I used to get so mad when other counselors would tell the campers that the fruit trees around us were poisonous, or that they were all sprayed with dangerous chemicals. They weren’t! They were Himalayan blackberries. Salmonberries. Thimbleberries. Raspberries. Oregon grape. Cherries. Apples. Pears. All good, delicious stuff!
I know some of them did it out of ignorance, and probably really did believe that the fruit was inedible, or were too afraid to say “I don’t know”. But others did it because they wished to keep kids on-task for activities so that they weren’t distracted by ripe berries. You fools! Nothing is worth that—nothing! I can promise you that no camp activity was of more worth or value or general life enhancement than allowing children to find delight and appreciation in nature. No game or ceremony or arbitrary rule can offer more joy or freedom than plucking a wild fruit off the bush, knowing it is good to eat.
Sure, you can make it on time to lunch if you tell a child that a salmonberry will kill them. But you’re lying—you’re teaching them to view wild things as innately hostile and foreign, when you ought to be teaching them how to identify plants, how to be cautious, and how to see themselves as part of the world. Let them be late to activities! Let them hop fences if no one’s around to complain! Let them be distracted and juice-stained and sticky! Let them be sweet-seeking animals, and, if you really want to be responsible, just make sure they wash the fruit before eating it. When are they going to have another, better chance…?
Yes! This!
Teach the kids about the local plants. What is edible and what is dangerous! If you don’t know, let the kids know that. They can smell the rote answer as just placating them.
David A Kessler, author of The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite,
is a doctor and lawyer, med school dean and former FDA commissioner.
He’s also someone whose weight has yo-yoed back and forth all his life,
someone who is plagued with insatiable junk-food cravings. His new book
– grounded in research that included dumpster-diving chain restaurants
to read the ingredient labels on the foods whose makeup they wouldn’t
discuss, tries to answer the neurological question of why we crave
shitty junk food:
The labels showed the foods were bathed in salt, fat and sugars, beyond
what a diner might expect by reading the menu, Kessler said. The
ingredient list for Southwestern Eggrolls mentioned salt eight different
times; sugars showed up five times. The “egg rolls,” which are
deep-fried in fat, contain chicken that has been chopped up like
meatloaf to give it a “melt in the mouth” quality that also makes it
faster to eat. By the time a diner has finished this appetizer, she has
consumed 910 calories, 57 grams of fat and 1,960 milligrams of sodium.
Instead of satisfying hunger, the salt-fat-sugar combination will
stimulate that diner’s brain to crave more, Kessler said. For many, the
come-on offered by Lay’s Potato Chips – “Betcha can’t eat just one” –
is scientifically accurate. And the food industry manipulates this
neurological response, designing foods to induce people to eat more than
they should or even want, Kessler found…
“The food the industry is selling is much more powerful than we
realized,” he said. “I used to think I ate to feel full. Now I know, we
have the science that shows, we’re eating to stimulate ourselves. And so
the question is what are we going to do about it?”
Today I got curious about nutmeg and wound up learning something I never would have expected: it looks Incredibly Cursed™️ when raw!
The outside fruit is normal enough, but the nutmeg seed itself is encased in this strange scarlet webbing, called the aril, and looks exactly like the demon-infected heart of a video game monster. That haunted webbing is the source of mace, an apparently common spice that I have literally never heard of but which is the source of the classic doughnut flavor, among other things. (It’s not related to the self-defense aerosol.)
I think most people know you can also get balls high off freshly-ground nutmeg and possibly die after the absolute worst trip imaginable, potentially lasting several days.
So, that’s fun! Doughnuts are flavored with Deeply Cursed Monster Hearts and I find this utterly delightful.
ALARMING! I love it!
When I took a trip to Dominica, a cab driver once spontaneously pulled over to the side of the road, hopped out of the car, ran off into the bushes, and returned carrying a handful of fruit.
“I bet you don’t know what this is!” he said excitedly as he split one open.
He was right, I definitely did not.
(He also did this with several other fruits and vegetables–apparently one of his major sources of amusement was how few foods Americans can actually recognize in their natural state.)
Why do you get high off freshly ground nutmeg but not like, the stuff you buy in stores?
I think you can get high off old, pre-ground nutmeg, but the active chemical myristicin might be more potent in freshly-ground nutmeg and require you to eat less of it. It’s an insoluable dry powder, so eating large amounts of nutmeg is difficult to begin with.
That said, it’s apparently the Worst High Imaginable with a long, uncomfortable hangover.
Well, Jesus Tea* is basically Soothing Decaf Teas+Mild Spice+Vitamin-C Rich Juice+So Much Honey**.
…since concrete objects don’t have opposites per se,I’m kind of free-associating, so it comes out to something like:
Hypercaffinated Coffee+EXTREME SPICY, JUST POUR HALF A BOTTLE OF SRIRACHA IN THERE, MAYBE GRIND UP A COUPLE HABENEROS+Gin***+ just a hint some kind of artifical sweetner that may or may not cause cancer.
Which sounds like something colleage students would come up with as a hangover cure/study aid/other kind of unnatural life-aid, so it really does seem somewhat faustian so I’ll call it SATAN’S LATTE. I see from your description that you’re a programmer so lemme take a moment to do a safety psa and say DO NOT DO THIS AT ALL EVER. DON’T DO IT AT HOME. DON’T GO OVER TO A FRIEND’S HOUSE. DO NOT.
*Jesus Tea is not actually affiliated with any religion, it’s named that because it’s easy to google when you’ve got only two brain cells left from being sick.
** Jesus Tea is pleasant but innefective unless you gargle with salt water to break up the mucus in your throat/sinuses first.
*** IDK what the opposite of fruit juice is, but Gin and Juice was a favorite drink of my grandmother’s so I kind of opposite-pair the two. Also juice is nice and Gin smells like drain cleaner so flavor wise they’re probably opposites.
exactly 1 minute ago i had absolutely no idea what the plants sesame seeds and peanuts came from look like and i am shocked and surprised
for some reason every time I see pineapples growing I laugh out loud. Like, the punchline is it’s a pineapple!!!!!!!!! it’s a pineapple
An Interesting Fact About Peanuts, while we’re on the topic of food-plants:
Peanuts-you-eat grow underground, but they are NOT part of the peanut plant’s roots. Peanut plants are ambitious little fuckers and plant their seeds themselves. They flower like any perfectly reasonable legume, but once the flowers have been pollinated the plants do something called “pegging” (no really), in which they drill the stems where the flowers used to be into the ground. And that’s where the peanuts you eat form. Like so:
I’m going to pull myself together to endorse this Extremely Interesting Fact, but it’s going to be a real struggle
Ain’t botany fun?
I grew a pineapple so I definitely can confirm how pineapples are grown.
This came back around to my dash again, so thank you @theordinaryjd for this excellent pineapple, which has once again provided an excellent punchline.
I just… look at it!! it’s a pineapple! that’s so great!
