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I spent too much of my life learning to do things by following rules, up to and including a PhD and an MBA. I've since learned to love learning by doing and div

by spodek 9y ago

I spent too much of my life learning to do things by following rules, up to and including a PhD and an MBA. I've since learned to love learning by doing and diving in. Food is probably the best success in that area, combined with the observation that constraints breed creativity. My cooking gets high reviews (from friends, not critics http://joshuaspodek.com/food-world-reviews http://joshuaspodek.com/food-world-reviews) and has inspired my passion and podcast on leadership and the environment http://joshuaspodek.com/podcast http://joshuaspodek.com/podcast. Two constraints revolutionized my cooking: - to avoid food packaging - to avoid food where fiber has been removed Joining a CSA/farm share helped a lot too, by forcing a deluge of new produce on me that I had to figure out what to do with. I guess a third constraint was not to allow any food to go to waste. The three constraints force me to cook almost entirely from fresh vegetables, fresh fruit, and bulk legumes, nuts, grains, and seeds (filling bags I bring with me to the bulk food store). My diet became bland when I stopped packaged food since I didn't know what to do and mostly steamed vegetables or fried them with garlic and onions -- not bad once in a while but not exclusively. I don't like bland and do like delicious (I'm funny that way), so I experimented and learned how to combine flavors and textures to my tastes. Now my food is more delicious than ever. It's also cheaper, more convenient, and more social (I've met the farmers and visit their farm annually, and I invite people to dinner more than ever, plus I get invited to cook for friends' dinner parties). I love finding new local produce and the change of seasons bringing foods I haven't had for a year. I also pollute less -- I last threw out my landfill garbage in June. If you've read this far and care for advice, I advise just forcing yourself to cook from scratch for six months, no exceptions. Your diet will be boring and bland for a few months, but by a year, you'll find your diet more delicious than ever. At least that worked for me. My blog posts a lot about avoiding food packaging http://joshuaspodek.com/js_blogseries/avoiding-food-packaging http://joshuaspodek.com/js_blogseries/avoiding-food-packagin... and such if you click around. Oh, and buy a pressure cooker.

