Link Banana

Ten things the New York Times think you’re worrying about, but shouldn’t be:

1. Killer hot dogs.
2. Planet-destroying A/C. (This is only vehicular.)
3. The carbon footprint of exotic fruits.
4. Cellphones giving you brain cancer.
5. Evil plastic bags.
6. Bisphenol-A.
7. Killer sharks!
8. Declining Arctic Ice. (With this caveat: “You can still fret about long-term trends in the Arctic.”)
9. The unverse’s missing mass. (This boys and girls, is what is known as padding.)
10. Unmarked wormholes. (This boys and girls, is what is known as padding.)

Elizabeth Zierah explores the unexpected difficulty of losing your most undervalued sense: the ability to smell.

I lost normal function on the left side of my body from a stroke when I was 30, and although I’ve had a strong recovery, I still have limited fine-motor control in my left hand, I walk with a limp, and I can’t feel much on my affected side. Yet without hesitation I can say that losing my sense of smell has been more traumatic than adapting to the disabling effects of the stroke. As the scentless and flavorless days passed, I felt trapped inside my own head, a kind of bodily claustrophobia, disassociated. It was as though I were watching a movie of my own life. When we see actors in a love scene, we accept that we can’t smell the sweat; when they take a sip of wine, we don’t expect to taste the grapes. That’s how I felt, like an observer watching the character of me.

…Even after the usual grooming ritual—shower, deodorant, teeth brushing—I still have a nagging fear that I’ve missed something. What if I reek but don’t know it? What if I have something gross on the bottom of my shoe, and everywhere I go I leave behind a foul trail? I’m not only dogged by the fear of stinking; I’ve also found that life is more dangerous. I’ve burned food and melted pots so many times I should be declared a walking fire hazard. Like most anosmics, I view any gas appliance as an archnemesis. I’ve become compulsive about making sure my gas stove is really on when I turn the dial.

Aware of the internet’s love for bacon, Salon shamelessly devoted a week to it. If you’re interested, they are:

• Why we love bacon
• I made bacon
• I made other pork things
• Bacon won’t be cool forever

Marginal Revolution points to a peculiar fact: you can buy “futures” of almost anything, except onions.

The bulbous root is the only commodity for which futures trading is banned. Back in 1958, onion growers convinced themselves that futures traders (and not the new farms sprouting up in Wisconsin) were responsible for falling onion prices, so they lobbied an up-and-coming Michigan Congressman named Gerald Ford to push through a law banning all futures trading in onions. The law still stands.

And yet even with no traders to blame, the volatility in onion prices makes the swings in oil and corn look tame, reinforcing academics’ belief that futures trading diminishes extreme price swings.

Perhaps the most absurd part of the High Court’s ruling that Pringles are exempted from the VAT on crisps is that Proctor & Gamble happily pointed out how completely unnatural and unfoodlike their product is.

“It has a shape not found in nature, being designed and manufactured for stacking, and giving a pleasing and regular undulating appearance which permits comfortable eating.

“In this respect, it is unlike a potato crisp and, I would add, a potato stick or puff.”

He added: “A Pringle does not taste like a crisp or otherwise behave like one. Crisps give a sharply crunchy sensation under the tooth and have to be broken down into jagged pieces when chewed.

(via Slashfood)

I’ve not encountered this new way of packaging a gallon — non-Americans wonder: what’s a gallon? — of milk, but I’m interested to try it after seeing the decidedly mixed reviews so far.

The jugs are cheaper to ship and better for the environment, the milk is fresher when it arrives in stores, and it costs less. […]

“I hate it,” said Lisa DeHoff, a cafe owner shopping in a Sam’s Club here.

“It spills everywhere,” said Amy Wise, a homemaker.

Chris Coleson lost 86 pounds eating only at McDonald’s. Take that Jared.

(via Neatorama)

In pure combustion terms, propane always wins. If you add enough other factors, you may be able to excuse your preference for the taste of charcoal.

…because the substance is made from trees, it can actually be carbon neutral in the end. They contend that the harvested trees, if taken from well-managed timberlands, are presumably replanted. So, while the felled trees are emitting carbon on barbecues nationwide, the new trees are sucking that carbon right back up. Gas, on the other hand, can’t be replenished—or at least not for the millions of years it takes for organic matter to break down into fossil fuels.

China, forced by the Olympic to worry about the translations of restaurant’s food names, has mandated changes to some of the weirdest ones. Dishes being changed:

• Bean curd made by a pock-marked woman (to become “Mapo tofu”)
• Chicken without sexual life (to become “Steamed pullet”)
• Husband and wife’s lung slice (to become “Beef and ox tripe in chili sauce”)

(via kottke, who also highlights a Manhattan restaurant serving “sea urchin bukkake”)

Dan Koeppel raises the spector that American may have to stop counting Cavendish bananas as a staple food. In addition to a thorough history, he includes this astounding fact:

Americans eat as many bananas as apples and oranges combined,

I have no idea how this picture was made, but it looks really really awesome. That is all.

