Eating Wood

Whether or not cellulose is a good thing for humans to eat, is a difficult question. Several individuals have expressed shock and dismay at suddenly noticing it is in the ingredients list of your favorite foods. and some you don't like too.

I am really on the fence on this one. "K," who started this whole can of worms still has people commenting on the comments of other people's livid remarks. These remarks include ‎"YAY to the world of 'less expensive food, now we can buy bigger cars and more shoes!!" Yes, that is out of context. The original incendiary spark can be found here - Not Food?

And the full blown inflagration centers on the apparent deception to the consumer, who thinks he or she is getting edible food at the grocery store, while lo and behold, it is parts of trees or cornstalks, more likely, that we are actually "eating."

Personally, I am irritated that we can't figure out how to digest the stuff already. At this day and age, we could be responding to references about our ever expanding mid sections with "That's my reticulorumen, don't you have one yet?" We would need our reticulorumens to house a few bacteria we don't already own. I think they could be easily ingested by making some dirt milkshakes.

The same humans who don't want to have a go at eating chopped paper may not have tried the delightful and largely inedible slippery elm porridge. Made from the inner bark of the slippery elm, this porridge has the distinctive flavor of wood shavings. I have eaten it many times, and I didn't put on an ounce.
Have you seen this pop-up ad? One trick of the tiny belly. Eat wood.

I MUST point out that wood is not cellulose. Sure, some of it is but there are many other things to digest in wood, such as lignin. You try digesting lignin sometime.

 My Ganoderma, in its jar house, truly enjoys a wood diet. I treat the youngster to a warm-up in the oven twice a day. Just over 100ºf. Soon, it will be moving again. More space, more wood, more oxygen.

This all reminds me of a joke. What is brown and sticky? A stick.

BEANS Beans beans

The beans are being counted. Petaluma gold rush is a wildcard. It seems it has crossed with anything that bloomed in proximity to it. Maybe something is wrong with its flowers, maybe gremlins climbed around on the vines at night and popped the flowers open before they had a chance to self-pollinate.

One of the gremlins may be named E.M. She lives down our street. E.M. definitely gets into other people's back yards, possibly their gardens as well. She made her way up the B.N. right-of-way and popped the heads off all the sunflowers she could find, then stuffed them in a bag she was shielding herself with. I don't have definitive proof of this, but I COULD see her, and she WAS hovering over spot after spot behind the garden, and she DID have a large cloth bag which appeared to be larger every time she picked it up. I am just enough afraid of her that I did NOT run out back to holler "GO AWAY and put some UNDER garments on before you show up again!"

Today I noticed that the sunflowers were all headless. The sunflowers outside of the garden AND the sunflowers inside the garden.

Random

Who knew there are endless rules for the pinning of insects? I said this was going to be random... Their little legs and antennae must be placed, they can't be positioned in any way except horizontally, they should face left, and flies' heads should be turned. The insect must be five millimeters above the first I.D. slip and ten millimeters above the second I.D. slip. The pin should be on the right side of the thorax. The most useful tidbit is that, by refrigerating your dead insects before pinning them, they lose some of that disgusting crunchiness when the pin is first inserted.
We feared a killing freeze two nights ago, so I picked all the beans, ready or not. They are hanging by their stems, upside down and there are hundreds of them. The winners so far are Arikara and black turtle.

 Followed by brown Norwegian and (yes!) Petaluma gold rush. But with hundreds of pods still to count the final results could be completely different.
We would all probably like to have our own dolipore septa with perforated parenthesomes but unless you are a homobasidiomycete it is just not going to happen. Sorry. Which reminds me. I hate a certain size. It is the size that things are when they are just about too small to get a good look at with a compound microscope. You know, the size that people who already know what these things should look like say "you can see it right next to the (insert word like dolipore) if you look carefully." So you look carefully and all you can see is tiny smudges that look exactly like the smudges on the far side of your range of view. I think that is about two microns. Stupid smudges. 
OK, one last thing. Do you think a reputable chocolate company should charge eight dollars for a box of chocolates when the pieces include varieties such as "spackling paste - toothpaste combo covered in dark chocolate" and "bathroom deodorizer flavored cream filling swirled wirh a milk chocolate nougat outside?" There are a number of companies here in M whose owning parties think if you just keep changing the smells and flavors of the products every two and a half weeks, you are bound to come up with that billion dollar creation no one can get enough of, sooner or later. I am convinced the recipe is simpler and more precise. I think I almost have it. You can buy a copy of the recipe in progress for only three dollars and forty seven cents, because it will have to go the USPS route. And you will have to sign a non-competition agreement. Someone will out and out steal it otherwise.

Treatise on Trehalose - or - Gano moves to the suburbs

The Ganoderma has moved out of its cramped quarters, to the pristine and expansive landscape of pelletized wood fuel, "Good Mews" kitty litter and hydrogen peroxide. Will it thrive there? I have been hauling it around to the warmest spots - indoors or out - to help it get a grip on life in a jar.

Here are the worried parents.

One of the many neat things about mushrooms is their inventiveness in their day to day needs. Take energy needs, for example. A human would settle for plain old sugar. Dextrose. Sucrose. You know, the stuff you like to eat because your body doesn't have to do a THING with it - it is already broken down and ready to go. Now, a mushroom doesn't store its sugar that way. It has something sneakier in mind, which is to store sugar in a form that it thinks other creatures won't recognize, or want. Well, it has made a mistake there, because this sugar is becoming popular.

It is called trehalose. Kazuhiko Maruta discovered a slick approach to manufacturing trehalose.  Of course, once Cargill caught word, their R&D people went straight to town. And like so many other facets of our American lives, trehalose is now really about C O R N. 

Cargill's slogan ought to be "Trehalose, the sugar you can't buy here in the US!" Trehalose can be bought and used in all sorts of recipes around most of the globe. The resulting food can be imported to the US. You can buy this imported food and eat it in the US. You just can't buy trehalose sugar in your local grocery store, go home and bake a cake with it in the US. On the other hand, if you would like to buy some trehalose, pop a teaspoon of the stuff in your mouth for what ails you, that is perfectly alright. By mail-order as a health supplement, it can be yours for only $10 or more per lb.

Now, some people still like to call trehalose the fungus sugar. And why would you want to eat it anyway? You could also call it the bug sugar, since bugs make it as well as mushrooms. As a sugar, it has some amazing properties. You may decide you want some after you check out Eric Drexler's blog HERE

He forgot one important quality of the stuff. Mess around with trehalose in the kitchen, if you ever get your hands on some. Baked foods sweetened with trehalose don't "brown" in the oven. They just stay the color they were when you put them in, even though they get cooked. I have yet to figure out why I would like to do that to my baked goods, but I know I want to.

OK, lastly, dinner yesterday. Pork grilled with rosemary and garlic, goat cheese turnovers, beets and spinach with a raspberry glacé and walnuts on top. For our anniversary, and enjoyed in the backyard to the sound of one billion cicadas, crickets, and other trehalose-producing bugs. Proprietary recipe, until it wins the Pillsbury bake-off.