Worthy Diversions

It’s a pre-holiday Wednesday. Summer is just around the corner. Schedules and commitments are in a state of flux. Perhaps you are occasionally having a bit of difficulty staying focused on your work.

Perhaps you are in need of a worthy diversion or two. Here are a few, just In case that’s the case.

The first is for TODAY. I am a big fan of Google Doodles and today’s is in the DON”T MISS IT category. It honors the birthday of Bob Moog, pioneer of electronic music with an interactive playable doodle inspired by the Moog synthesizer. You can even record your composition with the doodle’s 4-track keyboard and share it with your friends. Try it here  and read more about it here. 

Next up for tree-lovers is Leafsnap, an electronic field guide  being developed by researchers from Columbia University, the University of Maryland, and the Smithsonian Institution. It uses visual recognition software to help identify tree species from photographs the user snaps with their camera phone. It is available now as a free app for  iPhones; Android users have to wait. In the meantime, check out the beautiful images on the Leafsnap site. Leafsnap contains high resolution images of leaves, flowers, fruit, petiole, seeds, and bark. It currently includes trees of New York City and Washington, D.C. but will soon cover trees of the entire continental US.

Finally, “10 Brainteasers to Test Your Mental Sharpness” from Forbes. [Yes, all you doubters out there, I have many sources for my news.] Don’t peek at the answers. And be sure to read the analysis at the very end. We are, indeed, hard-wired and it is a challenge to keep an open mind.

Happy Wednesday. Enjoy the rest of your week.

Meatless Monday: Stalking the Wild Carrot

Their leafy tops are sprouting up everywhere — in lawns, along fences, in the sidewalk cracks. What are these weeds that look like carrots?

The answer? Wild carrot — Daucus carota — a member of the parsley family and the close relative to the big orange carrot we love to eat. In fact, it is from the wild carrot that the cultivated carrot was bred. 

Daucus carota is a biennial plant (as is its domesticated cousin), meaning that it takes two years to complete its life cycle. In its first year it has a frilly green top and puts its energy into its tap root, a long, grayish-white one in the case of the wild carrot. The wild carrots in the photo were all found within two blocks from my house; the largest one was plucked from the edge of the dentist's yard just up the street. It is pretty good-sized and did indeed exude the strong scent of carrot when I yanked it from the ground.

In its second year Daucus carota blooms with a flower cluster known as an umbel (like an umbrella) and sets its prolific amount of seed. In this stage it is known as Queen Anne’s-Lace and is quite beautiful. Check out photos of its entire life cycle here and here. 

Daucus carota  grows throughout North America (with the exception of the Canadian province of Alberta). It is concerned a “noxious weed” in several states and is under plant quarantine in the state of Washington. It can cross with the cultivated carrot, wreaking havoc by hybridizing the crop and ruining the seeds.

However, some consider this “noxious weed” a thing of value. Foraging has become very trendy. New York naturalist “Wildman” Steve Brill, who in 1986 was arrested in Central Park for eating a wild plant, is renowned for his foraging forays into urban parks. The wild carrot is indeed something for which some adventurous people forage. Among the recipes I found was one for sautéing wild carrots in olive oil with mint. Others describe shredding the root for use in salad or simmering the roots until tender. Some prize Daucus carota for its uses in alternative medicine. 

I, however, don’t intend to eat my recent harvest – for two reasons. The first being that I do not know the lead content of the soil in which these wild carrots grew. In New Haven, a former industrial center with many miles of heavily traveled roads and old housing stock, lead content in the soil runs very high. Most people who want to grow food resort to raised planting beds. In what type of crop is lead most likely to accumulate? The roots! In fact, the U Conn Soil Test Lab advises refraining from growing beets, carrots, or potatoes if the results for lead run high.  

