Kiroshi, Scurvy, and Lunch

Kiroshi, Scurvy, and Lunch

Karōshi (過労死^?), which can be translated literally from Japanese as "death from overwork", is occupational sudden death. The first case of karōshi was reported in 1969 with the death from a stroke of a 29-year-old male worker in the shipping department of Japan's largest newspaper company.  In 1987, as public concern increased, the Japanese Ministry of Labour began to publish statistics on karōshi. My father, Roger Wallace, recognized an imminent health threat when he saw one. He had spent his entire life dedicated to avoiding Karoshi, but he now had a name, and a diagnosis, and a cause. Now, normally when someone becomes concerned about a public health threat to a nation, there are telethons, or walks, or fund raisers, or public service messages, or research into the causes, prevention, and treatment of this new scourge on a community or a nation. My father, Roger Wallace, decided to handle the threat, the scourge, the public health menace of Karoshi, by eating lunch. Yes, it was a hard battle against a terrible threat, so he did it regularly, daily even. Every once in a while my dad would need help with some task such as cleaning out the attic, or storage, or building something like a fence, drainage ditch, whatever. He would call me up and we would discuss the details of the project. I would be briefed on the logistics. Plans would be drawn up, a schedule, time table, and a date set for the task. In his later years, schedules would be typed up, edited, emailed, then discussed, and revised. When the appointed day for the task arrived, I would get up early, usually around five am, shower, drive over to Orinda, and my dad would be eating breakfast, usually a sweet roll heated in the microwave oven and orange juice, Marjorie would be drinking a pot of tea with four tea bags. We would go over the schedule, logistics, then my dad would realize it was time for lunch. Well, not quite time, but soon, it would soon be time for lunch. So, let’s go to lunch right now. We’ll, beat the rush.

So, we go to lunch. Karoshi, you must fight against Karoshi. Now lunch was a prolonged process. When I am working on a project. I work, and work, and work, and then later in the afternoon when I am truly starving, I will get some fast food, and a diet coke,  scarf it down, wash my hands, and get back to the task at hand.  The major goal being alleviation of hunger and thirst. My dad on the other hand was fighting two major health care scourges in Northern California, Karoshi, death from overwork, and Scurvy, an 18^th century blight on the British Navy from lack of Vitamin C. You see, the Romans fought scurvy by drinking vinegar. It was my opinion that Roman soldiers really wanted to drink wine, but the storage containers weren’t air tight, so they had some vinegar, and the officers just didn’t want to waste “wine”, really, it is good for you, it will fight scurvy. Trust me. I’m an officer. The British Navy fought scurvy with limes, giving their nation the ethnic slur of Limey. My father fought against scurvy every day of his life with lemons in iced tea. Many, many lemon slices, carefully squeezed over the years into gallons of iced tea. It was a noble battle against an 18^th century scourge that he fought well into his 90’s in the 21^st century. Waiters throughout the San Francisco bay area were his soldiers in this battle. “Could I have some more lemon wedges and saccharine?”  He couldn’t say, sweet and low, or those little pink packages, it was saccharine. He had a little bottle of saccharine tablets prior to the days of sweet and low at every table. He looked like some sort of spy poisoning himself when he dropped the saccharine tablets into the tea. It was a great relief when sweet and low was available at every table in every restaurant. I was always surprised he didn’t say benzoic sulfimide or ortho sulphobenzamide, but he was trying to be helpful to the wait staff with saccharine.

Lemons, fighting scurvy one slice at a time.

So, we would eat lunch. Now my dad was on a “diet” most of his adult life. He took it extremely seriously. He weighed himself every day and plotted the Gravity Variations at 36 Las Vegas Road, Orinda California quite dutifully. He lost hundreds of pounds, all between 185 and 180 pounds. He was extremely careful with what he ate. For example, bread; bread was full of calories. When a restaurant provided say cheese toast. You know that toasted French bread with a layer of cheese, garlic, and butter toasted on the surface, he would carefully remove the “bread” layer and eat just the cheese layer. “Bread has a lot of calories you know.” When asked about this practice he was quite clear. “Haven’t eaten a piece of bread in years, maybe a decade.” “What about that piece of cheese toast.” “Didn’t eat the bread, it has a lot of calories you know.” Chocolate cake, sort of like bread but better? “Doesn’t count. It is not bread. Bread has a lot of calories you know.”

The other thing that is important to realize is that bread is flat. It is a topologic structure not a food based on grain that rises and is cooked. For example, muffins are not bread, they are not flat, they are spheroids, therefore they are not bread. Cake, cake comes in slices that taper to a sharp edge, not flat, therefore not bread. These concepts came clearly into focus in certain restaurants. Max’s Opera Café was a typical example. Max’s has wonderful rolls that come with dinner. They are warm, come in many flavors, some even have raisons. Rolls are not bread for two reasons. The first is they are not flat. The second is simply that it has raisons, and therefore is not a “bread”. When one eats a rolls of this type there is an official way to do it that must be followed. The first task is to straighten the tines on the fork. Forks, in restaurants, have tines that are not perfectly aligned. One must take out the dinner knife and straighten the tines so they are all perfectly aligned. The fork is held carefully in the hand with the index finger on the tine end of the fork and the tines, then used to puncture the rolls along the equator. The fork is then used to demarcate the equator of the rolls until it is separated in two. Butter is then smeared on the roll  and it is eaten. The next, and this may be even more important, additional rolls, with raisons, are requested from the waiter for others at the table who must have a roll with raisons. Moreover, the next step is to explain to the others at the table, no matter what their age or maturity, both how to use a fork, and how to puncture a roll around the equator to separate it into two halves. But a roll is not bread. “Haven’t eaten bread in more than a decade.”

