Musings

This is fact:

…formerly fat people need to eat less than never-fat people to maintain exactly the same weight. In other words, a 150-pound woman who has always weighed 150 might be able to get away with eating, say, 2,500 calories a day, but a 150-pound woman who once weighed more—20 pounds more, 200 pounds more, the exact amount doesn’t matter—would have to consume about 15 percent fewer calories to keep from regaining the weight.

But, why? I know this NYT article was posted last week, but the idea/notion/fact that your digestive flora makes a difference in the efficiency at which your body absorbs nutrients, including straight-out calories, is worthy of mention. Consider it hereby mentioned. Now I’m waiting for “efficient�? microflora like Bacteroidetes to be available over the counter…. (Or Firmicutes, if that’s the direction you need to go—and some people do!)

I’m reminded of how long it took ecologists who modeled the life cycle of a forest, for example, to include soil microbes. Big error, there!

I mean—we’re considering a complex interaction between food and nutrients put in the mouth, and what happens after. Part of it is called infectobesity—the role of infection—yes, infection affects digestive efficiency.

Posted at 10:22 PM | 2 Comments »

Two leetle technology “breakthroughs�? this week…. One, I learned how to set up RSS feeds; wow! liberating! Two, we have a new little boxlet (with its own remote!) that gets digital TV pictures from the air! Wheeeeoooo!

Posted at 10:03 PM | 3 Comments »

Some climatology types have examined the effect on agriculture in the US—specifically premium wine grape areas—by a continued trajectory of increasing temperatures over the next century. The figure they used is 2–6°C. This is Figure 2-f, showing where the prime areas will shift to—that is, those areas lacking extremes of heat and cold. They make the point that wine is economically significant with 3.5 million tons of winegrapes out of approximately 6 million tons of grapes harvested each year. By converting them into wine, their value increases greatly, with concomitant deleterious effects if their production drops this much.

This is your world, and the projection is not pretty. Note how few premium grapes will come from California. In short:

… areas marginally suitable for winegrape production in the current climate were nearly eliminated and the area capable of consistently producing grapes required for the highest-quality and highest-priced wines declined by >50%.

Don’t trust my word; download the original here.

And, no, I haven’t seen Al Gore’s movie yet. Have you? What’d you think?

Posted at 6:13 PM | Comments Off on Our future?

Rarely, we face a conjunction of the stars that result in a back-to-back series of social engagements; usually our life is far more low key. Not this weekend!

Friends arrived from southwest of here yesterday afternoon, and we partied until the wee hours (mine, anyway!), and got up and laughed and told even more stories this morning. Obligations, sadly, took them away around mid-day.

Then, the next shift arrived, about an hour later, from east of here. Being stuck in Little A-Town, they wanted to do Big City stuff, so we hied off to the High Museum to check out the current exhibits mostly, and 1.5 galleries of permanent exhibits. Many galleries were closed for the latest upgrade, but we had pretty much taken in all our brains could absorb by the time we wandered back to the parking garage….

To refortify ourselves, we dined (first time for all) at Pacific Kitchen, an unalloyed success! Yum.

Posted at 9:21 PM | 3 Comments »

I’m afraid our three-week absence wasn’t the best prescription for the tomato plants, but there’s still a chance we’ll get a couple of ripe ones before the season ends! These are Banjo B’s cherry tomatoes, even producing after transplanting mid-season! In fact, while I was trying to get this shot, I was probably becoming infested with chiggers! (Count is now nine; I HOPE that’s final!)

Posted at 9:40 PM | 1 Comment »

There’s nothing like fresh spices for cooking. One I’ve never used, never found except in a semi-desiccated form, is lemon grass. Banjo B used it in the Thai food last night, and it’s a show-stopper.

Now that we’re home, I need to schedule a trip to Hastings Garden Center to see if I can find a pot of lemon grass!

Yes, dear Reader, we’ve completed the Great Loop to the Northlands, and we’re back in Big A-town, craving sushi (take out tonight!), and getting the pile of mail dispersed (thankfully, much of it to the trash), putting away the travel gear, figuring out the first (fast) grocery list, and piling up the dirty laundry.

Welcome home!

Posted at 7:39 PM | 2 Comments »

Good friends are the best! We enjoyed a great evening with M The Archaeo and Banjo B, and their lovely daughter! Among the best was M’s peaches and cream pie (sorry, no recipe), mmmm. M says the summer she found the recipe, she made it every week and had to quit when she gained ten pounds!

