Pringles are not potatoes. And now Hershey's Kissables are no longer "candy coated milk chocolate," but "chocolate candy."

From the Candy Blog [via Consumerist]:

The new version is called Chocolate Candy which is code for chocolate-flavored confection, or candy that contains chocolate but can’t be called chocolate because it has other stuff in it that’s not permitted by the FDA definitions (like more oil than actual chocolate).

That's not the only Hershey's chocolate whose chocolate has been diluted, apparently:

It strikes me as odd that Hershey’s new Pure Chocolate campaign comes on the heels of their attempts to dilute the definition of chocolate and have changed the formulation on many of their favorite candies (5th Avenue & Whatchamacallit) to include new coatings that are not pure chocolate any longer.  

What's next? Non-corn Corn Flakes? Non-wheat Wheat Thins? Non-cheese Cheese Whiz? (Okay, maybe you already have your doubts about that last one.)

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Political strategists think alike, and their Machiavellian mindset leads them without fail to the low road of branding their opponent as unpatriotic, un-American, and vaguely French. That's the takeaway from leaked emails by Mark Penn, former top strategist of the Clinton campaign, who it turns out suggested an uber-patriotic approach to Clinton that the McCain camp has taken up, with gusto, in the last several weeks of the presidential campaign.

The New York Times has an excerpt from a soon-to-be-published article in The Atlantic, which includes hundreds of leaked emails from the Clinton campaign. Here is one choice bit of Penn advice:

All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared towards showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting that in a new light.

Save it for 2050. … Every speech should contain the line you were born in the middle of America American to the middle class in the middle of the last century. And talk about the basic bargain as about the deeply American values you grew up with, learned as a child and that drive you today. Values of fairness, compassion, responsibility, giving back …

Let’s explicitly own "American" in our programs, the speeches and the values. He doesn’t. Make this a new American Century, the American Strategic Energy Fund. Let’s use our logo to make some flags we can give out. Let’s add flag symbols to the backgrounds.

McCain's campaign seems to be following this script line by line. His campaign has adopted a new slogan, "Country First," and his campaign ads and statements in recent weeks — especially since Obama's Berlin speech — have highlighted Obama's celebrity appeal to foreigners, and accused the Illinois senator of being unpatriotic.

Things get complicated by the race issue. For example, in an ABC News interview after Obama's Berlin speech, one McCain supporter made a point of mentioning how McCain was "all-American" and "one of us." Those could be references to Obama's lack of patriotism — or they could be code words for race. 

Intentionally or not, McCain's current line of attack strikes both of these lightning rods. His strategists, like Penn, know that "international" and "American" are mutually exclusive terms in this country's politics — even if trends of globalization mean that, in the "real world," American and global interests look increasingly alike.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

A reader E. commented on my post, "The politics of Pringles," asking whether the claims in it were true. I wasn’t sure if E. was talking about the post itself or another reader comment, which claimed that the food we eat is made from petroleum. In any case, here are the facts on both claims:

Are Pringles potato chips, or some potato-like substance in a can?

The latter. Their potato content is less than 50 percent, and Procter & Gamble, the maker of Pringles, has itself argued in a British court that the Pringle cannot be considered a "potato crisp" (the British term for "potato chip"). For corroboration, see the links in my previous post, or this BBC article. 

Now, there is a silly Internet rumor floating around that Pringles are made from leftover McDonald’s French fries, which is untrue, as this post at urbanlegends.about.com makes clear. That said, there is also a lot of funny business that goes into making McDonald’s French fries taste so good, as you can read here.

Is our food made from petroleum?

It depends on what you mean by "made from."

Today’s industrial farms grow crops like corn and wheat using chemical fertilizers and pesticides, both of which are derived from petroleum. Fossil fuels are also needed to plow and irrigate the fields and ship the harvest to market. (See this New York Times article about how rising fuel costs are hurting American farmers.)

So, our food is made using lots and lots of petroleum. Even in organic industrial agriculture, the fossil-fuel tab is considerable: Michael Pollan says that the 80 calories of energy in a single, one-pound box of lettuce requires the burning of 4,600 calories of fossil fuels to produce and ship.

Is petroleum actually in our food?

If you are like most Americans and eat food with artificial dyes in it, then yes.

Synthetic food dyes are "derived primarily from petroleum and coal sources," according to the Food and Drug Administration. In fact, this U.S. News article points out that the fears about the ill effects that petroleum- and coal-based artificial dyes may have on children are prompting companies to switch to natural, carmine-based dyes. The problem is, carmine is made from ground-up insects. Carmine also happens to be an allergen.

And so it goes.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Here’s one of the most concise pieces I’ve seen detailing the genocide in Darfur:

It seems to me that not enough attention is being paid to the racial component of the killings. This 60 Minutes piece describes the African Arab militias known as the Janjaweed as “racist,” which is an apt term but one I’ve rarely heard, even though it might translate the genocide there into terms that Westerners can better understand. The social categories in Sudan are complicated, as they are everywhere, but that said the genocide there is not unlike the lynchings and other kinds of Jim Crow-era violence that whites used to intimidate, terrorize, and drive off African Americans.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Everyone (even the president) talks about America’s "addiction to oil," and this recent debate over offshore drilling has made me think that the addiction analogy is a useful way to think through the issues.

