any action, but the sound of shots all around gives us hope: there’s something out there. And when times are desperate, the desperate do a “drive.”

The author with the fruits of his hunt.The author with the fruits of his hunt. (Photo by Brett Bachman)The deer drive is more art than science, a risky maneuver that almost guarantees you’ll see something but lessens the chances for a clear shot at a stationary animal quite significantly. It’s a relatively simple concept: send several people through a patch of woods in one direction to scare any deer resting in the area, and strategically place several more along the animals’ favored escape routes to catch them as they run past. 

Saturday, we choose a small patch of oak bordering a horse pasture owned by an elderly, distant relative who has offered up the location with the stipulation that he be given premium placement in a roughshod stand, sitting above a marsh tangled with cordgrass that had recently been ransacked by what appears to be a family of raccoons. I stand with another cousin along a fence line overlooking the wetland’s southern edge, staring into a patch of brush that in past years has proven to be a reliable exit path for scared deer. 

Sure enough, after nearly a half-hour of scanning the tree line, we spot them: three flashes of white bobbing through the brush, one buck and two small does. 

Nearby, a blast shatters the still air, and I try to get one of the fleeing animals within my sights. No luck. We watch the tree line for another 10 minutes or so, expecting to see the telltale orange clothing of our comrades. Instead, my cousin waves toward a tangle of downed hardwoods, where I can make out the faint outline of antlers. Another blast, and one more flash of brown rockets past me about 20 yards out. I wheel around and fire off a last-chance shot, not realizing how loudly my heart is pounding until after the deer falls. 

It’s a buck — a small buck, technically five points, but enough to feed myself several times over. I hear a cheer from the woods, as well. Another deer is down, this one a large eight pointer. “I just love it when a drive comes together,” my uncle says, beaming. Back at the truck, someone cracks a beer. We all bask in the warmth of a successful day — though the work of getting this animal onto our plates is only just beginning.

***

I am, by all accounts, a bona fide city boy now. I live in Brooklyn, and I work almost exclusively on a computer. It’s a long shot from the backwoods of my youth and even further from the dirt-road life my grandfather led — but it’s exactly this connection to the land that brings me back each year and keeps me sitting in the cold for hours on end, waiting for that little flash of movement that has the potential to stock my freezer for months on end. 

In all, this year brought three deer for our family to butcher and another two whose owners chose to send it in for professional handling — a smashing success, given that some years we struggle to even lay eyes on anything. Before the job, we treat ourselves to a breakfast of venison steak, rare, and a pair of runny eggs each. The rest is bloody, cold work, good for reminding you that despite humanity’s attempts to distance ourselves from the brutal realities of nature, survival remains a serious business.

My friends in the city tend to treat this obsession with equal parts fascination and bewilderment. “Don’t you feel bad?” one asks. “I could never kill something,” another says definitively.

I’ve been inside slaughterhouses and consider me, well, unconvinced by any of the arguments that pulling a trigger is somehow worse than buying packaged meat at a store. None of the avid hunters I know feel sunny when their quarry goes down — but it’s important to remember that, for those of us who haven’t sworn off meat for good, dinner almost certainly involves death. It’s natural, after all — humans have hunted for millennia. As Sitting Bull said: When the buffalo are gone, we’ll hunt for mice.

It’s in our blood.

Deb Haaland is taking on racist names on federal lands

At the urging of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a ​​member of the Pueblo of Laguna who is the first Indigenous person to hold a cabinet-level position in a U.S. presidential administration, the federal government is beginning a formal process to remove racist and derogatory names from lands under its jurisdiction. 

Last week, Haaland ordered the Interior Department’s Board on Geographic Names to institute procedures to remove terms such as “squaw,” which is found in the names of more than 650 federal sites. For the first time in U.S. history, a federal order now explicitly designates “squaw,” a racist and misogynist term used as a slur against Indigenous women by settlers, as a derogatory term.  

In a statement, Haaland said that the move marks a “significant step in honoring the ancestors who have stewarded our lands since time immemorial.” 

“Racist terms have no place in our vernacular or on our federal lands,” she added. “Our nation’s lands and waters should be places to celebrate the outdoors and our shared cultural heritage — not to perpetuate the legacies of oppression.”

The new task force charged with implementing the process will be made up of representatives from federal land management agencies, while history experts, members of the general public, and representatives of Indigenous communities will be tapped to create an advisory board to review and recommend the name changes, according to the order. This move accompanies pending Congressional legislation to rename more than 1,000 names on federal land that currently include derogatory terms. 

The Native American Rights Fund, which has long called for the removal of derogatory place names, applauded the move.