(via Matt Yglesias, who actually links to this story about rapidly chilling beverages)

A sad fact I’d not heard before:

So it is across much of south and east Ethiopia. In the highlands the rain was erratic; in the lowlands it fell not at all. The result is that an extra 4.5m of Ethiopia’s 80m people need emergency food, on top of the 5m or so who already get it, according to the UN’s World Food Programme.

The government says a recovery is possible if the rains expected later in the year are good. Foreign aid specialists say that the food shortages are “going in the direction of high mortality”. The government is supposed to have 450,000 tonnes in a grain stockpile, with 100,000 tonnes in reserve to keep prices from rising too much. But it has only 65,000 tonnes left.

Mark Bittman has some practical advice for omnivores looking eat less — not no — meat.

1. Forget the protein thing. Roughly simultaneously with your declaration that you’re cutting back on meat, someone will ask “How are you going to get enough protein?” The answer is “by being omnivorous.” Plants have protein, too; in fact, per calorie, many plants have more protein than meat.

Abigail Haddad is an excellent contrarian:

Organic food has garnered an extraordinary amount of attention from the media and, along with “local” food, is a darling of foodies and environmentalists, who talk up its civic virtues and benefits to the environment. There’s just one problem with this: agriculture has moved away from small-scale, local, and organic farming because these types of farms are land- and labor-intensive and don’t do a very good job of feeding lots of people. In addition, they are not definitively better for the environment, and their growth would lead to higher food prices than most Americans are willing to pay.

Some more practical points:

If you drive to your local farmers’ market to buy a few items from a farmer who has driven a truck several hours to be there, the number of food miles is relatively small; but compared to conventional agricultural products, the efficiency of each food mile is much lower.

If you drink organic milk, you may picture happy cows wandering in fields full of grass; but in fact, as Michael Poll[a]n discussed in his 2001 New York Times article “Behind the Organic-Industrial Complex,” it’s more likely your organic milk came from cows that spend their days in lots, eating grain and attached to milking machines—just like conventional cows.

In a mildly repetitive summary of why he gave up salmon, Taras Grescoe offers a smattering of troubling details about the way it’s brought to market. Like:

To rid salmon of the lice, fish farmers spike their feed with a strong pesticide called emamectin benzoate, which when administered to rats and dogs causes tremors, spinal deterioration and muscle atrophy. The United States Food and Drug Administration, already hard-pressed to inspect imported Asian seafood for antibiotic and fungicide residues, does not test imported salmon for emamectin benzoate. In other words, the farmed salmon in nearly every American supermarket may contain this pesticide, which on land is used to rid diseased trees of pine beetles. It is not a substance I want in my body.

This Green.view column raises some valuable points about Canada’s supposedly brutal seal hunts:

Still, groups such as the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) call it inhumane, and they have successfully lobbied politicians across Europe. In 2007, Belgium and the Netherlands banned trade in seal products. Other countries—perhaps even the whole European Union—may soon follow suit.

IFAW records hundreds of hours of video footage of the annual hunt, in which seals are killed either by shooting or with a hakapik, a heavy wooden club with a pick. Although IFAW feels the hunt is inhumane, a study published in the Canadian Veterinary Journal in 2002 concluded that most seals (about 98%) were killed in an acceptably humane manner.

The local city council has been talking about this topic, and today a scattershot but related essay appears on Slate:

My chickens, I like to think, are the most highly entertained chickens in the world. I sunbathe with them, hang out in the bushes with them, and sing to them. When they hear me sing my one cover, “St. Louis Blues,” they know to be nervous. “I hate to see … that evening sun go down,” I croon. And they get goose bumps. They seem to know that when that evening sun does go down, one of them will lose her head.

It’s the way of the future according to David George Gordon. I find myself surprisingly interested in it. The crucial component is this:

Insect lovers like Gordon argue that entomophagy — the scientific term for consuming insects — could also be a far greener way to get protein than eating chicken, cows or pigs. With the global livestock sector responsible for 18% of the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions and grain prices reaching record highs, cheap, environmentally low-impact insects could be the food of the future — provided we can stomach them.

(via Slate)

Senator Obama’s body man, Reggie Love, offers some stunningly out-of-touch details on the candidate.

DISLIKES

• Mayonnaise
• Salt and vinegar potato chips
• Asparagus (“if no other vegetables are available, he’ll eat it”)
• Soft drinks (he prefers water)

Joan Acocella offers a thoroughly New Yorker-y exploration of hangovers in this week’s issue (and finishes with a thoroughly annoying conclusion). My favorite bit was this:

Some words for hangover, like ours, refer prosaically to the cause: the Egyptians say they are “still drunk,” the Japanese “two days drunk,” the Chinese “drunk overnight.” The Swedes get “smacked from behind.” But it is in languages that describe the effects rather than the cause that we begin to see real poetic power. Salvadorans wake up “made of rubber,” the French with a “wooden mouth” or a “hair ache.” The Germans and the Dutch say they have a “tomcat,” presumably wailing. The Poles, reportedly, experience a “howling of kittens.” My favorites are the Danes, who get “carpenters in the forehead.”