Giving vegetarian food a bad name

Do not want.

We’re going to be doing a bit of traveling today, so I thought I’d start us off with a traditional hearty breakfast. Bacon and eggs, that’s the ticket! We’re ovo-lacto pescatarians, vegetarian easy mode, so the eggs are fine, but bacon is forbidden. Fortunately, we had picked up some Morning Star Farms Veggie Bacon Strips, so I thought I’d try those.

Big mistake.

These are perfectly rectangular, thin, flat sheets of something marbled with pink and white. A serving is 4.5 grams of fat, 2 grams of protein, and 1 gram of carbohydrate. You cook them in a frying pan, as if it were real bacon, and they sit there and get crispier, flatly. There’s none of the shrinking you get with real bacon, so after they’re heated through, you’ve still got an array of pink and white flawless rectangles.

Then you bite into one. They’re flavorless! They have a uniform texture which is nothing like bacon, lacking any fat. It’s exactly like thin strips of cardboard.

It’s my own damn fault for buying something that pretends to be meat-like. There’s nothing wrong with vegetarian food, and in fact it’s really tasty and flavorful and textured and complex, except when someone tries to make a pale imitation of something that relies on the complexity of animal tissue, and fails.

Even these Beyond/Impossible burgers have set themselves a low bar of emulating a meat that has a lot of the complexity ground out of it, and they’re not bad, but you can still tell the difference, and who knows how much effort has been put into the chemistry to get an approximation to ground meat flavor.

I should have just made a plateful of beans.

Don’t send a puppy to do an old dog’s work

I am surprised that Philadelphia, a city that has medical schools and hospitals, turned to a small group of enthusiastic college kids to help with their rollout of the COVID vaccine. Enthusiastic volunteers are great, but these young people were in charge of the management of the vaccinations, and that wasn’t a very good idea.

Philadelphia is home to some of the most venerated medical institutions in the country. Yet when it came time to set up the city’s first and largest coronavirus mass vaccination site, officials turned to the start-up Philly Fighting COVID, a self-described “group of college kids” with minimal health-care experience.

Chaos ensued.

Seniors were left in tears after finding that appointments they’d made through a bungled sign-up form wouldn’t be honored. The group switched to a for-profit model without publicizing the change and added a privacy policy that would allow it to sell users’ personal data. One volunteer alleged that the 22-year-old CEO had pocketed vaccine doses. Another described a “free-for-all” where unsupervised 18- and 19-year-olds vaccinated one another and posed for photos.

Again, tapping into youthful energy is a great idea, expecting youthful energy to manage a serious enterprise responsibly is not wise. I’ve known some 22 year olds who’d definitely have taken the job very seriously, but the guy who ran this show comes off as a glad-handing entrepreneur-type, which Drexel has in spades, and sounds like someone who is eager to self-promote himself into a CEO position for anything.

Just a few weeks ago, Philly Fighting COVID was receiving glowing coverage from the likes of NBC’s “Today.” The group had a compelling story: Doroshin, a graduate student at Drexel University, helped orchestrate an effort to use 3-D printers to make free face shields for hospital workers at the start of the pandemic. By summer, he and his friends were running their own pop-up testing sites citywide.

But as Philadelphia magazine reported, the group’s “executive team” lacked anyone with a medical degree or advanced degree in public health. Doroshin himself listed a résumé that included stints teaching a high school film class, producing videos of people longboarding and practicing parkour, and founding a nonprofit that, according to Philadelphia magazine, “mostly consisted of a meme-heavy Twitter account, some minor community lobbying, and a fundraiser with a $50,000 goal that netted $684.”

After all, who needs expertise?

Speaking to “Today,” Doroshin said that his lack of a traditional public health background allowed him to “think a little differently” and speed up the vaccination process. In another interview, he expressed hopes of setting up a McDonald’s-like franchise and suggested that best practices for administering vaccine doses “can go out the window.”

It may also be that the group was superfluous, leaving open the question why they were given this job.

When asked why the city didn’t initially partner with Penn, Temple, or another medical powerhouse for the vaccine rollout, Farley [Philadelphia Health Commissioner] said he wasn’t sure whether the organizations would have agreed to help when they were already tasked with vaccinating their own staff.

