(Not) Knowing

   One of the funny things about growing older (and in my case, that means OLDer), is that the more you think you know, the less you seem to know (or maybe it's just that there appears to be so much more to know).  I tended to like the opening words of Editor Stephen Orr from Better Homes & Gardens, who described himself as "...not the most precise person in the kitchen,  I love to cook but don't like to slow down to measure or weigh ingredients.  For me, cooking is more the grand gesture of making a dish.  I don't usually follow a recipe.  I taste and make adjustments as I go.  I think of it almost like making music.  That seems to be how I read, or learn, or remember, the bits and pieces seeming to come out okay in the end but far from perfect.  And lately, these random discoveries appear to be arriving at an ever faster rate.

   It started with a simple visit to my grocery store for some flour,* you know, those bags that you see almost daily and walk by without a thought because you so rarely need to pick up a bag (unless you bake a lot).  So there were the traditional brands: Gold Medal and Pillsbury, King Arthur's and even the store brand, and that was only the white flour and not the wheat or soy or whatever flour.  Here's how Epicurious put it: If life were simple, there would be one flour—all-purpose—and you would use it to bake every cake, cookie, and pastry, and they would all turn out moist, chewy, and flaky.  End of story.  But no.  Life is complicated and baking is a science, and next to the bleached and enriched all-purpose flour at the store, there is unbleached all-purpose flour, which you might mistake for unbleached bread flour, which is totally different than cake flour... which is similar to pastry flour.  But my wife just wanted "flour" so I grabbed a bag of Gold Medal then stopped.  There side-by-side was Gold Medal bleached and Gold Medal unbleached (same price).  But wasn't unbleached flour healthier?  And what was the difference?  Not much, as it turns out since flour will "bleach" naturally in a few months time ("bleached" uses chemicals to speed the whitening process but produces a "lighter" cake or cookie while losing few nutrients).

   Then came lichen, those colorful spots you occasionally see on shaded rocks and trees while out in the woods; I say "occasionally" because I can probably count on both hands the number of times I have actually noticed them.  Only as biologist Merlin Sheldrake pointed out in his book, lichens cover more area than our tropical rainforests, as much as 8% of the entire globe.  Not only that, but lichens are essential to creating our world: To this day, lichens confuse our concept of identity and force us to question where one organism stops and another begins...Lichens mine minerals from rock in a twofold process known as "weathering."  First, they physically break up surfaces by the force of their growth.  Second, they deploy an arsenal of powerful acids and mineral-binding compounds to dissolve and digest the rock...When lichens die and decompose, they give rise to the first soils in new ecosystems.  Lichens are how the inanimate mineral mass within rocks is able to cross over into the metabolic cycles of the living.  A portion of the minerals in your body is likely to have passed through a lichen at some point.  And they're everywhere, hard at working dissolving such rock formations as Mt. Rushmore and the monoliths of Easter Island (both places have to pressure-wash the rocks to try and preserve the rock a bit longer).

   Then came baby bottles and the topic of those micro-plastic particles.  Forget the BPA-free stuff that is now the accepted standard but turn to the most widely-used plastic in food containers, polypropylene.  It, too, is pretty much everywhere, from water bottles and food containers to...baby bottles.  Said an article in The Conversation: Earlier studies had suggested that adults and children in the US were exposed to between 74,000 and 211,000 particles over the course of an entire year, through the food they eat, the water they drink and the air they breathe.  But when baby bottles were sterilized or heated for formula, this is what they found: When the temperature of the water was raised from the recommended 70°C to 95°C –the temperature of recently boiled water– the release of microplastics increased from six million particles per litre to 55 million...From this, we concluded that infants are likely to consume an average of 1.6 million polypropylene microplastic particles each day...polypropylene baby feeding bottles account for 83% of the global market.  In case you missed that, it was 1.6 million particle each DAY...and that was just the babies.

   And while we're on the subject of water, let's not forget about what is IN our drinking water, or at least added to our water...fluoride.  Wait, didn't we grow up with dentists and health officials telling us how great fluoride is at preventing cavities and such and that was why it was being added to almost all of our drinking water?  Okay, that argument can go back and forth for another 75 years (yes, it's been in our water supplies for that long) but as an article in The Atlantic asked, if it was also in our toothpaste and getting put directly onto our teeth, why did we need more?  Asked the author of the piece: Then I wondered: How much fluoride is in my water, and how did public-health officials set the dose?  Fluoride in large quantities is bad news.  Potential side effects, I quickly discovered, include joint pain, bone fractures, sperm decline, dementia, premature puberty, gastrointestinal distress, immune-system dysfunction, (possibly) cancer, and (also possibly) lower IQ in children.  Children have smaller bodies than adults and thus are at risk of relatively greater exposure when they drink.  In calculating the dose, I thought, the authorities must have taken into account the weird thirsty kid who guzzles water by the quart.  But if they lower the dose to avoid harming that child, where would that leave my mother-in-law, who for some reason has decided she no longer wants to drink much water at all?  Is she getting shortchanged?  So how DO "officials" decide what is or isn't safe, and especially for something that everyone will experience...as an added chemical?     

