Shiny Cooking

Holidays aren’t big on this blog. You won’t see me doing a week of Easter recipes, mainly because I can’t be arsed to make dishes beforehand. However, I’d like to put in a word for today’s secular holiday, Earth Day.

Nearly 20 years ago, I took a biology class. It was an introductory course, so we looked at everything from cellular reproduction to continent-wide habitats. One topic that loomed large was climate change. We saw the papers and the data. Even back then, it was undeniable that since the Industrial Revolution, the amount of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere has been rising exponentially.

For Earth Day, we split into groups to do a presentation project of our own choosing on the environment. No matter what topic the group chose, climate change affected it in some way — one group looked into rainforest destruction, another into the impact of melting polar ice on arctic flora and fauna. Our group looked at the unique lemurs of Madagascar; one part of that was their changing habitat.

That’s why it saddens and frustrates me to see the willful ignorance and often outright lying on the part of climate change deniers. Even 20 years ago, it was clear that something was going on. Read more on this earth day, stand up for science…

Sugar beets are a communal crop. It’s rare for one farmer to have both the specialized harvesting equipment and the manpower required to harvest all of his sugar beets by himself. It’s also a busy crop: as the beets are pulled from the ground by the mechanical harvester they are dumped into a truck driven alongside it in the field, and they need to be driven to the sugar plant ASAP. As a result, several farmers work together in the fall to get everyone’s sugar beet crop in on time. Read more on Birthday Beignets, Anyone? A Whole Wheat Beignet Recipe…