Republicans want to drill offshore and in other new areas (such as Alaska) because they think it’s a quick and easy way to reduce gas prices. I’m somewhat sympathetic to this view: More supply will lower prices, and it is clear that many Americans are hurting terribly because of the higher costs of not only gas but all the goods and services that come from the burning of fossil fuels in our economy — basically, everything else. Yes, the higher price of gas is reducing consumption, just like a gas tax (remember the discussion of that in 2004?), which means less carbon emissions and less global warming, but the pacing is the problem: Everything is happening way too suddenly. The sharp rise in prices has blindsided Americans, especially those of fewer means, and these are households that are teetering on the edge to begin with, and can’t absorb the one-two punch of higher gas and food costs.

Democrats argue that drilling offshore will cause serious, irreparable harm to the environment, and may not even help lower gas prices that much, if at all, given what a small amount of oil can feasibly be pumped from the bottom of the sea, relative to Middle Eastern sources. All offshore drilling leads to oil waste being pumped into the sea, not to mention a risk of disastrous oil spills during transport, and so the damage that this kind of drilling can cause to oceans and seashores (and, more pragmatically, to the tourism industry) is very real.

But the most persuasive argument to me is that more drilling simply delays the solution to the problem. The solution is clear to everyone, I think: We need to develop non-polluting, renewable sources of energy. By drilling, we divert limited economic and political resources toward propping up an industry that eventually must be phased out. Every investment dollar that goes into the oil industry is a dollar not going to green energy.

It’s like a drug addict, who knows she has to quit, but keeps finding new reasons to shoot up. The solution is to stop using. The effects of using are clearly bad, and every time she gives into temptation, she makes the situation worse, and the addiction harder to break. Likewise, by continuing to give into our oil addiction, we’re making global warming and our Middle Eastern dependency worse, and moving further away from our goal of abstinence.

It’s a bit ironic that the Democrats are the ones who advocate quitting cold turkey this time, while the Republicans want "just one more taste."

If we really do need just "one more taste" to tide over our struggling families, then we might as well use the oil sources that have already been tapped — diverting some of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and recycling existing oilfields. It’s sort of like using the drugs stashed under your mattress rather than heading into the city to re-up. (Not that I have any experience in these things.) It’s still bad behavior, but at least you don’t have to go too far.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Medical research owes much to the mouse, that wee rodent that is more guinea pig than guinea pig, standing in selflessly (if unwillingly) on behalf of human beings in countless lab experiments that palpitate, penetrate, irradiate, and incinerate it in the name of science. Apparently, the mouse is an excellent surrogate for us humans across a wide variety of physiological measures.

All this said, this study, which examines the effect of ending alcohol consumption in mice, made me laugh. The study authors argue that their research shows a "causal link between abstinence from alcohol drinking and depression." I'm sure a good deal of the theoretical complexity behind this research got lost in the write-up, but I found it hilarious that we can infer this "causal link" in human beings by seeing whether mice who stop drinking can swim in a beaker of water. (It's called the Porsolt Swim Test.) Those mice who just float without swimming are deemed depressed. No word on whether they subsequently get therapy or AA.

I also love the name of the center responsible for this study, the "Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies." It sounds like a fun place to work: beer pong every Friday?

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

I was disturbed by this report that a former Baptist, now atheist, soldier is alleging discrimination in the Army because of his beliefs. He served two tours of duty in Iraq, but he claims he was ostracized and even threatened after he refused to pray with other soldiers.

After decades of virulent racial segregation, the U.S. military has won an admirable reputation for creating esprit de corps across ethnic and racial lines, and has made recent strides in extending equality to women servicemembers (its intolerance of gays and lesbians in uniform, of course, is a different matter). In any case, you'd think the military would know better not to discriminate based on religion, if only to avoid the public perception, particularly in the Middle East, that America is a Christian nation waging a war against Islam. It doesn't help that a group like the Officers' Christian Fellowship, which has representatives "on nearly all military bases worldwide," has made it their mission to "raise up a godly military," whatever that means.

When I was watching that series Carrier, I found the segment on religion particularly interesting, because evangelical Christians clearly dominated (well, there was a Wiccan group) and I got the sense that sometimes officers led prayers that everyone was expected to follow. It made me wonder how atheist soldiers got along with the rest of the crew. (Of course, the discrimination that believers face in many secular settings is worrisome, too. But hopefully there are fewer guns and bombs involved.)

Religiously inclined soldiers can take solace in their faith after going through the hell of armed combat, and surely that's why there are so many chaplains in the ranks of the military. Yet, if I were a man of the cloth (for the sake of argument), I wonder what would be going through my head as I blessed soldiers going off to kill the enemy. That "Thou shalt not kill" business in the Bible seems rather clear. When asking for God's help, it's probably best not to ask for things He doesn't much care for, like killing. And you know the other side is praying hard, too; asking God to take sides in a fight is like asking a parent to choose between her kids.

It reminds me of what Lincoln said during the Civil War when he was asked by a group of leaders to join them in prayer that God be on the Union's side. He answered, "Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side, for God is always right."

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen