goat

Food of last week:

 pasta e ceci via Smitten Kitchen

sweet potato and lentil curry via BBC

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I walked to a new grocery store today and the walk is even more scenic. The walking path is mostly a footpath through a residential district, so its lined with shrubs with flowers and berries. The store is located uphill, so on top of being a good workout, I get to see a good panorama of Bath. Too bad the store itself is quite small so still have to go to Sainsbury.

beech

Bath in b/w, one new photo and a bunch of old ones from here:

fondness

Things I ate last week:

 the default miso soup

vegetable...crustless quiche? omelette? egg饼?

the default vegetable soup

...but this is the tastiest version of my vegetable soup so far. Good sweetness and texture. Cook the following in the listed order:

• 1 bay leaf / couple black peppercorn
• 3 thick slices of smoked back bacon, fat trimmed & rendered

• 1 trimmed leek
• 3 cloves of garlic
• 1 carrot

• 1 sweet potato
• 8oz (by volume) dried white beans, soaked overnight

• half a head of "greens" (no idea what kind of greens it is, reminds me of collard greens. a whole bunch is cheap at Sainsbury)

Separation

W.S. Merwin

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

Poetry is an item on the to-do list with indefinite deadlines.

...

kids.

change my mind

Soundtrack of the week while working on the LT assignment. So much project management lessons learned, what a catastrophe it was.

sunshine

Sore throat, ugh :(

cows

I'm being a good little student and started on the (available for free) optional readings for my first course: Building Design for Low Carbon. The book Sustainable Energy with the Hot Air starts off, as with most books and lectures on this topic, justifying the reality of climate change. As in the physical phenomenal is happening, that there are "factual assertions" that are true. I find it a little sad that this premise is still required. The book also takes extra care to separate the "factual assertions" from "ethical assertions" which deal with why/how/what actions we should take. I'm glad that I took ENV221 and 222 in forth year as these two courses give a solid foundation for the ethical (most useful reading imo) and political issues involved in taking action.

...

All the above text is really leading into the fact that I forgot to post a quotations from From Field to Fork: Food Ethics for Everyone:

People gain weight because they eat too many calories or are too inactive for the calories they eat. Genetics affects this balance, of course, because heredity predisposes some people to gain weight more easily than others, but genetic changes in a population occur too slowly to account for the sharp increase in weight gain over such a short time period.

My first thought after reading these lines is that it sounds so darn similar to evidence for asserting that anthropogenic climate change is real.

This book is also a good introduction to the subject of Food Ethics, and does a good job of explaining some basic ethics framework as well. Kevin and Eric's philosophy discussions make much more sense after reading the background chapters in this book.

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Another book I've read this summer on the topic of food is Food Politics (I also follow the author's blog). This book is another good subject introduction to the numerous conflict of interests that exist in the food system.

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Lastly, my personal reading goals for this year is to tackle most of Terry Pratchett's Discoworld series. Seems appropriate as I'm in the U.K. and I would like some fun reading to do before sleeping in hopes that I'll sleep better with some buffer between when I close my eyes and looking at a screen. I hope I'll enjoy his work as much as I've enjoyed Vonnegut's.