I watched a video recently by a champion barbecue master. He did a whole history on umami flavour and explained that it’s caused by 3 compounds working together, not just one as people think:

• monosodium glutamate (MSG, everyone’s favourite, found in kombu seaweed)
• disodium inosinate (found in bonito flakes)
• disodium guanylate (found in dried shiitake mushrooms)

Funnily enough, all 3 of these compounds are additives in Doritos!

The biggest reason our food is not healthy is that it’s been bred for durability in shipping and long shelf life rather than flavour and nutrient content. Tomatoes are the poster child of this phenomenon. Compare backyard-grown heirloom varieties to store bought tomatoes and the difference is night and day!

There’s actually a pretty high correlation between flavour and nutrient content. This makes sense when you consider the purpose of taste and smell in the first place: to help us discern healthy food from poor food, to gauge ripeness, and to help us avoid poisonous or rotten food.

Of course highly processed food such as Doritos abuse this feature by targeting only the specific compounds responsible for great taste and leaving out everything else. This is why they’re so bad for you: highly tasty and addictive yet nutritionally empty apart from calories.

We have quite a bit of shade as well, though we do have one fairly decent spot of direct sun near the house. I also like to grow in containers on this gravel shoulder beside the driveway since our front yard gets more direct sun than the back.

If I get a nice big harvest of super hot peppers then I’m going to freeze some, pickle some, and dehydrate some. It’s pretty difficult to find uses for super hot fresh peppers unless you’re using them in a stir fry, Chinese style.

Yes! Go for it!

I actually love insanely hot peppers! I’m going to try growing some ghost peppers this year! But they won’t be the only type I’m growing, so I’ll have a backup plan!

Parsley sounds really nice actually. I remember opening up a package of dried parsley recently and the smell was incredible! I might even have some parsley seeds already in my collection (I bought a ton of seeds but got so overwhelmed I only grew a few types last year).

Last year I grew tomatoes and hot peppers as well as some herbs and a few sweet peas. The peas and tomatoes were truly incredible. The peppers were quite good but didn’t really eclipse store bought jalapeños in quantity or size (they were very small but tasty).

I’m still in the planning phases of my 2025 garden. I want to try growing some beans and squash as well as more varieties of tomatoes and peppers. I also want to grow a lot more of those peas because they were the best peas I’d ever tasted!

I have a couple of rosemary plants growing inside my grow tent right now. I may try growing some small lettuces in some of the many terra cotta pots I have. Also want to grow a lot more varieties of herbs (I have all the seeds).

I want to try growing some lettuce myself. But note that if everyone grew lettuce in their backyard it would not do anything to reduce winter demand for lettuce (which doesn’t keep all winter). The backyard lettuce revolution would destroy commercial lettuce producers in Canada who only grow outdoors in the summer, while leaving winter lettuce shortages intact.

I’ll look for Alberta lettuce in stores next time. I have literally never seen it. And I check the labels regularly to see where produce comes from.

If it helps, I’m in Ontario. So maybe Alberta lettuce isn’t shipped here.

Spanish citrus is fine but every orange I’ve ever bought from South Africa has been inedible. Dry, mealy, and bitter. Awful garbage that’s clearly been picked a month too early.

Sure and that’s great for packaged goods and more durable produce like peppers, potatoes, and gourds.

Fresh, delicate greens are the trickiest. They expire very quickly. But they also are very easy to damage while growing, harvesting, packaging, shipment to distribution, shipment to stores, unpacking, display, consumer-caused damage, and even transport home from the store.

I think to meet demand entirely domestically we’d probably have to grow 50-100 times as much lettuce in greenhouses as we’re doing right now.

Most produce waste is at the distribution and commercial level. Stores won’t buy ugly produce because consumers are picky about it.

Lettuce is a big problem though because it spoils really fast. It’s not like a green pepper that looks like an ugly goblin but is otherwise fresh and tasty. Bad lettuce is heavily wilted and covered in brown rust. Nobody will buy that, especially not at regular price, next to pristine lettuce.

20 million kg of lettuce. Is that per day? Canada has a population of 40 million. If that number is per year then it’s basically 500 grams per person per year. Most people who eat lettuce regularly eat more than that per week.

The question is: do we grow enough greenhouse lettuce in Canada to meet demand? That seems to be nowhere near the case, as all the stuff I see in stores in the winter is from the US.

Let’s say it was a 10000% tariff on US lettuce so that stores wouldn’t bother stocking it at all. What would the price of Canadian greenhouse lettuce be? $10? $20? $50?

Fruits and veg are the tough one. We don’t grow a whole lot of fresh green veggies in the winter. We don’t grow any citrus fruits whatsoever. We don’t grow berries in the winter.

Basically if you only eat local produce you’re going to be living entirely off preserves for half the year, the way my grandparents did a hundred years ago.

Unless of course you have a lot of space in your house to set up grow lights and grow your own greens indoors. I’m looking at that but it’s not easy to grow head lettuces like romaine that way.

Too late for that!

I prefer “feck”!

The process is simple and simple enough to do safely with automatic equipment without exposing workers directly to the lead. However Europe seems intent on phasing out lead acid batteries completely via suppression of demand with taxes.

Lead acid batteries truly are an example of an old and highly reliable technology with some tradeoffs. Yes, everyone knows lead is toxic, however modern battery designs are very well sealed so they never leak. The other tradeoff is that lead is very heavy such that lead acid batteries are too heavy for electric car use. However this last tradeoff doesn’t matter so much for stationary (such as a household) or low power (such as a motorcycle or ebike) use. In fact I would go so far as to argue that lead acid batteries are safer than lithium for some uses due to the latter’s fire risks.

Lithium batteries are not simple to recycle. They’re full of plastic which is wrapped in many fine layers like a roll of cling-film that’s been baked together. To recycle they probably have to be burned and the lithium re-smelted from them and then remanufactured in an energy and materials-intensive process.

From what I can tell, lead acid batteries in Europe have taxes applied to them to pay for recycling. Other places don’t have these taxes so lead acid batteries are very cheap there.

Having said that, I watched a video of a guy in Bangladesh recycling lead acid batteries by hand just using simple tools and a pot to melt the lead over a wood fire and a simple mold to pour the lead plates.

It’s a very basic, easy thing to do. It’s just labour intensive so it ends up very expensive if you have to pay Europeans to do it.

It’s also just common sense: don’t go into your calculus final stoned out of your mind!

Lots of research goes into common sense things though. Sometimes common sense is wrong.

Yes and Geordi is too perfectionist to deal with the messiness of working on an abandoned Cardassian station. The job is half auto mechanic, half engineer. Geordi is all engineer. We hardly ever saw him get his hands dirty.

He’s totally right. My attention span is shot. Need to take long breaks from scrolling to get it back.

Start it at 10m? So if you only borrow 9m you pay no tax?