Gel...Oh.

   The rather fascinating history of J-E-LL-O is one of those upward climbs that starts out with a small family creation and goes through several owners before catching on and entering the world of the consumer market (on a trivial note, and perhaps why I might be writing about this, my state of Utah holds the record for consuming the most lime-flavored Jello each year; in fact it's been named our state food!); and yes, there is a Jello museum.  Interesting trivia for sure, but what caught my eye was this from Quartz about gelatin in general: Gelatin is made from collagen --from the skin, bones, and connective tissues of animals-- that has been heated in liquid.  As the collagen cooks, long strings of proteins bind together in a three-dimensional pattern that effectively traps water and holds it in suspension.  Boing.  Okay, I knew that, especially since I occasionally take those vitamin and supplements which are each carefully encased in what's labeled, gel tabs.  Yes, I try my best to not knowingly eat meat so that means I have to bite and squish the liquid out of each tab, be it some awful tasting magnesium mixture or a blast of what seems to taste like the cod liver oil of days long past (vitamin E); I also pop the occasional lutein (food for the eyes, says my optometrist), which tastes even worse, but then you slowly begin to grow semi-used to the taste.  Wait, all you vegetarians knew about this right, since there are vegetarian capsules available although those are few and far between among the major manufacturers?  Here's one thing which I didn't know about those gelatin capsules...many of the gel caps (from cough syrup to CQ-10, whatever that is) are made from pork!  What?  But gelatin and resultant capsules can also be made from both sheep and fish.  Double what??  Check on the back of a gel cap bottle and you'll find that virtually all U.S. manufacturers now label the composition of the gelatin which was used (it used to almost always be cow (bovine).

     There are so many "hidden" animal ingredients (one sampling comes from the PETA site) that well, it'd be tough for me to be a strict vegan because one has to carefully read virtually every ingredient label; and I say this with full respect for those who are or want to be or continue to be strict vegans.  As but one example a friend of mine who neglected to bring a veggie patty to a party scanned the box of what I had brought (Morningstar's Grillers) and was happy with everything she read until she got to the ultra-fine print, that part of the ingredient list that says "contains 2% or less of the following," a list that progresses down in descending order; the third to the last ingredient, said "egg whites," at which point she handed me back the box and patty and said that she couldn't eat it...it had egg whites.  I mentioned that it must be just a microscopic amount since it was at the tail end of what seemed like 40+ ingredients; but that was that and there was no going back.  She would simply eat another piece of watermelon.  Bravo to her...but I'm not sure I would or could have that level of determination, especially knowing that I had downed more than my share of animal-based gel capsules when just wanting a B vitamin or an antibiotic (I rarely take either but when I do, I am generally not feeling well enough to argue and I just take the darn thing and get back to bed).  So now what I tell people is that I haven't knowingly eaten beef, poultry or pork for over 40 years...but no, I am nowhere near as strict as my label-reading friend.  Was she doing it for health reasons,* ethical reasons, personal belief reasons?  All three, or perhaps other reasons I hadn't considered?

Animation showing the spread of intensive agriculture across the

 globe over the past 10,000 years, based on ArchaeoGLOBE

 Project results. (Nicolas Gauthier, 2019, CC-BY-SA)

     It's difficult in today's world to simply be what you want to be; it seems that there are so many restrictions and guidelines and me-too pressures and such.  But each of us is unique...or are we?  In a survey with a bevy of archeologists (believed to be the first such survey among such a large group), humans have made a much broader and much earlier impact than it was originally thought, said a report from The Conversation: To guide this planet toward a better future, we need to understand how we got here.  The message from archaeology is clear.  It took thousands of years for the pristine planet of long ago to become the human planet of today.  And to view the graphic that accompanied the article and to watch our rather rapid takeover of the land, it would seem that there is nowhere left to go but down.

    So on a side note, I jump to the issue so prevalent and yet so buried in the news, that of fracking.  The bore holes and wells are technologically efficient, moving not only downwards but at angles and even horizontally to reach the trapped gases and oils.  A quick explanation of the process appeared in Live Science which said: After the fracking well is fully drilled and encased, fracking fluid is pumped down into the well at extremely high pressure, in some cases exceeding 9,000 pounds per square inch (62,050 kilopascals), according to a primer from Cornell University's environmental quality engineering course.  The pressure is powerful enough to fracture the surrounding rock, creating fissures and cracks through which oil and gas can flow.  The fluid that is pumped into the well to fracture the rock is called slickwater.  It is mostly water, though it also can contain a wide range of additives and chemicals that serve an engineering purpose...In addition to the water and chemical additives, "proppants" such as sand and ceramic particles are also pumped into the fracking well.  These proppants are added to prop open the fractures that form under pressure, thereby ensuring that gas and oil can continue to flow freely out of rock fractures even after pumping pressure is released, according to the EPA.  Once the underground rock is shattered and proppants are pumped into place, trapped reservoirs of gas and oil are released and pumped back to the surface, along with millions of gallons of "flowback" liquid, according to the EPA.  The flowback liquid contains water and a number of contaminants, including radioactive material, heavy metals, hydrocarbons and other toxins.  This wastewater is stored on the fracking site in pits, injected into deep underground wells or disposed of off-site at a wastewater treatment facility.  "Formation water" is the briny water that was in the pore spaces of the rocks.  "The formation water is usually very salty and can have high levels of radon, a radioactive gas that comes from the decay of uranium in the subsurface," Marcia Bjornerud, a structural geologist at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, told Live Science.  "Flowback water can be treated, but there are large volumes of it and so dealing with it is expensive, and beyond what many small-town water treatment plants can handle."  Hmm, pretty technical stuff but take a step back and it turns out that those "proppants" are pretty specific as well in that not just any old sand will do (think rough gravel vs. milled rice) and much of that sand is located in...Wisconsin.  Wait, even a basic peek at a map will show that Wisconsin is pretty far inland from any ocean.  But it wasn't always so said a piece in Discover: Half a billion years ago, when this sand was forming, Wisconsin was quite different, and in a very different part of the globe.  It was closer to the equator and was more or less at the edge of an enormous inland sea.

