Dear Kid,

The USA Today section of today’s paper highlights problems with excessive drinking. This is not exactly news, but they have Facts and you know how I love a good fact now and then. (Note: USA Today got their facts from the CDC, so I’m pretty confident in their findings.)

Here’s the most shocking one (imho): 1 in 10 working age adults will die from excessive drinking. Since you are either in or approaching Working Adult Age, this should be pretty important to you.

Between 2006 and 2010 (not a particularly long time), 88,000 people (a particularly large number) died from alcohol use. That’s the size of a medium sized city. That’s approximately 5 times the student population at Ohio University. It’s twice the undergrad population at The Ohio State University. It’s more than all the Ivy League schools put together.

In other words, this hits A Lot of People.

Excessive alcohol use includes binge drinking, heavy weekly drinking, underage consumption, and drinking while pregnant.

Let us discuss.

Drinking while pregnant means, well, drinking while pregnant. According to many doctors it means any and all alcoholic consumption any time during pregnancy and any time while trying to get pregnant (it being notoriously difficult to pinpoint exactly when these things will happen). Hopefully, not something you’re worrying about right now, but you should still know.

Underage drinking means drinking while not yet of legal age. Duh. Did I mention the It’s Not Legal part? Or the It Leads to All Sorts of Problems part? Or the Don’t Call Me to Bail You Out of Jail part?

Binge drinking means 5 or more drinks within 2 or 3 hours for men or 4 or more drinks for women within the same timeframe. Ha! you say. Who would drink that much? Or perhaps you wouldn’t say that because you know plenty of people who do. Binge drinking is rather prevalent on campuses. What’s worse is that (fasten your seat belt) 1 in 6 adults (that’s 38 million people if you’re counting) indulges in binge drinking.

Heavy weekly drinking means 15 or more drinks per week for men or 8 or more drinks per week for women. With some quick math you can probably figure out this means just 2 or more drinks a day for a man or 1 a day for a woman – on a consistent basis – can cause real, life threatening problems.

Let’s dig further, shall we?

“A drink” is defined as: 12 ounces of beer, 5 ounces of wine, 1.5 ounces of liquor. Ever watch someone pour a glass of wine? Frequently well over 5 ounces. Fancy mixed drinks? A typical Long Island Ice Tea has 2.5 ounces of liquor. And those red solo cups? Typically, they hold 16 ounces. Get my point? Supersize Me, alcohol style.

And we’re not talking shaving 20 minutes off someone’s life span. According to the CDC, people who die from alcohol abuse die about 30 years earlier than they would have otherwise.

Thirty years.

Pretty much forever from your perspective I assume.

If you think this is meant to scare/worry/upset/concern you, you are absolutely correct.

Have a nice caffeine-free diet coke or a glass of water and live on.

Love, Mom

Dear Kid,

Did you hear about the bear?

A 2 or 3 year old bear (no one’s gotten close enough to check his ID) is wandering around the Cincinnati area.

Authorities (I wonder if “authorities” refer to themselves as authorities) believe the bear wandered north from Kentucky (after swimming across the Ohio River) looking for a mate or Graeter’s ice cream. The bear was roaming through Milford earlier in the week and yesterday was spotted in Montgomery.

The authorities (see above) warned people to stay away from the bear (apparently bears are not known for sharing dessert) but they have no intention of harming the bear in any way (three cheers for harm-free bear handling). The just want to let the beast meander his way to wherever he’s going (bears are not known for carrying working GPS systems).

The public (which I think means anyone who is not “an authority”) should not put out food for the bear. But if the bear happens to lumber your way, and if you happen to be growing blueberries or vegetables or salmon or anything else that bears eat (which is almost anything) you should prepare for a small harvest this year.

The authorities are keeping an eye on the bear (the way some parents follow the school bus on the kids’ first day of Kindergarten [for the record, I never did that]) making sure the bear doesn’t get lost in the wrong neighborhood. They are also going to make sure the bear doesn’t climb up a tree and get stuck. (Not sure why this is a problem unless bears go wacko in trees. As Uncle David pointed out years ago, we don’t find a lot of bear skeletons in trees, suggesting bears figure out how to get down. Actually he was talking about cats at the time, but the principle is the same.)

