Corporations Make Healthy Eating Choices Very Difficult

It's often been pointed out—including by me—that the large purveyors of fast food serve unhealthy food—high in fat, calories, and sodium—and thus bear some of the blame for the epidemic of obesity in America and increasingly in other countries as well, as we are exporting our obesity along with our culture and our food.

However, there is a sense in which they should not get the chief blame. With their triple cheeseburgers, they are giving the public what they want. Many people are not health-conscious or do not have the knowledge to make health-conscious decisions about what they eat. Or, other considerations may trump any issues of good nutrition.

But, there are many people who try to eat healthy; and often these people are not well-served by the corporations who make and sell our food.

There is a lot of misleading marketing of food. Many products like nutritional supplements make unsubstantiated claims. (These claims are not adequately regulated by the government; the labels must merely carry a fine-print statement saying, "These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.")

Many products like energy drinks, energy bars, "power bars," and so forth are worthless. Many products that boast their fiber content contain so-called isolated fiber, which may not have the health benefits of natural fiber.

Many products made to sound healthy are full of unnatural and processed ingredients. For example, not yogurt but "yogurt powder"; not fruit but some concoction that's starch, sugar and coloring, with maybe a little fruit juice.

Some examples: According to the magazine Nutrition Action Health Letter, published by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (the people who have made in-the-news exposés of movie-theater popcorn and so forth), the following products, which are pitched to those seeking gluten-free foods, may not be truly healthful:

• Glutino Gluten Free Blueberry Breakfast Bars, which are "junk" because their "blueberry filling" has more sugar, apple powder, white grape juice concentrate, and water than blueberries.
• Glutino "gluten-free pretzels coated with premium yogurt" are largely made of corn starch and potato starch; the yogurt coating contains yogurt listed as last among its ingredients, meaning that, by quantity, it's the smallest of the ingredients in the yogurt coating.
• Food Should Taste Good Sweet Potato All Natural Chips contain more corn and corn oil than sweet potato. And some "veggie chips" have more salt than some of the veggie-derived ingredients.

Brands, and stores, who might try to make us think they deal in healthy food, often are doing quite the opposite. The so-called "health food supermarkets" deal in food that is high in sodium. They have bakery departments that sell us concoctions of sugar and fat (though no canny consumer truly expects these things to be healthy).

So it's very much a case of "let the buyer beware." More and more of us these days eat more and more food that we do not prepare from scratch but is served to us or it comes in a package. And even those who want to eat healthy often have an almost impossible job when making their food-buying choices.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein

More on Corporate Influence in the US

I have already blogged about the political influence of large corporations on the US government. By lobbying, and by means of money--their monetary contributions to political campaigns and setting up front groups that carry on advertising to advance their interests—corporations influence what laws are passed, what regulations are put into effect by US regulatory agencies, and what regulations already on the books get enforced. This latter can be a function of corporations—indirectly through Congress—denying funding to the regulatory agencies whose regulations these corporations see as not in their interest.

But here is yet another example of corporate influence. Plastics and other chemicals are being pumped into our environment in inconceivable quantities. We all have amounts of these chemicals in our bodies that could disrupt proper functioning of our bodies because some of them mimic the hormones that naturally occur in our bodies. Babies in the womb are exposed to these chemicals and might be born with (for example) small genitalia. Adult men's sperm counts are going down.

Plastics end up in our oceans. They harm wildlife who ingest these plastics. (Plastic objects get broken down by sunlight—not into harmless substances but into small pieces that look like food to sea animals.) Animals like albatrosses, sea turtles, seals, whales, and so forth are being found with plastics in their stomachs and were killed by them.

Major culprits are plastic bags and plastic bottles for bottled water—both of which we produce—and discard—by the billions. Many European countries have banned plastic bags. But many attempts to ban plastic bags—for example in San Francisco—have been thwarted by corporate influence.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein

Heterosexism in the US in the 1950s

When I was young (and impressionable, which goes without saying)—that is, in the 1950s, my teen years—all the models of love and romance that were held up to a young male in American society were of heterosexual couples. Everywhere one looked, the portrayals were of only heterosexual couples. This was true of songs, movies, musical shows--and books, with the exception of a very few books that still had, basically, "underground" status and which therefore very, very few people had access to or even awareness of. I remember when, here in Chicago, even in this big city, library books with a gay theme were kept not on display but locked away, so that you had to request them from a librarian. Kind of like the embarrassing situation that my fellow teen-age guys had to confront when they wanted to buy condoms, as these also were kept hidden and locked away in the drugstore.

