Thanksgiving in the Kitchen

On Thanksgiving morning, five of us bumped into each other in our kitchen, as we prepared an elaborate dinner. Janet, my mother-in-law, made creamed onions, a casserole combining several jars of onions, cubes of bread, a cream sauce, and some cheese. I had never seen that dish before it was served to me at the first Christmas after our marriage. It is a traditional dish in my wife’s family, which has evolved over many decades. “Know your onions” used to mean that we should understand the differences among local varieties of onion. But interstate commerce, made possible by big capital and better methods of preservation, has standardized onions across America, as it has potatoes, apples, and most fruits and vegetables. Our daily foods have changed in ways we can no longer grasp.

When Janet married into a family which had generations of connection with Wisconsin, she began to scout that the offerings of antiques and foods along the journey from northern Illinois to northwestern Wisconsin. For years, she, and now her daughters’ families, have bought cheese at one store in Tomah, an intersection in the center of the state, which specializes in fine aged cheddar. I love the onions, but the younger generation is less interested, and that tradition is likely to disappear.

My son Sam and daughter-in-law Katie brought squashes and wild rice for a vegetarian “salad” (they couldn’t agree on what to call it). They haven’t eaten meat for years. So they developed together a daily menu of foods I had never known and rarely eat except with them. Among the many traits they share are an appreciation for good raw foods prepared by hand and the willingness to spend time every day shopping and making dinner. Some of these dishes are so good, I have looked at Katie’s food blog to copy the recipe.

Many people, vegetarian or not, feel they can’t spare the time that such attention to healthy, tasty food requires. But Katie and Sam also have busy professional lives, often climb rocks and mountains, and generally do just as much as anyone else. Although they may not think about it this way, I would say they have swapped television for eating. According to Nielson, Americans average over 35 hours a week of TV, more than 5 hours a day. Instead they entertain each other in the kitchen and have learned much more about food than if they had been watching the Food Network.

My wife Liz made the turkey. It was probably the first turkey she made this year. She only cooks big birds on the biggest family holidays, and never orders turkey in a restaurant. The lengthy prelude that a turkey requires is as much a family ritual as the final presentation of the platter of fragrant meat, the moment when preparation ends and eating begins. Turkey is a symbol of the celebration of family and family history, made possible by national holidays, repeated every year through our mutual desire to be together. We are hardly a “traditional family”, in the mythological sense often given to that phrase, but we are bound by our traditions.

My contribution to the Thanksgiving meal was a cranberry bread, mostly according to the recipe printed on the bag of cranberries. Liz’s sister Pat makes a cranberry bread at family gatherings that I can’t get enough of. I connect cranberries with Maine, where I spent 27 years, and with Sam, who remains the only person I know who likes raw cranberry juice and is proud of it. Katie suggested that I don’t chop the cranberries, as the recipe suggests, with the result of bursts of cranberry scattered through the bread.

No family gathering brings everyone together. Someone we all remember has died, everyone is connected to more than one family, distances are no longer manageable without expense and planning. But I thought of Pat while I made the bread. Sharing recipes is like sharing love: it makes everyone happy today and in the future.

I did make another contribution to this holiday’s events. Although my own family paid little attention to Jewish holidays, like Passover and Hanukkah, Liz and I incorporated Jewish holidays into our new family’s invented practices. She probably had never seen a latke before she met me, and maybe never heard the word. On Friday, Liz made plate after plate of potato pancakes, onto which we all spooned apple sauce that had just come off the stove. The food processor eliminates the hardest task; latkes are no harder to make than hash browns. The only difference lies in the histories of the families who make them.

Family foods change gradually with each generation. Cooking and talking, bumping into one another constantly, checking each other’s dishes, cleaning up and making a mess again – it brings us all together with a common purpose and a shared understanding of who our family is, what we believe in, and what we want to eat.

For that I am thankful.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, December 3, 2013

The Disadvantage of Being White

In my lifetime the shift toward equality has been remarkable. Until the late 1960s the preferential treatment of whites and men was so normal that questioning it made headlines. That form of white male privilege is gone. Quite a few white men are so upset at the loss of that privilege that they now complain about discrimination.

On the online debate forum Debate.org, you can read dozens of white male complaints about discrimination against them. A study by Harvard and Tufts sociologists in 2011 quantifies this white certainty that they are now the underprivileged. White and black men and women were asked to rate the amount of discrimination against both ethnic groups. They all agreed that through the 1960s, there was significant discrimination against blacks and virtually none against whites. But then opinions diverge. Whites believe that discrimination against blacks has now nearly disappeared, while discrimination against themselves has greatly increased, well past the amount against blacks. The researchers summarized: “Whites believe...the pendulum has now swung beyond equality in the direction of anti-white discrimination.”

White feelings of discrimination are more common among the working class, according to a 2012 survey: about 60% of white working-class Americans said that discrimination against whites is as great as discrimination against blacks and other minorities, while 39% of college-educated whites believe that.

Those feelings are much more likely among conservatives, older Americans and people in the South.

Such beliefs are comforting to whites, especially men, who are dissatisfied with their lives. It’s all because of discrimination against them! Racist whites were delighted about the results of that study. On the neo-Nazi website Stormfront, one responder had a great idea, expressed in a typically racist manner: “Someone should make a youtube video with White and Black equally qualified job applicants (or even make the White person more qualified to be even more realistic) and drop some hint that one applicant is a Negro. I guarantee that the Black job applicant will be getting a call back while the White applicant is plain out of luck.”