If you happen to spot a bear, enjoy the view, but stay away. Very few bears are taught to behave nicely.

Love, Mom

Dear Kid,

You have such a good Daddy.

As we were leaving Niagara on the Lake on Sunday, Daddy said, “Would you like to stop at the chocolate place?”

On the way to Niagara on the Lake, we’d passed Chocolate F/X but we didn’t have time to stop. I’d forgotten about it, but your papa remembered.

Of course, we stopped. (Did I mention that we ate our way from one end of Niagara to the other?)

“If you can’t dip it in chocolate, it’s not worth eating” – Chocolate F/X

We met the owners, Art and Wilma, who happily told us all about Chocolate F/X while we sampled chocolate at their chocolate sampling bar. One of us sampled more than the other (I’ll leave it to you to guess which of us).

They import most of their chocolate from the Ivory Coast and Ghana, and then they proceed to do Amazing Things with it. You can watch some of the Amazing Things through the big glass windows (which we did) or take a tour (which we didn’t do).

If you’re planning a trip in that general direction, you might want to include time for a chocolate class (guess what’s on my agenda the next time we’re in that area?).

From the Unexpected Category, they carry a whole line of diabetic friendly products, cocoa mulch (seriously—mulch as is put down outside around the plants), and ice wine truffles. We tried an ice wine truffle. I may have to try it again to be sure it’s as good as I thought the first time…

Yum…

Love, Mom

Dear Kid,

Turns out I know the Top Eater in Cincinnati.

Let me back up. Turns out there is such a thing as the Top Eater in Cincinnati. And he’s one of my co-workers.

We found out when Sean Mulcahey, the eater in question, came back from lunch a week or two ago with a statue the size of small horse. He had just stepped out to eat 10 cheese coneys in 3 minutes. Who does that? Well, Sean.

I found this completely fascinating. Learning about the competitive eating scene was almost, but not quite, as startling as learning about American gypsy culture (via the TV show My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding) but with fewer Swarovski crystals. It’s a culture something about which I knew absolutely nothing so I grilled (maybe I should have sauteed him?) Sean (after giving him some popcorn to get the taste of cheese coney out of his mouth).

Are you familiar with MLE? Yes, we have another sports (sports?) acronym in our world. Major League Eating represents the top eaters in the country. These are the folks who snort down 7 billion hot dogs in 12 seconds. And competitions go so much farther than Nathan’s Hot Dogs. There are tater tot eating competitions, oyster eating competitions, grilled cheese eating competitions, pie eating contests, peeps eating competitions….you get the point. If it can be digested, it can be an eating competition.

Many of us have been known to pack away an entire package of Oreos or a gallon (or two) of ice cream in one sitting. We thought we were pros, but it turns out we are the rankest of amateurs.

Professional eating is about huge volume in zero time. Think vacuum cleaner of eating. This sort of eating makes Booker look like a slow, dainty eater. Get the point?

Back in the olden days, eating competitions were held at county fairs and other friendly local events. You went, you ate, end of story. Today, Major League Eating (also known at the International Federation of Competitive Eaters) wants to control the competitive eating world. You have to sign their contract to compete in a lot of the events. Which has caused an uproar (or possibly an upchuck) in some circles. But these days there is real money to be made at some of these events. Or free tea for a year. Or a trophy the size of a small horse.

Since Sean is the only Competitive Eater I know (or at least I think he is), I can’t attest to the personalities of most people who participate in eating competitions. I can say that we think Sean is pretty terrific. Also funny. And that’s not just because he has to help me with a major project today.

Love, Mom

Dear Kid,

There we were, driving along I90 in upstate New York (waaay upstate) when Dad (who was enjoying his favorite driving pastime of reading every sign along the road) said, “Grape Discovery Center.”

Since neither of us had ever seen a discovered grape, we immediately got off the highway, drove passed miles of grape vines, waved to the Welch’s factory, and found ourselves at the Grape Discovery Center.

Which is, in a word, fantastic.