markc 9y ago
>Joining a CSA/farm share helped a lot too Seconded, including a winter CSA, which gave me new appreciation for several root veggies I'd neglected (e.g. parsnip, rutabega, turnip). It can be an engaging challenge to use it all - in an Iron Chef sort of way.
loadedanvils 9y ago
>I spent too much of my life learning to do things by following rules, up to and including a PhD and an MBA. I've since learned to love learning by doing and diving in. I'm really interested to know how you transitioned. I'm a recent graduate and I'm planning to pursue a graduate degree, and I'm overly concerned with rules, which provide structure but also seem to constrict my learning and work.
- cossatot 9y ago
  My grad school advice, as a PhD who is not good with rules: - Understand what the rules are, why they are in place, and to whom they matter. Some are there to keep you from hurting yourself, some to keep you from hurting those on your level or below, some to keep your advisor from abusing you, and a lot to make sure you act in the best interest of the University via minimizing its liability, etc. You don't need to follow all of them all the time, but have some real justification when you do go off course, don't call attention to it, and don't screw anyone else over. - For your research, you need a dual-prong strategy of making sure you check off the boxes for others, i.e. actually doing what your advisor got funded to do (she is on the hook for this for most grants), on time and under budget as well; then, pour all the rest of your efforts into researching what you are interested in, with an eye towards building your skill sets for the future and learning how to learn alone. Read widely enough to know the range of options for a solution space and deeply enough to know what has actually been tried in your field, and not just what has succeeded. Teach yourself stuff that your advisors don't know. The payoff from a broad familiarity with programming, statistics and discrete mathematics is large, especially if they're under-utilized in your field, and these skills are widely transferable. Furthermore experimenting/exploration through computing is often super cheap and the cost of failure is low, unlike destructive analysis of your physical samples. - Keep your datasets small enough that you can master them. In the natural sciences, many scientists just want more and more data but getting and maintaining data is labor-intensive and has a huge opportunity cost. You don't always learn a lot of transferable skills that way unless you want to be a lab tech forever. The major exception is when obtaining data is primarily observation and measurement, which are really important to building intuition and just noticing subtleties.
jbob2000 9y ago
You make a lot of grand statements there without backing anything up. If it was so convenient and cheap to cook this way, then everyone would be doing it. I have tried and tried and tried to cook like you suggest. I end up wasting food as it goes bad before I can use it. I have a small apartment and ended up going to the grocery store every 2 days to restock. Some ingredients aren't sold in quantities appropriate for 1-2 people, so things go stale or expire before they get fully used. I wasted way more food attempting to change my food practices than I did maintaining the way I was raised. I'm skeptical about farm shares, I don't think it scales. If it became more popular, you'd had everyone hopping in their cars every weekend and driving out to a farm. Much more efficient to load everything on 1 transport truck than to have a thousand cars on the road just for picking up produce. And in winter climates, you aren't growing anything in the ground, so this produce is being shipped in to the farm anyways, just ship it to the grocery stores. Or it's being grown indoors, which requires increased energy usage (might be less energy intensive to ship veggies in on a truck than to grow them indoors?). Our modern food system, for all of its faults, is the only thing that works for everybody. Poor people? Disabled people? Car-less people? Dietary restrictions? All covered. Your diet and way of living works for wealthy, healthy people with time on their hands. It's not realistic at all.
- jmulho 9y ago
  Actually, our modern food system isn't working for the hundreds of millions of us who are dying from obesity, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, etc. Nor is it working for those of us (all of us) who are presently going bankrupt trying to pay for each other's healthcare.
  - jbob2000 9y ago
    > presently going bankrupt trying to pay for each other's healthcare. Only a problem for 2 countries in the world. The rest of us have this figured out.
- zaphod4prez 9y ago
  I have to say that your first statement seems totally ridiculous...do you really think that homo sapiens is homo economicus?? People are not rational optimizers, they're mammals. I'm sure I'm being a bit uncharitable to your claim here but your comment makes you sound like you actually are the 'older, wiser' economist in that old joke: "Two economists, one young and one old, are walking to lunch. The young economist looks down and sees a $20 bill on the street and says, 'Hey, look a twenty-dollar bill!' Without even looking, his older and wiser colleague replies, 'Nonsense. If there had been a twenty-dollar lying on the street, someone would have already picked it up by now.'" As to your second paragraph...have you considered the possibility that you, specifically, didn't do a good job of cooking for yourself and that the fact that you failed to cook this way could be, well, your failure (to plan or execute or whatever), rather than a global failure of the idea "cook for yourself and use fresh produce"? As for farm shares, many/most CSAs deliver, either to the home or to a central location in town (often a local co-op). So it is, in fact just one delivery truck driving down the highway. And to your final paragraph, I simply say that that is an utter failure of imagination. At the moment, it's absolutely true that participating in this kind of eating & cooking demands some flexibility of schedule. Mostly, wealthier people are the ones who eat this way. Now, why is that the case? Well, our entire food production and distribution system is built around a different model. Deviating from that model, given the current state of the system, is expensive. That doesn't mean that people with the power and resources to do so shouldn't actively work towards changing the system into somethign more sustainable and accessible for all. In fact, in NYC there is an incredible farmer's market (called "greenmarket"), which runs in several poor neighborhoods and accepts food stamps, and it's life-changing for many people. I think that if you spoke to a few of the people who shop there, you'd never be as offhandedly dismissive of "eat fresh produce & cook for yourself" as you are here.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

by spodek 9y ago

markc 9y ago

>Joining a CSA/farm share helped a lot too Seconded, including a winter CSA, which gave me new appreciation for several root veggies I'd neglected (e.g. parsnip, rutabega, turnip). It can be an engaging challenge to use it all - in an Iron Chef sort of way.

loadedanvils 9y ago

>I spent too much of my life learning to do things by following rules, up to and including a PhD and an MBA. I've since learned to love learning by doing and diving in. I'm really interested to know how you transitioned. I'm a recent graduate and I'm planning to pursue a graduate degree, and I'm overly concerned with rules, which provide structure but also seem to constrict my learning and work.