“Names that still use derogatory terms are an embarrassing legacy of this country’s colonialist and racist past,” said John Echohawk, the group’s executive director. “It is well-past time for us, as a nation, to move forward, beyond these derogatory terms, and show Native people — and all people — equal respect.”

The order could empower activists across the country, including those living in the area currently named Squaw Valley, located in Fresno County, California. For two years, residents have claimed that local officials have been unwilling to meet with them to discuss renaming the valley. 

Following Haaland’s announcement, Fresno County Supervisor Nathan Magsig indicated that the federal order would not necessarily alter the stance of county officials. “When I saw the Secretary make that decision that they made, I was a little bit taken aback because they are one individual,” he told The Fresno Bee. “But there are other voices that are out there that need to be heard, too, that are just as valuable as her opinion.”

While changing federal names has historically been an arduous process that can take many years in some cases, several name changes have established a precedent that Haaland is building upon. For example, following the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and the peak of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, the Board on Geographic Names took actions to eliminate the use of derogatory terms for Black and Japanese Americans. And in recent years, states like Oregon, Maine, Montana, and Minnesota have passed legislation prohibiting the use of the word “squaw” in place names.

It’s the most wonderful time of year … to not make your loved ones of color visit a sundown town

Our invitation arrived in the mail a few weeks ago, but I decided I would not be attending in January, long before the event was thought of.

My husband and I were expecting it, however. His niece eloped in December 2020, mid-pandemic, and the young couple recently discovered they’re expecting. That’s wonderful news. They selected a date coinciding with our Thanksgiving visit to the Midwest, an opportunity for their expanding extended family to gather.

While we are staying with my mother-in-law in a city many miles away from the affair, I will delight in helping her to prepare the cakes and treats her daughter has requested, family recipes we’ll be baking from scratch. We will load my mother-in-law’s car with all the supplies needed for the celebration, along with snacks for the two-and-a-half-hour trip each way.

Then I will wave goodbye to my husband as he drives his mother there, and breathe a sigh of relief at having chosen my calm and sanity over being the only Black person present in the house of two-time Trump voters . . . in a village of about 2,000 people, where my presence temporarily raises its African American population from 13 to 14.

That number is not a joke. It’s listed on the town’s 2020 census data.

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In the current political environment, my visit to such a place elevates the probability of emboldened strangers aggressively parroting Tucker Carlson’s talking points in my face. It increases the likelihood that someone will ask how I feel about Ahmaud Arbery‘s killers or Kyle Rittenhouse’s culpability, mainly to confirm whether we are the liberals they assume us to be. 

Even if no one is so bold, I can expect stares and polite silence when I reveal what I do for a living and that I reside in a supposed “anarchist” city.

Noooo thank you. Despite my mother-in-law’s initial insistence that we’re all family, I am avoiding all “Get Out” adjacent situations now and forevermore.

Are you in a similar bind? In that case, I invite you to choose yourself and your safety this holiday season. Yes, I said safety.

Returning to that population statistic, another simplifying factor is that my husband’s sister and her family live in a part of Illinois that fits the characteristics of a sundown town.

The late James W. Loewen, a sociology professor at the University of Vermont who wrote “Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism,” defines sundown towns as communities that “kept out African Americans (or sometimes Chinese Americans, Jewish Americans, etc.) by force, law, or custom.”

The assumption that sundown towns mainly exist the South is incorrect. They’re all over the country, with most of them concentrated in the Midwest. Many are listed on Loewen’s online database.

Few places announce themselves by posting signs on the outskirts of town, as they once did. But they persist because of the local population’s adherence to keeping things as they always have been – tradition, in other words. Functionally that means local law enforcement officials are more likely to harass non-white people who happen to pass through.

That also means if you’re a Black, Indigenous, Asian, queer or other non-white, non-heterosexual conforming person who somehow gets invited to such a place, you can expect at the very least to stand out. You may be a guest in someone’s home, but unless your name is Candace Owens or Winsome Sears, the locals who are also present may make you feel outnumbered.

No dishes or punches need to be thrown or weapons drawn for a person to feel unsafe. No slurs need to be uttered for someone to let you know they think of you as . . . different. All that’s required is people to make you feel out place. Even those who mean well are prone to party fouls like kicking off small talk by raving about how much they love “Green Book” or “The Help” although you didn’t ask. This has actually happened before, and 2021 left me too exhausted for another round.

