It’s nice to think that there are still people living in such mystery and wonder. And that there are other people so keen on preserving that.

One BBC reporter spent the day eating as many e-number filled (e-numerous?) foods as possible in order to make a point about the widespread fears attached to their consumption.

By the end of the day I felt like a balloon of slurry on the verge of bursting. I’d eaten 50 different E numbers, but have I eaten enough to poison myself?

No, said my GP, Dr Jonty Heaversedge, who explained that the basic toxicology principle for safe consumption was a 100-fold safety margin.

Scientists work out how much of any E number an animal can eat on a daily basis before having any ill effects, divide that by 10 (in case humans are more sensitive than animals) and then divide by 10 again, just to be safe.

He concluded that one shouldn’t discriminate against food that contains E-numbers:

Are these actually bad for you? Words like “preservative”, “emulsifier” and “stabiliser” sound bizarre and scary for something you put in your mouth. But lemon juice is an antioxidant preservative, also known as E330 (citric acid), egg yolk is emulsifier E322 (lecithin) when added to oil to make mayonnaise, and stabilisers include E460, or cellulose, which comes straight from plants.

One commenter on the BBC website notes:

And E300 is vitamin C! Most people think Es is a classification system for chemicals instead of a multi-language labelling scheme.

All the same, I understand why people are hesitant to eat food whose ingredients are obfuscated with code.

The Day I Ate As Many E-Numbers As Possible @ BBC News. (Photo by Flickr user RuneT)

A poster by the city of Muenster in Germany presenting a visual argument for more efficient transport solutions (i.e. bus or bike vs. car). Click image to enlarge.

Via John Lunney‘s blog.

His wikipedia page has a summary of his rather compelling argument for pro-nuclear environmentalism. He is probably most famous for his Gaia hypothesis.

There are more bikes, busses and trams than private automobiles! It’s almost balletic. (via paigeandmodern).

David Mitchell ruminates on the relationship between the way we use language and the way we see ourselves and others. I’m enjoying these videos a lot — Mitchell’s is like that endearingly curious and sometimes overly analytical voice in my head that has to be kept in check.

Check out his refreshing opinion on climate change, and the rest of his youtube channel. Thanks Aengus for bringing this to my attention.

A. A. Gill @ The Times:

The industrial processes we complain about are what first attracted Victorian housewives. Packet food was sterile, controlled and predictable. The joy of branded ingredients was in their consistency and purity. You see that in all the early advertisements that emphasise the safety of ingredients, that they could be offered to infants and invalids.

…

Anyone who has travelled to India knows that vomiting, diarrhoea, fevers and worse are constant concerns. That’s what eating everywhere was like before processed food. The fact that we so completely trust the volume and ingredients in packets of food is a great thing; the fact that we can feed 60m people three times a day without poisoning them is an even greater thing and is the triumph of the past century.

Read the full article: School trips to the slaughterhouse.

When bales of sorted paper arrive at a mill, they’re fed into a huge, blenderlike contraption along with water and chemicals. The resulting pulp then goes through a number of purification steps. First, a long chain called a ragger is lowered into the swirling mixture; things like twine and wire wrap around the chain and get pulled out. A metal screen at the bottom of the pulper picks out more contaminants—this should be when your plastic window fragments are removed. Next, the slurry is spun around in a cone-shaped hydrocyclone—which separates out higher-density items like stones and bits of metal (like staples)—and then it’s screened again through a finer mesh. Finally, if the pulp is being made into high-quality product like white office paper, air bubbles and detergents are pumped in to wash away unwanted ink particles.

The answers to more “recycling stumpers” at Slate.

The inner edge of the apple card is dark because I had to moisten it
in order to fold it without breaking the paper.

Paper doesn’t have to be made out of wood fibres, and it doesn’t have to be bleached and smooth. I had fun making this fruit and vegetable fibre based paper (admittedly it’s quite coarse — like card) and printing on it with fruit and vegetables afterwards. I should have gone the full mile and made the paint out of fruits and vegetables, too!

For more photographs and an explanation of the process, read the full post.

My desk looked like a schoolchild’s. Does all this count as regressive behaviour?

The process is thus:

1. Boil vegetable/fruit matter (peels, odd ends) for five minutes to soften them. At this stage you can also add an egg carton, or whatever scrap card you have lying around, if you want to add bulk. Use an immersion blender (or a regular one) to make a pulp the consistency of a thick porridge. The finer the pulp, the thinner you can make the paper. If you blend it too finely, however, the fibres will be too small to lock into one another, and you also won’t see the textures and colours of the individual ingredients.

For my mixture I used what fruit and veg peels were left over in the house. You can use almost anything, but I used the skins and odd-ends of things like lemons, clementines, spring onions, carrots… Then I tossed in what was left of a box of porridge oats.. and then I threw in the cardboard box they came in, too. And an egg carton. This stage is fun — it’s like making a witch’s potion. You can decide the colour of the paper at this stage by selecting ingredients of a particular colour, or by colouring the mixture with food colouring or paint.

The frame framing its maker.

2. You will need to make a sieve (whatever size and shape you like) in which to mould the paper/card. My dad was kind enough to knock this one together for me (above).

Once you have your frame, you can pour the pulp as evenly as possible into it and then carefully flop out the rectangle of pulp onto a fine dishcloth (i.e. not a towel whose thick material will leave a coarse imprint in the paper) that’s folded in two for thickness/absorbency.