Not only were all the models of romance in movies, etc., of a man and a woman. If you saw a ballet or anything else where there was dancing, it was always a man and a woman who were dancing together--even though that man dancing might actually have been gay and, by summoning up all the acting skills he could muster, had to feign romantic or sexual interest in his partner.

My examples will be from a few songs circa the 1950s. First the song, "There is Nothing Like a Dame," from the Broadway musical show South Pacific—which premiered on Broadway in 1949 and was later made into a movie. Here is a much-abbreviated version of the lyrics to that song (the setting is sailors, etc., on some Pacific island during World War II):

We got sunlight on the sand,
We got moonlight on the sea,
We got mangoes and bananas
You can pick right off the tree,
We got volleyball and ping-pong
And a lot of dandy games!
What ain't we got?
We ain't got dames!

…………

We get letters doused with perfume
We get dizzy from the smell!
What don't we get?
You know darn well!

We have nothin' to put on a clean white suit for
What we need is what there ain't no substitute for...

Any suggestion that of one of the uses (or needs, I should say) for a "dame" is sex is only very subtle here. Such was the morality of the time.

To continue quoting the lyrics of this song:

There is nothin' like a dame,
Nothin' in the world,
There is nothin' you can name
That is anythin' like a dame!

…………..

There ain't a thing that's wrong with any man here
That can't be cured by pullin' him near
A girly, womanly, female, feminine dame!

I get particularly offended by that last part, with its generalization about "any man" who inevitably needs a woman. There is no acknowledgment whatsoever, in this song, of the fact that there might just be some men in the service (and there definitely were!) who had no interest at all in "dames." (Nowadays I imagine a lot of women would object to the use of the term "dames.") Not to mention that, among the chorus boys dressed as sailors who were singing this song, there doubtless was a significant contingent of gay men, who again had to impersonate heterosexuals.

And all libidinous attraction was assumed to be to the opposite gender. Here is a bit of the '50s song, "The Petticoats of Portugal":

There's not a guy alive
Who doesn't thrive
On watching skirts blow free,
Especially the petticoats of Portugal.

Never mind that it would do nothing for this guy nor for hundreds of thousands of people like me: we simply didn't exist, at that time.

Then there was the popular song, "Love and Marriage" (later the theme song of the TV sitcom Married with Children):

Love and marriage,
Love and marriage,
Go together like a horse and carriage.
Dad was told by Mother,
You can't have one without the other.

The message would seem to be that, even for heterosexual couples, if you love one another, ya gotta get married. That should seem silly and maybe even offensive even to straight people! And there's no provision for the possibility that the object of your affection could be someone of the same gender. In the 1950s no one could even conceive of two people of the same sex getting married; and even in 2011, same-sex marriage is still impossible in more than three-quarters of the states of the United States.

So it was easy for me back then, growing up in a smallish town, to believe that I was the only one on Earth who was experiencing an interest in the bodies of other boys.

Since this was a metropolitan area of at least a few hundred thousand people, there probably was at least one gay bar somewhere in the area. But I would not have known about it, and I was too young to visit bars, anyway.

It wasn't until I was in college and studied fields like Sociology that I learned that such a thing as gay bars existed—in big cities. So then I—again like a lot of others—thought not merely that gay people congregated in the larger cities but that they existed only in those large cities.

So the point here is the painfulness of growing up with minority status, made even worse without the benefit of knowing even that others do exist. Accurate representations of any minority sexual interest did not exist because it was a taboo topic.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein

Not Acts of God

The by now very old (and if he's not tired by now, I'm tired of him) televangelist Pat Robertson said that the cracks in the Washingon Monument that appeared after the recent earthquake centered near Washington were an "act of God."

Glenn Beck says that Hurricane Irene is a "blessing."

I'm not going to try to get inside these guys' heads or figure out their chain of logic (!?!).

I see a dilemma in the thinking of people who are always seeing God's hand in this or that. First, if you believe that God can and does interfere in the workings of the physical or natural world, then the god you believe in is certainly not a benevolent god. These natural phenomena have caused enormous human suffering, particularly over time (certainly they've been going on for all of the history of the human species).