So if your spouse, partner or an elder has hauled out the “we’re family” cattle prod to herd you over the river and through the woods into Lovecraft Country because that’s how they celebrate every winter, now is a great time to push back. If you have a mother-in-law like mine, you may not have to; a gentle conversation was all it took for her to relent. That, and an offer to bake together. Time with family is all she wants, and the feeling is mutual.

Last year the pandemic gave millions of us a taste of such peaceful holiday moments, free of your Newsmax-addled uncle’s ravings. Even if he was in your Zoom room, you could mute him. Remember how nice that was?

There’s no law forcing you to resume that distress in person – not the legal bonds of marriage, nor adoption. Most people are keeping their celebrations intimate again anyway. According to a survey by Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center, an estimated 72% of Americans plan to celebrate this holiday season with just their household.

For everyone else, there is telecommunications and mail.

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Sending seasonal goodwill, situational best wishes and a lovely token is fine. It allows you to keep your whole body and its unperturbed emotions at home, far away from the stress of some fool braying nonsense about the evils of critical race theory or coronavirus conspiracies.

This changes the connotation of the holiday travel strategy termed “divide and conquer,” I realize. Many couples with family members that live in the same region but hundreds of miles apart know the system well. Sometimes being home for the holidays means splitting up to cover the most ground.

But the Jan. 6 insurrection attempt changed my attitude regarding where I’m willing to devote my time and mileage. I already knew my sister-in-law and her husband voted for the previous White House occupant twice, enthusiastically, and fully cognizant that he encourages violence against his political opponents , denigrates women and vilifies journalists.

That means they and their eligible children voted against my well-being and right to exist on three counts.

They weren’t thinking about me when they did this, which is why I doubt they’d understand that my absence from their event isn’t a matter of me taking a partisan stand. It’s about protecting myself from harm. I’m simply not in the mood to be around people who are not fully invested in my comfort and joy.

Residents of such burgs may take offense at such a broad characterization about their Nice Place to Live™, which is one of the reasons I have refrained from identifying precisely where my sister-in-law resides. (Good luck guessing the spot: Loewen began his sundown town research in 1999 with Illinois. As of 2020, his team’s estimate for that state alone came to more than 500 such places, or around 70% of all towns in the state.)

Honestly, I understand their ire for the same reason that I get why Hallmark Channel valorizes such places on greeting cards and in their holiday programming. They spruce up so nicely in wintertime! They do not like being made to feel bad about history! Plus, their denizens may have never witnessed any discriminatory behavior with their own eyes. (Again, see the part about the 13 Black folks out of more than 2,000.)

And when their neighbors and friends indulge in conversations salted with bigotry, they may simply leave the room or try to change the subject.

But insistent politeness is one of the reasons our democracy and fractured relationship with the facts teeters on the precipice. Refusing to discuss the cancers that are eating our country with the people disproportionately afflicted by that illness prevents people from acting, or voting, from a place of common good.

Those same nice people might argue they are using their politics for greater good by prioritizing law and order, family values and other coded language gift wrapping discriminatory policies that make it more perilous for people like me to be in places with dodgy cell phone reception.

They can view a jury clearing a man who drove to another state with a semi-automatic weapon and killed two people as validation of their second amendment rights, instead of a green light to other people with itchy trigger fingers that that they can attack anyone they disagree with on specious grounds and get away with it.

Also, they would really love to have you over for eggnog and cocoa.

The saying that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing is only partly correct. It misses the part about evil germinating in soil of silence before it spreads like a noxious weed. That may read in a way that makes the case for your bridge-building loved one, but not if you or your partner are supposed to be the actual bridge. It is never the season to be stepped on, no matter how softly – not on Turkey Day or after New Year’s . . . or ever.

Besides, there’s always the opportunity to extend an invitation to your place in the future as a show of goodwill. My mother-in-law did that earlier this year, offering to pay for her daughter’s family to join her on a visit to Seattle, where my husband and I live. But my sister-in-law’s husband forbade it, claiming our city – where legal weed is a gateway drug to such vices as coffee drinking, hiking and apple picking – is “too dangerous.”  

We had a good laugh at that.

Then I realized he’d presented us with a fantastic gift. Now, if pressed, I can say repeat the same statement about his town and know I’m speaking the truth.

For that I should send him a Thank You card, graciously designed by Hallmark.

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Red-fleshed apples: The science behind an uncommon (and much-desired) apple breed

Deep in Oregon’s Hood River Valley, a few select farms grow a rare cultivar of apples that look no different than most conventional varieties on the outside. This apple’s taut skin is an amalgamation of yellow, green and blush pink tints, with minuscule white blemishes adorned all over. To an unsuspecting consumer, these delicate apples could easily be mistaken for the commonplace Gala or Braeburn varieties.

