Grass Valley Vignette #1

I've been meaning to write about Grass Valley for some time, and I keep getting stuck. Mostly it's because I'm having trouble summarizing the place, even though as small as it is it should be very easy to summarize.

OK, I'll summarize. Grass Valley has 13,000 people in the city limits. It's a very small town. Nevada City is right next door (I can walk to it from my house) and it has another, oh, 8,000 people. You can Google them to see the location - they're in a forest about halfway between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe.

Now that the summary is over, I'll drop in some stories about the place here and there. And the first one is:

Vignette #1. The Story of Weston A. Price

Strolling through the Farmer's Market in Nevada City, I saw a slow food booth. The slow food movement, I think, basically promotes the opposite of fast food - I wasn't sure if it meant using crock pots, but it did have something to do with home cooking. I was familiarized to the movement from a huge slow food exhibition in San Francisco's Civic Center Park. In this exhibition, you basically waited 45 minutes in one of many massive lines to buy an apple for $4. Still, the Nevada City branch was hosting a free potluck with a presentation - something about "Fast meals with slow food". Perhaps we could meet other foodies. We cooked a couple quick vegetarian dishes, handed Max off to our babysitter and went to a meeting room in an office park.

There were about 10 people there, mostly elderly. I put my food down next to...some butter, bread, milk, jam, yogurt, oranges...very strange potluck. After some conversation, one of the statelier ladies slowly shoved some handwritten pages together and started talking.

Essentially, she said that you could make soup faster, for example, by making your stock once per week (after killing the chicken for the stock). Her mouth watered as she talked about living off cheese for a month - milk your goat a couple times a week, let it curdle, and store it in your barn. We started realizing slow food meant local and from scratch. From, I believe, ideally, your backyard. Oh. That's why that butter in the potluck was so freaking good. (Our chickpeas were canned in New York. Oops.) Next, she talked about how to make a good stock, the value of the gelatin in the stock, about the wondrous fats in butter and cream. I really wanted her to cook a meal for us. She mentioned Weston Price in passing. I should have paid more attention to the name.

Delia then asked how to make a vegetarian stock. After a bit of uncomfortable silence, the speaker said to avoid it if possible, but to use celery, carrots and onions. She talked more about Weston Price and soon the conversation in the room centered on similarities between slow food and Weston Price.

Figuring it's my turn to generate uncomfortable silence, I asked who Weston Price is. I was told he started a very well known food philosophy. After rudely blurting out that I hadn't heard of him, I was told in no uncertain terms that Weston Price is very famous. I was then given the Weston Price story.

Here's my recollection, in case you are one of the very few people not knowledgeable of Weston Price. As the lady explained, Weston Price was a dentist in the thirties who visited indigenous tribes to examine commonalities in their diets that led to excellent teeth, and hence, excellent health. The healthy diets, he found, consisted of plenty of meat and saturated fats. Unsaturated fat, it turns out, is horrible for you, but a large conspiracy of cooking oil manufacturers have covered this up.

I'm now looking uncomfortably at the two vegetarian dishes I brought - yams in sesame and peanut oil, and garlic chickpeas soaked in olive oil, and, umm...oops again. Still, I'm not sure I'm killing the participants. It's not clear to me that your teeth indicate your health. Doctors don't stare at my teeth during checkups and dentists don't give me nutrition advice. Perhaps that's a conspiracy also. Second, I read in a book "What to Eat" that you can boil a proper diet down to "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." From this book, I read people have known for a very long time that animal fats are bad for you but, under pressure from the cattle and pork lobbies, government warnings state that saturated fats (a fat in animals) should be restricted instead. In other words, if there is a conspiracy, it's exactly the opposite of Weston Price's. Also, don't all these indigenous tribes have 35-year lifespans?

By the end of the potluck it's pretty clear that the majority of people there follow Weston Price, so I decided to ask one of them if the Weston Price diet increases lifespan. She said, instantly, that Weston Price followers live 7 years longer. Someone else said their mom moved to India, switched to a vegetarian diet, and died prematurely.