The god who is always "punishing" mankind, for this or that or whatever, sounds like the Old Testament Jehovah, a vengeful god who once (the story of Noah) wiped out nearly all of mankind, who is an angry and wrathful god--as He himself tells us.

Ironically, the people who believe the things above are professed Christians; and I understand that in the Christian version of things, God in the person of Christ is supposed to be loving, forgiving, tolerant (never mind that we've got so many of these so-called Christian believers who spend enormous energy--and money--spreading hatred of gay people).

(To be accurate, there's always been that strain in Christianity--at least in American Christianity, going back to the earliest days. A notable American example of a hellfire, fire-and-brimstone preacher is the eighteenth-century figure of Jonathan Edwards.)

Maybe some Christian would care to explain their religion to me a little better. I see only paradoxes and inconsistencies.

Copyright (c) 2011 by Richard Stein

The End of the World? Or Just Our Sometimes Inhospitable Planet?

Earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, tsumanis. Wildfires, pipeline explosions. It seems like there are more of all of these going on, and I'm sure people are thinking, and asking one another, What's going on? Many people may see divine action here. For tens and hundreds of thousands of years, mankind has seen supernatural beings as being behind the actions of the forces of Nature.

In the last couple of years there have been earthquakes in Haiti, Japan, New Zealand, Peru; and in the US in California, Colorado, and Virginia—and one here in the Midwest, I believe (I forget where it was centered).

There are always earthquakes because the Earth is a geophysically active planet, with tectonic plates continually moving and shifting, colliding with and sinking beneath one another. I don't know whether statistics would show that they have been more frequent lately. If so, there is surely an explanation. Someone said that the Earth's poles recently shifted—which is not an unheard of occurrence, by any means—and that that is behind the recent earthquake activity.

Climate change, and specifically the warming of the planet, means that there is more energy—that is, heat—in the atmosphere, and that very simply means that, when there are storms, there is more energy available to those storms and they are going to be more violent.

So, I don't think that we are seeing signs of "the last days" or Armageddon, as some people may think.

Update, September 3, 2011
Here is an interesting article on the recent prevalence of natural disasters, with comments from meteorologists:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/03/disasters-in-us-an-extrem_n_947750.html?icid=maing-grid7|maing5|dl3|sec3_lnk1|92672

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein

The Decline of the West

One hundred or even fifty years ago, the world was a very different place. Fifty years ago the age of Colonialism was just coming to an end. Most of the European countries—Great Britain, Spain, France, Germany, Belgium, and The Netherlands--had had colonies in Africa, Asia, and the New World; and 50 years ago the last of those countries were gaining their independence.

So the age of European nations dominating their colonies was not that long ago. At about that time I saw the handwriting on the wall and foresaw that the era of the dominance of the White Man (Europeans and Americans) would come to an end at some point, and maybe within my lifetime.

Well, there are signs that it is, at least in the economic view. The US and other western nations have transferred enormous sums of money to Middle Eastern countries as payment for oil. So the tallest buildings in the world are now in the Middle East and Asia, not in the US. And China is on track to surpass the US and become the world's largest economy.

If you haven't noticed how much of what you buy says "Made in China" on it, I suggest you look at one of those terminals where shipping containers are transferred from trains to trucks. Then you can get some idea of the amount of commerce we have (mainly importing) with China.

In a sense—aside from what we pay for imports—China owns the United States. That's because they buy our government's debt, and the US economy would collapse if China ever stopped buying or sold what it already owns.

The US and its stock markets still make up more than half of the world's equities. I think it's something like 52%. But the volume of all the foreign exchanges has been catching up.

What much of the world perceives as the arrogance of the US is going to be harder and harder to justify as we become less and less able to call the shots for all the rest of the world.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein

Equal News Coverage for Celebrity Gay Couples

It seems that celebrity news now carries news about gay couples. I pretty regularly look to see what news stories show on AOL, even though I normally don't look specifically at the "Entertainment" news section.

So today I see (1) an item about George Michael breaking up with his boyfriend, and (2) an item about Ricky Martin spotted vacationing with his boyfriend.