But inside, the fruits reveal their deception — their crisp flesh flaunts a striking red hue instead of the typical off-white color marked by most commercial apples. Known as Mountain Rose, Hidden Rose or Airlie Red Flesh apples, these striking apples tout a sugary aroma and an equally saccharine taste with notes of mild tartness. Some say the apples taste like cotton candy, strawberry lemonade, or even fruit punch. Others pick up on its subtle hints of berry and citrus flavors.  

Mountain Rose apples — which can only be found in the Pacific Northwest — were first discovered in Airlie, Oregon, more than 60 years ago. Since then, the apples have joined a short list of naturally occurring and red-fleshed varieties spanning across the world. Most of these cultivars, such as the Niedswetzkyana, Almata and Rubaiyat apples, are predominantly found throughout Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and other parts of Central Asia. Collectively, the unique varieties are a scientific phenomenon, curiosities of genetics and horticulture. 

The presence of red flesh in apple cultivars is caused by the MYB10 gene, a localized genetic protein and transcription factor for anthocyanin pathways. Anthocyanins — which are a type of water-soluble polyphenolic pigment — give fruits and vegetables their signature shades of red, purple, blue or black. Consumers are probably familiar with anthocyanins from the produce aisle: purple potatoes and purple cauliflower, for instance, are those colors because of anthocyanins. 

In apples, the pigments manifest in the fruit’s skin — and, sometimes, within their flesh. Subsequently, red-fleshed apple cultivars exhibit “very high concentrations of foliar, flower and fruit anthocyanins,” according to a 2012 study published in Plant Biotechnology Journal.            

“In the majority of plant species, pigmentation is controlled by the relative amounts of anthocyanins, chlorophyll and carotenoids,” the study further outlined. “These compounds are essential for plant health and performance, but are also considered as phytonutrients or markers for dietary health.”

Anthocyanins act as powerful antioxidants and help shield the fruits from oxidation — the chemical process of gaining oxygen — and protect cells from damage caused by free radicals. High levels of antioxidants within red-fleshed apples allow the fruits to preserve their vibrant hue, even after they have been cut into and exposed to oxygen. The apples also retain their vibrancy in high temperatures, making some cultivars an ideal staple in baked goods.

With their extensive quantities of antioxidative phenolics — a class of chemical compounds naturally produced by plants — and anthocyanins, red-fleshed apples boast several nutritional and health benefits. Anthocyanin-rich foods help maintain eye health and aid in the prevention of cardiovascular diseases, neurodegenerative diseases, diabetes and cancer, according to a 2015 study published in the “Journal of Functional Foods.”   

Oftentimes, elevated concentrations of anthocyanins and phenols in red-fleshed apples come with a caveat: an off-putting and bitter taste.

“Plant-based phenols, flavonoids, isoflavones, terpenes and glucosinolates are almost always bitter, acrid or astringent,” explained a 2000 study from The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

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“This poses a dilemma for the designers of functional foods because increasing the content of bitter phytonutrients for health may be wholly incompatible with consumer acceptance,” the study stated.

Fortunately, the Mountain Rose breed doesn’t possess an undesirable taste — just a specific one. Indeed, consumers in the Pacific Northwest seek them out for their flavor, and they command premium prices. Yet if consumers in general do prefer sweeter apples, mixing that with the genes for red flesh might be a feat. 

Indeed, the attractive interior apple color caused by anthocyanin-producing genes is something that some farmers seek to emulate for a wider audience.  Hence, a few enterprising cultivators in New Zealand and Switzerland have managed to popularize the abnormal fruits through cross-breeding processes with commercial and sweeter varieties.

In 2010, scientists at New Zealand’s Plant & Food Research (PFR) helped decode the sequence of the apple’s genome. The team has since attempted to commercialize a new hybrid between red-fleshed and white-fleshed apple varieties. In that same year, Markus Kobelt — a nurseryman in Buchs, Switzerland — developed his acclaimed Redlove apples after cross-pollinating red-fleshed varieties with Royal Gala and Braeburn apples. Not much is known about the Redloves’ cultivation methods — Kobelt purposefully keeps his techniques a secret — but the apples have been described as “deliciously crisp and tart” and, overall, “biblically perfect.” 

Slowly but surely, red-fleshed apples are arising as a culinary marvel and a holiday showstopper. The apples are used to make handcrafted ciders and rosé that are exceptional in both flavor and color (which is, of course, red). Sweeter hybrids and cultivars add an unconventional touch in seasonal galettes, frangipanes, pies and spiced muffins.