    Now comes news of graffiti being found in ancient temples, only this graffiti was done nearly 2700 years ago when the Kush had conquered Egypt (I didn't and actually don't know much about the Kush civilization).  Said the article in The Conversation: A catalogue written in conjunction with the exhibition presents selected examples of graffiti from the Nile valley and beyond, including the ancient Roman city of Pompeii...We are all accustomed to understanding ancient cultures almost entirely through the activities of the powerful elite and the art they left behind in their palaces, temples, and tombs.  But that creates a distorted a picture of ancient life – as distorted as such a picture would be today.  The graffiti featured in this exhibition allow a glimpse into some of the activities of non-elite people and their religious devotion to particular places.  It’s a reminder that society is more than the elite and powerful.  Then came this from the recent issue of Rolling Stone: While the rich smell of leather has been a hallmark of high-end cars for decades, socially conscious buyers are changing that.  You can now order a Range Rover Velar or Evoque with a vegan interior featuring fabrics made from eucalyptus and even recycled plastic bottles.  Early next year, Volvo will launch its plug-in Polestar 2 sedan with vegan seats, and Tesla will soon offer its Model 3 and Model Y free of animal products.  Even mass brands like Ford are experimenting with soybean-based foams and materials derived from algae oil.  The trend is near a "tipping point" says Land Rover design director Gerry McGoveern.  "Leather seats are a bit old fashioned."

    Pico Iyer ended his book, as most authors do, with acknowledging the people who helped with his writings and getting published...except, this is how he began that section: My first thanks must go to my lifelong adversary and boss, Time, for allowing me, over sixteen years, to sift through an hourly mounting pile of impressions and experiences and feelings, and for showing me, finally, how many of them were useless, or temporary at least.  I can gaze at my own piles of papers and magazines clippings and digital unread pieced now safely filed away for reading (or not reading) at some unknown date, perhaps at so late a point in life that I, too, will feel that in the end those saved thoughts and words were "useless, or temporary at least."  As pointed out in the last post, what DO we take with us when our days are ending...memories, reflections of ourself, regrets, smiles?  And what DO we leave?  Perhaps there really are only one or two material things that our survivors would want or would at least feel is worth keeping.  Certainly it wouldn't be dishes (both my wife and I have already witnessed this with both siblings and friends turning down beautiful china, something which we did as well); what remains might be a necklace, or a wedding ring, or a picture (but not hundreds), or something even more sentimental...maybe a pipe?  Eventually every material thing goes away as easily as those pieces which were passed on, a form of basically transferring the guilt by avoiding the throwing of such items into the trash.  Someone else could use it we justify to ourselves, just not us.  And soon, it will be us hearing that same sentiment from the ether.  Those rare prints and coins and jewelry we so clutched and clung to now useless, or temporary at least.

    Author Heather Havrilesky noted later in her book that modern culture in the U.S. has a fascination with apocalyptic movies, television series and books, citing everything from The Hunger Games to Game of Thrones, and from The Walking Dead to zombies to nuclear Armageddon.  What she noted was this: ...we find a recurring desire for simplicity and solitude, for a reconnection with the self and the land, for a private chance to determine what one needs to survive and what can be left behind...What we want is something that the mandatory optimism and go-get-'em attitude of American culture can't give us.  We want a guilt-free escape into struggle and compromise and curmudgeonly solitude.  We want a chance to understand our bare minimum requirements for survival.  And underneath almost every tale, we discover the same notion: that we might be happier  --or at least stronger, more focused more admirable-- if only we had much less.  In the end, as continents shift and move ocean sands, when time again blinks its eye and we make way for the next dominant species, we may find that words such as graffiti and fracking and being vegan have also evolved into something quite different and accepted; and we may discover that understanding life, our life anyway, was always as simple as a bowl of cherries...and yet also as complex and unsteady as a bowl of Jello.


*So the question becomes, are such vegetarian and vegan diets healthier?  A recent study of nearly 50,000 people was recently released in the British Medical Journal and highlighted in a piece in Bloomberg.  In part, the article mentioned: After adjusting for factors that might influence the results, researchers found that fish eaters had a 13% reduced risk of heart disease than meat eaters, while vegetarians and vegans had a 22% lower risk....But the study found 20% higher rates of stroke in vegetarians and vegans than in meat eaters, equivalent to three more cases of stroke per 1,000 people over 10 years...This was mostly due to a higher rate of haemorrhagic stroke—the type caused by bleeding in or around the brain.  In the article, one possible theory was the shifting balance of vitamins...