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country fly, city fly

Atop a mountain this past summer, backcountry camping for three nights an eight hour hike from civilization, I spent an hour each day keeping up my writing by scribbling narratives of our daily advenutres into my smartphone. This is one of my entries.

day two

Anyone in search of an example of modern evolutionary pressure look no further than the common fly. 

Back in the city, like up high in the mountains, flies are ubiquitous.

But unlike the mountains, the cities are filled streets, buildings, parks and coffee shops full of people.

City flies need to be smart and fast.  Any fly that is not keenly aware of its surroundings and has not the instinctual inclination to leap into the air and off into the safety of flight is doomed to be swatted by any of a million people. Flies are not be dullards, and any fly born without the inbuilt drive to flee is unlikely to survive long enough to pass on its disadvantageous genome to a future generation.

We will have spent nearly three days up high in the backcountry camping in the mountains where a million variety of insects thrive. In fact even high up above the tree line where even in mid-August patches of snow remain in the share of large rocks, there are so many flies that an adventure-seeker is bound to spend as much time swatting away bugs as admiring the views. And it struck me as curious—though probably less so for the fly which I smacked dead upon my bare forearm—that there must be significantly less pressure, evolutionarily speaking of course, for mountaintop flies to carry a genome that knows better than to get smacked by a human—which a fly may rarely, if ever, see in its short life on the side of a mountain—than for one of its city cousins who encounter humans as a matter of course and have no such luxury as to leisurely investigate a bare forearm on a Friday afternoon.

Nearly every fly I encountered up on that mountain was indifferent to the risk of sudden death carried by my swiftly moving hand. Nearly every fly sat patiently and still as I reached over and snuffed it away.

Smacking a city fly requires speed and agility on the part of a human, but one feels superhuman atop a mountain as the dull flies understand too little what awaits the looming shape and shadow of a hand moving towards them.

Evolution at work.

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cliffs and ladders

Atop a mountain this past summer, backcountry camping for three nights an eight hour hike from civilization, I spent an hour each day keeping up my writing by scribbling narratives of our daily advenutres into my smartphone. This is one of my entries.

day one

The logic of the warning signs which were hung at either end of that certain section of trail suggesting the use of safety gear was irrefutable. That fact was doubly logical as I clung for dear life to the side of a cliff wall with nothing but the tension of my fingers and a tenuous trust of the laws of physics on my side.

We had been hiking for literal hours, always aware that somewhere up ahead we were due flute an encounter with a technical section of trail that would bring us face to face with a climb requiring hand over hand up a series of angled steel bars pounded into the cliff face. A steel cable ran parallel to the mountain ladder, it self bolted at intervals into the same rock and intended for that aforementioned safety gear.

Seasoned hikers would have carried helmets and harnesses and used a double-caribeener system tethering them to the cable as they climbed. Carefully they would scale the fifty of rungs always tied to a line to catch them if they fell.

We free climbed.

And to boot we were carrying weighty backpacks stuffed with all the gear and food we would need to camp for three days on the mountain. So I, fifty pounds heavier on my feet and being perpetually tugged backwards clung to the bars and took them as best I could, one ring at a time. One false move, one misplaced step, and I could have, would have, fallen not just to the starting point of our climb but a further hundred meters of the lower edge and onto the jagged rocks below. If you suspect I am exaggerating for effect, let me be clear that if anything I am failing to convey the deadly seriousness of this particular section of nature hike.

My fear of heights kicked into overdrive and with sweaty hands and shaking legs and a heartbeat that would rival my run training sprints, I clambered to the top and all but kissed the ground.

For what it’s worth, we’re taking a different route down to complete the loop and I’m pretty sure there are no mountain ladders.

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the great pasta kerfuffle

Eating pasta on the streets of Rome

I alluded to this in my most recent post on brand loyalty: the great spaghetti sauce change up of 2024 and the “kerfuffle that caused” in our house.

First of all, we’re not Italian. So when I write about “spaghetti sauce” I need to be exceptionally clear that we are basically talking about the red bolognese-ish sauce that we concoct on our stove top and pour over top of spaghetti pasta noodles boiled from a box. It is a Canadian-slash-North-American bastardization of traditional Italian pastas prepared out of raw convenience, and as I wrote in my previous post, a lot of brand habit and loyalty.

Second, I’ve tasted great pasta sauces. We have been to Italy and I have eaten cacio e pepe and ragù alla bolognese, both on the narrow street cafes of Rome, and I know—I know—that what we make at home is not even a knock off, but rather a work night meal distant cousin-by-marriage thrice removed alternate version of these dishes.

What we are very poorly copying is a kind of bolognese sauce, probably better known in Italian as a ragù alla bolognese or more simply something like a ragù bolognese.

The difference is that for fifteen or so years our version involved a little powdered spice pack that got mixed into some browned ground beef with a can of tomato paste and a couple cups of tap water and rehydrated into a chemical after-tasting red sauce that took about fifteen minutes from fridge to table and was “good enough” to make it through the meal rush on average once per week.

But then we went to Italy, as I mentioned, and I had some time on my hands over the winter and I started thinking to myself that I probably could use some of that time on my hands to come up with a better version of our weekly sauce hack that (a) was just as simple and cost effective to prepare, (b) didn’t come from a spice envelope via the grocery store and (c) sure, still wasn’t an Italian sauce but probably tasted a bit closer—maybe a first cousin, only once removed kinda thing.