They’ve just moved into a new place, and somehow have found the time to begin transforming the back yard into a place of beauty. They transplanted all their favorite plants and veggie garden, and we found both tomatoes and peppers among the flowers, including dahlias, and several familiar ones I don’t know the names of.

The apparent downside of our lovely stroll: I seem to have acquired at least two chigger bites!

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Peaches & cream

K.’s creativity was unbounded yesterday. Even with a poorly equipped kitchen and a difficult-to-adjust apartment-size oven, she undertook to make not one but two apple tarts as our contribution to dinner with the Hunter-Gatherer and R. Two, K. felt, was necessary because the guest list was long enough that with only a 9.5 inch tart pan, the size of the pieces would have been too meager. We all moaned happily and involuntarily as we forked morsels into our no-longer-hungry maws.

This particular recipe (sorry, I don’t have it) has a shortbread crust, a cream cheese custard with small apple bits, and spiced sliced apple top layer, and I think K. got it from a B&B somewhere (not Helmer).

She’s willing to go to considerable trouble for not only desserts, but also any other dish. Me, I’ll fuss with main dishes, but I generally do fairly simple sides, etc., and, okay, get “fancier�? desserts from the bakery—not an option up here!

Consider: to use a single tart pan to make two tarts, you have to convince the first one to part company from the pan so you can reuse it. Consider: a shortbread crust is very fragile for such an operation!

And, yet, with considerable application of ingenuity, we did it!!!

Postscript: as the second tart was in the oven and the heat both in the kitchen and outdoors was becoming oppressive, we finally!! got a rainstorm, which cooled everything down, although even on sandy soil, the moisture only penetrated an inch.

Posted at 10:59 AM | 2 Comments »

The trek continues; we left the So-Mich green (doesn’t the Botanist’s garden look great!) bound for the northlands.

At the cottage, we found more green, some we whacked down with the Super Mower. We also found that in our absence wee grey mice and a bat had made the building their coffin. Ick.

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Treking on

Along with population growth, think about basic resources, like potable water, and The Future….

Intensification of production generally entails increased costs, of one form or another. In agriculture, say you are a subsistence farmer, and you decide you need to expand your field into an area you previously avoided because of its slope. So you get out the kids and uncles and other hangers-on, and put together a work party and grub up some rocks and do some terraforming and, presto, you have some terraces that make your new field flatter and allow it to retain more moisture.

Here, Henry I. Miller and Gregory Conko (never heard of them, but Miller is at the Hoover Institution at Stanford) discuss several facets of modern agricultural intensification. They make some points I’ll summarize here about two big crops here in North America: maize and potatoes (both new world species, let me add).

Maize (you may call it corn) is susceptible to a mold called Fusarium, which produces a deadly fungal toxin, especially in grains damaged by insect invaders. This is just the situation in the Third World—and organic fields in our own US (and Canada). Thus, organic maize is more likely to be hazardous to your health from eating it than non-organic cornmeal grown from seeds that are genetically resistant through gene-splicing to corn borers (called Bt corn).

Similarly, potatoes are a mega-crop in the US that supplies French fries to every mouth around nearly once a day on average. Potatoes can be gene-spliced with a gene from the same bacterium used for the maize mentioned above (Bacillus thuringiensis) and another gene from elsewhere and they will be more resistant to the Colorado potato beetle and another the potato leaf roll virus, meaning reduced use of insecticides that endanger the health of farm workers.

Cautious consumers have rejected both genetic alterations.

See, more food production is necessary to support a burgeoning population, and sometimes easy, low-impact changes can be instituted at first to kick up production, but then it gets more complicated. Even making a bigger garden can have a downside—fewer trees for firewood, for example, or medicinal plants (“weeds�?) being squeezed out, or fewer pollinating insects. When you get to monocropping, the only way we now have to feed the global population at current levels (and they’re still rising, mind you), you’re facing a wealth of ethical decisions with unending implications.

So, if you buy organic because you think it’s better for the environment, you better rethink that. If you buy organic because you think it’s better for your health, which I used to think was a good argument, you have to rethink that, too. If you buy organic because you think it sends a message to policy-makers, you’d best put at least some of your $$ toward various population control programs, it seems to me. And, hey, good luck. To all of us.

Posted at 4:01 PM | 3 Comments »