Here is the second caveat. If you are planning to eat it, be certain that what you have plucked is indeed Daucus carota and not its close relative, poison hemlock, Conium maculatum. Poison hemlock lacks the carrot scent and does not have the fine hairs you will find on the wild carrot leaves and stalks, but the two plants are otherwise very similar in appearance and are found in many of the same settings. BE SURE.  Hemlock, you may recall is what killed Socrates.

If you decide to forage, be careful out there.

I often blog on food, food issues, or topics related to growing things on Monday in support of Meatless Monday, one of several programs developed in the Healthy Monday project, founded in 2003 in association with Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Communications. Meatless Monday’s goal is “to help reduce meat consumption 15% in order to improve personal health and the health of our planet.”

Meatless Monday: Big Food

“Big Food: Health, Culture, and the Evolution of Eating” is a HUGELY popular exhibit which opened in February at the Yale Peabody Museum. The Peabody has long been THE destination for lovers of dinosaurs and dioramas of wildlife. Big Food provides another reason to pay this gem of a New Haven  attraction a visit. According to the Yale Office of Public Affairs & Communications, the exhibition has attracted over 40,000 visitors since its opening, and in March Big Food set the record for the most monthly visitors to the Peabody in a decade. 

Big Food examines Americans’ complex relationship to food. Food is essential to life, but how we eat in America involves much more than meeting our nutritional needs. Big Food offers the visitor the opportunity to learn about the neuroscience of eating, the genetics of eating, culture and environmental influences on our food choices (including marketing), and what the impact of all these influences has been on our collective health.

Big Food opens with a bang! The entrance to the exhibit is a passageway between two walls of “food” which illustrate what (and how much) the typical American consumes in a year. Here is just a portion of what is on the list: 17 pounds of red meat, 607 pounds of dairy products (including 12 PINTS of yogurt and 5 GALLONS of ice cream), 79 pounds of added fats and oils, 149 pounds of fresh fruit, 29 pounds of French fries, 14 pounds of potato chips, 64 pounds of sugar, 66 pounds of corn sweetener, 45 GALLONS of soda, and 22 gallons of milk.

Kids will love the interactive exhibits with buttons to push and loud sound effects, including a game in which you try to guess the sodium, sugar and fat content of a familiar food before it is smashed, and another in which you try to strike a balance between calories in and calories out while walking on a tightrope over shark-infested water. I rode a stationery bike until I had burned enough calories to eat a small strawberry with no net gain [more work than I expected]. 

Kids will also be able to relate to  a number of visual displays. “Eew, that’s gross,” is likely to be heard near the plexiglass box containing a representation of 5 pounds of body fat. I saw some tweens  examining the box containing a series of sweet drinks juxtaposed with a series of stacked spoons which indicate the number of teaspoons of sugar in each drink. 

Grownups are more likely to focus on the wall showing the change in portion size of a number of common foods over the past couple of decades. [To test your knowledge on this subject, revisit this post from the past where I told you about the NIH’s Portion Distortion Quiz. 

The visuals conclude with “Expanding America 1985-2010,” a series of maps of the USA,  through which you watch the country succumb to the Obesity Epidemic state by state. In 1985, 8 states had adult obesity rates exceeding 10%. In 2010, all states exceeded 20%; 13 exceeded 30%. Today more than one of every 3 Americans is obese.

At the exhibit’s exit point, visitors are asked to vote for a healthy lifestyle change they will make in their lives. One of the choices is Meatless Monday!

Big Food continues at the Peabody through December 2012. For directions, hours, and cost of admission, visit the museum website.

Those of you who live too far away to make the trip to New Haven can experience some of the exhibit, including casting a vote and playing “Strike a Balance,” by going online. 

No excuses allowed. There are absolutely no valid reasons not to check out Big Food!

I often blog on food, food issues, or topics related to growing things on Monday in support of Meatless Monday, one of several programs developed in the Healthy Monday project, founded in 2003 in association with Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Communications. Meatless Monday’s goal is “to help reduce meat consumption 15% in order to improve personal health and the health of our planet.”