So. This is my new recipe.

bardo’s sausage ragu

400 grams of spicy Italian sausage meat
1 onion
2 cloves of garlic
1 large can of tomato sauce
1 small can of tomato paste
2 solid glugs of olive oil

Brown the sausage meat. I like to break it into hearty chunks, but you can crumble it, too. Either, or. Add the onion and garlic to soften. Add the tomato paste and sauce as well as the olive oil, and simmer it all for a while. Serve over pasta.

In that previous post I wrote about the habits connected to this thing I was thinking of as brand loyalty. We were stuck in this rut of bad spaghetti sauce from a powder for years simply because there was a lot of cognitive load to go from that weekly routine and the ingredient list we had memorized over to this updated version.  I started cooking this new version, and yet the groceries would appear after a shopping trip with the ingredients for the old version. I would make a trip to the store to buy the stuff for the new version and then the wrong one would get made, or a broken version of the new one would get made (missing an ingredient or two) and then feelings would be hurt on both sides because “we knew the old one” and “you’re complicating things” and “but this version is nicer” and “yeah, it’s good but you need to update the shopping list so we buy the right stuff.” It was a kerfuffle. 

Six months later we’re pretty locked in on the new updated recipe, but seriously—it took some leaping and jumping and planning to break the old habit—to break the loyalty to the old, easy way.

And that is what I was getting at in my last post: walking into a grocery store and trying to unravel the list you might have built into your brain about how to make simple daily meals for yourself and/or your family is not as simple as picking up a new brand of ketchup or a new cut of meat or a different vegetable you’re not used to cooking with. It’s an extra step. And that’s a challenge when you shop while traveling, or just checking out a new food market—hopefully you’re the kind of person who is willing to step up to that kind of challenge.

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loyal out of habit

I’ve been thinking a lot about brand loyalty lately.

I’m surrounded by food these days. Overflowing shelves packed with things that seem delicious and interesting and unique—but yet I don’t recognize a single brand name.  It might sound like I’m describing some kind of weird suburban middle-aged man’s nightmare. But no. On the contrary. I’ve just been wandering the aisles of a local grocery store that specializes in importing and selling products that either originate in Europe and Asia or serve a more eclectic low-volume local food producer niche (like organic and vegan and gluten-free, say.) And my “regular” grocery store doesn’t stock much of this, or if they do it is relegated to a single aisle down which my cart rarely turns because, well—I have this kinda sorta outdated idea of brand loyalty stuck in my thick craw.

I’m going to be shopping at this new place a lot more in the foreseeable future. Reasons. If you know you know kinda reasons.

But that does mean that I’ll really need to get over my brand loyalty complex and get a little less picky about scanning the shelves for those familiar brands which I’ve been eating my whole life. 

Because I just have.

After all, brand loyalty has a lot to do with habit, doesn’t it?  We like to tell ourselves it’s about quality or consistency or other jibber-jabber ideas, but in the end—I mean if we’re really being honest with ourselves—it’s a lot to do with habit.  How many of us, honestly, have tried a different brand of ketchup with enough gusto to give it a proper chance? How many of us stray from our regular brand of margarine? Or even try a unique variety of salad dressing, let alone a whole other brand name?

Oh, I know you adventurous types exist—maybe you’re even in the majority in this little subset of readers reading a food-ish blog—but take your average ordinary grocery shopper and I have a gut vibe check on that, and know how I personally shop, and so long as price isn’t really a factor then—well—I’m a brand loyal guy through and through.

But it’s all just habit. Lowering the cognitive load of changing things up. Climbing out of that rut is hard work, right?

We shop when we travel. 

I mean, even when we go to the mountains for a weekend, we hit the grocery store and buy at least half our meals to prep in a rental kitchen (assuming and assuring the condo or whatever we rent usually has some kind of kitchen.)  The grocery store in our favourite mountain town, though, is just another cookie cutter version of our local everyday store. Maybe that’s a bad example. 

But here’s a better one: when we traveled to Europe last year—we went shopping. We hit up the local markets and grocery stores and bought up breakfast foods and stuff to make sandwhiches and you know what? Gasp. Surprise. How odd? We couldn’t find all those North American brands in the corner grocery store in Paris or Milan. Who’d have thunk it, huh?

Of course we didn’t.

And yeah, its the adventure of travel. A different brand of milk. A strange box of cereal. A little jar of jam with a label in a foreign language and I’m pretty sure that says “strawberry” but I could totally be wrong, right? Adventure!

But then you go back home, settle back into your routine and you’re there, right back there, buying the familiar brands to which you have built up a habitual loyalty. And that’s okay, too? It really is.

But why?

Brand loyalty. Maybe it’s just really good marketing. Maybe it really is about quality. Yet, I like to think it has more to do with something I alluded to a couple paragraphs back: you gotta think more when you shift brands. There is a cognitive hurdle to leap over. There is a decision to make. If you’re already trying to figure out what to make for dinner for the next three days, who wants to add to the complexity by deciding if maybe we should switch up the brand of soy sauce, coffee, or cheese we’ve been buying for twenty years.  Some day I’ll write a whole post about the day I invented a new spaghetti sauce standard in our house and the kerfuffle that caused—and yet now that we’ve cleared the chasm between the old way and the new way, we can’t imagine doing it the old way any more.  It was all brand loyalty and breaking habits.

I think about brand loyalty a lot when I’m wandering those aisles. People are going to shop at a store like this one, maybe for the first time or maybe over and over for a few things here and a few things there, and every new product they put in their cart is a decision they need to make? Right there. Every break from a familiar brand is a barrier to busting down an old habit.

So, how many habits are you willing to change while visiting your local market, huh? I’m going to bend my mind a lot in the coming weeks.