Life is Easy, huh?
An ex-student of mine posted the following picture, with the caption 'Life is easy':
I wanted to point out the privilege in an obtusely pedantic fashion but I figured I'd save it for here instead. # Life is indeed easy, for you... The work hours that went into that simple bowl of simple is phenomenal. Pretty mindblowing, to me. Think about it.
The Fork
Forks were first used around 400AD as far as we know, and it was far longer until it joined the knife and spoon as an eating utensil. In the case of an ancient Venetian princess who made use of such a tool, it was said with disdain:
[S]uch was the luxury of her habits … [that] she deigned not to touch her food with her fingers, but would command her eunuchs to cut it up into small pieces, which she would impale on a certain golden instrument with two prongs and thus carry to her mouth.
St. Peter Damlan was offended by her snobbery and was nothing short of glad when she died of the plague - clearly a punishment from God for using such a vain item. The pronged nature of the fork gave it a pretty bad rep and was highly condemned in general.
In the middle ages, it was seen, of course, as the devil's pitchfork and so most people tended to eat from a scoop-shaped piece of stale bread. The fork was not only condemned but mocked.
in 1605, Carolin Young told of an old allegory about an island of hermaphrodites who ate with forks. Their personalities generally mocked, they struggled with the utensil and managed to spill more food than they could eat.
Sexism was soon to follow with a culture insisting that forks were too girly, with sailors in the early 1900's still refusing to use them.
On the whole, those who used forks were the wealthy and elite, with the poor sticking to scoop-shaped things and their own fingers. So yeah, life is easy now for you, elite fork users. Just be sure to check your privilege.
Domestication
Think how much work actually goes into making that fork, the bowl, the food itself. Thousands of years of genetic modification and domestication of pigs to make that bacon (I'm assuming that's what it is).
Pigs were domesticated as long as 9,000 years ago from pretty fearsome wild boar, and it was hardly an easy process. Many generations went into making these animals tamer, juicier, weightier, and they often interbred with their still-wild counterparts, making it an even more frustrating and grueling process.
Pigs now, of course, are much more tasty, and far more enslaved:
With about 121 million pigs eaten per year in the US, and over 400 million in China, the death toll for that little sliver of bacon is quite pricey, but it doesn't even end there.
The process from a baby pig to a slab on your plate is monumental. You can read in detail the entire process here, but in short:
• Artificially inseminate a pig
• Drown them in antibiotics so disease in their disease-ridden living quarters is held at bay
• When grown about 5 years, slaughterhouse
• Process the gargantuan amount of feces (2-5x more than a human, per pig)
That last point is a real and ongoing issue, from contaminated drinking water and health issues to properly values plummeting from the bad smells.
Here in Shanghai, somewhat famously, there was The Great Die-off of pigs down the Huangpu River, where 16,000 rotting pigs were found floating downstream from some unknown distant farms who presumably dumped them for unknown, ominous reasons - possibly death-by-porcine circovirus..
This is a river where about 1/5th of people get their drinking water from. 
Source 
Source
Now, China is battling a major swine flu outbreak, causing mass losses in pig population and an 8% rise in pork prices as well as devastating financial loss for the farmers themselves, as the whole herd typically has to be slaughtered and dumped, as well as the whole population of pigs in the 3km surrounding area of any infected population. Every single region and province in China is now affected by this.
Life is... ahem
And I didn't even touch upon the manufacturing processes of stainless steel, agriculture of vegetables, transportation and its carbon footprint, and so on.
Yeah, life is easy, as long as you don't stare at your dinner plates too long.
Pig Domestication | Pork manufacturing process | The Shanghai Great Die-off | Swine flu outbreak
Latter two images source seemingly from Chinese State-run Media, so I'm calling fair-use on this one.
Well, I read this on the wrong night. I was already feeling a bit grim. Thanks a lot. But...as a former history major, I loved the narrative. I may be a little out of my element in science, but boy, throw some history at me and I am right at home.
My only excuse for your student is that he/she must have been very, very young.
And--I have guilt about a lot of things, but not pigs. No bacon on my plate, ever.
Great blog Mobbs. Don't think I've read any by you before. More history, please.