My head still hurts from the cognitive dissonance. Delia wants to go to the next Weston Price potluck. I don't because I'll have a hard time shutting up. But we did leave with a jar of perhaps the best apricot jam we've ever had.

In any case, how is this a Grass Valley vignette? According to the speaker, about 70 people were in the Weston Price club of Grass Valley. Given the size of Grass Valley, that's a really big number. But it doesn't surprise me that much - if it's an alternative movement, it's probably in Grass Valley.

Max's first disease

Max in middle of his disease.

I guess our luck had to run out sometime, and on what we suspect was Wednesday, December 10, Max caught a disease from his playgroup. Max seemed fine as the weekend approached, as documented by the photo below.

Max and strainer.

However, Max's visit with the eternally older, bigger and stronger Louisa on Sunday did not go well. Oh sure, in a sense it never goes well for Max - Max ignores Louisa and she tackles him, Max reads a book and Louisa takes it from him, but this time he was very clingy and whiny. Was he teething? Did he need sleep? We had no idea.

A rare smile from Max. Luckily, Louisa didn't catch the disease, despite sharing his food.

Soon, he started sounding like he was snoring, except he was awake and had all kinds of cute little coughs. At night it wasn't so funny. He coughed himself awake about every hour and we had to soothe him to sleep every time. A visit to the doctor the next day revealed he had croup. For the unitiated, croup is caused by breathing difficulties, and is normally fine and can be treated at home, unless in some cases the trachea closes and it's fatal. Good to know. Anyway, he was sent home with some steroids that are used to open up his trachea. Delia and I spent the rest of the day holding him while he coughed on us. Good thing baby viruses are no match for my manly immune system.

So anyway, Max responded pretty well - the next day he was tired but certainly sounded much better, and by Wednesday he was starting to crawl around a bit. Another baby in the baby group, Sean, also had croup, and his mom was pretty sick, which certainly helped us isolate the cause.

Sean: Disease carrier?

So Delia offered to take care of Sean a bit while his mom caught some sleep. And, not to say I'm implying anything here, but Max's recovery soon took a big U-turn. A couple days later, he left the doctor with another prescription for steroids, as well as some antibiotics (for apparently a secondary ear infection). Mom got a little sick, which didn't help. As for me, my manly immune system gave out completely and I got pretty much the full list of symptoms in Nyquil commercials. Mom, baby and me sick at the same time. Words of sympathy we got were something like "Get used to it."

On Saturday, however, Delia's parents heroically drove over to help. With Delia's dad cooking and mom taking care of Max, Delia and I could wander around like a zombie, lie in bed with my eyes closed, or read a great library book with the heady title, "The Future of Freedom" while Max was in good hands, coming out only to eat their soup. What was most amazing to me, though, was how Max responded. My job, as I saw it, was to soothe him and keep him from being too miserable. However, Delia's mom didn't bother with the misery part and played with him like he was healthy. For the first time in a while, his smile came back.

Delia's mom and Max.

Anyway, while we suspect there were several diseases in this house, Max is getting better. Here's Max's preferred use of the swing.

Last night. It was amazing to watch Max start from the floor and systematically work himself into the most dangerous position he could find.

We're not fully recovered yet, but things are improving, not counting mom. Anyway, here are a couple things I learned:

1) They (by that I mean the alien creatures who create articles on the Internet) recommend a cool mist humidifier for a croupy baby. Maybe in theory, but in practice it freezes the room. Perhaps for this reason, Max refused to be put into the crib and would only fall asleep being held (opening his eyes every few minutes or so just to make sure you didn't cheat and put him down.)

2) Nothing sucks more than trying to sing to your baby when you have laryngitis.

3) I couldn't sleep last night because of various pains, but that let me look around YouTube and find this video of an insane man surfing an unbelievably big wave. Even if you don't surf, look at the link.