Speaking of life...

________Photo of daffodil shoots: Homegrown. Shot February 27, 2008; 19 degrees F.

Squeezing a minute while the pie is in the oven to toss a big thank you out to all my visitors! Thank you for all your kindnesses - for reading, commenting, teaching me, and helping to make this blog one of my favorite hobbies. Cheers!

________
Photo: Homegrown

I saw this ad while flipping through the Sunday paper. I was going to say something about it, but I think I'll just put it up here and let you say something about it. Maybe I'll say the thing I wanted to say if no one says it. But I think someone might say it.
Click for larger.________Photo: Homegrown. Scanned from January 6 newspaper insert.

Until after the esophagogastroduodenocolonoscopy.1 Well, not all eating. This is tonight's dinner:

And tomorrow's breakfast too. Actually, just 4 Dulcolax. But the whole bottle, 14 complete servings of that MiraLax must be enlisted to perform the unsubtle function.

I had reservations posting this. But, well, what's a blog for? So, if you have any experience with this procedure, your comments are welcome!
________1 A combined esophagogastroduodenoscopy and colonoscopy.
Photo: Homegrown. I wish it wasn't.

They became unstuck in time a day later.
"So it goes."
- Billy Pilgrim 1________
Photo above: Homegrown, from a couple days ago. It's frozen water in the cut-off bottom of an old gallon jug. I use it as a water feeder for birds. They, however, use it as a bathtub. There's one particular female cardinal that sits in it at night (if it's warm enough) for about 5 minutes. The water comes up to her neck. She occasionally flutters her wings.

Boy, do I get excited over new foods. Red quinoa! New for me, old for people who live in the Andes Mountains of South America, who, according to the box, have been growing it for more than 5,000 years. I wonder what they served it with. Maybe it's old for lots of you too, but I'm having fun with it!

It's a little more crunchy than the white quinoa I'm used to, if you could call quinoa crunchy at all. Otherwise, it's pretty similar in taste and cooking time.

The rusty red color of the grain blooms to a foggy purple color when cooked. (Click for larger.)

My apologies for lack of updates. I've been busy writing for another site.
________Photo: Homegrown.

In my thinking-out-loud comment under RS and Colon Cancer, I spoke of the social pressure to eat a certain way.

Below is an example. It's a photo of the entrance foyer of a large food store where I shop. A mountainous display of some food item always occupies this space. This week a mountain of soft drinks was being erected. The last display was a mountain of chips, crackers, and dip. At the top of the display (they weren't done piling yet) is often a wide screen television showing people consuming the food in the display, interspersed with "fun" activities ... sports, parties. I can't imagine these are just props, that they don't include them in their inventory without the intention of selling them.

Melinda shared these photos of her garden-in-work:"Here are 3 pix of what I brought w/ me from the condo when we moved to the little house w/ big deck. As you see, so far they aren't in the ground, but I did just get the raised bed, so hopefully I'll get it together [soon]."

Famed for its wine. Wikipedia has Burgenland inhabited since the Stone Age. How many years ago that was, I can't tell. I wonder if Burgenlanders enjoyed wine back then.

Below is Willi Wetschka (right) and his friend in the barn of Wetschka's winery, 2007.

Click to enlarge.________

Melinda's raised-bed installation:

Click for larger.________Photos: Melinda

There was a full moon last night. It will be visible tonight too, and according to NASA, it will be the brightest full moon you'll see for the next 16 years:"That's because it's the highest-riding full moon until the year 2023."

Below is a photograph of Santas from the Volunteers of America. The time is 12:45 pm, November 25, 1941. The place is Chicago.

Do you notice anything odd about this photograph?

Click to enlarge.________Photo: Scanned from Saveur Magazine, December 2007.

"Fool me once, shame on...
Shame on you.
Fool me ... you can't get fooled again!" 1________1 US President No. 43, Nashville, TN, Sept. 17, 2002.
Photo: Advertisement for FritoLay corn chips scanned from March 2008 AARP magazine.

Lavender wrote:"You know, 150 years ago and further, sugar was not easy to come by and was rather expensive. Today, it is everywhere and in almost everything. It is offered free on tables even. Sweet things were a real treat. ... In some cultures, fruit is still considered a dessert. If I tried to tell my family that we were having oranges for dessert they would think I was kidding."I'm struck by that last sentence. It makes me want to cook more simply, to learn to appreciate foods in their unadorned state.

Lavender Blue shared these photos of her garden. (Click for larger.)

Ruby shared these photos of her garden. (Click for larger.): "Here are some pictures of what I have going on this year.

The photos below are from photographer Peter Menzel's 2005 book, Hungry Planet: What the World Eats.