That's a surprise! Well, I haven't posted anything with consistency for a long time since I started work again so I guess there's that. Good to know you're not a bacon eater (even though I am)! I'm a history lover too so I'll likely include more in the future =)
I shouldn't admit it, but I get a little lost in the sea of blogs on Steemit. SteemSTEM.io makes it easier for me to find quality blogs all in one place. I'm sure I won't miss any of yours in the future:)
So I think most cities in China get their fresh water from reservoirs. In the case of Shanghai most fresh water comes from a reservoir which is located within the Yangtze which has been open since 2010. See these wonderful images -> https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/89996/fresh-water-for-shanghai So the link says that about 70% of the tap water comes from that reservoir. I couldn't find clear info on where the other 30% comes from. Before 2010 the tap water indeed came from Huangpu.
Those images from 2013 link to the Independent. So I am confused about the last sentence :o)
Cuz the independent didn't take that image, I can bank on that. Original source unknown, likely Chinese media. Don't worry It's not like I'm planning on Stem-voting this anyway
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I dunno, Lemouth just said feel free to, so now I feel like I have to put more effort in... urgh, effort
Owl love you whatever you do, Mo. You must be Mo-ved by that :D
I am feeling disgusted with the floating porks... However, I am sure something similar could be found with other animals, especially in big countries like China or the US where you have so many beings to feed. In any case, we will all eat insects in a couple of decades...
Insects are great because if you report 16,000 dead flies were found in the river, nobody would raise an eyebrow =) I'm very pro-insect diet, but I have to get over the natural 'gross' factor first
And the psychological wall I guess (I have never managed to cross it myself).
Life is hard.
Life is... ahem : best conclusion ever ... the man who wears no rosy glasses but still survives on steemit lol, back with a vengeance
You're so right and i completely share your view there. I have had a few mad ravings in some other places on how 'energy' is actually the only real currency that makes any sense (but the banks wont like the fact that you couldnt make money with money simply by having enough of it ofcourse).
So, you would need an explanation to see what i mean, after reading this (a car is worth x energy 'units' starting from the bare resources, the man hours used in retrieving those, the logistics in transporting, converting to 'usable' resources, putting those together , the energy used in the proces, man hours in that logistics to the vendor, well distribution center first -> vendor, man hours transport, sandwich eaten, lightbulbs turned on until it finally gets into the hands of the one who will be driving it)
Slightly beyond omega to calculate but when i take over the world (when i grow up) and inherently inevitably the -bank i'll be sure to give you a call to help me figure out the #newworldcurrency lol (somewhat a-pun to the #new world order the protectorate on steemit has decreed but let it not be said i said something subversive like that or id be a heretic ...
again
as if the dark ages werent enough to cull out the devil jin ... (clearly didnt work hehhe)
always a pleasure to read !!!
In the end, the good guys always win
No, sir, in the end the winners write history, that's why they're always the good guys ....
i dont know who said that but it might be me
Your mid-section on energy economics is pretty cool although it really is just a ore elaborate version of what is already the case, albeit massively flawed and corrupted. If we could calculate such things so specifically, we'd live in a world where whether prediction was a non-issue and nobody would ever get lost in a supermarket. But it is pretty intense to think about how much goes into literally anything you can see in front of you, especially if you look at it historically.
One can only hope you take over the world so we can truly learn to appreciate what we all have =)
I must say those wild boars and semi-wild pigs are way tastier and healthier than nowadays antibiotics "fed".
It's sad that every continent, well, to be more precise almost every country has some problems with natural disasters and pollution.
I've heard so many excuses or just unawareness of it... it's catastrophic.
That last sentence would have made a good pun if it involved cat meat :o)
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Generally it seems an excess of anything tends to strive for bottlenecking. We can hold it off wihth meds and aid as much as we want these days but does that make the inevitable fall later on even worse? Hmm
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as god intended them to be
Sad but true, and infuriating, to boot. If more people knew the truth behind the basic elements we encounter in every day life, and the corruption that lies underneath like a ninja plague.. it would be a different world. I would hope. I don't know. The horrors of mankind give too many surprises. To the point at which little surprises me anymore. Regardless, I have hope for the future, and big dreams for my daughter's generation (she is 13).. and the single greatest thing we can do for them is to educate and inspire them to change the direction of these proverbial runaway trains running amuck amongst them.
Cheerful thoughts by serena.
Like you say, 'little surprises me' - I think a lot of us have the same sentiment, largely thanks to media exposing the world to this stuff constantly, which is pretty unique in human history. Those born in your daughter's generation are going to be so much more equipped than we ever were. For me, the internet was basically a new thing growing up, but to be born surrounded by a media tsunami all day, every day, she'll adapt!
And how in the hell has your blog escaped my eyes for so long??
I've always written mostly boring science stuff, that's probably why =)