Not only do they have everything grape imaginable (Little frogs holding wine glasses? Check. Grape seed oil? Check. Water bottles shaped like a bunch of grapes? Check.) but they have grape juice to taste, wines to drink, and wine slushies to slurp. We sampled the Concord grape juice (too much driving still to do to sample anything alcoholic) and it was a-MAZ-ing. I’m not a grape juice fan particularly and I could have chugged a gallon of this. It was fresh, it was smooth, it was sweet, it was everything you want when you say yum.

There was a Learning Center in the facility and we wandered through (one of us wandered faster than the other), where we could learn about grapes and Welch’s.

Turns out, O Best Beloved, grape juice was created by religion. Let that bit of news seep in for a moment.

‘Tis true. Allow me to explain.

Dr. Thomas Bramwell Welch was a dentist and Methodist. He was a teetotaler and knew that even a teeny sip of wine was highly problematic for alcoholics. But he felt strongly that everyone should be able to take communion.

He mulled. He considered. He contemplated. He cogitated. And then he invented grape juice.

You’d think it would be easy to a no brainer. Squeeze grapesà get grape juice. Well, my friend, you’d be only partially right. If you drink it right away, it’s juice. If you wait, the juice ferments into wine.

Dr. Welch followed Louis Pasteur’s lead and cooked his juice (in their bottles) to kill off all the yeasty, fermenty things.

Thrilled with his discovery, Dr. Welch grabbed up his bottles and went to church. Where they patted him on the head (figuratively speaking) and told him they weren’t interested (literally speaking).

Dr. Welch was pretty bummed and went back to polishing teeth free of all sorts of stains (except grape juice stains because no one was drinking his juice).

That might have been the end of the story, except that he had a Most Wonderful Son who figured out Many Wonderful Things like how to sell grape juice.

It takes about 2.4 pounds of grapes (between 600 and 800 grapes) to make a bottle of wine.

After many, many years of hard work, Welch’s became an overnight success and grape juice is now one of the most important non-alcoholic, non-caffeinated beverages in the world. Right after caffeine free diet coke.

We had a lovely visit to the Grape Discovery Center. And it only took about 20 minutes to talk Dad out of trying to grow grape vines at home.

Love, Mom

Dear Kid,

Do you know what a butter tart is? According to My Friend the Internet, a butter tart is “a type of small pastry tart highly regarded in Canadian cuisine and considered one of Canada’s quintessential desserts.” Yesterday, I had part of a quintessentially Canadian dessert.

It was quite delicious (according to me), and since we split one 4 ways (Daddy, Grandma Lala, and Grandpa shared it with me), it was just the right amount.

We have been eating our way through Niagara on the Lake. I thought we were coming for the theater (we saw four fantastic shows in three days) but that turned out to be almost incidental to the food.

We’ve been staying at a charming B&B where the proprietress believes in serving lovely 3,000 calorie breakfasts. One day we had eggs Benedict, fruit with honey and yogurt, and blueberry bread. Today we had cranberry scones, fruit with a honey sauce, individual soufflés with a homemade dill sauce, toast, breakfast salsa, turkey bacon…you get the point.

Some days we’ve had a little bit of lunch; some days we almost haven’t bothered. And the dinners have been delish. And about 7 billion calories each.

Friday night was amazing. The six of us had dinner at a winery called Peller Estates. Our waiter, the charming Benoit who insisted on not being told the outcome of the French/Swiss soccer game because he had recorded it and planned to watch it later in the evening (the French won), brought course after course after course.

We started with chocolate martinis and an amuse bouche which was a small piece of smoked fish and sauce—slightly more than one bite, but not much more. Dad and I shared a scallop appetizer (about which I am going to dream happily for many years to come). Then a palate cleanser which was an ice made of sparkling wine with strawberry rhubarb syrup poured over it. Are you hungry?

For a main course I had swordfish (yum) and for dessert Grandma and I shared a tiramisu which was very good but only vaguely related to a tiramisu either of us had ever seen.

And being as how we were at a winery, there was wine. But since you’re underage and I’m not good at describing wines, I’ll leave it at that.

Off to cross back into the US and bringing wonderful memories and a few extra tons of weight around our middles.

Love, Mom