Then lay another folded dishcloth on top and press the paper flat, sandwiched between two planks of wood using — if you’re lucky enough to have one — a press, or, like me, your body weight. This is both to squeeze out excess water so the paper can dry quickly, and very importantly, to push the fibres of the paper into interlocking positions so it’s strong when it dries.

3. The next part is perhaps the most delicate stage of the operation: Carefully peel away the dishcloths and place the still fragile sheet on old newspapers to dry completely.

I ironed on a plank of wood instead of a soft ironing board.

4. The final stage is to iron your dry card flat — or put it between some heavy books for a while — and then guillotine the edges neatly (unless you prefer a rugged finish).

All done!

I wouldn’t advise eating your stamps after use.

I cut in half some fruit and veg and used them as stamps to decorate my paper.

I tested the stamps in my notebook before trying it on the extremely valuable paper.
No way I was making a mistake after all that work.

It is indeed a lot of work, but it’s all great fun and not without its spoils; the finished product can be a notebook cover, the basis of a painting, the basis for a greeting card, material for making a collage, a work of art in itself…!

I learnt how to make paper from an artist in Germany (one Gerhard Feuchter) who, amongst other paper artworks, made sculptures with his paper fibres by colouring the pulp and slathering it onto 3d wire frames to dry.

See also:

*The encrypted poetry book I made and bound in Germany, under the wing of Herr Feuchter.

*All about Plant Fibres and their application in nature and in man-made materials.

[E. O. Wilson] has written widely on human nature, on genes, on mind, on culture. Then, beginning in 1984 with Biophilia, he expanded his field of vision to position human beings within their own crucial ecosystem, the earth. It’s no accident that small children are riveted by other life forms: we humans emerged to consciousness in necessary converse with them. It’s only in the past fifty years or so that children have been brought up to think chickens come from the supermarket and Nature is a TV show. As with so many things, what we don’t know may kill us, and what we seem not to know right now is that without a functioning biosphere (clean air, clean water, clean earth, a variety of plant and animal life) we will starve, shrivel, and choke to death.

Wilson wrote one of my favourite books, The Diversity of Life and is renowned for his work studying and writing about insects, and ants in particular. His latest book is called Anthill, but this time it’s a novel, a fiction.

So, why has Wilson now turned to novel-writing? Those of us who’ve been at it for a while might have warned him off. Stick to what you know, we might have said. Rest on your considerable laurels. Don’t risk having the literati point and jeer; don’t give your opponents the opportunity to tear you down. What have you got to gain?

“A wider readership for urgent ecological messages” might be one answer. Many people have trouble grasping complex hypotheses and long strings of numbers, whereas narrative skills seem to be part of the basic human toolbox—an adaptation that gave those who could spin impressive yarns an evolutionary edge. Studies have shown that we identify with and remember stories, learning more easily from them than we do from more abstract presentations. (Hence the “stories” of such things as candles and pencils that we got in primary school. Are kids now being taught via Andy Atom and Ginny Gene? If not, maybe they should be.) Biologists—like doctors—are by their nature prone to storytelling: they study life forms, and a life form is nothing without its story, moving and changing as it does through time, through birth to growth to reproduction, then back into the ongoing food chain. Wilson may well have reasoned that he could get his warnings across more easily through a novel than through another “Nature” book.

What to make of Anthill ? Part epic-inspired adventure story, part philosophy-of-life, part many-layered mid-century Alabama viewed in finely observed detail, part ant life up close, part lyrical hymn to the wonders of earth, part contribution to the growing genre of eco-lit: yes, all these. But hidden within Anthill is also a sort of instruction manual. Here’s an effective way of saving the planet, one anthill at a time, as it were—preserving this metaphorical Ithaca as an “island in a meaningless sea,” a place of “infinite knowledge and mystery.” The largeness of the task and the relative smallness of the accomplishment make Anthill a mournful elegy as well: this may be all that can be saved, we are led to understand. But we are also led to understand that it’s worth saving.

Full review @ nybooks.com

I happened upon this 1910 book, Early English Poems, at archive.org in its entirety and in several formats (plain text, jpg, pdf, kindle, etc). The selected poems are from the beginnings of English literature to up until Chaucer, Wyatt and Surrey.

In the book is a gem of a song called “Earth” (p 170), which seems to be all about man’s materialism. Ahead of its time, surely! I’d love to hear what it sounded like originally sung.

A note from the book:

That this singular and impressive little poem may be more readily understood, the word earth has been here printed with a capital wherever it is used to signify man, the creature made of the dust of the earth. This emphasizes the distinction between the different senses in which the word earth is used throughout the poem.

And (because I can’t copy and paste the correct formatting) here’s the song in image format:

I think “should” and “would” used to be “sholde” and “wolde”, and would therefore have rhymed with “mold” and “gold” in the fourth quatrain.

Lord Stern, the author of the influential 2006 Stern Review on the cost of tackling global warming, said that a successful deal at the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December would lead to soaring costs for meat and other foods that generate large quantities of greenhouse gases.

He predicted that people’s attitudes would evolve until meat eating became unacceptable. “I think it’s important that people think about what they are doing and that includes what they are eating,” he said. “I am 61 now and attitudes towards drinking and driving have changed radically since I was a student. People change their notion of what is responsible. They will increasingly ask about the carbon content of their food.”

The UN believes that meat consumption will double by the middle of the 21st century. Read more.

Related: Our outdated beliefs.