“In retrospect, I wish we hadn’t worked with Philly Fighting COVID,” he said. However, Farley said the fractured partnership “will not overall slow down our vaccination process,” adding that the city is limited by the number of vaccine doses it has, not by the number of people who can administer it.

Identifying the mission-critical bottlenecks seems like a job for an experienced manager, and Doroshin wasn’t it. My own experience here in Minnesota is that we don’t have a surplus of vaccine at all, and our queries about getting it have been met with recommendations that we just sit and wait patiently for everyone with higher priority to get theirs, and while I’m sure we’ve got plenty of college students who’d be willing to help, there just isn’t any vaccine for them to help with.

Adjusting to pandemic rules is going to wreck me this term

It wasn’t a good night. It’s not a particularly good morning either. I’m teaching the first in-person lab of the semester today, and in addition to anxiety about mingling with potential flesh-incubators of a virus that could kill me, I’m sweating over the major changes to the lab.

Under normal circumstances this first 3 hour Drosophila lab would be casual: here are the flies, here’s how to grow them, take your time setting up this first cross, take a little while to get familiar with fly morphology, and all the while I’d wander the lab, helping people out and answering questions and showing them things on the microscope. You know, the normal way of doing things.

Not this year.

The lab has been split up into 3 one-hour sections, with a third of the enrolled students assigned to each. I have to prep the lab so everything is at hand right there at their bench: no wandering over to that shelf to pick up fly bottles, then to that sink for medium, then to the incubator for flies. Nope, the ideal is that they come in, sit down, and don’t get up until their tasks are done. I have to run around and set up 8 stations with all supplies, including anesthetized flies of the right genotypes. I have to have it all set up before lab, and then I have to replenish everything 15 minutes before the next hour long section comes in.

The tasks have been greatly pared down, too. Make medium. Learn to distinguish male from female flies sleeping in a petri dish. Sort them into the bottles of medium. Put them in the incubator. You’re done, get out, I have another batch of students coming in. I’ve tried to trim every non-essential thing out of the process so that if I had to do it myself, I’d be done in 5 minutes, because I know that it takes a lot longer to navigate the unfamiliar.

I feel like a choreographer who has carefully laid out all the steps, and then I’m expecting the students to do a full performance without rehearsal…and if they mess up (which will be all my fault, not theirs), it’s going to delay or ruin the next 6 weeks of crosses, and will block the next hour’s worth of students from getting in and getting their job done. I had anxiety dreams about forgetting some little thing, and waves of students getting progressively more and more slowed down, and hundreds (my class isn’t that big) of students accumulating in a socially-distanced mob outside my door, waving signs and chanting about how I’m an incompetent teacher.

So yeah, everything’s going just fine. The sad thing is that even if everything goes off flawlessly, I’m going to go mad trying to juggle everything for three hours this afternoon, and I’m going to stagger out lathered in sweat at the end of it. After I clean up the chaos, that is, because I’m doing it again on Thursday. I hope I don’t have to be coherent or conscious for anything tonight.

Oh, and yesterday I had to run out to the local plague pit grocery store for last minute supplies, and encountered two mouth-breathing a-holes who couldn’t even be bothered to wear a mask. I am beginning to hate about half the residents of this town.

Do you like to play games?

A few news items:

  • I sometimes play on Sitosis, a free public Minecraft server. It’s totally vanilla, with a mature user base, and has been wonderfully free of drama and griefing — I strongly recommend it, if you’re into that game.
    But did I say “free”? Someone has to pay for the server, and that requires voluntary donations. If you play there, and you can afford it, it’s time to pay for the hosting, and they’re looking for a little bit of money to keep it going.
  • Lately I’ve been playing a little bit of No Man’s Sky, a space exploration game with a bit of minecraft-style creative construction thrown in. I live-streamed it last week, and I’ll be up to mischief again on Friday night.

    I’ve also been thinking a bit about that Netflix show, Alien Worlds, and that it has a lot in common, both strengths and weaknesses, with NMS. I’ll probably babble a bit about that while I build a primitive shack on a strange planet.
    By the way, there is some obnoxious interaction between NMS and Linux that I haven’t been able to track down that does funny things to the sound. I’ll probably sound like I’m inhaling helium the whole time, for extra fun.