Well, someone has done that, or something like it. In response to job ads in newspapers, the National Bureau of Economic Research sent out 5000 resumes with names that sounded black or white, like Lakisha and Jamal, or Emily and Greg. Although the resumes were the same in every other respect, “white” names received 50% more callbacks than “black” names. That racist result was true across a variety of industries, including employers who advertise “equal opportunity”. Having a “white” name was equivalent to eight more years of experience for a “black” applicant.

A similar study this year of possible racism was done by sending a white and a minority tester of the same age and gender posing as a possible home renter or buyer. Across 8000 tests in 28 cities across the US, blacks were shown 11% fewer rentals and 17% fewer homes than whites. Whites were likely to be offered lower rents, or quoted lower prices. This was a significant improvement over the first time this study was done in 1977, but still far from equality, much less anti-white discrimination.

Some people wondered whether the election of Barack Obama meant an era of racial equality had finally arrived. We know better now.            Suppose Hillary is elected President in 2016. Would that mean that women’s equality has been achieved? I know some white men who would probably go further – they would say that being a woman is an advantage, that another nail has been put into the coffin of white men, now always at a disadvantage.

Too much attention is paid to the few women and the few African Americans who manage to reach high positions. What counts is the next election, the next promotion, the next hire. Will a woman have an equal chance? Will an African American have any chance?

Would Hillary’s election mean that a woman, Republican or Democrat, has an equal chance as a man in the next election? Of course not.

All the complaints about affirmative action and the whining by white men that they now suffer from discrimination imply one thing – that less qualified women and minorities are being unfairly put in front. But it’s very hard to find any such examples. Much more likely is that less qualified white men get the nod. Hence the slow pace toward equality of opportunity.

We have not reached equality, much less some fantasy world where having been the object of discrimination forever gives one extra power. We have reached a point far enough away from unquestioned white male privilege that the reduction in that advantage is being felt. None of the complainers can cite a single study that shows any real privilege for minorities or for women. But that won’t stop the whining.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, November 26, 2013

The Website That Didn’t Work

                                                                                                                             

Many people have offered explanations for why the Affordable Care Act’s website, HealthCare.gov, has not worked as planned. Some blame President Obama, as if he were the programmer responsible. Some blame “government” more generally, meaning that government cannot do anything well, certainly not as well as private enterprise. Some blame liberalism, linking the politics of health care with the technological implementation of signing up for insurance. Many of these explanations are openly partisan, created by conservatives who so badly want the ACA to fail that they shut down the whole government.

Certainly Obama must take some responsibility, as chief promoter of the legislation for which the website is supposed to act as gateway. Although he was far away from the details of constructing the website, he took political credit for winning the most ambitious transformation of American health care since the passage of Medicare in 1965. Because Republicans have attacked this legislation so vehemently since the day it was signed in 2010, the political significance attached to how it would work grew enormously. Obama must take blame for two sets of failures: the technical problems of the website and the massive cancellations of private insurance policies that contradict his oft-stated promise that those who liked their health care plans could keep them. These two failures have significantly damaged the Democrats, but more important, they have made life more difficult for millions of Americans.

Republicans cannot give away all of the blame, though. They decided well before the ACA came to a vote that they were going to oppose every element of health care reform. The possibility of reaching compromise ended already in July 2009, just six months after Obama took office, when Republican senators vowed to defeat any Democratic bill: minority leader Mitch McConnell said, “We’re doing everything we can to defeat it.”

That was just the beginning of Republican efforts to torpedo ACA, a story which is well known. At the federal level, House Republicans kept trying to repeal the bill. They refused to provide the funds requested by the Department of Health and Human Services to implement the ACA. At the state level, Republican-controlled states refused to work with the federal government to implement the insurance exchanges.

Is this just normal politics? Not if we look at the first version of Obamacare, which we could call Romneycare in Massachusetts. When Governor Mitt Romney exulted about passage of his most significant legislative achievement in 2006, he was flanked by Democrats. The Massachusetts health care bill was a bipartisan creation, written by Jonathan Gruber, an MIT economist who is a Democrat, and Robert Moffit, from the conservative Heritage Foundation. After its passage, Democrats helped to implement it. Now it functions to increase the number of people with insurance and reduce the annual growth of insurance costs. That’s how government is supposed to work.

Here’s one more reason, perhaps the most important, why HealthCare.gov failed to work properly. Giant new computer systems usually fail. Other huge government IT projects have had similar results. Last year, the Air Force scrapped a software project that cost $1 billion over seven years. A spokesman said that the Expeditionary Combat Support System “has not yielded any significant military capability.”

In case anyone believes that government is the problem here, giant commercial IT projects also fail. Last year, Apple rolled out Apple Maps after two years of development as a competitor to Google Maps, but it made embarrassing errors, and CEO Tim Cook apologized publicly. A year later, however, Apple Maps is successfully taking customers away from Google. The 2010 merger of United Airlines and Continental caused massive foul-ups when the two reservation systems could not cooperate properly. In August, the Department of Transportation fined United because 9000 refund requests from customers were still delayed.

These are not isolated cases. One survey of thousands of big IT development projects estimated that over 40% failed and 52% were “challenged”, meaning over budget, behind schedule or not meeting user expectations. Even if those numbers are exaggerated, the likelihood of HealthCare.gov working on its first day, or even in its first month, was small.

That takes us back to the beginning – the responsibility of the Obama administration to integrate this knowledge into their planning. Because several different software development companies worked on different parts of the website, and its proper functioning required computer systems from many different government agencies and insurance companies to mesh smoothly, a long period of testing was necessary before the public rollout. That didn’t happen.

The Obama administration failed to deliver what it promised. Republican obstructionism contributed to the failure. But now more people who are eligible are enrolling for Medicaid. People who have signed up are already saving money on insurance. Eventually the website problems will be fixed. Only then will we be able to weigh the value of this singular reform of our health care system.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, November 19, 2013