To understand these concepts one must remember that my dad worked on anti-matter in graduate school and as a particle physicist. Anti-matter is matter that is like normal matter but exactly opposite. So, instead of an electron, one gets a positron. Positrons are just like electrons only with a positive charge.  When matter and anti-matter come in contact, they are obliviated in a burst of energy, and two photons are emitted in equal and opposite directions. My dad worked on the antiproton. So, when it came to dieting, my dad worried a lot about antimatter. For example, examples are always good in these discussions. You have heard of empty calories? Empty calories are extremely dangerous and need to be neutralized by being filled up with regular calories. So, ice cream, full of empty calories right? That’s why you need chocolate sauce to fill up the empty calories in the ice cream. My dad was just concerned for your health and safety. 

The other thing about restaurants, and this was more an issue when we were younger and there were buffets. You want to get your money’s worth. We went to a number of buffets as a kid. The Fairmont with its rotating restaurant on top of the hotel was especially popular but the Clairmont was also good. The Marriot in Berkeley was excellent. When you go to a buffet, you need to only eat expensive stuff. No lettuce, no pasta, no vegetables, they are cheep you can get them at home. Shrimp, lobster, fillet mignon, dessert. No jello. I don’t care if you want jello, you can have that at home, eat an éclair. When we went on cruises, it was the same, only the buffet was 24/7 and lasted for a week, then two weeks, then a month. You can see how theories of empty calories and bread poisoning can be helpful in these matters.

Now one must consider the reality of the cost of eating in restaurants. The simple fact, according to my father, is it is much cheaper to eat in a restaurant than to eat at home; much cheaper. Very simple math, here. To eat in a restaurant you enter the restaurant, order food, eat it, and pay. It is very simple indeed. When you eat at home, first you are making $250 an hour. So you go to the grocery store and you buy a basket of groceries for $250. You spent an hour buying the groceries so those groceries cost $500. Now you cook a meal, that takes an hour, you eat the meal, another hour, you clean up from the meal, that is another hour. So, the meal at home took four hours at $250 an hour added to the cost of the groceries, that simple meal at home cost $1,250! The restaurant meal was $50, a bargain at twice the price. You can’t afford to eat at home. Now, cruises, cruises save money. You get on the cruise at $100 a day per person, you are there for a month. That is only $3000 a month per person, you could easily spend that eating three meals at home in one day. Cruising is way, way cheaper than being at home. The longer the cruise, the more money I am saving. Oh, I am also fighting Karoshi, have you ever heard of someone dying of Karoshi on a cruise? I think not.

When our kids were small, and my Dad and Marjorie were not on a cruise, they would baby sit our kids. My dad did this for my brother’s kids, Scott and Katherine, as well. He was a very dedicated baby sitter but it was extremely expensive. My dad would show up in his white general motors car, unload the multiple computers in their little nylon zipper cases, cover the dining room table with computers, and then proceed to explain how expensive it was to baby sit the grand children. You see, we drove here from Orinda which is a total of 33 miles, which without traffic takes 41 minutes. With traffic, it takes an hour, which at $250 an hour is $500 dollars to get here and return to Orinda. We baby sat for four hours, that is another $1000. So, this dinner and a movie you went to cost us $1,500. I am not sure we can afford to baby sit. The costs of baby sitting were not really that small. My dad would sit at my computer and surf the internet. When he found something of interest he would print the page in color on our ink jet printer. By the end of an evening there would be a one inch think pile of color print outs of web sites, and a completely empty set of ink jet cartridges. I gave him a number of zip drives and thumb drives hoping he would stop the color printing and just save the page. “Oh, no this is simpler when I print. Thanks.”  The ultimate cost estimate was when Doonesbury published the strips of one of the character’s father giving him the bill for his childhood. My father thought this was a tremendous idea and kept at it. The bills got larger and larger and somehow I never had the money after paying the $250 an hour it cost to eat dinner, to pay the guy. One time when I was in college he called me late at night. I woke up to a question. “Are you going to all your classes?” “Yes, why do you ask?” “Well, I was calculating and realized that since you are taking five classes, three classes a week, and hour a piece, for a semester. Those classes each cost more than a box seat at the opera. Make sure you don’t miss one.” “Thanks dad, put it on my tab.”

So, while the guy drove $1000 used white general motors cars until their engines no longer held oil, and straightened the tines of forks at restaurants, and never bothered to charge for his time, or efforts in the computer world, he did generate a bill for my childhood, baby sitting his grandchildren, and even eating a meal in my house. “You know it’s time for dinner, we should go to a restaurant, this meal at home is costing us thousands of dollars.