I believe that Americans devote much too much of their attention to celebrity news and gossip. (I mean, these are just people like you and me. My theory is that this celebrity mania stems from the 1930s when the publicity departments of Hollywood studios tried very hard to drum up interest in the lives of their film stars. But I think it's gotten worse and we have more and more magazines, TV shows, etc., with celebrity news.)

Still: While I'm quick to say that I don't think any celebrity news is among the most important of the day's events in the world, still I'm glad to see that maybe gay/lesbian people have become just as worthy of attention as anyone else. That is, as long as it's not done with the sort of tone that it might have been done with at one time--that is, in the day and age when any imputation of homosexuality would have been enough to ruin a celebrity's career.

Copyright (c) 2011 by Richard Stein

US Is Not Number One

Almost like a football cheer, many folks would be quick to chant, "US is number one!"

But, sadly, the US is not number one in many areas.

The US is not number one in per capita income, in life expectancy, in infant mortality, in literacy rate. We don't have the tallest buildings or the fastest trains in the world. And Americans are not the tallest people in the world (we once were, but now it's the Dutch).

(I probably shouldn't even get started on education. Finland, for example, has 93% of its high school students graduate; in the US, it's 75.5%. And on worldwide standardized tests of school kids' achievement in science and math, the US rates nowhere near the top but only in the middle of the pack.)

Now the latest report calls attention to the state of US infrastructure. In the latest report, the US ranked number 6 among the world's countries, and, in an update expected to come out next month, the US will be rated number 12.

The deteriorating US infrastructure--deteriorating roads and bridges--is costing jobs and economic growth. More money needs to be spent on infrastructure.

But, with "spending" now a dirty word in the US Congress, due to the new power of Tea Party members of Congress, that is not going to happen.

Update, September 15, 2011
Here is an article on the US' standing in education rankings: http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2011/09/14/the-world-is-becoming-more-educated-than-the-u-s/?icid=maing-grid7|maing5|dl24|sec3_lnk1|95582

Update, July 28, 2012
A recent article says the US ranks 16th in percentage of "college attainment."
Copyright (c) 2011 by Richard Stein

Religious Leaders Amass Wealth as Well as Power

Church establishment and hierarchies, it seems, have always been pretty good at attracting to themselves a lot of power and material possessions.

In ancient Egypt, the high priest wielded a lot of power. During the so-called Intermediary Period, when Egypt was divided into a northern and southern kingdom, a ruler of the North, Psusennes, was able to be very powerful by becoming High Priest as well as Pharaoh.

In the century or two before about the year 1000, the Vikings attacked and pillaged the monasteries in the north of England. Presumably the monasteries had sufficient wealth to tempt the Vikings to rob them.

In 1536, King Henry VIII of England dissolved the monasteries of England. Among other reasons he had was to seize the monks' wealth.

Throughout later centuries in Europe, the Church had staggering wealth and power. Church leaders were also temporal rulers. Look at the monastery of Melk in Austria, with its fabulous, gilded, Baroque rooms.

Today, the Vatican has enormous wealth. It is known to be a big stockholder in the Italian economy. The truth is, no one knows the magnitude of the wealth of the Vatican because it simply refuses to reveal any numbers.

Copyright (c) 2011 by Richard Stein

Buffet Says Rich Should Pay More Tax

Warren Buffet, one of the wealthiest men in America, has gone on record publicly saying that the wealthiest in America should pay more taxes, should pay their share and "share the sacrifice."

That that is true seems to me should be non-controversial, a no-brainer. Yet a local TV station in Chicago polled its viewers, "Do you think that the wealthiest Americans should pay more taxes?" Even though a pretty good majority—91%--voted "Yes," I am surprised that 9%--that is roughly one in 10—voted "No." I wonder why not. Maybe they buy that often-voiced Republican and Conservative argument that taxing the wealthy stifles job creation. But sparing the wealthiest individuals and corporations from taxes is trickle-down economics. It was tried during the Reagan years and it does not work.

Anyway, Congress take note of these poll results: There is very wide public support for raising taxes on the wealthy.