cossatot 9y ago
My grad school advice, as a PhD who is not good with rules: - Understand what the rules are, why they are in place, and to whom they matter. Some are there to keep you from hurting yourself, some to keep you from hurting those on your level or below, some to keep your advisor from abusing you, and a lot to make sure you act in the best interest of the University via minimizing its liability, etc. You don't need to follow all of them all the time, but have some real justification when you do go off course, don't call attention to it, and don't screw anyone else over. - For your research, you need a dual-prong strategy of making sure you check off the boxes for others, i.e. actually doing what your advisor got funded to do (she is on the hook for this for most grants), on time and under budget as well; then, pour all the rest of your efforts into researching what you are interested in, with an eye towards building your skill sets for the future and learning how to learn alone. Read widely enough to know the range of options for a solution space and deeply enough to know what has actually been tried in your field, and not just what has succeeded. Teach yourself stuff that your advisors don't know. The payoff from a broad familiarity with programming, statistics and discrete mathematics is large, especially if they're under-utilized in your field, and these skills are widely transferable. Furthermore experimenting/exploration through computing is often super cheap and the cost of failure is low, unlike destructive analysis of your physical samples. - Keep your datasets small enough that you can master them. In the natural sciences, many scientists just want more and more data but getting and maintaining data is labor-intensive and has a huge opportunity cost. You don't always learn a lot of transferable skills that way unless you want to be a lab tech forever. The major exception is when obtaining data is primarily observation and measurement, which are really important to building intuition and just noticing subtleties.

jbob2000 9y ago

You make a lot of grand statements there without backing anything up. If it was so convenient and cheap to cook this way, then everyone would be doing it. I have tried and tried and tried to cook like you suggest. I end up wasting food as it goes bad before I can use it. I have a small apartment and ended up going to the grocery store every 2 days to restock. Some ingredients aren't sold in quantities appropriate for 1-2 people, so things go stale or expire before they get fully used. I wasted way more food attempting to change my food practices than I did maintaining the way I was raised. I'm skeptical about farm shares, I don't think it scales. If it became more popular, you'd had everyone hopping in their cars every weekend and driving out to a farm. Much more efficient to load everything on 1 transport truck than to have a thousand cars on the road just for picking up produce. And in winter climates, you aren't growing anything in the ground, so this produce is being shipped in to the farm anyways, just ship it to the grocery stores. Or it's being grown indoors, which requires increased energy usage (might be less energy intensive to ship veggies in on a truck than to grow them indoors?). Our modern food system, for all of its faults, is the only thing that works for everybody. Poor people? Disabled people? Car-less people? Dietary restrictions? All covered. Your diet and way of living works for wealthy, healthy people with time on their hands. It's not realistic at all.

jmulho 9y ago
Actually, our modern food system isn't working for the hundreds of millions of us who are dying from obesity, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, etc. Nor is it working for those of us (all of us) who are presently going bankrupt trying to pay for each other's healthcare.
- jbob2000 9y ago
  > presently going bankrupt trying to pay for each other's healthcare. Only a problem for 2 countries in the world. The rest of us have this figured out.
zaphod4prez 9y ago
I have to say that your first statement seems totally ridiculous...do you really think that homo sapiens is homo economicus?? People are not rational optimizers, they're mammals. I'm sure I'm being a bit uncharitable to your claim here but your comment makes you sound like you actually are the 'older, wiser' economist in that old joke: "Two economists, one young and one old, are walking to lunch. The young economist looks down and sees a $20 bill on the street and says, 'Hey, look a twenty-dollar bill!' Without even looking, his older and wiser colleague replies, 'Nonsense. If there had been a twenty-dollar lying on the street, someone would have already picked it up by now.'" As to your second paragraph...have you considered the possibility that you, specifically, didn't do a good job of cooking for yourself and that the fact that you failed to cook this way could be, well, your failure (to plan or execute or whatever), rather than a global failure of the idea "cook for yourself and use fresh produce"? As for farm shares, many/most CSAs deliver, either to the home or to a central location in town (often a local co-op). So it is, in fact just one delivery truck driving down the highway. And to your final paragraph, I simply say that that is an utter failure of imagination. At the moment, it's absolutely true that participating in this kind of eating & cooking demands some flexibility of schedule. Mostly, wealthier people are the ones who eat this way. Now, why is that the case? Well, our entire food production and distribution system is built around a different model. Deviating from that model, given the current state of the system, is expensive. That doesn't mean that people with the power and resources to do so shouldn't actively work towards changing the system into somethign more sustainable and accessible for all. In fact, in NYC there is an incredible farmer's market (called "greenmarket"), which runs in several poor neighborhoods and accepts food stamps, and it's life-changing for many people. I think that if you spoke to a few of the people who shop there, you'd never be as offhandedly dismissive of "eat fresh produce & cook for yourself" as you are here.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]