We are one, and our actions matter.

I want to share some quotables that I came upon recently while reading The Omnivore's Dilemma. They link what we like to think of as separate things: how we eat, what industry does, the war machine, and the impact of our way of life on our ancestors. I think a linked view - though less simple, and less easy to manipulate - is a lot truer to our lives as inherently biological organisms, despite our attempts to automate and electrify every last detail.
(These kind of quotes usually have a habit of being lost amid a blitz of little pieces of paper I keep around to "remember" ideas and suggestions and provocations and work schedules &c. But I trust that the internet, record of imaginary signals, will guard these a little more safely. And might better send them out into the world than moi in lecture mode!)


"Organic's rejection of agricultural chemicals was also a rejection of the war machine, since the same corporations -- Dow, Monsanto -- that manufactured pesticides also made napalm and Agent Orange, the herbicide with which the U.S. military was waging war against nature in South East Asia. Eating organic thus married the personal to the political."
Michael Pollan

"In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations."
From the Great Law of the Iroquois Confederacy

Kitchenology and the composition of the cloud

Here's a fun fact I learned while trying to figure out what's with all the pastry flour called for in vegan baked goods: there are different types of flour with different characteristics based on exactly what's in them!

A list of basic types of flour used in baking:
All-purpose flour, bread flour, cake flour, pastry flour

And here's how they vary, mostly in terms of gluten protein content:
Flour type: ([protein composition range]; characteristics)*

All-purpose: ([0.09, 0.12]; rises well, mixable, moderately elastic)
Bread: ([0.12, 0.13]; well-risen, chewy, elastic)
Pastry: ([0.08, 0.09]; some body, moderately tender)
Cake: ([0.05, 0.08]; inelastic, very tender)

A few uncommon flours:

Buckwheat (0.09; heavy, flavorful)
Whole wheat (0.14; heavy, dense, high in trace minterals)
Rye: (0.09; inelastic, low gluten)

Also exciting: some eggless cake recipes and an NPR feature on valentine's vegan treats !

Ta-da! And that's my daily ration of random factoids. Now, time to get to the store to find some pastry flour.. if they don't have that, I guess I can substitute with a weighted mixture of cake flour and all-purpose.. but now, I know why!

*This is the typical engineering way of expressing things, which implies that flour type is a function of both protein composition and characteristics. In actuality, it would be more correct to say that characteristics are a function of flour type and protein composition, but what variables am I going to use for characteristics? Let's not get too mathematical, here.

When do isolated outliers become a disturbing trend?

Regardless of whether or not you buy into the American high school ideal, it's a sad day when a bright, promising boy picks up a gun and kills his entire family. What stays with me the most is the message of the gun-control advocates: a gun is 22 times more likely to be used against a family member than to be used to protect the family against intruders.

Second is this idea that the system obviously isn't working for many young people. Those who are coming into power now, after the baby boomers take leave. When a school becomes less a fertile socioacademic playground and more a dry, confining standardized testing station -- or when the home becomes more of a repository for techno must-haves, in which there's 0.5 daily hours on average to spend together, since mom and dad work longer hours and dutiful daughters and sons shuttle from activity to activity, essential for the college application, you begin to detect you've developed a major problem. I'm not sure how to synthesize any kind of comprehensive review of what American cultural practices might be contributing to a growing detachment and disaffectation (see Affluenza for that), but this is how it appears in my fish-eye lens: we are judging quantity over quality. And paying qualitative consequences.

Or it could be a lingering consequence of World War II values. That's pretty plausible, observing how that value set has irrevocably altered almost every kind of consumption and industry there is in the US (not to mention the continuing dominance of economics over other values -- sustainability, for example). That reminds me a little of something I heard about that's been going on in Japan: the hikikomori.