Warren Buffet is a good guy, there's no doubt. He has partnered with his fellow-richest guy Bill Gates to form a little group that lobbies other wealthy people to get them to be more philanthropic. Buffet said he pays some 17% of his income in taxes. Unfortunately, with the many loopholes that exist, many wealthy individuals are able to shield almost all their income from taxes. The rich can afford clever attorneys who help them to exploit a large number of ways of avoiding the income tax. Thus wealth, as always, begets wealth, and the rich and super-rich, under current policies, just get richer. Those in the upper 1% by income now control 33% of assets in this country.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein

A Very Brief Summary of Wrongs Done to Native Americans

In the 1830s, US President Andrew Jackson, in defiance of a decision by the Supreme Court, ordered the Cherokee Indians, Choctaws, and several other tribes in the American Southwest, to leave their homes and march westward to a new land that was promised them, Oklahoma (which was then named Indian Territory). The story of this forced march (The "Trail of Tears"), is an extremely sad one. According to Wikipedia, "Many Native Americans suffered from exposure, disease and starvation en route to their destinations. Many died, including 4,000 of the 15,000 relocated Cherokee."*

Maybe even sadder, the promise of this land for the exclusive and perpetual ownership and use by the Indians was broken a few decades later, when white settlers started moving in.

In 1868, the Treaty of Ft. Laramie promised 41,000 square miles of land (in four states, centered around Montana) to the Lakota (Sioux) Indians. Again the treaty with its promises was broken a few decades later when gold and silver were discovered on those lands and white settlers began dispossessing the Indians of what had been promised to them.

The Indian cultures had no concept of land ownership, and when they did agree to sell their land to the White Man they often did not really understand what they were doing. Or, when they agreed to sell, they had been backed into a position of having no choice. Their lands--hunting and burial grounds, sacred mountains, and so forth—were enormously important to the Indians and yet they had to leave them, again and again.

Time and again, promises made to the Indians and treaties were simply forgotten and ignored by the US government. That is only one aspect of all the wrongs and mistreatment perpetrated against the Native Americans. The buffalo (bison), on which the Plains Indians depended for food, were deliberately, systematically, and efficiently wiped out as a matter of US government policy. This virtually destroyed Indian culture and turned a proud people into dependents. The Indians, deprived of their food source, were forced into dependence on the government's Indian agencies for handouts of food, and these handouts were not always adequate or dependable; and there was much corruption, fraud, and abuse in the system of Indian agencies, all to the detriment of the Indians whom they were supposed to benefit.

The catalog of wrongs done to the Indians is endless and shameful. They often were simply massacred, shot and their homes burned. They were given blankets infected with smallpox, perhaps deliberately (my impression is that the evidence on that is not completely clear).

As I have written elsewhere, in my view it is extremely cruel to deprive a people of its culture and its language. In addition to the utter destruction of the buffalo-centered hunting lifestyle of the Plains Indians, Indian cultures were vitiated in other ways, too. Indian children were removed from their families and sent to "Indian schools" where they were forbidden to speak their native languages and punished if they did so. This was all part of a policy to force the Indians to assimilate to the White Man's culture, but obviously done out of a lack of any respect for their own culture. Racial attitudes meant that the Indians were regarded as "savages"--even by Andrew Jackson, who professed to love the Cherokee. Clearly, Jackson held conflicting and irreconcilable attitudes toward the Cherokee. (Notions of the superiority of any European and Christian culture to any indigenous New World culture also worked to cause the Spanish conquerors to destroy the great empires of the Aztecs, Maya, and Inca.)
_________
*Wikipedia, s.v. Trail of Tears.

Copyright (c) 2011 by Richard Stein

Americans Are Lucky

We here in America are lucky. But maybe not (in my opinion) for some of the reasons usually given.

From earliest times, America was to be a haven and refuge, a new and better society. One of the earliest colonies in what became the United States, that in Plymouth (Massachusetts), established in 1620, was founded by members of the Puritan sect who left England to escape persecution-- and, incidentally, once in the New World set up a theocracy which was anything but religiously tolerant. (Just as a couple of examples, Roger Williams was expelled from Plymouth for having and spreading ideas that the government did not like. Anne Hutchinson was expelled because she and her preaching were deemed unorthodox.)

For much of America's history, there was a sense--quite often expressed--that this new land was special. It was given to the newer arrivals to tame the wilderness, to civilize the "savages." America was seen as "the new Eden," a chance for mankind to make a new start with divine blessing, free of many of the Old World's problems such as religious intolerance, bad governance, and so forth. Many immigrants came to the United States also to make a fresh start in their personal lives, sometimes even to shed their identities and take on a new one. (A bit like Australia, some early arrivals on the shores of America were criminals who had been sentenced to "transportation" and who sometimes made a fresh start in America and even became materially very successful.) It was seen as a matter of divine dispensation: God was giving Mankind a second chance.