    I could throw in a bunch of other surprises (to me, at least): except for primates we humans are the only ones to suffer gout, which ...can accumulate not just in joints of the arms and legs but in the major blood vessels, kidneys and tissues of the spine (STAT); fires burning in the Arctic again set records; wait, the same Arctic where there's snow and such? (Nature); we in the U.S. now have more tigers held captive than remain in the wild in the world; similar stats hold for our prisons as well (National Geographic); only recently was half of the universe's matter found; it had been missing for 20 years (The Conversation); and this surprising view in Kyle Harper's book of the city of Rome in the 4th century, a city which had: ...28 libraries, 19 aqueducts, 423 neighborhoods, 46,602 apartment complexes, 1,790 mansions, 290 graneries, 254 bakeries, 856 public baths, 1,352 cisterns and fountains, and 46 brothels.  The 144 public latrine facilities produced 100,000 pounds of human excrement per day!  That was 1700 years ago!  Now jump forward to the future and see what one powerhouse** has in store for your home!

   With the arrival of what appears to be an early winter, I look back of how fortunate so many of us are.  We are warm and often quick to forget that so many people may instead be bracing for not only the cold temps, but the unexpected coldness of not even having heat to turn on, or money to pay the rent, or even the chance to go to the doctor.  For many of us, the world revolves as if little has changed, while for others the world has changed dramatically.  Children are now again home full-time and being home-schooled, often not by choice.  I must admit that if I were faced with such parental duties, I would quickly realize how little I knew, that is really knew, the math and biology and history and grammar of my own school years now rather dated and about five grades behind (20 years ago my niece was taking algebra at age 10...what??).  To be honest, I have no idea what concepts today's early schools are teaching  (does this basic law look at all familiar: a2 + b2 − 2ab cos[C] = c...at some point I think I learned that, with "learned" being sketchy at best).  Throw in being a single parent, perhaps struggling for work (and money), maybe having an elderly parent who also needs some caring, and the bills that continue to arrive....aughh!  Imagine having your "world" of learning and knowing now turned upside down and way out of balance.  So that would be and IS a big part of life that I don't "know" at all; and it might be that that is actually one of the most important things I'm missing in all of this reading.  My heart goes out to the many out there, even as I try to help in some meager way with checks to the food bank or donating warm clothes or giving money where needed.  But putting myself in their shoes?  Of that, I have no idea.  Said a recent update from National Geographic: By the end of 2020, about 100 million additional people are projected to find themselves in extreme poverty, living on less than $1.90 a day.  Millions more are slipping into less extreme poverty tiers.  Continued lockdowns could worsen these already grim projections in 2021. 

   Samuel Pugh's prayer said in part: ...help me to destroy my complacency; bestir my compassion, and be concerned enough to help; By word and deed, those who cry out for what we take for granted.   It's a good thought, that perhaps we need to step back and take a bigger view of things to see just what we really "know" about life around us.  When it's cold out (this morning it's 14 degrees F) where do the animals go?  Where do the people go?  Struggling for air in the ICU in the hospital (our ICU beds in my city are full) one must wonder what happens now...where DO we go?  To know something may be just the beginning for with it comes the realization that knowing something may be not what you really need to know.  Compassion, empathy, pain, love.  Editor Stephen Orr finished his thought about baking at home and those aromas filling the house by adding this: ...it's less about enjoying the finished result than it is about perfecting their technique while getting constructive feedback in the process.  Their generosity is especially apparent during the holiday season.  Nothing says, "I've been thinking about you" like a freshly home-baked sweet -- the intention that goes into selecting the right recipe for a specific person, buying the ingredients, and then combining, handling, and baking them.  Each step adds a layer of care and thought that's passed through to the lucky recipient.  This season, more than ever, the humble baked good is the rare thing that can bring us together -- even as the circumstances might keep friends and family apart.  I'm not totally sure, but I think he knows... 

*If you want to delve further into wheat, a review in the London Review of Books on the book Amber Waves had this to say: Plain white flour has many drawbacks as a food, one of which is lack of flavor.  Most mass-produced raw white flour tastes of almost nothing...It's also lacking in nutrients...White flour must be fortified with calcium, iron, thiamin and niacin to make up for the fact that the nutritious part of the wheat has been taken away during the milling process...In 2019, wheat was grown on more land than any other food crop: 538 million acres across the globe.  On average, it contributes the largest amount of calories to the human diet of any foodstuff...

**In my early days, the inexpensive goods didn't come from China but from Japan, and before that, Taiwan.  It was common to see the evolution move with the labor, as Made in Taiwan got replaced with Made in Japan, and now, Made in China (it's since moved on from that as you've likely observed).  But the other day Bloomberg's New Economy mentioned the two big powerhouses in the essential key to advancing our communications to 5G, and no, it's not Huawei in China.  Said the piece: The rule of thumb in the semiconductor industry --Moore’s law-- states that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles every couple of years.  That figure, improbably, is headed into the trillions.  Meanwhile, the tally of companies that can afford to keep pace with the investments necessary to pile all those transistors on to a silicon wafer has moved just as dramatically in the opposite direction: only three remain at the cutting edge of manufacturing, down from about 25 in 2002.  One of those, Intel, is flagging.  The industrial future of the planet rests to an extraordinary degree on two companies— Samsung in South Korea and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the go-to supplier for Apple Inc. and the focus of next-generation chipmaking.  Taiwan?   As in Straits of Taiwan?  Hmm...