Menzel traveled to 24 countries, visiting and photographing 30 families for the book. Each photo represents the weekly food intake for the families pictured. (Each family was asked to purchase, at Menzel's expense, a typical week's groceries. The book lists the food items in detail, broken down by food group and cost, along with how the food was raised and prepared.)

I came across Menzel's photos on Amber's Blog (on Gaia), her post from November 27, 2007. She has a few more there, and some interesting comments.

Germany: The Melander family of Bargteheide
Food expenditure for one week: $500.07

Or at least I thought I did. Last summer my fasting blood sugars were pushing 120 mg/dl. (100-125 is prediabetes, 126 or more is full-fledged diabetes). I went on a very low-carbohydrate, Atkins diet. My fasting sugars came down, hovering near 100.

I went off the Atkins diet when I experienced some precancer, and when others in my family were diagnosed with cancer. I went on an animal-free, high-carbohydrate diet. Now, over 70% of my calories come from carbohydrate.* And my fasting blood sugars are always in the 70s!

No, really. A comprehensive, online, free!, encyclopedia of every living thing on the planet. One page for each. Millions of pages. And it's a wiki - a collaborative, updatable effort from people all over the world. I can't think of a more ambitious project facing the internet.

And it went live on Tuesday (although it may be slow, it's getting over a million hits per hour):
Encyclopedia of Life (EOL)

Here's what the New York Times had to say:
The Encyclopedia of Life, No Bookshelf Required

Here's its official blog:
Encyclopedia of Life Blog

Here are some sample pages (clicking the image will take you to EOL's demo page):

Yeti Crab

Death Cap Mushroom

Do visit a Calorie Counter.

It also counts protein, fat, carbohydrate, fiber, and lots of other nutrients the USDA has tucked away in their data base. Uncluttered, fast, informative - government agencies in charge of food could learn from a site like this. :)

The owner of the site also has a blog. His last entry on November 6th points to a spectacular table he just created that compares basic nutrition facts for some popular foods from over 20 fast food restaurants:

Fast Food Restaurants & Nutrition Facts Compared

An NPR commentator asked a dairy farmer how Daylight Savings Time affects his cows. I thought it wouldn't, because cows live by a biological clock. That was my knee-jerk reaction.

The farmer said, "It's tough getting them up early!" *
(So, they make the cows live by man's clock.)
"And they don't produce as much."
(...)
"But it's not as bad as in the fall when we gain an hour!"
(Oh, no...)
"The cows get health problems in their udders because their milk builds up!"
(Why don't we just schedule people to work around the cows' cycle?)
________* I'm paraphrasing.
Photo: Dr. Baker milking cow, circa 1900, Texas.

An almond is a seed.

So are Brazil nuts, cashews, walnuts, pecans, pistachios, and pine nuts.

Wheat berries, corn kernels, oat groats, rice, barley, quinoa, buckwheat, and amaranth are also seeds. Sesame, pumpkin, sunflower, flax, poppy, fenugreek ... seeds. Lentils are seeds. Peanuts are seeds. Beans ... kidney, pinto, soy, mung, adzuki ... more seeds. Fresh peas and green beans are seeds.

Seeds sprout. So I thought I'd soak some almonds in water. Yes, indeedy, they sprouted.

Sherri, where's Sherri? Sherri (the other one) this is for you. And for Melinda. And anyone else with a garden. I planted some herbs yesterday.* I know, this is a far cry from squash and tomatoes. But I'm limited by space and sun. And the deer, oh dear. (It's in the 40s here this morning, I hope they don't wilt.) This is my garden.

I'd love to experience your gardens vicariously. So if you (or others) have food-growing photos you'd like to share, I'll post them.

The National Resources Defense Council has published this wallet card to aid in selecting fish. I know it's difficult to read. Clicking on it will take you to the original .pdf source where you can make some good quality printouts.

________

I was digging through the FAO's data files and saw some numbers I thought would look better on a chart than in a few columns on Excel.

Click for larger.
There are 172 countries included in this graph. I couldn't fit all their names on the x-axis but you can go to the Excel file to see the intake for a particular country. Protein intake ranges from 25 grams/person/day in the Democratic Republic of Congo to 136 g/p/d in Israel. (Israel?) The US consumed an average of 133 g/p/d. Intakes are for the years 2002-2004.

You can find the raw data at:
Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, Food Security Statistics (Under Food Consumption / Nutrients).
________Chart and image of chart: Homegrown.

I have a question ... for anyone ... because it looks like many of you know more about prehistoric man than I do.

I looked up the average lifespan for some older humans (I don't know prehistoric designations, but this chart said Neanderthal, Upper Paleolithic, Neolithic):
Wikipedia: Life Expectancy

The UK Department of Health released its "Health Profile of England 2007". They noticed a trend:

The UK Government Office for Science projected that trend 40 years into the future and determined that a "bold whole system approach is critical":