Bizarre Food Facts

I’m reading Ripley’s Believe or Not! Encyclopedia of the Bizarre, and I found some really interesting facts about food that I just had to share. Please note that I can’t attest to the accuracy of these information, I’m quoting directly from the book.

But true or not, they are certainly fascinating, especially since I study natural health and am naturally intrigued with bizarre facts about food. These particularly caught my interest because they relate directly or indirectly to certain things I’m learning about food in my natural health education: 

• In a village near Accra, Ghana, five thousand tons of rock are mined every year, then crushed and mixed with water and turned into edible dough.
• A teaspoonful of sugar can be dissolved in a glass full of water to the brim without spilling a drop.
• The first American settlers used lobsters to fertilize their gardens, and fed them only to widows, orphans, and servants.
• Salt added to a grapefruit will make it sweet.
• The left ham is more tender than the right ham because pigs use only their right leg to scratch themselves.
• Meat was often sold door-to-door in the United States in the 1890s, in unrefrigerated wagons.
• Garlic belongs to the lily family.
• The apple is a member of the rose family.
• Apricot pits are more valuable than apricots.
• There are about five hundred different types of bananas!
• A lemon is a berry, not a fruit!
• The Romans used lemons as mothballs.
• The more sardines packed in a can, the greater the profit to the packer – the oil is more costly than the fish.
• There is no such fish as a sardine. The fish may be pilchards, herring, or anchovies.
• The whites of eggs and the deadly venom of a rattlesnake contains the same chemical constituents, in the same proportion.
• A dull knife can slice cheese thinner than a sharp knife can.
• If you use milk in your tea you are drinking leather. Milk contains fibrin and albumen. Tea contains tannin. The mixing of the two make a turbid liquid – the turbidity thus caused is tannate of fibrin, or leather.
• It takes all the beans from twelve coffee trees to make two cups of coffee!
• Coffee is a fruit juice!

Well, there are a whole lot more bizarre facts to be found in the book, not just about food but about every other subject matter there is! I’m having a great time reading it, and am simply amazed at some of the stuff in there!

My First Knitted Cowl

I’ve crocheted more than I knitted but I haven’t actually made anything for myself. Almost every single project I’ve ever crafted were gifts for friends and family and I just ended up never having the time to make something for myself.

Part of it is because I’m too ambitious, I guess. I only started really learning more about knitting (other than knit and purl) early this year, and instead of making simple things like scarves, I decided that my first project would be a sweater.

I took four months to finish it, and for a first sweater it looks really good! I have to say that I’m really proud of myself, but unfortunately it’s a little too big for me.

It probably wouldn’t have been a problem for me to frog it and just redo the whole thing again, but that’s four months of work gone! That’s a whole lot of wasted time!

So I decided that while I pondered what to do about the sweater, I’ll stick to simple and quick projects for the next couple of months. The days are getting colder and I needed something warm for my neck, so I knitted a cowl.

I simply love the color and I’ve loved wearing it these last couple of days!

I got this free pattern from Ravelry, and I love it so much that I’ll probably make a few more cowls in this pattern with different types of yarn and colors.

I’m working on a headband now, for the cold days that I need to tie up my hair but want my ears to be covered. It’s actually almost done, I just need to sew a button on it and weave in the ends. Pictures soon!

Feels Like Home

I’ve been lamenting the fact that Lone and I have been living in Calgary for more than a year now but we haven’t had one single photo of us or our family to decorate our home. We’re renting right now and I’ve always had long term homes, so there are times that I feel hesitant to put too many holes in the walls because these home we’re living in now is only temporary.

Truth is, we’re not very good housekeepers anyway (though I’m working on that), and more often than not the house is a mess. So who are we ever going to invite over anyway? No guests, no need for decorations!

But you know, I feel better when the house is clean, and I feel better when I see our pictures on the wall. So yesterday we hung up a really simple picture hanger that cost about $12.99 from Ikea.

Sorry for the bad lighting, I’ll take another one soon and hope it comes out well.

I love it! And the place feels more like a home already.

This is only one small part of the house, but I’ll be gradually making changes and posting more pictures up as I go.

Good Writing vs Bad Writing

Most of the time I love the courses I’m taking. In fact, I love them all. There’s only one course that I’m really not liking right now; the Anatomy and Physiology course.

It’s not the subject matter because I am interested in the body and how it works. I find it very fascinating, and when I was young I used to read all sorts of encyclopedias and books about weird body facts and all that.

The reason I don’t like this particular course is because the writer of the course material wrote it in such a way to make it more complicated, confusing, and difficult to understand than it really is. When I read the course, I spend a lot of time re-reading the sentences to try to make sense of it, but when I borrowed one of the textbooks on Anatomy and Physiology from the library, I enjoy reading it so much that I feel like I want to read the whole book from cover to cover.

Unfortunately, the textbook is huge, and I’ve only got a limited amount of time to finish the course.

Bottom line is, it is so important to be able to write in a way that people understand what you’re saying, and enjoy reading the things you write.

I’m just going to have to slog through the rest of the course materials. =(

Extreme Measures

I was supposed to be working on my Anatomy and Physiology course today, but the text was so dry and confusing that I decided I was going to take a break from it. I typed “Anatomy” on Stumbleupon, hoping to find some interesting sites that would help me more than the text I was reading, and I stumbled upon this very interesting article about a man who was forced to operate on himself to take out his appendix.

One of my teachers have actually mentioned something about learning how to do this for himself. He’s an adventurer and frequently goes hiking and camping in the wilderness on his own. Although he’s never had to operate on himself, he knew that if he got appendicitis when he was alone in the woods and far from any help, he would die if he couldn’t operate on himself.

So he studied anatomy and herbs, figuring that he’d use what he could find in the woods, and he did some meditation stuff to help him learn to control his heart rate and body functions so that he’d be able to operate on himself if he ever needed to, and that was what started him on the journey of becoming a herbalist.

I myself am interested in herbs and natural health, but I am not an adventurer like him, and I would be too afraid of the many other ways I could die in the wilderness, forget about appendicitis! I would probably never venture into the wilderness on my own, ever, and never to a place that’s so isolated that I couldn’t get to help in an hour or so.

Yes, I’m a wimp, and that’s why I have the utmost respect for people like my teacher and the man in the article who actually did have to operate on himself. All I can hope for myself, is to learn as much as I can about herbs and natural health so that I can help people, and myself, without having to resort to invasive surgery.