But this has to be viewed, today, as myth-making, so that's not what I meant in the opening sentence. I mean we have been spared much of the human misery like, for example, the starvation and homelessness that is going on in Somalia. We have had our Civil War and it cost a shocking number of lives, but many of the earth's peoples have endured decades of civil warfare that has created far more widespread suffering.

Look at the poor people of Vietnam, who not only suffered killing of their civilian population and destruction of their homes and crops and livestock during the Vietnam War; but are still suffering today in the form of birth defects as the result of the defoliant Agent Orange that was sprayed on their land during that war. Not to mention that American soldiers during Asian wars--in Vienam just as earlier in Korea--left behind "war babies" who do not find social acceptance in those countries because of their mixed race and have to live their lives with that stigma.

India, despite astonishing progress, still has shocking poverty among literally millions of its people. China, despite its economic miracle and the prosperity of its urban population, still has much true poverty among its rural population.

I don't wish to make our Civil War or the War of 1812 or the French and Indian War mere footnotes; but in more modern times America has not suffered any war on its own soil. We have poverty and we have problems, but a majority of Americans since the Depression generation have not suffered in the manner that enormous segments of humanity have.

I am not a flag-waver at all, and I am the last one to take an America-can-do-no-wrong attitude. I just want to point out that we, compared to great masses of humanity, have been comfortable and secure, and spared a great deal; and we just don't know what the sad lot is of so many humans.

Copyright (c) 2011 by Richard Stein

The "Big Money Boys" Fund the Tea Party

Here is an article by Judy Carbone of the University of Missouri that shows (very well, in my opinion) that it's the "big money boys" who control the Tea Party--rather than the Tea Party being some kind of grass-roots, populist movement. These few individuals effectively control the government, and have been trying to convince the public that "government is the problem" (as Ronald Reagan tried to convince the American public). She says, though--contrary to what I have maintained--that the public "gets it"--knows who runs things and calls the shots--while, somehow, the public still thinks that government is the problem because of the effective propaganda of these big-money, Right-Wing voices. And she shows how these people have been trying to render powerless those segments who have been the power base of the Democrats, such as unions.

She names some of these people: The Koch brothers, two extremely wealthy men who have a large network of think tanks; and Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul, who propagandizes via Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, etc.

She also says "The Tea Party has held the country hostage to a manufactured crisis designed to prove their ideological purity." Regular readers of this blog know that I have said the same thing.

To read this important article for yourself, click on the link:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/june-carbone/money-men-tea-party_b_915997.html

Copyright (c) 2011 by Richard Stein

Two (Surprisingly) Nutritious Foods

You may not think of watermelons and mushrooms as being fruits and vegetables that are superior in nutrition or healthfulness.

Probably you think of watermelon as being mostly water (duh!), and the same for mushrooms. But it happens that both of these foods are packed with vitamins and healthful phytochemicals (plant-based substances that are very good for the human body), and I have read or heard more than one source recommend including more of them in our diets. So I have been trying to follow the recommendations and eat more of both of these. I like them, and I'm trying to remember to buy them when I go shopping. As to watermelon, there's this consideration for me: being a one-person household, I don't want to buy whole watermelons; and individual slices for sale in the supermarket seem to be a very poor buy.

As to mushrooms, I have several ways in which I like to prepare them (not into raw vegetables as a rule). It seems to me that there are two varieties of the common white button mushroom that most Americans think of first when we think of "mushroom": the ones that you ordinarily see in supermarkets, packaged in a half-pound package (don't ever buy the already-sliced ones because once they're sliced, they lose nutrition); and those sold in bulk.

The packaged ones are of a very uniform, medium size, and stay very nicely white in your refrigerator for days. I personally prefer to buy bulk mushrooms at the produce store. They are not so uniform in size and may be larger; and they begin to turn brown a day or two after you get them home. But I like their cooking quality. They genuinely brown as you are sautéeing them, whereas the smaller, whiter ones don't. And I think they might be tastier.

Copyright (c) 2011 by Richard Stein