Ruminant Rhythm
It is fairly easy to drag me down the Paleo diet highway. Humanity evolved eating whatever they could get their hands on and faced the almost daily prospect of starvation for 90,000 years. When we domesticated livestock and crops, 10,000 years ago, we doubled our life span. I was on a YouTube documentary about how Egypt became the most successful empire in the world's history. Three thousand years! Eight times longer than the British. Ten times longer than the Romans! Think for a moment about how living beside the Nile was their happy accident? It flowed north, filled with hippo shit, dead fish guts and composted plants. It flooded its banks each spring, giving them a 10 mile wide strip of new soil that literally threw food back at them. Fruit, vegetables, grains. To feed both themselves and their livestock. It gave them time to develop hieroglyphs and build pyramids. The endless human quest for their next meal was over. Well, not exactly. Now that we figured out how to feed everyone, we had to fight over it. Queue endless subsequent empires, wars of conquest, and self-imposed misery. For good measure, nine hundred years ago, we threw in, killing each other over imaginary deities. Here in the West, we don't really have to fight for our supper any longer. If you are really lazy or disabled, the state will feed and house you. I have so much food in the house I sometimes wonder what your average stone age (or third world) hunter / gatherer would make of it? My cupboards are full, pantry is full, fridge is full, the freezer is stuffed. I swear, zombie apocalypse tomorrow, I got a year's worth of food before I have to go out. Except for one thing. I take cream in my coffee. So does SWMBO. We drink milk with our meals. It is the ultimate first world problem. My entire existence is driven by udder juice! We are supposed to be weaned as infants and never touch the stuff again. No adult mammal on the planet, other than us, has dairy as a major part of their diet. Why is that? I actually think I know the answer. We (humanity), found that we could feed grasses and grains to just about any mammal ... and get protein, without killing it! That's it. That's dairy. You don't kill the goat. You milk it. So now, every three days or so, I am forced to re-create history and go out among the Mongol hoards, the Roman legions and the pillaging Vikings. I grab my granny cart, my little dog and I walk up to Zehr's to buy two liters of cream and four liters of milk. When I go, I walk like an Egyptian.
"Pass Me The Envelope"
About a decade ago, I began amassing my Academy Award Best Motion Picture list. It was the discovery of the IMBD site (MG) that prompted this. I found you could filter for all Oscar nominated movies for each year. My thought experiment was that for every year I was alive, I would purchase the DVD and have the ultimate Mitch Movie Collection. Someday soon, I will share that list with you.
In the same vein, I suggested last week that would share my strategy for decluttering my book collection. Here's the plan. In the science fiction genre, their annual awards are called the Hugo and Nebula awards. Each year, judges choose a novel from five or six nominees. I must have better (or more pedestrian) taste in books than I do in movies. I created a "bucket list" to read every winner from 1957 to date. More than half of them I had already read and I still own twenty-one of them. The list for the other forty or so I gave to Robert at Sunshine Used Books here in Guelph. I take him a bag of books. He gives me three or four back from my list. I highly recommend you visit his store. It is at the corner of Stevenson and Speedvale. Here's the list:
My Optimum Week
Well, that was easy. 6K on T&T products. 6K on fruits and veggies. 5K on RTE (ready-to-eat). 3K on cereal. 3K on milk and cream. 5K on frozen entrees and 1K on eggs. I was wondering why Zehr's is pushing the T&T products so I Googled them. Another good Canadian success story. Cindy Lee, an immigrant from Taiwan and a working mother of three, wants to bring an Asian flair to the BC grocery market. She opens two stores. Over the next 15 years, they opened nine more stores across Canada, and Loblaws buys them out, management team and all! “T&T” has a double meaning: Tina & Tiffany, her two daughters, and the initials of two early investors. The spinach noodles do not spike my blood sugar and we like the pork meatballs in our spaghetti sauce. Here's your list:
I was on a guacamole kick last year and got away from it. Those Naturally Imperfect avocados (Mexico) in the flyer triggered me. It is a perfect time to get reacquainted. Short version, I buy the mix and chop my own vegetables. SWMBO doesn't touch the stuff so red onions, jalapenos, the sky is the limit. HINT: Tiny florets of cauliflower, blanch for 30 seconds in salted water. Rinse in cold water, drain and add it to your guac! The Frontera can be hard to find, try Sobeys? Zehr's carries the dry one and I add a bit of mayo or sour cream. Enjoy.
You will also notice something a little different in my "competition" section from the top of the chart. I have always said that using these methods, all of your non-perishables should be free. Having said that, if you don't have points, then premium brands of non-perishables on sale at Costco are the best deal out there. Every brand we buy, was in this month's Costco flyer. I gave you those sale prices and the resulting unit prices for comparison.
What I'm Reading
Orson Scott Card
Michael Connelly
We Are Watching
Thunderbolts on Amazon Prime. It reviewed well and Florence Pugh gives a nuanced performance. I think it's me. I am just so over super hero movies. I mean, how long are they going to beat this dead horse? I started writing about the genre and it quickly turned into two pages. I will circle back with more in a couple of weeks. Go ahead and watch it ... if you are eight.
Equalizer 3 on Netflix - Third installment (duh) of Denzel's cash machine. A really likeable supporting cast gets this over the line. Four stars.
... and finally
In the early 1800s, the Chinese were selling lots of tea, silk, and porcelain to Britain for silver. Yes, pure silver ... boatloads of the stuff! This created an ugly trade imbalance that the British did not appreciate. "How dare they not trade for things we want to sell them?" Britain didn't really have much the Chinese wanted. The beads & blankets that worked on the Iroquois over in Upper Canada didn't really cut it on an advanced 3000-year-old culture. What to do? What to do? We've got it, old boy! We will grow opium in India, smuggle it into China and addict the entire nation. Then, we can use the silver they gave us for drugs ... to buy their tea, silk and porcelain. If they object, we will fight two wars, block their ports, shell their cities and impose brutal trade concessions. Queue the navy.
It worked so well, they even got a one hundred year lease on a little place called Hong Kong. The best deepwater port in Asia and a garden spot right dab smack in the middle of their country. To say this is part of the racial memory of modern day Chinese people and politicians, is a gross understatement. This is in their bones! They call the period from the 1830s opium wars to the end of the WWII the "Century of Humiliation" (百年国耻). Today, when Americans like J.D. Vance call China "a land of peasants lending us money so we can buy peasant manufactured goods' ... you are going to hit a nerve. Now accuse their government of smuggling in drugs (fentanyl) to addict your citizens! The irony is astounding.
BTW, this went on for over one hundred years. What finally changed things? In 1949, the communists came to power. Probably wasn't hard. Everyone was high and pissed off. They put 20 million addicts into treatment (sounds like locked them in a closet using the "die or get better" treatment. While they were locked up, Mao executed anyone caught within ten miles of an opium deal. Problem solved. Opium abuse within China was wiped out. It took four years.
Mitch & Maddie